The Backpacker

by John Harris

  At first Dave wouldn’t give up his hut on Hat Rin beach to move into the house. He said that it was too much of a good thing, and that if he did move in with us he’d probably never, ever be able to leave. And although he quite liked Toomy, and had even grown fond of her strange Thai ways, he wanted to retain some sort of link to the outside world; some connection to other travellers who came and went on a weekly basis in Hat Rin.

  Rick and I thought this was understandable and attributed it to him being American, and therefore insular, teasing him over it whenever he showed even the slightest fondness for anything Western, or if he expressed a disliking for any local food. Sometimes one of the girls would cook a particularly hot curried fish, or bitter, salty pork, which Dave would say he couldn’t eat. ‘Go back down to town and get a hamburger,’ we’d gibe. In truth, however, Dave was more than equal to the both of us, who struggled through some of the food just because he was watching. Rick told me that before we arrived he often threw a lot of the food out the window when Ta wasn’t looking.

  After about two weeks of to-ing and fro-ing on a daily basis from Hat Rin through the jungle to the house, Dave gave in. He appeared early one morning standing outside on the path, pack slung over his shoulder and his usual back-to-front US navy baseball cap on his head, shouting obscenities up at the window. ‘You lazy no-good fuckin’ hippies, I’ll tear ya limb from fuckin’ limb! Got me a grenade an’ if you don’t open this door, so help me I’ll blow this house apart along with half this cock-suckin’ hillside, God damn it!’

  We let him in.

  He claimed that he’d become tired of the same old talk at Hat Rin, and that the recent full-moon party had been the last straw. According to him, hundreds of travellers from just about every island in the Gulf of Thailand had converged on the beach, all waiting for something to happen. Which of course it did: the moon came out!

  There was no sign of any real partying and, just as Rick had warned, the so-called full-moon party turned the beach into a cross between a flea market and a railway station. Locals made a killing by extending their restaurants so far onto the beach that you couldn’t pass by without buying something (at wildly inflated prices), and everyone hung around for the party-train to arrive and carry them on to some unforgettable, once in a blue-moon rave up. The train was delayed. Forever.

  The real reason that Dave had finally moved up to the house, though, was because Suzy had left Koh Pha-Ngan. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to be with her, he spent most of his time with Toomy anyway, but rather that he felt responsible for her well-being. She had almost been raped by a Thai man one night while walking home from the Back Yard Pub along a dimly lit jungle path. Someone had heard her shouts and chased the perpetrator away before any serious damage could be done but the effect on Dave seemed to be worse than on Suzy. He vowed to find the man who had tried it on but, after being told that the Thai had left the island and gone back to his home in Samui, Dave was left feeling guilty. Suzy’s leaving to travel north with a girlfriend took the weight off Dave considerably, and he soon had the spring back in his step and the voice in his throat.

  Rick and I spent most of our time during those first few weeks without Dave going over the details of what we’d done since being apart, and talking about the people we’d met. I also told him about the beating and the severed finger, to which he gave the same, matter-of-fact reply as Dave had: ‘Life is cheap out here, John.’

  For his part, he had spent his time after leaving India, first in Bangkok and then had travelled directly south to Koh Pha-Ngan as planned. Whenever I suggested that he might have better spent his time by travelling around the country, he reminded me of the philosophy of staying put when you find something you like. ‘When I get bored,’ he said, ‘that’s when I’ll move on.’

  I agreed.

  ELEVEN

  Dave was rapidly becoming a convert to our travel philosophy, and although he held a round-the-world ticket that required him to be in certain places at certain times in order to receive maximum benefit, he could see the futility of running quickly from country to country just to satisfy that end. The ticket wasn’t refundable or reroutable so, on his first night at the house, we held a ceremonial burning.

  The three of us went down to the beach at midnight, alone, and placed the folded ticket on a piece of dry driftwood. Dave squirted lighter fuel that he’d bought for his Zippo onto the ticket and it was lit and sent out to sea, the three of us watching, chest-deep in water, as the dark current took it around the rocks and out of sight. Dave whistled The Last Post.

  After smoking a couple of joints we lay down at the water’s edge. Rick was lying beside me, snoring evenly, and looked like he had cut himself shaving, a single king-size Rizla stuck to the side of his face with sweat. I turned back to look at the night sky, breathing in the air with a deep suck and filling my lungs. I could still smell the grass we had smoked and, reaching out blindly and picking up one of the used roaches from the sand, I sniffed the residue that had stained the cigarette paper jet black, marvelling at its simple narcotic potency. ‘There are probably thousands of backpackers on beaches all over the world right this minute, smoking their brains out on grass,’ I mumbled to no one in particular.

  Resting up on one elbow, Dave flicked a lighted butt into the air, that sailed through the stars like a red satellite. ‘Maybe there’s someone up there sitting on a beach smoking their brains out too,’ he said, his voice soft in the still night air. ‘High as a kite on the shores of The Sea of Tranquillity.’

  ‘Millions of them.’ Rick woke up and rolled onto one side looking for his lighter, and using his fingers he ploughed through the soft sand, sifting it like a comb. ‘What time is it?’

  I checked my watch. ‘Half past twelve. If you want a paper you don’t need to look further than the end of your nose.’

  ‘Uh?’ He went cross-eyed and pulled it off, talking to it in an attempt to copy my accent. ‘Oh you facking kant, there you are.’

  I didn’t even realise I had an accent and said, angrily, ‘I don’t speak like that.’

  ‘You do. You’re a cookney incha?’

  ‘Not really.’ I looked back up at the zillions of twinkling stars. ‘They say to be a cockney you need to have been born within the sound of the Bow Bells in East London. I was born in South London.’

  ‘Well that’s London innit?’ He finished making the joint and lit it up, the light making his face look scary against the dark backdrop of palm trees and night sky. He lay back down and I watched as he drew on it, producing a red ember bright enough to light his cheeks and nose.

  We lay in silence for a few minutes, enjoying the gentle breeze that was carrying his smoke back up the beach and into the bushes, and I said, ‘This place is fucking amazing, don’t you think, Claude?’

  ‘Hmm.’ Rick looked over at me. ‘Who’s Claude?’

  I said nothing for a few seconds.

  ‘John?’

  ‘I just remembered a blue film that I watched once. In it there was this guy called Claude with a cock shaped like a banana.’ I turned my head. ‘He looked exactly like you; like a Dutch rock star.’

  Dave was sniggering. ‘Jim Thompson was in nudie movies?’

  ‘I only meant that you look like him,’ I laughed, and looked back up at the sky, taking the joint. ‘Don’t get it out and show us or anything.’

  We lay in silence again, listening to the sounds of the beach. The only noise was the breeze when it picked up, just strong enough to rustle the leaves in the trees behind us. Occasionally it stopped, but just as the lull became too long and I began to sweat it would pick up again, cooling me down. Apart from the gentle rustle of the trees the world around us was utterly silent, even the lapping waves had died down and, strangely, so had the jungle insects.

  I shrugged to myself at the anomaly and drew on the joint, comforted by the heat that was produced against my nose and face every time a deep enough drag was taken.

  As the fuzzy feeling
started to hit my brain I noticed a strange light over by the rocks and sat up giddily, trying to focus. ‘Rick, Dave, look.’

  ‘Wow, flames!’ Rick said, and tried to stand.

  As quickly as we could under the influence of the dope (which turned out to be a stumbling, weaving snail’s pace), Dave and I walked down the beach towards the rocks for a closer inspection. We couldn’t climb over the boulders and decided to swim round to see what it was. When we rounded the curve and saw the enormity of the fire we didn’t know what to do.

  The piece of wood with the ticket on must have floated into some other driftwood that had been washed up on the rocks, and those few pieces, sun-baked over months, had caught fire, set off by a small block of oily polystyrene that was bubbling away by the water’s edge. The washed-up driftwood was in turn entangled with dry, wind-fallen palm branches which ran all the way up the side of the hill, spreading out into the jungle floor. The whole lot was ablaze!

  We panicked, climbed up onto the rocks and quickly put some of it out by splashing water over it, but without buckets our meagre handfuls of seawater only went so far. I could only splash about ten feet up the rocks, and Dave could only hold so much in his mouth at one time. We beat it with sticks, threw rocks at it and pissed on it, but all to no avail.

  Eventually, having roasted our bare bodies like lobsters on the flames, we gave up and dived back into the cooling sea, the salt stinging my chest and arms so much that it felt like being attacked by a hundred jellyfish at once.

  Rick was standing at the water’s edge when we got back to the beach, his face lit up by the orange glow above the water. ‘Am I hallucinating?’ he asked when we approached. ‘Please tell me I am.’

  From the beach it looked like a scene from one of those old dinosaur films, where the finale inevitably involves the hero escaping from the monsters whilst volcanoes erupt behind him. He simply swims across a small lagoon, towards the cave that leads back to his own time zone, while all hell breaks loose around him in ‘The Land that Time Forgot’.

  We both told Rick that he wasn’t hallucinating and that we didn’t think it wise to hang around. At first he couldn’t move, and we had to pull him away, but as soon as we cleared the sand and entered the tree line, taking one last look back to make sure that we all weren’t hallucinating, the brisk walking pace became a run.

  Falling over logs, smacking head first into trees, scraping arms and legs on branches; none of it mattered because we couldn’t feel the pain in our panic. Dave was almost castrated when he ran full pelt into a tree root that had worked its way out of the ground and stuck up in the air. ‘Ooff!’

  Half walking, half carried, we got him the back to the house, blood gushing down his leg where the root had raked a piece of skin the length of a cigarette out of his inner thigh. In the rush to see how the fire was progressing Dave forgot his pain, and Toomy’s attempt at nursing him, and the three of us rushed up the small wooden steps, through the large top floor room and out onto the wooden balcony.

  On the way back to the house I’d prayed constantly. Prayed that when we reached the house and looked out from the top floor I would see nothing, just the usual stunning view of the dark palm tops, running like a soft blanket down the hillside to the silvery moonlit sea. Normally the only thing visible in the distance on any given night was the faint, dull shape of the small, rocky outcrop, and beyond that another island.

  It was all still there tonight but with one major difference: colour! The view had always been monochrome at night. Dozens of varying shades, but still monochrome, with the possible exception of a blue tinge. Tonight we had glorious technicolour. Or rather, monochrome with more than a tinge of orange in the bottom, right-hand corner of the view.

  The flames were now as high as the first palm trees, and, although the fire didn’t appear to be broad, two or three palms at most, it was there, glowing as a reminder of how stupid we had been to light a fire in the first place.

  Toomy came up and dressed Dave’s leg while the three of us sat and watched in silence. And, as if a Masonic signal had passed between us, no one mentioned the fire to any of the girls. If they saw it and smelt the burnt wood on our bodies, they would have made the connection; it seemed safer if we distanced ourselves from the whole episode. If the island did burn down overnight, we didn’t want to be held responsible. We were all well aware that each piece of land on the island, each and every bay, in fact every square foot and each individual palm tree, had an owner who was willing to kill in order to protect his investment.

  Ta became suspicious every time we went out to check, asking why on earth we didn’t stay outside like we always did. ‘Too cold,’ said Rick unconvincingly, and immediately broke out in perspiration. I said that there were too many mosquitoes out tonight, and Dave said nothing at all, he just stared at me and Rick, nervously trying to read his guidebook.

  Unable to sustain our level of anxiety any longer, and eventually too tired from nervous exhaustion, we sloped off to bed, each of us using the excuse of relieving ourselves to check the blaze one last time.

  ‘I’m just going outside for a piss,’ Rick explained woodenly to Ta, and left.

  ‘Why you tell me, man?’ she asked. He went out and came back a moment later shaking his head. He looked at me, very worried.

  ‘Umm, I’m just going outside for a piss,’ I said to Muck.

  She frowned. ‘Why you don’ use toile’?’

  ‘Me too,’ Dave said, running in behind me, ‘I, err, need to pee,’ We went out and came back in without even going through the motions. ‘Jeez,’ he said through clenched teeth, and we all went to bed

  I lay and stared at the ceiling; a ceiling that I was sure looked much more orange than normal, though whenever I looked out of the window to see if it was the glow from the fire, all I could see was a moonlit sky, the blackness of the jungle, and the same orange glow near the rocks. With a sigh in my throat and an empty butterfly feeling in my stomach, I lay on the bed and tried not to think of fire.

  When I was about eight years old, almost exactly the same thing had happened to my brother and me. Adjacent to the council estate where we grew up was a piece of land that all the local kids referred to as ‘the dump’. No one had used the acre or so of land for years and, although ear-marked for development of public housing, the council had fenced it off and let the footings of the previously demolished brick houses become a weed-infested playground for the kids from the nearby tower blocks. (Who says the government doesn’t provide adequate recreational facilities for youngsters?)

  My brother and I, along with our friends, spent most of our childhood on this stretch of wasteland, smashing up old TVs, playing war and climbing the few remaining trees in order to place a sofa at the top-most branches as a comfortable lookout spot. We always used the dump to burn our plastic Air-Fix models too, and it was on one such occasion that, what started as the ceremonial melt-down of the Bismarck almost turned into the Great Fire of London II.

  We beat the burgeoning flames with sticks and branches that night as best we could but couldn’t contain them as they quickly spread among the dry summer grass and bags of fly-tipped household rubbish. After five minutes of trying it was called off, and the halfdozen of us ran out through a hole in the corrugated iron fencing and back to our respective homes.

  All night I lay awake in bed, listening to the sound of fire engine sirens as they were summoned from all the nearby stations in a joint effort to put out the fire. My brother and I lay there trying to pick up the gist of the earnest conversation my mum and dad were having in the next room. ‘I don’t know, Rose,’ I heard my dad say with mounting concern, ‘there’re a lot of fire engines, it must be something big.’

  We were shitting ourselves!

  The next day, eager to see what had happened, but at the same time afraid that the police would make a house-to-house inspection using sniffer-dogs that were trained to smell burnt wood on little boys’ clothes, my brother and I went down the road to
school. The devastation was considerable. What had once been a greenish piece of land amongst the concrete of the estate, was now a single black square on an otherwise grey chessboard. There were no remaining trees, apart from one Hiroshima-style charcoaled stump, and all of the perimeter corrugated metal fencing had melted and twisted, buckled beyond repair.

  The others who had been party to the sinking of the Bismarck were also standing on the roadside that morning, uneasily watching the few remaining firemen as they rolled up their hoses and prepared to leave. We stood around, occasionally stepping aside at the request of the council operatives who now had the grim task of cleaning up the black, sooty water that ran like rivers of carbon in every direction.

  None of us went to school that day, afraid that the police, alsatians walking obediently alongside, would be scouring the place and asking all sorts of difficult questions. My brother, with his usual imagination, said he’d seen a meat wagon pull into the schoolyard and that we would probably be hung for the crime. He said it would be safer if we all went home and complained to our mums of stomach pains to get the day off. I already did have pains in the stomach! And, as a silent signal passed between us, we all went home and agreed never to speak or boast about the incident to anyone, ever. A vow of silence that I have maintained until now.

  When I did manage to doze off, I was only asleep for about an hour before a cockerel started crowing and woke me up. Rick and Dave were already standing over me. ‘C’mon, John, let’s go,’ they said in unison.

  Without needing an explanation, I looked around at Muck, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and quietly slipped off the bamboo mat onto the creaky wooden floor. The three of us tiptoed out into the morning sunlight and made our way down the long jungle path towards the beach. Dave led the way, commando-like in his blue, navy-issue vest and cap, his wild afro sticking out of the sides like a bald man.

  ‘D’you keep your money under that hat, Dave?’ Rick said as we rushed downhill.