It was during one of our endless Plan B discussions that I discovered Jed had once watched me in exactly the same way as we were now watching Zeph and Sammy. He’d seen the spiv drop us off and when we’d made the swim he’d told Sal – which was why she, Bugs and Cassie had been ready to greet us when we reached the camp. This was the main function of his detail, as a look-out, and the dope collecting had been more of a sideline. He went on to tell me that since his arrival there had been three groups that had tried to find the lagoon. Two had given up at one or other of the obstacles. The one to get through had been the Swedes’.
Knowing this made me feel marginally less guilty about having given out a copy of the map, because people were managing to find their way to us anyway. Jed explained they’d have heard about the beach as the Eden rumour Zeph had described. Jed himself had heard it from a guy in Vientiane, and ‘with nothing better to do’ he’d decided to follow it up. He’d had to check out six other islands in the marine park before finding the right one. The Swedes had gone on more concrete information. They’d overheard Sal talking with Jean on a Chaweng Rice Run.
It came as a surprise to me to hear that acting as a look-out was the primary function of my new detail. I couldn’t understand why the job needed to be clouded in so much mystery, and Jed, in turn, was a little surprised to hear that the mystery existed. He admitted that Sal didn’t want it talked about as she felt it would be bad for the atmosphere, but as far as he was concerned, the main reason he didn’t talk about it was because nobody ever asked him.
This had led to my most interesting revelation about Jed, connected to Daffy’s reaction to his uninvited arrival on the beach. I remembered Keaty telling me that the camp had listened outside the longhouse while Daffy shouted and Sal tried to calm him down. What I didn’t know was that Daffy had refused to speak to Jed from that day on. For the thirteen months until Daffy had left the island, he and Jed had never exchanged a single word. It had been the original reason for the creation of Jed’s detail – to keep him away from the rest of the camp for most of the day.
I felt a great deal of pity for Jed when he told me this. It explained why he’d always seemed so distant from the rest of us. His apparent aloofness was only because he felt he ought to keep out of people’s way, even now that a year and a half had passed. It also explained why he so conspicuously accepted unpopular tasks, such as the Rice Run.
But Jed didn’t appear to feel any pity for himself. When I suggested to him that it must have been hard to have faced such a cold reaction, he shrugged and said he could understand it.
♦
‘Something’s bothering me,’ I said, putting down Jed’s binoculars.
Jed frowned. ‘You and me both.’
‘I’m afraid they’ll find my rucksack.’
‘…Your rucksack?’
‘I hid my rucksack there, and so did Étienne and Françoise. We couldn’t swim with them…and if they find our bags they’ll know they’re on the right track.’
‘…How well did you hide them?’
‘Pretty well. The thing is, I’m starting to think I might have copied the map down wrong. I drew it in a real hurry and there were a lot of islands to fill in. I remember there were differences between Daffy’s map and the map in Étienne’s guidebook too. I easily could have missed out an island between Ko Phelong and here.’
Jed nodded. ‘It’s possible.’
‘So if they reckon they’re on the right island, that explains why they haven’t moved for the last nine days. They’re checking the place out, looking for the beach…which they won’t find…but they might find the rucksacks.’
‘It’s possible,’ Jed repeated. ‘But they might also have spent the last nine days wondering how the fuck they’re going to get back to Ko Pha-Ngan.’
‘And wondering how they could have been so stupid as to believe in a map that someone slid under their door.’
‘That would make them about as stupid as you then.’
‘Stupid as me…Yeah.’
Jed scowled and ran his hands over his face. ‘What I want to know is what they’re doing for food and water.’
‘Magi-Noodles and chocolate. That’s what we did.’
‘And water? They’d have needed to take a barrel of the stuff to have lasted this long.’
‘Maybe there’s a source on the island. It’s high enough.’
‘Must be…I’ll tell you what, though, you’re wrong about that map. Look at them. They sit on that one spot all fucking day. It faces us, right? So they know this is the right island. They’re sitting there and trying to work out how to reach us…’
I sighed. ‘You know what we should do?’
‘No.’
‘We should take the boat and head round to them. Then we get them on board, set a course for the open sea, and make them walk the plank. Problem solved.’
Jed tilted his head at the sky. ‘OK, Richard, let’s do it.’
‘OK. Let’s.’
‘OK.’
‘OK.’
We looked at each other briefly, then I went back to staring through the binoculars.
∨ The Beach ∧
56
White Lies
We’d stay at our look-out post until the bottom curve of the sun was just about to hit the horizon, then we’d head back. There wasn’t much point spying if it was too dark to see, and anyway, Jed said it wasn’t safe to be up on the island after nightfall. You didn’t know what or who you might be walking into. Back at camp, Jed would go and talk to Sal – filling her in on the day’s non-events – and I’d get some dinner. Then, carrying my bowl of leftovers, I’d look for my old fishing detail. Usually I’d find them near the kitchen hut, having a smoke before bedtime.
Lying to Sal and Bugs was easy but I hated lying to my old detail, and I hated lying to Keaty even more. The truth was that I didn’t have a choice. Until we knew whether Zeph and Sammy would make it to the beach, there was no sense in stirring. The best I could do was satisfy Keaty’s curiosity about the exact nature of Jed’s work, and when I told him he wasn’t as surprised as I’d expected him to be.
‘It’s a good idea,’ he said, matter of factly. ‘Since the Swedes, people have been worried about who might turn up.’
‘What about since me?’
‘Daffy told you. It’s different.’
‘Were people angry about the Swedes then?’
‘…Daffy mainly.’
‘Jed said Daffy didn’t like him much either.’
Keaty started cleaning his Gameboy screen against his shorts. ‘He didn’t make it very easy for any of them, but once they were here…you know…what could he do?’
‘Is that why he left the beach?’
My question hung in the air while Keaty carefully inspected the tiny glass panel.
I asked him again.
‘Basically,’ he said eventually. ‘Yeah.’ He pushed in the Mario cart and switched on the machine. ‘You completed this yet?’