‘Voices,’ said Étienne quietly. ‘You can hear it?’
I strained to listen again. This time I found it, distant but getting clearer.
‘It’s Thai.’
I choked. ‘Fuck! We’ve got to run!’ I clambered to my feet but Étienne dragged me back down.
‘Richard,’ he said, and through my fear some part of me registered surprise at the calm expression on his face. ‘If we run we will be seen.’
‘So what do we do?’
He pointed to a dark copse. ‘We hide in there.’
♦
Lying flat against the earth, peering through the mesh of leaves, we waited for the people to appear.
At first it seemed that they would pass us out of sight, then a branch cracked and a man stepped into the field, close to where Étienne and I had been standing a few minutes before. He was young, maybe twenty, with a kick-boxer’s build. His chest was bare and etched with muscle, and he wore military trousers – dark-green and baggy, with pouches sewn into the legs. In his hand was a long machete. Slung over his shoulder was an automatic rifle.
I could feel Françoise’s body pressed against mine – she was trembling. I looked round, somehow thinking I might calm her, but I could feel the tightness in my face. She stared at me, eyebrows raised as if she wanted me to explain. I shook my head helplessly.
A second man appeared, older, also armed. They stopped and exchanged a few words. Though they stood more than twenty metres away, the curious looping sound of their language carried perfectly over the distance. Then another man called out from within the jungle and they set off again, vanishing over the ridge, down the slope we’d originally come from.
♦
Two or three minutes after their sing-song chatter had faded away, Françoise suddenly burst into tears. Then Étienne started crying too. He lay on his back and covered his eyes, his hands bunched into fists.
I watched the two of them blankly. I felt in limbo. The shock of discovering the fields and the tension while we’d been hiding had left me empty. I just knelt on the ground, sweat running from my hairline and down the side of my face, and thought of nothing.
Finally I managed to gather my wits. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Étienne was right. They didn’t know we were here, but they might find out soon.’ I reached for my bag. ‘We’ve got to leave.’
Françoise sat up, wiping her eyes on her mud-streaked T–shirt. ‘Yes,’ she muttered. ‘Come, Étienne.’
Étienne nodded. ‘Richard,’ he said firmly. ‘I do not want to die here.’
I opened my mouth to speak but couldn’t think what to say.
‘I do not want to die here,’ he repeated. ‘You must get us out.’
∨ The Beach ∧
20
Falling Down
I must get them out? Me? I couldn’t believe my ears. He’d been the one who’d kept his head when the dope guards were coming. I’d lost my shit. I felt like saying, ‘You fucking get us out!’
But just by looking at him I could tell he wasn’t about to take control of the situation. And neither was Françoise. She was gazing at me with the same scared, expectant expression as Étienne.
So, not having a choice, it ended up being me who took the decision to go on. In one direction there were gunmen, walking along the tracks we had ignorantly assumed were made by animals. Perhaps they were even on the way to the beach and would find a chocolate-wrapper or footprints that would betray our presence. In the other direction we didn’t know what we might find. Maybe more fields, maybe more gunmen, maybe a beach full of westerners, and maybe nothing at all.
Better the devil you know is a cliché I now despise. Hidden in the bushes, shivering with fright, I learnt that if the devil you know is the guard of a drug plantation, then all other devils pale in comparison.
♦
I have almost no recollection of the few hours after leaving the plateau. I think I was concentrating so hard on the immediate that my mind couldn’t afford space for anything else. Maybe to have a memory you need time for reflection, however brief, just to let the memory find a place to settle.
What I do have is a couple of snapshot images: the view from the pass looking back on the dope fields below us; and a more surreal one – surreal because it’s a sight I could never have seen. But if I close my eyes I can see it as clearly as I can see any image in my mind.
It’s the three of us making our way down the mountain on the far side of the pass. I’m looking from behind, so I can only see our backs, and the image is elevated slightly as if I’m standing further up the slope. We don’t have our bin-liner bags. My arms are empty and outstretched, like I’m trying to steady myself, and Étienne is holding one of Françoise’s hands.
The other strange thing is that beyond us I can see the lagoon and a white smear of sand over the treetops. But that isn’t possible. We never saw the lagoon until we reached the waterfall.
♦
It was the height of a four-storey building – the kind of height I hate to stand upright near. To gauge the drop I had to crawl to the cliff edge on my belly, afraid that the sense of balance which allows me to stand on a chair would desert me and I would lunge drunkenly forward to my death.
On either side the cliff continued, eventually curving around into the sea, then, unbroken, rejoining the land on the far side. It was as if a giant circle had been cut out of the island to enclose the lagoon in a wall of rock – just as Zeph had described. From where we sat, we could see that the sea-locked cliffs were no more than thirty metres thick, but a passing boat could never guess what lay behind them. They would only see a continuous jungle-topped coastline. The lagoon was presumably supplied by underwater caves and channels.
The falls dropped into a pool from which a quick-flowing stream ran into the trees. The highest trees were more than equal to our height. If they’d been a little closer to the precipice we could have used them to get down – and getting down was the big problem. The drop was too sheer and too far to consider climbing.
‘What do you think?’ I said, crawling back from the cliff edge towards Étienne and Françoise.
‘What do you think?’ Étienne replied, apparently not yet ready to let control pass from my hands.
I sighed. ‘I think we’ve definitely found the right place. It’s where Mister Duck’s map says it is, and it fits Zeph’s description perfectly.’
‘So near and so far.’
‘So near and yet so far,’ I corrected vacantly. ‘That’s about it.’
Françoise stood up and stared over the lagoon towards the seaward rock-face.
‘Perhaps we should walk around there,’ she suggested. ‘It may be easier to climb.’
‘It’s higher than here. You can see where the land rises.’
‘We could jump into the sea. It is not too high to jump.’
‘We’d never clear the rocks.’
She looked irritated and tired. ‘OK, Richard, but there must be a way down, no? If people go to this beach, there must be a way.’
‘If people go to this beach,’ I echoed. We hadn’t seen any sign that people were down there. I’d been carrying an idea that when we reached the beach we’d see groups of friendly travellers with sun-kissed faces, hanging out, coral diving, playing Frisbee. All that stuff. As it was, from what we could see the beach looked beautiful but completely deserted.
‘Maybe we can jump from this waterfall,’ said Étienne. ‘It is not so high as the cliff in the sea.’
I thought for a moment. ‘Possibly,’ I replied, and rubbed my eyes. The adrenalin that had kept me going over the pass had faded and now I was exhausted, so exhausted I couldn’t even feel relief at having found the beach. I was also dying for a cigarette. I’d thought of lighting up several times but was still too jumpy about who might smell the smoke.