The morning was dark, heavy-clouded and humid. Alladad Khan spoke to the windscreen a long Urdu speech. Nabby Adams listened contemptuously. “He says he thinks it’s going to rain,” he translated. “But what does he know about it, I’d like to know. I know what he really means. He wants to push on, so he can get back to his wife and child to-night. He doesn’t want me to start boozing anywhere. Anyway,” said Nabby Adams, “we’ll christen the journey, so to speak. That kedai there, just up that road.”
In the kedai, a squalid hut where chickens ran and a goat waved its placid beard, there were some Sikhs, happily drinking from a bottle of high-grade samsu. They begged the newcomers to join their party, smiling fatly behind their beards. But Alladad Khan was stern. One bottle only. Nabby Adams spoke eloquently, protesting, reviling, but Alladad Khan was adamant. They had to push on. He looked out through the dirty window at the dirty sky, clouds moving sluggishly in heavy coils.
“Who does he think he is?” said Nabby Adams. “Ordering his superiors about. Just because he’s taken a bit of money out of his wife’s saving-box he thinks he can bloody well rule me. Well, he can’t.” But, meekly enough, he drank his warm beer, and, as the sky darkened yet further, consented to continue the long journey.
“Are the people really different up there?” asked Fenella. Cool libraries with anthropology sections were in her head. She automatically saw form in her mind the exordium of a stock monograph: “The aborigines of the Upper Lanchap present, ethnologically and culturally, a very different picture from the inhabitants of the coastal areas. …”
“You’ll see some of them,” said Nabby Adams. “With blowpipes and stark ballock-naked.” Off his guard, trying to stem his dog’s elaborate affection, he had let that out. Shocked, he began to apologise, but soon desisted. It was no good. He had no drawing-room talents. He had better shut up. Gloomily he closed his eyes and watched the figures dance and leer at him:
Bung Cheong $157
Heng Seng $39
He dozed liverishly. In his dream he was drinking in Bombay, paying for rounds with ample rupees. So grateful were his drinking companions that they came closer to him, speaking in happy pants their thirsty gratitude, and one black-bearded drinker licked him wetly, juicily, on the nose. With deep grumbles he pushed the dog away. As they rolled on, under the heavy sky, past the rubber trees and squalid villages, Crabbe slept a little too. He had not been sleeping well lately. When, at two or three in the morning, he sank into deep exhausted oblivion he always had to fight his way out from a cold coffin of water, and, waking, seek a cigarette and a book, scared of yielding again to those deceptive arms.
Alladad Khan and Fenella spoke softly together, in slow Malay garnished with a few English words. She was learning fast to understand him, to make herself understood.
“She is wearing me down,” said Alladad Khan. “When I am out late she wants to know where I have been. She will not believe me when I say I have been on duty. Now she is saying that I have been seen with a European woman, and she cries and calls me bad names, and now she is asking her brother to try and arrange for me to be transferred into his district so that he can see what I am doing all the time. It is becoming hell.”
“Be master,” said Fenella. “Tell her you will do what you like. You owe nothing to her. You do not even …”
“But there is the question of responsibility, of duty. I married her, I have to consider her.”
“If she starts whining or complaining again you must try hitting her.”
“A man should not hit a woman.”
“A woman sometimes welcomes a blow. She always knows when it is deserved.”
“You open my eyes,” said Alladad Khan.
The rain, like a football crowd, was waiting to charge and rush at the opening of the gates. The jungle that stood back sullenly and threateningly to let the road go through looked defiled and clotted in the thickening light. Mist rested halfway up the mountains. Soon the rain started in an orchestral roar.
“This will make us late,” said Alladad Khan. “It becomes hard to see and the roads quickly become flooded.” The windscreen wipers swished softly and monotonously, like, thought Alladad Khan, like himself rocking that baby. Left to right to left to right to left. The car soon seemed islanded in water. The two at the back awoke to heavy wetness on their faces, and all the windows were shut tight. Still the water soaked in and the car floor was thinly flooded. Nabby Adams was monotonous in grumbling Urdu, swinging the deep words from left to right to left to right to left.
“We’ll have to stop soon,” he said. “We’re not far off Tomcat or whatever it’s called.”
“Tongkat?”
“Yes, Tomcat. There’s a couple of kedais there. We can wait till the rain stops.” Thirst began to oppress Nabby Adams heavily. The dry mouth after the unrefreshing nap, the heat in the car, airless, the steamed windows fast battened.
Gloom sat at the next table when, the car parked in a rain-pool among jubilant ducks, they rested their elbows on the clammy marbled top and waited for beer. The rain lashed and swished and emptied down, drinking the drab land with a dropsical passion.
“I think,” said Nabby Adams, “we’d all better go into silent prayer.” Suddenly, unbidden, a memory congealed in his mind of himself as sexton’s assistant pumping the organ on Good Friday, long ago. The trees had wept, the gravestones sluiced in the spring flood. And all the time himself pumping away and then, in the last chorus of Stainer’s Crucifixion, he had decided to leave off, to hell with it, and he left the organist stranded in mid-chord, the air groaning out to nothingness, like the air coming out of a corpse in a moan when you lift it to wash its back.
“Father, forgive them,” said Nabby Adams, “for they know not what they do.” The dog came to lick his hand and then, smelling of old tinned peaches, tried to climb on his lap. They drank their flat washy bottled beer, and Nabby Adams felt a twinge of heartburn.
“The bloody price of it,” he said with sudden passion. He thought of India, and forgot that it ever rained in India.
Crabbe looked at the ‘No Spitting’ notice on the wall and his head swam with the absurdity of four languages telling people not to spit, all on the same notice. A thin Chinese bathing girl beckoned from a calendar. From behind her, in the swimming open kitchen, came the noise of painful expectoration.
“Get it up,” said Nabby Adams, “even if it’s only a bloody bucketful.”
The gleeful savage rain knifed the road again and again and big-drummed on the tin roof and gargled and choked gaily in the gutters.
“Sometimes,” said Fenella, “one could wish one were dead.”
Alladad Khan made a speech. They must push on. Nabby Adams felt a twinge of tooth-ache.
“Do you want something to eat first?” asked Crabbe. They looked at the plates ranged temptingly on the table before them, covered with cloudy plastic bells. There were some cakes of a sick pink colour, little red jellies made in tumbler-moulds, pallid round blobs of dough containing a cold core of minced goat’s liver. They each peeled in silence a tiny banana, ingesting it like a medicine. Nabby Adams felt further twinges in tooth and duodenum.
The rain pounced on them like a pack of big wet dogs as they sought their islanded car. Push on. The rain became their world; they gaped out from their windowed tank, swishing through floods, at the drowned jungle and huts and swimming rice-fields. The road was theirs alone. No other vehicle was to be seen as they squelched on to Gila. Perhaps they had missed the announcement? Perhaps the living and the newly-risen dead had all been instructed to report at some great town of stilled factories and parked cars, no more to be used, for there, at the zenith, in the rain of the Last Day, He stood in His glory, flanked by seraphic trumpeters? And they and that witless hoicking towkay had missed it all, swilling beer without relish, the four of them, miles from life and the end of life. They carried guilt, like an extra spare-wheel, in the boot.
Miraculously, in mid-afternoon, they found themselve
s running out of the rain-belt. They were still twenty miles from Gila. The sky was clearer, the roads dryer, there were people still alive, walking through villages, cycling, even driving an occasional car. Thankfully they wound down the windows. But they must push on, climbing steeply now.
“We’re coming to it, now,” said Nabby Adams. ‘Just our bloody luck, in a way. The terrorists don’t come out much when it’s raining. We could have done with rain here, not back there.” Behind them they could almost hear still the fierce sky-flood.
Fenella was feeling sick. Not frightened, just sick. Sick with the car-journey, sick with a little fever. But she couldn’t ask them to stop, not now, not just yet. Though, in response to a long piece of Urdu from Nabby Adams, Alladad Khan was stopping. …
“Let him handle the gun,” said Nabby Adams. “I’ll drive through this stretch.”
Should she ask them to wait a little while, just to allow her to go over there by the side of the road, so that she could …? But they would think she was frightened.
“Doesn’t do to stop here really,” said Nabby Adams. “Ambush here the other week. We should have changed over farther back down the road. He should have reminded me. It’s his gun. Let him use it, if he has to.”
Fenella felt sicker. They now entered sheer packed jungle, the road winding through in wide curves, almost seeming to double back on itself. Speed was impossible. As Nabby Adams cautiously turned the wheel his dog woke up to the realisation that her place was there, at the front, with him. She fought and squirmed from the holds of Alladad Khan and Crabbe and vaulted clumsily over to lie down at her master’s feet, with the brakes and gear-lever. Nabby Adams started violently and, in a flood of violent speech, nearly drove the car into vast jungle clumps of torrid vegetation. She tried to climb on his knee. There was a struggle to remove her. Fenella held her shaking, panting body to her own, her sick nostrils full of dog-smell. Nabby Adams drove on slowly.
“It’s a bad patch, this,” he said. “You never know where they’ll be. Sometimes they lay a bloody big tree-trunk across the road. Then you know you’ve had it. Stop it,” he said, as the dog stretched painfully to lick his nose.
Another mile. And another. The jungle was terribly silent. The road ran sluggishly between the deep beds of lianas, hacked out of sweating, breathless, obscene, sunless greenery. The tree-tops could not be seen. The sky was choked by the tangled limbs and fingers of parasite growths which choked and sucked their sky-high hosts. There were no noises. Only a snake wormed across in front of them, then swam like a fish through the green sea of jungle floor. Another mile. And another. Alladad Khan, his gun ready to aim, suddenly saw himself, Alladad Khan, in a film, his gun ready to aim. Ha! How far away she seemed, she and her squalling milky brat. Adventure. He heard the atmospheric music of the sound-track.
Another mile. “What’s that?” Crabbe rapped. A movement behind a tree, a shaking of parasite leaves.
“A bloody monkey,” said Nabby Adams.
Another mile. Fenella would have to, here and now, never mind what they thought, if only she could get hold of her handkerchief. … The dog gave her a gamy kiss.
Another mile. Not a sound, only the engine and the slow tyres and the breathing. Now it was like going into the horrible secret essence of green life, shut in by it, annihilating all that’s made. …
They turned and came into clearer road. They could see the sky. The jungle was retreating. “We’re through now,” said Nabby Adams. “We’re all right now. Thank Christ for that. God,” he added, “I’d give my left bloody leg for a nice bottle of Tiger.”
Fenella said, shaken, “Would you mind stopping, just for a minute? I’ve got to …”
By the side of the road the three men ministered to her, encouraged her.
“Get it up,” said Nabby Adams. “Go on, all up. Think of one of them pink cakes in that shop.”
Behind them the jungle crouched, impotent now, locked in its cage again.
10
IBRAHIM WAS NEARLY ready to depart. He had the flat to himself to-day and ample leisure to gather together his barang and choose a few keepsakes from the possessions of his master and mistress. Aminah, the amah, had been given two days off to visit a sick aunt in Taiping. So, with only the pounding rain for company, Ibrahim ruled for a few hours the decaying Residency and sensually had his will of it.
It was better that he should go. Worry had been wearing him down to the bone these last few weeks. It was better that he should go and hide himself in a place where his wife could not find him, whose location the Johore pawangs could not fix. He had been lucky to meet the fat planter from down the Timah road. He had met him in the cinema. Ibrahim knew the fat planter well, had often seen him in the company of a fair young man from the Drainage and Irrigation Department. But lately the fair young man had been seen much in the company of a new man, a white-faced Customs officer with innocent glasses on his tiny nose, and Ibrahim surmised that the fat planter was hurt and lonely. He had told Ibrahim so and offered him the post of cook and friend in his big empty bungalow on the huge estate. No one surely, thought Ibrahim, would ever find him there. There was an estate shop and, three miles away, a small kampong, and, if Ibrahim should wish to taste the pleasures of civilisation, it was easier to get to Tahi Panas than to Kuala Hantu. And the pay was good: one hundred and twenty dollars a month and all found. It was, undoubtedly, a change for the better.
For worry had been making him a bad servant lately. Twofold worry. He had taken Rahimah’s eight dollars and bought himself a lovely new sarong and a few trinkets besides, but that deadly potion lay still in the barang-box under Ibrahim’s bed. Ibrahim was convinced that it was a lethal concoction. He had been hearing that Rahimah now hated Tuan Crabbe and hated Mem Crabbe also, and that she wished them both dead. Or, if not dead, maimed, deformed, Mem certainly bereft of her shining hair, Tuan deprived of his potency. He had heard these stories round the bazaar and in the market. And then he had received a nasty letter from Rahimah, written curtly in tiny Jawi script. “Belum lagi pegang janji. …” He had not fulfilled the agreement, he agreed, but now he knew what she, with woman’s deceit and treachery and downright wickedness, wished him to do. He could not do it. And Rahimah had theatened him with dire punishments. She would get the pawang to stick pins in his image, to raise ghosts which would drive him mad and make him, in screaming desperation, hurl himself from the high balcony.
Two women after him. Ibrahim groaned. But it was well known that they had no power over you if they did not know where you were. The last week or so had been hell. Serving the soup one night he had suddenly screamed and dropped the plates. For a mat by the door of the dining-room had suddenly raised itself, danced a couple of steps nearer to the table, and then stopped. Ibrahim had heard of the demon that disguises itself as a mat, but never before had he seen one. Leaving the mess of steaming broth and broken china on the floor, he had rushed out to his kitchen, there to utter terrified prayer on his knees. And then, one quiet night, washing up the dinner dishes, he had become convinced that there was a hantu dapur lurking behind the refrigerator, ready to do mischief and smash everything up unless appeased with offerings of bananas and rice or an invitation to a party. And, most frightening of all, Ibrahim had been sure that there was a penanggalan floating outside his bedroom window. He almost saw the waving head and neck and the long string of tangled hanging intestines. He almost heard the squeal of ‘Siuh, siuh, siuh’. Thank Allah, these usually only sought houses where there were new babies, thirsting for infant blood. Perhaps the Tamil cleaner in the next quarters, where there was a new baby every year and the annual duty of adding to God’s Kingdom had just been fulfilled. And then somebody had told him that a graveyard ghost had been seen tumbling and rolling in its gravesheet over the lawn at the front of the house. No wonder he was getting thin, no wonder he could not do his work properly.
Tuan had been displeased with him lately and called him harsh names. And Mem had kept saying, as she tasted t
he curry or felt the plates he had forgotten to heat, something that sounded like “Tu bed, tu bed”. Yes, it was as well that he should be going. Ibrahim needed a friend rather than a master, someone who would be kind and loving, even when the curry had too much chilli in it or the mashed potatoes were watery and cold.
Ibrahim now packed his belongings in his box and his imitation-leather attaché-case. He packed also his mistress’s tortoise-shell combs, two cards of hair-clips, a brassiere and a silk slip. Also a feathery fan he had always liked. He took a packet of Tuan’s razor-blades (a gift for his new master) and a couple of tins of cigarettes. He could also do with some bed-sheets. He knew the drawer where these were kept. Also, of course, he must have money. To his annoyance there was no money in the desk-drawers. There was no money anywhere, except a few worthless coins in a little lacquer jug. Tuan had let him down. Still, he could sell something. There were two unopened bottles of gin which would bring him twenty dollars. The sherry bottle was only half-full; he could not do anything with that.
Ibrahim eventually sat down in one of the arm-chairs in the lounge, drinking a glass of orange-squash, looking again at the deadly phial which Rahimah had entrusted to him. The rain lashed and thundered down still, the river was rising. The trishaw he had ordered would be coming for him soon. This would take him as far as the town’s end. Then he could get a bus to Kelapa. Then he could walk to the estate, leaving his box in a kedai to be called back for. He turned and turned the phial over, feeling guilty. He had taken the money and spent it. If it was a deadly poison he could not be blamed. He had acted in all innocence. Perhaps, again, it was not a deadly poison; surely Rahimah would not be so foolish? But love, he thought shuddering, does strange things to a woman. And, in any case, Tuan and Mem had wronged him, Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh. Ibrahim tried to feel hard and bitter, but found it difficult. He pondered for a long time, trying to generate resentment. He had done his best to please them, but they had not been grateful. This was too cold and that was too hot, and this had not enough salt in it and that had too much. And they had not even noticed that he had been losing weight and had things on his mind.
The Malayan Trilogy Page 14
