The Beach

∨ The Beach ∧

18

All These Things

There are one hundred glow-stars on my bedroom ceiling. I’ve got crescent moons, gibbous moons, planets with Saturn’s rings, accurate constellations, meteor showers, and a whirlpool galaxy with a flying saucer caught in its tail. They were given to me by a girlfriend who was surprised that I often lay awake after she went to sleep. She discovered it one night when she woke to go to the bathroom, and bought me the glow-stars the next day. Glow-stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear.

♦

‘Look,’ Françoise whispered, keeping her voice low so Étienne wouldn’t wake. ‘Do you see?’

I followed the path of her arm, past the delicate wrist and unexplained tattoo, up her finger to the million flecks of light. ‘I don’t,’ I whispered back. ‘Where?’

‘There…Moving. You can see the bright one?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Now look down, then left, and…’

‘Got it. Amazing…’

A satellite, reflecting what – the moon or Earth? Sliding quickly and smoothly through the stars, tonight its orbit passing the Gulf of Thailand, and maybe later the skies of Dakar or Oxford.

Étienne stirred, and turned in his sleep, rustling the bin-liner he’d stretched out beneath him on the sand. In the forest behind us some hidden night bird chattered briefly.

‘Hey,’ I whispered, propping myself up on my elbows. ‘Do you want me to tell you something funny?’

‘What about?’

‘Infinity. But it isn’t that complicated. I mean, you don’t need a degree in – ’

Françoise waved a hand in the air, tracing a red pattern with the tip of her cigarette.

‘Is that a yes?’ I whispered.

‘Yes.’

‘OK.’ I coughed quietly. ‘If you accept that the universe is infinite, then that means there’s an infinite amount of chances for things to happen, right?’

She nodded, and sucked on the red coal floating by her fingertips.

‘Well, if there’s an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen – no matter how small the likelihood.’

‘Ah.’

‘That means, somewhere in space there’s another planet that, by an incredible series of coincidences, developed exactly the same way as ours. Right down to the smallest detail.’

‘Is there?’

‘Definitely. And there’s another which is exactly the same, except that palm tree over there is two feet to the right. And there’s another where the tree is two feet to the left. In fact, there’s planets with infinite amounts of variations on that tree alone, an infinite amount of times…’

Silence. I wondered if she was asleep.

‘So how about that?’ I prompted.

‘Interesting,’ she whispered. ‘In these planets, everything that can happen will happen.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Then in one planet, maybe I am a movie star.’

‘There’s no maybe about it. You live in Beverly Hills and swept last year’s Oscars.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Yeah, but don’t forget, somewhere else your film was a flop.’

‘Oh?’

‘It bombed. The critics turned on you, the studio lost a fortune, and you got into booze and Valium. It was pretty ugly.’

Françoise rolled on to her side and looked at me. ‘Tell me about some other worlds,’ she whispered. In the moonlight her teeth flashed silver as she smiled.

‘Well,’ I replied. ‘That’s a lot to tell.’ Étienne stirred and turned over again.

♦

I leant over and kissed Françoise. She pulled away, or laughed, or shook her head, or closed her eyes and kissed me back. Étienne woke, clasping his mouth in disbelief. Étienne slept. I slept while Françoise kissed Étienne.

Light-years above our bin-liner beds and the steady rush of the surf, all these things happened.

♦

After Françoise had shut her eyes and her breathing had eased into a sleeping rhythm, I crept off my plastic sheet and walked down to the sea. I stood in the shallows, slowly sinking as the tide pulled away the sand around my feet. The lights of Ko Samui glowed on the horizon like a trace of sunset. The spread of stars stretched as far as my ceiling back home.