by David Savill
We understand the solo-traveller is a free spirit with an open and enquiring mind. We understand the solo-traveller is looking for an independent travel experience. We also understand solo doesn’t have to mean lonely. On our small group tours the solo-traveller can share experiences with like-minded individuals, and travel with the peace of mind that comes from company.
It wasn’t India they were trying to sell, it was ‘self-discovery’. It wasn’t solo travel, it was dating. She unwrapped a chocolate.
Jack had thought because she made him breakfast they might spend the day together, and the following Friday, he had made an embarrassing suggestion they might go out again. But what was she supposed to do with a twenty-year-old boy who still lived with his college friends? After Will, sex was really all she had needed from men. When the great couple had decided to split up, her friends had commented on how well she was doing, how remarkable Anya just managed to keep going, but her indifference was the exact opposite of what it suggested. Somehow, when it came to matters of her own heart, knowing what was right wasn’t the same as doing what was right. And so people thought her cold. Anya knew that.
She scrolled through the playgrounds of the western self presented by the website: Indian mountains, Nairobi safari, Thai beaches. Thai beaches. Curving shores fringed with palm trees. The black, broken teeth of archipelagos in the Indian Ocean. Was she really looking at the pictures and hoping she would see William?
Then she stopped. Not William, but something else.
Solitair is proud to introduce Kao Lak ‘Heaven Resort’. Anya took the key to the stationery room from the hook behind a filing cabinet. The room flickered into life, narrow and long with metal shelving to the ceiling on every wall. It was called the stationery room because the shelves were still full of unopened boxes of printer paper, highlighter pens and desk tidies. But really, the room was the office dump: old beta cameras from field trips, ailing tripods, mosquito nets, rucksacks full of moulding clothes, a pair of walking boots dusted with sand that might have come from some Central Asian desert. When the organisation had moved from single offices to open plan, there had only been room for one small set of drawers beneath each desk, and Anya had wheeled her old cabinet in here, complete with the notes she should have destroyed or put into secure storage. In those days, when she was not yet a senior researcher, when laptops were still unreliable and too heavy, she had kept parallel notes on paper. Thank God.
Anya could say this for herself. Her filing was impeccable. The books for the year 2000 were easy to find. And her notes were as brilliant as her filing.
Ljuba Crvenović, a thirty-two-year-old woman, who lived on the top floor of a shoddy Belgrade block. Bogdan Banović, the investigating policeman in Stovnik who had ordered Coca-Cola with his Turkish coffee. Vesna Knežević, the young redhead who lived at 32 Bjelave in the hills of Sarajevo among sheets of washing and the thunder of feet from a school playground. Vesna had been Kemal Lekić’s girlfriend.
Back at the desk she unfolded the newspaper with Vesna’s picture in it. The journalist at the Stovnik Gazette had pointed out the four people shouldering the painted green coffin which was supposed to contain Kemal Lekić’s body. Vesna was at the front.
‘Vesna was his girlfriend,’ the journalist pointed out, then fingered the others. ‘His best friend, the father of the family he lived with, and this is Marko Novak, Marko was like his brother.’
The coffin they carried had been empty. After the shelling, Kemal Lekić’s body had never been found. This in itself was not an unusual consequence of the kind of Second World War mortar rounds the Serbs were using. But it was the journalist who had first mentioned the rumours.
Kemal Lekić had escaped the shelling and been recruited by the CIA to fight against Islamic militants. Kemal Lekić had never even been present at the shelling, but had already left the country and was fighting in Chechnya with the rebels. Both of these rumours made sense if you worshipped the man as a hero. No one wanted their heroes to die. But the third rumour was perhaps the most plausible. Kemal Lekić was now living in Thailand, working in a holiday resort.
Anya googled Kemal Lekić straight away. There was a Wikipedia page now, dedicated to the heroic exploits of Kemal’s brigade. But the story of his death at the age of twenty-two was still the same. She only knew his face from the obituary photograph in the Stovnik Gazette, and at a distance of more than four years, was surprised to discover how good looking he was. Handsome enough she had to remind herself of what he had done.
She has remembered it right. Kao Lak, Heaven Resort. The words in pencil on the last page of the book. The name of the resort in a holiday photograph, on the hall table of Vesna’s house.
Beneath the ocean’s surface, a tsunami travels unseen.
Only as the tsunami approaches shore, does its energy take shape.
Tuesday 5 April 2005
Cambridge
There is a philosophical idea which says if something cannot be perceived, it cannot exist. Marko is about to ask Emeka whether he has ever heard of Schrödinger, when Emeka says: ‘There should be a test you have to pass before they let you have a dog.’
‘Like a dog licence,’ Marko says.
‘They used to have a dog licence in this country. Before this country started going to shit.’
Marko’s Nigerian employee is watching the balding greyhound across the street. She is tied to a street light beneath the Airman. The owner of the greyhound is an alcoholic who stays for Tuesday lock-ins. The dog will lie on the pavement until the not so early hours of the morning, opening and closing one lazy eye to anyone who passes by, her haunches shivering.
A stagger of girls climbs the steps to the club. They might be too young, but they’re pretty enough. ‘In Bosnia,’ Marko remembers, ‘we used to say, if you want to be a host to a guest, you should also be a host to his dog.’
Emeka clicks his teeth. ‘Fur all matted up and bones showing. It’s disgusting.’
Marko’s phone buzzes in his pocket. It could be the Roxy, or the boys at the Fountain. But there is no message, and the missed call only tells him it was an ‘international number’. The second ‘international number’ of the evening.
Most likely a call centre.
‘Boys.’ The boom of the club opens up behind them. It is the head barman, craning around the porthole door, white towel over the black shirt of his arm. ‘Those girls.’
‘No?’ Marko says.
‘Kid in the kitchen goes to their school.’
Marko shakes his head, half apology, half self-disgust.
On a night like tonight, when clouds are low enough to mist the green, people leaving the street and crossing Parker’s Piece momentarily drop out of sight before reappearing in the light of the lamp post which ties the paths of the park together. There is a moment of uncertainty, when it seems entirely possible one of the students, dog-walkers, professors or homeless drifters might disappear. They are in Schrödinger’s box.
The door closes. Emeka hasn’t moved. ‘Someone should put that dog out of its misery.’
‘Do something about it then.’
‘It isn’t my dog.’
Marko steps down to the pavement and crosses between the cars. The drunk’s knot is so bad, the dog could have untied it herself. He leaves the rope at her neck and uses it as a lead. Her legs scuttle back as he pulls her over the road. ‘You want to save the dog? Save the dog!’
Yellowing, soupy eyes, silvery bald patches over her back – the old thing stinks. Emeka gets down on one knee and strokes her neck. ‘Greyhounds are made for running, you poor bastard.’ He takes the lead from Marko, but when he reaches the edge of the piece and unknots the rope she doesn’t move.
‘Go on!’ Emeka shouts. ‘Run – run!’ He taps the dog’s backside with the toe of his boot, finds a stick and throws it into the darkness. When he tries to lift her haunches, the dog stands up, turns her back legs and sits down again.
Marko shouts from the steps of the
club, ‘She only plays for her master!’
Emeka puts his hands in the pockets of his jacket and shakes his head. ‘Stupid dog.’
‘Only for her master!’ Marko smiles. ‘That’s why dogs are dogs!’
Marko’s office is the table next to the jukebox in the Millennium Kebab. It is a short walk on Tuesdays, right next door to the Airman. Husni serves him pickled jalapeños at the end of a shift and he sucks them off the stem. He drinks yoghurt and a coffee but never touches the meat. There didn’t used to be any Bosnian-run kebab houses. No real ćevapi, no burek. Only the Turkish places like Husni’s. There were hardly any Bosnians in ’96. Now there’s a ‘Balkan’ restaurant out towards Grantchester, and cul-de-sacs in Cherry Hinton where Serbians face Albanians in capitalist harmony. Marko prefers to hide with the Turks and read his book for the night class. Philosophy for Beginners. He finds it easier to read in public, with the television of the kebab house and noise of customers. He can’t concentrate when it is quiet.
‘Your friend.’ Husni slaps the dough for tomorrow’s flatbread on the counter. ‘What’s he do with dog?’
‘He loves animals.’
‘I love animal.’
‘I love animals, but I know when something isn’t my business.’
The last two college boys fall out of the kebab house, arms around one another, pavement a tightrope. In the end, Emeka had given up on the dog. She had kept walking back to the road, and it seemed safer to just tie her up again. Marko puts down the book, and scrolls through his missed calls. Before the international numbers, only Millie. Yesterday she had sent him on a diversion from the market to pick up some books reserved in the college library. Husni sits down, and Marko feels the plastic bucket of his seat tighten. The tables are modular, the seats connected like a see-saw without the action. Husni pushes a piece of thin blue carbon paper across the table. Some sort of form.
‘DVLA,’ he says. ‘Speeding.’
The ongoing saga of the Turkish man’s driving licence. Marko pushes his laptop to one side. Husni gives him a pencil, and Marko tells him he’ll need a pen, a black one.
‘I thought they cancel points already.’
Marko looks down the form and ticks the boxes. ‘Did you have any valid reason for doing 53 in a 30 mph zone?’
‘My wife was pregnant and I’m taking to hospital?’
Marko shakes his head. Husni doesn’t have a wife. ‘Something they can’t check.’
‘What do I know?’
‘It was January.’ Marko looks at the incident date on the form. ‘I’m going to say there was a local fog, and it was impossible to read the signs.’
‘I shouldn’t be driving so fast in the fog.’
‘Yes, but there’s no law against driving fast in the fog.’
‘But driving fast in the fog is dangerous!’
Marko studies his Turkish friend; this man who has been in the country longer than him, but still not learned enough of the language to understand a basic form. No wonder the British complain about people who don’t integrate.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘Trust me. This is your best chance.’
Above the kebab house, Marko walks into the warm fug of Millie’s sleep. When the shop provides so much heat, he can forgive the cold blue glow of its sign. In the bedroom Millie has bunched the duvet into her chest, bare leg shining in the light of the bedside lamp. Even after three years, there is an exotic quality to her dark skin.
She has fallen asleep on her book and he gently lifts up her head to remove it.
Jonathan Woolf, Political Sciences in Post-War Europe.
The theory baffles him, but he loves the history which contextualises each chapter. He has read ‘The Eastern Front’ several times.
Thirty-nine million civilians died in the Second World War. One in ten of the Russian population . . .
Marko sits up in bed.
. . . One in five of the Yugoslav population.
Before his family moved to Bosnia, his mother’s grandparents had been Croatian. His great uncles, their parents too. The one in five. The book describes columns of Croatians, Serbs and Bosnians, marching across the continent; 100,000 Croatians in post-war Austria alone. A map shows how in 1942, only Spain, Britain and Russia stood outside the borders of Nazi occupation.
We are still living with the social and political consequences of the mass migration of peoples.
He is a consequence. We are all consequences. Millie a consequence of Haiti, a consequence of slavery.
The sentences of the book range far above the events they describe, and Marko recedes, unimportant in the great scheme of things.
A consequence.
He closes his eyes. When the phone in his pocket rings, he does not know how long he has been asleep.
International number.
He closes the bedroom door and stands in the fluorescent light of the kitchen. ‘Yes?’
There is a moment of silence, in which his voice is nowhere and anywhere.
When the man replying makes a question of his name, Marko lands in Bosnia, no longer the young man he is, but a boy.
‘Marko?’
He is standing on the sidelines of the five-a-side pitch on their housing estate in Stovnik. His cousin is walking across the pitch in a Chelsea football shirt.
‘Marko? Is that you?’
‘Samir?’
‘Marko, it’s Samir. Can you hear me?’
He knows how long it has been since he last heard his cousin’s voice.
He knows he has lived almost a decade in England. But now he is in Stovnik on the day he left.
‘Perfectly,’ he says. ‘I can hear you perfectly.’
Christmas Eve, 2004
Kao Lak
On jet-lagged legs, Anya wobbled from the bathroom, into the lounge of the beach hut. Will handed her something champagne-y in a plastic cup, and poured himself a mineral water.
‘Citronella!’
‘Sorry?’
‘The smell in the room, I was trying to think what it was. Citronella – for the mosquitoes.’
‘Oh yes,’ Will said. ‘Cheers!’
‘Naz Drowie!’ When she looked up from the fizz, Will seemed to be inspecting the wooden slats of the bungalow walls.
‘What a great place you’ve found!’
‘Trip Advisor told me good things.’ She wandered over to a raffia-work bookcase and its dog-eared collection of novels left by previous guests.
‘I’m glad you wanted to do it,’ Will started. ‘I haven’t really given myself a holiday these past three years.’
‘I was coming here anyway.’
Since landing in Phuket, she had struggled with this petulant teenage girl sulking inside her and trying to get out; a girl looking for attention every time her mouth opened.
William had met Anya in Bangkok before the transferring flight, head poking above the others in arrivals. Anya had forgotten what a beanpole Will was; forgotten too that delicious feeling of her toes stretching as she reached up and threw her arms around his neck. But the embrace had been calculated on her part, a demonstration of the confidence she wanted to exude. From there on, it had all been improvisation; oddly easy, the conversation about the fatuous in-flight magazine, and predictably strained, talk of their lives in Bangkok or London. The charabanc ride from Phuket airport to the resort had proved awkward too. As the other tourists climbed onto the back of a converted pickup, Anya shuffled up, knee to knee, Will’s hand resting between them like a lost glove she felt the need to pick up. She had to remind herself it didn’t belong to her any more.
The busyness and noise of the journey passed, and entering the candlelit bungalow over the marshes, Anya suddenly wanted only to sleep. From the shelf, she picked up a Black Lace novel with yellowed pages. The bustiered heroine on the cover had blood-red hair and a severe fringe, and had trapped the neck of a man beneath the heel of her vermilion boot.
‘Do you like Bangkok?’ She tried again. ‘I thought you wer
e trying to get away from cities?’
‘Away from cities – was I? No, I love cities.’
‘You always said about London that you hated all the people.’
‘Wow,’ William laughed, ‘sounds incredibly misanthropic. I don’t know. Maybe I was just bored with London.’
‘You always used to talk about moving to a small village and finding real “community”.’
He was sitting in a wicker bucket seat with an ease she found oddly frustrating, and however much she tried, she couldn’t stop digging at him. She wanted to say something about his clothes, about the saffron-yellow harem trousers and Birkenstocks. What had happened to Will? It just wasn’t him. Will dressed almost religiously in black Converse and tan cords. The trousers with the linen shirt made him leaner and younger than she remembered. In fact, there were actually a number of perfectly nice things to be said about Will’s appearance, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to say them.
‘Is this a new, teetotal William?’
‘Not teetotal exactly.’ Will looked at the water. ‘Just taking a break from booze,’ he sighed. ‘I thought getting out of the city I might try and get fit. You know, while you’re off doing whatever you have to do, meeting and whatever. I thought I could get some swimming in.’
‘Not a bad idea,’ she said, and then realised it sounded like a criticism of his physique when all she really meant to say was – oh, she might just as well shoot herself now.
She didn’t have to come to Thailand. She could have ignored his emails. And having decided to come, it didn’t have to be this. She could have told him about her work plans, and left things at a meet-up, a coffee in Bangkok. Instead, she had used the notes on Kemal Lekić as an excuse to come to Kao Lak and then let William know this was where she would be. It had seemed clever at the time. Now it just seemed devious. And her eyes were burning. She rarely wore contacts and they had been in for twelve hours.