Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Minou’s voice was languid. ‘Please come up. I’ve been busy this morning.’ She sounded reproachful, as if it were Judith’s fault.

  A young Asian man let Judith in, then went back to what looked like a furtive attempt to disguise events of a recent and unusual wantonness. Judith had a glimpse of Lady Hobday herself, wearing a bathtowel.

  ‘Take a pew!’ she called, waving, then disappeared back through the bathroom door.

  Judith picked her way between the litter – there were clothes, newspapers, room-service trays and a silver flute in an open velvet-lined case – lying on the suite’s sitting-room floor, and sat down on the one uncluttered chair. The man continued his tidying up without looking at her, then scuttled through an adjoining door. Splashings from a shower were mixed with boisterous singing in what Judith took to be Vietnamese. From somewhere beyond – the bedroom? – the man began singing the same song.

  She waited several minutes, then assumed an expression of irritable boredom which she had to maintain until twelve-thirty, when Minou reappeared.

  This was a different Minou. Her face, without cosmetics, was barely pretty and her hair fell in straight, wet strips. She was wearing black trousers and a crumpled white shirt. She looked, more than anything, like a young market coolie.

  One arm was stretched behind her back. She whipped it round and held in front of Judith the forage cap with green wings. Then she pulled it over her dripping hair and began to kick at the debris left on the floor, adroitly jerking some underwear and a blue sequinned evening dress into the air, catching the bundle and tossing it through the bedroom door.

  ‘No amahs,’ she explained. She gave a larrikin grin.

  A coffee-table-sized book had been lying on the carpet, under the evening dress. Minou picked the book up and riffled through its pages. ‘I liberated this, in Bangkok,’ she said. She smiled reflectively at a coloured photograph. ‘Do you steal things? Ever?’

  ‘No,’ Judith said. ‘Never.’

  ‘I bet you’d steal this,’ Minou said. ‘Regardes, la.’

  Judith took the book, printed in some Asian script – Japanese? – aware that Minou was observing her closely. Somehow she kept her voice steady.

  ‘Very impressive. The colours are nice.’ She could not think of anything else to say.

  Minou was smirking. ‘Don’t you want to look at the other pictures? There are more interesting ones.’

  Carefully, as if it might break, Judith handed the book back. ‘Pornography isn’t my bag,’ she said.

  ‘Ooooh. Sorry.’

  Her tone suddenly made Judith irate. ‘I suppose you were in Bangkok after you escaped from Saigon, were you?’ she asked. ‘That’s where all the smart people first landed. The ones who fought their way on board the American military transports.’

  The gibe hurt, or at least startled into life some secret memory of Minou’s. The hostile amusement in her eyes drained inwards, leaving them shuttered. For a moment, Judith saw, Minou was not lounging like a young thug in a suite at the Lakeside, but was elsewhere, and different. Then suddenly she smiled.

  ‘Yes, la. That is when I was in Bangkok.’ She dropped the book back on the carpet and poked at it with her bare big toe. ‘Do you think I wouldn’t have stayed, if I’d had the option? What do you think they’d do to women who’d been friendly …’ she shrugged, ‘ … with the enemy?’

  Judith felt the foolishness that follows the ebbing of sudden rage. ‘Yes. It must have been frightful for you,’ she murmured.

  Minou continued in her American drawl, ‘I saw what happened to my mama, after Dien Bien Phu. People spat at you, in the street. Nowadays, things are better organized they have re-education camps and new economic zones. But the truth is,’ she sounded offhand now, as if bored with the subject, ‘because I was born in Vietnam, and so was mama and grandmama and great-grandmama, and everybody, I wish sometimes I was still there. It’s not good to be ripped away from your family and your customs, la, all the things you like. All the people who’ve looked after you since childhood. What’s the West got for me?’ She retracted one nostril in an exaggerated sniff of distaste.

  ‘Comfort?’ Judith asked dryly.

  For a moment Minou appeared not to have heard her. But she had, for she went on, irritably, ‘Comfort. A comfortable existence.’ She fell silent, then said in a low voice, ‘I’m Asian. I feel déracinée here.’

  It was pretty rich, Judith thought, coming from someone who was half-French, spoke English like a Long Island debutante and enjoyed to the full the privileges of being married to a member of the Australian Establishment.

  ‘Anyway, let’s have lunch,’ Minou added, in a different tone.

  She dialled the telephone but instead of speaking to room service began giggling into the receiver. Her voice had become childish. ‘Judith and I are going to have lunch up here in the suite. What will we eat, Papa?’ She giggled during his reply, then asked, ‘What wine will I get?’

  Judith stared out the window at the splendid view of the southern mountains – ‘groaning purple’, they’d been called in a poem. She tried hard not to notice that Minou was telling Hobday, ‘Judith is lovely, Papa. With bi-i-i-g boobs. Boobs like pamplemousse. The sort you like.’ She broke into French.

  Judith could feel through her back that Minou was glancing at her, watching her for a reaction. There was a click, the telephone was dialled again, and Minou was saying in her cool American voice, ‘Two fish-of-the-day. That’s O.K. with you, Judith? Pommes frites and side salads. O.K., Judith? And a bottle of Leasingham Riesling. Immediately, please. We’re running late.’ To Judith she called, ‘One moment’ and vanished into the bedroom, pinching at the wet strips of hair that escaped under the green wings of her cap.

  She came back thirty-five minutes later, transmuted into a cosmetics-advertisement beauty and wearing a cobalt-blue silk kimono dress.

  While a waiter, an Australian, was murmuring, ‘Yes, Lady Hobday. Thank you, Lady Hobday’, palming Minou’s tip, she waved him off. Then she arranged herself in one of the dining chairs he had drawn up for them and crossed her mannequin’s legs one way, then another, as if she could see herself in a glass. It was already a quarter to two. Judith noticed, with resignation, that Minou in the interim had varnished not only her fingernails but also her toenails. She was determined now not to get angry with Minou again.

  ‘Well, about the Malaysian camps,’ she said cheerfully.

  Minou stuffed a piece of fish in her mouth and slopped out the wine as if there were plenty more where that came from. Between bites she mumbled, ‘Eat. Drink.’

  From time to time Judith told herself to stop drinking so quickly and laughing so loudly – Minou was a born mimic and her imitations of the diplomatic wives in Kuala Lumpur were maliciously accurate. She also knew several silly ‘Irish’ jokes and to illustrate one she snatched up the silver flute and played ‘God Save the Queen’. Later, to give the punch line for her riddle, ‘Why aren’t women allowed into the same part of the mosque as men?’ she got down on the floor and made improper movements and noises.

  They ordered another bottle of riesling, then coffee and cognac, then more cognac, and had to go often to have a pee. Once Judith looked out the picture window and the mountains seemed black. She felt panic-stricken as she said, ‘I must go’, but Minou insisted so sweetly that she stayed on.

  Later, as she was going down in the lift, Judith repeated to herself, ‘She’s a monster. She’s a lunatic. Hobday must be out of his mind to have married her.’ It was small excuse for what they’d done together that afternoon.

  5

  Judith stalked briskly out through the hotel foyer, hoping none of the staff would recognize her as a party to the incident there with members of the Atlanta Lions Club. There had been a look of horrified bewilderment on the face of the red-skinned man, a bank manager perhaps, whom Minou had picked as their butt. He had stepped back as if to defend himself from a blow, his blood-spotted eyes bulging with incomprehen
sion.

  Judith had burned with resentment against Minou for talking her into helping play the practical joke, and with shame for agreeing.

  Afterwards Minou had said, ‘You live in such a safe world. That’s why you’re so squeamish, la! You just talk, and risk nothing.’ The old memories this remark had stirred up had worsened Judith’s sense of moral emptiness. Minou had sneered, ‘I remember you at the dance in Glebe. What a Queen Bee! We all said “Here comes a Queen Bee”.’ Judith had slanged back, ‘You should talk! In your Jourdan sandals and your Zampatti dress! You’re just a dyke ripping off a middle-aged lecher.’ It had all been ridiculous and demeaning.

  She had driven home from the Lakeside in the late, golden afternoon feeling nothing for the beautiful landscape and its barricade of ancient mountains.

  ‘Enter the thunder cloud!’ Richard had said when she walked into the living-room at half-past six. ‘We’re not entirely sober, I see. Another speeding fine?’ he added, and put on a look of sham astonishment when she did not answer. When she walked past him into the bedroom he followed and said, ‘You’re pissed. What’s going on?’

  ‘I’ve got to ring Sancha,’Judith said. ‘I’ve just had a row with Minou Hobday and I’ve got to find out how much damage it’s likely to do me.’

  It was easy for Richard to manhandle her, as he did now, propelling her from the bedroom to the living-room, where he pushed her on to the Bamboli four-seater.

  ‘I’ll make you a pot of tea so you can sober up and tell me what you’ve done. Then we’ll decide if you’re going to ring Sandra.’ Judith thought, You lawyers get people’s names wrong on purpose, as an intimidation technique.

  She looked around the large white-and-silver room, with its tropical palms in pots and the imported Italian furniture that the children were not allowed to touch. We’ve got everything, she thought. Two of everything. Forty-five thousand a year and no debts. Neither of them drank spirits or smoked. Neither had the nerve to suggest they should risk the envy of their friends on lower incomes, or the disfavour of the Party, by getting more household help. ‘I can’t afford a live-in au pair,’ she’d lied to Sancha yesterday. Only with skiing holidays and Richard’s investments in Georgian silver flatware – kept hidden at the bottom of the dirty clothes basket – could they get rid of the money.

  Judith’s head began to thump.

  When Richard came back with the tea she told him how a chance remark of hers had incited Minou to say how much she despised the Atlanta Lions, who were staying in the Lakeside. Somehow they had egged each other on, and before Judith could get out of it, they’d gone down to the foyer and had begun flirting with the men. One man, believing in his luck, had accepted Minou’s invitation to her room.

  At the lifts she had bent over, coughed, and juggled a handful of plastic vomit from the kimono sleeve of her dress, dropping it on the carpet at his feet. He had not seen her sleight-of-hand. She and Judith, half collapsing with laughter, had slid into the lift. As the doors closed Judith had caught the man’s expression.

  But when Minou had realized that Judith felt ashamed, she’d become abusive. There in the lift they’d had the first round; then, back in the suite, Minou had suddenly and irrelevantly demanded if Judith found Hobday attractive. A moment before replying Judith had known that any answer would be the wrong one, but she was too emotionally exhausted to care.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she had said.

  ‘Get out of my suite! Get out and leave my man alone!’ Minou had shouted at her, and Judith had gone. She had spent fifteen minutes skulking on the mezzanine floor before getting up the courage to pass through the foyer.

  She said to Richard, ‘Minou lost a lot of her family in the war. Her father disappeared before she was born. Hobday’s all she’s got here.’ It astonished her to hear herself defending Minou, but Richard had just called Lady Hobday a string of copulative names.

  ‘So Sir Adrian is her daddy now,’ he said. The story had shocked him out of his irritation with her, but it was returning, Judith realized. He added tightly, ‘It is a peculiarity of your trade to consider that getting drunk is not only a permissible but also a useful method for pursuing facts. Could I put it to you that sobriety is a more useful one?’

  ‘You sound like a bloody lawyer,’ Judith said.

  ‘That’s a remarkable statement.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured.

  His chest deflated. ‘Well, ask Sandra if there’s any way you can still get into the camps without this strumpet’s help. Or should we say, in the teeth of her opposition?’

  Richard had fed and bathed the children and put together a creditable niçoise salad by the time she had finished talking to Sancha. When the boys hung around the terrace table and Sebastian wanted to sit on her knee Richard said, ‘Go away. Your mother has got herself into trouble again and I want to talk to her in peace.’

  Judith put her elbows on the table and slumped her chin into her hands. ‘I may as well cancel my ticket tomorrow. Minou is the only interpreter I’m likely to be able to get. Through the UN High Commissoner for Refugees – a Frenchman who Sancha says thinks Minou is God’s gift – she can stop me getting into the camps. She’s done that already to a television team from West Germany. They wasted ten days there, trying to talk their way in, and got nowhere, thanks to Lady Hobday’s influence.’

  Richard sat silent, studying her. He was wearing the green-and-white PVC apron that said ‘I AM A HUMOURLESS FEMINIST’. It had seemed more amusing on him in the photograph that had gone with a magazine article, ‘Husbands Who Are Liberated And In The Kitchen’. He was sulking. Judith noticed how heavy his jowls were going to be in a few years, even if he did keep up his jogging.

  She said to him with her eyes, Give me sympathy.

  ‘You’ve buggered things up, haven’t you?’ he said at last. ‘You were determined not to do a critical piece on the refugees, and now you’ve found an excuse for not doing the job at all. They’ll send somebody else, I suppose? Barney?’

  ‘They will bloody not!’ The heat of her reaction surprised her. ‘You spiteful bastard!’ she called at Richard as she rushed off to the bedroom. She heard him saying later to the boys, ‘You mother’s a proper harridan when she’s upset,’ and grinned evilly to herself when David asked, ‘What’s a harridine, Daddy?’

  At 9.30 pm the telephone rang. Judith answered it and as she did, heard the click of the other receiver, in the study. She thought, He monitors my phone calls now.

  ‘Yes?’ she said briskly. There was no immediate answer.

  Then, ‘Oooh, la! Still cross with me, Miz Wilkes?’

  Minou talked for an hour, dropping the wheedling little-girl voice after a few minutes for a tone of authority. By the time Judith rang off, telling Minou that she would indeed be delighted to stay in the Kuala Lumpur Residence, she had covered pages of her notebook with information. It included important statistics and the names and telephone numbers of officials in Malaysia.

  Richard came into the bedroom a few moments later and kissed her forehead. ‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘Your Lady Hobday is all and more than I had imagined. A neurotic, an obvious liar, a creature of charm and cunning. That story she just told you about begging on her knees for a seat on the plane out of Saigon!’ He looked put out. ‘I was quite moved. Were you?’

  Judith nodded.

  ‘You’ve had a tiring day,’ Richard said as he unzipped his fly. He made this excuse on her behalf often; she never offered it herself, these days. She wondered sometimes what happened in other marriages where there were the same difficulties. Once he had asked her to go to a doctor about it and she had cried for hours, reduced to childishness and with a child’s instinct to grab at excuses, snivelling, ‘It’s not my fault. It was the way they told us things at school.’ They had not referred to the matter again. She was always tired at night: she worked so hard, and they entertained and went out so much, and there were the children to cope with on weekends. She and Richard had found, if no
t peace of mind, a truce in these evasions. He had, she knew, his little diversions. What else could she expect?

  It only took a few minutes, and she kept her eyes closed. In the days when, for his sake, she’d pretended to enjoy it she’d watched his face a couple of times and seen in his eyes a different kingdom. Now that she had trained herself to reduce sex to mere physical assault she could remain tranquil, and slipped easily into sleep when Richard rolled off her.

  The beasts were waiting, wrestling with each other playfully in the long, bleached grass. Then they set out to hunt, padding through the stretched shadows of forest twilight. The creature they felled was only half-grown; they had just captured it when it vanished. In rage at being cheated they turned away from the empty patch of grass, and the larger tiger – who with dreaming eyes had groomed his mate with his tongue, cuffing her lightly for attention – reared up and leapt towards her. She cringed back from him and suddenly was inside a cage. People were shouting abuse and glaring at her.

  Judith opened her eyes. They had left the bedroom curtains drawn back and outside the terrace was washed with moonlight, its blond slate paving still barred with the shadows cast by the pergola, as it had been when they had gone to bed. She wanted to believe that the pattern of shadows had suggested the cage. But the dream that had happened two nights running now was an ancient one, forgotten, as an injury can be for years until one day, running to greet a friend, a leg collapses and you cry out in astonishment. And afterwards live with an unvoiced dismay.

  She woke fresh and cheerful in the morning and gave Richard his breakfast in bed.

  ‘I slept like a log,’ she said, and looked puzzled. ‘I think I had a dream. Oh, well, I can’t remember it now.’

  PART THREE

  MALAYSIA

  6

  Her anger dissipated at Sydney airport as the herd instinct took hold of her. Judith shuffled along in line with the three hundred others and submitted to a stewardess who took her beach hat, rolled it out of shape and threw it in an overhead locker. This is how you get people to walk into gas chambers, she thought. They’ll do anything they are told, as long as they are all together and one will lead the way.