The Beach

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.

? The Beach ?

87

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 Francoise 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 Francoise, 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: Etienne’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?’

Etienne 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. Etienne’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