The Day Of The Wave (2 page)

'Mer-people? You're weird,' the teenage girl smirks as she strides alongside me carrying her flippers. She must be sixteen, maybe seventeen. She's hardly said a word till now but I didn't miss her eyes raking over my body from my torso up to my face as I ran over the rules again. I didn't miss Kalaya watching her, either.

'Izzy, wizzy, let's get
bizzy
!' the little kid calls out, dancing in front of his sister suddenly, pointing the stick. I freeze in my tracks, barefoot in the sand. 

Bizzy
. Just that word. That name. I don't think I've heard anyone say it for a really long time. I don't think I've even let myself think it. I hold a hand to my heart for a fraction of a second max and the kid laughs, thinking I'm playing his game. His parents do, too. 

'You're an idiot,' the teenager tells him, looking from him to me. Somehow I remember to smile, motion her forwards again towards the sparkling water as she twirls her long brown hair around one hand over her shoulder and flashes me a thin smile. She could've been Bizzy, the day before it happened, walking with me up to the boat. My heart starts its merciless drum, even as I zip it further inside my website.

Don't
think
about it.

'Are we ready?' I say as I jump up the steps to where the crew have now strapped the tanks in place. They hold out their hands to help the family up and Kalaya holds onto the kid, watches us with him as we leave. Kalaya's great with kids. She's great with everyone actually. She's great with me... most of the time. 

As the boat chugs away across the glistening blue I think of every other thing that's great about Kalaya, because there has to be something to stop the name going round in my head again now, faster than the wave that swept her away. 

Bizzy.
 

I sigh heavily through my nostrils, rest my hands on the cool window pane, bang my hot head against the glass. The street is a frenzied blur below me. Tuk tuks, motorbikes, people, all scurrying about in neon halos. I can still feel as much as hear the frantic energy coursing through my jetlagged fug as I head to the mini bar and yank out a bottle of cold water. I pour a glass and take three huge gulps, then three more. My hands are shaking. The dream, again. Jesus. When will it end? The wave... it was so big, coming right at me...

Pull it together. There can't be a wave in Bangkok.

I sit back on the messed up bed, hold the cool glass to my clammy forehead, reach over and turn the A/C on. I don't know why I thought the dreams would stop once I actually got to Thailand. Every time I wake up now it's with a jump, as I'm flung from some crazy visual nightmare or flashback. I even had a dream on the plane - a nice one, surprisingly enough. I dreamed about Ben. 

We were standing there on Christmas evening, watching the fire twirlers making patterns in the twilight. His sandy fingers were laced through mine all over again and the teenage-almost-kiss was right there in the salty air, lingering between us, making me tingle. The very last time everything was perfect. 

What the hell am I doing back here?

Colin.

The thought slams through me, like it always does, making me want to be sick. 

'Now's your chance,' Amy said when I finally drummed up the courage to tell her I'd broken up with him. She thrust the press invite back at me like a fairy godmother sending me off to a ball and my
real
godmother, god bless Maria, seemed to think it was a good idea, too. 'Maybe it'll help' she said, predictably. 

I pick the photo up from my bedside table, bring it to my lips. 'Sorry I'm being such a baby,' I tell my mom and dad. 'But tell me you don't think I'm crazy, being back here?'

I pull my legs up, hold the photo to my chest, look out of the window at the dirty rooftops. The sun will be up soon. I can see millions of cables twisting and turning like motionless black mambas through the sky. I close my eyes. I can see those cables in the water, too. I can see the snake-like pieces of them slithering along; me, clinging to a tree with red raw knees, watching the world collapse. 

I saw them falling on that morning, down from their towers, then colliding and coiling round beams and limbs and bodies. Modern jungle meets raging ocean. Children, men, women, dying in silence like me. Like Ben and my parents.

Don't think about it.

I can't stop thinking about it.

I flop back on the bed. The last time I was here I was as good as dead. I died a bit when the wave came in and swept me off my flip flops; when it ripped my new red sundress from my body and left me naked. I died a bit more when the German boy who pulled me up into that tree was crushed by a moving electricity pylon and carried off out of reach, into the washing machine spin of froth and debris. 

I died even more when I lost my grip, fell and had to cling to a dead woman's bloated torso. '
I'm so sorry,'
I cried at her as we rode the current for what I found out later was a mile into town. She was a buffer and a life raft;
'a float of lost hope'
, I wrote later in my journal.
'A horror movie boat with glassy eyes and perpetual shock on a blue-gray alien face'. 

Don't think about it.

The last time I was here I was just like her on the inside. Dead. But on the outside I was a survivor. I was one of the lucky ones. 

I'm too wound up to go back to sleep now. I have to interview the hotel manager about her cookbook over breakfast in less than three hours anyway. The only thing I want to do is sleep, but sleeping means the nightmares come back. No thanks. 

My iPad sounds out with a Skype call and I jump. Colin. My stomach plummets even further. I know he's still trying to make up for what he did... what he says he only did the once with my ex sodding flat mate, of all the clichés. I ram my palms to my eyes. I'm a total idiot for what I did the night before I got on the plane. I shouldn't have done it but the thought of being here was winding me up. I needed him. Stupid.

I pull the pillow over my head. There's no way I'm picking up. I don't need to listen to any more of his niceties. The email still makes me sick to think about and he knows it: 

'Thanks for last night, Colin. Really hoping we can do it again sometime when you can get away. I know what it's like to just need someone to hold you and not judge you and to just be there. I'm always here for you. Claire x'

I don't even know how many times I sat there on the sofa, reading it, trying to make it read like something innocent between two friends. They hardly knew each other. They'd only met a few times when he'd come over to the house, but as I sat there, all the pieces fell together like some hideous jigsaw puzzle; the nights I'd go to bed early, exhausted, leaving them watching science fiction movies together in the living room; the conversations they'd have about things like whether John Pertwee made a better Doctor Who than Colin Baker, while I sat there with absolutely nothing to contribute.

'You were an iceberg!' he accused me when I confronted him. 'Really, Izzy, you're so cold sometimes. It's like you're here, but you're not really here. And you're a control freak, you know you are! I feel like I'm walking on eggshells around you lately. Claire was just... there. I'm sorry!'

I force his words from my head, shove the pillow away, slam the iPad into the drawer. I came here to get away, to do something for myself, not to sit here obsessing over him on top of everything else. 

I turn on the TV. Pretty Woman is playing on the pay-per-view channel. I'll watch two-thirds of it, then I'll venture out and get one of those stupidly strong coffees with condensed milk from the street vendor. 

That's one good thing about Thailand that I never got to experience when I was sixteen - the coffee. Finally, a positive. That's my
gratitude
for today, in fact. I'm pretty sure there will be nothing else good about it whatsoever, so right now I'll just be grateful for the coffee. 

'Big night last night?' I ask Sonthi. He's shoveling the fries into his mouth like they're live worms struggling to get away.

'Why you ask?' he says while he chews.

'Because you're wearing sunglasses indoors, man!' I reach across the table and swipe the Ray Bans off his face, but he grabs them back and pushes them onto his nose, throws a fry at me. I dart to the left and miss it, just as a guy in a Burger King shirt throws me a dirty look and goes to sweep it up with his shovel and brush. 

It's seven a.m but the place is busy with the usual tourists who probably haven't been to bed yet. I'm pretty sure Sonthi is one of them. He said something about going to Patpong with some friends once we left the bar last night, but I made my excuses. He told me he was going to see a buddy who works on a stall at the night market, but I know what lines the streets over there and it isn't just fake bottled Smirnoff and fake Converse sneakers. I've seen ping pong balls being shot from places I never would've thought ping pong balls could fit over the years. It gets old fast. Besides, I know Kalaya has eyes everywhere in this city. 

'What time we meeting this guy?' Sonthi asks me now, yawning and sitting back in his chair with his Pepsi. He has stains on the front of his black T-shirt. I have no clue what caused them and I don't want to know.

'We said seven-thirty,' I tell him, casting my eye to Khao San Road outside. Some of the vendors are already setting up across the street; the usual crap. Dresses, T-shirts, billowing fishermen pants in every color you can imagine, sunglasses, bongs and bootleg DVDs. It's tourist central right here but Prak, our scuba equipment source sounds like a multitasking pro. 'Prak's running a stall for a friend today, he'll call when he gets here with the stuff,' I explain again. 

Sonthi nods, yawns for even longer and rubs his eyes under his shades. He was too drunk last night to remember anything. I'm just thankful he showed up. He reeks of booze but he's going to have to help me carry thirty scuba masks and some waterproof packs back to the hotel, whether he's a zombie or not. 

He fishes his phone out of his pocket, taps at the screen. My eyes flit back to the street. A girl's walking past the window in a bright blue sundress and my eyes move on her lean legs, her white feet in her flip flops; even whiter against red nail polish. So white. 

I smile to myself. Some of these tourists are so pale they're practically translucent when they arrive. I see them every day in Khao Lak, sprawled on the beaches, soaking up the sun and then inevitably cancelling their dives because they're redder than the expensive lobsters they order from the dinner shacks at night. They do everything to excess and then they leave. 

Something about this girl is eerily familiar though. I watch her cross the street; the way she runs a little to avoid the speeding yellow and green taxi coming at her. She heads for the coffee guy and I watch as she orders her drink, runs her hand through her long brown hair in the sunshine. Something about the way she's moving makes me lean even closer to the window in my seat. 

She turns her head to the side, smiles, says something to the vendor and I see it - the slightly upturned nose that was spattered up close with light brown freckles. It wrinkled when she frowned at me, or laughed at me and mocked my American accent. My heart lurches. I force my eyes away.
Idiot. It can't be her.
 

I'm so hot now the sun's shifted. It's streaming through the glass. I pull out my cell. It's only seven-fifteen. 'You getting breakfast, man?' Sonthi asks me. I shake my head. I'm not hungry anymore. He pushes his phone towards me on the greasy table. 'See this girl from last night. Belgian,' he says, grinning like the cat that got the cream. Something tells me he got more than that but I'm scared to ask. I feel like Kalaya's psychic sometimes, reporting everything she so much as suspects back to Sasi and I'm done covering up for his shit. 

He flicks through several photos in front of me but my mind is playing on her now, Izzy, all over again. I cast my eyes outside. The girl is still there, sipping from a giant plastic cup of iced coffee, considering a rail of clothing just being set up. The way she's standing... it could almost be her. Older of course. The way she could have been. 

Sunglasses are perched on her nose. I catch sight of them before she turns away. The seller's hooking her in the way they do, picking out dresses, holding them up at her and she's fending him off with the damn sunlight still playing in her hair. My heart's contracting and expanding in my chest; my palms are getting wetter by the second. 

Is it her?

No. Izzy's dead. And anyway, what the hell would she be doing
here?
It was that fucking kid on the beach the other week, throwing her back into my brain like some kind of boomerang. It hits me from time to time, from out of nowhere, course it does, but I don't let it get to me if I can help it, what's the point?

I ball a ketchup sachet in my fist as Sonthi flicks through yet more photos. I can't take in a word of what he's telling me about last night. It's pointless, yes, but it's getting to me.

I remember the way her hair was shining when I spotted her talking to Toby on the beach. He was collecting shells again, I think, to add to the zillion he had already and she gave him one she'd picked up earlier from the ocean floor. I'd never noticed any girl's hair before Izzy's. Back in D.C all the girls looked the same, but in Thailand, everything about this English girl with her crazy cool accent and snappy comebacks was sexy as hell. British Izzy. Bizzy I called her later. I was sixteen and dumb but after eight days I wrote it in the sand in a heart for the ocean to wash away. The ocean washed everything away after that. 

'Let's go,' I say, standing up and picking up the giant sack I had to bring all the way here in a tuk-tuk after the taxi drivers tried to rip me off. Even with my basic Thai they still try it on in Bangkok. 

'Did he call you?' Sonthi asks in confusion, getting wearily to his feet.

'Not yet but I need air, let's take a walk.' I walk to the door, push it open. A blast of heat smacks me in the face and curls around me like a fog. It's vicious this time of year, before the rains come. I motion at him to follow me across the street. I can see the girl still, just ahead of me now by roughly ten meters. She's moving to the next stall, slipping through a side alley towards the row of stores behind the market. I start to follow on autopilot. The voice in my head is screaming at me,
you're crazy
!