The Beach

by Alex Garland

  I was about to reply when Sal clapped her hands and stood up. ‘OK,’ she said briskly. ‘As everyone knows, we’ve got a problem.’

  ‘Too fuckin’ right,’ drawled an Australian voice from the other side of the circle.

  ‘We thought we had another seven weeks of rice, but it turns out we’ve only got enough for two days. Now, this isn’t a major catastrophe, nobody’s going to be starving to death, but it is a minor one.’ Sal paused. ‘Well, you know what’s coming. We need to go on a Rice Run.’

  Several people booed; mainly, I guessed, out of a sense of duty.

  ‘So… Who’s volunteering?’

  Jed’s hand shot up.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ hissed Keaty.

  ‘Thank you, Jed. So OK… that’s one… Who else?’ Sal scanned the faces, most of whom had noticeably downcast eyes. ‘Come on… We all know Jed can’t do it alone…’

  Just as when I jumped from the waterfall, I only realized what I was doing after I’d started doing it; an invisible wire seemed to have attached itself to my wrist and was pulling it upwards.

  Sal noticed, then glanced at Bugs. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him shrug.

  ‘Are you volunteering too, Richard?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I answered, still a little surprised to find that I was. ‘I mean… Yeah. I’m volunteering.’

  Sal smiled. ‘Good. That’s sorted then. You’ll leave tomorrow morning.’

  There wasn’t much preparation to be done. All we needed was money and the clothes on our backs, and Sal produced the money. I spent the rest of the afternoon fielding Keaty’s accusations about my sanity.

  Étienne and Françoise finally returned from the corals as it was getting dark. They were also surprised I’d volunteered.

  ‘I hope you are not bored with life here,’ Françoise said, as we chatted outside the longhouse entrance.

  I laughed. ‘No way. I just thought it might be interesting. Anyway, I haven’t seen Ko Pha-Ngan yet.’

  ‘Good. It would be sad to be bored of Eden, no? If you are bored of Eden, what is left?’

  ‘Eden?’

  ‘Yes, you remember. Zeph called this place Eden.’

  ‘Zeph…’ I frowned, because, of course, I hadn’t remembered. ‘Yeah, that’s right… He did.’

  ’Toon Time

  I stared hard at the water. I needed to stare hard. The image under the surface kept shifting, and I had to concentrate to work out what I was seeing.

  One moment I was looking at coral. Red corals with curving white fingers. The next moment I was looking at bare ribs poking out of bloody corpses. Ten or twenty ruined bodies, or as many bodies as there were coral beds.

  ‘Rorschach,’ said Mister Duck.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Is it a cloud of butterflies? Is it a bed of flowers? No. It’s a pile of dead Cambodians.’ He laughed quietly. ‘That’s a test I don’t see you passing.’

  ‘I don’t see you passing it either.’

  ‘Well said, Rich. A salient point.’

  Mister Duck looked down at his wrists. Large black scabs had formed around his hands and lower arms. It seemed he’d finally stopped bleeding.

  ‘I tell you, Rich,’ he said. ‘Getting these bastards to close up has been a nightmare… A total fucking nightmare, I’m not kidding.’

  ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘Well, I tied a cloth around the top of each arm, really tight, and that slowed the blood enough to let me clot. Clever, huh?’

  ‘That’s the boy…’ I began, seeing my chance, but he interrupted me.

  ‘All right, Rich. That’ll do.’ He rocked on his heels like a kid with some good news to tell. ‘So, ah… do you want to know why I did it?’

  ‘Healed the cuts?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK.’

  Mister Duck smiled proudly. ‘I did it because you wanted to shake me by the hand.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Remember? You were walking back from the carved tree and you decided you wanted to shake me by the hand. So I said to myself, I’m not going to let Rich shake my hand if I’m bleeding all over the place! No fucking way!’ He emphasized his words with a jabbing finger. ‘Rich is going to get a clean hand to shake! A dry hand! The kind of hand he deserves!’

  I wondered how to respond. Actually, I’d completely forgotten about shaking his hand, and wasn’t even sure I still wanted to.

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Put it there, Rich!’ A darkly stained palm shot out.

  ‘I…’

  ‘Come on, Rich! You wouldn’t refuse to shake a guy’s hand, would you?’

  He was right. I never could turn down an extended hand, even from enemies. ‘No. Of course not…’ I replied, and added ‘Daffy’ as an afterthought.

  I reached out.

  His wrists exploded. They burst apart into two red fountains, spraying like high-pressure garden hoses, soaking me and blinding me, filling my mouth.

  ‘Stop it!’ I yelled, spitting and spinning away from the jets.

  ‘I can’t, Rich!’

  ‘Just fucking stop it!’

  ‘I…!’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Wait…! Wait, wait… They’re getting back to normal…’

  The sound of the fountains dropped away to a steady splashing. Cautiously I looked around. Mister Duck was standing with his hands on his hips, still bleeding profusely, examining the mess and shaking his head.

  ‘Christ,’ he mumbled. ‘How awkward.’

  I stared at him incredulously.

  ‘Really, Rich, I can’t apologize enough.’

  ‘You stupid bastard! You knew that was going to happen!’

  ‘No… Well, yes, but…’

  ‘You fucking planned it!’

  ‘It was supposed to be a joke.’

  ‘A jo –’ I hesitated. The taste of iron and salt in my mouth was making me feel sick. ‘Idiot!’

  Mister Duck’s shoulders slumped. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said unhappily. ‘Maybe it wasn’t a very good joke… Perhaps I’d better go.’ Then he walked past me and straight off the edge of the rock-shelf, but instead of falling the few feet down to the water, he simply hovered in mid-air.

  ‘Could you just answer one thing, Rich?’

  ‘What?’ I snapped.

  ‘Who are you planning to bring back?’

  ‘Back from where?’

  ‘The world. Aren’t you and Jed…’

  Mister Duck paused, suddenly frowning. Then he looked down at the empty space beneath him as if noticing it for the first time.

  ‘Oh damn,’ he groaned, and dropped like a stone.

  I looked over the shelf. When the ripples cleared the water was clouded with blood and I couldn’t make him out. I waited a while, to see if he’d resurface, but he never did.

  THE RICE RUN

  Jed

  Jed wouldn’t let me wake Étienne and Françoise. They’d asked me to say goodbye before I left, but Jed shook his head and said, ‘Unnecessary.’ I stood over their sleeping bodies, wondering what he meant. He’d woken me five minutes earlier by putting his hand over my mouth and whispering, ‘Shh,’ so close to my ear that his beard had brushed my cheek. I’d thought that had been pretty unnecessary myself.

  I thought his knife was unnecessary too. It appeared as we stood on the beach, getting ready for the swim to the seaward cliffs, a green-handled lock-knife with a Teflon-coated blade.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a tool,’ he replied, matter of factly. Then he winked and added, ‘Sinister, huh?’ before wading into the water with the knife between his teeth.

  Until the Rice Run, Jed was a mystery to me. The most time we’d ever spent together had been on my first day, when he’d escorted us from the waterfall. After that we’d had almost no contact. Sometimes I saw him in the evenings – never earlier, because he returned to the camp so late – and small talk had always been the extent of our conversations.
Normally, small talk is enough for me to form an opinion on someone. I make quick judgements, often completely wrong, and then stick by them rigidly. But with Jed I’d made an exception and kept an open mind. This was mainly due to conflicting accounts of his character. Unhygienix liked him, and Keaty thought he was a prat.

  ‘We were sitting on the beach,’ Keaty had once said, his forehead creased up with irritation, ‘and there was this noise from the jungle. A coconut falling off a tree or something. A crack. So Jed suddenly stiffened up and did this little glance over his shoulder, like he was some finely tuned commando. Like he couldn’t help his own reflexes.’

  I nodded. ‘He wanted you to notice.’

  ‘Exactly. He wanted us to notice how fucking alert he is.’ Keaty laughed and shook his head, then launched into a familiar diatribe about how crap it was to work in the garden.

  But Unhygienix liked Jed. Sometimes I’d needed the toilet late at night and found them still awake, sitting by the kitchen hut, getting stoned on grass nicked from the dope plantations. And if Unhygienix liked Jed, he couldn’t be all bad.

  There were three caves that led into the seaward cliffs. One was at the base of the jagged fissure, by the coral gardens, another was maybe two hundred metres to the right of the fissure, and the last was maybe fifty metres to the left. That was the one we swam for.

  It was a good swim. The water was cool and cleared the morning haze out of my head. I spent most of the time underwater, watching fish scatter, wondering which ones might end up as today’s lunch. It was strange that there were always so many fish in the lagoon. We must have been pulling out thirty a day, but the numbers never seemed to go down.

  Dawn was breaking by the time we reached the cave. We couldn’t see the sun yet – the east was blocked by the cliffs as they curved around to rejoin the island – but the sky was bright.

  ‘You know this place?’ Jed asked.

  ‘I’ve seen it while I’ve been working.’

  ‘But you’ve never been through.’

  ‘No. I went up to the coral gardens once and saw the cave there… Beneath the fissure.’

  ‘But you’ve never been through,’ he repeated.

  ‘No.’

  He looked disapproving. ‘You should have. Golden rule: first thing to do when you arrive some place is find out how you can get out again. These caves are the only ways out of the lagoon.’

  I shrugged. ‘Oh… So is that how you get above the waterfall?’

  ‘See here.’ He walked into the entrance of the cave and pointed directly upwards. Bizarrely, in the blackness, I could see a fist-sized circle of blue, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I made out a rope, hanging the length of the shaft.

  ‘It’s a chimney. You can climb it without the rope, but the rope makes it easier.’

  ‘And then you can walk around the cliff tops, back to the island.’

  ‘Exactly. Want to try?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said quickly. I had the idea he was testing me.

  Jed raised his eyebrows. ‘Uh-huh. An adventurous type. I had you down for something else.’

  That annoyed me. ‘I found this place, and what’s the big deal about climbing up the…’

  He cut me off. ‘Maybe this place found you,’ he said, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. Then suddenly he smiled. ‘I’m taking the piss, Richard. Sorry. Anyway, we don’t have time now. The journey will take four hours at least.’

  I checked my watch. It was almost seven. ‘So our ETA is eleven hundred hours.’

  ‘Eleven hundred hours…’ He chuckled and patted me on the arm, lapsing into an American accent. ‘ETAs, FNGs. You’re my kinda guy.’

  Keaty had met Sal and Bugs in Chiang Rai. They’d gone on an illegal trek together over the Burmese border, and after the trek was over Sal had asked him if he was interested in being taken to paradise.

  Gregorio had met Daffy in Sumatra. Gregorio had been beaten up and robbed, and when Daffy found him he was trying to hitch his way to Jakarta so he could contact the Spanish Embassy. Daffy had offered him cash to get to Java. Gregorio had been reluctant to accept, because he could see Daffy was short of money himself. Daffy had said ‘Fuck Java,’ and told him about the beach.

  Sal had been on an eighteen-hour bus ride with Ella. Ella had a portable backgammon set.

  Daffy had heard Cassie asking for a job in a Patpong bar.

  Unhygienix had cooked Bugs a six-course meal on a houseboat in Srinagar, starting with hot coconut soup and ending with a mango split.

  Moshe had caught a Manilan pickpocket trying to razor Daffy’s backpack.

  Bugs had worked with Jean, grape-picking in Blenheim, New Zealand.

  Jed…

  Jed had just turned up. Jumped from the waterfall, walked into the camp with a canvas overnight bag and a soaking wet bushel of grass under his arm.

  Keaty said the camp had been thrown into instant panic. Was he alone, how had he learnt about the beach, were there more with him, more coming? Everyone ran around going crazy, then Sal, Bugs and Daffy turned up. They took him into the longhouse to talk while everyone waited outside. People heard Daffy shouting and Bugs trying to calm him down.

  The cliffs were about thirty metres thick, but you couldn’t see through them to the open sea because, not far in, the roof of the cave dropped below the water-level. I wasn’t happy about swimming into the blackness but Jed assured me the roof rose up again quickly. ‘It’s a piece of piss,’ he said. ‘You’re up again before you know it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s low tide so we only have to swim half the cave. When it’s high tide you have to swim the whole cave in one go, and even that’s easy.’ Then he took a deep breath and slipped under, leaving me alone.

  I waited a minute, treading water and listening to my splashes echo round the walls. My feet and shins were cold, kicking in the chilled area, reminding me of the diving game off Ko Samui. ‘Put me down as the adventurous type,’ I said loudly. It was supposed to be a joke, something to give me courage, and in a way I suppose it worked. The echo spooked me so much that the inky water seemed less scary than hanging around.

  Jed had only worked on an official work detail, carpentry, for six days. Then he’d been taken off and started doing his ‘missions crap’, as Keaty put it, above the waterfall.

  People talked about it at first. They thought he ought to be working and were irritated that Sal, Bugs and Daffy refused to explain why he was allowed to do his own thing. But time passed, and as Jed’s face became more familiar they stopped asking questions. The main thing was that no other travellers appeared immediately after him, which had been everyone’s fear, and he brought in a steady supply of grass, previously a luxury in short supply.

  Keaty had a theory. Because Jed hadn’t been recruited he was an unknown quantity, and therefore, if he decided to leave, a danger to the camp’s secrecy. So when Sal had realized Jed was the type who was into missions, she created one just to keep him happy.

  Personally, I thought the theory was unlikely. Whatever Jed was doing, it was what Sal wanted him to be doing. Diplomacy wouldn’t have entered into it.

  Unusually for me, I kept my eyes shut as I swam, feeling my way along the cave roof with outstretched hands and only using my legs. I guessed that each kick made a metre and carefully counted my strokes to give me a sense of distance. After I’d counted ten I began to feel worried. An ache was building in my lungs, and Jed had been adamant that the underwater passage was no more than a forty-second swim. At fifteen I realized I had to make a decision about whether to turn back. I gave myself a limit of three more kicks, then my fingertips broke surface.

  I knew there was something wrong as soon as I took a breath. The air was foul. So bad that even though I was bursting for oxygen, I could only manage short breaths before I started gagging. Instinctively, pointlessly, I looked around me, but the absence of light was so absolute that I couldn’t see my fingers an inch from my face.

  �
��Jed!’ I called.

  Not even an echo.

  I reached up and my hand sank deep into something wet, with freezing tendrils that clung to my skin. A jolt of adrenalin rushed through my body and I snatched my hand back.

  ‘It’s seaweed,’ I whispered, after my heart had stopped smashing into my eardrums. Seaweed, coating the rock, absorbing the noise.

  I gagged again. Then I retched, pushing up a mouthful of vomit.

  ‘Jed…’

  Self-Help

  Once I’d started, I kept throwing up for several minutes. Every time my stomach contracted I couldn’t help doubling up and I’d vomit with my head underwater, then have to straighten up quickly to snatch a breath before the next heave. The vomiting finally stopped, although it took three dry retches before my stomach would concede it was empty. Then I was left, floating in blackness and amino acids, wondering what the fuck I should do next.

  My first thought was that I should continue down the passage – I was assuming that I’d surfaced too soon, tricked by an air pocket left open by an extra-low tide. But that was easier said than done. While I’d been throwing up I’d twisted and turned twenty times, and was now completely disorientated. That led me to my second thought: I should work out the dimensions of the air pocket. This, at least, was something I could accomplish. Steeling myself, I reached up again and pushed my hand into the seaweed. I flinched, but this time I didn’t pull my hand back, and through the slimy growth I felt rock, an arm’s length above my head.

  Several fumbling minutes later I’d created a good mental image of my surroundings. The pocket was about two metres wide and three metres long. On one side there was a narrow shelf, big enough to sit on, and everywhere else the walls curved straight down from the ceiling and ran into the water. There, the mental image began to fall apart. By groping around with my hands and feet, I seemed to find four passages leading into the rock, but it was hard to judge underwater. There could even have been more.

  It was a grim discovery. If there’d been only two passages, then whichever direction I chose to swim, I’d either come up in the lagoon or the ocean. But these other passages could lead to nowhere. I could find myself swimming into a maze.