The Beach by Alex Garland Read Free Book Online Page A

minutes later I looked back and he was gone. I guessed he'd found his punter.
Étienne appeared not long after, beaming.
'Hey, Richard,' he said. 'Did you see the girl walking this way?'
'With a lamé dress?'
'Yes! My God, she was so beautiful!'
'She was.'
'Anyway, Richard. Come to the restaurant.' He reached out a hand and hauled me up. 'I think we have a boat to take us into the marine park.'

The man was the Thai version of a spiv. Instead of being lean and weasel-like, with a pencil moustache and a flash suit, he was short, fat, and wore drainpipe marbled jeans tucked into giant Reebok trainers.
'Tha' can be arrange',' he said, quoting from the universal phrase book of the entrepreneur. 'Of course, yes.' He grinned and made an expansive gesture with his arms. Gold sparkled in his mouth. 'No' difficul' for me to do tha'.'
Étienne nodded. So far he'd done all the bargaining, which was fine as far as I was concerned. I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and hating getting ripped off.
'Actually, my frien', your gui' book is no' correc'. You can stay Ko Phelong one nigh', two nigh' — is OK. Bu' this island you can only stay one nigh'.' He took Étienne's book and laid a chubby finger on an island close to Phelong.
Étienne looked at me and winked. From my memory of Mister Duck's map, which was back in the beach hut, our island was the next one along.
'OK,' said Étienne, and lowered his voice conspiratorially, even though there was no one around to hear. 'This is the island we want to see. But we want to stay more than one night. That is possible?'
The spiv furtively looked over his shoulder at the empty tables.
'Yes,' he whispered, leaning forward, then looked around again. 'Bu' is mo' money, you un'erstan'.'
The deal was eventually struck at 1,450 baht, diligently knocked down from 2,000 by Étienne. At six the next morning we were to meet the spiv in the restaurant and he would take us to his boat. Only then would we pay him the money, a point Étienne wisely insisted upon, and he would take us to the island. Three nights later he would come back to pick us up—our contingency plan in case we got stuck there.
That left us with only a couple of problems.
If we made it to the next island along, we would be missing when the spiv came to collect us. To deal with this, Étienne invented a story about some other friends we were going to meet there, so we might come back early — no cause for alarm.
Another difficulty was how to get from the drop-off island to the beach island. We could have asked the boat to take us directly there, but not knowing exactly what we were going to find on the beach, we didn't want to blunder in on a motor boat. Anyway, as the beach island was out of bounds to tourists, we thought it better to start out from one we were allowed to stay on - if only for one night.
Étienne and Françoise seemed far less concerned about this last step of the journey than I was. They had a simple solution — we would swim. By examining Mister Duck's map and the map in their guidebook they'd decided that the islands were roughly a kilometre apart. According to them, that was a manageable distance. I wasn't so confident, remembering the diving game from the day before. The tide had pulled us a long way down Chaweng beach as we swam. If the same thing happened between the islands, the length of the swim could effectively double as we corrected and recorrected our course.
The final problem was what we would do with our bags. Again, Étienne and Françoise had worked out a solution. Apparently they'd done a lot of planning last night while I was getting stoned. Later that day, sitting in the shallows with the wash collecting sand around our feet, they explained.
'The backpacks will not be a problem, Richard,' said Françoise. 'Actually, maybe they will help us to swim.'
I raised my eyebrows. 'How's that?'
'We need some plastic