Grandad, Thereэ's head on the beach

'But. ..'

'What?'

'She didn't turn up to receive her diploma. Vanished. No record of her leaving the country.'

'Obviously she did. She's here.'

'From Washington to Pak Nam Lang Suan. Every young girl's dream. But just to make sure it really is her I'll send you a photo to your phone. It was from her school yearbook.'

'I get a strong feeling we're missing some vital information.'

'And I'm afraid the Internet can't fill in that gap. The last I have for her is the university newsletter listing the students who didn't collect their diplomas, and a modest little hacking of the central airline registry that told me she wasn't on the passenger manifesto of any flights out of the country. Right now, she only exists in your resort. The trail has gone cold. But I can tell you that both her mother and father resigned unexpectedly from their jobs.'

'How do you know that?'

'A cunning little invention called the telephone. I called their places of employment. Nobody has any idea where they are.'

'So Dad vanished too? Damn. I wonder where he went?'

'Have you checked the boot of the car?'

'Yes. Grandad went through it. It's empty. No bloodstains.'

'This is a darned fine mystery, Jimm. Too bad I won't be around to solve it for you. On Thursday the good ship Sissi will be setting sail for foreign shores.'

'Good. So I have two more days of free research assis-tant.

I met Aung under a lamppost beside the District Electricity Authority building. He'd said he couldn't give me an address because his domicile didn't have one. He'd have to guide me there in person. He was standing back in the shadows when I drove up, and he stepped into the light like a dishy cabaret singer. Unfortunately, he was now dressed, but his hair was just as unruly as earlier. A feral beast. My insides felt like a newly opened soda bottle. I was wearing a dress with a pattern that trivialized my bottom but positively yelled out how nice my legs were. My shoes had half-heels, just enough to take me up to his height. My sensual lips were within smooching distance.

He smiled and I wanted to throw him up against the

Electrical Authority sign. But he was too fast for me. He headed off along the main street. Eight P.M. and not a car in sight. Pleasure city. After passing the council hall, he ducked down an alleyway, and I followed him into a labyrinth of little dwellings. The belly of Pak Nam. We passed poky concrete row houses with the doors open so anyone could look in to see families watching TV, small fat people sitting cross-legged on the floor drinking beer, teenagers patching motorcycle tires. Then down tighter and darker paths, where a girl could never feel safe. Where at any moment a rough man might turn around and throw his arms around her.

But he rounded one final corner and stood bathed in a moody yellow light from another open doorway. He smiled and kicked off his shoes. I joined him on the front step, and a little girl of about two came at me from out of nowhere and lifted the hem of my dress above her head. I have to say it was fortunate I was wearing underwear because there were a dozen people in the room looking in my direction. They all seemed to think my indecent exposure was funny, or perhaps, like the Thais, Burmese used laughter to camouflage embarrassment. I wanted to punch the little girl in the nose but was aware that this would be an inopportune moment to do so. I'd get her later. I unfastened my shoes, and Aung introduced me to various members of the Burmese community who had turned up in honor of my visit. Then I met Aung's pretty wife, Oh, and their five children.

'Have you eaten yet?' Oh asked me. Her Thai was just as Thai as that of her husband. I wasn't sure of the etiquette. Should I say yes or no? I tried no. It was a winner. The women retreated joyfully to the back area, which I assumed housed a kitchen. There were only two rooms, divided by a wall that didn't make it all the way up to the ceiling. It was a minimalist terraced garage of a place. The walls were painted with watered-down pink undercoat, and the electrical wiring was all visible. There was a large poster of Aung San Suu Kyi and a smaller one of our own royal family on a skiing holiday. The floor was tiled with non-matching squares, and there was a stack of bedding, presumably for seven, in one corner.

I heard a gas range pop and the clatter of pots and dishes.

'I invited some members of our community committee,' said Aung. The men were all still with us, and they were folding themselves down into a circle on the floor. In jeans or shorts I'm fine with sitting on the ground. But I was wearing a dress. I felt stupid. But what the hell? They'd already seen my Macro Huggy Rabbit bikini briefs.

'That's good,' I said and negotiated a position that was demure but totally uncomfortable. Another half hour and I'd be paralyzed, and they'd have to carry me out to the truck.

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.