The Sleeper (31 page)

I can’t believe that, at last, I get to be bad. I remember how I would watch the scary crowd at school, the people who didn’t go to lessons if they didn’t fancy it, who didn’t bother with homework, who fought and swore and shrugged at the consequences. And I knew that I could have been one of them. For some reason, I wasn’t. It was there, deep inside me, and now it is out.

I break the rules on a scale none of those idiots at school could ever have dreamed of. And now I need to put this book away (Jake would go crazy if he knew there was a paper trail) and go out for some serious celebratory drinks.

Bangkok – I love you.

March 25th

I sent almost all the money home. I am, depressingly, the good girl after all.

It’s strange just to be hanging out in Bangkok like every other traveller. In a sense it feels completely safe, but it’s also a bit of a comedown. I haven’t got the energy to do any more sightseeing. Today Jake and I stretched out a ‘full English breakfast’ in the best people-watching café, playing Scrabble and watching the passers-by. I like to look at the extremes: at one end, the teenagers who are away from home for the first time, wide-eyed and scared, still wholesome. You can almost see them filing away their first impressions for transmission home. When I see them, I want to get up and follow them around for a few weeks, to watch what happens as they settle in.

At the other extreme, there are the casualties. These are unnerving, and for different reasons than the obvious ones. All I see along here are the white people, the privileged travellers, and the ones who are the hopeless addicts make me flinch. With their wild beards (every casualty I have ever seen has been a man) and their crazed eyes and the clothes they’ve obviously been wearing for years, they are a little reminder of the fact that it can go wrong.

Anyway. I beat Jake at Scrabble and he pretended not to be annoyed. Then he told me our next trip is in three weeks’ time.

‘I’ve got stuff to take care of,’ he said. ‘So, babes, I’m going to have to leave you to it for a bit. Get yourself to a beach. I got you a mobile phone. I’ll call you when we need you.’

I was a tiny bit annoyed, but I hid it. I can do a few weeks on a Thai beach – it’s not really something to take umbrage at. In fact, I just love him calling me ‘babes’. No one in London would ever have done that. I was never a babe type, back there. Head girl Lara has gone, for ever. She is dead. In her place is a lawbreaking babe with a Thai mobile phone.

March 27th
On the bus out of Bangkok

Jake has gone away. I don’t want to know any more than that. I know that I am brilliant at my role, and my job ends there. It is odd how it makes me glow inside when they tell me they’ve never met anyone who can carry it off like I can. What a strange thing to have a talent for.

My brand-new phone is tucked away in my bag. I will keep it charged and hidden, and I must check it several times a day. Other than that, I am on holiday. I miss Jake, but there are not many things in life that are better than being on a bus with a hefty crime novel, watching the Thai countryside fly by, being aloof whenever anyone looks like they want to talk to me.

This is a tourist coach (at the cheapest possible end of the tourist scale), and everyone on it is a backpacker like me.

This bus is heading for Krabi, and from there I’m going to get a boat to Koh Lanta, and go to a beach and read and chill out. I don’t care if I don’t speak to a single person.

My backpack, devoid, as far as I can tell, of all dodgy contents, is tied to the roof with everyone else’s bags. As this is a cheap bus, it rattles along with its windows open and no air conditioning. It’s hard writing on it.

I think I’d get away with it, if anyone found this book. I’d tell them it was fantasy, and they’d look at me and believe me. Plus I don’t think I’ve actually said it.

A man across the aisle keeps trying to talk to me. I can’t be bothered, so I’m going to pretend to be asleep.

March 31st, I think

I’m lying on the beach, thinking about Jake. We have no future, and that’s one of the things I love about us. We barely have a thing to say to one another. It’s brilliant!

When I first met him, all naïve and hurt by Olly, I thought differently. My mind instantly started to try to fit him into what was expected of me.

A handsome Australian: what a great souvenir, I thought, to bring home from my trip. A handsome Australian husband, perhaps. That would have shown them.

Then, when I realised what he was about, I had to make adjustments to the narrative. That was liberating. He is definitely and hilariously not husband material. This is an adventure we’re having together, and soon, very soon, we’ll both move on. That is the most exciting thing of all. We are only about sex and business, and only for as long as it suits us both.

We met on the Khao San Road. Where else? I was on my own, newly arrived from London and utterly shaken. Dad was apoplectically furious with me for leaving, and even more furious with Olivia for making me go. I was single and on terrible terms with everyone. I knew no one on this entire continent, and had not a clue how to navigate things. I’d bought some clothes from one of the stalls earlier that day so I might blend in a bit, and all I was planning to do was to sit in a café and read a book, perhaps with a beer. That would have been an achievement.

And then I looked up, and he was watching from across the street.

He walked straight over to me, and stood there and smiled.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Jake.’

I couldn’t help myself. I smiled back. ‘Lara,’ I replied.

We walked along the road next to each other, and that was it. That night, that actual night, I discovered the joys of sex, and realised what I had been missing in my boring relationship. He is thirty-three, eleven years older than me. I adore his Australian accent, his curly hair that falls into his face all the time. I love the way he looks at me. I love the way he makes me want to break the rules, to be bad for him. We are not soulmates. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

April 2nd

I’m sitting in bed, under my mozzie net, writing this. Today I made a friend, Rachel. This makes me very happy.

I still haven’t heard from Jake, even though I check my phone all the time. I didn’t really expect to, because I don’t want to know about the transactions etc. That is utterly not my department. My three weeks off come with the understanding that there’s a big job on its way.

All the same, he’s my boyfriend, and I wouldn’t mind the occasional hello. I sent him a text to say I was here and he hasn’t replied. I hope he’s OK, because it occurred to me today that anything could have happened and I wouldn’t know.

There’s nothing I can do, though, but wait.

I know there’s an internet place up on the main road, but I’m staying away from it. I don’t want to read emails and send postcards or anything like that. I just want to lie on the sand and read.

Koh Lanta is a bigger island than I expected – there’s one the boat passed on the way called Koh Jum which was smaller, and loads of very alternative-looking people got off there, so I might move on and see what that’s like in a bit. I probably won’t, though, because that would require momentum and packing, and I’m enjoying not doing those things.

I’m staying at the south of the island, eking out my budget as best I can.

I’ve sent home thousands and thousands of pounds now. Money that I earned by risking my life. Dirty, filthy junkie money. He must know that, really. Only Leon has thought to question my job at the ‘American bank’. It’s much easier for Dad if he takes it at face value.

He even said ‘wherever you’re getting it from’ in his last letter. Bastard.

Anyway. Koh Lanta. I’m staying in a wooden bungalow, very shackish, that I reach by climbing hundreds of steps up the rocks above the sea. It looks out over the water, and across to the land at the other side of the bay. In the night you can see the lights of the boats, fishing boats out on the water. It’s warm and still up here. When I switch the ceiling fan off it gets so hot, sometimes, that I wake up in the night slippery with sweat and hardly able to breathe. That is the only time the anxiety creeps in.

I love living like this more than I can ever say. Whatever happens in the rest of my life (and I have a pretty good idea now of the way I’d like it to go – more of that in a minute), I know that it will never get better than this. This has been my turning point. Talking to Rachel today was the first time I felt I just wanted to hang out with someone and relax. I felt the tension drift away.

I come with no baggage, here. Travellers all dress the same, in the clothes you buy at the stalls. The baggy trousers, Thai Coca-Cola T-shirts, flip-flops. I’m a million miles away from the privately educated uptight London girl who avoided trouble at all costs.

So, things could go two ways for the new improved me. I might get caught this time. Then I would just see what happened. It would be horrific, I know, but I almost don’t care. I’d rather that happened than that I went back to the life I used to have. If I were caught, I’d be in the papers and they’d pardon me because I’m young and female. Everyone at home would be astonished. My dad would feel terrible, and he would be mightily embarrassed in front of all his ‘contacts’.

Alternatively, I stop. And I stay in Asia, and I get a sensible job, in Bangkok or Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. I could live out here and travel around. The more I think about it, the more I want to do that. For the first time, I don’t want to be caught crossing the border. That is slightly worrying. It means there is too much at stake.

April 3rd

I’m sitting out on my little rotting balcony now, in the early morning, and I can see Rachel bustling around her own shack, checking if the sarong and bikini she hung up last night are dry.

Rachel is my new friend. She’s from New Zealand. A couple of days ago we had a ‘friendship at first sight’ moment, actually quite like Jake and me with our ‘lust at first sight’. Sometimes being a backpacker is like being a four-year-old. When you’re four, you go to a playground, walk up to another child and say ‘I’m four,’ and they say ‘So am I,’ and you’re friends. It’s like that. I saw Rachel, liked her, and we started talking, and so we became friends.

She’s tall and slim and gorgeous. I’m looking across at her now, wishing I had her bone structure and her long hair. She looks like a French film star or something, and she’s funny.

She’s just turned round and smiled at me and asked why I’m staring. She even said, ‘Are you writing about me?’

We met right here, when I was standing on my balcony early in the morning a couple of days ago, looking out at the sea. I woke earlier than this and went out to watch the fishing boats in the pinkish glow of the sunrise. I was standing there in just a baggy T-shirt and knickers, gazing and thinking, when she said, ‘Morning!’ and it shocked me so much that I screamed.

Then I laughed because I felt stupid, as she was just on the next balcony, a few metres away, doing exactly the same thing as me. Standing there looking out at the sea.

‘I’m Lara,’ I told her, though I am never that forward. Normally I keep the wall up for as long as I can.

‘Rachel,’ she said.

‘Australian?’

‘Kiwi.’

‘Oh, sorry, is that a faux pas?’

‘Yeah. It would have been if I was incredibly precious and chippy.’ And just like that, we were friends. We went to breakfast together, lay on the beach together, and chatted when we felt like it, swapped novels, said nothing when we felt like saying nothing. She found an unlikely little Scrabble set on a shelf in a bar, and we’ve played over and over again. We’re very evenly matched.

I’ve never had a friend like Rachel before. Which, I can now see, is because home life has been so constrained, so uptight, so miserable that I never managed a proper friendship. How pathetic.

She doesn’t have an idyllic home situation either, though she hasn’t said much about it. I haven’t told her the tawdry story of my boring boyfriend either – the thing that brought me out here – but I will.

And now the sun is getting stronger and I need to put some cream on, and a hat, or I’ll get burned. Rachel’s setting off from her bungalow, heading down the steps towards mine. I might suggest we halve costs by moving into one of them together.

April 6th

I keep the phone on a splintery little shelf that I can only reach by standing on my rickety chair, and although I still switch it on and check it twice a day, more and more I don’t actually want to hear from Jake.

I wish I could stay here for ever. No one can reach me. There are no letters, no cards, no emails, and only Jake has my phone number. Nobody from the wider world has the faintest idea where I am.

It is strange to live in a world in which my own parents, Bernard and Victoria Wilberforce, depend on filthy money procured for them by their corrupted favourite child. Just so they can keep up appearances in suburbia. They might not know where their money comes from, but they should ask. How could they let me be doing this on the other side of the world? How can they not care? It makes me wonder if they even like me at all.

I always pretended I wasn’t their favourite, even though nothing could have been more obvious. Olivia told me they loved me better than her hundreds, probably thousands of times, and I always denied it because I was hardly going to say ‘yes, of course they do’. Now I am far enough away. I have no idea why, but Dad always appeared to hate her. No wonder she turned out so vile.

I will never forgive Dad for that day. He took me aside, into his study, a room we were rarely allowed to go into. It smells of stale cigarettes in there, because he smokes with the window slightly open and thinks that means it’s ventilated.

We sat at his stupid shiny desk, and I remember that it was so polished I could see my face in it, though I pretended I wasn’t doing that.

‘Lara,’ he said. ‘Look. I’m going to tell you something that I need you to keep to yourself.’