The Beach Read online

  ‘It’s cool,’ Sammy replied, smiling slightly. ‘We’ll hang out here a bit longer. But listen, have a good time in Ko Pha-Ngan. Are you coming back this way?’

  I nodded.

  ‘OK, so we’ll catch up later on. We’re here for a while. A week at least.’

  We all shook hands, then Étienne and I followed after Françoise.

  Dinner was laden with heavy silences, sometimes broken by a terse exchange in French. But Françoise knew she’d acted foolishly, and was apologetic as we said good night.

  ‘I do not know,’ she explained. ‘I was suddenly frightened they would want to come with us. Zeph made it sound so… I only want it to be us…’ She frowned, frustrated by her inability to express herself. ‘Do you think they have realized we know about the beach?’

  I shrugged. ‘Hard to say. Everyone was pretty stoned.’

  Étienne nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, and put his arm around her shoulder. ‘Everyone was stoned. We should not worry.’

  It took me a long time to get to sleep that night. It wasn’t just because I was anxious about what might happen tomorrow, although that was part of it. I was also troubled by the hurried way I’d said goodbye to Zeph and Sammy. I’d enjoyed their company and knew it was unlikely I’d find them again, if I did come back to Ko Samui. Our parting had been too quick and awkward, too confused by dope and secrets. I felt there was something I’d left unsaid.

  A Safe Bet

  I wouldn’t call it a dream. Nothing with Mister Duck was like a dream. In this case, it was more like a movie. Or news footage, swaying on a hand-held camera.

  Mister Duck was sprinting towards me across the embassy lawn, his wrists still freshly slit, blood looping out from the cuts as he pumped his arms. I was reeling from the noise of the screaming crowds and helicopters, watching a snowfall of shredded files. Classified snow, swirling in the backdraft from the rotor blades, settling on the manicured grass.

  ‘Born twenty years too late?’ shouted Mister Duck, belting past me and flipping into a cartwheel. ‘Fuck that!’ His blood echoed the movement, briefly hanging in the air like the trace from a firework.

  ‘See up there!’

  I looked where he pointed. A hovering insect shape was lifting off the roof, with people clinging to the landing skids. It dipped as it pulled away, struggling with the heavy load, and clipped a tree outside the embassy walls.

  I shouted with excitement.

  ‘That’s the boy!’ Mister Duck yelled, ruffling my hair with a wet hand, soaking the collar of my shirt. ‘That’s the kid!’

  ‘Do we get to escape from the embassy roof?’ I yelled back. ‘I always wanted to do that!’

  ‘Escape from the embassy roof?’

  ‘Do we get to?’

  ‘You bet,’ he laughed. ‘You fucking bet.’

  Leaving

  I drew quickly, sweating despite the early morning chill. There wasn’t time to take the same kind of care over the map as Mister Duck had. The islands were rough circles, the curving shore line of Thailand a series of jagged lines, and there were only three labels. Ko Samui, Ko Phelong, and Eden.

  At the bottom of the page I wrote ‘Wait on Chaweng for three days. If we haven’t come back by then it means we made it to the beach. See you there? Richard.’

  I crept outside. A light already shone in Françoise and Étienne’s hut. Shivering, I stole along the porch and slipped the map under Zeph and Sammy’s door. Then I collected my bag, locked up my room, and went to the restaurant to wait for the others.

  The Thai boy who’d been kicking the coconut husk was sweeping the floor. As I arrived he glanced outside, to check it was as early as he thought it was.

  ‘You wan’ banan’ pancake?’ he asked cautiously.

  I shook my head. ‘No thanks. But I would like to buy four hundred cigarettes.’

  GETTING THERE

  Littering

  The spiv’s motor boat was painted white down to the watermark strip, and below that it was yellow – or yellow when it lifted clear of the sea, pale green when it sank back down. At one time his boat must have been red. The white was blistered or scraped away in places, leaving crimson streaks that looked like cuts. With the rolling movement and growling engine, the cuts were enough to make me feel the boat was alive. It knew which way I expected it to lurch and routinely surprised me.

  Beside us, where the water was disturbed, the morning sun played tricks in the sea. Gold shapes like a shoal of fish spun beneath the surface, matching our speed. I reached down and trailed my hand, catching a fish on my palm. It swam there, flickering over my lifeline, then I balled my fist. The fish slipped out and swam on my closed fingers.

  ‘You should not look down,’ said Françoise, leaning over from the other side of the boat. ‘If you look down, you will feel sick. Watch the island. The island does not move.’

  I looked where she pointed. Strangely, Ko Samui seemed miles behind us, but the drop-off island still appeared as distant as it had an hour ago.

  ‘I’m not feeling sick,’ I said, and sank my head back over the side.

  Hypnotized by the gold fish, I didn’t move again until the water turned blue and I saw a coral bed loom beneath me. The spiv cut the engine. I put a hand up to my ears, surprised by the silence, half thinking I might have gone deaf. ‘Now you pay,’ said the spiv reassuringly, and we slid towards the shore.

  The sand was more grey than yellow and strewn with dried seaweed laid out in overlapping arcs by the tide. I sat on the trunk of a fallen coconut tree, watching our ride chug into the distance. Soon it was hard to find, a white speck occasionally appearing on the ridge of a high swell. When five minutes passed without a sighting I realized it had gone and our isolation was complete.

  A few metres away, Étienne and Françoise leant on their rucksacks. Étienne was studying the maps, working out which of the several islands near us we had to swim to. He didn’t need my help so I called to him that I was going to take a walk. I’d never been on a real desert island before – a deserted desert island – and I felt I ought to explore.

  ‘Where?’ he said, looking up and squinting against the sun.

  ‘Just around. I won’t be long.’

  ‘Half an hour?’

  ‘An hour.’

  ‘Yes, but we should leave after lunch. We should not spend the night here.’

  I waved in reply, already walking away from them.

  I stuck to the coast for half a mile, looking for a place to turn inland, and eventually found a bush whose canopy made a dark tunnel into the tree-line. Through it I could see green leaves and sunlight so I crawled inside, brushing spider webs from my face. I came out in a glade of waist-high ferns. Above me was a circle of sky, broken by a branch that jutted out like the hand of a clock. On the far side of the glade the forest began again but my impulse to continue was checked by a fear of getting lost. The tunnel I’d crawled through was harder to make out from this end, disguised by the tall grasses, and I could only orientate myself by the sound of breaking waves. I gave up my token exploration and waded through the ferns to the middle of the glade. Then I sat down and smoked a cigarette.

  Thinking about Thailand tends to make me angry, and until I started writing this book, I tried not to do it. I preferred it to stay tucked away in the back of my mind. But I did think about Thailand sometimes. Usually late at night, awake long enough so I could see the curtain patterns through the darkness and the shapes of the books on my shelves.

  At those times I made an effort to remember sitting in that glade with the shadow of the clock-hand branch lying across the ferns, smoking my cigarette. I chose this moment because it was the last time I could pinpoint, and think: That was me being me. Normal. Nothing much going through my head apart from how pretty the island was, and how quiet.

  It isn’t that from then on every second in Thailand was bad. Good things happened. Loads of good things. And mundane things too: washing my face in the morning, swimming, fixing some food, whate
ver. But in retrospect all those instances were coloured by what was going on around them. Sometimes it feels to me like I walked into the glade and lit the cigarette, and someone else came along and finished it. Finished it, stubbed it out, flicked it into the bushes, then went to find Étienne and Françoise. It’s a cop-out, because it’s another thing that distances me from what happened, but that is how it feels.

  This other person did things I wouldn’t do. It wasn’t just our morals that were at odds; there were little character differences too. The cigarette butt – the other guy flicked it into the bushes. I’d have done something else. Buried it maybe. I hate littering, let alone littering in a protected marine park.

  It’s hard to explain. I don’t believe in possession or the supernatural. I know that in real terms it was me who flicked the cigarette butt.

  Fuck it.

  I’ve been relying on an idea that these things would become clear to me as I wrote them down, but it isn’t turning out that way.

  When I got back to the beach I found Étienne crouched over a little

  Calor gas camping stove. Laid out beside him were three piles of

  Magi-Noodle packets – yellow, brown and pink.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘I’m starving. What’s on the menu?’

  ‘You may have chicken, beef, or…’ He held up a pink packet.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Shrimp. I’ll go for chicken.’

  Étienne smiled. ‘Me also. And we can have chocolate for dessert. You have it?’

  ‘Sure.’ I unclipped my rucksack and pulled out three bars. The ones closest to the top had melted and remoulded themselves around the shape of my water bottle, but the foil hadn’t split.

  ‘Did you find anything interesting on your walk?’ asked Étienne, cutting open one of the yellow packs with a penknife.

  ‘Nothing in particular. I stuck to the coastline mainly.’ I looked around. ‘Where’s Françoise? Isn’t she eating with us?’

  ‘She has already eaten.’ He pointed down the beach. ‘She went to see if it is a big swim to our island.’

  ‘Uh-huh. You worked out which one it was.’

  ‘I think so. I’m not sure. There are many differences between the map in my guidebook and your friend’s map.’

  ‘Which one did you go for?’

  ‘Your friend.’

  I nodded. ‘Good choice.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Étienne, hooking a noodle from the boiling water with his penknife. It hung limply on the blade. ‘OK. We can eat now.’

  Thai-Die

  Françoise said it was one kilometre away and Étienne said two. I can’t judge distances over water, but I said one and a half. Mainly it just looked like a long swim.

  The island across the sea was wide, with tall peaks at each end that were joined by a pass about half their height. I guessed that once it had been two volcanoes, close enough together to be connected by their lava flow. Whatever its origins, it was at least five times the size of the one we were on, and gaps in the green showed rock-faces which I hoped we wouldn’t need to climb.

  ‘Are you sure we can do this?’ I said, more to myself than anyone else.

  ‘We can,’ said Françoise.

  ‘We can try,’ Étienne corrected, and went to get the backpack he’d prepared with bin-liners, bought from the restaurant that morning.

  The A-Team: a television series that was a hit when I was around fourteen years old. They were BA Barracus, Face-man, Murdoch and Hannibal – four Vietnam veterans accused of a crime they didn’t commit, who now worked as mercenaries, taking on the bad guys the law couldn’t touch.

  They let us down. For a moment it had looked as if Étienne’s contraption would float. It dipped underwater and held its level, the top quarter bobbing above the surface like an iceberg. But then the bin-liners collapsed and the bag sank like a stone. Three other attempts failed in exactly the same way.

  ‘This will never work,’ said Françoise, who had rolled her swimming-costume down to her waist to get an even tan, and was not catching my eye.

  ‘There’s no way,’ I agreed. ‘The rucksacks are far too heavy. You know, we really should have tried this out on Ko Samui.’

  ‘Yes,’ Étienne sighed. ‘I do know.’

  We stood in the water, silently considering the situation. Then Françoise said, ‘OK. We take one plastic bag each. We only take some important things.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t want to do that. I need my rucksack.’

  ‘What choice? We give up?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘We need some food, some clothes, only for three days. Then if we do not find the beach, we swim back and wait for the boat.’

  ‘Passports, tickets, traveller’s cheques, cash, malaria pills.’

  ‘There is no malaria here,’ said Étienne.

  ‘Anyway,’ Françoise added, ‘we do not need a passport to go to this island.’ She smiled and absently brushed a hand between her breasts. ‘Come on, Richard, we are too close, huh?’

  I frowned, not understanding, a list of possibilities appearing in my mind.

  ‘Too close to give up.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yes. I suppose we are.’

  We hid our rucksacks under a thick patch of shrubs near a distinctive palm tree – it had two trunks growing from a single stem. In my bin-liner I packed Puri-Tabs, the chocolate, spare shorts, a T-shirt, Converse shoes, Mister Duck’s map, my water bottle, and two hundred cigarettes. I wanted to take all four hundred, but there wasn’t room. We also had to leave the Calor gas stove. It meant that we’d have to eat cold noodles, soaked long enough to make them soft, but at least we wouldn’t starve. And I left the malaria pills too.

  After tying the bin-liner with as many knots as the plastic would allow and then sealing them again inside a second bin-liner, we tested their seaworthiness. Without the weight of the rucksacks they floated better than we could have hoped. They were even strong enough to lean on, so we only had to swim with our legs.

  At a quarter to four we waded into the sea, finally ready to leave. ‘Maybe more than one kilometre,’ I heard Françoise say behind me. Étienne said something in reply, but it was lost as a wave broke.

  The swim passed in stages. The first was full of confidence, chatting as we found a kicking rhythm, and making jokes about sharks. Then, as our legs began to ache and the water no longer felt cold enough to cool us down, we stopped talking. By this time, as on the boat ride from Ko Samui, the beach behind us seemed as far away as the island ahead. The jokes about sharks became fears, and I started to doubt that I had the strength to finish the swim. Or doubt, quote unquote. We were about halfway between the two points. Not being able to finish the swim would mean dying.

  If Étienne and Françoise were also worried they did nothing to show it. It wasn’t said, but it felt as if mentioning the fears would only make things worse. In any case, it wasn’t like there was anything we could do to make things easier. We’d put ourselves into the situation. All we could do was deal with it.

  And then, strangely, things did become easier. Although my legs still ached like crazy, they’d developed a kind of reflex kick, something like a heartbeat. It kept me moving and allowed my mind to drift beyond the pain. One idea that kept me distracted for ages was composing the newspaper headlines that would inform people back home of my fate. ‘Young Adventurers in Thai-Die Death Swim – Europe Mourns’ covered the necessary angles. Writing my obituary was harder, seeing as I’d never done anything of any importance, but my funeral was a pleasant surprise. I drafted some good speeches, and a lot of people came to hear them.

  I’d moved on to thinking that I should try to pass my driving test if I got back to England when I saw driftwood on the beach ahead, and realized we were nearly there. We’d been careful to stick together over most of the swim, but in the last hundred metres Étienne pulled away. When he reached the beach he did a cartwheel, achieved with a last reserve of energy, because then he collap
sed and didn’t move again until I joined him.

  ‘Show me the map,’ he said, trying to sit up.

  ‘Étienne,’I replied between gasps for breath, and pushed him back down. ‘We’ve done enough. We’re staying here tonight.’

  ‘But the beach may be close, no? Maybe it is only a short way down the island.’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Shh.’

  I lay down, pressing the side of my face into the wet sand, my gasps becoming sighs as the aching drained from my muscles. Étienne had a strand of seaweed caught in his hair, a single green dreadlock. ‘What is this?’ he muttered, tugging at it weakly. Down by the sea Françoise splashed out of the water, dragging her bag behind her.

  ‘I hope this beach exists,’ she said, as she flopped beside us. ‘I am not sure I can do the swim again.’

  I was too exhausted to agree.

  All These Things

  There are one hundred glow-stars on my bedroom ceiling. I’ve got crescent moons, gibbous moons, planets with Saturn’s rings, accurate constellations, meteor showers, and a whirlpool galaxy with a flying saucer caught in its tail. They were given to me by a girlfriend who was surprised that I often lay awake after she went to sleep. She discovered it one night when she woke to go to the bathroom, and bought me the glow-stars the next day.

  Glow-stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear.

  ‘Look,’ Françoise whispered, keeping her voice low so Étienne wouldn’t wake. ‘Do you see?’

  I followed the path of her arm, past the delicate wrist and unexplained tattoo, up her finger to the million flecks of light. ‘I don’t,’ I whispered back. ‘Where?’

  ‘There… Moving. You can see the bright one?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Now look down, then left, and…’