by James Austin Farrell

“The Gibbon Rehabilitation Project.”

“Yeah, I saw that. What you do think they do in there?”

“Rehabilitate gibbons.”

“What’s wrong with the gibbons?”

“Maybe they fell out of a tree.”

“Or they have a drug problem.”

“I did once see a smoking monkey.”

“Fuck off.”

“It smokes?”

“Yeah, in a Chinese zoo. He’s addicted. It’s on YouTube.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“I think he’s dead now though.”

“Maybe they’re alkies, or junkies…maybe gibbons from all around the world come here for treatment. A rehab far from the hustle and bustle of the jungle.”

“It’s in a jungle.”

“Not really, because they’re in the project. The project is all high-tech.”

“It’s a strange thing, a gibbon rehab. It would be a good title for a story, ‘The Gibbon Rehabilitation Project’.”

As they passed the project on their way to the island of Yao Noi in southern Thailand, Dara saw a man outside the entrance standing on what looked like crutches made from branches. The man had curly black hair and a kind of smoked tan, the tan people get when they have no choice but stay out in the sun all their lives. He wasn’t Thai, he looked European, French, Dara thought. He looked like one of the many Frenchmen that seemed to get stranded in Thailand. Lost Frenchmen without sun cream or the tools needed to shave, they were a common sight in the tropics.

“Daz, how far to go?”

“It’s just around the corner, and don’t call me Daz.”

Dara had not seen his friend Sting – a name Sting had acquired as a teenager due to his protuberant cheekbones and white skinny hair – for 12 years, not since the days of the Dark Arches. For many reasons, and not just because the nickname was puerile, Dara had dumped his nickname as soon as he had boarded the plane that took him away from England for the last time. ‘Daz’ had a scurrilous nature, it wouldn’t suit his future, so when he walked onto the plane he became Dara. Hearing Sting call him Daz again seemed to add weight to his bones, it made him feel tired.

The other man in the car, Stings’s best friend and house-mate, had a terrible nickname, though he seemed comfortable with it. Ratty, as he was called, was an onomatopoeic misnomer due to Ratty’s heavy bulk and slow plodding movements. Dara had not met Ratty before and thought it strange that he complied with being called this name. Ratty was funny, in a mordant way, and so it didn’t take long for he and Dara to get along. This was a relief to Dara as he recognised the fact that Sting had spent much of his life with two close friends, first Dara in his teens, and with Ratty as an adult, so it was important for the two to support Sting’s continuity.

“You know why they started calling him Ratty,” Sting asked Dara the first night they had all met in chthonic Patong. “Because in school he cut the tails off a bunch of lab rats and filled his pockets with them. He kept them in his jacket for weeks.”

“A slight exaggeration Mr. Moore. I kept them for 3 days…don’t let the facts get in the way of a good tale.”

Ratty looked at Sting with an air of faux indignation. He then realized what he’d said.

“Tale!”

“Tails,” said Sting earnestly.

“The teacher caught me though…with a pocket full of rat tails,” Ratty told Dara, verifying with an abashed kind of smirk that his actions back then had been slightly unhinged. Dara wondered, if a man had done such a thing as a child, surely a residual quirkiness would have followed him into the future. He studied Ratty’s large round Disney head for a while though soon gave up trying to locate an impediment.

Patong failed at what it was supposed to do, it wasn’t as good as its marketing suggested, but Dara had been there a few times, he knew the reality behind the gloss. Sting and Ratty had been “rinsed” by bar staff just after Dara had arrived. Dara wasn’t surprised, being ripped off in Phuket was an initiation, something you had to accept and move on from. Anyone who has been to Patong goes home blushing. Phuket was an illusion, selling itself as paradise when in fact its days of beauty had a long time ago ended. Facelift after facelift it had turned into something monstrous. It didn’t look natural anymore.

“5,000 baht is a big bill for a bar in Thailand,” he had told the pair, who were both too drunk to care. The cash they had saved seemed to have lost much of its Mancunian value during the exchange. To Ratty and Sting the baht was almost play money.

Patong didn’t really like people. It had had enough of people. Patong disliked itself. No one was genuinely happy in Patong, though people were so geared towards having a good time they were compelled to pretend. A lot of effort had been spent to get to Thailand, so punters feigned happiness fearing an alternative realism.

The streets bundled drunken sun burnt tourists from one bright light to the next, balls tightly packed into a tired pinball machine bouncing off touts, prostitutes, and farmer’s daughters who had been packed off to what they thought was the end of the world by desperate elders, with a 3^rd class one way bus ticket to sell cigarette lighters that talked and flashed. Cripples crawled around under the feet of over-indulgent Swedish tourists who were unable to differentiate a show from a catastrophe. Russian girls drifted casually, disdainfully, in-between the football jerseys of proud-to-be-English almost-alcoholic men who had come to Thailand to fuck and ultimately fall in sloppy love with girls that liked to say the word ‘love’ but had never experienced anything more than cold survival. They were born losers in the game they played, the survival of the poorest. There were lurid scenes of exploitation and manipulation in every bar, though in the guise of something benign. Poverty and wealth, hustling in the streets, the needy and greedy fighting for notes and travellers checks with as much tenacity as dogs dig holes in the ground where they sense bones. But people came in hordes from all over the world, like martyrs on a pilgrimage to worship a filthy stinking shrine, giving themselves, their money, to the photo-shopped images of smiling Thais who found these foreigners arrantly repellent, but also frustratingly indispensable.

The three men were resolute not to spend another night in Patong and so they booked out of their hotel early and left for the island of Yao Noi. They arrived at the Khao Yak Bungalows and were greeted by a man whom Dara said did not speak Thai well. The islanders were Muslim, though Dara wasn’t sure why they didn’t seem to be able to speak Thai fluently. The man didn’t want to speak Thai to Dara, which made Dara suspicious. He never felt comfortable with Thais who wanted to speak only English with him. It seemed to him competitive… or they were hiding something. He had noticed before that some Thai people had less scruples about deceiving someone when they used English, as if ethics didn’t count in the foreign language.

As they unpacked their bags in their wooden bungalow Sting saw that Dara had cuts, what looked liked knife cuts, around his legs and upper body. There must have been around 30 slashes from his thighs to his shoulders, some of them quite deep.

“What happened to you,” Sting asked. It wasn’t the first time Sting had seen Dara with cuts all over his body. From time to time when they were young Dara would show up on a night out with cuts on his face, arms, neck. Sting guessed back then that Dara had cut himself, but niether Sting, nor Dara’s other friends broached the matter with Dara. It was as if Dara’s friends had taken a vow of silence concerning Dara’s scars.

Dara and Sting were both orphans and so on meeting each other in their early teens in school they had an affinity, an affinity that awarded them both a mutual strength. They had an ugly story to tell and it felt exhilarating to empathize with each other. The affinity however was disastrous in a way as both boys were self-destructive, being an orphan seemed to encourage nihilism, as if an anchor – the umbilical cord maybe – had never been fastened to anything solid, which left them floating in the whirlpool of society without a station to return to when they required calm. Intemperate behavior seemed natural to them, and it seemed there was nothing to hold them back, restrain them, and doing bad things together was easier than doing bad things alone. The families that had fostered them did not care for them, in the loving sense; they gave them a place to stay, they called them ‘son’, but with as much conviction and acidic humour as a prisoner might call a cell ‘home’.

By the time both boys were 20 they were living in a hostel for the homeless. While most other young men in the hostel robbed, or grafted, as it was dubiously called by those who plied that trade, Dara and Sting sold drugs. Fuelled by resentment and by a team spirit, they colluded to take what they could from others. They ripped people off, they sold Paracetamol saying it was E, and baking powder as speed, when they didn’t have the real thing. There was never any retaliation as they sold to students, and the students in Leeds were scared of real people. They were Robin Hoods, sharing the spoils with themselves; they thought they deserved the money.

Dara had left home after his last foster-mother had found a few ounces of speed in his bedroom. She informed him with great pleasure when he arrived home that day that she was going to “shop him” to the police. She had never liked him. He was “above himself” she liked to say. Immediately after she threatened to call the police, without much mental preparation, he held her down to the floor. He felt an animalistic urge to bite her face, which shocked him. “I WILL kill you if you don’t tell me where that fucking speed is.” And so she told him. Dara left the house and knew better than to ever go back. Anyway, he didn’t want to give another person the pleasure of kicking him out. He spent a few nights on the streets, sleeping in a service station toilet where lorry drivers would come in throughout the night to masturbate, though he later found a hostel for the homeless that was partly funded by what was then called Leeds Polytechnic. There he found a book called ‘The Conquest of Happiness’ which he read over and over, while at the same time he learned how to write resumes for prospective employers he would never be employed by. Dara was unemployable, it was his choice, he thought he knew better than to work for anyone. Work seemed like slavery, all jobs seemed like slavery. “You write very well,” a volunteer student teacher told him, and she added, “I can’t believe you ended up like this.”

A few months later Sting joined him at the hostel. Dara wondered if he had done this as an act of martyrdom. But Sting ‘s relationship with his ‘carers’ had not been much better than Dara’s relationship had been with his own foster parents, if you added up the bruises, the arguments, the nasty things a family could verbally share. It sometimes felt as if they were living identical lives, what happened to one would often happen to the other. Sting made the decision to leave home and lied to the shelter that he had been living on the streets, and that he would adhere to the requisites of their ‘work solutions’ project. Dara told Sting he’s been selling “a few pills here and there”, though as soon as Sting was living at the shelter they sold hundreds of pills around the Hyde Park area of Leeds, the slum where students with generic accents nested like tropical birds that had made industrial chimneys their home.

With funds raised from selling Ecstasy and amphetamines, at a time when these drugs were required weekend sustenance for a fashionable life in Leeds, they opened a stall in the depressive Dark Arches selling Indian handicrafts, clothes, jewelry, that they bought from a buyer of theirs called Henry who travelled for half the year and lived in Leeds for the other half. They were going straight, in terms of money it was not ideal, but both boys figured that if they kept on dealing they would be caught, or taxed, at some point. It felt like a promotion, too, a promotion into the mainstream. They would be good, if not better, than other, more normal people, at ‘proper’ work.

Since meeting Henry Dara wanted to travel.

Sting foresaw Dara’s future. Their identical life was about to transform into two uneven parts. He knew Dara would leave as soon he recognized the doggish anticipation on Dara’s face as Henry told him stories about Thailand, Vietnam, India, Nepal.

Their shop was a success, and they didn’t need require a middleman after long. Dara did the buying himself in India, the part of the job he enjoyed the most. Truth me known, he hated the Dark Arches. He called Sting close to Christmas after the shop was less than two years old and told him he wasn’t coming back.

“The shop is yours mate… I’m sorry. I can’t live there any more Sting. There are fucking demons back there in those arches. I couldn’t bear to walk through there one more time… I’m sorry mate.”

“Go, go do what you have to do,” Sting told Dara, “I knew it was coming anyway.”

“Why don’t you come over here?”

“Nah, I like England Dara, as weird as that may sound to you.”

Dara felt sad, but also deliriously independent from his guesthouse in Anjuna beach, Goa. It had to be done. Sting had always dealt better with bad weather and the morose English pub life. Sting thought England had charm. He liked the squalor of working men’s clubs; he praised The Smiths for their morbid indoctrination of youth culture and didn’t seem to mind the bellicose poetry scrawled over beaten up bus shelters. Fuck the Pakis, fuck the skins, fuck Man U…there is no black in the Union Jack. Fuck England, thought Dara. He was happy to leave everything behind, everything except Sting. But Sting would do well, he would be good at life in England.

And so Daz became Dara again. The name he liked. He’d never met his biological mother as she had moved to Australia a few years after putting him up for adoption, a couple of years after having a one night stand with a classmate. Dara imagined her to be unique, creative, having given him his unusual name. It was necessary to give her some kind of talent, after all, he was hers, he carried her genes, so he imagined her to be something she was probably not. Dara’s father, whom Dara almost found, had died of alcoholism only a few weeks after Dara had been making calls from the phonebook to all the people with his equally unusual, but less exotic surname: Medley.

“Oh, I’m really sorry,” said his aunt – the first blood relative Dara had ever spoken to – he died three weeks ago. He called this woman a few times and she told him that he had “drank himself to death” after being left by his wife.

“It’s was the kids he missed,” she said, “they weren’t his, but he loved them.” This love, good love, had deviated from its course, love collided with loss, and Dara’s dad, his aunt explained, fatally crashed. Dara felt the force of his own viscera, as if it were pulling him towards the ground. His father’s inability to hold on to life, this partly constituted Dara. He couldn’t lie to himself, and as he put the phone down for the last time with his aunt images flashedthrough his mind of him cutting himself with knives, crying, head-butting doors, dreaming of escape.

Sting and Dara had both succeeded. Life was light at last, it felt worth living, or rather, it felt worth not destroying. The Nietzschean adage was embodied in the pair, ‘What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’. It felt like that for a while.

“I had an accident…I fell off my bike, into a bush…a sharp bush,” replied Dara in response to Sting’s interest in the wounds on his body, knowing that however unbelievable his story sounded that Sting would not question him further. Ratty looked unsure as Dara detailed as best he could the fictional fall into the jungle from his motorbike, while Dara wondered just how much Sting had told Ratty about their past.

Only metres from their rustic hut was the beach, a beach full of broken shells and other bits of the earth’s shrapnel. In the distance the islets of the Pahngna archipelago were spellbinding to look at. There could be few better places to look out at than this thought Dara. He pondered over suitable adjectives. Sublime is an over-used word, he thought, it is one of those fashionable words popular with the dramatic union of confident educated English 30 somethings, like phenomenal, or outstanding. The words were now duds in the armory of lexicon, thought Dara, they had been weakened by overuse. But the view was, sublime.

“It’s really fucking nice innit,” he told Sting and Ratty.

Sometimes Dara had nightmares where he was sleeping in shop doorways or service station toilets where he would see the boots of lorry drivers shudder as if lightly shocked by an electric current. The Dark Arches and the sound of the tarred river Aire smacking agonizingly against the black stone walls often haunted him while he was asleep. As he looked at the islets dotted around the ocean, serene, like the shells of sea monsters stopped at march through the ocean, his past and present juxtaposed in his mind.

Sting had brought the past to Thailand and it was sitting with Dara on the beach. Sting reminded him of the past. Where there is beauty scum always follows, he thought, but a memory shouldn’t be a significant enough thing to bother him. The past had passed. The reality was, he was having a good time. He was in a good place, with good friends. Although he looked at the cuts on his legs and he felt as if he had been bequeathed with a poison. What kind of toxin had been present in his father’s sperm when he fired it off into his mother’s cunt? Beauty wasn’t enough. It was a necessary sideshow, but it was just that, it didn’t have longevity. It will always be spoiled Dara mused. Self-pity on the other hand was like herpes, it never went away. Sting didn’t require daily sunshine, mountain views, tropical beaches, he was content enough walking through the sullen drizzle with a carrier bag full of beer, or so Dara thought. Why didn’t Sting feel such self-pity? He had been an orphan, too, he had lived, well kind of, on the streets. Dara tried to ignore these thoughts pestering him and invoke that overused word ‘sublime’ again into his thoughts.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s pretty much just like Manchester,” said Ratty ironically after Dara had asked him if he liked the view, “in fact, I don’t know why we spent all this money coming here.”

He looked at Sting for approval of this statement.

“Yeah, fuck it Daz, we’re going back.”

They don’t compel me to go back, thought Dara, as the two talked about the endless rain and dark doleful mornings when the alarm clock would startle them into submission. Dara had forgotten what it felt like to be cold, to have to pay outrageous bills that decapitated your earnings; to worry about such things as the cost of eating out or the price of a movie ticket. He had become a travel writer, a travel writer who may have sold out to the temptation of a glossy magazine’s pay scale, nonetheless, he had made a name for himself and earned enough money to live as a freelance writer, which was unusual in Thailand. Everything had worked, he had succeeded at all the things he had tried to do.

Whenever he heard his severed name, of which the two were insistent on calling him, something tugged at him, as if history were trying to reel him back in. The word ‘Daz’ heralded the sound of hooves clapping against a rotten road into his past. But the past is what they talked about, they had to cover a lot of years.

Sting had left Leeds for Manchester many years ago and found an office job, after he had sold the shop. He informed Dara that he told no one in Manchester about his past, the drug dealing, the hostel. He had also adopted a Mancunian accent in an attempt, so Dara assumed, to thread himself into an improved existence. It worked, Dara saw that, Sting was a believable Mancunian.

In accordance with their aspirations for the night they bought a bottle of cheap Thai rum and then proceeded to talk more about the past, the present, and how they acquired money to live.

“I’m an accounts manager, for a paint company,” Ratty told Dara.

“Do you like it?”

“No, I fucking hate it…It’s a job, of course I hate it.”

“Sometimes,” Sting said, “sometimes I just don’t want to get out of bed.”

This surprised Dara, maybe he had been wrong about Sting’s apparent imperviousness to what Dara considered a depressing country.

“But you’re paid well at least. You have all the shit people need these days.”

“It’s not all that bad,” Sting said, feeling he may have been a little sensational, and he didn’t want Dara to think he had made a wrong choice staying in England, “we have good mates, we have a laugh.”

The ocean was calm. It sneaked up to the shore and tickled the washed up detritus that lay there. Shells, carrion, bits of wood, a single flip-flop that made Dara feel somber. The three took their Sangsom rum to the beach. They had drunk so much they were almost incoherent, but they were content. They looked at the moon that was unusually bright.

“It’s brilliant, isn’t it, the moon?” Dara said drunkenly.

“Yeah, fucking ace,” said Sting sarcastically.

“No but, doesn’t it make everything else seem so inconsequential?” Dara wasn’t quite sure what he meant by this, only that the moon seemed to rub out fear. But that may have also been the rum.

“I don’t feel inconsequential at all,” Ratty said, and he grabbed a yellow plastic seahorse from the sand that had been washed up by the tide. He passed the horse to Sting, who studied it with an ironic look of seriousness.

“It’s a flying horse Ratty.”

“Pegasus,” Ratty replied.

“The moon is brilliant, right, have you got anything better to say?” said Sting caustically, a gibe to his old friend. It was a show of kinship. He threw the horse at Dara after Ratty had passed it on.

“No, not really. I’m fucked,” replied Dara. “It’s all I’ve got to say…I’m keeping this horse by the way.”

He was glad these two had showed up in his life. They weren’t aware that before they had met, Dara had been going through what he thought might be – but how do you know? – a mid-life breakdown. He had been dumped, only to be re-snatched, to be dumped again. A harrowing experience for an orphan.

“What you don’t realise,” Dara told the pair later that night, “is that when I speak Thai, or date a Thai girl, then I kind of become Thai. I lose myself in their language game, as what’s-‘is-name might say” – Ratty and Sting were not familiar with Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy, nor would they care about such things as language games. They were in one, their own, and that was enough – “and so I lose at their game because I am just not good enough at it… I’m conflicted, I don’t know who I am. You need to be flexible to adapt, and you have to adapt in Thailand or you can’t enjoy it, but the more I do adapt, the more I seem to lose myself.”

Dara felt like a lunatic attempting to justify his lunacy.

He was talking about the relationship he had been in more than anything else. A relationship that had started out benign but had become a torment to him the more he realised it was untenable. But rather than leave, he tended to it, he tried to ignore the fact that no matter how much he, and she tried, they would never reach a point of mutual satisfaction. He couldn’t change enough, no matter how well he could communicate with her in her tongue.

“You’ve changed,” she told Dara one night. “What happened?”

What had happened is Dara could no longer maintain the game he was playing. He could no longer commit to both their fantasies.

“Shall we get some more beer,” Sting asked. Sting was concerned for Dara’s welfare, but talk of adaptation and integration within a culture he knew little about, he didn’t feel he had the necessary tools to give Dara any advice, after all, wasn’t this Dara’s forte? He didn’t want to say it, but Sting had known for a long time ago that leaving the Dark Arches was not going to cure Dara of his ailment, of whatever it was that troubled him. If those cuts are self-inflicted, thought Sting, well, there are knives in every kitchen drawer in every country. Sting looked at Dara affectionately, he would like to cure him, to do something for him, but they had pretended for so long that Dara’s scars didn’t exist it was hard to broach any matter concerning emotional dysphoria in Dara’s life. It would be changing tack in what they both had ratified as a relationship standard, a contract. More alcohol was not a solution, but it was an acceptable diversion.

“I’ll get ‘em.”

Sitting on the beach the next day another flip-flop surfaced onto the shore. They took a photo of it, and threw it back into the ocean.

“Good Luck,” said Sting.

“Bon voyage,” said Ratty.

The light of the sun seemed to focus on the cuts on Dara’s legs as the three attempted to catch crabs as they scurried out of their holes in the mud. He tried to pull his shorts further down, but he saw the cuts on the back of his calves. “You fucking idiot,” he muttered angrily to himself, and the girl that had left him danced across the sand, mocking him.

“So what happened to your last girlfriend,” Dara asked Sting when they returned from crab hunting.

“I just left?”

“I thought you were going to get married?”

“We thought about it. We had the house and everything…5 years.”

“So what happened?”

“I’d had enough. I just got up one day, went downstairs…she was watching soaps as usual, and I did one.”

“That’s intense. I can’t do that. You didn’t see her again?”

“No, that was it.”

“No contact at all?”

“No, nothing. Well, not after we shared our things.”

Dara pondered this. How someone can just withdraw and disappear. He had never been able to do this. For Dara relationships lingered, other than the ones with his ‘families’. The cruelty that love causes once it has been poisoned by time was not sufficient enough reason to leave it completely behind. He carried his scars with him. He wanted them with him, he wanted in a way to placate them. He needed the burden, or at least he couldn’t expunge it from his memory, which was the same. In some ways all his lovers lived with him, they were ghosts lying next to him in a cramped bed. He dreamt about all of them regularly. They all loved him and hated him in equal measures.

“So what about your Thai girl?”

This was a question Dara knew at some point he would have to answer? He wanted to talk about her, but not truthfully, he wouldn’t tell him all the details.

“She left me.”

“Oh, shit, sorry about that,” said Sting.

Dara thought that because of Thailand’s notoriety for farcical relationships between foreign men and Thai women that Sting might not take him seriously. He didn’t want to be belittled for something that had caused him so much pain.

“She was a nice girl, but she wanted to marry me, a bit too quickly, so I pushed her away.”

It sounded corny thought Dara, “push her away” but love is corny, love was a cliche. You can’t talk about love and sound intelligent, thought Dara. He knew that if he expressed to Sting what he was actually thinking, apropos his relationship, that he would sound insane.

“So she left, went to another guy. But she still keeps calling me. I don’t really get it.”

“If she left, then fuck her, don’t answer the calls.”

Dara could not do this. Sting wasn’t yet aware how much of this holiday was rehabilitation for Dara. He didn’t know that Dara was clinging to his phone in his pocket most of the time hoping it might vibrate in his palm. When she did call, she would reel Dara back in, and emotionally exhausted he would say all the things he thought she wanted to hear. He felt trained, corrupted, he wagged his tail and woofed for her each time she called. His self-respect had long ago abandoned him, he was subsisting on shallow hope while caring for her emotional demands.

“I can’t do that. I can’t cut people off.”

“It’ll do you no good to keep answering those calls. Get rid of her.”

“She’s on Facebook.”

“Then fucking block her, and then block her phone number.”

Sting’s impassioned response to this made Dara wonder if Sting hadn’t guessed already the main reason behind the scars on his legs and arms.

“I haven’t slept well in months, not since she left.”

“Get rid of her Daz, take it from me, it’s better to leave than to hang on. If she’s with another guy and calling you she’s a bitch, and you’ll be better without her, trust me.”

But Dara could not amputate people from his mind. His girlfriend, who he had obsessively thought about every day, all day, since she had left, had become like an active tumour to him. He couldn’t remove her completely, if he willingly drove her out of his thoughts bits of her remained fastened, clinging to the antipodes of his consciousness where they would machinate to regroup. He dreamed about her every night for the two or three hours he managed to sleep. And Dara had become so obsessive about her he had not been able to focus on anything else. He vomited in the shower on occasion. He threw up over his toothbrush when her absence filled the bathroom. This girl, this farm girl, had unscrewed something in his head. He wasn’t rational anymore. He couldn’t walk properly, he stumbled whenever her face came into this thoughts. She was so pervasive she affected his basic motor skills. To think he had considered breaking up with her before she left, and now she was suddenly ideal. He had made the biggest mistake in his life? Or, was he punishing himself? Was he was fine tuning his own disaster?

Two days before he met Sting and Ratty Dara had sat at home waiting, hopelessly neurotic, thinking she might call or send him a message. Only she didn’t call. He saw her on Facebook with the other man. A few hours later he was sat with a kitchen knife in his hand and was slicing various parts of his body intermittently filling his glass from a 5 litre box of cheap wine. His chest was covered in spilled wine and spilled blood. The self harm, as it had done in the past, was absorbing and fulfilling. The perfect blind massage for a sad man. The knife stroked the skin, and no other feeling could be better. It was horribly sublime. Blood streaked over his body. He took the knife to his face but thought better of it due to some self-harm he had committed on himself years ago. Do I love her, he asked himself, or am I just fucking insane? He cut, he felt dumb and ashamed, but it felt like it was the right thing to do.

Dara had examined in the past what he considered something to be an Asian trait: torture. Torture, he theorised was common in Asia due to the pressure of social hierarchies and repression of emotions, repression from being able to outwardly express emotions. People had their rung on the ladder, and you couldn’t do anything about it, everyone had a station, a status,. Unconsciously they detested this status and wanted nothing more than to be free of it. But they couldn’t. If given an opportunity to hurt with impunity, to have a kind of invisibility, then people exploited their position, Dara thought. He blamed ‘them’, he blamed their culture, just as many expats blame their chosen country for their unhappiness when things turned sour; this was endemic in the expat community. But there was no doubt this girl had him tied up, and she was more than willing to hurt him. She had become malignant to him, as had her family who called him often to tell him they loved him. It was all a game they were playing, thought Dara, though he might wake up some days having dreamed about her and believe everything they told him. Thailand, he had told many people in the past haughtily, is not for the sensitive. His hubris had turned on him, as it always does, and now he was as weak and pitiable as the people he used to give advice to.

They hired a golf cart to take them around the island. During the day Dara went to the post office and sent the girl that was torturing him a gift, as well as a gift to her deviant mother. He not only crashed the car into the post office wall, but then knocked over a parked motorbike. As they drove back into the guesthouse car park he went over a hill and the cart scraped loudly on the ground. Rather than get out and face the guesthouse owner whose car they had been banging up all day the three laughed in the car until tears ran down Sting’s cheeks. It was a moment of levity Dara had been waiting for.

“There are no fucking jobs in England Dara,” Sting told him as they sat that night in a bar owned by a dark skinned man called Matt, a Yao Noi Muslim who smiled most of the time though he had a look of anxiety constantly imprinted on his face as he stood behind his bar, as if he were unsure about something.

“It’s true, even the skilled can’t find work,” Ratty said.

They were already drunk having downed shots with Matt, who wasn’t really supposed to drink.

“Is Bandit really taking us home?” asked Ratty, bemused.

Bandit, their taxi driver, was drinking cheap whisky in the corner of the bar.

“Yeah, who else is going to take us?” replied Dara.

“But he’s fucked?”

“So what?”

Dara genuinely didn’t understand Ratty’s misgivings.

“So we hired a taxi driver so we could get home safe and he’s getting fucked up?”

“Yes. Everyone drinks and drives, it’s no big deal.”

“But don’t you have one of the worst road accident/fatality records in the world?”

“What would you rather have, the fear of crashing one night, or the safety of England where you are continually under the pressure of oppressive rules? I like this anarchy, don’t you?”

“I think I’d rather be pressured in England mate,” Ratty said laughing.

In some ways both Ratty and Sting felt deliriously unbuckled in Thailand and they liked it. That’s why they are here, thought Dara, to get taken home by drunks like Bandit. Englishmen died like lemmings in Thailand from all manner of disasters, but they kept coming in the thousands every year.

“I’m telling you Dara,” Sting said after Dara had refuted that some people just couldn’t find work in England, “I deal with people at the job centre and they are fucking useless. Sometimes we take them to work seekers conventions where they are meant to get picked up by companies who have a quota to employ a certain percent of their workforce with the disadvantaged. I tell them to look good, make an effort…and these are the ones who genuinely want to work…One guy turns up with baked beans in his beard…another guy has like a layer of scum on his teeth, as thick as a gum shield… I have to walk them into the room like school children or they would get lost. They are just fucking useless, they’re society’s rejects.”

“So they’re mentally retarded?” asked Dara.

“No, they’re just fucking dumb.”

“They’re not dumb, they just play dumb.”

“And we have to hire a guy with special needs,” said Ratty, “he needs a special desk ‘cos his arms are all short…what do you call them?”

“I know what you mean,” Dara said.

“This desk costs thousands, and he’s shit anyway. He’s a fucking grumpy useless spaz, but we have to employ him. He just costs everyone time and money.”

“You get sick of it, you can’t help some people,” said Sting.

“I think fuck their government hand-outs, that’s the whole problem, the pity,” said Dara.

“You’ve changed.”

“I’ve lived in poor countries mate. I see how lazy England can be. The dole is a disease, well it’s a cause of a disease, and the symptoms are psychosomatic. Take away that safety net and much of these people will be cured.”

“It’s not like that, what can they do?”

In Thailand ‘rejects’ had family. Family was their disease. Dara knew in England family, the safety net of family, had been replaced by welfare. It was probably a good thing, progressive, he couldn’t think of an alternative, but he was drunk, and he wanted to annoy Sting. He wasn’t sure why.

“Leave them. Let them suffer, soon enough you won’t see many people like that. The next generation will be stronger, it’ll have to be. Society will evolve out of its welfare poverty.”

“You’re talking shit Dara, and I don’t believe you mean that,” said Sting.

Dara then walked away holding onto his phone as it flashed in his hands. Sting and Ratty looked away and said nothing.

When Dara returned to the bar he had an expression on his face that Sting had seen Dara wear many times in his youth. It denoted recklessness.

Another man had joined them in the bar.

“Dara, this guy used to go to Zoo Bar,” said Sting, hoping Dara would come out of his reverie. “Can you believe that?”

The man was large and docile, standing beside a woman he groped that didn’t look too happy about it.

“He knew Specky. He was a mate of Eddie.”

Specky, Dara found out, as well as many of their other mutual acquaintances in Leeds, had succumbed to heroin addiction, or/and jail, and/or death.

“You don’t remember Eddie?” asked Sting excitedly as he poured down shots with the new man.

“No,” said Dara, though he wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to retrieve such a name from his memory.

“Eddie!”

“No, I can’t remember him.”

“He used to deal to…”

“I can’t remember him Sting,” said Dara again.

Sting and the new man talked about the ghosts from the past while Ratty talked to the man’s girlfriend.

On a small island in the south of Thailand a man form the Zoo Bar had turned up. It irked Dara, especially because the man had an air of arrogance about him. He seemed imperiously glad to have survived when so many had died young.

Dara felt uneasy. His phone would not bleep nor vibrate another time that night. He didn’t want to see anyone from the Zoo Bar. He thought he despised people who claimed unemployment benefits. He thought he hated the government for pandering to their needs. He disliked employment. He hated the fact that he hated so much when he should feel happy in this paradisiacal island with an old friend he trusted and loved.

“It was bullshit Sting,” said Dara, swaying on his stool, aware he was drunk and about to say something he would regret, “All that scene in England was fucking bullshit, and all those people who died were fucking losers. They deserved it.”

“Fuck off, you enjoyed England at times…And I know you don’t mean that.”

“No I didn’t enjoy England, that’s why I left.”

The big man they had met felt the tension between these old friends and turned towards his girlfriend who was talking to Ratty. Ratty seemed pleased with himself.

“What do they know about what we did,” Dara said to Sting so that only Sting could hear. “What did you tell Ratty? That you came out of a hostel, that we dealt gear, that we were orphans?”

“No, I didn’t tell him any of that, why should I. What’s the point Dara?”

“And now you try and help these fucking people born with no future?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Help people like you and me?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t help them, you admitted you can’t help them. Some people can’t be helped.”

“I was kidding, I try and help. What do you do for people?”

“Nothing, I don’t believe in help.”

“Fuck me, shut up Dara.”

“You called me Dara.”

“Daz.”

“Why not tell Ratty where you came from?”

“There’s no point. Stop being such a dick.”

“Why don’t you tell people about your past?”

“If people know that stuff they come to conclusions about you, so I just omit that shit.”

“So you deny what you are.”

“Fuck off Dara. You’re the one who ran away, not me.”

“You just took the easy option and changed your name.”

“Easy? You don’t think it wasn’t hard for me getting a decent job, lying all the time about my past. I didn’t see you turning up to anyone’s funeral. It wasn’t fucking easy Dara moving on, far from it. I stayed, and I dealt with it, you ran so you didn’t have to deal with it. I don’t bring up the past only because it could be damaging to me. Not because I deny it, I live with it. I don’t run away from it.”

“Fuck that,” said Dara slurring, “I moved on.”

“No you didn’t, you hid…oh fuck this shit Dara, what are we arguing for…”

“What are you boys talking about,” asked Ratty as he shifted across the bar.

“Rat tails,” said Dara, “I’m going for a piss.”

Dara felt ashamed at what he had said to Sting. He admired his friend for staying in England, he was envious of him for his contentedness. What magic did Sting possess? How had he calmed the sea of his turbulent life?

He didn’t return to the bar deciding instead that he would walk the long dark road back to the guesthouse and listen to the waves hit the shore along the way. That would calm him. The Gibbon Rehabilitation Project was somewhere on the way back and he would stop there and maybe go inside, well, as far as he would be allowed to enter. The road was not lit by lamps, only by the moon, though Dara could just about see further ahead. He moved his head from side to side to see if he could see the sign to the centre. It seemed important to him that he find this place. Thailand was generally a noisy place but this road that Dara walked on was very quiet, the only noise was the ocean in the distance to his right and the sound of insects. As he made his way to the bottom of a hill close to the entrance of the posh Six Senses Resort Dara saw a figure in the road. As he approached he noticed the man was walking clumsily, as if something was tugging at him from both sides. He must be drunk thought Dara. As he caught up with the man he thought he better say something lest the man think he was about to get jumped on that quiet dark road.

“Hello,” Dara said in Thai.

The man turned to him. His face in the dark looked broken, like a cracked pot that had been put back together again.

“Hello,” said the man, and then said, “Foreigner.”

“Yeah,” said Dara.

“You speak Thai?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Captain Bao,” said the man.

“I’m Dara.”

The man was dressed in rags. He wasn’t just drunk, he was pulverized by drink.

“Where are you going,” the man asked. A question easier to annunciate in Thai than it is in English, for a drunken man.

Dara did not know how to say Gibbon Rehabilitation Project in Thai.

“Home.”

“Argh, home…yes, me too. Home is a long way from here.”

“Yeah, but I like this road,” said Dara.

“I don’t like it,” said the man, who then laughed and coughed at the same time.

“You’re a captain?” asked Dara.

“Yes…I’m a captain. I’m a fisherman.”

Dara didn’t really know what to say. He thought about saying, ‘How is fishing then?’, though he just said “Fishing.”

“I don’t fish anymore,” the man then laughed, and coughed again, “I don’t have a boat anymore…now I drink,” he said smiling.

“You have a Thai wife,” asked the man.

“No.”

“Money,” said the man, “marriage is expensive.”

“I’m in a rush,” said Dara, “goodbye.”

The man didn’t say anything, he just looked at Dara and smiled. But as Dara walked some way ahead of him he heard the man shout, proudly it seemed, “Captain Bao!”

Dara never found the project.

When he arrived at the guesthouse he realized he didn’t have a key to the room, so he drank what was left of the rum that was on the balcony. After an hour or so the boys weren’t back so Dara lay down and covered himself in Sting’s over-sized Union Jack towel. He woke up a while later and still they weren’t back so he walked to the parking lot to find a bike he could ride to go back to the bar. All the motorbikes at the guesthouse were parked with the keys still in the ignition. People didn’t steal things on Yao Noi as it was such a small community, and it would be hard to hide anything. The owner had earlier told Dara this. As he started one of the bikes two men shouted at him from a distance. Dara couldn’t really see the two dark figures. As they approached he noticed that one of the men, a Thai man, was holding a shotgun, the other man Dara was sure was the Frenchman who had seen outside the project. He was walking on crutches made from branches.

“What the fuck are you doing?” asked the Frenchman.

“I am locked out, I can’t get in, so I just thought I’d take a bike and go and get my friends. I’ll pay you for the hire.”

“This is not a fucking bike for hire.”

The Thai man had the gun pointed at Dara and he wondered if his life might end. It seemed like pantomime, a serious pantomime.

“Ok, I’ll get off. Look, I’m sorry about this, I thought all the bikes were for hire.”

“You are fucking drunk,” said the Frenchman superciliously, “go back to your room.”

The Thai man still didn’t put the gun down.

Dara walked back to the room feeling exhilarated. It was the first time in his life he had had a gun pointed at him. When he arrived at the room he banged loudly on the door, and this time Sting answered.

“Shit, you must have come back while I was over there. You won’t fucking believe what just happened to me.”

Dara woke up with not just a hangover, he felt as though his body now relied on alcohol. His mind required booze to enable motion. He couldn’t remember how many days, weeks, he had been drinking heavily. He recalled the self-harm, perhaps the climax of the binge, but he still couldn’t fathom how long before that he had been drunk every day. Days were becoming hallucinatory, he wasn’t sure he had lived the memory of them, objects seemed distant, further away than they actually were, and he didn’t quite feel that he was the sole proprietor of the voice in his head.

As Ratty and Sting slept with their hangovers Dara walked to the restaurant next to the parking lot – hoping he wouldn’t bump into the two men from the night before – and bought a bottle of rum. It was an impassive act, fluent. Dara would deal with his hangover.

Now I don’t care he said to himself. He had reached the point of estrangement from his wits that nothing mattered, a point at which he was willing to allow the alcohol to do the most damage possible.

The view of the islets was transfigured by his grazed view of life, everything seemed ugly to him. This was not the wrong side of bed, it was an acceptance of the lingering individualized dystopia that had been pushing itself into his life for some time.

His plan was to drink the rum while looking for the project. Once he found the project he would enter, and finally see just how gibbons were rehabilitated. Wearing the same clothes as he had worn the night before he walked onto the road and went in search of the project.

They’re all fucking sleeping, Dara told himself.

He swigged the warm rum from the bottle. It was so awful he almost threw up, but it would get better, he could rely on that.

People on the dole, he said to himself, those pathetic lice that burrow under the fabric of society, living off of the life-blood of others… I might cut myself, I might feel sorry for myself, but at least I damage only my own body. I am not asking for help, to be redeemed, I am not crawling through the streets with a victim label stuck to my chest. But his heart wasn’t in it, he couldn’t suspend belief enough to buy into his own crap and detest those people he knew nothing about.

He walked up the hill he had walked over in the other direction the night before. There was no sign of the project. He suddenly felt a great anger towards the Frenchman and the guy that had pointed a gun at him.

You’re pathetic, he said to himself as he looked down at his legs and the cuts. He recalled the Dark Arches, standing in winter with Sting next to the stall, both of them joyous and equally surprised at how much they were selling. He remembered Sting had said to him, “At this rate we’ll be fucking rich in two years Dara. Fuck everyone that said we’d come to nothing.” But Dara felt right then he had come, or was at least coming, to nothing. Dara had not waited to be rich, he had gone to India to be poor, but that hadn’t worked out either. He had become a travel writer who lied for a living, who laughed insincerely to editor’s jokes, editors who invited him out for all expenses paid meals, as long as Dara made the world sound nice. Ingloriously he had fallen in love in an effort to reinstate love into his lonely life, and he had failed, he had hatched a story that could get off the first page, because it just didn’t make sense.

His father sat in a council flat room, alone, drinking himself to death, flogged by his loss. Dara carried these genes and he didn’t require a blood test to prove it. He knew what he was. How fucking sore he felt about this predeterminism, how hopeless it felt to be human, to part of someone else, and to be caught up in this universe and all its hackneyed plots and tribulations. Those people that crooned over the fact we are all one, how insidious it is to be part of all this, thought Dara, if only he could extricate himself from the universe, to go on living but be completely disconnected from the whole. Being human was slavery, right from the moment you are born you are a slave. And the older you get the more deeply submerged you become in your slavery, the more aware you are of who you are, the more you realize you are predictable, you are trapped. Even the freedom to cut myself up was programmed in me, he thought, his father had probably done the same.

He had reached the bottom of the hill and walked so far he was almost at the bar they had been at the night before. Where was that fucking project? He felt he needed it now. A couple in honeymoon beige attire drove past him in a Six Senses golf cart. They both looked at him with dread as he stood at the side of the road drinking from a now half empty bottle of rum. Yeah, fuck off, he said under his breath. But that wasn’t enough either, it felt powerless.

He decided to walk back to the top of the hill where there was a view point looking out over the ocean. When he arrived he was covered in sweat, the sun was at the apex of its daily routine. He sat down on a bench and looked at the islets in the distance. A fishing boat was moving silently across the ocean, an ocean that was all sorts of colours he couldn’t put a name to. He realised at that moment he was holding his phone in his pocket.

His mother had released him from her womb, and a year or so later she had given him away. He imagined he had screamed just as much on the second ejection as he had on the first. The longer you live with a mother, he had read concerning an adopted child’s removal, the harder it is psychologically on the child in later life. A year is a long time when it is just that. To be someone else, to hear his named being called, James, he had been James, even when not conscious of itself does the baby suffer after the switch? Did it hurt to become Shaun, somewhere in the soft machinery of his baby brain did the confusion register? And not just the sounds but the smells, the smell of the mother, her shape, her strength. Perhaps Sting had not suffered the same ignominy, maybe he had had a quick getaway. Since this abandonment he had tried in vain to relocate another womb, to insinuate himself into another mother’s cloisters. But on each time he had been rejected, or he had rejected them, he wasn’t sure. All these surrogate mothers were failures, it wasn’t their fault, it was his, because he clung to an illusion that was always bound to fail, like the swords he dreamed of as a child that always seemed to bend like rubber when he needed them to fight. The screaming baby in him had to accept what it was, a bastard, an unwanted bastard, and so be it. Enough of the crying, enough of the self harm.

He took his hand away from the phone. This is it, he said to himself, you can make a choice. Emotion is decision, it can be that way.

Below him were crooked rocks, deposits of natural history, some trees were growing out of the cliff side. He was sick of the sound of cicadas, but they started anyway. They were determined, but how ignoble a life they had, to wait for so long underground and then have so little freedom once they had surfaced from the earth. Dara at least had time, he had time to put things right. Cicadas didn’t. There were holes in the plot that he could fill, space to be subjugated.

He stood up and walked towards the edge of the cliff. He looked at the rocks, the ocean, the bottle in his hand, his legs, and thought to himself ‘the death drive is strong in me’, which made him laugh as he contemplated the film Star Wars. It felt like a modicum of freedom, the fact he could jump, or not jump, and it was not the decision, but the indecision, that made him feel better.

“Dara!” shouted Sting from behind him, which startled Dara so much he almost lost his footing.

“What the fuck are you doing… you mad twat?”

Sting and Ratty stood behind him, both of them completely still, as if a movement would send Dara over the edge. Dara realised that they probably thought he was thinking about jumping off. It might look that way, the bottle in his hand corroborating a suicide. He thought about telling them that he wasn’t thinking about jumping, only the possibility of it, but he didn’t. He couldn’t change now what they had already most likely concluded, and anyway, they had that tacit agreement not to broach serious matters such as thoughts of suicide. Even now that seemed unbreakable.

“I’m just having a drink and looking at the sea… I’m on holiday.”

“Sit down, you look wasted.”

They all sat squashed together on a wooden bench, Dara in the middle, forced by Ratty’s heavy bulk into Sting’s boney ribs.

“I’m ok.”

“Why the fuck did you come out here?” asked Sting.

“I think you might have been doing a few too many disappearing acts Daz, every time we close our eyes you’re off,” said Ratty.

“To look at the ocean… and I went to find the Gibbon Rehabilitation Project but it wasn’t there.”

“Wasn’t where? That’s not even on the island, it’s on the mainland,” Ratty said smiling sympathetically.

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. We passed it just before we got to the pier.”

“But I thought it was just around the corner…I saw that French guy.”

“What French guy?”

“The one on homemade crutches.”

“I think you’ve been hitting that rum a bit too hard.”

That was true, thought Dara, but he was sure it was the same French guy.

“Crutches made of sticks.”

Ratty and Sting didn’t say anything and thought better of collusive eye contact. The three sat for a minute in silence, Sting and Dara unnerved by Dara’s latest proclamation, while Dara was perplexed, still sure the project was close by.

It seemed all three men were looking at the same thing as Dara pondered drinking more rum. Silently they all focused on those cuts on his legs.

“Nothing fucking matters that much Dara,” said Sting, now looking upwards towards Dara’s face.

“I know,” Dara replied, “I know that.”

“I think a ‘night off’ might be in order,” he told Ratty and Sting, “why don’t we go to that restaurant that doesn’t exist?” All over the island the three had seen signs and advertisements for Yao Noi’s famous crab restaurant though they had never found it.

“Crabs are tricky fuckers,” said Ratty.

“I’m good with that,” said Dara.

Ratty looked at Sting, not Dara, as he knew what he was about to say might be risqué: “We might even see that Frenchman on crutches.” Both Ratty and Sting looked at Dara awaiting the response. Dara just nodded his head.

Each embraced at the pier. Sting and Ratty were going to Koh Phi Phi nearby. Dara had to get back to Chiang Mai to work. He was sad to see them go.

“See you in a few years,” said Sting.

Dara looked at Sting and wondered if the man had changed much, he looked not too dissimilar in appearance to the 15 year old he had sat in math class with. They had grown up, ostensibly, that’s how things worked, but the passing of time didn’t erase the child, the present always had a foothold onto the past. Behind the older face Sting’s childhood remained visible to Dara.

“Ratty, it was good to meet you.”

“You too squire…stay away from knives.”

“I will.”

“And stay away from rum.”

“I am.”

Dara got in the taxi and waved goodbye.

“See you in the Dark Arches Dara,” Sting shouted as Dara’s window closed.

“Not likely mate.”

The car pulled away and within minutes Dara found himself back in his Thai skin talking to the taxi driver about Yinglack Shinawatra, the new female Thai PM. He needed time to adjust, to feel comfortable in his Thai outfit.

After while Dara purposely drained the conversation they were having, until he and driver sat silently looking at the long road ahead that led to the highways of Phuket. Dara caught sight of the sign in the distance, the sign for the Gibbon Rehabilitation Project.

“Do you know that place,” Dara asked the taxi driver.

“No, well, a little bit.”

“What do they do in there?”

“They take care of monkeys I think.”

“Take care, how?”

“I don’t know.”

Dara really had no idea why he had become so obsessive about that place. It seemed silly now, now they had passed it. Still, he thought, I’m going to search for it on the internet when I get home.

“Can I come see you in Chiang Mai,” the taxi driver asked Dara as they neared the airport, “we can go for a drink.”

It might have been strange in England to request something like this to a stranger, but this was Thailand, and so Dara said, “Yeah, give me a call if you’re ever up in Chiang Mai.” And they exchanged phone numbers.

He had a few hours to wait for his flight, and had no choice, other than sit in the terminal, than to find a place in a pub where the prices of drinks were criminally inflated. Groups of westerners sat animatedly, each tattooed with their own brand of uniqueness. The westerners talked loudly, they expressed themselves, talking almost at a pitch so others could hear them in the bar. It seemed as if they were pushing an identity on themselves, wrestling for an identity, making sure anyone nearby knew what they were, what kind of people they were.

The Thais in the pub on the other hand sat quietly, they looked at their phones and tablets and browsed through pictures, exonerated from the present, instilling in themselves a joy at realizing they had had a good time, because the photos were proof. The pleasures lie in the fact, not the act. A good time was being had by all it seemed, they just had different MOs.

As Dara was thinking about this an old woman sitting opposite him turned to a man sat in the group of young westerners. The woman was ugly, she had probably grown uglier than she had expected, she looked as though she had done some miles travelling around the world.

“Do you speak English? I need some help.” she asked the man, a stocky Scandinavian

The man, sat on the peripheries of the group, gave a look to the others as if to say, ‘why me?’ and ignored the old woman.

The woman recognized what had happened. She didn’t look the part anymore. She had probably been as loud and full of confidence as the young people she was sat next to once, but now she was anathema to young fashionable people. Resignedly she looked at her computer screen again.

When the group left Dara purposefully caught the attention of the old woman. She noticed him and asked him if she could help him.

“I can’t make this text big enough to read, and there’s no box here to make it bigger,” she told Dara.

“Ok,” said Dara, and he looked at the screen.

“I’m trying to send an email back home,” said the woman.

“Yeah,” he said, “If you click this you can choose 200% and it will enlarge the text…there you go.”

“Thank you so much,” she said, “I am really dumb with these things.”

“So am I.”

“Thanks”

“No problem.”

Dara went for a smoke. When he came out of the empty smoking room the woman was leaving.

“Thank you again,” she said to him.

“No worries,” he said.

He felt wooden, he felt he had no role in his surroundings, as if he were a prop, not a person. He wasn’t sure what his place was in all of this. What was he supposed to do? He felt like an imposter all the time, he was a series of insincere people and none of them seemed to fit him. He’d never been able to stand the sound of his own voice, this was because it didn’t sound how he thought it should sound. Others he met seemed to fit so comfortably in their skin, why didn’t he feel this way?

Dara’s phone then beeped. He thought it might be the girl, but it was a message from Sting, with a photo attached.

Dara looked at the photo and saw Sting and Ratty stood above him the night he was threatened with a gun. As he lie outside their hut on the floor, sleeping under Sting’s Union Jack towel, both of them looked at the camera with their thumbs up, smiling.

“Next time don’t leave the bar,” said the message.

It was a good end to the trip, it fitted. Everyone had their secrets, but they were coming clean.

He took out a notepad from his backpack, and found a pen. The notebook was empty. He’d brought it with him foolishly thinking he might write a poem or something while on the island.

At the top of the first page he wrote, ‘The Gibbon Rehabilitation Project’.