Escape from Pleasure Island

By S.K. Pickles

A bone-idle Job-Seeker is hired by a hipster magazine to infiltrate a Dr Moreau type island of media stereotypes. Escape from Pleasure Island is a backpacking adventure comedy and satire.
Two old school friends living on benefits and an ex-scoutmaster from Sevenoaks are hired by an ultra-cool hipster magazine and sent to infiltrate an island in the South China Sea; an island where the women are tagged and fought over at anti-techno parties, an island populated by camping shop survivalists, hooligans, various sub-species of hippy, latin lotharios,Swedish beach babes, Jihadists, rampant homosexuals and a sexy, albeit hairy 'three bush' neo-feminist. There will be beards.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bellend Books
• Release date: Feb 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386131519

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

A DIFFERENT KIND OF WANK

I still remember that moment vividly: the chance encounter that would rip my mundane existence apart and propel me on the path to Pleasure Island. I was sitting in my seat in Caffe Nero, minding my own business, looking around; seeking inspiration – my eyes alighting on Japanese tourists and lunch break secretaries – wondering if every woman had at some point in their life been on the receiving end of a money-shot (even old grannies, or if there was a cut off point – say, those born after 1955 – which would safely exclude my mum) when I had a strange thought, or rather, a kind of porn-flash.

God – the white-bearded toga-wearing one – spunking on the earth with an almighty groan before turning away and trying to tuck himself back into the void of eternity. It was at that very moment, as God turned his back on me and shambled off amongst the stars, that I heard my name and jumped, as if caught out in my own creative onanism.

Stew?

A man with designer frames and a Noel Edmunds-like beard had paused at my table; not the usual Charles Manson/cultivated lumberjack/ faux-Muslim hipster beard, but still, of that ilk.

It’s K, he said, Keith…Thailand.

He was wearing a vintage Tachini tracksuit top of eighties turquoise and tight expensive looking jeans. In his hands, two takeaway cups, one marked skinny. Somebody said excuse me and he turned sideways, flashing the label on his bum. I moved my net-book towards me.

Ten years, at least, he said.

Suddenly I saw him, Beer Chang in hand, younger without the beard; dread-locked, eyes red with spliff, Massive Attack playing in the background as we sat around with our feet in the sand. The island of Ko-Mak, Thailand.

It’s crazy, he said. What you up to?

Ah, not much.

That was true. I watched his eyes shift over my tatty fleece and stained backpack.

You still writing?

Not really.

I touched the net-book again and pulled it towards me at an angle, as if some devilish porn might glint out of it. Not that I watch porn in Caffe Nero, but my diary winked at me shamefaced, with its bland list of complaints. A different kind of wank.

Did you finish that book… that serial-killer travel guide thing?

Nah… what about you? What you up to?

I work for Perp now. Perp magazine. I’m assistant deputy editor.

Perp! I knew of it. No, let’s be honest. I knew it. Big fat magazine of popular culture. Hipster central – if hipsters were even still a thing with them. Full of edgy journalism about weird music and drugs that no one had heard about, spliced together with American apparel ads and arty porn-like fashion spreads with the occasional tit and ironic muff thrown in.

He glanced over his shoulder into the autumn light. An Indian summer, holding out its last warm fingers upon the shoulders and cleavage of London’s finest.

Well, it was cool to see you, he said.

That made me feel good. I remembered I had liked him back then, on Ko-Mak, but it was too late. He gave a final quick smile, flash toothy in his beard and turned on his heel.

See you around, he said.

I’m always here.

He paused then and turned, opened his mouth as if to say something but thought better of it. He gave a little two finger salute instead and continued on, leaving a whiff of fruity aftershave in his wake.

I packed up soon after, not able to re-engage with my diary: a moaning diatribe about how this net-book – an incredibly drawn out and convoluted purchase – had just came up again on e-bay, thirty pounds cheaper, and worse than that, the dark realisation that I probably should have bought a tablet.

When I went outside Keith was there at a table on the street. He had his back to me but I could see he was laughing. I could see it reflected in the eyes of the pretty blonde that sat opposite him, the way her eyes scrunched up and glittered. The man next to her was also laughing. He was clean-shaven, perhaps even too young to shave, with a blonde fifties quiff; some kind of golden Elvis surfer-dude. They looked like people from a magazine. There was an i-Pad on their table and I eyed it covetously as the girl stroked and tapped it and spun it for Keith to see. I stole past. Keith didn’t notice me, but the girl did. She flinched and put her arm over the screen protectively, glaring at me from beneath sunny bangs until I was safely out of reach.

About five days later and I was staring at a photograph of Emma that had been taken in a little beach bar shack. I’d been thinking about Ko-Mak a lot since that meeting with Keith and had found the photo tucked between the pages of an old notebook, amongst my pile of clothes. Keith was actually in the picture, in the background behind Emma (my girlfriend at the time) staring with red, camera-flash eyes, like some dread-locked terminator sent from the past.

Perhaps sensing my stillness, G looked up from his drawing. We were in the stuffy yet draughty, kitchen-cum-living room of his council flat; a smell of fish and cabbage wafting from next door, whilst from a distant stairwell an angry or deranged man was banging a door and shouting something about cunts.

I tilted the photograph away from G’s insolent gaze and ruminated on Keith again. His beardy grin and the models at the table haunted me. I was convinced they were models now. The sun had shone upon them like a spotlight, almost as if one of those photographer’s assistants had been there with their tin foil reflector things – certainly a job I wouldn’t have minded, if pushed, to do – bouncing light around, adjusting bra straps, supplying cheeky banter. Well, yes, why not? Something like that, talking and laughing with models. Not folding cardboard boxes or talking about central heating or any of the other dreary jobs the job-centre was trying to trick me into. No, something with a bit of glamour: open plan offices and lunch breaks with skinny girls and skinny coffees, soft lighting, ping-pong tables and bean bags. Not, as I endured recently, sitting in some canteen lit up like an interrogation room watching old bints eating Scotch eggs and dunking teabags. But beggars are not supposed to be choosers, at least not down the job-centre when you are trying to upgrade your job-seekers allowance to depression related income support – or whatever it is they try to pass off as depression related income support these days.

G leered at me.

I don’t know what exactly happened to him between leaving school and the two of us finding each other on Facebook some twenty years later, but it seems that after a stint of homelessness and a halfway-house interlude (perhaps a brief stay in the nut house) he’d been given this council flat just like that. And as I was now technically homeless – sleeping on his sofa, incognito – he had been advising me on how to go down that route.

You’ll never get another girlfriend like that, he said. Plus you’re old now. When you’re old you need to be rich to get fit girls.

I turned the photo over. That’s very insightful, I said.

I wondered briefly if he was cleverer than he looked (which wouldn’t have been difficult) and if this was part of his plan to push me over the edge into full on, benefit enabled depression.

Just saying! he said, happy to sneak in a new favourite expression, gleaned from one of his teenage soaps. You should burn that photo.

I’m not going to burn it. Jesus. I’m only looking at it.

He shrugged and continued to ink in his drawing: another pencilled rapper. This one with a big H on his cap.

What’s the H for? I asked, to change the subject.

Hatchet. He’s one of the Top Up Boys.

You doing another job for them?

He liked it when I said job. These thumb and finger wielding rappers – ‘Yo man, check out my hands,’ – were the only things G drew now. Giant shoes and baseball caps with guns and knives drawn next to the rapper like an accessory for a doll. They were crude renderings that lacked the detail and introspection of the early cock work that had made him infamous at our school.

These pen and ink rappers were however gracing the mixtape covers of the estate’s wannabe grime crew: The Top up Boys. They paid G for his art in respect (I knew that they were really laughing at him, but he didn’t). They paid him in fist bumps and good-natured grimy banter: ‘Yo, G, Was up,’ and ‘G, my man.’

He was the tolerated, bumbling good-natured village idiot of the estate.

And I was sleeping on his sofa.

I went and stood by the window and looked out over the estate. Some kids were smashing bottles down in the playground. It was getting cold now.

What time’s your social worker coming by? I asked him.

Two o’clock.

I better go out for a bit then.

I cycled down to Caffe Nero, Camden, and took my seat in the window; small latte and Lidl chocolate muffin in my open backpack to pick at surreptitiously. Keith walked by in the street and saw me. He gave a start and quickened his pace. Strange, I thought.

I opened my netbook and stared at the last lines of yesterday’s entry.

G keeps the house clean. So that’s not so bad…

And then Keith was slipping into the chair opposite me. He leaned across and grasped my arm.

Stew, thank God, he said. I’ve been looking for you.

CHAPTER 2

A CURIOUS PROPOSAL

His eyes darted around suspiciously. He smiled, showing white teeth through blond and black hair. Did he highlight his beard? He tapped one painted nail on the table, a kind of skin brown colour, like a woman’s tights.

Let’s go for a walk, he said.

I looked at my coffee.

Buy a take out. He slid a two pound coin across to me. I’ll meet you outside.

I went back to the counter and asked for a take-away cup and poured my coffee into it and pocketed the coin. I glanced out the window, but he was bent to lighting a cigarette. I imagined a blonde model smiling dreamily as she painted his nail, and the nudge and winks from editorial staff as they discussed layouts and weekend parties over lattes and pastries.

We walked up towards Camden-lock in silence. He walked a few steps in front, looking away as if we were not together. He turned left before the bridge and we walked along the canal.

He motioned to a low wall. It was damp and cold. No girls tanning their legs now; just a couple of muffled tramps with a bottle of white-lightning and a dog wearing a sack. We sat as far as from them as we could.

So…Keith!

I go by K now.

K?

And you are still…Stew, Stewart… Pickles?

I repressed a sarcastic reply. I was thinking of the two pound coin in my pocket – and the models. Also, I was hopeful that I would be able to wrangle an invite to a Perp party. One of those arty flash-photo parties where everyone looked like they were having a good time outside the toilets.

Yes, that’s my name, don’t wear it out.

He made a strange face, like someone who was having doubts about what they’d just put in their mouth.

Have you got another name? Like a pen name or something? he asked.

A pen name? What for?

No…I mean, I googled your name, I actually found it written in an old notebook back from Koh-Mak, but I just wondered – if with your writing – if you used another name ever?

No, I said, I don’t have a pen name.

Oh! He waved the last of his cigarette. Self-published, blogs perhaps? And regarded me with what I could only think of as a beady eye.

He noticed me staring and said, D’you want one? glancing at his fag. But I wasn’t looking at that, I was looking at the nail of his little finger, painted pink. Did he have a harem of models? I felt a hissing envy in the reptilian recess of my brain.

No. No blogs. Really! I haven’t done anything with my writing.

He took a drag. Good, he muttered.

Good?

No…No! I didn’t mean it like that. Quite the opposite Stew… Actually… He flashed a showman’s grin and scratched at his beard with the pink nail. I have a proposal for you.

He told me what he had in mind and then just stared at me with a little expectant grin. He couldn’t really be waiting for an answer, could he? He must be waiting for questions.

Is this a joke? I said.

Absolutely fucking not.

And you want me…because I’m no-one?

You’re perfect. Not just because you’re a nobody – ah, you know what I mean – but because you can write, at least I remember you could, and you know the area, you know islands. You’re pretty clued up on the travel scene, right?

So, you want a writer to go to some island, and write a story for Perp but it can’t be an actual writer?

Or a journalist or anyone connected with the industry. Not a real writer… not even a blogger.

I felt my eyes glaze, which is the last thing I wanted. I knew now was the time to look alert. I wasn’t bored of course, but rather caught in a whirl-pool of day-dreams: I was already there, in the office of Perp, covered in the sweat and grime of the jungle, torn khaki pockets and ragged pussy-magnet beard, tossing my moleskin notebook onto the desk – ‘take a look at that,’ – some cute little skinny-latte trollop smiling at me…

Do you want me to start again? said K, I know it’s a lot to take in.

Start again! I said warily.

Right. So…there’s this island. It’s in the South China Seas…maybe you should ask me questions.

Um! Right…so, where is it exactly?

Little gold beard-hairs tickled his lips as he bared his teeth. That’s just one of the fucking things. We don’t know. Nobody knows exactly where it is or who it belongs to. It might be a private island; it might be Chinese… it’s fucking madness. There is no official way to get there. Officially, it’s uninhabited…but the stories! We’ve talked to people who have met people who have been there.

"It’s like The Beach. In that book." I said.

"No…not like The beach. There’s bars on there, parties, wild fucking parties. Boats are coming and going. Things go on. Crazy things. Sex and violence. Medieval shit…but it’s some kind of paradise too. It’s established. How the fuck can anything like that exist in the world now and still be off radar? Do you realise how massive this is?"

Yes, I said.

You should be excited.

I am…

I’m fucking excited.

No journalists?

No…no fucking way. I don’t know how they manage it. We’ve tried to get people there. We’ve talked to others in the media, documentary makers, even the big boys… Josh knows people at the Guardian. Nobody can get close. They’ve got some kind of massive media shit-sniffer. We sent one of our DVD reviewers, she’s American-Vietnamese, only ever wrote for us, no one else, and under a pseudonym. She called us crying from Phnom Penh, passport stolen, black eye, sexually assaulted. He spoke eagerly, spit beginning to fleck his beard-hairs. Bloke from the the Independent was arrested in Bangkok for drug possession. Everyone says he’s some kind of strait-edge yoga freak. No one – no-fucking-one – has got in and out with a story. All we have are camp-fire rumours. Not one reliable interview, nothing on tape. It’s mega. Sick mega. Total shit-dick.

What kind of rumours?

He grinned. A grin of relish. Some say it’s an artificial island, or that it was founded by Vietnam vets and hill-tribe women, or Saigon whores…different versions of that one. He licked his lip hairs. They take your passport away when you arrive. No electronic items, no phones, no cameras allowed. You have to leave the island naked…they’ve got some kind of… He tapped his wrist, he was very excited now, fucking bracelets for the women.

Bracelets?

To show their sexual availability. I mean… this is rumour. Here, look at this.

He worried at his phone, tapping and squeezing it and looked all around, as if some lurkers might be watching us from the bushes. He whispered, This is the only footage thought to have been shot there, apparently shot on some kind of spy camera and smuggled out anally. He was staring wide eyed at the screen, at a grainy black and white smudge. There’s no audio. He cupped his hands around it and lent into me. I could smell his perfume, sweet and cloying. We look like two guys watching porn I thought. Then I thought, maybe he is gay. I hope he’s gay. The thought of his model harem still scratched at some scab in my brain. But then I thought: You too are going to be writing for Perp. You too can have a harem.

It took a moment for me to realise what I was looking at. Feet walking in the surf. Then the camera view flashing up, over the sand, to wooden shacks, palms and foliage. Figures stumbled here and there zombie-like.

Looks like a full moon party, I said.

Yes, yes, he said, uninhabited island remember…look.

Now there were heads. The backs of heads. A crowd looking at something. Then a shoulder, an ear, and we were seeing what they were looking at. Two men circling each other, jabbing, feinting. One of them did one of those spinning Van-Damme back-kicks, missed, and the other jumped on him, wrestling.

They’re fighting, I said. I realised both our bodies were tense, and our breath ragged.

K tapped the screen. It froze. There! he said.

What?

He pinched and widened his fingers and a grainy figure appeared. A pixelated outline of breasts, taunt midriff and bikini bottoms – enough to stir the sand in my nether regions. She had her wrists crossed in front of her.

Is she tied up? I said.

K didn’t reply. He stared at the figure as if seeing it for the first time. Then he tapped the screen again. The little camera eye roamed, across the sand, pushed and shoved in the crowd and offered another glimpse between bodies. K tapped and froze it again. He squeezed and expanded. This time it was just the belly and thighs of a girl, but you could see that she too had her hands bound in front of her.

They’re fighting over them, said K.

Is this real? How do you know this is real? Is it on You-Tube?

It was. He frowned, thinking. "This is going to be a lot for you to take in all in one go, but let’s try. It appeared on You-Tube about six months ago, under the title: ‘Hidden Island Fight for Woman’. New user account. Comments were slow to come, ‘What the fuck is this,’ etc. ‘Is this for a film?’ But then someone wrote that they had seen this on an island off the coast of Vietnam. A place called Pleasure island.

Pleasure island?

"It went viral. Low viral. But it was soon picked up by a myth busting site. It was bare discredited. Scarily so. Several people said it was a scene they remember being staged in Ko-Phan-Ghan for a no budget film. The film was never made of course…although a couple of actors came forward."

That’s pretty good discrediting.

No, wait. Not one of those user accounts, not on You-Tube, Myth-Busters, or traced back to Facebook – is more than a year old.

I thought for a moment. I was surprisingly clear headed. The clearest headed I’d been in a long time. K stared at me, slack jawed.

But you said the video was only posted six months ago. The accounts were from before that.

That’s the mad thing. Think about it. Think of the forward planning. What is involved. What must be as stake?

Hold on a second. You’re saying that all those accounts were set up to discredit a video that might or might not come out in a year?

He swallowed, slightly bug-eyed and I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. But then I felt cheated. Angry and cheated. Just my luck: job offer of a lifetime from a conspiracy nut job. I started to move my feet around like I might stand.

It’s easy to create a fake identity, Facebook or whatever, he said quickly. They’re pretty easy to spot too, we did a story on that last year. These were much harder. I had to dig deep. These profiles had real photos, real people. So I started to message them, I had a few brief replies: ‘Yeah, it’s true. It was a film, I was there.’ But when I wrote back for more info – nothing. Then the video disappeared from You-Tube and all the accounts I’d tracked vanished too. All the Facebook and Google-plus accounts. Before it all disappeared, we got one screen capture of a partial friend’s list of one of the deleted profiles. I contacted them. In fact, they didn’t know that friend at all. They just accepted requests from cute guys and girls.

When was this?

A couple of weeks ago.

I thought for a bit. Who else knows about this?

People at Perp. People in our documentary department. He tugged at his beard.

You understand…it sounds a bit crazy. A bit paranoid.

Yes.

You think that video is genuine.

Fuck it. It doesn’t matter. That’s just one thing. I wanted to show you something. But the rumours are enough. There is defiantly something there… and anyway, dude, what have you got to lose?

I didn’t answer.

I would be over there myself if I could. But this is the next best thing. I get this story for Perp and I’m made. I thought of you, you’re perfect. Is your passport valid?

Yes. Do I get paid?…I mean upfront?

Plane ticket. Expenses. He shrugged, Chance of a fucking lifetime?

When do I go?

Nearly.

Nearly?

Nearly there. You’re my man. But Tinky Brolin’s got his man.

Tinky Brolin?

Fucking new boy in the office. God, why didn’t I see you two days ago? I’ve been looking for you. We got to pitch our men on Friday. We’re only sending one.

Who’s Tinky’s man?

I don’t know.

You should find out. Find out who he is.

Why?

So we can nobble him. I want this job. Fuck Tinky Brolin.

K laughed. I knew it man. You’re perfect.

CHAPTER 3

THE TOP UP BOYS

Tinky sounded like an R&B mainstream rap name – Piddy, Tinnie, Tinky, Plinky – the kind of person who thinks they are hard enough to have a name like a Tellytubbie. They’re probably just waiting for somebody to laugh in their face when introduced at a party. ‘Hey, Richard, I’d like to introduce you to Wee Piddle.’ ‘Wee Piddle? Ha Ha!’ ‘Muther Fucker.’ Blam Blam!

To my surprise Tinky was white skinned, more or less. Although his granddad was Portuguese; and that with a sunbed tan and attitude gave him a ‘black’ look. He wore his hair in complicated braids, tied up in a top knot. A kind of glossy, dub-step groove-meister with bright coloured trousers that were somehow tight but sagging – big belt buckle and a white plastic rosary with matching hula-hoop earlobe plug things. All very serious. The only possible nod to irony that I could see Tinky sporting were the cowhorn handlebars on his fixie. I found all this out from his Facebook and Tumblr page.

I sent him a friend request using the fake Facebook account that K had told me to set up. He’d given me a link explaining how to do it. I was Jenny. A nineteen year old from Palm Springs. The ten quid pay-as-you-go phone that K had given me sat on the table. I checked it again for messages. Nothing. Checked again that the silent setting was off.

You’re up early, said G.

He opened the fridge and stood there in the yellow light, staring. Seven am, November 1st. He was wearing his velour pyjama tracksuit and Fila slippers.

Poor G, in his shiny tracksuits and his fake gold chains; like a nylon whale, bloated on years of junk food and medication. The years had not been kind to him, but then again, his childhood had not been kind either. At our school, back on the rain-swept fields of Essex, he had been almost lanky. I remember him as perpetually stooped, benign and gormless, with a mass of black hair and Groucho Marx eyebrows.

I was something of an outsider myself – but in a more misunderstood artist way – and one day, seeing him drawing, we got talking about comics. I was just coming out of a superhero phase and fancied myself as a defender of the weak and downtrodden. We became friends of sorts.

G, or Graham Bell as he was then (bell-end for short) was dim, rubbish at sports, useless with girls and smelt a bit damp, but he was a very skilled cartoonist, albeit hampered by his obsession with cocks. He didn’t seem able to draw without adding a cock, usually attached to one of our tea-stained, dandruff flecked teachers and usually being inserted into one of their colleagues (vaginally or anally, gay or straight, it didn’t matter). He gained some notoriety and a meagre ration of popularity from these etchings, which I like to think I nurtured, as far as I could.

I would say, ‘Bell-end’s all-right,’ as we crowded in the toilets looking at a drawing of Mr Wheeler getting bummed by Hitler-the-caretaker, or Lottie the dinner lady impaled by a salivating Mr Neat. What I remember most about the cartoons though, is not so much the cocks as the uncanny characterisation and the incredible attention to detail. He would draw every face in the class in brilliant likeness, their trainers and the way they knotted their ties, all staring wide eyed as Mr Wilders pointed at the whiteboard with his enormous dong. It looked as if he spent hours on each picture. I think everyone could see there was an amazing talent there and Graham received a few good-natured jostles and back slaps from Wayne Branson and the other bruisers of the school. His popularity was short lived though and came to an unfortunate end when one day a cartoon of the headmaster caning