He cut me off. 'Maybe this place found you,' he said, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. Then suddenly he smiled. 'I'm taking the piss, Richard. Sorry. Anyway, we don't have time now. The journey will take four hours at least.'
I checked my watch. It was almost seven. 'So our ETA is eleven hundred hours.'
'Eleven hundred hours…' He chuckled and patted me on the arm, lapsing into an American accent. 'ETAs, FNGs. You're my kinda guy.'
Keaty had met Sal and Bugs in Chiang Rai. They'd gone on an illegal trek together over the Burmese border, and after the trek was over Sal had asked him if he was interested in being taken to paradise.
Gregorio had met Daffy in Sumatra. Gregorio had been beaten up and robbed, and when Daffy found him he was trying to hitch his way to Jakarta so he could contact the Spanish Embassy. Daffy had offered him cash to get to Java. Gregorio had been reluctant to accept, because he could see Daffy was short of money himself. Daffy had said 'Fuck Java,' and told him about the beach.
Sal had been on an eighteen-hour bus ride with Ella. Ella had a portable backgammon set.
Daffy had heard Cassie asking for a job in a Patpong bar.
Unhygienix had cooked Bugs a six-course meal on a houseboat in Srinagar, starting with hot coconut soup and ending with a mango split.
Moshe had caught a Manilan pickpocket trying to razor Daffy's backpack.
Bugs had worked with Jean, grape-picking in Blenheim, New Zealand.
Jed…
Jed had just turned up. Jumped from the waterfall, walked into the camp with a canvas overnight bag and a soaking wet bushel of grass under his arm.
Keaty said the camp had been thrown into instant panic. Was he alone, how had he learnt about the beach, were there more with him, more coming? Everyone ran around going crazy, then Sal, Bugs and Daffy turned up. They took him into the longhouse to talk while everyone waited outside. People heard Daffy shouting and Bugs trying to calm him down.
The cliffs were about thirty metres thick, but you couldn't see through them to the open sea because, not far in, the roof of the cave dropped below the water-level. I wasn't happy about swimming into the blackness but Jed assured me the roof rose up again quickly. 'It's a piece of piss,' he said. 'You're up again before you know it.'
'Really?'
'Yeah. It's low tide so we only have to swim half the cave. When it's high tide you have to swim the whole cave in one go, and even that's easy.' Then he took a deep breath and slipped under, leaving me alone.
I waited a minute, treading water and listening to my splashes echo round the walls. My feet and shins were cold, kicking in the chilled area, reminding me of the diving game off Ko Samui. 'Put me down as the adventurous type,' I said loudly. It was supposed to be a joke, something to give me courage, and in a way I suppose it worked. The echo spooked me so much that the inky water seemed less scary than hanging around.
Jed had only worked on an official work detail, carpentry, for six days. Then he'd been taken off and started doing his 'missions crap', as Keaty put it, above the waterfall.
People talked about it at first. They thought he ought to be working and were irritated that Sal, Bugs and Daffy refused to explain why he was allowed to do his own thing. But time passed, and as Jed's face became more familiar they stopped asking questions. The main thing was that no other travellers appeared immediately after him, which had been everyone's fear, and he brought in a steady supply of grass, previously a luxury in short supply.
Keaty had a theory. Because Jed hadn't been recruited he was an unknown quantity, and therefore, if he decided to leave, a danger to the camp's secrecy. So when Sal had realized Jed was the type who was into missions, she created one just to keep him happy.
Personally, I thought the theory was unlikely. Whatever Jed was doing, it was what Sal wanted him to be doing. Diplomacy wouldn't have entered into it.
Unusually for me, I kept my eyes shut as I swam, feeling my way along the cave roof with outstretched hands and only using my legs. I guessed that each kick made a metre and carefully counted my strokes to give me a sense of distance. After I'd counted ten I began to feel worried. An ache was building in my lungs, and Jed had been adamant that the underwater passage was no more than a forty-second swim. At fifteen I realized I had to make a decision about whether to turn back. I gave myself a limit of three more kicks, then my fingertips broke surface.
I knew there was something wrong as soon as I took a breath. The air was foul. So bad that even though I was bursting for oxygen, I could only manage short breaths before I started gagging. Instinctively, pointlessly, I looked around me, but the absence of light was so absolute that I couldn't see my fingers an inch from my face.
'Jed!' I called.
Not even an echo.
I reached up and my hand sank deep into something wet, with freezing tendrils that clung to my skin. A jolt of adrenalin rushed through my body and I snatched my hand back.
'It's seaweed,' I whispered, after my heart had stopped smashing into my eardrums. Seaweed, coating the rock, absorbing the noise.
I gagged again. Then I retched, pushing up a mouthful of vomit.
'Jed…'
Self-Help
Once I'd started, I kept throwing up for several minutes. Every time my stomach contracted I couldn't help doubling up and I'd vomit with my head underwater, then have to straighten up quickly to snatch a breath before the next heave. The vomiting finally stopped, although it took three dry retches before my stomach would concede it was empty. Then I was left, floating in blackness and amino acids, wondering what the fuck I should do next.
My first thought was that I should continue down the passage –I was assuming that I'd surfaced too soon, tricked by an air pocket left open by an extra-low tide. But that was easier said than done. While I'd been throwing up I'd twisted and turned twenty times, and was now completely disorientated. That led me to my second thought: I should work out the dimensions of the air pocket. This, at least, was something I could accomplish. Steeling myself, I reached up again and pushed my hand into the seaweed. I flinched, but this time I didn't pull my hand back, and through the slimy growth I felt rock, an arm's length above my head.
Several fumbling minutes later I'd created a good mental image of my surroundings. The pocket was about two metres wide and three metres long. On one side there was a narrow shelf, big enough to sit on, and everywhere else the walls curved straight down from the ceiling and ran into the water. There, the mental image began to fall apart. By groping around with my hands and feet, I seemed to find four passages leading into the rock, but it was hard to judge underwater. There could even have been more.
It was a grim discovery. If there'd been only two passages, then whichever direction I chose to swim, I'd either come up in the lagoon or the ocean. But these other passages could lead to nowhere. I could find myself swimming into a maze.
'Two out of four,' I heard myself muttering. 'One in two. Fifty fifty.' But it didn't matter how I put it. The odds sounded bad.
The alternative was to stay put and hope Jed came to find me, but it wasn't very appealing. I felt like I'd lose the plot if I waited in the pitch blackness, swimming around in my own sick, and I hadn't the faintest idea how long it would be before I'd start breathing carbon dioxide. This was' an idea I found particularly frightening. I could see myself huddled up on the small rock-shelf, gradually succumbing to a sinister sleepiness.
For a minute I stayed relatively still, treading water and going over my options. Then I started to panic. I splashed around wildly, bumping into the walls, choking, whimpering. I snatched at the seaweed above my head and pulled it down in great clumps. I lashed out, smashed my elbow on the rock-shelf, felt my skin tear and hot blood run over my arm. I shouted, 'Help.'