CHAPTER 16
I can’t find any logical explanation as to why I chose to go to Thailand around the time Cass arrived there. But I did. I had a job and enough money for a two-week cheap return flight to Phuket and some daily expenses once I got there.
The brochure had clinched it. It was the picture of blue sky, jungle, waterfalls, and a brightly coloured bird they called a toucan with a huge beak and a saucy glint in his eye that made my mind up. I was, after all, looking for some peace and tranquillity. I wanted to get away from the likes of Coolie and my job as a binman with the council where my workmates treated 4:00 a.m. as the best time of the day to rattle bins, rev engines, and shout their way through the slumbering side streets of North London.
I’d wanted to forget about Lennie, who, at 5:00 a.m., would loudly claim that Trinidad was superior to Jamaica, and about Bungee, the Paki, who would pick anything out of a domestic waste bin if he thought it had any intrinsic second-hand value. I once heard him shout in triumph when he found a child’s teddy bear covered in ketchup and chip oil. I definitely wanted to get away from Friggin’ Biggin, who’d been the truck driver for nine years and thought he was entitled to bellow instructions to the rest of us from 4:00 a.m.
I’d wanted to get away from traffic jams and pollution and the noisy placard-waving anti-police demonstrators that had taken over from the climate-change demonstrators of a month ago. Noise is the biggest pollution around London, but they seem to ignore that anomaly.
In the end, I packed a bag with the sort of nervous excitement I’d normally associate with a spotty twelve-year-old, and just before leaving for the airport for my first taste of air travel and foreign places, I called Walid.
Walid and I, of course, knew nothing of Kevin’s adventure in Scotland or about Roger or about Cass having called during the night, so it was just your usual pointless catch-up call and all Walid wanted to talk about was his passport and Gordon.
“I’ll call you, Walid,” I said at the end.
“Yeh,” he said. “If you’re flying over Turkey, look out for Cass.”