by Susan Barker
‘What’s come over you? Why are you being so cruel?’
‘Do you find me cruel?’ Cantonese again. ‘How come you feel the little cruelties so much more keenly, Christopher? What about the cruelties that you help inflict? What about imprisoning people in a concentration camp? Surely that is worse.’
I was furious. What had politics to do with us?
‘This again! I thought we’d taken care of this! You know I am just doing my job.’
‘And does doing your job mean you no longer have a mind of your own? If you had any conscience you would have left months ago. Instead you look about the village and pat yourself on the back for a job well done.’
‘This is stupid, Evangeline. It’s ridiculous to blame me. Everything – the Emergency, Resettlement, the New Villages – is beyond my control. I am not the British Administration. I am just one man. I am here to do what I can, day in, day out, to protect the villagers from the Communists and make life better for them.’
‘Don’t you ever question what you do, day in, day out? Villagers are dying because of how lousy the conditions are, because of what the British Administration has done. Because of what you – glorified prison warden – help to do.’
I took a deep frustrated breath. ‘We are working hard to return Malaya to its people,’ I said, ‘to make her independent. This is the reason I came here. It’s wrong to make a scapegoat of me.’
‘If you don’t see the harm of your actions, then you are blind.’
‘Blind? Don’t talk to me about blindness, Evangeline. The Communists have brought nothing but suffering and misery to the people. More so than the British.’
‘I am not a Communist.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you are just the Communists’ whore.’
This viciousness brought a stab of sweetness. We circled each other like warring tigers, our faces masks of darkness, from which the voices of strangers emerged.
Evangeline laughed. ‘That’s more like it, Christopher. Now you’re being honest! Why are the men never whores? What name is there for a man who lies to a woman about taking her back to his country to get what he wants? Lies, lies, lies … You make me sick.’
‘I never lied. I meant every word.’
‘And I am not a whore.’
‘Then, I don’t understand. If you hate me so much, and think me a prison warden, then why did you come to the watchtower? For yourself? For the Communists? How do you know that bandit? Why are you talking in Chinese? For whose benefit? Is he near by?’
Silence.
‘Come on, Evangeline. We are above this, you and I. Turn on the torch and let me see your face. I don’t believe you hate me. I don’t believe this is you.’
Silence.
‘Do you love me?’
Silence.
‘Come on, Evangeline … turn on the torch and let’s go back.’
There was a faint breeze, the stirring of conscience. A sharp intake of breath, and like the shattering apart of glass the tension broke. Evangeline was crying. A victory that brought me no joy. She hid her face in her hands and shook. Now we can go back, I thought grimly, and moved to steady her in my embrace. But before I reached her there was crashing in the undergrowth. And before I could turn to see what was going on, one side of my body was overwhelmed by pain and I was screaming on the ground. Never in my life had I known such agony. The whole of my consciousness was subjugated to it, and I was only dimly aware of myself writhing and screaming, and of the boot viciously kicking my back. After a while the kicking went away and I lay in the clearing, stunned and breathing stunted breaths. I called for Evangeline, but she was gone. The moon had gone too and the clearing was so dark I couldn’t tell whether my eyes were open or closed.
I lost consciousness and, when I came to, the clearing was suffused with the grey light of dawn. Pain shrieked below my ribs. I gritted my teeth and lifted my head a fraction of an inch, almost expecting to see a crimson mist above my torso; a fine nimbus of blood. My shirt was soaked red and cleaved to my skin, resisting slightly as I pulled it up. The wound was three or four inches long and scalpel-thin. What had been lacerated? Kidney? Liver? Spleen? There were some dark leaves stuck to the skin surrounding the wound … Oh, no, not leaves, but leeches! – pulsating as they drank from the gash. Nauseated, I tore the blood-glutted leeches off me, ripping them to bits where the suckers remained stubbornly welded to my flesh. I wiped the slime and leech-muck off my fingers and on to the soil. Then I lay very still, so as not to aggravate the pain. It was very cold and damp and I realized it was raining, the canopy drumming as raindrops slid from one leafy precipice to the next. Through the hole in the rainforest roof, drops like shards of glass fell and stung my eyes.
The pain came and went in powerful tides. When it was at its worst it induced in me a dazzling synaesthesia, a magnesium flare in my mind. And in the split second that white light drenched my consciousness came numbness and ephemeral reprieve. Then the pain would surge again from nothing, igniting nerve endings one by one.
As I lay there in the spitting rain, I fell prey to hallucinations. I imagined the nearby bushes were shaking as Evangeline and my assailant hid, gloating and spying on me. I heard their laughter in the percussion of the rain and glared at the offending bushes, jaw clenched in anger and humiliation. Minutes later I imagined that Evangeline crept into the clearing to kneel beside me. She took my hand and pressed it to her soft cheek, weeping for forgiveness. The Communists had taken Grace hostage, she said, and had forced her to betray me. But now she was back and would never leave me again. She wept and covered my face with kisses moist with tears and begged and begged me to forgive her. And, weeping too, I forgave. I forgave and forgave and forgave until my heart bled with joy. Then my beloved was gone, and my joy turned to bitter disappointment because Charles Dulwich had replaced her, puffing on a cigar and lording it over the clearing in his rattan chair. Charles gave me a stern talking to. Serves you right for being such a dupe! What did you expect, taking up with a low-breed Communist bitch? Haven’t you learnt by now that humans are born into this world to cheat and lie and damage one another? It was the first and last time in my life that Charles’s pessimism has ever consoled me.
After an hour the rain stopped and sunshine sifted through the mosaic of branches and leaves. The miracle of the sun on my skin lent me the strength to prop myself up on my elbows – a manoeuvre that was agony, but rewarded me with the feeling that I was alive. Had the rain continued to batter me I’m sure I’d have lost my will to live and quickly died. I looked around the clearing, defeated. To claw my way out of that fortress of leaves, as I had clawed my way in, was impossible. I couldn’t even stand. As the sun heated the jungle, steam rose from the soil and the rotting odour strengthened. Here and there the canopy dripped, and to my left a trickle of rainwater slid down a liana vine. Slowly, agonizingly, dying of thirst, I dragged my carcass towards the vine. But when I was halfway there the trickle dried up and I collapsed, flat on my back once more, exhausted by mere inches of progress.
The canopy twittered with birdsong and crashed as some tree-bound creature hurtled from bough to bough. How I envied the wildlife up there in the parapet of leaves. The canopy was the zenith of the rainforest, a leafy amphitheatre of exotic feathers and finery. As I lay amid the millipedes and grubs I was keenly aware that I’d sunk to the very depths of the jungle hierarchy; the morass of decomposition, the strata of decay. When it comes to death, nature is ever fair and egalitarian, and if I were to die in that clearing, earthworms and saprophytic fungi would reduce me to the same nutrient-rich soil that every dead animal becomes. The only possible deviation to this fate would be if I were to be swallowed by a giant python. Then my masticated remains would reside briefly in its carnivorous intestines, before being shat out on to the forest floor.
My heart shrivelled up in hopelessness. I thought of the jungle-craft that Kip Phillips had taught me on our Sunday-afternoon hikes; how to make a rodent snare; how to build a fish trap ou
t of twigs; how to identify edible fungi and so on. I remembered Kip telling me, as we huffed and puffed up a steep trail, that if one is lost in the rainforest the wisest thing to do is to bang a stick on a tree buttress, as a buttress can amplify a bang so it travels for a distance of three miles. Kip had demonstrated with his rambling stick, striking the buttress of an ancient tree as though it were a gong. The effect was loud as gun blasts.
‘If you are lucky,’ said Kip, ‘a search party will take a compass bearing of the bang and come and rescue you. But be careful!’ he warned, wagging his finger. ‘Buttress-whacking is a means of communication for the Reds. You might accidentally bang out a secret Communist code!’
The most formidable buttress in the clearing lay just beyond a fly-buzzing thicket. The buttress was four feet in height; a sinuous wing of wood, strange and extraterrestrial. I was weak and enervated and every movement brought great pain. But if anything could amplify a bang to within range of a search party, that buttress was it.
I dragged myself on my back, inch by painstaking inch, the angry mouth of my wound screaming in protest. As the heat of the day mounted, more and more flies came out of hiding to buzz under a nearby thicket. The thicket was en route to the buttress and, as I heaved myself along, a few flies drifted over to me, translucent wings whirring. I furiously batted them away, repulsed by the thought of them laying eggs on me and fly larvae burrowing into my wound. Halfway to the buttress, searing pain forced me to stop beside the fly-besieged shrubs. Gritting my teeth, I willed the pain to subside so I could move on. It was then that I noticed the leather flask, half buried in the mulch under the thicket. The Hallelujah refrain from Handel’s Messiah chorusing from above, I grabbed the flask, unscrewed the lid and tipped the contents down my parched throat … only to splutter and cough and spit it all out again. Whisky! – as filthy and acrid as petrol. I tossed the flask aside and lay on my back again, head turned sideways to see what else was hiding under the thicket. And as I stared and stared through the branches and maelstrom of flies, the nest of shadow stirred and became a human face.
I turned away and gazed up into the lofty marquee of leaves. Then I turned back, to check what I’d seen was real and not a hallucination. The dead man was covered in flies. They crawled out of his parted lips and roamed the contours of his face and glassy eyes. The flies droned and droned, and I stared and stared, my breathing ragged. I felt the kiss of flies on my cheeks, but did not brush them away. The putrescence that had lurked in my nostrils since entering the clearing the night before suddenly had a new significance. I dry heaved, once, twice, but my empty stomach had nothing to offer the soil. The man had not been dead long – his skin undecayed, waxy and pale. The corpse was too thin to be Timmy Lo, and too recent a kill. The worms had made a banquet of Timmy weeks and weeks ago.
Then recognition came. Triggered by the sharpness of his cheekbones and vulpine tapering of his face. Slowly, the death mask began to correspond with my memory of the last time I’d seen the face alive. The corpse stared at me with dead eyes.
‘Well, Detective,’ I murmured, ‘you were wrong about Evangeline not being a Communist. You were about as wrong as you can get. Why ever did you write that letter?’
Then it occurred to me Detective Pang hadn’t been wrong. He hadn’t written the letter. He wasn’t the only person in The Village of Everlasting Peace literate in English. I knew of at least one other person – skilled enough to teach the language to high-school students, no less. The intention of the letter, according to its author, was to warn me away from Evangeline. Yet by convincing me of her non-involvement with the Communists and making me sympathetic to her plight, it had succeeded in doing the opposite. If the true aim of the letter had been to pave the way for love and deception, then it had accomplished this very well.
I ask Detective Pang about the letter when he comes to my flat. The detective pretends not to hear, preferring to scatter sunflower-seed husks over the carpet, or retune the dial of the kitchen radio to shrieking paranormal frequencies. I suspect he is embarrassed that Evangeline discovered, then assumed, his true identity. Poor old Detective Pang. So good at his job until they found him out. Did they march him into the jungle at gunpoint? Or was he lured to the imperialist slaying ground, as I had been, by some treacherous village floozy? Detective Pang is very reticent on the subject of his death, so I doubt I’ll ever know.
After travelling with me from Kuala Lumpur to London in 1980, Evangeline’s letter now lives in a shoebox in my hallway cupboard. The document is an antique now; fallen to pieces, burnt by air to the colour of straw. Once upon a time reading the letter upset me and I’d lie awake for hours afterwards, full of scalding emotion and eruptions of bile. But not any more. Before I left The Village of Everlasting Peace in 1953, I investigated Evangeline’s background, consulting official documents and villagers who had known her. The letter had given a factual account of the events of Evangeline’s life during and shortly after the war. Her epistolary revelations were true, the only falsehood the nom de plume.
Clever Evangeline. Not a week goes by when I don’t take that letter from the shoebox and turn the pieces over in my hands. By now I know the damn thing by heart. Every loop of handwriting and dot and dash of punctuation. Every lapse of grammar, misspelt word and inky smear. I know that letter better than the wrinkles of my own face. It’s all I have left of her, you see.
I let the branches fall and obscure the detective once more. Then I continued dragging myself to the buttress – much to the chagrin of my boot-clobbered back and screaming wound. The throb in my side had a speeding tempo, a diabolical rhythm, and progress was slow. When I reached the buttress I collapsed against it, ear pressed to the wood, as if listening for a heartbeat. My poor broken body was spent and I hadn’t even begun.
There was a heavy stick within reaching distance. I grasped it in both hands and beat the buttress with force. The thwack of it resounded through the jungle, and I was certain every creature within a quarter-mile radius had heard. Heartened, I beat out a slow arduous rhythm, with a long recuperative pause between each bang. I feared the hollow thuds would summon axe-wielding Communists to come and finish the job. But it was a risk I had to take. As the hours passed and the patterns of light shifted across the ground, strength faded in my arms and my palms were slippery with weeping blisters. But whenever I felt the urge to give up, I’d think of the corpse under the shrubs and hit the buttress with renewed vigour. So long as I had the stick in my hand and was able to bang it, I had a lottery ticket and a chance to live.
All of my human will was condensed into hitting the buttress. I thought no profound thoughts about the nature of life and death. Had no memories of England, or my childhood, or my dear old mother and sisters. I thought only of pain and endurance and Evangeline. The monotonous rhythm was hard to sustain and I was kept going by contradictory desires – the desire to see Evangeline and resume our love, and the desire to have revenge upon her. ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’ as sung by the First Battalion Worcestershire Regiment echoed in my head. Even after a fitful mid-afternoon doze, the song was there upon waking, like a headache that wouldn’t go away.
The day passed in stark thirst and pain, and by dusk my arms were useless – any noise I made inaudible beyond the clearing. I lapsed back into delirium and Detective Pang crawled out from under the shrubs to offer some words of encouragement. But it was no good. No one had come. The battle was lost. Darkness was returning me to the womb of the earth and I was certain that the violent fragrance of decay came as much from me as the murdered detective.
So I tossed the stick aside, the clearing as black as the bottom of a grave, each passing minute another spade-ful of soil.
19
TENDRILS OF SMOKE unfurled in my nostrils and I sneezed awake. Cold grey dawn and excruciating pain. My body slumped against the buttress; bones aching, every cell of me panting with thirst. To have survived another day left me underwhelmed, to say the least.
My eyes
were blurred as steamed-up glass, and I blinked and blinked, afraid the loss of sight was permanent. Slowly the fog lifted and I saw a man standing in the clearing. I squinted at his muddy boots and woollen socks. Camouflage uniform and bull-neck. Gold buzz-cut capped with an olive beret. Part Billy Bunter, part snarling pit-bull face. The man dragged on his cigarette, then blew the smoke up towards the hole in the canopy, as if puffing a signal for help. Lieutenant Spencer grinned like a pumpkin on Hallowe’en.
‘Hello, Goldilocks.’
Size eleven boots rooted to the ground, the lieutenant flickered like a candle flame in a draught. It occurred to me then, with sinking heart, that my deus ex machina was a hallucination. The stiff hinge of my jaw creaked to let out an enquiring croak. Spencer dragged on his roll-up and squinted at me, piggy-eyed, as his nostrils spurted smoke.
‘Wotcha doing lying on the ground for?’
The bloodstain spread from sternum to groin, my clothes filthy and dark, I patted my wound and smiled with a touch of pride. Trying to focus on the lieutenant gave me a splitting headache. His face shifted as if viewed through a kaleidoscope; a slowly revolving Picasso of eyes and jug ears, stubbly chin and nose.
‘That pansy little cut!’ scorned the mouth on his forehead. ‘The village ain’t even a mile away. You could have hiked it. Took me twenty minutes to get here.’
The pain surged in offence. I gritted my teeth, my hand closing around the large stick I’d tossed near by.
Lieutenant waggled his roll-up at my clenched fist. ‘Little drummer boy, are we now?’
The policeman laughed as I lay debilitated by my near-fatal stab wound. I’ve never understood the urge to mock a man when he is down. What a cheaply won sense of superiority. The tinnitus of flies gathered around the thicket. I pointed my stick and said the detective’s name.
The lieutenant jerked an eyebrow. He crouched by the shrubs, lifting the branches to peer underneath. He stared for a good long while, then let out a low whistle.
