The Beach

'Was wrong. I know. I couldn't help it.'

Etienne nudged me. 'You do not like Bugs, huh?'

'It isn't that. I'm just wasted. I'm not thinking straight.'

'That's bullshit, Rich,' said Keaty, grinning slyly.

Jed nodded. 'Admit it. I've seen the way you look at him.'

There was a silence while everyone looked at me, waiting for an answer. Eventually I shrugged. 'All right then, you've got me. I think he's a prat.'

This time we laughed so long and so helplessly that people started peering at us to find out what was going on.

Cab!

'Night John-Boy,' said a voice. Bugs' voice, loud and firm.

' 'Night Rich,' came the immediate reply – hard to recognize, but I guessed Moshe.

I grinned at the darkness. I knew Bugs had been pissed off by the way we'd laughed at him, and knew this was his way of regaining – what? Authority or respect. And now his cue had been chucked directly back to me, the person who caused the laughter. That must have grated.

My grin widened and I let the silence hang for a few seconds, then I said, 'Night Jesse.'

Jesse passed it to Ella, who passed it to an Aussie carpenter, who passed it to one of the Yugoslavian girls, and I tuned the rest of the game out.

There was a question that needed answering, I realized as I lay awake that night and listened to the laser beams hammering on the longhouse roof. Why did Bugs get on my nerves so much? Because he really did. I hadn't even realized how much until Jed told me to admit it.

I mean, it wasn't like he'd done anything bad to me or said anything rude. In fact I barely ever talked to him. Not talk talked. Our exchanges were all about work, arranging the carpentry detail to knock up some new spears, passing on a message from Gregorio or Unhygienix, stuff like that.

To answer the question I made a mental list of all the things he'd done to piss me off. There'd been his stupid stoicism when he hurt his leg, the thing with the soup, his almost wacky name. He also had an irritating competitive streak. If you'd watched the sun rise over Borobudur, he'd tell you that you should have seen the sun set, or if you knew of a good place to eat in Singapore, he'd know of one better. Or if you'd caught a shark with your bare hands…

I decided to deny him the chance to talk me through his tiger-shark experience.

But anyway, these weren't big enough reasons. There had to be something else.

'Just a hunch then,' I muttered, and rolled over to go to sleep, but it didn't satisfy me as an answer.

It would have been useful if Mister Duck had dropped by that night, because I could have asked him to fill me in more about Bugs' character. Unfortunately he didn't. He was a bit like taxis in that respect. Taxis and night buses.

Seeing Red

The rain continued to pour all through that week and half the next, but in the early hours of a Thursday morning it stopped. Everyone was relieved, and no one more than the fishing details. Sitting on the seabed for one-minute bursts, occasionally spotting a fish and usually missing it, had got old pretty fast. When we woke to see that the blue skies were back, we couldn't get down to the water quick enough. Something of a killing frenzy ensued—we caught our entire quota within an hour and a half – and after that, the only thing left to kill was time.

Gregorio and Etienne swam off to the coral gardens, and Francoise and I swam back to the beach to sunbathe. We lay in silence at first, me watching how much sweat could collect in my belly button before it spilled out, and Francoise on her front, sifting sand through her fingers. A few metres away, in the shade of the trees, our catch splashed in their buckets. Considering its source, the sound was strangely soothing. It complemented the moment – the sea breeze and the sunshine – and I missed it when the fish were all dead.

Not long after the last splash Francoise sat up, twisting gracefully out of her recline so that she was kneeling with her hands on her hips and her slim brown legs tucked neatly to the side. Then she rolled the top of her swimming costume down to her waist and stretched her arms up at the blue sky. She held that pose for several seconds before relaxing again and dropping her hands into her lap.

Without thinking I sighed, and Francoise glanced at me. 'What is the matter?' she said.

I blinked. 'Nothing.'

'You sighed.'

'Oh… I was just thinking…' My mind ran through a quick list of options: the return of the sunshine, the stillness of the lagoon, the whiteness of the sand.' …how easy it would be to stay here.'

'Ah yes.' Francoise nodded. 'To stay on the beach for ever. Very easy…'

I paused for a moment, then sat up too, spilling my sweat reservoir into the waistband of my shorts. 'Do you ever think about home, Francoise?'

'Paris?'

'Paris, family, friends… All that.'

'Uh… No, Richard. I do not.'

'Yeah. I don't either. But don't you think that's a bit strange? I mean, I've got a whole life back in England that I can hardly remember, let alone miss. I haven't telephoned or written to my parents since arriving in Thailand, and I sort of know they'll be worried about me, but I don't feel the urge to do anything about it. When I was in Ko Pha-Ngan, it didn't even cross my mind… Don't you think that's strange?'

'Parents…' Francoise frowned as if she were struggling to remember the word. 'Yes, it is strange, but…'

'When did you last contact them?'

'I do not know… It was… That road. The road we met you.'

'Khao San.'

'I called them from there…'

'Three months ago.'

'Three months… Yes…'

We both lay back down on the hot sand. I think the mention of parents was slightly disquieting and neither of us wanted to dwell on the subject.

But I did find it interesting that I wasn't the only one to experience the amnesiac effect of the beach. I wondered where the effect came from, and whether it was to do with the beach itself or the people on it. It suddenly occurred to me that I knew nothing about the past lives of my companions, except their place of origin. I'd spent countless hours talking to Keaty, and the only thing I knew about his background was that he used to go to Sunday school. But I didn't know if he had brothers or sisters, or what his parents did, or the area of London where he grew up. We might have had a thousand shared experiences that we'd never made an effort to uncover.

The only talking topic that stretched beyond the circle of cliffs was travel. That was something we talked about a lot. Even now, I can still reel off the list of countries that my friends had visited. In a way it wasn't so surprising, considering that (apart from our ages) an interest in travel was the only thing we all had in common. And actually, travel conversation was a pretty good substitute for conversation about home. You could tell plenty about someone from the places they'd chosen to visit, and which of those places were their favourites.

Unhygienix, for example, reserved his deepest affection for Kenya, which somehow suited his taciturn nature. It was easy to imagine him on safari, quietly absorbing the vastness of the landscape around him. Keaty, livelier and more prone to enthusiastic outbursts, was much more suited to Thailand. Etienne had an unfulfilled yearning to go to Bhutan, quietly good-natured fellow that he was, and Sal often talked about Ladakh – the northern province of India, laid-back in some ways and hard-edged in others. I knew my affection for the Philippines was equally as telling: a democracy on paper, apparently well-ordered, regularly subverted by irrational chaos. A place where I'd felt instantly at home.