Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  The relief lorry arrived through the mud, Baker landing in a pool of water he couldn’t have seen as it pulled up. “Is the camp still there?” Brian asked when he’d finished cursing. “Or has it bin swept away?”

  Baker refused a cigarette: “We’ve got to go back to the hut and bring the accumulators out.”

  “You can’t get back yet. The paddy field’s flooded.”

  “The signals officer says we must.”

  Brian felt as though he’d been thumped at the back of the head, red stars winking in front of his eyes. “The jumped-up bastard, what does he know about it? He wants to come out and get ’em himself instead of knocking back whisky and cornflakes in his jumped-up mess.”

  Baker had been to a public school, was hidebound and full of games, mutinous only within the limits of King’s Regulations. “We have to do it anyway.”

  Brian came down the steps. “Back through the slosh for a couple of mouldy accumulators.” The lorry took little over a minute to do the runway mile, and Baker was daunted to see the water so high. “Come on then,” Brian called out, already waist into it, “frightened o’ getting wet? Don’t mind the odd snake: they run away from yo’ first.”

  “Balls,” Baker shouted, in with a splash. Brian waded quickly, only stopping to point out a gap in the path, feeling more courageous now that someone was with him, and he was in the lead. Still, if you had somebody shooting at you from them trees you wouldn’t even think about snakes. “The boys in the hut have been feeling sorry for you, out all night in the floods,” Baker called. The rain no longer drove like needles but splashed against the dull putty of Brian’s skin, was unfelt through his fatigue. A snake rippled on the right. “Thanks,” he shouted to Baker.

  “We’re going to operate the DF frequency from the signals section while the rain lasts. Is there a gap here?”

  “No, come on a bit. There, it’s not deep, though. They should a bleddy well thought o’ that yesterday.” Still, it was good: the signals section was only fifty yards from the billet: he’d be able to nip down the road and see Mimi more often. He unlocked the door of the hut, and the bloated leech swam out again. “The gale blew a tree down on to one of the bashas last night,” Baker told him. “No one was hurt, though.” They lifted the accumulators to a chair. Brian sensed he was seeing the last of the place, that no one would operate from there again. Baker thought they should bring in the auxiliary aerial and went outside to get it, but he let go as if it were electrified: spiders, leeches, centipedes, and scorpions scrabbled for the protection if offered against the flood.

  “God,” he exclaimed. “Let it stay.”

  I’ll be out here another year, and on that boat by next autumn. The thought gave him patience. There’s something good about being here, though, and interesting, because in a way I wouldn’t have missed it, in spite of what the old man said. After all, there worn’t any scorpions in Radford, and I’ve allus wanted to travel. But what a way to do it! Shouted at like a rag-bag all the time for not wearing a uniform. I wouldn’t be seen dead in it, though I have to put it on to get my pay.

  He covered the accumulators with his cape (soaked to the skin, he didn’t need it any more) and they carried them slowly to the lorry. “Better not slip,” he said, “or you’ll get an acid-bath. Imagine gettin’ a pension for rheumatics and a scorched arse.” One foot slowly before the other, it took all his will-power not to speed up against the driving rain. “You wouldn’t be able to settle down, would you?” Baker said, happy because they were halfway across.

  It seemed as if the rain would never end. A glittering sea of blue, equal sky above green hills, and the pastel colours of Muong across the straits, with red and black ships in the harbour and yellow strips of beach north of the town, seemed like a dream already, even vaguer than memories of Nottingham. On fine days it was a treat out at the hut sitting in the basket-chair stark bullock naked to get brown, while some poor aeroplane belted his morse lungs out for a bearing or met report. He’d make a fire and have sardines on toast, wearing down another tin from the endless supplies in the grub chest. Once he’d given a few tins to the Chinese rice sower who drove his ox and plough by the hut, and the man had made him feel foolish by bowing his thanks about half a dozen times. That’s the worst of doing a good turn to an ignorant bastard; he ain’t got the brains to know that everybody’s equal. Still, bowing to them’s like shaking hands with us, according to Mimi. The continuous rattle of rain was the only real thing at the moment, a cocoon of water that enveloped his brain and the whole world.

  From the back of the lorry he saw the DF hut, a small dark block in the middle of a vast square lake of grey. Then it was out of sight and they were roaring down the runway as fast as an aeroplane trying to take off. Wet and hungry, he would get cleaned up and go to the canteen, drink as many bottles of Tiger Beer as he could take. In a day or two he would see Mimi. Baker prodded him: “You were going to sleep,” he said.

  CHAPTER 17

  Left from the main road (ignoring a notice saying: BEYOND THIS POINT OUT OF BOUNDS TO ALLIED FORCES) meant cutting himself off from the forceful grip of lights and traffic, and entering dark groves of palm-trees. The narrow lane was indented with cart-ruts, and trees rising on either side overlapped it with shadows. He felt a criminal every time he parted from the traffic, committed to some irrevocable step, though in fact he was only going to see Mimi. Walking, he pictured her framed beyond the darkness, behind the fireflies that now and again glittered in pairs and seemed to put out their lamps when he went too close.

  Black night was a good camouflage until danger had passed and you could light up again, proving that fireflies knew a thing or two. He pictured her, the collar of a blue kimono dominating the bones of her round face, sitting maybe at her rattan table to make up before he came. Or perhaps, wearing her pyjama dress, she stared vacantly into the mirror, a mirage of green or yellow, at a small face and slow-moving, finely made hands. He couldn’t see her features clearly when she was out of his sight: the image shifted or became blurred, taunted him with having no memory. It was the same with most things. After getting back from watch and as the camp came in sight—a score of long huts clear and sharp among slim-poled palm-trees—the airstrip and DF hut he had only half an hour left were already vague and beyond description, shimmering in the open heat and the dreaminess of wide spaces. Absence makes the heart grow fonder only because memory plays you false. The strange, beyond reach whether in the past or future, was always more tasteful than what stood before your eyes, made itself even more illusive if you tried forcing your eyes like antennae into the dim corners of it. He couldn’t for instance recall certain parts of Nottingham, or old faces, no matter how much he screwed up his will to do so; yet they would come vividly when he was least trying or expecting them, so sharply that he once stopped tapping morse in the middle of an urgent message and, with an aircraft waiting at the end of his signals, was transfixed until the picture departed. Such visions made the power of his memory seem unreliable and weak.

  He stopped to light a cigarette and, in the accentuated darkness left when the match went out, saw the glow from lights in the village. But the dark trees in front gave greater promise, and he walked on. He hadn’t seen Mimi for a week, which was bad enough, but worse when measured by the appetite each visit left him with. An application to the signals officer for a temporary all-night pass had been turned down because the reason for asking it had been guessed. Three dollars a day wouldn’t cover much more than a weekly visit to the Boston Lights taxi-dance hall where Mimi worked, and in any case there was a one o’clock limit to these expeditions. He was lassoed from left and right by legislation devised by some genius for persecution: permission for this, permission for that—still, what did I expect when I let them call me up? I should have told them I had an old blind mother to support and that I believed in God and Jesus Christ and all that pack of rotters. Then maybe they’d ’ave let me off. And everybody at home used to think I was clever because I r
ead books! Christ, I knew a hundred words of French before I was able to tell my left hand from my right, and I knew the capital of Bulgaria at the same time as I learned to read the clock. Bucharest, wasn’t it?

  The vision that had stopped his morse dead in its tracks was when he went to get a job at fourteen. I had to have a medical and the eye doctor said to me: “Now look at the circles on that card, son. You’ll see that the circles are broken on the left or right side. Starting from the big circle at the top, I want you to tell me what side the gap is on every circle, left or right.” What a laugh. I never felt so ignorant in all my life, though it didn’t stop me getting the job.

  The track was dry, a shallow bed of powder, for the monsoon had been over some weeks and the one-season year was three quarters on to Christmas. A hand in pocket, he recognized by the motion of his legs the peculiar swaying walk of his father, though it was hardly noticeable to someone looking at him, and most of it had been eradicated by parade-ground drill in England. But it was there and gave him comfort as he walked in the darkness, accentuating his own self and setting him apart from the camp and all it stood for. A Malay in white shorts and pith-helmet came by like a phantom, and Brian said good night in the man’s own language, a reassurance to both that they were passing human beings and not ghosts. There was no reply to his greeting, and he wondered whether his Malay had been understood. He knew the days of the week and how to count, a few common words of food and drink, a verb or two, but no more. There were classes in Malay at the camp but he couldn’t bring himself to go, was unable to take the learning of it seriously, half thinking that Malay didn’t matter as French and Spanish might, and half not being bothered to master it. He had seen it was easy enough to learn: you could put words together in a string without bothering about such complications as grammar, of which he knew nothing.

  The Patani swamps weren’t far off, and vegetable decay, rank and bittersweet at the same time, mingled with the smell of fish and rice being cooked on glowing charcoal fires from huts among the trees. The bungalow was across a clearing, half a dozen rooms on stilts with rotten floors, and a palm-leaf roof that leaked in rainy weather. But the feeling of it, when he was in Mimi’s room drinking tea, or lying with his head across her and his thoughts in comforting oblivion, with the smell of joss impregnated in the wood of the widow’s room and drifting through to them, was of a last refuge, an outpost of his forward-pushing consciousness that in some strange way was similar to certain patches of his life now left so far behind that he couldn’t draw them to him, let alone fit them with words.

  He saw a light from the corner window: Mimi’s room. The Chinese widow who let it was on her weekly visit to Muong, and wouldn’t be back until the last ferry—which docked when Brian was to be in camp. He didn’t go up the front steps, but using his guile in case the widow hadn’t yet left, made for the back, kicking his way through the tangled garden and thinking in one panic-stricken moment that he had trodden on a snake. Maybe it’s dead, he told himself, walking along the veranda. He hoped Mimi hadn’t heard him, looked in through the unshuttered window and saw her lying on the bed wearing only the bottom half of her pyjamas, the nipples of her small pointed breasts ready to embrace the roof. She seemed to be staring blankly at nothing, but her eyes moved, and following them, he saw a lizard on the ceiling hunting insects. “Why don’t you climb in?” she said, not looking at him.

  He hesitated. “You can see the lizard better from inside,” in a small persistent voice hard to disobey. He leaned his elbows on the sill and smiled: “I’m watching it from here. I’ll disturb it if I come in.” She looked a treat, with her short black hair, a round face with sallowy yet youthful skin, and heavy unmoving eyelids. Like a doll, he’d said at first, but that was for the story-books, the lucky dips of ancient Christmases, a twisted picture of geography given out at his no-good school. He remembered the first night’s dancing at the Boston Lights, talking to her and buying round after round of drinks and wanting to sleep with her, seeing her mouth well shaped by lipstick and strangely angled eyes that looked so profoundly blank in the few seconds when nothing was being said that he felt momentarily panic-stricken on realizing the distance between them both. But that was a few months back, and he knew now that there was no bigger gap between them than had separated him from Pauline at the start of their long bout of passionate courting in Nottingham over four years ago. Even here I can’t get her from my mind, though I’m married, so who can wonder at it? It plagued him like a magic lantern out of control, switching from one thing to another, Mimi to Pauline, then back to the here and now of Mimi, because it was like having the blade-point of an axe paining your lungs to dwell too much on Pauline, and the way he’d betrayed her as soon as she was out of sight.

  Returning from the dance hall on that first night, having lost Mimi to her other customers, he separated from the gang he was with on the ferry and walked down to the third-class deck. A small Chinese girl in black sat with legs curled up on a form, twisting her fingers together and holding the entangled result to the light to see what she made of them. Then she got tired of this and began to cry: Brian dropped a handful of coins into her lap and she stopped, her mother wondering what it was that woke her now there was silence.

  The boat was in mid-channel: Muong like a row of dying embers, while northward the smooth sea was empty for a thousand miles as far as Rangoon and the Irrawaddy. The black lifeline of the opposite shore had long since faded, but for the encrusted lights around Kota Libis pier waiting for the ferry’s touchdown. Back on the first-class deck, stepping over outstretched legs, he saw Mimi gazing at Muong from the rail. The night air was warm and she stood in her yellow dress, clutching a black handbag. “A penny for your thoughts,” he said.

  She turned quickly: “Oh, it’s you. I’m sleepy”—and looked back at the water, as if only the ploughed-up phosphorescence of it could give rest from the vivid colours her eyes had been seeing the last five hours.

  “Do you work as hard as this every night, then?” He noticed her ear-rings, small yellow lanterns whose shadows were thrown on the flesh beneath her ears by rights from above. “You get tired whether you work or not,” she informed him. He kissed her, felt the touch of cool ear-rings as he drew back. “Stop it,” she said, turning away. “I have to be wide awake with you boys.”

  “Not with me,” he said; “I only want to know where you live.” It was beyond him that she hadn’t simulated anger at his kiss—though he expected the going to get harder. But she smiled: “What do you want to know for?”

  “To come and see you.”

  Instead of resistance, she teased him: “What for?”

  He sensed that this sort of humour would never leave her, even when she was tired. It was a mask. Because of it he didn’t know whether to think she was younger, or older, wondered how an invisible listener would have seen it—then spat into the water. “Because I like talking to you, instead of always to the others in camp.” Slyness seemed as good a way to break through as any. Mimi was a giggling child one minute, much younger than him; then was in touch with a life into which he could never reach either because of age, or because she had access to depths that went off at a tangent to his own. Himself, he felt young and old in stages, knew nothing but the fact of being on the boat with her, future and past and everything else obliterated except the lights and water and wooden decks of the ferry-boat around them fastened by booze and sentiment within the prison of himself at nineteen, which didn’t help towards an easy flow of conversation.

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he said, taking out a packet of cigarettes. “So I don’t suppose you work.”

  No longer smiling, she wouldn’t have a cigarette, so he lit one for himself. “I don’t,” she said.

  Not caring about being persistent, he asked: “Can I see you then?”

  “If you like.” She was listless, and he hardly noticed her joyless agreement in the surprise he felt at it. The fact that he was taking advantage of her came to him di
mly and didn’t bother him anyway. When he didn’t look like speaking, she smiled: “Don’t you want to come?”

  “Yes, course I do.” The lights of Kota Libis were large, and they saw people moving about and waiting as the boat did a half-turn ready for the approach. His spent fag dropped into the water. “Where shall I meet you?” sliding an arm around her.

  “At seven, outside the photo shop. In the village.”

  The lizard hadn’t moved for ten seconds. What sort of a view did it have of her, upside down on the ceiling? “This is a long game,” he said; “it can go on all night.”

  “The children play it,” she said.

  “Like my mother: she says she used to sit in the kitchen when she was a little girl and watch the clock hands move. It was a game that lasted hours.”

  “That would bore me.”

  “I like lizards as well,” he said. “Out at my DF I’ve got a pet chameleon, green on top and duck-egg blue underneath. It waddles over the floor every morning and I feed it a saucer of bread and milk. We’re pals now, in fact. He went off for a couple of days not long since, and I thought he’d got eaten by a snake, but then he came back with a female, so he must have been courting. Now I’ve got two of ’em supping at the saucer. I reckon they know when they’re on to a good skive.”

  She was laughing, a sort of distrustful giggle, flattening her breasts and sitting up on the bed: “Why do you tell me such stories?” He leapt over the window-sill and sat next to her. “Because it’s good to tell stories. Anyway, that’s the on’y time you like me, i’n’t it?”

  He drew her close. “You’re so funny,” she whispered. Many of her remarks seemed like meaningless counters, long since detached from inside her, with no real connection to her own self. These he imagined her having used freely to other lovers she must have had: he recognized and resented them, jealous because they stopped him getting close to her. “That’s better than having a long face all the time,” he said, “like some people I know.”