The Day Of The Wave (16 page)

Izzy's right, Alan could be anywhere now. There are hundreds of hotels on Phi Phi. 

I'm about to head back to the beach when a young kid with sandy brown curls races past me, laughing and shrieking. He stops and chases the ball that's bounced inside and I can't see the face but he looks just like him. I clutch at the doorframe as my heartbeat goes into overdrive. He's exactly the same height.
Holy shit. Toby?

'Sir, can I help you?' the reception guy says now, hurrying over. He looks anxious now, like I just almost gave him a heart attack.

I yank my hand from the doorframe, straightening up. 'I'm OK, sorry, I just... thought I saw something,' I say. My eyes are still on the boy as he turns around with the ball and starts bouncing it all the way outside again. It's not him.

Of course it's not him. Idiot. 

I'm shaking. I sit down on a soft, white chair just outside. This is exactly what happened when I thought I saw Izzy that time outside Burger King, only it turned out to be her. This kid isn't Toby. I'm starting to think it will never be Toby. 

*

I didn't know what planet I was on as Dao's arm around me guided me down the steps of the dive boat. It wasn't the same beach I'd left just over an hour ago, when I last let go of Izzy's hand. I was trembling, like another earthquake was rattling through me. My eyes scanned the apocalyptic scene. People waded through water in places there shouldn't have been any water, or cars, or upturned TV sets, or discarded luggage flattened into the remains of what had been a row of hotels and the dive shop.

I couldn't speak. Dao stayed with me till we were collected with about twenty other sobbing, bleeding people in the back of an open truck and taken to a makeshift rescue center. I was fine on the outside. 

'You're a miracle,' one lady said to me, putting her hands on my shoulders. She was a nurse, she said, from Ireland. She'd examined me but I couldn't remember anything other than pulling my wetsuit straight back on afterwards. It was all I had.

'My brother. My uncle,' I managed and her face crumpled.

'You and your friend Dao, you were the only ones,' she said, as firmly as she could.

The only ones who WHAT
?, I wanted to scream as her chin wobbled.
The only ones who didn't die? The only ones who've come to the rescue center so far? 

Dao left. He had to find out what happened to his family. I felt like no one cared about mine, but everyone was crying. Everyone was lost. I saw more blood and injuries than I'd ever seen and more bodies in bags than I could count. 

'Why are they in bags?' I asked a Thai guy that first afternoon. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt; there was nothing medical about him at all, yet he'd been bringing the bags in for hours. I stood up from my seat and followed him into a room full of them and I was too fast for him to stop me. The smell was insane. I almost threw up.

'Too big,' he said, motioning to them and then to a stack of empty wooden boxes. Caskets. He meant the bodies were too bloated to fit inside the caskets. He handed me some Tiger Balm, told me to rub it on my nostrils. Everyone was doing it.

I couldn't sleep. I couldn't stop thinking about Toby in a body bag. His face woke me up the second I drifted off, screaming, banging from the inside, asking why I let him go. I stayed for two days at the rescue center, maybe three, slept on pink fluffy blankets that smelled weird, but I buried myself in them anyway. I talked to people; all the people I could as the pieces started to fit together, asking questions, waiting. I comforted some and some comforted me, but Izzy's face too kept me screaming on the inside. I lost her. I lost Toby. 

'Isabella,' I said to the girl in braids behind the computer. She was frantic, tapping away a million miles an hour. A line of people were behind me. All of them were bedraggled and beside themselves, like the cast of a war movie. 'Isabella from England. Izzy. I left her on the beach. Can you look again?'

'We don't have any Isabella's yet, I'm sorry,' she said. I asked a hundred times about Toby, too, and Charlie and Van and Tee, but I always got the same answer. 

They'd brought in experts from everywhere - Austria, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, and all of them I realized quickly were carrying out the gruesome tasks it took to identify the dead. Most of it wasn't even happening behind closed doors. There weren't enough doors. 

After a while, no one was bringing the injured in anymore. It was just more bodies and still none of them were Toby. Still none of them were Charlie or Izzy. At least, I didn't think they were. There were panels of photos of the bodies as they were brought in, on the walls. But they were all so horribly deformed. You can't even imagine what water does. People go black, their eyes bulge out of their sockets. The only way to recognize somebody at first is by their jewelry. 

They were fingerprinting the corpses, I discovered. They gave them full dental examinations and took X-rays, then they sent the DNA samples away for analysis. It was when I learned they were matching them to a missing-person's list in Phuket that I begged to be taken there, to the International Hospital. I knew more bodies were there. Maybe I'd find Toby there.

I found my mom instead. She'd just flown in and been allowed a transfer. 'My baby,' she cried when she found me, pulling me against her and sobbing. I was sixteen but her words hit hard. I felt like a baby; a useless, helpless, broken baby. Glenn stood solid like a tree behind her. He hugged me too. It was the first and last time he ever did. 

We moved to a hotel, where we stayed for two weeks and I made it my job to look out for Sonthi. He was going through the same thing, only he was still searching for twenty people he loved. We played guitar at night. We knew the same Beatles song so we sang together outside, taught ourselves the harmonies to take our minds off all the tragedies.
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, Now it looks as though they're here to stay, Oh I believe in yesterday.
 

Even though Sonthi didn't know the meaning of the words, I think they helped us both somehow. The yesterdays we missed were haunting everyone but at least we escaped with our lives.

I went with mom to the councilor, too, but she cried all the way through, and she cried so much at the hotel that I didn't sleep for days. I was a shell. I had no tears left. 'They're gone, they're never coming back,' mom yowled.

'We don't know that!' I yelled at her, but she yowled even more into the walls and the floor and the pillow, while a thousand other people doing the same made even the hotel feel like a funeral parlor. 

We got told that DNA breaks down once bodies decompose. The longer we had to wait, the less chance we had of identifying anyone. Eventually I had to say goodbye to Sonthi and everyone at the hospital I'd gotten to know. Our flight was booked; my brother and uncle and Izzy were officially missing, assumed dead. My mom was a pale-faced Martian I didn't know anymore and she hadn't really spoken to me in days. 'Toby, my baby, Toby!,' she wailed into Glenn's expensive shirt as he helped her outside and into the taxi. 

I was just about to leave for the airport when the girl in braids came to grab me. 'Ben,' she said, leaning down, putting a hand to my shoulder. I could tell by her face she had bad news. 'We found Isabella, from the UK,' she said as the tears careened down her face. 'There's only one on the list. I'm so sorry.'

It was raining when I got outside. It was a real tropical downfall; the kind of rain that lashes and hurts. I turned my face up to it and let it hit me as the wind howled. I wanted to feel the physical crash of everything that had been breaking my heart. The only thing I felt was how it wasn't rain at all. It felt like my brother and Izzy and Charlie and two hundred thousand other souls were crying.

*

When I find Izzy back at the bar she's talking happily to the barman and Bob Marley's
Waiting in Vain
is blasting out ironically from the speakers. 'Any news?' she asks when I walk up behind her. I notice she's lined up everything on the bar, from the straws to the napkins, to every single beer mat. There's hope in her eyes but I shake my head, order a Chang and sit at the stool next to her.

'What happened? You look pale? Did you see him?'

'No,' I say, forcing my brain back to the present. 'He checked out.'

'Oh... pooh.'

'Don't worry, the police won't let him go. If he buys a boat ticket, we'll hear about it.' 

'Thank you for going in there and looking,' she says, putting a hand to my arm for a second. The heat of her and her closeness makes me want to lean in and bury myself in her neck and forget what I just saw... or thought I saw. But maybe her being here is a part of why I saw it anyway. 

'I'm OK,' I say. I know she knows I'm lying.

'Nepatr here was just telling me there's another boat trip tomorrow,' she tells me after a moment. 'Not the one to the Bamboo Island orgy. It's one that takes you snorkeling, and it has drinks and stuff on board.'

The barman grins. 'Good time,' he says, flipping the top off my beer, but my eyes don't leave Izzy's face.

'So you
want
to go out on a boat now, and you want to go snorkeling?'

She smiles down at her lap sheepishly, looks at me through her hair for a second. Impulsively I tuck it behind her ear. 'No, I don't want to snorkel,' she says. 'I don't want to go in the water, but I think getting out on more boats will be good for me. I'll look out the window this time. Baby steps, right?'

'I don't think there are windows on those boats, Izzy. It's just like a deck, and a DJ at one end usually, and a lot of alcohol and drunk people.'

She nods. 'Well... maybe it will be OK. Nepatr says you can always see the land, so it's not like we're on open water. I think I can handle it. I feel like I have to keep pushing myself.'

'You really don't,' I say, putting my hand on hers. 'You have nothing to prove.'

'To myself I do,' she says, looking at my hand, then putting hers on top. 'Ben, I've been so stupidly scared of everything for so long.
Everything
. I don't want to be that person anymore. I don't want to be scared. '

I let out another sigh as she searches my eyes. The corridors are calling me down them again till I can see the workings of her brain. She's pulling me on a fucking roller coaster ride here but she's making up for lost time and God knows we lost enough.

'Are you sure you're alright?' she says now. I realize I'm chewing my cheeks, gripping my beer hard. There are things I don't normally let myself think, let alone talk about most of the time. They itch and burn under my skin while I run, but I run till I'm numb every time. I'm not as numb with her. And maybe that's what scares
me
.

'Look at me, I'm Harry Potter!' Justin's yelling to the American girls, walking over to them again on the deck. He's drawn a lightning bolt on his forehead with the ash from the ashtray. The two brunettes in purple bikinis are both giggling and taking photos but I think they're on mushrooms too, because every now and then they stop what they're doing and just stare at their hands.

'How long do mushrooms affect you for?' I ask Ben. Kalaya smiles. We're watching them from a white seat, sitting on beach towels. I'm trying not to dwell on the fact that we're drifting further away from the island. 

'He took many,' she says, raising her voice above the music. 'He bought a big bag.'

'How many did
you
have?' Ben asks her.

She grins. 'I had many too.' She puts her cocktail down and leans into him. We didn't see them till dusk last night. Apparently Justin found Kalaya and swept her off to some bar to wait for us, but she drank a mushroom shake and flew to the moon and neither of them remembered to look for us for hours. 

'She was Hermione,' Justin tells us now, walking over with the girls and waving a fork at Kalaya. He lifts it high and draws a slow pattern in the air. They all look up at it, mesmerized.
Expeliarmas
!' he yells, making them jump and start squealing with laughter; Kalaya too. He runs off shouting more spells and the American girls follow him, weaving through the hundred or so people on board, all drinking cocktails from plastic cups.

I try not to smile. They're a good distraction from the fact that we're on this boat. This time there are no windows, just like Ben said. I can still see the green smile of the headland curving round the sandy bay of Phi Phi but I won't lie, no matter how amusing Justin is, I'm not having a brilliant time. I know it was my idea but maybe I was being too bold when I suggested it. The barman was pretty convincing, told me his brother runs the trip. 

'He funny boy,' Kalaya says, motioning to Justin with a manicured finger. Ben raises his eyebrows and I do the same discreetly in his direction. When we asked Justin and Kalaya why they weren't answering their phones last night, Justin said he didn't even realize his phone was ringing. He said it was covered in hieroglyphics and he thought it was an ancient Egyptian tool from the future. 

He's yelling 'Dumbledore' at the DJ between songs now. I'm trying my hardest not to feel bothered by the fact that Kalaya's hand is on Ben's knee, or that she keeps kissing his bare shoulder. Shirtless again and leaning back in his seat, his abs are like the surface of a wall. I want to touch them. I've never seen a body like his up close before and sometimes I can't even connect it with his face, or with the Ben I knew before. He's more than the sum of his six-pack but I can't keep my eyes off him anyway.

I get up, walk to the railings and grip them while I force myself to look at the water. The thought of Ben having sex with her last night wouldn't go away. It still won't. We had such a great afternoon, running round looking for Alan. We never found him but it was like we were on an adventure; like we were those two teens conjuring up a world that was just ours again. We watched the sunset from the top of the hill, while a hippy with a big white beard tried to sell us paintings. 

We talked about the art of the wispy clouds and the way the pink and orange streaks were like the work of an angry artist, mad at his canvas. We wondered if the people who died that day wound up there in the heavens, freckles made of stardust and sky; if they're painters of other people's destinies or guardians of chance encounters. I love how Ben can talk about these things. No one else can. Or maybe
I
can't seem to talk about anything like that with anyone else.