‘Mmm. That’s how I know how toxic it can be. Look at you. Without this Beach of yours, don’t you think life would be better by now?’
‘Better? I don’t think I’d have got over Meggie any sooner, if that’s what you mean.’
‘No. I didn’t mean that exactly. But if you hadn’t spent hours and hours online worrying about other people’s tragedies – that Triti girl, and the German kid who
was kidnapped – you could have focused on your own grief. Found a way of coping.’
‘No way. I’m going back to sleep,’ I say, and turn away from him. He knows
nothing
about how it feels to lose someone.
Except, as I close my eyes, I realise he
is
right. There’s a kind of liberation being thirty thousand feet above ground level, unable to consider going online or fixing someone
else’s problems.
Could this be a taste of how things will be when this is all over?
I open my eyes again and reach for Lewis’s hand to say sorry for snapping. He squeezes back.
For the first time, I do actually allow myself to wonder about life
after
the Beach’s version of the afterlife.
It might even be good.
‘Good morning, Miss Forster, would you care for some breakfast?’
The voice is so soft that I think it’s another dream – about angels this time, perhaps. But dreams don’t generally come with the smell of hot coffee and fresh croissants.
I open my eyes. I’m on the plane. The sky outside is light now.
‘You’ve been out for nearly seven hours, Ali. Good going!’ Lewis is already tucking into a plate of noodles.
‘We have a choice of Asian style or European,’ the attendant says.
‘European, thanks.’
She places the tray in front of me: fresh fruit, a basket of bread, jams, plus a dainty dish containing a doll-sized cooked breakfast.
‘You know they breed extra-small chickens to lay eggs specially for aeroplane meals,’ Lewis says.
‘What?’ It takes me a second too long to realise he’s joking. ‘Give me a break, Lewis, I’m not even properly awake yet. How much longer do we have to go?’
He points to his TV screen. It shows a world map with an out-of-proportion plane superimposed on top, at least as big as India. But I get the message. We’re nearly there.
‘Under two hours, I’d say. Then we change planes. Then, finally, we get to take our first steps in Thailand.’ He pulls his lips apart with his fingers in a strange grin.
‘Land of
smiles
.’
‘I’m almost too nervous to eat.’
‘I’ll have yours, then—’
I stop him reaching over to grab my croissant. ‘I said
almost.
It does feel weird, eating breakfast for the second time in twelve hours.’
‘One of the jet-setter’s secrets, Ali. The sooner you acclimatise to the new time zone, the more ready you are to hit the ground running.’
‘Not sure that
hit the ground
is the best phrase to use when we’re miles above the earth, Lewis.’
I’m in no hurry to land, I realise. I’m more chilled here than I have been in months. Good company. No Sahara. No internet. No pressure to fix the unfixable.
Once we do hit the ground, that’s when the pressure starts again. But I’m ready. Excited, almost. A new continent. An old mystery.
My last chance.
Asia.
I didn’t expect so much green. As we come in to land at Phuket Airport, sea turns into forest. No,
jungle.
The word thrills me, and the view thrills me even more.
‘You’re smiling,’ Lewis says, leaning over to check how close we are to the ground. We changed planes in a foggy Bangkok, going straight from air-conditioned plane to
air-conditioned bridge and air-conditioned lounge. I felt removed from reality.
But now our final destination is only seconds away.
‘Is that a nice way of saying I normally look miserable?’
‘No. But you haven’t had many reasons to smile lately, Ali. I hope this holiday will change that.’
Holiday
sounds wrong, but I try not to let my smile fade. Lewis is doing something so wonderful for me. It’s not his fault that the minute I begin to have fun, I feel guilty about
my sister dying and about my failure to find out why.
Except . . . I’m not the one to blame.
The thought is so unexpected that it shocks me more than the impact as we touch down with a bump.
It’s unexpected, yes, but it’s also true. Someone else chose to take Meggie’s life – and Tim’s and Zoe’s too. Then the police jumped to conclusions and
refused to consider the possibility that Tim didn’t do it.
None of that is my fault.
Is it time for me to forgive myself for something I didn’t even do?
‘Come on, daydreamer, another bonus of our business-class status – we get off the plane first!’
My right leg has gone to sleep and I let Lewis take my hand to help me up. He really would make someone a fantastic boyfriend.
Not me, though. Obviously. I have Danny.
Or, at least, I did.
The pain of not knowing whether our last meeting was the final goodbye should be enough to put me off relationships for a very long time. Far better that Lewis and I are close friends. And
anyway, what would he see in me?
‘Ready?’ he asks.
I nod.
‘Ladies first.’
At the top of the plane steps, I take my first breath of Thai air through the gap between the cabin door and the bridge.
I’m disappointed that it doesn’t smell like a posh oriental spa. The strongest scent is kerosene.
But the air is warm, as welcoming as a tropical ocean.
A second later, we’re back in the air-conditioned terminal and it leaves me longing for outside. We queue – the business-class ticket doesn’t win us a smile from the border
guard, whose suspicious eyes peek over the top of his surgical mask.
‘Has no one told him this is the land of smiles?’ Lewis whispers and I pull a face.
‘Be careful. He could send us back home.’
It’s only when the guard inspects Lewis’s passport for what feels like ten minutes that it occurs to me. We might already be on the wanted list. If my parents happened to pop over to
Cara’s, then it’s all over.
I try to stay calm. Would Interpol really get involved with a seventeen-year-old who does a bunk with her ‘boyfriend’ during her school holidays?
They might if her parents told them she was depressed, deluded,
mad.
‘Next. NEXT!’
I look up. The guard’s eyes are blazing with anger because I dared to keep him waiting for a fraction of a second. I step forward, forcing myself to smile, as though I cross international
borders every day of the week.
Out of the corner of my eye I spot Lewis waiting on the other side. His face is creased with tiredness and anxiety.
Yet again I wonder why the hell he’s doing this for me.
Finally the guard throws the passport back at me with the stamped immigration form tucked inside. As I walk away from the booth, unable to believe I’ve got away with it, Lewis steps
forward to take my hand. But this time, he pulls me along.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he says, and we make our way towards the luggage carousel, where his posh case is already waiting and looking much more pristine than either of us. He
drags it off before it can make another revolution and we walk through Customs.
And into chaos.
People are shouting and waving signs at us, none with our names on them.
‘Taxi, taxi!’
‘Hotel, very nice! Special price for you! Very cheap! Cheapest in Phuket.’
They pronounce the Ph more like a B and their voices are insistent. The kerosene smell has gone, replaced by heat. I never knew heat had a smell till now but this is intense.
Voices, honking horns, the screech of brakes.
I
love
it.
‘There should be a car waiting . . .’ Lewis scans the exit. ‘Over there. Off we go.’
I want to watch some more. After the luxuries of the last twenty-odd hours, this unfiltered reality is intoxicating.
But I follow him anyway. Morning sunlight dazzles me for a moment, then I see a long black estate car . . . no, I think it is actually a proper limousine, with a gold lily flower logo on the
door.
‘Mr Tomlinson? Miss Forster?’ The driver is wearing a high-collared jacket in soft gold silk. He lurches forward so suddenly that I think he’s tripped, but then I realise
he’s desperate to relieve me of my shabby backpack before I can take another step. He opens the door and a new smell hits me: leather polish and sharp citrus aromatherapy oils.
Now this
does
smell like a posh health spa. There’s chilled water and cool towels in a console between our seats. When I run the towel over my face it has the same scent as the
fragranced air-conditioning.
‘The journey will take only twenty minutes,’ the driver says once we’re inside. ‘Welcome to Phuket. Now, please relax. Is the music all right for you?’
I hadn’t noticed it till now – it’s classical and soothing, and so completely at odds with the frenzied life beyond the smoked windows that it makes everything even more
surreal. The engine is so quiet that you wouldn’t know the car was moving if you closed your eyes.
But I’m not going to close my eyes, even though they’re gritty from the flight – and still swollen from the fire. There’s too much to take in; I don’t want to miss
a thing.
After we leave the airport, it’s like driving through a film set. It must be rush hour because the whole of Phuket is on the move, sometimes three or four adults balanced on a single
moped, weaving in between open trucks crammed full of animals or buses crammed full of people.
At junctions, the traffic lights are mounted high above street-level, like on American freeways in the movies. Jumbled stores line both sides of the road. One is built like the grandest of
temples, in marble so white it glows like false teeth. But right next to it there’s an open shack that’s only being held up by the piles of tyres and random car parts it’s
selling. If they removed just one grimy engine, I’m pretty sure the entire terrace of shops would come crashing down.
And everywhere there are kids in school uniform, freshly laundered like a detergent advert, untouched by the dust and the heat.
I’d expected palms and sand and unbroken blue skies, but this . . . this is so incredible. If this is the world, I want to see every corner.
‘It’s so much more than I thought it would be,’ I say to Lewis.
‘Hmm?’ He’s checking his phone.
‘Is everything OK?’ I reach in my pocket for my own phone. I don’t even know for sure if it’ll work out here but I hold my breath as I switch it on. Will there be
something from Cara? Or worse, from Mum and Dad?
The plan is that Cara will text and email us both when it all goes tits up and then I’ll email my parents to tell them it’s all right, that I’m safe and will explain everything
soon. Of course, I won’t tell them where I am. Every second counts.
No one has reported you missing yet! Be careful, C xxxxx
I’m relieved the phone works, but I try not to imagine the effect my trip is going to have on my parents. I have to be selfish. It’s not Olav that I need, it’s
this.
Closure.
A little girl is clinging to the back of her mum’s motorbike. She’s wearing a white dress with a sailor collar. She notices me watching her and waves so enthusiastically that I worry
she’ll fall off.
I wave back. Perhaps it’s more than closure I need. It’s new horizons, too. How strange if I come to find the Beach and end up discovering the world.
Exactly nineteen minutes after we leave the airport, the driver turns into what looks like a national park. Ahead, there’s a lake surrounded by beach houses: not
dilapidated huts, but pastel-painted three-storey buildings that would look just right in New England, or somewhere, but seem very out of place here. Our limo passes a bus painted in psychedelic
patterns, the kind you’d expect hippies to have used on a trek through Asia in the sixties.
More greenery but still no sign of a beach. Finally, the car turns right and we drive up to wrought-iron gates so ornate that they could have been stolen from a royal palace. The guards here
look even sterner than the guy at the border but, when they see us in the limo, they raise the barriers.
Lewis puts away his phone. ‘Hope this place is going to be all right. At the last minute the choice was a bit limited.’
Trees jostle for position along the final stretch of drive, and to one side I can see people out playing golf on greens so bright they look radioactive.
‘Oh,
wow!’
I gasp.
The hotel is like a giant pavilion. The second our car stops, both passenger doors are opened at the exact same moment by two porters.
‘Welcome to the True Lily Hotel,’ they chorus in sing-song voices. There are more cool, citrusy towels, and then garlands of white flowers are placed around our necks. Their perfume
is thick, almost too intense.
Like the flowers Sahara sent.
I stumble as I enter the lobby. One more step and I’d have ended up in the water: the floor is made up of walkways suspended over huge pools full of fish and lilies.
The maze of paths makes me dizzy; I look up and feel dizzier still. The roof is
so
far away. Birds swoop and soar into the open eaves. Giant fans whirl but I can’t feel any
draught.
Then I realise the building has no back wall. Instead it’s open, with a view across another enormous lake. My eyes are still sore but everything’s more in focus here, and more
vivid.
Is that an
elephant
on the grass outside?
‘Ali, shall we?’
Lewis touches me lightly on the arm and I take careful steps as we head across another pond towards a sofa area. Already a bamboo tray is set with a porcelain tea set.
Tea?
I can’t imagine drinking anything hot right now. Every step I take, I sweat even more.
Classy.
I sit down opposite an elegant woman in a dress that reaches her ankles. What does she think of me, all dishevelled and over-heated? It’s obvious I’m not used to this, that I
don’t belong.