by Nigel Barley
‘What?’
A huge hand took a pinch of his cheek and shook his face as a dog would a rat.
‘We want you to go on seeing your little friend. As they say, “Keep it up”. Something else.’ He took a key from his top pocket and dangled it in front of his face. ‘It’s hard to get a little privacy around here, so here’s the key to the theatre changing room. No one will bother you there. You can even do him a private version of your act, sing the song about Lola’s squeezebox, put on a nice, little show to keep him happy.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh I don’t think you need to know that. Let’s just say that, since we are your friends, any friend of yours is a friend of ours. Right? Got it?’ They shouldered their way out through the flap. Loiterers outside bent and peered in the hope of catching a glimpse of mayhem and destruction inside then flinched back to avoid being elbowed. ‘Let’s say this is your last big push in the East, your war effort, seeing action nightly. Get you a medal, like as not. We’ll be rooting for you.’ They swaggered away laughing and backslapping.
He weighed the key to the theatre backstage in his hand and stared at the bottle in sheer disbelief. So, he was the overripe cheese baiting their trap for poor Dong-ju, of whom he had grown more than a little fond. But since Dong-ju was already trapped, there could be no harm surely in letting him have the odd additional nibble at the cheese before that fact was made clear to him.
* * *
The first explosion came just after midnight when the streets were empty and, since the site was so low-lying, it was actually heard only in the south of the island. One minute the Quarantine Camp was going about its sleepy business in Moulmein Road next to the Leper Asylum and Paupers’ Hospital. The next, people were staggering, dazed, from the ruins, some naked, some in ripped nightshirts, wondering where the roof and water tank had gone to, while the only fatalities were a group of guards from Changi, freshly cleared of smallpox infection, and about to return to their duties. The effect on the Japanese was out of all proportion, with troops running around in all directions, waving weapons, seeking someone to be aggressive to, like ants when some great animal blunders into their nest and lumbers off into the dark. Indian street-traders on their way home were beaten up and their barrows overturned in pools of pungent curry, the transvestites of Bugis Street were searched and harassed, revealing several surprises but none explosive, and Erica was apprehended, driving back from a night club in the uniform of an able-bodied French sailor, more than a trifle drunk and very angry.
The soldiers, surrounding her car and teasing her out at bayonet point, were nonplussed and exalted by their prize. This was clearly a foreign agent but why was he wearing a uniform? Could he be the spearhead of some attempted landing? And why did his mannerisms recall those of Bugis Street? This unexpected detention did not prevent Erica deploying her mouth to good effect but, since her Japanese was of a very male form, acquired in military company, it only added to the confusion. In her bag, they found a card, bearing an officer’s name and radioed headquarters. Some problems you could beat up or simply shoot but this was clearly a problem of officer quality, so they tied Erica up, confiscated her pom-pom, adopted poses of acute military preparedness on either side of the prisoner and waited for an officer to come.
It was over an hour before Captain Oishi appeared, lightly unshaven and rumpled but very cross. What was all this? Sabotage by communist guerrillas, they said. Why had they tied up this woman of deep diplomatic connections? Diplomatic connections? Not a communist then? The soldiers saw, with dismay, their hoped-for promotions and congratulations turned to rebuke and sulked. And from Erica, of course, no thanks for Oishi but pouts and loud reproach.
‘So,’ she said, ‘the Japanese only have spies, not eyes for me any more?’ Then, to the horror of the gaping soldiers, she began to sing that horrible, little song in a cracked voice while performing some sort of gruesome little girl’s skirt-lifting dance. ‘Are the stars out tonight? I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright, Cos I only have eyes for yooooou dear.’ Why had he not been in touch? Had he forgotten her? Had he found someone younger and prettier? Drink turned her lachrymose. He found it hard to understand why, in his heart, he should feel such guilt that the answer to both was emphatically ‘yes’? He wondered idly what she had done with the French sailor whose clothes she wore. Eaten him alive, perhaps, or just stripped him and turned him out to wander the streets naked. Finally, after much soothing and coaxing, she was enticed back behind the wheel and gone in an irritated crashing of gears and with hot promises from Captain Oishi, easy lies that he had no intention of keeping, so that he felt a kind of sad sophistication dawning upon him. ‘Easy-peasy-Japanesey’, as Tokyo Rose put it. As he turned to walk away, his foot struck something soft and heavy, a melodramatic metaphor for his heart perhaps. Bending down in the flickering light of the burning building, he saw it was a sandbag—the sort you found on military balloons, the kind of balloons he had just released on test flights and that sometimes blew back in shifting winds, the balloons that gave him an excuse for staying in Singapore and not rejoining his unit. He saw the soldiers looking at him with curiosity, reduced to blank silhouettes by the blaze behind them, and kicked the evidence swiftly into the roadside ditch.
‘Dead rats!’ he said with a grimace. It did not sound military enough. ‘You find them everywhere in this damned place—just like communists.’ He was shaking.
* * *
HK looked noticeably less crumpled. He had even regained a little of his bounce and sucked air in through his teeth with something like gusto. Uniquely, he had visited Lily before the meeting and was calm and in control. Shriven. Tea had been served. There was something of celebration in the atmosphere. In a rare moment of electricity supply, the ceiling fan was turning.
‘I have spoken to the Yokohama Bank people down at the old Chartered Bank of India building. The loan has been extended for another year, at a slightly higher rate. But perhaps we should not concern ourselves too much with the rate.’
They all knew why but no one wanted to say it. Heads turned automatically towards Loh Ching, sitting up the far end as immobile as an ivory statue. He frowned with a sound like rustling papyrus and asked the forbidden question. ‘Why should we not concern ourselves too much with the rate? The interest is already ruinous.’
HK grinned. ‘I believe we have all heard the news—the … er … latest developments in Europe and the American invasion… I mean … the activity reported in the Philippines. There is every reason to think that the loan may be … lost sight of in the larger issue.’
Loh Ching snorted. ‘Perhaps the Chairman does not agree that it is darkest at the foot of the lighthouse and that conversely too much light may be dangerous to moths?’ They laughed. HK blushed. ‘Let us be frank. I have sought information on the situation. Manila has not simply been liberated. The Japanese navy have turned it into a battlefield, inhabitants massacred, respectable women violated, shops looted. The entire city is blood and flames. We saw it when the Japanese arrived. We shall see it again if they leave. Do you not think Yamashita has left his orders? And this time it will be much, much worse. All civilians will become hostages in house-to-house fighting and the whole city will be reduced to rubble.’ Fear tingled around the table.
‘Perhaps,’ said HK nervously, ‘this is not the time or the place …’ A murmur of horrified dissent broke out. ‘Let Loh Ching speak!’
‘It is the time for us to prepare. We cannot wait any longer. We have seen that we cannot rely on the regular British army for they will always save themselves first. But in the jungle, I have heard, there are men in another uniform, Chinese and British together. They are not fools and they grow daily stronger. You all saw their bold attack on the Changi guards a few nights ago in the very middle of our city. That was a warning from the British to the Japanese not to harm their prisoners. We must contact these men.’
‘But are they not communists who wish us ill?’
Loh
Ching sighed and looked round the room, gathering the threads together. ‘Some are communists but their enemies are our enemies, so they are our friends. They must be told that clearly before the bad time comes. We must send them an ambassador.’ His gaze wandered around the room and came to rest on HK. He puckered his lips sourly. ‘Sometimes people can be very stupid.’
* * *
‘Yoshi? What is it?’ Orchid joined the ghostly figure on the balcony of the block of flats, looking out over the dawning city. They had abandoned all pretence of caring what people thought and nowadays she walked boldly past the sentry and up the front steps, the little room behind the Orchid House left forlorn and empty. The sentry, too, simply ignored her and no longer even bothered to try to look up her skirt as she highheeled up the stairs. Nobody seemed to think much about anything any more. In the brooding, sullen silence, everyone was waiting intensely for something to happen. The whole city was liked the wispy husk of an insect once a spider has sucked it dry. Oishi had no idea where his squad were or what they were doing. He had not been to headquarters for several days. A series of dull thuds shuddered from the north.
‘The naval base.’ He said it with relief. The navy was nothing to do with him. He could not be blamed. ‘At Sembawang.’ They would be bombing the oil depot, spreading blazing oil on troubled waters. At least that could not be his balloons running amok yet again. He had a momentary vision of one of them, soaring away into the sky, like a lark, free and untrammelled, with the sun glinting on its varnished top and felt envy. No. Not balloons. This must be something else, something far bigger, possibly something worse. The city had been drawing breath for another hot day. Now it held that breath.
‘Could it be the British?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’
‘When are you expecting them to come? Next month? Another year?’ She scanned his face with sharp eyes. And then, suddenly, a huge silver shape flashed, in a great curve, across their field of vision, so clean, so beautiful, like a great dolphin but trailing smoke—wounded. He span round.
‘American B-29 Superfortress!” It would be coming all the way from India or Cocos-Keeling. He had never seen one before but had learned to recognise the intelligence silhouettes and felt a train-spotter’s excitement as he picked out the neat rows of rivets, the stars on the wings, the diagnostic remote-controlled machine gun turrets of the latest model. Above it, in the high heavens, now glided wave after wave of identical creatures, hardly more than sparkling dots, droning by in perfect, invulnerable formation as this one struggled vainly to rejoin the herd, coughed and finally collapsed behind the trees, where the war-tubas had once stood, in a groaning crumpdetonation that shook the ground and broke windows on the upper floors. They threw themselves down behind the brick balustrade and coughed mortar dust and hot kerosene stink.
He peered over the edge, then, cautiously, drew her up, hugged her, parted, began awkwardly pulling on clothes. ‘I must go. You must go.’
She looked at him with exasperated affection. ‘Be careful, Yoshi’
‘Of course. There is no danger.’ He gripped her bare elbows. Warmth flowed between their bodies displacing all else. He had felt terror, hatred and triumph before but never this kind of melting, all-accepting love. It sapped him of energy and he slumped against her in something less akin to joy than despair.
‘Oh Yoshi. I do love you but you are like all men. Well, there is one way that is different. Most men just see women as more territory to raise their flag over. I never felt that with you. But you can be so stupid, especially when you are being clever. Please remember that, whatever may happen in the future.’
‘What?’ He laughed. ‘What does a little girl like you know about all men?’
‘That’s just it. Like all men, you think innocence is like ice-cream for you to just gobble up but that when this war is over I will just go back to being a little girl, clothes, babies, smiling all the time. But I know that something terrible is going to happen here.’ She shook her head in misery. ‘I know you will not just give in. I know you will not run away. I see what other people do not. You are a true warrior at heart and that before anything else. Perhaps I’m the only one that sees that.’ His face softened.
‘Where could we run to? We have no Cocos-Keeling. Even there, the world would come between us. There is no danger, here. I am only going to run about and shout at everyone as they expect me to. They will mostly be just hitting local people who look happy. That organises itself. But you must try not to look happy. Yes, that’s perfect. Have you got the pass I gave you? Good.’ They would also be beating to death anyone denounced by their spies as brave enough to cheer at the bombing but that, perhaps, should not be mentioned.
She stopped and took his head between her hands. ‘What is a … what was it? Cocos-Kling?’
He laughed. ‘Cocos-Keeling. It is a place some people dream of. Sit here on my lap and I will tell you all about it.’ They settled the way a father would tell his child a fairy story, his arms around her closing off the outside world, his mouth close to her ear. ‘You are so innocent that you may be a little shocked.’ He looked in her eyes and stroked back her hair and told her of Hare and his ladies, at which she laughed and pinched his ears as the representative of his whole foolish sex. He told her of the haven on the extinct volcanic rim in the vast blue emptiness and the still, silver lagoon that it sheltered at its heart. He spoke of a simple life of fish and coconuts and of palms, swaying in cooling breezes and of the furthest horizons on earth where the loudest sounds were the distant thunder of the surf and the cries of wheeling birds. He embroidered his dreams and fantasies, in bold colours, onto the bare canvas, evoking a paradise immune to change or strife, a place of warm hearts and honest ways, full of the laughter of children, adding—as a final afterthought—groves of benodorous peach trees, for no paradise is thinkable, for a Japanese, unless framed by flowering trees. Soon they had sunk down onto the island of the bed and were the only people left in the world.
* * *
Lady Pendleberry had never found the Japanese easy to understand. They were, if possible, even worse than the Irish. Inscrutable, was the word one used, an odd, unpronounceable, very awkward word, that was itself suitably hard to grasp. Sometimes they smiled at you and it was then they were most dangerous. She had never seen one cry—not even the twittering Japanese women in the bitches’ barracks. But now there was something about them that made them even harder to get along with. It was the constant indecision and prevarication that she recognised in the daily changes of policy that unnerved and displeased her. In any of the large houses that she had run, it would have been a sign that the butler and housekeeper were at loggerheads and marked the moment when the mistress intervened to push through the green baize door, sit them down and bang their silly heads together. First, rations had been cut as punishment for the Allied air raids on the harbour area, as if the prisoners had had a hand in them. This was announced by Colonel Saito with visible pleasure. He really was a horrid little man. The knowledge that his true place in life was that of a greengrocer only made his oppression worse. Then, his assistant had smarmily increased the rations again to be at the same level as those issued to serving Japanese soldiers. Then they had been cut once more to a level that varied according to the whim of the man who had the key to the supplies shed. Then, out of the blue, came an issue of Red Cross parcels that the Japanese had always denied receiving in the first place. Having lurched across war-ravaged Europe, trundled through frozen Russian nights on the trans-Siberian railroad, rattled through deserts, trailed across the islands of Japan and tossed on steamy shipboard to Synonan-to, they were simply dumped in the yard, in the streaming rain, names written on them in blue wax crayon, cardboard boxes of that weird pinkish brown favoured by continental postal services and tied with string. It was immediately clear that the boxes themselves were a valuable resource, that the string must be unknotted and not cut. It could be unpicked and used to suture wounds, or made into wicks for
oil lamps or traps for birds and the busybody administrators of the prison bustled into unnecessary action, confiscating the parcels, so that they could redistribute them again with proper lists but no string. The Jews, under a hirsute Armenian with wild hair, immediately came and shouted at Dr Voss, demanding its restoration.
‘What for you take our string? It is contrary to the Geneva Convention to take the string. It is not British string but the string of colonial peoples. Even the Japanese do not steal the string of the oppressed.’ Wearily, she handed it back.
The boxes weighed more than ten pounds so the prisoners were too weak to carry or even drag them very far. Lady Pendleberry sat on the floor, legs splayed, looking out on the yard and lifted the lid from her own box. Someone had cut two little half moons at the bottom of the lid so that your fingers could slide conveniently underneath without lifting the whole thing. At such a mark of consideration, she started to cry. The pictures and colours of the labels, the disproportionate size of things, transported her back to childhood, Christmas in the nursery, nanny telling her not to eat all her sweets at once. She handled the rusty tins with awkward wonder—cocoa, treacle pudding, greasy meat roll, processed cheese—items from another world, lower class, gross and queasy but undeniably British, part of that distant dream of the time before. Tears refilled her eyes, overwhelmed them and trickled down her thin, crêpey cheeks and her whole body was racked with sobs. She cried for a lost past of certainty and confidence, for houses with white pillars and pattering servants where cups came with matching saucers and tinkling teaspoons, for tea with cake and the fact of idle, smiling conversation taken for granted at meals that were more than just fuel. She cried for her stiff, arthritic hands and her cloudy, unfocussing eyes. She cried most of all to see her name written on the official lid by someone out there who assumed that she still existed while she knew that her old self had gone for ever, like a woman who comes across an old, forgotten photograph from her youth and realises—now that it is too late—that she was once briefly beautiful. And then the sobs were crosscut by shocking titters, the two combining to make a rhythmic sound rather like an old, squeaky bicycle at the realisation that nowhere, in the whole women’s section, was there a single tin-opener.
