by Jean Chapman
‘I’ve just shot Josef Guisan,’ she told him, moving out and around the wire to where the body lay.
She had shot him in cold blood, she knew that. Murder, she supposed. She thought about George in prison. Lovers in prison, one for rape, one for murder. What about that? And what about Liz and Wendy? She watched Inspector Aba as he took over the lead; she doubted he would let the matter go without an inquiry.
They approached the fallen man with caution. But there was absolutely no doubt, the shot had hit the heart with pinpoint accuracy. The stain on the chest looked black now and the inspector ordered a man back for a lamp. Anna came too from the house and stood by Blanche, gripping her hand as the inspector raised the light.
‘Aaah!’ She greeted the sight of Josef’s body with a cry that expressed justice done. By her side a small voice piped, ‘that’s good thing! He hurt my grandmother many times.’ He pushed himself between Anna and Blanche and took both their hands. Looking up at Blanche, he added, ‘You like mongoose, kill bad things.’
Blanche regarded the inspector, whose officiousness seemed to waiver at Datuk’s judgement. He went back to bend over the body. As he moved the rifle the hand was lifted too, and in death the finger was still curled in the trigger guard.
‘It is fortunate thing he did not have time to fire first,’ Inspector Aba concluded.
Chapter Twenty-Three
There was a feeling of extreme peace all around. There had been a voice before, but now blessed stillness. Alan felt on the very lip of heaven. He had only to bequeath his breath to the wind and be gone.
And yet ... and yet ... it felt like a dream, half remembered, something in life half yearned for even while not properly recalled.
There was a voice that came again and he remembered the same voice had called before. A siren voice, luring him away from this blankness that was oblivion. A siren voice, but it paused and he knew he could decide to go now.
The voice came again louder, as if it yearned for him. He wondered, wavered — siren voices invited disaster, sang sailors on to rocks.
He thought he heard another sound, as if he gasped — was he trying to swim away? Then there was much activity around him. Was this the final surge over treacherous reefs to the calm lagoon beyond?
Be still, leave me, leave me. His brain inside his skull felt too big, too much to be poured back in. ‘Quarts into pint pots,’ he heard his father say, adding with a familiar, weary acceptance, ‘but you’ll always try!’
‘Alan, Alan,’ the urgent voice said close by his ear, ‘come back to me.’
How could he? He didn’t know where he was.
Something like panic stirred at the base of his spine and ran like uneasy fingers up to his head. Sensation flooded back, awareness like all-over pins and needles assailed him and he felt as if his body was unbalanced, as if he swam or floated in some strange substance like ... like the warm wobbly wallpaper glue his father’s decorator used.
He remembered his father always had the firm’s decorator at home. ‘I like to see a good professional job,’ he would say, then add as an aside just to Alan, ‘and I don’t want to have to do it.’ Memory came crushing back. His father was dead. The hurt of his death came sharp on the recollection. His father was dead; his mother? She had cried the last time he had seen her, cried about him, because of him. What had he done? It all seemed so sad.
Was it his mother speaking to him? It was a woman’s voice, he thought. Like his mother, always asking him to do things. ‘Take your father’s lunch to him.’ Go and tell your father the carpenter’s not able to come today.’ But his father was dead and his mother had cried because he had sailed far away, to the other side of the world.
He supposed he could open his eyes, though it seemed like quite an undertaking. Like someone shut up inside a difficult box of tricks with booby traps on all sides, he cautiously ordered his eyelids to go up a little. Nothing happened, only after a time the quality of colour seemed to have altered — black had become a kind of gingery brown.
It took him some time to realise that his eyes were parted a fraction and what he could see was hair — it could be a beard. He didn’t know he had a beard. A small quaking laugh formed somewhere as he wondered if he was Rumpelstiltskin.
Something moved across his vision, a hand, and he felt something being soothed on his lips, moist, sweet, nice. He was hungry, he realised, very hungry.
‘Alan!’ the voice was urgent. ‘I thought your lips moved. Alan?’ The fingers that had brought moisture before now played along his lips as if testing for some reverberation of life.
Then the moisture and the sweetness came on his lips again.
He could see no one.
Then another sensation blotted out all others. Someone was moving a finger along the line of his ribs. This had happened to him before — and this was a different memory. This was something he wanted. This was the voice. He wanted to see, and he forced his eyelids higher like a child reborn with an urgent instinct to view his world.
He could see a wall of bamboo, a high woven roof. Then he focused on someone very close to his side, someone — making free with his body. The face and the voice all came together. ‘Liz!’ he shouted. ‘Liz!’ The sound started in his mind like a triumphant shout, but came from his throat like the rasping of a rusty knife on an old dry brick.
‘Alan? Alan!’ This was the yearning voice! Now her anxious face peered down at him as if hope was some strange creature she was afraid to look for.
‘Alan?’ The word was all caution. He saw how she slowly allowed herself to recognise the light of rational life in his half-opened eyes. He saw her face transformed as finally she saw he knew her. ‘Alan, my darling ... Oh! I didn’t think we’d ever really look at each other again.’ She pressed her face close to his. ‘Oh! Thank God, thank God! If there’s no more than this, I thank God!’
He did not understand, remembering her finger along his ribcage. What was she saying? There was to be much more!
‘I knew if I loved you enough you wouldn’t go from me.’
He felt her tears hot on his cheeks and he tried to move a hand to touch her, but she rose too soon. ‘I must tell the others.’
She ran to the doorway from the sleeping bench where he lay against one wall. He felt bereft as she left; turning his head to watch, he was alarmed when she seemed to drop out of sight from the door. Then he remembered native huts he had seen high on stilts. He had not realised that some might have such noble-seeming proportions inside. The room where he lay seemed enormous and airy, with pleasant filtered sunlight.
He heard her calling, ‘Lee, Ch’ing, Pa Kasut! He’s come round! He’s come back!’
Then her head reappeared in the doorway. Alan felt his mind light up, and as she ran across to him he thought she was like a girl in an English buttercup field with the sun behind her — and he lying in the grass.
‘Will you try a proper drink?’ She took up a small cup and dipped it into a bowl. Then she was back by his side supporting his head, letting him sip from the cup. ‘This is what the Sakais have brewed, it’s kept you alive.’
He was aware of the strange sensation of hair all around his lips as he drank. After she had taken the cup away he tried to lift a hand to feel. He wondered at the slowness of the hand that came eventually from his side upwards. He wondered at the hand. Did those elongated, skeletal fingers belong to him?
Liz watched with a beaming smile and, as one after another climbed up into the room, she gestured to them, drew them over to the sleeping bench. ‘He’s moving,’ she cried, ‘he’s moved his hand — and he knows me. He knows! Oh, Lee, thank you! Thank you, Ch’ing! Thank you, Pa Kasut!’
They came and peered at him. He peered solemnly back. He remembered the Chinese faces of Lee and her mother. There were many native faces, men wearing crossed bandoleers of tiny multi-coloured beads, women wearing colourful sarongs, some from the waist, some tied above their breasts. All were strangers — but all kind, all smiling
.
‘Pa Kasut.’ Liz indicated the oldest of the men, who came forward nodding and smiling with great satisfaction.
‘Good! Good!’ he proclaimed and motioned with his fingers to his mouth. Alan nodded and Pa Kasut grinned broadly and ordered his women to go and prepare food, hurrying after them down the ladder like a fussy chef after his underlings.
When Alan had drunk, he tried her name again. ‘Liz.’
It was better this time, recognisable. He looked at the other girl. ‘Lee.’
They all laughed as if he had told them the funniest joke in the world.
They propped him up a little and gave him a different drink, goat’s milk with a curious warm aftertaste like alcohol. It was so good, it warmed his stomach. He lifted a hand again and touched his beard. He remembered something of being in a raid, a jungle camp, the shooting, but it was vague, blurred as a misted window. ‘How long?’ he asked.
‘Many weeks.’
‘Where?’ He queried his surroundings with his eyes.
‘We’re safe,’ she told him. ‘A Sakai hill camp. Lee says it’s beautiful; I haven’t looked around much.’
‘You remember telling us to hide under our big bed?’ Lee knelt by Liz’s side at the bench. She nodded for him as she saw recollection in his eyes. ‘Then when the communists came back and you were hurt ... ’ She paused to draw her hand across the top of her head in the direction of the bullet that had scored Alan’s skull. ‘Then we hid you.’
With a great effort Alan brought his hands together in the Eastern manner of thanks. Lifting one hand to his head, he found and traced the smooth scar starting just right of centre and running back and across through his mass of hair. He was surprised that the sensitivity of the wound still bordered on pain.
Liz watched him realise the injury and the seriousness of it, how close he had come to death.
‘Here’s your food,’ Lee said, going to help the women carry the cooking pots in. ‘Pa Kasut will have prepared it. He has a wonderful knowledge of plant medicines. His mixture my mother is sure saved your life.’
As the days passed, Alan began to realise how much he owed to all these people, both the Guisans and the Sakais. He also began to feel that if there was such a place as heaven on earth, then this was probably it.
With Liz to help him first to drink and eat, then to sit and finally to take his first steps across to look out of the door, paradise indeed felt very close.
The hillside had sections of the ground cleared around it to allow the Sakais to grow their haphazardly broadcast crops of tapioca and maize, and the hut was built on stilts some ten feet from the ground. This gave a unique view of the jungle below. They could overlook the mass of variegated greens and the many trees blossoming in the canopy, never seen from the ground, only suspected by their perfume.
From above it was possible to realise how, with no winter to dictate their cycle, trees blossomed and fruited to their own individual rhythm. Each one in its own season produced flowers in masses of white, pink, scarlet or yellow. Yet more glorious Technicolor was poured from the outcrops of rock around the camp, where creepers in all the colours he last remembered seeing in nasturtium beds back in England vied for attention.
‘How on earth did they get me up here?’ Not just the steepness of the slopes but the ladder from the ground made him ask. The descent to ground level still looked formidable to him.
Liz laughed. ‘They carried you, of course, all trussed up like a hammock, hung from poles.’ She finished the sentence hardly aware what she said, for his expression had changed to one of complete anguish. He staggered as if some awful pain had stabbed him through, threatening to bring him to his knees, to fell him. Alarmed he might tumble, she pulled him away from the doorway.
‘What is it?’ she asked, grasping tight, almost shaking him in her alarm. He steadied himself again but held his head in his hands and groaned.
‘I’ve just remembered Danny. Danny ...’ For a moment he had to search for his second name. ‘Danny Veasey. He was killed on the op before I got this.’ His hand went to his scalp. ‘I ... carried his body.’ He looked at her now with urgent questioning. ‘What happened to his body? God! It wasn’t just left?’
‘No.’ She re-emphasised the word as he looked at her with some doubt. ‘No. There was a military funeral; I read it in the Straits Times. One man missing, one man killed. Major Sturgess went to the funeral.’
‘The major ... and, I suppose, Sarge Mackenzie and the lads, but I should have been there.’ He went back to sit on his bed.
‘I should have kept the newspaper, there was a full report. It was — ’ She broke off, reliving the trauma of that first evening she had believed Alan dead.
‘I should have written to his mother.’ His voice was low, thick with regret.
‘You can still do that when we get back.’ She moved to his side as he lay down, so slowly, like someone afflicted by a new wound.
‘There was a photograph in the Times, I remember. I’m sure we’ll be able to get a copy from somewhere. Joan may even still have hers, they never throw their newspapers out until the print’s practically read off them.’
He did not answer and she saw he was asleep again. In the first few days she had been alarmed by these sudden lapses into sleep, fearing he might have slipped back into a coma. Now she saw it for the exhaustion it was, each new achievement tasking his strength to the limit.
Keeping watch by his bed, she was torn two ways. They did have to go back, but she felt that time here in this peaceful camp was what Alan needed. Once back they would undoubtedly be parted; she supposed he would be taken into a military hospital or sent on furlough somewhere like the army rest camp on Penang island — or even home to England. All she could be certain of was the time remaining to them in this jungle settlement — before the army in the shape of Major John Sturgess finally arrived.
It was a total mystery what had happened to the army unit he was supposed to have been bringing to recover Alan, travelling so quickly unhampered by women — that had proved a hollow boast! She had expected them within a day or two of Lee arriving.
She wondered if perhaps they had not even set out because she had disobeyed orders. But Sturgess had ‘lost’ Alan from a mission he was in charge of. Surely his duty would be to recover his man if the opportunity was given? Duty she would have thought to be a prime mover in the major’s life — and giving orders.
Then she remembered Sturgess needed Lee to identify some of the communist suspects the police had rounded up. He would come, she decided grimly.
Ch’ing, Lee and Liz had become aware that there was a growing unease in the settlement. Lee had heard Heng Hou’s name whispered fearfully among the women as they worked around the cooking fire. Their presence put the Sakais in extreme peril.
Liz’s task must be to help get Alan fit enough to travel as soon as Pa Kasut thought it safe. In the meantime she decided to emulate her mother; if there was nothing to be done about a situation, then there was no point in worrying about it.
She went quietly to the door and waved to Lee, who sat with her mother helping some Sakai wives and girls dye bark cloths for new sarongs. Lee yearned for two things; to hear that Heng Hou was dead, and to be out of the jungle.
The women often sat and made extravagant plans for shopping trips, telling the Sakai women they must come to Rinsey after the troubles and they would give them pretty materials and cooking pots. Lee always became quite animated as she talked of things she would buy — but first she was going to the cinema at Ipoh. ‘I’d like find boyfriend go with,’ she confided. ‘Then a trip to the shops of Kuala Lumpur.’
Liz proposed they should all go to Singapore for a holiday. ‘We’ll shop until we just can’t carry another thing and our feet are ready to drop off.’
‘Then we go eat fancy cakes in restaurant,’ Ch’ing had said, and a whole new topic opened up.
Alan stirred on the bed and she wondered how long it would be before they were all
plunged back into their own lives. She realised that she had to treasure this time. What a place for a honeymoon! she thought.
Alan was still distressingly skinny, but already it was possible to see a difference. The bones in his shoulders no longer looked as if you could grasp them like handles.
The following morning she asked Sardin to come to help Alan down so he might walk about outside.
Alan hesitated at the top of the house ladder. As an interested crowd gathered, Bras and Sardin took his hesitation as an invitation to help and practically carried him down to ground level.
‘Terra firma — I think,’ Alan said, moving cautiously for the first time on real ground. ‘Though it still feels as if it has a spring in it, like the house floor.’
‘Afraid it’s your knees.’ Lee laughed.
‘I should have done more exercise, some knee bends,’ he said as he made a brave if unsteady attempt at just that.
‘You need swimming,’ Bras informed him.
The remark was greeted by the women putting their hands over their mouths to hide their smiles and Pa Kasut clearing his throat in the manner of all fathers mildly censoring their sons.
Alan thought of the last swim he’d had — in a river battling with a lethal packing case with Danny on the bank — and found nothing to laugh at.
‘Is there a swimming place?’ Liz asked.
‘Oh, yes.’ Bras pointed up between two high peaks of rock, then swooped his hand over and down.
‘Between those peaks? she asked. ‘It looks a long walk.’
‘No so far,’ Bras said. Again the Sakais, male and female, seemed to find it a big joke.
‘Is there something wrong with the place?’ Liz demanded of Pa Kasut.
‘No,’ he replied at once and with complete conviction, ‘very good place.’
‘Then why is everyone grinning? Does everyone come to watch or something?’
Bras looked very solemn. ‘No, very private.’
