by Paul Theroux
“I’ll buy you a drink,” said Leigh, but that was impossible because money was not allowed and only a member could sign chits. The brass plaque on the club entrance—MEMBERS ONLY— mocked us both. I looked for someone I knew, but all I could see were tanned long-legged mothers, fine women in toweling smocks, holding beach bags and children’s hands, waiting for their syce-driven cars after a day at the club pool. They were eagerly whispering to each other, and laughing; the sight of that joy lifted my heart—I couldn’t help but think they were plotting some trivial infidelity.
“The new squash courts are over there,” I said, stepping nimbly past the doorman and bounding up the stairs.
“Drink first,” said Leigh. “I’m absolutely parched.” He was enjoying himself and he seemed right at home. He led the way into the Churchill Room, and “Very agreeable” he said, twice, as he looked for an opening at the bar.
The Churchill Room had just been renovated: thick wall-to-wall carpets, a new photograph of Winston, a raised bar, and a very efficient air-conditioning system. In spite of the cool air I was perspiring, a damp panel of shirt clung to my back; I was searching for a familiar face, someone I knew who might sign a drink chit. The bar was packed with men in white shirts and ties, some wearing stiff planter’s shorts, standing close to the counter in groups of three or four, braying to their companions or sort of climbing over each other and waving chit pads at the barmen. Leigh was pushing ahead of me and I had just reached out to tap him on the shoulder and tell him I had remembered something important—my nerve had failed me so completely I could not think what, and prayed for necessity’s inspiration—when I saw old Gunstone over in the corner at one of the small tables, drinking alone.
Gunstone was one of my first clients; he was in his seventies and came to Singapore when it was a rubber estate and a few rows of shophouses and go-downs. During the war he was captured by the Japanese and put to work on the Siamese Death Railway. He told me how he had buried his friend on the Burmese border, a statement like a motto of hopeless devotion, an obscure form of rescue, I buried my friend. He was the only client who took me to lunch when he wanted a girl, but he was also the cagiest, because I had to make all the arrangements for him and even put my own name on the hotel register. What he did with the girls, I never knew—I never asked: I did not monkey with a feller’s confidence—but it was my abiding fear that one day Gunstone’s engine was going to stop in a hotel room I had reserved, and I was going to have to explain my name in the register. I never saw Gunstone’s wife; he only took her to the club at night and most of my club work was in the daytime.
“Jack,” he said, welcoming me, showing me an empty chair. Good old Gunstone.
“Evening, Mr. Gunstone,” I said. It was a servile greeting, I knew, but I could not see Leigh and I was worried.
Gunstone seemed glad to see me; that was a relief. I feared questions like, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
“What’ll you have?” asked Gunstone.
“Small Anchor,” I said, and as Gunstone turned to find a waiter Leigh appeared with a drink in his hand.
“Chappie here wants your signature, Flowers,” said Leigh.
I took the chit pad from the waiter and put it on Gunstone’s table, saying “All in good time,” then introduced Leigh. Gunstone said, “Ever run into old So-and-So in Hong Kong?” and Leigh said charmingly, “I’ve never had the pleasure.” Gunstone began describing the feller, saying, “He’s got the vilest habits and he’s incredibly mean and nasty and—” Gunstone smiled—“perfectly fascinating. He might be in U.K. now, on leave.”
“Do you ever go back to U.K.?” Leigh asked.
“Used to,” said Gunstone. “But the last time I was there they passed a bill making homosexuality legal. I said to my wife, ‘Let’s get out of here before they make the blasted thing compulsory!’”
Leigh laughed. “I meant to ask you, Flowers,” he said, “are you married?”
“Nope,” I said. Leigh went on talking to Gunstone. Once, and it was at the Tanglin Club, I used to fix up a certain feller with girls. The feller was married and I eventually got friendly with the wife, and “She’s ever so nice,” I said to the feller. On the afternoons when he had one of my girls I visited his wife at their house in Bukit Timah and had no fear that he would show up. But there were children; she hollered at them and sent them out with the amah. She was very sweet to me, a moment after she had cuffed the children. One afternoon I was in the Bandung. I had agreed we should meet, but I realized I was late, delaying over a large gin. She was waiting; I was waiting; I did not want to go. It was like marriage. I went on drinking, and lost her.
“I must be going,” said Gunstone. He pulled the chit pads over and signed them. He said, “I scratch your back, you scratch mine.”
“Tomorrow,” I said, and winked.
“Lunch,” said Gunstone. “The usual time, what?”
“Sounds frightfully hush-hush,” said Leigh.
To Gunstone I said, “We were just leaving, too,” which made it impossible for Leigh to object. It was unfair to do this, but I was sore: Leigh’s two gin slings were going to cost me a whole afternoon of waiting in the lobby of a hotel, cooling my heels and worrying about Gunstone’s engine.
Yardley was telling his joke about the Irishman and the love-starved gorilla as we entered the Bandung. We walked over to the bar and, perversely I thought, Yardley delivered the punch line to Leigh, “‘One thing more, sair,’ says O’Flannagan to the zoo keeper, ‘If there’s any issue—any issue at all—it’s got to be raised a Roman Catholic.’”
They started to laugh—Yates, Smale, Frogget, and loudest of all and closing his eyes with mirth, Yardley himself. I smiled, though I had heard it before. Leigh wasn’t amused; he said, “Yes, well.” That was his first mistake in the Bandung, not laughing at Yardley’s joke. Yardley, an old-timer, had been drinking in the Bandung for years, and one day when Yardley was out of the room Frogget said, “Yardley is the Bandung.” Every bar had a senior member; Yardley was ours. Frogget, a large shy feller, balding but not old, was Yardley’s ape. Frogget—Desmond Frogget—ate like a horse, but he was sensitive about his weight; it was considered impolite to remark on the amount of food Frogget ate, the platters of noodles he hoovered up. Frogget could not have been much more than thirty-five, but the ridiculous man had that English knack of assuming elderly biases and a confounding grumpiness that made him seem twice his age. He regretted the absence of clipper ships, he remembered things that happened before he was born and like other equally annoying youths who drank at the Bandung started sentences with “I always” and “I never.”
“Don’t believe we’ve met,” said Yardley, putting his hand out to Leigh.
Leigh hinted at reluctance by frowning as he offered his hand, but the worst offense was that after he said his name he spelled it.
“Been in Singapore long?” asked Smale. Smale was a short, ruddy-faced man whose squarish appearance gave the impression of having been carpentered. He carried a can of mentholated cigarettes with him wherever he went. He was working the cutter on the lid as he asked Leigh the question.
“No,” I said, “he just—”
“To be precise,” said Leigh in a prissy voice, and checking his watch, “four hours and forty-five minutes.”
“We like to be precise around here,” said Yardley, nudging Frogget. “Don’t we, Froggy? I mean, seeing as how we’re all on the slag heap of life, it’s a bloody good thing to know the time of day, what Froggy?”
“I always wear my watch to bed,” said Frogget.
“You come down from K.L.?” Yates asked, seeing Yardley getting hot under the collar.
“Hong Kong,” said Leigh, stressing the Hong the way residents do. He looked around the room, as if trying to locate an exit.
The Bandung was a huge place—in its prime a private house with an elegant garden, birdbath, and sundial and intersecting cobblestone paths. But the garden had fallen to ruin an
d the trellises had broken under the weight of vines which had become thick, leaning on and pinching the frail trellis ladders. I liked the garden in this wild state, the elastic fig trees strangling the palms, the roots of the white-blossomed frangipanis cracking the stone benches and showing knuckles between the cobblestones. And the vines, now more powerful than the trellises that had once supported them, needed no propping; they made a cool leafy cavern from the walled front entrance to the verandah, where there were pots of orchids hanging from wires, with gawking blossoms and damp dangling roots.
The bar itself stood in what was once a vast parlor, colored glazed tiles on the floor and a ceiling so high there were often some confused swallows flying in circles near the top. The windows were also large and Yardley said a swarm of bees flew in one day, passed over the heads of those drinking at the bar, and flew out the other side without disturbing a soul. The adjoining room we called the “lounge,” where there was a jumble of rattan furniture, a sofa, the piano Ogham used to play, and little tables and potted palms. No one sat there except the barman, Wallace Thumboo, when he was totting up the day’s chits at midnight, sorting them into piles according to the signatures. I was seeing the Bandung now with Leigh’s eyes, and I could understand his discomfort, but I didn’t share it.
“Could use a coat of paint,” Leigh said. “Do I smell cats?” He wrinkled his nose.
“I was in Hong Kong a few years back,” said Yardley. “My towkay sent me up to get some estimates on iron sheeting. I was supposed to stay for a month, until the auction, but after two days I came back. Couldn’t stick the place. They treated me like dirt. Told the towkay the deal was up the spout. Ever been to Hong Kong, Froggy?”
Frogget said yes, it was awful.
“What’s the beer like?” Smale asked Leigh.
“My dear fellow,” said Leigh, “I haven’t the remotest idea.”
That annoyed everyone, and Yardley said, “Got a right one ’ere.” At that point I wasn’t sure who I disliked more—Yardley for being rude to Leigh, or Leigh for spelling his name and saying “I haven’t the remotest idea” to what was meant as a friendly question. The next thing Leigh said put me on Yardley’s side.
“Flowers,” said Leigh sharply, ignoring the others, “I thought you said we could get a drink here.”
This magisterial “Flowers,” in front of my friends. Frogget grinned, Smale winked and raised his glass to me, Yates frowned, and Yardley smirked as if to say, “You poor suffering bastard”—all of this behind Leigh’s stiffened back.
I knocked for Wally and ordered two gins. Leigh wrapped his hanky around his glass and drank disgustedly. It may have been anger or the heat, but Leigh was reddening and beads of sweat began percolating out of his face. Ordinarily, Yardley would have behaved the same as Gunstone and said, “Ever run into old So-and-So in Kowloon?” which might have brought Leigh around. Or he would have told his story about the day the swarm of bees flew through the window, and if he was in a good mood he would have embellished it by imitating the bees, running from one side of the room to the other, flapping his arms, and buzzing until he was breathless.
“Bit stuffy in here,” Smale said.
Yardley was looking at Leigh. Leigh seemed unaware that he had nettled Yardley. Yates said he had to go home and Yardley said, “I don’t blame you.”
“Say good night to Flowers,” said Frogget.
“Mister Flowers to you, Froggy,” I said.
Yates left, saying good night to everyone by name, but omitting Leigh. Leigh said, “Tiffin time—isn’t that what they call it here?”
Yardley had not taken his eyes off Leigh. I thought Yardley might sock him, but his tactic was different. He told his McCoy joke, the one he always told when there was a woman in the bar he wanted to drive out. It concerned four recruits being interviewed for the army. The sergeant asks them what they do for a living and the first one, saying his name’s McCoy, mutters that he’s a cork sacker (“puts the cork into sacks, you see”); the next one, also a McCoy, is a cork soaker (“soaks it in water, you understand”); the third McCoy is a coke sacker (“sacks coke for a dealer in fuel”); and the last one, a mincing feller in satin tights, says that he’s the real McCoy. Yardley told it in several accents, lengthening it with slurs and pauses (“What’s that you say?”), and obnoxiously set it in Hong Kong.
Leigh made no comment. He ordered a gin for himself, but none for me.
“You giving up the booze, Jack?” said Smale, who noticed.
“A double, Wally,” I said.
Yardley giggled. “I must have my tiffin,” he said.
“Tiffin time, breh-heh,” said Frogget.
“Take care of yourself, Jack,” said Yardley, and left with Frogget shambling after him.
“I think I’ll go whore hopping,” said Smale in a thoughtful voice. He pressed down the lid of his cigarette can and said, “Say, Jack, what was the name of that skinny one you fixed me up with? Gladys? Gloria?”
I pretended not to hear.
“Give me her number. God, she was a lively bit of crumpet.” He stared at Leigh and said, “She does marvelous things to your arse.”
“Ask Wally,” I said.
“It was like being dead,” said Smale, still addressing Leigh. He grinned. “You know. Paradise.”
Wally was polishing glasses at the far end of the bar, smiling at the glasses as he smiled at the counter when he wiped it and at the gin bottle when he poured. Wally said, “What you want, Mr. Smale? You want mushudge?” He nodded. “Can.”
“Aw hell,” said Smale. “Maybe I should forget it. I could have another double whiskey, toss myself off in the loo, and go down to the amusement park and play the pinball machines. What do you think?” He leered at me, then snorted and sloped off.
Leigh did not say anything right away. He climbed onto a barstool and dabbed at the perspiration on his upper lip with his finger. He looked at his finger, and feelingly, said, “How do you stand it?”
It made me cringe. It happened, this moment of worry when, hearing a question that never occurred to me, I discovered that I had an answer, as once in the Tai-Hwa on Cecil Street, a stranger wearing dark glasses asked, “Where you does wuck?” and I remembered and was afraid.
4
IN MY CUBICLE, irritably dialing a third hotel, I heard Gopi coming. Then, in Singapore, disability determined the job; Gopi, a cripple, was a peon from birth. He could be heard approaching by the sigh-shuffle-thump of his curious bike-riding gait. One leg was shorter than the other, and the knee in that rickety limb bent inward, collapsing into the good leg and making Gopi lean at a dangerous angle as he put his weight on it. A long step with his good leg checked his fall, and that was how he went, heaving along, dancing forward, swaying from side to side, like the standing dance of a man pumping a bike up a steep hill.
Some years ago a horse named Gopi’s Dream ran an eight-furlong race at the Singapore Turf Club. I was not a member of that club, but two dollars got me into the grandstand with the howling mob; and it was there that I spent at least one afternoon of every race meeting. I had just arrived and was getting my bearings when I saw that the horse I had picked for the first race had been scratched. There were poor odds on all the others except Gopi’s Dream, and the logic of choosing this horse was plain to me. I put ten dollars on him to win, though my usual bet was a deuce on a long shot to place, bolstered by a prayer, which I screamed into my hands as the ponies leaped down the homestretch. I told myself that half the bet was Gopi’s Deepavali present. Gopi’s Dream won, as all horses do when the logic is irrefutable, and it paid two hundred dollars; half I put away for Gopi, the rest I lost in the course of the afternoon.
The next day I took Gopi to a shop over on Armenian Street and had him fitted for a brace and a boot with a five-inch sole. He was a bit rocky on it at first, but soon he got the hang of it and instead of his cyclist’s swaying he learned a jerking limp, dragging the enormous boot and clumping it ahead of him and then chasing it
with the other leg. The brace clinked and the boot gave out long twisting squeaks. The odd thing was that although he walked fairly straight he walked much more slowly, perspiring and pulling and swinging the boot along.
He stopped wearing the apparatus. He told me in Malay that it was “biting” his leg and that it was at the cobblers being put right. After a week I asked him about it; he started wearing it—two days of clinks and squeaks, then he stopped. I asked why. It was biting. The brace was a greater affliction than the limp, a cure more painful than the ailment; the incident cured me of certain regrets.
“All full up,” the voice was saying to me over the phone. Gopi peddled over and I slammed the receiver into its cradle.
“Hupstairs,” said Gopi, pointing his slender finger to indicate that Leigh was in Hing’s office. He clamped his tongue at the side of his mouth and scribbled in an invisible ledger to show he had seen Leigh writing. Then he asked me about Leigh: Who was he? Where was he from? Did he have children? Was he a Eurasian?
I told Gopi what I knew and asked what time Leigh had arrived.
“Seven-something.”
That was news. As an eager new employee at Hing’s, with the hunch that if I did a good job I had a chance for promotion, I used to come in at seven-something, too. By the time Hing rolled in I was already in a sweat, saying “Right you are, Mr. Hing,” and “Just leave it to me.” There was no promotion. I asked for Christmas off; Hing said, “I am Buddhist, but wucking on Besak Day, birthday of Buddha, isn’t it?” I started to come in at eight-something and never said “Leave it to me,” and after I made a go of my enterprise it was ten before I showed my face. I would not be promoted, but neither would I be sacked: he could never have gotten another ang moh for what he paid me. In the acceptance of this continuing meekness, the denial of any ambition, was an unvarying condition of enduring security and the annual promise of a renewed work permit. It was an angle, but it cost me my pride. When someone at a club bar or hotel lounge said, “Go on, Jack, have another one,” I was happy; I had the satisfaction of having earned my reward. The reminder that the drink would never have been offered if I hadn’t had a girl in tow was something that didn’t worry me unless a feller like Leigh woke up my scrupling with, “How do you stand it?” A feller who lived in Singapore and knew me would never have asked that. The real question was not how but why. My answer would have unstrung him, or anyone.
