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

"Here's the problem," she said. "We stupidly left home without our ID cards. My husband has FedExed them to Songkla. So, just tonight we don't…"

Mair laughed.

"We're so desperate we'd let Andrew Hitler stay here without checking his ID," she said, and winked. "No questions asked at the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort."

To their credit, the lovelies laughed. They must have known who Andrew Hitler was because they handed over a deposit big enough to rebuild our ornamental garden a hundredfold. I was sure we'd have to return most of it the next morning when they fled in horror, but it was nice to have serious money in my hand for once. Arny walked in front of the Honda, as he herded them to their room like a muscle-bound mahout guiding an elephant. I could see mother and daughter gaze out toward the murky gray sea and the garbage-strewn beach, and I knew they wouldn't be unpacking. But as the car slowly followed Arny, the question that entered my mind was "Why does it have no number plates?"

Arny-born Arnon but edited in admiration of Arnold Schwarzenegger-was in the same boat as me. Once our mother sold up, against everyone's will, and moved to Nevernowayland, we'd had a filial obligation to follow her. She was only fifty-seven then, but we sensed she'd need us. Despite, or perhaps because of, her eccentricities, she had become a popular member of the Maprao women's association. Together they'd formed an animal protection group and a local-produce cooperative. They'd ignored Bigman Beung and taken control of a biodiesel still donated by some Japanese Lions Club. They had oil-waste buckets in all their houses and had arranged weekly pick-ups. They'd already produced enough rough fuel to run all the Weed-wackers in the district. All the professional grass cutters now queued up at the still, delighted to be paying half the cost of diesel at the pumps. The women planned to expand and convince truck drivers to drive on waste. As none of these incentives existed before we arrived, I have to assume Mair was the catalyst. Either way, she had a lot more friends than me and Arny. What she didn't have was a man in her life, so what happened the day after our run-in with the rats really caught us all by surprise.

Our family compound is set back from the beach, which gives us a fifty-fifty chance of not being swept out to sea. My hut is a few meters from Mair's. I was woken at two A.M. by a heavy grunting sound competing with the crash of the surf. The grunt was winning. At first, I thought it was Sticky eating my flip-flops again, and I was preparing to go back to sleep when a horrendous scream rent the air. I rushed out of my hut to find Grandad Jah rushing out of his. We were both carrying our fake Movada LD flashlights. The sound had most certainly come from Mair's hut, so we hurried onto the balcony and hammered on the door.

"Mair! Mair! You all right?" I called.

There was no reply. I turned the handle, but the door was locked.

"Mair?"

Grandad went to the side window, but that too was shut.

"Mair!"

I grabbed the smallest flowerpot and was about to smash the porch window when I heard the click of the lock. The door opened a crack. Mair somehow oozed herself out through the gap and quickly closed the door behind her. I shone my light on her face. She was flushed. Sweating. The wind whipped up her hair. Her ugly Chinese pajamas were disheveled. In fact, the top was inside out. Mair did the Titanic smile.

"You all right, child?" Grandad asked.

"Fine," she said. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"There was a scream," I told her.

She looked up at the big black racing clouds as if trying to remember the lyrics to a song.

"Mair?"

"Yes," she said at last, "it was a nightmare. I remember it clearly. In my sleep I must have kicked the TV on and…and there was a horror movie. Yes. A scream. Simple as that."

She nodded at the end, as if the explanation might have been in some way credible. From behind her, the sound of a glass falling onto the floor but not breaking. We have sturdy glassware.

"I should turn off the TV," she said. "Go back to bed, both of you."

She turned and squeezed back into the dark room. In the brief second my flashlight beam was allowed inside, I swear I saw movement on the bed.

"You girls never learn from your mistakes," said Grandad gruffly as he turned away and headed back to his hut. The Gulf wind shoved against his skinny carcass, and I feared he might be carried off by it. My mother was on her way to sixty. A girl only in the eyes of a father. I flicked off my light and made heavy footfalls down the wooden steps. And there I waited.

Twenty seconds later Mair giggled and said, presumably to her TV, "They're none the wiser. Go to sleep."

I tried to ignore all the clues, but they were there, flapping around in the wind like dirty laundry. I went back to bed that night wrapped in incredulity and not a little envy. It had been almost eighteen months since my last. . . since I last had a nightmare and kicked the TV. Before attempting to sleep, I reached for the trial drugs now open on my bedside table and took two, washed down with the last of my Romanian red. The room was so black I felt like I'd been painted out of the scene. I didn't know whether to laugh or suffocate myself with my pillow. Instead, I found myself in a dream.

It was disconcertingly erotic. I was locked in a steamy embrace with Ed the grass man in the unfinished hull of his new squid boat. We were on a mattress of curly wood shavings. Ed, I may not have mentioned, was the gangly young man who came every month to cut our grass with his impressive Weedwacker. He'd once begged me to go out with him. Well, perhaps he didn't beg exactly. In fact, he didn't quite get around to asking, but I knew he was about to.

He wasn't bad-looking, as grass cutters went. He had those dark chocolate eyes, not Vosges exactly, more Tesco Lotus plain. But despite that and his knotty muscular stomach, I wasn't about to let him have his way with me. And I was most annoyed to find him there in my erotic dream. Who did he think he was, clunking away there on top of me, his knees banging against the wooden planks? And to make matters worse, I awoke to the realization that the sound of our love-making was in fact that of a headboard banging against the wooden wall of the neighboring cabin. My mother's cabin. I looked at the alarm clock. It was six fifteen. Did she have no shame? I took two more antidepressants and wrote on the questionnaire beside DAY ONE, "No effect whatsoever."

One of my chores at the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort was to prepare meals for the family and, on rare occasions, the guests. Sooner than listen to Mair's headboard, I went to the kitchen early to fix something for our two paying visitors. I was sure they wouldn't have had a moment's sleep in that mildewy, lizard-happy, wind-rattling room and would be on the road early. So, as I wanted them to have at least one positive memory to take from us, I bought some of Jiep's excellent rice porridge in plastic bags and stewed my own o-liang orange tea, thick with sugar, as a going-away present. I needed to waylay them long enough to ask about the missing number plates. That was one of the three mysteries I'd decided to solve that day. The second was to follow my anonymous head and find out who he was and how he'd come to be on our beach. Although I'd lied to Bigman Beung about writing an article, further thought had told me it might not have been such a bad idea.

The Chumphon News, a weekly, was the nearest thing we had to a local paper. It was based in Chumphon town, eighty kilometers north along the highway. (Chumphon's claim to fame was that it boasted a Tesco, a Carrefour, and a Macro all within a kilometer of each other. In Thailand, our superstores liked to huddle.) I'd done a couple of human interest features for the News and the odd petty crime report. My last expose had been on the smuggling of carrots from China. They paid less than for a table clearer at Kentucky Fried Chicken, but news was in my blood. It's what I did. I needed the buzz of seeing my name in print. And that and my antidepressant trial constituted my total income at the time. I decided I would do a piece on head retrieval and visit the foundation whose job it was to trace the families of the dead. And if, in the process, I could get Ben and Socrates fired, all the better.