The Beach (9 page)

Neutralized by wet hair and dark skin, each of the six swimmers looked like a carbon copy of the other. I didn't recognize Étienne and Françoise until they'd crossed the hot sands and were laying out their catch.
Something made me hesitate before I stepped out from behind the tree-line. Seeing my two travelling companions on such friendly terms with the other swimmers felt strange. They were all laughing and calling each other by name. It made me realize how much I'd been left out by sleeping through the first night and day in the camp. And then, when I did step out, none of the group noticed me. I had to stand there a few moments, a grin frozen on my face, waiting for one of them to look up.
Eventually, not knowing what else to do, I coughed. Six heads turned in unison.
'Hi,' I said uncertainly. There was a silence. Françoise was frowning slightly, as if she couldn't quite place me. Then Étienne's face split into a huge smile.
'Richard! You are better!' He bounded over and embraced me. 'Everybody,' he said, tightly gripping me with one wet arm and making an expansive gesture with the other. 'This is our friend who was sick.'
'Hi, Richard,' the swimmers chorused.
'Hi...'
Étienne hugged me again. 'I am so happy you are better!'
'I'm happy too.'
I looked over Étienne's shoulder at Françoise. She was still standing with the group and I smiled at her. She returned the smile but in a lop-sided way. Or a knowing way. I suddenly wondered what kinds of things I might have blurted out to her in my delirious state.
As if to panic me further she walked over and lightly brushed a hand against my arm. 'It is good to see you better, Richard,' she said flatly, then as I opened my mouth to reply she turned away.
'I caught a fish!' said Étienne. 'This is my first time fishing, and I caught a big fish!' He pointed to the catch. 'You see this big blue fish?'
'Uh-huh,' I replied, only half listening as cold thoughts flooded my head.
'Mine!'
I was introduced to the other swimmers.
Moshe was a tall Israeli with an ear-splitting laugh. He used it in the same way as a madman uses a gun, spraying it around with bewildering randomness. Hearing the laugh made me blink instinctively, like hearing a hammer pound on brick or metal. Our conversation was impeded by having to watch him through the strobe effect of my convulsing eyes.
Then there were two haughty Yugoslavian girls whose names I could never pronounce and certainly never spell, and who made a big deal about being from Sarajevo. They said, 'We are from Sarajevo,' then paused meaningfully, like they expected me to faint or congratulate them.
And there was Gregorio. Gregorio I warmed to at once. He had a kind face and a soft Latin lisp, and when we were introduced he said, 'I am very pleathed to meet you.' Then he dried his hand on his T-shirt before offering it to shake, adding, 'We are all very pleathed to meet you.'
I can't remember one thing about what Étienne said to me as we walked back along the shallows. I remember he was talking about what I'd missed while I was asleep, and I have a vision of the way he cradled his catch, smothering his brown chest with silver scales, but everything else is a blank. It's a measure of how disturbed I was by what I might have said to Françoise.
I realized I had to find out the truth or it would drive me crazy. Françoise was walking a few paces behind the group so I lagged behind Étienne, pretending to find an interesting sea shell. But as soon as I did so, she picked up her pace. Then when I caught up with her she seemed to deliberately drop behind again.
Seemed. It was impossible for me to tell. When she slowed she was apparently distracted by something in the trees, but that might have been no more real than my interesting sea shell.
It was enough for me. By now I felt sure my suspicions were correct, and rational or otherwise, I decided I had to clear the air without any delay.
When I lagged behind the next time, I caught her by the arm.
'Françoise,' I asked, trying to find the right balance between firm and casual. 'Is there something funny going on?'
'Funny?' she replied, wide-eyed. 'Oh, well, everything here is so strange. Of course, I am not used to it yet.'
'No, I didn't mean here... Look, maybe it's just me, but it feels like there's something funny going on between us.'
'Us?'
'Me and you,' I said, and instantly began to blush. I coughed and pointed my head at the ground. 'I thought that, while I was ill, maybe I said something that...'
'Oh.' She looked at me. 'What are you afraid you said?'
'I don't know what I said. I'm asking you.'
'Yes. And I am asking what you are afraid you said.'
Fuck, I thought. Rewind.
'Nothing. I'm not afraid I said anything.'
'So...?'
'So I don't know. I just thought you were acting funny. It's just me. Forget it.'
Françoise stopped. 'OK,' she said. The rest of the group began drawing away from us. 'Let me say it, Richard. You are worried you said you loved me, yes?'
'What?' I exclaimed, momentarily thrown by her Exocet-like bluntness. Then I gathered my wits and lowered my voice. 'Jesus Christ, Françoise! Of course not!'
'Richard...'
'I mean, that's a ridiculous idea.'
'Richard, please. It is not ridiculous. It was what you were afraid of.'
'No. Not at all. I was...'
'Richard!'
I paused. She was staring straight at me. 'Yes,' I said slowly. 'It's what I was afraid of.'
She sighed.
'Françoise,' I began, but she interrupted me.
'It does not matter, Richard. You had this fever, and in a fever people can say strange things, no? Things they do not mean. So you are afraid you said something strange. It means nothing. I understand.'
'You aren't angry?'
'Of course not.'
'And... Did I say anything? Anything like that?'
'No.'
'Really?'
She looked away. 'Yes, really. You are very sweet to worry, but it is nothing. Do not think of this again.' Then she pointed to the others, who were now fifty feet down the beach. 'Come. We should
go.'
'OK,' I said quietly.
'OK.'
We caught up with the group, neither of us talking. Françoise walked up to Étienne and started chatting with him in French, and I walked a little aside from the others. As we neared the turning off the beach to the camp-site, Gregorio sidled over.
'You feel like the new boy in school?'
'Oh, uh... Yeah. A bit.'
'These first days are difficult, of course, but do not worry. You will find friends quickly, Richard.'
I smiled. The way he emphasized the 'you' made it sound personal, like he thought there was something particular about me that would make it easy to find friends. I knew it was just the way he spoke English, but it made me feel better all the same.

While we'd been on the beach, the camp had filled up with people. I could see Bugs and Sal by the entrance to the longhouse, talking to a group who all carried ropes. A fat guy was busy gutting fish outside the kitchen hut, stacking the hollowed bodies on broad leaves and emptying the innards into a blood-smeared plastic bucket. Beside him a girl blew on a wood fire and fed the flames with kindling.
The centre of the clearing seemed like a focus point. Most of the people were there, just milling around and chatting. At the farthest end a girl was carefully laying wet clothes over the guy lines.
Gregorio was right. I did feel like the new boy in school. I scanned the clearing as if it were the playground on my first day's lunch break, wondering what divisions and hierarchies would have to be learnt, and which of the thirty or so faces would end up as friends'.
One face stuck out. It belonged to a black guy sitting alone, his back against a storeroom hut. He looked around twenty, he had a shaved head, and his eyes were fixed intently on a small grey box in his hands - the Nintendo Gameboy I'd spotted earlier.
Étienne and Françoise followed Moshe to deposit their catch with the fish-gutters. I nearly trailed after them. The schoolyard atmosphere was telling me to stick with the people I knew, but then I looked back at the Nintendo guy. His face suddenly screwed up and over the murmur of talking I heard him hiss, 'Game Over.'
I began walking towards him.
I once read that the most widely understood word in the whole world is 'OK', followed by 'Coke', as in cola. I think they should do the survey again, this time checking for 'Game Over'.
Game Over is my favourite thing about playing video games. Actually, I should qualify that. It's the split second before Game Over that's my favourite thing.
Streetfighter II — an oldie but goldie - with Leo controlling Ryu. Ryu's his best character because he's a good all-rounder - great defensive moves, pretty quick, and once he's on an offensive roll he's unstoppable. Theo's controlling Blanka. Blanka's faster than Ryu, but he's only really good on attack. The way to win with Blanka is to get in the other player's face and just never let up. Flying kick, leg-sweep, spin attack, head-bite. Daze them into submission.
Both players are down to the end of their energy bars. One more hit and they're down, so they're both being cagey. They're hanging back at opposite ends of the screen, waiting for the other guy to make the first move. Leo takes the initiative. He sends off a fireball to force Theo into blocking, then jumps in with a flying kick to knock Blanka's green head off. But as he's moving through the air he hears a soft tapping. Theo's tapping the punch button on his control pad. He's charging up an electricity defence so when Ryu's foot makes contact with Blanka's head it's going to be Ryu who gets KO'd with 10,000 volts charging through his system.
This is the split second before Game Over.
Leo's heard the noise. He knows he's fucked. He has time to blurt, 'I'm toast,' before Ryu is lit up and thrown backwards across the screen, flashing like a Christmas tree, a charred skeleton. Toast.
The split second is the moment you comprehend you're just about to die. Different people react to it in different ways. Some swear and rage. Some sigh or gasp. Some scream. I've heard a lot of screams over the twelve years I've been addicted to video games.
I'm sure that this moment provides a rare insight into the way people react just before they really do die. The games taps into something pure and beyond affectations. As Leo hears the tapping he blurts, 'I'm toast.' He says it quickly, with resignation and understanding. If he were driving down the M1 and saw a car spinning into his path I think he'd react in the same way.
Personally, I'm a rager. I fling my joypad across the floor, eyes clenched shut, head thrown back, a torrent of abuse pouring from my lips.
A couple of years ago I had a game called Alien 3. It had a great feature. When you ran out of lives you'd get a photo-realistic picture of the Alien with saliva dripping from its jaws, and a digitized voice would bleat, 'Game over, man!'
I really used to love that.
'Hi,' I said.
The guy looked up. 'Hi.'
'How many lines did you make?'
'One four four.'
'Uh-huh. Pretty good.'
'I can do one seven seven.'
'One seven seven?'
He nodded. 'How about you?'
'Uh, about a hundred and fifty is my best.'
He nodded again. 'You're one of the three FNGs, huh?'
'Yep.'
'Where are you from?'
'London.'
'Me too. Want a game?'
'Sure.'
'OK.' He gestured to the dirt. 'Pull up a chair.'

A few years ago I was going through the process of splitting up with my first serious girlfriend. She went away to Greece for the summer and when she came back she'd had a holiday romance with some Belgian guy. As if that wasn't bad enough, it seemed that the guy in question was going to show up in London some time over the next few weeks. After three hellish days and nights, I realized that I was dangerously close to losing my head. I biked over to my dad's flat and emotionally blackmailed him into lending me enough cash to leave the country.
On that trip I learnt something very important. Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.
After that first day, wandering around the clearing, I didn't really question a single thing about the beach.
The rice: over thirty people, two meals every day, eating rice. Rice paddies need acres of flat, irrigated land which we simply didn't have, so I knew we couldn't be growing it. If the situation hadn't come up with the Rice Run, I might never have known where it all came from. Unremarked, I would have let it pass.
Assimilation: from day one we were working, everybody knew our names, we had beds allocated in the longhouse. I felt like I'd been living there all my life.
It was the same thing that had happened on the aeroplane; my memory began shutting down. Ko Samui became a hazy, dream-like place, and Bangkok became little more than a familiar word. On the third or fourth day I remember thinking that Zeph and Sammy might turn up soon and wondering how people would react. Then I realized I couldn't quite recall Zeph and Sammy's faces. A couple of days later I'd forgotten they might be coming at all.
There's this saying: in an all-blue world, colour doesn't exist. It makes a lot of sense to me. If something seems strange, you question it; but if the outside world is too distant to use as a comparison then nothing seems strange.
Why would I question it anyway? Assimilating myself was the most natural thing in the world. I'd been doing it ever since I became a traveller. Another saying: when in Rome, do as the Romans. In the traveller's ten commandments, that's commandment number one. You don't march into Hindu temples and start saying, 'Why are you worshipping a cow?' You look around, take on board, adjust, accept.
Assimilation and rice. These were just things to accept - new aspects of a new life.
But even now, I'm not asking the right questions.
It doesn't matter why I found it so easy to assimilate myself into the beach life. The question is why the beach life found it so easy to assimilate me.
Over the first two or three weeks there was a song that I couldn't get out of my head. Actually, it wasn't even a song. It was just a couple of lines from a song. And I don't know the song's name, but I suspect it's called 'Street Life', because the only lyric I could remember went, 'Street life, it's the only life I know, street life, dah dab-dah dah dah dah dab-da-dah.' Except the way I sang it went, 'Beach life', instead of 'Street life', and all I could do was repeat that little bit over and over.
It used to drive Keaty crazy. He'd say, 'Richard, you've got to stop singing that fucking song,' and I'd have to shrug and say, 'Keaty, I can't get it out of my head.' Then I'd make an effort not to sing it for a while, but without meaning to I'd start again a couple of hours later. I'd only realize I'd started again when Keaty would smack his forehead and hiss, 'I asked you not to fucking sing it!
Jesus,
Richard!' Then I'd have to shrug again. Eventually I got Keaty singing it too, and when I pointed this out he said, 'Aaargh!' and wouldn't let me play on his Nintendo for the rest of the day.