by Susan Barker
‘Dearie me,’ he said, ‘now that ain’t a pretty sight. Your old slyboots girlfriend do that to him, did she?’
He flicked his cigarette butt under the bushes. Was Evangeline back in the village? The question was a strangled whimper in my throat. The lieutenant came and squatted by me. He flipped open his knapsack and uncapped a water canister. He tilted the canister to my lips and I gulped and gulped, water streaming down my chin. Oh, it was glorious! Spencer laughed and I didn’t care. I couldn’t gulp it down fast enough. I could feel my stomach bloating and my cells hydrating one by one, intoxicated by the elixir of life.
‘Well then,’ said Spencer when the water was gone, ‘s’pose I ought to piggyback you home. But first things first …’
The lieutenant delved into the knapsack once more and removed a first-aid kit. He took out a small glass vial and a syringe. He tugged a hanky from his pocket – crumpled and filthy, as if used to polish his boots – and gave the needle tip a wipe.
‘Now then, Christopher,’ he grinned as the needle pierced the foil lid of the vial, ‘have I got a treat in store for you!’
The voyage out of the jungle came to pass in a dreamy haze. The good lieutenant and I were weightless, borne along by a flock of angels and harpsichord music. The savage undergrowth parted like the Red Sea as the lieutenant cradled me in his arms. Why he grunted, cursed and wheezed as he did was a mystery to me.
The weeks of hospitalization were also hazy. Sterile sheets replaced the decaying jungle soil and my bloodstained clothes were exchanged for a backless hospital gown. They pumped me with donated blood, and tubes drip-fed me and rinsed the septicaemia from my arteries and veins. For a while my kidney flailed and floundered, the medics uncertain whether it would heal and resume functioning.
Every night I woke in an orgy of screaming, clawing the bandages from my mid-section, convinced that maggots had infested my wound. I slapped the nurses who came to calm me and head-butted the night porter, disturbing the other patients on the ward. The hospital staff wanted to bind me to the bed like a mental patient, but Charles made a fuss and had them move me to a private room. During the day hallucinations and spells of madness enlivened my drug-fuddled state. I confused the nurses tending to me with Evangeline and, forgetting her betrayal, would pull them to me and kiss them full on the lips. I’d pinch their bums and slide my hand inside their brassières during my sponge baths (which, to my mortification, I mistook for caresses of a more intimate nature). Convinced one long-suffering female doctor was the love who’d forsaken me, I chucked my dinner tray at her, splattering her with peas and gravy, and shouting every disgusting insult that came to mind. Thank God those nurses had a sense of humour. When I recovered they’d tease me. They’d wink at me and say: ‘No kiss for me today, Christopher?’ And I would blush, grateful they’d seen the funny side.
When I was better the police came to interview me. I recounted every detail of my affair with Evangeline and the events of the night I was stabbed and abandoned in the jungle. I was not the first government official to have had a liaison with a resettlement camp internee and no disciplinary action was to be taken against me. It was put to me kindly, however, that if I wanted to return to old Blighty to put my ordeal behind me, that would be perfectly understandable. And what a temptation it was, the chance to flee the heat and mosquitoes and knife-wielding Communists. But I was determined to stick it out. It’s my duty to stay for the remaining months of my contract, I said, without the faintest premonition that I was to stay in Malaya for another twenty-eight years.
And so I returned to the kingdom of ramshackle slums and backed-up drains. I’d been hospitalized for nearly two months, but not much had changed. I resumed my role as Assistant Resettlement Officer as if I’d never been gone.
Though my fugitive beloved was very much alive and on the run (with a $100,000 bounty on her head), I was haunted by her. I saw her everywhere. Queuing by the standpipe, sowing seeds in her market-garden plot, wandering through the village with a basket of clothes for mending. I was busy from dawn to dusk, but from time to time a strange paralysis would sweep over me and I’d be lost in the memory of her (brought to, God knows how many minutes later, by the repetition of my name and fingers clicking in my face). Evangeline was my waking thought and the last thing on my mind at night. It became a secret vice of mine to go up to the watchtower and stand in the emptiness, listening out for echoes of the past.
The missionaries unofficially adopted the wayward Grace and I went to see her at the Jesus cottage once a week. Blanche Mallard was rather cross about my complicity in Evangeline’s fib about needing solitude for Bible studies and to seek the Lord. But she forgave me, relishing her subtle reminders that I’d been punished for my sins. Though the other sinner had fled, Blanche assured me of the even-handedness of divine retribution.
‘The Lord has seen and He has judged! The jungle may shield her from the eyes of the government, but not from the eyes of our Heavenly Father!’
Grace replaced the late Humphrey in the missionaries’ affections. They scrubbed her pink with carbolic soap and dressed her in Marina’s prim cast-off blouses and ankle-length skirts. They often left Grace and me alone together in the Jesus cottage kitchen, behind the beaded curtain. Seated across the table, Grace would fidget and rock her chair on its hind legs. She’d rest the sole of her bare foot on the table edge, showing off the frilly bloomers they’d made her wear. Grace was blank as a Noh mask. But if I smiled she would mimic me, like a baby gurgling in a pram. As sermons, psalms and words of scripture droned in the classroom next door, I’d lean close to Grace and speak to her in Cantonese. Where has she gone? Did she ever really love me? When will she come back? Grace would wince, twisting from the intensity of my gaze. Or she’d yawn hugely, baring her stumpy, gappy teeth. Sometimes Grace would cease fidgeting and trap me with an unflinching stare. And in that stare I’d be reunited with Evangeline. The gyre of smoke-grey irises so familiar to me, and something else – something living behind the eyes. I’d leave the Jesus cottage then. I’d resolve not to go back. But then another week would go by, and I inevitably would.
I returned to The Village of Everlasting Peace an object of communal ridicule: the Foreign Devil seduced and tricked by a woman of the Min Yuen; the hypocrite who broke the rules he enforced. But as days became weeks became months my determination not to quit my job earnt me a grudging respect. I was solemn, hard-working and logical in my approach to things. The romantic, happy-go-lucky Christopher Milnar who’d arrived at Kuala Lumpur airport was gone – died in that jungle clearing.
‘I miss the old Christopher,’ lamented Charles. ‘You’re such a misery guts these days.’
Charles was a fine one to talk, of course. In 1952 he was so heavy of heart, the organ dragged along the ground, aorta and ventricles clogged with dust. Charles had handed the reins over to his demons. The bad mood that plagued him in the mornings now lasted all day. No one liked him much any more, except Lieutenant Spencer, who was loyal as a dog. But the former Raj orphan and Changi POW was unable to accept Spencer’s love graciously. He was a condemned man and anyone who loved him was condemned too. Drunken abuse shattered the night as he turned on his dearest companion. Charles yelling, glasses smashing, chair legs splintering across Spencer’s back. Spencer was the stronger of the two, but I very much doubt that Charles was the one stabbed with filthy syringes or shoved through the veranda railings and chased out the village gates by the speeding bullets of an antique handgun (a family heirloom, once belonging to Charles’s grandfather, Thomas Dulwich Esquire). But again and again Spencer went back to the officers’ bungalow, the battered housewife whose fidelity to the beast survived every brutal attack.
‘You made each other so unhappy,’ I said to Charles, as he swilled a glass of whisky in my armchair the other night. ‘Why didn’t you have the courage to break it off?’
‘Unhappy!’ scoffed Charles. ‘Whatever are you talking about? You were the unhappy one, Christopher. We were
having an absolute ball!’
I stayed in The Village of Everlasting Peace for another year. The insurgency raged. The burnt carcasses of ambushed trucks cluttered the roads, and tin mines and rubber estates were bombarded with grenades, shrapnel glittering in the morning sun. THIS RUNNING DOG LED BRITISH IMPERIALISTS TO ARREST OUR PEOPLE declared the sign hung from a villager strung from the perimeter fence.
My wound healed into scar tissue. I grew a moustache and people said it aged me. Sometimes I taught English to the children in the village school. Cat Dog Horse. A B C. One Two Three … Sometimes, during checkpoint searches, I’d discover notes written in Communist code in a hollowed-out pineapple, tube of toothpaste, or bicycle pump. Sometimes Charles and I would eat our supper in silence, staring at the flamingo-pink ebbs of the sinking sun. And so the year went by.
One morning in January 1953 I went to breakfast to see Charles washed and shaven and in his chair. Charles was smiling, trouser braces hitched over his recently ironed shirt. I hadn’t seen Charles smile since October 1952 and was right to be suspicious.
‘Good morning, Christopher.’
‘Good morning, Charles.’
‘How are you today?’
‘Same as usual.’
‘Jolly good.’
Charles lifted his coffee cup and drank, eyes smiling at me over the rim (old red-eyed Devil, whisky spiders scuttling out every night to spin webs of blood). I buttered my roll and added a dab of jam. I shook open The Straits Times and began to read. But it was no good. Charles’s smile was impossible to ignore.
‘What’s the matter, Charles?’ I snapped. ‘You look like the cat who’s got the cream.’
‘I have some news that might interest you.’
‘Oh?’
‘I received a telephone call from the Jalang town police station this morning. There was a raid on a bungalow in Batu Pahat last night. When the police burst in three men made a dash for it and were shot dead. The others were arrested. There were two women in the bungalow, one of whom, you’ll be interested to hear, was Evangeline Lim, hiding in the back room with a baby. They arrested her.’
‘Arrested?’
For 364 days Evangeline had been out of sight but omnipresent in my mind. I had obsessed and obsessed over her, until she was no longer a creature of flesh and blood, but a thing of myth. My monomania had made Evangeline a lesser god. How could she be captured? How could they handcuff a deity?
‘Yes, arrested.’ Charles’s grin was bursting at the seams. ‘The police are hardly going to slap her on the wrists and send her on her scheming whoring way, are they now? I say, Christopher, you’ve gone deathly pale! You don’t still hold a candle to that murderous wench, do you?’ Charles widened his eyes, though he knew perfectly well.
‘Where is she?’
‘They are holding her at Jalang town police station. She is under interrogation.’
Interrogation: a euphemism for cigarette burns and electric shocks; for suspects stripped naked and spat on and dunked in barrels of water. Strong men and women had committed suicide in police custody.
‘Jesus …’
‘Why are you so concerned?’ asked Charles. ‘Need I remind you that this is the same woman who tricked you and left you for dead.’
Charles was amused. I hardened my face to lessen his satisfaction.
‘What are the charges?’
‘The charges are numerous,’ said Charles. ‘Membership of the Communist Party, running away from The Village of Everlasting Peace, the attempted manslaughter of Assistant Resettlement Officer Christopher Milnar …’
I nodded.
‘The last charge carries the death penalty,’ said Charles. ‘If you testify against her, the woman is as good as dead.’
The trial of Evangeline Lim took place at the Selangor Magistrates Court on 18 February 1953. I arrived at nine o’clock and sat with the five other witnesses, all of whom were Surrendered Enemy Personnel. The courtroom was large and panelled in dark wood. Though the ceiling whirred with fans, the room was oppressive and as hot as an oven; a taste for the guilty of the perdition to come. The missionaries and Grace were there, sitting in the public gallery. The missionaries wore white gloves and church-going hats, and waved cheerily when I glanced round. (‘Look! There’s Christopher,’ Blanche said to Grace, as if they’d come to see me in a play.) Also in the public gallery was a Chinese journalist in horn-rimmed spectacles, scribbling in his notebook, and some British men – detectives from the Special Branch, who’d gathered the intelligence leading to the raid on the bungalow in Batu Pahat.
There was no jury at Evangeline’s trial. The local population, who were often anti-government and had Communist allegiances, were not considered trustworthy enough for jury service, and Evangeline was to be tried by the old Assessor system. Mr Justice Morrison was to preside over the trial, and two assessors – one Malay, one Chinese (both English educated) – were seated either side of him. Evangeline was late. As the courtroom waited I twitched as if I’d drunk a gallon of coffee, my shoe tap-tap-tapping and a tic agitating in my temple. The other witnesses were relaxed, the trial a welcome day out of jail. They made good-natured complaints about the broken-down air conditioning and broiling heat, and made fun of Mr Justice Morrison’s white curly wig. They gossiped about me in Hokkien: what’s wrong with this Foreign Devil? He’s making the whole bench shake. You’d think that he was the one on trial!
At nine thirty Evangeline Lim was escorted into the Selangor Magistrates courtroom by two female prison wardens. When I saw her my heart banged like a slammed door. I was on fire, my cheeks blazing, flames licking the ceiling. The courtroom murmured to itself. My beloved was barefoot and wearing a blouse and cotton slacks. She’d changed. Her greying hair was now chin-length, pinned back with tortoiseshell combs. And she looked older, her skin lined as if she’d aged a decade in a year. She wasn’t nearly as pretty as I remembered. The opposite of pretty, in fact. But I ached for her nonetheless. Evangeline’s eyes skimmed the benches before she took her seat. She must have seen me (the lone Caucasian, the man with the flambéd cheeks) but her face bore no trace of recognition. I wanted to rectify this, to shout and shout until she acknowledged me. And when a scream did pierce the ears of the courtroom, for one disorientating moment, I thought it was me. Grace was screaming at the top of her lungs in the public gallery, the missionaries flapping about, trying to silence her. Evangeline’s was the only head in the courtroom not to be turned by the commotion. She stared into midair, her face a vault, from which not a mote of emotion escaped.
One by one the witnesses were called up to the stand. And one by one they identified Evangeline as the ranking party official Small Cloud and described the specifics of their acquaintance with her. The Communist Party defectors testified in a perfunctory manner, scarcely breaking into a sweat when cross-examined by the lawyer for the defence. I, on the other hand, sweated torrents, the ceiling fans mocking me with their redundant whirring as I fidgeted on the bench. Evangeline held her head high as the surrendered Communists gave evidence against her (only once narrowing her eyes when a witness claimed that she had supplied him with hand grenades). During the breaks in court the Surrendered Enemy Personnel were taken to a private room, where they smoked and drank chrysanthemum tea. Unable to eat or drink, I wandered the corridors of the courthouse until the trial started up again. When five o’clock came I realized that I would not be called to the stand that day. Court was adjourned at a quarter to six and I left the Selangor Magistrates Court exhausted, without a word to anyone.
I spent the night in a hotel in Kajang, the lamps blazing in my room as I lay awake until dawn.
I imagined Evangeline dying. Dangling from a noose of rope, stool kicked from under her feet. The brittle snap of her neck, truncated gasp from her strangled windpipe. The light-headedness as oxygen seeped from her brain. And then nothing, I presumed. A corpse hanging from the gallows. I could not comprehend it, the eternal snuffing out of life. For Evangeline, who had
lived and breathed and cared for her sister and washed clothes in the village stream, to no longer exist. I would not testify. I would leave tomorrow. But I knew my loyalty was to an illusion; to a woman who had left me for dead.
I bathed at sunrise, ladling water over insensate flesh. Then I shaved away the night’s shadows, the eyes staring out of the mirror smudged dark with sleeplessness. The razor scraping my stubble bit my cheek. Rinsing away the blood in the basin, I thought what sweet relief two quick slashes of the blade would bring.
* * *
Three hours later I was in the witness stand, an exhumed corpse of a man, describing my relationship with Evangeline from beginning to end, omitting nothing, except that I had loved her.
The lawyer for the defence said that my testimony was motivated by revenge for a love affair gone sour. Evangeline had not lured me into the jungle. Fuelled by one-man heroics, I had chased after the bandit alone. The consequences of my stupidity embarrassed me, so I blamed Miss Lim. I was confident the assessors would not believe him. His was the strategy of the desperate, of a side with nothing to lose. As her lawyer made these audacious claims Evangeline seemed dissociated from the proceedings, as if she wasn’t listening. What a coincidence, I said, for Miss Lim to vanish on the night of my attack. What a coincidence for me to have stumbled upon the corpse of Detective Pang on my own. The lawyer continued to accuse me, and though I didn’t lie once, when I left the stand an hour later I was trembling with shame.
When Evangeline stood in the dock I was struck again by how old and plain she was; a woman not a single head would turn for in the street (except mine, of course: my head will never cease to turn for her). Though English was the language of the courts and it would have been in Evangeline’s favour to speak it, she used an interpreter and testified in Cantonese – a decision that baffles me to this day. When the prosecution asked her to confirm or deny whether she was a Communist, Evangeline denied it. Though she had been forced to live among the Communists she’d never met the witnesses. She accused them of perjury; identifying her as Small Cloud to receive free pardons. They were out to save their own skins, she said, and not to be trusted. Evangeline’s defence was a denial of everything. When the prosecution cross-examined her about the night I was stabbed I expected the lies to continue. But they didn’t.
