Chapter 3 - Swimming out to Sea. Thailand, 1980

Ali stomps down the sands to take his suffering to the sea. The hole inside of him drains his vitality like a terrible vacuum and it's an effort not to just give I altogether; to just crumble onto his knees and shrivel in misery, shrinking until he's as indistinct as the countless particles of sand. But unless some soldiers in togas turn up with a cross and some nails there will be no merciful death in self-pity. Ali is sentenced to the far worse punishment of having to grin and bear it. He has no choice except to get on with life however little it means to him.

He's sure of one thing - no one else wants to hear about his troubles. Most people have enough of their own. This is why he has become a virtual hermit in the midst of a crowded city. With the exception of D and a few business associates he has no close friends and he's content to keep things this way.

So he raises his head in dignity while he still can and marches towards the water with the arrogance of a prince of the beach. He walks past the hundreds of red and blue jellyfish washed up on the shore, ignoring their silent pleas to be returned to the depths. They seem pathetic as the sun sucks out their liquid and armies of tiny crabs and lice will shortly be along to feast upon the harvest of the tide. Ali doesn't even give them the time of day as he steps into the sea. He couldn't care less that thousands more of the poisonous molluscs are floating out there.

Whereas other sand-dwellers point nervously out into the blue, espying a single jellyfish and declaring the entire ocean to be out of bounds until the necessary nuclear attacks, Ali is the only one to enter the water. He knows that there is a hell of a lot more water than jellyfish. Without giving them any attention, he's able to swim out among whole schools of the blubbery creatures without getting stung. The micro-currents produced by his arms and legs as they arc through the water seem to create a protective space around him.

He hopes for the clouds in the sky to get their act together and block out the sunlight. Though his cancer has been cut out he now has a scalp as sensitive as a baby's and it burns easily. His black bathing cap helps a little but it's of far more use to the local children - They like to see for how long they can keep track of Ali in the ocean before he disappears out of range.

The sea could as well be bath water by its temperature. He sloshes his arms through the water to get an idea of its prevailing mood today and he likes to just play with its resistance, stretching and caressing the water like the body of a lover. He becomes impatient to lose his vertical stance and so he casts adrift his feet from the bottom, plunging into the weightless realm of motion. He misses this every moment that he's chained to the gravity of the land.

Ali also abandons the humdrum reality of the outer world. Passport numbers, nationalities and bank accounts mean very little out here - the same for memories, problems and personal histories. In these realms of blue, his identity is only that of a mammal inclined towards salty water but lacking the usual fins and webbed feet.

The sea is a playground where he can thrash and play at will without fear of breaking any expensive vases. Nor will anyone complain or phone the authorities if he decides to adopt the mental age of a five year-old, crying, fooling around and dribbling at the mouth. There is water all around him, glistening all his skin and sealing every orifice. It fits around him like a velvet glove, anticipating each of his body's changing contours. It adjusts to his slightest motions like the most attentive of massage.

He begins to swim out with no particular distance in mind, just taking it stroke by stroke. Just as life is taken breath by breath. No horizons will be reached in a single stroke. The swimming becomes as natural as walking and there's not a moment when any part of Ali's body is not moving. Each limb follows its own arcing, swooping, zigzagging course exploring the infinite paths of movement. Not a style recognised by the Olympic authorities but the overall effect seems to propel him forwards. For it should be said that despite the marathon distances and time Ali accumulates in the sea, his technique less befits that of a streamlined swimmer than a drunk kangaroo; more or less walking through the water as if he were groping for the bar and his next whiskey.

The only condition Ali sets upon himself is that he should be utterly relaxed at all times. Any tension in the body is a resistance against fully unifying with the water which is, of course, the only way to go. So now that he's away from shore a little, he allows all to hang loose as if he were a dead body pushed overboard, lifeless and at the utter mercy of the waves. His head droops down below the surface and he blows out the air in his lungs in a strange underwater language. One hopefully not understood by sharks or giant squid. His arms and legs float together and he ends up acquiring a kind of foetal position. All traces of strain picked up on land leave him and the playful currents begin to nudge life back into his body. Just as his air is up he finally pisses and so knows he's feeling at home in the ocean. He raises his head for more air.

He feels ten times lighter and now his movements are effortless, slicing through the water like butter. The sea has become something absurdly soft and luxurious to lounge in and every position becomes a delight. But today Ali is intent on losing sight of the land and so he resumes his erratic stroke, switching sides as either one tires. Every now and then he plays dead man when he needs to recharge.

The tides are helping him pull away from the shore and it's not long before the familiar landmarks become visible to the expanding horizons either side of him: the palm tree peninsula to the East and the less attractive concrete eruption to the West. He switches off from these points of orientation and loses himself with the lull of splashing water and his own hypnotic motion.

He swims out into the Great Blue Infinite where there are answers to all his questions and somewhere out here lies his solace. He trusts in the safety of these depths that could just as easily rise up to swallow him in a moment if they so desired. But however far out he goes, he is only ever swimming in his own pocket of water, a couple of metres in diameter and he concerns himself only with that.

A swell begins to rise although the sea itself remains an unruffled sheet of calm. The rolling hills lift and drop Ali as gently as a mother handling her baby and they alternately obscure and reveal the land, leaving Ali to understand that all this water is actually stacked up high as mountains. It's a great mercy that it doesn't all come crashing down upon the unsuspecting civilisation.

Upon the sea's surface a myriad of intricate patterns are traced by invisible artists of the wind. There are fleeting swirls and cris-crosses etched into the silk that expand until they're cut up by the new curls and bubbles of a fresh gust. A cry of a sea bird causes Ali to look up and from the position of the sun he guesses he's been gone a couple of hours. Millions of yellow bellies will now be guzzling rice and noodles. Machines of perilous smoke are competing for inches upon the webs of tarmac and harsh voices clamouring in dispute over small pieces of printed paper.

But all in a land that is out of sight, out of mind. Fuck it all. Ali begins to tumble and enters a free-fall where he can never hit the bottom, surrendering control of his limbs to the natural play of elemental energies. Tai Chi under water. He keeps his head below the surface and so is free of any notion about which way is up, returning only to grasp a mouthful of air once every minute or so.

He leaves off the focus from the overworked arms and feet to encourage an overall body motion led by the hips, abdomen and head. Each motion communicates with the next until even the motion of his little toe calls the next posture of this timeless dance. He pirouettes on invisible points and dives in search of nothing - finds it and then glides back up with raised arms that pop above the surface to point out directions for the passing butterflies. He'd love to know what business they have out here.

The longer he continues the motion the less contrived it becomes and his mind can shut off, each new manoeuvre arriving faster than he can conceive. This is play of perfect joy and he can't ever recall sex coming close to it. Here Ali is perfectly free and meets no resistance. It's like a day ticket to the pleasure rooms of Heaven. If there was just somewhere here where he could grab a banana milkshake then he'd never need to return.

Still, it's time to head back and if it took him a few hours to get out here then he can count upon a four or five hour haul back against the current. But fortunately it's not a matter of strength. Whenever he tires he just plays Dead Man again, tapping into the ocean's inexhaustible supplies of energy and he's on his way again.

On the return journey it's more crucial than ever that Ali takes it stroke by stroke. If his eyes are staked upon the horizon's beach then he'll drown in his own panic that he's not getting any closer. What does a guy have to do to get somewhere here? Instead he just has to trust that he's actually moving forwards even if every voice in his head tells him otherwise. He spends his time hunting the small currents on which he can hitchhike a few metres against the tide - for water moves in all directions at once, chutes and spurts constantly weaving through the ocean fabric. All Ali has to do is ride with the water going his way. He finds that even by just announcing his intent to get somewhere, he can forget all about progress and engage himself with other games of his own devising. When he next raises his head, he'll have crossed huge stretches on just a postage stamp of energy.

With some reluctance, the landmass ahead of him begins to grow and Ali's need for a milkshake begins to grow by the metre so that the last few kilometres are sheer murder. He pulls into a late afternoon beach scene where almost no one is in the water. The first few steps on land are like granite and Ali becomes aware of how exhausted he is.

"Did you see any jellyfish?" someone asks.

"I didn't look." He answers and hauls his body up the beach and home where nobody awaits him.