by Nigel Barley
‘Yes, yes. Please take for your families, for those you love who are far away and so cruelly missed.’ He cleared the catch in his throat and gulped more palmwine.
‘I hear,’ Catchpole growled authoritatively in Pilchard’s ear, ‘that the Japs are shifting more of the Changi prisoners to rest and convalescent camps by the sea in Thailand. Lucky sods! Plenty of food, clean water, decent climate—not like us poor buggers penned up here working our backsides off. They’ll do nothing but play football on the beach and go fishing. They even took a piano with them to help pass the time.’
‘How do you know these things, Catchpole?’
He tapped his nose wisely and winked. ‘Be like Dad. Keep Mum’. Sources, old man. Sources. You forget, I have taken over as religious correspondent.’
Like all such institutions, the Raffles Museum received a stream of mail from lunatics of every political, racial and religious stripe—people who found messages from God in every artefact or held themselves to be wronged pretenders to the sacred Riau throne or reincarnations of Queen Nefertiti. It fell to the current ‘Religious Correspondent’ to reply to all these in tones of evasive politeness, avoiding giving either offence or encouragement. Pilchard had prided himself on earthing all such enthusiasms with a single, devastating page, known within the confines of the institution as a ‘Fuck Off You Red-Nosed Bastard Letter’, that blended high condescension and sneering world-weariness with the lawyer-proof pedantic scholarship and icy politesse that were a form of rudeness. Should any fellow acadenic write in criticism of the museum or gardens they would receive a letter reading, ‘Dear X, In the gretest confidence, I feel I should warn you that someone has been writing absurd and offensive letters to the Director and using your name.’ Catchpole clearly operated otherwise.
‘Sauces? There are no sauces,’ complained Dr Post, sadly mouth-watering ‘Gravy. Ketchup! Oh my God, HP sauce.’
‘I thought you said, last week, they were to be used to build a canal directly across the Kra peninsula and cut off Singapore’s trade for ever.’
Catchpole blushed and bridled. He must be boiling to death under that caked and implausible thatch. ‘That, old man, was something quite different. I do wish you’d try to keep up. Priorities change. The war is in constant flux.’
‘Flux?’ questioned Post. ‘I had a dose of it at Easter.’
‘Our next course,’ said the Professor, bowing to the idea of it, ‘is a gift from General Yamashita from the magnificent herd of deer that eat the grass of the Governor’s palace, the same as is eaten today by the General himself. It is to say thank you for the gift of the new Yamashita hybrid of the Tiger orchid that we have developed here and loyally named after him. Thanks to Dr Pilchard, its father.’Applause, laughter.
Ong swept in grandly with plates on which lay two thin slices of crispy-fried venison, arranged to occupy maximum surface area, and completed with bowls of slimy manioc paste. Of late, the plates had seemed to get steadily larger, the portions of food smaller. The whites dribbled and drooled and thought of lost Sunday roasts, pined for gravy and potatoes, missed family rows over the sliced sirloin.
‘Mustard,’ whimpered Dr Post in a pang of Surbiton nostalgia. ‘Do you remember mustard? Does anyone? The English sort, all hot, that brings tears to your eyes.’ He cried in demonstration. ‘And thick slices of meat with fat. This is so thin it looks like something prepared for a microscope slide.’
The Professor raised his glass again. ‘A toast!’
‘Toast,’ Post snivelled tearfully. ‘Proper bread cut into soldiers. Crust! Butter! Butter melting from the heat of the toast. My god, thick-cut marmalade. Now it’s always jam tomorrow.’
‘I see some of you made to cry by great, grateful feelings. It brings me such joy to see us united in a common endeavour as all the world around us is disturbed by necessary readjustments and we alone still live and work in harmony inside this garden, an example to the whole Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. To harmony!’ Jamjars waved unenthusiastically as he drained his glass and Pilchard—roughly versed in Japanese etiquette—rose and deferentially refilled it from the Winchester bottle on the floor, marked ‘Sulphuric Acid’.
Now the Indians were chattering excitedly, peering at their plates in horror, pushing them away in rejection. ‘Beef!’
‘No.’ Pilchard, reseated across the table, hastily mimed soothing but inaccurate moose horns with spread hands. ‘Not beef. Deer. You can eat it.’
‘Not beef but very like beef, then,’ disdainfully conceded a Tamil barrackroom lawyer who otherwise worked on the drains and now burst into watery, bubbling Tamil to his mates. They shuffled themselves rapidly into sects of greater and lesser tolerance, some eating, others not.
Mustafa—previously the driver of the Gardens’ tractor, when there had been such a thing, and now acting head of the Malay staff—prodded his own plate unhappily.
‘Islam?’ he asked dolefully. Pilchard lay down his fork and sighed.
‘Oh Christ! Why does every little thing have to be so complicated?’ Then he caught himself in time and smiled. ‘Yes,’ he encouraged smoothly. ‘Islam. You can eat. Islam yes. The butcher was Muslim, too. Completely halal.’ What the hell was the word for deer?
Mustafa pouted and looked as if he was about to cry through his moustache. ‘Islam?’ he asked again in a little boy’s voice and wriggled on his seat.
‘Yes, Islam, Islam.’ He was tired, had drunk too much. His body, unused to food and drink, was sending agonising shafts of dyspepsia through his guts and he opened his mouth to snap something back—many a true word is spoken in indigestion—and then, from somewhere plucked a soft answer. ‘Well look. I’m not a Muslim myself but I’m sure there’s nothing in the Koran against eating deer.’ Mustafa reluctantly speared the flesh. Then the word came to him suddenly from somewhere, like a blessing. ‘Kijang,’ he said. ‘It’s called kijang.’ Hang on. Maybe that was Javanese not Malay?
Mustafa’s mouth snapped shut then gaped in horror. ‘So … is NOT lamb.’ His eyes were all betrayed trust, brown pools of shocked innocence. ‘Oh Mr Pilchard how could you lie to us about such a thing when you know our ways?’ The scandal buzzed through the Malays. ‘You say is lamb but is NOT lamb. How could you do that? You have betrayed our trust.’ They pushed away their plates, sulkily.
‘No, no. Islam … is lamb … Don’t you see? I thought … What I meant …’
Catchpole sniggered. ‘Looks like the fasting month has come a little early this year. That’s what you get for telling porkies, old man.’ A gross feeder, he reached swiftly across to grab the abandoned meat, gripping Mustafa’s plate with two hands. Sweat trickled down his forehead from under the wig. ‘Waste not, want not,’ chewing greasily and tipping. ‘It’s an ill wind …’
Mustafa stared down at a picture in the newspaper marking his now-empty place. Freshly revealed, it showed a dumpy Chinese, caught blinking against the flash of the photographer, like a man snapped in adultery—therefore looking drunk—presenting a huge cheque to smirking General Yamashita, himself in the pose of a man who has won the football pools and is keen to display the figures on it. ‘See!’ he sneered. ‘Even when the rest of us are starving the Chinese still have millions.’
‘Pickles,’ announced the Professor, happily. ‘We should now eat delicious pickled plums but owing to inconvenient war developments cannot.’ But under Ong’s directing finger, Ping and Pong reappeared to deal out rings of pineapple like deck quoits. The Bromelidae patch had been stripped.
‘Actually, what you were saying about the Kra peninsula, old man, I rather gather that plan has been dropped. All their efforts are going into the capture of your favourite place, Cocos-Keeling, preparatory to the attack on Australia.’
Pilchard was peeved at the gloating voice, chewing through pineapple slush. He turned, irritated. ‘You know Catchpole, I sometimes think that it’s not the enemy who really get up one’s nose but those who are supposed to be on our side. If even half the
things you claim to know are accurate, then the Japs ought to shoot you as a spy. On the other hand, you may just be a complete idiot and one day I will shoot you myself’
‘Well really …’
‘Now that we are all stuffed with refreshing food and joyful to delirium, I should like us all to consider an old Japanese poem that teaches us to be happy where we are and not sad for where we cannot be,’ said the Professor, seemingly, to the ceiling, as he dribbled juice and sagged in his seat, ‘for living is an activity that leaves no survivors. It is from eleven hundred years ago from a work of great wisdom, the Hinky mondka.’ He began to croon in a ghostly chanting voice with lightly bouncing hand-gestures—like the ping-pong ball over the subtitles at the cinema—the sound echoing around the room, seeming to dim the lamps by its insistent rhythms, conjuring spirits out of the woodwork and terrifying the staff with memories of village bomohs. ‘Yononaka wo, Ushi to yasashi to, Omohe domo, Tobitachi kanetsu, Tori ni shi arane ba.’ An unearthly hush fell over the table, as from a magic spell. A quavering hoot and some great insect flapped across the glass of the window as if summoned from Hell, to be beaked away, squirming, by a silhouetted owl. The Professor ran his hands through his long hair and sniffed back tears. In his time at the Gardens he had reverted to civilian hair that now gleamed like snow on wintry Mount Fuji. ‘It is a little hard to translate but something like …’ He rose to his feet, ‘I feel life is sorrowful and unbearable but I cannot fly away since I am not a bird.’ He stiffened and bowed, fluttered tired arms sadly in emulation of absent wings and walked with unsteady dignity out of the room and upstairs to his quarters. They heard the door shut softly. The protesting creak of springs. Snores followed immediately.
‘Well,’ said Catchpole, self-righteously wig-straightening. ‘Now, that’s what I call a rum do. I sometimes wonder whether the old man’s really quite all there.’
* * *
Pilchard had been aware of the heliotropic cat for several months. It kept mostly to the roofs and other elevated areas as it moved slowly round to bask and purr in the shifting sun but sometimes whorls of pigeon-feathers on the ground marked points where it had come down to strike. The solar timetable made the general sweep of its movements relatively predictable though it seemed to realise the importance of varying its routines and scheduled stops. During the occupation, cats had become as jumpy as nuns in a night club, rightly interpreting all friendly overtures as marks of evil designs. Occasionally its emerald eyes and Pilchard’s own would meet and it would briefly pause and stare down at him, jet black and glossy, with a terrible clarity of vision that stripped away all human dissimulation, before sneering and moving on.
Ong was becoming more insistent. Pilchard’s duties in the Orchid House offered few opportunities for gleaning edible supplies and Ong had unilaterally cut his rations. Often, when the food reached him there would now be nothing left but fermented manioc that smelt of babies’ sick and when fruit was distributed at the end of a meal, there would be none for him. Their previous master–servant relationship counted for nothing and had, if anything, been reversed. He was the child sent home from the party without an orange. All his life, Pilchard had been a pudding-lover in a savoury world and now sugar was rarer than TNT. It had taken a long time to teach Ong the principles of English cooking—that fish only existed as an excuse for eating chips and that a main course was only valid as a precursor of puddings. And now those bitter lessons had been forgotten. Appeals went unheard. The Professor simply stared away into the distance, defining such practical unpleasantness out of existence, and lit a cigarette. The heliotropic cat would have to pay the price of his admission back into the charmed circle of survivors. It would have to be hunted and killed for the table, flung contemptuously at Ong’s feet. But how? The Japanese had announced the confiscation of all means of death at a distance—on threat of death close up—and the ancient shotgun that had enforced the rule of law on the monkeys and squirrels in the gardens had been solemnly surrendered by the Professor. The roofs, over which the cat ranged, quickeared, with such poise and confidence, were fragile and inaccessible so high-level ambush was not an option. He had a fantasy of stealing Catchpole’s wig and using it as a lure, a sort of fake rat, to trap the cat. Sometimes, he had seen it climb trees, presumably to catch the rodents that ate the coconuts, and so there must come a stage when it came down again in a series of ill-coordinated, backward-facing, jerky drops. That would be the moment to strike. He set a watch.
It was three hungry days before he caught sight of it through the pink mass of Cymbidium insignine. It was working the coconut trees over by the forest reserve and he watched with admiration as it emerged from the shadows, flexed its claws and leapt up at the trunk and then progressed just like a native nut-picker in a series of barbed leaps up into the canopy where it disappeared into silence. In the early afternoon, a brief but violent rustling announced a kill, probably a squirrel, and Pilchard crouched in the cover of a crimson bougainvillea, clutching a pruning knife, to wait until thirst drove it down again. A sleepy hour passed. Another. And then the scraping of claws on bark came from far up in the green shade as the cat slid, braked, slid again, edging ever closer until it stopped some ten feet above the ground and looked around with sharp eyes and pricked ears. Pilchard froze and held his breath. His thumb slid appraisingly over the edge of the pruning knife. The cat slid a little further down the trunk, now on the side away from him. Closer. Ever closer. Softly, softly catchee pussy. He could see its claws flexing and sliding and coiled his body to spring and … a hand fell on his shoulder.
‘Jesus Christ!’ In a single moment he felt the knife drop from his dead fingers, his heart sought to burst out of his chest and the cat shot, a spitting, scratching horrent furball, between his astonished legs and skittered off into the undergrowth. He turned, shaking, and found a small Chinese, somewhat older than himself, wearing what seemed to be navy blue knickers and a torn vest, laughing up at him. Over his shoulder was a woven bag like those in the Malay twigware section of the museum.
‘Good afternoon, Tuan. I apologise for startling you.’ It seemed to Pilchard that he spoke English far too well for someone who thought of navy knickers as an outer garment. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
‘What?’ He leaned on a tree for support, wiped the sweat from his eyes.
‘I said “Good afternoon, Tuan”. Tuan works here in the garden?’
Pilchard nodded. He badly needed a drink—palm wine, tea, pond water—anything.
‘My name is Chen Guang. I have come from the mangrove research station specially to see Tuan.’
Mangroves had been largely cleared from around the shores of Singapore except in the northern backwaters where the gardens had been granted generous rights over several hundred acres of acrid and valueless mud, swamp and sea. As a mere research outstation, in the present situation, it had been left to its own devices, Britain abandoned by the Roman legions.
‘The mangroves? I don’t understand.’
The old man smiled patiently. On closer examination, he was maybe not as old as he had seemed, maybe only in his forties. It was not the face. The body had stooped, now it straightened, seemed spry, almost youthful.
‘I have been protecting the mangroves for Tuan.’ He spoke gently as if to a slow-witted child. ‘From tomfoolery.’ He smiled at the trail of the absent cat. ‘There are bad men who come there to steal the mangrove poles. They take them and sell them in the market. Because they do not rot, the Malays use the poles to build their houses over the water.’ Pilchard had seen the sellers hauling the great orange aerial roots about in the market, Tamils, big, hairy men, very dark, machete-wielding and muscular but with skinny calves—scary. He wondered how this little man could ever hope to stop them. ‘In return for my guardianship I ask only for a place to live with my small family and the right to fish for shrimps and prawns. They are very prolific this year.’
Since when did a simple fisherman ever use a word like ‘prolific’ or ‘gua
rdianship’, very schoolbought words?
‘You know why they are so “prolific”?’ The man smiled. ‘Death,’ he said simply. ‘It is life from death. We do not care to eat them ourselves so we sell them to the Japanese who gobble them down and always want more. There is a sort of justice in it, eating humble pie. One day the prawns will consume Japanese bodies and then we will perhaps eat them but I do not think so. That is why I have brought Tuan this.’ He stretched out his hand, closed. palm downward, like an invitation to play Stone, Paper, Scissors. Pilchard stared at it curiously and then held out his own upward-cupped hand and the two mated. Something soft was pressed into his palm and, looking down, he saw a roll of banknotes fit to choke a horse. ‘It is half the money of the prawns. Since the mangroves are Tuan’s, perhaps the prawns are Tuan’s too. Is it good?’
Pilchard was astonished. ‘Yes,’ he said, taken aback. ‘Yes. It’s good, all right. Very good. Thank you.’ He slipped the money rapidly in his pocket. Enough to make a cat laugh.
‘One thing more I need from Tuan only, a simple paper for the Japanese, showing I am the official guardian of the mangroves. It is an administrative matter. The Japanese want so many pieces of paper. Otherwise they will trouble me and I am a man who treasures tranquillity.’
Pilchard thought rapidly. The money bounced comfortingly against his thigh, evoking memories of days of more rampant sexuality. There was no chance he would give it back.
‘Er … Let me think … Wait here. Please sit. I will return with a paper.’ It was a matter of some ten minutes to get to the office and bang out a pompous letter on leftover, fancy, headed notepaper, backdated to the previous year, appointing Chen Guang to his non-existent office. He paused, then signed it ‘Fernando Dagama’ with a great flourish and added a couple of the Professor’s talismanic Japanese notices from the perimeter, slipped them all in an envelope. ‘If you put these on the gate, they will discourage visitors.’
