The Beach Read online

  ‘OK.’

  Gregorio passed me the mask and I set off for the water. ‘Swim deeply and look under the boulders,’ he called after me. ‘The fish will be hiding.’

  It was a buzz, swimming through the thick vapour. I couldn’t wear the mask because the spray was too dense to let me breathe through my mouth, which meant I was constantly blinking to clear the water from my eyes. With nothing to see but a blurred foot of sea on either side of me, and each breath requiring a manageable amount of labour, I felt agreeably cocooned by a mildly dangerous world.

  I stopped at the first boulder I came to. It was one of the smaller ones, sixty or so metres from the shore. We rarely used it as there was only room for one person to sit on it at a time, but seeing as I was alone it didn’t make much difference. When I stood up my top half cleared the layer of mist. Étienne was standing on the sand, holding his hands like a peaked cap to ward off the rain. I waved my spear in the air and he spotted me, then turned to walk back to the tree-line.

  The first thing I needed to do was to find a heavy stone so I could rest on the bottom with a decent lungful of air. I put on the mask and slipped into the water, kicking out for the sea floor. The light was dark grey, deadened by the black sky and the mist, but the visibility was good. There weren’t, however, any fish to be seen, not even the clouds of tiny fry which usually wheeled around the corals.

  I took my time hunting for the stone, making myself move slowly. If there were any fish around I didn’t want to scare them off. Eventually I spotted one that looked the right size and weight. I’d run out of air by that time so I stuck my spear beside the stone to make it easy to find again, and rose up to the surface.

  On the way back down a few milkfish appeared, coming to inspect the new arrival to their storm shelter. I settled at the bottom with the stone on my lap and waited for their curiosity to bring them within range.

  *

  I saw the shark on my third dive. I’d just killed my first milkfish so it must have been attracted by the smell of blood. It wasn’t much of a shark, about a foot longer than my leg and much the same width, but it gave me a hell of a shock. I didn’t know what to do. Despite its small size it made me nervous, but I didn’t want to swim back with only one fish. I’d have to explain why I gave up so soon, and it would also be embarrassing if the shark was seen later. It was probably only a baby.

  I decided I’d have to resurface and hang around on the boulder, hoping it would go away. I did this and spent the next ten minutes shivering in the mist and rain, crouched down because I didn’t want the others to see that I wasn’t fishing. Every so often I peered underwater to check if it was still there. It always was, circling slowly near the spot where I’d been sitting, watching me – I reckoned – with its inky eyes.

  A brilliant idea coincided with a blistering peal of thunder. I put my milkfish, which was still in the twitching stage of death, on the tip of my spear. Then I rolled on to my front so I could dip my head and arms into the water, and held the spear ahead of me. The shark responded at once, breaking out of its leisured pace with a crisp snap of its tail. It headed towards me at an angle that would have carried it past the boulder, but six feet away it turned abruptly and lunged at the milkfish.

  Out of sheer instinct I pulled the spear back. The lunge had been so quick and threatening that my reflexes had got the better of my common sense. The shark whipped past me and vanished behind a bank of corals. It didn’t reappear within ten seconds, so I pulled myself out of the water to get some air.

  I swore at myself, took a few deep breaths, then dipped back in.

  The next time the shark appeared it was more cautious, swimming near but showing little interest. The milkfish was dead by now and floating limply, so I tried jerking the spear to approximate life. The shark’s enthusiasm revived. Again it began its angled approach, but this time I took care to tense my arms. As it lunged, I pushed. The point of the spear caught momentarily on its teeth or gums, then sunk into its mouth.

  With a mighty wrench I pulled myself upwards, stupidly thinking I’d hoist the shark on to the boulder behind me, but the spear simply snapped. I looked blankly at my broken spear for a couple of seconds, then shoved myself completely off the rock.

  Underwater, the greyness was already hanging with curiously static strings of blood. Close by, the shark wildly thrashed and twisted, champing at the splintered bamboo between its teeth, sometimes diving directly downwards and ramming its snout on the seabed.

  Watching it, I realized I’d never killed anything as large before, or anything that fought so violently for its survival. As if to complement my thought, the shark increased the intensity of its thrashing, and became obscured behind a cloud of disturbed sand and shredded seaweed. Occasionally, like in a comic-book fight, its tail or head would appear out of the cloud before darting back inside again. The sight made me grin, and salt-water eased through the sides of my mouth. I resurfaced. I needed to spit and I needed some air. Then, with no intention of going near it while it was in that frantic state, I floated face down and waited for it to die.

  Hi, Man

  I don’t keep a travel diary. I did keep a travel diary once, and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down. Everything else slipped away, as though my mind felt jilted by my reliance on pen and paper. For exactly the same reason, I don’t travel with a camera. My holiday becomes the snapshots and anything I forget to record is lost. Apart from that, photographs never seem to be very evocative. When I look through the albums of old travelling companions I’m always surprised by how little I’m reminded of the trip.

  If only there were a camera that captured smell. Smells are far more vivid than images. I’ve often been walking in London on a hot day, caught the smell of hot refuse or melting tarmac and suddenly been transported to a Delhi side-street. Likewise, if I’m walking past a fishmonger’s I think instantly of Unhygienix, and if I smell sweat and cut grass (the lawn kind) I think of Keaty. I doubt either of them would appreciate being remembered in such a way, especially Unhygienix, but that’s how it is.

  All that said, I wish there’d been someone with a camera when I sauntered out of the mist with a dead shark over my shoulder. I must have looked so cool.

  That afternoon, I was the toast of the camp. The shark was grilled and cut into strips so everyone would get a proper taste, and Keaty made me stand up and repeat my story to the whole camp. When I got to the part about the shark’s first lunge, everyone gasped as if they were watching fireworks, and when I told how I tensed my arms for the deathblow, everyone cheered.

  For the remainder of that day and night I had people constantly coming up to me to give their congratulations. Jed was the nicest. He walked over to where I was smoking with Étienne, Françoise and Keaty, and said, ‘Well done, Richard. That was really something. I think we ought to rename you Tarzan.’ That made Keaty giggle like crazy, mainly because he was stoned, so Jed sat down with us and we all got wasted together.

  It was doubly nice because Keaty and Jed got on so well. After the Rice Run I’d been trying to persuade Keaty that Jed was OK, and now I felt like I’d had some success. It also turned out they had something in common, one of those weird coincidences that could easily never have been realized. Six years ago they’d both stayed at the same guest-house in Yogyakarta, on the very same night. They were able to work this out because on that night the guesthouse had mysteriously burned down – or not so mysteriously as it turned out. Keaty had been tripping, and the mosquitoes in his room were driving him mad. Knowing that mosquitoes were driven away by smoke he lit a small fire, and the next thing he knew the room was completely ablaze. Jed explained that he’d had to escape the guesthouse by jumping from a third-storey window and that all his money had been burned, and Keaty apologized, and everyone rolled around laughing.

  If there was a sour note to the evening, it was Bugs, but ironically even that turned out OK. He came over while we were in the middle of anoth
er laughing fit, this one about the moment Étienne had realized we were standing in a dope field.

  ‘Hi, man,’ he said, flicking his head back to clear the hair from his eyes.

  At first I didn’t answer because I was out of breath, and then I said, ‘What?’ It wasn’t a good choice of words. I’d honestly meant it in a friendly way, but it came out sounding like a confrontation.

  If Bugs was taken aback he didn’t show it – then again, he wouldn’t have done.

  ‘I just came over to say congratulations. About the shark.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Thanks. I… uh… I’m glad I caught it…’ Again, my stoned head seemed to be putting the most inappropriate words into my mouth. ‘… I’ve never caught a shark before.’

  ‘We’re all glad you caught it… Actually, I’ve caught a shark before.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, now trying extremely hard to concentrate on what I was saying. ‘Really? That’s amazing… You should certainly… uh… certainly tell us about it.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Keaty echoed, then coughed in a way that sounded suspiciously like a suppressed giggle.

  Bugs paused. ‘It was in Australia.’

  ‘Australia… Gosh.’

  ‘Must be about five years ago now.’

  ‘Five years? Was it as long ago as that?… uh…’

  ‘A tiger shark, twelve-footer.’

  ‘How very… huge.’

  Suddenly Keaty dissolved into hysterics, and he set off Jed, who set off the others.

  Bugs smiled thinly. ‘Maybe I’ll save it for another time.’

  ‘It sounds like a great story,’ I managed to say before he turned to go. Then Keaty gasped, ‘Certainly,’ and I collapsed as well.

  ‘My God, Richard,’ said Françoise a couple of minutes later. Her face was shining from tears. ‘What were you saying to Bugs? Everything you said…’

  ‘Was wrong. I know. I couldn’t help it.’

  Étienne nudged me. ‘You do not like Bugs, huh?’

  ‘It isn’t that. I’m just wasted. I’m not thinking straight.’

  ‘That’s bullshit, Rich,’ said Keaty, grinning slyly.

  Jed nodded. ‘Admit it. I’ve seen the way you look at him.’

  There was a silence while everyone looked at me, waiting for an answer. Eventually I shrugged. ‘All right then, you’ve got me. I think he’s a prat.’

  This time we laughed so long and so helplessly that people started peering at us to find out what was going on.

  Cab!

  ‘’Night John-Boy,’ said a voice. Bugs’ voice, loud and firm.

  ‘’Night Rich,’ came the immediate reply – hard to recognize, but I guessed Moshe.

  I grinned at the darkness. I knew Bugs had been pissed off by the way we’d laughed at him, and knew this was his way of regaining – what? Authority or respect. And now his cue had been chucked directly back to me, the person who caused the laughter. That must have grated.

  My grin widened and I let the silence hang for a few seconds, then I said, ‘’Night Jesse.’

  Jesse passed it to Ella, who passed it to an Aussie carpenter, who passed it to one of the Yugoslavian girls, and I tuned the rest of the game out.

  There was a question that needed answering, I realized as I lay awake that night and listened to the laser beams hammering on the longhouse roof. Why did Bugs get on my nerves so much? Because he really did. I hadn’t even realized how much until Jed told me to admit it.

  I mean, it wasn’t like he’d done anything bad to me or said anything rude. In fact I barely ever talked to him. Not talk talked. Our exchanges were all about work, arranging the carpentry detail to knock up some new spears, passing on a message from Gregorio or Unhygienix, stuff like that.

  To answer the question I made a mental list of all the things he’d done to piss me off. There’d been his stupid stoicism when he hurt his leg, the thing with the soup, his almost wacky name. He also had an irritating competitive streak. If you’d watched the sun rise over Borobudur, he’d tell you that you should have seen the sun set, or if you knew of a good place to eat in Singapore, he’d know of one better. Or if you’d caught a shark with your bare hands…

  I decided to deny him the chance to talk me through his tiger-shark experience.

  But anyway, these weren’t big enough reasons. There had to be something else.

  ‘Just a hunch then,’ I muttered, and rolled over to go to sleep, but it didn’t satisfy me as an answer.

  It would have been useful if Mister Duck had dropped by that night, because I could have asked him to fill me in more about Bugs’ character. Unfortunately he didn’t. He was a bit like taxis in that respect. Taxis and night buses.

  Seeing Red

  The rain continued to pour all through that week and half the next, but in the early hours of a Thursday morning it stopped. Everyone was relieved, and no one more than the fishing details. Sitting on the seabed for one-minute bursts, occasionally spotting a fish and usually missing it, had got old pretty fast. When we woke to see that the blue skies were back, we couldn’t get down to the water quick enough. Something of a killing frenzy ensued – we caught our entire quota within an hour and a half – and after that, the only thing left to kill was time.

  Gregorio and Étienne swam off to the coral gardens, and Françoise and I swam back to the beach to sunbathe. We lay in silence at first, me watching how much sweat could collect in my belly button before it spilled out, and Françoise on her front, sifting sand through her fingers. A few metres away, in the shade of the trees, our catch splashed in their buckets. Considering its source, the sound was strangely soothing. It complemented the moment – the sea breeze and the sunshine – and I missed it when the fish were all dead.

  Not long after the last splash Françoise sat up, twisting gracefully out of her recline so that she was kneeling with her hands on her hips and her slim brown legs tucked neatly to the side. Then she rolled the top of her swimming costume down to her waist and stretched her arms up at the blue sky. She held that pose for several seconds before relaxing again and dropping her hands into her lap.

  Without thinking I sighed, and Françoise glanced at me. ‘What is the matter?’ she said.

  I blinked. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You sighed.’

  ‘Oh… I was just thinking…’ My mind ran through a quick list of options: the return of the sunshine, the stillness of the lagoon, the whiteness of the sand. ‘… how easy it would be to stay here.’

  ‘Ah yes.’ Françoise nodded. ‘To stay on the beach for ever. Very easy…’

  I paused for a moment, then sat up too, spilling my sweat reservoir into the waistband of my shorts. ‘Do you ever think about home, Françoise?’

  ‘Paris?’

  ‘Paris, family, friends… All that.’

  ‘Uh… No, Richard. I do not.’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t either. But don’t you think that’s a bit strange? I mean, I’ve got a whole life back in England that I can hardly remember, let alone miss. I haven’t telephoned or written to my parents since arriving in Thailand, and I sort of know they’ll be worried about me, but I don’t feel the urge to do anything about it. When I was in Ko Pha-Ngan, it didn’t even cross my mind… Don’t you think that’s strange?’

  ‘Parents…’ Françoise frowned as if she were struggling to remember the word. ‘Yes, it is strange, but…’

  ‘When did you last contact them?’

  ‘I do not know… It was… That road. The road we met you.’

  ‘Khao San.’

  ‘I called them from there…’

  ‘Three months ago.’

  ‘Three months… Yes…’

  We both lay back down on the hot sand. I think the mention of parents was slightly disquieting and neither of us wanted to dwell on the subject.

  But I did find it interesting that I wasn’t the only one to experience the amnesiac effect of the beach. I wondered where the effect came from, and whether it was to do with the beach itself
or the people on it. It suddenly occurred to me that I knew nothing about the past lives of my companions, except their place of origin. I’d spent countless hours talking to Keaty, and the only thing I knew about his background was that he used to go to Sunday school. But I didn’t know if he had brothers or sisters, or what his parents did, or the area of London where he grew up. We might have had a thousand shared experiences that we’d never made an effort to uncover.

  The only talking topic that stretched beyond the circle of cliffs was travel. That was something we talked about a lot. Even now, I can still reel off the list of countries that my friends had visited. In a way it wasn’t so surprising, considering that (apart from our ages) an interest in travel was the only thing we all had in common. And actually, travel conversation was a pretty good substitute for conversation about home. You could tell plenty about someone from the places they’d chosen to visit, and which of those places were their favourites.

  Unhygienix, for example, reserved his deepest affection for Kenya, which somehow suited his taciturn nature. It was easy to imagine him on safari, quietly absorbing the vastness of the landscape around him. Keaty, livelier and more prone to enthusiastic outbursts, was much more suited to Thailand. Étienne had an unfulfilled yearning to go to Bhutan, quietly good-natured fellow that he was, and Sal often talked about Ladakh – the northern province of India, laid-back in some ways and hard-edged in others. I knew my affection for the Philippines was equally as telling: a democracy on paper, apparently well-ordered, regularly subverted by irrational chaos. A place where I’d felt instantly at home.

  Amongst some of the others, Greg went for gentle Southern India, Françoise went for beautiful Indonesia, Moshe went for Borneo – which I took to be connected to the jungle-like growth of his body hair – and the two Yugoslavian girls chose their own country, appropriately nationalistic and off the wall. Daffy, I didn’t need to be told, would have chosen Vietnam.