The Beach

∨ The Beach ∧

9

R & R

The journey from the train station at Surat Thani to Ko Samui passed in a sleep-fogged blur. I vaguely remember following Étienne and Françoise on to the bus to Don Sak, and my only memory of the ferry ride was of Étienne shouting in my ear over the noise of the boat’s engines. ‘There, Richard!’ he yelled, pointing towards the horizon. ‘That’s the marine park!’ A cluster of blue-green shapes was just visible in the distance. I nodded obligingly. I was more interested in finding a soft spot on my backpack to use as a pillow.

♦

Our jeep from the Ko Samui port to the Chaweng beach resort was a big open-top Isuzu. On the left the sea lay blue between rows of coconut palms, and on the right a jungle-covered slope rose steeply. Ten travellers sat behind the driver’s cabin, our bags clamped between our knees, our heads rolling with the corners. One had a baseball bat resting against his shoulder, another held a camera on his lap. Brown faces flashed past us through the green. ‘Delta One-Niner,’ I muttered. ‘This is Alpha patrol.’ The jeep left us outside a decent-looking bunch of beach huts, but backpacker protocol demanded we check out the competition. After half an hour of slogging across the hot sand, we returned to the huts we’d first seen.

Private showers, a bedside fan, a nice restaurant that looked on to the sea. Our huts faced each other over a gravel path lined with flowers. It was très beau, Françoise said with a happy sigh, and I agreed.

The first thing I did after shutting the door behind me was to go to the bathroom mirror and examine my face. I hadn’t seen my reflection for a couple of days and wanted to check things were OK.

It was a bit of a shock. Being around lots of tanned skin I’d somehow assumed I was also tanned, but the ghost in the mirror corrected me. My whiteness was accentuated by my stubble, which, like my hair, is jet black. UV deprivation aside, I was in bad need of a shower. My T–shirt had the salty stiffness of material that has been sweated in, sun-dried, then sweated in again. I decided to head straight to the beach for a swim. I could kill two birds with one stone – soak up a few rays and get clean.

Chaweng was a travel-brochure photo. Hammocks slung in the shade of curving palm trees, sand too bright to look at, jet-skis tracing white patterns like jet-planes in a clear sky. I ran down to the surf, partly because the sand was so hot and partly because I always run into the sea. When the water began to drag on my legs I jumped up, and the momentum somersaulted me forwards. I landed on my back and sank to the bottom, exhaling. On the seabed I let myself rest, head tilted slightly forward to keep the air trapped in my nose, and listened to the soft clicks and rushes of underwater noise.

♦

I’d been splashing around in the water for fifteen minutes or so when Étienne came down to join me. He also ran across the sand and somersaulted into the sea, but then leapt up with a yelp.

‘What’s up?’ I called.

Étienne shook his head, pushing backwards through the water away from where he’d landed. ‘This! This animal! This…fish!’

I began wading towards him. ‘What fish?’

‘I do not know the English – Aaah! Aaah! There are more! Aaah! Stinging!’

‘Oh,’ I said as I reached him. ‘Jellyfish! Great!’

I was pleased to see the pale shapes, floating in the water like drops of silvery oil. I loved their straightforward weirdness, the strange area they occupied between plant and animal life.

I learnt an interesting thing about jellyfish from a Filipino guy. He was one of the only people my age on an island where I’d once stayed, so we became pals. We spent many happy weeks together playing Frisbee on the beach, then diving into the South China Sea. He taught me that if you pick up jellyfish with the palm of your hand, you don’t get hurt – although then you had to be careful to scrub your hands, because if you rubbed your eyes or scratched your back the poison would lift off and sting like mad. We used to have jellyfish fights, hurling the tennis-ball-sized globs at each other. On a calm day you could skim them over the sea like flat pebbles, although if you chucked them too hard they tended to explode. He also told me that you can eat them raw, like sushi. He was right. Literally speaking, you can, as long as you don’t mind a few days of stomach cramps and vomiting.

I looked at the jellyfish around us. They looked the same as the ones in the Philippines so I decided it was worth the risk of a sting, thinking how worldly and impressive it would seem to Étienne. The gamble paid off. His eyes opened wide as I plucked one of the quivering blobs from the sea.

‘Mon Dieu!’ he exclaimed.

I smiled. I didn’t realize French people actually said ‘Mon Dieu’. I always thought it was the same thing as English people supposedly saying ‘what’ at the end of every sentence.

‘It is not hurting, Richard?’

‘Nope. It’s about how you hold it, like stinging nettles. You try.’

I held out the jellyfish.

‘No, I do not want to.’

‘It’s fine. Go on.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, sure. Hold your hands like mine.’

I slid the jellyfish into his cupped hands.

‘Oooh,’ he said, a big grin spreading over his face.

‘But you can only touch it with your palms. If you touch it anywhere else it’ll sting.’

‘Only the palm? Why is that?’

I shrugged. ‘Don’t know. That’s the rule.’

‘I think maybe the skin is more thick there.’

‘Maybe.’ I picked another one out of the water. ‘They’re weird, aren’t they? Look, you can see right through them. They don’t have any brains.’

Étienne nodded enthusiastically.

We peered at our jellyfish in silence for a few moments, then I noticed Françoise. She was on the beach, walking towards the water in a one-piece white swimsuit. She saw us and waved. As her arm lifted her swimsuit drew tightly over her chest and shadows from the one o’clock sun defined her breasts, the dip under the ribcage, a groove of muscle down her stomach.

I glanced at Étienne. He was still examining his jellyfish, pulling its tentacles outwards from the bell so it sat on his palm like a glass flower. Perhaps familiarity had blunted him to Françoise’s beauty.

When she reached us she was unimpressed by our catch. ‘I do not like them,’ she said curtly. ‘Will you come for a swim?’

I pointed at the chest-deep water, shoulder-deep for Françoise. ‘We are swimming, aren’t we?’

‘No,’ said Étienne, finally looking up. ‘She means a swim.’ He gestured to the open sea. ‘Out there.’

♦

We played a game as we swam out. Every thirty feet we would each dive to the bottom and return with a handful of sand.

I found the game strangely unpleasant. A metre underwater the warmth of the tropical sea would stop, and it would turn cold, so abruptly that by treading water one could pinpoint the dividing line. Diving down, the chill would start at the fingertips then swiftly envelop the length of the body.

The further we swam, the blacker and finer the sand became. Soon the water at the bottom became too dark for me to see anything, and I could only blindly kick out with my legs, arms outstretched, until my hands sank into the silt.

I began dreading the cold area. I would hurry to catch my fistful, pushing up hard from the seabed though my lungs were still full of air. In the times I waited at the surface, while Étienne or Françoise swam down, I would keep my legs bunched up beneath me, using my arms to stay afloat.

‘How far out do we go?’ I said when the sunbathers on the beach behind us had turned into ants.

Étienne smiled. ‘You would like to go back now? Are you tired? We can go back.’

Françoise held up her hand clear of the water and unclenched her fingers. A lump of sand rolled out and dropped into the sea, where it sank, leaving a cloudy trail behind.

‘You are tired, Richard?’ she said, eyebrows arched.

‘I’m fine,’ I replied. ‘Let’s swim further.’