Grandad, There's A Head on the Beach

Начало книги

"Grandad?"

He didn't so much as look up. He had a lot of problems, did Grandad. Deafness wasn't one of them. Ignorance was. He feigned the former to achieve the latter.

"Grandad?"

He knew I was there, but I admit I'd chosen a bad time to get through to him. It was the morning rush hour in downtown Maprao and he had traffic to examine. As the fishermen traveled to or from their boats, a lot of them stopped off at Jiep's rice porridge stall across the street. Six thirty was as busy as it would ever get. He sat beside the road in his white undervest and his Fred Flintstone shorts and he tsssked and tutted at the passing vehicles. Like an ex-matador might sit on a farm fence glaring at a bull, pondering how, in his prime he would have demeaned and disfigured the beast, so Grandad gave the evil eye to every passing truck and motorcycle sidecar. There weren't that many, but every one of them flouted the highway code in one way or another. Grandad knew every regulation. He'd been a traffic policeman for forty years, and then for fourteen more years he'd subscribed to the Royal Thai Police Force Road Users' Gazette to keep up with amendments. He was a living compendium of petty legislation: probably the most knowledgeable man on the subject in Chumphon province, if not the whole country We'd often urged him to send in an application to Channel Five's Genuine Fan, where people who'd spent their entire lives focused on something utterly useless-combative stag beetles, designer handbags, English Premiership football results and the like-had a chance to answer questions on their chosen specialty and win a refrigerator. Grandad Jah would have had a fleet of Toshiba freezers by now.

Читать дальше →