Parrot fish circle the grey reef.  These huts can only be reached by boat, the website said, or a fifteen-minute trek through the jungle.  You took the jungle route, you carrying most of the bags, sweeping back the undergrowth with the edge of a waterproof snorkeller’s rucksack so as not to accidentally palm some creeping stinging burrowing thing, and the mosquitoes came like a swarm for your blood.  Touch nothing in the jungle, that’s a rule you’d heard somewhere.  You kept checking back to see if she was okay, struggling with a bag of her own, sweeping the fronds.  You made it, drenched in sweat and bitten half to shit, to this Thai-run hideaway with barely no guests and no English signage, tucked in a cove where the white sands turned to cliffs and canopy.  At night you can get to the next beach by foot, if you wade around the rocks, knee-deep in the slosh, waist-deep if you time it wrong, waves from the Andaman shunting you back into the rocks, rocks poking up through the sand to find the soft bellies of your feet, rocks sharp enough to slice, feet naked and blundering.  You run this insane gauntlet every night, the pair of you, because at the end of it there is pizza.  Daylight brighter than stage lights, you spend the afternoons floating, faces down, looking for life.

The urchins pattern the reef bed, sparkling black as they catch the filtered light, scattered, huddled, in shallows and deeps.  Careful of them, they’re the toxic ones.  Are they?  Blimey, they’re everywhere.  The shard was tumbling in loose sand in the shallows, where only the little pale ghostfish swim. 

She hobbled to the beach with the tiniest trickle of blood from a puncture wound that looked like nothing.  But it wasn’t nothing.  You watched her grit her teeth and her face go red as the hotel owner and the cook bashed the wound with an empty nahm soda bottle.  Jep ka, you think she said, you imagine she said.  Her voice in Thai was higher and cutesier than in English, especially when being polite.  The hotel owner told her, in Thai, that bashing the wound would bring out all the fragments. 

You had the hotel owner arrange for a boat to come.  You couldn’t speak enough Thai to understand him, but you could make arrangements, that you could do.  She hopped her way into the boat, her bandaged foot held up away from the water, or maybe the boat owner carried her in, you can’t remember.  If you were five inches taller and a sight stronger you’d’ve carried her in yourself, but you’re not.  Something in the boat’s engine failed, and it stopped two hundred metres from the shore of the larger island.  You sat there in the sun, rocking, with four Italian men, until a larger boat came and you transferred over to it, no gangplank, her stepping her way across on the toes of her bad foot, eighty-odd metres of Andaman below.  Five and a half years earlier you’d gone on your first holiday together: four nights in Barcelona, and in the shallows there one of those ghostfish had come to her, brushed itself against her, almost sat on her stomach.  Hey!  Look!  He likes me, she said, or something like that, in cute voice, and the ghostfish dabbed around at her abdomen strangely.  The two of you referenced that little fish for years.  The ghostfish, the abdomen.  The boat returned you to Koh Lanta and you went to the International Clinic, and she made the nurses’ eyes go wide with her Thai.  Ooo, tum mai poot tai geng ka?  They flushed the wound with water, a tiny cut that hid a deep hole, Christmas tree-shaped, and they tweezered out the fragments, dozens of them, all black and glittering, some so small they were barely visible.  So strange to think that, at one point, all those little black daggers had been alive.  The doctor injected a syringe straight into the wound, no anaesthetic.  She said it was alright if you needed to wait outside.  You did.  You wondered how often you’d watched her grit her teeth through pain.

She showered with plastic bags over the bandage, leaning on you, both naked, as she hopped to the bathroom, positioned herself with one hand on the wall under the shower’s flow, and balanced her bagged foot on a little plastic stool.  You have no idea where in that beachside hut you’d found a little plastic stool – maybe it wasn’t a stool at all, maybe the bathroom bin.  You remember her thigh, knee bent, the tiny purple veins on its underside, the curve of it, the forward shoulders, the little blue heart inked onto the back of her neck.  You’d thought of names for the children you were going to have.  You talked about this often, delighted in it – had a dozen names for girls but could barely think of one you liked for a boy.  The names were spoken so much they almost had faces attached – not quite, but almost.  Personalities, imagined interactions.  Imagined children, that though imagined took up a place in your heart.  The ghostfish in Barcelona sniffed around her abdomen probably for only two or three seconds, but you kept talking about it for five and a half years.

Earlier that day, the day of the shard, you’d circled the reef following groups of parrot fish as they swam and chomped at the half-dead coral with their strange keratin fish beaks.  The colours – pinks and yellows on blue and green bellies, like tie-dye shirts, like 80s ice lollies, round and bulbous, the biggest ones as long as your forearm and fat as a dog.  You kicked and circled as you followed them, both of you, in circles that arced away from each other, chasing different shoals, until you were no longer in each other’s vision.  You’d break the surface to look for her snorkel, her heels and bum bobbing, you’d wait for her to raise her head above the surface too and you’d make an ok hand signal as a question, requesting one back to check she was okay.  You felt it was your job to check that she was okay.  You did this a lot.  You couldn’t carry her to a boat, but you could check she was okay.  She’d usually say that she was.

– Chris Neilan