فصل 04

Chapter four

Beach Life

After that first day, wandering around the clearing, I didn’t really question a single thing about the beach.

I soon felt like I’d been living there all my life. Ko Samui became a dream-like place, and I couldn’t remember anything about Bangkok. On the third or fourth day I remember thinking that Zeph and Sammy might arrive soon and wondering how people would react. Then I realized I couldn’t quite remember what Zeph and Sammy looked like. A couple of days later, I’d forgotten they might be coming at all.

Routines developed quickly.

I’d wake up at about seven, seven-thirty, and go straight down to the beach for a swim with Etienne and another guy called Keaty. Then we’d go back to the camp and wash the sea salt off our bodies in the shower hut.

Breakfast was at eight. Every morning the people doing the cooking would boil a lot of rice and it was each individual’s responsibility to cook anything else they wanted. Most people had their rice plain, but a few made the effort to boil some fish or vegetables. I never bothered.

After breakfast people would separate. Mornings were for working, and everybody had a job to do. By nine the camp was always empty. There were four main areas of work: fishing, gardening, cooking and carpentry.

Etienne, Francoise and I were in a fishing group. When we’d arrived there’d been two fishing groups, but we made it three. We were in one group with Gregorio. Moshe and the two Yugoslav girls were in another, and the last group was three Swedish guys called Karl, Sten and Christo. They were very serious about their fishing, and every day they’d swim through the caves in the cliff to the open sea.

I felt lucky to be working in the fishing group. If Etienne and Francoise hadn’t volunteered to go fishing on the first day, we might have had to do gardening or cooking. Those jobs didn’t appeal to me.

If there was a leader in the camp, it was Sal. When she talked, people listened. She spent her days walking around, checking that people were working properly. At first she spent a lot of time making sure we were settling in OK. After the first week she seemed satisfied and we rarely saw her during the work period.

The only person who didn’t have a clear job was Jed. He spent his days alone and was usually the first person to leave in the mornings and the last person to come back. Keaty said that Jed spent a lot of time near the waterfall and above the cliffs. Sometimes he would disappear and spend the night somewhere on the island. When he came back he usually had some fresh dope, obviously taken from the dope fields.

At about two-thirty, people would start coming back to camp. The cooks and fishers would always be first so they could start preparing the fish. Then the gardeners would arrive with their vegetables and fruit, and by three the clearing would be full again.

Breakfast and dinner were the only meals of the day. Dinner was at four o’clock and people usually went to bed about nine. There wasn’t much to do after dark, apart from getting stoned. Night-time camp fires weren’t allowed because low planes could see them, even through the leafy ceiling.

Except for the people with tents, everybody slept in the longhouse. It took me a while to get used to sleeping with twenty- one other people, but soon I started enjoying it. There was a strong sense of closeness in the longhouse. Often, just as people were going to sleep, a voice from somewhere in the darkness would say, ‘Night Frankie.’ Then there’d be a short pause while we waited for someone else to say, ‘Night, Sal,’ or Gregorio, or Bugs, or anyone they felt like saying good night to. Then the named person would have to say good night to someone different, and it would go around the whole longhouse until everyone had been mentioned. No one’s name was ever forgotten.

On the morning of my fourth Sunday, everyone from the camp was down on the beach. Nobody worked on Sundays. The tide was out, so there was a large area of sand between the trees and the sea. Sal had organized a huge game of football. Nearly everyone was playing but not me and Keaty. We were sitting on a rock, chatting.

After a while I stood up. ‘Feel like a swim?’ I asked.

‘Sure.’

‘We could swim over to the coral. I haven’t seen it yet.’

I swam down to the seabed and sat on the sand. Then I rested some stones on my lap so I wouldn’t float back up again. Through my mask I could see the brightly coloured coral all around me in the hot tropical waters.

I looked up and saw Keaty’s legs above me. He was sitting on a rock, and had attracted the attention of a little blue fish. It was mainly interested in biting his ankles. I rolled the stones off my lap and let myself float up to the surface. I pinched Keaty’s ankle as I passed, using my fingernails like a row of teeth.

‘Ow! What did you do that for?’ said Keaty.

‘There was this little fish…’ I laughed.

‘I thought it was a shark.’

‘There are sharks here?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Millions.’ He pointed out to the open sea.

I pulled myself out of the water and sat next to Keaty on the rock. He started rolling a joint.

‘How long have you been here?’ I said.

‘Two years. I met Sal in Chiang Mai and we got friendly. We travelled around Thailand a bit together, then she told me about this place and brought me here.’

‘Tell me about Mr Duck. Daffy. No one talks about him.’

‘Yeah. People were shocked when they heard he’d died,’ Keaty said. ‘I didn’t really know him. He was a bit distant, to me anyway. I mean, I knew who he was, but we didn’t talk much.’

‘So who was he?’

Keaty looked surprised. ‘You don’t know anything, do you, Rich? Haven’t you seen the tree yet? The tree by the waterfall? You’ve been here just over a month!’

‘Um, I don’t think so.’

‘Man!’ Keaty smiled. ‘I’ll take you there tomorrow. Then you’ll see.’

‘OK,’ I said, as he disappeared underwater.

That night, just as the light was starting to fade, we were given our sea-shell necklaces. Sal and her boyfriend, Bugs, wandered over to where we were sitting and gave them to us. The necklaces were important to me. However friendly everyone was, Etienne, Francoise and I were the only ones without them. Now we’d got them, I felt we’d been officially accepted.

I slipped the necklace over my head. ‘Well, thanks a lot, Sal.’

‘Thank Bugs. He made yours.’

‘OK. Thanks, Bugs. It’s a really nice necklace.’

He nodded, then began walking back to the longhouse. I couldn’t make up my mind about Bugs. It was weird, because he was exactly the kind of guy I usually make friends with. But there was something about him that I didn’t like.

My suntan was progressing well. The sky had been mainly cloudy over the first few days, but now I was getting as brown as I’d ever been.

‘Cool,’ I said the next day when we were fishing, noticing how dark my skin was.

Etienne looked round. ‘What is it?’

‘Just my suntan. I’m getting really brown.’

Etienne nodded. ‘I thought maybe you were thinking of this place.’

‘The beach?’

‘You said “Cool,” so I thought you were thinking how good it is here.’

‘Oh, well, I often think that… I mean, it was worth the trouble, wasn’t it? After that long swim, and the dope fields. You fish, swim, eat, lie around, and everyone’s so friendly. It’s such a simple life. If I could stop the world and restart life, put the clock back, I think I’d restart it like this. For everyone. You know what I mean?’

Etienne nodded. ‘All these thoughts are the same as mine. The same as everybody’s.’

I got out of the water and checked my watch. It was exactly midday. ‘I think I’ll go and find Keaty now. He’s going to show me a tree.’

‘Tree?’

‘A tree by the waterfall. Tell the others where I’ve gone. See you later.’

Since arriving at the beach, I’d only been to the waterfall a couple of times, and never on my own. It was partly because I had no reason to go there but also, I now understood, because the area made me feel nervous. It represented a link between the beach and the outside world, the world I’d nearly forgotten.

I found Keaty near the vegetable garden where he worked.

‘Hey,’ he said when he saw me. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You were going to show me a tree. I left work early.’

‘Right. I forgot. Let’s go.’

It was a tree about twenty metres high to the right of the pool. I’d noticed it before when I’d been wondering how to get down from the top of the waterfall. Keaty showed me the marks cut into one side of the trunk. Three names and four numbers. Bugs, Sylvester and Daffy. The numbers were all zeros.

Sylvester? Another name from a children’s film, like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. ‘Who’s Sylvester in the camp?’ I asked Keaty.

‘Salvester.’

‘Oh, so Sylvester is Sal, right?’

He nodded.

‘So they were the first people here?’

‘The first. Nineteen eighty-nine. The three of them hired a boat from Ko Pha-Ngan.’

‘They knew about this place already, or…’

‘Depends who you talk to. Bugs said he’d heard about a hidden lagoon from some fishermen on Ko Phalui but Daffy used to say they found the place by chance.’

‘By chance?’

‘Yeah, that’s what he said. They didn’t start the camp until nineteen-ninety. They spent the second half of eighty-nine going round India, then came back to Ko Pha-Ngan at the end of the year. They saw that Ko Pha-Ngan was becoming as spoilt as Ko Samui. And they wanted to stay somewhere completely unspoilt. Especially Daffy. They really knew what they were doing. They’d organized most things in the camp by the time Sal brought me here which was… uh… ninety-three.’

‘So when you came, were there as many people as now?’

‘More or less. Apart from the Swedes and Jed.’

I looked back at the tree. ‘And the zeros. What do they mean?’ Keaty smiled.

‘That was Daffy’s idea. It’s a date.’

‘A date? The date of what?’

‘The date they first arrived.’

‘I thought that was eighty-nine.’

‘It was.’ Keaty touched the tree. ‘But Daffy used to call it year zero.’

We started walking back towards the camp and I thought about what Keaty had told me. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of what Sal, Bugs and Daffy had done. From Keaty’s words I pictured the scene. January nineteen-ninety, maybe New Year’s Eve, Ko Pha-Ngan. Daffy, Bugs and Sal talking as the sun starts coming up. Sal’s found a boat to hire, Bugs has some tools in his backpack, Daffy’s got a sack of rice and perhaps some bars of chocolate. By seven that morning they’re walking down the beach. They don’t look back, they just get into their boat and sail for the hidden paradise they’d found a year before. I found myself wishing I could meet Mr Duck again. I wanted to shake him by the hand.

As we passed the kitchen hut, Keaty and I looked in to say hello to the guy who was the main cook. His face was an angry red and shining with sweat.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘The rice,’ he said, marching out of the kitchen hut to one of the huts used for storing food.

We followed behind. ‘There!’ he said, pointing to three empty sacks and two full ones.

‘What’s the problem?’ said Keaty.

The guy tore open the top of the nearest full sack and rice poured out; black and green, completely rotten.

I covered my nose and mouth to block the terrible smell. ‘Ugh! That’s horrible!’

The guy pointed up to the roof.

‘It leaked?’ I asked.

He nodded, too angry to speak, then marched back to his cooking.

‘Well,’ said Keaty, as we walked back to his tent. ‘It isn’t all bad news about the rice. You should be glad, Rich.’

‘Why?’

‘No more rice means a Rice Run. You can get some more cigarettes.’

In the tent, Keaty lay on his back, smoking one of my last cigarettes.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘there are two main reasons why people don’t like doing the Rice Run. Number one, it’s a complete nuisance. Number two, it means visiting the World.’

‘The World?’ I asked.

‘The World. It’s another Daffy thing. The World is everything outside the beach.’

‘So what happens on the Rice Run?’

‘A couple of people take the boat and go to Ko Pha-Ngan. Then they buy some rice and come back here.’

‘We’ve got a boat?’ I asked.

‘Of course. Not all of us are such good swimmers as you, Rich.’

‘I didn’t realize… I didn’t think about that… Well, a quick trip to Ko Pha-Ngan doesn’t sound too bad.’

‘Yeah.’ Now Keaty was grinning. ‘But you haven’t seen the boat yet.’

An hour later, the entire camp sat in a circle. The news about the rice had been passed around quickly, and Sal had called a meeting.

Keaty was sitting next to me. ‘I bet Jed volunteers,’ he whispered. ‘He loves doing special duties.’

I was going to reply when Sal clapped her hands and stood up. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘As everyone knows we’ve got a problem. We thought we had another seven weeks of rice but we’ve only got enough for two days. Now, this isn’t a major crisis, nobody’s going to starve to death, but it is a minor one.’ Sal paused. ‘Well, you know what I’m going to say next. We need to go on a Rice Run. So… who’s volunteering?’

Jed put up his hand immediately.

‘What did I tell you?’ whispered Keaty.

‘Thank you, Jed. So OK… that’s one… Who else?’ Sal looked around. Most people were looking at the ground. ‘Come on… We all know Jed can’t do it alone…’

Just as when I jumped from the waterfall, I only realized what I was doing after I’d started doing it. I put my hand up.

Sal noticed, then glanced at Bugs. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him nod.

‘Are you volunteering too, Richard?’

‘Yeah,’ I answered, still a little surprised to find that I was. ‘I mean… yeah. I’m volunteering.’

Sal smiled. ‘Good. That’s decided then. You’ll leave tomorrow morning.’

There wasn’t much preparation to be done. All we needed was money and the clothes on our backs, and Sal produced the money. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to explain to Keaty, Etienne and Francoise why I’d volunteered.

‘I hope you are not bored with life here,’ Francoise said, as we chatted outside the longhouse entrance.

I laughed. ‘No, I just thought it might be interesting. Anyway, I haven’t seen Ko Pha-Ngan yet.’

‘Good. It would be sad to be bored with paradise, no? If you are bored with paradise, what is left?’