The Beach

∨ The Beach ∧

49

Seeing Red

The rain continued to pour all through that week and half the next, but in the early hours of a Thursday morning it stopped. Everyone was relieved, and no one more than the fishing details. Sitting on the seabed for one-minute bursts, occasionally spotting a fish and usually missing it, had got old pretty fast. When we woke to see that the blue skies were back, we couldn’t get down to the water quick enough. Something of a killing frenzy ensued – we caught our entire quota within an hour and a half – and after that, the only thing left to kill was time.

Gregorio and Étienne swam off to the coral gardens, and Françoise and I swam back to the beach to sunbathe. We lay in silence at first, me watching how much sweat could collect in my belly button before it spilled out, and Françoise on her front, sifting sand through her fingers. A few metres away, in the shade of the trees, our catch splashed in their buckets. Considering its source, the sound was strangely soothing. It complemented the moment – the sea breeze and the sunshine – and I missed it when the fish were all dead.

Not long after the last splash Françoise sat up, twisting gracefully out of her recline so that she was kneeling with her hands on her hips and her slim brown legs tucked neatly to the side. Then she rolled the top of her swimming costume down to her waist and stretched her arms up at the blue sky. She held that pose for several seconds before relaxing again and dropping her hands into her lap.

Without thinking I sighed, and Françoise glanced at me. ‘What is the matter?’ she said.

I blinked. ‘Nothing.’

‘You sighed.’

‘Oh…I was just thinking…’ My mind ran through a quick list of options: the return of the sunshine, the stillness of the lagoon, the whiteness of the sand.’…how easy it would be to stay here.’

‘Ah yes.’ Françoise nodded. ‘To stay on the beach for ever. Very easy…’

I paused for a moment, then sat up too, spilling my sweat reservoir into the waistband of my shorts. ‘Do you ever think about home, Françoise?’

‘Paris?’

‘Paris, family, friends…All that.’

‘Uh…No, Richard. I do not.’

‘Yeah. I don’t either. But don’t you think that’s a bit strange? I mean, I’ve got a whole life back in England that I can hardly remember, let alone miss. I haven’t telephoned or written to my parents since arriving in Thailand, and I sort of know they’ll be worried about me, but I don’t feel the urge to do anything about it. When I was in Ko Pha-Ngan, it didn’t even cross my mind…Don’t you think that’s strange?’

‘Parents…’ Françoise frowned as if she were struggling to remember the word. ‘Yes, it is strange, but…’

‘When did you last contact them?’

‘I do not know…It was…That road. The road we met you.’

‘Khao San.’

‘I called them from there…’

‘Three months ago.’

‘Three months…Yes…’

We both lay back down on the hot sand. I think the mention of parents was slightly disquieting and neither of us wanted to dwell on the subject.

But I did find it interesting that I wasn’t the only one to experience the amnesiac effect of the beach. I wondered where the effect came from, and whether it was to do with the beach itself or the people on it. It suddenly occurred to me that I knew nothing about the past lives of my companions, except their place of origin. I’d spent countless hours talking to Keaty, and the only thing I knew about his background was that he used to go to Sunday school. But I didn’t know if he had brothers or sisters, or what his parents did, or the area of London where he grew up. We might have had a thousand shared experiences that we’d never made an effort to uncover.

The only talking topic that stretched beyond the circle of cliffs was travel. That was something we talked about a lot. Even now, I can still reel off the list of countries that my friends had visited. In a way it wasn’t so surprising, considering that (apart from our ages) an interest in travel was the only thing we all had in common. And actually, travel conversation was a pretty good substitute for conversation about home. You could tell plenty about someone from the places they’d chosen to visit, and which of those places were their favourites.

Unhygienix, for example, reserved his deepest affection for Kenya, which somehow suited his taciturn nature. It was easy to imagine him on safari, quietly absorbing the vastness of the landscape around him. Keaty, livelier and more prone to enthusiastic outbursts, was much more suited to Thailand. Étienne had an unfulfilled yearning to go to Bhutan, quietly good-natured fellow that he was, and Sal often talked about Ladakh – the northern province of India, laid-back in some ways and hard-edged in others. I knew my affection for the Philippines was equally as telling: a democracy on paper, apparently well-ordered, regularly subverted by irrational chaos. A place where I’d felt instantly at home.

Amongst some of the others, Greg went for gentle Southern India, Françoise went for beautiful Indonesia, Moshe went for Borneo – which I took to be connected to the jungle-like growth of his body hair – and the two Yugoslavian girls chose their own country, appropriately nationalistic and off the wall. Daffy, I didn’t need to be told, would have chosen Vietnam.

Of course, I know there’s an element of pop psychology about how much you can read into people’s favourite travel locations. You can choose which aspects of a nation’s character you want to accept or ignore. In the case of Keaty, I chose liveliness and enthusiasm because mercenary and calculating didn’t fit the bill, and in the case of Françoise I ignored dictatorship and mass murder in East Timor. But nonetheless, I have faith in the principle.

♦

‘I’m going to take the catch back,’ I said, standing up.

Françoise pushed herself up on to her elbows. ‘Now?’

‘Unhygienix might be ready.’

‘He will not be ready.’

‘Well, no…but I fancy a walk. You want to come?’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Uh, don’t know. I was thinking about heading for the waterfall or into the jungle somewhere…maybe to find that pool.’

‘No, I think I will stay here. Or maybe I will swim to the corals.’

‘OK.’

I walked to the buckets, and as I bent to lift them I saw my face reflected in the bloody water. I paused to study myself, almost a silhouette with two bright eyes, and then I heard Françoise padding over the beach towards me. Her dark face appeared behind my shoulders and I felt her hand on my back.

‘You do not want to come to the corals?’

‘No.’ My fingers squeezed around the handles but I didn’t straighten, knowing that if I did her hand would drop. ‘I’d rather go for a walk…Are you sure you don’t want to come?’

‘Yes.’ Her red reflection shrugged. ‘It is too hot to walk today.’

I didn’t reply, and a couple of seconds later I heard her footsteps padding back across the sand. When I looked around she was wading into the water. I watched her until the water reached her torso, then started the walk back to camp.