Free The Backpacker by John Harris Page A

rolled a joint and had only smoked half before the room started to spin. I hadn’t smoked for a while and the effect seemed to be double what I remembered it to be. Suddenly overcome by a queasy feeling, I lay down in an attempt to keep the room from moving. Phew! Was this strong or was I simply unaccustomed to smoking? I closed my eyes and felt worse, the room whizzed, my stomach felt woozy and I belched before running into the toilets and throwing up a barely digested green curry. ‘Fuck!’ The sweat ran off my head and fell like rain, cratering the leafy green liquid. I ladled some water onto my head and the dizziness eventually cleared enough for me to go back and sit on the bed.
    After half an hour, my body recovered just enough energy for me to stand and fix up my mosquito net, but it felt like such an arduous task to tie a piece of string and attach the loops that I did it incorrectly. I fell back onto the bed; one end of the net pinged off and it smothered my head like a mist. Too tired and too pissed off to bother, the sleep my body craved enveloped me like the net and I quickly drifted off.
    I hadn’t even noticed the scribbled message that had been stuck to the inside of my door with a Rizla.
    THREE
    John.
    Fucking good to see you!
    Contact soon.
    Sir William.
    I pulled the piece of paper from the door leaving half the gummed edge behind, and stood, pondering the note. The early morning sunlight was streaming through the gaps in the planks of the door making vertical lines like laser beams across my chest. Squinting and moving my eye out of the line of fire, I sat on the edge of the bed. What did it mean?
    Of course, I should have been wondering how on earth someone had managed to get into my room the night before to post the message. The door had been locked so whoever it was either had the key or knew someone who had it. The previous night’s events went carefully through my mind, stage by stage, in an attempt to sift out a face or a figure that had been hanging around my hut, and who may have been the intruder. I suddenly felt the urge to check my belongings, to make sure that nothing was missing. My passport, video camera and money were all still there, nothing had been touched.
    The next question that entered my head was why Rick hadn’t spoken to me himself. If he knew I was here why had he only left a message? And what was all this knighthood stuff?
    Unsure exactly what to make of these events, I unzipped my holdall, pulled out the postcard he’d sent me and cross-checked the scrawl. The note was indeed in the same handwriting, and not only that but it was written in the same garish purple ink.
    Fucking good to see you! I imagined him saying it as he wrote it down, wondering whether or not to spell it Fooking . Fook. Fooking fook. The words on the paper went over and over in my head. Written on a Rizla, I thought, and sat with my back against the shuttered window, how typical of him. More typical would have been to include a rolled joint as a welcoming present.
    I rolled the note into a tiny ball and pushed it out through the window shutter, momentarily blinding myself in the sunlight. Outside, the beach looked almost deserted through my limited strip of vision, and blinking rapidly to stop the bright light from stinging my eyes, first the beach and then the sea came into view.
    I pulled away from the window, startled as someone suddenly walked onto the wooden veranda of the hut. ‘Goo’ mornin’, sir,’ came a delicate female voice.
    My heart beat a little faster, and I pushed one eye up against the shutter again to see who it was. The woman arranged her things on the wooden platform, and soon the sound of fruit being chopped drifted in along with the sweet sticky smells. Peeping through the shutter and manoeuvring my head, I tried to get a look at her face, but my field of vision was restricted so I just eyed her technique. One hand held the machete while the