Colin Cotterill - Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach

"My husband had been away on a business trip," she said. "At least that's what he called it."

OK. Good. A rare anecdote about our father. We knew so little about him she was guaranteed the undivided attention of her children. To us, our father was a fictional character we only got to meet in stories.

"I was desperate for him," she said. "Two weeks without his strong arms around me. Two weeks without the taste of his tongue. Two weeks without-"

"Mair!" Arny shouted and pointed his fork and his eyebrows toward Noy. I personally doubted the girl was a stranger to strong arms and tasty tongues and the rest. Mair forged ahead with barely a pause. She was there in the past, seeing it all.

"We'd been married for two years," she said. "But I'd never let him believe I was just there for the taking. The only way to fire a man's passion is to make him understand you aren't the house bicycle. He couldn't just climb on and go for a ride around the block whenever the mood took him. There had to be a flat tire now and then. Sometimes the saddle would come loose and you wouldn't have the right size spanner to straighten it. A twig might get stuck in the gears."

I forgot to mention our Mair had a habit of getting tangled up in her own metaphors.

"Men need motivation to perform," she said. "And there's nothing like rejection to make a man try his best. If you beg, he hands out loving like alms to a tired old monk who needs a shave. But if you show no interest, ho ho, his pride pushes him onward and upward. So he was away for two weeks and I was desperate, so I hacked off my beautiful long hair with scissors and I dressed all in white, and when he walked in the door, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor reciting the Precepts. Actually I'd never memorized the Precepts. I was just making it up. But he wouldn't have known that. He wasn't that. .. you know, connected to the Lord. He asked me what had happened, and I told him I'd become a nun and I couldn't have contact with a man for three months. By dinnertime he was drooling like an octopus. And that night, once I'd rescinded my vows, I had the best hammering I'd ever experienced in my life."

"Mair," I said. "I really don't think this is relevant."

"Really?" She smiled as if remembering the intimacy of that night. "I think it's relevant. If it hadn't been for that homecoming present, you wouldn't be sitting here at this table."

"Why wouldn't…? Oh, my God. You aren't…?"

"Nine months later my little angel of heaven arrived in the world. The child conceived of passion. That's why you have so much fire in you, daughter."

"Fire? I was the result of you impersonating a nun. I'll go to hell."

"Don't be silly, child. We were husband and wife. Couples often resort to role-playing."

The revelation was too much. As if I wasn't already messed up, now I had to analyze how religio-erotic blackmail might have affected me. I looked across the table where Noy and Mamanoy were sitting open-mouthed like catfish on ice at Tesco. And that was when Mair dropped in her non-sequitur of "Would anybody like some mixed-friends ice cream?" Followed a few seconds later by the bang. At first I thought it was something exploding in my head, a brain overload perhaps, but everyone looked around, so I knew they'd heard it too. We all rushed outside. Always a good idea when someone's firing mortars at you. But I imagine, like me, they assumed it was the electricity distribution box, which blew up often. Instead, we saw gray smoke coming out of Mair's shop and being immediately dispatched on the wind.

Grandad Jah and Arny made the womenfolk stand back cause we were all so fragile and needed protection. They walked into the shop through the smoke, and Arny grabbed the nice red fire extinguisher that had stood beside the door unnoticed for a year. He was trying to figure out how to follow the Chinese instructions to make it foam.

"Arny, don't bother," I said, pushing past him. "There's no fire."

A blast of some type had sent cans and packages flying to the back wall and ripped apart two shelf units. Ground zero was our refrigerator, which now looked like a paper lantern after a wind-tunnel experiment. Something mighty powerful had torn that up. The shop was open-fronted with a pull-down metal shutter. We had moved to an area where people tended not to lock their doors, so we'd got into the habit of leaving the shutter open while we were eating. If some rare customer should happen by, he or she could alert us by beating a stick on the zinc watering can suspended from the rafter or just leave the money on the counter. It was that kind of place. All this by way of explaining that the shop was wide open and anyone could have tossed in an explosive without even slowing down their car…or their black SUV.

In a place like Maprao you didn't have to wait for the evening broadcast on public radio. News spread like urine in a public swimming pool. First on the scene, as ever, was Captain Kow. I swear he has some sort of radar antenna inside that dirty gray baseball cap he never takes off. Then there was Jiep, the rice porridge lady, and Chat from the used-bicycle dealership, and Loong, the coconut pulp grinder, and Ari, the monkey handler, without his monkey, and Auntie Sakorn and her fourteen-year-old pregnant niece. Very soon the entire village was standing around staring at our bombed-out shop. Someone with a sidecar on their motorcycle had kindly given Constable Tawee a lift. The volunteer village constables were semi-serious police whose main function was to fine locals for betting on card games. Hardly a day went by when some group of fishermen's wives wasn't betting away their husbands' income. As he rarely left the police box, I imagine Tawee had to rely on gamblers with guilty consciences turning themselves in. He wasn't qualified to do any investigating, but he did have a cell phone and I was sure he'd called the real police. "Real" being relative, in our case.

This presented two problems for us. I called Grandad Jah to one side.

"The gun?"

"What about it?"

"You have to get rid of it."

"I do not."

"You know who did this, don't you?"

"Yes."

"If we accuse them, the gun story comes out. It'll be our word against theirs. We all saw them pull their knives, but if they find the gun…"

"They won't."

I glared at him.

"They won't," he repeated.

The only competent officer at the local police station was Lieutenant Chompu, and he was warm and snug in my pouch. He'd be no problem. Whoever else they sent to investigate our explosion would merely ask the questions as they were laid out in the regulation manual. All I needed to do was get to the witnesses and make sure we all told the same lies. Arny was our weakest link. They wouldn't need interview room violence to break him down. If they raised their voices, he'd confess-even if he wasn't responsible. I found him squeezing pilchard cans back into shape and reminded him he was interfering with a crime scene. He pouted. I grabbed his thick arm and led him outside.

"Arny," I said. "Grandad Jah didn't shoot at the body snatchers."

"He didn't?"

"No."

"You know I'm not very good at this?" he said.

"I know. But this is family, and I need us all to stick together with this one. Do you really want to see Grandad locked up in chains in the Lang Suan prison, the handcuffs chafing his old flaky wrists? His body riddled with rat-and flea-bites from the communal bedding? Abused in the shower room by perverts with fetishes for…skinny and ignorant old men?"

He thought about it.

"No," he said at last.

"Then you didn't see him shoot at the body snatchers."

"OK."

And I knew I was pushing my luck, but I needed one more small lie from him. This one was for me.

"And Noy and Mamanoy? They don't exist."