by Alex Garland
I felt a great deal of pity for Jed when he told me this. It explained why he’d always seemed so distant from the rest of us. His apparent aloofness was only because he felt he ought to keep out of people’s way, even now that a year and a half had passed. It also explained why he so conspicuously accepted unpopular tasks, such as the Rice Run.
But Jed didn’t appear to feel any pity for himself. When I suggested to him that it must have been hard to have faced such a cold reaction, he shrugged and said he could understand it.
‘Something’s bothering me,’ I said, putting down Jed’s binoculars.
Jed frowned. ‘You and me both.’
‘I’m afraid they’ll find my rucksack.’
‘…Your rucksack?’
‘I hid my rucksack there, and so did Étienne and Françoise. We couldn’t swim with them… and if they find our bags they’ll know they’re on the right track.’
‘… How well did you hide them?’
‘Pretty well. The thing is, I’m starting to think I might have copied the map down wrong. I drew it in a real hurry and there were a lot of islands to fill in. I remember there were differences between Daffy’s map and the map in Étienne’s guidebook too. I easily could have missed out an island between Ko Phelong and here.’
Jed nodded. ‘It’s possible.’
‘So if they reckon they’re on the right island, that explains why they haven’t moved for the last nine days. They’re checking the place out, looking for the beach… which they won’t find… but they might find the rucksacks.’
‘It’s possible,’ Jed repeated. ‘But they might also have spent the last nine days wondering how the fuck they’re going to get back to Ko Pha-Ngan.’
‘And wondering how they could have been so stupid as to believe in a map that someone slid under their door.’
‘That would make them about as stupid as you then.’
‘Stupid as me… Yeah.’
Jed scowled and ran his hands over his face. ‘What I want to know is what they’re doing for food and water.’
‘Magi-Noodles and chocolate. That’s what we did.’
‘And water? They’d have needed to take a barrel of the stuff to have lasted this long.’
‘Maybe there’s a source on the island. It’s high enough.’
‘Must be… I’ll tell you what, though, you’re wrong about that map. Look at them. They sit on that one spot all fucking day. It faces us, right? So they know this is the right island. They’re sitting there and trying to work out how to reach us…’
I sighed. ‘You know what we should do?’
‘No.’
‘We should take the boat and head round to them. Then we get them on board, set a course for the open sea, and make them walk the plank. Problem solved.’
Jed tilted his head at the sky. ‘OK, Richard, let’s do it.’
‘OK. Let’s.’
‘OK.’
‘OK.’
We looked at each other briefly, then I went back to staring through the binoculars.
White Lies
We’d stay at our look-out post until the bottom curve of the sun was just about to hit the horizon, then we’d head back. There wasn’t much point spying if it was too dark to see, and anyway, Jed said it wasn’t safe to be up on the island after nightfall. You didn’t know what or who you might be walking into. Back at camp, Jed would go and talk to Sal – filling her in on the day’s non-events – and I’d get some dinner. Then, carrying my bowl of leftovers, I’d look for my old fishing detail. Usually I’d find them near the kitchen hut, having a smoke before bedtime.
Lying to Sal and Bugs was easy but I hated lying to my old detail, and I hated lying to Keaty even more. The truth was that I didn’t have a choice. Until we knew whether Zeph and Sammy would make it to the beach, there was no sense in stirring. The best I could do was satisfy Keaty’s curiosity about the exact nature of Jed’s work, and when I told him he wasn’t as surprised as I’d expected him to be.
‘It’s a good idea,’ he said, matter of factly. ‘Since the Swedes, people have been worried about who might turn up.’
‘What about since me?’
‘Daffy told you. It’s different.’
‘Were people angry about the Swedes then?’
‘… Daffy mainly.’
‘Jed said Daffy didn’t like him much either.’
Keaty started cleaning his Gameboy screen against his shorts. ‘He didn’t make it very easy for any of them, but once they were here… you know… what could he do?’
‘Is that why he left the beach?’
My question hung in the air while Keaty carefully inspected the tiny glass panel.
I asked him again.
‘Basically,’ he said eventually. ‘Yeah.’ He pushed in the Mario cart and switched on the machine. ‘You completed this yet?’
‘About twenty times.’
‘I was wondering where the batteries were going…’ He gazed at the Nintendo but didn’t begin playing. ‘So what do you do when you find someone coming?’ he asked casually.
‘… Just watch them, I guess.’
Keaty grinned. ‘You mean you take them out, right? Extreme prejudice.’
‘I’ll tell you when it happens,’ I replied, laughing uncomfortably, and was spared any further questions by the arrival of Jesse, looking for some Rizlas.
After that conversation I’d more or less managed to avoid the subject of my detail. It wasn’t difficult. Keaty had taken to his work in a big way and it only took a small nudge to get him talking about it. To my relief, the same applied with my other ex-colleagues, so I could always steer the conversation towards fishing. From their point of view, I suppose they were trying to emphasize my inclusion in the group by sticking to topics of shared experience. From my point of view, I was happy to talk about anything that upheld a sense of normality.
For the first few days, during my panicky stage, this was a bit of an effort. Given the way I was feeling, a calm exterior required constant concentration. When I let my guard drop I would drift off into my own anxious thoughts while people were talking to me. I could only use the excuse of being stoned or tired up to a point.
But there was a helpful side to the constant concentration: I never had time to feel jealous of the ease with which Keaty had replaced me, or sad that the secrets I was keeping were causing unexpected barriers between me and my friends. Unexpected, because I’d been worried that the detail would distance me from them, but soon I understood that it actually distanced them from me. I was still involved in their lives. I knew what was going on. I knew when they’d caught a pretty fish, and that Jean was trying to lure Keaty back to the garden, and that Cassie was trying to arrange a move from carpentry so she could work with Jesse, and that Bugs wasn’t having any of it.
I no longer had to struggle to maintain a calm appearance. In theory, perhaps, then I should have started to feel jealous of Keaty and sad about the lies, but I didn’t. Curiously, I took comfort from these things. I realized that I had been given one less problem to worry about, because if I was the one creating the distance then I had equal power to remove it. And if Zeph and Sammy failed in their attempt to reach us, I would be able to bring them closer without any effort. It would simply be a matter of not lying to them any more, which would be easy, seeing as there’d be nothing to lie about. Obviously, this was only a comfort if Zeph and Sammy failed to reach us, but if they didn’t then Sal would certainly get to hear about the map, and I’d be fucked anyway.
It was in this frame of mind – alert but calm or something close – that the second aspect of my new detail emerged. I think I first noticed it on the fifth day, when I woke half an hour before Jed and impatiently counted the minutes until it was time to go. Or maybe it was the sixth day, when Zeph and Sammy were missing from their beach and we scanned the sea for three silent hours, coolly professional, nothing to be said, until they reappeared three hours later. Most accurately, Keaty noticed it first, althou
gh he didn’t realize it at the time. ‘I bet you’re secretly looking forward to prowling around up there,’ he’d joked when I’d told him about the switch, but my mood had been too sour to see that he was right.
There was nothing strange about it. Jed and I were on a covert mission. We had binoculars, jungle, a quarry, a threat, the hidden presence of AK-47s and slanted eyes. The only missing element was a Doors soundtrack.
Too familiar to be strange, and too exciting to dread. Before long, impossible not to enjoy.
Ol’ Blue
At the end of the tenth day we were, as usual, hurrying to get back to the lagoon before nightfall. The sun was already below the western curve of the seaward cliffs and the orange light of early evening was turning blue. Whenever we were on the move we wouldn’t talk, so all our communication was by hand signal. A clenched fist meant stop and stay still, a flat palm held horizontally to the ground meant hide, a pointing gesture with all fingers kept together meant move forward cautiously. We’d never discussed the meanings of these signs, neither had we discussed the new words we’d started using. We’d say, ‘I’ll take point,’ instead of, ‘I’ll walk first,’ and we described distances in terms of klicks. I don’t actually remember how or when these things had been adopted. I think they’d simply felt like the most appropriate vocabulary for the situation.
That evening, Jed had taken point. He always did if the light was failing because he knew the island so much better than I did. I was having a little difficulty in keeping up with him, unable to find his easy compromise between speed and stealth, and when he gave the clenched-fist signal I missed it and walked straight into his back. The fact that he didn’t frown or swear made me aware that something serious was up. I eased myself away from him and stood still.
Just ahead of us the jungle became patchy and broke into a wide area of grasses and shrubs, so at first I assumed that Jed had seen someone in the clearing. Then I noticed that his gaze was pointed almost directly at his feet. For a couple of moments we both remained motionless. I still couldn’t tell what the problem was because his body was obscuring my view. After a long minute of silence, I cautiously reached out and tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t react and it suddenly struck me that there could be a poisonous snake on the ground in front of him. I glanced around for a stick but I couldn’t see one, then I inched to the side in order to get a better view.
I would have gasped if my jaw and chest muscles hadn’t seized up. Lying less than a metre from Jed’s feet was a Thai. He was flat on his back, eyes closed, and he had an automatic rifle lightly resting in the crook of his arm. Jed slowly moved his head to face me, as if he was afraid that by disturbing the air he might wake the man. ‘What now?’ he mouthed. I jabbed a finger in the direction we’d come, but he shook his head. I nodded vigorously, and Jed shook his head again, glowering. Then he pointed at his foot. He was standing on the barrel of the rifle. The pressure had lifted the butt several inches above the Thai’s bare arm. As soon as he moved his foot away, the butt would drop.
‘Shit,’ I mouthed, and Jed rolled his eyes desperately.
I thought for a minute. Then I started to creep backwards along the track. Jed stared at me as if to say, ‘Where the fuck are you going?’ but I raised a hand to tell him not to worry. I knew what to do because I’d seen it done on Tour of Duty.
I can never remember the names on Tour of Duty. That’s partly because the series is so terrible, but it’s also because the characters come from the same school as NYPD Blue’s (black lieutenant, unorthodox cops who get results). So in Tour of Duty you have the tough sergeant who knows all the tricks, the green lieutenant who learns all the tricks, the simple Southern hick who learns to make friends with the sassy blacks, the Hispanic you can rely on in a firefight, and the East-Coaster who wears glasses and probably reads books. The names really aren’t important.
The main thing is the scenes that these characters play out – tending the orphan who’s been wounded by shrapnel, stopping a rival platoon from doing a Zippo raid, leaping from helicopters into a whirlpool of flattened grass, hugging comrades as they cough and die, and dealing with mines.
The platoon is walking through the jungle when suddenly there is a barely audible click. Everyone hits the dirt except one man, an FNG, who stands rigid with fear. ‘I don’t wanna die, Sarge!’ he blurts, and starts to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Sarge crawls over on his belly. ‘You hang on in there, soldier,’ he mutters. He knows what to do. He had the same thing happen in Korea, ’53.
Bizarrely, Sarge starts to tell the soldier about an apparently unrelated incident that happened when he was a kid, working on his daddy’s farm. Sarge had a hound dog that he loved dearly, name of Ol’ Blue, and the soldier listens, distracted by the clever ploy. Meanwhile, Sarge is easing his knife under the soldier’s boot and sweat is cutting a line through the dirt on his brow.
Ol’ Blue was caught in a rabbit snare, Sarge explains, and every time he struggled the snare grew tighter. The soldier nods, still not grasping the connection. ‘What happened to Ol’ Blue?’ the soldier asks. ‘Did ya get him out, Sarge?’ ‘Sure we did, soldier,’ Sarge replies. Then he tells the soldier to lift his foot, nice and easy now. The soldier is confused, frightened, but he trusts Sarge. He does as he is told, and Sarge slips a rock on to the knife blade, maintaining the pressure on the mine. Sarge chuckles. ‘Son, all Ol’ Blue had to do was relax.’
I wasn’t going to start blathering on to Jed about Ol’ Blue. As I gently laid the stone on the rifle barrel, even the noise of rock scraping against metal sounded like someone hammering on a petrol drum. When the stone was positioned I looked up at Jed. He shrugged calmly and motioned for me to get up. I suppose he wanted me to be ready to start running if the gun dropped.
Inch by inch, Jed eased up his foot. The butt shifted downwards a fraction and I heard him draw in a quick breath, but it didn’t contact the Thai’s arm. We exchanged a glance, stepped gingerly over the man’s legs and continued quietly down the island. Drama over.
It took us another forty-five minutes to reach the top of the waterfall, and I grinned solidly every step of the way. I was grinning so much my jaws were aching, and if we hadn’t needed to keep silent I would have been laughing out loud.
Credit
I dived off the waterfall that day, much to Jed’s surprise, and much to my surprise too. I hadn’t been planning it. We were standing on the cliff edge looking at the sunset, which was cloudless and very beautiful and deserved a moment’s reflection. Sometimes, with these cloudless evenings, the light played a strange trick. Instead of beams of brightness radiating out from the horizon, there were beams of darkness – in other words, the polarized image of a traditional sunset. At first glance you accepted the image, only vaguely aware that something about it was wrong. Then, as with Escher’s endless staircase, you suddenly realized it made no logical sense at all. Each time I saw this effect it intrigued me and I could always pass twenty quiet minutes, pleasantly confounded.
Jed had no better answers for the phenomenon than me, but he always gave it a try. ‘Shadows, cast by clouds hidden behind the horizon,’ he was arguing that night, when I tapped him on the arm and said, ‘Watch this.’ Then I toppled forwards. The next instant I was watching the cliff face rushing past me and feeling a distant sense of alarm that my legs were bent. Their displaced weight was turning me in the air, and I was in danger of landing on my back. I tried to straighten them and a moment later I hit the pool, where I spun through several violent underwater revolutions, lost all the air from my lungs, and drifted back to the surface.
Up on the cliff top I could see Jed watching me with his hands on his hips. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he disapproved. A little while later he snapped at me as we made our way from the waterfall pool to the camp, although it may also have had something to do with the song I was singing.
It was ‘I saw a mouse! Where? There on the stair. Where on the stair? Right there! A little mouse with clog
s on, well I declare, going clip-clippity-clop on the stair, right there!’
‘Jesus, Richard!’ he said, as I looped the tune and began the chorus again. ‘What’s got into you?’
‘I’m singing,’ I replied breezily.
‘I know you are. Cut it out.’
‘You don’t know that song?’
‘No.’
‘You must know it. It’s famous.’
‘It’s the stupidest song I ever heard.’
I shrugged. I couldn’t deny it was a stupid song.
We walked in silence for a few minutes, me turning the tune over in my head and humming under my breath, then Jed said, ‘You know, you want to watch yourself, Richard.’ I didn’t know what he meant so I kept quiet, and a couple of seconds later he added, ‘You’re high.’
‘… High?’
‘Dope. High.’
‘I haven’t smoked a joint since last night.’
‘Exactly,’ he said with emphasis.
‘… You’re saying I should cut down on smoking dope?’
‘I’m saying dope’s got nothing to do with it.’ A branch was blocking our path and he held it aside until I passed him, then let the branch snap back. ‘That’s why you should watch yourself.’
I snorted dismissively. The way he was talking reminded me of his obscure references to blame on Ko Pha-Ngan. Sometimes Jed could be wilfully cryptic, and uncharitably I decided it had probably led to his alienated position in the beach life just as much as the awkward circumstances of his arrival. That, in turn, made me think of my own budding alienation.