We have been invited to what S is very keen to emphasise is Not. A. Tour.
S has some friends over, and they have some friends, totalling four friends, and she has hired out the boat for them to go on a fun cruise around the islands. She asks us to come which we are very flattered by, as presumably this means we count as friends too. And not ‘tourists’ or ‘the idiots who tried to feed the mice in my house’. Or similar.
“Bring your own beer,” she says.
We do not realise the significance of this particular instruction until we arrive. We have bumped into the friends, who are staying in one of S’s other houses, as they were leaving and, in a moment of brilliance, I introduce us with all the ease of all those American travellers we have previously been jealous of. So we are learning something on this journey then. Other than how to get fat and sunburned.
We chat to the friends as we walk to the pier. I will give them names as I am beginning to tire of the alphabet privacy protection scheme I have been furiously implementing – and also because these were Characters. With a capital C. S introduced them as such when she first mooted the suggestion. And so they are.
There is Star – who is a teacher in Thailand, and also an artist, (“Big stuff, not canvases – with a huge hole in the middle and a big triangle poking out – that sort of thing”). Pale skinned and carefully covered up against the sun, Star is deep thinking and a reader. Later in the trip we will discuss favourite books. For now we get the usual small talk over with – our names, our jobs, whether we say ‘holiday’ or ‘vacation’, ‘garbage can’ or ‘bin’. That sort of thing.
There is Norma – combining twinkly and down to earth, guttural voiced, brown skinned and toking a cigarette. Not a ‘toke’, you understand. A cigarette. For now, at least. Norma runs a beer for ex pats. She is not a reader. She wants some peace and quiet. Running a bar is tiring. She has cancelled the pub quiz.
There is Scout – basket ball teacher, younger than the others, tanned and tattooed and surprisingly slow moving. Off the court at least. Scout is interested in lots of things – but none of them become evident in conversation. I think her main interest today is beer. “We are on vacation”, she keeps saying. It’s true. These girls are Cutting Loose. As I write this I realise I didn’t spend enough time talking to Scout – or she didn’t want to waste drinking time on talking. Because all I know about her, still, is that she likes beer and squaddies. But she doesn’t call them squaddies. In fact she thinks it’s hilarious that we do.
And finally, Caro. Extremely quiet, she keeps herself closed within a seemingly self imposed silence. She walks heavily and tentatively, and is carefully coiffured and made up. From the start she meets us at pier rather than at the house, hanging back always, from the rest of the pack.
And it does feel like a ‘pack’, wild and free and fast bonded – which we, for a day, have been permitted to run with. It’s a gloriously freeing possibility because these girls are very different and, as we are about to find out, they party hard. We run with them for the day. Whether we keep up is another matter. I rather suspect not. But they tolerate us, patiently, as we pant in their wake.
We wait for S for a few minutes. During that time both Scout and Norma crack open a beer. It is not quite ten in the morning. M and I both look for a little too long at the beer can, just a little too open mouthed before we collect ourselves and look away. Everyone except Star is smoking, so that with the beer they don’t have hands left to carry their bags. They put them down on the pier as they wait. They clank. Bulging with cans of beer (we have brought four cans, two each. It seemed like a generous amount for a day in the sun on a boat), Scout’s bag also boasts a bottle of whisky.
“I don’t know if we’ll get to this,” she says casually, “but I thought I’d bring it anyway.”
M and I are still on the water. Just in case this is sounding rather prudish, it’s not as though we are saints. We were drinking beer last night, so we are particularly in need of the water we are now so virtuously drinking. It’s true we don’t smoke, but we are certainly not without vices. Ice cream and Pringles, to name but a few. And as for morning drinking – we once planned a whole day around having ‘Breakfast Stout’ with our breakfast. Just because it’s called that.
That was a great day.
To get back to the point, S having zoomed to join us on her motorbike, (the pier is maybe ten metres from our houses but no one in Thailand walks anywhere), we all clamber onto the boat. This is easier for some than for others – I manage to hop rather nimbly, because I am a little more practised, having done this for snorkelling a few days before. There is, shamefully, an extra spring in my step because I think that with the exception of S and M (now there’s an interesting combination of letters), I am, for once, the bravest and most fit. I bask a little in this unusual status, though I feel a pang of guilt, especially witnessing Caro’s obvious discomfort and extremely wobbly landing into the boat. I read the embarrassment on her face and understand it because I have been there. That I am walking a little taller and chattering away a little chirpier for it, is a little bit mean. In my defence - it just gets tiring – always being the nervous one – the one who, rather than just breezing in, is only there because they’ve had to fight a hundred internal battles to grit their teeth and make themselves do it. Whatever it is. It’s nice, for once, to be the person I envy – who doesn’t feel the fear in the first place. Who doesn’t think twice about it. I skip merrily to the back of the boat and deposit our, now seemingly meagre, offering of beers into the cool box.
We set off. I spend the time chatting to Norma and Star, though, being very different people, each is a very separate conversation. Norma and I discuss her bar, how she needs a break, how much pressure it is to always be the friendly bar owner. I sympathise, imagine it is hugely tiring, and venture that her bar sounds a little like the bars of my imagination, in which the bar server grins at you, knows you by name and starts pouring your drink before you’ve even sat down. I hold back the rest of this image, which involves the bar tender polishing glasses with a tea towel (something I have never seen any bar tender actually do) and listening to my problems. (As I don’t really have that many of those and the image doesn’t really allow for actual upset, I think the ‘problems’ are with my latest ‘dame’ and that I might be a cigar puffing man in this image. Figure that one out if you can, psychoanalysts. I suspect I’ve simply lifted it from a film.) Norma tells me I would love Phuket. I keep quiet at this point because we have partially avoid it because it is ‘party central’ and we wanted something less touristy and more authentic.
“It’s party central,” says Norma, “I mean I’m too old for it but you two are young enough to enjoy it.”
I blush, enjoy this, because it too, is a new experience. We are generally really quite decrepit in comparison to other travellers, whose average age is somewhere between 18 and 25. In this group of people I think that we are probably the youngest, except, perhaps, for Scout. Everyone wears their smoking, drinking, partying personalities on their faces, which manages both to age them and to keep them young.
I point out that we are in our mid thirties. Exactly in our mid thirties in fact.
“Oh,” says Norma looking me up and down in rather frank disbelief, “well that won’t matter because you look young enough to get away with it.”
I blush again. But I love it. Years fall from me and drown in the green, glittering sea we are speeding through. I ignore the fact that in terms of lifestyle, our cat loving, home cooking, yoga practicing selves, preferring a good film and a good beer or a glass of wine to a club, are probably decades older and duller than our new found friends.
Norma and I discuss health.
“They wanted to break my cheekbones,” says Star, who was a model when she was younger, “to make my eyes more symmetrical.” I express horror and am horrified. I can see Star’s ex-modelling career in her face. She has pale skin, dark eyes and hair and full lips. Shave the years away back to when she was eighteen, and I can see that burgeoning beauty. I am glad she didn’t let them break her cheekbones. I can’t even see what she means about her eyes. She seems perfectly symmetrical to me. We discuss how beauty is in the quirks, the interesting features of people’s faces.
Caro sits in the back of the boat, away from the others. No one seems to be speaking to her much, though someone has told me she is writing a science fiction novel. I really want to talk to her about it. I really want to talk to her generally because I feel sad for her that everyone is huddle in the front of the boat and she seems so left out. I don’t like to see someone on their own unless I am convinced they chose it. And I am not so sure that Caro did. She seems nervy to me, a little bashful, and when I try to include her in conversations by virtue of addressing things partly in her direction, and catching her eye, something flees across her face that looks a little bit like paranoia. You know the feeling, it’s the ‘have I got something on my face’ mode of thinking. I am largely open and bubbly in company – but I have been there. We all have. I resolve, once we stop and the engine is not so deafening, to engage her in conversation.
Throughout all of this Scout has sat at the front of the boat, chain smoking and chain drinking. I think it’s perhaps half past ten and the floor of the ship is already littered with empty beer cans. It’s not all Scout - Norma is putting away her fair share, Caro is quietly smoking and sipping in the back of the boat and S is up front with us, eschewing the cigarettes but joining in valiantly with the drinking. Star, M and I drink water. I think what a relief it is that, whilst everyone around us is taking things rather less slowly, not once has anyone tried to pressurise us to join them. That such extremes of indulgence are going on and neither side has felt the need to justify itself or to judge the other is deeply refreshing. No one lectures about lung cancer. No one feels the need to point out whether or not the sun is past the yardarm. Whatever that expression means. No one asks us when we are going to lighten up or light up. Or to catch up with the drinking.
Our first stop is the mangrove forest. The trees live, literally, on the water, roots tangled and seeming to form their own land mass. The trees are both beautiful and other worldly, but they are not, here, the star attraction. Monkeys appear in hordes, clambering and whooping and either carrying babies and making babies with rather too obvious energy and enthusiasm.
“They will come on the boat,” warns S, much to my delight and some people’s rather pale acceptance. But even as she says it the monkeys are diving and swimming towards the boat, dunking, apparently, their clinging babies into the sea in doing so.
The first monkey to appear ignores us totally, moves straight to the bag of bananas which the much too used to this Captain is holding out, pulls it to the floor and rifles through it. He is already perched, a banana in each foot, one in the hand and another between his legs by the time the others arrive. Soon monkeys are all around. I stand amid them, happily, thrilled that they are so happy to be near us, though I do have some qualms about feeding them. I know that monkey, eagle and squirrel populations are threatened by tourists feeding them, generations growing up without the skills to hunt and survive without handouts, and with no sense of responsibility felt for them by any individual tourist, they starve as soon as the tour operators stop going there.
For now though, I rather shamefully ignore this information, and enjoy the proximity of the monkeys. It is not until all the bananas are finished, and the Captain is cleaning the deck of the boat, now tastefully decorated with monkey poo, that Scout comes rather abashedly out from the back of the boat, furthest away from the animals,
“I got a bit scared,” she says with a slight giggle.
“That’s OK” says S, reassuringly. I remember my snorkelling experience and understand. At the same time though, that now familiar sense of pleasure in being unafraid myself, rears its ugly, and yet so compelling, head, and a feel a thrill of pride. I am perfectly aware, (and have in fact written about it myself in 'Escalators and Offices - it's a jungle out there' earlier), that true courage comes not from being unafraid, but from being fearful and overcoming it, but this does not stop me walking just a little taller, holding my head up just a little higher.
This theme continues when we all strip off into bikinis to swim in the beautiful, crystal water, around the quiet bay of a nearby island. We pose for a photograph.
“Here,” shouts somebody, “put the good looking couple in the front!”
“The good looking couple?” I say with what I know is an enormous blush and a goofily pleased smirk, “we’ve never been called that before!”
Several people respond instantly, “Seriously?”, “you should have been!”
There is genuine incredulity in their voices. I bask in it. I absolutely bask. I bask like a cat in the sun, a pig in mud, a hippo in the river. I have never felt so good looking. And it occurs to me that it really has been a long time since we were considered the good looking couple, or at least a long time since anyone felt the need to tell us. This isn’t a problem, but I have been battling with a wide range of inferiority complexes on this trip, including the one that revolves around feeling older, sweatier, fatter or generally less aesthetically pleasing than either my tourist or local counterparts.
“You are beautiful,” a Thai shopkeeper will say to me later in our trip, when I buy a dress from her, “your skin, so pale. We think it beautiful.”
I will respond with the same incredulity I experience now on the boat, telling her that Thai skin is golden and lovely, that I have seen the myriad of ‘whitening’ skin products, that in England we are desperate to have a tan.
“Yours is beautiful.” I say.
“No, yours!”
We laugh.
“Perhaps,” she says, “we should each learn.”
And perhaps we should. To accept our skin colour the way is grows naturally. To see the beauty in ourselves. And yet, back on the boat, blushing and grinning as the camera records, for ever, this moment, I realise that I never feel that I am something without somebody telling me I am more it than someone else. We are the ‘good looking couple’ which distinguishes us from others. It is a bitter and sad truth, but perhaps we never really believe in our own beauty unless it somehow vanquishes others.
But this a day for cutting loose, not for internal philosophising and I am snapped back to earth by a proffered hand rolled cigarette which smells remarkably herbal.
“Want some?” says Norma.
I decline, partly because I would rather drink and I don’t think the two would combine especially well, and partly because I am rather on the goody side of shoewear. But I like that the others are, and as it is passed round, communally and companiably, I feel myself relaxing back against the boat, water lapping around it as we wend our way, the Captain matching the slower change in mood, casually towards the next beauty spot. I fetch M and I our first beer. It’s probably eleven or something. I don’t know. I take my watch off and shove it right at the bottom of my bag. I cross one of my newly beautiful legs over the other. I let the sun play on my young looking face. I wink lasciviously at my good looking husband, who looks a little taken aback. I am happy. I like this day.
It continues in much the same vein. The next place we stop is tranquil and rocky. Our boat disgorges its passengers in a whirl of chain smoking (of both kinds), beer, cackling and shouting. It is tranquil no longer, as I rather suspect the two couples who have taken a kayak here and are picnicking on the beach, might be noting. Scout engages their guide in a riotous round of flirtation and inhalation of the various tobaccos on offer. He refuses a beer though because it wouldn’t be right. He’s a guide after all. He has to be in charge of a boat. I laugh and avoid the eyes of the kayaking couples, swimming out a little way because though I am enjoying my day out with the free-er minded and excitable crowd, I need a little pause in my decibel levels. S joins me and we discuss the beauty of the surroundings and her rather infamous sounding ex partner. Later in the day I will have a very similar conversation with Star, who is generally more restrained than the others and has refused various substances in the same quantities M and I have. It seems that men who sleep with their wives best friends are rather more in abundance than I previously thought. I look at M, for a moment, swimming out a little further, sun and a smile on his face. I have a surge of love for him. Partly because I am considering the prospect of losing him to any one of my beautiful and lovely female friends, and everything, as we know, is more precious when threatened, and partly because I simply know that he really wouldn’t do it. I know that. I don’t need him to tell me or to prove it. I just know. And besides, as I swing my smooth, slim legs over the side of the boat to get back on, I remember that today I am beautiful.
“You have a wonderful figure,” says Star, gazing enviously at me, “You’re very well proportioned.”
If I am anything, well proportioned is not it. I am rather lumpy in some of the right places, and a few of the wrong ones. But today I don’t refute it. Today I am beautiful.
“This is how you get a six pack,” says Scout, pointing at M’s rather bashful abdomen. She, Norma and the guide, who seems to have abandoned his tour, appear to have been discussing each other’s need for exercise. “Yoga and cycling.”
I don’t think it’s just me. I think, by the end of the day, we both walk a bit taller, and hold in our stomachs.
We stop for lunch on a small island and I finally get to talk to Caro. She is excited to tell me about her book and I am excited to her. It’s an interesting concept, a man whose conscience rebels at his assignment to ‘volunteer’ to do work on other planets, which turns out to involve pillaging the ecology and murdering the locals. I resolve to read it and she gives me a website from which I can get hold of it cheaper. It’s a nice success story and it encourages me. It doesn’t make me feel inadequate for not being published myself, which is nice. So the feeling good because you are more ‘something’ than someone else doesn’t necessarily work the other, more negative way. Which is nice.
It’s all nice. What more can I say? We swan decadently and now glamorously, through the rest of the day, until we bid farewell to our fellow sailors, who are about to start on the whisky and then check out the talent on the other, more party filled, side of the island.
It’s been good. They have been generous, happy people. We have been their compatriots and we have been welcomed in and appreciated for things we didn’t know we were, or could do.
“I am perfectly proportioned” I inform M, proudly later, posing in my towel having emerged from the shower.
“Oh, really?” says M, sticking his chest out, “well I am good looking.”
I think we can fade out to that.
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