Quotes from the Book
The first I heard
of the beach was in Bangkok,
on the Ko Sahn Road. The Ko Sahn Road was
backpacker land. Almost all of the buildings
had been converted to guest houses, there were
long-distance telephone booths with air-con,
the cafes showed brand-new Hollywood films
on video, and you couldn't walk ten feet
without passing a bootleg tape stall. The main
function of the street was as a decompression
chamber for all those about to leave Thailand;
a halfway house between the East and the
West.
I'd landed
at Bangkok in the late afternoon,
and by the time I got to Ko Sahn it was dark.
My taxi driver winked and told me that at one
end of the street was a police station, so I
asked him to drop me off at the other end. I
wasn't planning on a crime, but I wanted to
oblige his conspiratorial charm. Not that it
made much difference at which end one stayed
because the police obviously weren't active. I
caught the smell of grass as soon as I got out of
the cab, and half the travelers weaving past me
were stoned.
The driver
left me outside a guest house with
an eating area open to the street. As I studied
it, checking the clientele to gauge what kind of
place it was, a thin man at the table nearest me
leaned over and touched my arm. I glanced
down. He was, I guessed, one of those heroin
hippies that float around India and Thailand.
He'd probably come to Asia ten years ago and
turned an occasional dabble into addiction. His
skin was old, though I'd have believed he was
in his thirties. The way he was looking at me, I
had the feeling I was being sized up as
someone to rip off.
"What?" I said warily.
He pulled
an expression of surprise and held up
the palms of his hands. Then he curled his
finger and thumb into the O-shaped perfection
sign and pointed into the guest house.
"It's a good place?"
He nodded.
I looked
again at the people around the tables.
They were mostly young and friendly looking,
some watching TV and some chattering over
their dinner.
"Okay."
I smiled at him in case he wasn't a
heroin addict but just a friendly mute. "I'm
sold."
He returned
the smile and turned back to the
video screen.
Quarter
of an hour later I was settling into a
room that was a little larger than a double bed.
I can be accurate about it because there was a
double bed in the room, and on four sides there
was a foot of space. My bag could just slide
into the gap.
One wall
was concrete -- the side of the
building. The others were Formica and bare.
They moved when I touched them. I had the
feeling that if I leaned against one it would fall
over and maybe hit another, and all the walls
of the neighboring rooms would collapse like
dominoes. Just short of the ceiling, the walls
stopped, and across the space was a strip of
mosquito netting. The netting almost upheld
the illusion of being in a confined, personal
area, until I lay down on my bed. As soon as I
relaxed, I began to hear the cockroaches
scuttling around in other rooms.
At my
head end I had a French couple in their
late teens -- a beautiful, slim girl with a suitably
handsome boy attached. They'd been leaving
their room as I got to mine and we exchanged
nods as we passed in the corridor. The other
end was empty. Through the netting I could
see that the light was off, and anyway, if it had
been occupied I would have heard the person
breathing. It was the last room on the corridor,
so I presumed it faced the street and had a
window.
On the
ceiling was a fan, strong enough on full
setting to stir the air. For a while I did nothing
but lie on the bed and look up at it. It was
calming, following the revolutions, and with the
mixture of heat and soft breeze, I felt I could
drift to sleep. That suited me. West to east is
the worst for jet lag, and I wanted to fall into
the right sleeping pattern on the first night.
I switched
off the light. Enough of a warm
glow from the corridor outside came through
for me to still see the fan. Soon I was asleep.
Once
or twice I was aware of people in the
corridor, and I thought I heard the French
couple coming back, then leaving again. But
the noises never woke me fully and I was
always able to slip back into the dream I'd been
having before. Until I hard the man's footsteps.
They had no rhythm or weight and dragged on
the floor.
A muttered
stream of English swearwords
floated into my room as he jiggled the padlock
on his door. Then there was a loud sigh, the
lock opened with a click, and his light came on.
The mosquito netting cast a patterned shadow
on my ceiling.
Frowning,
I looked at my watch. It was two in
the morning -- late afternoon, English time. I
wondered if I might get back to sleep.
The man
slumped onto his bed, giving the wall
between us an alarming shake. He coughed
awhile, then I heard the crackle of a joint being
rolled. Soon there was blue smoke caught in
the light, rolling through the netting.
Aside
from the occasional deep exhalation, he
was silent. I drifted back to sleep, almost.
"Bitch," said a voice. I opened my eyes.
"Fucking bitch. We're both as good as ..."
The voice paused for a coughing fit.
"Dead."
I was wide awake now, so I sat up in bed.
"Cancer
in the corals, blue water, my bitch.
Fucking Christ, did me in," the man continued.
He had
an accent but at first my sleep-fogged
head couldn't place it.
"Bitch" he continued.
A Scottish accent. Beach.
There
was a scrabbling sound on the wall. For
a moment I thought he might be trying to push
it over, and I had a vision of myself being
sandwiched between the Formica board and
the bed. Then his head appeared through the
mosquito netting, silhouetted, facing me.
"Hey," he said.
I didn't
move. I was sure he couldn't see into
my room.
"Hey.
I know you're listening. In there, you
know you're awake."
He lifted
up a finger and gave the netting an
exploratory poke. It popped away from where
it was stapled to the Formica. His head struck
through.
"Here."
A glowing
red object sailed though the
darkness, landing on the bed in a little shower
of sparks. The joint he'd been smoking. I
grabbed it to stop it from burning the sheets.
"Yeah,"
said the man, and laughed quietly.
"Got you now. I saw you take the butt." For a
few seconds I couldn't get a handle on the
situation. I kept thinking -- what if I actually
had been asleep? The sheets might have caught
fire. I might have burned to death. The panic
flipped into anger, but I suppressed it. The man
was way too much of a random element for
me to lose my temper. I could still see only his
head and that was backlit, in shadow.
Holding
up the joint, I asked, "Do you want
this back?"
"You
were listening," he replied, ignoring me.
"Heard me talking about the beach."
"... You've got a loud voice."
"Tell me what you heard."
"I didn't hear anything."
"... Heard nothing?"
He paused
for a moment, then pressed his face
into the netting.
"You're lying."
"No.
I was asleep. You just woke me up ...
when you threw this joint at me."
"You were listening," he hissed.
"I don't care if you don't believe me."
"I don't believe you."
Well
... I don't care ... Look." I stood on the
bed so our heads were at the same level, and
held out the joint to the hole he'd made. "If
you want this, take it. All I want is to go to
sleep."
As I
lifted my hand he pulled back, moving out
of the shadow. His face was flat like a boxer's,
the nose busted too many times to have any
form, and his lower jaw was too large for the
top half of his skull. It would have been
threatening if not for the body it was attached
to. The large jaw tapered into a neck so thin it
seemed incredible that it supported his head,
and his T-shirt hung slackly on coat hanger
shoulders.
Past
him I saw into his room. There was a
window, as I'd assumed, but he'd taped it up
with pages from a newspaper. Apart from that
it was bare.
His hand
reached through the gap and plucked
the butt from my fingers.
"Okay,"
I said, thinking I'd gained some kind
of control. "Now leave me alone."
"No," he replied flatly.
"... No?"
"No."
"Why
not? What do you ... Do you want
something?"
"Yep."
He grinned. "I wants lots. And that's
why" -- again he pushed his face into the
netting -- "I won't leave you alone."
But as
soon as he said it he seemed to change
his mind. He ducked out of sight, obscured by
the angle of the wall. I stayed standing for a
couple of seconds, confused but wanting to
reinforce my authority -- like it wasn't me
stepping down, just him. Then I heard him
relight his joint. I let that make the end of it
and lay back down on the bed.
Even
after he'd switched his light off, twenty
or so minutes later, I still couldn't get back to
sleep. I was too keyed up, too much stuff was
running through my head. Beaches and bitches,
exhaustion; jumpy with adrenaline. Perhaps,
given an hour of silence, I might have relaxed,
but soon after the man's light went out the
French couple came back to their room and
started having sex.
It was
impossible, hearing their panting and
feeling the vibrations of their shifting bed, not
to visualize them. The brief glimpse of the girl's
face I'd caught in the corridor was stuck in my
head. An exquisite face. Dark skin and dark
hair, brown eyes. Full lips.
After
they'd finished I had a powerful urge for
a cigarette, empathy maybe, but I stopped
myself. I knew that if I did they'd hear me
rustling the packet or lighting the match. The
illusion of their privacy would be broken.
Instead
I concentrated on lying as still as I
could, for as long as I could. It turned out I
could do it for quite a long time.
