Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  Knotman offered him a fag. “Have a smoke first.”

  “When I come back.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “You’ll be wasting your time,” Baker chipped at the tree-bole with his knife. Its sharp blade, digging with nonchalant dull strikes at the wood, sounded vicious and useless, an acknowledgment of defeat. “As long as I’m not wasting yourn,” he threw back. “It’s barmy to come all this way and then turn back.”

  Knotman listened, sat back without interfering. He’d brought them this far and now they could make up their own minds about reaching the top. If they found it collectively important to do so, they’d see a way there—though as far as he was concerned there was no point in taking risks. The three-mile detour was impossible because it would mean perhaps two days without water. “I’m knackered,” Kirkby said. Jack suggested they bed down for the night and have a bash in the morning: “Once we’re over the summit there’ll be plenty of water.”

  “I think we can call it off,” Odgeson said, and he was taken up on it: “Suits me,” Baker agreed quickly. “I didn’t like this picnic from the beginning.”

  “Why did you come then?”

  “For the experience.” Brian couldn’t argue against such an answer, unwilling to admit that his own reasons were felt to be deeper, if more diffuse.

  From tracking the contours, he edged upwards, tunnelling like a collier through thick undergrowth, clambering over the fallen five-foot girth of trees that blocked his way. There was too much silence, and he wielded his kukri against ironwood to create the rough companionship of noise. Such a tree-filled wilderness put fear into him, and now and again he stopped in his crashed pathway as if to listen for its full effect, looked for ants, leeches, a snake maybe, but could see nothing except the swinging of his own arm when he went on. Kota Libis camp was years away, England a dream before he was born, Pauline walking to the shops on Aspley Lane a dim apparition; maybe since I came up here all the rest of the world’s turned to jungle and there’s nothing to go back to.

  He climbed towards the summit, came by a green rockface blocking his way. He thought, among the claustrophobic desolation of this high jungle, of the waterfalls and pools several miles down towards the plain, of the stream’s noise, which had seemed so tormenting at the time but which now was remembered as a sort of heaven. Both places mixed before his eyes. He leaned to light a cigarette.

  A clump of trees overhung the summit, rag-mops giving him the glad-eye from too far up. Maybe if I edge farther along I’ll find a chimney that’ll get me through in ten minutes. Above the rag-mops were grey and water-bellied clouds settling in for afternoon and evening. He was determined to reach the summit and, looking along the way he might take, saw a coiled python placed a dozen feet away.

  He was protected by a screen of horror, within which a hand went to his shoulder only to find that he had forgotten his rifle. As he backed away, the stripes and diamonds began to move, to perform a colourful oscillation along the ground, over trees and roots; it was bigger than any he’d seen in the snake temples of Pulau Timur or the paddy field at Kota Libis. He went downhill, from tree to tree-bole, still watching the snake, which wound back into its sluggish coils now that he wasn’t too close. His fear of it went, for somehow being without a rifle there seemed no need to hurry or panic, and in the shadowy gloom he lost sight of it. Then his fear came back and he fled towards the others, no longer feeling alone in the jungle. He didn’t mention having seen the python: “I can’t find any way round or up,” he grumbled, before sinking down for a rest, glad that no one retorted: I told you so.

  Knotman hitched up his pack and rifle, and the rest followed, threading a way between trees and bushes. A different set of muscles came into play for the descent, and Brian’s legs ached and stung as he steadied himself on the steep slope so as not to be slung forward against some hard tree. A slow drizzle fell, and in the dusk Brian and Kirkby spread their blanket into a rough cradle between two bushes, sat down to chew biscuits. Jack rammed a bayonet into a tin of jam and handed it around, but there was no energy to forage among the tins for a more elaborate meal—and no dry wood on which to cook it. “The sooner we get back to camp now, the better,” Kirkby said.

  “Maybe they’ll rustle up something good at the cookhouse when we do,” Knotman laughed, “like hummingbirds’ foreskins on toast, or some such thing.” On their bleak dark four-thousand-foot ledge Brian felt as if the party had shrunk in numbers, they were so isolated and dispirited. He counted them: six, yet wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen only two or three, thinking that maybe a fire would have made a bigger crowd out of them. Perched high in the saturated air and mountainous vegetation, miles from the nearest spark of light, he couldn’t fight through the steel band of exhaustion towards sleep, was afraid that if he did he would roll off the ledge and perhaps spill against some tree.

  He lay all night with a built-in sensation of closed eyes roaming through some demanding wilderness of half-sleep, the trammels of an exhausted mind and body searching for something impossible to find, then grieving over the fact that it might never be found even in a thousand hours of real sleep. The hard curve of rocks and soil under the blankets troubled him distantly, though less than the damp mist coldly moistening his face. Such uneasy rest was a variation on great silences, broken by fire within and a furious crashing of noise that often dragged him half-back to consciousness, as though a force over which he had neither control nor resistance fastened itself at his entrails and sent him into more coughs until the sound of it woke him up. Kirkby grunted and nudged, causing someone else to curse at the dearth of real sleep. Aware of his aching bones, he opened his eyes on the off-chance of encouraging sleep should he close them again decisively, but then found he had no desire to close them, and lay for what he could have sworn was a long time, looking into the silhouettes of bush leaves and humped bodies roundabout.

  It often seemed that dawn was about to appear: when the shape of bush leaves began imperceptibly to change, he kept his eyes closed for as long as he could bear it, imagining that when he opened them the leaves would have taken on colour, and hoping that before he could witness this miracle of change no voice would yell that it was time to get up, or that Baker’s buckshot-gun wouldn’t start the day like a newly sharpened tin-opener ripping across the dark sky to let in sunlight. But he never slept more than a few minutes (which had nevertheless seemed like hours), so that the leaves before him were still outlined with the same blackness against tree-boles behind.

  When day did come, it approached like thought: impossible to say from where. Grey light crept out of the fibre of each bush, escaped from thin leaf veins to show bodies sleeping roundabout and tree trunks developing a neutral though positive shade. They rolled blankets in silence, were damp and exhausted, each face showing the bewildering fight of attempted sleep. Baker passed around biscuits spread thickly with jam, hard to get down the throat on a swallow of water.

  Mist cleared while they were packing, a curtain drawn from a vast area of north Malaya. Below and far into the distance, long bars of white mist were drifting across lesser summits and spurs, breaking up over rice fields and coastal swamps as the sun gained strength. Smaller hills of Gunong Barat reared at them from across the valley, whose waterline, hundreds of feet below, was buried deep in the green furrowed jungle.

  Loftier mountains, far to the south, formed a low line of blue amorphous summits in the far-off sky. Small villages were dotted about the coast, lay in loops and bends of silver rivers that twisted from the hills towards greener landscapes, mingled with mangrove swamps, and entered the indistinct frontiers of the sea.

  “That’s a view and a half,” said Jack. “It’s a pity you can’t drink it, though.” Baker thought it the least they could expect after a four-day climb. Brian had nothing to say, yet when they began filing down into the forest, he held back and was the last to leave. It was too much to grasp in a mere few minutes, impossible to carry away so soon. He wan
ted to stay until the sight of it drove him down by its familiarity, to sit where he was for a long smoke and look of contemplation at the land spread out below in choicer and more living colours than the most artistically produced map. All this climb, he thought, hearing the others already on the crashing descent, and I’ve got to leave it. I might never come up here, or any other such mountain, again—which put such a dismal shadow over his heart that the next thing he knew he was ploughing with drawn kukri into the cool gloom and familiar dank smells of the wood.

  They came to the brink of a precipice, a thousand-foot sleeve of grey rock on the mountainside blocking the way to water farther west, so they backed up three hundred feet and found a thin ledge with a few bushes and shrubs growing on its surface. Baker pushed his paybook into Brian’s hand: “My will’s in there.” Brian shrugged and stuffed it into his shirt pocket: “Don’t blame me if I lose it, you loon.”

  Knotman dropped his pack and was feeling a way over, looking like a brigand with unshaven face, dirty clothes, and rifle sticking above his broad shoulders. He spanned the first gap, his legs a pair of compasses about to draw a circle in empty air, hands clutching the rock above. The sky was blank below him for hundreds of feet, a few insecure bushes sprouting out occasionally. Fascinated by such peril, Brian wondered whether it would have been lessened had they talked among themselves and ignored him. Jack threw down his cigarette and leapt forward, even before Knotman’s boot-studs had stopped sliding.

  He hung from a bush, his boots waving methodically about for a foothold: “Stay where you are,” he called hoarsely. “I’ll be all right.” Brian already wondered how they’d get down to the plain if Knotman brained or injured himself, and how they’d find him if he fell like a stone into the treetop forest below.

  He made footholds, coaxed the fair weight of his body slowly back, his rifle a guiding finger of safety at the ledge he was trying to reach. He stayed still a moment, seemed to relax his efforts as if uncertain whether or not it was worthwhile saving himself. No one spoke, fearing to break the spell of survival: then he gathered strength for a terrific pull-up, and was on the ledge from which he had fallen.

  He organized a chain to get the rest of them over. Brian stood with feet spanning two gaps in the rockface, unafraid only because he resisted looking up or down as he reached for packs and rifles passed to him, easing them over his chest to the next pair of hands.

  On the other side they sat for a smoke, and Brian unhooked his waterbottle. “I’d save it,” Knotman said.

  Brian opened the map: “We’ll reach water soon.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Knotman replied. So he didn’t drink, though his throat felt like cracked celluloid.

  They went in single file, bushes curving overhead, wet leaves brushing hands that swung at creepers as they skirted the roots of great trees—against which they occasionally crashed if accelerated by weakness and a top-heavy load. Brian felt done-for, and crouched under creepers rather than drag energy to his bones and chop them out of the way. The brown whip-like tail of a snake disappeared through the leaves, a sight that cleared his vision and gave back strength. The last thing he wanted was a skinful of poison, so he walked upright. He stayed in the lead to go at his own rate rather than follow someone else’s pack, for the more exhausted he grew the quicker became his pace—though never so great that the others were left too far behind. A look of effort marked everyone: they came down with kukris no longer used, and loads bearing no resemblance to the neat shape of a pack. Their shirts were dark with sweat and soil patches, trousers and sleeves torn, faces set hard with tiredness, and a week’s growth under slouched bush hats—coming through the tunnels of the forest, fatigued at having climbed a small upshoot of the earth on which they were lost like insects.

  He turned, to slosh at creepers in a new-found strength that kept him ahead, swinging with joy down each bank that lay in his path, until one led him between lips of brown soil that formed the dry bed of a stream. He followed it, stepping over lichen-covered boulders, and soon saw water jerking out of a spring, the beginning of a stream copious enough to sink his tin mug when he threw it in. “I was ready to do a Rupert Brooke on you,” Baker said, “in the corner of this foreign field. Brian has my will, so it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “We were lucky to find water so soon,” Odgeson thought.

  “It was due to my good navigation,” Brian claimed. “I steered by the sun and had my map open all the way.”

  “You couldn’t see the sun,” Baker cried, pulling off his boots, “and the map you drew is no bloody good.”

  “You won’t be able to get them on again if they’re wet,” Knotman said. Baker ignored him: “I could have steered better with my cock,” he called to Brian.

  “If there’d bin a brothel down here, I suppose you could.”

  Tributaries came in by thorn-covered gullies as they tramped along, unnoticeable until threads of water were elbowed from under bushes by their side. They reached an island in the stream and split up for the evening tasks. Baker sat on a rock in his underwear, patching his trousers, while Jack and Brian were high up the bank, filling the air with the splinter of branches and dragging wood back to the fire.

  It grew dark, and water formed two phosphorescent humps as it dropped into a deep pool at the foot of the cliff face. Fire shadows danced at the bordering wall of the forest a few yards away, and they ate a hot meal, back in the familiar sound of water travelling out of nowhere into nowhere, a stream that hurried by six men locked in the shadows of the forest, mocking the purposelessness of their journey as it passed.

  Brian lit a cigarette and lay back, stars like the eyes of fishes set between black tree-shapes towering about. The primeval noise of the water receded into another locker of his mind, leaving his immediate senses in a vacuum of half-consciousness. Then the noise poured back into his brain and ears and he heard Baker say: “It looks as if Seaton’s asleep”—so he pulled off his shirt and swilled himself in the icy water, then, in spite of its sting, fell straight into a deep blank slumber.

  Waking early, he was glad to be getting out of the forest. Now that there was no such obsessive goal as reaching the peak, he felt its spirit imposing too heavily on him, saw the jungle for the desert it was, a dull place because no one of flesh-and-blood lived there. All you could do was burn it down, let daylight and people in; otherwise it was only fabulous and interesting when written about in books for those who would never see it. Still, he’d always be able to say he’d been in the jungle, tell anybody who asked that the best thing was to leave it alone, but that if you had to see it you should get a few thousand feet up and look down on it. He could easily understand how the jungle would drive you crackers if you had to stay there too long; how its great forest-mind could eat you up with the dark grin of possession. He sent a nub-end spinning into the stream, watched it taken to where they would follow.

  They descended by the winding defile, taking to jungle at midday to avoid stone-faced waterfall cliffs. The panic flight of tin-footed minuscular fugitives sounded on the foliage roof, a commencing tread of raindrops before the full weight of water crashed on to them, spattering hats and finding a short-cut to their skins. Soil and leaves made anchors of their boots as they slithered down, edging back to the stream. Brian shouted through the wall of rain: “One minute dry; the next drenched.” Baker, only a foot away, heard nothing.

  “That was a big piss,” Knotman said when they stood by the stream. Clouds were scattering, and shirts steamed on bushes in the returning sun. An Avro 19 droned like a silverfish high overhead towards Burma, and Brian waved in greeting. Brown water swirled at their thighs as they slowly descended, and when the sun burned, Brian’s shirt felt pasted to his shoulder blades, a poultice that increased the aches instead of lessening them. By map and compass they were close to where the lorry had brought them nearly a week ago. A score of tins remained, dragged up and down the mountain for nothing. “We might as well dump ’em,” Ki
rkby suggested.

  Knotman didn’t agree: “You’ve a month’s rations there, in right-little tight-little England.”

  They came out of the jungle. Stubbled, tired, bush hat pulled down, Brian felt he could have travelled for weeks more, until he reached the dam over the stream and collapsed on to its concrete platform, held there for a minute by a wild saw-toothed cough that left him without breath, sitting still and trying to bring trees and sky back into focus. He watched the others emerge: Jack with his shirtsleeve torn away; Knotman limping because he hadn’t had his boots off for days; Odgeson chalk-white and walking carefully as if afraid he might fall, while Kirkby and Baker looked fit by comparison.

  Odgeson went to the planter’s house and telephoned for a lorry from the camp. They set off four miles to meet it at the main road, a slow straggling file all but done for after the rapid descent. Brian was at the end of his strength, faint itches chafing at various parts of his body where leeches still fed. I don’t feel as though I’ve got enough blood left to keep myself going, never mind them, the greedy bastards. I’m pole-axed, and wish I was in Nottingham out of this blood-sucking sun, back where it’s cool and my brain will clear so’s I can start to think, pick up the bones of my scattered thoughts. I’ll be twenty-one next year, and an old man before I know it.

  Packs were swung like corpses on to the waiting lorry, helped by a sergeant who had come up for the ride, the same who had got Baker in trouble outside the admin hut last week. “There’s a war on,” he told them. “It started while you were away. We thought you might have got caught up in it.”

  “What sort of a war?”

  “The Communists are at it, trying to throw us out of the country and take over. They’ve killed a lot of people already.”