Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  The residences of ambassadors and high commissioners were here, a place which only a hundred years earlier had been virgin jungle. The Ampang tin mines had been located a bit further on and sixteen kilometres back had been the river junction, with a collection of ramshackle shophouses. This was now the centre of town. The jungle itself, botanists reckoned, was one hundred million years old. At night when a car’s headlights picked out a fence post over which vines had grown almost two metres in the space of a few days, Ralph would sense the violation; the jungle, so staggeringly grand, was paradoxically as tender as a spring bud and, once disturbed in its natural flow of energy, was ruined for ever. In an afternoon a man with a chain saw could undo the work of millennia. All along the roadway to the East Coast the injured trees were choked with curtains of parasites.

  He turned to Kanan, who was crouched over the steering wheel, driving at thirty kilometres per hour. ‘Lady Hobday has disappeared. Perhaps kidnapped,’ he said.

  Kanan clicked his tongue.

  ‘Keep it quiet, mate. I really shouldn’t have told you.’

  Kanan had found the entrance to Ralph’s house. He carefully negotiated the gravel drive and stopped under the lighted porch. An amah came out to open the door for Ralph but retreated when she saw he was with Kanan, whose hair and eyes, in the semi-light, shone like licorice.

  An inchoate plan returned to Ralph’s mind. He continued, however, to talk of Minou’s disappearance. ‘There will be rejoicing in the coffee party set,’ he said.

  ‘The other ladies hate her, isn’t it?’ Kanan replied. ‘It makes them angry that they must treat her with respect. And they are envious of her because she is young and pretty. And she has a mission in life.’

  ‘Yes, well, her mission, as you call it, may have come to an end. She and the syce have not been seen for twenty-four hours.’

  Kanan shook his head. ‘Impossible. Not if she is with Bala.’ Bala, the syce, was some distant relation of Kanan’s and had been taken on as Minou’s chauffeur on Kanan’s recommendation.

  Ralph smiled at his friend’s confidence. It was, he recognized, part of the extreme form of narcissism which Kanan’s background had fostered, that Kanan should find it inconceivable that any protégé of his would be foolish enough to be kidnapped. One night Ralph had watched, fascinated, as Kanan lay against his mother’s lap, being fed with her fingers. His great, lustrous eyes had been drunk with well-being, like a baby’s at the breast. Kanan was thirty-six years old at the time.

  Ralph changed the subject. ‘Listen, mate,’ he began ‘there’s somebody I would like you to meet. She’s an Australian journalist, a friend of Sancha’s, who is going to cause me a helluva lot of trouble about the camps. She’s one of those bloody women’s libbers.’ He paused and leant back in the car to look at Kanan. ‘I’ve got a theory about that sort of sheilah,’ he added.

  Kanan nodded, politely attentive.

  Ralph almost sniggered as he said ‘I think all they need is a bloody good screw. Why don’t you take her mind off work?’

  Kanan laughed. Ralph shocked him often with his destructiveness and although Kanan knew its source he was still caught unawares.

  ‘You know my wild days are over, Ralph,’ he said, then softened the rebuke with, ‘You are the playboy these days.’

  It was not the reaction Ralph had hoped for. He tried again, ‘Sancha showed me a school photograph of her. She’s not bad looking. Tall, blonde, big norks …’ His voice trailed away, for Kanan had averted his face. ‘Well, see you, mate. How about we go to Brickfields for dinner next week?’ The image of the Brickfields stall they both loved – with its little chipped dishes of vegetarian curries served by fat waiters who hitched at their dhotis, and shouted and cleared their nasal passages loudly – made Ralph’s gut churn once more. He clenched his fist, then punched Kanan lightly on the shoulder. ‘Goodnight, you chaste Indian householder. Bastard,’ he said, and jumped out of the car.

  8

  When Judith arrived in Kuala Lumpur her luggage did not. Or perhaps it did and was mislaid somewhere in the terminal building. The Malay girl from Qantas was winning in her smiles, but uncertain.

  ‘You are the unlucky one tonight,’ she said as Judith stood by the baggage roundel. When she climbed on to the machinery and peered down the chute she could see a group of Malay boys lying at the bottom, playing cards. They smiled and waved at her.

  ‘They are on go-slow,’ the Qantas girl explained. ‘The government is threatening to put the ringleaders in gaol.’

  A northern Indian Malaysian, a passenger from another flight who had already questioned Judith closely with that extraordinary presumption which was as much a part of Asian good manners as was the soothing lie, said, ‘Go-slows! Now we are developing the diseases of Western affluence,’ and he went on loudly to attack the Qantas policy of cheap fares to Europe, which did not extend to ASEAN member states. He had discovered Judith was a journalist half an hour earlier and now lectured her on her responsibility for arguing the ASEAN case in the Australian news media. He ended quietly, pleasantly, by offering a lift in his Mercedes.

  When he moved off an Australian businessman pressed his card on her and invited her to dinner at his hotel for the following night. ‘You need friends in a place like this,’ he said and patted her shoulder. She heard him calling the Malay girl ‘Little Blossom’ and she and the girl later exchanged looks of shared resentment.

  ‘The company must give you seventy-five dollars a day if your luggage is lost,’ the girl murmured to Judith when, after an hour and a half, it became clear that the suitcase with her typewriter, her background notes, her very raison d’être had vanished. Judith walked out of the terminal to find a taxi thinking, It looks different but underneath it’s the same bloody chaos and confusion.

  There was a system for hiring taxis from the airport now. One paid the fare to town in advance at a kiosk and handed the receipt slip to the cab driver. By midnight only a few old black-and-yellow Peugeot taxis were waiting outside. Judith approached the car at the top of the rank. A Chinese, whose body was shaped like a squashed loaf of bread, levered himself from the front seat and stood looking at Judith with his square head lowered, as if preparing to charge at her.

  ‘Hotel Malaya, please,’ she said and handed him the receipt slip. The driver took it. Judith got into the cab. The driver got into the cab. Nothing more happened.

  ‘Hotel Malaya,’ Judith said.

  The man nodded and sat there.

  ‘I want to go to the Hotel Malaya,’ Judith said.

  ‘We wait,’ the driver said.

  ‘No. You give me back my receipt,’ Judith said.

  The driver shook his head. ‘We wait.’

  Groups of people were getting into other taxis and driving off. Judith opened the door; the driver turned around.

  ‘You get out? You no get out!’ he shouted. ‘I sick man. I very sick. I work.’

  She managed to snatch the receipt from him and scrambled from the back seat. The driver ran after her down the roadway, towards the one remaining taxi.

  ‘I take four person only! I need money. I very sick,’ he yelled.

  The driver of the other cab looked at her and made the honking sound which puzzled Malaysian Chinese make.

  ‘Please take me to the Hotel Malaya,’ Judith said, thrusting the receipt at him.

  The driver shook his head. ‘You, him,’ he said, pointing to his huge colleague.

  The first man had caught up with Judith. ‘O.K., O.K., O.K., O.K.,’ he panted. They returned to his taxi and set off at irate speed.

  There was nothing to see except an occasional ghostly row of rubber trees. The old plantation stretched for kilometres, then there was complete blackness again, and after a while a luminous glow, then factories with the names of British companies on them. Independence or not, the colonial master held still, as Judith knew, the lion’s share of the economy. She glared at Crosse and Blackwell in neon lights. Houses and a hotel – the Sahi
d – appeared. The driver swerved into its drive and stopped.

  ‘This is not the Malaya,’ Judith said.

  The driver opened the door. ‘You get out. You get other taxi.’

  They had a scene about the receipt slip but Judith, through the sheer energy of desperation that is the traveller’s aid, won. Somebody who was asleep on the front steps of the Sahid, when tempted with a ringgit note to do so, got up and whistled her another cab. Half an hour later she arrived, shaken, in the centre of Kuala Lumpur at the Hotel Malaya. The left-hand back door of the second taxi had, on a curve, flung open and Judith had saved herself from falling out on to the roadway by clinging to the seat. The driver, a Malay haji, had chuckled, addressed Allah, and reached back with one arm to slam it shut again. Judith was too flooded with adrenalin after that to pay attention to the streets they were passing. The stupid, unfocused feeling that compounds from physical and nervous exhaustion and which reduces concentration to small nips at the environment had overtaken her. She noticed the red-and-gold Kong Hee Fat Choy signs plastered in the foyer, the plastic New Year peach and mandarin trees, and a sign by the lifts saying ‘Special Raw Fish Dinner’, but not much else.

  There was no room booked at the Hotel Malaya for Wilkes or Wilkinson or Wills. The desk staff seemed thrilled about her lost luggage. ‘Qantas. Lot of trouble, la!’ they said, grinning.

  A young Malay escorted Judith to her room and he stood grinning at her when he had – more for his own amusement than for her education, she thought – operated all the electrical gadgets there. She was too stupefied to understand his instructions about the airconditioner.

  ‘You travel alone? You stay alone?’ he asked.

  Judith nodded.

  ‘You like a drink?’ He was a very pretty boy and his expectations of success were evident.

  ‘No. I just want to go to sleep.’

  He looked from her empty hands to the bed and grinned some more. Half an hour later when Judith was just dozing off he knocked on the door. ‘I bring you nice drink. Still early, la. You have nice drink’, he called.

  Judith tiptoed to the door and put the safety chain in place. She could hear him muttering nastily outside and was shivering with nerves when she got back into bed, naked. She was unable to go to sleep for another hour and in that time her brain jitterbugged with ideas so dejected and bitter that at one stage she began sniffing in misery. She thought, When women everywhere were downtrodden at least they were in the main treated gently, like pets, because they were so vulnerable. Now we have claimed equality but we’ve not won respect, merely hostility. She recalled suddenly what it was that she had disliked about the Singaporeans. They had been no more brusque than Australian airport staff; they had, however, not been submissive. One expected Asian flunkeys to be submissive, like women. I’m a class traitor, she thought, and, I should have been more supportive of Minou to those drunken bums in Singapore.

  She awoke with a jolt from the sound of something being slid beneath the bedroom door. The room was in darkness. She lay still, waiting for the next noise, taut with the sense of vulnerability that nakedness causes.

  Nothing happened.

  After a few minutes her fright abated. She switched on the bedside lamp and saw that a newspaper, printed in Chinese characters, had been pushed into the room. It must be morning. A photograph of Deng Xiaoping shaking his fist accompanied the lead story. Judith found her watch on the bedside table. It was six o’clock local time, which meant she had had about three hours sleep after being awake for almost twenty-four. She felt ratty, as if her brains had been fried, and when she recalled the events of the previous evening she snivelled with rage.

  She went to the window and drew the blackout curtains. The sky was tenderly coloured, on the flood from dawn to daylight, which happened in a snap as she looked at it. The sky turned pale blue and the grey shapes below and in the distance changed into buildings. Here and there, on hilltops, there were patches of black-green jungle: monkeys had frolicked in them before, she remembered. On that first day, with Ben, she had asked him to stop the car and had coaxed a tiny monkey to scamper from the troupe and accept a peanut from her palm. It had eaten it squatting not far away from them, constantly flicking glances at her, its little jaws working overtime.

  The jungle ink blots looked smaller, now. Seven storeys down men in pyjamas shuffled out of front doors and silently spat on the roadway. A man on a bicycle delivered a butchered pig to a woman who appeared to be shouting at a knot of young men wearing white singlets and baggy khaki shorts. A few cars passed noiselessly, though they could well be honking their horns at nothing in particular, Judith thought. Sound and heat were occluded from the room by the sterile blast of the airconditioner. The view was of utterly normal Chinatown activities, and yet, back then ... She shivered, cold from the airconditioning and dirty, stripped of the comfort of even a toothbrush. She had picked this hotel from a travel agent’s list because it was in the centre of town, where everything had been boarded up and great curls of fire had flowed upwards into the night sky. There had been a sickening stench of burning rubber. Ben had said that usually this area smelled of sandalwood incense, curries, drains and ‘the Indian favourite, attar of roses’.

  It was still too early to ring anyone to enquire about Minou’s disappearance. Judith made the best toilette she could and set out for breakfast in the street.

  The air outside the hotel felt as sticky as warm beer and was laden with the sounds and scents of intense, competitive small-scale capitalism. In flower stalls children were wrapping coloured tissue paper around individual chrysanthemum flowers, attempting to outdo the children at adjoining stalls. A dozen metres further on was a collection of food stalls. There were few customers but the young men in baggy shorts and singlets flashed their cleavers over chickens and shallots and ginger with an urgency which suggested Armageddon was at hand and that they, personally, were in charge of feeding their army before the battle. Every boy over the age of eight seemed to be smoking.

  Judith took a seat at a footpath restaurant and within seconds a waiter appeared in slapping sandals beside her and said, ‘Aaagh?’ Seconds later he slapped a bowl of chicken rice on the table, splashed tea into a cup by holding the pot about sixty centimetres above it, cleared his sinuses, spat, and slapped off again.

  It is because they are here on sufferance, Judith thought. They know that any day the Malays might again take out their parangs. Every minute counts.

  A newspaper boy walked up to her and held the Straits Times in front of her face. The lead story, she realized from the photographs, was the same as the one in the Chinese newspaper delivered to her hotel room. It said ‘CHINESE TROOPS MASS ON VIET BORDER’.

  At a nearby table a light-skinned Indian bought a newspaper also and sat stroking a fantasy beard as he read it. He looked up at Judith. ‘There is only Thailand between us and Vietnam, isn’t it?’ he said. He added, ‘And you Americans left the Vietnamese such a good arsenal. Many Hercules, Chinook helicopters and Iroquois gunships, isn’t it? Even the poor boat people when they arrive here have beautiful M l6s.’ He swayed his head from side to side and Judith thought, We’re all going mad. He uses gestures as old as his race and refers to military equipment like a snotty wire-service reporter.

  The waiter honked ‘Aaagh?’ and smiled at Judith with astonishment when she paid. The astonishment was, she recalled, another local peculiarity. Ben said the Chinese had known for almost a century that Western women did not have long, hairy tails – as they had previously believed – but they still seemed to find it odd that they obeyed the laws of gravity. Or the conventions of commerce, Judith thought now. She tried honking back at the boy, which affected him with a crescendo of quacking and giggling.

  She turned the corner and walked slowly down Petaling Street, groping back into memory. There was a shop here, she recalled, which Ben had shown her on the afternoon before, as she referred to it mentally, ‘we rescued the Indian’. The shop had been particularl
y horrifying. It was still there, though no longer locked with an iron grille with the caged animals dying inside from lack of food and water, as they had been then when the proprietors had been too busy saving their own lives to care for their stock. A sign said ‘Pets Shop’, in English, which was, Ben had told her, a poor translation.

  A Chinese woman invited Judith inside now. The first stacks of cages held little dogs, stub-tailed orange cats, baby monkeys and birds of all sorts. Judith followed a narrow alleyway between the cages into gloom and the sharp smell of reptilian ordure. There, as Ben had warned her, were the other pets: pythons, cobras, kraits, civet cats with mad yellow eyes, wells filled with snapping turtles and cage after cage of giant monitor lizards. On the floor a hessian bag heaved and bulged from the life inside it.

  Judith knelt in front of a lizard wrapped upon itself in a cage that was far too small. Its blunt snout rested upon its front paws and it looked into Judith’s face with an expression of desolation. It looked ill, for tears dribbled from the corners of its eyes.

  ‘Hullo, old friend,’ she said, and the creature raised its head slightly and flicked its tongue. You could talk to any animal, she’d discovered in childhood. You had only to wish them well, and they responded, even creatures whose intelligence was ancient and dim recognized something, some common vibration of the heart.

  The shopwoman startled her. ‘You buy? Him very good.’ She had a thirty-centimetre-long chopper in her hand. She reached to open the cage.

  Judith jumped up. ‘No. No. I don’t want it.’