by Nigel Barley
‘But presumably he did not limit his activities to arranging them in glass cases and just dusting them off from time to time as in some living museum?’
‘Apparently not. The male offspring, he formed into a brass band. Apparently they were quite accomplished and in great demand for social occasions.’
‘And the females?’
Pilchard blushed. The abraded saucy pictures on the walls zoomed into focus.
‘Er … well … It’s not entirely clear. His enemies, of course, claimed that he … er … ploughed them back in.’ Lady Pendleberry transferred her stick to the ‘present arms’ position and rose like a black storm cloud over the sun.
‘Enough! When we came here this afternoon, we did not expect smut and innuendo.’ She breathed through flared nostrils. ‘A little geography and geology would have been quite in order, even a modicum of natural history might have passed without comment, though it is always dangerously physical. We did not expect the documentation of depravity. Dr Pilchard, as a public servant, you should be ashamed of yourself.’
‘Oh put a sock in it Betty. Thank god this is more interesting than last week’s “Punctuation in Shakespearean English”. I want to know more.’ Other women murmured assent. ‘You go if you want to. Nothing wrong with a bit of historical “how’s yer father”. You weren’t such a prude when we were at school together.’ Pilchard thought he heard a threat of inconvenient disclosure there. ‘Carry on Dr Pritchard.’
‘Very well then.’ It is hard to stalk out haughtily when dressed in pink tule with holes in it through which show chicken-wing legs, but Lady Pendleberry made a worthy attempt.
‘Now,’Dr Voss smiled, settling roundly in her chair. ‘Let’s get back to the dry bones of history and, please, for God’s sake, Dr Pilchard, try to put a little warm flesh on them.’
Part II
The Garden in the Wilderness
Pilchard looked back the way he had come. From afar, the whiteness of Changi prison gleamed like a jewel in a setting of base metal, the streaks of lichen and decay invisible at this distance. It was possible to imagine it as a sort of enchanted medieval palace. Clustered around it were the carbuncles of barracks—Selarang for the Australians, Roberts for the Brits and the Dutch and a strip of no man’s land in between to keep them apart. But the perimeter leaked like a sieve. Goods could be traded in and out on a flourishing black market fuelled by the work parties who stripped their worksites bare. Charged with clearing a warehouse, they would steal not only from the cargo but virtually demolish the building. Some were from London dockers’ families and had generations of traditional skills in low thievery. Beams and hinges would be magicked into thin air. Doorlocks would evaporate, nails from the walls, pipes and taps would suddenly dissolve into nothing. Give us the job and we’ll finish the tools.
From the tarmac road, radiated a network of dirt tracks linking up the little Malay villages and their emerald fields. Here, the locals dwelt in insanitary ease, replacing the lost income of fishing—prohibited by the Japanese—by a windfall of commerce. Chinese middlemen had moved in, relations of sponsorship and clientship had blossomed, trading circles spontaneously formed themselves. In less than three days, the same distributor-head of a looted Morris might be stolen by POWs on the docks, smuggled into the camp, smuggled back out to the Chinese, exchanged in half a dozen trades and sold back to its owner as a replacement through an established store. Life reasserted itself.
They had come for Pilchard before breakfast, Sergeant Fukui, a rat-faced Korean, and worried-looking Truefitt, floor supervisor with his clipboard, and kicked him listlessly awake.
‘You come! Speedo! Speedo!’ He had struggled unwillingly to consciousness. In Changi oblivion was a precious state, almost holy, that had to be respected by others.
‘What? Who? Why?’ Giggling Fukui mimed exaggerated cutting of throats and kicked again. O’Toole watched impassively.
‘Shitbags,’ he observed quietly and dispassionately, to no one in particular, as if identifying a particular species of insect. Manson woke up and let out an experimental hiss of steam, boilers not yet up to pressure. Truefitt sweated copiously.
‘They’ve got a chit. From Yamashita’s own office.’ Droplets began to gather at his temples. ‘I hope you’ve not been up to anything that will get the rest of us into trouble, Pilchard.’
‘Oh for God’s sake stop kicking me. There’s no point.’ He struggled for sandals only to have them kicked away again.
‘Speedo! Speedo! Japan number one. Britain number ten.’ Fukui all teeth and spit. Why did he smell of garlic? It was the French who were supposed to smell of the stinking rose.
‘Yes. Whenever I do number one’s I think of Japan.’ Pilchard struggled to his feet. ‘If I don’t come back O’Toole gets my kit.’ Spoken with the force and clarity of a deathbed declaration.
The battered face crumpled into softness. ‘That’s very decent of you, old man.’ He leant up on one elbow. ‘But don’t you go worrying about that. It’s probably just some admin thing. You’ll be back in a jiffy. Seen it happen loads of times.’
‘Speedo! Speedo!’ Jostling and shoving. The droplets at Truefitt’s temples gathered and flowed. Manson let out a whistle and juddered his pistons threateningly. As they marched him away down the gloomy pre-dawn corridor, Pilchard could hear the whispered news of his removal already rustling through the prison like a swarm of cockroaches and felt a sudden puzzled numbness, as of a man reading a newspaper and coming abruptly upon his own obituary, written by a normally authoritative source.
He did not wonder what it was that he had done. We are all overdrawn at the moral bank and, anyway, the old rules no longer held. All pretence of living in a just or even comprehensible world had long disappeared. But he did worry slightly over which of his offences they had discovered. That could shape his end. Was he to be swiftly executed or merely to suffer endless, unspeakable pain and mutilation? Or would one come before the other? Would it be the march onto the parade ground in the hot sun before ranks of horrified troops, the forced kneeling, all the time making the decision whether or not to beg and grovel wretchedly for mercy? You knew it would be pointless but it seemed stupid to toddle off into oblivion without even playing your last card. After all, for one who had no faith in an afterlife what did the dignified manner of your going matter one way or the other? At the hospital, if you were the doctor on duty, they always wanted you to say that so-and-so popped off laughing and joking, saluting and singing the national anthem. In reality, most went screaming and cursing if they had the strength or whimpering if they didn’t. They had already reached the administrative block, a series of tired, brick huts faced by an open corridor. He was already being pushed and shoved into an office, already bowing at someone he had not bothered to identify through the mist of fear and confusion. It was one of those irreversible moments in life, a climacteric, that governs everything that is yet to come, the opening of a buff envelope that held the key to one’s future, the saying of ‘I do’, the signature on the army application form. There was an officer’s voice coming at him. He tried to concentrate, blinked the sweat out of his eyes.
‘The paper says you will report at once to Stamford Road. The order is straight from headquarters. You will carry this pass and wear this armband on your right arm.’ The uniform pushed over a piece of cloth bearing a red sun and a snarl of characters. Pilchard was dazed. He was to go back to the museum? Someone had pulled some strings. He was not going to die after all. He immediately began to regret his missed breakfast. And then they had taken him to the gate and just pushed him out. No transport. Nothing. An orphan. Barely a penny in his pockets. Gesturing with their rifles that he should walk, no longer the master race. ‘Japan number one. Britain number ten!’ It sounded like the house chants of his prep school. On such childish principles are great empires based. Fair enough. The morning sun was still gentle on his face. He felt like a bigger schoolboy getting a sudden, extraordinary day off while everyone el
se was still swotting at their lessons and set out, hesitantly at first, then—like Felix—kept on walking, kept on walking, even humming to himself and possessed of a curious lightness of being.
* * *
‘Hong Kong’ Fong settled back in the great rosewood chair that was the over-literal mark of his office, Chairman of the Chinese Traders’ Association. His hand dropped casually to find the comforting chip in the antique mother-of-pearl inlay of the armrest and he explored it with a canny fingernail, experiencing the same guilty pleasure he had got as a boy from picking at the scabs on his knees, finding the fault lines in them, easing them up, enjoying the rush of blood as they came away and their sticky chewiness on his tongue. He had been smacked by his mother for that. He was too young for this job, too insignificant, too small, a child again. They all knew it. With his taste for linen suits of skimpy, modern cut, he contrasted with these old patriarchs, from established trading houses, sitting round the table in their motheaten silk tunics and embroidered slippers. Most of them were barely out of pigtails. He spoke the wrong language too, the Cantonese of his Hong Kong parents, not their Baba Hokkien mix of mainland language and Malay. He was not King’s Chinese. He was his own man. HK. Above his head, a poster from the Propaganda Department made the point. It showed an elderly Chinese merchant in despair over his boarded-up shophouse with its Union Jack while next door, a young, laughing Chinese, looking very much like HK, was chubbily beating off the customers clamouring for his Japanese products. A slogan read ‘Make Fortune By Cooperating With Japan’. It was the Japanese who had chosen HK over the heads of his elders and he felt the resentment that radiated from these old men so used to deference and submission from wives and children, employees and colleagues, even from salaried government officials. They made absolutely sure he felt it.
‘We are required to submit figures on the degree to which the campaign to replace British goods at home with Japanese goods is progressing.’ They looked at him sourly and said nothing. Everyone knew there were virtually no Japanese goods to replace the British goods with, that the whole thing was empty words. They were expected to survive indefinitely like camels living off their humps yet, among them, HK was the only one with no hump. The others had long prepared for war in depth, had hidden stores in hidden locations to which no one person held a map. True, thanks to informers, the Japanese had tracked down some reserves of the second rank and broken them open, forcing staples out onto the markets but mountains of rice, rivers of soy sauce and lakes of oil formed a whole secret landscape as yet unrevealed. Meanwhile, in the world the public saw, nothing at all was being delivered to their empty warehouses while the whole island was being ruthlessly stripped bare of goods and even scrap to keep Japan going, for the Japanese recognised no basic human needs, in their conquests, that could not be met simply with more submission and flags. Flags had, of course, arrived in large quantities. They all had them outside their shops and, inside, an amuletic photograph of the pinch-faced, weedy Emperor. There was the same one there on the wall, squinting down on them where once Chiang Kai-Sheck had hung from the same rusty nail. Being slightly smaller, it was framed by a rectangle of greasy dirt. HK coaxed.
‘The figures, of course, do not have to be entirely accurate. The marking of a general trend will be sufficient to satisfy the Japanese.’ They stared impassively back. Blank defiance. The Japanese had come to him. It was, surely, his personal problem. Not theirs. Everyone knew that the merchants’ written records had always been imaginative works of fiction, spun from nothing, conjured up for the tax authorities. The real figures were in their heads. HK began to sweat. ‘Some sort of a gesture is required. That is all.’ His voice had taken on a pleading tone and he hated it. One or two of them had picked up on it and begun to smirk at his discomfort. A few years back, when the Japanese had attacked Manchuria, they had held meetings like this—actually in this very room—about the enforcement of the boycott on Japanese goods declared by the firm-fisted patriots of the China Relief Fund. ‘Help Britain and you help China’ had been the slogan pushed at them then. But at that time, HK had sat at the bottom of the table and held his tongue. Tongue. His mind wandered. He thought wistfully of the things he had done with Lily last night in a little shophouse in Geylang. At least he could still keep it up, unlike these old men, for all their ground rhino horn.
Loh Ching laid the long nail of an index finger gently on the tabletop like a householder testing the surface for dirt. It had the same effect as if one of the others had rapped on it loudly with a hammer and silence fell immediately. The senior trader. His face was as sere as one of the seven sages, head of the house that the legendary Whampoa CMG—richest man on earth at the time—had founded a century before. He spoke softly, making everyone bow their heads and strain to pick up his words. Serenity was a mark of rank that Loh Ching used to float above the merely material world.
‘We are simple men of business, not of politics. Singapore is not our home. Let us not talk of home. Singapore is nobody’s home. We have no roots here. People simply live here to do business. As a young man, Mr Fong embraces … current realities … without the attachment some of us feel to our … older, loyal customers.’ HK gushed sweat into his singlet. It was damned hot up here on the first floor of the ‘shophouse. And this was dangerous talk. Anyone here could be an informer. God knows, he was half an informer himself. ‘I have a simple suggestion to make that should render all parties content.’ He looked slowly around at the row of bowed heads and respectfully downcast eyes. A suggestion from Loh Ching was as good as an order. ‘I suggest that we should concentrate on selling Japanese goods to the British.’ There was a silence in which the street noises became suddenly very obvious, a honking horn, a shouting child.
HK thought desperately. What the hell did he mean? ‘The British?’ he said. ‘The British are all sitting with empty pockets in Changi. How can we sell to the British? What can we sell to the British?’
Loh Ching smiled patiently and sighed at the obtuseness of others. ‘Perhaps you have not heard what has happened.’ Happened? Had something happened? Apart, that is, from the invasion of Singapore—sorry Syonanto—the killing, the terror, the collapse of their whole world. ‘There has been a sign from Heaven.’
‘From Heaven?’
Loh Ching nodded. ‘It was outside the Victoria Theatre several days ago. Stamford Raffles pissed on General Yamashita.’ They giggled like schoolboys. He had said ‘pissed’ just like that, right out loud. ‘Many people saw it. They say that as the Japanese were attacking his statue, it suddenly came to life, stood up and peed on them to show its contempt. The Japanese were very frightened and tried to shoot Raffles but, of course, the bullets just bounced off and he laughed at them. A man of iron! So they shot many of our people instead, then crept back later and dragged him away to the museum, like mice round a dead cat. It is a clear sign for us that they do not hold the mandate of Heaven, that they will not be here for long, that the British will surely return. As leaders of the community, we must look up to the heavens, not just down at our own feet. We must be ready when they do return.’
Oh God. It was old man’s talk. Tea-leaves, omens, looking at clouds. Loh Ching was sitting there chuckling, just like his grandmother would have done over her I-Ching reading, pretending they were still in China—a China most of them had never actually visited. In the old days, there had hung a great, ironwood panel along the side wall, carved with the curlicued ideogram for ‘long life’, picked out in gold with the Seven Sages in jade, scattered the length of its sinuousities like pilgrims along a cosmic trail. During the bombardment, it had fallen from the wall and killed a sleeping watchman, lying, in apparent security, beneath it. Then, Loh Ching had argued that this had signified the futility of further resistance following lack of foresight. The lesson of his childhood was that there was no point in confronting their credulity. That would make them angry. He must respectfully undermine the old fool from behind. He put a radiant smile of grateful enlightenment
on his face, nodded enthusiastically, cringing forward.
‘But the British have no money and we have no goods. How may this be?’
Loh Ching sighed again—a dog barks, the caravan moves on—and smiled like a man finally allowed to lay down his trump card.
‘We shall extend each other credit. It is to be a matter of trust between us, us and the British.’
HK’s head was swimming at the pointless stupidity and sentimentality of it all. The blood suffused his face as he raged internally with the urge to shout and bang on the table and make these dozing idiots feel the bite of reality. Then his breathing settled and his eyes cleared. It was like the tune coming through all the background elaborations on one of the jazz records he collected. The elements began to fall neatly into place like the pieces of a jigsaw. There was a scheme here that could work and then, in a flash, he saw it all. The British prisoners had a central fund into which the wealthy had been allowed to pay money. Such small wages and allowances as came from the Japanese were also paid into it. The merchants would supply goods against IOU’s guaranteed by the central fund. Colonel Saito, the camp commandant, he knew, would permit it if a sufficient percentage were paid into his own account. Prices could be pitched high and Saito would make sure just enough stuff got through to the prisoners to keep the system going and all sorts of neat little scams could be bolted on along the way. It would increase the sales of Japanese goods in the short term. If the Japanese prevailed, losses would be small and the merchants would be seen as having co-operated in the promotion of their exports and they would still be in business. If the British returned, they would be patriots and receive payment not in the downward-spiralling cherry blossom that was Japanese banana money but aromatically convertible Straits dollars. He inclined his head.
