Diamonds in the Dust

by Kate Furnivall

  There had been a mud slip that had delayed her drive into town, and she was hurrying now to make it to the Victoria Club in time for a swim with Harriet Court. She squeezed her big American car past one of the bicycle rickshaws that darted up and down the high street, as irritating as the fat black flies, and spotted a gap in the traffic. Instantly she accelerated into it. She swung the wheel to take the corner into Alexandra Parade, an elegant boulevard of imposing buildings where the British Empire had placed its colonial stamp on this docile patch of the Malay Peninsula.

  At exactly that moment, another car did the same, as sleek and ruthless as a black-finned shark.

  “Damn you, look out!” Connie shouted, and slammed on her brakes.

  It was too late. She fought the steering wheel, but the back end of the Chrysler cut loose. With a sickening lurch of her stomach, she felt it start to swing in a wide, uncontrollable arc. Her wing raked the black car, but instead of slowing, it seemed to gather momentum from the impact. It was the screech of her bumper that alerted people. Faces turned to stare at her, wide-eyed with shock as the two-ton metal missile hurtled toward them on the sidewalk. The car jerked when its wheel caught in one of the deep storm drains, but still it didn’t stop, and figures scattered in all directions.

  The moment seemed to elongate. Appalled, Connie watched it happen. She saw a woman yank her child off its feet and open her mouth in a huge melon-sized scream. An old man in a straw boater stood paralyzed with fear directly in front of her, and a dark moist patch blossomed on the front of his pale flannel trousers. Connie dragged at the steering wheel, her heart slamming against her ribs. The car’s hood shifted a fraction to the right and took down one of the timber uprights of the covered walkway that gave shoppers respite from the scorching sun. The crack of the wood was like a gunshot. The old man ducked, so that the bumper missed him by the width of the brim of his hat, and instead selected a different victim: a stocky native woman wearing a bright green sarong, a woven basket perched on her shoulder.

  Connie screamed at her through the windscreen as she stamped on the brake pedal. “Run! Run!”

  Please, please, run faster!

  But the woman knew that her time had come. That the spirits had chosen her, and there was no escape. She swung round at the last moment and faced the oncoming car. She stared straight into Connie’s eyes and her lips moved, but the words were swallowed by Connie’s own scream as the bumper uttered its muffled grunt. It had found flesh. The woman’s eyes became huge black pools of pain for one brief moment before she disappeared from Connie’s sight and the car shuddered to a halt.

  No!

  Connie was shaking, teeth chattering. With an effort of will she unclamped each finger from around the steering wheel and seized the chrome door handle. She tumbled out of the car and raced to the front of the hood. She caught sight of a pair of bare feet, their soles covered in red dust, then caramel-colored legs and the edge of a green sarong. On the ground, the rest of the woman’s body was hidden from sight behind the crowd that had gathered around her, but they drew back at Connie’s approach, opening a path for her. As if she were unclean.

  “Call an ambulance! Pangil ambulans!” she shouted to a man in a striped butcher’s apron, and he said something in reply, but the connection between her ears and her mind seemed to have broken because the sounds meant nothing to her.

  The Malay woman lay on her back, not crumpled, not in a tangle of blood and fractured bones, but straight and unharmed as though she had dozed off by mistake in the heat. With a rush of relief Connie dropped to her knees on the sidewalk beside her and lifted the limp hand. It felt warm and dry against her own damp palms, with short stubby fingers that curled around hers in a stubborn grip. She isn’t dead, thank God, she isn’t dead. But the woman’s eyes remained firmly closed.

  “An ambulance is coming, a doctor will be here very soon. Don’t try to move,” Connie told her, her throat so tight the words sounded as if they’d come from someone else’s mouth. She leaned over the motionless figure, shielding her from the glare of the sun, and asked softly, “Are you in much pain?”

  No response.

  “I’m so sorry,” Connie said. “I didn’t mean to . . .” Her voice trickled away. She wanted to wrap the woman in her arms and rock her gently. “Please,” she murmured, “open your eyes if you can hear me.”

  Still no response.

  Thick black lashes lay on the plump dusky cheeks, and fine veins traced a network back into her temple where the beginnings of a bruise were starting to form. She looked a similar age to Connie herself, about thirty-four, but the woman’s dense black hair that she wore pulled back into a knot behind her head was showing the first few streaks of gray. Maybe she was older. Her nose was broad, and the skin of her arms a patchy, uneven brown as if she worked with chemicals of some sort. What world have I wrenched her out of?

  There was no blood. Not a mark on the sarong or on the woman herself, except for the slight bruise, and Connie allowed herself to hope it was just a concussion. Softly she started to talk to her, to entice the woman’s stunned brain back into action. She asked her name, her address, who should be told about the accident, what was in the crushed basket at her side. She stroked her hand, tapped her arm, touched her cheek.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said again.

  The eyes opened suddenly. There was no flicker of warning, just closed one moment, open the next, in a narrow slit of life that sent Connie’s heart clawing up into her throat.

  “Selamat pagi,” she said to the woman. “Hello.”

  The eyes weren’t black anymore; they were drenched in blood.

  “An ambulance is coming,” Connie said quickly.

  The woman’s lips moved, but no sound emerged. The stubby fingers gripped harder, pulling at her, and Connie leaned forward, so close she could feel the moist breath on her ear as she tried to catch the faint words. For the first time since she’d knelt down, she became aware of the circle of people gathered around her in the street. White faces. Sun hats. A ginger mustache. A dark uniform with brass buttons. Voices aimed at her but jumbled together in a blur. With a jolt she realized that there was a young native girl of about sixteen crouched on the other side of the woman, a curtain of silky black hair half obscuring her face, but her eyes were fixed on Connie and her expression was accusing. Behind her stood a tall native youth, his face set hard. He was wearing a waist sarong and a sleeveless shirt from which his fingers were unconsciously tearing a button.

  “Do you know her?” Connie asked.

  The girl stared at her coldly. “She is our mother.”

  “I’m sorry,” Connie said yet again. Empty, useless words. “It was an accident.”

  “White lady.” The English words came in a guttural gasp from the lips of the woman lying on the sidewalk, a flutter of sound that barely reached her.

  “I’m here,” Connie squeezed her hand. “And your children are here.”

  “Listen, white lady.”

  “I’m listening.” Her ear was almost brushing against the struggling lips and there was a long pause, during which the heat of the day seemed to gather itself and launch an attack like a blow on the back of Connie’s neck. “I’m listening.”

  “I curse you. You family. You children. And you. I curse you all.”

  Words sharp as a cobra’s bite, but Connie did not release her grip on the small hand. The blood-filled eyes opened wider, flashed at her full of malice, and then abruptly closed. Her fingers grew limp.

  “No!” Connie cried. “No, don’t go. Curse me again, curse me as much as you wish, call your evil spirits down on my head, but don’t go.”

  A policeman stepped into her field of vision. “Mrs. Hadley, the ambulance is here. They’ll take over.”

  Men in white uniforms gently moved Connie aside. She rose to her feet, tremors grinding up through
her body and jamming her mind. Soft voices spoke to her, careful hands guided her, treating her as if she were glass and might shatter. When she realized she was being ushered off the street into the shade of a nearby building, she broke free and searched the crowd for the woman’s son and daughter, but they had vanished.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Hadley.”

  “Drink this, Mrs. Hadley.”

  “You’ve had a nasty shock.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. We have witnesses.”

  Policemen, with questions and notebooks, brandished their sympathetic smiles in her face and told her she could go home, they would drive her home, but she shook her head. It was almost one o’clock.

  “No, thank you. I have to pick up my son from school.”

  The building that had given her refuge was a British bank with thick stone walls to keep out the heat, and a vast, cooling fan that stirred the leaden air with brisk efficiency in the small office where she was seated. The bank manager had a sunburned bald head and a kind smile.

  “Take your time, my dear,” he said. “Take all the time you need.”

  She sat there alone, listening to the sounds in her head. The screech. The crack. The thud.

  * * *

  How do you tell your seven-year-old son that you have killed a woman in the street?

  Connie’s fingers gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles chalk white. She didn’t say anything at all in case the wrong words spilled out of her dry mouth. Heavy insects blundered against the windscreen as she drove out of town with her son, Teddy, on the front passenger seat, swinging his legs and chattering about the different colors of a python’s skin.

  Did children in England talk of such things? How many told their mother, as Teddy did, that a king cobra could move as fast as a galloping horse? Was this normal?

  In Malaya, nothing was normal.

  They were heading back home along the eight miles to the Hadley Estate. It was a vast tract of land that had been in the Hadley family for three generations, hacked by hand out of the raw jungle at the end of the nineteenth century, and was now the largest rubber plantation in the region, just to the northeast of Kuala Lumpur. It stretched in shimmering layers of dense green for over five thousand acres toward mountains that reared up blue and hazy in the distance, and employed nearly seven hundred laborers, a mongrel mix of Malays, Tamils, and Chinese.

  Nine years ago when Connie, full of youthful excitement, first stepped off the boat into the sweltering heat of Malaya, she had been astounded not only by the size and lush extravagance of the beauty of the estate, but also by the power of an estate owner—the Tuan Besar—over his workforce. It seemed to her that Nigel was like a god, a father, a judge, a bank manager, a doctor, and King Solomon all rolled into one. If he put a black mark against a laborer’s name, then that native would find work nowhere else in the district, but if a man was a skilled rubber tapper or a diligent finisher of the rubber sheets in the packing sheds who buckled down to the tough discipline of plantation life, he was highly valued and treated well.

  Nigel knew nearly all his workmen by name. That fact alone had stuck in Connie’s mind and impressed her enormously when he had mentioned it as she danced in his arms to a slow foxtrot at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Out here in the tropics, swamped by a never-ending tide of brown and yellow faces, she had found it even more incredible.

  “Why are you driving so slowly, Mummy?” Her son’s voice was impatient.

  “I’m being careful, sweetheart.”

  “But it will take ages to get home.”

  “There’s no rush.”

  Teddy swiveled to face her on the front seat of the Chrysler. “Yes, there is, Mummy. I have to build my airplane again.”

  She risked taking her eyes off the dirt road for a split second. It was full of potholes and gullies where monsoon rains had scoured channels in the red earth that could crack a car’s crankcase if you weren’t alert. Teddy’s young face was so earnest, his eyes as round and bright as chestnuts. She noticed that his school uniform of white shirt and gray shorts was streaked with grass stains, the collar torn, and there was a telltale scratch on the tip of his chin.

  “What is it, Teddy?” she asked. “Have you been fighting with Jack?”

  Her son shook his head adamantly, the waves of his thick brown hair ruffling in the breeze from the open window. As fast as he had his hair cut it seemed to grow again overnight, framing his small face and sticking out over his ears.

  “No,” he said. But he was no good at lying.

  “Jack is your best friend,” she said gently.

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Oh, Teddy, what was the fight about this time?”

  His slight seven-year-old body slumped back in the seat, and he picked in silence at a scab on his leg. Connie gave him time, as immaculate straight lines of plantation trees slid past the window. It was Field 16, a fine stand of hundreds of young rubber saplings planted in rows thirty feet apart, the trees ten feet from each other. The Rubber Research Institute of Malaya recommended an initial planting of 240 trees to the acre, reducing to 100 trees an acre once they were grown and ready for tapping for their white flow of latex. But Nigel insisted he kept the land so well fed with fertilizer and rock phosphate that he could get away with 120 trees per acre and still produce a top-class yield.

  The sun hung directly overhead, so that shadows formed in dark balls at the base of the trunks. School started for Teddy at eight o’clock in the morning and finished at one o’clock, to avoid the worst of the exhausting heat of the afternoon. In the car the air was as oppressive as Connie’s thoughts.

  Listen, white lady. The words hissed through her brain.

  “Nothing lasts here.”

  She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She felt Teddy’s gaze turn to her, and he tucked his hand between the seat and her damp back, something he did only when he was worried.

  “Won’t we last?” he asked.

  “Of course we will, sweetheart. So will your friendship with Jack. I only meant . . .” Oh Christ, what did she mean? “I only meant that the tires wear out quickly on these rough roads. Cars break down easily.”

  “Is that why you had the crash today? Did the car break?”

  “No, darling. It was an accident caused by another nasty car, but don’t worry about it. We’ll get the dents mended and we’ll be fine. Now tell me what happened with Jack.”

  “His Brewster Buffalo shot down my Fairey Battle.”

  Connie’s heart sank. Her young son had spent all of last weekend building the airplane out of balsa wood with painstaking care, the tip of his tongue clamped between his small white teeth. His dogged patience amazed her. The results were sometimes a little rough and ragged at the edges, but they were all his own work and Connie was immensely proud of his sticky little fingers. Since the war in Europe started two years ago in 1939, her son had become obsessed with airplanes, his bedroom walls covered in recognition charts. He could name every aircraft in the sky the way other people named birds.

  “Don’t worry, Teddy, I’ll help you build a new one.”

  She pulled over to the side of the road and dropped ten cents into her son’s hand. This was one of their rituals. Each day on the journey home from school Teddy bought a slice of fruit from the roadside stall. It stood next to a small shrine that was constructed out of brightly painted stones and adorned with frangipani flowers, a small blue statue of a Hindu goddess, and a bowl of colored rice. A rat, fat and bold, sat on its haunches beside the shrine, munching on stolen rice grains.

  Teddy skipped over the ruts to the fruit stall and pointed at two large slices of watermelon. She watched him chatter away to the man serving on the stall—Teddy’s command of the Malay language was far superior to her own. He seemed to absorb the strange words as readily as her pillow absorbed her
strange dreams at night. He had lived here all his short life, and had no fear of this alien and exotic country. He wasn’t afraid of snakes the way she was, nor did he shiver at the thought of one of the Communist agitators in the workforce slitting Nigel’s throat in bed at night.

  This year, there had been numerous labor strikes in the tin mines up at Gambang and in the gold mines at Raub, and now the unrest was spreading to the rubber plantations up and down the length of the Malay Peninsula. The demand for rubber for tires and waterproofing had increased in a steady climb ever since the war had started in Europe, and rubber had been designated priority cargo for the war effort. America and Britain were clamoring for it. Inevitably the price had skyrocketed. From five pence a pound to twelve pence a pound, and now the labor force that helped to produce it was demanding a hefty raise in their meager wages. She could see their point. It was the Chinese workers who were the troublemakers, stirring up the easygoing Malays, but Nigel assured her it would blow over eventually. It was the Japanese, not the Chinese, they should be worrying about, he said.

  Connie and Teddy sat in the car together eating the red flesh of the melon, spitting the black pips out of the open windows with expert aim, a brief moment of normality in a day that was anything but normal. When she’d finished she tossed the green rind out onto the roadside and within half a minute it was covered in a shiny black coating of ants, their huge jaws capable of reducing it to nothing in the blink of an eye. This was a country in which the jungle and its voracious insects smothered and devoured everything. Especially tender-skinned white people.

  She wiped her hands on her handkerchief and dabbed at Teddy’s face with it. She smiled at him. “Come on, Pilot Officer Hadley, let’s go and build you a new Fairey Battle plane.”

  “I think a Blenheim will be better. It carries more bombs.”

  She tweaked his chin toward her and inspected the scratch. She must remember to put antiseptic on it. If not, in a day or two she could be picking tiny white maggots out of it with tweezers.

  “Very well, a Blenheim it shall be.”