Grandad, There's A Head on the Beach

5.

It's hard to describe our nearest town, just as it's hard to call it a town and keep a straight face. Think of any crossroads you know, then squeeze it to a point where two cars can barely pass one another without slapping wing mirrors. Remove traffic lights and stop signs from your thoughts. Add the chaos of handcarts and sidecars and people walking in the street because the pavement has cars parked on it. Then imagine you're standing in the middle of the cross. North you'd see a few cramped wooden shops selling nothing anyone would ever need. Likewise to the south. Dead end to the southeast where the road terminates at the river. Too bad if you're new to the district and travel in that direction at any speed. The Pak Nam Champs Elysees, route 4002, heads west. It's there you can find the 7-Eleven, the post office, the bank, the market, the district office, and the best darned lady finger banana seller in the country. You cannot, however, find decent cappuccino, pizza, wine, cheese, ice cream, black forest cake, or cherries-all those things that make a civilized society. This was truly a hardship posting for a girl who grew up in a multicultural metropolis.

I pulled up in front of the old ice factory at the docks. The sound of ice being crushed resounded like strikes at a bowling alley. I'd had to ask directions. The factory was in a cleverly concealed turn-off before the cul-de-sac. When you were driving into town, you could see the harbor from the road bridge. It made a good photograph. The sun glinting off the water as the triumphant fishing vessels returned with their catch. A few tourists stopped there. That and the concrete battleship were our only photogenic spots. But being down here was different altogether. The hastily put together hovels all around me spoke of poverty and disorder and neglect. Temporary accommodation for temporary people. Clunky wooden fishing boats gathered around the concrete piers, two or three abreast, like polite pigs at a feeding trough. On the jetties, people worked. I don't mean they went through the motions with one eye on the overtime clock. I mean they toiled. They sliced and gutted and bagged and hauled and lugged. There was a different pace to life. An urgency. It was a bit eerie really.

I stepped out onto the dirt parking lot. There were people all around, but nobody stared. Nobody so much as turned their head. All right, I know I'm no head-turner, but there's this world standard of inquisitiveness, isn't there? "Who is this broad-hipped, short-haired stranger?"

"What does she want with us?" Down here at the docks, nobody cared. I looked at my hand to see whether I'd become invisible on the drive over.

There was music playing. Women joking. Men shouting. And I understood not one word. And all at once I knew how Dorothy felt. I wasn't in Thailand anymore. The Toyota Mighty X had come down in the land of the Munch-kins. I was only five minutes' jaywalk from the town post office, postcode 86150, but I was completely in the wrong country. Nobody had been able to tell me exactly how many Burmese there were around Pak Nam as the majority weren't registered. But I'd certainly found myself in a hub. I needed a guide. Chompu had given me a name. He said I should ask at the open-air ice works for Aung.

I walked up to a big-boned woman whose face was caked in yellow-brown paste. I'd seen it a lot, but I'd never actually understood the concept. You splatter the gunk all over yourself as protection from the sun. The sun, as we all know, ages us prematurely and makes us unattractive and therefore unmarriageable. But I doubted that the effects of that nasty old sun would have been noticed much before our thirtieth birthday. And by then we should have been wed. After twenty-two, the odds started to stack up against us. So why, I ask, would you want to spend your most alluring years plastered in a vomit-colored death mask? It's like those poor Muslim girls who have to squeeze all their sexuality into a two-by-eight-centimeter eye-letterbox slot of opportunity. I'd tried that "if you're a nice person, men will find you attractive" routine, and I'm afraid it gives men far too much credit. They want something to show their mates. You have to have at least one selling point. I have my lips, which Mair often reminds me are sensual. The Burmese throwing huge blocks of ice in a crusher had breasts. They drew attention from her face. I know it's a little catty of me to say this, but perhaps, in her case, the powder mask did her a favor.

"Excuse me," I said. "I'm looking for Mr. Aung."

She didn't so much as look up. I rechecked my invisibility. I was there.

"Mr. Aung?" I said.

I didn't want to be ignored again, so I put my hand on the next ice block on the conveyor. I tried for eye contact. She shrugged and looked away.

"Do you speak Thai?" I asked. The ice blocks were jamming up behind me and my hand was getting an ice ache, but I wasn't about to give in.

"Do…you…?"

"No speak," she said.

Good. Contact.

"Mr.. .. Aung."

She pointed toward the nearest dock.

"Two…one…seven…one," I think was what she said.

"Two one seven one?"

She nodded. I thanked her and tried to leave, but my hand was stuck to the ice block. I may have screamed a little. Meeting Mr. Aung with a chunk of ice clutched to my chest would have made a bad first impression. Obviously I wasn't the first person to stick myself to a giant ice-cube because she had a plastic bottle of lukewarm water beside her that she sprinkled on my hand, and like magic, I was released.

I presumed 2171 was the number of a boat. They each had four digits in white paint at the front. The front of the boat is either the bow or the galley. I never did remember boating vocabulary. I knew you had to pass an oncoming ship to the starboard, but I didn't know whether that was left or right. Fortunately, I'd never have to learn it because I had no intention of being on the sea in any kind of vessel whatsoever. At high school I sat out swimming lessons because Mair had knitted me a swimsuit. I kid you not. Hand knitted. It was like a suit of armor. If I'd so much as stepped in the water, I'd have sunk like a rock. I did eventually learn to swim, but that had led to a number of other traumatic experiences in water. So I gave it up, and as a non-swimmer I fully intended to be a non-boat passenger.

I asked the nearest Burmese if there were any Thais around. He said yes, then walked off. At the same high school where I didn't learn to swim, I also didn't learn to speak Burmese. They had a very small part-time elective course. Instead, I went on to intensive English, memorized hundreds of pop songs, joined a student exchange to Australia, watched a lifetime of American movies, and fell in love with Clint Eastwood. And what good did that do me? Here in Maprao, even my Thai was a mystery. Southern Thai dialect was like listening to sausages popping on a grill, and now I learned there are more people here speaking Burmese than standard Thai. I was a minority.

"Can I help you?" came a voice.

I turned to see a dark-skinned man in shorts. Only shorts. His torso was decorated with grease smears, but that was a body without a gram of fat. A worker's body. On top of it was an untidy head; hair sheared and uncombed, a wispy haphazard beard, a recent scar dividing his left shoulder in two. But, my word, he was adorable. His smile went straight to my womb.

"I'm Aung," he said.

He put down his spanner and wai'd me. I wai'd him back.

I said, "Ming ga la ba," the only Burmese I knew. I hoped it meant good day. He probably didn't even know I was speaking Burmese because he continued in Thai.

"How can I help you?"

"Your Thai is very good."

We said that to Westerners all the time, but we didn't really mean it. We didn't really expect that much from the wealthy whities. But we tended not to compliment menial day laborers from neighboring countries, even if they were fluent. But Aung was fluent and gorgeous.

"I've been here twenty-four years," he said, and smiled again. "I must have picked it up."

I'd obviously reached that hormonal juncture in my life when every second man I met was a sex object. Aung conjured up feelings in me I hadn't felt since university. I wished he'd put on a shirt so I didn't have to stare at his pectorals. But he continued to stand there, sweating wonderfully.

"I…I…" I said.

"Yes?" He smiled.

"I'm a journalist. I was hoping I could interview you about the problems the Burmese community faces in Pak Nam."

"No problem," he said, which surprised me for some reason.

"Really? When would be a convenient time?"

"I work till seven," he said. "Any time after that is fine."

"Would tonight be too soon?"

"No."

"Sissi, he's so…"

"Yes?"

"So natural."

"Jimm, we're all buds of Mother Earth."

"No, we're not. We start off natural, then we're tutored in the arts of pretense and deception."

There was a pause, and I wondered whether we'd been cut off.

"That comment wouldn't be directed at me, by any chance?"

Damn. Why was everything about her?

"Shut up, Siss. No. It's him. He's raw. If he'd hit me over the head with his spanner and dragged me off to his cave, I wouldn't have made a whimper."

"OK. So you've got the hots for a Burmese. Welcome to the bottom of the barrel. I'm happy for you."

I wondered when the Burmese stopped being equals. Everyone hated them. It was as if you got yourself a shitty junta government and it was a reflection on the whole population.

"I'm going to marry him," I said, just to be cantankerous.

"Yeah, right. So do you want information about your Honda City, or do I have to listen to tales of migrant lust all night?"

"You already found something?"

"It's not that hard."

"What do you know?"

"The car was registered in the name of Anand Pany-urachai. I looked him up. They're not an online family at all. No Facebook, no Twitter, not even e-mail accounts, as far as I could ascertain. That's really odd for a young girl in the dot com age. So I had to go down the slow track. The prehistoric route. National records. A program put together by orangutans. I started with the census and found where they live, and I worked outward from there. There's a program that allows me to align and cross-reference the-"

"Sissi, I've got to meet my Burmese in ten minutes. Can we just cut to the chase?" I'd always wanted to say that.

"All right already. I just wanted you to appreciate how much love I put into this assignment."

"I appreciate it."

"Father, Anand. Owns a small engineering company. Some gambling problems. Rumors they were living beyond their means. He seems to have sorted that out. No outstanding debts. Mother, Punnika. Middle school principal."

"Any political connections?"

"He's a registered democrat. He's helped with campaigning. Nothing fanatical. Couldn't find anything for the wife."

"And the daughter?"

"Right. Now here's where cross-references went bananas. Once I put in her name, I was bombarded. Daughter, Thanawan. Twenty-four. Nickname, Bpook. Number two in the nation in 2003 in high school mathematics. Number fourteen nationally in chemistry. Top fifteen percent in English, History, Thai language, Physics and Geography. Girl's a genius.

Who'd have thought it?

"Didn't you have to be overweight and dowdy to excel in high school?" I asked.

"She won a scholarship in 2004 to study in the U.S. Georgetown. Washington, D.C. And in the sciences, no less: they have very high standards."

"And she got through the course?"

"Barely."

"What?"

"It's really odd. She squeezed through on Cs and Ds. It was as if they were carrying her for four years. Every year the faculty had to get together to decide whether to kick her out. She was the class dunce. Some of her professors tried to convince her to save her money and go home. They were certain she'd bomb her finals."

"And did she?"

"Straight As. A-plus in four subjects. A-minus the lowest. Top scorer for the year for that program. It pumped her GPA up to somewhere approaching respectable."

"How?"

"That's what the faculty wanted to know. Clueless for four years, then a sudden spurt. The university didn't like it. They convened the Honor Council and interviewed our girl. They hired a private detective to investigate."

"Wasn't that a bit excessive?"

"They had a reputation to maintain. They take academic dishonesty very seriously. They were sure she'd cheated, but they needed to prove it. She was interrogated. There may have even been a lie-detector test at one stage. I accessed the personal files of the detective. In the end they decided to give her an oral test in the subjects she'd excelled in. A sort of resit of the examinations and thesis topic, but with a committee asking the questions. They checked for bugs and transmission devices and put her in a soundproof studio and bombarded her for three hours."

"And?"

"Got 'em all right. Nobody could understand it. Given her high school results, they had to assume she'd been suffering from some mental disorder for four years and then suddenly got over it. But whatever the reason, she's kept her mouth shut. At the end of it, they had no choice but to give her a degree."

"Happy ending."

"But. .."

"What?"

"She didn't turn up to receive her diploma. Vanished. No record of her leaving the country."

"Obviously she did. She's here."

"From Washington to Pak Nam Lang Suan. Every young girl's dream. But just to make sure it really is her I'll send you a photo to your phone. It was from her school yearbook."

"I get a strong feeling we're missing some vital information."

"And I'm afraid the Internet can't fill in that gap. The last I have for her is the university newsletter listing the students who didn't collect their diplomas, and a modest little hacking of the central airline registry that told me she wasn't on the passenger manifesto of any flights out of the country. Right now, she only exists in your resort. The trail has gone cold. But I can tell you that both her mother and father resigned unexpectedly from their jobs."

"How do you know that?"

"A cunning little invention called the telephone. I called their places of employment. Nobody has any idea where they are."

"So Dad vanished too? Damn. I wonder where he went?"

"Have you checked the boot of the car?"

"Yes. Grandad went through it. It's empty. No bloodstains."

"This is a darned fine mystery, Jimm. Too bad I won't be around to solve it for you. On Thursday the good ship Sissi will be setting sail for foreign shores."

"Good. So I have two more days of free research assis-tant.

I met Aung under a lamppost beside the District Electricity Authority building. He'd said he couldn't give me an address because his domicile didn't have one. He'd have to guide me there in person. He was standing back in the shadows when I drove up, and he stepped into the light like a dishy cabaret singer. Unfortunately, he was now dressed, but his hair was just as unruly as earlier. A feral beast. My insides felt like a newly opened soda bottle. I was wearing a dress with a pattern that trivialized my bottom but positively yelled out how nice my legs were. My shoes had half-heels, just enough to take me up to his height. My sensual lips were within smooching distance.

He smiled and I wanted to throw him up against the

Electrical Authority sign. But he was too fast for me. He headed off along the main street. Eight P.M. and not a car in sight. Pleasure city. After passing the council hall, he ducked down an alleyway, and I followed him into a labyrinth of little dwellings. The belly of Pak Nam. We passed poky concrete row houses with the doors open so anyone could look in to see families watching TV, small fat people sitting cross-legged on the floor drinking beer, teenagers patching motorcycle tires. Then down tighter and darker paths, where a girl could never feel safe. Where at any moment a rough man might turn around and throw his arms around her.

But he rounded one final corner and stood bathed in a moody yellow light from another open doorway. He smiled and kicked off his shoes. I joined him on the front step, and a little girl of about two came at me from out of nowhere and lifted the hem of my dress above her head. I have to say it was fortunate I was wearing underwear because there were a dozen people in the room looking in my direction. They all seemed to think my indecent exposure was funny, or perhaps, like the Thais, Burmese used laughter to camouflage embarrassment. I wanted to punch the little girl in the nose but was aware that this would be an inopportune moment to do so. I'd get her later. I unfastened my shoes, and Aung introduced me to various members of the Burmese community who had turned up in honor of my visit. Then I met Aung's pretty wife, Oh, and their five children.

"Have you eaten yet?" Oh asked me. Her Thai was just as Thai as that of her husband. I wasn't sure of the etiquette. Should I say yes or no? I tried no. It was a winner. The women retreated joyfully to the back area, which I assumed housed a kitchen. There were only two rooms, divided by a wall that didn't make it all the way up to the ceiling. It was a minimalist terraced garage of a place. The walls were painted with watered-down pink undercoat, and the electrical wiring was all visible. There was a large poster of Aung San Suu Kyi and a smaller one of our own royal family on a skiing holiday. The floor was tiled with non-matching squares, and there was a stack of bedding, presumably for seven, in one corner.

I heard a gas range pop and the clatter of pots and dishes.

"I invited some members of our community committee," said Aung. The men were all still with us, and they were folding themselves down into a circle on the floor. In jeans or shorts I'm fine with sitting on the ground. But I was wearing a dress. I felt stupid. But what the hell? They'd already seen my Macro Huggy Rabbit bikini briefs.

"That's good," I said and negotiated a position that was demure but totally uncomfortable. Another half hour and I'd be paralyzed, and they'd have to carry me out to the truck.

If you didn't count the disappointment, it was a splendid evening. I was pleased that I could still enjoy myself without alcohol. Aung and Oh seemed comfortable together. They somehow made you feel that living in a sub-divided brick dog kennel was the answer to a dream. After a while I'd learned to ignore the TV channel-hopping from the next room, the even louder Mo Lum country music tape from the place behind, the howling dogs, the screaming babies, the drunken arguments. I felt like an anthropologist doing research on twenty-first-century slum culture. But like I said, it was a good night. The committee members were all interesting and smart, and we talked and laughed a lot. All the while I took notes.

There were some 5,400 Burmese in and around Pak Nam. Half of them were here officially. This meant they had sponsors and ID cards. The rest paid fines to the police whenever they were rounded up and gave their cell phones or any jewelry they were foolish enough to be wearing. As part of the conditions for their employment, the Burmese were not supposed to have cell phones. They couldn't own or drive motorized vehicles. The legal Burmese had access to the thirty-baht health care services, but the kids weren't accepted at local schools. Legally the schools were obliged to take them, but in reality they had nowhere to put them and no teachers to teach them. So they ignored the law.

I had so much interesting data I even considered actually doing a story on it. But what Thai publication would give a monkey's about the harsh living conditions of the Burmese? Nobody would read it. And it wasn't even big enough for the world press. These people had told me about humiliation, degradation, corruption, and racial prejudice. But what the world wanted was violence on a huge scale. To get into Newsweek these days, you needed celebrity break-ups or genocide. But now I had my chance. The younger kids were asleep on the tiles, and I decided to tell everyone about my head. I described the discovery, the collection, and the refrigeration of my uncle what's-his-name. During the telling, passed on through the buzz of translation from Aung and Oh, I noticed some disquiet in the ranks. There were glances. Looks of guilt. I'd obviously trespassed on some hallowed ground. But at the end of my story nobody had a comment to make. I didn't even get the obvious question, "Why did the police and collection crew automatically assume the head was from a Burmese?" The hair, the skin color, the earring-they all pointed to a Burmese fisherman but didn't eliminate a Thai. Or was I missing something?

"Have you heard of other Burmese bodies or parts thereof being washed up on the beach?" I asked.

Again the stares. Again the feeling I'd overstepped the mark. The shaking of heads. One man, Shwe something, long-haired, mustachioed like a seventies folksinger, looked me straight in the eye and spoke…Burmese. His wife tried to interrupt, but he ignored her. The other men shouted. But he continued to speak to me and nobody translated. I watched it like a bemused viewer at her first Australian Rules football game. No idea what was going on. At last they all stopped, and all I could hear was a cacophony of slum life around us. Our room was quiet.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Nothing," said Aung.

"That was a long noisy nothing, Aung."

He gave me a smile, but there was nothing erotic about it this time.

"Just a small domestic disagreement between husband and wife. She thought he was flirting with you. It happens."

"Not to me," I thought. My research was finished for the night, but I was getting tired of being lied to. What I needed was to get Shwe alone. We'd see how his wife liked that basket of mackerel.