Kathryn Woof

Chapter One

She stands at the reception desk, looking out at palm trees rippling in the breeze and air that is being bent by the hot sun. She shouldn’t be here, she knows that.

‘I’m sorry, Kha, no smaller rooms available,’ the diminutive Thai lady says from behind the desk, as she ends her search through their booking system.

‘Really, it’s no problem, I’ll enjoy the extra space,’ replies Cassie, too sharply she realises, as the woman looks down to avoid her gaze. She just wanted to put an end to the explanation that she will now be staying alone.

She has travelled a long way to get here, her head flitting between humiliation and righteous indignation after her recent ejection from the office. She landed in the sun drenched local airport, two flights from London. A tuk tuk brought her to a jetty, then a boat puttered slowly, heavy in the salty coastal waters of the Andaman Sea, steered by a captain who stood on fishing nets and delivered his only passenger into the mangrove filled bay that she was now looking at, from reception. The water sloshed, opaque with silt, at the shore. She is now six thousand miles away from ignominy.

She shouldn’t be here alone, but she has come anyway. Her friend Sophia has been too indispensable for her boss to lose, even for one holiday. Cassie pep talked her, but everything she suggested, Sophia said she had tried before.

‘I can’t insist. If I let him know how much I need this break, he’ll start to doubt me. I have to carry this off, Cassie.’

Cassie knew exactly what she meant. Eight years of hard work had brought them to the cusp of senior roles, their reflections just starting to show in the glass ceiling as they approached their thirties. The effort they’d put into getting this far, finding themselves somewhere, finally. It was the time to push on, not burn out. Well, she’d got that one wrong, hadn’t she.

The lady finishes checking her in, gives a little bow of her head, then motions to a man waiting by Cassie’s luggage. He hoists her suitcase onto his shoulders and proceeds down the sandy path that leads into the resort. She follows. Six thousand miles, and ten, eleven, twelve steps away from London.

They pass a collection of basic villas as they go. Wooden, with big windows, and a verandah out front. Although they are simple, the huts look well tended. She should be fine here.

‘The restaurant is that way,’ says the man, pointing to a path on their right. ‘Quick walk,’ he adds, nodding encouragingly. ‘Straight on for the pool.’ He turns to a path on the left and starts up it. ‘This way for your room.’

At the top of the trail are two larger villas, side by side.

‘Kap Khun Kha,’ she says, thanking the man, stumbling over the words she has read online, learning the basics before she arrived. He kicks off his shoes and shows her inside. An air conditioning unit is pumping and she pulls at her blouse and fans it against her chest, holding her arms down at the elbow to hide the growing patches of damp that have bloomed. She nods at the man, indicating she has everything she needs. He holds his palms together, ‘Khap,’ he says, and he goes, closing the door behind him with a click.

Flopping onto the bed, all she can hear is the sound of the air conditioning thrumming away in reply to her searching ears. She has an itch in her mind that asks for something to touch it. She reaches for her phone, then lays it down. There is no-one she wants to hear from. Not her one trusted friend, who has let her down; not her brother, Paris, who knows every detail about what has happened; and not her parents. No, definitely not her parents.

She is alone, and far away, and she is free, and can do anything that she wants. She is ashamed and she is hiding. She can meet anyone here and tell them she is on holiday.

Her watch vibrates - time to take her medicine. She taps it off. She can do whatever she wants. She smiles at that. Then she worries that somehow her parents will find out. She picks up her phone and turns it off.

Sleep starts to roll through her mind like fog, and flickering in and out of consciousness, she wonders what it will be like when she wakes up.

Chapter Two

Darkness. A crying baby. A baby or a child? Cassie sat up and checked her watch. It was just after eight o’clock in the evening. Outside the villa, the day had ended. A light on her veranda illuminated the palm leaves and foliage that tapped against the windows.

The crying was strong and muscular; her hands clenched as she listened to the note of fury that she could detect in the sound. She peered through her dark room, looking out of the window at the front. A couple were walking up the path. They were dragging bags and pushing a buggy with the screaming child inside of it, up towards the hut next to her own, while one of the staff from the resort kept pace behind them with more luggage on his shoulders. They probably couldn’t see her, she thought, dark as it was inside her own hut, and with the light from her porch shining out into their faces. She scrambled up from the bed and stood to watch as they came up the trail.

The man could be called handsome, but something stopped him from being attractive. His face was hard edged by a square jawline and prominent cheekbones. Short hair. His expression was set as he doggedly ignored the crying child and pulled the bags up to the door. It was a different member of staff that was helping them, not anyone that Cassie recognised from her own check-in several hours before. The young Thai man kicked off his shoes as he opened the door, and walked into the hut, to run through the same tour that all patrons must be given on entry into their living quarters: here’s the air conditioning, this is how the remote works, there is the bathroom. That was it.

The mother followed through the door. Cassie didn’t have as long to look at her, but noticed that she hadn’t tended to the child. Perhaps they’d had an awful journey.

Cassie moved to the side of the room, and continued to watch them through the windows as the lights were turned on and the bags were set down. Now the mother went to the child, unstrapping the restraints which held it in the buggy, and picked it up. Cassie noticed the sparse hair and wondered if it was a boy or girl. As it was lifted, the answer was revealed in the fully pink clothing.

The mother made an effort to sooth the child, but the little girl pushed her hands against the woman’s shoulders and there was a slight struggle, as she resisted the comfort. Fascinated, Cassie stood watching, as the man came over to his window and stared out of it over to her hut. He looked at her. She quickly moved her hands to the curtains, making a show of closing them. Her face was hot with shame.

She could still hear the child crying.

‘Not your business, Cassie,’ she said aloud. Hearing her own voice cutting through the evening brought her back into herself, into her body. She realised how close she had been to that familiar realm where her imagination ran away from her, outpaced the facts, and brought her to a place of dark acts and outcomes. Automatically, she thought about her medicine, and wondered, with the time difference, what part of the day she was supposed to be in. She checked her watch, and did a quick calculation. It was only lunchtime at home.

She showered in the functional bathroom, which was relieving in its simplicity. She was exposed to so much luxury in her work travel assignments, hotels with en-suites as big as her bedroom at home, staff hovering in corridors waiting to tidy and provide. She had loved the lavishness when she had first accessed it through work expense accounts, but with time, and repetition, and loneliness, she had realised there was nothing special for her in the size of the bath, the number of sinks, or the tiles on the wall. Not at the price of her happiness. As a child she had always been happy to let her father pay for extravagance, but now when she travelled, after a lifetime of limitless funds, she craved the more rustic experiences which brought her closer to herself. Was it her real self? The girl she had been before? She couldn’t say anymore what that was.

She had been looking for anchor points when the idea of going to an island had struck her. Yaya, her grandmother, had lived on an island. She’d loved those summers as a child. And although it was the Greek islands her family had been familiar with, she had chosen the Thai islands to expose herself to something she had never seen in real life, but had imagined so many times. She wanted to see the beaches that people had posted on instagram. She wanted to see how they’d changed in the decades that had passed since the tsunami. She wanted to get better - she was so desperate to get better.

She had seen this resort, off the beaten track, and knew it was the place she should be. Its only facilities were its location and the natural beauty that surrounded it. She recalled the little of it she’d seen as they walked up the winding path today from reception. Clean, well appointed, no frills.

As she started leaving the room for dinner, turning off the lights and gathering up her book, she noticed the crying had stopped. She didn’t recall when it had become quiet, but it was silent now next door. She wanted to feel pleased, but her breath caught as she drew it in and the raggedy exhale was full of worry. She chided herself again - she was meant to be here to recuperate. It was a sign of her burnout that she was so on edge. She would relax over the next few days and these little things wouldn’t worm their way into her mind.

Nevertheless, as she pulled the door closed and turned the key, she looked sideways to get a glimpse of the family through their windows.

The lights were on, but the curtains were closed. She couldn’t see them. But still, she felt. Dark spots dropped through her vision, like an unwelcome snowfall and she felt tendrils sprouting from within her subconscious. She stomped her feet as she walked down the path to bring her mind back to her physical body and world.

Chapter Three

She slept late into the morning, pulled down by her jetlag into a deep sleep broken only by her alarm. She stumbled a little as she made her way to the bathroom to splash her face with water. She wondered if this was what mornings were like without her usual doses.

‘Don’t think about what time it is at home,’ she commanded herself, and like the fabled blue elephant, all she could do was focus on the fact that she was normally slumbering away at this time.

At the sink she was surprised to see a wooden tray with frangipani flowers arranged on it. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed that the night before, even from here she could smell the sweet perfume. She lifted one to her nose, and as she did an ant crawled out of the flower’s heart and onto her hand, causing her to drop it into the sink, brushing her fingers against each other with a grimace. She quickly finished getting ready.

Arriving at the café, she found a table by the beach. Her first morning at the edge of this island, only a ten minute walk from her hut. She’d chosen banana pancakes, and the creamy cooked fruit was like a paste inside the batter, hitting her tongue with sugar sweetness. One serving wasn’t enough, and she visited the buffet twice more, loading up her plate. As she sat back down, pulling back the heavy wooden chair, the feet screeched against the floor tiles, and the little kid in the family next to her jammed his hands to his ears, shouting, ‘Ow!’

‘Sorry, sweetheart,’ said Cassie smiling apologetically. The kid turned around and Cassie began to tell the chair to be quiet. ‘Naughty, loud chair!’ she said, waggling her finger. The kid belly laughed. It was nice to be the bearer of lightness for once and she felt compelled to try for more. ‘Mealtime for humans, not singing time for chairs!’ She put a finger to her lips and shushed at it.

The kid shouted for more: ‘Again, ‘gain!’

Cassie had no idea how to say no to a child, so she carried on. ‘Chair must behave if Chair wants to stay for lunch,’ furrowing her brow and making a serious face. The kid cracked up and Cassie felt a real smile rise on her face, the first in months.

The mum and dad were watching with amusement, and as he asked again for more, the mum intervened.

‘Theo, honey, that’s enough now.’

The dad used a french fry to distract the child, who took into his podgy hand and jammed it into the dollop of ketchup on the plastic plate in front of him.

‘Sorry I didn’t mean to cause such a distraction.’

‘Not at all,’ replied the mum, ‘outside entertainment is always welcome, otherwise we’re the ones running the circus twenty-four-seven.’ She smiled. She had an American accent, with a touch of something else, olive skin and dark brown hair tied in a low pony tail. She wore rectangular glasses, the kind that have no rims, and always led Cassie to assume that the wearer was an accountant. She had no make-up, but glowed with the vibes of someone who wasn’t striving to figure out what others wanted from her. She looked relaxed.

‘Just arrived?’ asked the dad. He was the one guiding fries into the child’s hand, a dirty wet wipe in his other hand which he was using to clean the excess sauce from the kid’s face. He looked like he hadn’t caused any issues for his wife in his life. It was possible they were the polar opposite of every parenting paradigm that Cassie had ever been exposed to.

‘I got here yesterday evening. It’s my first day, I’ve just come for breakfast,’ she raised her eyebrows and gave an awkward laugh, seeing that they had lunch in front of them already. ‘This beach is amazing, the cliffs are stunning. How about you guys?’ she asked to stop her garbling.

‘We got here a week ago, still another week to go though,’ the woman said. ‘We wondered if we could spend a whole two weeks on this little island, but we’re not bored yet, there are still some trips we want to take.’

‘I’m John,’ the man said, ‘and this here is Theo,’ he ruffled the wispy curls on the kid’s head.

‘I’m Angelina,’ said the woman. ‘Actually, I’m sure we’ll be seeing lots of you around, there aren’t many other places to go on this little beach. How long are you here for?’

Cassie filled them in and the chat flowed effortlessly. It was nice to have such casual things to say to strangers. After a while, Theo started grumbling and they made their apologies, saying they needed to get him home for his nap.

As they were walking away, Cassie realised she hadn’t told them her name, but it was too late to jump up and say it. Instead, she made Theo laugh one last time, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue at him. He rewarded her with a belly laugh, their little joke, as he glanced back at her over his father’s shoulder.

Cassie felt proud of herself, something close to relaxed, and waved a hand to catch the eye of the waitress for more coffee. Maybe she would check her messages later.

As she sat there, she saw the woman from the villa next door come into the restaurant. She watched her go to the serving station and speak sharply to the waitress. The girl wrote down what must have been a food order and the woman then sat at the bar.

As Cassie’s coffee arrived, she saw the woman had been served a take-out box and was walking away from the cafe back towards the huts. Strange, thought Cassie. Why take-out? Was someone sick?

‘Stop making up stories,’ she said quietly to herself. She looked around discreetly, and saw the waitress catch her eye with a smile. ‘Shit.’ She sighed, jiggling her heel against the floor as the girl walked over. ‘Could I have another coffee? It’s too good,’ she said as the waitress drew near. The girl nodded and smiled, bobbing at her knees and then walking away. It was hard to say who was the more awkward.

Cassie blew a breath out, puffing her cheeks and clasping her hands under the table. She ground the balls of her feet from side to side on the sandy tiles, wincing.

‘Today is going to be great,’ she said, and she nodded her head.

Six thousand miles and one day away from it all.