Emily Barr - The Sleeper

I’m looking forward to this job, and even more so to the moment it’s over: the first moment of my new life. Of course I have to start my life on a different continent from the one where my family live.

I told Rachel all about what happened with Olivia, too, when I read that one-word email – ‘Sorry’ – that must have cost her so much. When I read it, I smiled at how much I don’t care any more, and so I described the scene and made myself (and Rachel) laugh. As I’m lying on the beach and Rachel is off swimming in the sea, I’m going to write it down now, to prove that it has no power over me at all.

I’d been going out with Olly for nearly two years, since the end of my first year at university. He was Mr Sensible. A public school boy with impeccable manners. He liked me because I was eminently suitable for him – a privately educated girl with no apparent wild side. We made the world’s blandest couple. He was, of course, taller than me, broader than me, and a rugby player, with a florid complexion and a fogeyish manner that will mean he’ll really feel at peace with the world on the day he turns forty-six.

So we were heading inexorably towards a dull future. We would get engaged (he would have asked Dad’s permission, I know it), and then have a church wedding, and I’d wear white and be given away, and my sister would glower in the unflattering bridesmaid’s dress I would force her to wear, for my own amusement. Then we’d have two children, a boy and a girl, and Olly would have a career in the City while I’d work part time and coordinate the nanny.

At some point I would have had a breakdown and done something crazy, that much is for fucking certain.

Anyway. I thought we were trundling along happily, having duty sex a couple of times a week and going to bars in Fulham that were full of people like us. We were middle-aged before our time, but this, we thought, was great. We felt quite the grown-ups.

And then, one day, I was in Bloomsbury, walking through Tavistock Square, and I decided, on a magnanimous whim, to go to Olivia’s student hovel and say hello. She was living in a flat in the basement of one of those crumbling town houses. The flat had six tiny bedrooms over two floors, with a minuscule bathroom on each floor, a kitchen in the corridor by the stairs, and a concrete patch of ‘garden’. All the same, its location, in a row of cheap hotels in Tavistock Place, was amazing. Olivia insists she’ll always live in central London. It’s one of her rebellions against growing up in suburbia.

One of her flatmates answered the door. It was the blonde fat girl with the glasses, who always puts her hair in a bun that falls out, strand by strand, hair grip by hair grip, over the course of the day. As soon as I saw the stricken look on Fat Girl’s face, I knew Olivia was up to something.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Is Olivia home?’

I could see her brain ticking over. ‘Um,’ she said. ‘No! She’s not. Sorry. I can get her to call you?’

I was intrigued, so I edged past her into the grimy hallway, and through the front door of their flat. It smelt of curry and stale alcohol and uncleaned bathrooms. The fat girl tried to stop me, so I sped up, passed the bathroom (a man wearing just a towel came out and widened his eyes at the sight of me), tried not to look at the state of the little table at the top of the stairs or the dishes piled in the sink, and rushed down the stairs to the basement level.

Her room was the last one, right under the stairs and beside the door that led out to the courtyard. Fat Girl, in her desperation, yelled out, ‘Olivia! Lara’s here!’

There was a scuffle. Whispers. Panicky shufflings and mutterings. Even then, though, it did not occur to me for half a second. If I hadn’t seen the evidence, I still wouldn’t believe it.

I rushed forward and opened the door, still believing that this was none of my business, even though, it transpired, it was. And there was my sister, quickly doing up a dressing gown cord, and my boyfriend, wearing just a pair of pants, halfway out of the window that led into the courtyard.

The two of them had been shagging for quite some time, it turned out. Olly tried to explain, to talk to me about how things weren’t ‘quite right’ with us, otherwise this wouldn’t have happened, but I couldn’t be bothered with a word of it.

‘I’m going travelling,’ I told Olivia, ‘and you are welcome to him.’ To Olly I said nothing at all, not one word, not ever. The only thing I wanted to do was go away, and the most appealing idea was Thailand. I did it without a backward glance. Oliver and Olivia: the perfect couple.

Dad had just asked me for money to bail out his sinking business. He was incensed that I was going travelling instead, but I told him I’d find a way to help, and I have.

I have ignored every letter and email from my sister, and I will continue to do so. I have no sister.

Olly hasn’t come to find me, and he won’t, thank God. I know that he is logical enough to have factored the possible fallout into his decision to sleep with my sister, and to have accepted that if I found out about it, we would be irrevocably over. He’s stupid, yes, but not that stupid. I won’t be seeing him again.

How refreshing to revisit that scene and find that, in fact, I’m grateful to the two of them for their treachery. They’re the ones that have to live with themselves. Not me. I don’t have to have anything to do with either of them ever again. And that is the most liberating thing in the world. I don’t have to marry a crashing bore who’s crap in bed. I don’t have to marry anyone. I don’t have to have a sister. I’m on my own. Rachel’s my sister, and we’re heading down to the beach again.

April 18th

Krabi

Krabi is full of ‘falangs’, i.e. foreigners. While I’m all too well aware that I am one myself, I still don’t like to see this many others. There’s something annoying about the way all of them – all of us, I should say – think that we’re special. It only takes a quick glance around to see that this is not at all the case. Everyone’s dressed the same, acting the same, treating Thailand as a theme park. I’d like it if the Thai people could go to a different part of the world and swan around there thinking they’re slumming it.

Anyway. Rachel and I left Koh Lanta – lovely Koh Lanta – this morning. We sat on the deck of the boat for hours as it took us towards the mainland (pausing for the alternative crowd at Koh Jum), and I spent a long time trying to quell my nerves.

I held this book and considered throwing it into the water. I knew it was what I ought to do.

I couldn’t quite bear to. Perhaps before we get on the plane I’ll destroy it in Krabi.

Jake’s always brushed aside my objections. One thing he said which has stayed with me is this: ‘Every country has people addicted to drugs. Very few of them are home-grown products. How much smuggling do you think happens? It’s a thriving industry, Lara, and the number of people who are caught is minimal. You’d only get caught if Customs were tipped off, or if something about you made them suspicious. Which is never going to happen because you’re such a fucking genius. Our operation isn’t like that. It’s a tiny little operation working below the official radar. No one’s tipping anyone off because we’re not treading on anyone’s toes and we’re not screwing each other over. It’s safer than crossing the road.’

I laughed at that part, because it was clearly rubbish. Half an hour later I stepped into the path of a rickshaw and got a cut leg and a bruised arm, so in fact, as far as I’m concerned, he was right.

All the same, I am having an attack of conscience.

We got to Krabi at lunchtime, took a cab to a cheap guest house on one of the main roads, and checked in to two little rooms with fans but no A/C, next to each other around a courtyard. You reach the rooms by walking through the back of the check-in, directly through the middle of the kitchen (battered aluminium pots and smells which are half enticing, half gross), and through the family’s sitting area. Then you emerge into the courtyard with its six huts and three loo/showers round the corner.