The Backpacker

by John Harris

  He was silent for a minute, staring at the wreckage, before turning and standing over me. ‘There’s something I didn’t tell you, John. I haven’t quite lost everything.’ I looked up, wondering what the fuck he was talking about, and frowned. Rick put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a huge wad of Thai baht, waving it in the air. ‘She may have taken my passport but I took that bitch’s money. All of it!’

  ‘You did what?’ I exclaimed, standing up and hitting my head on an over-hanging branch.

  ‘Heh heh. If she thinks she’s got one over on me wait till she looks under the floorboards.’ He ran his thumb over the end of the notes and they purred like a pack of cards. ‘That’ll teach her to steal my fooking passport!’

  I stopped rubbing my head. ‘That’s why she burnt your fucking hut down and stole your passport, you moron! That’s what she’s after, not me, not you, that fucking money! Jesus, no wonder you left the house last night, it all makes perfect sense now!’

  ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘What’s got into me? What’s got into you, you idiot? You’re the one who’s stealing money from a Thai Mafia bird, not me.’ I leant against a tree trunk to steady myself. ‘Fuck me, Rick, if someone told me you had done this I’d never have believed it possible, not in a million years.’

  ‘Don’t get so ratty.’

  ‘Ratty! Ra–?’

  ‘I’ve got money.’

  ‘A lot of fucking good money’ll be to a dead man.’

  ‘Who’s a dead man?’ He looked about. ‘I’m not, you’re not. I told you before, if she wants to fook about with the Mafia that’s her problem. If Tommy fooked about with some hard men, that’s his problem, it’s between Thais, it’s got nothing to do with us. You and me just leave this island on the next boat out tomorrow morning and go to the mainland. Simple.’

  ‘Huh.’ I picked up my bag and slung it over my shoulder, nearly knocking Rick’s head off in the process, and put one foot on the slope that we had just slid down. ‘You can wait until tomorrow if you want, I’m going now.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Koh Samui. I can’t see any point in waiting around here to be found and beaten. Let’s go back to the ferry and leave now. We can stay there overnight and leave in the morning.’ I started to climb the muddy bank.

  Rick coughed sheepishly. ‘That was the last ferry that we came in on John, it’ll have gone by now.’

  Suddenly, as if I’d been shot with a tranquilliser dart, all of my energy seemed to leave me.

  ‘Sorry Olly!’

  I don’t know where it came from but I laughed. I had to; otherwise I think I might have cried. I sat down on the edge of the clearing and buried my face in my hands, unable to even look at Rick for fear that I might blow up at him. One thing I have to say about Rick, though, is that he knows when to shut up and leave someone to their thoughts. And the thoughts I had in my head were things that he wouldn’t have wanted to hear anyway, because mostly they involved insulting him.

  We sat there for about an hour while I tried to figure out what to do. I say ‘I’ tried to figure it out because, judging by the way Rick sat around idly flicking twigs onto a nearby veranda, his mind wasn’t on the problem at all. Eventually I got fed up with the silence and the sound of my own thoughts inside my head. ‘Rick.’

  He looked up mid-flick. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Don’t keep playing with those sticks, it’s really annoying. What are we going to do?’

  He released the twig and sighed. ‘The first ferry leaves Thong Sala for Surat Thani at seven in the morning, I think. Otherwise we go back tomorrow morning on the one to Koh Samui and leave from there to the mainland.’

  ‘Thong Sala? That’s on the other side of the island!’

  ‘Yeah, we’d have to get one of the trucks from here: a bit risky. We could walk.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, I came in that way when I arrived. It’s ten miles, at least.’

  ‘Well then the only alternative is to go back the way we came, through Samui. At least we won’t have to walk far.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I considered the options, stretching out my aching legs and digging my feet into the soil. ‘The only problem there is that they’ll probably be expecting it. Remember, as far as they’re concerned I’m still in the hospital. Tommy can’t tell them otherwise because there’s no phone at the house.’

  He nodded. ‘Thong Sala will definitely be safer, especially if they know about the money. They could be all over that ferry tomorrow morning.’

  ‘You seem to forget, Rick, it’s not us against the mob. We’ve only got the girls to contend with.’ I sat back down on the log and thought. I could see that he was hiding something else about Ta and co but didn’t bother to ask, there didn’t seem to be any point in going over old ground. We needed a way out and I was determined to find one, however daunting the odds.

  In the end, after hour upon hour of discussion, we agreed that the best thing to do was to stay on Koh Pha-Ngan and go out on one of the pick-ups early the next morning, catching the first ferry over to the mainland. The first part was very risky, but we both agreed that it was better than the Samui option; at least we should be in the clear once we were on the ferry. To lessen the risk, we needn’t catch the pick-up in town but could jump in at one of the resorts further along the coast. Rick seemed to think that there was a small group of tourist huts on a fairly remote beach about two miles along from Hat Rin. He and Ta had gone there once, before I had arrived, on a day trip to some unspoilt corals, and, though his memory was vague, he thought that it wasn’t far from the main Hat Rin ferry port road.

  The escape plan seemed sound enough and, unless one of the girls just happened to be in the pick-up truck, appeared to be foolproof. The main drawback for me was going to be the walk to get to that beach. If we were going to get the first ferry out in the morning it would mean walking through the night; a prospect that filled me with dread.

  We had two choices of route: either along the dusty main road or up the coastline. The coast route would involve clambering over rocks and swimming across dark bays, while the road, even if we tried to follow the tree line, left us dangerously exposed to all passing traffic. We couldn’t decide one way or the other and, as ridiculous as it seems, ended up flipping a coin.

  ‘One more time,’ I said, the coin having come up heads for the coast route. ‘Best of three, how about that?’

  ‘You can’t make a decision, that’s your problem.’

  ‘OK then, you decide which route to take.’

  ‘I’ve already told you, I think we should go along the coast. You only want to flip again because it didn’t come up tails, admit it.’

  We needn’t have bothered flipping the coin; after only half an hour into the journey we came up against a series of rocky outcrops so ragged that we were unable to cross. At first we stood and stared, trying to gauge the amount of effort required to swim around the headland, but even in the dark I could see that the rocks jutted out at least twice as far as the ones between Hat Rin and our party beach.

  ‘What do you think, John?’ Rick leaned against a rock, pulling his cigarettes from his pocket.

  I looked up at the escarpment, its outline black and jagged against the night sky, the base strewn with huge boulders that had tumbled down, finally smoothing out into the shimmering moonlit sea. ‘Not with this bag,’ I said, patting my holdall, ‘I can’t swim with this. To be honest, even if I didn’t have this I don’t know if we could make that swim. Who knows how much further around before we hit a beach on the other side?’

  Rick rolled the foil from his cigarette packet into a ball and flicked it away. ‘You’re a better swimmer than me, I suppose. If you can’t do it then neither can I. We can’t go over the top, it’ll take forever. We’ll have to turn back.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘There’s nothing else we can do.’ He sighed heavily. ‘What time d’you reckon it is?’

  I looked up at the sky and said, ‘Two, three late
st.’

  ‘We’ll have a ciggie and then move off. We should be able to cut through the fields at the back of town.’

  We smoked a cigarette each and walked back the way we’d come, and, as Rick had suggested, turned off into what looked like a cultivated piece of land behind Hat Rin. Besides the odd shout in the distance, carried by the gentle breeze across the relatively flat land, and the occasional boom of a loud speaker, we heard nothing. There was something quietly soothing about finally being out in the open field, away from the choking jungle, and with the aid of another painkiller I felt my spirits lift, as the land sloped upwards very gently to meet the dusty main Hat Rin– Thong Sala road.

  ‘Which way d’you want to go?’ Rick asked as I stood beside him, the dirt track cutting through the palms left and right of us like a perfectly routed channel. ‘Don’t answer that,’ he said, and put his arm around my shoulder. ‘Go north young man, and avoid being cut up into little pieces and fed to the sharks.’

  We walked through the night along that dusty track as it wound its way through the trees like the course of a river, changing direction when the engineers came, like we had, up against rock faces too large to cross. Up and down we went, a rollercoaster with two people side by side, rising and falling with the track and puffing away on cigarettes, the puffs of blue smoke hanging breathlessly behind us.

  The width of the track was exactly the same as the height of the palm trees and dense jungle that lined it, and I felt like I was walking down a tunnel, square on cross-section and open at the top. The moon was only a sliver, a toenail clipping, but provided the tunnel with just enough light: silver on the tree tops when we reached a brow in the road, orange on the sandy clay soil of the track.

  By the time we reached a small lane that turned off the main road the moon was only just visible, lying on its curved back on a bed of palm tops, comfortable and snug.

  ‘This looks like it,’ Rick said, stepping off the track onto the grass verge.

  ‘Two miles my foot. More like five.’ I leaned against a signpost, exhausted.

  The sign was obscured by sun-dried mud that had splashed off the road during the rainy season. Rick nudged me to one side and chipped off the two-inch thick mud cake. ‘Cosy Resort and Bungalows,’ he read. A small arrow pointed down the narrow jungle path. ‘This is it. Now we just wait until it gets light and get into the first pick-up that comes by.’

  I immediately threw my bag onto the ground and blinked hard, squeezing the sting out of my tired eyes. ‘Fuck, I’m knackered.’ Trampling down the grass by the roadside, I made a small sitting area. ‘How long d’you think before the first truck comes along?’

  ‘Before the first ferry. Around six, I think.’

  ‘Think?’

  ‘Definitely before seven anyway. Someone’s got to come by before seven if it takes half an hour to get there. What time now?’

  ‘Five,’ I said, yawning, ‘not later.’

  ‘Course, there may be other transport before then. I think we should stay alert and get anything that comes along. If–’

  I squatted and then laid down, using my bag as a pillow.

  ‘What the fook are you doing?’

  ‘Going to bed, what does it look like?’

  ‘Bed? Someone’s got to keep an eye out.’

  ‘You can,’ I rolled onto my side, smacking my lips. ‘Wake me when a truck comes along.’

  ‘But why me?’

  ‘Because you fucked up,’ I said closing my eyes. ‘Goodnight.’

  EIGHT

  ‘How the fuck are we going to know if they’re friendly or not?’ I shouted, still blinking rapidly against the bright, early morning sky and trying to locate the shoulder strap of my bag. ‘It could be one of Ta’s cronies.’

  Rick was standing in the middle of the track waving his hands wildly above his head as though directing a helicopter in to land. ‘Try,’ he replied, ‘see what happens.’

  Amidst a cloud of orange dust and the sound of tyres grinding on hard earth, I clambered up the incline to the road where Rick had been. It was like the scene from a magician’s stage show where a puff of smoke heralds the disappearance of the beautiful assistant. Rick wasn’t beautiful but the effect was similar. In the time I had taken my eyes off him to pick up my bag he was gone, replaced by the cloud of dust.

  He reappeared to my right leaning into the window of a pickup. My heart was in my mouth: either they didn’t know Ta and would drive us to the ferry, or Rick was about to get his brains blown out.

  The driver thumbed behind him and Rick put a thumb up to me. ‘We’re in!’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I shouted back, and ran to the vehicle and jumped in the back with him. ‘So far so good.’ For one heart-stopping moment the driver started a three-point turn, but then, after looking out of his side window to ensure that he had cleared a pot-hole, we drove on.

  Rick was regaining some lost ground in my estimation, after messing up so badly: he had been right about the field that took us around the back of Hat Rin, and now about the first pick-up of the morning. Things were definitely looking up on his part. We reached Thong Sala ferry pier and went to the ticket office of the ferry company.

  A tight-lipped, weasel-looking Thai man opened the shutter for the first business of the day, arranging the cushion on his seat before sitting on it and looking up at us. ‘Ngh?’ he grunted, still not fully awake.

  ‘Two tickets to Surat Thani, please.’ He punched them out and slid them across the counter, writing the price (different to what it said on the ticket) on a scrap of paper. We didn’t argue and paid. ‘What time does it leave?’ I asked.

  He stabbed the ticket with his finger and huffed.

  ‘Eleven! Isn’t there one before that?’

  His stabbing finger came up and tapped on the window, where a timetable had been stuck with tape. It confirmed what was written on the ticket: S. THA VIA K. TAO AND K. SAM. – ARR. S. THA 11.00

  I deflated. ‘Now what?’

  ‘Wait. What else is there to do?’ Rick scanned the dock-side. ‘There’re a few cafés around here, they’re not open yet but we can get something to eat when they do, and hide in them until the ferry comes.’

  As we walked away in search of some breakfast, I glanced back at the ticket office and saw the weasel pick up the phone. ‘D’you know anyone who’s got a phone on Koh Pha-Ngan, Rick?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know anyone who has, but plenty of people have got phones. Most of the bungalow owners and restaurants have a phone, why?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, turning back and walking on. ‘Just paranoia.’

  Having not seen anyone that we recognised while hanging around the cafés, we assumed that we were in the clear, and when the boat eventually arrived and the passengers started to board, Rick and I waited on the top floor balcony of a restaurant that overlooked the jetty just to be sure.

  ‘See anyone?’

  ‘Nope,’ he replied, ‘not a sausage. We’ve been here for three hours and I haven’t recognised a single person from Hat Rin, or anywhere else for that matter.’

  ‘Good.’ I stood up. ‘Let’s get on that boat and get the fuck out of here.’

  The ferry wasn’t the same as the one I’d arrived on when first coming to the island. Unlike the previous, smaller two-deck passenger ferry that usually plied these waters, the one that came in now was a huge steel car ferry with five decks, snack bars and air conditioned TV lounge. When it came alongside, it nearly took the jetty from its moorings under the impact, sending most of the queuing passengers to their knees.

  As with the previous night’s ferry from Koh Samui, we waited until the last minute before running out from our cover and boarding the boat, not even bothering to show our tickets for inspection and running straight on deck. Whether my earlier paranoia was justified or not, when we got to the front of the upper deck and looked over at the passengers below, we got the shock of our lives to see Toomy sitting up front.

  Ri
ck pushed me back against the steel wall. ‘She must have already been on the ferry when it arrived!’ He peeped back over the edge. ‘Shit!’

  ‘Impossible,’ I said, ‘this boat came from Koh Tao.’

  ‘Yes, but before that it must have come from Surat Thani.’

  I made a quick mental adjustment. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  He nodded. ‘They’re waiting for us in Surat Thani,’ we both said. ‘Fuck!’

  Because of the number of decks and the size of the boat it would be easy enough for us to keep out of sight during the four-hour crossing. The decks fore and aft were tiered, like most large vessels, so that the lower decks were wider and longer than the next one up, a bit like a wedding cake. All we had to do was stay seated on the deck above Toomy and look down occasionally to see if and when she moved. The difficulty would be getting off the boat in Surat Thani without being seen. I suggested getting off at Koh Samui, but as Rick said, we still had to get from there to Surat Thani, so the problem wouldn’t be solved.

  ‘Then there’s nothing we can do,’ I sighed, peeping over the edge of our deck beside Rick, ‘just stay here and sit tight. Maybe she’ll get off in Samui.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  The boat blew its horn and we parted company with the island. The brown, churned up water cleared and we picked up speed, first running near to the shore and then clearing the headland at Hat Rin, where the water turned a familiar blue. If Toomy hadn’t been on that boat I would have felt my spirits lift as high as the sea birds flying above us. Rising and dipping as they scooped up the fish that had been chopped to pieces in our wake, their white bodies flashing brilliantly against the tropical blue sky.

  We pulled into Koh Samui briefly to let on a handful of passengers before moving away into open water again, but Toomy didn’t get off, and, apart from once going into the snack bar and bringing back a pot noodle for herself, she didn’t move for the next two hours.

  Eventually the boat gave another loud blast of its horn and we pulled in at Surat Thani. Toomy got up and did a full circuit of the bottom deck before checking out the upper ones, obviously looking for us, and when she came up to our end of the boat we hid in the toilets and watched through a gap in the door. Thinking that we were not onboard, she shuffled dejectedly back to her deck and waited by the side, staring vacantly into the water.