Platform (9 page)

I had just ordered a Singapore Sling when Babette made her appearance. 'Well, well . . .' I said. She was wearing a generously cut two-piece bathing suit, figure-hugging shorts and a wide wraparound top in a symphony of light and dark blue. The fabric seemed to be exceptionally sheer; it was a swimsuit which clearly only came into its own when wet. 'Are you not going to swim?' she asked. 'Euh . . .' I said. Lea appeared in turn, more classically sexy in a bright red vinyl one-piece, with black zips open to reveal her skin (one of them ran across her left breast, giving a glimpse of nipple), and cut very high on the thighs. She nodded to me before joining Babette at the water's edge; when she turned round, I was in a position to observe that she had perfect buttocks. The girls had been suspicious of me at the beginning; but since I had spoken to them on the ferry they had come to the conclusion that I was a harmless human being and moderately amusing. They were right: that was about it.

They dived in together. I turned round to ogle a bit. The guy at the next table was the spitting image of Robert' Hue. When wet, Babette's swimsuit really was spectacular: you could easily make out her nipples and the crack of her bum; you could even see the slight swelling of her pubic hair, even though she had opted to cut it quite short. Meanwhile, people were working, making useful commodities; or sometimes useless commodities. They were productive. What had I produced in the forty years of my existence? To tell the truth, not very much. I had managed information, facilitated access to it and disseminated it; sometimes, too, I had carried out bank transfers (on a modest scale; I was generally happy to pay the smaller invoices). In a word, I had worked in the service sector. It would be easy to get by without people like me. Still, my ineffectuality was less flamboyant than that of Babette and Lea; a moderate parasite I had never;
been a high-flyer in my job, and had never felt the need to pretend to be.

After dark, I went back to the hotel lobby, where I ran into Lionel; he was sunburned from head to toe and' delighted with his day. He had done a lot of swimming; he'd never dared dream of somewhere like this. 'I had to; save pretty hard to pay for the trip,' he said, 'but I don't regret it.' He sat on the edge of a sofa; he was thinking' about his daily life. He worked for Gaz de France in the'' southeastern suburbs of Paris; he lived in Juvisy. He often had to call on people who were very poor, old people whose systems weren't up to standard. If they didn't have money the to pay for the necessary modifications, he was forced to cut off their gas. 'There are people who live in conditions . . .' he said, 'you can't imagine.'

'You get to see strange things sometimes . . .'he went on, shaking his head. As for himself, things were okay. The area he lived in wasn't great, actually it was downright dangerous. 'There are places that are best avoided,' he said. But in general, things weren't too bad. 'We're on holiday,' he concluded before heading off to the dining room. I picked up a couple of brochures and went off to my room to read them. I still didn't feel like eating with the others. It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.

I'd found out from Lea that Ko Samui wasn't just a tropical paradise, it was also pretty phat. Every night at the full moon there was a massive rave on the tiny neighbouring island of Ko Lanta; people came from Australia or from Germany to attend. 'A bit like Goa . . .' I said. 'Much better than Goa,' she interrupted. Goa was completely past it; if you were looking for a decent rave now, you had to go to Ko Samui or to Lombok.

I didn't ask as much. All I wanted right now was a decent body massage, followed by a blowjob and a good fuck. Nothing too complicated on the face of it; but looking through the brochures I realised with a feeling of profound melancholy that it didn't at all seem to be the speciality of the place. There was a lot of stuff like acupuncture, massage with essential oils, vegetarian food or tai-chi; but body massage or go-go bars, nada. On to of everything, the place had a painfully American, eve Californian, feel about it, focused on 'healthy living' an 'meditation activities'. I glanced through a letter to What' On: Samui from a reader, Guy Hopkins; he was a self-, confessed 'health addict' and had been coming to the-island regularly for twenty years, 'The aura that backpackers spread on the island is unlikely to be erased quickly by upmarket tourists,' he concluded; it was depressing. I couldn't eve set off in search of adventure as the hotel was miles from anywhere; in fact everything was miles from anywhere since there was nothing here. The map of the island indicated no identifiable centre: several chalet resorts like ours, set on tranquil beaches. It was then that I remembered with horror that the island had had a very goo write-up in the Guide du Routard. Here was a place where] they had managed to avoid a certain moral slide: I was; caught like a rat in a trap. Even so, I felt a vague satisfaction, however theoretical, at the notion that I felt up to fucking. Half-heartedly, I picked up The Firm again, skipped forward two hundred pages, skipped back fifty; by chance I happened on a sex scene. The plot had developed a fair bit: Tom Cruise was now in the Cayman Islands, in the process of setting up some kind of money-laundering scheme, or in the process of unmasking it, it wasn't too clear. Whatever the deal was, he was getting to know a stunning mixed-race girl, and the girl wasn't exactly backward in coming forward. 'She unsnapped something and removed her skirt, leaving nothing but a string around her waist and a string running between her legs'. I unzipped my trousers. This was followed by a weird passage that was difficult to grasp psychologically: 'Something said run. Throw the beer bottle into the ocean. Throw the skirt on to the sand. And run like hell. Run to the condo. Lock the door. Lock the windows. Run. Run. Run.' Thankfully, Eilene didn't see things quite that way: 'In slow motion, she reached behind her neck. She unhooked her bikini top, and it fell off, very slowly. Her breasts, much larger now, lay on his left forearm. She handed the top to him. "Hold this for me." It was soft and white and weighed less than a millionth of an ounce.' I was jerking off in earnest now, trying to visualise mixed-race girls wearing tiny swimsuits in the dark. I ejaculated between two pages with a groan of satisfaction. They were going to stick together; didn't matter, it wasn't the kind of book you read twice.

In the morning, the beach was deserted. I went for a swim just after breakfast; the air was warm. The sun would soon begin its ascent across the sky, increasing the risk of skin cancer in individuals of Caucasian descent. I intended to stay long enough for the maids to make up my room, then 1 would head back, lie beneath the sheets and put the air-conditioning on full; with the greatest serenity I contemplated this free day.

Tom Cruise, on the other hand, was still plagued with worries about his affair with the mixed-race girl; he even considered telling his wife (who, and this was the problem, was not content simply to be loved; she wanted to be the sexiest, the most desirable woman in the world). The idiot behaved as though the future of his marriage was at stake. 'If she was cool and showed a trace of compassion, he would tell her he was sorry, so very sorry, and that it would never happen again. If she fell all to pieces, he would beg, literally beg for forgiveness and swear on the Bible that it was a mistake and would never happen again.' Obviously, it came to much the same thing; but in the end the hero's unremitting remorse, though it was of no interest whatever, began to interfere with the story — which was pretty serious: we had a bunch of extremely nasty Mafiosi, the FBI, maybe even the Russians. It was enough to make you angry, and in the end it made you sick.

I had a go with another American bestseller, Total Control, by David G Baldacci; but that was even worse. This time, the hero wasn't a lawyer but a young computer genius who worked a hundred and ten hours a week. His wife, on the other hand, was a lawyer and worked ninety hours a week: they had a kid. This time the bad guys were a 'European' company which had resorted to fraudulent practices in order to corner a market. Said market should have been the territory of the American company for which our hero was working. During a conversation with the bad guys from the European company, the bad guys -without the least compunction - smoked several cigarettes; the atmosphere literally stank of them, but the hero managed to survive. I made a small hole in the sand to bury the two books; the problem now was that I had to find something to read. Life without anything to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life and that can lead you to take risks. At the age of fourteen, one afternoon when the fog was particularly dense, I had got lost while skiing; I had had to make my way across avalanche corridors. What I remember most were the low, leaden clouds, the utter silence on the mountain. I knew the drifts of snow could shear away at any moment if I made a sudden movement, or even for no apparent reason, some slight rise in temperature, a breath of wind. If they did I would be carried with them, dragged hundreds of metres on to the rocky ridges below; I would die, probably on impact. Despite this, I wasn't in the least afraid. I was annoyed that things had turned out this way, annoyed for myself and for everyone else. I would have preferred a more conventional death, more official in a way, with an illness, a funeral, tears. Most of all, I regretted never having known my wife's body. During the winter months, my father rented out the first floor of his house; this year the tenants were a couple of architects. Their daughter, Sylvie, was also fourteen; she seemed to be attracted to me, at least she did her best to have me around. She was slender, graceful, her hair was black and curly. Was her pubic hair black and curly too? These were the thoughts that flitted through my mind as I plodded across the mountainside. I've often wondered about that, since: faced with danger, even death, I don't feel anything in particular, no rush of adrenalin. I had searched for the sensations which attract 'extreme sports' fanatics in vain. I am not remotely brave, I run away from danger if at all possible; but if push comes to shove, I greet it with the; placidity of a cow. There's probably no point in searching for meaning in this, it's just a technical matter, a question, of hormone levels; other human beings apparently similar' to me, seem to feel nothing in the presence of a woman's body, something which plunged me, at the time and still, plunges me into a state of agitation I can't control. In most circumstances in my life, I have had about as much freedom as a vacuum cleaner.

The sun was beginning to get hot. I noticed that Babette and Lea had arrived on the beach; they had settled themselves about ten metres away from me. Today, they were topless and dressed simply, identically, in white thongs. Apparently they'd met some boys, but I didn't think they were going to sleep with them: the guys weren't bad, reasonably muscular, but not that great either; all in all, pretty average.

I got up and gathered my things. Babette had put her copy of Elle next to her towel. I glanced towards the sea; they were swimming and laughing with the boys. I stooped quickly and stuffed the magazine into my bag; then I walked on along the beach.

The sea was calm; the view stretched out to the east. Cambodia was probably on the other side, or maybe Vietnam. There was a yacht, midway to the horizon; perhaps there are millionaires who spend their time sailing back and forth across the oceans of the world; a life at once monotonous and romantic.

Valerie approached, walking along the water's edge, amusing herself by taking a sidestep now and then to avoid a stronger wave. I quickly propped myself up on my elbows, becoming painfully conscious that she had a magnificent body and was very attractive in her rather sensible two-piece swimsuit; her breasts filled out the bikini top perfectly. I gave a little wave, thinking that she hadn't seen me, but in fact she was already looking in my direction; it's not easy to catch women out.

'You're reading
Elle
she asked, a little surprised, quietly ironic.

'Euh . . .' I said.

'May I?' she sat down beside me. Easily, with the familiarity of a regular reader, she skimmed through the magazine: a quick look at the fashion pages, another at the front pages. 'Elle reads', 'Elle goes out' . . .

'Did you go to another massage parlour last night?' she asked, with a sidelong glance.

'Um . . . no, I couldn't find one.'

She nodded briefly and went back to reading the cover story: 'Are you programmed to love him forever?'

'Is it any good?' I asked after a silence

'I haven't got a lover,' she replied seriously. This girl completely unsettled me.

'I don't really understand this magazine,' she continued without a pause; 'All it talks about is fashion and new trends: what you should see, what you should read, the causes you should campaign for, new topics of conversation . . . The readers couldn't possibly wear the same clothes as the models, and why on earth would they be interested in new trends? They're mostly older women.' 'You think so?'

'I'm sure. My mother reads it.'

'Maybe the writers simply write about the things they're interested in, not what interests their readers.'

'Economically, that shouldn't be viable; normally things are done to satisfy the customer's tastes.'

'Maybe it does satisfy the customers tastes.'

She pondered, 'Maybe . . .' she replied hesitantly.

'You think when you're sixty you won't be interested in new trends any more,' I insisted

'I certainly hope not . . .' she said sincerely.

I lit a cigarette. 'If I'm going to stay, I'll have to put on sunscreen,' I said in a melancholy voice.

'We're going for a swim! You can put on sunscreen after.' In a flash she was on her feet and pulling me towards the shore.

She was a good swimmer. Personally, I can't say that I know how to swim, I can float on my back for a bit but I get tired quickly. 'You get tired quickly,' she said. 'It's because you smoke too much. You should do some sport. I'm going to sort you out . . .' She twisted my bicep. Oh no, I thought, no. In the end, she calmed down and went back to sunning herself after she'd vigorously dried her hair. She was pretty like that, with her long black hair all tousled. She didn't take off her top, it was a pity; I would have really liked her to take off her top. I would have liked to see her breasts, here, now.