A Safe Bet

I wouldn't call it a dream. Nothing with Mister Duck was like a dream. In this case, it was 'more like a movie. Or news footage, swaying on a hand-held camera.

Mister Duck was sprinting towards me across the embassy lawn, his wrists still freshly slit, blood looping out from the cuts as he pumped his arms. I was reeling from the noise of the screaming crowds and helicopters, watching a snowfall of shredded files. Classified snow, swirling in the backdraft from the rotor blades, settling on the manicured grass.

'Born twenty years too late?' shouted Mister Duck, belting past me and flipping into a cartwheel. 'Fuck that!' His blood echoed the movement, briefly hanging in the air like the trace from a firework.

'See up there!'

I looked where he pointed. A hovering insect shape was lifting off the roof, with people clinging to the landing skids. It dipped as it pulled away, struggling with the heavy load, and clipped a tree outside the embassy walls.

I shouted with excitement.

'That's the boy!' Mister Duck yelled, ruffling my hair with a wet hand, soaking the collar of my shirt. 'That's the kid!'

'Do we get to escape from the embassy roof?' I yelled back. 'I always wanted to do that!'

'Escape from the embassy roof?'

'Do we get to?'

'You bet,' he laughed. 'You fucking bet.'

Leaving

I drew quickly, sweating despite the early morning chill. There wasn't time to take the same kind of care over the map as Mister Duck had. The islands were rough circles, the curving shore line of Thailand a series of jagged lines, and there were only three labels. Ko Samui, Ko Phelong, and Eden.

At the bottom of the page I wrote 'Wait on Chaweng for three days. If we haven't come back by then it means we made it to the beach. See you there? Richard.'

I crept outside. A light already shone in Francoise and Etienne's hut. Shivering, I stole along the porch and slipped the map under Zeph and Sammy's door. Then I collected my bag, locked up my room, and went to the restaurant to wait for the others.

The Thai boy who'd been kicking the coconut husk was sweeping the floor. As I arrived he glanced outside, to check it was as early as he thought it was.

'You wan' banan' pancake?' he asked cautiously.

I shook my head. 'No thanks. But I would like to buy four hundred cigarettes.'

GETTING THERE

Littering

The spiv's motor boat was painted white down to the watermark strip, and below that it was yellow – or yellow when it lifted clear of the sea, pale green when it sank back down. At one time his boat must have been red. The white was blistered or scraped away in places, leaving crimson streaks that looked like cuts. With the rolling movement and growling engine, the cuts were enough to make me feel the boat was alive. It knew which way I expected it to lurch and routinely surprised me.

Beside us, where the water was disturbed, the morning sun played tricks in the sea. Gold shapes like a shoal of fish spun beneath the surface, matching our speed. I reached down and trailed my hand, catching a fish on my palm. It swam there, flickering over my lifeline, then I balled my fist. The fish slipped out and swam on my closed fingers.

'You should not look down,' said Francoise, leaning over from the other side of the boat. 'If you look down, you will feel sick. Watch the island. The island does not move.'

I looked where she pointed. Strangely, Ko Samui seemed miles behind us, but the drop-off island still appeared as distant as it had an hour ago.

'I'm not feeling sick,' I said, and sank my head back over the side.

Hypnotized by the gold fish, I didn't move again until the water turned blue and I saw a coral bed loom beneath me. The spiv cut the engine. I put a hand up to my ears, surprised by the silence, half thinking I might have gone deaf. 'Now you pay,' said the spiv reassuringly, and we slid towards the shore.

The sand was more grey than yellow and strewn with dried seaweed laid out in overlapping arcs by the tide. I sat on the trunk of a fallen coconut tree, watching our ride chug into the distance. Soon it was hard to find, a white speck occasionally appearing on the ridge of a high swell. When five minutes passed without a sighting I realized it had gone and our isolation was complete.

A few metres away, Etienne and Francoise leant on their rucksacks. Etienne was studying the maps, working out which of the several islands near us we had to swim to. He didn't need my help so I called to him that I was going to take a walk. I'd never been on a real desert island before – a deserted desert island – and I felt I ought to explore.

'Where?' he said, looking up and squinting against the sun.

'Just around. I won't be long.'

'Half an hour?'

'An hour.'

'Yes, but we should leave after lunch. We should not spend the night here.'

I waved in reply, already walking away from them.

I stuck to the coast for half a mile, looking for a place to turn inland, and eventually found a bush whose canopy made a dark tunnel into the tree-line. Through it I could see green leaves and sunlight so I crawled inside, brushing spider webs from my face. I came out in a glade of waist-high ferns. Above me was a circle of sky, broken by a branch that jutted out like the hand of a clock. On the far side of the glade the forest began again but my impulse to continue was checked by a fear of getting lost. The runnel I'd crawled through was harder to make out from this end, disguised by the tall grasses, and I could only orientate myself by the sound of breaking waves. I gave up my token exploration and waded through the ferns to the middle of the glade. Then I sat down and smoked a cigarette.

Thinking about Thailand tends to make me angry, and until I started writing this book, I tried not to do it. I preferred it to stay tucked away in the back of my mind. But I did think about Thailand sometimes. Usually late at night, awake long enough so I could see the curtain patterns through the darkness and the shapes of the books on my shelves.

At those times I made an effort to remember sitting in that glade with the shadow of the clock-hand branch lying across the ferns, smoking my cigarette. I chose this moment because it was the last time I could pinpoint, and think: That was me being me. Normal. Nothing much going through my head apart from how pretty the island was, and how quiet.

It isn't that from then on every second in Thailand was bad. Good things happened. Loads of good things. And mundane things too: washing my face in the morning, swimming, fixing some food, whatever. But in retrospect all those instances were coloured by what was going on around them. Sometimes it feels to me like I walked into the glade and lit the cigarette, and someone else came along and finished it. Finished it, stubbed it out, flicked it into the bushes, then went to find Etienne and Francoise. It's a cop-out, because it's another thing that distances me from what happened, but that is how it feels.

This other person did things I wouldn't do. It wasn't just our morals that were at odds; there were little character differences too. The cigarette butt—the other guy flicked it into the bushes. I'd have done something else. Buried it maybe. I hate littering, let alone littering in a protected marine park.

It's hard to explain. I don't believe in possession or the supernatural. I know that in real terms it was me who flicked the cigarette butt.

Fuck it.

I've been relying on an idea that these things would become clear to me as I wrote them down, but it isn't turning out that way.

When I got back to the beach I found Etienne crouched over a little