Catching the Sun
Just how badly do you want to find paradise?When Tom Finn is almost jailed for confronting two burglars in his own home, this taxi driver takes his young family to live on the tropical island of Phuket, Thailand.Phuket is all the Finn family dreamed of – a tropical paradise where the children swim with elephants, the gibbons sing love songs in the jungle, the Andaman Sea is like turquoise glass and this young family is free to grow.But both man-made disaster and the unleashed forces of nature shatter this tropical idyll for Tom Finn's family.CATCHING THE SUN is a gripping, moving story of a family who go in search of Paradise – and end up discovering themselves.
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TONY PARSONS
Catching the Sun
For Yuriko and Jasmine In sunshine and in shadow
‘… it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.’
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
‘Do good – get good. Do bad – get bad.’
Thai proverb
Table of Contents
Part One: Swimming With Elephants
Part Three: The Young Man and the Sea Gypsy
Part Four: Song of the Gibbons
1
On the first day we watched the elephants come from the sea.
‘Look!’ Keeva cried. ‘Look at the sea!’
I sat up but I could see nothing. Just my daughter – Keeva, nine years old, stick thin, pointing out at a sea so calm it looked like a lake made of glass.
Tess, my wife, stirred beside me and sat up. She had been sleeping, worn out by a night in the air and coming seven thousand miles. We both watched Keeva, down where the sand met the water, excitedly waving her arms in the air.
I could actually see the heat. We were on the beach at Nai Yang, just after breakfast, and the air was already starting to shimmer and bend. I thought – If it’s this hot so early in the day, what will it be like later?
Keeva was jumping up and down by now.
‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘You must see it! Oh, oh, oh!’
Our boy, Rory, was between me and Tess, on his stomach, a wet and battered copy of My Family and Other Animals on his lap. He looked up at his twin sister, adjusting his glasses, impatiently shaking his head. Then his jaw dropped open.
‘Oh,’ he gasped.
Tess laughed, and stood up, brushing the sand from her legs, and all the exhaustion of the journey seemed to vanish with her smile.
‘Can’t you see them?’ she asked me, taking Rory by the hand as they began walking down to the sea.
Then it was suddenly there for me too, this thing poking out of the water, a gnarled tube moving towards the shore. It looked like some prehistoric snorkel. Then there was another one. Then two more. All these prehistoric snorkels, steadily moving towards Hat Nai Yang. And always getting bigger.
Everyone on the beach was looking out to sea now, and there was a collective gasp as the head of the first elephant broke the surface, its huge eyes blinking, the mighty head nodding, the beads of water flying from the ears. And then another. Then an entire family of elephants was marching out of the water, their mighty grey bulks rising out of the sea like gods from the deep. I saw the men on their backs, the mahouts, lean and brown and grinning, steering with their bare feet pressed behind the ears of the great beasts.
But really all we saw were the elephants coming out of the empty sea.
‘Wow,’ said Tess. ‘How did they do that, Tom?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’
I looked down the great sandy sweep of Hat Nai Yang. The beach was a perfect bow shape, and I guessed that somewhere beyond the curve in the bay there was a secluded spot where the mahouts slipped into the water to surprise the people further down the beach. But watching the elephants come out of the sea still seemed like more than a clever trick.
It felt like magic.
Keeva backed away from the elephants. They were out of the sea now, their giant feet contracting as they trod on the soft sand of Hat Nai Yang. She came running back to us.
‘Elephants can swim?’ Keeva said. ‘Elephants can swim, Daddy?’
‘Elephants are good swimmers,’ Rory said, blinking behind his glasses. ‘Like all mammals. Apart from apes and humans. They have to be taught to swim. The apes and the human do.’
His sister snorted with derision. ‘I swim good.’
Rory’s eyes never left the elephants. ‘But you had to be taught, didn’t you? And the elephants just know.’
Rory took my hand and we stood watching as Tess and Keeva walked down to the crowd that had gathered around the elephants.
There were four of the big beautiful brutes, being patted and petted and cooed over by the people on the beach. The bird-like chatter of Thai filled the air. It was a Sunday and Hat Nai Yang was popular with locals at the weekend. We were the only foreigners on the beach.
‘Looks like a family,’ Rory said.
‘Four of them,’ I said, smiling down at him. ‘Same as us.’
But his face was serious. He peered at the elephants and the blaze of the early morning sun turned his glasses into discs of gold.
‘They’re very floaty,’ he said thoughtfully. He looked up at me. ‘What do you call it? When something is very floaty?’
I thought about it. But he was faster than me.
‘Buoyant,’ Rory said. ‘Elephants are very buoyant mammals.’
We watched the crowd with the elephants. A young Thai woman in an old-fashioned swimsuit was lying on her belly and one of the elephants was softly patting her on the back and legs with one of its mammoth feet. The monster paw lingered over her buttocks, and seemed to think about it. The crowd roared with laughter.
