by Nigel Barley
Then Ping, or possibly Pong, reappeared with a bowl of cherry-pink soup that he set down also helpfully. Pilchard looked questioning. What soup, after all, is bright pink?
‘Not crab I hope.’
‘Lizard,’ offered Dr Post, spooning with a sigh. ‘You know chichak. Not so bad really. Clears you out a treat. One splash and all is silent.’ He hesitated and reached nonchalantly across for the triumphalist newspaper the squirrels had been wrapped in, folded it carefully and stowed it away in his pocket, a slight glow of embarrassment about the eyes. ‘At least it’s better than being here in the sago worm season. Terribly binding sago worms.’
* * *
That night, Pilchard slept in one of the old curators’ houses in Cluny Road in a ramshackle bed with too many uncoordinated springs. It was an old mock-English, mock-Tudor building with endless tatty rooms, furnished rather like a seaside boarding school with objects that seemed not to have been chosen but rather to have been simply abandoned where they stood by previous generations. Upstairs somewhere was Prof Tanakadate, exiled from the Director’s true house by bomb damage, wrapped in the tinkle and twang of arid koto music from a wireless set. Dr Post shuffled and groaned next door like an old dog unable to find comfort in its bones. Possibly they had poor, missing Dagama—gone mad—stowed, raving, in the attic. Mosquitoes whined around the bed net like flies around a food safe. Where had that been? Ah yes, the Three Bears’ bungalow. How long ago that all seemed. He lay a while listening to the small, hopelessly fragile beating of his heart in the vastness of the night. The garden lay all about, monochrome as in a photograph and stealthily silent, handed back to the animals that also made a living there, sharp-eared and fleet-footed. Out here, far from the centre, they still had the regular music of the hours, the pre-dawn birds, the morning splashing of ducks, the stillness at noon before the evening whirr of crickets and the nighttime screech of owls. Moonlight pressed against the window panes and gleamed in metallic sheen on the leaves as fireflies flashed and dotted the shadows with Morse. He snuffed the oil lamp, a wick floating in coconut oil, and stared up at the darkened ceiling. In his mind, he slowly retreated to another garden, where his father had worked as a gardener at weekends. It was the garden that had sent him East.
It was a special place, a lush oasis in the suburban desert, a model of and for the world and where Dad worked to escape from the joyless wastes of the British Sunday with its interdictions on play, joy, life. It belonged to Sir Robert Vane-Tempest-Stewart, of an ancient house, who had rekindled his fortunes by marrying an heiress of the Landsmann family, owners of a factory that made Landsmann’s Famous Foaming Suppositories, advertised by the first poster to greet you as you turned into the High Street. Pilchard had been eagerly instructed by other boys what you did with them but still didn’t quite know why. In an experimental frame of mind, he had added water to one and seen it fizz to destruction in the sink like a slug on which salt has been poured. Whenever he saw Sir Robert giving Dad his orders or paying his wages, he heard the hiss of those suppositories in which the sound of distant oceans lay curled as in a conch shell. On the whole he liked the VTSs. They had no son, only a stringy daughter who disappeared to Australia and reappeared with her own gawky baby girl and no husband. Local women looked at her and pursed their lips and said nothing. They had a gift of saying nothing very loud. There were tales told of a marriage, a car accident, not believed, and the baby was minutely examined for signs of racial admixture—alas not found—but there was still plenty of time for that to show up later to complete her disgrace. If not, there might be signs of mental impairment, opening up other lines of attack through that male cousin she had always seemed far too thick with to be healthy. Where Pilchard lived, everyone always thought the worst of everyone else and was invariably proved right to do so.
Sir Richard would sometimes ruffle Pilchard’s stringy red hair in a regretful, son-deprived sort of way. Once he asked, “And what do you want to be when you grow up, young man?” Expecting no doubt the answer, “an engine-driver.” Children were always taught that to be winsome, boys should want to be engine-drivers, girls ballet-dancers.
“A doctor, Sir Richard,” he replied in a clear voice.
Sir Richard was taken aback, stared down at him as if seeing something he very much did not want to see. Then he exploded in over-hearty laughter. “Setting his sights a bit high,” he snorted to Dad and ruffled again, roguishly.
Later, Dad had paused over the bonfire of leaves he was building. He had shown Pilchard how to pick up great piles by pinching them between two boards.
“What you said about being a doctor.” He blushed, overcome by the terrible embarrassment of fathers and sons. “Hang on to that, son.” He coughed, pretending it was the smoke, but it wasn’t the smoke. The blood had roared in Pilchard’s ears. He thought he was going to die from shame.
“Right, Dad.”
They moved apart fast. They never spoke of it again and Dad quickly changed the mood by giving him a thudding ride in the wheelbarrow on top of all the leaves.
He recognised the VTS house as the real house that he read about in children’s books at school, of which his own was an insubstantial abbreviation, a mere child’s model. It was a place where they had even the evening paper delivered and magazines came new, not second-hand and with corners torn. It was large and modern, full of great bare surfaces and sharp edges unabridged by time, an uncompromised expression of the individual human will. Inside, one affectation amazed Pilchard more than any other. The china all matched. He had seen the housekeeper throw away a cup just because it was chipped even though it didn’t leak. The basic colour of the walls was white, startling in a world where most were painted in ‘practical’ dark green gloss at the bottom and cream at the top and a waggly line between the two that shifted slightly at each repainting. It had big metal windows, unafraid of the light and prying neighbours, in which fresh curtains danced. Anyway, the neighbours were so far away they were mostly reduced to the well-mannered sounds of their lawnmowers. At the front, a gravel drive, deep as Brighton beach, consumed space extravagantly, a bare place where the gardener’s job lay not in coaxing spindly unmatched plants into life as in his own back yard but eradicating them utterly. The gravel was so deep, Dad’s bicycle skidded and swerved as he turned in. At the rear, lawns fell in swags of serial savannah down to a border that was expensively replanted every few months with exotic colour. They bought plants they knew could never survive the winter just to be able to look at them for a few weeks in summer and then throw them away. And beyond it lay a jungle and swamp of graceless rhododendron pierced with dark and frightening tunnels, dotted with narcissus and crocus and shadowed carpets of thick velvet moss. There was a pale walled garden with fruit trees, covered with netting against the birds like some giant tropical bed. And an arch of roses cut through it like the barbed wire fences in the POW camp at Changi. At the very end, behind all the defences, lay a rustic shed of logs with the bark left on, such as John Wayne would use to do what a man’s gotta do while suffering the tireless affronts of the Indians who lived in the tangled rhododendrons.
Inside, was a delicious accretion of past and forgotten things covered in dust that spoke of people who had an assured place in time, who could look both backward and forward with confidence. There was leaf mould and spiders’ webs across distorting window panes, grey-handled rakes and brooms of twigs and cupboards full of things that would be useful some day stored in old cigar boxes. These were a special treasure like big, red Oxo tins. Pilchard took delight in the impossible lightness of their balsa wood, their mortised construction, the hinged brass fastening and the rash of gold embossed seals that swarmed on their lids. Some had pictures of dark, moustachioed men, fandangoing women and inscriptions in foreign tongues rich in vowels that seemed to taste of coffee. Occasionally he would find empty aluminium tubes with screw tops that were clearly valuable possessions to be pocketed even if their possibilities could not quite be defined. Best of al
l were the skins of aromatic cedar wood that lurked in the bottom. Pilchard closed his eyes and inhaled their dark, whorish odour to know places heavy with spice, gold and jewels where people dressed in rustling silk, a fabric he otherwise knew only through an old blouse of his mother’s made from a purloined parachute.
Right at the end of the garden was the greenhouse, paradoxically white, a bubble of contentment where time paused like an animal at a waterhole. Here, the very air was special, the musky exhalation of a dinosaur, a fluid medium that smothered noises into accents of silence. The floors were always wet like in the outside lavatory at home but here the water dripped into a pool of irises on whose surface water boatmen—not to be found anywhere else in his world—catamaraned. Roots stretched down into the water in gnarled white fingers and then faded away in green underwater mist. In one corner nested flowerpots and seed-boxes that reeked of creosote, heaped up like the dry bones of an explorer, and echoed to the tick of the wooden windowframes as they heated and cooled. Marrows and tomatoes sent out thick tendrils of tropical exuberance, weighed down bamboo supports and pressed against the streaming glass. Pilchard particularly adored the cool cucumbers that clung to, encumbered, wires pegged into the frames, a sort of vegetable equivalent of the VTS’s gas fridge—through heat to the miracle of ice.
He was forbidden to come here alone, Dad, a confirmed non-swimmer, being haunted by some uncharacteristically metaphysical vision of the dangers posed to children by still pools. He seemed to have glimpsed some dire portent that he could never shrug off. If he caught his son alone there, he would shout and hit out, terrified by his own fear and then repent and be ashamed. All this ensured that Pilchard came anyway, secure in the immortality of youth and sat listening to the pond calling to him, running its warm green water through his fingers, looking down into its swirling depths that danced with motes of gold and flirted with the frisson of death in the innocently circling goldfish. It was here that Dad had drummed into his head not just the difference between right and wrong but right and left, the tomatoes and the cucumbers. In later years, wherever he was in the world and wanted to be sure of left and right he would have to think himself back into this greenhouse through which the co-ordinates of the earth ran as in some personal Greenwich. Babies and the sick are the only creatures who truly live in the present since their bodies are the boundaries of their world. The young live in the future, the old in the past. It was only in the greenhouse that Pilchard reverted to an infantile simultaneity. And in his dreams, he would come here almost every night to find himself.
He woke sweaty and trembling, weighed down with heavy, nameless dread and knew he had to go out despite the curfew. He shrugged on an old sarong and stepped outside into quivering humidity, touch-toed across the verandah floorboards into sandals and crept down the edge of the path, avoiding the crunch of gravel. A cloud shifted and the moon shone out like a searchlight, the road gleaming in sudden clarity like an invitation in copperplate. His own former lodgings were not far from here, a flat in a characterless modern block that was otherwise inhabited by pale clerks from the Sanitation Department. He stepped out onto the tarmac. The greatest danger was from a sentry standing in the shadows, guarding one of the larger houses that had been seized for Japanese grandees and he tried not to shuffle which only made the soles of his sandals slap noisily. It did not matter. He had stepped sideways out of time and knew himself to be magically invisible in the starlight. Ten minutes later, he stood in front of the block. It was a redbrick structure with stuccoed communal stairwell and it was in this narrow compass, on the first floor, that he and Margaret had led their married strife. It was odd that you only knew you were happy afterwards, as history, but misery was always keenly felt in the present. The worst rows had always climaxed on landings. Perhaps they carried with them the sense of a threshold being crossed. It was clearly not nostalgia for those days that had brought him back but he still had no idea what unfinished business it was.
The building had suffered a direct hit, ripping out the front wall so that it was seen as in cross-section, pathetic private parts laid bare to public gaze with the shock of bared buttocks. His feet led him, on automatic pilot, up those same stairs to the door, ridiculously still locked while the whole wall to one side was no more, mere moonshine. Stepping round the doorframe, he clinked over rubble to review his past life in moonlit black and white and was surprised to feel merely tired and hollow with no hint of rage or regret. And then he saw that this was no random damage. The furniture was smashed and overturned by human hands. The walls were scrawled with obscenities, written—from the smell—in excrement, as though his wife had secretly returned to have the last word. The last word being ‘drongos’, however, argued more plausibly that this was the work of rampaging Australian troops, in the period before final surrender, when they were looking for booze and self-expression concerning the qualities of British leadership. With patient malice, one had taken down the photo albums, removed every single photograph and shredded them all, by hand, to tiny confetti. It was unimportant. That part of the past was mere fiction, all lies and false smiles for the camera. From the floor, Pilchard took the pointless cake slice that was his mother-in-law’s wedding present and went to the rear garden. Finally, it would be useful. Three inches down, under a rose bush, was a cocktail shaker with the lid screwed down. Inside, his father’s silver Benson wristwatch. It seemed absurd to wear it on his wrist while in a sarong and nothing else so he held it in his hand, as a child does his bus fare, and walked back to Cluny Road, as in that dream where you float through the streets naked. As he lay in bed and tried in vain to rewind the Benson, he saw that it had locked solid, with unconscious prophecy, at precisely one minute to midnight.
* * *
Captain Oishi read, with schoolboy excitement, of Alexander Hare and pirates and female slaves and of the spice trade and rampaging armies. The day waned and he switched on his desk lamp and read on, the tea brought by his servant cold and untouched at his elbow, paperwork piling up in a disregarded heap of yellow paper, like unwashed laundry. He read how Hare had finally despaired of the whole Malay archipelago and set sail for South Africa with his ‘family’ crammed aboard his merchant ship. There, at the Cape, he had bought a house and estate away from the town and all might have been well had he not made a foolish mistake. He tried to turn the male house slaves into field slaves which they were not minded to accept, so that they went into rebellion. It was not the status of slave that they rejected—as you might at first have thought—it was the loss of prestige involved in the shift from house to farm. The authorities, always nervous of a slave revolt, had called out the militia and the whole story had leaked out to the public. They, in turn, were not shocked to find workers shackled in servitude or whipped to death—such things were commonplace at the Cape—but were unprepared for the blatant sexual ménage of frank enjoyment established by Hare with his magnificent ladies, as opposed to the hushed proprietorial fumblings of their own households. He was ordered to leave. Pausing only to buy some Chinese women at advantageous prices and snap up some Mozambiquan ladies who fired his collector’s zeal in wholly new directions, Hare loaded up his followers onto his ship and set sail once again.
* * *
The gardens should have reeked of sex, for every part of them boiled with sexuality. The air danced with storms of pollen as stamens yearned lustily and dustily for their corresponding carpels and pimpish made-to-measure anthers frotted suggestively against the bodies of fertilising insects. Bees, wasps, flies, beetles, moths, even birds were pressed into reproductive service. Everywhere spores and seeds spiralled on the sunlit wind while suckers swelled, tunnelled and thrust into darkness underground. Nature—monosexual, bisexual, transsexual—was equally about its business in the high leaf canopy and the low undergrowth and only the raking gardeners seemed asexual, though—in their way—they were as yoked to plant reproduction as guileless insects. Each movement of air waved the blatant sex organs of flowers that men pres
ented to girls by the fistful in token of their erect penes and promiscuously wafted the same smells that humans expensively distilled and used to complement their own musky odours of crotch and armpit. Hundreds of scents crisscrossed, blended and ultimately pooled into a single blousy belch. High up, on the coco de mer, swayed luscious twin nuts that grossly caricatured the groins of Seychelles maidens, a provoking tuft of red fibre at the joint. The mathematics of fertility were prodigious and Pilchard could tell you that this was the largest seed in Nature, some 22 billion times greater than the orchid spores that compensated by being 22 billion times more numerous. And yet the Orchid House was a well of monastic tranquillity and peaceful, flitting shadows. In a style of carved curlicues and glass skylights, it seemed to have been inspired by Simla railway station. There had once been elaborate plans for electric fans, blowing across stands of water, to increase the humidity for sensitive and spoiled mountain species but the electricity had not liked the moisture and the moisture had attacked the electricity so that both had been replaced with gardeners intermittently spraying water by hand. Captain Oishi had never seen so many orchids, hanging neatly from the rafters in little grey baskets made of cross-hatched twigs, like the log cabins of Americans, that aged and decayed most poetically. The General was away building tunnels and this was a chance for an extended break from the office just up the road. Orchids were supposed to recall male testicles but Captain Oishi had little interest in male testicles apart from his own. ‘Rice balls’ were to him just an end-of dinner treat not the painful affliction of the Changi prisoners and his own testicles were smooth and well-nourished from the yeast extract sent regularly by his loving mother.
