Soul Storm (23 page)

But she smiles kindly, pours my tea.

‘Miss Forster. Welcome to Thailand and to the True Lily Hotel.’

It’d be rude to refuse. I’ll pretend to drink. But when I lift the cup to my lips, I almost drop it.

It’s ice cold.

Meggie always used to laugh about my name. ‘Little Alice in her own Wonderland. Nothing makes sense for Alice! Off with her head!’

I’ve never felt more like a character in someone else’s topsy-turvy world. Even the Beach felt more familiar than this.

Beach? I haven’t even seen the reason we came here yet.

‘ . . . the role of the concierge is to make your holiday truly memorable,’ the lady is saying. ‘We offer various trips to places around the island, including the setting for
the Bond movie . . .’

I don’t want to see where they filmed a Bond movie.

I want to see Soul Beach.

Lewis is nodding politely as the woman – her badge says Guest Services – continues telling us about places we don’t want to visit and restaurants where we will never eat.

This isn’t a bloody holiday.
I try to catch Lewis’s eye. He looks funny with the blossom necklace against a white shirt that’s crumpled from almost twenty-four hours
of travelling. His face shows exhaustion, though he’s still nodding.

Finally the woman finishes her monologue.

‘I’m happy to answer any questions before we show you to your villa . . . the Tiger Lily, it’s one of our most luxurious.’

Villa?

‘I think you’ve told us everything we could possibly need to know,’ Lewis says and, despite the tiredness, there’s a twinkle in his eye as he looks at me. ‘Alice?
Anything else before we go to our
villa
?’

‘Only one thing,’ I say. ‘Where’s the beach?’

Of course, there’s no way we honoured guests could be allowed to
walk
to the beach.

No, the woman summons a golf buggy and we rumble off, away from reception, over a bridge, past little landscaped gardens leading up to tiny front doors complete with letterboxes and numbers.
Behind the doors I can just glimpse red-tiled roofs.

It’s freakily similar to the neat estate I live in at home.

Until a group of sparrow-sized birds with bright yellow legs and even brighter yellow faces swoop by the side of the buggy.

And then the baby elephant blocks our path.

OK, maybe not quite like home.

The buggy driver brakes gently alongside and turns to the left. There’s an opening and beyond it, mopeds and vans race by on a main road.

‘In Thailand, beaches must not be owned. All are public, but we have outstanding facilities for our guests, of course,’ the driver is telling us, as he helps us step down from the
golf buggy. There’s a fierce-faced man in khaki uniform at the gate. He steps into the road and halts the traffic to let Lewis and me cross.

This isn’t right.

In the distance, I glimpse the sea. The colours are perfect, the lower half a deep turquoise, the heavens a clearer, brighter blue.

But the rest of it doesn’t fit at all.

Lewis takes my hand and we head for the water. There’s a paved walkway leading towards the beach, and either side there are stalls and shops. We pass an open-air massage place full of
bored-looking Thai women, fanning themselves with newspapers. To the right, a tourist shop is selling hats and mats that wouldn’t look out of place on Brighton beach. Another stall has
cherry-red sarongs and emerald tie-dye dresses swinging in the sea breeze.

Ahead there are bleached-wood loungers with cushions deeper than my mattress at home and parasols woven from palm rushes. Finally the path stops and the sand starts. I take off my trainers and
leave them on the paving stones.

As I step into the sand, it shifts under my feet. Warm. No,
hot,
so hot that I have to keep moving so I don’t burn my soles.

To my left, a restaurant packed with holiday-makers eating lunch.

Wrong.

Reggae music blasts from a bar to my right.

Wrong.

No harsh rocks, no secluded bay, no jetty, no birds of paradise.

No beautiful teenagers.

No Danny.

No Meggie.

Wrong, wrong, WRONG!

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Lewis whispers.

I can’t answer. It
is
beautiful. Possibly the most beautiful place I’ve ever visited in my life. Close up, the sea is as clear as air, and translucent crabs skitter across
the sand like ghosts.

But it’s
nothing
like Soul Beach. All this way, all this money, all the pain I’ll be putting my parents through.
For nothing.

‘It’s not supposed to be
here,
by the way, Alice.’

‘What?’

‘The place we’re looking for. It’s a good couple of hours away but there are no hotels over in that direction, not since the tsunami. This resort is just our base for the trip.
Closest I could get accommodation that didn’t look like a health hazard. No good coming this far to be laid low with dysentery or something.’

‘Oh.’

‘Let’s see how we feel later, but my plan would be to recover today and then, tomorrow, we will go to find what you’re looking for.’

The relief makes me light-headed. Or maybe it’s the heat or the jet lag or that weird herbal tea. Whatever it might be, I begin to fall, until Lewis steps in front of me and catches me in
his arms.

‘Thank you,’ I whisper.

He nods. ‘You know I’d do anything for you, Ali.’

I smile, but I wish he hadn’t said that. It makes me feel even more faint.

When I wake up, I have no idea where I am. Whether it’s night or day.

Slowly, I
make
myself remember, dredging my tired brain for snippets of information.

Thailand. Daytime, I think, unless I’ve slept all the way into night. It is dark here, and I’m groggy, but my instinct tells me I’ve been out no more than an hour, two at
most.

I’m certain about one thing: I need water. There’s a tiny sliver of light to my left, enough for me to see a bedside table. I reach out and a carved stone lamp comes on as I touch
it, giving off the gentlest of glows. There’s a bottle of water in its own ice bucket. I lift it to my lips and drink.

And
drink.
Even once I’ve finished the bottle, I could drink another one, but it’s enough for now.

The room – sorry, I’m remembering now, the
villa –
is huge. The bed on its own is larger than my entire bedroom at home. It’s set on a platform: around me there
are glass walls, and thick curtains keeping out most of the daylight. I have a vague memory of the manager mentioning a remote control and so I sit up properly and peer under the bedside table.
Push one button – all the lights fade up. Push a second – classical music fills the room. Push the third . . .

The curtains draw back smoothly, like I’m in a theatre. Sunshine blinds me momentarily. But even now I can see, I can’t make sense of what’s in front of me. I sit up –
still dressed in the t-shirt I wore for the flight,
ugh –
and glance through the floor-to-ceiling glass.

My room seems to be floating in the middle of a lily pond.

I climb out of bed, my legs rubbery, and the soles of my feet make contact with the cool white marble of the floor. I walk across the room. There are sliding doors in front of me and I pull them
apart. Heat hits me. Glass steps lead down to . . . no, down
in
to the pond. It’s too tempting.

I dangle my right foot in the water.
Ah.
So much cooler than the air. I step down again and the water reaches to my knees. It’s a delicious feeling.

The ‘pond’ isn’t natural – it’s tiled, for a start, and there are lights in the walls, the beams rippling in the water. But the whole pool is surrounded by trees
and kept completely private by stone walls that are covered with greenery. The stone looks oddly familiar . . .

Of course. It’s the same grey-black colour as the rocks on the Beach. My heart begins to pound.

No. Don’t get your hopes up. Maybe that’s pretty much the standard colour for stone across the whole of Asia.

‘Mooo.’

The noise is so loud it makes me jump.

‘MOOO!’

Again. Are we next to a farmyard? Whatever’s making that noise must be enormous.

Except it seems to be coming from right next to me.

Lewis will know.

I wonder if he’s up and about. I should find him, get the plan confirmed for visiting the
real
Beach. This isn’t a holiday.

‘Ow.’

I’ve stubbed my toe on something. A blue glass chair, set into the tiles, halfway under the water. It makes me smile and I sit down on it. This does feel like Wonderland. James Bond
curtains. Underwater furniture.

‘Moo!’

Farmyard sound effects.

Except this time it’s clearer where the moo is coming from. Over in the corner of the water garden. I wade towards it.

A frog. Or, more of a toad, I guess. He’d only just fit in the palm of my hand. Except I wouldn’t pick him up because he looks a bit . . . well, warty. His body is round and brown,
with orangey stripes down his back.

‘That wasn’t really you, was it?’ I say to the toad, who stares back with dark, challenging eyes. I guess he doesn’t speak English.

But then he moos again.
So
loud that if I wasn’t seeing it close-up, I wouldn’t think it was possible. The expression in his face is defiant, as if to say, this is my
country and my pond, I’ll moo as much as I like.

I begin to giggle. Then it turns into a belly laugh. Maybe I’ve finally lost it. But at this moment, wading around in the privacy of my own water garden, thousands of miles from everything
familiar, I feel lighter than I have for a whole year.

The Tiger Lily Villa gets more like Wonderland with every new discovery.

The shower has more controls than the space shuttle. I fill the glass cubicle with citrus-scented steam before I manage to get any water to come out. When it does, it’s like a monsoon.
I’m completely baffled by which shower gel to try from the rainbow of potions in glass decanters, so I try a bit of each one.

There’s even a choice of bathrobes. I pick one made from cool navy cotton.

Wherever I walk, the lights fade up automatically and music follows me too. A wood panelled corridor leads from the bedroom and bathroom to a heavy wooden door. When I open it, there’s a
huge dining and lounging area, with floaty white curtains and exotic flowers and plants along three walls . . .

And to my right, there’s a glass wall: beyond it, a vast garden leading down to a lily-covered private lake.

In the garden, a figure sits under the parasol, reading a paper.

Lewis has changed into shorts and a t-shirt. He’s not wearing glasses, and his hair’s wet and drawn back from his face. His head is slightly bent as he reads. He’s as still as
the lake.

I’ve never watched him like this before. Suddenly he looks so different. Like this is his element. It makes sense – at home, in his flat, he surrounds himself with plants.

The concentration in his face draws me to him. All the frantic gestures he usually makes – running his hand through his mad hair, fiddling with his phone, downing another can of Diet Coke
– are a distraction. But now I’m seeing a new Lewis, the person behind his running commentary of self-deprecating wisecracks.

A beautiful mind.

I don’t know where that phrase comes from, but it’s precisely right.

But it’s not just his mind. His legs are pretty good too, and his face, in profile, is classically handsome, like a Roman statue.

How have I not seen this before? His busy-ness has disguised who he really is. Now he’s calm, I can finally see him clearly.

He dazzles me. Right now, it’s like he’s brighter than the sun.

And like the sun, he makes my skin burn.

Suddenly I’m all too aware of how thin this bathrobe is, and how my hair is dripping and my face is scrubbed clean with no make-up. I take a step backwards but he
had
to choose
that moment to look up, didn’t he?

‘Ali! You’ve surfaced from the depths of sleep. Excellent!’

I check the tie around my waist is firmly knotted and walk towards him, holding my hand up to shield my eyes from the fierce sunlight. ‘How long have I been out?’

‘Couple of hours. Not very long. The theory goes that to fight jet lag you’re supposed to stay up as long as you possibly can, but I grabbed an hour, too. Woke myself up in the
pool.’

‘Pool?’

‘Um . . .’ he points behind us. How did I
not
notice the long, narrow strip of pure blue that seems to project into the lake itself? Or the adjoining whirlpool that looks
like a cube of jade crystal?

‘I guess I can use jet lag as my excuse,’ I say, knowing it’s a poor excuse when he’s already wide awake.

He smiles. ‘Hungry? Let’s have lunch.’

I look down at my dressing gown and my pale legs poking from underneath. My Soul Beach tan is only an illusion created when I go online – it doesn’t travel into real life.

‘Don’t worry, Ali, we don’t have to set foot outside the villa.’

Of course, the villa has its own kitchen, just inside the grand entrance.

‘Don’t suppose the guests ever come in here. It’s probably strictly for their manservants or battalion of chefs,’ Lewis says. The room is narrow and slightly tatty.
There’s no air-con, only a mesh across the mean window to keep the insects out. ‘The kind of people who usually stay here don’t do their own cooking. They probably don’t
even know how to turn on a tap.’

‘Is the villa
very
expensive?’

‘Reassuringly expensive, but I decided that as the chief executive and sole employee of my own company, I deserved a little bonus,’ he says. ‘Plus, they upgraded us. Which was
nice of them, wasn’t it?’

I nod. ‘You know, Lewis, I’m not all that hungry.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind, but you should have
something.
Now, you just go and lay the table, and I’ll rustle something up.’ He hands me cutlery and glasses and I
walk down the grand entrance hall back to the dining lobby. I can hear him chopping.