Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  And now … the boat was close enough to shore to anchor … now he was only a few years off military age, and he was a big boy (from the French blood of his grandfather, probably) and they might not believe that he was only thirteen. They were drafting the Chinese, especially, as front-line troops for the Kampuchean war. Chinese boys were expendable. And in the north … Adrian said there was going to be a Red Army invasion within another few weeks; it was in the top secret cables.

  At least I’ve got Papa Adrian. He says ‘You are not a failure. You have done everything you can to try to help them. This sense of shame that’s instilled into you neo-Confucian children. It’s worse than guilt. Guilt is for trespass. People can decide not to trespass, but they cannot, by an act of will, succeed against impossible odds. Can’t you see that, Minou?’ And then he gets exasperated and talks about history and stuff and the Japanese shame about losing the war and their emperor being made into an ex-god by General MacArthur. If I want to stop him, I have to say ‘Papa,’ and look at his cock.

  Minou shook her head and jumped backwards – the water had crept up over her ankles, to her trouser-legs.

  She looked up and saw the boat was anchored now, and some of them were climbing down a rope ladder into a dinghy. That was smart. They’d brought a dinghy for the ones who could not swim. Some of the men were jumping overboard. The tide was coming in fast, and they were, too. She began jumping up and down, suddenly wildly exhilarated for them, for herself.

  ‘Oh, you’re like a spaniel!’ She said that to the first man to reach the shallows and come rushing with a bow-wave in front of his shins to embrace her. A stranger.

  And then it was all joyous confusion. Even when the fishermen came running along from the village, shouting, and the police arrived and fired shots in the air, and Bala came rushing saying, ‘Quickly, Madam, there is trouble with Special Branch. Let me drive you away. We will say the car has been broken down and you have been staying in Mersing for two nights.’ But she could not drag herself away from them – they had photographs from home and bottles of fish sauce. And finally when the police realized she had not arrived on the boat too, they said, ‘Lady Hobday! We have been searching for you.’

  They forced her to leave, took her off by police car to the airport, while Bala drove the Citroen back to KL. Her exhilaration had lasted throughout the flight, but as the taxi from the airport crossed the boundary road, Jalan Pekeliling, and rattled and clattered into streets which were like paths in a garden, so lush and green was everything around, she began to be frightened of what she had done.

  Then she was home.

  The Australian Residence was designed to impress, as were all of the houses in this area. Like most of them it was doublestoreyed, with a semi-circular drive. Minou darted out of the taxi, leaving the servants to collect her luggage, and ran into the cool of the main reception room. It had white stone floors, was large enough to hold two hundred people and was, thanks to its fans and french windows, as light and airy as the seaside. But she felt suffocated by the room. Her mind had been suddenly forced to constrict on entering the house. The laughter she had shared with her compatriots, the expanded sense of life, was squeezed out.

  A group of High Commission wives, jubilant with scandal, was seated at the far end of the room, taking morning coffee. On seeing her they fell silent abruptly then gathered their wits and rose, one of them crying, ‘We’ve been so worried, Lady Hobday.’

  Minou sauntered over to them. They took in her spikeheeled sandals and pencil-thin trousers and white shirt tied in a knot over her navel.

  ‘I’m glad that worry has not ruined your appetites, la!’ Minou picked up the last of the curry puffs and ate it noisily. ‘Yum, yum,’ she added, looked at the empty silver dish and then at each of the women, with their floral dresses exposing fat arms mottled by sun.

  ‘Do sit down.’ She raised her arm, sniffed her own armpit and said, ‘Ouf!’

  The wife of the military attaché stood up again, for Minou had remained standing. ‘We called in to see if there was any way we could help.’ She was unable to contain her moral outrage and added, ‘Poor Sir Adrian has been frightfully anxious about you.’

  Once, feeling a chord of sympathy in this woman, Minou had said, ‘From the age of twelve I’ve had no compass for my life, except … well, anyway, it’s been very confused and I’ve had to invent stories about it.’ Within a week strangers at cocktail parties were approaching her, their feigned seriousness barely concealing their anticipated thrill as they said, ‘Do tell me about your life. It must have been interesting.’ Minou had not trusted any of them since, and grinned to see that they were bursting to know what she had done, and why.

  In her Senior’s Wife’s voice she said, ‘I’m going to have a bath. Would any of you like to scrub my back?’ She smiled to imply that this was not to be taken as entirely offensive, but that it was nevertheless their notice to clear out.

  Minou’s favourite servant, an old Black and White amah whom she called ‘Aunt’ in Cantonese and whom Hobday called The Wrath of God – she did have a face like a toad and her life of celibacy may have been enforced had she not voluntarily embraced it in childhood – panted up the stairs behind Minou. As she did, she muttered, loudly enough for the departing ladies to hear, about the consumption of curry puffs and ‘fat’. A former high commissioner had warned Hobday, ‘The Black and White considers it beneath herself to speak anything but bad English to her employers.’

  Aunt or Wrath of God would stand at the breakfast table with its white napkins folded into fans, by her, and command Hobday, who was taller than she even when seated, ‘You eat, Master. You got young wife. You need strong,’ and would reel backwards, cackling. Once when she was massaging Minou – the woman had hands and wrists as powerful as a woodchopper’s – she had said, ‘You clever girl. Why you marry, Missus?’ and when Minou replied, ‘Love, Aunt,’ had squeezed up her gargoyle face in derision.

  ‘Master’s new plants come,’ she said to Minou as she ran the bath. She looked as though she were going to spit into the bathwater. ‘No good. No flowers.’

  Minou shrugged. Her husband was an enigma to her. He protected her, that was enough. That was all a woman wanted from marriage – a man who would not abandon you when you were pregnant (as had happened to Mama) or get murdered, like the governor, or turn out to be married to somebody else, like a certain American. From intuition, refined by years of study of male behaviour, she knew how to amuse Hobday and to what limits she could go before he would be alarmed by her. Beyond that she understood little about him, and was incurious. As a matter of common sense she kept potential rivals at bay and encouraged all his passions, which included football and growing plants in a greenhouse, as well as the usual ones in men his age. When in company his conversation bored her or made her uneasy, but alone together they lived a life of rich play. Initiating the games was her side of the contract and the guarantee of Hobday’s continued devotion, for he was addicted to them, as she had discovered on the night she had first been to bed with him, in Canberra. She had had an intuition that he was ripe with stored-up fantasies and had reached some point of despair which games would release. Hobday, with an air both of fear and exhilaration, had taken over from then on.

  On the third night he had pleaded urgently, ‘Will you marry me? I will divorce my wife if you will.’ Although she had sworn off men for life, after that ‘husband’ from Atlanta, she had the healthy avarice of poverty, which was the reason for being in bed with Hobday at that moment. She had departed from the warm burrow of the Glebe sisterhood with few regrets.

  Minou telephoned Hobday from the bathtub. ‘Papa? C’est moi,’ she murmured. ‘Why don’t you come home? Baby wants to give you a kiss.’ She made some soft purring noises into the receiver.

  Hobday evidently had somebody with him in the room, for he said stiffly, ‘My dear, I’m delighted you’re home.’

  Minou crooned, ‘I want to fuck you, Papa.’

  �
�I’m sure that would be in order, my dear,’ he replied. ‘Mr Hamilton has been giving me a most interesting briefing, which he has almost finished. I think, then, I could come home for an early lunch, as you suggest.’

  ‘Ooooh, la! That again,’ Minou said, giggled and hung up. She rang through to the kitchen and told the cook to prepare the luncheon trays. Then she painted her face, dressed herself in the pink gingham nightdress with matching frilled panties which Hobday had purchased for this game, and half-dried her hair. He – she thought of Hobday as ‘he’ – would want to dry it properly himself.

  There had been no rain for more than a week, unusual for Kuala Lumpur, where it normally rained every couple of days, all year round. Despite the ceiling fans the bedroom would be too hot for him, in his suit, Minou realized. She shut the windows and turned on the airconditioner, then crouched under the bedclothes, rehearsing the most dramatic events of the story she would tell him. He had known in advance that the turtle story was a blind, that she was hoping to see a boat come in. But then she had made the silly mistake of forgetting to cancel her hotel booking, and this had led to all the fuss with Special Branch.

  ‘He’s angry with me,’ Minou said aloud, for thinking back to her telephone conversation with him, she had realized his voice had been more stern than she might have expected.

  He strode into the room without knocking and his expression was, as Minou saw with a fright, grave. She began to cower under the bedclothes then noticed that old Aunt was immediately behind him, carrying the luncheon trays. Minou sat still and contrite in the centre of the large bed, waiting for the servant to leave. Hobday paced up and down, also waiting. When the woman departed, he spoke.

  ‘You have seriously embarrassed me, Minou. I’ve had to make a personal apology to the Foreign Minister and to explain the nature of your, ah, interest in turtles to the head of Special Branch. I did that as soon as I was told you were missing. For their own reasons the police chose publicly to pretend to go on looking for you. There’s been hell’s own delight with the Press.’

  Minou began whimpering. Hobday merely noted her condition.

  ‘I am in the middle of delicate negotiations on the boat people. Embarrassment like this leaves me vulnerable to pressure from the Malaysian government to take more of them than Australia is willing to accept. I can’t afford things like this. How you dress, how you treat the other wives, I don’t care about. They are the tiresome trivialities of diplomatic life and I’m senior enough to be able to ensure that you can be as free as you wish, socially. But this is different. I cannot afford to become vulnerable, to be in the debt of a foreign government. And you, my girl, can’t afford this obsession with your family.’

  Minou was crying frantically now, for the terrifying thought had come back to her that she had gone so far beyond the limit of his tolerance that she would lose his protection.

  Hobday’s manner softened. ‘It’s over. Forget about it. I’ll play golf with the King after lunch, and that ought to close the matter. Now stop crying.’

  She dared to look up and saw that his face muscles were relaxing. He had a wet sponge in his hand.

  ‘You know it has been worth every social inconvenience for me to … uh … have you,’ he said. He sat on the bed to pat her face with the sponge. ‘You mustn’t be naughty like that again.’

  Minou sniffed and gave him a look of brazen appeal. ‘Baby is hungry,’ she murmured. To her immense relief, he smiled. ‘Open up,’ he said.

  After he had fed her, he dried her hair with a towel while she squealed and wriggled and he told her to keep still. He led her to the bathroom where he finished the grooming with an electric dryer; he was an expert now in rolling the circular brush through her hair. Minou watched him in the looking glass with wonder. She did not understand his pleasure in this mother-baby game. She knew only that it was necessary to him, for during it his large body became peaceful and his stony face took on contentment.

  ‘You look seventeen years old,’ she said and Hobday, absorbed, chuckled to himself.

  He rang down to the kitchen for coffee. The play was over but he still had a luxurious afterglow, and lolled on the bedroom chair, cheerfully calling, ‘Come in, come in’ when there was a tap on the door. He even patted Wrath of God on the back of her yellow strangler’s wrist as she set down the coffee cups.

  ‘I had an interesting lecture from young Hamilton this morning,’ Hobday said. He had crossed his legs at the knee and was holding his coffee cup daintily; these delicate gestures too, Minou had noticed before, were part of the afterglow of the game.

  ‘Yes?’ she listened brightly.

  ‘Yairs. He seemed to be wound up in a way which I found … hmm … irrational in a man whose political sense is normally acute. He said he’s afraid our refugee immigration programme will be cut out or cut down. The refugees are, of course, unpopular with the Australian electorate. Hamilton says that the ALP may make a promise to scrap the programme – give money, but allow no immigration – which would oblige the Australian government to make a similar pledge before the next election. I told him it would be a diplomatic impossibility for any government of ours to carry out such a policy. ASEAN retaliation against us for such an unfriendly act would be …’ Hobday waved a hand languidly. ‘No landing rights for Qantas? Oil blackmail via Islamic brothers in OPEC, which they could then extend to demands for lowering of our tariffs? Anyway he got very excited and tried to argue with me. Union pressure, fear of wage dilution and so forth.’ Hobday paused. The marvel of being able to cosset Minou, yet also at times to talk to her as an intelligent equal, pierced him with pleasure. ‘I got the idea that he has some personal interest in the refugee programme. Do you know anything about that?’

  Minou was alert. ‘He goes to Pulau Bidong more often than he needs to.’

  ‘And does he have a special … friend there?’

  ‘There was an interpreter a couple of months ago.’

  ‘Ha! The spoils of power. Immigration officials are kings in those camps. And what else?’ Hobday looked at her mildly. She was, he knew only too well, an habitual liar and even a thief, if she got the chance. Yet she was his other half, the part that lay dormant.

  Minou shivered, nerving herself for betrayal. ‘There’s a woman called Lan who’s his mistress now. He’s given her a priority assignment but it will be three months at least before the backlog is cleared and she can go to Australia. And he shouldn’t have selected her. She’s got no job qualifications.’ Minou was looking sulky. Hobday enjoyed her histrionics; years of self-discipline had robbed him of the power to express emotion. When she cried and sulked and giggled he was attracted to her by a force which seemed instinctual, it was so strong. ‘You are my fatal solipsism,’ he said to her once. She had smiled prettily.

  ‘Go on,’ he coaxed. Sometimes it took him weeks to get the truth out of her; sometimes he never did.

  Minou burst out with it. ‘She’s a killer, la! Their boat was attacked by pirates and some people got killed. She worked out a trick to play on the pirates. Her people managed to get the pirates’ pistols and knives, then they killed all of them. Lan herself shot five men. Everyone was talking about it on Bidong.’

  ‘Hmmm. Justifiable self-defence, I’d say.’

  ‘No, Adrian. She also killed her husband. She didn’t like him.’

  Hobday raised his eyebrows. ‘Did she indeed? You’re a fierce lot, aren’t you?’ he said amiably. He glanced at his watch and rose.

  ‘By the way, I spent half an hour with your journalist friend, Judith Wilkes, in the office this morning. Quite an attractive girl – that Marilyn Monroe voice – and sharp. Definitely sharp. Now, now, don’t look at me like that. You are not Lan.’

  Minou, in her pink baby’s dress, propped up in the middle of the bed like a child’s night-time doll, waved her long arms at him. ‘Papa! Your plants came,’ she shouted as he went off for golf with the King.

  She sulked for a while over his remark about Judith, regrett
ing her impulsive gesture of insisting that she stay at the Residence. She liked her, and she didn’t like her. And the feeling was mutual.

  ‘Book, Book, what will I do?’ Minou said aloud, then hopped out of bed and went to the chest of drawers where, wrapped always in the piece of yellow silk that a great-grandmother had spun, woven and dyed, she kept the Book and the pouch of coins. ‘The I Ching is all that’s left of my life,’ she had told Hobday when, shyly, she had first shown him the parcel. ‘Be guided,’ Mama had said. ‘The Book tells us that which is hidden inside us, the wisdom of our hearts.’

  Minou sat on the blue Tientsin rug on the floor to throw the coins, asking, ‘What will happen when Judith comes to stay in my house?’ and concentrated. Her hands, pressed together like butterfly’s wings as she shook the three pieces of money, then flapped open to let the coins roll out on to the rug. She threw Revolution, changing to Obstruction.

  Minou sometimes cheated with The Changes; she threw again and got a change to Possession in Great Measure. ‘Goody,’ she said aloud, in English, and rang downstairs for Aunt to come to the bedroom to give her a massage. It was no good puzzling what Possession in Great Measure might mean. That would become clear, in time.

  Aunt entered the room and planted her hands on her hips, making a noise in her throat as if bringing up phlegm. Her disapproval was caused by the fact that Minou was not yet prepared for her massage; she was still wearing her baby costume.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ Minou said, pulling the silly thing off and tossing it on the floor.

  Aunt, kneeling beside the bed, squeezed her naked buttocks in silence. At length she said, ‘You clever, Missus. Master very angry. Later, smiling.’

  She continued her massaging, muttering to herself, slowly increasing the volume of her voice as the limbs softened from kneading, a rhythmic pressure that Minou experienced as sunshine rising through her body.