by Rosie Thomas
‘So when did you make it? Where, and why?’
‘So many questions,’ Simon said.
Ever since he had let her in, her history and her questions had probed his defences. Kath would never have asked such questions. Kath had been absorbed in herself. Not unhealthily, but with the normal, sharp appetite of youth. Even thirty years ago she had made him feel old, because she was so fresh and full of juice. He had loved that. With Kath’s different, surprising daughter – who had come too close, in so short a time – beside him, he wondered whether he had loved the real Kath, or even known her. He felt angry with this girl because she threatened to distort a happy memory, a cherished one because so many other memories were not happy.
Simon didn’t want to look at the game now because it reawakened those other memories. He didn’t know what impulse had made him bring it out. He studied Kath’s daughter instead, as her fingers explored the old wood from Shamshuipo camp.
She didn’t look like her mother, even. Kath had been all curls and satiny curves. She had full, soft lips and a ready smile. This girl was lean and flat, and her close-cut hair made her look even more like a boy. As well as asking questions, she listened to the answers as if trying to memorise them. And her eyes moved quickly, taking in everything. Unlike her mother, she didn’t smile very often. She did laugh, in startling bursts, but it was a fierce kind of laughter, more like a man’s.
Simon didn’t think Harriet Trott was happy, but he did not attribute much significance to that. Happiness was not an expectation of his own, either.
‘Is this lettering? Chinese lettering?’
Questions.
‘It’s Japanese,’ Simon told her.
The dam burst with the words. Sights and sounds, smells that choked him, all flooded up. The stinking tide swept him away from his workbench, from his redoubt, to another place. He became another man.
Lieutenant Archer, Royal Artillery. Shamshuipo Prisoner of War Camp, Hong Kong, in the spring of 1942.
Simon stared into the gloom of his kitchen, not seeing the girl, blind to everything but the horror of the camp. He was back there in an instant, and he knew as always that nothing he had done or ever could do would obliterate what he had known in that place.
The smells were the worst.
Forty years later Simon Archer could try to close his eyes and muffle his ears, but the smells still crept inside his head to rot the bones of his skull.
There were dying men all around him. The dysentery buckets overflowed on to the concrete floors of the prison, and the sick men lay in their mess too weak to move.
The scents of putrefaction and death were part of the air itself, the principal flavours of the meagre portions of grey rice.
The smell had become a fifth limb that Lieutenant Archer dragged with him everywhere, even outside the camp to the working parties at Kai Tak airport, to the munitions dumps, wherever their Japanese captors herded them. The pains of hunger and sickness, perversely, seemed to be part of another man’s body, so that he could observe them without emotion. Sometimes he could hear other men moaning or screaming, but he made no sound himself. He could turn away from the sights, pitiful or nauseating, until quite soon he had no need to do even that much because they grew familiar through repetition, and he became as indifferent to them as were the rats that ran over them all where they lay.
It was only in the later years that the sights came back to torture him. Starvation, maltreatment and disease. In Shamshuipo Simon knew that was all that lay ahead for him and the five thousand other men in the camp. He began to regard the men who were dying, and those who were already dead, as the lucky ones.
But in answer there always came the thought of Rosemary, his wife, and the baby son he had never even seen, at home in England. Even though he knew in abstract what war meant at home, Simon always imagined his family with a soft glow around them, as if of firelight, and then he would painfully remember the sweetness of love and domesticity. The will to live returned, burning more brightly.
Lieutenant Archer, naked except for a loincloth knotted between his legs, crawling with vermin and exhausted from malnutrition and hard labour on building the Kai Tak runway, sat on a concrete floor and played with the broken end of a packing case. He turned the wooden strut in his hands and numbers ravelled in his head. In the filthy labyrinth their unassailable logic helped him to stay deaf and blind to everything around him.
Slowly, tenaciously, Simon began to devise a kind of numbers game. He needed markers, and so he collected buttons from decayed battledress. Out on a working party, he watched the ground for round, smooth pebbles and when he found them he held them in his mouth until the return to Shamshuipo.
While some of the men screamed out their misery and others gnawed silently on it, Simon tilted his packing case at an angle and let the round pebbles run down the slope. He thought of choices and options, all the fruitful possibilities of freedom that had been closed off to him, and he built them into his game instead. He tried to carve wishbone shapes from twigs, although he was past wishing, but he had no knife blade or other sharp instrument. He began to collect spent matches instead. The Japanese guards all smoked, and they dropped the matches like largesse. Even the men were able to smoke sometimes. They collected flies that swarmed through the camp and plagued their captors as indiscriminately as themselves. They sold them to the guards, one hundred dead flies per cigarette.
So Simon shuffled between sprawled bodies and picked up the burnt matches. He made a kind of glue from hoarded grains of wet, cooked rice, kneading them into a fine, grey paste. He stuck the matches together to make wishbones. The balls rolled, and dropped through the wishbone-gates when Simon opened them. He could open or close the gates, and so he had created minuscule choices for himself. With increased concentration he added the numbers, challenging himself with new and harder combinations, scratching the columns of figures with a white stone on to the concrete floor.
He hunched over his packing-case board as if it offered him freedom.
In time, the game attracted the attention of the other men, those who were still able to take notice of anything around them. Simon showed one or two of the men how to position the button markers, and to set the pebbles rolling to meet them along matchstick paths. None of them had energy or ingenuity to spare, and interest in Simon’s contraption soon flagged. He was able to keep it to himself, refining the apparatus and allowing the numbers to replicate cleanly inside his head.
The guards saw no reason to bother themselves with a contraption of sticks and stones, but still Simon generally kept it hidden under his scrap of blanket whenever one of them was near.
Then came a day when he was absorbed in watching the pebbles following the paths he had decreed for them, and so he didn’t see a guard they called the Fat Man making his way between recumbent prisoners. The Fat Man was stopping every few yards to point at a man, who was then jerked to his feet and hustled away. The Fat Man was choosing those men who still had some strength left. There was clearly some task waiting to be done by the few who still might be fit enough.
It was too late when Simon looked up. His eyes met the corpulent guard’s, who responded by pointing straight at him. With an automatic, belated movement Simon tried to cover up the packing case with his blanket. As the Fat Man’s fellows pulled him to his feet, Simon saw the guard’s eyes flicker inquisitively to his game. The pointing finger moved to it, and beckoned.
The game was pulled out for the Japanese to inspect.
Simon waited. There was nothing for him to do but watch. He saw the Fat Man’s big, shiny round face bend to the game, the rolls of flesh distending his filthy tunic, and the broad, black half-moons spreading under his armpits. As he stood there Simon caught his richly oily and fishy scent in symphonic contrast to the common stench of Shamshuipo.
The guard glanced at him, curiosity making sharp points of light in his flat black eyes.
‘What?’ the man asked Simon.
The
Fat Man was hated for his knowledge of a few words of English as much as for his appearance and behaviour. Simon masked fear and disgust with a polite smile. He looked like a grinning skull.
He answered, ‘It’s a game. A game of skill and numerical calculation, involving the setting of two-way gates in various combinations to permit balls to reach pre-positioned markers via a kind of maze, or labyrinth. Each of the gates is awarded a numerical value, and the points scored are totalled when the balls reach their markers. Lowest score wins.’
The guard was staring at him, his face a suspicious mask. Simon knew that he couldn’t have understood more than two words of his mannerly explanation. He broadened his smile, and scooped up the tunic buttons to reposition them.
‘It goes like this. The numbers form a labyrinth of their own, a wonderfully logical structure that is colourless, odourless, beautiful and safe. Unlike this terrible place.’ The guard blinked. Simon let the pebbles drop along the matchstick gullies. Everyone watched them as they went.
The Fat Man’s face split like a pulpy fruit into a wide smile, to match Simon’s.
‘Crever,’ he said, and held out a huge hand for the buttons.
Simon let him play for himself. He could smell the man too strongly now, and he realised that his proximity was making him shiver with fear. The Fat Man was engrossed, but his companions called roughly to him. Reluctandy he lifted his head, and then thrust the packing case end back at Simon. He jerked a banana thumb to indicate that it should be stowed away again beneath the blanket. Simon did as he was ordered.
There was a moment then when the Fat Man considered him. Simon shrank, but there was nowhere to hide himself. And then, miraculously, the Fat Man shook his head. Simon understood that, whatever ordeal was being prepared for the few strong men, he was not going to be made part of it. The Fat Man lumbered on down the lines. Simon sat down in his place. He had no choice but to sit, because his legs gave way beneath him. His terror was the final weakness. None of the men who had been picked out ever came back. Simon never knew where or why they had been taken, but he supposed that in some way his game had saved his life. Afterwards, the Fat Man ignored him.
Simon kept the game hidden from that day on. It became a kind of lucky talisman. He believed that if he could keep it, he would survive.
When at last the Shamshuipo prisoners were moved from Hong Kong to Japan, Lieutenant Archer managed to smuggle his piece of packing case with him. It stayed with him in the new camp, thrust under his tatami mat. He sat on it and slept on it for two years. The years were terrible, but they were better than the ones that had passed in Hong Kong. Simon survived because he was set to work on the docks, and he could steal enough food to stay alive.
On 15 August, 1945, he heard a formal, measured voice speaking ornate phrases out of a Japanese foreman’s wireless. Soldiers and civilians were running, or standing frozen into stillness, some of them weeping. At the end of the Emperor’s speech, an interpreter scrambled up on to a platform of oil drums.
‘You are free, gentlemen. The war is over.’
A lorry-load of US paratroopers came to liberate the camp. They brought bread, and fruit, and tinned ham, candy and the unthinkable luxury of American beer. Simon took his packing-case game from under his mat and walked out of captivity with it wrapped in his arms. It was his only possession. Simon Archer reached England after four years spent as a prisoner of the Japanese. It was not, however, a return home. His wife and the baby son he had never seen had died in the bombing of Coventry, and he was not looking for a home without them.
This was what Simon told Harriet as she sat on his bench in the cold, cluttered room. She listened in silence, with only her eyes moving from the game to his face and away again, over the room’s shadows.
At the end, she touched the rough wood once more. Simon saw that he had told her enough. Her questions, at least for the time, had been answered. His body ached and his eyes burned. The assault of memories had left him feeling weak and helpless.
‘I’m tired,’ he told her. ‘It’s too late for you to go anywhere now. You’ll have to stay the night here.’
In silence, Harriet followed him upstairs. The room at the back of the house was chilly and dusty, but otherwise clean. He gave her yellowing sheets from a chest of drawers. They said good-night soberly, each of them stripped of the warm, temporary blanket of drink.
‘You won your five pounds,’ Simon said.
‘No, I didn’t. I prefer to take the direct route.’
‘Of course.’ There was perfectionism in her, as well as persistence. It didn’t surprise him that she was unhappy. But he didn’t pursue the thought. He wished that he had left the game in its hiding place. He was exhausted, and if he slept he was afraid that he would dream of Shamshuipo.
Harriet lay down wearing most of her clothes. The day seemed to have lasted for a very long time, or to have been taken up by a complicated journey. She was glad to have arrived at a destination, to bed in this unfamiliar room, where she could examine her impressions. They fitted together, after Simon’s story. The withdrawal and denial that had puzzled her became bare and understandable fact. She felt ashamed of her probing, now, and more ashamed because it had been motivated by her own self-centred hunger.
Harriet knew that she couldn’t offer Simon any comfort. Her own resources were meagre, and she doubted that even the most generous warmth could touch him now. But he had said that he was glad when she came back, with the courage of her curry and cheap white wine. And he had told her that he wished she was his daughter. There had been that, and the spurt of laughter, between them.
More than that. Harriet took the last of her impressions and fitted it into the picture. He had drawn the old packing case out of its hiding-place and shown it to her. She lay still, hearing the musical descent of the wooden balls as they followed their separate paths. It was simpler and more elegant than life, she thought. The only common factor was the will to win that they both engendered.
She hadn’t expected to sleep. But she did doze, and then fell into a series of disturbed dreams. When she woke it was in the dirty light of very early morning and the house was silent. She slid out of bed and put the top layer of her clothes on again, then crept downstairs to the kitchen. She had been intending to make herself a cup of tea because the drink of the night before had left her parched, but the chaos of the kitchen was uninviting. She used the kettle of boiling water for washing up instead, and worked her way through the piles of dirty plates and pans.
When that was done she cleared and wiped the table and the other surfaces, removing the most obvious rubbish and taking care to put the tools and clock pieces back exactly as she found them. She found herself humming as she worked, enjoying making order out of the mess. In the cupboard under the stairs, amongst more of Simon’s abandoned skeleton projects, she found a long-handled broom and ancient mop and bucket. She swept and washed the floor, and then peered into the shadowy larder that led off the kitchen. There was nothing in it. Simon must have produced yesterday’s tea-bag and eggs from some other hiding-place.
It was nine o’clock. Harriet picked up her bag and let herself out into the street, leaving Simon’s front door on the latch. She didn’t think that anyone would try to get in while she was away. She walked briskly to the Pakistani-owned corner shop that she had noticed two streets away.
‘Do you know Mr Archer?’ Harriet asked the woman in a sari who helped her to pack two bulging plastic carriers. She described him and the street.
The woman shook her head regretfully. ‘I do not. And we know most of the people here.’
Harriet was unpacking the shopping, arranging her purchases in the larder, when she heard Simon behind her. She swung round, almost guiltily. He looked at the packets and tins.
‘You should have accepted your winnings. That must have cost more than five pounds.’
‘The money isn’t important. I just wanted to get you some supplies.’
Simon regarded her
and she blushed. He didn’t say anything, except, ‘I’ll make some tea.’
They sat in the same positions as the day before, and Harriet drank her tea gratefully and ate slices of bread and marmalade.
‘When is your train?’ Simon asked. He didn’t try to soften the implication. He wanted her to go and leave him alone again, in peace. Yesterday’s precarious intimacy had disappeared with his dreams of Japan. He didn’t want this girl interfering with his possessions, clumsily imposing a sort of order that only reminded him of how a different, parallel life might have been lived. He didn’t want her food, either. The bright packets belonged to the other, fertile life.
Harriet’s eyes dropped to her plate. ‘There are plenty of trains. I’ll catch one this morning. I should get back to work,’ she offered, making a necessity of departure.
Simon said, ‘Yes.’
When they had finished breakfast she washed the plates, put away the remainders. When that was done she surveyed the room, glad that she had been able to do something, however small, out of her impotence.
‘Thank you,’ Simon said kindly. He put out his hand and they shook, formally, as they had done at the beginning. He escorted her past the grandfather clock, back to the front door.
‘Wait a minute,’ he said. She watched him return to the kitchen, and come out with one of the empty bags from the corner shop. Then he went into his front room. Harriet saw the corner of one of the dismembered armchairs, and heard a drawer pulled open. When he came out again he was carrying the plastic bag, made square and heavy by the packing case end from Shamshuipo. He held it out to her.
Harriet looked at him in wonder.
‘Take it. It’s yours.’
‘You can’t mean that.’
‘I do. Do whatever you want with it.’
He was suddenly eager to have both of them out of the house. They had become entwined, in the dreams fuelled by unaccustomed whisky. He wanted them both gone, although he didn’t expect that the memories would vanish with them.
