As I became sleepy I started to fantasize. I imagined the train was a space ship and I was en route to some distant planet.
I don’t know if I’m alone in doing this kind of thing. It isn’t something I’ve ever talked about. The fact is, I’ve never grown out of playing pretend, and so far there are no signs that I ever will. I have one quite carefully worked-out night-time fantasy that I’m in a kind of high-tech race. The race takes place over several days, even a week, and is non-stop. While I sleep my vehicle continues on autopilot, speeding me towards the finish line. The auto-pilot thing is the rationalization of how I can be in bed while I’m having the fantasy. Making it work in such a logical way is important – it would be no good fantasizing that the race was in a Formula One car, because how could I go to sleep in that? Get real.
Sometimes I’m winning the race, other times I’m losing. But on those occasions I also fantasize that I have a little trick up my sleeve. A short cut perhaps, or just a reliance on my ability to take corners quicker than the other competitors. Either way, I fall asleep quietly confident.
I think the catalyst for this particular fantasy was the little red bulb beside the reading lamp. As everyone knows, space ships aren’t space ships without little red bulbs. Everything else – the clever compartments, the rushing noise of the train’s engine⁄warp drive, the sense of adventure – was a happy complement.
By the time I fell asleep, my scanners were detecting life-forms on the surface of a distant planet. Could have been Jupiter. It had the same kind of cloud patterns, like a tie-dye T–shirt.
♦
The warm security of my space-ship capsule slipped away. I was back on my bed on the Khao San Road, looking up at the ceiling fan. A mosquito was buzzing in the room. I couldn’t see it but its wings pulsed like a helicopter’s when it flew near. Sitting beside me was Mister Duck, the sheets around him red and wet.
‘Would you sort this out for me, Rich?’ Mister Duck said, passing me a half-rolled joint. ‘I can’t do it. My hands are too sticky. The Rizla…The Rizla keeps falling apart.’
He laughed apologetically as I took the joint.
‘It’s my wrists. Slit them all over and now they won’t stop bleeding.’ He lifted up his arm and a squirt of blood arced across the Formica wall. ‘See what I mean? What a fucking mess.’
I rolled the joint but didn’t lick it. On the strip of gum was a red fingerprint.
‘Oh. You don’t want to worry about that, Rich. I’m clean.’ Mister Duck looked down at his sodden clothes. ‘Well, not clean…’
I licked the Rizla.
‘So spark it up. I’ll only make it wet.’
He held out a light and I sat up on the bed. My weight sunk the mattress and a stream of blood ran down the slope, soaking into my shorts.
‘Now how’s that? Hits the fucking spot, huh? But you want to try it through a rifle barrel. That’s a serious hit, Rich.’
‘Blow my mind.’
‘Yeah,’ said Mister Duck. ‘That’s the boy. That’s the kid…’
He lay back on the bed with his hands above his head, wrists facing upwards. I took another drag. Blood ran along the blades of the fan and fell around me like rain.
∨ The Beach ∧
Ko Samui
∨ The Beach ∧
9
R & R
The journey from the train station at Surat Thani to Ko Samui passed in a sleep-fogged blur. I vaguely remember following Étienne and Françoise on to the bus to Don Sak, and my only memory of the ferry ride was of Étienne shouting in my ear over the noise of the boat’s engines. ‘There, Richard!’ he yelled, pointing towards the horizon. ‘That’s the marine park!’ A cluster of blue-green shapes was just visible in the distance. I nodded obligingly. I was more interested in finding a soft spot on my backpack to use as a pillow.
♦
Our jeep from the Ko Samui port to the Chaweng beach resort was a big open-top Isuzu. On the left the sea lay blue between rows of coconut palms, and on the right a jungle-covered slope rose steeply. Ten travellers sat behind the driver’s cabin, our bags clamped between our knees, our heads rolling with the corners. One had a baseball bat resting against his shoulder, another held a camera on his lap. Brown faces flashed past us through the green. ‘Delta One-Niner,’ I muttered. ‘This is Alpha patrol.’ The jeep left us outside a decent-looking bunch of beach huts, but backpacker protocol demanded we check out the competition. After half an hour of slogging across the hot sand, we returned to the huts we’d first seen.
Private showers, a bedside fan, a nice restaurant that looked on to the sea. Our huts faced each other over a gravel path lined with flowers. It was très beau, Françoise said with a happy sigh, and I agreed.
The first thing I did after shutting the door behind me was to go to the bathroom mirror and examine my face. I hadn’t seen my reflection for a couple of days and wanted to check things were OK.
It was a bit of a shock. Being around lots of tanned skin I’d somehow assumed I was also tanned, but the ghost in the mirror corrected me. My whiteness was accentuated by my stubble, which, like my hair, is jet black. UV deprivation aside, I was in bad need of a shower. My T–shirt had the salty stiffness of material that has been sweated in, sun-dried, then sweated in again. I decided to head straight to the beach for a swim. I could kill two birds with one stone – soak up a few rays and get clean.
Chaweng was a travel-brochure photo. Hammocks slung in the shade of curving palm trees, sand too bright to look at, jet-skis tracing white patterns like jet-planes in a clear sky. I ran down to the surf, partly because the sand was so hot and partly because I always run into the sea. When the water began to drag on my legs I jumped up, and the momentum somersaulted me forwards. I landed on my back and sank to the bottom, exhaling. On the seabed I let myself rest, head tilted slightly forward to keep the air trapped in my nose, and listened to the soft clicks and rushes of underwater noise.
♦
I’d been splashing around in the water for fifteen minutes or so when Étienne came down to join me. He also ran across the sand and somersaulted into the sea, but then leapt up with a yelp.
‘What’s up?’ I called.
Étienne shook his head, pushing backwards through the water away from where he’d landed. ‘This! This animal! This…fish!’
I began wading towards him. ‘What fish?’
‘I do not know the English – Aaah! Aaah! There are more! Aaah! Stinging!’
‘Oh,’ I said as I reached him. ‘Jellyfish! Great!’
I was pleased to see the pale shapes, floating in the water like drops of silvery oil. I loved their straightforward weirdness, the strange area they occupied between plant and animal life.
I learnt an interesting thing about jellyfish from a Filipino guy. He was one of the only people my age on an island where I’d once stayed, so we became pals. We spent many happy weeks together playing Frisbee on the beach, then diving into the South China Sea. He taught me that if you pick up jellyfish with the palm of your hand, you don’t get hurt – although then you had to be careful to scrub your hands, because if you rubbed your eyes or scratched your back the poison would lift off and sting like mad. We used to have jellyfish fights, hurling the tennis-ball-sized globs at each other. On a calm day you could skim them over the sea like flat pebbles, although if you chucked them too hard they tended to explode. He also told me that you can eat them raw, like sushi. He was right. Literally speaking, you can, as long as you don’t mind a few days of stomach cramps and vomiting.