by Nigel Barley
The land on either side of the road became more wooded with scrappy, unhappy-looking trees. He turned off onto an unsurfaced track dusted with sandy soil and glided along smoothly, on hushed tyres, for several miles, over leaf mould until the land beneath him turned sudden black and sullen. There was still the foul, sweet smell of human putrefaction that clung to the branches and leaves from the vicious battle fought as the Japanese crossed the strait from the mainland, a lingering stench of gangrenous flesh turned to mulch, tainted with terror, now being rotted down to anonymous plant food. Big, black birds were circling on the horizon. Something had freshly died there. The earth was crosscut with brackish rivulets and trickling inlets that had to be skirted round or splashed through and when he came to a point where two paths met, he hesitated, his engine suddenly very loud in the forest as he coasted to a stop. Some largish animal skittered away into the wild bushes and he had a terrible urge to look behind him for unseen monsters, as when a little boy lost in the rhododendron garden. He had only been here once before, years ago, and memory was sluggish. His foot engaged the gear but the combination had settled into the sodden soil and he let out the clutch too fast and stalled. In the abrupt silence, his own heart throbbed in his chest, then he saw, tacked to a dispirited tree, one of the Japanese signs he had given Chen Guang and he knew he had found the mangrove research station. Dismounting, he pulled off goggles and helmet, stowed them in the sidecar and set off down the track, the soil sucking at his heels.
After a few hundred yards there was a gate, old but freshly repaired with a big sign proclaiming the reserve in three languages, like a translation test, and threatening dire penalties for trespass. An expensive new lock and chain showed it meant business. Climbing over, he walked towards a simple hut built out on poles over the ooze. The tide was coming in on a black and white world, leached into shades of grey, where mudskippers flapped in the shallow encroachment among the bullyboy crabs and clenched roots He strode up to a door of plain planks and knocked. An old towel was drying over the rail by the water.
‘You should not have come.’ The voice was soft behind him. He turned and saw Chen Guang, very close, with another, bigger man behind him. They both held long, sharp parangs.
‘What?’
Chen Guang hung a smile on his face. ‘You should not have come without letting us know.’ He slid the parang, rasping, into his belt. The other man did likewise. ‘We have nothing to offer an honoured guest.’ He pushed open the door and led across the room on bare feet to the platform over the water and indicated an old rattan chair. ‘Please sit, Dr Pilchard, or is it Mr Dagama?’ The other man hovered uncertainly.
‘I think perhaps it had better be Mr Dagama.’
Chen Guang laughed softly and sat. ‘My boy will bring tea.’ Was that boy ‘son’ or boy ‘servant’? He spoke to him in odd-sounding Chinese. ‘So…excuse me if I am blunt. Asians are not supposed to be blunt are they? What is it that brings you to our shores, Mr Dagama?’ He gestured magnificently across the mudflats. ‘Have you come simply for the view or the rent or to bring me flowers or is it—I wonder—curiosity?’ Pilchard smiled. They had checked over the motorbike.
‘Well, perhaps curiosity—a little. I rarely have the opportunity to leave the Gardens and I thought …’
‘We all treasure our tranquillity, Mr Dagama. I believe I told you that. I thought you had understood me. My boy and I rarely have visitors. Your very loud motor bicycle risks disturbing our neighbours. We should not wish to attract attention and so be considered bad neighbours.’ There were six chairs on the platform, arranged in a circle. Six. On a shelf by the door were ten cups. But they had no visitors. Something gleamed in the middle of the floor. He stared at it idly till it shifted into focus. Jesus! It was a single rifle bullet encased in brass and copper. The Chinaman had seen it too and seen that he had seen it. They lifted their eyes to stare at each other.
‘I apologise Chen Guang. I too would not wish to be thought a bad neighbour. People should not concern themselves with the business of their neighbours. I have often thought that the world would be a better place if we all minded our own business.’ He stooped, picked up the bullet and handed it back to his host, then calmly sat again. His knees were shaking. He realised how easy it would be for him to disappear in this swamp. No one knew he was here. His life, he sensed, depended on the next few minutes. ‘That is the reason I obeyed the Director’s personal order, sending me to check on the station today, so that I could confirm that all is well here and spare you visits from others who would be more inquisitive. We have an arrangement, you and I, and, now I think of it, I am a very incurious man.’ The tea was brought, allowed to cool in silence, drunk with a polite show of reluctance. Perspiration, fuelled only partly by the tea, flowed down his chest, while outside, over the bleak mud, the rising water swirled in and pooled silently under the platform they sat on. The son—if such he was—ignored the vacant chairs and crouched in a corner in a way that only emphasised his bulk, took the parang out of his belt and lay it on the floor declaratively within easy reach. He would be one of the solutions to the problem of Tamil incursors into the mangroves.
‘How is your daughter, Chen Guang? She does not live here with you?’
He frowned. ‘My daughter?’
‘Orchid?’
‘Orchid? My daughter Orchid?’ He furrowed his brow. ‘Ah. No, no. She lives with her … mother.’ Pilchard was surprised to feel a stab of disappointment. ‘This is not a place to bring a woman. It can be dangerous here—marshes, tides, crocodiles, snakes. And bodies everywhere. It is not good for a young girl to see such things.’ Suddenly, there were voices outside, young, male voices, speaking happily in Chinese and laughing. Chen Guang shot a sharp look at the son, flicked his eyes towards the door and he rose and went out. The voices stopped. He came back in, his face a blank. Chen Guang smiled.
‘The fishermen who catch the prawns. You work with the Japanese? You collaborate though you are British?’ He said it so it sounded like ‘brutish’ and that hard word ‘collaborate’ was always carefully avoided at the Gardens. They spoke instead, more kindly, of ‘co-operation.’ Pilchard shifted uncomfortably and the rickety platform beneath them shuddered.
‘It is like the men at the Electricity Plant and the Water Board. The Governor ordered us to co-operate with them for the wellbeing of the public and the preservation of heritage.’ Not quite true. They had not been exactly ‘ordered’. The small dishonesty itched at the back of his neck. Chen Guang pouted skeptically.
‘The Electricity Plant? They say that when the Japanese air raids started, it took the man with the keys half an hour to come to the office, yawning, to turn off the streetlights. So the targets were all nicely illuminated and, when he finally threw the switch, the only people hindered were the emergency services. Is that true?’
Pilchard felt personally challenged. ‘That is not my concern. You must understand. I am a trained medical doctor. Doctors are always to some degree neutral, having a higher, humanitarian duty.’
‘The Japanese who shot the doctors and nurses at the Alexandra Hospital did not seem to be thinking of that higher duty. The patients bayoneted on the operating tables there might also not agree.’
‘That was a terrible thing.’
‘Yet this higher humanitarian duty is only for the benefit of plants.’
Pilchard blushed. ‘Occasionally, there is a medical emergency. I do what I can. But Man is not simply a material creature. The mind, science, the wider, cultural world must also be maintained. The inhabitants find relief in the Gardens. Everyone has a need for a little beauty in their lives, especially now.’
Chen Guang chuckled and stared at his mug. It had a hideous red flower painted on it. Contempt flickered in his eyes. ‘Then perhaps the Governor should also have allowed the flouncy hat-makers to “co-operate” with the Japanese for the good of the people? A nice hat can be so very lifting.’
Pilchard felt suddenly dog-tired. He was being sedu
ced by the fact of talking a common language, by reference to overlapping worlds of literary reference. He had nothing in common with this man. Language was no bridge across to shared understanding.
‘Look. I just don’t see how it would make the world a better place if I were stuck in Changi prison for years. That would help no one.’
Chen Guang smiled and bounced the bullet in his hand as if assessing its worth, tossing it up and catching it again confidently. ‘The question then is whether the best way to make the world a better place and to “help people” is to sit in your garden and just play with your plants. You inhabit an artificial bubble of niceness and ignore the real world. A young man should engage the world not seek to hide from it.’
Pilchard wasn’t standing for that. ‘An odd remark from a man skulking in the marshes. And how do you know that the Gardens aren’t the real world and what is out here an artificial bubble of nastiness? Perhaps it is the things in the Gardens that we are really all fighting for.’
Chen Guang grinned. ‘A good point.’ His teeth ground out words with bitter relish. ‘Anyway, you might argue that people are just cockroaches and you are not an entomologist.’ He reached out and forensically tweaked a questing ant to death. ‘I think you must be a recovering idealist. The only pure thing to serve is an idea and perhaps people are just the accidental hosts that carry the truly important life form, ideas, that may be thousands of years old. Even scepticism is an idea. Perhaps you should consider that Mr … er … Dagama.’ He squeezed his voice, making it small and mocking. ‘Or perhaps—I think—you are now going to defend notions of bourgeois, romantic love or maybe quote Voltaire at me.’
‘Voltaire? You mean that thing about “we should cultivate our garden”? You’re no fisherman. Just who the hell are you?’
‘Perhaps a fisher of men? It does not matter who I am. At a time like this, we are all forced to compromise, to be someone else, to become men of action—everyone but you perhaps.’ He grinned in superior triumph and stood, walked over decisively to a corner and reached up into the roof thatch and peeled off some notes from a bundle there. Returning, he pushed them into Pilchard’s top pocket with the tired, worldly air of a man paying off a prostitute, wearily keeping his hot, pre-coital promise, despite disappointing services received. ‘It is hard for any man to remain aloof. To refuse to engage life cannot be a form of wisdom. It is a sterile stupidity. It makes all the suffering pointless, even one’s own. Don’t you know, Mr Dagama, there’s a war on?’
* * *
That night he dreamed of snow. Thick, heavy flakes drifted, scything and twirling through the icy night air. They settled on the bare branches of trees and sopped up the pools on the ground. As they touched your face, they feathered gently at your eyelashes, melted and slid down your cheeks and nose. Caught in your mouth, they disappeared into water and the dissolved magic of lost space. Within their spidery crystals, they inhaled all sound and sucked in all colour, leaving a skeleton world created by their own sacrificed mortality.
He awoke, his head trapped in a pool of moonlight, panting for water like a dog lapping at a puddle, his mouth dry, his head heavy. Someone had thrown grit in his eyes. Barechested, Pilchard rose and reknotted his chequered sarong, his normal sleeping garb in a bachelor household. Downstairs was water. He padded down the darkened stairs and was surprised to find light in the sitting room, one of the oil lamps turned down low. In two armchairs, pulled together, perched Post and Catchpole, facing the fireplace, a brickbuilt deliberate irrelevance since the British did not know how to sit in a room without the focus of a fire that could never be lit. Each wore looted silk pyjamas, the daytime uniform of the Armenians from Change Alley, busily whispering to each other, Catchpole with his hearing aid around his neck and the wig atop his head with greater than normal approximation, almost jauntily askew. He had lost weight and swags of loose skin now covered the suspension cord of his earpiece. The two of them whirled round and stared at him as he entered, like guilty schoolboys.
He was irritated to find Catchpole here but then he was always irritated to find him anywhere. Living cheek by jowl like this had made Pilchard realise that it was not the big things in life that really annoyed, it was the small ones. Propinquity yearned to turn into commitment, understanding into trust, awareness into concern. But Catchpole put used matches back in the box so that you picked up a matchbox anywhere in the house and found that the comforting rattle inside was illusory. All the matches were already dead. Catchpole could only stir tea with a teaspoon—dessert spoons, knives, pencils etc. could not be used and, since the house only possessed two teaspoons, he was constantly searching, creating upheaval and complaining about the damned things. This sat curiously with the mess in his bedroom but Pilchard had a nagging fear that the apparent disorder might really be arranged alphabetically and clockwise. Had a telescope not stood between the trombone and a tambourine? True, dressing gowns had been all over the radiogram but perhaps that merely showed that, in Catchpole’s world, they were garments on a gramophone. Also, Catchpole washed up in the order in which dishes were served. Soup plates must be washed before pudding bowls. To see ranks of crockery lined up on the draining board in strict chronological order at a time when all food was just fuel, drove Pilchard insane, yet he could not explain why. Such discoveries worried him. They suggested that the rift with Margaret might not be a matter of deep and incompatible feelings. It might be a mere nothing about teaspoons, matches and the petty friction of just living together with clashing classifications.
‘It’s happened,’ croaked Dr Post, stifling a sob. ‘It’s finally happened, old man.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘The invasion of Europe, D-Day, the Second Front. Dominion and American troops are knocking the Hun for six from one side, while the Russians are pushing down from the East, on the other. It’s all over, old man. Just a matter of time now. There’s going to be an end to all this.’ He snuffled wetly and buried his face in his hands. From outside a frog croaked disbelief. Pilchard, shocked, plonked his behind on the dining table. If he had been French, he might have put his arm round Post to comfort him. Brits couldn’t do such things.
‘Bloody hell!’ He had only been a fake German for one day and already the real Germans were losing the war. ‘How do you know?’ Then. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’
Catchpole sneered back in glossy, grey stripes. ‘It’s on the wireless. Even Tokyo Rose has admitted it though of course she goes on about “determined resistance” and “imminent counterattacks”.’ He tapped the bakelite box around his neck. ‘Did it never occur to you that there might be more to this than meets the eye, that it might be a crystal set as well as a hearing aid? It’s one of the latest models and I can tune the cat’s whisker to Radio India and walk down the street listening through the earphone without anyone knowing. Wonders of science. As for the war, it’ll all be over by Christmas. The Japs will start behaving a bit better now, you’ll see. I think we might celebrate with a cup of tea. Why don’t you make us one Post?’ Dr Post snuffled and shuffled off to the kitchen. Catchpole settled back imperiously in his chair and arranged the flaps of his pyjama jacket chastely across gaping crotch. Then, breezily, ‘There’s going to be some changes around here. There’s nothing like a war for making a little space on the promotion ladder. I think it’s clear which of us will be the new Director when the Brits come back. I should watch my P’s and Q’s a bit more if I were you, old man. I have always kept a loyal distance from our occupiers and fearlessly sought out information to subvert their propaganda but I can’t help noticing you’re very thick with your young Japanese friend, Oishi, which I suppose explains where you get your money from, and collaborators will get pretty short shrift round here, once things get back to normal, if I have any say in the matter. Those of us who have worked to resist the invaders from within will deserve some reward for their sufferings and I intend to see they get it. On the whole, I should do rather nicely what with my arrears of pay, intere
st added, and so on.’
Pilchard goggled in sheer disbelief. He felt his face stiff with choked rage. ‘You still expect to get paid?’
‘Of course. I realise that your position is rather different, old man. You express it in the careless way you dress. Officially, I suppose you’re still in the Volunteer Force and therefore a POW and not a proper employee of the museum and gardens at all but I have a contract of employment with fixed annual increments and expect my contribution to be recognised.’
