The Dying Beach (30 page)

Jayne hesitated but only for a moment. ‘Are you happy to leave now?'

Pongsak nodded, patting the back of his infant son sleeping on his shoulder. Jayne relayed the plan to Paul, who looked sceptical.

‘We don't have much choice,' she said.

Pongsak's beat-up car was parked down the road from the temple. They piled in, Wan in the front seat with the baby on her lap, Jayne and Paul in the back with the two boys between them.

Pongsak switched on the engine, bringing the stereo to life and filling the car with the mournful warbling of Thai folk music.

One of the boys was asleep within minutes, slumped against Paul. The other sat wide-eyed and rigid. Jayne nudged Paul and nodded at the boy.

‘He probably thinks we're ghosts,' she whispered.

Paul tilted his head towards their driver. ‘Where's he taking us?' he mouthed.

‘A guesthouse on a beach.'

Paul shrugged and turned to face the window, unaware of the scared little boy's eyes on his back.

50

Paul would have hugged Pongsak if it wasn't culturally inappropriate. The guesthouse he'd found for them was perfect, right on the Hat Nai Plao beach and virtually deserted. Their bungalows, though monastically austere, had verandas overlooking the moonlit sea. Paul's even had a hammock.

With only cold water on offer, he showered quickly, pulled on a pair of shorts and a clean T-shirt and headed for the hammock with his bottle of whisky and a couple of glasses he found in the bathroom.

Jayne joined him within minutes, her hair damp, bringing cigarettes and a bottle of water.

‘Would you like the hammock?' he said, in a bid to ingratiate himself.

‘That's big of you, Paul. Let me think about it.' She lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly. ‘Tell you what, if you go inside and fish out Pla's notebook, I promise not to take the hammock while you're gone.'

He expected her to pull one over on him, but returned to find her sitting cross-legged on a chair. She'd lit a mosquito coil and was using an empty Coke bottle as an ashtray. Paul tossed Pla's notebook into the hammock, poured two generous shots of whisky and handed one to Jayne.

‘Cheers.' He took a decent sip and almost choked. ‘Shit, what's this?'

‘I told you, it's the local brew. Rice wine. Stick with it. You won't notice the taste by the second or third glass.'

‘How do you manage to be so coolheaded about everything?' Paul said, resuming his place in the hammock.

Jayne laughed. ‘I'm not a coolheaded person at all. I just play the part of one.'

‘You make it look so easy.'

‘What?'

‘This.' He gestured to the scene in front of them. ‘Being a farang in Thailand.'

‘Oh, that.' She shrugged and took another drag of her cigarette. ‘It's easier than being a freak in Australia.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Nothing.' She waved and exhaled a cloud of smoke. ‘Everything's easier when you speak the language.'

‘Why do you live in Thailand, anyway?' Paul persisted.

She took a sip from her glass. ‘For the local whisky.'

He gave up trying to interrogate her. ‘You've been here way too long.'

A tired silence fell between them, the lapping of the waves like sighs.

‘How are you feeling after today?' Jayne said.

‘Fine.' Paul stared straight ahead at the sea, determined to prove equally adept at deflecting questions he didn't want to answer.

‘It was tough.'

Paul nodded, took another sip of whisky.

‘Did Pla ever talk about her family?' Jayne asked.

‘I knew her parents were dead.'

‘Did she mention the aunt or anyone else in Nakhon Si Thammarat?'

‘Why would she?'

‘Do you know why she went to Krabi?'

Paul shrugged. ‘For work, I guess.'

‘Why do you think she was drawn to the power plant consultations?' she pushed.

He met her gaze. ‘To be with me.'

‘Ah.'

Both of them stared out to sea, neither speaking for a minute or two.

‘I don't blame you for not wanting to talk about it.' Jayne broke the spell. ‘You must be exhausted.'

Paul felt himself losing his fragile hold on his temper. ‘Yeah, I am exhausted after carting the ashes of my dead girlfriend across the country and fronting up to her last remaining relative with fuck-all to offer, apart from empty wishes in a language she couldn't even understand.'

‘I get that.' She was unfazed by his tirade. ‘I guess it's the price you pay for being intimate with someone.'

‘Christ, you sound like those sanctimonious little shits I trained with. They're so keen to volunteer in Thailand but they don't want to actually get close to Thai people.'

‘I didn't mean—'

‘Is that why you thumb your nose up at everything the Thais value in terms of proper female behaviour?'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘You smoke. You drink. You date an Indian, for god's sake. Why the fuck do you live in Thailand?'

She eyed him impassively. ‘I try to be respectful, to get by. I'm not so naive as to imagine I can assimilate.'

What was wrong with him? Why the hell was he dumping on her? She wasn't to blame for the mess he was in. ‘Jayne, I'm sorry—'

‘Don't worry about it.' She dropped her cigarette into the Coke bottle and stood up. ‘For the record, I made that comment about the price you pay for intimacy out of empathy. It wasn't meant as a criticism.'

Paul grabbed her wrist as she walked past. ‘Please, don't go. I'm sorry. It's not your fault. You just hit a raw nerve. The other Aussie volunteers gave me such a hard time about getting involved with a local that I freaked out. Behaved like a prick. Backed right off. Pla didn't deserve it. And I can't help thinking that if I hadn't abandoned her, she might still be alive today.'

Jayne frowned at his hand on her wrist. He released his grip, expecting her to keep walking. But she stayed where she was, stared out to sea as she spoke. ‘About a year ago, I went to Chiang Mai to stay with a friend. I loved this man, but when things got hot between us, I couldn't handle it. I left him at his place to cool off, said I'd stay at a hotel and we could talk in the morning. Later that night he was murdered on his front veranda by the Thai police.'

‘Christ.'

‘For a while I did what you're doing, tortured myself with the thought that if only I'd stayed for the night, he might still be alive. But Paul, it's bullshit. More likely scenario is we'd both be dead.' She drained the contents of her glass and touched her hand to his arm. ‘I never bought the argument that Pla drowned. I think she was killed because she got in someone's way. And you could've been killed, too, Paul, if you'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

‘But who'd want to kill Pla?'

‘I know I'm supposed to be off the case, but can I see Pla's notebook?'

He handed it to her. ‘Can I have one of your cigarettes?'

‘I didn't think you smoked.'

‘I don't.'

She handed him the packet, took a seat and leafed through the notebook. ‘Light me one, too?'

Paul put two cigarettes between his lips, lit both, handed one to her. A gesture he'd seen in an old black-and-white movie, the name of which escaped him.

Jayne accepted the cigarette without looking up. Paul lay back in the hammock and smoked while she read. He felt lighter, no less regretful about the way he'd treated Pla, but somehow less guilty.

‘Your friend in Chiang Mai. Was he Thai?'

‘No, he was gay,' she muttered through the cigarette between her teeth.

Paul figured he must have misheard her.

She removed the cigarette and stabbed at the book with her free hand. ‘It's been playing on my mind all afternoon. I'm sure Pla mentions mangroves somewhere in these notes.'

‘Right at the end, I think. I noticed because it's in English.'

She leafed through the pages. ‘Shit, you're right. Here it is…
Need to ensure indirect impacts don't damage
environment in other areas, such as mangrove forest
. And the context was…' She backtracked over Pla's notes. ‘Pakasai village consultation. The PR consultant was there, the engineer, the health official, the headman Amnat. They talked about explosives, dengue fever, business opportunities…' She looked up. ‘Does the name Choom ring any bells?'

‘Should it?'

‘There's something familiar about that name.' She glanced at her watch. ‘God, it's only nine o'clock. It feels so much later.'

‘Tell me about it.' Paul stifled a yawn.

Jayne rested her cigarette on the mosquito coil tray. ‘I'll be back in a few minutes.'

He watched as she ducked into her room, re-emerging with her mobile phone to her ear. He thought he heard the word ‘sweetheart' as she strode out of earshot towards the beach.

The cigarette she left smouldering had turned to ash by time she came back. Her eyes were shining, her cheeks flushed.

‘Choom is the name of a man Rajiv and I met at a village one night when we mistook a golf driving range for the project Pla was working on. He wasn't from that village, though. He gave us a lift back to our guesthouse on his way home. He runs a company that sells diesel generators.'

‘Diesel generators?'

‘Yeah, as in a local business that can only lose customers when a power plant opens in the area.'

‘Could be coincidental.'

‘True. When we showed Pla's photo around, he gave no sign he knew her.'

Somewhere in the dark a gecko trilled.

‘My instincts tell me—'

‘What does your gut say?'

They spoke at the same time, stopped, smiled.

‘I want to go back to Krabi and interview him,' Jayne said. ‘It is only a gut feeling, but if Choom told Pla he intended to start farming shrimp in the mangroves, you can see her trying to stop him, can't you? I mean, growing up around here she'd know firsthand the damage commercial shrimp farming does to mangrove forests.'

‘Would he have her killed for it?'

‘That's what we need to find out. I've managed to get another day's grace out of Rajiv. If we leave early enough tomorrow morning, we should reach Krabi in time to track down Choom.'

‘You want us to go back to Krabi?'

‘I assume you want justice for Pla even more than I do.'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘I'm counting on Apex Enterprises being open for business on a Saturday. That's the link to Choom…'

Paul was too tired to concentrate on what she was saying. His vision of a relaxing night sipping whisky on the beach dissolved and, with it, his last reserves of energy.

‘…and if it's okay with you, I'd like to hang onto Pla's notebook for a while longer.'

He nodded as she lit another cigarette and held out her glass for a refill.

Paul left her with the bottle.

51

Jayne took the bottle and headed to the beach, too wired to even think about sleeping. An outcrop of smooth boulders offered the perfect vantage point for staring out over the moonlit sea. The rocks were still warm and as Jayne took in the view, she wished she could absorb the calm of her surroundings as the stones had absorbed the heat of the day.

She glanced back at Paul's bungalow and saw his light go out. The day's events had clearly taken it out of him. Poor bastard. He appeared to know nothing of Pla's marriage nor her prior history of activism, and, given his already fragile emotional state, Jayne decided not to enlighten him. To learn he was not the centre of Pla's world after all would be a terrible blow to his self-esteem. So she'd taken the Thai way out, telling him only what he wanted to hear, withholding any information that might upset him.

She was impatient to get back to Krabi and to the case. She didn't have time to deal with the fallout of coming clean with Paul about Pla. At least that's what she told herself as she sat on her rock and gazed over the Gulf of Thailand, trying not to think how she'd feel in Paul's position.

What if Rajiv had been married—or God forbid, still was? It wasn't a question she'd thought to ask him. Her instincts told her he was too sexually inexperienced for a married man, not to mention too guileless to keep something as significant as a wife under wraps. But for all Jayne knew, there was an arranged marriage waiting for him back in Bangalore. She'd been fooled before.

Why the fuck do you live in Thailand?

Paul's question played on her mind. Given it'd been more than five years, it was surprising how rarely she asked herself the same thing.

Back in 1992, the decision to stay had been a no-brainer. A short-lived affair with a French teacher, while freeing her from a philandering fiancé, had also cost her her job at an elite girls' secondary school in Melbourne. She could get as much work as she wanted teaching English in Bangkok, and at the same time put off returning home to the censure of family and friends.

Truth was, Jayne had long felt like an outsider among her peers. Since her final year of high school, in fact, when she spent six tantalising months on a student exchange in France. When she returned home, her passion for the outside world met with lack of interest, if not downright hostility—as though it was disloyal to find anywhere as attractive as Australia. Being of an age when what mattered most was fitting in, Jayne tried to tamp down her enthusiasm, aspire to the same things her peers wanted out of life. But she couldn't unlearn what she knew to be true, neither about herself nor the world. For all that Australians liked to boast about the national larrikin spirit, in reality only irreverence was tolerated. Unconventionality was not.

The Thais weren't ones for rocking the boat either, but they were much more polite about it. Besides, as a farang, she wasn't subject to the usual rules. So long as she was also polite, Jayne was more or less left to her own devices. Certainly there was no pressure to fit in. She was allowed to be an outsider in Thailand in a way she never was in Australia.