‘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 runnel 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, whatever. 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.’
∨ The Beach ∧
17
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.’