The Beach

∨ The Beach ∧

28

‘Night John-Boy

Routines developed quickly.

I’d wake around seven, seven thirty, then head straight down to the beach with Étienne and Keaty. Usually Françoise wouldn’t swim because it was too much hassle getting the salt out of her long hair every day, but sometimes she would. Then we’d go back to the camp and rinse off in the shower hut.

Breakfast was at eight. Every morning the kitchen crew would boil up a load of rice, and it was up to the individual to sort out anything else. Most had their rice plain, but a few made the effort to boil up some fish or vegetables. I never bothered. For the first three days we mixed in our Magi-Noodles for a bit of flavour, but when the Magi-Noodles ran out we settled for the rice.

After breakfast people would begin to disperse. Mornings were for working and everybody had their job to do. By nine the camp was always empty.

There were four main areas of work: fishing, gardening, cooking and carpentry.

Étienne, Françoise and I were on the fishing detail. Before we’d arrived there’d been two fishing groups, but we made it three. Gregorio and us made up one group, Moshe and the two Yugoslavian girls made up another, and the last group was a bunch of Swedish guys. They were very serious about their fishing and every day they’d swim through the cliff caves to the open sea. Sometimes they’d come back with fish as big as your leg and everybody would make a fuss over them.

Work-wise, I felt pretty lucky. If it hadn’t been for Étienne and Françoise volunteering to go fishing on that first day, we wouldn’t have met Gregorio, and I might have ended up on the gardening detail. Keaty was on the gardening detail and he used to complain about it all the time. He had to work over half an hour from the clearing, up by the waterfall. The head gardener was Jean, a farmer’s son from south-western France who pronounced his name like he was clearing his throat, and he ran his garden with an iron fist. The problem was, once you’d taken on a job it was pretty hard to change. It wasn’t like there were rules, but everybody worked in groups so if you changed jobs you had to leave one group and break into another.

If I hadn’t been a fisher, I probably would have tried to get in with the carpenters. Kitchen duties didn’t appeal at all. Aside from the hellish chore of cooking dinner for thirty people every day, the three cooks all carried a lingering odour of fish innards around with them. The head cook, whose nickname was Unhygienix, had his own private store of soap in his tent. He seemed to get through a bar a week, but it didn’t do any good.

The carpenters were run by Bugs. Bugs was Sal’s boyfriend, and he was a carpenter by trade. He’d been responsible for the longhouse and all the huts, and he’d had the idea of tying the branches together to make the canopy ceiling. From the way people treated him, it was obvious that Bugs was much respected. It was partly that everybody relied on the things he made, but it was also because he was Sal’s boyfriend.

If there was a leader, it was Sal. When she talked, people listened. She spent her days wandering around the lagoon, checking on the different work details and making sure things were running smoothly. At first she devoted a lot of time to making sure we were settling in OK, and often joined us when we swam down to the boulders, but after the first week she seemed satisfied, and we rarely saw her during the work period.

The only person who didn’t have a clear working detail was Jed. He spent his days alone and was usually the first person to leave in the mornings and the last person to come back. Keaty said that Jed spent a lot of time near the waterfall and above the cliffs. Every now and then he would disappear and spend the night somewhere on the island. When he turned up again he usually had fresh grass, obviously taken from the dope fields.

Around two thirty, people would start drifting back to camp. The kitchen crew and the fishers would always be first so the food could be prepared. Then the garden detail would arrive with their vegetables and fruit, and by three the clearing would be full again.

Breakfast and dinner were the only meals of the day. We didn’t really need more. ‘Dinner was at four o’clock and usually people went to bed about nine. There wasn’t much to be done after dark, apart from get stoned. Night-time camp-fires weren’t allowed because fires were too conspicuous to low planes, even through the canopy ceiling. There were a lot of low planes around, flying to and from the airstrip on Ko Samui.

Apart from those with tents, everybody slept in the longhouse. It took me a while to get used to sleeping with twenty-one other people, but soon I started enjoying it. There was a strong sense of closeness in the longhouse which Keaty and the others with tents missed out on. There was also the ritual. It didn’t happen every night, but it happened often, and every time it made me smile.

The origin of the ritual was the Waltons TV series. At the end of each episode you’d see a shot of the Waltons’ house and hear all of them saying good night to each other.

The way it worked in the longhouse was like this.

Just as people were drifting off, a sleepy voice from somewhere in the darkness would say, ‘Night John-Boy.’ Then there’d be a short pause while we waited for the cue to be picked up, and eventually you’d hear someone say ’

‘Night, Frankie,’ or Sal, or Gregorio, or Bugs, or anyone they felt like saying good night to. Then the named person would have to say good night to someone different, and it would go around the whole longhouse until everyone had been mentioned.

Anybody could start the game off and there was no order to the names called out. When there were only a few names left it got difficult remembering which people had been mentioned and which hadn’t, but that was part of the game. If you screwed it up, then there’d be loud tuts and exaggerated sighs until you got it right.

Although the ritual was sort of taking the piss, in another way it wasn’t. No one’s name was ever passed over and right from the first time we heard it Étienne, Françoise and I were included.

The nicest thing was when you heard your name but you couldn’t recognize the voice. I always found it comforting that someone unexpected would think to choose me. I’d fall asleep wondering who it could have been, and who I’d choose the next time.