Saint Jack

by Paul Theroux

  I heard footsteps on the verandah and went to the door, thinking it might be Mr. Weerakoon. I faced three Chinese who resembled the feller at the bar—short-sleeved shirts, long hair, sunglasses, skinny pinched faces. One was small enough to qualify as a dwarf. He swaggered over to a barstool and had difficulty hoisting himself up. Now the four sat in a row; they exchanged a few words and the one who had come in first asked for a coffee again.

  Yusof shook his head. He looked at me.

  “We don’t serve coffee here,” I said.

  “That is kopi,” the feller said slowly. The others glared at me.

  “So it is,” I said. “Yusof, give the gentlemen what they want.”

  At once the four Chinese raised their voices, and getting courage from the little victory, one laughed out loud. The dwarf hopped off his stool and came over to me.

  “You wants book?” he asked.

  “What kind?”

  “Special.” He unbuttoned his shirt and took out a flat plastic bag with some pamphlets inside.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “Finish your coffee and hop it.”

  “Swedish,” he said, dangling the plastic bag.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I can’t read Swedish.”

  “Is not necessary. Look.” He undid the bag and pulled one out. He held it up for me to see, a garish cover. I could not make it out at first, then I saw hair, mouths, bums, arms.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Look.” He turned the page. It was like a photograph of an atrocity, a mass killing—naked people knotted on a floor.

  “I don’t need them,” I said. He shook the picture in my face. “No—I don’t want it. Yusof, tell this creep I don’t want his pictures.”

  “Tuan—” Yusof started, but the dwarf cut him off.

  “You buy,” said the dwarf.

  “I not buy.”

  Now I looked at the three fellers near the bar. The first had swiveled around on his stool. He held the brandy snifter out at arm’s length and dropped it. It crashed. Upstairs, a giggle from a girl in a beaverboard cubicle.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Cheap.”

  “Okay, I’ll take a dozen. Now get out of here.”

  The dwarf buttoned the pamphlets into his shirt and said, “You come outside. Plenty in car. You choose. Very nice.”

  I shook my head. “I not choose. I stay right here.”

  Glass breaks with a liquid sound, like the instantaneous threat of flood. One feller shouted, “Yoop!” I saw Yusof jump. The mirror behind him shattered, and huge pieces dropped to the floor and broke a second time.

  “Tell them to stop it!” I said, and went to the door. “Where’s your lousy car?”

  A black Nissen Cedric was parked on Kampong Java Road, just beyond the sentry box where Ganapaty was hunched over a bowl of rice. He busily pawed at the rice with his fingers.

  “In there,” said the dwarf, opening the trunk.

  There were torn newspapers inside. I turned to object. My voice would not work, my eyes went bright red, and a blood trickle burned my neck; I seemed to be squashed inside my eyeballs, breathing exhaust fumes and being bounced.

  Believe any feller who, captive for a few days, claims he has been a prisoner for months. My body’s clock stopped with the first sharp pain in my head, then time was elastic and a day was the unverifiable period of wakefulness between frequent naps. Time, like pain, had washed over me and flooded my usual ticking rhythm. I swam in it badly, I felt myself sinking; pain became the passage of time, pulsing as I drowned, smothering me in a hurtful sea of days. But it might have been minutes. I ached everywhere.

  For a long time after I woke they kept me roped to a bed in a hut room smelling of dust and chickens and with a corrugated iron roof that baked my broken eyes. This gave my captors problems: they had to feed me with a spoon and hold my cup while I drank. They took turns doing this. They untied me, removing everything from the room but a bucket and mattress, and they brought me noodles at regular intervals. My one comfort was that obviously they did not plan to kill me. They could have done that easily enough at Dunroamin. No Chinese will feed a man he intends to kill. Anyway, murder was too simple: they didn’t want a corpse, they wanted a victim.

  “Money? You want money? I get you big money!” I shouted at the walls. The men never replied. Their silence finally killed my timid heckling.

  Grudgingly, saying “Noodoos,” banging the tin bowls down, they continued to feed me. Now and then they opened the shutters on the back window to let me empty my bucket. They didn’t manhandle me—they didn’t touch me. But they gave me no clue as to why they were holding me.

  Confinement wasn’t revenge for fellers who lingered at a murder to dig out the corpse’s eyes or cut his pecker off, and risking arrest by wasting getaway time, dance triumphantly with it. I guessed they had kidnaped me, but if so—time and pain were shrouding me in the wadded gauze of sleep—something had gone wrong. Often I heard the Cedric start up and drive away, and each time it came back they conversed in mumbles. The Singapore police were poor at locating kidnapers. Even if the police succeeded, what rescue would that be? It would mean my arrest on a charge of living off immoral earnings. Some friend would have to ransom me. In those days wealthy towkays and their children lived in fear of kidnapers; they were often hustled away at knifepoint, but they were always released unharmed after a heavy payment. Who in the world would pay for my life?

  A memory ambushed my hopes. On the Allegro a feller had told me a story I remembered in the hut. A loan shark had worked on a freighter with him. He called the feller a loan shark, but his description of the feller’s loans made them sound like charity of the most generous and reckless kind, and eventually everyone on the ship owed him money, including the skipper. One day at sea the loan shark disappeared, just like that. “We never found him,” said the feller on the Allegro, and his wink told me no one had ever looked.

  The remembrance scared me and made me desolate, and I believed I would stay that way, in the misery that squeezes out holy promises. But that loneliness was electrified to terror the day my Chinese captors had a loud argument outside my hut. I had felt some safety in their mutters, in the regular arrivals of meals and in the comings and goings of the Cedric; and I had begun to pass the time by reciting my letters of glad news and my litany, Sir Jack, President Flowers, King John, Bishop Flowers. I drew comfort from the predictable noises of my captors and their car. My comfort ended with the arguing—that day they didn’t bring me food.

  I heard it all. The dwarf’s name was Toh. He fretted in a high childish voice; the others bow-wowed monotonously. I listened at a crack in the wall, as my empty stomach scolded me and the argument outside grew into a fight. It had to concern my fate—those whinnyings of incredulity and snuffling grunts, smashings and bangings, and Toh’s querulousness rising to an impressively sustained screeching. Then it was over.

  That night they put the bed back into my room, but I was so hungry and disturbed I couldn’t sleep. I was drowsy hours later when I heard the door being unlocked. The morning dazzle of the sun through the door warmed my face. I started to rise, to swing my feet off the bed.

  “You stay,” said Toh.

  Two fellers began tying me up.

  “What’s the big idea?” I said. “You want money? I get you money. Hey, not so tight!”

  I considered a fistfight, working myself into a fury sufficient to beat them off and then making a run for it. I decided against it. Any rashness would be fatal for me. They were small, but there were four of them, and now I looked up and saw a fifth. I had survived so far by staying passive; I was sensible enough to prefer prison to death—to surrender anything but my life. Something else stopped me: I was in my underwear and socks—they had taken my shoes. I wouldn’t get far. If I had been dressed I might have taken a chance, but seminaked I felt particularly vulnerable. I let them go on tying me.

  They roped my ankles to the end of the bed, and then put
ropes around my wrists and made me fold my arms across my chest. I was in a mummy posture, bound tightly to the bed. The fifth man was behind me. I rolled my eyes back and saw that he was stropping a straight razor, whipping it up and down on a smacking tongue of leather.

  “Who’s he?” Numbness throttled my pecker.

  Toh was checking the knots, hooking a finger on them and pulling. Smick-smack, went the razor on the strop. Toh pushed at my arms, and satisfied they were tight, said, “That Ho Khan.”

  “Just tell me one thing,” I said in a pitifully unfamiliar voice. “Are you going to kill me? Tell me—please.”

  Toh looked surprised. “No,” he said, “we not kill you.”

  “Why the razor?”

  “Shave,” he said.

  The other fellers erupted into yakking laughter. I tried to shift on the bed to see them. It was impossible. I couldn’t move.

  “You’re trying to scare me, aren’t you?” I heard smick-smack-smuck.

  Toh leaned over and nodded, smiling. His dwarf’s face made the smile impish. “Scare you,” he said, “and scare udda peoples, too.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Smuck-smuck. “Come on, this is silly. I’m an American, you know. I am! The American consulate is looking for me!”

  “Mei-guo ren,” someone said, “an American.” Another replied in Chinese, and there was laughter.

  “Now I give you but,” said Toh. He scrubbed the backs of my arms with a soapy cloth. The others leaned over for a good look. One was holding a bowl, eating noodles as he watched, gobbling them in an impatient greedy way, smacking his lips and snapping at the noodles like a cat, not chewing. He peered at me over the rim of his bowl. He gave me hope. No one would eat that way in the presence of a person about to be slashed.

  Ho Khan fussed with the razor. He braced his elbows, one against my throat, one on my stomach; and then, scraping slowly, shaved the hairy parts of my arms that Toh had soaped, from my elbow to the rope at my wrists. To my relief he put the razor aside.

  My relief lasted seconds. Ho Khan fitted a pair of wire glasses over his eyes and took a dart-shaped silver tool which he dipped into a bottle of blue liquid. He leaned on me again and with the speed of a sewing machine began jabbing the needle into the fleshy part of my arm. He was tattooing me—biting on his tongue in concentration—and behind him the others shouted, bursts of Chinese, seeming to tell him what to write in the punctures.

  8

  AT NEWTON CIRCUS, by the canal, they pushed me out of the car and sped away, yelling. I found a few wrinkled dollars in the clothes they had handed over, enough for a pack of cheroots and a meal of mutton chops at a Malay gag stand on the corner. I was grateful for the night, and glad too for the incuriousness of the Chinese who wolfed food noisily at tables all around me and didn’t once look at me. My arms appalled me; I examined them in the light of the stall’s hissing pressure lamp. The shaven backs of my arms were swollen and raw, the fresh punctures tracking up and down from elbow to wrist, the small half-exploded squares of Chinese characters, perhaps fifty boxes puffed up and blue and some still leaking blood. I felt better after a meal and a smoke, and left, swinging my arms, so that no one could see their disfigurement, down the canal path, past the orphanage, in the direction of Dunroamin.

  I smelled the acrid wood smoke, the stink of violence, before I saw the damage; the strength of it, at that distance, telegraphed destruction. The house was gutted. The tile roof had fallen in and the moon lighted the two stucco roof peaks, the gaping windows, the broken and burned verandah chicks. The abandoned black house looked like an old deserted factory; the fire had silenced the insects and killed the perfume of my flowering trees. No crickets chirped in the compound, a smell of burning hung in the still air. Torn mattresses were twisted and humped all over the driveway and lawn. I was about to go away when, feeling the fatigue and pause of melancholy, I decided that I would enter the house, to try to find something in the ruins that belonged to me, anything portable I could recognize to claim as a souvenir, maybe a scorched clock or the German metronome Mr. Weerakoon kept in a cupboard drawer: There’s an interesting story behind this little thing . . .

  I stumbled in the driveway, and stumbling felt like an intruder. Stepping over the splintered front door, I passed through the bar. Broken glass littered the floor. I balanced on fallen timbers, tiptoed into the music room, and there I stood, in the decay the fire had made, not wanting to go upstairs to see what had happened to my cats. The staring shadows of the overturned chairs stopped me. I could feel the tattoos aching on my arms.

  Then I saw the candle burning in the kitchen, and near it a crouching man, his face lighted by the yellow flame.

  The eeriest thing about him, this old scarecrow in the burned-out house, was that he was imperturbably reading a folded newspaper. I would leave him in peace. I started toward the front door and kicked a loose board with my first step. Bang. The candle flame flickered and went out.

  “Don’t worry,” I called to him. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I made my way into the kitchen, found the candle and lit it. The old man had run to the wall where a blanket was spread. He was Chinese and had the look of a trishaw driver, the black sinewy legs and arms, close-cropped hair, a small dark reptile’s face. He wore a blue jacket and shorts, and on his feet were rubber clogs cut from tires.

  “You know me, eh? Me Jack.” I laughed. “This my housel” In that dark smelly place every sound was weird and my laugh was ghoulish. “You want smoke?” I threw him a cheroot. He cowered when I brought the candle over for him to light it.

  “Me Jack,” I said. “This my house—Dunroamin.”

  He blinked. “You house?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “All finished now.”

  He cackled and said something I couldn’t make out.

  “You live here now?” I asked. “Sleep here, eat here—makan here, eh?”

  “Mahan, makan,” he said, and picked up a small bowl. He offered it to me. “You makan.”

  There were lumps of rice inside, with two yellow pork rinds on top of the rice. I took it and thanked him and choked back one of the rinds. It was a sharing gesture and it worked. The poor man was calmed. He went to a tin lunch pail and spooned some more rice into the bowl.

  “No,” I said.

  “Makan,” he said, and smiled.

  I took the bowl and ate a few grains, chewing slowly. I pointed to the newspaper. “You read, eh? Sin Chew Jit Poh?” Naming the paper was like conversation. I thought of another. “Nanyang Siang Pau, eh?”

  He nodded eagerly and handed me the paper.

  I put the bowl down and unfolded the paper, looked at it, said, “Yes, yes,” and gave it back.

  He didn’t respond. He was looking at my arms. He put a skinny finger on one row of tattoos, and tapping each character, worked his way down, tracing the vertical column. He frowned and tapped at another column, but faster now. “Chinese,” I said. “Chinese tattoo.”

  I grinned.

  He backed away, holding an outstretched palm up to ward me off; he groaned distinctly, and he ran, kicking over the tin lunch pail, and tramping the broken boards of the music room, and howling down the drive.

  That night I slept on the old man’s blanket and breathed the fumes from his crudded lunch pail.

  “Curse of Dogshit,” said Mr. Tan, translating in the Bandung the next day. He read my left arm. “Beware Devil, Whore’s Boy, Mouth Full of Lies, Remove This and Die. Very nasty,” said Mr. Tan. “Let me see your other arm.” The right said, Red Goatface, Forbidden Ape, Ten Devils in One, I Am Poison and Death, Remove This and Die.

  After that, Mr. Tan was included in the conversations Yardley had with the others when my tattoos were mentioned. For years, Mr. Tan had sat every afternoon alone with his bottle of soybean milk. Now he was welcome. Yardley couldn’t remember all the curses and he called upon Mr. Tan to repeat them.

  “Incredible,” Yardley said. “There, what about that one?”


  “Forbidden Ape,” said Mr. Tan promptly.

  “Can you imagine,” said Yardley. “And that one—‘Monkey’s Arse’ or something like that?”

  “Dogshit,” said Mr. Tan.

  “All right,” I said. “That’s enough.”

  “Remember old Baldwin, the chap that worked for Jardine?” asked Smale. “He had tattoos all over the place. Birds and that.”

  “You going to keep them, Jack?” asked Coony. “Souvenir of Singapore. Show ’em to your mum.”

  “You think it’s a joke.” I said. “These things hurt. And the doctor says I have to wait till they heal before I can get them off.”

  “You’ll never get them buggers off,” said Yardley.

  “The doctor says—”

  “They can graft them,” said Smale.

  “Acid,” said Yates. “They burn them off with acid. I read 162 about this somewhere. It leaves scars—that’s the only snag. But scars are infinitely preferable to what you’ve got there, if you ask me.”

  “Maybe they used some kind of Chinese ink,” said Coony. “You know, the kind that never comes off.”

  “Balls!” said Smale. “If it was Chinese ink he’d be able to wash the flaming things off with soap and water. No, that there’s your regular tattooing ink. You can tell.”

  “Monkey’s Arse,” said Yardley, laughing. “Christ, be glad it’s not in English! What if it was and Jack was in London, on a bus or something? ‘Fares please,’ the conductor says and looks over and sees Monkey’s Arse, Pig Shit, and all that on Jack’s arm.”

  “He’d probably ride free,” said Frogget.

  “No, I’ve got a better one,” said Smale. “Let’s say Jack’s in church and the vicar’s just given a little sermon on foul language. The lady next to Jack looks down and—”

  “Lay off,” I said, rolling down my sleeves to cover the scabrous notations. “How would you like it if they did it to you?”

  “No bloody fear,” said Coony. “If one of them little bastards—”

  “Shut up,” said Yardley. “They’d tattoo the same thing on your knackers before you could say boo.” Yardley turned to me and said, “Don’t get upset, Jacko. They got ways of getting that stuff off. But I’ll tell you one thing—you’d be a fool to try it again.”