by Nigel Barley
‘As always, Loh Ching sees further than us all.’
* * *
There was no sign, of course, of the little, single-decker bus that used to run from outside the gates, its patient terminal, so that climbing aboard conveyed the sense of using a taxi. Pilchard adjusted his armband, making sure it was visible to all and kept boldly to the very middle of the road, not wanting some rifle-wielding, sharp-shooting guard in a distant watchtower to suddenly spot him from afar and detect in him an escaping prisoner. His scuffing and insecure sandals gave him an old man’s shuffling and apologetic gait—a fitting target for any bored sentry—and his heels pained him, the skin cracked and ridged like cheese graters. At the beginning of all this, the CO of the Volunteer Force had addressed them all and told with medical certainty that they had nothing to fear from Japanese infantry. He had listened with incredulity as it was explained, with complete seriousness, that Japanese were all bandy and physically unable to climb out of a trench so that they would perish, in their thousands, in the roadside ditches, like wasps caught and drowned in an old jamjar. They were short-sighted and with eyes so slitty they could not see at all in the dark or in rain. Good Aryans—no wait that was the other lot—good Britons had nothing to fear from them. That had proved to be untrue. They had pursued the retreating British with admirable agility, both in and out of ditches, and their snipers had acquired a fearful reputation for patience and accuracy in both rain and darkness.
Beneath the coconut trees on either side of the road, ramshackle Malay houses had sprouted and dirty, nostril-probing, naked children gathered to watch him walk past with the hungry eyes of tiger cubs not yet grown big enough to eat him. Pilchard felt horribly alone. Among such Muslim folk, there were no barking dogs, naturally, but even cats had become scarce so close to the wire, transformed readily by the camp chefs into rank ‘catsoulet’, ‘catserole’, ‘purrgedel’ and spicy but gamey ‘tom yumm’. The grubby children were strangely mute. At the capitulation, it was the sudden silence of the Chinese—a people who normally lived life at full volume—that had been the really terrifying thing while, elsewhere in Malaya, loudly jeering Malays and Indians—in that first exuberance of ‘Asia for the Asians’—had spat and thrown stones at the Allied troops as they marched past into captivity and danced with delight in the streets, while villagers had hastened to denounce any Allied forces hiding out in the jungle. It was clear local goodwill could not be taken for granted. Now, they were at the uncomfortable stage of a man waking up from the bleary pleasures of the night to face the intrusion and threat of an alien presence. Yesterday, a boy near the camp had been shot dead for flying a kite. The Japanese, to whom kites were traditional weapons of war, had assumed he must be signalling to someone. Now all children expected to be shot at and childhood was suspended for the hostilities.
The camp around the prison proper covered a vast area, being in fact several army camps collapsed together and penned behind barbed wire. Around the outer fence, left lazily uncleared of brush, was a maze of ditches and crawl-spaces used by the black-marketeers in their nocturnal comings and goings. It was tempting, but too dangerous, to take a short cut through all that tangled Apama corymbosa. Yet already, from this distance, he could hear the dull thud of the waves beneath the red cliffs of Tanah Merah, like an artillery salute, calling him down to the southern shore, while the siren rustling of the palm fronds above him spoke of sea and a fresh wind and a distant horizon and he found his steps taking a fork and heading in that direction, eyes suddenly wet with tears at memories of seaside holidays that crowded in unbidden. It took him a good hour to scramble down to the sea, on legs unused now to walking, to a little bay where, he remembered, the sand was purest gold and lapped by gentle waves that faded to a dimpled green. As he stepped out onto the beach and felt the wind that smacked the water, there was a fleeting impression of space and the salt taste of liberty on his lips. That sea there was the same one they looked at in Australia where they were free and there was no real fear—just the petty suburban worries that he would never consider again. Sand, eggtimers, tide, waves—a beach stopped the normal flow of everything, converted the straight line of time’s arrow into zigzag back and forth or to circle. It seemed impossible that he could not, by some mere act of will, shift perspective and transport himself across that ocean.
He focused again. The beach had changed. Everywhere were coils of barbed wire rusting on great wooden posts. It was not clear which side had done it. He stopped near the edge of the sand. There could be mines too and any Japanese soldier who saw him here would open fire at once. And then the wind shifted and there came, not the smell of the fresh, open sea but a terrible stench. Pilchard had smelt death often enough in Changi to recognise its clinging, rosaceous scent. Bloated bodies were entangled at the feet of the trestles that held up the wire, dozens, maybe hundreds, half in, half out of the sea, bobbing jauntily in the little waves. The wind carried a castanetting noise, like the busy typing pool of an insurance office at full stretch, that he could not at first identify. Then he realised with horror that each corpse was swarming with a hundred feasting crabs, possibly Carcinscorpius rotundicauda, clicking away in frenzy with claws like manic chopsticks. So the rumours had been correct then. The Japanese had taken a terrible revenge for the succour the Singapore Chinese had given their cousins on the Chinese mainland, rounded up anyone on the lists of support organisations, anyone with Triad tattoos, in the end any young men at all who just happened to fall into their hands and brought them to lonely spots like this and Pulau Belakang Mati to be bloodily bayoneted, clubbed to death, machine-gunned along with the Sikhs who had refused to join the INA and the Malays who had so bloodied their noses. He swigged calming water hastily from his bottle, emptying it, and swallowed hard and a trifle unsteadily.
In early accounts of Singapore, this was where the Sea Gypsies had lived and the beaches had been littered with the skulls of those brought here in acts of piracy to be slaughtered. He had written a professionally dry paper about some of their more picturesque customs for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. The British had had the bones cleaned up and flung in the sea by the sackload since there had been no invention of physical anthropology as yet to cry out against the waste of specimens. Now the skulls were back and there would be plenty of work for the anthropologists after this lot. As his vision cleared, two khaki-clad Japanese figures appeared, waddling up the beach a few hundred yards away, through a sort of sand mist whipped up by the breeze, gripping probing rifles, boots slung around their necks and bare feet slipping in the powdery sand. They pushed each other playfully, like schoolboys and giggled, the sound of their laughter cut through by the buffeting wind. This south shore was too dangerous, would be too heavily patrolled—asking for trouble. He must choose another way. He ducked back into the long grass and waited until their happy, chattering voices had passed and faded on the wind, then headed back inland through the tall, swishing stems that he identified provisionally as being of the genus Imperata.
* * *
In sick bay, Lady Pendleberry shifted her weight in the splintered cane chair. Both she and the chair had seen better days. She fanned herself tiredly, feeling no relief from the hot draught and thought of similar missions of mercy in the Norfolk village of her youth. Then, it had been baskets of coal and turnips for the old and sick, propped on the front of her bicycle, as she did the rounds of the bleak farm cottages. Cold had been the enemy then. These days it was heat and the remedy now was water and coconuts but it was all the same and just as pointless. Others would see the habit of charity as the mark of her simplicity and generosity but it was more that, when simply everyone was so far below you, their own petty social hierarchies faded to nothing and they all deserved sympathy equally. She ought to be knitting as she sat but she was just too tired. A Japanese pullover had been stolen the day before, already unpicked and mated with other old wool. Now it would have to be reknitted into new goods to sell back in town and it was her turn to effe
ct the reincarnation. Mrs Grimes was panting wearily on the thin, stained mattress, her eyes closed against the weak light from outside. No sheet. No blankets. Just the formless cotton shift of the ward that would serve as her shroud when the time came—which would be soon. The bed was not best placed to catch any breeze but could not be moved. It was a heavy, wooden bed that stood out from the chipped enamel bedsteads of the rest of the ward and the reason was that a crystal set was hidden in the leg, that doctors listened to furtively through their stethoscopes during ward rounds. She was not supposed to know but then she had spent her life knowing things she was not supposed to know. Occasionally, it hummed and gave the game away and had to be surreptitiously kicked. Darkness gathered in the corners and she watched it advancing down the ward as night fell. It was supposed to be malaria but all they had to offer was boiled bitter papaya leaves, a cruel parody of quinine that was hardly likely to cheer Mrs Grimes up or break the fever. Everyone thought it tasted like quinine so maybe it did some good but no one knew for sure. But you could see that it went deeper than that and that it was as much despair as anything else. The old woman had just had enough of it all and had decided to go. For tuppence she would go with her, just lie down and feel the sweetness of turf rolling over her. Mrs Grimes drifted back to consciousness and reached out to grasp her hand. The touch was of sandpaper left out in the sun. She would want water which meant the long trek to the far end of the ward and the only jug. But she did not want water.
‘It’s George I miss,’ she whispered through cracked lips. Lady Pendleberry patted and smiled comfortingly. George was the husband, killed in the bombing just before the surrender, some sort of lowly clerk at the waterworks, shabbily chubby—his rank in the scheme of things being fixed by his work cubicle without hatstand and piece of carpet, no telephone, second-hand Morris Minor parked outside—no driver of course. In the colonies you had to get used to people being out of place, usually rather above themselves, often beyond themselves. It was not just that they were not quite top drawer. Many had no drawers at all. And now even such authority and order as there once was had been swept away—except her own position of course, a rock above the flood.
‘Do you think I’ll see him again, your Ladyship?’ She panted. ‘In Heaven, I mean?’
‘I’m sure you will dear, when you finally get there. But don’t you go worrying about that now. Perhaps you would like some water?’ The war had affected religious faith in different ways. Some of the women had embraced it with a simple fervour that had them on their knees at all hours, night and day, since only divine intervention could bring an end to all this. But faith could not hide the fact that the chaplain was forever wriggling on the contradiction between an all-powerful and all-knowing, benevolent god and one who let things like this war happen in the first place. Sometimes, according to the chaplain, their present plight was to be seen as a test of that faith, on other days as a punishment for pride. Lady Pendleberry could not see why an all-knowing god could not know the state of her faith just as well as anything else and surely it was viciously cruel to have set up this war as a sort of extended moral driving test? And since god and imperial destiny had parted company, she found that she had rather less time for god than before.
‘George was wonderful. I’d never find another like him. In bed. You know. Just wonderful.’
Lady Pendleberry blanched and withdrew the hand that flew to her throat and felt for the absent string of pearls that had always hung there. This was the sort of intimate confidence that made her uncomfortable. Then duty reasserted itself and the hand went back.
‘There, there, Mrs Grimes.’ She patted again with a little more stiff superiority in her voice. ‘Hush now. Don’t upset yourself, dear. Just lie quietly and rest. Perhaps I should get you that water.’
‘Sex,’ said Mrs Grimes with unexpected volume and sitting up. Lady Pendleberry looked around anxiously at the forms in the other beds, mostly sleeping, though some were twitching and kicking in involuntary dance steps. It was vitamin deficiency. They called it ‘happy feet’. They tap-danced silently on air for hours. She was aware of the horrible prominence of feet, horny, yellow.
Mrs Grimes sniggered. ‘… just wonderful.’ She was going to make a scene, more intimate revelations, descriptions of beer-fuelled, brutish lust consummated up against the edge of the kitchen table in some artisan’s dwelling, not at all the thing. The lower classes occasionally showed themselves up like that at the end, as was only to be expected but, on the whole, one was surprised by how well some of them behaved. ‘Sex,’ she said again, loudly, shrilly, almost a shout, half a boast. ‘He was wonderful with the sex.’ Lady Pendleberry’s hand was raised to her own mouth, wanting to hold it over Mrs Grimes’s, to stop the cloacal flow of smut. ‘Wonderful. I was so lucky in that department. Blessed. A woman couldn’t find better. He was special, my George. He wasn’t like other men.’ Lady Pendleberry squeaked in horror, throat and face glowing with embarrassment and looked wildly at the ranged beds to see if anyone else was listening to this madwoman. Mrs Grimes smiled queenly at her then gulped and spoke with great weight as if fighting to pass on some final distillate of wisdom to the world. ‘You see, your Ladyship, in all the years we were married … he … never … once … bothered me. Lovely.’ She fell back, head to one side, a gargle in her throat and the pressure from her grasp abruptly ceased. A hand fell on Lady Pendleberry’s shoulder and she jumped.
‘Has she gone, Betty?’ It was Dr Voss standing behind her, the other hand in the pocket of her white coat, stethoscope dangling, cropped hair, comfortingly mannish. Despite herself, a faint smile had crept onto Lady Pendleberry’s lips. Hurriedly, she wiped it off.
‘She went peacefully. A blessed release. She said she had a good life. At the end she spoke fondly of her husband.’ Not exactly a lie. The chair creaked and sagged sceptically beneath her. Dr Voss sighed.
‘If only she had hung on a little longer. She really should have, shouldn’t have popped off like that.’ She made it sound like a failure of etiquette. She leaned forward to ear level and whispered excitedly. ‘We’ve got drugs coming, Betty. Anti-malarial, painkillers!’ Her mind swam with pictures of crisp white boxes, shiny phials. ‘Imagine! From the Chinese merchants of all things. They’re giving us credit. Who would have thought after some of the things we’ve said about them? If they had heard! There are times you just stop believing in the goodness of people and then something like this happens, so kind, so selfless.’ She pulled Mrs Grimes’s smock down with a reflex gesture of modesty and walked away to make the funeral arrangements, her step a little lighter but with tears in her eyes and her fists clenched on her damp hankie at the rediscovered generosity of mankind.
* * *
Pilchard found the devastation in the town astonishing. In the heat of actual conflict, it was not surprising that windows had been broken and even people killed but it was as if nothing whatever had been done since to even tidy up the mess, as if people themselves had been broken. Everywhere were gutted houses, looking as though their roofs had been knocked open with a giant spoon and their contents just scooped out. Blasted cars littered the roads and blocked the drainage ditches and unburied remains lay everywhere, pretty much where they had fallen, a prey to demented, slavering dogs who had clearly not coped very well with the undomestication so suddenly forced upon them. On one corner a richly red Chinese temple seemed to be doing a roaring trade, belching out clouds of clove-scented joss smoke. Chinese had not only selves and family to feed but also hungry ghosts. Yet, after the over-gleaned and desertic surroundings of the camp, everything here was still richly wasteful. One or two houses still held furniture and private possessions, possibly even food. He paused in front of a shoddy, jerry-built bungalow, Public Works Department, no porch, lower clerks for the use of. At the side was a space to park a car and a tap. It was dripping beguilingly. There must be water from a rain tank on the roof somewhere. He turned in and crunched across weed-dappled gravel and into the welcome,
stencilled shade of a scarlet bougainvillea. The tap gargled hoarsely then delivered up warm, brackish water, not exactly fresh but a roof source should be safe enough. He ducked his head under the flow, gasping gratefully, then carefully refilled and stoppered the bottle. Having come so far, it would be foolish not to have a quick look round. He scuffed up the steps and pushed on the door. Locked. A good sign, like an archaeologist finding the seal on an Egyptian tomb still intact. Round the back were French windows. He took a rock from the edge of the flower bed and paused in front of the glass, puzzled by his own reluctance to break it and so cross a line that would redefine the world of cultural regression and his place in it. It shattered under a single blow and he reached in and found it had been unlocked all along. In like Flynn, as the Australians said. So, now he was no longer a Roman citizen but one of the unwashed barbarians after the Fall, a hunter-gatherer, lighting a campfire on the mosaic floor of their banqueting hall and eating torn flesh with his bare hands before relieving himself, grunting, belching and scratching, in a corner. It had come to that.
Inside was a living room that said ‘poor-but-honest’—neat but careworn in a way that showed too much washing and cleaning of cheap material and a space too small to ever be cool. The air bore the lingering kerosene undertones of Flit. On the sideboard, picture frames displayed white faces of women with big noses and bad teeth. A tobacco jar—empty—displaying the arms of Morecambe-on-Sea. On the lino, the pattern had gone but the surface was still polished—clearly had a good servant—while a runner merely accentuated rather than concealed the baldness, like a bad wig, and led him through a door into a passageway and down to the kitchen that glowed behind lowered blinds. He glanced into the seedy bathroom whose air was sweet with the caramel of mildew. It showed the usual sad housedruff that reveals the seamy underside of all our lives. A tin of prickly heat powder lay spilled onto the floor. A towel, clean but shredding at one end and two socks, whole but unmatched, abandoned orphans. On the edge of the bath, surviving slivers of old bars of soap had been parsimoniously pressed into a new lump, like an uprooted tumour, still bearing great pennypinching thumbprints and in one corner of the ceiling, a growth of mould had benefited from human absence to stage a great breakthrough and was now moving down the side wall in an unopposed advance. A poor white man in the East had no purpose, like an honest one in government. An image of the appalling Erica Rosenkrantz flashed into his mind, at the club, irritably cigarette-stubbing and snapping. ‘People should not be allowed to be poor. It makes them such a ghastly bore.’ The kitchen breathed old meat curries and onions but, compared to the prison, it was a glittering treasurehouse of cutlery and pans. Flies were still optimistically buzzing round a meat safe where something had decayed to a diarrhoeal smear on a plate. An unexpected sophistication was the long-snouted EverReady electric gas-lighter on the tabletop. He knew where to look. In the kitchen cabinet, lined with old newspapers, were a tin of baked beans and one of rice pudding—the ‘Chinese wedding cake’ of his childhood. In the drawer a tin-opener. The beans he set carefully to one side. The rice pudding he attacked, ripping open the lid, whimpering, sitting on the floor—barbarian that he now was—and sucking it down like warm and lumpy catarrh straight from the tin, cutting his nose on the lid but not caring. He wiped out the inside with a finger and sucked it. He had cut the finger too. With satiety came the urge to sleep, just like Goldilocks in the house of the Three Bears. He could not read the Japanese chit, taken from his pocket that he was bleeding onto. It looked like a waterfall of beautiful spiders. Was he given a time limit to get to the Museum? He had no idea. Anyway, watches were the first things the Nips had taken so that, under the sleeves of their uniforms, some wore several up their arms, like the spivs in cartoons. But that was another problem for another time. It must be about noon. Too hot to walk anyway. He picked up his tin and—fingersucking—made for one of the bedrooms, a real double bed, sheets, comforting softness, muted heat, ear-damping silence and lay down on his habitual side, leaving unacknowledged space for an absent other. Sleep.
