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  To the real Bonnie

  acknowledgments

  I have read, enjoyed, and learned about the natural history of Thailand and the islands in the Gulf of Thailand, and about the habits of tigers, from these books:

  Chasing the Dragon’s Tail

  Alan Rabinowitz;

  The Singing Ape

  Jeremy and Patricia Raemaekers;

  Fight for the Tiger

  Michael Day;

  Tigers in Red Weather

  Ruth Padel

  “When there is war,

  the poet lays down the lyre,

  the lawyer his law reports,

  the schoolboy his books.”

  —MAHATMA GANDHI

  “Where have all the flowers gone,

  long time passing?”

  —PETE SEEGER

  prologue

  It all began with my mother changing her mind. At the time I was glad that no grown-ups, except Layla Campbell, were coming. Jas and I adored Layla Campbell. We’d met her only three times, but we knew that she was special, mysterious. She had taken over as our cadet leader from Mrs. O’Hanlon, who retired or went home or something.

  Layla had this halo of curly red hair and wore lots of black smudgy eye makeup, which made her eyes glisten as if she were on the verge of tears. She held a cigarette like Lauren Bacall in the movies, and had this big sad mouth. Jas and I called her the Duchess, because of her posh Edinburgh accent.

  We tried to walk like her, stole cigarettes from our mothers and choked trying to smoke like her. So we couldn’t have been happier that she was to lead our camp.

  But I’m going too fast. I’ll start at the beginning. I remember when my journal was new and pristine, with clean white pages and a sky-blue hardback cover. Now it looks the way I feel—dirty, battered, torn, ripped, shattered, falling apart.

  My journal takes me back to the Forbidden Island, and it’s all happening again….

  one

  JOURNAL OF BONNIE MACDONALD

  MAY 11, 1974

  AMNUYTHIP, THAILAND

  Hooray! Tomorrow the Amelia Earhart Cadets go to the island with Layla Campbell.

  Senior Amelia Earhart Cadets:

  Hope

  May and Arlene (the “Glossies”)

  Jas

  Me

  Juniors:

  Jody

  Natalie

  Sandy

  Carly

  To pack:

  Journal

  Waterproof holder for journal (v. important)

  Sleeping bag

  Flashlight (take lots of spare batteries)

  Pencils

  Backpack

  Book? Ask Mom for recommendation

  Swiss Army knife

  Change of clothes

  Flip-flops

  Towel

  Toothbrush and misc. toiletries

  Mosquito coil

  Finally, we’re off. The rain is bucketing down, the roads are flooded, and you can hardly see through the windshield because there aren’t any wipers, so the Duchess hangs out the window and mops it with her tie-dyed scarf so the driver can navigate. She asks me to hold on to her legs so she doesn’t fall out. She has these really long legs. Jas and I are laughing like mad.

  The road disappears completely at one point and you can’t tell where the ditches and fields begin. We’re making a wake like a motorboat. People are wading through water to get home, their belongings in bundles on their heads. Only the gentle-faced water buffalo look unfazed. They’re in their element.

  I glimpse through a gap in the flowering frangipani trees a girl of about my age, her heart-shaped face made up like a woman’s, with scarlet lip color, black eye shadow, and powdered cheeks. Her black hair, decorated with red and orange flowers, is like a waterfall to her tiny waist. She stands on a balcony and looks as if she is waiting for someone to press a button so her life can begin.

  Bar girls and their scrawny-legged bosses squat on tables and look bored; Buddhist monks in orange robes hold umbrellas over their shaved heads; and confused stray dogs swim around looking for a place to stand and bark at the suddenly wet world.

  Inside the bus the juniors are shrieking and whooping every time the water gets really deep outside. There are stranded vehicles all over the place.

  In the back of the bus, between bumps and careering, May is attempting to apply mascara to Arlene’s eyelashes. They both turned up wearing no makeup but they have transformed themselves from senior cadets into femmes fatales in a matter of minutes, with bright pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. Arlene shrieks—a lump of mascara in her eye.

  “Spider-eyes! You look like you’ve got spiders around your eyes!” May hitches up her tube top and laughs.

  Jas rolls her eyes at me.

  Jody, Carly, and Sandy are staring out the windows, clutching their teddy bears. It’s their first camping trip. Carly and Sandy are the only ones wearing cadet uniforms—khaki skirt and shirt, with a red neckerchief. Natalie is huddled in the corner looking anxious.

  “Don’t worry, Nat, we’ll survive,” I tell her, and she smiles faintly through her frown and carries on sucking the satin edge of her rag.

  Sandy is the smallest girl, with pale hair and skin and skinny limbs. She looks as if she’d float away if you blew on her. Jas pulls her onto her lap so she doesn’t get too bumped around on the bad roads.

  When the bus finally arrives at the wooden pier, we older ones help the little girls onto the boat, amid lots of screeches and giggles.

  “Why won’t the stupid boat keep still?” May demands. The boatman tries to hold it steady as the lively waves drag it in and out.

  By the time we’re all settled on the boat, the sun has come out, but it’s a rough trip and nearly everyone is sick. Not me, though.

  Hope manages to vomit into the wind and gets it all over her orange sweatshirt.

  “Are we there yet?” Sandy moans. She is as green as the praying mantis I found in my bedroom last week, or one of the snakes the Thai boys torture on the compound.

  Waves come over the bow and the sides and soak us all. Even the juniors’ teddy bears are sodden.

  An hour’s boat trip is about as much as I can take at the best of times. The secret is to keep your eyes on the horizon so your brain can make sense of what is happening to your body. Dad told me that. He used to vomit in his helmet when he first started flying. Now he flies Phantom F-4s. He’s in the Special Air Service Regiment, deployed as an instructor to the United States Air Force front-line base at Utapao, an hour’s drive away from our home compound at Amnuythip.

  We’ve been in Thailand for two years. We don’t see much of him—he mostly has to stay on the base—and when we do see him he looks very tired, with dark bags under his eyes, and his wavy brown hair has gone completely gray. But he’s still handsome. These days he has a very short fuse, and I mostly stay out of his way. Mom says that’s wisest. Dad thinks the war will be over in less than a year. We’ll go back to Scotland then.

  It’ll be great seeing Grandpa and Grandma again, but it will be hard leaving my friends here, and I do love Thai food, especially sticky rice. There’s a little beach bar at Amnuythip where they have the best sticky rice ever. We have parties there sometimes when Dad and
the other fathers are home. The Buddhist bar owner was a monk for many years and he’s covered in tiny tattoos, mostly words, like a newspaper of flesh. He and his wife cook chicken, pork, prawns, stalked barnacles, clams, lobster, and rice-stick noodles with all sorts of herbs and spices—ginger, coriander, lemongrass, and galangal. They were childhood sweethearts and lost touch with each other for years, but met again when she was a widow with five children. Mom thinks that’s so romantic.

  There’s a tiny part of me that wishes Mom were here. Mrs. Campbell smiles and hugs the little ones, but I can tell that she’s worried. The boat bumps and shudders on the waves.

  We’re nearing the island when the outboard motor stutters and stops.

  “What’s up?”

  “Are we out of fuel?”

  The boatman, who looks about a hundred years old, can’t get the motor started. He wears a black patch over one eye, like a pirate.

  “Isn’t that where we are supposed to be going, Mrs. Campbell? I think we’ve gone too far.” I point to the landing place we came to last time we camped.

  The sea sweeps us quickly past the island, and we seem to be drifting fast. The current is really strong.

  “I’m sure the boatman knows what he’s doing, Bonnie.”

  We watch him doing things to the outboard motor, but it still won’t start. We’ve gone way past our little island, and lots of others, too. They rise like big lush anthills straight out of the water. The boatman hauls up a small canvas sail and mutters something. I don’t know what he’s saying but the Duchess translates.

  Rather than tack back against the wind and current to our island, which will take hours, she explains, he’s taking us to another, which is much bigger than the one we had planned to camp on, but has a landing place and freshwater, he says. Or that’s what Mrs. Campbell thinks he says. Is her Thai really that good? I’m impressed. But the others are appalled.

  “There are over fifty islands in this archipelago,” shouts Mrs. Campbell between screams and groans.

  “I don’t care where we stop, as long as it’s soon,” I tell Jas. She nods wearily and we huddle closer together. Waves crash over us and the boat is nearly overturned a couple of times. We use our hands to bail the water out.

  “Where are the life jackets? No life jackets? No, of course not. Why did I ever say yes to this stupid trip?” Arlene says.

  “Shut up, Spider-eyes! Will you just shut up?” May answers.

  The Glossies (Jas and I thought of that name; they spend most of their time dressing up like they’re going to be photographed for a magazine, messing with their hair and plastering their stupid faces with too much makeup) squabble at the best of times. And this is not the best of times.

  We are getting very close to a reef. Waves build up into breaking surf and our boatman steers carefully toward a gap between two exposed rocks and coral heads. As the boat reaches the gap it is raised high on a wave and we are swept into a lagoon.

  There is a thin stretch of sand and, on the right, black rocks reaching out into the sea, like a natural harbor, except that as we get closer we can see that waves are surging between the rocks, making it dangerous to get too close.

  Another wave surfs us in to land safely on a steeply sloping beach. As quickly as we can, we lift the little girls over the side and help Mrs. Campbell unload the tents and bags and boxes of provisions. She gives me her guitar to carry. “Take care of it, Bonnie; it’s very precious to me.”

  “Sure will, Mrs. Campbell.” My heart leaps. She has chosen me to be responsible for her beloved instrument. This is going to be so great.

  “Oh, solid land!” Arlene sinks to her knees and kisses the sand. Then she splutters and spits. I notice that she hangs back while the rest of us get on with organizing things. Probably doesn’t want to ruin her nails!

  Jas, Hope, and I run back and forth, carrying the backpacks and provisions. The water swirls around us and the boat twists in the restless waters.

  For some reason the boatman won’t set foot on the island. Mrs. Campbell tries to get him to help unload the crates of bottled water, but he shakes his head, yelling, “Yaksha! Yaksha! Koh Tabu!” and keeps pointing back to the mainland.

  It takes all our strength to pull the crates ashore. Mrs. Campbell gets the others to help shove the boat off the beach, and the boatman doesn’t even wave as he turns back toward the sea. He gives up trying to get the outboard going and sails now for the mainland, after a difficult launch over the surf. We won’t see him again until he picks us up in three days.

  “What was he saying, Mrs. Campbell?”

  “Nothing, Bonnie. A silly taboo. The locals don’t come here if they can help it.”

  “Why don’t they?”

  “He didn’t say. It’s only superstition, whatever it is.”

  “What’s Yaksha?”

  “I think it’s something to do with Hindu gods, isn’t it? A temple guardian?” says Jas.

  “Giant. A mythical giant,” murmurs Mrs. Campbell.

  I feel as if we are still rising and plunging on the waves and eventually have to sit down while my head settles.

  “I’m going to explore,” May announces.

  “No, not yet, May. We need to set up camp first. Then you can search for wood for a campfire.” Mrs. Campbell slaps May’s bottom with the flat of her hand and May shrieks, laughing. Everyone smiles, relieved to be together and safe.

  It’s paradise, no adults to spoil things. I don’t count the Duchess as an adult. She’s fun. I look around, making mental notes for my journal. There are wispy casuarinas and tall coconut palms at the top of the beach, and green jungle rising steeply in a backdrop. The pale strip of beach is nearly covered by water, and there’s all sorts of flotsam and jetsam on the tide line. Treasures to take home and to write about in my journal.

  Most of us want to pitch camp under a banyan tree, beneath its spreading branches. But Jas insists it is bad luck to sleep under a banyan—something about ghosts and demons living in the branches. So we end up choosing a clear space near the tree, above the high-tide mark.

  It’s hard work pitching our tent, but great fun. The wind keeps whipping it away from us, and Jas and I laugh hysterically, almost wetting ourselves. I’m glad Jas is with me and also pleased Mom didn’t come now. She would have complained about the primitive sleeping arrangements and refused to use the toilet, which we seniors have dug well away from the camp.

  We drape nets over our sleeping bags, though it must be too windy for mosquitoes. I can save my mosquito coil for another night. I love the way the burnt embers look like a dead, dried-out, curled-up snake in the morning.

  The Duchess unpacks our Thai cooker—a simple barbecue with a lid on it—places the charcoal inside, and lights it now so it will be good and hot for cooking our supper.

  “Now you can look for firewood, but don’t stray far from the beach, please, and keep an eye on the wee girls.”

  She means the juniors. In Amelia Earhart Cadets we have seniors (fourteen to seventeen years old) and junior members (between nine and thirteen years old). You can become a chief cadet if you pass ten tests with credit. I have passed only five so far: First Aid; Knots; Woodwork; Swimming; and Navigation. I haven’t been a cadet for very long. The only chief cadet among us is Jas, who, like me, is fourteen. She’s good at everything, but you can’t be jealous or cross about it because she’s so sweet. She’s the sort of girl who would give you her last piece of chocolate, she doesn’t gossip, and she can keep a secret. That’s rare.

  We all walk along the narrow strip of white sand, gathering shells and driftwood. There are striped tiger cowries and fragments of oyster, cone shells, and pink tellins, like a baby’s fingernails. We don’t get these on the beach at Amnuythip. There’s nothing on the sand there apart from filter tips and prawn shells.

  The wind drives fine grains of sand into our eyes and forces the waves far up the beach, sending spume flying like soapsuds through the air. Still, I find so many lovely shells
I can’t carry them all. And there’s plenty of driftwood, and huge chunks of chestnut-colored kelp dragged up from the deep. We end up with quite a pile of wood to keep the fire going and Mrs. Campbell is delighted.

  “We’ve brought plenty of charcoal,” she says, “but there’s nothing quite like a wood fire.”

  She says we should map the island while we’re here and invent names for the beaches and landmarks. That’s our only task apart from keeping a journal, which I do anyway. I write all sorts of things in my journal—like love poems to Lan Kua, which I’ve never shown him, of course. Lan Kua says I am Pee Prai—a beautiful woman spirit who entices men to fall in love with her. He’s such a charmer, and I am not a flirt. He’s sixteen and drop-dead gorgeous—a typical Thai youth, with short, glossy black hair. And he’s got a great body—slim and muscled, no taller than I am. I also sketch in my journal, and stick found things into it, like interesting matchbox covers, leaves and flowers, Thai labels, feathers and photographs, stuff from magazines that I don’t want to lose, and other poems that I write that are fit to be seen by the general public—unlike the love poems.

  We explore the beach, which I have named Landing Place. At one point there’s no sand, only jagged rocks that rise to a peak about fifty feet high, so we have to clamber over those at sea level. I’ve named that Dragon Point, because that’s what it looks like, the tail pointing into the sea, the large head facing inland. Hope points out a shallow cave looking over the tail. She has to shout above the noise of the wind. We cover only a tiny part of the island’s circumference, but we’ll do more tomorrow. It’s much bigger than the island we were supposed to have camped on. But this one is definitely more interesting. And, I wonder, if it has freshwater, why isn’t it inhabited? That’s the kind of thing my dad would think about if he were here.

  “This island’s so beautiful. Why do you think no one lives here?” I ask Jas.

  “It’s probably just superstition. The ‘forbidden island,’ the boatman said.”