Catching the Sun

I looked at Rory and Keeva with the turtle. They were keeping a deferential distance as the turtle started to dig into the sand, moving its flipper-like feet to dig a hole.

As the feet fluttered in the sand, it didn’t look like very effective digging. But a hole somehow began to appear, and the head and shell of the turtle became covered in sand, giving it a carefree, oh-I-do-like-to-be-beside-the-seaside air.

The sea gypsies, the chao ley, were slowly coming up the beach towards the turtle. They were different from any Thais that I had ever seen – shorter, stockier and darker, and yet their hair was streaked with gold, as if they had just emerged from a fancy hairdressing salon rather than the Andaman Sea.

They stopped some distance from the turtle, kicking their bare feet in the sand, not looking at us, and now ignoring the turtle. At first I thought they were beachcombing. But they were waiting.

Mr Botan watched them with mounting anger. To us they were colourful travelling folk. To him they were a bunch of thieving, peg-selling pikeys.

‘Look!’ Rory cried.

The turtle had begun to lay its eggs. We edged closer and so did the chao ley.

‘These sea beggars,’ Mr Botan said to me. ‘They follow the turtle. They know she will lay her eggs.’

Rory’s eyes were pleading. ‘They’re not going to hurt her, are they?’

I stared at the chao ley.They didn’t seem as though they were going to give her a saucer of milk. The three of them were watching the turtle now. The tough-looking little boy. The girl, who was perhaps sixteen. And the old man. Watching the eggs emerge. If their skin had been one shade darker then it would have been black.

The turtle laid five eggs and then seemed spent. Keeva was disappointed.

‘Is that it?’ she said. ‘Is that all the eggs? I thought there would be – I don’t know – millions.’

But Rory was in a fever. I really believe it was the best day of his life.

‘They don’t lay many eggs in Phuket,’ he said to his sister, patient but breathless, grateful for seeing this vision. ‘Because it’s warm all year round, see? So they don’t have to worry about the weather. But the eggs are left unprotected. They’re small and soft. The eggs are. Predators eat them up. Rats. Lizards.’ He looked at the chao ley. ‘People.’

The turtle was dragging itself back to the sea. The old chao ley passed it and walked swiftly to the eggs. He picked one up, examined it briefly, and started back to his boat.

‘I can’t believe that’s legal,’ Tess said.

Mr Botan spoke harshly to the chao ley and began following him.

Hefting the egg, the old man gave him a mouthful back.

Mr Botan stopped, shaking his head. ‘He says he only takes one, out of respect for the mother. But he says the rats will eat the rest anyway.’

Rory whimpered. Tess looked at me, as if I might somehow rescue our day out. But all I could do was shrug. I wasn’t going to get in a punch-up with some old sea gypsy over a turtle’s egg.

‘Sounds sort of reasonable,’ I said.

Rory walked warily to the sea turtle, his shoulders sunk with anguish. We all followed him. The tough-looking chao ley boy was squatting on his haunches watching the turtle as it crawled and clawed its way to the sea. He ran one curious hand across the turtle’s rock-like shell.

Rory began hyperventilating.

‘He shouldn’t touch it,’ Rory said. ‘Excuse me? Oh, excuse me? You shouldn’t touch it. I don’t think he speaks English. Tell him not to touch it.’

But the young sea gypsy was already up and off towards their boat, pausing only to scoop up the frisbee that our children had discarded in the sand. He looked at it as if it was a shell, and wandered down to the shore, idly tapping it against his thigh.

‘Hey,’ Keeva called, going after him. ‘That’s not your frisbee.’

The boy turned to face Keeva. She held out her hand and he took a step back, holding the frisbee above his head, although he was a couple of inches shorter than her.

Then Tess was there.

‘Do you speak English?’ she asked with a friendly smile, and in that simple question you could see that she had been a great teacher.

She had been sick of the school at the end – the lack of discipline, the lack of ambition, the parents who owned more tattoos than books. But the way she looked at that hard little child who was stealing our frisbee made me see that she had loved her job once, and maybe missed it more than she let on.

The boy looked at Tess with his fierce feral eyes.

‘I am an engineer,’ he announced, his voice thin and reedy. ‘I am from Germany. I am from Australia. What time is the train to Chiang Mai? Is there anything cheaper? I want something cheaper. I am a student. I am an engineer. I am Mr Smith. I am Mr Honda from Tokyo bank. Take me to a doctor. My stomach is bad.’

Tess clapped her hands and laughed.

‘That’s very, very good,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

But he stared at us silently, bitterly, and it was his big sister calling to him from the boat where she waited with the old man who revealed his name.

‘Chatree!’ she called. ‘Chatree!’

‘Look, you can play with us if you want,’ Keeva told him. ‘But taking something that doesn’t belong to you is basically not cool.’

But the boy had no time for play.

He ran off to join his family. They were getting back in the boat, the man wrapping the egg in some sort of filthy blanket.

I picked up the red plastic frisbee as they pushed off. The turtle swiftly disappeared below the waves, but we watched the canoe for a while longer, the three dark figures bobbing up and down on the empty sea until they were round the bay and out of sight.

‘They wander still,’ said Mr Botan, making it sound as if it had always been that way in the past, and it would be that way forever.

5

We walked back up the green hill to home and every step of the way the sound of Rory’s crying mixed with the evening sigh of the sea.

‘Stop crying,’ I told him, and it came out far too harsh, but tears in my family always filled me with a wild panic.

Keeva threw a thin protective arm around her brother’s shoulders.

‘Crying doesn’t change anything,’ I said, more gently now, although I knew the damage had been done.

‘I can’t help it,’ he gulped. ‘I know it doesn’t do any good. I know that. But I can’t stop.’

‘Why do you cry?’ asked Mr Botan.

He did not know Rory like the rest of us. We knew exactly why he was crying.

‘The egg,’ Rory said, a tear running down one lens of his glasses. ‘The mother. The baby.’