Paradise Incoming (SAMPLE)

Chapter 02

Con and I had been sitting in a quiet corner of a local dive called The Pig & Fiddle, a place with maroon fur-de-lis wallpaper, dirt-coloured carpets and mismatching furniture. The average age of the clientele was at least forty, so it made for easy drinking with no loud music and no rowdy teenagers looking for shots and cocktails.

We were on our fourth or fifth pint when Con slapped his hand on the table and said “let’s go to fucking Asia.”

Con always did this. He never talked, he just did and usually, I went along with it for lack of having anything else to do. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve never had to work a day in my life thanks to an overtly successful family business on my father’s side. I’ve got a bank balance of over seven figures and, being an only child, a family inheritance of at least eight figures, and yet I spend most of my time in countries that earn about ten English pounds a day.

Poor little rich boy.

“Which part?” I asked, gulping my pint until the head disappeared.

“I don’t know – you’ve got a foam moustache – just not Ko Phangan, it’s shit.”

“We could go there and then Cambodia?” I suggested, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. I was starting to feel extremely drunk, and ended up smearing the foam across my cheek and it took a few more attempts before it finally dried up somewhere around my earlobe.

“Done,” he said, lifting his pint to my apparently ingenious location suggestion. I lifted back, but didn’t drink. The glass felt unusually weighty in my hand; five pints was usually my limit.

“But no hang on,” I said, blinking forcefully to rid myself of the hazy duplicate I was seeing of everything. “I don’t wanna go and do the normal village... run... thing... again. If we’re gonna go, we’re gonna do it properly.”

Con raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

The truth was, I hadn’t actually formulated a plan, my beer brain was at the forefront of my real brain and it seemed to be talking for me. However, I didn’t want to lose momentum so I let it carry on.

“Well Thailand is full of islands, yeah? We could go to Cambodia, do the thing there, and then head on out to one of those Marine Parks, or just start off in Bangkok, for some reason.”

“What the government protected marine parks? Nice plan, Batman,” said Con, rolling his eyes.

“That’s the point!” I said excitedly, putting my beer down with such gusto that it sloshed over the edge onto the beer mat. I paused to mop up the spill with another beer mat before continuing. “That’s the point. You can stay on a few of them for maybe one or two nights. All we need to do is find one big enough to hide in and we can stay there for a while. Or something.” 

I filled my mouth with beer to avoid having to say any more. Con was the plan man, not me. 

“That could actually work,” said Con, scratching his day-old stubble thoughtfully. “I’ll have a word with my mate Dan I met in China a couple years back, I’m pretty sure he’s doing boat tours over there at the minute.”

He continued mumbling, but I wasn’t listening. My attention had diverted to the scar on his left forearm. It was long and thick; this was no paper cut. It was clear that the cut had run deep and the wound had taken time to heal. I still couldn’t imagine what had happened to him that was so terrible and before I knew it my mouth had run off, leaving my brain behind. I asked him the forbidden question.

“How exactly did you get that scar?”

Silence.

Con set down his glass heavily and stood up, his chair tilting back so much I had to lean out and catch it to prevent it falling over. I began my usual flurry of apologies “Listen man, I’m sorry--”

“I’m gonna take a piss,” he said sharply and walked off towards the toilets.

While he was gone I was sure to buy him a fresh pint and a packet of dry roasted peanuts as a peace offering. He seemed to appreciate the gesture and simply flicked the back of my ear with a well placed finger and called me a twat. I was happy enough with that, at least he didn’t punch me.

I decided to change the subject.

“What’s that guy’s name again?” I asked, stealing one of his peanuts.

“Who?”

“That Chinese guy who works on a boat.”

“Oh, his names Dan Chong, he’s a proper fucking spiv,” laughed Con, throwing a handful of peanuts into his mouth. “He quite often does jobs on the side and claims the weather delayed him, or there was too much competition so he had to go further out, he’d be perfect for it.” He washed the peanuts down with a mouthful of beer.

I nodded. “If he’s still there. And not sacked.”

Con nodded in agreement. “Yeah he will be. Bloody better be.”

Con had made that life-changing phone call to his friend Dan the same evening and before I knew it we were talking about dates to go and how long we’d be out there.

I always offered to support him financially if we travelled together and he’d always argue and refuse, but that didn’t matter. I knew he appreciated it. There’s no way I’d force a friend to struggle for cash if I had seven digits of it to give away.

At the end of the evening, a total of nine and a quarter pints of beer and a single dry roasted peanut in my stomach, with ideas and notes written on everything from receipts to beer mats, I left Con in a taxi to his house, and staggered back home to my two bedroom flat in in Camden.

The next morning I woke up fully clothed with a sticky mouth and a brain that felt like it might explode if I breathed too loudly. I had only vague and dream-like memories of actually doing anything after leaving the pub, until I checked my e-mails and saw a confirmation message, thanking me for booking two one-way tickets to Suvarnabhumi Airport, just 30 kilometres from Bangkok.

I telephoned Con, who was annoyingly fresh and sober after last night’s antics.

He thanked me for booking the tickets and, as usual, insisted on paying me back for his share, but I refused and mockingly threatened to upgrade his ticket to first class. We always flew economy. It was another unwritten rule we had of differentiating travellers from tourists. No luxuries, no special treatment. If it wasn’t basic, dirty, local and broken, it was tourism.

“Gonna be a stormer, mate!” he bellowed down the phone, laughing as though he’d heard the funniest joke in the world. Each laugh pierced my aching brain like a railroad spike.

“Mother of God,” I laughed back. I had a feeling this was going to be quite an interesting little adventure. Bangkok, Ko Samet, some paradisal little island and Cambodia with a Chinese man, a Greek-turned-Scottish man and an American-turned-English man.

What on earth could go wrong?