The Beach

'Right. I forgot.' He looked over to where Jean was growling at one of the other gardeners. 'Jean!'

Jean looked round.

'Gottataketimeoff.'

'Heugh?' Jean replied.

'Backlateriftherestimeok?'

Keaty waved, and Jean waved back uncertainly. Then Keaty propelled me out of the garden. 'If you talk quickly he can't understand,' he explained. 'Otherwise he would have tried to make you wait until the detail stopped work.'

'Smart.'

'Uh-huh.'

It was a rocket-ship tree about twenty metres to the right of the pool. I'd noticed it before when I'd been wondering how to get down from the waterfall. Some of its branches grew near to the cliff, and I'd considered an Indiana Jones-style leap into its lower canopy. Standing at its base, I was glad I'd had the sense not to try. I'd have jumped on to a deceptively thin layer of leaves and fallen forty feet to the ground.

It was, like all the other rocket-ship trees, an impressive sight, but that wasn't why Keaty had brought me to see it. He'd brought me to see the markings cut into one of its twelve-foot stabilizer fins. Three names and four numbers. Bugs, Sylvester and Daffy. The numbers were all zeros.

'Sylvester?'

'Salvester.'

I shook my head. 'Sal.'

'I tawt I taw a puddy tat.'

'So they were the first?'

'The first. Nineteen eighty-nine. The three of them hired a boat from Ko Pha-Ngan.'

'They knew about this place already, or…'

'Depends who you talk to. Bugs said he'd heard about a hidden lagoon from some fisherman on Ko Phalui, but Daffy used to say they were just island-hopping. Found the place by chance.'

'Chance.'

'But all the camp and stuff. That didn't start until ninety. They spent the second half of eighty-nine doing the Goa thing, then came back to Ko Pha-Ngan for the new year.'

'And what, Ko Pha-Ngan was on the way out?'

Keaty nodded. 'Well on the way. That's when it clicked. The thing was, those three had been going to Ko Samui since it was a secret, so when they saw Ko Pha-Ngan had maybe a year left…'

'A year left at best. I heard by ninety-one it was already fucked up.'

'Right, so they'd seen it all before. Especially Daffy. Daffy was completely obsessed. You know he wouldn't ever go to Indonesia?'

'I don't know anything about Daffy.'

'Boycotted because of Bali. He went there only once, in the late eighties, and wouldn't ever go back. Used to talk all the time about how sick it made him.'

We sat down with our backs against the slab of root and shared a cigarette.

'I mean,' said Keaty, exhaling hard, 'you've got to hand it to them.'

'Definitely.'

'They really knew what they were doing. Most things were set up by the time Sal took me here, which was… uh… ninety-three. The longhouse was up and the ceiling was sorted out.'

'Two years.'

'Uh-huh.' He passed me the cigarette.

'So when you came, were there this many people?'

Keaty paused. 'Well… Pretty much…'

I looked at him, sensing that he was being cagey. 'How do you mean, 'pretty much'?'

'…Everyone apart from the Swedes.'

'In two years the only new people were the Swedes?'

'…And Jed. The Swedes and Jed.'

'That's not many. Well-kept secret.'

'Mmm.'

I stubbed out the cigarette. 'And the zeros. What are they about?'

Keaty smiled. 'That was Daffy's idea. It's a date.' 'A date? The date of what?' 'The date they first arrived.' 'I thought that was eighty-nine.'

'It was.' Keaty stood up and patted the stabilizer fin. 'But Daffy used to call it year zero.'

Revelations

Set up in Bali, Ko Pha-Ngan, Ko Tao, Borocay, and the hordes are bound to follow. There's no way you can keep it out of Lonely Planet, and once that happens it's countdown to doomsday. But set up in a marine park, where you aren't even supposed to be…

The more I thought about it, the more the idea grew on me. Not just a marine park, but a marine park in Thailand. Of all places, backpacker central, land of the beaten track. The only thing sweeter than the irony was the logic. The Philippines is an archipelago of seven thousand islands, but even in that huge fractured landscape, an equivalent secret would be impossible to contain. But amongst the legions of travellers passing through Bangkok and the southern islands, who'd notice when a few slipped away?

Strangely, the thing that least intrigued me was how they'd actually managed to get it all done. I suppose I sort of knew. If I'd learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don't talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.

From Keaty's few words, I pictured the scene. January nineteen-ninety, maybe New Year's Eve, Ko Pha-Ngan, maybe Hat Rin. Daffy, Bugs and Sal, talking as the sun starts coming up. Sal's found a boat to hire or even buy, Bugs has some tools in his backpack, Daffy's got a sack of rice and thirty packs of Magi-Noodles. Perhaps bars of chocolate have melted and moulded around the shape of his water bottle.

By seven that morning they're walking down the beach. Behind them they can hear the rumble of a portable generator through the thump of a sound system. They don't look back, they just push off from the sand and head for the hidden paradise they found a year before.

As I walked back towards the camp, on the way to find Etienne at the coral garden, I found myself almost hoping for another meeting with Mister Duck. I wanted to shake him by the hand.

I never did find Etienne and Francoise. I bumped into Gregorio on the beach. He was carrying our catch back to camp, and when I told him I was going to the corals, he looked doubtful.

'I think you should wait,' he said. 'Wait for… maybe one hour.'

'How come?'

'Etienne and Francoise…'

'They're having sex?'

'Well… I do not know, but…'

'Uh-uh. An hour, you reckon?'

'Oh…' Gregorio smiled awkwardly. 'Maybe I am too generous to Etienne.'

I shook my head, remembering my first night in Bangkok. 'No,' I replied, irritated to hear a sudden tightness in my voice. 'Spot on, I'd say.'

So I went back to the camp with Gregorio.

There was nothing much to do there except compare fish sizes with the other details. The three Swedes, as usual, had caught the biggest and were swaggering about, telling the cooks about their fishing technique. I got pretty pissed off listening to them, but even more annoying were the images of Francoise and Etienne that kept popping into my head. Eventually, craving something to occupy my mind, I went to Keaty's tent and dug out his Nintendo.

Most bosses have a pattern; crack the pattern, kill the boss. A typical pattern is illustrated by Dr Robotnik during his first incarnation in Sonic One, Megadrive version, Greenhills Zone. As he descends from the top of the screen, you jump at him from the left platform. Then, as he starts swinging towards you, you duck under and jump at him from the right. As he swings back, you repeat the process in reverse until, eight hits later, he explodes and runs away.

That's an easy boss. Others require much more manual dexterity and effort. The last boss on Tekken, for example, is a relentless fist-swinging nightmare.

The boss that distracted me from Etienne and Francoise was none other than Wario, nemesis of Mario. The problem was that to reach him, I had to struggle through several tortuous stages. By the time I arrived at his lair I'd taken too many hits and had lost the vital power-ups I needed to finish him off.

Every now and then, Unhygienix would take a break from cooking and wander over to inspect my progress. He and Keaty were the only two people in the camp who'd ever completed the game. He'd say things like 'Donta pausa on thata platforma.' (I'm abandoning his Italian accent from now on. You'll just have to imagine it.)