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

If you didn't count the disappointment, it was a splendid evening. I was pleased that I could still enjoy myself without alcohol. Aung and Oh seemed comfortable together. They somehow made you feel that living in a sub-divided brick dog kennel was the answer to a dream. After a while I'd learned to ignore the TV channel-hopping from the next room, the even louder Mo Lum country music tape from the place behind, the howling dogs, the screaming babies, the drunken arguments. I felt like an anthropologist doing research on twenty-first-century slum culture. But like I said, it was a good night. The committee members were all interesting and smart, and we talked and laughed a lot. All the while I took notes.

There were some 5,400 Burmese in and around Pak Nam. Half of them were here officially. This meant they had sponsors and ID cards. The rest paid fines to the police whenever they were rounded up and gave their cell phones or any jewelry they were foolish enough to be wearing. As part of the conditions for their employment, the Burmese were not supposed to have cell phones. They couldn't own or drive motorized vehicles. The legal Burmese had access to the thirty -baht health care services, but the kids weren't accepted at local schools. Legally the schools were obliged to take them, but in reality they had nowhere to put them and no teachers to teach them. So they ignored the law.

I had so much interesting data I even considered actually doing a story on it. But what Thai publication would give a monkey's about the harsh living conditions of the Burmese? Nobody would read it. And it wasn't even big enough for the world press. These people had told me about humiliation, degradation, corruption, and racial prejudice. But what the world wanted was violence on a huge scale. To get into Newsweek these days, you needed celebrity break-ups or genocide. But now I had my chance. The younger kids were asleep on the tiles, and I decided to tell everyone about my head. I described the discovery, the collection, and the refrigeration of my uncle what's-his-name. During the telling, passed on through the buzz of translation from Aung and Oh, I noticed some disquiet in the ranks. There were glances. Looks of guilt. I'd obviously trespassed on some hallowed ground. But at the end of my story nobody had a comment to make. I didn't even get the obvious question, "Why did the police and collection crew automatically assume the head was from a Burmese?" The hair, the skin color, the earring-they all pointed to a Burmese fisherman but didn't eliminate a Thai. Or was I missing something?

"Have you heard of other Burmese bodies or parts thereof being washed up on the beach?" I asked.

Again the stares. Again the feeling I'd overstepped the mark. The shaking of heads. One man, Shwe something, long-haired, mustachioed like a seventies folksinger, looked me straight in the eye and spoke…Burmese. His wife tried to interrupt, but he ignored her. The other men shouted. But he continued to speak to me and nobody translated. I watched it like a bemused viewer at her first Australian Rules football game. No idea what was going on. At last they all stopped, and all I could hear was a cacophony of slum life around us. Our room was quiet.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Nothing," said Aung.

"That was a long noisy nothing, Aung."

He gave me a smile, but there was nothing erotic about it this time.

"Just a small domestic disagreement between husband and wife. She thought he was flirting with you. It happens."

"Not to me," I thought. My research was finished for the night, but I was getting tired of being lied to. What I needed was to get Shwe alone. We'd see how his wife liked that basket of mackerel.

There's something you need to know about the monsoons. They come. And they blow. And they go. It's not like a Robert Louis Stevenson story, where the biting wind blows blood-numbing sleet off the ocean for three months at a time. The southern monsoon season is more like a security guard at a gold necklace shop. Day after day nothing happens. Then suddenly two masked robbers burst in, firing guns and banging the guard over the head. They scoop up the necklaces and they're gone. Then it all goes back to nothing again. I got that one from Mair, but it's one of my favorites.

When I got to bed that night, there was no wind at all and the surf was soothingly soft. The first monsoon had passed and we were back to nothing. That was too bad because I needed a distraction. I needed crashing waves to drown out my thoughts. My brain was trying to convince the rest of me that I was over the hill. That I would never again feel the strong arms of a lover around me. Never again have a man snore in my ear. That, like the salt virgins of Xanadu, my vagina would seal itself up and I would become a fossil. The antidepressants weren't working. Or perhaps they weren't strong enough to counter my mega-midlife crisis. I took another two, washed down with Chilean red, and lay my head on the pillow. I couldn't be bothered to clean my teeth again, so I knew they'd be mauve in the morning. I needed a man, desperately. I needed to be admired, wanted, complimented, desired…loved. How difficult could that be? Village head Bigman Beung desired me, as did Major Mana. So there were precedents. I wasn't totally repulsive. All I needed to do was transfer that desire to a man with skin rather than scales.

Since I am a Thai woman, my culture discourages me from making the first move. But my culture is eroding as fast as the Gulf coastline. And I am a Thai woman raised by a liberated, free-thinking hippy mother. Unlike most Thais, I never fit in with groups. Relationships with my friends, whom I always felt were wary of my un-Thainess, evaporated on the last day of high school and then again the day after my university graduation. I had been encouraged to embrace the modern world and follow my instincts. Mair wouldn't have thought twice about being the aggressor when she was my age. Enough of being the tick on a blade of grass, hoping some hairy creature might brush past me. No, sir. Tomorrow I would go after my prey. It was a good plan and I felt confident. I might have even found sleep about then if it hadn't been for the headboard of my mother's bed banging against the wooden wall of her cabin.

I was in the new, barely used meeting room at the Pak Nam police station. They still hadn't removed the plastic wrapping from the chairs. It had taken me a while to get up to the second floor. I had been passed from man to man like a baton on my way up. Loitering was the activity of choice there. Officers old and new were leaning and sitting and standing at every corner, like statues in an ancient mansion. Nobody seemed to have a job. Those I knew, like Desk Sergeant Phoom, quickly introduced me to those I didn't, summarizing my entire life in twenty seconds and ending with the ubiquitous "She's single." But as they knew I was a reporter and therefore educated, "She's single" here was not intended as an invitation to date me, more a sorrowful postscript much in the vein of "She only has two months to live."

I was discreetly removing chair plastic with my nail scissors when Chompu threw open the door of the meeting room. He entered diva-like with the back of his hand on his forehead, slamming the door behind him. In order to get into the police force, Chompu had pretended to be straight at the interview, just as many other successful gay policemen had done before him. Some even married and produced children to compound the effect. But my Chompu had wanted to make a stand for camp. He believed that openly effeminate men had a role in the modern Thai police force and should not have to disguise what nature had given them. Consequently, he'd been transferred thirty-eight times in his career, and here he was at rock bottom. There was nowhere else to be transferred to. So Chompu could be himself and nobody really cared.