Jed

Jed wouldn't let me wake Étienne and Françoise. They'd asked me to say goodbye before I left, but Jed shook his head and said, 'Unnecessary.' I stood over their sleeping bodies, wondering what he meant. He'd woken me five minutes earlier by putting his hand over my mouth and whispering, 'Shh,' so close to my ear that his beard had brushed my cheek. I'd thought that had been pretty unnecessary myself.

I thought his knife was unnecessary too. It appeared as we stood on the beach, getting ready for the swim to the seaward cliffs, a green-handled lock-knife with a Teflon-coated blade.

'What's that for?' I asked.

'It's a tool,' he replied, matter of factly. Then he winked and added, 'Sinister, huh?' before wading into the water with the knife between his teeth.

Until the Rice Run, Jed was a mystery to me. The most time we'd ever spent together had been on my first day, when he'd escorted us from the waterfall. After that we'd had almost no contact. Sometimes I saw him in the evenings – never earlier, because he returned to the camp so late – and small talk had always been the extent of our conversations. Normally, small talk is enough for me to form an opinion on someone. I make quick judgements, often completely wrong, and then stick by them rigidly. But with Jed I'd made an exception and kept an open mind. This was mainly due to conflicting accounts of his character. Unhygienix liked him, and Keaty thought he was a prat.

'We were sitting on the beach,' Keaty had once said, his forehead creased up with irritation, 'and there was this noise from the jungle. A coconut falling off a tree or something. A crack. So Jed suddenly stiffened up and did this little glance over his shoulder, like he was some finely tuned commando. Like he couldn't help his own reflexes.'

I nodded. 'He wanted you to notice.'

'Exactly. He wanted us to notice how fucking alert he is.' Keaty laughed and shook his head, then launched into a familiar diatribe about how crap if was to work in the garden.

But Unhygienix liked Jed. Sometimes I'd needed the toilet late at night and found them still awake, sitting by the kitchen hut, getting stoned on grass nicked from the dope plantations. And if Unhygienix liked Jed, he couldn't be all bad.

There were three caves that led into the seaward cliffs. One was at the base of the jagged fissure, by the coral gardens, another was maybe two hundred metres to the right of the fissure, and the last was maybe fifty metres to the left. That was the one we swam for.

It was a good swim. The water was cool and cleared the morning haze out of my head. I spent most of the time underwater, watching fish scatter, wondering which ones might end up as today's lunch. It was strange that there were always so many fish in the lagoon. We must have been pulling out thirty a day, but the numbers never seemed to go down.

Dawn was breaking by the time we reached the cave. We couldn't see the sun yet – the east was blocked by the cliffs as they curved around to rejoin the island – but the sky was bright.

'You know this place?' Jed asked.

'I've seen it while I've been working.'

'But you've never been through.'

'No. I went up to the coral gardens once and saw the cave there… Beneath the fissure.'

'But you've never been through,' he repeated.

'No.'

He looked disapproving. 'You should have. Golden rule: first thing to do when you arrive some place is find out how you can get out again. These caves are the only ways out of the lagoon.'

I shrugged. 'Oh… So is that how you get above the waterfall?'

'See here.' He walked into the entrance of the cave and pointed directly upwards. Bizarrely, in the blackness, I could see a fist-sized circle of blue, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I made out a rope, hanging the length of the shaft.

'It's a chimney. You can climb it without the rope, but the rope makes it easier.'

'And then you can walk around the cliff tops, back to the island.'

'Exactly. Want to try?'

'Sure,' I said quickly. I had the idea he was testing me.

Jed raised his eyebrows. 'Uh-huh. An adventurous type. I had you down for something else.'

That annoyed me. 'I found this place, and what's the big deal about climbing up the…'

He cut me off. 'Maybe this place found you,' he said, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. Then suddenly he smiled. 'I'm taking the piss, Richard. Sorry. Anyway, we don't have time now. The journey will take four hours at least.'

I checked my watch. It was almost seven. 'So our ETA is eleven hundred hours.'

'Eleven hundred hours…' He chuckled and patted me on the arm, lapsing into an American accent. 'ETAs, FNGs. You're my kinda guy.'

Keaty had met Sal and Bugs in Chiang Rai. They'd gone on an illegal trek together over the Burmese border, and after the trek was over Sal had asked him if he was interested in being taken to paradise.

Gregorio had met Daffy in Sumatra. Gregorio had been beaten up and robbed, and when Daffy found him he was trying to hitch his way to Jakarta so he could contact the Spanish Embassy. Daffy had offered him cash to get to Java. Gregorio had been reluctant to accept, because he could see Daffy was short of money himself. Daffy had said 'Fuck Java,' and told him about the beach.

Sal had been on an eighteen-hour bus ride with Ella. Ella had a portable backgammon set.

Daffy had heard Cassie asking for a job in a Patpong bar.

Unhygienix had cooked Bugs a six-course meal on a houseboat in Srinagar, starting with hot coconut soup and ending with a mango split.

Moshe had caught a Manilan pickpocket trying to razor Daffy's backpack.

Bugs had worked with Jean, grape-picking in Blenheim, New Zealand.

Jed…

Jed had just turned up. Jumped from the waterfall, walked into the camp with a canvas overnight bag and a soaking wet bushel of grass under his arm.

Keaty said the camp had been thrown into instant panic. Was he alone, how had he learnt about the beach, were there more with him, more coming? Everyone ran around going crazy, then Sal, Bugs and Daffy turned up. They took him into the longhouse to talk while everyone waited outside. People heard Daffy shouting and Bugs trying to calm him down.

The cliffs were about thirty metres thick, but you couldn't see through them to the open sea because, not far in, the roof of the cave dropped below the water-level. I wasn't happy about swimming into the blackness but Jed assured me the roof rose up again quickly. 'It's a piece of piss,' he said. 'You're up again before you know it.'

'Really?'

'Yeah. It's low tide so we only have to swim half the cave. When it's high tide you have to swim the whole cave in one go, and even that's easy.' Then he took a deep breath and slipped under, leaving me alone.

I waited a minute, treading water and listening to my splashes echo round the walls. My feet and shins were cold, kicking in the chilled area, reminding me of the diving game off Ko Samui. 'Put me down as the adventurous type,' I said loudly. It was supposed to be a joke, something to give me courage, and in a way I suppose it worked. The echo spooked me so much that the inky water seemed less scary than hanging around.

Jed had only worked on an official work detail, carpentry, for six days. Then he'd been taken off and started doing his 'missions crap', as Keaty put it, above the waterfall.

People talked about it at first. They thought he ought to be working and were irritated that Sal, Bugs and Daffy refused to explain why he was allowed to do his own thing. But time passed, and as Jed's face became more familiar they stopped asking questions. The main thing was that no other travellers appeared immediately after him, which had been everyone's fear, and he brought in a steady supply of grass, previously a luxury in short supply.

Keaty had a theory. Because Jed hadn't been recruited he was an unknown quantity, and therefore, if he decided to leave, a danger to the camp's secrecy. So when Sal had realized Jed was the type who was into missions, she created one just to keep him happy.

Personally, I thought the theory was unlikely. Whatever Jed was doing, it was what Sal wanted him to be doing. Diplomacy wouldn't have entered into it.

Unusually for me, I kept my eyes shut as I swam, feeling my way along the cave roof with outstretched hands and only using my legs. I guessed that each kick made a metre and carefully counted my strokes to give me a sense of distance. After I'd counted ten I began to feel worried. An ache was building in my lungs, and Jed had been adamant that the underwater passage was no more than a forty-second swim. At fifteen I realized I had to make a decision about whether to turn back. I gave myself a limit of three more kicks, then my fingertips broke surface.

I knew there was something wrong as soon as I took a breath. The air was foul. So bad that even though I was bursting for oxygen, I could only manage short breaths before I started gagging. Instinctively, pointlessly, I looked around me, but the absence of light was so absolute that I couldn't see my fingers an inch from my face.

'Jed!' I called.

Not even an echo.

I reached up and my hand sank deep into something wet, with freezing tendrils that clung to my skin. A jolt of adrenalin rushed through my body and I snatched my hand back.

'It's seaweed,' I whispered, after my heart had stopped smashing into my eardrums. Seaweed, coating the rock, absorbing the noise.

I gagged again. Then I retched, pushing up a mouthful of vomit.

'Jed…'

Self-Help

Once I'd started, I kept throwing up for several minutes. Every time my stomach contracted I couldn't help doubling up and I'd vomit with my head underwater, then have to straighten up quickly to snatch a breath before the next heave. The vomiting finally stopped, although it took three dry retches before my stomach would concede it was empty. Then I was left, floating in blackness and amino acids, wondering what the fuck I should do next.

My first thought was that I should continue down the passage –I was assuming that I'd surfaced too soon, tricked by an air pocket left open by an extra-low tide. But that was easier said than done. While I'd been throwing up I'd twisted and turned twenty times, and was now completely disorientated. That led me to my second thought: I should work out the dimensions of the air pocket. This, at least, was something I could accomplish. Steeling myself, I reached up again and pushed my hand into the seaweed. I flinched, but this time I didn't pull my hand back, and through the slimy growth I felt rock, an arm's length above my head.

Several fumbling minutes later I'd created a good mental image of my surroundings. The pocket was about two metres wide and three metres long. On one side there was a narrow shelf, big enough to sit on, and everywhere else the walls curved straight down from the ceiling and ran into the water. There, the mental image began to fall apart. By groping around with my hands and feet, I seemed to find four passages leading into the rock, but it was hard to judge underwater. There could even have been more.

It was a grim discovery. If there'd been only two passages, then whichever direction I chose to swim, I'd either come up in the lagoon or the ocean. But these other passages could lead to nowhere. I could find myself swimming into a maze.

'Two out of four,' I heard myself muttering. 'One in two. Fifty fifty.' But it didn't matter how I put it. The odds sounded bad.

The alternative was to stay put and hope Jed came to find me, but it wasn't very appealing. I felt like I'd lose the plot if I waited in the pitch blackness, swimming around in my own sick, and I hadn't the faintest idea how long it would be before I'd start breathing carbon dioxide. This was' an idea I found particularly frightening. I could see myself huddled up on the small rock-shelf, gradually succumbing to a sinister sleepiness.

For a minute I stayed relatively still, treading water and going over my options. Then I started to panic. I splashed around wildly, bumping into the walls, choking, whimpering. I snatched at the seaweed above my head and pulled it down in great clumps. I lashed out, smashed my elbow on the rock-shelf, felt my skin tear and hot blood run over my arm. I shouted, 'Help.'

'Help.'

My voice sounded pathetic, like I was crying. It was a shocking noise and it jolted me into a second of silence. A second later, my fear was swamped by a sudden tidal wave of disgust. Ignoring the foul taste, I took a huge gulp of air and ducked underwater. I didn't count the strokes this time, or worry about feeling my way. I took whichever of the four passages I found first and swam as hard as I could.

The List

I was in a bad way. My legs and hands were knocking painfully against the passage walls and there was a pressure deep inside my chest, something the size of a grapefruit trying to drive itself upwards through my neck. After perhaps fifty seconds I began to see red through the darkness. 'It means I'm dying,' I told myself as the colour grew brighter and the grapefruit reached my Adam's apple. In the middle of the redness a spot of light started to form –yellow, but I expected it to turn white. I was remembering a TV programme about how dying people see lights at the end of tunnels as their brain cells shut down. Suddenly resigned, my kicks grew weaker. My powerful breast-stroke became an erratic underwater doggy paddle. When I felt rock scraping along the length of my stomach I realized I was no longer aware if I was facing up or down.

To say that this pissed me off sounds flippant, but that's the best way I can describe it. I think that a part of my mind, however bewildered, resented being wrong about the split-second theory in video games. I wasn't raging or fighting in the way I'd always imagined I would. I was just fading away. The resentment provided a new burst of energy, and with it came the realization that the redness might not be death after all. It might be light, sunlight, passing through the water and the lids of my tightly shut eyes. Drawing from my last reserve of strength, I forced myself to make one more hard kick.

I came straight up into brightness and fresh air. I blinked the glare out of my eyes, gasping like a speared fish, and slowly Jed came into focus. He was sitting on a rock. Beside him was a long boat, painted the same blue-green as the sea.

'Hey,' he said, not looking round. 'You took your time.'

I couldn't answer at first because I was hyperventilating.

'What were you doing back there? You've been ages.'

'Drowning,' I finally managed to say.

'Yeah? You know anything about engines? I've tried to get this going but I can't.'

I splashed over to him and tried to haul myself on to the rock, but I was too weak and I slipped back into the water. 'Didn't you hear me?' I panted.

'Sure.' He started absently running the blade of his knife against his beard, as if he were shaving. 'Now, I know it's got enough gas because the tank's full, and I know the Swedes said they had it running the other day.'

'Jed! I got stuck in some air pocket with more exits than…' I couldn't think of anything famous with a large number of exits 'I nearly drowned!'

For the first time Jed looked at me. 'An air pocket?' he said, lowering the knife. 'Are you sure?'

'Of course I'm fucking sure!'

'Where?'

'I don't know, do I? Somewhere… in there.' I turned back to the black entrance of the cave and shivered.

Jed frowned. 'Well… that's pretty weird. I've been through there a hundred times and I've never found any air pocket.'

'You think I'm lying?'

'No… And there were several exits?'

'Four at least. I could feel them and I didn't know which one I should take. It was a fucking nightmare.'

'So you must have strayed down a split off the main passage. Shit, Richard, I'm sorry. I honestly didn't know that could happen. I must have been through there so many times that I automatically follow the same route.' He tutted. 'But it's amazing. Everybody on the beach has swum through that cave and no one's ever got lost.'

I sighed. 'That's my fucking luck.'

'Bad luck, all right.' He held out a hand and pulled me on to the rock.

'I might have died.'

Jed nodded. 'You might have. I'm sorry.'

A voice in my head was telling me that I ought to lose my temper, but there didn't seem anything to lose my temper at. Instead I lay back and looked up at the clouds. A silver speck was threading a vapour trail across the sky and I imagined people inside peering out of the windows, watching the Gulf of Thailand unfold, wondering what things could be happening on the islands beneath them. One or two of them, I was sure, must be looking at my island.

They'd never have guessed what was happening in a million years. Thinking this, I managed a dizzy smile.

Jed brought me back to earth by saying, 'You smell of sick.'

'I've been swimming in the stuff,' I replied.

'Your elbow's bleeding too.'

I glanced down, and at once my arm began to sting.

'Jesus. I'm a wreck.'

'No.' Jed shook his head. 'It's the boat that's the wreck.'

The boat was twenty feet long and four feet wide, with a single bamboo outrigger on the right-hand side. On the left side it was lying flat against the rocks, tied up, protected by a line of buffers made of tightly rolled palm leaves. It was also protected, and hidden, by the mini-harbour formed by the entrance to the cave.

Inside the boat were some of the Swedes' fishing implements. Their spears were cut longer than ours and they had a landing-net, I noticed enviously. Not that we needed a landing-net inside the lagoon, but it would have been nice to have one all the same. They had lines and hooks too, which explained why they always caught the biggest fish.

Despite what Jed had said, I took to the boat immediately. I liked its South-East-Asian shape, the painted flourishes on its prow, the strong odour of grease and salt-soaked wood. Most of all I liked the fact that all this stuff was familiar to me, remembered from other island trips in other places. I felt pleased to have a store of memories which enabled me to feel nostalgic about such exotic things.

Collecting memories, or experiences, was my primary goal when I first started travelling. I went about it in the same way as a stamp-collector goes about collecting stamps, carrying around with me a mental list of all the things I had yet to see or do. Most of the list was pretty banal. I wanted to see the Taj Mahal, Borobudur, the Rice Terraces in Bagio, Angkor Wat. Less banal, or maybe more so, was that I wanted to witness extreme poverty. I saw it as a necessary experience for anyone who wanted to appear worldly and interesting.

Of course witnessing poverty was the first to be ticked off the list. Then I had to graduate to the more obscure stuff. Being in a riot was something I pursued with a truly obsessive zeal, along with being tear-gassed and hearing gunshots fired in anger.

Another list item was having a brush with my own death. In Hong Kong, aged eighteen, I'd met an Old-Asia hand who'd told me a story about having been held up at gunpoint in Vietnam. The story ended with him having the gun shoved in his chest and being told he was going to be shot. 'The funny thing about facing death,' he'd said, 'is that you find you aren't afraid. If anything, you're calm. Alert, naturally, but calm.'

I'd nodded vigorously. I wasn't agreeing with him out of personal experience. I was just too thrilled to do anything but move my head.

The dope fields had fitted neatly into this category of the list, and so did the air pocket. The only downside was that I wasn't able to claim being alert (naturally) but calm, which was a line I fully intended to use one day.

Twenty minutes later I was ready to get going.

'Right,' I said, sitting up. 'Let's start up the engine.'

'The engine's fucked. You can't start it. I think we might have to go back and get the Swedes to sort it out.'

'Sure I can start it. I've been on this kind of boat loads of times.'

Jed looked doubtful but gestured for me to give it a try.

I crawled into the boat and slid down to the stern end, and to my great delight I recognized the engine type. It was started like a lawnmower, by winding a rope around a flywheel and giving it a hard tug. A closer look revealed a knot at one end of the rope and a groove in the wheel for it to fit into.

'I've tried that fifty times,' Jed muttered, as I put the knot in place.

'It's in the wrist,' I replied with deliberate cheerfulness. 'You have to start slowly then snap it back.'

'Uh-huh?'

When I was ready to pull I gave the engine a last cursory check. I wasn't looking for anything in particular but I wanted to give the impression that I was, and my shallowness paid off. Almost obscured by layers of grease and dirt I noticed a small metal switch with 'on/off' written beneath it. I glanced backwards over my shoulder and discreetly flicked it to the correct setting.