It's Life Jim, But Not As We Know It 4 page

'Born twenty years too late?' shouted Mister Duck, belting past me and flipping into a cartwheel. 'Fuck that!' His blood echoed the movement, briefly hanging in the air like the trace from a firework.

'See up there!'

I looked where he pointed. A hovering insect shape was lifting off the roof, with people clinging to the landing skids. It dipped as it pulled away, struggling with the heavy load, and clipped a tree outside the embassy walls.

I shouted with excitement.

'That's the boy!' Mister Duck yelled, ruffling my hair with a wet hand, soaking the collar of my shirt. 'That's the kid!'

'Do we get to escape from the embassy roof?' I yelled back. 'I always wanted to do that!'

'Escape from the embassy roof?'

'Do we get to?'

'You bet,' he laughed. 'You fucking bet.'

Leaving

I drew quickly, sweating despite the early morning chill. There wasn't time to take the same kind of care over the map as Mister Duck had. The islands were rough circles, the curving shore line of Thailand a series of jagged lines, and there were only three labels. Ko Samui, Ko Phelong, and Eden.

At the bottom of the page I wrote 'Wait on Chaweng for three days. If we haven't come back by then it means we made it to the beach. See you there? Richard.'

I crept outside. A light already shone in Francoise and Etienne's hut. Shivering, I stole along the porch and slipped the map under Zeph and Sammy's door. Then I collected my bag, locked up my room, and went to the restaurant to wait for the others.

The Thai boy who'd been kicking the coconut husk was sweeping the floor. As I arrived he glanced outside, to check it was as early as he thought it was.

'You wan' banan' pancake?' he asked cautiously.

I shook my head. 'No thanks. But I would like to buy four hundred cigarettes.'

GETTING THERE

Littering

The spiv's motor boat was painted white down to the watermark strip, and below that it was yellow – or yellow when it lifted clear of the sea, pale green when it sank back down. At one time his boat must have been red. The white was blistered or scraped away in places, leaving crimson streaks that looked like cuts. With the rolling movement and growling engine, the cuts were enough to make me feel the boat was alive. It knew which way I expected it to lurch and routinely surprised me.

Beside us, where the water was disturbed, the morning sun played tricks in the sea. Gold shapes like a shoal of fish spun beneath the surface, matching our speed. I reached down and trailed my hand, catching a fish on my palm. It swam there, flickering over my lifeline, then I balled my fist. The fish slipped out and swam on my closed fingers.

'You should not look down,' said Francoise, leaning over from the other side of the boat. 'If you look down, you will feel sick. Watch the island. The island does not move.'

I looked where she pointed. Strangely, Ko Samui seemed miles behind us, but the drop-off island still appeared as distant as it had an hour ago.

'I'm not feeling sick,' I said, and sank my head back over the side.

Hypnotized by the gold fish, I didn't move again until the water turned blue and I saw a coral bed loom beneath me. The spiv cut the engine. I put a hand up to my ears, surprised by the silence, half thinking I might have gone deaf. 'Now you pay,' said the spiv reassuringly, and we slid towards the shore.

The sand was more grey than yellow and strewn with dried seaweed laid out in overlapping arcs by the tide. I sat on the trunk of a fallen coconut tree, watching our ride chug into the distance. Soon it was hard to find, a white speck occasionally appearing on the ridge of a high swell. When five minutes passed without a sighting I realized it had gone and our isolation was complete.

A few metres away, Etienne and Francoise leant on their rucksacks. Etienne was studying the maps, working out which of the several islands near us we had to swim to. He didn't need my help so I called to him that I was going to take a walk. I'd never been on a real desert island before – a deserted desert island – and I felt I ought to explore.

'Where?' he said, looking up and squinting against the sun.

'Just around. I won't be long.'

'Half an hour?'

'An hour.'

'Yes, but we should leave after lunch. We should not spend the night here.'

I waved in reply, already walking away from them.

I stuck to the coast for half a mile, looking for a place to turn inland, and eventually found a bush whose canopy made a dark tunnel into the tree-line. Through it I could see green leaves and sunlight so I crawled inside, brushing spider webs from my face. I came out in a glade of waist-high ferns. Above me was a circle of sky, broken by a branch that jutted out like the hand of a clock. On the far side of the glade the forest began again but my impulse to continue was checked by a fear of getting lost. The runnel I'd crawled through was harder to make out from this end, disguised by the tall grasses, and I could only orientate myself by the sound of breaking waves. I gave up my token exploration and waded through the ferns to the middle of the glade. Then I sat down and smoked a cigarette.

Thinking about Thailand tends to make me angry, and until I started writing this book, I tried not to do it. I preferred it to stay tucked away in the back of my mind. But I did think about Thailand sometimes. Usually late at night, awake long enough so I could see the curtain patterns through the darkness and the shapes of the books on my shelves.

At those times I made an effort to remember sitting in that glade with the shadow of the clock-hand branch lying across the ferns, smoking my cigarette. I chose this moment because it was the last time I could pinpoint, and think: That was me being me. Normal. Nothing much going through my head apart from how pretty the island was, and how quiet.

It isn't that from then on every second in Thailand was bad. Good things happened. Loads of good things. And mundane things too: washing my face in the morning, swimming, fixing some food, whatever. But in retrospect all those instances were coloured by what was going on around them. Sometimes it feels to me like I walked into the glade and lit the cigarette, and someone else came along and finished it. Finished it, stubbed it out, flicked it into the bushes, then went to find Etienne and Francoise. It's a cop-out, because it's another thing that distances me from what happened, but that is how it feels.

This other person did things I wouldn't do. It wasn't just our morals that were at odds; there were little character differences too. The cigarette butt—the other guy flicked it into the bushes. I'd have done something else. Buried it maybe. I hate littering, let alone littering in a protected marine park.

It's hard to explain. I don't believe in possession or the supernatural. I know that in real terms it was me who flicked the cigarette butt.

Fuck it.

I've been relying on an idea that these things would become clear to me as I wrote them down, but it isn't turning out that way.

When I got back to the beach I found Etienne crouched over a little

Calor gas camping stove. Laid out beside him were three piles of

Magi-Noodle packets – yellow, brown and pink. 'Great,' I said. 'I'm starving. What's on the menu?' 'You may have chicken, beef, or…' He held up a pink packet.

'What is this?'

'Shrimp. I'll go for chicken.'

Etienne smiled. 'Me also. And we can have chocolate for dessert. You have it?'

'Sure.' I unclipped my rucksack and pulled out three bars. The ones closest to the top had melted and remoulded themselves around the shape of my water bottle, but the foil hadn't split.

'Did you find anything interesting on your walk?' asked Etienne, cutting open one of the yellow packs with a penknife.

'Nothing in particular. I stuck to the coastline mainly.' I looked around. 'Where's Francoise? Isn't she eating with us?'

'She has already eaten.' He pointed down the beach. 'She went to see if it is a big swim to our island.'

'Uh-huh. You worked out which one it was.'

'I think so. I'm not sure. There are many differences between the map in my guidebook and your friend's map.'

'Which one did you go for?'

'Your friend.'

I nodded. 'Good choice.'

'I hope so,' said Etienne, hooking a noodle from the boiling water with his penknife. It hung limply on the blade. 'OK. We can eat now.'

Thai-Die

Francoise said it was one kilometre away and Etienne said two. I can't judge distances over water, but I said one and a half. Mainly it just looked like a long swim.

The island across the sea was wide, with tall peaks at each end that were joined by a pass about half their height. I guessed that once it had been two volcanoes, close enough together to be connected by their lava flow. Whatever its origins, it was at least five times the size of the one we were on, and gaps in the green showed rock-faces which I hoped we wouldn't need to climb.

'Are you sure we can do this?' I said, more to myself than anyone else.

'We can,' said Francoise.

'We can try,' Etienne corrected, and went to get the backpack he'd prepared with bin-liners, bought from the restaurant that morning.

The A-Team: a television series that was a hit when I was around fourteen years old. They were BA Barracus, Face-man, Murdoch and Hannibal – four Vietnam veterans accused of a crime they didn't commit, who now worked as mercenaries, taking on the bad guys the law couldn't touch.

They let us down. For a moment it had looked as if Etienne's contraption would float. It dipped underwater and held its level, the top quarter bobbing above the surface like an iceberg. But then the bin-liners collapsed and the bag sank like a stone. Three other attempts failed in exactly the same way.

'This will never work,' said Francoise, who had rolled her swimming-costume down to her waist to get an even tan, and was not catching my eye.

'There's no way,' I agreed. 'The rucksacks are far too heavy. You know, we really should have tried this out on Ko Samui.'

'Yes,' Etienne sighed. 'I do know.'

We stood in the water, silently considering the situation. Then Francoise said, 'OK. We take one plastic bag each. We only take some important things.'

I shook my head. 'I don't want to do that. I need my rucksack.'

'What choice? We give up?'

'Well…'

'We need some food, some clothes, only for three days. Then if we do not find the beach, we swim back and wait for the boat.'

'Passports, tickets, traveller's cheques, cash, malaria pills.'

'There is no malaria here,' said Etienne.

'Anyway,' Francoise added, 'we do not need a passport to go to this island.' She smiled and absently brushed a hand between her breasts. 'Come on, Richard, we are too close, huh?'

I frowned, not understanding, a list of possibilities appearing in my mind.

'Too close to give up.'

'Oh,' I said. 'Yes. I suppose we are.'

We hid our rucksacks under a thick patch of shrubs near a distinctive palm tree—it had two trunks growing from a single stem. In my bin-liner I packed Puri-Tabs, the chocolate, spare shorts, a T-shirt, Converse shoes, Mister Duck's map, my water bottle, and two hundred cigarettes. I wanted to take all four hundred, but there wasn't room. We also had to leave the Calor gas stove. It meant that we'd have to eat cold noodles, soaked long enough to make them soft, but at least we wouldn't starve. And I left the malaria pills too. After tying the bin-liner with as many knots as the plastic would allow and then sealing them again inside a second bin-liner, we tested their seaworthiness. Without the weight of the rucksacks they floated better than we could have hoped. They were even strong enough to lean on, so we only had to swim with our legs.

At a quarter to four we waded into the sea, finally ready to leave. 'Maybe more than one kilometre,' I heard Francoise say behind me. Etienne said something in reply, but it was lost as a wave broke.

The swim passed in stages. The first was full of confidence, chatting as we found a kicking rhythm, and making jokes about sharks. Then, as our legs began to ache and the water no longer felt cold enough to cool us down, we stopped talking. By this time, as on the boat ride from Ko Samui, the beach behind us seemed as far away as the island ahead. The jokes about sharks became fears, and I started to doubt that I had the strength to finish the swim. Or doubt, quote unquote. We were about halfway between the two points. Not being able to finish the swim would mean dying.

If Etienne and Francoise were also worried they did nothing to show it. It wasn't said, but it felt as if mentioning the fears would only make things worse. In any case, it wasn't like there was anything we could do to make things easier. We'd put ourselves into the situation. All we could do was deal with it.

And then, strangely, things did become easier. Although my legs still ached like crazy, they'd developed a kind of reflex kick, something like a heartbeat. It kept me moving and allowed my mind to drift beyond the pain. One idea that kept me distracted for ages was composing the newspaper headlines that would inform people back home of my fate. 'Young Adventurers in Thai-Die Death Swim – Europe Mourns' covered the necessary angles. Writing my obituary was harder, seeing as I'd never done anything of any importance, but my funeral was a pleasant surprise. I drafted some good speeches, and a lot of people came to hear them.

I'd moved on to thinking that I should try to pass my driving test if I got back to England when I saw driftwood on the beach ahead, and realized we were nearly there. We'd been careful to stick together over most of the swim, but in the last hundred metres Etienne pulled away. When he reached the beach he did a cartwheel, achieved with a last reserve of energy, because then he collapsed and didn't move again until I joined him.

'Show me the map,' he said, trying to sit up.

'Etienne,' I replied between gasps for breath, and pushed him back down. 'We've done enough. We're staying here tonight.'

'But the beach may be close, no? Maybe it is only a short way down the island.'

'Enough.'

'But…'

'Shh.'

I lay down, pressing the side of my face into the wet sand, my gasps becoming sighs as the aching drained from my muscles. Etienne had a strand of seaweed caught in his hair, a single green dreadlock. 'What is this?' he muttered, tugging at it weakly. Down by the sea Francoise splashed out of the water, dragging her bag behind her.

'I hope this beach exists,' she said, as she flopped beside us. 'I am not sure I can do the swim again.'

I was too exhausted to agree.

All These Things

There are one hundred glow-stars on my bedroom ceiling. I've got crescent moons, gibbous moons, planets with Saturn's rings, accurate constellations, meteor showers, and a whirlpool galaxy with a flying saucer caught in its tail. They were given to me by a girlfriend who was surprised that I often lay awake after she went to sleep. She discovered it one night when she woke to go to the bathroom, and bought me the glow-stars the next day. Glow-stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear.

'Look,' Francoise whispered, keeping her voice low so Etienne wouldn't wake. 'Do you see?'

I followed the path of her arm, past the delicate wrist and unexplained tattoo, up her finger to the million flecks of light. 'I don't,' I whispered back. 'Where?'

'There… Moving. You can see the bright one?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Now look down, then left, and…'

'Got it. Amazing…'

A satellite, reflecting what – the moon or Earth? Sliding quickly and smoothly through the stars, tonight its orbit passing the Gulf of Thailand, and maybe later the skies of Dakar or Oxford.

Etienne stirred, and turned in his sleep, rustling the bin-liner he'd stretched out beneath him on the sand. In the forest behind us some hidden night bird chattered briefly.

'Hey,' I whispered, propping myself up on my elbows. 'Do you want me to tell you something funny?'

'What about?'

'Infinity. But it isn't that complicated. I mean, you don't need a degree in—'

Francoise waved a hand in the air, tracing a red pattern with the tip of her cigarette.

'Is that a yes?' I whispered.

'Yes.'

'OK.' I coughed quietly. 'If you accept that the universe is infinite, then that means there's an infinite amount of chances for things to happen, right?'

She nodded, and sucked on the red coal floating by her fingertips.

'Well, if there's an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen – no matter how small the likelihood.'

'Ah.'

'That means, somewhere in space there's another planet that, by an incredible series of coincidences, developed exactly the same way as ours. Right down to the smallest detail.'

'Is there?'

'Definitely. And there's another which is exactly the same, except that palm tree over there is two feet to the right. And there's another where the tree is two feet to the left. In fact, there's planets with infinite amounts of variations on that tree alone, an infinite amount of times…'

Silence. I wondered if she was asleep.

'So how about that?' I prompted.

'Interesting,' she whispered. 'In these planets, everything that can happen will happen.'

'Exactly.'

'Then in one planet, maybe I am a movie star.'

'There's no maybe about it. You live in Beverly Hills and swept last year's Oscars.'

'That's good.'

'Yeah, but don't forget, somewhere else your film was a flop.'

'Oh?'

'It bombed. The critics turned on you, the studio lost a fortune, and you got into booze and Valium. It was pretty ugly.'

Francoise rolled on to her side and looked at me. 'Tell me about

some other worlds,' she whispered. In the moonlight her teeth

flashed silver as she smiled.

'Well,' I replied. 'That's a lot to tell.' Etienne stirred and turned over again.

I leant over and kissed Francoise. She pulled away, or laughed, or shook her head, or closed her eyes and kissed me back. Etienne woke, clasping his mouth in disbelief. Etienne slept. I slept while Francoise kissed Etienne.

Light-years above our bin-liner beds and the steady rush of the surf, all these things happened.

After Francoise had shut her eyes and her breathing had eased into a sleeping rhythm, I crept off my plastic sheet and walked down to the sea. I stood in the shallows, slowly sinking as the tide pulled away the sand around my feet. The lights of Ko Samui glowed on the horizon like a trace of sunset. The spread of stars stretched as far as my ceiling back home.

In Country

We set off immediately after breakfast: half a bar of chocolate each and cold noodles, soaked in most of the water from our canteens. There wasn't any point in hanging around. We needed to find a freshwater source, and according to Mister Duck's map, the beach was on the other side of the island.

At first we walked along the beach, hoping to circle the coast, but the sand soon turned to jagged rocks, which turned to impassable cliffs and gorges. Then we tried the other end, wasting precious time while the sun rose in the sky, and found the same barrier. We were left with no choice but to try inland. The pass between the peaks was the obvious goal so we slung our bin-liners over our shoulders and picked our way into the jungle.

The first two or three hundred metres from the shore were the hardest. The spaces between the palm trees were covered in a strange rambling bush with tiny leaves that sliced like razors, and the only way past them was to push through. But as we got further inland and the ground began to rise, the palms became less common than another kind of tree – trees like rusted, ivy-choked space rockets, with ten-foot roots that fanned from the trunk like stabilizer fins. With less sunlight coming through the canopy, the vegetation on the forest floor thinned out. Occasionally we were stopped by a dense spray of bamboo, but a short search would find an animal track or a path cleared by a fallen branch.

After Zeph's description of the jungle, with Jurassic plants and strangely coloured birds, I was vaguely disappointed by the reality. In many ways I felt like I was walking through an English forest, I'd just shrunk to a tenth of my normal size. But there were some things that felt suitably exotic. Several times we saw tiny brown monkeys scurrying up the trees, Tarzan-style lianas hung above us like stalactites – and there was the water: it dripped on our necks, flattened our hair, stuck our T-shirts to our chests. There was so much of it that our half-empty canteens stopped being a worry. Standing under a branch and giving it a shake provided a couple of good gulps, as well as a quick shower. The irony of having kept my clothes dry over the swim, only to have them soaked when we turned inland, didn't escape me.

After two hours of walking we found ourselves at the bottom of a particularly steep stretch of slope. We virtually had to climb it, pulling ourselves up on the tough fern stems to keep us from slipping down on the mud and dead leaves. Etienne was the first to get to the top and he disappeared over the ridge, then reappeared a few seconds later, beckoning enthusiastically.

'Hurry up!' he called. 'Really, it is amazing!'

'What is it?' I called back, but he'd disappeared again.

I redoubled my efforts, leaving Francoise behind.

The slope led to a football-pitch-sized shelf on the mountainside, so flat and neat that it seemed unnatural in the tangle of the surrounding jungle. Above us the slope rose again to what appeared to be a second shelf, and past that it continued straight up to the pass.

Etienne had gone further into the plateau and was standing in some bushy plants, gazing around with his hands on his hips.

'What do you think?' he said. I looked behind me. Far below I could see the beach we had come from, the island where our hidden rucksacks lay, and the many other islands beyond it.

'I didn't know the marine park was this big,' I replied.

'Yes. Very big. But that is not what I mean.'

I turned back to the plateau, putting a cigarette in my mouth. Then, as I patted down my pockets looking for my lighter, I noticed something strange. All the plants in the plateau looked vaguely familiar.

' Wow,' I said, and the cigarette dropped from my lips, forgotten.

'Yes.'

'…Dope?'

Etienne grinned. 'Have you ever seen so much?'

'Never…' I pulled a few leaves from the nearest bush and rubbed them in my hands.

Etienne waded further into the plateau. 'We should pick some, Richard,' he said. 'We can dry it in the sun and…' Then he stopped. 'Wait a moment, there is something funny here.'

'What?'

'Well, it is just so… These plants…' He crouched down, then looked round at me quickly. His lips had begun to curve into a smile, but his eyes were wide and I could literally see colour draining from his face. 'This is a field,' he said.

I froze. 'A field?'

'Yes. Look at the plants.'

'But it can't be a field. I mean, these islands are…'

'The plants are in rows.'

'Rows…'

We stared at each other.' Jesus Christ,' I said slowly. 'Then we 're in deep shit.'

Etienne started running back towards me.

'Francoise.'

'She's…' My mind was filling with too many thoughts to answer the question. '…Coming,' I eventually replied, but he had already passed me and was crouching over the slope.

'She's not there!'

'But she was just behind me.' I jogged to the ridge and looked over. 'Maybe she slipped.'

Etienne stood up. 'I will go down. You look here.'

'Yes… Right.'

He began slithering down the mud, then I saw the yellow flash of her T-shirt in some trees further along the edge of the plateau. Etienne had already slid halfway down the slope and I threw a pebble at him to get his attention. He swore and began making his way back up.

Francoise had come out into the plateau, tucking her T-shirt into her shorts. 'I needed the bathroom,' she called.

I waved my hands frantically, mouthing at her to keep her voice down. She cupped a hand by her ear. 'What? Hey! I have seen some people further up the mountain. They are coming this way. Maybe they are from the beach, no?'

Hearing her, Etienne called from down the slope, 'Richard! Make her be quiet!'

I sprinted towards her. 'What are you doing?' she asked, and then I'd reached her and was pushing her to the ground.

'Shut up!' I said, clamping my hand to her mouth.

She tried to squirm out of my grip and I pressed harder, bending her head back on her shoulders. 'This is a dope field,' I hissed, carefully enunciating each word. 'Do you understand?'

Her eyes bulged wide and she started snorting through her nose. 'Do you understand?' I hissed again. 'It's a fucking field.'

Then Etienne was behind me, pulling at my arms. I dropped Francoise and, for a reason I still don't understand, I lunged for his neck. He twisted behind me and wrapped his arms around my chest.

I tried to struggle but he was too strong. 'You idiot! Let me go! There are people coming!'

'Where are the people?'

'On the mountain,' Francoise whispered, rubbing her mouth. 'Higher.'

He looked up to the second plateau. 'I can't see anyone,' he said, easing his hold on me. 'Listen. What is that?'

We all went silent but I couldn't hear anything except blood pounding in my ears.

'Voices,' said Etienne quietly. 'You can hear it?'

I strained to listen again. This time I found it, distant but getting clearer.

'It's Thai.'

I choked. 'Fuck! We've got to run!' I clambered to my feet but Etienne dragged me back down.

'Richard,' he said, and through my fear some part of me registered surprise at the calm expression on his face. 'If we run we will be seen.'

'So what do we do?'

He pointed to a dark copse. 'We hide in there.'

Lying flat against the earth, peering through the mesh of leaves, we waited for the people to appear.

At first it seemed that they would pass us out of sight, then a branch cracked and a man stepped into the field, close to where Etienne and I had been standing a few minutes before. He was young, maybe twenty, with a kick-boxer's build. His chest was bare and etched with muscle, and he wore military trousers – dark-green and baggy, with pouches sewn into the legs. In his hand was a long machete. Slung over his shoulder was an automatic rifle.

I could feel Francoise's body pressed against mine – she was trembling. I looked round, somehow thinking I might calm her, but I could feel the tightness in my face. She stared at me, eyebrows raised as if she wanted me to explain. I shook my head helplessly.

A second man appeared, older, also armed. They stopped and exchanged a few words. Though they stood more than twenty metres away, the curious looping sound of their language carried perfectly over the distance. Then another man called out from within the jungle and they set off again, vanishing over the ridge, down the slope we'd originally come from.

Two or three minutes after their sing-song chatter had faded away, Francoise suddenly burst into tears. Then Etienne started crying too. He lay on his back and covered his eyes, his hands bunched into fists.

I watched the two of them blankly. I felt in limbo. The shock of discovering the fields and the tension while we'd been hiding had left me empty. I just knelt on the ground, sweat running from my hairline and down the side of my face, and thought of nothing.

Finally I managed to gather my wits. 'OK,' I said. 'Etienne was right. They didn't know we were here, but they might find out soon.' I reached for my bag. 'We've got to leave.'

Francoise sat up, wiping her eyes on her mud-streaked T-shirt. 'Yes,' she muttered. 'Come, Etienne.'

Etienne nodded. 'Richard,' he said firmly. 'I do not want to die here.'

I opened my mouth to speak but couldn't think what to say.

'I do not want to die here,' he repeated. 'You must get us out.'

Falling Down

I must get them out? Me? I couldn't believe my ears. He'd been the one who'd kept his head when the dope guards were coming. I'd lost my shit. I felt like saying, 'You fucking get us out!'

But just by looking at him I could tell he wasn't about to take control of the situation. And neither was Francoise. She was gazing at me with the same scared, expectant expression as Etienne.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 657