The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness

by Malcolm Pryce

  Our driver was a scrawny man, a scarecrow of sinew the colour of deep wood stain. He stood upright on the pedals to gain the necessary force to overcome the inertia, the muscles in his legs strained like hawsers, but once we were under way he sat back down and pedalled with more ease.

  We ploughed slowly through the sea of oncoming people like a fish going the wrong way through a shoal. The narrow thoroughfare forced the people to jostle together and proceed like toothpaste squeezed from a tube. The whole world had come out to play, and one supposed this was largely because the intensifying heat of the dying day rendered whatever hovels they lived in unbearably hot. Neither did it seem that great store was set by leaving babies behind to stew; the tiniest of children, sometimes already wearing their pyjamas, walked along with the adults. The night air was a riot of noises: car horns, electronic music, a girl singing, shouts, and rising and falling with uncanny synchronicity, a chorus of cicadas, as if somewhere in this neighbourhood tonight a giant was frying bacon.

  ‘We’ll have fun tonight,’ said Earwig.

  I said nothing, wondering what the word ‘fun’ conveyed to him.

  ‘You a bit of a sportsman, are you, Jack?’

  ‘Can’t really say I am, although I did play football at school.’

  He laughed. ‘Football! That’s a good one. Well, even if you are not, you soon will be. You’ll start off saying, “Oh no, I could never do anything like that!”, and then you will. I did. Everyone does. Except Spaulding. You should have seen Curtis when he first came.’ He laughed again and the driver lurched without warning into an alley to our right, one darker and less congested, the gloom pricked by the licking orange tongues of cooking fires in stoves on stalls that lined the way.

  Behind the stalls a wide expanse of seating stood in the darkness under awnings strung up without much planning and festooned with lights. One got the impression that these dark canvas caverns continued for miles, like mine workings, into the heart of Bangkok. From time to time Chinamen ambled across our path swinging upside-down cockerels in one hand and long curved knives in the other. Along the floor, under the tables, other captive birds stared out from wicker baskets. Some stalls had tanks of live fish and crustacea, and from time to time one would be fished out with a net and deposited straight into a sizzling wok.

  ‘They’ll eat anything, these people. You wouldn’t believe,’ said Earwig. ‘Dogs, rats, bats, frogs, hornets, snakes … anything with four legs except a table.’ On saying that he dug me sharply in the ribs to alert me to the fact, lest I hadn’t been aware, that this was a joke. I formed the impression that it wasn’t originally his joke but that he used it often.

  ‘How amusing,’ I said. ‘Do they really eat those things?’

  ‘Those are quite tame. Live monkey brains, ever hear of that?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ve seen it. They have a special table with a hole in the middle. The monkey’s head sticks up and they take the top off like a boiled egg. Then they stick their spoons in.’

  ‘That really does sound quite appalling. Are you having a joke at my expense?’

  ‘I swear to you it’s true, Jack.’

  We pulled up at one of the restaurants and pushed through to a vacant table where we were waited on at once by a boy in short trousers and grubby vest. Spaulding took command and spoke to the boy in Siamese in a manner that suggested he was quite comfortable in that language. Earwig nodded to me with a gleam of proprietorial admiration in his eye, as if to say with regard to his proficiency, ‘Look at that!’ It was clear there were many things that Spaulding could do that Earwig admired.

  Beers quickly arrived and we chinked the chipped glasses and drank each other’s health. The beer was called Singha and came in a brown bottle wrapped in a label featuring the image of a golden lion. The beer tasted unlike any beer I had tasted before: it had a cloying sweetness that contrasted with a slight medicinal flavour. Although unusual, I did not find it unpleasant. The heat was even stronger here in the airless covered restaurant, almost as hot as when one opened the firebox door, but much more humid. In such an atmosphere there are few things more welcome than a cold beer.

  We did not have to wait long for the food. Spaulding had ordered both Siamese and Chinese dishes and explained what they were when they arrived. Grilled chicken feet, roasted sparrow, fried grasshopper, fried beetle, cobra soup and a green curry. And rice. And more beers. The other diners ate with chopsticks, but without being asked the serving staff placed a fork and spoon down for each of us. ‘Tuck in,’ said Spaulding, reaching over with his spoon and scooping up some grasshoppers. Not wishing to be considered a wet blanket, which I suspected was the secret object of this escapade, I followed suit and crunched them thoughtfully. They were not unpleasant. They weren’t really anything.

  My thoughts turned to Jenny. She had been quite amused when I told her the chaps wanted to take me out, predicting all manner of lurid itineraries, only half in jest. The truth was, I would much rather be with her. The juvenile misbehaviour that men are traditionally expected to view as entertaining has always struck me as tedious. I was afraid if this was what they had in mind, the chaps were going to find me a terrible disappointment.

  ‘Good source of protein,’ said Spaulding, and looked at Roger, who raised a hand to minutely adjust his question-mark-shaped quiff and said, ‘Rather!’ He wore a permanent smile, slightly supercilious, as if life for him were a puzzling joke, and yet in his eyes there was a vacancy that suggested there was no one there doing the smiling.

  A stallholder to my left fished his hand into an Ali Baba basket and drew out a cobra, head held at the throat between two practised fingers. With his other hand he sliced the snake open with a razor, then reached in and pulled a throbbing bit of flesh and handed it to a customer who swallowed it.

  ‘Gall bladder,’ Spaulding explained. ‘You might want to try some yourself, it helps a man … remain alert. Curtis went wild for it.’

  ‘Curtis liked to remain alert,’ said Earwig. ‘There are better ways, though.’ He drew what looked like a packet of sweets from his pocket and showed me. ‘This is what you need, keeps you going. I can let you have some if you like.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Panzer-Schokolade,’ he replied unhelpfully.

  ‘Tank chocolate?’ I translated.

  ‘It’s what they used, isn’t it? The German panzer crews. And our boys too, the pilots.’

  ‘Benzedrine,’ said Spaulding. ‘Filthy stuff if you ask me.’

  ‘Each to his own,’ said Earwig. ‘You know, you can get anything you desire here, in Bangkok. Anything.’

  ‘I rather fancy I will disappoint you,’ I said warily, anxious not to encourage them. ‘I consider myself for the most part a contented man.’

  ‘Have you ever been out East before?’ said Spaulding.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘You may struggle to hold on to that air of contentment,’ he said. ‘It’s easy being content in a shop selling orthopaedic shoes, but what about in a sweet shop?’

  The smallholder fished out a plateful of live shrimp. They danced and jumped and tickled the empty air crazily with legs like broken cocktail sticks. He threw them into a wok of boiling fat that exploded into clouds of steam that quickly disappeared. Then he poured in liquor of some description that sent the whole mess bursting into flames, and filling the air with the most intoxicating reek of charcoal, charred fish and alcohol.

  ‘There are the girls, of course,’ said Earwig, ‘but that’s just the start. Guns, drugs, gems …’

  ‘Or if you want to hurt someone,’ said Roger, ‘that can be arranged.’ I looked at him, aware that this was the first time he had spoken this evening.

  ‘Or adventure,’ said Earwig. ‘Fancy yourself as a soldier of fortune? You can find an agent who will find you a war.’

  ‘That’s if your tastes are conventional,’ said Spaulding. ‘Contented men usually have tastes that are less obvious. Back
home there is no way they can easily be accommodated, so they linger, they grow like a monster living in the sewer fed on the scraps that fall down the drains.’

  I looked him in the eye. ‘Was Curtis a contented man?’

  He held his glass an inch below his chin and considered. ‘I would say he was most discontented.’

  ‘That surprises me. The information that I have is that he was one of those men in life who lack the imagination to be particularly discontented.’

  ‘People like that are always the ones who surprise you. Some of them go a whole life without ever once revealing the monster – it lies dormant till the day they die. With others it breaks free late on in life, and wreaks havoc. They are the ones who surprise you. It is always the quiet, spectacled librarian who turns out to be the best torturer.

  ‘Earwig talks about girls. Yes, you can get girls here, you can buy them for an hour or a lifetime for very little money. You can use them as your slave and subject them to the most vile degradations if that is what you like. Whatever it is … whatever terrible dream that nestles in the hidden cellar of your heart, the dream so dark and appalling you dare not even acknowledge it … here you will find the one opportunity in this world to assuage it. Here you will find people more depraved than you who will not blink to supply for money the corruption your heart dares not even name to itself.’ He took a violent swallow of his beer and said, ‘I have to tell you plainly, Mr Wenlock, your Mr Curtis was a most terrible rotten egg.’

  We returned to the samlors and continued through the dark, sweaty, perfumed night to another assignation. As we rode I considered the strange narrative of Curtis that was being presented to me. The tale of a man who for years harbours some unnameable vice in the cellar of his heart, whose will finally crumbles and unleashes the forces of doom that he willingly embraces. It was a story violently at odds with the image of the human wallflower I had received so far. I thought of the Countess in Cornwall, telling his story through tendrils of mauve, late afternoon cigarette smoke. Could she have been so wrong about her son? Her own flesh and blood? Or was Mr Spaulding a man utterly without scruple?

  Along the road urchins sold necklaces of flowers, and the perfume intermingled with the cooking smells and sweetened the reek of stagnation. Amid the crowds there was the occasional flash of amber, like fireworks, as groups of monks passed barefoot, shaven-headed and clad in saffron robes. Although I had no idea where we were, we seemed to be moving ever deeper into the labyrinth of alleys and small lanes, into the dark heart of this town.

  The closeness of the houses made me think of images that I had once seen in a book of the poorer districts of London in the times of Dickens. Like those times, this felt like a human stew. The air and ground throbbed with the energy of so many people going and coming, never still, incessantly about some business like bees in a hive or at the calyx of a flower. You can get anything you want here, Earwig had said. Was that not true of all great cities where not far from beautiful houses lay districts where people lived in poverty too abject to contemplate? Or was there something here that other cities did not possess?

  I lacked the imagination to picture to myself the desires of desperate men. My life had been spent in service of the railway and my wants had been small and not greatly difficult to gratify. At the Weeping Cross Railway Servants’ Orphanage the food was, I can see looking back, spartan. But at the time I had nothing to compare it with, and thus did not hunger or crave things I had no knowledge of.

  It is only since the war ended and my employment with the railway terminated that I have known hardship, but I know that such hardship is soft compared with the agonies of those – and there are so many – who are truly destitute. And though I cannot imagine the tastes of those whom Earwig refers to when he says you can get anything you want, I have still frequently encountered men driven to desperation by the promptings of these tastes, men who destroy themselves like moths consumed in a candle flame.

  I have seen, many times, ladies with bruised faces who have assured me all was well, and seen the terrible remains of ladies caught in trees who leapt to their deaths from speeding trains. I have caught men accompanying young children who were not their own, and I have read with grisly bafflement the scant details of the subsequent court cases. A man can get anything he wants here, but is that why Curtis came? From what little I knew of him I had formed the impression of a wallflower who went through life causing as little fuss as possible, and then one day some strange upset caused him to go off the rails.

  His mother had said his recent letters contained evidence of a man growing more and more unwell. The concierge at the Raffles spoke of a nervous breakdown occasioned by the Fall of Singapore, and in particular the symbolic interment of the silver roast beef trolley. If this was true, then his quest around the shores of Borneo in search of my mother had accelerated a process that was already in train, the way a volcano can rumble gently for many years, the pressure inside slowly building, until one day the plug of solidified lava that fills the throat blows clear like a champagne cork and the surrounding countryside catches fire beneath a rain of burning rock.

  Why did he come here? Was his quest at an end? Did he perhaps have a hankering – part of his inner moral collapse – to star in a film? Or was it merely for a reunion with Sam Flamenco, with whom he had formed that unlikely partnership?

  But would going off the rails for him involve what was, to all extents and purposes, a form of pilgrimage to the stews of licentiousness? It seemed to me that this was the version one would find in an adventure novel, and it was from this that the chaps were drawing their inspiration. I felt that this evening was really a pantomime arranged to give me the impression that Curtis had done what many men who come to these strange and unfamiliar climes do. It did not ring true for me.

  I turned to Spaulding. ‘Why do you say Curtis was a rotten egg?’

  ‘I didn’t like the cut of his jib.’

  ‘In Singapore they told me he did something that scandalised the British community here.’

  ‘It’s true. On my birthday. Frankly it nauseated me.’

  ‘I heard he turned up wearing a necklace of human ears.’

  ‘He did, but it wasn’t that, it was the rest of the outfit that I objected to.’

  ‘I see,’ I said although I did no such thing. ‘What was he wearing?’

  ‘It hardly matters. I shouldn’t worry about him, though. If he’s gone off with a tart it won’t last long. He didn’t strike me as having a lot of money. Once it runs out, the love will be over. He’s probably down at the coast somewhere, right now. Pattaya or Hua Hin, or one of the islands. You see them sitting outside their rented villas, staring into the evening sky. If you catch him early, he’ll be in a sort of delirium of joy. Later on, you’ll find him sitting on a chair staring out to sea looking crushed by the utter boredom of it all. That’s when they start to quarrel.’

  The beer must have been much stronger than I had imagined, because I seemed to have fallen asleep for a part of the journey. I awoke midway through some speech Spaulding was giving about a banquet once given by the old Manchu emperors.

  ‘… three hundred courses, six days to eat. Frog’s belly, carp tongue, leopard foetus, rhinoceros tails and deer tendons, elephant trunk, gorilla lip, monkey brain and camel hump, and to finish it off, egg tart.’

  I nodded, my mind bleary.

  ‘The best bit is this: bear’s left paw. But specifically the left one, because that is the one it licks and is therefore considered more tender. Thing is, how did they know which one it licked? Do all bears lick the left paw? What do you think?’

  We pulled up outside what appeared to be a down-at-heel hotel. A group of blind musicians played next to the entrance. One of them, a girl, raised a tin cup at the sound of our arrival and said, ‘You good heart, sir.’ It was unclear whether it was a statement or a question. Or perhaps just an expression of hope. A camera flashed in our faces – it belonged to a man wearing a dark suit and an
inexpertly knotted tie. Spaulding shooed him away impatiently.

  We entered a dimly lit passage. To the right was a small hotel desk, unmanned, with wooden pigeonholes behind containing keys. A telephone sitting to one side was the only sign of hotel life. To the left was a door leading into a bare tiled room in which some people were playing cards at a table. A fat lady with her back to us looked round with great effort. On seeing us, she stood up with even greater effort, and shuffled forward. She wore a dark skirt that rippled on her like the skin of a caterpillar. Her arms and shoulders were bare, and gleamed with gold bangles. Her face was thickly powdered white, like a ping-pong ball, and her dark thin eyes glittered.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Spaulding. ‘Paradise.’

  We followed the lady upstairs. I tripped on the step and had to be helped by Spaulding. I was aware of feeling increasingly out of sorts. I wondered what Jenny was doing and longed to be with her.

  At the top of the stairs was a busy Chinese restaurant. The waiters wore jackets and ties, the waitresses cheongsams in midnight-blue silk.

  We moved to the next room, a private room. I was finding it difficult to walk, but had enough presence of mind to refuse the offered opium. I ordered a cup of tea instead, which came without milk and tasted like the water one boils sprouts in. A girl brought a pipe about 18 inches long with a porcelain bowl at one end, and put it down next to a lamp on the table.

  ‘It’s the breath of God,’ said Spaulding. ‘Ethereal, celestial, it’s like the world becomes a flower, did you know that? There’s nothing like it.’

  The girl unwrapped a piece of opium the size of a gobstopper, like a ball of dough. She divided it into smaller balls the size of peas, then put one on a small piece of wood and held it over the lamp, while shaping it with a spindle held in the other hand. It began to sizzle. Once satisfied she put it in the pipe and handed it to Roger, who sucked on it greedily, his face becoming for a second a gargoyle of longing: cheeks gaunt, eyes almost popping. He leaned back, eyes closed in some unimaginable delirium, and said softly, ‘Rather!’