The Beach

  ‘Help.’

  My voice sounded pathetic, like I was crying. It was a shocking noise and it jolted me into a second of silence. A second later, my fear was swamped by a sudden tidal wave of disgust. Ignoring the foul taste, I took a huge gulp of air and ducked underwater. I didn’t count the strokes this time, or worry about feeling my way. I took whichever of the four passages I found first and swam as hard as I could.

  The List

  I was in a bad way. My legs and hands were knocking painfully against the passage walls and there was a pressure deep inside my chest, something the size of a grapefruit trying to drive itself upwards through my neck. After perhaps fifty seconds I began to see red through the darkness. ‘It means I’m dying,’ I told myself as the colour grew brighter and the grapefruit reached my Adam’s apple. In the middle of the redness a spot of light started to form – yellow, but I expected it to turn white. I was remembering a TV programme about how dying people see lights at the end of tunnels as their brain cells shut down. Suddenly resigned, my kicks grew weaker. My powerful breast-stroke became an erratic underwater doggy paddle. When I felt rock scraping along the length of my stomach I realized I was no longer aware if I was facing up or down.

  To say that this pissed me off sounds flippant, but that’s the best way I can describe it. I think that a part of my mind, however bewildered, resented being wrong about the split-second theory in video games. I wasn’t raging or fighting in the way I’d always imagined I would. I was just fading away. The resentment provided a new burst of energy, and with it came the realization that the redness might not be death after all. It might be light, sunlight, passing through the water and the lids of my tightly shut eyes. Drawing from my last reserve of strength, I forced myself to make one more hard kick.

  I came straight up into brightness and fresh air. I blinked the glare out of my eyes, gasping like a speared fish, and slowly Jed came into focus. He was sitting on a rock. Beside him was a long boat, painted the same blue-green as the sea.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, not looking round. ‘You took your time.’

  I couldn’t answer at first because I was hyperventilating.

  ‘What were you doing back there? You’ve been ages.’

  ‘Drowning,’ I finally managed to say.

  ‘Yeah? You know anything about engines? I’ve tried to get this going but I can’t.’

  I splashed over to him and tried to haul myself on to the rock, but I was too weak and I slipped back into the water. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ I panted.

  ‘Sure.’ He started absently running the blade of his knife against his beard, as if he were shaving. ‘Now, I know it’s got enough gas because the tank’s full, and I know the Swedes said they had it running the other day.’

  ‘Jed! I got stuck in some air pocket with more exits than…’ I couldn’t think of anything famous with a large number of exits. ‘I nearly drowned!’

  For the first time Jed looked at me. ‘An air pocket?’ he said, lowering the knife. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m fucking sure!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I? Somewhere… in there.’ I turned back to the black entrance of the cave and shivered.

  Jed frowned. ‘Well… that’s pretty weird. I’ve been through there a hundred times and I’ve never found any air pocket.’

  ‘You think I’m lying?’

  ‘No… And there were several exits?’

  ‘Four at least. I could feel them and I didn’t know which one I should take. It was a fucking nightmare.’

  ‘So you must have strayed down a split off the main passage. Shit, Richard, I’m sorry. I honestly didn’t know that could happen. I must have been through there so many times that I automatically follow the same route.’ He tutted. ‘But it’s amazing. Everybody on the beach has swum through that cave and no one’s ever got lost.’

  I sighed. ‘That’s my fucking luck.’

  ‘Bad luck, all right.’ He held out a hand and pulled me on to the rock.

  ‘I might have died.’

  Jed nodded. ‘You might have. I’m sorry.’

  A voice in my head was telling me that I ought to lose my temper, but there didn’t seem anything to lose my temper at. Instead I lay back and looked up at the clouds. A silver speck was threading a vapour trail across the sky and I imagined people inside peering out of the windows, watching the Gulf of Thailand unfold, wondering what things could be happening on the islands beneath them. One or two of them, I was sure, must be looking at my island.

  They’d never have guessed what was happening in a million years. Thinking this, I managed a dizzy smile.

  Jed brought me back to earth by saying, ‘You smell of sick.’

  ‘I’ve been swimming in the stuff,’ I replied.

  ‘Your elbow’s bleeding too.’

  I glanced down, and at once my arm began to sting.

  ‘Jesus. I’m a wreck.’

  ‘No.’ Jed shook his head. ‘It’s the boat that’s the wreck.’

  The boat was twenty feet long and four feet wide, with a single bamboo outrigger on the right-hand side. On the left side it was lying flat against the rocks, tied up, protected by a line of buffers made of tightly rolled palm leaves. It was also protected, and hidden, by the mini-harbour formed by the entrance to the cave.

  Inside the boat were some of the Swedes’ fishing implements. Their spears were cut longer than ours and they had a landing-net, I noticed enviously. Not that we needed a landing-net inside the lagoon, but it would have been nice to have one all the same. They had lines and hooks too, which explained why they always caught the biggest fish.

  Despite what Jed had said, I took to the boat immediately. I liked its South-East-Asian shape, the painted flourishes on its prow, the strong odour of grease and salt-soaked wood. Most of all I liked the fact that all this stuff was familiar to me, remembered from other island trips in other places. I felt pleased to have a store of memories which enabled me to feel nostalgic about such exotic things.

  Collecting memories, or experiences, was my primary goal when I first started travelling. I went about it in the same way as a stamp-collector goes about collecting stamps, carrying around with me a mental list of all the things I had yet to see or do. Most of the list was pretty banal. I wanted to see the Taj Mahal, Borobudur, the Rice Terraces in Bagio, Angkor Wat. Less banal, or maybe more so, was that I wanted to witness extreme poverty. I saw it as a necessary experience for anyone who wanted to appear worldly and interesting.

  Of course witnessing poverty was the first to be ticked off the list. Then I had to graduate to the more obscure stuff. Being in a riot was something I pursued with a truly obsessive zeal, along with being tear-gassed and hearing gunshots fired in anger.

  Another list item was having a brush with my own death. In Hong Kong, aged eighteen, I’d met an Old-Asia hand who’d told me a story about having been held up at gunpoint in Vietnam. The story ended with him having the gun shoved in his chest and being told he was going to be shot. ‘The funny thing about facing death,’ he’d said, ‘is that you find you aren’t afraid. If anything, you’re calm. Alert, naturally, but calm.’

  I’d nodded vigorously. I wasn’t agreeing with him out of personal experience. I was just too thrilled to do anything but move my head.

  The dope fields had fitted neatly into this category of the list, and so did the air pocket. The only downside was that I wasn’t able to claim being alert (naturally) but calm, which was a line I fully intended to use one day.

  Twenty minutes later I was ready to get going.

  ‘Right,’ I said, sitting up. ‘Let’s start up the engine.’

  ‘The engine’s fucked. You can’t start it. I think we might have to go back and get the Swedes to sort it out.’

  ‘Sure I can start it. I’ve been on this kind of boat loads of times.’

  Jed looked doubtful but gestured for me to give it a try.

  I crawled into the boat and slid
down to the stern end, and to my great delight I recognized the engine type. It was started like a lawnmower, by winding a rope around a flywheel and giving it a hard tug. A closer look revealed a knot at one end of the rope and a groove in the wheel for it to fit into.

  ‘I’ve tried that fifty times,’ Jed muttered, as I put the knot in place.

  ‘It’s in the wrist,’ I replied with deliberate cheerfulness. ‘You have to start slowly then snap it back.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  When I was ready to pull I gave the engine a last cursory check. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular but I wanted to give the impression that I was, and my shallowness paid off. Almost obscured by layers of grease and dirt I noticed a small metal switch with ‘on/off’ written beneath it. I glanced backwards over my shoulder and discreetly flicked it to the correct setting.

  ‘Here we go!’ I shouted and gave the rope a yank. Without even a splutter the engine roared into life.

  West More Land

  At the point we set off, noisily chugging out from the mini-harbour in a cloud of petrol fumes, I was keen to get to Ko Pha-Ngan. Although I’d been told it was past its best, Hat Rin still had a slightly legendary reputation. Like Patpong Road or the opium treks in the Golden Triangle, I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. I was also pleased to be doing something important for the beach. I knew that Sal appreciated my volunteering for such an obviously unpopular task, and I felt like I was involved in something serious and worth while.

  But an hour later, as the shape of Ko Pha-Ngan was forming on the horizon, my keenness began to be replaced by anxiety. It was the same feeling I’d had under the waterfall. I was suddenly aware that encountering the World would bring back all the things I’d been doing such a good job of forgetting. I wasn’t exactly sure what those things were, because I’d forgotten them, but I was pretty convinced I didn’t want to be reminded. Also, although we couldn’t really talk over the noise of the engine, I sensed Jed was thinking along the same lines. He was sitting as rigidly as the choppy motion of the boat would allow, one hand gripping the tiller, keeping his eyes absolutely fixed on the island ahead.

  I reached into my shorts pocket for a cigarette. I’d taken a new pack – hoping the seal would keep them waterproof – and matches. They were in the plastic film-carton that Keaty used to keep his Rizlas dry. ‘This is the most precious possession I have,’ he’d said before handing it over. ‘Guard it with your life.’ ‘Count on it,’ I’d replied earnestly, imagining a three-hour boat trip without nicotine.

  Lighting up turned into a bit of a drama because the matches were a crappy Thai brand and they splintered if you pushed them too hard. The first three broke and the next four blew out in the wind. I’d only taken ten in the film can, and was beginning to lose my cool, when I finally managed to get the cigarette lit up. Jed lit one too, off the end of mine, then we both went back to gazing at Ko Pha-Ngan. Between the blue and the green I could now make out a strip of white sand.

  To avoid thinking about the World, I started thinking about Françoise.

  A few days earlier Étienne and I had been having a diving competition near the coral garden about who could make the smallest splash. When we asked her to judge it, she watched us both and then shrugged, saying, ‘You are both very good.’ Étienne looked surprised. ‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘But who is better?’ Françoise shrugged again. ‘What shall I say?’ she laughed. ‘Really. You are both as good as the other.’ Then she gave us both a little kiss on the cheek.

  Her reaction had surprised me too. The truth is, Étienne was a much better diver than I was. I knew that without a shadow of a doubt. He could do effortless backwards dives, swan-dives, jackknifes, weird twists without a name, all sorts of things. I, however, could only manage a backwards dive with a violent jerk that usually flipped me right back on to my feet. As for who could make the smallest splash, Étienne entered the water as straight as a bamboo spear. I didn’t need to see myself to know that I was more like a tree-trunk, branches and all.

  So when Françoise said that we were both as good as each other, she was lying. A funny sort of lie. Not malicious, apparently diplomatic, but vaguely puzzling in a way I found hard to pin down.

  ‘West… more… land…’ I heard over the noise of the engine. Jed was calling to me, snapping me out of my day-dreaming.

  I looked round and cupped my hand to my ear. ‘What?’ I yelled.

  ‘I’m heading west! There’s more open beach to land! Less beach huts!’

  I gave him the thumbs up and turned back to the prow. While I’d been thinking about Françoise, Ko Pha-Ngan had got much closer. I could now see the trunks and leaves of the coconut trees, and the mid-day shadows beneath them.

  Re-entry

  A hundred or so metres from the shore, Jed cut the engine so we could paddle the rest of the way in. The idea was to look like day-trippers but we needn’t have bothered. The stretch of beach we landed on was empty apart from a few beat-up old beach huts, and they looked like no one had stayed in them for quite a while.

  We jumped out and waded to the sand, dragging the boat by the outrigger. ‘Are we going to leave the boat here?’ I asked when we were clear of the water.

  ‘No, we’ll have to hide it.’ Jed pointed to the tree-line. ‘Maybe up there. Go and check it out. Make sure this area is as empty as it seems.’

  ‘OK.’

  I started jogging up the beach, then slowed to a walk almost immediately. My sense of balance still thought I was at sea and I was swaying drunkenly from side to side. It passed quickly, but for a couple of minutes I actually had to concentrate to keep from falling over.

  Not far from where we’d landed I found two palms that were far enough apart to let the outrigger through and close enough together to look inconspicuous. Between them was a bush with a large canopy which would cover the boat completely, especially with the help of a few well-placed branches, and the nearest of the ramshackle beach huts was a good fifty metres away.

  ‘Here seems fine,’ I called to Jed.

  ‘Right. Give us a hand then.’

  Everything would have been much easier if there’d been a third person to help us. With the weight of the engine it took both of us to lift the stern – we had to keep the propeller up to stop it from getting damaged – so the front end kept sliding away from us. It was hard enough on the sand, but getting it over the small grass verge was a nightmare. We had to shunt it in short back-breaking bursts, none of which seemed to take us more than a foot.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I panted, after the boat had swivelled away from the tree-line for the twentieth time. ‘Is it always this hard?’

  ‘Is what always this hard?’

  ‘Rice Running.’

  ‘Of course,’ Jed replied, smoothing the sweat out of his beard. A stream of oily drops ran down his wrist and dripped off his elbow. ‘Why do you think nobody wants to do it?’

  Eventually we managed to manoeuvre the boat between the trees and under the bush. After we’d knocked up some camouflage, there was no way anyone would have spotted it unless they were going out of their way to look. We were even worried that we’d have trouble finding it again ourselves, so we marked the spot by pushing a forked stick into the sand.

  We were completely exhausted, but there were two consolations. One was that it would be easier getting the boat back to the water, because it would be downhill and the ocean made for a bigger target than the space between two palm trees. The other was that we could treat ourselves to a big meal as soon as we got to Hat Rin.

  We set off in high spirits, discussing which soft drinks we were going to order and whether Sprite had the edge on Coke. Jed noticed the couple first, but we were already a fair distance from the boat so we didn’t worry too much. As we passed them I looked straight at their faces, not for any reason except to be ready with a smile if they said hello.

  They didn’t. They kept their eyes pointed at the ground, and by their expressions I could see
they were putting the same concentration into walking as I had earlier.

  ‘Did you see them?’ I said when they were out of earshot. ‘Wasted by lunch-time.’

  ‘Liquid lunch.’

  ‘Powdered lunch.’

  Jed nodded, then hawked up and spat on the sand. ‘Fucking Freaks.’

  An hour later we were walking past rows of busy beach huts and weaving between sunbathers and Frisbee games. I was surprised that people weren’t taking more notice of us. Everyone looked so strange to me that I couldn’t believe I didn’t look equally strange to them.

  ‘Let’s eat,’ said Jed, when we were about halfway down Hat Rin, so we walked into the nearest café and sat down. Jed looked over the menu while I continued to marvel at our surroundings. The concrete under my toes felt particularly weird, and the plastic chair I was sitting on. It was just a standard chair – the same kind I used to have at school, curved seat with a hole in the back, V-shaped metal legs – but I found it bizarrely uncomfortable. I couldn’t work out the right way to sit on it. Either I was slithering down or I was perched on the edge, both of which were useless.

  ‘How the hell do you do this?’ I muttered.

  Jed looked up from the menu.

  ‘I can’t seem to sit…’

  He started laughing. ‘Does your head in, doesn’t it? All this.’

  ‘It sure does.’

  ‘What about your reflection?’

  ‘… How do you mean?’

  ‘When was the last time you saw your reflection?’

  I shrugged. There was a make-up mirror near the shower hut which the men used for shaving, but it only showed a tiny area of your face at any one time. Apart from that, I hadn’t seen myself for over four weeks.

  ‘There’s a sink and a mirror over there. Go and have a look. You’ll get a real shock.’