by Ings, Simon
‘Dad.’ Ester looks back out of the window, not believing what she has seen. At first there is only sea. Then, as the swell rolls under them, tipping them forward, the horizon wheels into view. What’s left of it. The thing bearing down on them already takes up half the sky.
Ester throws her tin at him: ‘ Dad.’
David bumps against her as the bow of their little boat rises, pressing them against the companionway door. The boat trembles and flexes as the wave rolls under them. They tip forward.
It can only be a ship. It looks more like a building.
David pushes past Ester, tripping her over. She topples and cracks her head on the table. He yanks the door open and pulls himself into the cockpit. Rain blows into the cabin. The boat tilts. The rain changes direction. Ester’s head throbs. She’s going to be sick.
David shouts something. How the air is gone.
He clambers inside.
‘What?’
‘Flare gun!’ It’s already in his hand. He’s learned his way around the new storage, after all. The boat tilts. He braces himself against the companionway door and fires. Against spray and grey water the flare is about as impressive as a kid’s sparkler. It hits the side of the wall and explodes.
The waves crash and spit. There is no sky. The wall is perfectly vertical, as though cemented to the ocean floor. Everything goes dark.
A few years later – Christmas Day, 2004 – David laughs and lifts his can of Coke, toasting the memory. ‘And if that’s not enough, some cunt turns a hose on us.’ Below the hotel verandah, Phuket’s feral dogs are fighting among the restaurant’s bins.
Ester remembers the white jet hitting her father full in the chest, knocking him across the afterdeck. He wrapped his arms around a winch housing as the hose played over him, forcing him back against the lifeline. The jet changed direction. It hit the moulding around the companionway door, spraying sea water into the cabin, plugging her mouth...
‘They were using the hose to push us away.’ David drains his Coke. ‘Bastards probably saved our lives.’ He leans back in his chair, arms behind his head. He wants to show off his swimmer’s muscles to Peter, sitting opposite him: a South African yachtsman, a great red tower of a man.
Peter’s skin cooks more than it tans. There is a swollen quality to him, like a roast tomato, ready to burst. He is fit enough: big enough to wield his weight. Ester feels sorry for his family, having to share their cabin with all that bulk. Peter draws heavily on a local cigarette, turns towards where the dogs are hiding, and throws the butt over the balustrade. He pauses, waiting for a reaction from the shadows. Nothing. ‘They were trying to get rid of you.’
‘They were trying to push us away.’
‘They thought you were pirates.’
‘On a ten-metre sloop?’
‘Should they care what you are? They’re a whale. You’re fry.’ David’s not finished his story. ‘Soon after, we found the engine wouldn’t start.’
The ignition-key housing was cracked. Whenever water got into it, it shorted the circuit and the diesel tried to turn over. Tried, but couldn’t: they’d left the engine in gear to jam the propeller while they sailed. Now there wasn’t enough life in the batteries to start the engine; and without the engine they had no way to charge the batteries. ‘In a storm, in the middle of a shipping lane...’
Normally, David manages to make this a funny story: a joke told against himself. Tonight it’s different. It’s ugly. A brag. A bid for attention. Ester gets up from her chair. ‘I’m going to say goodnight.’
John and Sarah, the elderly English couple sitting next to her, wish her sweet dreams.
Ester’s departure has an immediate effect upon David. He leans back precariously, rights himself; his front chair legs click against the floor tiles. ‘Bright and early in Rawai, yes?’
Ester smiles, says nothing. He watches her go. You can see how nervous he is, how much he fears his daughter’s disapproval. They met at the airport this morning and she has yet really to meet his eye. Ester wants this holiday to work. She needs her father back in her life, but she can wind him up a little. She owes him that.
Sarah, sensing an awkwardness, applies the linctus of her conversation: ‘Rawai! Such a lovely spot.’
‘We’re going scuba diving.’
‘Lovely.’
There are only diehards left on the verandah now. David Brooks. Kevin from San Francisco. Peter the South African. John and Sarah, the quiet, elderly couple from England (their eyes too bright, their smiles too polite; they’ve heard all these stories before).
Kevin tells his tale: ‘All these bloodcurdling things I kept hearing about the local pirates got me so scared, I did that thing, you know? You scatter a box of tacks over the deck before turning in for the night? About two in the morning a lump of driftwood knocks against the hull. I go running out, wrench in hand, barefoot...’
The story raises a chuckle. Nothing raucous. In their drunk, they have become philosophers.
Sarah says: ‘Half the time they’re just trying to sell you fish.’
‘They boarded me.’
All eyes on David again.
‘This kid and his old man. In harbour, of course. These things almost always happen in harbour. No one ever says that.’
Grumbles of assent.
‘Kid had a gun. I don’t know guns. Some sort of gun. Not a handgun.’
‘Ay-Kay.’ Peter wants them all to know he’s on first-name terms with assault weapons.
‘It wasn’t so bad. They wanted money, cigarettes. My boat was just a hire. Very simple. Old. No fancy electronics. But it gets under your skin. The old man showing you photo-booth snaps of his kids while his eldest pokes you in the ribs with a gun muzzle. I don’t suppose it was even loaded.’
‘Probably bloody was.’ Peter again. ‘As well that you stayed calm.’
‘Calm?’ David frowns, staring at the table. ‘I was scared.’
It’s John’s turn. The elderly Englishman. God forbid he and his wife ever attempt to return home: their England’s long gone. He pulls a book out of the pocket of his navy-blue blazer and shows it to them: a battered paperback with a two-tone cover. He holds it up for them to see. He’s presenting it to them. He’s making a presentation. Behind the unparodiable precision of his costume – blazer, whites and deck shoes: the ex-colonial yachtsman abroad – you get a glimpse, in this moment, of what lies beneath. The regional manager. The systems analyst. One of British manufacturing’s trusty but surplus second lieutenants.
‘Tarutao’s a Thai prison island that got mislaid in the last war. One day the supply ships simply stopped coming.’ John says that starving prisoners and warders joined forces and turned to piracy to survive, establishing a pirate dynasty that’s even today the scourge of the Andaman Sea. ‘Jolly good read,’ he assures the company, hauling himself out of his chair. The book is by a local novelist. John found it in Phuket Used Books in Mueang.
Perhaps John’s book report is a parting shot: a way of saying he doesn’t believe a word of the stories he’s heard this evening. David would like to think so. Better that than an old man chuntering on, out of his depth.
‘Come along, John.’ Hooking her arm in his, Sarah leads him away.
At about 2 a.m., Ester wakes to find there is just one soda water left in her fridge. It is one of those cans that practically vanish in your fist, good for diluting a single G&T. She knows she should drink more water and that she’ll suffer for it in the morning if she doesn’t, but she hasn’t the energy to go downstairs to the Coke machine. She just cracks open the can, slugs it down, and crashes out again.
About 5 a.m. she stumbles off to the toilet and after that she manages to sleep – only to be woken, around 8 a.m., by the bed. It’s shaking.
By the time she comes fully awake the tremors have stopped. Twenty minutes later they start up again. In the light threading through bamboo blinds she watches her little turquoise Schweppes can jangle its way to the edge of the bedside ta
ble, and off. She gets up, kicks the can under the bed with her heel, and heads to the bathroom a second time. The tremors are a novelty for her: unnerving, but not strong.
In flip-flops, bathing suit, bikini and sarong, and with a belly full of paracetamol, she heads over to the beach-side Starbucks. She carries her double-shot latte to a table with a view of the beach. The water is running out. Kids are jumping in and out of rock pools exposed by the tide. She doesn’t pay this much attention until, halfway through her coffee, she finds tourists leaning across her table for the view. The sea has not merely withdrawn. It has vanished. There are fish flopping about on the rocks.
People are walking where the sea should be. Even the locals are gathering to look. She follows them, the cup still in her hand. Crusts of wet sand give under her heels as she heads for the rocks of the exposed seabed. She passes a local man and his son; they are gathering huge fish in a carrier bag. She comes to the rocks. They are too sharp for her feet. She stands there, chugging coffee, looking out to where the sea has gone. Now, if it went away so quickly –
Yes: it’s coming back.
Children run back up the beach, squealing. Now everyone is running. There is a piece of driftwood rolling about in the surf. Something happens to Ester’s eyes – there’s a small snapping sensation as they adjust to the scale of the thing – and she sees that the piece of wood is a boat. There are people in it. She turns and runs back to Starbucks, out of the way of the water. She doesn’t run fast, as though admitting the size of the oncoming wave will add to its strength. People are standing around the bar. She pushes in among them. Nobody pays any attention to her. They have eyes only for the water. She shoulders her way through and out of the building and across the street. There’s a tremendous bang as the wave hits the sea wall. Safely on the other side, and in the shade of a concrete stairway, Ester dares to look around. Spray fills the sky: the wall has contained the waters. There are people on the road, leaning on each other, knocked breathless, shocked. Others are laughing.
Something rises behind them. Something black and absolutely flat: a metal sheet. Foam fizzes along the sheet’s leading edge, and it falls. Vehicles topple over. The sky is white. A wall of dirty black foam punches its way across the road towards Ester, shaking chairs and palm fronds and people and a couple of dinky purple sofas in its fists: Starbucks’ entire contents, fittings, staff and clientele.
David sleeps through the night-time tremors, only to be woken by a loud bang. He thinks of bombs. A terrorist atrocity. The Dhofari rebellion. He opens his eyes wide, his body stiff and straining under the sheet.
It is absolutely quiet. There is no birdsong. He gets to his feet and opens the blinds. His room lies at the back of the hotel, overlooking the pool. He snatches a robe from the foot of the bed and opens the verandah doors. There is something wrong with the pool. The water level is too high. The water slops over his feet, sending bottles of shampoo clattering over the decking and – what are those grey things?
Fish. He is surrounded by little flapping fish. The water is black. A sewer main must have burst. He hobbles back to his room and shuts the door.
There’s shouting in the corridor. He goes to open the door. As he turns the handle something ice-cold slaps his ankles. Water is squirting into the room through the bottom of the doorframe.
The door bangs open. Black water engulfs him. He sprawls. He gasps for air and swallows something sharp. He flails, pulling at the furniture, toppling it into the water. It floats.
He sneezes. It feels like he’s swallowed a razor. He spits out a mouthful of greenish foam and gets to his feet. He leans against the door jamb. The water is roiling around his knees, unable to choose a direction. Sneezing and coughing, he wades into the corridor. The lights are out. In the dimness, he can’t see the water for debris: napkins, passports, bedsheets, nappies, shattered wood, Formica. He has a dim notion that he has to gather things. Penknife. Passport. Sunscreen. He turns back into the room. The first car rolls into the pool. Then the second. The wave does not compute. The wave cannot be coming towards him because his room is at the rear of the hotel. Mist fills the air, obscuring his view of the pool. Shadows loom in the mist. They take on form and dimension. A motor scooter smashes through his windows on a tide of broken glass and corrugated iron.
The swell carries Ester across the road. She glimpses her hotel, then the water folds over her. When she comes up again, she is being hurled towards a building she does not recognize. It is built over a sunken parking area. Water curves, dips, rushes under the building. The current drags her along a concrete awning towards the sink-hole. She grabs hold of an exposed rebar. She levers herself on to her elbows and leans over the concrete shelf with the water rushing around her legs. The water is trying to pull her off and carry her under the building.
When the surge eases, she pulls herself on to the shelf. She is bleeding everywhere. Where she grabbed the rebar, her palm is gashed open, There are two dribbling slashes across her breasts where the water dragged her along the awning. Her legs look as though someone has gone at them with a lawn strimmer. The water is full of glass.
By now the water is receding, taking with it the contents of the hotel lobby: computers, TVs, filing cabinets, children, tables, panelling. From up the road the water streams back, bearing off whole bungalows. Cars. People. Sheets of corrugated iron go past at twenty, thirty miles per hour, skimming and slicing the surface of the water.
A dark line appears on the horizon. Another wave.
David heaves himself into the corridor and there’s an old man rooted there, frozen; they practically touch noses. ‘Christ!’ The man’s all bloodied up, his face a streaked thing, bacon, barely human. ‘Sarah.’ Blood streams through his hair and down his face. He says: ‘This isn’t my hotel.’ He’s wearing a yachting blazer. It’s John, the Englishman.
David says, through a throat that burns, ‘You need to sit down.’ ‘I was on the beach with Sarah.’
David reaches out for him. Is there any part of him that’s safe to touch?
‘Where’s Sarah?’
‘What?’
‘Come with me and sit down.’
‘This isn’t my hotel.’ John turns away from David and stumbles down the hall. The back of his skull is off. There are wet things in his head. At the foot of the stairs he kneels down. David doesn’t know how to help him. John heaves drily into the water and rolls around and sits on the stair and says, ‘We’ve got to find the can.’
‘It’s gone, John. Where do you think it’s ended up, after all this?’ ‘Well,’ John grumbles. ‘You would say that. Wouldn’t you?’ He makes like a cat, bringing up a fur ball, and his face just, well, sticks. It jams there, so that he can no longer speak. He only hoots.
‘I’m coming back,’ David tells him. ‘I’ll find somebody. I’m coming back for you.’ He climbs the stairs to the roof. A couple of dozen people have gathered here, blocking his view of the sea. Taller than the rest, Peter the South African leans on the parapet, an SLR camera pressed to his face. Someone screams and people pull away from the edge and he sees past Peter to a towering wave that has no water in it at all: only gas heaters, air conditioners, people, motorcycles and cars.
The building shakes. The wave forces its way down an alley. People fall into him, screaming. Peter is still at the balustrade, the camera pressed to his face. David, light-headed, sways forward and joins him.
Peter is using the camera’s telephoto lens to scour the beach. ‘They went down there this morning,’ he says. ‘Suzie and the kids. She took them for a swim.’
Along the coast waves criss-cross each other, mounting and bursting. The beach bungalows are falling apart. Corrugated-iron sheets spill into the water. Beds, TVs, plastic ducting, washing machines. Wreckage grinds together, creaking and banging. Horns and alarms fill the air. A tuk-tuk has been hurled into the crown of a palm tree.
Peter says: ‘Where’s your daughter?’
‘I don’t know. I saw John.’
‘He wanted us to go and find the can.’
‘Fuck the can.’
‘That’s what I told him.’
‘The can is gone.’
‘I know.’
‘I mean. Look.’
‘Yes.’
Peter stands with his face pressed to the back of his camera. His family is lost as surely as the can is lost: there’s no point in his standing here. ‘Peter. Come on.’
‘I’m fine. Go find your daughter. Go, take care.’
David stares at Peter. They have never liked each other. David leaves the roof and heads downstairs. John has vanished. In his place are two French girls. The waves have torn all their clothes off. There are deep punctures all over them, as though someone has attacked them with a fork. David helps the girls up the stairs. The stairs are thick with mud. The girls whisper their thanks. Everyone keeps calling him ‘doctor’.
He goes back down, counting the number of landings, and stops where black water, thick with turds and tampons and shampoo bottles, slops over his feet. Ester’s room is under water.
Ester climbs on to the apex of the roof. She gets her bearings. She is about half a block away from their hotel. Above her, on the balcony of a neighbouring apartment block, a woman wrapped in a sari encourages her boy to jump. Hand in hand, they make the leap. They fall straight through. Ester, sitting athwart the ridge tiles, feels the whole roof flex as they hit it, and disappear.
Ester works her way along the roof. At the edge of the building she looks for a way across the alley. The water has receded, leaving behind a tangle of refrigerators and mattresses. The waves have driven a Toyota Hilux tail-up into the wall below her. She lowers herself into the flatbed. The cab’s rear glass is missing. She climbs through. The cab is full of blood. She crawls over the plastic fascia to the driver’s side door and scrambles out through the window.
From here she’s able to reach a balcony on the first floor, but the room beyond is jammed with shattered furniture. She climbs back over the balcony and gingerly works her way down the rubble, through a webwork of fallen power and telephone lines, and into the water. It is black, opaque, it comes up to her knees. Straining for sounds of a third wave, she wades round to the back of the hotel, stubbing and cutting her feet on rebar and lawn chairs.