The Beach (5 page)

Sunset was spectacular. Red sky gently faded to deep blue, where a few bright stars already shone, and orange light threw elastic shadows down the beach as people strolled back to their huts.
I was stoned. I'd been dozing on the sand with Françoise and Étienne, recovering from our epic swim, when Sammy and Zeph turned up with half an ounce of grass wrapped in newspaper. They'd spent the day at Lamai hunting for their lost room key and found it hanging on a piece of driftwood, stuck into the sand. They'd bought the grass to celebrate.
'Someone must have put it there knowing we'd come looking,' Zeph had said as he sat down beside us. 'Isn't that such a decent thing to do?'
'Maybe it was a stupid thing to do,' Françoise had replied. 'Someone could have taken this key and robbed your room.'
'Well, uh, yeah, I suppose.' Then he'd looked at Françoise, obviously taking her in for the first time, and given his head a little shake. I think he was clearing a mental image that had just appeared. 'No, definitely. You're right.'
The sun had begun its rapid descent to the horizon as the grass began to take hold. Now we all sat, watching the colours in the sky as intently as if we were watching television.
'Hey,' said Sammy loudly, breaking us out of our reverie. 'Has anyone ever noticed that if you look up at the sky you can start to see animals and faces in the clouds?'
Étienne looked round. 'Have we ever noticed?' he said.
'Yeah,' Sammy continued. 'It's amazing. Hey, there's a little duck right above us, and that one looks like a man with a huge nose.'
'Actually, I have noticed this since I was a small child.'
'A small child?'
'Yes. Certainly.'
Sammy whistled. 'Shit. I've only just noticed it. Mind you, that's mainly to do with where I grew up.'
'Oh?' said Étienne.
'See, I grew up in Idaho.'
'Ah...' Étienne nodded. Then he looked confused. 'Yes, Idaho. I have heard of Idaho, but...'
'Well, you know about Idaho, huh? There's no clouds in Idaho.'
'No clouds?'
'Sure. Chicago, the windy city. Idaho, the cloudless state. Some weird weather thing to do with atmospheric pressure, I don't know.'
'There are no clouds at all?'
'Not one.' Sammy sat up on the sand. 'I can remember the first time I saw a cloud. It was in upstate New York, the summer of seventy-nine. I saw this vast fluffy thing in the sky, and I reached and tried to grab it... but it was too high.' Sammy smiled sadly. 'I turned to my Mom and said, "Why can't I have the candy floss, Mommy? Why?" Sammy choked and looked away. 'I'm sorry. It's just a stupid memory.'
Zeph leant over and patted him on the back. 'Hey man,' he murmured, just loud enough to hear. 'It's OK. Let it out. We're all friends here.'
'Yes,' said Étienne. 'We don't mind. Of course, everybody has a sad memory.'
Sammy spun around, his face all screwed up. 'You, Étienne? You have a sad memory too?'
'Oh, yes. I used to have a little red bicycle, but it was stolen by some thieves.'
Sammy's expression darkened. 'The bicycle thieves? They stole your little red bike?'
'Yes. I was seven.'
'
Seven!
' Sammy shouted and thumped the ground with his fist, spraying everyone with sand.' Jesus! That makes me so fucking mad!'
There was a shocked silence. Then Sammy grabbed the Rizlas and started furiously rolling up, and Zeph changed the topic of conversation.
The outburst was probably a clever move. Étienne's response had been so charming that it would have been cruel to reveal the truth. Sammy's only way out was to follow the bluff to its natural conclusion. As far as I know, Étienne believed there were no clouds in Idaho to the day he died.
By the time we'd smoked the joint, the sun had almost disappeared. Just the slightest curve of yellow shimmered over the sea. A slight breeze picked up, sending a few loose Rizlas skimming along the sand. With the breeze came the smell of cooking — lemon grass and fried shell-fish - from the restaurant behind us.
'I'm hungry,' I muttered.
'Smells good, huh?' said Zeph. 'I could do with a big plate of chicken noodles.'
'Or dog noodles,' said Sammy. He turned to Françoise. 'We had dog noodles in Chiang Mai. Tasted like chicken. All those things -dog, lizard, frog, snake. They always taste like chicken.'
'How about rat?' I asked.
'Uh-huh, rat too. Distinctly chicken-like.'
Zeph picked up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers, trailing patterns between his legs. Then he coughed, almost in a formal way, as if he wanted everyone to pay attention. 'Hey,' he said. 'Do you know about Kentucky Fried Rat?'
I frowned. It sounded like another wind-up, and I felt that if Étienne was going to fall for it in the same kind of way I might start crying. I still had a picture in my head of his concerned face as he explained about his little red bike.
'No. What is it?' I said warily.
'It's one of those stories that get around.'
'Urban myths,' said Sammy. 'Someone got a small bone stuck in their throat. Then they got it analysed and it was a rat bone.'
'Yeah, and the person it happened to was a friend's aunt's cousin. It never happened to the person you're talking to.'
'Oh,' I said. 'I know.'
'Right. So there's a Kentucky Fried Rat doing the rounds at the moment. You heard it?'
I shook my head.
'About a beach. This amazing beach hidden somewhere, but no one knows where it is.'
I turned my head away. Down by the sea a Thai boy was playing with a piece of coconut husk, keeping it in the air using his knees and the sides of his feet. He timed a flick badly and the husk flew into the water. For a few moments he stood there with his hands on his hips, perhaps wondering if it was worth getting wet to retrieve it. Then he started jogging up the sand towards the guest-house.
'No,' I said. 'I haven't heard about that. Fill us in.'
'OK,' said Zeph. 'I'll paint you a picture.' He lay back on the sand. 'Close your eyes and think about a lagoon.'
Think about a lagoon, hidden from the sea and passing boats by a high, curving wall of rock. Then imagine white sands and coral gardens never damaged by dynamite fishing or trawling nets. Freshwater falls scatter the island, surrounded by jungle — not the forests of inland Thailand, but jungle. Canopies three levels deep, plants untouched for a thousand years, strangely coloured birds and monkeys in the trees.
On the white sands, fishing in the coral gardens, a select community of travellers pass the months. They leave if they want to, they return, the beach never changes.
'Select?' I asked quietly, as if talking through a dream. Zeph's vision had entirely consumed me.
'Select,' he replied. 'Word of mouth passes on the location to a lucky few.'
'It's paradise,' Sammy murmured. 'It's Eden.'
'Eden,' Zeph agreed, 'is how it sounds.'
Françoise was completely thrown by hearing that Sammy and Zeph also knew about the beach. She couldn't have acted more suspicious if she'd tried.
She stood up suddenly. 'Now then,' she said, dusting sand off her legs. 'We leave early tomorrow morning for, ah, for Ko Pha-Ngan. So I think we shall go to bed now. Étienne? Richard? Come.'
'Huh?' I said, disorientated as the image of the beach splintered. 'Françoise, it's seven thirty in the evening.'
'We leave early in the morning,' she repeated.
'But... I haven't eaten any dinner. I'm starving.'
'Good. So we shall eat now. Good night, Sammy and Zeph,' she said, before I could ask them to join us. 'It was very nice meeting you. And really, your beach, what a silly story.' She laughed gaily.
Étienne sat upright, looking at her as if she'd lost her mind, but she ignored his appalled expression and began marching towards the restaurant.
'Look,' I said to Sammy and Zeph. 'I think she's... If you want to eat with us...'
'Yes.' said Étienne. 'You are very welcome. Please.'
'It's cool,' Sammy replied, smiling slightly. 'We'll hang out here a bit longer. But listen, have a good time in Ko Pha-Ngan. Are you coming back this way?'
I nodded.
'OK, so we'll catch up later on. We're here for a while. A week at least.'
We all shook hands, then Étienne and I followed after Françoise.
Dinner was laden with heavy silences, sometimes broken by a terse exchange in French. But Françoise knew she'd acted foolishly, and was apologetic as we said good night.
'I do not know,' she explained. 'I was suddenly frightened they would want to come with us. Zeph made it sound so... I only want it to be us...' She frowned, frustrated by her inability to express herself. 'Do you think they have realized we know about the beach?'
I shrugged. 'Hard to say. Everyone was pretty stoned.'
Étienne nodded. 'Yes,' he said, and put his arm around her shoulder. 'Everyone was stoned. We should not worry.'
It took me a long time to get to sleep that night. It wasn't just because I was anxious about what might happen tomorrow, although that was part of it. I was also troubled by the hurried way I'd said goodbye to Zeph and Sammy. I'd enjoyed their company and knew it was unlikely I'd find them again, if I did come back to Ko Samui. Our parting had been too quick and awkward, too confused by dope and secrets. I felt there was something I'd left unsaid.

I wouldn't call it a dream. Nothing with Mister Duck was like a dream. In this case, it was 'more like a movie. Or news footage, swaying on a hand-held camera.
Mister Duck was sprinting towards me across the embassy lawn, his wrists still freshly slit, blood looping out from the cuts as he pumped his arms. I was reeling from the noise of the screaming crowds and helicopters, watching a snowfall of shredded files. Classified snow, swirling in the backdraft from the rotor blades, settling on the manicured grass.
'Born twenty years too late?' shouted Mister Duck, belting past me and flipping into a cartwheel. 'Fuck that!' His blood echoed the movement, briefly hanging in the air like the trace from a firework.
'See up there!'
I looked where he pointed. A hovering insect shape was lifting off the roof, with people clinging to the landing skids. It dipped as it pulled away, struggling with the heavy load, and clipped a tree outside the embassy walls.
I shouted with excitement.
'That's the boy!' Mister Duck yelled, ruffling my hair with a wet hand, soaking the collar of my shirt. 'That's the kid!'
'Do we get to escape from the embassy roof?' I yelled back. 'I always wanted to do that!'
'Escape from the embassy roof?'
'Do we get to?'
'You bet,' he laughed. 'You fucking bet.'

I drew quickly, sweating despite the early morning chill. There wasn't time to take the same kind of care over the map as Mister Duck had. The islands were rough circles, the curving shore line of Thailand a series of jagged lines, and there were only three labels. Ko Samui, Ko Phelong, and Eden.
At the bottom of the page I wrote 'Wait on Chaweng for three days. If we haven't come back by then it means we made it to the beach. See you there? Richard.'
I crept outside. A light already shone in Françoise and Étienne's hut. Shivering, I stole along the porch and slipped the map under Zeph and Sammy's door. Then I collected my bag, locked up my room, and went to the restaurant to wait for the others.
The Thai boy who'd been kicking the coconut husk was sweeping the floor. As I arrived he glanced outside, to check it was as early as he thought it was.
'You wan' banan' pancake?' he asked cautiously.
I shook my head. 'No thanks. But I would like to buy four hundred cigarettes.'

The spiv's motor boat was painted white down to the watermark strip, and below that it was yellow - or yellow when it lifted clear of the sea, pale green when it sank back down. At one time his boat must have been red. The white was blistered or scraped away in places, leaving crimson streaks that looked like cuts. With the rolling movement and growling engine, the cuts were enough to make me feel the boat was alive. It knew which way I expected it to lurch and routinely surprised me.
Beside us, where the water was disturbed, the morning sun played tricks in the sea. Gold shapes like a shoal of fish spun beneath the surface, matching our speed. I reached down and trailed my hand, catching a fish on my palm. It swam there, flickering over my lifeline, then I balled my fist. The fish slipped out and swam on my closed fingers.
'You should not look down,' said Françoise, leaning over from the other side of the boat. 'If you look down, you will feel sick. Watch the island. The island does not move.'
I looked where she pointed. Strangely, Ko Samui seemed miles behind us, but the drop-off island still appeared as distant as it had an hour ago.
'I'm not feeling sick,' I said, and sank my head back over the side.
Hypnotized by the gold fish, I didn't move again until the water turned blue and I saw a coral bed loom beneath me. The spiv cut the engine. I put a hand up to my ears, surprised by the silence, half thinking I might have gone deaf. 'Now you pay,' said the spiv reassuringly, and we slid towards the shore.
The sand was more grey than yellow and strewn with dried seaweed laid out in overlapping arcs by the tide. I sat on the trunk of a fallen coconut tree, watching our ride chug into the distance. Soon it was hard to find, a white speck occasionally appearing on the ridge of a high swell. When five minutes passed without a sighting I realized it had gone and our isolation was complete.
A few metres away, Étienne and Françoise leant on their rucksacks. Étienne was studying the maps, working out which of the several islands near us we had to swim to. He didn't need my help so I called to him that I was going to take a walk. I'd never been on a real desert island before - a deserted desert island - and I felt I ought to explore.
'Where?' he said, looking up and squinting against the sun.
'Just around. I won't be long.'
'Half an hour?'
'An hour.'
'Yes, but we should leave after lunch. We should not spend the night here.'
I waved in reply, already walking away from them.
I stuck to the coast for half a mile, looking for a place to turn inland, and eventually found a bush whose canopy made a dark tunnel into the tree-line. Through it I could see green leaves and sunlight so I crawled inside, brushing spider webs from my face. I came out in a glade of waist-high ferns. Above me was a circle of sky, broken by a branch that jutted out like the hand of a clock. On the far side of the glade the forest began again but my impulse to continue was checked by a fear of getting lost. The runnel I'd crawled through was harder to make out from this end, disguised by the tall grasses, and I could only orientate myself by the sound of breaking waves. I gave up my token exploration and waded through the ferns to the middle of the glade. Then I sat down and smoked a cigarette.
Thinking about Thailand tends to make me angry, and until I started writing this book, I tried not to do it. I preferred it to stay tucked away in the back of my mind. But I did think about Thailand sometimes. Usually late at night, awake long enough so I could see the curtain patterns through the darkness and the shapes of the books on my shelves.
At those times I made an effort to remember sitting in that glade with the shadow of the clock-hand branch lying across the ferns, smoking my cigarette. I chose this moment because it was the last time I could pinpoint, and think: That was me being me. Normal. Nothing much going through my head apart from how pretty the island was, and how quiet.
It isn't that from then on every second in Thailand was bad. Good things happened. Loads of good things. And mundane things too: washing my face in the morning, swimming, fixing some food, whatever. But in retrospect all those instances were coloured by what was going on around them. Sometimes it feels to me like I walked into the glade and lit the cigarette, and someone else came along and finished it. Finished it, stubbed it out, flicked it into the bushes, then went to find Étienne and Françoise. It's a cop-out, because it's another thing that distances me from what happened, but that is how it feels.
This other person did things I wouldn't do. It wasn't just our morals that were at odds; there were little character differences too. The cigarette butt—the other guy flicked it into the bushes. I'd have done something else. Buried it maybe. I hate littering, let alone littering in a protected marine park.
It's hard to explain. I don't believe in possession or the supernatural. I know that in real terms it was me who flicked the cigarette butt.
Fuck it.
I've been relying on an idea that these things would become clear to me as I wrote them down, but it isn't turning out that way.
When I got back to the beach I found Étienne crouched over a little
Calor gas camping stove. Laid out beside him were three piles of
Magi-Noodle packets - yellow, brown and pink. 'Great,' I said. 'I'm starving. What's on the menu?' 'You may have chicken, beef, or...' He held up a pink packet.
'What is this?'
'Shrimp. I'll go for chicken.'
Étienne smiled. 'Me also. And we can have chocolate for dessert. You have it?'
'Sure.' I unclipped my rucksack and pulled out three bars. The ones closest to the top had melted and remoulded themselves around the shape of my water bottle, but the foil hadn't split.
'Did you find anything interesting on your walk?' asked Étienne, cutting open one of the yellow packs with a penknife.
'Nothing in particular. I stuck to the coastline mainly.' I looked around. 'Where's Françoise? Isn't she eating with us?'
'She has already eaten.' He pointed down the beach. 'She went to see if it is a big swim to our island.'
'Uh-huh. You worked out which one it was.'
'I think so. I'm not sure. There are many differences between the map in my guidebook and your friend's map.'
'Which one did you go for?'
'Your friend.'
I nodded. 'Good choice.'
'I hope so,' said Étienne, hooking a noodle from the boiling water with his penknife. It hung limply on the blade. 'OK. We can eat now.'