Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  “But funny people are sadder than anybody.” It was strange to him: her old man had become a shopkeeper, she said—bone-poor, though, at first—from Canton, and he imagined him with a stick over his shoulder, like Dick Whittington, only Chinese, coming south-west in a junk chewing a plug of opium to help him on his way. He saw him as young and steel-faced, hat on his head shaped like a handleless dustbin lid, living off a handful of rice a day and shaking hands with endurance, handsome perhaps, but making a hard go of it in Singapore. The thought was terror to Brian: in Nottingham yes, but he would have died over a life like that, scraping cent by cent from kerb-stall to backstreet shop, which even now, Mimi said, wasn’t all that easy. But Mimi had been to high school, and this difference, with female and Chinese thrown in, not to mention a couple of years in age, had for some time mixed up his attitude towards her, though things between them seemed to be improving at last.

  The high school hadn’t lasted long and he was touched by the sad way she had left. A boy-friend who worked for some political party (he was in no doubt as to the sort of party, using his instinct accurately nowadays as to left and right and knowing enough about Mimi) had got her pregnant at sixteen, then disappeared because the British police were after him. The Japs came soon after, and no one had seen him since. They didn’t see the British police for four years either, except in chain gangs.

  She sat with legs under her, away from him. He wanted to lean forward and embrace her, but the wish deadened because of the look in her eyes. “You’re the sad one,” he said. “I suppose you get so fed up with having to laugh every night of the week that you can’t even act yourself when you’re with me.” He walked away, sat on the one chair in the room. “So I tell you funny stories to make you laugh. That’s the best way, i’n’t it?”

  “Sometimes”—like a child who cannot understand what is being said to it. He said: “I knew a lump o’ wood once that joined the air force and got sent to Malaya. It was a smart and chipper piece, not a big lump of wood, about half a pit-prop, if you want to know, that parted its hair on the wrong side of its head, but still it met a lady pit-prop that spoke Chinese when she was asleep, but when she was awake she spoke slow English and said she loved him. How’s that for a good beginning?” In the teeth of everything, there was a spun-out ebullient story he couldn’t stop himself telling and acting out, as if several whiskies had already taken effect and sparked it off—except that he’d touched none. The story became another limb, crazy and uncontrollable, used without thought, a joyful rigmarole spinning words out of the night of himself. It was a bout of inspired clowning, like a flash of sheet-lightning that opens—and glows metallic and incandescent against the horizon of the mind until the story or clowning has gone.

  She was laughing by the end, brought over to him by a short-circuit that avoided the separate complex depths in each of them. It was silence or laughter, and though he could find out little or nothing in face of either, he preferred to see her laughing, which meant at least a warmer welcome. She lay out flat and shook off her pyjamas, naked but for a bangle on her wrist, an oriental maja. Her fleshy nakedness was matched to the damp perspiring night, was connected in some way, he thought, looking up, with the dance of death around the moth lamp of electricity: what the dark bellies of the geckos missed, the sun captured and sizzled to death. He thought back through her nakedness to his sweetheart girl-friends of Nottingham, of how true it was that no matter how many times they had made love together he had never seen any of them completely bare of clothes (except Pauline, his wife, but she did not count), not slept the night and seen them as he saw Mimi now, talking as if her birthday suit were the latest fashion advertised in the Straits Times—something to be shown off and proud of, acquired at enough expense to justify revealing it in the flattering half-light to Brian, for whom she had a sort of love that neither could explain or yet feel compromised by. There was uncertainty as to which was more real: to go slowly through layer after layer of tormenting yet hypnotic cloth and cotton and discover the smooth whiteness with exploring fingers, or take one nakedness straight to the other or your own. It was a matter of climate and locality, a difference as much evident in his own body and brain as between two far parts of the earth: jungle with field, swamp and wooded hillocks, a sea of sharks and sting-rays, to the slow meadow-winding of Midland rivers whose banks were sometimes as heavily clothed as the girl he lay with while watching their heavy cumbersome unwilling serpentining through the winter.

  “I’ll make some tea soon,” she said, returning his kisses, “and then we’ll be cooler.”

  “It’d need eight pints of beer to stop my thirst, but then I’d be good for nothing!” Tea was a natural division of their meeting time, after which they made love, a ritual evolved through many visits. “When I get back to Nottingham I wain’t be able to drink the steaming mash my mother makes, with sugar and milk. I like it cold and weak now, served up in bowls.”

  Her thin arms slid away from his neck: “You’ll soon get back to the English way.” He was used to the rhythm of her voice, so that, while complete sentences registered more quickly, he lost the facility for reading hidden meanings in them, accents and stresses being removed as the need for repetition waned. His dexterity at reading morse rhythms had proved a loss in that it enabled him to master Mimi’s too soon, and because her own language was Chinese, she was able to hide so much in her flat deliverance of English. “I’m not going back to England,” he said.

  She seemed surprised. “Why? It’s a very nice country. That’s what it says in the Straits Times!”

  “It might be, but I don’t like it.”

  “Well, you’ve got to go back,” she smiled. “You promised to send me those books and things.”

  He’d forgotten about that: books of sexual technique and contraception. “You know enough of that without me sending you books on it.”

  “I like to read about it, though,” she said petulantly; he seemed to be going back on his word.

  “All right,” he said; “but I’ve still got a year to do out here. I might even stay on longer.”

  Insects were worrying her: she disentangled a sheet and drew it up. “You haven’t got a job in Malaya, so you’ve got to go back.”

  “I could get work as a rubber planter. It wouldn’t take me long to learn Malaya, if I really tried.”

  “What’s England like?” she asked. “Tell me about England.”

  “I don’t know anything about England. But I’ll tell you about Nottingham if you tell me about the jungle. If the insects are bothering you, pull your net down.

  “They’re not: they never do. If you became a rubber planter you’d be in big danger.” Neither spoke. They heard the croak of bullfrogs and crickets working their looms of noise in the deep grass outside. Dogs barked from the huts, and the surviving wail of a steamer siren from Muong harbour came, debilitated after its fight with tree shadows and avoidance of village lights. He laughed: “You sound like a gypsy giving me a warning. There’s no danger in being in Malaya.”

  The bed creaked as she faced him more fully, her coal-like eyes shining with concern: “You think you’re living in a peaceful country then?”

  He smiled—for the benefit of himself. It seemed peaceful enough: tigers, snakes, and a no-good climate, but what did that matter? “It’s O.K.,” he said. “Just take things in your stride, then you’ll be all right. I ain’t been in the jungle yet, but I might even do that soon. Some of us on the camp are thinking of climbing up to Gunong Barat to see what mountain jungle is really like. Uphill all the way, I suppose.” He remembered seeing Pulau Timur for the first time, an island viewed from twenty miles and six thousand feet away as the Avro 19 roared high along the coastal swamps up from Singapore. Pulau Timur was an inanimate crumple of green hills lying in bright blue sea just off the mainland, looking from so high like the plasticine relief models he used to make at school, glittering under the light-bulb of the midday sun.

  The Avro closed in low o
ver its port of Muong, climbed the wooded hills behind, and threw a shadow on empty sea to the west. Brian’s stomach didn’t turn willingly with the plane, whose belly seemed to scrape a hilltop when it turned back over the island and descended for a run-in across the two-mile straits. Down over blue water, the runway was like a glistening slice of canal, widening between trees in front. He saw sand under the water, a couple of sampans hastening out of the way, fishing traps sticking from the surface like knives ready for the plane’s belly, then a long sandy beach passed in a yellow line on either side and the engines dipped ominously. This was the moment of fear, when science seemed to desert them and silence take over. Brian looked to the left and saw a huge mountain far off to the north, its grandiose peak pointing skywards, indicating a direction that he’d never before taken note of. The isolation of it reached to something in himself, the solid independent greyness beyond heat and cold, halfway into another world that attracted him, in a few seconds, more than anything else ever had. The far side of the moon seemed as familiar as his own cousin compared to this new dimension of life glimpsed far off beyond the water and coastal swamps. Then the vision went as engines roared and the plane passed over a tarmac road along the shore where cars, lorries, and bullock carts waited for its descent, rolled by a few wooden buildings, palms, ramshackle control tower, until a bump and jerk brought it on to the runway and gave him a feeling of relief to have landed. A few evenings later he stood on the beach watching the sky above Pulau Timur, orange, yellow, green, and bloody colours streaked like a horizontal waterfall over the hills, stretching south to north and boiling away towards Siam and Burma. Palm-trees bent over the water, and night fires burned in fishing villages, pointing to the mountain he had seen from the plane. He had discovered its name: Gunong Barat—the mountain of the west—and seen its height marked on a map as four thousand feet. It stood separate from the main range of Malaya, a series of peaks and humpbacks divided by forest, filled gullies, and watercourses, culminating in one pinnacle that dominated the landscape for miles. On nights of full moon its sharp ridges stood out as if it were an island, rearing up from mangrove swamps, king of the small towns and paddy fields of the coastal plain, far more complex in structure, he saw, than had appeared in one simple glimpse from the plane window. He hoped to be able to climb it, but didn’t suppose the opportunity would ever arrive. It was twenty-four miles north of the camp, covered in thick jungle, trackless, and, he thought, probably wouldn’t be worth climbing anyway. “I don’t know what you want to go up there for,” Mimi said. “Nobody lives there.”

  “How do you know? I’ve heard that right on top is a caff where they sell cream buns and coffee, run by a bloke from Yorkshire. He’s been there thirty years and don’t get much trade because everybody thinks nobody lives up there.”

  “You’re pulling my leg,” she laughed. “But you don’t know what I mean. There’s going to be a lot of fighting in Malaya because people don’t like the British being here. There’ll be a war.” He knew there might, having read in newspapers of murders on rubber estates, of people being shot for mysterious reasons that the newspapers couldn’t fathom. Not long after coming up from Singapore, he asked a telephone corporal why it was still necessary to put ON ACTIVE SERVICE across all letters, and he replied that the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, supplied with arms during the war by the British, had now turned awkward and didn’t want to give them back, were in fact becoming an anti-British army because they wanted independence. “And it’ll get worse,” the corporal said, a prophet who knew everything. “There’ll be such a bloody bust-up one day, I only hope I’m not here to see it, though I suppose it’s my luck I will be.”

  “Well,” Brian said lightly, “maybe I’ll just go back to England as soon as I can and take a nice safe job in some factory or other. Then I’ll be able to send you them books on sex I promised you.” He pulled the sheet gently down and caressed her. “I don’t want to go back, though. I want to stay here for keeps.”

  “This isn’t any good for you. What will happen when the fighting starts? Everybody thinks that a Communist army is going to come out of the jungle and kill the British. Nobody can stop them, they think. And maybe a lot of Chinese and Malays will get killed as well.”

  “I don’t know. Anyway”—half facetious and serious—“I’m a Communist, so maybe I’ll be all right.”

  “You shouldn’t joke.”

  “I’m not joking. You ask me to tell you something about England, don’t you?” He lit cigarettes. “The smoke’ll scare the insects away. I come from a scruffy old house in Nottingham, and before the war I remember seeing my old man crying—in tears—because he was out o’ wok and unemployed. He hadn’t worked for years, and there was never any dough and hardly enough grub in the house. The kids were better off, mind you, because they had free milk and a hot dinner every day—they had to mek sure we’d be fit for the war and to fight Communists, the sly bastards. It’s a bit better now, but why should I be against the Communists?”

  “I don’t know,” she said; “but you are, aren’t you?”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “All the rest of the British are.”

  “Don’t be so sure. I’m not. I can tell you that. I’ve got a mind of my own.” His serious mood was shattered by Mimi’s serious face, by some air bubble that broke in the bloodstream of his imagination. “So if you know any true-red Communist wants to buy a Sten gun and fifty rounds of ammunition, tell ’im I’ve got one. If he can’t afford to buy it all at once, he can pay me ten dollars a week. Or a crate of Tiger Beer now and again.”

  “You’re crazy,” she laughed. “I’ve never met anyone so crazy.”

  “I’m a no-good loon, and that’s why you love me, i’n’t it?” he said, kissing her mouth, neck, and breasts, pressing her scarcely perceptible nipples in a black rage of passion, a bolt of lightning forcing his hand around the back of her. She broke away and reached for a dressing-gown: “Get undressed. I’ll fetch some tea, and we can drink it in the dark.”

  Silence was the melting away of a stockade that released his thoughts. They came like pictures from the past, less clear than reality, though more definite than dreams, but at the same time more tribal than thoughts, let in by a disabled present. The darker, more tangible tide of Nottingham streets and people sent tentacles to the jungled hills of Malaya, assailing him at their own select times, sometimes infecting him with the poison needle of nostalgia, though often with a whirlpool of dislike and determination never to go back there if he could help it, to let its huge sprawling mark shrink and rot in some far-off lumbered-up corner of his memory. Reactions were strong because at twenty the future did not exist: present passions were based on what had gone before, and Nottingham found it easy to jostle Malaya from his brain.

  He unbuttoned his shirt, sat listlessly on the bed waiting for her to come back. Unlike in the wireless hut, he hated to be alone here—as if dangerous ghosts were waiting to spring from each corner. It was a strange room, too filled with the personality of someone and something else, a staging post through which many peoples had gone before. He smiled: well, you couldn’t blame anybody for that. It smelt of perfume and perspiration, talcum powder and musk from the outside trees, blended with a subdued odour of Patani mud and joss. His hand touched the bed where Mimi’s warm body had lain, and he lay back deeper in a foreign land than he’d ever imagined and smiled to think he hadn’t been far wrong when he swore to grandad Merton as a kid that he’d go one day to Abyssinia. I expect he’d a bin satisfied wi’ this, right enough. “The dirty young bogger,” he’d have said. “Trust ’im to get ’old of a woman as soon as ’e gets there! He’s a chip off my block, all right.”

  The tray made a faint rattling along the veranda, night music muted by the soft tread of her returning bare feet—careful for splinters in the worn boards. He listened in a daze, as if the sounds concerned only some far-off neighbour of himself, was abstracted and motionless almost until she reached
the door; then, still without waking, merely as if his state of abstraction had quickened, he slipped off his shorts and pulled the sheet over him, reaching for a cigarette to which the match flared as Mimi’s hand put out the light. The last sight as he lay back at ease was of the gecko shooting forward and devouring a mosquito that had been whining up to then around the room for blood. The skin behind his shoulder itched slightly, so he was sure the mosquito had had plenty, and he grinned at the thought of part of himself being twice removed in the depths of another gut, like that far-fetched tale about Jonah fast in the raps of a whale.

  She set the tray on the floor, and he felt her breathing as she bent over to give him tea. “Marvellous,” he said as they drank. “I’m croacking to death.” She crouched by the bed, laying the tea aside after one sip, and putting her arm on him. “Brian, Brian,” she whispered. There was no tone in the words, and he didn’t understand them. “What’s up?” he said loudly. “You think the bullfrogs’ll get yer?” His tea had gone in one gulp. “I can’t tell what I think,” she said. “Neither can I,” he answered, disturbed because he knew he should be able to. Maybe he could, yet wouldn’t. Thinking was like swimming under water: you have to develop a knack of doing so while holding your nose so that you don’t drown. If you couldn’t think sometimes, you floated, but that was no good, for all the colours and delights of the world were often under the surface: rocks and seaweeds, watersnakes and fantastic fishes—dreams and cartwheels of the imagination. But he couldn’t swim under the water at will: mostly, when he tried, his lungs and ears seemed ready to explode, and he surfaced quickly to get out of danger. Sometimes, though, he stayed under long enough to enjoy sights and sensations, and he felt that if he concentrated on breaking over the effort and fear he would eventually be able to master it. Thought was like this, almost as impossible to master as the water, yet always drawing him as if holding out the promise that one day he would be able to descend safely into his own mind, much farther down than he was able to now.