Free Seven-Tenths by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

offered a place where one could hear only the sea’s rinsing murmur, the cries of birds and, at night, the tiny hollow sigh of a lamp wick in its glass chimney.
    Now this place no longer exists, and I need no reminding as our bangka noses on to the Fantasy Elephant Club’s new beach. The tangle of boulders and thorns which had always hidden the foot of the cliff is gone. In its place is a concrete sea wall which at one end abuts the foundations for a small pier. Grey cement teeth stick up out of the blue water sprouting tufts of rusty reinforcing rods. On the spot where I had pitched a flapping shelter during a storm on my first visit to ‘Tiwarik’ many years before stands an octagonal, open-sided beach house with at its centre the beginnings of a circular bar surrounded by polished marble stools. At empty stone tables sit a variety of site officials – architects and engineers – waiting for a boat, as well as a blue-uniformed guard with a pistol and a walkie-talkie.No, he says, it isn’t possible for me just to stroll on up and look around. This is a Japanese operation and things are run in an efficient and security-conscious manner. Why do I want to visit the island, anyway? I explain that I had once spent time here, had lived here alone, am curious to revisit it. The guard calls up, is told to wait. I sit down on a marble stool and watch relays of sweating boys stagger beneath the sacks of sand they are unloading from a bangka . Time passes; the guard speaks, his radio crackles back; more time passes. Finally, I and my two friends from ‘Sabay’ are allowed to walk up to the site but are reminded that when it is finished the Fantasy Elephant Club will be exclusively for Japanese members.
    The precipitous footpath is gone. To replace it a steeply curving road has been bulldozed across the face of the cliff. As we walk up we are passed by a roaring truck full of cement and trailing sooty fumes. At that moment the last vestiges of ‘Tiwarik’ vanish in clouds of carbon. We stop on a curve where labourers are digging a trench for a power cable. They are from ‘Sabay’ and I fished with one of them four years before. He tells me this is the site of the accident a month or so back, just before Christmas. Some boulders fell out of the freshly cut embankment and crushed three workers from up the coast. Two died on the spot, a third is in hospital in Manila and likely to die. I hope their families have been compensated. Oh yes, says my informant’s workmate, they were each given 30,000 pesos (almost £600).
    Once at the top I am unable to recognise nearly all the familiar landmarks. I cannot even be certain where I saw the pegs and surveyor’s ranging rod on my last visit. Much of the Field of Crabs is now landscaped and has been disguised as a miniature golf course. A tennis court is even now being surfaced and a small swimming pool receiving a first coat of obligatory blue. Individual bungalows – double glazed, air conditioned, self-contained – are disposed among tasteful arrangements of rocks already planted with flowering shrubs. The centrepiece of the development (‘the masterpiece’, as the assistant to the architect told me down below in the beach pavilion within the latter’s earshot) is the clubhouse itself, a long, low, white palace whose foyer is painstakingly decorated with appliqué designs of shells set in cement. This is apparently tocontain all manner of restaurants, sushi bars, guestrooms and steam baths. At the moment it holds a good few Filipino labourers wearing the snipped-off corners of plaster bags on their heads as sunhats. A siren sounds from up in the forest, a strident wail which sends an instant image of escaped prisoners fleeing through the mind, but it is only to mark the beginning of the labourers’ mid-morning break. Most unwrap their merienda from scraps of newspaper where they stand. A few head up towards a straggle of huts pitched against the steep, rocky slope in the