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

"Yes."

I wondered whether this was one of those gag scenes where the person you're speaking to only knows the word yes.

"Where did you learn your English?" I asked.

"I graduated from the University of Rangoon many moons ago. I was an English major. Not frightfully useful in my present circumstances, I might add."

All right, he could speak. He sounded like a leftover from the British Raj, but he could speak. My problem then for the next fifteen minutes, as we locked the office and drove my truck to Grajom Fy, was shutting him up. He was his own favorite subject. I could tell you all about his life, but it would really be a huge chunk of unnecessary narrative. So all you need to know is that his name was Clive. His portfolio in Pak Nam had nothing to do with orphans. He was here to initiate AIDS-awareness programs for the Burmese community. AIDS was still good charity, and even though there were far more pressing problems for the Burmese in Thailand, AIDS was what got Iowan and Indianan church folk dipping into their pockets. So, despite the fact he had no medical training and couldn't speak Thai, his command of the English language for some reason made him the ROT representative in Pak Nam. In his yellow ROT uniform the Burmese could see him coming half a kilometer away, but I wondered how they viewed him. With his education, I imagined he'd be something of an outsider. And would Shwe be comfortable with Clive as an interpreter?

We found Shwe among the vast spread of sunning tables laying out sandfish on racks like neat torture victims. All began well. The two were acquainted. They exchanged smiles and greetings. Shwe nodded curiously at me and told Clive a quick story, which I'm certain involved my underwear. Clive's brown cheeks turned claret. We retired to the shade of a huge deer's ears tree and sat on large plastic buoys.

"What would you care to know?" Clive asked, still too embarrassed to look me in the eye.

"Last night I was asking a group what they knew about Burmese bodies being washed up on the beach. Shwe had something to say, but the others there wouldn't let him tell me. I want to know what he knows."

Clive's translation and the subsequent discussion in Burmese took some time, and I thought I was about to be excluded until Clive sighed and looked at his knees.

"Well, goodness," he said. "One is never too old for an education. I am flummoxed to learn of these things. It would appear that there have been numerous disappearances from amidst the Burmese. All unexplained. A husband would fail to return from his toil in the plantation. A workmate might stop by his associate's dormitory only to discover the door open and the bedding unperturbed. A fishing boat captain might be overwhelmed that a good and steadfast mate had failed to turn up for his shift. In the past year alone there have been thirty such incidences of whom he knows."

"Were they reported to the police?" I asked.

Clive passed on the question.

"In the case of a Burmese being registered and having a Thai sponsor," Clive said, "the employer would go to the police station to report that one of his workers had vanished mysteriously. The response would invariably be that the Burmese are a notoriously unreliable race and the worker probably found some other place of employ that offered a more substantial stipend. There was, however, no explanation as to why he would be of a mind to leave behind his clothes, possessions, and, in some cases, his Burmese ID card and money."

"Is there a theory as to where these missing workers may have gone?" I asked.

Another dialogue.

"There are tales," said Clive. "Seafarers" yarns about deep-sea slave ships. Vessels whose crews work under armed guard, never paid. Subsistence rations. Torture and cruelty. Out at sea for a month transferring their catch to smaller boats. No way to tell of their plight. And in case of a mutiny, a bullet to the head."

"Or a machete to the neck," I added.

"Quite so. Nobody has ever returned from such cruises."

"So, if nobody returns…?"

"Hmm. I shall inquire."

The Burmese chatted. In the middle of their conversation Shwe's left leg started to play the Thai national anthem. He laughed and rolled up his trouser cuff. There, taped to his calf was a cell phone in a holster. He switched it off. He obviously wasn't about to calmly hand over his phone to the police. Necessity was the mother of invention.

"There is no cement evidence," Clive said. "But the slices fit together to make the cake. The account from a drunken Thai crew member. The sight of a man being bundled into a truck. Missing Burmese. Body parts found on a beach…"

"So there have been other parts?"

"Again, rumors."

It wasn't any type of tale a journalist would touch with a long bamboo pole. The Internet was full of this stuff. Not a shred of evidence.

"Why wouldn't Aung want me to hear this?" I asked.

"For the same reason you won't write about it," he said.

Shwe smiled.

He was right. I was a journalist in spirit. There might be facts I could follow up on, statistics, hospital records and the like, but I wouldn't get much from the Burmese. Why would they want to bring a rock face down on themselves? Who'd volunteer to have his precarious life crushed by getting involved in an investigation into a bunch of unsubstantiated claptrap? The missing were missing. The dead were dead. The police didn't care. Protect yourself and your kin, that's the way of it. I asked whether Shwe knew anything about the head on our beach. He said he didn't, but he'd ask around.

I drove Clive back to Pak Nam, and he was pleasantly quiet. I assumed this was his inauguration into the horror of life for the poor fisherfolk. This wasn't the yellow-paper-chain world, or the world of asexual hand-puppets telling each other to use a condom. This was the world where people got eliminated. There was no evidence, but I could tell that he believed what he'd heard. When he stepped out of the Mighty X, I asked him how he knew Shwe.

"I consult with him from time to time," he said. "He used to be the head of urology at the East Yangon General Hospital."

"So what's he doing here drying fish?" I asked, although I was sure I knew the answer already.

"The poor blighter has a son back home with muscular dystrophy. In his old job he didn't make enough to medicate the boy. This pays twice as much."

All this excitement and it wasn't even lunchtime. Just as well because I was supposed to be the one making it. I don't know how I ended up with kitchen duty, but it was by far the hardest job in the household. Mair looked after the shop, which was currently Kosovo. Arny minded the chalets, all but one of which were empty. Grandad Jah watched traffic. I made breakfast, lunch, and dinner and solved world problems. You can see where all the pressure fell in our family.

I pulled into the car park and saw a crowd standing around the latrines. Nobody was doing anything. They just stood by the concrete block, staring like tourists at the pyramids. It didn't occur to me at first, but as I walked down to the beach, I noticed some geometric anomaly with regard to our public loos. The entire block was leaning at a thirty-degree angle. When I reached the scene, the problem was clear. The sea had claimed the entire beach right up to the crest. The water was scooping out the foundations of our toilet block wave by wave. We weren't talking tsunami here. This was a deceptively gentle rise of the tide. To my left, the polite surf was already lapping at the top step of the front cabin. The plants bobbed up and down in their plastic pots. The picnic table was sub-aqua. In the four hours since I'd left, our resort had become Venice. Captain Kow was right. Earth was in the process of wreaking revenge on its abusers.

As King Canute discovered to his chagrin, there isn't a lot you can do to turn back the sea. We stood and watched. Our kitchen, farther inland, had a thirty-centimeter wash, and the carport was a quay. But this was a kindly reminder from Mother Nature that we lived beside several trillion liters of water. If it wanted us, it could have us any old time. I stood beside Mair as the toilets dipped another four degrees.