Catching the Sun by Tony Parsons

Author:Tony Parsons [Tony Parsons]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

The Young Man and the Sea Gypsy

19

On New Year’s Day Mr Botan’s new second-hand longtail spluttered out of the still, sun-polished bay and into the choppy, deeper blue of open sea.

Mr Botan gave me some small foamy pink earplugs which I took but didn’t use. The throaty rumble of the longtail’s two-stroke diesel engine was loud, though not deafening, as we left the shore far behind. I loved that sound.

As the sun grew stronger I sat in the middle of the longtail, huddled under a little green umbrella that Mr Botan had erected for me. He was the colour of old teak, and apparently unaffected by even the fiercest heat. But the sun was not the only reason he wanted me to stay in the centre of the boat.

When I was on either side of the longtail, Mr Botan could not see where he was steering, for ahead of us the bow of the longtail curved dramatically upwards like the sharp end of a Viking ship. From his position at the stern, steering our course with a rudder attached to the longtail’s old diesel engine, Mr Botan never had a clear view of what was ahead of us. Under the national flag of the Kingdom of Thailand, there were bright silk scarves of blue, pink and yellow tied around the top of the bow, and they fluttered and whipped like the flags of some forgotten army in the wind of open water, not for decoration, as I had always thought, but for warning. Like so much of Thailand, behind the delicate, decorative beauty there was a hard-headed, practical purpose. The silk scarves were our headlamps.

Mrs Botan had made us Haway thawt, an omelette stuffed with mussels, and when we stopped on open water, we ate it with our fingers for lunch.

He showed me how to weight a trap for lobster. The fishing was poor, but just when it seemed that we would have a bad day because we had set out late and missed the best spots, the nets he threw into the water were suddenly full of white snapper, squid and crab, so much crab that he was able to teach me the difference between blue crab, red crab and soft-shell crab.

He was in a hurry to get back, and I could not understand why, but when Hat Nai Yang was in sight I could see that some rough version of the fish market was operating, and the longtails were docking with their catch. There were even a few tables and chairs on the sand where the line of restaurants had once stood. The island was already rebuilding.

Tess was sitting beneath the shelter that I had made on the sand, ready to give bottled water to anyone who asked. We had brought down all the water that we had left in the shed, and it took up so much space that Tess and Rory and Keeva and Chatree and Kai sat in a semi-circle before her using the stacked pallets as seating.

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