‘Well,’ Keeva said. ‘Looks like they’re staying in the sea.’
She picked up a red plastic frisbee and wandered down to the water. Rory pushed his glasses up his nose and anxiously watched the sea.
‘It’s November and they lay their eggs from now to May,’ he said. ‘But they’re dying out.’ He watched his sister throwing the frisbee in the air and catching it as she let the almost non-existent waves lap her toes. ‘No loggerhead turtles for fifteen years,’ he muttered to himself. ‘They’re all endangered, or already dead, maybe even extinct.’
Tess touched his back.
‘One day we’ll see the turtles,’ she promised. ‘One day soon. We’ll keep watching, okay?’
Rory nodded and went down to join his sister. Mr Botan checked his watch, as if he had specifically told the turtles to be at Hat Nai Yang at this time and place.
The children played with the frisbee on the edge of the sea until Keeva got bored and came back complaining of hunger. Her brother followed her and we ate our picnic – Pahd Thai from the Almost World Famous Seafood Grill. The light had almost gone and we were packing up to go home when we saw the turtle.
It was already out of the water and hauling itself across the smooth white sand, looking like the most exhausted thing on the planet. Its head looked a thousand years old and there were tears streaming from its depthless black eyes.
‘Daddy,’ Keeva said, stricken. ‘She’s crying.’
‘No,’ Mr Botan said.
‘That’s the salt gland,’ Rory said, trembling with excitement. ‘It helps the turtle to maintain a healthy water balance when it’s on dry land. Don’t worry, Keeva.’
Mr Botan nodded. ‘Not sad. Not upset.’ His Chinese face grinned. ‘Very happy day,’ he said, genuinely delighted at the sight of the turtle, and not for our sake. ‘Very good luck,’ he said. ‘Very good luck for Thai people.’ He pointed an instructive finger. ‘They are the universe,’ he said. ‘The top of the shell is the sky. The bottom of the shell is the earth.’
We watched the turtle for a while and then we saw the boat. A rough canoe, no engine, containing three shadowy figures. It was difficult to see them in the dying light, but they were coming to land where the turtle must have crawled from the sea.
Mr Botan watched them suspiciously.
‘They are not Thai,’ he said. ‘They are chao ley. They stay close to the shore during the long rains.’
‘Fishermen?’ said Tess.
He laughed shortly.
‘They do a little fishing, but they are not fishermen,’ he said. ‘They look on the beach for anything they can eat or sell or use.’ He spat on the sand. ‘Look at their boat!’
As they landed on the beach we could see that it was a canoe that seemed to have been carved out of some ancient tree. ‘No engine!’ Mr Botan snorted. All the longtails had two-stroke diesel engines. He considered a dugout canoe to be a relic of the Stone Age.
‘They live on the island?’ Tess said.
‘A few,’ Mr Botan said. ‘Down south. All the way down south. On Hat Rawai. They approach tourists with their rubbish. There are others on Ko Surin and Ko Boht. They have Kabang. House boat. Or shacks. They move around the sea.’
‘Gypsies,’ I said. ‘Sea gypsies.’
‘Thieves,’ said Mr Botan. ‘Beggars. Tramps. Some chao ley are not so bad. Almost like Thai. Almost. They get registered. We call them Mai Thai – new Thai. But these are moken. Like oken – sea water. Same name, almost. They don’t even want to be Thai, these moken.’ He clearly took it personally. ‘Anyway,’ he said, looking back at the turtle. ‘They are more Burmese than Thai. Anyway. Mai pen rai. Never mind, never mind.’
The rough boat was being dragged out of the water. There was a man and two children. A girl in her mid-teens and a younger boy who, now I looked at him again, was more like a tiny man than a child. He was not tall but he was broad and the way he moved as he dragged the canoe further up the sand suggested the kind of workhorse strength that you only get from years of manual labour.
I looked at Rory and Keeva with the turtle. They were keeping a deferential distance as the turtle started to dig into the sand, moving its flipper-like feet to dig a hole.
As the feet fluttered in the sand, it didn’t look like very effective digging. But a hole somehow began to appear, and the head and shell of the turtle became covered in sand, giving it a carefree, oh-I-do-like-to-be-beside-the-seaside air.
The sea gypsies, the chao ley, were slowly coming up the beach towards the turtle. They were different from any Thais that I had ever seen – shorter, stockier and darker, and yet their hair was streaked with gold, as if they had just emerged from a fancy hairdressing salon rather than the Andaman Sea.
They stopped some distance from the turtle, kicking their bare feet in the sand, not looking at us, and now ignoring the turtle. At first I thought they were beachcombing. But they were waiting.
Mr Botan watched them with mounting anger. To us they were colourful travelling folk. To him they were a bunch of thieving, peg-selling pikeys.
‘Look!’ Rory cried.
The turtle had begun to lay its eggs. We edged closer and so did the chao ley.
‘These sea beggars,’ Mr Botan said to me. ‘They follow the turtle. They know she will lay her eggs.’
Rory’s eyes were pleading. ‘They’re not going to hurt her, are they?’
I stared at the chao ley. They didn’t seem as though they were going to give her a saucer of milk. The three of them were watching the turtle now. The tough-looking little boy. The girl, who was perhaps sixteen. And the old man. Watching the eggs emerge. If their skin had been one shade darker then it would have been black.
The turtle laid five eggs and then seemed spent. Keeva was disappointed.
‘Is that it?’ she said. ‘Is that all the eggs? I thought there would be – I don’t know – millions.’
But Rory was in a fever. I really believe it was the best day of his life.
‘They don’t lay many eggs in Phuket,’ he said to his sister, patient but breathless, grateful for seeing this vision. ‘Because it’s warm all year round, see? So they don’t have to worry about the weather. But the eggs are left unprotected. They’re small and soft. The eggs are. Predators eat them up. Rats. Lizards.’ He looked at the chao ley. ‘People.’
The turtle was dragging itself back to the sea. The old chao ley passed it and walked swiftly to the eggs. He picked one up, examined it briefly, and started back to his boat.
‘I can’t believe that’s legal,’ Tess said.
Mr Botan spoke harshly to the chao ley and began following him.
Hefting the egg, the old man gave him a mouthful back.
Mr Botan stopped, shaking his head. ‘He says he only takes one, out of respect for the mother. But he says the rats will eat the rest anyway.’
Rory whimpered. Tess looked at me, as if I might somehow rescue our day out. But all I could do was shrug. I wasn’t going to get in a punch-up with some old sea gypsy over a turtle’s egg.
‘Sounds sort of reasonable,’ I said.
Rory walked warily to the sea turtle, his shoulders sunk with anguish. We all followed him.