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

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-"