The Backpacker (11 page)

Without needing an explanation, I looked around at Muck, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and quietly slipped off the bamboo mat onto the creaky wooden floor. The three of us tiptoed out into the morning sunlight and made our way down the long jungle path towards the beach. Dave led the way, commando-like in his blue, navy-issue vest and cap, his wild afro sticking out of the sides like a bald man.

‘D'you keep your money under that hat, Dave?' Rick said as we rushed downhill.

He didn't turn around to answer the question. ‘Think I'd tell you if I did? Helps me to think.' He hurdled the tree root that had injured him the night before like an Olympian.

‘Think about what?' I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Stuff.'

‘Stuff? What stuff?'

‘I dunno, stuff,' he said irritably. ‘Don't ask, man, we're in enough trouble as it is.' He pushed through the last bush and trotted out onto the sand followed by Rick and I. All eyes swung right towards the rocks.

‘It's all right,' Rick said happily, almost overcome with joy, ‘the trees are still here.' And without another word, the three of us stripped and ran into the water, in a mad rush to swim to the rocks and be the first to proclaim it ‘OK'.

Dave was the first up. He swam hardest and seemed most anxious about what damage we might have caused, probably because it was his ticket and his idea to set fire to it.

‘How is it?' I shouted, and climbed up out of the water. Dave was a good twenty feet ahead, climbing hand-over-fist up boulders towards the trees. ‘Dave?'

‘Fuckin' brilliant!' he called back, standing on the highest rock, hands on hips. ‘Huh!'

For the first twenty feet or so the rocks were completely blackened. Where the rocks stopped and the foliage began, the grasses and bushes had been completely wiped out, flattened into a carpet of fine grey ash with delicate little grilled twigs standing up like charred hairs, ready to fall at the slightest breeze.

Barefoot, we walked into the jungle, trying not to brush up against the tree trunks. Although the bases of the palm trees were black up to about head height, they were still healthy and as sturdy as ever.

‘No problem,' I proclaimed, with both hands against a trunk. ‘Go in further, Dave, let's see how far it went.'

‘That's it! It stops right here.' We stood side by side, toes touching the line where the black ash stopped and living grass began: a perfect, crisp line that ran in a semi-circle. ‘It just stopped,' Dave said, incredulous.

‘Looks like it. Unless someone put it out.' I turned to Rick. ‘Does anyone else ever come around here?'

He shook his head, still staring at the ground. ‘I didn't think so, but, looking at this, now I'm not sure.'

Dave took his cap off and wiped his forehead. ‘This has been put out, look.' He bent down and picked up a clean cigarette butt from the ashes. ‘New.'

‘Rick, what about Toomy's brother?'

‘Tommy? I haven't seen him since you guys first got here.'

I turned to Dave and inspected the used cigarette. ‘That guy we saw being beaten up,' I said slowly, ‘the one who had his finger chopped off. They didn't call him Tommy did they?'

TWELVE

Whether someone had put out that fire or not, and whether or not the guys doing the beating up had called the beatee Tommy didn't matter to Rick. As far as he was concerned the fire was out, we had been saved from a fate worse than death, and Tommy, as his sister had stated, was in Bangkok visiting relatives. After all, Tommy was a popular name in Thailand; Hat Rin beach even had a ‘Tommy's Bungalows'.

Rick also pointed out to me that he'd been here quite a while and hadn't seen anything untoward happen yet, not to him or anyone else, and reminded us how easy we had it. I had to admit that he was right. When he went through the good points: the beach, the parties, the drugs, the house, virtually free living, and beautiful Thai girls to boot, I quickly forgot about any of the possible dangers involved, if indeed there were any, and went about the business of having a good time.

The one and only important thing Rick and I still had to do was phone England and tell our families that we weren't coming back: something I'd been dreading and avoiding like the plague ever since the three of us had agreed not to go home.

‘How long d'you reckon you'll stay away for?' I said as we walked along the jungle path towards Hat Rin, trying to size up my companion's situation. I needed a long-term commitment.

‘As long as it takes, John,' Rick replied without looking up from the uneven track. ‘Or until I run out of money.'

Good reply, I thought, and nodded my approval.

Rick held a branch aside for me to pass. ‘What d'you think they'll say when you tell them?'

‘Dunno really,' I said, ducking under. ‘My ol' man'll probably go on about my career, my house and all that shit.'

He let the branch spring back. ‘You got a house?'

‘Yeah, well, a mortgage anyway.' I'd already thought about this once or twice over the past week. At first it had worried me, but as the days went on it seemed a lot of fuss over nothing. Why the fuck should I worry about a pile bricks and mortar? ‘What about you,' I said walking on, ‘what'll happen with your missus?'

‘Hmm,' he shrugged, ‘just tell her. Cross that bridge when I come to it. I dunno, I haven't thought about her really. Strange when you think that we've been together for seven years.'

We wended our way through the steamy jungle and came out onto Hat Rin beach, and by the time we got to the telephone office we were both prickly with sweat. The company that ran the international phone service was obviously reasonably well off, installing air conditioning that was much too powerful for the size of the room. It was like walking into a fridge. We both flopped onto the leather couch by the service counter, and the receptionist looked at Rick before glancing outside to see if it was raining.

‘Yes, sir,' she said looking back, after seeing that it was still sunny, ‘where you like telephone?'

‘I would like to telephone England,' I said and stood up, ‘London to be precise. And he would also like to phone England.' I thumbed at Rick, slouching behind me.

‘Thank you, sir, booth number two please.'

I turned to Rick. ‘Who's going first, you or me?'

He pointed at me and said nothing.

‘Coward.' I walked into booth number two and stared at the telephone. Someone at the other end is going to get a shock. Who should it be first: parents, fiancée or work? Hardest first: parents.

I changed my mind and dialled work. ‘Hello, Norman Jarvis please,' I said into the mouthpiece with an affected air of authority. The secretary put me through without realising it was me, and not wanting to get bogged down in nervous chit-chat, I didn't let on. My heart beat a little faster. I'd been working there for five years.

‘Jarvis,' said my boss.

‘Hello Norman, it's John, John Harris.'

Delay. ‘Dear boy, hello! How was your holiday? Inja wasn't it?'

Shit, I thought, how
was
my holiday? ‘Err, yeah, it's great. I wa–'

‘Back on Monday, I believe, tell us... ' delay, ‘tell us all about it, what?'

‘Yeah, well, that's the thing Norman, I, err, I'm not coming back.' I inhaled and closed my eyes, waiting for the explosion at the other end.

It came. ‘W-what? You've found another job you mean?'

‘No, nothing like that,' I exhaled, ‘I'm not coming back to England. It's pretty good out here, you see. I'm going to travel around a bit, see what happens, you know.'

‘Not coming back?' he choked on his words. ‘You've got to come back. What about all those projects you're working on, you can't just leave them, who's going to run them?'

Not saying anything seemed like the best thing to do, he'd probably answer his own questions.

‘Good heavens, man, have you taken leave of your senses? Inja!' I said nothing for thirty seconds as he ranted on. ‘John... John... you there?'

‘Can't speak much longer, Norman, I've got to go, there's a time limit on international phone calls from here,' I lied, faking static. ‘My mum will come in with my written notice next week. If there's any problem just tell her and she'll get in touch with me, OK? I'll see you Norman.'

‘Fine, good luck, but I thi–'

More fake static. ‘Bye, Norman... ' I put the phone down and flew into a minor rage. ‘Projects!' I screamed at the phone, ‘Who gives a fuck about your stupid projects?' It was hard to believe that while my life was about to change in every way possible, my boss was only concerned with some crappy building project. A project that made him rich and me miserable.

When finally feeling composed again, I telephoned my parents and then Sanita. The conversation with my parents was similar to the one with my boss, just substitute ‘house' for ‘project'. Strangely enough my mum was more understanding than my dad, she seemed to know how I was feeling. I helped the situation along by telling them that it was just a fad, that I'd be home in two or three months; all that was needed was for me to see a bit of Asia.

Before even dropping the bomb-shell on Sanita the tears started. Why else would I be phoning? Again my reasoning was straightforward: three months maximum and then back home to normality, that's all I needed.

Taking a deep breath and walking out of the booth, I felt like I had been through ten rounds with Mike Tyson. Rick looked up at me. ‘How'd it go?'

Shaking my head and puffing my cheeks, I clenched my eyes in a tight blink for two seconds. ‘Fucking nightmare,' I said, holding open the door to the booth and gesturing inside. ‘Your turn in the dentist's chair.'

THIRTEEN

Work!
is a four letter word. It conjures up the same image the world over: getting up in the morning to do something you don't want to do, day in day out. After a few months of
work!
, or years depending upon the person's primeval yearning for freedom, you feel like a robot: alarm clock, get up, wash, catch the train,
work!
, go home, watch TV, go to bed. In that one sentence I've probably just described the daily routine of ninety-five percent of the working population of England. It's the same in every other developed country in the world. Routine is the cause of most marriage break-ups and social discontent.

That's my theory anyway.

It came as a surprise to me, therefore, that I accepted my new routine with open arms. There's no question about it, life on Koh Pha-Ngan was routine, but there were two fundamental differences between my new routine and the old one.

Firstly, although daily actions remained constant, the people around me changed. New backpackers would arrive and leave Hat Rin every week, and either said they were staying long-term and did, or said they were only staying for a few days but ended up not being able to leave. The latter was usually the case.

The second, more obvious difference between now and then was the nature of my daily routine. For the first time in my life it felt like my reason for waking up in the morning was just that: to wake up. If I didn't want to, nobody was saying I had to. If I wanted to go to the beach I'd wake up and go to the beach. If I wanted to mess about with Rick and Dave all day long in the jungle, that's what I'd do. That's not to say that I didn't get bored, but when boredom did set in I just did something else. When you
work!
you don't have that option.

Waking at around eight every morning, my first job was to actually get out of bed. How drunk or stoned everybody got the previous night usually dictated my ability to roll off the floor mat. Sometimes rolling over and off was quick and efficient, while other times the roll sideways ended at the edge, leaving me teetering on my side for a few seconds, before rolling back. Sometimes this rolling around went on for hours.

The one effective cure for a hangover in the tropics is the sea. Before we had breakfast, without even washing, we often just got up, put on some shorts and ran down into the cool morning ocean, keeping on running until we were submerged in the water.

Some mornings I wandered off down the jungle path to the beach while the others slept off their hangovers. Lying on the sand on my stomach, my chin resting on the palms of my hands, I would watch in intrigued silence as the crabs, unable to break free of their routine, went to
work!
around me. They seemed to live a pointless existence on the beach, coming out of their little holes and going back in again. They would come out and make minuscule little balls with the sand, first eating it then sucking out the nutrients and spitting out the grains, mashed together with crab spit. Flicking a jellyfish tentacle into their midst gave them something else to eat and provided my morning's entertainment.

Learning to tell the time without looking at my watch gave me something to concentrate on every day too. The best way was obviously by looking at the sun and checking the position of shadows that were cast by its position in the sky, but I soon found that the body has its own clock, and that it's possible to guess the time of day without even looking at the sky. Sometimes I got it wrong but usually it was possible to be accurate to within an hour.

So, in what we considered the true spirit of freedom and the timeless nature of our travel plans, a few months after the sacrifice of Dave's airline ticket, the three of us ceremoniously burnt our watches too.

FOURTEEN

The months rolled by and we spent Dave's and my birthday in true, drug-crazed party style. Rick and I eventually celebrated our one year's anniversary since leaving England on that beach by having one of the usual parties, only this time everything was free.

We should have realised beforehand just how crazy people get when something is being given away. It was like a buffet dinner where everyone goes up to get food even though they can't eat any more. The queue for the acid never stopped, and it wasn't until five in the morning on the third consecutive day of the non-stop rave that the drug finally ran out. The beach was strewn with bodies, all in various states of sun-baked, drugged-out madness for three more days after that, and even when they left, some people lived in the jungle for a few more weeks, hoping, no doubt, to cadge a few more freebies.

I never did like the idea of living off someone else, especially by deceit, and would never have done it if Rick hadn't already been set up with Ta. But the fact was that we would have run out of money after about six months if we hadn't had free accommodation. As it was, the money I had left when arriving in Thailand was still in my pocket, and that meant that the inevitable four letter word could remain lodged in the back of my throat, unspoken, as long as I stayed put.

Far from my finances dwindling they had actually grown slightly. The acid that was sold on the beach paid for food and drink, with enough left over for us all to share and do what we wanted. It wasn't a lot by Western standards, pennies really, but when you're living cheaply in a Third World country those pennies go a long way. ‘It's all relative, boys,' as Dave was so fond of saying.

The acid, despite what Rick had originally said, wasn't produced entirely by using plants from the jungle, but was brought over from Holland by some contact of a Thai girl called Ning. Ning was the female, Koh Pha-Ngan version of Timothy Leary, and could supply Rick with copious amounts of anything. The arrangement was simple: she paid the man from Amsterdam, Rick paid her, the party-goers paid him, and we all lived happily ever after.

Ning scared the shit out of me though. Her wild eyes, and even wilder look, made me think that she could flip at a moment's notice, and I avoided her whenever possible, even avoiding eye contact with her if I could help it.

Empress Ning, as we called her – partly because of the name (Ning the Merciless) but also because she dressed like some absurd woodland nymph – was a forty-year-old Thai drug addict. Unlike most people, especially Thais who live on beaches or in jungles, she wore very long flowing dresses that had been torn to shreds by years of clambering through trees and over rocks. Someone forgot to tell her that she was dressed for the urban jungle, not the real one. But above all she was just plain weird.

Dave also thought she was nuts, and, like me, avoided her at all costs. He said he'd seen a similar look once when he was stationed in the Gulf and had been asked to guard a condemned man. The person in question was an Iraqi who had defected and entered Kuwait, raping and torturing his way through the town, out of control, until he was finally stopped by a US patrol. They had intervened during his lynching and didn't know what to do with him. Dave said that the man had possessed the most horrible look in his eyes; a look, he said, not dissimilar to the Empress Ning.

Rick of course, with characteristically dark humour, thought this was hilarious, and went out of his way to make sure we bumped into each other on the gloomy jungle path that led up from the beach. He always found a new trick up his sleeve to get our paths to cross, and I fell for it every time. ‘John,' he'd say as we sat on the beach at night having a smoke, ‘I'm just going into the bushes for a crap.' As soon as he disappeared, so Ning would appear, staring and grinning like a psychopath. I hated that.

Apart from being terrified of Ning, Dave settled in really well at the house, and with some of the money he'd saved he set about building a small extension to the top floor balcony. Not really an extension, more of a tree-house that leaned half on the building and half on an adjacent tree, it could accommodate only two or three people. It was open to the elements on all sides, but it was a nice place to keep cool in the evenings, and it kept him busy.

Dave was like that; if he wasn't doing something with his hands he was talking, and nobody wanted to listen to him all day long. Building the tree-house kept him constantly busy because pieces were always falling off in the wind. ‘Where're you going, Dave?' we'd ask as he left the beach. ‘Too hot down here,' he'd reply, and disappear up the path. Twenty minutes later we'd hear the sound of hammering over the treetops like a giant pterodactyl-sized woodpecker:
clock clock clock
.

As for me? Well, apart from learning to tell the time and watching the crabs I just mooched about having a laugh. I wasn't into drugs really, apart from the odd smoke, and didn't think Dave needed any help in reconstructing the island, I didn't even keep a diary, so my hands were pretty well idle. I did like to keep in with the crowd on the main beach though and often went down to meet new people.

So, there we were, the three of us enjoying life with our three Thai girlfriends, with not a care in the world. We'd even forgotten about the conspicuous absence of Toomy's brother, Tommy, and the severed finger incident that had given me nightmares for the first two months. Toomy went to seemingly unnecessary lengths to explain that Tommy was no longer in Bangkok, and had now gone north to visit other relatives in Chiang Mai and probably wouldn't be back.

It all sounded very probable, and if I hadn't become sick we would have believed it to be the truth. But I did get sick; I caught dengue fever, and the truth behind the severed finger was finally revealed.