‘Passports, tickets, traveller’s cheques, cash, malaria pills.’
‘There is no malaria here,’ said Étienne.
‘Anyway,’ Françoise added, ‘we do not need a passport to go to this island.’ She smiled and absently brushed a hand between her breasts. ‘Come on, Richard, we are too close, huh?’
I frowned, not understanding, a list of possibilities appearing in my mind.
‘Too close to give up.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yes. I suppose we are.’
♦
We hid our rucksacks under a thick patch of shrubs near a distinctive palm tree – it had two trunks growing from a single stem. In my bin-liner I packed Puri-Tabs, the chocolate, spare shorts, a T–shirt, Converse shoes, Mister Duck’s map, my water bottle, and two hundred cigarettes. I wanted to take all four hundred, but there wasn’t room. We also had to leave the Calor gas stove. It meant that we’d have to eat cold noodles, soaked long enough to make them soft, but at least we wouldn’t starve. And I left the malaria pills too. After tying the bin-liner with as many knots as the plastic would allow and then sealing them again inside a second bin-liner, we tested their seaworthiness. Without the weight of the rucksacks they floated better than we could have hoped. They were even strong enough to lean on, so we only had to swim with our legs.
At a quarter to four we waded into the sea, finally ready to leave. ‘Maybe more than one kilometre,’ I heard Françoise say behind me. Étienne said something in reply, but it was lost as a wave broke.
♦
The swim passed in stages. The first was full of confidence, chatting as we found a kicking rhythm, and making jokes about sharks. Then, as our legs began to ache and the water no longer felt cold enough to cool us down, we stopped talking. By this time, as on the boat ride from Ko Samui, the beach behind us seemed as far away as the island ahead. The jokes about sharks became fears, and I started to doubt that I had the strength to finish the swim. Or doubt, quote unquote. We were about halfway between the two points. Not being able to finish the swim would mean dying.
If Étienne and Françoise were also worried they did nothing to show it. It wasn’t said, but it felt as if mentioning the fears would only make things worse. In any case, it wasn’t like there was anything we could do to make things easier. We’d put ourselves into the situation. All we could do was deal with it.
And then, strangely, things did become easier. Although my legs still ached like crazy, they’d developed a kind of reflex kick, something like a heartbeat. It kept me moving and allowed my mind to drift beyond the pain. One idea that kept me distracted for ages was composing the newspaper headlines that would inform people back home of my fate. ‘Young Adventurers in Thai-Die Death Swim – Europe Mourns’ covered the necessary angles. Writing my obituary was harder, seeing as I’d never done anything of any importance, but my funeral was a pleasant surprise. I drafted some good speeches, and a lot of people came to hear them.
I’d moved on to thinking that I should try to pass my driving test if I got back to England when I saw driftwood on the beach ahead, and realized we were nearly there. We’d been careful to stick together over most of the swim, but in the last hundred metres Étienne pulled away. When he reached the beach he did a cartwheel, achieved with a last reserve of energy, because then he collapsed and didn’t move again until I joined him.
‘Show me the map,’ he said, trying to sit up.
‘Étienne,’ I replied between gasps for breath, and pushed him back down. ‘We’ve done enough. We’re staying here tonight.’
‘But the beach may be close, no? Maybe it is only a short way down the island.’
‘Enough.’
‘But…’
‘Shh.’
I lay down, pressing the side of my face into the wet sand, my gasps becoming sighs as the aching drained from my muscles. Étienne had a strand of seaweed caught in his hair, a single green dreadlock. ‘What is this?’ he muttered, tugging at it weakly. Down by the sea Françoise splashed out of the water, dragging her bag behind her.
‘I hope this beach exists,’ she said, as she flopped beside us. ‘I am not sure I can do the swim again.’
I was too exhausted to agree.
∨ 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.