The Backpacker

by John Harris

  With his mouth open, and still staring at the hospital, he slid slowly down a tree trunk onto the leafy ground and put a hand to his forehead. ‘That guy you saw on the beach that day you first arrived. Remember?’

  I started to nod deliberately.

  ‘The one who took a beating from those Thais?’

  I nodded harder. ‘Yes?’

  ‘The finger.’ He closed his eyes as though hoping to shut out the reality. ‘Oh fooking hell, that was Tommy!’

  ‘Well done.’

  Then Rick came out with the most blindingly stupid comment I’d ever heard: ‘But that’s Thai Mafia business, what’s it got to do with us?’

  ‘Fucking hell, Rick, use your brain!’ I slumped down on the ground opposite him. ‘If Tommy’s involved then so are the girls. They must have been banking on you as their meal ticket.’ I pointed at the hospital. ‘Whoever did that to Tommy has been promised a pay-off from Ta.’

  He looked up and shrugged. ‘That’s her problem.’

  ‘It’s your problem now, you’ve got the payroll. Or so they think. Jesus!’ I slapped my forehead with my palm. ‘All this time we’ve been living for ‘free’! They’re going to want their money back; with interest!’

  ‘Yeah, well that’s why I moved out last night when I found out about Ta.’

  Rick proceeded to tell me how, on the way back to Koh Pha-Ngan on the ferry the previous day, he had met an old Thai hand who’d been travelling in and out of the islands for years. Rick had asked him about his travels and had discovered that, among other things, he had also been mixed up with a girl called Ta the previous year on Koh Pha-Ngan. The man knew Tommy and the girls and had told Rick how they’d cleaned him out of every penny he had, even stealing his camera. At first Rick hadn’t believed it was the same girl, but when the man went into detail about her pretending to be Thai royalty he knew there could be no mistake. When they had alighted from the ferry, Rick went straight up to the house and packed his gear.

  ‘What about Dave?’ I asked.

  Rick shook his head forlornly. ‘He wasn’t there. I looked everywhere for him: on the beach, on Hat Rin beach, I even swam around to those rocks we used to dive off, but he wasn’t there. I reckon he must have been fooking about in the jungle, you know what he’s like. Anyway, it started to get dark so I took my gear down to Hat Rin and booked into a really obscure set of bungalows, way off the beaten track.’ He pulled out a cigarette. ‘They’ll never find us there.’

  ‘Too late.’

  ‘Mm?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Did you check your gear when you left last night?’

  He drew on the cigarette and exhaled. ‘Course. What d’you take me for?’

  ‘Was your passport there when you left?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then they know where you live, because Ta’s got your passport now. She was here with it not ten minutes ago, I saw her waving it about. And Tommy told me they had it.’

  ‘No way. They’re just trying to scare you. It could’ve been anyone’s passport. Did you look at it?’

  ‘Only the cover. From a distance.’

  ‘Then they’re bullshitting.’

  I raised an eyebrow and reached over for one of his cigarettes. ‘I hope you’re right, because we’re not going to get very far without it.’

  We smoked a cigarette each and I quickly ran out to the car park drinks vendor and fetched two Cokes. At first I shouted the order from the cover of the trees but the man would only open them, refusing to bring them over to us. Unusual, I thought, for a country that operates on those old-time, shoe-shine values, and began to suspect that he too was working for Ta.

  Handing one bottle over to Rick, I squatted and said, ‘You know, you should have brought your gear over with you. Now we’ve got to hike back to Hat Rin.’

  ‘I only came over to tell you what I knew, I didn’t expect to see those two on the bloody ferry.’ He wiped the rust off the top of the bottle and took a sip. ‘I thought I’d come here, pick you up and go back to pick up my gear. Head off in the morning.’

  ‘You were on the same ferry as Ta?’

  He nodded seriously. ‘I had to hide all the way over, not easy on a boat that size. I saw her get into a taxi at the port and I caught the bus. I had no idea she was coming here.’

  There was something about Rick’s story that didn’t quite fit. One small piece missing from the jigsaw that nagged me. ‘If you knew about Ta,’ I queried, ‘but she didn’t know about you, why the hell did you run and hide last night? You’d have been better off staying put until we left the island for the mainland.’

  ‘Good job I did, huh? Otherwise you would have had to come and get me up at the house.’

  ‘So? We could have sneaked away from the house when they were out and caught the first ferry over to the mainland.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, she saw you here with Tommy, in the same room. She’d know that you knew, and would’ve beaten you back.’

  I frowned. His logic made little sense to me. Rick couldn’t have known last night that Ta was going to see me with Tommy today, so why had he left the house last night? My head spun with one of those verbal conundrums, like the ones you get in cartoons, or Laurel and Hardy films: ‘How did he know last night that she would know today that I knew he knew... ’ I rubbed my temple to relieve the headache that was steadily building. There didn’t seem to be any point in pursuing that line of questioning so I moved on to the present as opposed to previous events. ‘So what now?’

  ‘So now we go back and get the gear.’ He picked up a twig and began to drive it into the soil like a drill-bit. ‘Then we fook off.’

  ‘What about Dave?’

  He shrugged, concentrating on the drilling. I knew that Rick was right, and that his shrugged answer to my question meant that we couldn’t go back to the house for Dave. If we saw him in Hat Rin then all well and good, but otherwise we would have to part company without saying goodbye.

  Anger started to boil up inside me as Rick lit another cigarette and continued twisting the twig into the ground. I wanted to blame him, to tell him how it was all his fault for lying in the first place, but the words only formed in my mind and got stuck in the back of my throat, unable to work their way out into audible sounds. A gasp was emitted instead, which probably more adequately summed up my feeling of resignation. How could I blame Rick when I had gone along with the scam for so long?

  A rustle in the bushes broke my concentration and I watched as a monkey, as small as a cat, ran along the ground, snatched something in its paw and climbed another tree. ‘Where are we going to go?’ I sighed, still watching the animal. ‘I don’t fancy going back to Bangkok. What about Chiang Mai?’

  Rick noticed the monkey and looked up, as it leapt from a high branch into thin air and glided for twenty feet before sticking to another tree trunk.

  ‘Rick?’

  The monkey did the same again, only this time over a much greater distance to a lower treetop where its mate was waiting. When the male came crashing down on the palm leaves, the female immediately lifted her rear into the air and they started mating.

  ‘Malaysia,’ Rick said looking back. ‘I’ve always wanted to go there.’

  ‘Malaysia? I was thinking more along the lines of Phuket.’

  ‘My dad always said that the prettiest girls in the world are Malays.’

  I stood up, brushing the earth from the seat of my shorts. ‘Rick, you’ve got no passport,’ I reminded him, ‘it’ll have to be Bangkok or Chiang Mai. Shall we go?’

  ‘When it gets dark,’ he said, flicking the twig into the bushes. ‘I don’t want anyone to spot us. There’s a ferry at eight, we’ll get that one.’

  SIX

  ‘The Fugitives,’ Rick whispered, grinning furtively, and held his hand up to keep me back. ‘Wait till they start to raise the gangplank and then we’ll run on.’

  Standing behind him, I watched the scene through the crook of his arm. The fat Thai dock-hand
was leaning against an oil drum, the rope that was attached to the draw-bridge in one hand, cigarette in the other. ‘Boom!’ I said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That guy, he’s smoking a cigarette and practically sitting on an oil drum. Boom!’

  ‘Fat bastard, serves him right.’ Reaching into his trouser pocket, he pulled out his cigarettes. ‘Want one? Go on, it’ll calm your nerves.’

  ‘Who’s nervous?’ I said, taking one.

  ‘You are, I can feel it.’ He took one himself and we both sank back around the corner to light up, out of sight.

  We had spent most of the day outside the hospital, hiding in the trees watching monkeys shag. We didn’t really expect Ta to come back to the hospital that day, but if she did we thought we could scare her into emptying the contents of her handbag for our inspection. We were kidding ourselves of course, it was just brave talk; neither of us had the inclination to approach her ever again after seeing what had happened to Tommy.

  However, neither Ta nor any of her cronies did come back to the hospital, and at sunset, having smoked our way through two packets of cigarettes and drunk the vendor out of Coke, we set about our long, arduous route to the ferry pier, deciding to play it extra safe and catching a local bus instead of a taxi. The logic behind our choice of transport stemmed from the fact that all members of the Thai Mafia have their sticky fingers in every business on every island from Koh Samui to Bangkok, so a bus should be a safer bet. We felt it unlikely that the driver of a government run service was the employee of a crime boss, and promptly boarded a bus that took us in completely the wrong direction, deliberately, to confuse whoever might be following us. First catching a bus one way, and then taking two more around the island, plus a taxi to get us to where we wanted to be, we finally hitched the last mile or so to the ferry on the back of a lorry full of copra. It was probably over-elaborate, but neither of us wanted to be knee-capped so we suffered the journey in silence. It never occurred to us how pointless it all was considering that we were about to catch a ferry right back into the lion’s den.

  The light from the match lit a circle on the wall behind Rick’s head like a saint’s halo, the shadow in the centre wobbling gently with the flicker of the flame. I leaned in to light my cigarette and accidentally extinguished it. ‘Oops.’

  Rick sighed. ‘Some fugitive you turned out to be, you can’t even light a fooking cigarette!’

  ‘I don’t think lighting cigarettes is a requirement, do you?’

  He lit another match. ‘Course it is, everyone knows that.’ With his hand still out-stretched I lit up and followed his gaze around the corner. A last lone backpacker flip-flopped onto the boat deck, handing over his ticket to an inspector as he went, and the fat gangplank operator flicked his cigarette away, both hands now holding the rope. ‘What a shit job,’ I remarked, ‘pulling that rope up and down all day.’

  ‘Some– Ouch!’ Rick shook his hand and blew on his burnt fingers.

  ‘What were you saying about fugitives?’

  He replied with a look and turned back to the dock. ‘Right, you ready?’

  The fat man took one heave on the rope and the pair of us darted out from around the corner of the building. I slipped on a mini oil-slick but recovered quickly, catching up with Rick. Fatty saw us running out onto the floodlit dock and stopped pulling, his hands high on the rope. We waved our tickets in the air and, realising that we were going to jump straight on, the man put his hands slightly further down the rope, allowing it to slip through his chafed palms. The broad entry ramp dropped three feet, and we leapt at the same time, clearing the ramp edge and the three or four feet beyond, and came down, still running, on the deck of the ferry. We didn’t stop jogging and laughing until we were standing at the prow of the boat.

  Rick looked down at the burnt match that was still pinched between thumb and forefinger and flicked it over the side before looking at the horizon. ‘Here we go again.’

  The engines roared into life and churned up all the small-fry too young to know what a propeller was, the world turned and the dock of Koh Samui edged away from us. Both of us turned on cue, the stiffening breeze giving the signal, and squinted at Koh Pha-Ngan in the distance. Its few twinkling lights looked ominous, beckoning, not beautiful as they once had been, and not ‘home’ any more.

  Twenty minutes later we were pulling into the pier on Koh Pha-Ngan.

  ‘Now comes the hard bit.’ Rick jumped down off the gunwale and moved forward towards the few people who were lined up to disembark. ‘I think it’s best if we stick to the crowd. What there is of it.’

  I jumped down and immediately went into a squat in pain.

  ‘You OK, John?’

  ‘Need another pill, that’s all. Let’s go.’ I straightened and we followed the rest of the passengers off the boat. I popped another painkiller but didn’t have enough spit to swallow and had to cough it up. One of the backpackers on the boat asked me if I was OK and gave me a drink of her mineral water. ‘I’ve always laughed at backpackers for carrying their little plastic bottles of water wherever they go,’ I said, and swallowed another pill, gulping down half the bottle with it. ‘Thanks.’

  She turned out to be just the cover we needed and we continued talking until we reached the path that split two ways: right to Hat Rin and left to one of the more remote beaches. ‘OK,’ I said, raising a hand, ‘Hat Rin’s just over that hill, ten minutes walk.’ Rick and I pretended to take the left-hand fork and, when the crowd had gone, went in behind them and disappeared into the jungle to avoid the more obvious route to the main beach.

  The hill rose up from one bay, where the ferry port was situated, crossed the top and then descended into the next where the main beach was, and where Rick had booked into a hut.

  Although we didn’t follow the path up the hillside, there were numerous small animal tracks that wound their way through the dense foliage, making the climb easier for Rick than we’d expected. For me the effort of staggering upwards was exhausting, and I had to stop every few paces for breath, sweating like crazy in the evening’s humidity.

  ‘What about the Back Yard Pub?’ I gasped as Rick forged ahead.

  ‘We’ll just have to go around it and hope that no one sees us. It’s way over there anyway.’

  When I got to the top of the hill he was already descending the other side towards the town, and with a quick, apprehensive look down at the lights of the restaurants along the beach, I took a deep breath and jumped, sliding in the loose earth and dead leaves.

  The hair-raising slide to the bottom was like skiing on a dry ski slope: fast and fun, but unbearably painful on the hands and arse. At one point there was a dip ahead of me and the top of Rick’s head went up and then vanished as he slid out of sight. I followed, first hitting a rock that sent me sprawling forwards, scraping my palms painfully, before correcting my balance and sliding on. The slope ended in a gentle levelling out where Rick was standing, casually smoking a cigarette. In a blizzard of airborne particles I slid to a halt right at his feet and went into a coughing fit.

  He held out his hand and slapped my back. ‘What a ride, eh?’

  ‘The, ahem, best.’ I stood, blinking the dust from my eyes. ‘Fucking fantastic.’

  At the bottom of the hill where we stood, a group of tourist huts began almost immediately, the harsh jungle floor turning abruptly into smooth cultivated earth. The hut nearest to us had a couple sitting on the veranda, and I was just about to comment when I noticed the expression of utter horror on Rick’s face.

  ‘They know where I live!’ he hissed through clenched teeth.

  Cleaning off the dirt from my shorts and picking out the leaves, I was so preoccupied with my grooming that I had hardly noticed the acrid smell in the air. With one finger still in my ear to clear out the dust, I said, ‘How do you know?’

  Rick stared into the clearing and slowly pulled the cigarette from his lips. ‘Because when I left my hut this morning it wasn’t on fooking fire.�
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  SEVEN

  At first I couldn’t quite grasp what Rick was talking about and had to ask him to repeat what he’d said. He raised an arm and pointed. All I could see was a neat row of white-washed little buildings with their wooden verandas jutting out like bottom lips on a dozen, bodiless square heads. ‘There!’ he repeated impatiently, ‘between the second and third row.’

  And I saw it; the charred, smouldering wreckage of blackened wood, lying like a slaughtered, barbecued elephant between two huts. I cautiously moved forward a step, sticking my neck out as though still not able to believe my eyes, having already not trusted my ears. ‘You’re not telling me that that... ’ I pointed and looked at Rick, ‘... that pile of burnt wood is, was, your hut?’

  He nodded heavily and buried his head in his hands.

  Up until that point in time, that very moment when he nodded, the whole of the previous day’s events had seemed like a game; just another adventure to add to my list of things I’d done while travelling. Even seeing Tommy all bandaged up in that hospital, I told myself, didn’t concern me; it wasn’t my body lying there broken and useless, he wasn’t my brother.

  Now that I was looking at the remains of Rick’s accommodation, burnt to a cinder along with our belongings, the seriousness of our predicament loomed over me like the palm trees. I had prudently taken my indispensables with me from the house to the hospital: passport, money etc., but I knew that Rick hadn’t, and that, along with a few of my tatty clothes, he had lost all of his gear.

  He looked at me and smiled lopsidedly. ‘Doesn’t matter about the passport now does it?’

  I closed my gaping mouth. ‘Are you sure that’s your hut?’

  He pulled the key from his pocket and held it up. ‘Go and try the door if you want.’

  ‘Arrgh, I don’t believe they did that!’ I turned away from him and sat down on a log. ‘Why? Why would they burn your hut down? Now you’ve lost everything.’