Mama-San

It had all gone wrong or it had all gone right. I couldn't decide which.

On the one hand, just like on the plateau, when it had come down to it I'd lost my nerve. I hadn't been alert but calm, I'd been alert but queasy. But on the other hand, maybe that was how it should be. Right to panic on the plateau, right to feel sick when I heard the gunshots. I've read about it enough times, seen it in enough films: the first day on your first tour, you're supposed to lose your shit in a contact. Later, more experienced, jaded, you are caught unawares one day that death still has the capacity to appal you. It is something you dwell on, and through it you gain strength.

I ran this second interpretation over and over as I made my way down to the waterfall. I also tried to look on other bright sides. Mainly that our problem with the new arrivals was over, and my part in compromising the beach's secrecy was irreversibly closed. But they didn't make a dent in the way I was feeling. Still battling with my contracting stomach, struggling to focus on the terrain ahead of me, trying to work through my urge to yell. I wanted to yell a lot. Not an Iron John, exorcizing kind of yell. More this kind: running down a road at top speed to catch a bus, and bashing your knee straight into a concrete bollard. Just like you'd done it deliberately, as hard as you possibly could. It isn't a yell born from pain, because at that moment nothing hurts. It's a yell that comes from a brain on overload, refusing to concede what has just happened, and refusing to try.

Sal was waiting for me beneath the waterfall. 'What the hell happened?' she said, more angry than anxious, before I'd even finished swimming to the shore. 'Why did I hear gunshots?'

I didn't answer until I'd reached the shallows and was wading towards her. 'The rafters,' I puffed. The impact on hitting the water always knocked the air out of me, and this time it had been worse than usual.

'They've been killed?'

'Yes. I saw them get caught by the guards and then later I heard the firing.'

'You didn't see it?'

'No.'

'What happened when they were caught?'

'They were beaten.'

'Badly?'

'Yes.'

'Badly enough to scare them? Maybe just a message?'

'Worse.'

'Then?'

'They got taken away somewhere. Dragged.'

'Dragged… You didn't follow.'

'No.'

'What next?'

'The shooting… when I reached the pass.'

'I see…' Sal's eyes bored holes into my head. 'Badly beaten, you say…'

'Very badly.'

'You feel responsible for their deaths.'

I thought about this before replying, not wanting to give away my connection to Zeph and Sammy at this late stage. 'It was their decision to come here,' I said eventually, shifting my weight from my left foot to my right. I was still standing knee-deep in the pool and my feet were sinking slightly into the mud. 'They made a lot of noise in the jungle. It was their fault.'

Sal nodded. 'Others may have heard the shooting. What will you tell them?'

'Nothing.'

'I think Étienne might know about Christo. He's being difficult again…'

'I won't tell Étienne,' I interrupted. 'I won't tell Françoise or Keaty or anyone… Except Jed… You know I'll tell Jed.'

'Of course I do, Richard,' she said crisply. 'But it's nice of you to ask permission.' Then she spun on her heel and began walking away. She didn't even wait for me to climb out of the pool, or to hear me whisper, 'I wasn't asking your fucking permission.'

Reanimator

I didn't follow Sal back to the camp because I didn't want to see everyone yet. In fact, I didn't want to do anything much. Except maybe sleep. It was the idea of oblivion that appealed; nothing to do with tiredness. I wanted to get away from the brain that was still making me want to yell. The problem was, of the various benefits sleep might provide, oblivion wasn't on the cards. If I slept I'd dream, and I knew dreams were not the place to avoid these things.

I ended up talking to myself. Walking around the pool, treating my mind as if it were a separate but reasonable entity, I asked it to leave me alone for a while. Or at least turn down the volume.

This wasn't the deranged caricature if might sound, full of expressive gestures and wild looks. It was an earnest attempt for some peace and quiet that happened not to work. My mind deflected reason like Superman deflecting bullets, chest puffed out, completely unfazed. So I tried a few different tacks, like attempting to get interested in a pretty flower or the bark patterns on the carved tree. But all these techniques failed equally. If they achieved anything, it was that my failure compounded my frustration and made me feel worse.

My last attempt was to dive back into the pool. Underwater had always had the qualities of a refuge for me. Calming, blinding, deafening; a perfect escape. It worked too, enveloping me in anonymous coolness, but in an unavoidably temporary way. Without gills I had to keep surfacing, and as soon as I surfaced my mind resumed its circular debates.

No place to avoid these things. I realized this eventually, hammered into breathless submission. I climbed out of the pool and headed straight into the jungle. I didn't follow the gardeners' path. I followed the network of carpentry paths, which I could use to reach the beach without crossing the clearing.

I'll keep this brief. Absolutely limited to what I remember, with no filling in the blanks. Not that I've been filling in the blanks up until now; it just so happens that my memory of the next few minutes is patchy. No doubt a result of the traumatic morning, and the previously described frame of mind.

'The rafters are dead,' I said. 'Christo will be dead within forty-eight hours. All our problems are over except one. It's time you got sane.' Karl looked at me through his waxy eyes. Or he looked through me, or he wasn't looking at anything at all. Whatever. I didn't really care. I took a step towards him, and as I did so he lashed out viciously at my legs. Maybe revenge for having kicked down his shelter. The blow hurt, so I hit him back.

I sat on his chest, my knees against his upper arms, trying to push a handful of rice into his mouth. His skin reminded me a lot of the dead Freak on Ko Pha-Ngan, slack to the touch, moving loosely over the muscle. Touching it wasn't a pleasant sensation at all. Especially when he began to writhe.

He made sounds, probably words. 'That's the boy!' I shouted. 'Guess I'm curing you now!' His fingers clawed at my neck. I pushed them away. I think I may have lost the rice in the struggle. I think I may have been holding sand.

I assume I closed my eyes. Instead of Karl's face with bugging eyes, I have a mental picture of a reddy-brown blanket. Nothingness, so closed eyes seem like a logical explanation. They would also explain the next image I have in my memory slide-show – a blue blanket, re-opening my eyes for a split second as I fell backwards and glimpsed a cloudless sky. And the next image, returning to the reddy-brown blanket again.

I sat up. Karl was twenty or more metres down the beach, running like crazy. Amazed that he could still have so much strength after days of virtual starvation, I leapt to my feet and sprinted after him.

Reasonable Doubt

Down the beach, through the tree-line, up the path, into the clearing. I'd nearly caught him. I was just about to get a hand to his hair. Then I tripped over a guy line from one of the tents and went flying, and Karl made a beeline for the Khyber Pass.

I scrambled up. Several people were standing directly in his way. 'Catch him!' I shouted. 'Jesse, Greg, for fuck's sake! Bring him down!' But they were too shocked to react, and Karl whizzed by. 'You idiots! He's getting away!' A few seconds later he'd reached the pass. In the baffled quiet that followed we listened to him crashing through the undergrowth, and then the silence was complete.

'Fuck!' I shouted, sinking to my knees, and started banging my fist on the ground.

A light hand touched my shoulder. I looked round to see Françoise leaning over me, and behind her a semicircle of curious people. 'Richard?' she said anxiously.

Another hand, Jesse's, reached under my arms and hauled me up. 'You OK, mate?'

'Yes,' I began, and then stopped, trying to remember what had happened.' …I think Karl's out of his coma thing.'

'So I saw. What happened?'

'…He attacked me,' I said doubtfully, and everyone gasped.

'You are hurt?' said Françoise, peering at my face to check for damage.

'…I managed to fight him off. I'm fine…'

'Why did he do it?'

'I… I really don't know…' I shook my head in desperation. I didn't feel at all ready to cope with these questions. 'Maybe… Maybe he thought I was a fish. He was a fisher and… he's mad…'

Sal saved me from the shit I was coming out with. The crowd parted and she came striding through.

'Karl attacked you, Richard?'

'Just now. On the beach.'

The second confirmation of Karl's assault brought a second gasp from the crowd, and they all started to talk at once.

'It should have been me to catch him!' said Unhygienix furiously. 'He ran so close!'

'I saw the look in his eye!' added Cassie. 'He looked right at me! It was terrifying!'

'And the foam in his mouth!' said someone else. 'Like rabies! We should catch him and tie him up!'

Only one voice went against the flow: Г‰tienne's. 'This is impossible,' he shouted above the racket. 'I do not believe Karl would attack Richard! I do not believe it! I was with him this morning!'

The din began to die down.

'This morning I was with him for one hour! One hour, and he ate rice with me! He was getting better! I know he would not attack anyone!'

I got myself together enough to frown in disbelief. 'Are you saying I'm a liar?'

Г‰tienne hesitated, then turned away from me, addressing the others. 'For one hour I was with him! He said my name! For the first time in a week he talked! I know he was getting better!'

Quickly I began to backtrack, not caring about this argument, just wanting to get away. 'Yes. Étienne's right. It may have been my fault. I could have frightened him…'

'No!' Sal interrupted sharply. 'I'm afraid that Karl has become dangerous. This morning I also went to see him, and he made a lunge at me too.'

Startled, but not about to contradict her, I studied her expression hard and wished I had her capacity for sniffing out a lie. She was acting like she was telling the truth, but I knew that meant fuck all.

'Luckily Bugs was there to pull him off. We were down on the beach, just before he left for Ko Pha-Ngan with Keaty. I should have warned you all already, but I was trying to work out the best way to deal with him…' She sighed with apparent and entirely uncharacteristic regret. 'I was stupid. I didn't want to bring down the Tet celebration with more bad news. It was irresponsible, but things had been going so well… I didn't want to ruin morale.'

Jesse shook his head. 'Tet's all very well, Sal, but we can't have someone that dangerous just roaming around.'

Everyone nodded, and for some strange reason, I felt they were all nodding at me.

'Something will have to be done.'

'I know, Jesse. You're quite right. Richard, I hope you can accept my apologies. You shouldn't have been put in that situation.'

'No need for that, Sal,' I replied immediately. Even in the context of a lie – and by now I was sure she was lying – I felt extremely uncomfortable having her apologize to me. 'I understand.'

'But I do not!' said Étienne desperately. 'Please! Please, everybody must listen! Karl is not dangerous! He needs help! I think maybe we could take him to Ko Pha…'

This time it was Françoise who cut him off, by doing nothing more than walking away. His voice failed him as he watched her march across the clearing. Then he started after her, still not able to speak, holding his arms ahead of him, paralysed in mid-plea.

Up-ended

Almost as soon as Étienne and Françoise walked off, the rest of us began to wander across the clearing. There was no further discussion about Karl. As far as the others were concerned, I think they were all aware that the calm since Sten's funeral was in jeopardy, and a huge exercise in denial was underway. Instant, informal, an intuitive consensus so that talking about anything remotely contentious was out of bounds. No problem for me. It meant that no one asked me to elaborate on Karl or brought up the topic of the gunshots. The only downside was having to labour through a few contrived conversations, which seemed a fair trade-off.

The strangest of these exchanges was with Jean, not least because he almost never spoke to me. He came over with a shy smile and asked the kind of stupid question that can only come from uneasiness. 'You are working, Richard?' he said.

At the time I was having a smoke outside the kitchen hut, trying to reconstruct my splintered nerves. 'No, Jean,' I managed to reply, relatively steadily. 'Not at this exact moment. I'm smoking a cigarette.'

'Ah.'

'Would you like one?'

'Oh no!' he said hurriedly, looking quite alarmed. 'I do not want to take your cigarette.'

'Go ahead. Keaty's bringing me some back from Hat Rin.'

'No, no. I can smoke grass.'

'…OK.' I returned his smile, willing him to fuck off with all my heart.

But he didn't. He scratched his head and shuffled his feet a bit. I had the impression that if he'd owned a cap he'd have been holding it in his hands. 'You know, Richard, I was thinking.'

'Mmm?'

'Perhaps you would like to see the garden one day. Sometimes you would come to see Keaty, but now it has changed. After Keaty was fishing, I made the garden even larger. Now it has seven areas.'

'Seven?' I said tightly. 'Great.'

'So one day you will come to see it?'

'It's a date.'

'A date! Yes!' He let out a roar of laughter, so theatrical that for a few seconds I thought he was taking the piss. 'A date! Then we will see a film!'

I nodded.

'A date,' he repeated. 'See you on our date, Richard!'

'See you then,' I replied, and mercifully he began to back away.

I avoided visiting Jed until darkness was beginning to set in. I didn't want to be seen entering the hospital tent. I knew that this would be a tacit acknowledgement of Christo's existence – which, under our consensus, was perhaps the most important of the Things To Ignore.

If possible, conditions were even worse inside the tent than they had been before. Stench-wise it was the same deal, but the trapped heat seemed more intense and there were puddles of dried and drying black liquid everywhere. Blood from Christo's stomach, soaking in the sheets, collecting in the folds of the canvas floor, and smeared across Jed's arms and chest.

'Jesus Christ,' I said, feeling sweat begin to prickle my back. 'What the fuck's been going on in here?'

Jed turned towards me. He was lit from below by his up-ended Maglite. It made the stray hairs of his beard glow like light-bulb filaments and hid his eyes in absolute darkness. 'Do you have good news for me?' he murmured. 'I'm tired of bad news now. I only want to hear good news.'

I paused, squinting at the shadows in his eye-sockets, looking to see some form inside them. Something about his manner was threatening and his demonic glow made me wonder if I was having a hallucination. So much so that I felt I should confirm his realness if I was going to stick around. Eventually I reached for the Maglite and shone it directly at his face. His hand flicked up to shield the glare, but I saw enough flesh to reassure me.

I rested the torch back on the floor. 'I've got news. Zeph and Sammy are dead.'

'Dead,' Jed said without emotion.

'Shot by the dope guards.'

'You saw it?'

'No.'

He cocked his head to the side. 'Disappointed?'

'No. I saw them get beaten and

'That was enough for you.'

'…It made me feel sick,' I finished. 'I didn't expect it to, but it did.'

'Oh.' The bright filaments of Jed's beard twitched as some invisible expression passed across his features.

'…Aren't you pleased? Not pleased, I mean relieved…In a way.'

'I'm not relieved at all.'

'…You aren't?'

'No.'

'But it means the beach is safe. Tet and morale… and our secrecy…'

'I don't care about the beach any more, Richard.'

'You… You don't care about the beach?'

'Would you like to hear my news?'

I shifted my weight to disguise my unease. '…OK.'

'Today's news is that there isn't any.'

'…No visitors.'

'That's right, Richard. No visitors. Again.' He cleared his throat. 'I haven't seen a single soul, except his and maybe mine… Can't stop thinking about why that might be… Why do you think it is, Richard? Me and Christo, waiting here all day long, with no visitors…'

'Jed… We've been over this before.'

'Are you in a hurry?'

'…No.'

'So we can go over it again.'

'…OK. It's just like you said, people are trying to get back to normal. They don't want to be reminded.'

'And it would be the same if it was Sal in here.'

'It might be different if it was Sal. She is the boss. But I don't think…'

'What if it was you?' he interrupted.

'In here?'

'In here dying. What if it was you?'

'Some people would come, I guess. Françoise and Étienne. Keaty…'

'Me?'

'Yeah. You'd come.' I laughed weakly. 'I hope.'

Jed let the laughter hang in the air, making it sound unpleasant and alien. Then he shook his head. 'No, Richard, I meant what if it was me in here.'

'…You?'

'Me.'

'Well… people would come to see you.'

'Would they?'

'Of course.'

'Would they?'

'…Yes.'

'But I am in here, Richard.' He leant towards me, blocking the Maglite, throwing the whole of his upper body into shadow. I pulled back at once, unsure of how close he was. When he spoke, hissed, he can't have been more than five or six inches away. 'I'm in here all fucking day and all fucking night. And nobody comes to visit.'

'I come to visit.'

'But no one else.'

'I… I'm sorry.'

'Yes. I'm sorry too…'

'But…'

'Sure.'

A couple of seconds later he sat back, and we watched each other across Christo's stained body. Then his head dropped and he absently began rubbing flakes of dried blood off his forearms.

'Jed,' I said quietly. 'Do me a favour.'

'Mmm.'

'Get out of the tent for a while. I'll stay here with Christo and

He waved a hand dismissively. 'I think you miss the point.'

'You really should…'

'I don't want to see those fuckers outside.'

'You wouldn't have to. You could go down to the beach.'

'Why?' he said, suddenly sounding very clear and definite. 'To clear my head? To get me thinking straight and keep me sane?'

'…If you like.'

'As sane as everyone else?'

'It would help you get some perspective.'

'It would help nothing. It doesn't matter where I am. I'm still in this tent. I've been in this tent since the day I got here, just like Christo. Just like Karl and Sten. The tent, the open sea, the DMZ. Out of sight and out of…'

Just for the briefest moment I heard a thickness in his voice. I held my breath, oddly panicked by the prospect of him in tears, but he appeared to regain control and continued.

'When the Swedes arrived and Daffy freaked… Daffy vanished… I really thought it would change… With him gone, I thought it would change… But he was so sly… He came back… so sly…'

Jed's voice faded to an indistinct whisper. Then he rocked forwards and touched his temples with his fingertips.

'Jed,' I said, after a pause. 'What do you mean, he came back?'

'Killed himself,' he replied. '…Came back.'

I frowned, dislodging the build-up of sweat in my eyebrows. It ran down my face and stung the corners of my mouth. 'You've seen him?'

'Seen him… yes…'

'When?'

'Ko Pha-Ngan, first… Should have seen him earlier…'

'You saw Daffy on Ko Pha-Ngan?'

'With your friends. Your dead friends…'

'With Zeph and Sammy?'

'He gave them the map.'

I hesitated. 'Jed, I gave them the map.'

'No…'

'I'm telling you, I gave them the map. I remember doing it clearly.'

'No, Richard.' He shook his head. 'Daffy gave them the map.'

'You mean… They had the map before I gave it to them?'

'I mean he gave them the map when he gave it to you.' Jed sat upright again. The movement drew the canvas floor tight and unbalanced the up-ended Maglite. As it fell it briefly dazzled me, then rolled to rest as a single beam. 'He gave the map to Étienne,' he said, carefully replacing the torch. 'And to Françoise, and Zeph, and Sammy, and the Germans, and all the others…'

'The others?'

'The ones we haven't seen yet. The ones that will arrive next month, or week, and the ones that will arrive after them.'

I sighed. 'Then… you see Daffy when you see me.'

'Not so much before… But now, yes.' Jed nodded sadly. 'Every time I see you… Every time…'

Same-Same, But Different

As I got into bed, the first into the longhouse that night, I heard the sound of Bugs and Keaty returning with the Tet supplies. There was a lot of excited chatter when people saw what had been brought for the celebration, and later I heard Keaty calling my name. Later still, Françoise joined him. I didn't answer either of them. I was lying on my back with a T-shirt draped over my head, waiting for sleep. Surprisingly, I didn't have to wait too long.

The clearing had always been a clearing. It had almost doubled in size as the camp had grown, but had existed in some form since the rocket-ship trees were saplings. Two hundred years ago? Maybe more. The only way I know how to date a tree is to cut it down, but it wasn't hard to imagine those rocket-ship trees having seen a few centuries through.

'A Herculean task,' said Mister Duck thoughtfully. He was standing in the spot where the longhouse now stood, thigh-deep in ferns. 'Diverting the stream. We only attempted it in the second year, when there were fourteen of us living here. Couldn't have done it without Jean, of course. Not just the know-how. He worked like an ox… kept us going… I wish you could have been with us, Rich. I wish you could have been with us from the very beginning. Me, Sal and Bugs… The mood, you can't imagine…'

I pushed carefully through the shrubs, pacing out the distance from the longhouse door to where I estimated my bed must be. It was curious to be in the position where I knew, at that moment, I was also sleeping. 'I can imagine the mood,' I said, stepping sideways, disconcerted by the idea that I was standing on my head. 'I can imagine it easily.'

Mister Duck waggled a finger at me. 'If I didn't know you better, Rich, I'd take offence at that. There's no way you can imagine the way we felt. Apart from anything, you're too young. On and off, I'd been travelling with Sal and Bugs for over eleven years. Eleven years, Rich! How can you imagine what it's like, living with cancer for eleven years?'

'…Cancer?'

'Sure, cancer. Or AIDS. What do you want to call it?'

'Call what?'

'Living with death. Time-limits on everything you enjoy. Sitting on a beautiful beach, waiting for a fucking time-limit to come up. Affecting the way you look at the sand and the sunsets and the way you taste the rice. Then moving on and waiting for it to happen all over again. For eleven years!' Mister Duck shivered. '…Then to have that cancer lifted. To think you've found a cure… That's what you can't imagine, Rich.'

The waterfall and its pool, at least, were exactly the same. A few shrubs different, I suppose, and doubtless a few invisible branches had broken in the trees, but not enough differences to warrant a double take.

One major difference perhaps, but one that would have taken me a while to notice. The carved tree hadn't been carved, and as soon as we arrived by the pool, Mister Duck produced a pocket knife and set about cutting in the names.

I watched him for a while, interested by the concentration on his usually restless face. Then, as he began to write the zero calendar, I asked, 'Why me?'

He smiled. 'I liked the way you talked when I threw the joint at you. You were so indignant and funny… But mainly, I chose you because you were a traveller. Any traveller would have done the job. Spreading the news is in our nature.'

'Our?'

'I'm no better than you. I'm just the same.'

'Maybe worse…'

Mister Duck completed the last zero with a twist of his wrist, and an oval of bark dropped cleanly on to his lap. 'Hey,' he said happily. 'I'd forgotten I did that. How amazing.'

'Maybe worse,' I repeated. 'If I had a part in destroying the beach, I did it unwittingly. You did it on purpose.'

'Who says I destroyed this place? Not me, pal. Not from where I'm standing.' He glanced at his crossed legs. 'Sitting.'

'Who was it then?'

Mister Duck shrugged. 'No one. Stop looking for some big crime, Rich. You have to see, with these places, with all these places, you can't protect them. We thought you could, but we were wrong. I realized it when Jed arrived. The word was out, somehow out, and after that it was just a matter of time… Not that I acted on it at first. I waited, hoping he was a one-off, I guess. But then the Swedes arrived and I knew for sure. Cancer back, no cure, malignant as fuck…' He stood up, dusted the earth off his legs, and flicked his bark zero into the waterfall pool. 'Terminal.'

I punched him as hard as I could, square on his solar plexus. Then, when he doubled up, I pushed him on the floor and kicked him in the face.

He took it all without any attempt to fight back. He let me lay into him until my knuckles were cut and my ankle was twisted. Then, when I'd run out of breath and had collapsed on the grass beside him, he uncurled, pulled himself up, and started to laugh.

'Shut the fuck up!' I panted. 'Shut your fucking mouth!'

'Gripes,' he chuckled, spitting out a broken tooth. 'What's got into you?'

'You tricked me!'

'How? What did I ever offer you? What did I ever say I'd provide?'

'You…'

'I never offered you anything but Vietnam, and only because you asked for it. It so happens you wanted the beach too. But if you could have had Vietnam and kept the beach, it wouldn't have been Vietnam.'

'I didn't know that! You never told me!'

'Exactly.' Mister Duck beamed. 'That was the beauty of it. You not knowing was Vietnam too. Not knowing what was going on, not knowing when to give up, stuck in a struggle that was lost before it started. It's incredible really. It all works out.'

'But I didn't want that Vietnam!' I began. 'I didn't want that kind! I wan…' Then I stopped. 'All? …Wait, you're saying it all works out?'

'All. Right to the bitter end.' He rubbed his hands together. 'You know, Rich, I always thought euthanasia was a kindness. But I never dreamed it could be so much fun.'

BEAUCOUP BAD SHIT