Aldiss, Brian W-A Rude Awakening

by A Rude Awakening(Lit)

  The world was alive with heroes after the war. Unexpected countries were suddenly thrown open like treasure-chests, their secrets bursting into the light of incredible truth. The most ordinary people had dramatic stories to tell.

  Europe had undergone its terrible upheavals, but the upheaval that took place in the Far East was grander, more terrible, more far-reaching. That upheaval still remains largely misunderstood or neglected. From the splendour and havoc of the East, few stories travelled back to the West. Those that have done so are largely misleading. To give but one example: the film of The Bridge over the River Kwai, which dealt with the Death Railway built largely by British and Australian prisoners of war in order to link Burma with Malaya, was a tremendous success because it glorified the white man. It showed him building a bridge which the Japanese could not have managed on their own. The truth was that the Japanese were masters of the jungle; they were ferociously brave and ingenious enemies and, as their post-war success has shown, they were fully a match for the European races at building anything from a watch to an oil tanker. Bridges were nothing to them. And they endured conditions that no white races had been trained to endure. As it was with the Japanese, so it was with the other teeming peoples of South-East Asia then, and now. Perhaps the West dare not know.

  There was another reason for not being eager to go home. As the women were beautiful, so the men were amazingly resilient. The Chinese in particular were to exhibit their capacity for endurance and for an unexcelled ability to flourish in impossible conditions. Four million of them fled from the Communist regime in their homeland and were cast upon the rock of Hong Kong. There, they made a world-success of what, under four million variegated Europeans, would have turned into a concentration tamp on a grand scale.

  Ernst Sontrop, the faithful servant, and a couple of friends, managed to launch a small boat from a desolate stretch of coast and sail up the Malacca Straits towards the Anderman Islands. They were picked up, half-dead after twenty-one days afloat, by a British naval vessel. They were taken to Colombo, where the servant died.

  After some weeks in India, the three Dutchmen were given passage on a ship bound for England. The ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic by a German U-boat. Later, he was to discover that he was almost the sole survivor of the ship. Sontrop drifted on a lifebelt to the coast of France. He met up with members of the French Resistance and after some months made his way into occupied Holland, to fight with the underground against the Nazis.

  'You had a brave time in Burma, Horatio, but fighting in an occupied country, then you need a different sort of courage. Each time you have to go to sleep, you wonder if you will waken with a German carbine muzzle stuck in your stomach.'

  'Strange experience to get home and find it's an enemy country.'

  'Holland is not my home. Sumatra is my home. That is why I come back here as soon as I can to fight for what is mine.'

  We had another cigarette, smoking in silence.

  'We will go back to the HQ and find if your Captain Boyer has made contact.'

  'Will Addy return to Medan some day?'

  'Of course. Once we put down this bloody Merdeka movement.' He took up his carbine from his bed and slung it over his shoulder as we made for the fancy door.

  The Jeep driver had disappeared. We walked around and discovered him down by a little Chinese stall, sucking a mango- flavoured ice cream.

  A message awaited me in the Dutch HQ. They could not contact Captain Boyer. He had left Padang. Nothing was said about where he had gone.

  'Thanks a lot,' I said to Sontrop as I left his office. 'I shall have to go to Div HQ and find out where he has gone. If he's in Palembang or Singapore, I'm in trouble.'

  'It's a disappointment not to help you more. I will see you again before you leave Medan, I hope.'

  'Sure.'

  'Perhaps a little celebration.'

  'That would be great.'

  As we shook hands in the hall by the tiger, I said emotionally, 'This is a great place, Medan, the heat, the bloody insects. I've got to go back to England, and the thought it kills me just to think of it.'

  He said, 'The world owes a debt to your country. When you have returned back there, it will not be painful for you, I think. You will quickly forget the East it is not inside you here.' He touched his chest. 'As it is with me.'

  'I somehow don't fancy going back to that little dark bombed-out island.'

  'I was in England, Horatio. We had a vacation when my parents were on leave in the Netherlands, before the war. We spent some days in Hull, a very pleasant and historic city.'

  I went to the door. 'Oh, yes, Hull! Hull's great. Well, thanks again for the lunch.'

  'You are welcome.' He bowed.

  Outside was the sunshine, the dusty road. My Jeep was there waiting, its driver a few yards away, chatting to some Rajput Rifles from the nearby British HQ. He strolled over affably when I emerged.

  'You want go back home, Johnny?'

  'Johnny...' from a bloody naik! He was fresh out from India, as Kyle was fresh out from England. Someone else who did not know the rules. When I arrived in India, three years earlier in Jan 1943 to be precise no Indian would have dared to call any British soldier 'Johnny'. Since then, American troops, with their easy money and habits, had flowed into Calcutta and Bengal in their hundreds, and from them the custom of calling everyone 'Johnny' had spread. Maybe the Yanks thought it sounded democratic; for anyone who served in the Fourteenth Army, it had a ring of contempt.

  'You can return to lines and report back jhaldi to Colour- Sergeant Dyer in "M" Section, Naik, thik -hai?'

  'Thik-hai, Sergeant.' That was better.

  'And no side-trips on the way, malum?'

  'Acha, sir.' He jumped into his vehicle and drove off, grinning.

  A fucking great thing zoomed in from the nearest swamp and landed on my cheek. I struck it with unnecessary violence and almost laid myself out. I missed the fucking great thing.

  Peering groggily at my watches, I decided that an average reading made it about one-forty-five.

  The signal office shift would have changed. Corporal Kyle was no longer on duty. I strolled into the office and spent the best part of an hour trying again to contact Captain Boyer, only to receive the same answer as the Dutch. Boring old Boyer was on the wing. Maybe he had pissed off to Singapore on leave. Or India. You never knew with officers. By now, he could be bedding one of the memsahibs of Ootie, who slept only with lieutenants or above. I had had enough: I was going to see Margey.

  I had some money on me Dutch guilders and worthless Jap guilders which served as currency in the bazaars. In one of the Chinese shops along the Kesawan, I found a can of Argentine corned beef, heavily overstamped 'NAAFI', going for thirty guilders, or almost three pounds sterling. Some illicit quartermaster was making a fortune. I paid up, sighing. Margey loved corned beef; her tastes were very sophisticated.

  As I emerged into the street, the sky was rapidly clouding over. Wind scurried down the pavement. In four minutes, the streets would be awash. Before I reached Margey's alley, the first drops of rain smashed against the ground.

  Brother-in-law Fat was not seated at the central table. That in itself was remarkable. The erudite Tiger Balm was also absent, to my relief. The morning had been fruitless enough without him. Someone was at the table, sitting there in the gloom over a packet of fags; it was one of the most-frequented tables in the NEI. The someone was one of the interchangeable little old wrinkled men who guarded the place and kept it well fumigated with cigarette smoke.

  'Tabeh, Bapa,' I said. He returned the greeting by offering his fag packet.

  Auntie was not to be seen. One of her full-moon smiles would have gone down well. The screens were still round her sofa, as they had been when I left the house before dawn. Groans issued from behind them.

  The old boy gestured at them and said something like 'Sakit, sakit', which I did not understand.

  A Chinese came from behind the screens. His little black
bag and serious air marked him out as a doctor. He was sand coloured and wore sand-coloured shirt and shorts. He started chatting loudly with the old boy at the table.

  If Auntie was ill, it was no business of mine. Margey was my target. Once, not so many weeks ago, I had run, run up those two grotty flights of stairs with her in my arms. Couldn't wait to get her up there. Strong as a fucking ox, mad as a mosquito.

  'Margey!' I called.

  No reply. I looked at the watches on my wrist. The Amsterdam masterpiece had stopped again. According to the other, it was ten past two.

  No room like hers anywhere. Anonymous yet personal, rapturous yet melancholy. The Bird's Custard had been stored away. I stared out of the window at cracked roofs running with rain, at broken gutters belching water, at the stones below under flood. Let it piss down, I thought, let it always be extreme.

  On the sagging pediment of a nearby roof, a row of shite- hawks sat. They were drab brown with white heads, scraggy creatures watching for something to salvage from the flood. A rat, an unwary lizard, a fish, a sick dog, a human corpse all were welcome to the shite-hawks. It was their war, their peace. Whatever happened in Medan, they'd do well out of it.

  Under the low ceiling it was as hot as ever. I took my boots off, removed my belt, set it with the revolver upmost by the head of the bed. I stretched out and closed my eyes.

  Sleep came down, zonk, like the swoop of a shite-hawk.

  A slight noise and I was awake again, right hand on gun butt.

  Someone was coming up the stairs. More than one person, talking in low voices. I sat up and aimed the revolver at the door.

  Logic declared that no extremists would break in to this area of Medan in daylight hours, nor, having broken in, would they tread quietly up the stairs, exchanging pleasantries. However, logic had little power against a mental picture of being killed on Margey's bed.

  A woman's voice. Not Margey's. Daisy's. It must be Daisy's! She called, softly, 'Su Chi!'

  Daisy's cubicle was dark; since it had no window, such light as it received filtered over the partition. A match scraped in a box, lamplight glowed on the ceiling, throwing a pale wing of shadow above my head. I heard the chink of money. Then came a chuckle and the sound of someone preparing to fuck Daisy.

  'The bloody Chinese...' I thought. 'Mid-afternoon...' They were at it all the time. What else was there to do when you were stuck in a country paralysed by revolution, preceded by three years of servitude under the scum of the earth? As banks closed, everywhere thighs were bound to open, the lips of those neat little Eastern twots to unfurl like buds, and fornication to commence. The savoury sounds from next door illustrated my thesis; I clutched my prick and wondered at the laws of the globe.

  Although I had never thought about it before, old Daisy was not a bad screw. Her baby had ruled her out of consideration. True, she was a bit short, and rather podgy in the face, but one could imagine that good things lurked under the striped pyjamas she wore. Most of the good things were getting a hammering now. She was murmuring, making a little crooning noise, erotic enough to bestow erections on any mate within earshot, be he soldier, animal, alligator, or chicken.

  Whoever the guy was, he was getting into his stride. A decided slurp came from her socket each time his piston drove home, echoed immediately by the slap of two Chinese bellies coming together. I couldn't help fantasising about Margey, taking up that same comfortable pace with her, as we lay side by side. Something of the sort would be good even with Daisy. I could imagine her, only a few feet away. They were getting more excited now: those chubby buttocks would be going like a fiddler's elbow...

  His heels were jammed against the partition, making a regular drumming sound. The sod was grunting and she was going ah-ah-ah to entourage him. She was encouraging me, too. Suddenly oh, shit! Oh, Jesus wept! I was coming all over my bloody jungle greens.

  What a bloody fool, what an ape! I had not even realised I had the damned thing in my hand. It had fitted in there of its own accord. Now it lay looking smugly up at me, relaxing, heaving slightly, like an old bull elephant seal on the rocks. Leaving its trail all over my flies and jacket.

  Dead silence next door. From my pocket I fished a sweat rag something I'd been issued with in Burma and mopped myself up. But the effects remained obvious.

  I lay back in disgust, conscious of a tropical headache gathering like thunderclouds behind my forehead. A revolting ginger object with perspex wings and countless legs or mandibles belted in through the window. It homed in on the come-stains, vibrating a great curled tongue with glee. It could have passed for either a new evolutionary brand of hornet or the innards of a Javanese watch. I struck it away with fear and loathing and it commenced to gyrate upside-down on the floor with loud whirring sounds. It was the innards of a Javanese watch.

  They had finished next door. The old chap was panting and wheezing. He could be the sand-coloured doctor I had seen down below, attending old Auntie. Standard fee: One Visit, One Bunk-Up. He was getting paid. Daisy said something in a low irritable voice, then the baby squeaked. It was on the bed with them.

  I lay where I was until they went downstairs again, propping myself on one elbow and resting my head on my hand.

  Life is a knocking-shop, nor am I out of it... It followed from this degrading experience that Margey was also just a little whore. Whatever was happening on the political front, whoring like the business of the shite-hawks on the roof outside never ceased to prosper. How else could she pay her way through life? From everyone, a price was exacted.

  For a while I thought of Margey with hatred. She had been so bloody secretive about the other side of her life ever since we met. But the hatred went fast, like a storm blowing out to sea. You couldn't hate Margey. She had only been tactful, protecting me from the rottenness that surrounded her. She had to keep old Fat in cigarettes in exchange for this billet. Perhaps that was the arrangement.

  When I had arrived in Medan to take delivery of my gin- palace, before the horrible event of the 'arms deal', Johnny Mercer was going out with Margey. He introduced me to her apologetically, and the three of us had a drink in a little Malayan shack on the edge of town.

  Margey said so little that evening that I scarcely realised she could talk English. She looked small and not particularly interesting; her European-style dress did not suit her.

  As we walked down the road afterwards, Margey trailing behind us, Johnny said, 'Do you want to take her on, Horry? She's very nice, though she doesn't say a lot. Her talents lie in other directions.'

  I didn't know, and said as much.

  'Look, she really is smashing, though she was acting a bit thick back there. Trouble is, she always wants to eat Chinese grub and it doesn't suit my stomach.' He was silent for a moment, then he added, quietly, 'It's no skin off my nose. I'm going to jack her in; I've got a bit of blonde crumpet up the RAPWI whose husband's been shipped home with his chest shot up.'

  I looked back at the girl behind us. She sauntered along so innocently, her eyes directed to the ground. She was plump; the European little-girl dress was unsuitable and did nothing for her figure. As she caught my eye, she smiled as at some secret but rather shameful joke. I always remember that moment.

  'Does she dance?' I asked.

  The very next night, I took her to the sergeants' mess Saturday hop. Johnny faded gracefully out in the direction of the RAPWI, and thereafter was always tactful in his references to Margey. Although Margey was tactful about Johnny, I soon found out that she had not been fond of him he had not behaved 'politely'.

  Margey had been open and affectionate towards me from that first dance. Such was her nature. Such was the nature of the political situation that she had to pay her way with her one natural resource, just like Daisy and Margey's enemy down the street, Katie Chae.

  I devoted a lot of psychic energy to denying the fact to myself.

  You always paid more than you could afford. When I got back to the Blight only a few days to go I would lose my
freedom, while pretending not to lose it, and would vanish into Barclay's Bank like my father, lost for ever to the world of wider possibilities. Surely it was better to stay in Medan.

  But there were few possibilities here either. That was why Daisy and Margey were screwed regularly by whoever had a few guilders. Or a can of bully beef.

  I sat up and wiped furiously at the patches on my trousers, almost ruining my matrimonial hopes in the process.

  If I took Margey back to England, that would be okay. For her and me. And yet... Even here, even in Medan, even in the bloody Indian Army, even ten thousand miles from home, I still met with that stupid British prejudice from my fellow sergeants, a racialism that it would take a million years to wipe out. They would screw the local girls of any shade or persuasion. But to love them, to treat them as human beings, that was not to be thought of.