by Nigel Barley
Pilchard gripped the arms of his chair till they creaked, fighting back the urge to suggest that Catchpole should splurge this windfall on a new wig and shoot the old one.
‘If I may say so, Catchpole, your only contribution to bringing down the Japanese has been trying to eat them out of house and home and, as for your dress, you look like a junior official from the Ministry of Fat Bastards. I don’t believe you have so much as set foot outside the safety of the Gardens throughout the occupation. And I wouldn’t race to hang out Union Jacks if I were you. It could take years to finally bring down the Nazis. They could see us all out. And the Seventh Army here are not about to surrender to anyone. When I was in Changi, the commandant always threatened that if the Allies tried to retake Singapore his orders were to massacre all prisoners and then fight to the last man.’ He was gratified to see Catchpole blanch. ‘The models have already been established for what will happen. You recall those myths of Wendigos among the Algonquin Indians of North America? Monsters that prey on humans, created by acts of human cannibalism. A typical culture-bound myth of inappropriate consumption. Well, we are not short of Japanese Wendigos nowadays. You saw what they did to perfectly innocent Chinese when they arrived. What do you think they would do to someone like yourself who has so fearlessly undermined them from within? And we have the other psychosis, more Asian, amok, a sudden, wild outburst of indiscriminate slaughter after brooding on wrongs. There will be no shortage of that when the time comes. Anyway, soon we’ll all have bombs raining down on our heads which makes the idea of sides something of a luxury and an irrelevance.’
Post reappeared clutching mugs. ‘The third cup is always so difficult but somehow it never seems worthwhile to make a second trip, does it? Since it is a special occasion, I gave us a spoon of fresh tea each and the last of the sugar.’ He popped them down with wild abandon on the unprotected tabletop then looked around. ‘Oh, such long faces. I thought this was a jolly occasion.’
‘I was just saying to Dr Catchpole that we are going to be walking on eggs for some time. In fact, we can’t even count on having eggs to walk on. The Japanese could turn very nasty if they feel threatened and …’
The door was pushed open with a melodramatic creak and a great shadow fell into the room.
‘What’s this? A staff meeting?’ Prof Tanadatake, ruffled and owl-eyed. His hands were thrust down in the pockets of a Chinese dressing gown, supplied from Catchpole’s hoard. A large, yellow dragon swarmed over his back and embraced his shoulders. ‘Are you all plotting a coup behind my back?’ He laughed. ‘Is there some tea there?’ Dr Post leapt to fetch it. He sat down and sighed. ‘You could not sleep perhaps? There is a message carried on the wind, I think. Let me open the kimono.’
‘What?’ They recoiled.
He smiled at their shock. ‘A Japanese expression, merely. As you would say, “let me put my cards on the table”.’
‘Ah.’
‘So, you have heard of the invasion of Europe? I will not ask how.’ He cast a suspicious look at the radio, its permit tacked to the wall above the apparatus. ‘This must be a happy time for you. I do not know if it is a happy time for me. There can be little doubt that the Allies will finally defeat the Germans. I have long expected this and hope it may shorten the war. We cannot know what will happen then in the East. We may have to tolerate another generation of war or perhaps a separate peace may be possible where Japan remains the victor.’ He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one wearily. In the course of the conflict, the cardboard mouthpiece had got longer, the tube of tobacco ever shorter. ‘These are two wars that have become connected and they can continue separately. So, Russia is at war with Germany but not Japan. Before the war, I was a professor of vulcanology. After the war, I wish to be so again, if the new world still has volcanoes. I think it will. That is my only interest, together with the well-being of my family. But in war we must not jump the gun. We must all accept that things will get much worse before we can hope for improvement for we are small fish, carp on the chopping board, and our one aim must be to survive by not being noticed by bigger fish.’ The cigarette was finished already. He clapped his hands on his thighs and rose. ‘I should not have talked of food. I have made myself hungry.’ He seized his tea from re-entering Post’s hands like a bitter resolve. ‘Let us go to bed. There is nothing for us to do. We dare not make plans. We must wait. Always just wait until … until …’
‘Until the cows come home to roost?’ suggested Pilchard.
‘Exactly.’ The Professor looked around, as if seeing the drab, weary interior for the first time. ‘We have a house full of botanists, acres of gardens and there is never one single flower in this house to spread a little beauty and joy. Why is that?’
* * *
The camp tingled with excitement for the inmates knew of D-Day before their guards. It seemed impossible that such a momentous event could leave matters entirely unchanged on the ground but so it was. News was circulated by a roundabout route so that it would be impossible to trace any individual report back to its source and so find the hidden radios that were concealed in beams, water tanks, and, most ingeniously, in a functioning waterbottle that a squaddie carried dangling around his neck at roll call. Being caught with even a spare part for a radio was certain death. The extraordinary news burst upon the world via the wooden sidings of the lavatories in tiny but exuberant latrinogrammes, was pushed through the chink in the wall into the women’s section of Changi prison on a scrap of paper from a book lining, whispered, with alleged medical intent, in the ears of patients at the hospital and rapidly translated into a dozen tongues for people who had no clear idea of where Germany even was. Normal routine was enforced as before and was suddenly unbearable.
Then, without warning, the Japanese erupted in abrupt rage without even admitting what they were angry about. The camp concert, an extravagant production involving tinselly sets of the Queen Mary and Busby Berkeley dancing by hairy-legged transvestites, was cancelled on orders of the commandant. Ruthless searches were ordered, among both POWs and civilians. These were always an opportunity to pay off old grudges so it came as no surprise that one of the Japanese women in the bitches’ barracks, married to a British mining engineer, a guileless woman who could not have changed the battery in her own torch, was found to be in possession of advanced condensers and capacitors for the maintenance of wireless equipment. To the immense satisfaction of certain co-inmates, she was dragged away screaming. Pilchard’s abandoned stash of toilet tissue was discovered but, since it was blank toilet paper down a toilet, nothing was made of it. By now there was little for searchers to loot but still plenty of opportunity for gratuitous damage to property such as the slicing up of clothes and the ripping open of mattresses. Men were knocked about, the rice in the food hall overturned on the floor and walked through, the sick in the hospital driven from their beds and made to answer roll call. Sergeant Fukui’s boots played a prominent role in all these activities and his particular spite was reserved for the Javanese whose gardens he trampled underfoot and stomped to death, pausing only—good greengrocer that he was—to pick up a couple of papayas that he carried away laughing.
Sergeant Dewa decided right then that Fukui must die. It was a necessary tidying up of the world for, as he had explained to his several wives and many mistresses, he was a man who valued order above all else. This was the attraction for him of employment in the service of the Dutch, a pernickety, regulation-strapped people, whose way of life created many snug interstices in which a man of private morality could dwell.
Fukui was small and skinny and Dewa could easily have squeezed the life out of him like the pulp from a ripe marquisa fruit but that would have terrible consequences not just for himself but for his men. It must be done another way. He must die naturally. An accident seemed the best way, during his rounds perhaps. He speculated on arranging for a heavy tile to fall from the roof of the rickety lean-to but that required exact positioning of Fukui and experimentation
that might attract attention—also accomplices. He needed something he could do alone. Two days later, in the early morning, he found the dead monkey tangled in the scorched wreckage of his garden. At first he thought of it as a marvellous windfall of meat then saw the patches of mange and the skin covered in pustules and recognised it at once as the inedible instrument of his vengeance. In the forests around his village, he had seen things like this before, a disease like smallpox that animals caught. Most of the time, it lay dormant, but occasionally, it would burst out of the trees and bushes like a wild thing and men and women would catch it and some would die or be horribly scarred. As a child, he had survived the smallpox that had left its clutching clawmarks on his cheeks. And smallpox gave immunity.
He knew exactly what to do. He would use papayas. The Australian troops did not like the Javanese, called them paw-paws—papayas—‘green on the outside, yellow through and through on the inside and makes you throw up’. They had first fallen out over the Javanese refusal to collect and surrender snails to feed the chickens kept by officers—naturally, all white. Since then, the grudge had found more than enough to feed on and grown. Even the Japanese had started calling them ‘pawpaw’. It was fitting that the fruit should now be turned to a weapon of offence. Although immune to the disease, Dewa was reluctant to touch the unclean body and, instead, coaxed it cautiously across to the foot of the papaya tree that Fukui had ravaged, using the blade of his home-made hoe. He quickly dug a hole, by the edge of the path where Fukui passed, and tumbled it in, smoothed down the earth and waited, week by week, as the plant recovered, scented out the rotting body and sent down hungry roots to feed on the rich putrescence. Dewa knew that there are male papayas and female papayas and some that are both sexes and, if you prune the top of a papaya in the dry season, it may change its sex like a transvestite. This one was female, one male plant to about fifteen females being about right, just—as he liked to think with a smile—as was the case with himself. Dewa cosseted that plant, brought it water, picked pests from its shoots with his hands, removed damaged leaves and it grew thick and indecently green. Finally it set new fruit, great clusters of shiny pods, and he settled to guard it from those who would eat them or make medicine from its leaves or sap. To his men, he explained that the tree had a special holy purpose, was sacred, that it was protected from thieves by a great curse he had set upon it that invoked the power of the very Walisongo saints who had first brought the gift of Islam to their home town. They recognised the familiar signs of a man who had made a covenant with god and asked no questions but watched in awe as the papaya thickened, flourished and burgeoned like a cosmic waringin tree and its ripening fruit swirled with yellow and pink just like the Changi sunset.
And then, one day, as Dewa was attacking the weeds with his hoe, Fukui was there, his ratty eyes fixed on the fruit, as always a Korean guard towering behind him with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He stopped and smiled, looked at Dewa, then back at the fruit. Dewa bowed low. The worst part of bowing was that you couldn’t see what they were doing. If a blow came, it was always unexpected—even if half expected.
‘You give me that.’ Fukui pointed, stretched out a hand and leeringly fondled the bump on the bottom of a fruit. Dewa blushed, feeling his own nipple tingle with sexual violation. Just as well he had not planted a banana tree. With reluctance, he broke off the ripe papaya and handed it, poutingly, to Fukui, cupped deferentially in both hands. Fukui seized it, clicked his fingers, gesturing rudely. ‘More!’ Dewa broke off another with difficulty, for the stem was strong, and handed it over. Fukui snatched it, threw back his head and gloated, stalking off, deliberately clutching the papayas triumphantly to his chest like looted breasts as Dewa watched with dark eyes of quiet satisfaction.
The last time the monkeypox had come to his village, he had been just a young boy. It could not pass directly from man to man but, when they thought it was all over, it had come back and killed all the goats that grazed in a field where they had buried the dead livestock and they had nearly starved. The forgiving earth could cleanse almost anything but this disease lived on, unabsolved, for years, nested deep in the soil.
It was two weeks before the news came that Fukui was sick. Smallpox, they said, a name of sudden but mixed terror for few of the Japanese troops had been vaccinated while most of the Westerners had. He was whisked away in an ambulance to the Quarantine Camp of the Leper Hospital, with several of his close companions, their faces pale and sweaty through the glass. And Dewa grew in stature, a man—they said—full of divine power, sakti, a man very close to God, protected by him and given the power to strike down the ungodly with his curse. Little offerings began to appear at the base of his papaya tree. Its unconsumed fruit began to rot in luxuriant divinity.
* * *
Corporal Higgins had been greatly upset by the cancellation of the concert. He had worked long and hard on his Marlene Dietrich. The wig, he had constructed himself. Not one of those deliberately absurd things of grass the other comically female parts wore but real hair, much of it from a tonsorially blessed Indian trooper who had asked to have his thick locks completely shaved to mark his state of mourning for a brother. Bleached, teased, knotted onto an old bathing cap, it provided sweeping curls and an enigmatic, limp forelock to drape over the pasty makeup and red-lipped pout. It created an effect that would be greeted not with the usual alibi of excessively loud hilarity but with stunned and breathless silence. The fishnet stockings had been a real nightmare. He had contemplated pencilling a mathematically fiendish latticework directly over his legs before running into a commando who had seen service in Norway and retained a, now redundant, string vest. With a rather lower skirt than Lola might have wished and much higher boots, dyed black, it plausibly sheathed the gap in between in the stuff of male dreams. The voice was surprisingly easy to imitate, slack-jawed and breathy. The walk was challenging. The blank expression simply impossible for he had cultivated facial animation all his life and it was this that had fascinated his special friend, Dong-ju, one of the Korean guards, who dropped in for a scrape and a trim.
Dong-ju was not exactly young and was even getting a little thin on top but the short hair on his strong neck formed the most attractive whorls and his ears were a perfection of symmetry and such things count for a hairdresser. Moreover, he was a fan of the musical theatre, bitterly disappointed when the concert was cancelled, since, in the camps, the guards were as imprisoned as the prisoners. The most appalling stage acts were savoured by both guards and guarded, even especially so, for in badness, language counted for very little. Applause was thunderous, audience participation vigorous and vocal, things were thrown so that almost no turn was left unstoned.
It was immediately understood that no one must know of their involvement. Such a relationship could prove lethal to both of them but danger revived youthful excitement. Their cover for such frequent visits was the need for an extended programme of dandruff-control. And then, one day, two commandos with big arms—one the owner of the string vest—elbowed their way into the tent and eyebrowed the other intimidated customers back outside. Higgins was impressed. To control POWs with one’s eyebrows showed class.
The camp, like any public institution, was a loose aggregation of more or less criminal subsets, some under army control, much simply private enterprise and monopolies in trade, extortion and violence were ruthlessly enforced. This visit could be anything but trouble was certainly part of it. Unlike most of the prisoners, who wore an eclectic assortment of rags, they sported clean uniforms. Their bulk, and muscularity argued for control of private food supplies which then implied involvement in some rich racket. Probably, that meant the horse races. There were no actual horses in Changi, of course, but some prisoners were designated as such while others were ‘jockeys’ that rode them round on all fours over a pre-set course with ancillary delights such as gambling, nobbling and odds-fixing and occasional excessive use of the whip—all a useful outlet and sublimation for that unruly male energy
still boiling, pantingly unspent, beneath the malnutrition. One sat cross-armed and silent in the doorway, the other perched on the box that was the barber’s chair, with landlady gentility, and started to preen his nails with the scissors. The box creaked beneath his weight. Higgins half expected him to pull out a mouth organ at any minute and embark on some sentimental Blighty tune.
‘So, Higgins. We’ve been meaning to pay you a visit for some time. How are things?’
In his eventful life, Corporal Higgins had suffered a good bashing on numerous occasions and knew the smell of it. Escape was impossible. Resistance would be futile. These two could kill him with their bare hands. It would be safer to let them do what they had clearly decided to do so they would stop before he was quite dead.
‘I think maybe things just took a turn for the worse.’
They chuckled. ‘Oh, don’t say that. We hear you have a Korean fan. You’ve been seeing a lot of each other.’ So that was it. It was to be a good manly bashing with particular attention to the goolies and face. Teach him a lesson. Sleeping with the enemy added to the other thing. ‘That’s nice. We’re romantics at heart, him and me.’ He leered at the man grinning in the doorway. ‘The stars of the botanical drawings class, us two. I done some lovely sketches of petunias just last week. We like it when two people make each other happy. It’s heartwarming.’ He snipped at a thumbnail then threw down the scissors and stood up. Higgins gasped. Scissors were valuable, irreplaceable. Something black and shiny slipped from inside a sleeve. It looked like a truncheon. Higgins closed his eyes, waiting for the first blow. He hoped they would not break his teeth. Dentistry in the camp was non-existent. ‘This is for the two of you.’ The voice was very close. He steeled himself, then felt something pushed into his hands. He looked down and saw a bottle of whisky, it could even be the real thing.
