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.
‘She Yum-Yum,’ one of the elephant handlers shouted to me. This mahout, the one who had some English, was by far the oldest. They looked like a father and his three sons, and they all had lean, stringy bodies. Ropey muscles, bulging veins. Their skin was almost black from the sun. ‘Yum-Yum give massage,’ the old man called.
It did look like a massage. We watched the largest elephant carefully wrap its trunk around Keeva and lift her clean off the sand. She shouted with delight.
‘You want to do that?’ I asked Rory.
He shook his head. ‘They’re not meant to be clowns,’ he said. ‘Elephants are working animals.’
‘Oh, come on, Rory,’ I said.
‘They’re not here to entertain us,’ he said. ‘For some sort of show. Some sort of circus. They carried teak. Maybe these ones. Maybe these were the ones who carried the teak. Up in the mountains. Elephants are good in mountains.’
‘But this is work too,’ I said. ‘Maybe they prefer to do this than carry piles of wood around all day.’
He was not convinced.
‘Elephants are strong,’ he said. ‘Elephants are smart.’ He looked up at me through his glasses. ‘Now they have to muck about with Keeva, who didn’t even know that elephants can swim.’
I felt a flicker of irritation. Silently we watched the elephants moving into the sea. There were children on their backs. Keeva was on the largest elephant, gripping its ears and laughing as it splashed into the water.
We watched the elephants gently crashing through the tiny waves that lapped the shore at Hat Nai Yang. Tess was smiling as she took a photograph of Keeva. The elephants were mugging for the cameras now. The one that my daughter was on dipped under the water and then surfaced. She gasped, eyes wide, trying to find some air before she could even think about laughing.
‘But they’re beautiful, aren’t they?’ I said, mostly to myself. ‘They’re beautiful.’
I wiped my fingers across my forehead. The sun was getting hotter.
When the sun was setting over the looking-glass sea, we found a small strip of seafood restaurants on the beach at Nai Yang.
We walked past them on the dirt road that ran by the beach, and we had no idea which one to choose. They all blurred into each other, a jumble of tables and chairs on the sand, candlelight flickering on the tables as night came quickly in, and they all had the day’s catch displayed at the beach entrance, fresh fish glistening in deep boxes of ice.
They were not much more than barns with no front and no back, straddling the road and the beach, and they all had curved wooden entrances wrapped with palm leaves. The doorways were just token gestures. There was nothing either side of them, and you could walk straight into any one of these places from the road or the beach or even the sea.
‘This one,’ Tess said.
The Almost World Famous Seafood Grill, a sign said in English.
The owner had strung fairy lights in the casuarina trees that rose between the tables. We stood there watching the lights twinkle green and red and blue, starting to feel the jet lag kick in, when an old Thai woman came out of the kitchen and took the children by the hand.
‘I’m Mrs Botan,’ she said. ‘Come with me, please.’
We watched the children go off with her, passing through the archway, also wrapped in fairy lights, and down the beach to a table at the edge of the sea. Tess and I looked at each other for a moment and then followed.
Mrs Botan parked us at our table and disappeared. We kicked off our shoes and wiggled our toes in sand that was more white than gold. The sun went down blood red and very quickly, and the green hill that rose over Nai Yang grew dark above the glassy bay.
I had never seen a sea so peaceful. It barely rippled when it touched the shore. There were no banana boats or jet skis out in the bay, just the longtails of the fishermen, thin and wooden and curved, like one-man Viking ships. They all had a single parking light, green or blue, and the lights nodded in the warm night air.
Without being asked, the old woman – Mrs Botan – came back with bottled water for the children and Singha beer for us. Then a waiter who was about eleven years old started bringing the food. An omelette stuffed with mussels. Giant barbecued prawns in sweet chilli sauce. A fish and vegetable curry. A huge plate of steaming rice.
Tess and Keeva began to tuck in. But Rory and I exchanged a look. I think we both felt overwhelmed.
‘And some bread,’ I told our child waiter.
The boy was startled. He stared at me for a while, looking worried, and then he raced off to fetch Mrs Botan.
‘Some bread, please,’ I asked