Casting Off (21 page)

‘Sure,’ he replied after a couple of anxious hours. ‘Come for a visit. I’ll have an apartment sorted by tomorrow and you can stay with me.’ Excellent news –
he apparently wasn’t avoiding me after all.

It took a mini van and two ferries to get to Lanta. The first ferry, from Phuket to Phi Phi Don, was jampacked full of foreigners who stripped off to their bikinis and stayed outside on the deck
for the fast, windy ride, efficiently using every available second of tanning time. I went inside, to sit on the chairs in the air-conditioning, and watched touts clambering through the
stretched-out legs of the sunbathers, showing them photo albums of hotel rooms, offering them the best rates, free taxi rides, their first-born children. They pushed and pushed to get a sale or
even an agreement to just take a look at the proffered photos. But they didn’t give me any hassle. ‘I am staying with my friend,’ I said and they smiled and moved on. Perhaps the
tan made me look like a long-termer – there was precious little money to be made from the semi-permanent farangs.

‘I’ll pick you up on the bike,’ Guy had texted. ‘Let me know when you get in.’

He pulled into the car park looking every inch the Easy Rider in his shorts and T-shirt, sunglasses on, hair tied back and with his wide smile. I climbed on casually, trying to look as cool as
him.

‘Emma, don’t lean when we go round corners or you can tip the bike over,’ Guy shouted backwards over his shoulder to me as we went along. Seemed I wasn’t all that cool. I
tightened my grip on his waist.

We went straight to his apartment – which turned out to be one room and most of that was taken up by a bed. He had a little fridge, a desk and chair and a TV and little else.
Looks
like we’ll be sharing, then
, I thought.
Maybe he does like me too
. I tried to get a grip on my giddiness and act normally.

‘Beer?’ he asked. I took a can of Skol – the cans were back! – and we sat on the bed, drinking and talking about what we’d been up to since we’d last met. He told me he’d felt really ill the day after we went out on Lipe and had
been laid up in bed for a few days, worried that it was a second bout of the dengue fever he’d had earlier in the year.
Yay! No avoiding!

‘They call it break-bone fever,’ he said,’and now I know why. It really does feel like your bones are breaking. It was so painful. And apparently it’s even worse the
second time round. I was lucky it wasn’t that.’

Dengue fever, dengue fever. It sounded so tropical, so colonial. ‘Oh no, I’m sorry, I can’t come to luncheon today. I’ve been struck by damned dengue fever.’
I’d never met anyone before who had had it. Was it worse than malaria? And if you could get dengue round here, did that mean malaria was prevalent, too? I’d stopped taking my lariam a
few months earlier because I wanted to save my remaining tablets for when we got to places where hospital care was less reliable than in Malaysia or Thailand: Sudan, for example. Or Eritrea.

The phone rang and Guy spoke to someone for a few minutes and then asked if I minded if he just popped out to pick up his friend Ross, the guy he owned the boat with, from the ferry
terminus.

‘Have a shower, watch some TV, use my computer to check your emails if you want,’ he said, logging on for me. ‘When I get back we’ll go out. There’s a few parties
on tonight. I won’t be long.’ And he closed the door behind him.

What I really wanted, after the hot, sticky travelling, was a long shower – my first in weeks that didn’t come from a bucket – and to use the toilet. I hadn’t been to the
loo all day.

The bathroom of Guy’s apartment had a normal, Western-style toilet, not a squatter, I was relieved to see, and although there was no toilet paper, there was a bum gun. After hours of
holding it in it was a relief to sit down and relax. I gunned my bum, stood up and flushed, glancing at the bowl.
Oh
, quite literally,
shit
. I looked on in horror as, instead of
emptying, the toilet filled with water.
It’ll be OK
, I reasoned with myself
, maybe there’s a trick to flushing. I’ll just try again and hold the handle down for
longer this time
. I waited for the cistern to refill and flushed a second time. Water rushed in, but not out, and now my poo was swirling around, dangerously close to the top of the bowl. I
started to panic properly. Guy could be back any minute and I could imagine fewer things less romantic than having to tell him I had blocked his toilet with my turd.

I looked around the bathroom for a bin, a drain, anything. There was a covered drain on the tiled floor and I lifted off the grate and looked down it.
Could I throw the poo down there?
I wondered, wildly. I looked from toilet to drain, from drain to toilet. But I couldn’t do it. I had another idea and went into the bedroom, looking for a plastic bag. There was an empty
crisp packet in the bin and a small plastic bag. I grabbed them both, checked the plastic bag for leak-prone anti-suffocation holes and went back into bathroom, praying that Guy wasn’t about
to open the front door and catch me red – well, brown – handed. There was nothing else for it. I had to poop-a-scoop my own shit. I took a deep breath and lowered my hand into the
bowl.

So now I had a bag of poo in my hand to dispose of and time was running out. I ran, panicked, back into the bedroom and opened the door to step out on to the small balcony. The apartment was on
the first floor. Could I get away with dropping it over the side? I dangled the bag over the railing and scanned the ground below me. Yes – there was a grassy area. Maybe I could secretly
retrieve it later. But then I saw a middle-aged Thai woman cooking at a stall to my right, her washing-up area only a few metres from the bag’s likely landing point. What if she heard it
thump and, curious, went to investigate? Or – far, far worse – what if the bag exploded on impact with the ground, like a water bomb? I turned and went back inside. There was only one
place I could put it – and that was back in the bin. I pulled the knot of the handles even more tightly, moved the other rubbish out of the way and buried the bag of shame underneath it all.
I sniffed the air cautiously – would he be able to tell? I didn’t think so.

I did a Lady Macbeth on my hands, showered, changed and was checking Facebook, pretending to be calm, when Guy arrived back. ‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes, fine, fine.’

He went into the bathroom and I heard the toilet. I braced myself for any surprised shouts, in case anything had been hiding halfway round the U-bend and had decided to worm its way back out.
But there was only the sound of the shower starting. Crisis averted.

As we left the apartment, I pointed nonchalantly at the trash. ‘Your bin is pretty full now with all these empty beer cans. Shall I empty it on the way?’ I asked, and swept it up and
out.

The weather in the UK, of course, has a lot of to do with it, but when you see bikers in England they are invariably clad head to toe in leathers, with stiff boots protecting their feet, gloves
covering their hands and sturdy helmets cushioning their heads. If they come off their bikes at speed and slide along the ground, the leather gets ripped off, rather than their skin and muscle. But
in South East Asia it’s not like that. It’s hot and sticky, the laws and approach to health and safety are laxer and, well, it’s just not cool. In Malaysia, at least, everyone
wears a helmet. And their coat on back to front if it’s raining. But in Thailand, with their laidback approach, which I was loving, it’s shorts, flip-flops and hair flowing free in the
wind. And drunk driving all the way. I was very lucky that Guy is a good, well-practised rider and we never had an accident, not when it was raining, when it was dark or when we were drunk, and
especially not when it was all three at the same time.

We flitted from bar to bar, from birthday party to dive masters’ graduation ceremony, from snorkel tests to transvestite fashion show. At our final stop of the evening, I climbed wobbily
off the bike in the car park of a pub. Although we had been getting on well, talking and laughing, Guy hadn’t made a move on me, or even touched me, and I had decided, with the clarity
inebriation brings, to lunge at him and kiss him. As I focused my eyes on his gorgeous face, I was dimly aware of Toni Braxton’s 1997 hit ‘Un-break My Heart’ playing in the
background. I started my offensive.

‘No!’ he yelped and jumped back, further away.

‘What?’ I demanded, hands on hips. ‘Am I not allowed to kiss you?’

‘Oh,’ he said, moving back towards me a little bit. ‘I thought you were trying to slow dance with me.’

‘In a car park?’ I laughed, finding it funny but also a little bit hurt that he’d leapt away from me so abruptly.

He let me give him a quick peck, a bit awkwardly, given that the moment was lost, and we went in to drink buckets of samsong (very strong Thai whisky) and Red Bull, and meet more of his friends.
Later he led me to some sun loungers on the beach for some proper kissing, sans Toni Braxton.

I stayed on Lanta with Guy for four days, meeting his friends, who were all divers, or training to be dive masters, or ran dive shops or taught diving or owned diving companies or were on
holiday to – you guessed it – dive. We went out drinking every night, starting from about 4pm or 5pm, and carried on until the early hours of the morning. In the afternoons, while we
were recovering from one pub session and steeling ourselves for the next, Guy entertained me with tales of island life, filling me in on all the gossip and drama. And there was a lot of it –
Lanta Life
could easily have been a soap opera, and a multicultural, incestuous one at that. Everyone went out with everybody else and even those with a boyfriend or girlfriend back home
joined in with the sleeping around pretty much the minute after they had waved off their beloved at the airport. Those people who had done more than one season on the island seemed to have their
own moral code and completely lived for the moment. They didn’t worry about the expectations and values of the wider world, about their futures, their bank balances or pensions, whether they
would find a husband or wife and settle down. They worked for a pittance, just to pay for the rent on their one-room flats, and as long as they had a beer – or 10 – in their hand each
night, and they were diving, they were happy. Although I admired their carefree spirit, I couldn’t help but worry on their behalf about what they would do when they got older. A
hand-to-mouth, party-led existence is all well and good while you are young and beautiful, but later on? I was curious about whether people eventually become so detached from normal life that they
are unable to go back to it. But maybe they didn’t want to ‘go back’. Maybe this
was
normal life, doing what you loved, with no stressing over anything other than who had
pinched your latest boyfriend. Perhaps I should try it for myself.

After a lunch-time breakfast of sticky rice and spicy som tam papaya salad each morning, Guy and I climbed on to his bike and he showed me his favourite spots on the island. During mid-afternoon
chats over first beers I picked up on his back story. He’d been to uni and got a job in computer programming, earning good money, but he’d seen it as a means to an end – and that
end was travelling, teaching diving to fund himself as he went. He’d never settled or even stayed in one place for long enough to put down roots, it seemed, except here in Thailand, where the
monsoon season drove the divers away every spring and drew them back again before Christmas. He had lived out of a bag for years, visiting remote parts of South America and Asia. I got the
impression that he was very happy to continue his itinerant lifestyle for ever. A girlfriend would fit into that only if she went with him.

‘It’s harder for chicks, you know?’ he said one afternoon while we lazed in a couple of hammocks on a beach, the smalls of our backs just inches from the sand, his toes hooked
around one edge of my hammock, rocking me slightly. ‘It’s more natural for them to want to settle down, have a home, friends around them. So it’s difficult.’ He was talking
generally, not about us – if there even
was
an us – but I found myself wondering if I could be that kind of woman, never settling, constantly moving. I always liked to have a
nest to go back to, to feel secure in – as a kid I’d turned our garden shed into a mini house, making pretend bunk beds out of cardboard boxes, and baked beans and sausages from orange
beads and brown wax crayons. I wasn’t sure I could be literally homeless, however much I liked someone.

I was having a good time with Guy but I was finding it hard to read him. He wasn’t very touchy-feely or affectionate, especially when ballads were playing in car parks. In fact, in looks
and personality and in terms of his and my ‘relationship’, he was the exact opposite of Steve. The only thing they had in common was that they were both boat bums. Guy would say
confusing things like ‘I’m no good at relationships,’ and leave me wondering whether that meant he thought we were in one, and he was apologising for his behaviour, or if he was
telling me he didn’t want one. But then the next minute he would say, ‘I’ll miss you when you’re gone,’ ‘Why don’t you come sailing with me to
Indonesia?’ or ‘I find you much more attractive than those beautiful Swedes over there.’ (Actually, that last statement mainly just left me unsure whether he was complimenting me
or telling me I was ugly.) I was really, really attracted to him and it could well be that the fact he wasn’t throwing himself at me was making me keener. The thrill of the chase, and all
that. I ordered myself to stop worrying about it, in my new spirit of letting things be. I had to leave both Lanta and Thailand anyway and get back to England for my brother’s wedding.