Hiroshima Joe: A Novel

by Martin Booth

  He gained the cover of the discarded strips of pine and reached up to open the door. The handle was round and smooth and his perspiring palms made grasping it awkward, especially as he dared not stand or even crouch up to get a better purchase on it. He turned it and the door stuck. He looked down and saw he had ignored the bolt at the base, which he now pulled. It cracked open, but with a sound that seemed like a chasm opening in the air. He listened for footsteps, ready to pull his penis out should a guard come to find the cause of the noise and, subsequently, him: he could pretend to be urinating. He had been a prisoner long enough to know he’d get a thorough slapping for this, but that would be all.

  He looked upward. There was a bolt at the top of the door. By great good fortune, it was drawn back.

  The door did not creak as he moved it a half inch at a time. When it was open by a foot he began creeping through into the timber yard behind. He had never seen the door used but knew he would come out by the buckets they used as latrines. Once through, he closed the door as carefully as he had opened it. With it shut on the latch, he stood and tiptoed to the corner of the building. He could see Sandingham across the yard, slouched in his ropes in the burning sun. In the shed the guards were talking loudly to each other.

  By the corner he halted and listened once more. Nothing: all clear. Sandingham’s head was lolling from side to side. His eyes were shut and blood had trickled from his mouth and ear, to congeal as a dark brown stain on his chest. Garry choked back the rage he felt as, impotently, he watched his lover just thirty feet away.

  Going down like a sprinter on his blocks, Garry readied himself for the run. In four seconds he would be behind the wood pile to Sandingham’s right. That was in deep shadow now. He could hide there and figure out what to do next. Quite what it was he was aiming to achieve did not occur to him: he would play it as it came. All he knew was that he felt he had to do something to help Sandingham.

  Sandingham raised his head. He opened his eyes once more and saw Garry behind the angle of the shed. It was plain to him that his friend had in mind some sort of escape; perhaps he planned to cut him loose or maybe he was just bringing him water. His throat was parched. Yet he knew that to do anything at all was asking for a terrible retribution. Sandingham had to stop him, but he couldn’t call out for that would attract the guards. Besides, his mouth was too dry to make more than a croak. He looked hard at him and shook his head. To do so caused rivers of pain to rush through his chest and his neck. His damaged ear rattled and bubbled as if it were full of liquid.

  He made every effort to force a word out of his mouth, but he could not. It was dry and his throat was scorched with the bile he had puked up with the water.

  Garry rose from his bunched position and broke cover.

  ‘Miro! Dassoda!’

  The bullets caught him in the side and, at such short range, he was hoisted off the ground and sailed fully six feet into the wire. His neck was split open below his Adam’s Apple and the windpipe hung through the gash. His arm was shattered. His legs tore open at the thighs. He hung on the wire for a moment and then dropped, as if at his leisure, on to his knees. Then he pitched forward and lay still, twitching slightly.

  Sandingham wanted to die.

  The two guards advanced upon Garry’s body with unease. They prodded it with their rifles, as they might a wild animal, before taking it by one arm and dragging it into the shade of the office. There, to stop his quivering, they bayonetted him several times through the spine.

  With the heat building on to his grief and dazed state of pain, Sandingham passed out. When he came to the sun was much lower and the prisoners had departed in the lorry. There was no movement in the timber yard and no sound except for a lone bird. He turned his head in the direction of the wire and saw, through the fence upon which tiny shrivelled bits of Garry still adhered, a brown bird the size of an English thrush. It was whistling a plain song. Its breast and throat filled with air then deflated as it gave its call. After five minutes it stopped its singing and hopped, two legs together with each jump, to the papaya at which it started to peck, devouring the seeds from the dirt and then extracting them from the fruit itself. It was oblivious of the ants.

  There was the steadily increasing din of a vehicle approaching. The hancho rushed from the door of the office into the yard and swung the gates open. A lorry drove in which Sandingham had not previously seen. From it issued five guards and an NCO, a socho or sergeant-major. He was heavily built and it was plain to Sandingham that he was not of Japanese stock. He spoke his orders with a guttural accent. The soldiers obeyed him with considerable alacrity. They untied Sandingham from the log, retied him more tightly with his hands behind his back, a length of cord running from his hands to his ankles which were placed in a rope manacle. He was pulled to the lorry and bodily thrown into it. The guards positioned themselves around him.

  In the meantime the Korean socho had been giving the hancho what Sandingham, in different circumstances, would have termed a ‘right bollocking’. This culminated with the hancho bowing and the socho giving his face a resounding slap.

  The lorry drove off in the direction of the camp.

  At the gate, the commandant stood in front of Sandingham and punched and slapped him about a bit in front of a small gathering of PoWs. It was an object lesson for them to see the harvest of criminal activity. He was then taken to an office in the commandant’s building and given a third degree interview in Japanese, much of which he did not understand, the translator being absent. He was able to grasp that he was accused of stealing food from the Japanese people which, under Rule Four on the board, meant ‘big punish and death may be’: the Imperial Japanese Army, he was told, was made up of the entire people of Japan, all of whom were fighting for the glory of their land and Emperor: so, to steal from a farmer was to steal from the armed forces.

  He cowered at the sight of the guards. He pleaded and begged forgiveness. He swore innocence. He screamed for mercy. He screamed in agony. He accepted his guilt. He denied it. He submitted to everything, for there was no alternative.

  By midnight, Sandingham was semi-conscious. He had been beaten in the ordinary sense of the word, had had one of his thumb-nails wrenched off and the soles of his feet scorched with matches and cigarette butts. Most of his interrogation took place with his questioners seated and he himself standing with his arms tied behind his back and just above his waist. This did not quite dislocate his shoulders. He had been forced to drink over a gallon of water after asking feebly at ten o’clock for a drink. The water in his stomach now made him bloated and heavy. He had tried hard not to urinate but had been unable to stop himself. At eleven-fifteen he became aware, as if it was happening to another, of the warm liquid running down his leg. It gave him the strange sensation of childhood guilt, so out of place in such a bizarre, wicked situation. The guards and the socho laughed at him for this then punished his act by singeing his testicles with a match, burning the hairs off as one might prepare a plucked chicken.

  He was left standing until morning when he was cut down and placed in eiso.

  Solitary confinement in the camp was served in a cell with no light. Sandingham stayed there for the winter months of 1944, living on the most frugal diet necessary to keep him alive. He heard little and saw nothing but the arrival and removal of his food and his lavatory bucket.

  At first, he tried pacing his tiny cell for exercise, attempting to walk three miles a day, the distance from his father’s house to the Five Feathers public house. He worked it out in his head: one step was 32 inches and he could take two steps across the cell. There were 1760 yards in a mile, 5280 feet, 63,360 inches. Divide this by 64 inches: here he found his mind at first fuddled but later clearer when he worked it out in the dirt on the floor. That went in 990 times so there were 1980 steps to the mile, 5940 steps to the saloon bar of the Five Feathers. As he walked, he tried to visualise landmarks on the way – the gate leading on to the common, the Methodist chapel outside the vi
llage, the farm duck pond, the derelict barn by the copse. But he found this an onerous pastime and it made him sick with longing and nostalgia. He tried doing press-ups and bunny-hops but they rapidly sapped his strength. He thought to count the time off but was soon lost.

  After a few weeks, he existed in a dream world of nostalgia, hatred, fear, love, self-pity and loss. He relived his life and worries. He grappled with his unwarranted guilt at being a homosexual, a man who rejected God, a man who sought peace. He was in turn an avowed heterosexual, a devout Christian and a warrior. He was a king, a pauper, a demon, a god, a creature of darkness. What he was not, in those months, was a man. All he remembered constantly in his befuddled mind was Garry’s courageous stupidity and Mr Mishima’s undercover friendship.

  For hours in some of the ceaseless days, Sandingham tried to reason why Garry had acted in such a way. Was it because he planned to escape, and that was the easiest way? he wondered. Possibly it hadn’t been planned at all, was just some spur-of-the-moment decision – or not even that, just an involuntary action, a reflex spurred by some drive deeper than he or Garry would know. At other times, he wondered if it was out of love. But the more he tried to puzzle it out, the more he remembered and the more it hurt until, finally, he actively pressed such thoughts out of his mind.

  And, spinning head upon heel through these waking and sleeping nightmares revolved the same tormenting thought, unanswered and unanswerable: Bob was dead. Garry was dead. He was alive. What was it that was saving him?

  In the cell, he passed his third Christmas in captivity, excluding the one upon which he had been caught, and saw in 1945.

  PART NINE

  Hong Kong: Autumn, 1952

  THE BRISK WIND was coarse with heat. The dust eddied in the dirt track by the Chinese middle school along the road from the hotel. Sandingham walked down the track, tripping and stumbling in the dry runnels made by the torrents of rain from the three tropical storms that had driven across the South China Sea in the first half of September. He had been up to Ho Man Tin ‘village’ to see if there were any chance of his obtaining by stealth, thievery or purchase a small amount of opium. He had remaining only his hidden emergency supply in his room.

  Ho Man Tin was a squatter area in the heart of the Kowloon peninsula. Situated on a barren hill of gravelly earth interspersed with boulders, it was densely crowded and inhabited largely by refugees from Red China who had managed, against the will of the Hong Kong authorities and probably of God himself, to get into the colony.

  The population of Ho Man Tin lived in a shanty town as ingenious as it was over-populated. The shacks were constructed out of whatever could be found at hand: metal sheeting, tea chests, scrap timber, cardboard and tar-paper, hessian sacking – the detritus of the city. This cramped town within a town was almost a state in itself, with its own map of lanes and alleys known by heart to every being who lived there. It had its own sewerage system of meandering, circuitous ditches a foot wide and six inches deep that slugged along through the shacks and lean-tos and flowed, especially when it rained, to either a nullah of the city planners’ design or a low-lying sump of valley with a natural soak-away. The lack of laid-on water supplies – water was obtained from stand-pipes in the nearest streets, up to five hundred yards away – gave rise to a thriving business in the carriage of buckets and tins on bamboo yokes or the backs of bicycles. As in the big city outside, wherever a service was required there was an eager band of opportunists to fill the demand.

  The closeness of the shacks made them a health hazard in the summer and a fire hazard in the winter. The inhabitants made a living by conducting any employment they could obtain or industry which required no capital investment – or as little as possible. Many were general coolies, labourers on building sites and in the streets. There were rickshaw drivers and petty smugglers, tricycle-pedallers and cricket-fighting gamblers and beggars. And there were those who fashioned hand-beaten pots, mugs and cheap vases, made soap and glue from bones and animal fat, joss-sticks from sandalwood powder and the bone glue, hair oil (from the same source as the soap), baskets from split bamboo, cotton from waste cloth, string, shoelaces … Some, more enterprising than the others, manufactured illegal matches, clay ‘cherry’ bombs and even fireworks. These, in the right season, could maim one man and make forty thousand homeless in an hour of holocaust, the flames fanned by a stiff, cool, winter breeze. Inevitably, some of the people of Ho Man Tin lived by crime.

  The criminals were not in the same league as Francis Leung. They were pickpockets, burglars of the poor, stealers of food and the raw materials required by the area’s little industries, whores and pimps for whores for the coolies, swindlers of tourists, illegal hawkers, bag-snatchers and minor drug-dealers.

  The latter did not supply to even the small opium dens hidden in the back streets of Kowloon, such as the one Sandingham frequented. They did not provide the premises for chasing the dragon, only the opium with which to do it in the privacy of one’s own shanty. Their supplies invariably reached them through the same channels, directed their way by the Leungs and other such big-time operators, but were often of inferior quality or cut with other substances not so likely to induce the dreams of contentment and the bliss of heavens. Most of Hong Kong’s opium came from the Golden Triangle, an area of inaccessible mountains and valleys on the Thai-Burmese border. It reached Hong Kong by way of Singapore and Manila, Saigon and Macau, Hanoi and China. Some came from China herself, but this was a comparatively sub-standard concentrate and usually ended up feeding the habit of the poorer addict. Sandingham had known, as he had walked up the track, that he would need more of the lesser variety to keep him going: it was not as powerful as that to which he had grown accustomed.

  He need not have concerned himself. He was unable to purchase any at all. The sight of a European in a squatter area, unless he were wearing a police uniform or carrying a clipboard in the company of other civic officials, was about an unusual as a bacon sandwich at a bar mitzvah, as Norb once used to say. And whatever is unusual is generally unwelcome. His scuffed shoes and shabby jacket and trousers, his cheap wristwatch and frayed collar, the usual signs of the down-and-out, up here showed him to be a man of some substance and position, and men of position do not ask for an ounce of opium without having an ulterior motive beyond actually needing the stuff.

  He was despondent as he reached the end of the track on Waterloo Road. He was more than reluctant to dip into his last-chance cache. He knew that he had to get some from another source. Where, was the problem. He was certain that Leung would have put it about that he was not to be supplied.

  The only alternative was drink: that would dull the craving for a while. But there again, booze cost money.

  There were times when he cursed opium. Yet there were times when he blessed it, too. He had first taken it to dull the physical pain of his wracked body, in the immediate post-war years. Later, he realised to his relief that it also reduced his mental agony, the memories he could not exorcise even by the deepest gin- or scotch-induced sleep. Opium was a good servant and a fair master – except when he was without it, when it became a cruel god.

  Fortunately, only two days previously, he had succeeded in stealing a wallet and a Leica thirty-five mm camera from a tourist in Hanoi Road. The money was not plentiful – the man carried mostly traveller’s cheques – but the camera had fetched thirty-two dollars in a pawnshop off the northern end of Shanghai Street. That his hotel rent was due again soon appeared of little consequence; his nerves took precedence over his roof.

  He looked right then left down Waterloo Road. The mid-afternoon traffic was light. To his left, in a haze of heat rising off the metalling of the road, he could see the bridge of the Kowloon-Canton railway. Leung and his band of merry saboteurs had blown that during the war.

  On an impulse, Sandingham turned that way, crossing the road by Victory Avenue and walking slowly up Peace Avenue. To his left was the embankment of the railway line protected by a wire fence
and a sloping, narrow expanse of dry grass, stunted trees and wind-lifted litter.

  Peace Avenue: looking about him as he stepped along the pavement, he wondered if the peace it celebrated was worthwhile. Urchins played in the gutter. A mangy dog rooted through some garbage left by an alley. At the tiny square that terminated the adjoining Liberty Avenue an old woman was sitting on a wooden box with her grandchild, eating boiled rice and cabbage from a bowl she held in her hands. Around her on the road lay the bones of a small fish she had spat out. As he passed her, she emptied a cup of tea leaves into the gutter. Above and all around the square, washing hung out on poles from metal-framed windows. The newly laundered garments dripped into the street and on to unwary passers-by. Chinese opera blared out from a third floor balcony.

  ‘Peace’ was this semi-squalor. After the war there had been a hope that a new world would rise phoenix-like from the damage. The phoenix was a Chinese mythical bird related to the dragon, born of fire and breathing the fire of redemption and renewal. After every war, throughout history, there has been hope: and, after every war, the selfishness and power hunger of politicians and the greed of businessmen has quickly commandeered and sequestered whatever was bright in that hope and used its means for their own ends. What remained was an old lady eating a plain meal in the street.

  The Leungs of the world, thought Sandingham. The inevitable bloody Leungs.

  Like a long-distance runner, he paced himself with an amalgam of those words – theleungs, theleungs, theleungs …

  At the end of Luen Wan Street he climbed the steps to the small station. A notice informed him that a train would be along soon.

  Within five minutes he was comfortably seated, looking out of the carriage window at the expensive suburb of Kowloon Tong. Here there were houses – not blocks of flats or tenements – each with its small, neat garden. The train stopped at a signal, and Sandingham watched a gardener watering plants with a red rubber hose while, behind, an amah hung out lace underwear on a line strung between two posts. This was where, in suburban comfort, the greedy adventurers and selfish profiteers lived with their families.