Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  “So will that,” Knotman said, putting his cigarette to a bloated leech fixed on a good feed at Baker’s shoulder. Shirts and trousers hung over bushes, and more leeches were found: sometimes they didn’t drop, but burst, leaving a copious fall of blood on arm or leg. Knotman said they should haul in a stock of wood for the night fire, and a blaze was going by darkfall. “It’ll be a bloody long time before we reach the top at this rate,” Baker said. He stood by the stream, gazing into thick shadowy jungle on the other side. “What did you expect?” Knotman asked. “A piece of cake?”

  “No,” he shot back; “a cable railway.”

  “You’re not in Switzerland,” Odgeson laughed.

  “I can’t see us reaching the top tomorrow, either,” Knotman said. “At this rate it’ll take three or four days.” Jack had finished eating, was polishing his twelve bore, pulling it through and clearing soil from the barrel. “I could dig a coal mine under this quicker than we’re climbing it.”

  “What they ought to do,” Brian said, “is burn all this down with flame-throwers and grow lettuces. Or build roads so’s cars could run over it at sixty miles an hour.” Supper finished, they hung mosquito-nets from overhanging branches and made beds beneath—two beds sleeping two in each. Brian didn’t see any reason for two being on guard, but Knotman thought it wise, so nobody argued. “Two in a bed,” Baker said. “It’s a pansies’ paradise.”

  “At least you’ll get summat out o’ this trip then!”

  “Balls, Seaton,” he shouted back.

  Brian was on guard with Knotman at midnight, sitting on a rock a few yards apart and stilled by a heaviness of unsatisfied sleep. Brian kept his rifle upright and head leaning out for it as he slowly lost consciousness. The crack of a twig came from the opposite bank—so close and overhanging in the darkness he felt he could stretch out his arm and touch it—once he woke up. Knotman had already heard the shrubbery rustling, seen a large cat poised in the low flames of the fire. They aimed at the same time. Brian joyfully let go five shots, glad to have noise in the oppressive darkness filled only by the stream rushing into the suicide dive of the nearby falls. The shots echoed into the surrounding mountain slopes like God’s whips trying to drive away darkness, and presumably the animal they saw slipped unnoticed away. The others didn’t stir, and Brian in the silence paraphrased some lines he remembered from Dante’s Inferno, a book he’d collared from the camp library months ago, and had read in fits and starts at the DF hut:

  “In the midway of this our mortal life,

  I found me in a gloomy wood astray,

  Gone from the path direct. And e’en to tell

  It were no easy task, how savage wild

  That forest, how robust and rough its growth … scarce the ascent

  Began, when, lo! a panther, nimble, light,

  And covered with a speckled skin appeared …”

  You’d think he’d written it on Gunong Barat, he thought, glad when Kirkby crawled from under the net and told him to get some kip.

  After breakfast he sighted bearings on visible hill-points and plotted them. “Hey,” he called from a ledge of higher rock. “You know how far we’ve come so far?” Nobody guessed. “One thousand three hundred paltry yards,” he yelled. “We’re a thousand feet above where we set off yesterday.”

  “Three more days. It looks as if you’re going to be right,” Odgeson said to Knotman, who merely nodded and slung on his pack, ready to lead upstream.

  A waterfall—two ashen lines on a green limestone cliff—meant another climb up through the jungle to get round it. Some falls twisted like threads of snow down easy slopes and were overcome on all fours, but mostly the sheer cliffs were dangerous to scale with such anchoring packs. At tunes the sores on Brian’s back forced their pain into the open, making him lag behind until he could bear weight resting on them again. By the end of the day, he had worn down their stings, knew it was only a matter of time before the skin hardened and he didn’t notice it any more—like the first time he’d gone with soft hands into the factory. Sweat dripped from his face as he toiled in the rear-guard, his whole body—legs and armpits, belly and groin and shoulder blades—caked in salt.

  “What’s the matter?” Knotman asked, seeing him shift his pack around. “I’ve got the galloping singapores,” Brian said. “The bleeders itch and chafe.”

  “I’ve got ’em as well, only mine are the galloping rangoons.” They sat around and smoked, everyone dwelling on his sores. Jack claimed the galloping hong-kongs, and Odgeson laughed at the idea of being stricken with the galloping penangs. “I’ve just got bleeding scabs on my bad back,” Kirkby raged, “and I wish they’d gallop away.” Hard biscuits and chocolate were handed around, tin mugs dipped at their feet for water.

  They sat among boulders in a scattered group, and a small green-fringed bird perched on a bough they all could see. Probably no human being had been there for years, since it wasn’t on the way anywhere and nothing grew there that men wanted. Even elephants had disappeared from that particular dent of the mountains. Jack quietly raised his .303, aimed, and shot the air wide open. The bird fell on a rock, red mixed with green. “With my crossbow I shot the albatross,” Brian laughed.

  “Fortunately for us,” Baker said, “it was only some jungle sparrow, otherwise Brian’s right: we’d really be in the shit.” Knotman gazed at the bird, stroking the stubble across his chin. “You’d better go easy on the ammo”—meaning: “You cruel bastard: you didn’t need to shoot it.”

  “Every bullet we fire is less to carry,” Jack said, back on his feet. “This pack’s giving me hell.”

  “Why did we bring rifles anyway?” Brian thought aloud. “They weigh an effing ton.”

  Odgeson laughed: “Instinct. Nobody questioned it, did they?”

  “Nobody questions bogger all. I wouldn’t take a rifle in Sherwood Forest, and this place ain’t more dangerous.”

  “What about that tiger you saw last night, then?” Jack asked.

  “That worn’t no tiger,” Kirkby jeered. “More like a shadder: yo’ lot’s a bag o’ nerves.”

  “It was something big,” Knotman said. “I saw it, and so did Brian.” Standing to the renewed weight of his pack before starting, Brian wondered whether he had. Noise of twigs and a shadow blacker than those around, then a cascade of bullets chasing it: the obtruding terrors of imagination that might or might not have added up to a tiger. Maybe I was seeing things, though it’s hard to believe Knotman was. As long as I didn’t wing it, because there was no need.

  He sat by one of the two heaped fires during the night, and the few yards of swirling stream held forth a pair of luminous pinheads growing slowly to green eyes, then diminishing again. Rushing water had filled his ears for days, was so familiar (like the factory at the yard-end in Radford) that the noise was no longer noticed. Only at certain times—like now when his mind turned fully to wondering what the phosphorescent lights across the stream belonged to—did the sound rush back. From humps of net-protected blanket someone grunted in his sleep: lucky sod—I expect he’s a long way out of this, on the back row at the pictures with his juicy young girl. I wish I was dead to the wide and dreaming away. The eyes still shone. Not another tiger, he hoped, and was about to laugh out like a donkey, but instead raised his rifle to fire before he got too terrified to do so. The eyes drifted apart and vanished, and he stared out each one until he had to close and refocus his own eyes. If the others knew I’d been frightened at a couple of fireflies, he laughed. The trouble is I’m too ready to lift this bleeding rifle when it’s not needed, almost as bad as Jack. A bullet never did anybody any good. I’ll jump at my own shadow next.

  “What’s going on?” Baker demanded from the other fire.

  “Nothing.” He laid more wood on the embers, and was startled by a dancing scuffle from Baker, whose shotgun exploded with a dull roar, the wake of its echo filled with curses. “What’s up?” Brian cried.

  “A snake. It just uncoiled near my boot.”


  “You want your brains testing.”

  “I’m not the only one,” Baker said.

  Even though each morning the amount of stuff to be packed diminished because of food eaten, it was hard to fit everything in. Blankets, capes, mosquito-nets, food, and ammunition lay scattered around waiting to find a place in the packs. It looked as if someone had tipped a dustbin over.

  They set off for the third day. No greater distance was spanned, but it was accomplished with less grumbling and exertion. At one place they saw the peak, a scarf of white cloud across its throat, two thousand feet above. “Tomorrow night,” Knotman said, “and we’ll be up there looking down on where we are now.” Everyone derided this, argued that by the look of it they’d be on top tonight, or early in the morning. Knotman hitched up his pack and went on, whistling to himself a good fifty yards in front.

  “But when a mountain’s foot I reached where closed

  The valley that had pierced my heart with dread,

  I looked aloft and saw his shoulders broad

  Already vested with that planet’s beam,

  Who leads all wanderers safe through every way.”

  “What’s that?” Jack said, catching up.

  “Poetry.”

  “I thought it was. You like poetry, man?” Baker and Odgeson overtook them: Brian heaved a swig from his waterbottle. “Sure.” He was bone-tired and exhilarated, caught in the jungle with water that seemed continually pouring through his heart. They tramped on, boots clashing over beds of small stones, stepping carefully across green-mould rocks. The peak was out of sight. A bird in the stream brought them to the foot of another waterfall. The file became a group, realized it was impossible to scale the cliff, made another file that went into the jungle.

  Brian dragged himself up by a bush root, eyes following the slow-lifting pair of mud-stained boots in front. Sixteen hundred yards a day was still the average. You’d starve on piece-work at sixpence a hundred. Even a bob wouldn’t be much cop. We’ll go ten times as quick on the way down, though if I do come on another lark like this I wain’t carry so much stuff. Eighty pounds is a mug’s game, tins of snap chafing my back to boggery when all we need is a load of biscuits and a few mashings o’ tea and sugar. Like the Japs: a bundle o’ rice and off they went.

  Coming out of the jungle, the stream had narrowed: large fallen trees lying more often across it had either to be clambered over or crawled underneath. They came to the foot of a water falling from the sky itself. It shook down in white streams, scarves gathered at evenly spaced ledges, and was transported with slow-intentioned gentleness into a pool of clear green water. “Maybe that’s the top of the mountain,” Odgeson said hopefully, but it turned out not to be. The watercourse no longer roared, was thinner and more rhythmic in its travelling the higher they climbed. To reach the escarpment top meant another spell among the trees. There were no paths and they kept by instinct to the line of the stream. Brian chopped and hacked until his muscles turned as dead as the wood under his feet. Fallen trees, overgrown with shrubbery and blocking his way, often proved to be no more than huge cylinders of purple soil held into shape by the tree’s covering of bark, which took longer to decompose: he stepped on to what had once been a tree or log and sank into soft soil. The only sign of life came from a few ants scurrying busily over the leaves or one or two leeches looping towards them like pieces of live bootlace. The whole place stank like a shit-house, Kirkby called on taking over the lead. When they stood still there was no sound but the distant spate of water from the falls or the music of a few birds in the treetops. And when they moved there was only the crashing of six men imposing their momentary will on the primeval forest, a splitting of shrubbery soon lost down the empty valleys. In the flashpan sunlight of a sudden emergence to the stream, an iguana darted into hiding.

  On a ledge overlooking the valley, they hacked bushes down to make room for a fire and beds. Jack found a huge, beautifully green grasshopper with antennae-like feelers going out from it. Brian edged it away with his boot, but Jack slammed it with the rifle-butt. It still wouldn’t move, so Baker came up with the shotgun and blew it to bits. A battery of mess-cans sizzled on the fire: spam, meat and veg, tea, fruit pudding, cheese and biscuits. By seven those not on guard crept under the nets to sleep.

  Brian and Knotman took the first two hours, talked in low voices: “What are you going to do when you get out?”

  “Find a job, I expect,” Brian said. “I don’t know what at, though. I was on a lathe before I got dragged up: only a couple o’ years ago, but it seems a century. Christ, I’ll be glad to get back to Pauline, though.” This last wish came into the open before he had known she was on his mind, a fervent cry that surprised him in the pause that followed. “You get your ticket soon, don’t you?” he said, to break it.

  Knotman reached to the fire for a light. “At Christmas—just a few months after you. They can get somebody else to guard their played-out Empire then. Not that they won’t, though: there’s one born every minute. They’ve made use of me for seven years, and now I’m going to do all I can to balls them up. Not by way of revenge, mind you: it’s just second nature, and I’ll enjoy doing it in a light-hearted sort of way.” He spoke in an easy, yet tired voice, giving Brian the impression that maybe it was possible for him to undermine the British Empire all by himself. “Sure sure, I volunteered to stay on in the air force”—having expected Brian to point this out—“but I was crazy, I admit that. I thought the Germans would want keeping under a few more years, but from fighting fascism I found myself helping the fascists out here. All I want to do now is get my hands on some hard work for a change, and if any of the friends I make happen to say they believe in the British Empire, I’ll be in a good position to tell ’em a few things about it. Not that I’ll get all hot and bothered, because they wouldn’t believe me if I did. No, I’ll drop it like a wise man who knows what he’s talking about.”

  “You sound like a resistance fighter,” Brian laughed.

  “No, I’m just talking. It’s so quiet in this jungle.”

  “That’s what you think,” Baker called from under his net. “Don’t you two bolsheviks know that all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds?”

  Dawn was grey, opened to a slow drizzle and the sound of Baker emptying his rifle down the valley, one bullet chasing another into silence while Knotman got up to make a breakfast of steam pudding and milk. An early start was planned against the summit, and waterbottles were dipped in what was left of the Sungei Pawan, because no more would be found until they crossed to watercourses on the far side of the mountain wall.

  Breaking away from the stream, the undergrowth turned from moist into brittle and thorny, covering each hand and arm with shallow but livid tears, which in Brian’s flesh seemed to fester while he looked at them. It was no longer a question of conquering the mountain, to look out with pride and exultation from its summit, but only to keep on climbing, stay locked in the treadmill of intentions formed in idle dreamlike hours that had never comprehended the reality of this. What good’s it going to do us? he thought. Fuck-all. Crash—his kukri flew at a sapling of thorns, and down it went, held under by his agile boot so that Kirkby, following, wouldn’t be cut with it. They hoped to reach the top by evening and light a fire for all at the camp (twenty-five miles off) to see. The thought of this grandiose plan had excited him during the long weeks of preparation, but now that he was close to it his enthusiasm went, tempered to a hidden-away part of him by the long drag up from the coastal lowlands.

  Bushes thinned, and for the next five hours they climbed without resting either to talk or drink water. Sweat, helped by the high-up blistering sun, poured out of him like a refugee soul, and after midday they walked into damp forest covering the steep surface of the escarpment—glad for once to enter it because the next clear daylight would come when they broke on to the actual summit. In places the vegetation gave way to grey-humped cliff, which on Knotman’s advice they circui
ted. “You wouldn’t be up to much if you slipped a couple of thousand feet,” he told Baker, who was all for going like a fly over the smooth surface. Then an hour was spent fighting another belt of thorn bushes, a strange misplaced preliminary to a pull-up through more wet forest, clinging to vines and creepers with the tenuous strength of curses and worn-out hands, arched laden backs crawling under fallen tree, boots caught in damp messes of soil. Brian no longer wanted to get to the top for the unparalleled view it would give (higher than any he’d seen) but only because the climbing would end, the expedition be as good as over. That in itself was enough to keep his legs moving. There’s no point in climbing a mountain unless there’s some purpose behind it, like to make a map or get food, collect wood or stake out a place to live, he thought, locked in his prison of leaves and branches that remained the same in spite of a continual movement.

  Near the end of the afternoon the mountain top loomed above, a wide door of smooth rock with neither path nor footholds for fully loaded men. “It’s too steep to scale,” Odgeson said, and Brian followed his gaze between mosses and lichen, up and into grey sky. They shed packs and rifles to sit wearily between trees, wedging themselves so as not to slide down the steep ground. Knotman looked done for, smoked a cigarette: “To get around that cliff could mean another six hours. Even then, it might not be possible,” he said. “We might go round in circles and still find a slice of cliff facing us.”

  Brian opened the map. “We’d have to go south-east for two or three miles. There’s a gap there.”

  “Count me out,” Baker said. “It’d take days.”

  “I’ve had my whack,” Kirkby said.

  “And me, man,” said Jack.

  “Maybe there’s still a way from here,” Brian persisted. To get up there seemed important again—now that hopes of being able to were fading. It was loony not to get to the top after struggling so far. Admittedly, they were all shagged out, but maybe with one last shin-up (an hour at the most) they’d be on that peak and making camp. He lifted Knotman’s kukri—feeling let-down by both him and Odgeson, who were, after all, supposed to be leading this foray. They were lost in some half-dream of cigarette smoke: “I’m off to see what I can find,” he said.