Catching the Sun

We watched the elephants gently crashing through the tiny waves that lapped the shore at Hat Nai Yang. Tess was smiling as she took a photograph of Keeva. The elephants were mugging for the cameras now. The one that my daughter was on dipped under the water and then surfaced. She gasped, eyes wide, trying to find some air before she could even think about laughing.

‘But they’re beautiful, aren’t they?’ I said, mostly to myself. ‘They’re beautiful.’

I wiped my fingers across my forehead. The sun was getting hotter.

When the sun was setting over the looking-glass sea, we found a small strip of seafood restaurants on the beach at Nai Yang.

We walked past them on the dirt road that ran by the beach, and we had no idea which one to choose. They all blurred into each other, a jumble of tables and chairs on the sand, candlelight flickering on the tables as night came quickly in, and they all had the day’s catch displayed at the beach entrance, fresh fish glistening in deep boxes of ice.

They were not much more than barns with no front and no back, straddling the road and the beach, and they all had curved wooden entrances wrapped with palm leaves. The doorways were just token gestures. There was nothing either side of them, and you could walk straight into any one of these places from the road or the beach or even the sea.

‘This one,’ Tess said.

The Almost World Famous Seafood Grill, a sign said in English.

The owner had strung fairy lights in the casuarina trees that rose between the tables. We stood there watching the lights twinkle green and red and blue, starting to feel the jet lag kick in, when an old Thai woman came out of the kitchen and took the children by the hand.

‘I’m Mrs Botan,’ she said. ‘Come with me, please.’

We watched the children go off with her, passing through the archway, also wrapped in fairy lights, and down the beach to a table at the edge of the sea. Tess and I looked at each other for a moment and then followed.

Mrs Botan parked us at our table and disappeared. We kicked off our shoes and wiggled our toes in sand that was more white than gold. The sun went down blood red and very quickly, and the green hill that rose over Nai Yang grew dark above the glassy bay.

I had never seen a sea so peaceful. It barely rippled when it touched the shore. There were no banana boats or jet skis out in the bay, just the longtails of the fishermen, thin and wooden and curved, like one-man Viking ships. They all had a single parking light, green or blue, and the lights nodded in the warm night air.

Without being asked, the old woman – Mrs Botan – came back with bottled water for the children and Singha beer for us. Then a waiter who was about eleven years old started bringing the food. An omelette stuffed with mussels. Giant barbecued prawns in sweet chilli sauce. A fish and vegetable curry. A huge plate of steaming rice.

Tess and Keeva began to tuck in. But Rory and I exchanged a look. I think we both felt overwhelmed.

‘And some bread,’ I told our child waiter.

The boy was startled. He stared at me for a while, looking worried, and then he raced off to fetch Mrs Botan.

‘Some bread, please,’ I asked her.

Mrs Botan furrowed her brow thoughtfully. She returned to the kitchen and I could hear excited voices. The clash of pans. Eventually she returned with a plate. And on the plate there were four thin slices of white bread.

‘Some bed,’ she said, and then she smiled, and gently patted the arms of my son and my daughter.

‘Your bread, sir,’ Tess said, reaching for a prawn the size of a lobster.

The bread was white and processed and at some point, although perhaps not recently, it had been purchased in a supermarket. Surrounded by the endless bounty of the Andaman Sea, the store-bought white bread looked like a rebuke.

Mrs Botan came back to make sure we were all right and to fuss over the children. Keeva preened and beamed, all poise and charm, but Rory was shifty and self-conscious, as if he thought himself unworthy of all the attention.

‘Enjoy your holiday,’ Mrs Botan said.

‘Oh, it’s not a holiday,’ Tess said, and she smiled at me.

I smiled back. No, it wasn’t a holiday.

It was work that had brought us to Phuket. We were here because of my new job and everything that came with it.

A new life. A better life. The chance to try again.

Tess did not say any of that to the owner of the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill. You can’t say any of that to someone you have just met, even if they are as nice as Mrs Botan.

But Tess smiled at me on Hat Nai Yang with the fairy lights glinting in the trees behind her, and the children ready for their beds, and the bone-white moonlight washing across the looking-glass sea, and it was all there in her smile.

2

I stood at the window waiting for the rain to stop. I looked at my watch and wondered how much longer it could last. The roads here scared me when it rained.

Keeva came and stood beside me and I put an arm around her shoulder. She was still warm from her bed.

‘It rains in Thailand?’ she said.

I heard Tess laugh at the table behind us. ‘It rains a lot in Thailand,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember when we came here when you were little? How hard it rained?’

‘The day we fed the elephants,’ Rory said.

Keeva shook her head. ‘I remember the elephants,’ she said.

We had arrived on Phuket at the start of the long rains, although what I had seen of the weather forecasting on the island was so vague as to be useless. The storms often announced themselves, the sky flashing electric white, and then nothing happened, or it was happening on another part of the island, or out to sea. But when the rains fell on you the sky was full of water, warm hard rain that immediately soaked you to the skin, and all you could do was run for cover and wait.

Through the trees and out on the sea, I could see the stately progress of a longtail boat. As it turned to shore, the two-stroke engine lifted from the water, and the long metal pole that held it was secured in the air by twine. The solitary figure on board began pulling fishing nets from the bottom of the boat, and tossed them on the beach. Even from this distance you could see them moving with life.

The house we were living in was a villa in Nai Yang, on the green hill that sits high above the beach. It was one of two small houses that stood at the end of a dirt road. They both had double-gabled roofs, the typically Thai roof that looks as if it has a smaller version of itself on top, like a lovely echo. The only way to tell the two houses apart was that one of them had a red satellite dish on the roof. To the great disappointment of my children, that was our neighbour’s house.

Our neighbour was also our landlord – a fit-looking, elderly man with a face that seemed more Chinese than Thai. I had only met him once, when I collected the key on the first day, but I could see him at the window of the house next door now, watching the rain. He rented our place to Wild Palm, the property company where I worked as a driver.

Wild Palm staff were scattered across the island, but everyone else was a lot further south, around Phuket town and Ko Surin Tao and Ko Patong, close to the Phuket of travel brochures and dreams. But where we were, Nai Yang, was old Phuket.

This far north, surrounded by plantations of rubber and pineapple, forty years of tourism were wiped away and you could feel the centuries recede to when Phuket had been one of the world’s great trading posts.

It took thirty minutes to walk down the green hill to the beach, and yet the sea felt very close. You could hear it breathing in the distance against the bow-shaped beach of Hat Nai Yang and when the rain stopped and the sun broke through, the Andaman glittered blue and gold through the casuarina trees.

This was not a place to come for a holiday. It was inland, with a different, rougher kind of beauty, thick forest that you could hear dripping when it rained, and the abandoned tin mines that dotted the landscape were a reminder that this had always been a place of sweat and toil and hard graft. This old Phuket was a place you came to look for a better life. A place to work.

I looked at my watch and decided I couldn’t wait any longer, whatever the rain decided to do. It was only my second week on the job and I wasn’t going to let a bit of rotten weather make me late.

As Keeva and Rory carried books to the kitchen table, preparing for their lessons, Tess came across and gave my arms a quick squeeze. I nodded because I knew she was telling me good luck, she was telling me to be careful, she was telling me that she would be thinking of me.

I kissed her lightly on the lips and went to the porch. Our neighbour was still at his window and his wife had joined him. She smiled and waved and I recognized her immediately as the owner of the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill. Of course. The landlord’s name was Botan too. Mr and Mrs Botan. Mrs Botan gave me an encouraging nod as I ran through the rain to a shed by the side of our house, skidding slightly on the rain-slick dirt. Mr Botan watched me and looked unimpressed.

There was an old motorbike in the shed. A 500cc Royal Enfield, made in India, the blue paint worn down to silver metal by the years and unknown riders, its frame freckled with rust. I wheeled it outside and looked up at Tess and Rory and Keeva standing on the porch, the children holding their books, the three of them looking from me to the sky. The rain seemed to be slowing down a touch, but I wondered if that was just my imagination.

I kicked the bike into life and at that moment the rain stopped dead and the sun burst through – dazzling, impossible sunshine so bright that it seemed to have a different quality to any sunshine I had ever known. Tess laughed and shook her head and held out her hands palm up as if to say, See how lucky we are?