by Claire Gray
‘Same here.’ I slide my hands out of his grip and take a step back. Steve, who I see every day, has changed. He’s like a man from a photograph, a walking scrap of the news, faded and damaged.
Grabbing a tub of biscuits from our lopsided table, Steve knock the blinds with his elbow and they swing loudly against the window. I twitch. When he reaches to stop them he somehow just makes the noise worse. He holds the tub in front of me until I pick out a handful of stale wafers.
‘You look like you could use the sugar,’ he says.
‘Yeah, and I should probably sit down.’
Steve sits too, but leans forward, like he wants to be as close to me as possible. I tear the wafers apart in my lap and listen to him breathing.
‘I can’t believe this has happened,’ he says. ‘I just don’t understand it.’
‘Do you know what caused the explosion?’ I ask quietly, afraid to hear the answer. I want it to have been an accident, not an attack.
‘It was a bomb outside Bar XS,’ Steve says, and although this has been my suspicion ever since I heard that awful noise outside my bedroom, it’s odd to hear him say it out loud and to realise that this is all more than just a nightmare.
‘Oh,’ I say, resting my head in my hands for just a second.
‘I’ll never understand how people can do such things,’ Steve says.
‘People must have died,’ I say, thinking in hard facts for the first time, wondering about numbers. ‘I mean, I’m pretty sure I saw bodies.’
‘I think so. I heard they did. I heard maybe three girls died, who were sat at a table outside the bar. That’s where people think the bomb was; under one of the tables. People keep bags under there all the time, don’t they?’
‘Yes. They wait there and have a drink before going to the bus stop down the road. Oh, it’s just so fucking horrible.’
Steve nods. ‘There are no words. But somehow we’re going to have to find some and write them down.’
He’s in the shadows over there; the electricity is still out. Usually this office is frantic with activity; computer screens, TV, radio, flickering lights and ceiling fan. Today it’s quiet; just his old laptop running off its battery, and the half closed blind still tapping against the glass. The hills are out there, familiar and beautiful, but they seem far away this morning. Too nice to be real. I go to the window, breathe against the glass and watch my breath hang there for a while, shrinking to nothing. Looking over the rooftops I can just about see the billboards that follow the line of the road to the port. Whoever’s behind the bomb probably travelled here that way. And today people will leave that way; survivors fleeing an island that is no longer any sort of paradise.
‘Have you been writing?’ I ask, turning to look at Steve’s laptop. ‘Will the paper go out as usual on Saturday?’
‘Yeah, but I’m discovering that it’s hard to write when you’re part of the story. You know, I’ve been down at the bombsite since around midnight. I was asking people if they’d seen you. I tried to help.’ He grips his legs and holds on tight. His fingers are black. So are the knees of his jeans.
‘I should have been there too. I went to a hotel and I’ve been walking around. I didn’t really know where I was going.’
‘You did the right thing staying away. What if another bomb had gone off at the bar? You can never tell when these things are really over.’ He looks over his shoulder now, like he’s still not quite sure it’s over at all.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask. ‘You don’t really look it.’
‘Sure I am. Don’t worry about me.’ He says this brightly but his face is yellow, and slack around the eyes. He doesn’t look as bad as I know I do, but he looks bad all the same. That’s what no sleep all night will do, a night spent breathing in smoke, fear and the dust from broken buildings. And watching people suffer in the middle of it all.
‘Have you spoken to the police?’ I ask. ‘I haven’t. I saw some that I recognised but I didn’t feel like I’d be able to speak any sense to them. All I could do was walk and look for you. Just backwards and forwards all night. I felt like a ghost.’
Steve frowns at me. ‘Lucy, you should take the day off. Go to my house and rest. I’ve got this. Maybe you ought to see a doctor.’
‘I’m actually fine. Just this ringing in my ears. A few cuts and bruises. I have a headache but it’s no worse than a hangover.’
‘I’d really feel better if you went home and rested. Shit, maybe you should look into going back to England for a while. Your family —’
‘No,’ I say, sharp enough to make him flinch. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Okay, okay,’ he says, not quite able to meet my eyes. ‘I didn’t see this coming, did you? This is a safe place. I fell asleep on the beach last week. Too many cocktails. And when I woke up my wallet was still poking out of my pocket, with money visible in it, and someone had stuck a parasol into the sand next to me so that I wouldn’t get burned.’
‘I’ve always felt safe too. Since I came here.’ I suddenly can’t remember the last time I blinked, and have to force myself to do it now. My eyelids feel hot and dry.
‘Please go back to mine,’ Steve says, his voice soft. ‘I have a fruit pie in the fridge, and some of that lemonade you like.’
I shake my head. He sighs and tugs on his moustache. I say: ‘I need to stay and help somehow. Going back to an empty house is the worst thing I could do right now. Don’t you think?’
‘I suppose. I’d come back with you, I mean, I should come back with you, but I can’t. There’s this sense of responsibility that I haven’t felt in a long time; like maybe my job really is important, no matter how small the Koh Star is. I’m going back to the bombsite. You don’t really want to come with me? I don’t think you should. You don’t even look like you ought to be walking around.’
I open my mouth to speak but then hesitate. I stand up, get a head-rush, then sit back down again so heavily that the chair bumps back against the desk.
‘How do you feel? Really?’ Steve asks.
‘My hair still smells of smoke even though I’ve showered,’ I say. Steve nods, urging me to go on. ‘And I’m here talking to you, but all I can see is the stuff I saw last night. I saw it all, almost. I didn’t tell my family that on the phone. I had to queue for half an hour in the hotel lobby to call them from behind the desk. I let them think I was far away and barely involved. But I was right there.’
‘You could have used the phone in this office,’ Steve says. ‘It came back on a little while ago.’
‘I left my keys in the hostel. I couldn’t get in here. It’s not safe to go back up to my room. Someone told me there’s structural damage. Or something.’
The phone begins to ring now from its nest of tangled wires.
Steve says: ‘People are starting to find our number online. Parents have been calling, worried about their children. I don’t know what to tell them. And journalists from Britain and Australia, a couple from Europe, who seem to have misunderstood the nature of our newspaper and expect me to be able to give them something useful. I have nothing useful. I’m just a bemused foreigner like everyone else. I’ve been telling everyone they’d be better off speaking to the Thai press who I’m sure are already arriving from the mainland. I’ve heard helicopters flying over.’
‘Let me get it,’ I say, reaching past him for the phone.
The person on the other end is clearing their throat, a dry wheeze that makes me picture a snake shedding its skin.
‘Shuttleworth speaking,’ he says eventually, as I pull the receiver a little further from my ear because I feel like I can smell his breath.
‘Bernard Shuttleworth?’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ he says, clearing his throat again. I look at Steve and grimace. I first went to Shuttleworth’s golf resort about a week after I started at the paper, to cover a story about a partially paralysed man who scored a hole in one. Shuttleworth, an elderly Australian, was dressed in crisp white shorts and a polo
shirt, a hat with a tassel on top, and was fairly disinterested in the disabled man’s achievement. I’ve been there a handful of time since and have never warmed to him. A lot of our funding comes from Shuttleworth, who likes us to print full page adverts for his resort. We deal with him reluctantly; rumours circulate about the way he treats his Thai members of staff.
‘When are you coming over here to discuss the new hotel wing? You were going to write a feature on it, remember.’
‘There was a bomb,’ I say. ‘A bomb went off last night.’
‘I know. That’s the other thing. I can’t get through to the police on the phone. It rings and rings and then there’s a recorded message. No English translation. What happened?’
‘I don’t know. It was on Main Street. You know Bar XS?’
‘No.’
‘You know, the bar where those tame mice run around on the shelves above the bottles of vodka?’
‘I’ve not been.’
‘Well, it was there. Outside of there. So that bar, the ice cream place next door to it and the hostel across the road were damaged and lots of people are hurt. People have died, apparently, but I don’t know for sure.’
‘Terrorists,’ Shuttleworth says, and I feel like he’s doing something else while he speaks to me, peering into a fridge or cutting his toenails.
‘I saw people with burns all over their legs and arms,’ I say, not really to him. ‘People younger than me. The same age as my little sister.’ I remember, for some reason, how Hannah used to love birds when she was small, and our house would be full of dirty feathers that she found in the street.
‘My club?’ Shuttleworth is saying. ‘That’s not damaged.’
‘No, that’s fine,’ I say, thinking of the seedy club near the beach that he owns, where the walls are painted black and stray dogs eat people’s vomit from the pavement in the morning.
‘So, no one can come over here today? I have literature. I’m thinking of going away for a while until all of this dies down. It would be good to pass the information on to you before I go.’
‘No, we can’t come over today,’ I say, raising my eyebrows at Steve. ‘We’re going back to the bombsite.’
As I say this, I get a sensation like I’m melting into the seat of my chair. The concrete on the street will still be blackened. The blood won’t yet have dried or been washed down the drains along with grey bubbles of charcoal. Steve is getting up, putting his wallet into his pocket, shutting down his laptop.
‘I’ll come,’ I spit into the phone. ‘I’ll head over now.’
‘Where are you going?’ Steve asks as I hang up.
I explain and he frowns at me as the screen of his laptop goes black and suddenly, without its insides whirring, the office seems deathly quiet.
‘You sure you want to go there?’ he says.
‘I know, I know. I should go the bombsite with you, but Shuttleworth pays for nearly all of our advertising. If we don’t go out there today and he gets pissed off, we won’t have any money coming in and…’ He knows, I think. He sees that I’m a coward.
‘Oh, sure, I get that.’ Steve nods, although his eyes say something different. ‘But do you really want to be alone with that man? He’s not nice. He has a way of looking at his female staff members that, since I picked up on it, I can’t help noticing. There was talk, last year, of a porter being beaten with a golf club.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Yeah, you’re tough,’ he says, and actually sounds like he means it. ‘If you want to work today, if you really won’t go back to mine, then I suppose a golf resort on the other side of the island might be the best place for you.’
Chapter Four
The trees are wild; I’m driving through a dank, green tunnel. A family of monkeys were sitting beside the road two miles back, but otherwise it’s just me out here; no other vehicles since I left town.
I washed Steve’s car for him a week ago, but it’s already filled with cigarette ash and candy wrappers. Its paintwork is coated with a grey dust which may or may not have come from the explosions. It felt greasy when I touched it; I’d like to wash my hands.
I think about the afternoon that I spent cleaning the car, while Steve grilled fish for us and mixed horrible, salty cocktails. That was a happy day, and probably the last one we’ll have for a while.
I’m whistling through my cracked lips because the radio isn’t working. I’m trying not to think; but I do think, of course. Groaning, I rattle the dials again, desperate for some noise. Visiting the golf resort seemed like a good idea; a way to keep busy but stay away from the crater in the road outside my hostel. But it wasn’t; I forgot that I’d be alone in the car. A burst of static jumps from the speakers; an electrical scream. I brake hard and pull over, because I can’t see the road anymore, just my memories of injured people. The wheels crunch over dry earth and rocks. Slipping out of my seat, I stumble on loose boulders and throw up into the dust.
Straightening up, looking into the barbed trees at the side of the road, I realise that I’ve been thinking about the baby all morning. The baby who I carried inside me for nine weeks and who then abruptly, with a certain violence, was no longer there. That whole series of events isn’t the worst thing I’ve lived through anymore, but I wouldn’t even be here if it hadn’t happened. I quit my job at the newspaper in England because, after everything happened, I couldn’t write a proper sentence or even think without getting confused. I wanted to shy away from anything bad or sad that made its way onto my desk. And most things were bad or sad. I’d just passed all my exams to become a senior reporter, but then it was like my mind had turned grey, like how smokers’ lungs get. No one understood. I didn’t try to explain, and I left without working my notice period so I couldn’t get a decent reference. I hadn’t even realised I was pregnant at that point.
Once I wasn’t pregnant any more, and had another secret to drag around with me, another reason to hate the feel of my body, my sister found this job at the Koh Star through a lucky Google search. It seemed ideal; I needed to escape, I needed to avoid thinking for a while, and here was an offer of exclusively soft news in a tropical environment. So, I left behind my pokey flat, my woolly hats and neglected friends and family. And, gradually, I’ve been getting myself back. I’ve thrown myself into writing about hotdog eating contests and unusual sea creatures, so that I would never have to think about anything bad again. And my plan was going fine until now. Everything has risen to the surface; a soup topped with scum. I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand and take a deep, broken breath. The vegetation is all around me, creeping closer. I can taste the plants, their spores dense in the air.
I need to stop thinking. I need to get back into the car, otherwise I’m going to collapse out here and die, and the plants will grow over me. I half run to get behind the wheel.
It takes forty minutes to drive across the island. It’s not a great distance in terms of miles; the island is the size of a small city. But the roads are bad, dipping and twisting through pockets of trees. Eventually I pull up beside the hotel buildings at Bernard Shuttleworth’s golf resort; white plaster, terracotta tiles. There’s nobody here. The fountain out front has been switched off. I thought, somehow, this would be a different world, untouched by the explosion, but there’s shock in the air here, just as there was back in town. It’s a couple of minutes before I force myself out of Steve’s car and crunch across the gravel. I tie my hair back as I go, feeling dust in it, feeling heat from the sun on my scalp.
Inside the building the air is cold; it hurts my skin. Water features babble all around me. This is a huge space, with corridors leading off it like spider legs. Statues are poised and watching; naked women carved from black stone wrestle with golden snakes, but there are no real-life humans about.
Then I hear something; the soft clunk of club against golf ball. It happens again and again, so I walk over marble tiles towards the sound, coming out the other side of the foyer and into an outdoor courtyard. Trees
are growing out here, their trunks covered in thick brown strands like hair. And on the other side of the courtyard, Shuttleworth is chipping golf balls over the top of a brick wall.
He is even squatter than I remember; his body the definitive pear shape. A floppy straw hat sits on his head, and his feet are trussed up in old leather sandals. There’s a basket of balls to his side, and a tray on the floor filled with half eaten fruit and an empty bottle of wine. I recall a rumour I heard from a backpacker who had worked at Shuttleworth’s nightclub; supposedly he’s father to the gaggle of children I saw hanging around here during my last visit. But I don’t always believe rumours. I look around. There are no kids today. No one at all but this old man.
‘There’s nobody on reception, is there?’ he says, turning to face me when my feet loudly scuff the ground. ‘Do you have bags?’ He rests the club against the wall and comes towards me, wiping his hands on the front of his shirt. His plump face is covered with white stubble. I smile at him but have to force it.
‘I’m not a guest. I’m here from the newspaper.’
He pulls a pair of glasses from the front pocket of his shirt and takes a moment to attach them to his face. ‘Lucy Lewis, of course it’s you. You’re clearly not here to play golf. You’re too young and beautiful. I’m sorry there was no one to greet you. Everyone’s been leaving, you see. I think we have three rooms occupied and barely any staff left to serve them. It’s a bit of an embarrassment. Come with me.’
Beckoning with a thick finger, he leads me out of the courtyard and along a concrete path which is rippled like sand on a beach. He holds open a wrought iron gate into what I assume is the backyard of his home. As I pass, he places a warm hand on my lower back and gently pushes me towards a seat.
‘This is very nice,’ I manage to say, looking at grapes hanging from a trellis above my head. I sit and watch as he pours lemonade from a jug filled with ice. My skin’s prickling where he touched me. I don’t like people to do that, especially when they’re looking at me the way he’s looking at me.