Anak Krakatoa.

Business is slow tonight. I’ve barely lifted a finger. The street is almost deserted, a few aimless tourists looking for something to buy, wiping the sweat off their foreheads before they waddle down to the shore of the lagoon. I’ll probably close early, swipe a few beers out of the fridge then waddle down to the lagoon myself. See if I can’t cut through the sourness of this hangover. I’ve sent the cook home. He wasn’t happy and told me if things don’t improve soon that he’ll leave. If he does I won’t hire anyone else. I’ll just do it myself.

Gin and Tonic is sat at the end of the bar trying to hide the fact that she’s staring at me. She comes in at the same time every night and drinks gin and tonic until she’s drunk enough to talk. She came here to escape her divorce. She took part of her settlement, bought a suitcase-full of tie-die sarongs and headed to Asia in the hope of finding love. She’s been here two weeks and still hasn’t plucked up the courage to proposition me. If she takes much longer I’ll have to do it myself. It’s been a long time since I’ve slept with anybody.

I’ll probably get a few people in around seven. Elderly sight- seers gently prodded off their liner by the cruise company so they can fumigate the cabins and put the Genuine South Island Seafood™ in the microwave. They’ll come in and order something served in a plastic coconut, complain that I have no air conditioning and won’t tip.

I sometimes get people in who have come to see if there’s still blood on the pavement. They’ll come in and say,

‘Is this where it happened?’

and I’ll say,

‘Yes.’

Then they’ll coo and look around the bar in rapt fascination before asking,

‘Were you here when it happened?’

and I’ll say,

‘No.’

Then they’ll leave; often without buying anything.

I’ll wait until the early evening “rush” is over before I have my first drink. I’ll then portion them out over the rest of the evening until I close the bar. Then I’ll get drunk.

My bar is the end of a concrete walkway fringed by palm trees. It overlooks an emerald green lagoon. The minaret of the mosque that stands behind my bar is reflected in it’s surface.

The local Imam came again today with another offer for the place. This time he came with a roll of plans tucked under his arm. He laid them out on the bar in the vain hope that I would be swept up in his dreams of pastoral bliss. They’re trying to buy up every restaurant, bar and gift shop along the strip to convert into a new mosque and social centre. Most people have sold; there seems no reason to keep a service industry alive when there is no one to serve. They aren’t offering a small amount of money either. It’s far more than the place is worth. He understands, he says, the strain. He wants to help. I’m not a Muslim, I tell him. He doesn’t mean spiritually, he says, he means financially. I ask if he thinks things will get better and he asks me to define better. He turned down the offer of a drink and left calm, sure that I would soon sell. He wouldn’t, he said, increase the offer he would just wait and God would provide. I have absolutely no intention of selling. I intend to sit here on my little strip of paradise until the whole venture goes belly up.

Things have changed. I used to be rushed off my feet. I had enough business for the cook to be able to hire his idiot brother to wash the dishes and put out the rubbish. A parade of English, Dutch and Australian backpackers worked here in two week stints to earn extra cash, their little arses wiggling between the tables as they made a travesty of the waiting profession. Flirting mercilessly with the customers and fucking me or John up against the fridges after their shifts.

Wholesalers would drink here, courting us for business. Offering us embarrassing discounts for the promise of using them exclusively. We were people to be known here at one time John and I. People to be reckoned with.

John was unsatisfied when I met him back in England. He was young and rich. He was in the middle of moving from his docklands studio loft to a mock Tudor mansion in a well heeled suburb of the city.

John had made his money by a combination of creativity and an unswerving faith in the gullibility of others. He had an almost messianic ability to convince people that they needed what they didn’t even want. He formed a company that specialised in “Structured Solutions.” and “Capital Logistics”. He offered department heads and H.R. officers strung out on caffeine and over work, the magic bullet. He convinced them that he could make ‘their operations sleeker, fitter and more competitive for the relatively small outlay’ that his ‘Motivational Directiveness Training’ (MDT for short) would run them to and that he could show by means of his unique ‘Productivity Improvement Scale’ (PIS for short) that dramatic change in weeks.’

From that point onwards he had unsuspecting office workers tramping from seminar to seminar forging “Client Reciprocal Foundations” and strengthening “Target Focus” by use of “Specific Guidance Mechanisms”. By the time I met him he had a fleet of “Potential Maximisers” working in virtually every corporate headquarters in the city. The company virtually ran itself. What had started as a highly profitable practical joke had become a real company with real personal assistants and real accountants and while he nominally ran it he wasn’t really needed so his weekends had started to bleed into his weeks.

He liked drugs. He liked drugs a lot even when they aggravated his haemorrhoids and acid reflux. He drank Gaviscon by the bottle and was never without a tube of antacids. He saw blood in his faeces so often now that he’d stopped being concerned by it. Every weekend was spent in exclusive and faux- exclusive bars and clubs around the city, dropping pills and scouring for suitable women to impress with his money and access to coke. The week was spent consolidating by drinking in the evenings and smoking weed in the mornings. John was young, rich and thoroughly miserable.

‘There’s got to be more than this.’

It happened to him every time we went out. He would become existential. He would feel remorse at the decisions he’d made in his life and would start to plan an escape.

‘You can talk all you want but there’s no chance that you’ll ever go through with it.’

‘I will, trust me, by the end of this year. I’ll sell that idiotic fucking company and get out and when I do you’ll come with me.’

He’d cried wolf so many times that when he actually did it I was completely gobsmacked.

‘Here, sign this.’

It was a contract, a part share in a venture in which he would put up the capital and I would pay back my share of the investment monthly.

‘I know we’re friends but if we make it legal we both know where we stand.’

We chose Angang Pandang because it was quiet and it was cheap. We were looking for an ‘Authentic Island Experience.’ The ethnic tourism of Thailand and Laos had failed to materialise here due to the fact that the ferry services were erratic at best and there was reluctance on the part of the local religious leaders to allow their Island to become a tropical getaway for students on their gap year. It was only permitted to sell alcohol on the stretch of beach facing the lagoon. That is where we bought our bar.

We were lucky. Through a friend of a friend we had been put in touch with Lucas. A Scottish man who’d almost drank himself to death staring at the sunset. When we met him he was desperate to sell and return his life to some semblance of normality.

‘The good life’s nearly bloody killed me.’

He took everything of value with him, down to the ashtrays and left us with nothing more than a timber framed shack on the beach.

We spent the next month scouring the island for as much mock- authentic art as we could find. We found a wholesaler that sold plastic cups in the shape of coconuts. We draped the bar in fairy lights and photos of us grinning like idiots and by the time we’d finished the bar looked like a Polynesian whore. Then we ripped everything down and started again.

We took off the front walls and replaced them with sliding bamboo doors. We kept the lights low, back-lit the spirits bottles and installed a DJ booth. Outside on the terrace we arranged a few tables facing the lake and after a day’s work we would sit there, listen to the call to prayer and slowly soak in rum and beer. We were in no hurry to open. We were in no hurry to become business men and to have to start thinking about deliveries and overheads. We were happy to potter along and be ready when we were ready. We both needed a holiday and we were taking one.

‘I can offer you a great deal more than you paid.’

‘But we’ve just opened. We should give it a go before we sell up. Don’t you think?’

‘I believe I’ve made it quite clear what I think.’

It was the first time that the Imam had come to try and get us to sell.

‘In principle all of the other bar owners are ready to sell. The rest of the avenue will be religious buildings.’

‘Well I’m sure people’ll need a drink after all that praying.’

He was lying. There was no chance that the other owners would be selling up. In the six months since we’d been open a new local government had regulated the ferry crossings and our little stretch of beach had been invaded by armies of backpackers. Lonely planet had described our enclave as ‘A quiet contemplative oasis nestled in the heart of the rampant commercialism of the South Seas.’ a ‘small, rustic hamlet of bars surrounded by a religious community’.

The locals were ecstatic. People who, up until this point, had survived by fishing, super glued palm fronds onto pieces of bamboo, called it ‘native art’ and opened gift shops facing the water. Timber huts used for gutting fish were converted into beach-front chalets. The focus shifted from subsistence to profit. Our bar became the central meeting place for all the people who were passing through and the religious community saw us as the biggest hurdle to jump in returning the island back to the way it was. They decided to speak to us in a language that they thought we would understand but we were having too much fun to listen. We offered a donation to the mosque which was politely rejected.

‘Well if there’s nothing more we really do have to get ready to open.’

‘Thank you for your time gentlemen and we hope that in the future that you will change your minds.’

‘The minute we do we’ll be straight on the phone.’

I left the island on the sixteenth.

‘Your father’s dead.’

It was five o’clock in the morning and I was closing down the bar. My mother called me and didn’t sound the least bit upset, as if she’d been expecting him to keel over. John had left earlier in the evening with a plain looking girl from New Zealand. He liked to fuck women in the lagoon. He liked the romance.

‘When they’re sitting with their grandkids on their knee I want them to remember that night in the lagoon. I’m giving them a gift, really.’

John hadn’t stopped being on holiday. He would idly pull a few pints until he found someone naive or drunk enough, then he would take the rest of the night off. He did no paper work, no ordering. He slept all day, scored coke in the early evening and drank and fucked at night. He’d put on weight and his skin was shiny. His eyes were the colour of nicotine and he’d developed a rattling cough that he tried to suppress by forcing more and more cigarettes down his throat.

‘I suppose we’ll have to get someone else in if you’re gonna fuck off.’

‘You could run the place by yourself, John.’

‘No I couldn’t, it’s far too much work. Are you sure you have to go back?’

‘It’s my father’s fucking funeral, John!’

‘When was the last time you spoke to him?’

‘That’s hardly the point. I have to fucking be there.’

He hired a little blonde Swedish girl that had been coming in the bar for about a week. He hadn’t managed to persuade her to sleep with him yet and thought the offer of a job might grease the wheels. She’d fallen in love with the island and had decided to spend the rest of the summer there. We’d been seeing each other since the day she’d arrived. She told me that I was the reason she’d decided to stay on but I didn’t believe her. She was with me when I received the call about my father. She held my hand as I’d tried to squeeze out tears that wouldn’t come. It certainly wasn’t love, you couldn’t fall in love in a place like that but she was nice and we seemed to get along. She went with me to the airport and promised me that there was no chance that John would get his greasy paws on her.

John sat by the bar looking at Christine’s arse as she reached for a bottle and wondered what it would look like without the support her jeans offered. He would get her slowly drunk during the evening then take her down to the lagoon after the bar closed. It was still early though and the bar was beginning to fill. He cut a line on the bar, offered the straw to Christine who shook her head. This sober and this early in the evening he could barely hold the straw to do the line. His hands had started shaking more and more over the last couple of weeks. After the main tourist season was over he would find a deserted island and dry out. He’d been over doing it and needed a break.

‘Have you got one of them for me?’

Coke was like fucking catnip for middle class girls on holiday.

‘Maybe. What have you got for me?’

She giggled and tried to look coquettish. She looked like she was having some sort of fucking seizure. That’s the thing with young girls. Flawless bodies but absolutely no class, no composure. A girl of nineteen or twenty still can’t coordinate her fucking arms and legs properly.

He chopped her a line and when she bent over to snort it he put his hands between her legs. She yelped but didn’t move it. He licked his middle finger and smiled.

‘I think you’re ripe…’

He unloaded on her tits, pulled his trousers up and politely asked her to get out of the office because he ‘had some work to do.’

‘Couldn’t I have another little line?’

‘Sorry darling but that was the last of it.’

She wiped his cum off with her knickers and threw them at him.

‘A souvenir.’

He smiled and said

‘Twat.’

under his breath as she tottered back into the bar. He dropped a gram of coke into a bomb and necked it with a sip of beer.

‘Could you come and help me please John?’

Christine looked flustered.

‘Is it busy?’

‘It’s getting really fucking busy.’

Silent Boy was the end of the bar again. He’d been in every night this week. Ordering one Coke and shifting around on the stool looking at the door.

‘Are you waiting for someone mate?’

Silent Boy looked up.

‘Sorry?’

‘I just wondered if you were waiting for someone.’

Silent Boy looked down into his glass of coke. John turned around and took a another look at Christine’s arse.

‘Excuse me.’

Silent Boy was looking straight at him, his hands were shaking.

‘Are you the manager?’

When I saw the news I prayed to God that it wasn’t our beach. I called the bar and the line was dead. I called John’s mobile and left dozens of increasingly hysterical messages. I was only sure when the news said that ten Britons had been killed and flashed up a picture of John. My mother begged me to stay. She was inconsolable when I told her I was going back.

People had flown in to collect the bodies. Brittle eyed parents making themselves useful and being practical. Using business as an excuse to stop them from breaking down.

Christine survived. Somehow. Somehow she’d been shielded from the blast that had vaporised John. A beam from the ceiling had fallen on her and crushed vertebrae and severed nerve endings. The doctors gave her a five percent chance of walking again. She didn’t want to see me. Her parents flew her back to Sweden as soon as she was well enough to travel.

The local Islamic centre volunteered to house the dead for identification. Those that could be identified without the use of D.N.A. testing.

The Imam came out and condemned the bombing calling it a ‘crime against humanity and the teachings of Islam.’ A extremist group claimed responsibility but nobody was ever found. John left me a sizeable amount of money in his will so I rebuilt the bar. After the dust had settled the tourists had evaporated. Roughing it’s fun but it isn’t worth dying for.

The gift shops and the restaurants closed and the owners went back to being fishermen and left me here. Two hundred square metres of Sodom. I’ve almost run out of money. Only one tap is pouring and I’ll strike the cocktails off the menus when the spirits run out. It’s hot today and this heat gives me a terrific thirst. Gin and Tonic smiles to me as she walks out of the bar. Tells me that she’s booked a flight and that she’s leaving tomorrow. The bar is empty now. I might fuck the rest of the night off and go and throw stones into the water. There’s nothing for me to do here. The sun is sinking below the horizon as the call to prayer bounces off the surface of the lake. Business is slow today.