by Alex Garland
The only thing I held back was that I’d given two other people directions to the island. I knew I should tell her about Zeph and Sammy, but I also thought she might be pissed off if she knew I’d spread their secret. Better to wait until I knew more about the setup and not risk rocking the boat so early on.
I also didn’t tell her about my dreams with Mister Duck, but that was different. There wasn’t any reason why I should.
I punctuated the end of the story, leading right up to the point where I’d walked into the camp and collapsed, by leaning out of bed and pulling the two-hundred pack of cigarettes out of my bin-liner. Sal smiled, and the confessional atmosphere was broken, abruptly flipped back to the semi-familiarity of before.
‘Hey,’ she said, stretching out the word in her North-American drawl. ‘You sure came prepared.’
‘Mmm,’ I replied, all I could say as I sucked the candle-flame on to the tip. ‘I’m the addict’s addict.’
She laughed. ‘I see that.’
‘You want one?’
‘No thanks. I’d really better not.’
‘Giving up?’
‘Given up. You should try too, Richard. It’s easy to give up here.’
I took a few quick drags without inhaling, to burn the waxy taste out of the cigarette. ‘I’ll give up when I’m thirty or something. When I have kids.’
Sal shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ she said, smiling, then brushed a finger over each eyebrow, smoothing out the sweat. ‘Well, Richard, it sounds like you had quite an adventure getting here. In normal circumstances, new guests are brought here under supervision. Your circumstances were very unusual.’
I waited for her to elaborate but she didn’t. Instead she uncrossed her legs as if she was about to leave.
‘Uh, now can I ask you some questions, Sal?’ I said quickly.
Her eyes flicked down to her wrist. She wasn’t wearing any watch; it was a motion of pure instinct.
‘I have some things to do, Richard.’
‘Please, Sal. There’s so much I’ve got to ask you.’
‘Sure there is, but you’ll learn everything in time. There’s no particular hurry.’
‘Just a few questions.’
She crossed her legs again. ‘Five minutes.’
‘OK, uh, well first I’d just like to know something about the setup. I mean, what is this place?’
‘It’s a beach resort.’
I frowned. ‘A beach resort?’
‘A place to come for vacations.’
I frowned harder. By the look in Sal’s eyes I could see she found my expression amusing.
‘Holidays?’ I tried to say, but the word caught in my throat. It seemed so belittling. I had ambiguous feelings about the differences between tourists and travellers – the problem being that the more I travelled, the smaller the differences became. But the one difference I could still latch on to was that tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.
‘What did you think this place was?’ Sal asked.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t think anything really.’ I exhaled slowly. ‘But I certainly didn’t think of a beach resort.’
She waved a chubby hand in the air. ‘OK. I’m kind of teasing you, Richard. Of course this is more than a beach resort. But at the same time, it is just a beach resort. We come here to relax by a beautiful beach, but it isn’t a beach resort because we’re trying to get away from beach resorts. Or we’re trying to make a place that won’t turn into a beach resort. See?’
‘No.’
Sal shrugged. ‘You will see, Richard. It’s not so complicated.’
Actually, I did see what she meant but I didn’t want to admit it. I wanted her to describe Zeph’s island commune of free spirits. A holiday resort seemed like a poor reward for the difficulties we’d had to overcome, and a rush of bitterness ran through me as I remembered the swim and the terror of hiding on the plateau.
‘Don’t look so disappointed, Richard.’
‘No, I’m not… I’m…’
Sal reached over and squeezed my hand. ‘After a little while you’ll see that this is a wonderful place, as long as you appreciate it for what it is.
I nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Sal. I didn’t mean to look disappointed. I’m not disappointed. I mean, this longhouse and the trees outside… It’s all amazing.’ I laughed. ‘It’s silly really. I think I was expecting an… an ideology or something. A purpose.’
I paused while I finished the cigarette. Sal made no movement to leave. ‘How about the gunmen in the dope fields?’ I asked, conscientiously tucking the dead butt back into the packet. ‘Are they anything to do with you?’
Sal shook her head.
‘They’re drug lords?’
‘I think “drug lords” is a bit dramatic. I have a feeling the fields are owned by ex-fishermen from Ko Samui, but I could be wrong. They turned up a couple of years ago and pretty much took over that half of the island. We can’t go there now.’
‘How do they get around the marine-park authorities?’
‘Same as us. Keep quiet. And half of the wardens are probably in on it, so they make sure the tourist boats don’t come near.’
‘But they know you’re here.’
‘Of course, but there isn’t much they can do. It’s not like they can report us. If we got raided then they’d get raided too.’
‘So there’s no trouble between you?’
Sal’s hand flicked to the sea-shell necklace around her neck. ‘They stick to their half. We stick to ours,’ she said briskly, then suddenly stood up, patting the dust from her skirt with pointless attention. ‘Enough talk, Richard. I really do have to go now, and you’re still running a fever. You need some rest.’
I didn’t bother protesting and Sal began walking away, her T-shirt catching the candlelight a little longer than her skin and skirt.
‘One more question,’ I called after her, and she looked round. ‘The man in Bangkok. You knew him?’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly, then she began walking again.
‘Who was he?’
‘He was a friend.’
‘He lived here?’
‘He was a friend,’ she repeated.
‘But… OK, just one more question.’
Sal didn’t stop, and now only her saffron T-shirt was visible, bobbing in the darkness.
‘One more!’
‘What?’ her voice floated back.
‘Where’s the toilet?’
‘Outside, second hut along by the edge of the camp.’
The bright sliver of light through the longhouse door slid back to blackness.
Exploring
The toilet, a small bamboo hut on the edge of the clearing, was a good example of how well the camp had been organized. Inside the hut was a low bench with a football-sized hole, through which I could see running water – a tributary from the diverted waterfall stream. There was a second hole cut into the roof, to let in what little light filtered past the canopy ceiling.
All in all, it was a lot more agreeable than many of the bathrooms one finds outside the westernized world. There wasn’t, however, any toilet paper. Not a surprise in itself, but I’d thought there might be some leaves or something. Instead, by the water channel, there was a plastic pitcher.
You find plastic pitchers all around provincial Asia and their purpose has confounded me for years. I refuse to believe that Asians wipe themselves with their hands – it’s a ridiculous idea – but, aside from washing digits, I can’t see what other use the pitcher has. I’m sure they don’t splash themselves down. Apart from being ineffective, it would make an incredible mess, and they emerge from their ablutions as dry as a bone.
Of the various mysteries of the Orient this should be the easiest to unravel, but the subject matter appears to be veiled in a conspiracy of silence. A Manilan friend once came with me on a trip to a small island off the coast of Luzon. One day I found him standing on a mud-dike, peering into the mangrove swamps w
ith obvious concern. When I asked him what the matter was he blushed furiously, which made his brown skin go almost purple, and pointed to some bits of toilet paper that were floating in the water. The tide was leading the toilet paper towards some houses, and this prospect had thrown him into a panic. Not for reasons of hygiene but because it would betray his western toilet habits – habits that the locals would find unacceptably disgusting. In his shame, he was considering wading into the swamps to hoick the pieces out and hide them elsewhere.
We managed to solve the problem by bombarding the water with stones until the paper shredded or sank. As we slunk away from the scene of the crime I asked him to describe the locals’ acceptable alternative, but he refused to tell me. He just hinted darkly that I’d find it as disgusting as they found our way. This was as close as I ever got to finding out the truth.
Luckily I only needed to piss so I was spared having to experiment. When the time came for solids I decided I’d slip into the jungle.
I left the toilet and began walking back across the clearing. I was still feeling slightly feverish but I didn’t want to spend yet more hours breathing stuffy air and watching flickering candle-flames. Instead I continued past the longhouse, thinking I might explore. I also hoped that I might find Étienne and Françoise, who’d been missing since I woke up. I imagined they were exploring too.
I counted nine tents in the clearing and five huts, not including the longhouse. The tents were only used for sleeping – inside the flaps I could see backpacks and clothes, and in one I even saw a Nintendo Gameboy – but the huts all seemed to have functional uses. Apart from the toilet, there was a kitchen and a washing area, also fed by tributaries. The other huts were for storage. One contained carpentry tools and another some boxes of tinned food. It made we wonder how long the camp had existed. Sal had said that the dope fields had appeared a couple of years ago, which implied the travellers had been around for some time before that.
Tents, tools, tinned food, Nintendo. The more I saw, the more I marvelled. It wasn’t just how much the camp had been organized, it was how it had been organized. None of the huts looked newer than the others. The tents’ guy lines were held with rocks, and the rocks were moulded into the ground. Nothing seemed random, everything seemed calculated: designed as opposed to evolved.
As I wandered around the clearing, peering through tent flaps and studying the canopy ceiling until my neck ached, my sense of awe was matched only by a sense of frustration. Questions kept appearing in my mind, and each question raised another. It was clear that, at some point, the people who’d set up the camp had needed a boat. This suggested the help of Thais, which in turn suggested a certain kind of Thai. A Ko Samui spiv might bend the rules to let backpackers stay on a marine-park island for a few nights, but it was harder to imagine them ferrying crates of food and carpentry tools.
I also found it strange that the camp was so deserted. It apparently supported a large number of people, and a couple of times I thought I heard voices near by, but no one ever appeared.
After a while, the quietness and occasional distant voices began to get to me. At first I just felt a little lonely and sorry for myself. I didn’t think Sal should have left me on my own, especially when I was ill and new to the camp. And Étienne and Françoise were supposed to be my friends. Shouldn’t friends have hung around to make sure I was OK?
But soon loneliness turned into paranoia. I found that I was starting when I heard jungle noises, my shuffling footsteps in the dirt sounded oddly loud, and I caught myself acting with an affected casualness, aimed at the eyes I suspected were watching me from the trees. Even the absence of Étienne and Françoise became a reason to worry.
Maybe it was partly to do with my fever, or maybe it was a normal reaction in abnormal circumstances. Either way, the eerie quietness was freaking me out. I decided I had to get out of the clearing. I went back to the longhouse to pick up my cigarettes and some shoes, but when I saw the long avenue of shadow that lay between the door and my candle-lit bed, I changed my mind.
There were several paths that ran from the clearing. I chose the nearest.
By good luck, the path I chose led directly to the beach. The sand was too hot for bare feet so I jogged down to the water’s edge, and after making a mental note of where I’d come out of the jungle, I flipped a mental coin and took a left.
Getting out from the claustrophobic cavern of trees calmed me down. There was plenty to distract me as I walked through the shallows.
From the waterfall, I’d seen the vast circle of granite cliffs as a barrier to getting down, but now they were a barrier to getting back up. A prison could hardly have been built with more formidable walls, although it was hard to think of such a place as prison-like. Aside from the lagoon’s beauty, there was a sense that the cliffs were protective – the walls of an inverse castle, sunk instead of raised. Sal hadn’t given me the impression of being very threatened by the dope farmers, but the knowledge that the cliffs lay between me and them was still comforting.
The lagoon itself was almost perfectly divided between land and sea. I estimated its diameter at a mile, though I wouldn’t rely on the accuracy of this guess. Now nearer to the seaward cliffs than on the waterfall, I could make out features in the rock-face I hadn’t seen before. Along the watermark were black hollows and caves. They looked as if they penetrated the cliff deeply – perhaps deeply enough to provide a passage for a small boat. The sea itself was punctuated by protruding boulders, slick where the waves lapped against them, flattened into slabs by centuries of tropical rain.
I’d walked a few hundred metres down the beach when I noticed some shapes splashing around one of the larger boulders. Bizarrely, my first thought was that they were seals, until I realized there couldn’t possibly be seals in Thailand. Then, looking harder, I realized they were people. At last I’d found someone.
I checked the urge to call out, for no particular reason other than a vague instinct to be cautious. Instead I jogged back over the sand to the tree-line, where I could sit in the shade and wait until the swimmers returned. There I found footprints, T-shirts, and to my delight, an open packet of Marlboros. After a millisecond of debate I stole one.
Contented for the moment, I blew smoke-rings into the still air, discovering that when the smoke-rings floated over the beach they would rise quickly and, without dissipating, drift into the overhanging palm leaves. It took me several baffled puffs to work out it was due to heat rising from the sun-baked sand.
The swimmers were less confusing. They were spear fishing. Every so often they’d all get out of the sea and gaze intently at the water around them, spears poised. Then they’d all throw their spears at once, dive back in, splash around a bit, and repeat the process. They seemed to catch a lot of fish.
Exocet
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.
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.