Stars Over the Southern Ocean

by J. H. Fletcher

  Come what might, he was committed. If he were arrested now he’d be on a one-way trip back to the hellhole he had left only that morning, yet he was not as frightened of that as he’d expected to be. On the contrary, he felt a sense of relief in knowing that now he was committed and could not turn back.

  Malaysia, he thought. Here I come.

  CHAPTER 48

  There were armed police on the train; one of the officers, carrying a submachine gun, stood at the carriage door just behind his seat. Greg had started the journey expecting that any moment the officer would take hold of his collar, but nothing happened. Eventually the man moved away.

  Greg watched the passing countryside. Peasants were working with water buffalo in the soil of clearings darkened by rain. It was rich country with many coconut groves, banana plantations and vast expanses of rice paddy.

  What he was seeing was a succession of images of rural life in a country he had come to love and it saddened him that he might be seeing it for the last time. He was under no delusions; escape now and he would never be able to return.

  He was angry as well as sad. He had come to believe what the lawyer had told him, that the partners in whom he’d had such faith had set him up to spend what might have been a lifetime in jail while they enjoyed the benefits of the vision that had led him to the creation of Nirvana. Criminals, the lawyer had said. Criminals with criminal associates.

  He had been such a fool, such a trusting fool.

  It was a dismal thought to end the day that in other respects had been so wonderful. Night slowly darkened the land through which the train was travelling and he told himself all would be well in the morning.

  At various times in the night the train stopped at tiny stations. Passengers boarded; others left. There was chatter and laughter, music from a transistor radio, the constant presence of the armed police. Each stop gave Greg a quiver of apprehension, that this might be the time when an official might pause by his seat to demand his papers, but it never happened.

  From time to time between stops he even managed short intervals of restless sleep.

  The night passed. Eventually came a reluctant dawn, a hint of green in the morning light as they passed through areas of dense rainforest that grew more extensive as they travelled south. At one stop, contrary to his expectations, a stall was selling refreshments and he bought a bowl of tom yam kung, a fiercely spicy soup of shrimp, lemongrass and mushrooms, a savoury bao in a plastic wrapper and some bottled water.

  It was the longest-seeming journey he’d ever made, twenty hours that felt more like twenty weeks by the time the train sighed to a halt at Su-ngai Kolok, but finally, in the middle of the morning, they reached their destination. Doors banged, voices shouted, and passengers grabbed their possessions and dismounted, the armed police among them.

  This was the tricky part.

  Everyone else was heading towards the Thai border post. If he headed in the opposite direction, one of the policemen might spot him and want to know where he was going. In Greg’s mind having no papers made him as conspicuous as having no clothes, so he merged with the people heading for the immigration building while he tried to work out how best he might slip away.

  Other people were standing around the entrance to the building where stalls were selling fruit of various kinds—mangosteen, durian and pomelos. Women sat on the grass beside the path with blankets spread in front of them on which were displayed a variety of trinkets: drinking cups made from coconut shells, tiny figures of fishermen carved in ivory, or more probably bone.

  Greg mingled with the people examining the various goods. Several made off in the direction of the town and he joined them, matching his pace to theirs. The sole westerner and a head taller than most, he stuck out like a lamp post in a paddy field, but soon they reached the narrow streets of the little town and he felt his shoulders relax. For the moment at least, he thought, he was safe.

  He had already decided he would wait until it was dark before trying to cross the border so he had seven or eight hours to kill.

  He strolled along the streets, half-deafened by the music blaring from the radios of the roadside stalls. Near the market he visited several Chinese temples and a shrine to the Toh Moh goddess. There was a park ringed by old buildings with a small pond heavy with silt where he sat for a while beneath a shade tree whose name he did not know. He ate prawns at a roadside stall. Slowly the hours passed.

  Lamps were shining in the windows of buildings when finally he decided to try his luck in crossing the river into Malaysia.

  The immigration building was closed for the night but there were bound to be guards at either end of the bridge crossing the river, so he kept well away from the road that led to the bridge.

  CHAPTER 49

  It was hard to see in the gathering darkness but he thought the river was running fast, with a lot of timber and the occasional complete tree being swept along by the current. It wasn’t the monsoon season, when rivers sometimes rose several feet in a night, but there must have been recent rain. It meant that crossing the river might be a problem as it raced south-east to its mouth in the Gulf of Thailand.

  At first there was a succession of little houses along the bank. A dog barked as he went by but soon he had left the last of the houses behind him and was following a path of sorts that ran parallel with the river. He saw a wooden jetty with the water foaming white around its outer end. There were boats moored to the jetty but in a shed on the bank he saw the glow of cigarettes and heard the sound of low-pitched voices. Probably a group of fishermen.

  He had thought of asking a fisherman to take him to the further bank, now barely visible in the darkness, but he hesitated. He was willing to pay well for the trip but only someone on the wrong side of the law would choose to cross in such a way and he was afraid the fisherman might report him in the hopes of a reward.

  He hesitated while he thought about it but decided the risk was too great and walked on.

  The sound of the water was very loud.

  A few minutes later, walking cautiously in the three-quarters darkness, he reached a place where the river made a sharp curve to the right. At that point he thought the speed of the current had created an eddy swirling across the stream to the further bank.

  The water looked uninviting but he thought this was as promising a place as any he’d seen so far. He shrugged off his shoes and tied them by their laces around his neck. It was important not to lose them. He would have to walk a long way once he’d crossed the river and without shoes he’d be in bad shape. He took what was left of his money and wrapped it in the plastic that he’d kept from the bao he’d eaten on the train. He put it back in his shirt pocket and buttoned it.

  He walked to the edge of the bank. He couldn’t see much but what he could see was enough to frighten anyone, the water, foam-curdled, racing with insistent murmur between its banks. For a moment his heart failed him, then he considered what awaited him in the Bang Kwang jail if he failed to leave the country.

  The dangers of the river were nothing in comparison with that. He took a deep breath and threw himself in, headfirst.

  The water wrapped around him like a python. The current dragged him under and he felt himself being swirled around in the river’s headlong rush. There was no way he could do anything to fight it. If the current held him under he might drown but he would not make the mistake of fighting it; do that and he would become exhausted and drown very quickly. No, he would go with the flow and hope. That was the only option he had.

  But please, God, let me come up to the surface before my lungs run out of air.

  The power of the river lessened and he thought he had entered the eddy he had seen from the bank. At the same moment his head—at last!—broke surface. He had just enough time to take a frantic breath of air before something hit him hard on the back of the head and almost drove him under again.

  It was the heavy branch of a tree and might have killed him but had not. He grabbed hold of it as i
t, too, entered the eddy. The current was still strong but much less so than in the main stream and it swept both the branch and himself in a wide curve that brought him close to the river’s southern bank.

  The bank was still out of reach. He was scared to let go of the branch but knew he would have to before the current drew them out of the eddy and back into the main stream. Already it seemed to him the bank was further away than moments before. He closed his eyes, praying to the God in whom he’d never believed, took the deepest breath he could and let go of the branch. The bank was ten metres away; at that moment, feeling the current once again dragging at his legs, it might have been a thousand. Now he fought it, flailing frantically towards the bank even as the river threatened to carry him away. A bush grew at the water’s edge, its roots emerging from the bank into the water. His fingers closed on the roots. He was afraid his weight added to the force of the stream might drag the bush out of the ground but—praise be—it held firm and he managed to claw himself to the bank.

  Getting out of the water, with the lip of the bank well above him, was another question.

  He put more pressure on the bush and felt it move. The slightest of movements, yet it was at once obvious that it would never support his weight if he used it to haul himself up the bank. Let go of it, on the other hand, and the odds were the current would carry him away.

  He looked around. A metre or two upstream was a small tree, as far as he could tell more securely rooted. Given that he couldn’t stay where he was, that looked his best option. Giving himself no time to think about it, he let go of the bush and made several frantic strokes against the stream and succeeded in wrapping his outstretched hand around the tree’s slender trunk. He pulled himself close, took a firm hold on the trunk and hauled himself out of the water.

  Into Malaysia.

  Emotionally and physically exhausted, he lay on his back on the bank, drawing deep breaths of humid air into his lungs, while his mind ran over the events of the last thirty-six hours.

  Thirty-six hours before, he had been in prison, in conditions that defied description.

  He had been released on bail, subject to strict regulations that he had broken as soon as he could.

  The twenty-hour train journey, expecting every minute to feel a hand on his collar.

  Waiting in Su-ngai Kolok for nightfall.

  Walking along the bank of the rain-swollen river.

  Finding the courage to hurl himself into the rushing stream.

  Succeeding, against all the odds, in fighting himself across.

  Such an adventure! Except it didn’t feel like an adventure. The threat of re-capture still hung over him and he knew he was only at the start of what threatened to be a long and terrible journey.

  He daren’t hang around for long; he needed to be well away from the river by sunrise or the border guards would be sure to find him. In his soaking wet clothes it wouldn’t be hard for them to guess where he’d come from and without papers they would send him back quicker than quick.

  Tropics or not, he was cold in his wet clothes. Cold and hungry. After all the energy he’d used up in the river, he needed food in his belly to build himself up again but there was no likelihood of his finding anything to eat any time soon. At least his shoes and money were safe; his watch was fine, too, which was something of a miracle, after the way the river had flung him about.

  Cold and hungry; he’d been angry, too, angry about the way he’d been cheated and forced into his present situation for something he hadn’t done. Anger had strengthened him but his struggle with the river had washed the anger out of his system; now he just wanted to get away. If he could have punished Mongkut and Somchai he would have done it like a shot but, as it was, he intended to wash his hands of the whole rotten business and start again somewhere. Somewhere in the Northern Territory, maybe, or one of the South Sea islands. It didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t Thailand. Thailand was out, but there were plenty of other places.

  CHAPTER 50

  He’d been walking three hours. To begin with he’d kept to the forest fringe. He had walked cautiously, eyes alert for soldiers or border guards. Given the choice, he’d have worked his way deeper into the rainforest. No one would have been able to find him there but walking through tropical forest in the dark was impossible, so the fringe it had to be.

  A motor vehicle passed him once but he saw the headlights reflected off the leaves of the trees when it was still a fair way off and had time to hide in a patch of long grass. The vehicle passed without slowing and after waiting cautiously for a minute he continued along the fringe. He heard water flowing somewhere in the undergrowth, and everywhere about him was the raucous cacophony of jungle sounds—cries, shrieks and barks allied to the rustles and thuds of unseen creatures moving in the forest canopy—but he pressed on, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the border.

  Now, on top of hunger, came thirst. Lack of water was more serious than lack of food, but after another half-hour he came to a rivulet crossing the road.

  He supposed it could be polluted but on balance thought that unlikely. In any case he had no choice. He crouched by the side of the rivulet, which was a few centimetres deep where it crossed the road. He cupped his hands full of water and raised them to his mouth. He drank. And drank.

  Refreshed, he went on.

  He was tired to the point of near-collapse, hungry, desperately short of sleep, and his feet were on fire where they had chafed against his wet shoes, but he still kept going, more slowly now, feet dragging in the dust now, but still pressing on as best he could. Time to rest later, when the coming of daylight would enable him to hide in the dense forest that began only metres from the road.

  At last he detected a lessening of darkness over to his left, where the eastern sky paled with infinite slowness before the coming sun. The jungle and the dirt road took finite form. It was just before seven when he left the road and made his way along what he thought was a game trail into the deep forest.

  Dawn came late to the jungle but he was able to make his way along the trail. The racket of the jungle animals had died with the coming of daylight to be replaced by the dawn chorus of unseen birds. Fatigue was turning him into a zombie. He found a clearing where a falling tree had brought down some of its neighbours. There was grass growing in the clearing and young ferns emerging from the soil.

  He found a level section of ground, lay down and was at once asleep.

  The rasping of insects woke him. He looked at his watch. He’d been asleep for over three hours. There had been no ill effects from the water he’d drunk but he was very hungry and very weak. He had to find food soon or he wouldn’t have the strength to carry on.

  He lay on his back, looking up at the dark canopy of the forest, and thought about his situation, where he was and where he was planning to go. He didn’t think about the so-called dangers of the jungle. People who knew nothing about it tended to talk about the tigers they imagined chasing them, the snakes lying in ambush, vicious cobras whose bite meant death, the pythons able and willing to crush their bones.

  All that was nonsense. He’d been in the jungle many times over the years and knew something about it. Nearly all the tigers had been shot out years before; cobras did what they could to avoid you, and pythons were not in the bone-crushing business, at least before you were dead. What pythons did, they suffocated you by constricting your chest so you couldn’t breathe, and the vast majority of pythons weren’t big enough to do that to a human being.

  No, it wasn’t the jungle or its occupants that bothered him but the knowledge of how far he was from the Australian high commission in Kuala Lumpur, which was where he reckoned on getting some general consular assistance in helping him get safely home to Tasmania.

  For years he’d thought of Noamunga and the wild coast of western Tasmania as one short step from hell yet now, if only he could get there, he would embrace it with open arms.

  Let’s not think about Tasmania, he
thought. In terms of what he still had to do to get there, that was a thousand steps too far. Think rather of what he had to do first. The kilometres he still had to travel to reach Kuala Lumpur. The urgent need to persuade someone in the high commission to listen to his story and provide the help he needed to get on a plane home. He had not forgotten that, the last time he’d checked, Australia had some kind of extradition treaty with Thailand. Which made it a definite possibility, if the person he spoke to—assuming he had the chance to speak to anyone—turned out to be another version of the Avis Willoughby who’d been so unhelpful to him, he might finding himself heading back to jail in Bangkok.

  I’d rather be dead, he thought. And no doubt he soon would be, if that were to be his fate.

  Yet even talking his way past the high commission’s staff was not the first step. First, he had to find food. Provided he could get to a village or town, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. After years of wandering around Asia, he spoke Malay tolerably well and, luckily, he’d for years been in the habit of carrying Malaysian ringgit and Singapore dollars as well as Thai baht with him. He wasn’t sure how far it was to the next town but with any luck he might soon be able to hitch a lift that would take him there. After that he still had to get to Kuala Lumpur, hundreds of kilometres to the south, and definitely too far to walk, so he would need a bus or another lift, preferably in a car or lorry going all the way to the capital.

  Very well, he told himself. Let’s get on with it.

  He had intended to carry on through the jungle, uneasy about returning to the road with the border still not that far behind him, but a single glance at the forest wall showed that was not a practical proposition. He remembered reading of an SAS team that had taken all day to hack its way through three hundred metres of jungle along the Malaysian/Thai border, near the Gunong Merah tin mine, over to the west. If they’d been unable to make better progress, he would certainly have no chance of doing so, for the SAS were tough men.