Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Ralph ducked his head deferentially and began to move off but the Malay bag-carrier hesitated. ‘Sir, you know several Dr Kanans. Which one do you wish me to contact?’

  Jamie’s face expanded sideways like a ball of potter’s clay flattened between the palms. For him to distinguish between one man and the next was, clearly, as bemusing as distinguishing one sheep from a flock was for a city-dweller.

  ‘Fourpenny Dark, you know!’

  ‘They are all dark, Sir.’

  ‘God, so they are!’ Jamie looked around him in delight. ‘Well, the cricketing one. The vegetarian one. That’s it, the one who is always such a bore when we have Beef Wellington. Has to have large servings of the Wellington. You know!’

  The secretary by now did know. He bowed again and withdrew, following Ralph towards the club-house.

  Jamie moved to a chair and relaxed after the mental strain. His body spread to the contours of his seat like a slowly deflating balloon. His eyelids slid down, and he sighed. ‘Bloody hot,’ he said.

  The shavings of brown iris left exposed beneath his plump lids were focused, Judith noticed, on the body of a teenage English girl lying with her mother under the neighbouring umbrella. The girl was so young and slender that her hip-bones formed two little peaks under the skin and her bikini pants were strung above them, raised just above her belly. Slowly the eyelids rose; slowly Jamie sat upright again and gave the merest inclination of his head towards the mother. She responded with a dazzled smile and Jamie looked away.

  He said to Sancha, ‘If ever I were in real trouble’ and paused to smile at the fanciful improbability of this, ‘say, a plane crash, like those people in South America, or kidnapped, or lost at sea – I do a bit of sailing, you know – if ever that happened, the person I would most like to have with me is good old Kanan. Amazing fellow.’ He nodded at Sancha and Judith, agreeing with himself. ‘Some of those Hindus, you know, they’ve got that what do you call it, Sanchie?’ He turned to Judith. ‘My English is getting worse and worse. I’m taking Malay lessons and now I can’t speak anything. What do you call that Hindu thing, Sanchie?’

  ‘Integrity?’ Judith said. The word had come out of the air to her.

  ‘Integrity!’

  For a moment there was interest in those eyes as shiny as beer-bottle glass, but it dulled. Judith thought, What do men like him see when they look at me? How do they know I’m unable to respond? The uneasy feeling arose that she was in an environment where people played with words while operating on a deeper, unfamiliar level of perception. Even this brown frog of a nobleman, with his lazy mind and wrist-watch with a ruby in the centre of its dial.

  Jamie said, ‘Old Kanan has magnificent integrity. Of course, it means he doesn’t care …’

  The English mother had given a whoop of alarm. Sancha leapt off her couch, her arms jerking around her. ‘Quick!’ she said. ‘Quick!’ She grabbed up Jamie’s golfing iron. ‘It’s there. I saw it, too.’

  People were standing up, some running away, some moving forward, enclosing the two adjacent tables and their occupants.

  ‘Move back, la!’ a Chinese man said.

  They were all staring towards the long grass beside the wire fence.

  ‘You give me,’ the Chinese man ordered Sancha, trying to take the golfing iron from her. She shoved him away with such force and such ease that they froze. She was possessed.

  ‘Come out,’ she muttered. Her eyes did not move from one spot in the grass and as if they had some energy force, it shuddered under her gaze. Then the cobra swept forward and up the bank, and reared. Sancha got it with the iron before it even had time to steady itself to strike. It jumped from the earth as she broke its back, twitched and danced as she continued to batter it.

  ‘It’s dead already,’ a woman murmured.

  ‘Filthy, filthy beast,’ Sancha breathed as she chopped at it. People were moving away.

  Her shoulders slumped and she looked up, bright-eyed. ‘Here,’ she said, grasping the corpse, which broke in two as she pulled it from the ground. ‘Here, you can eat it now.’ She handed the snake to the Chinese man. Jamie’s face was aglow with merriment.

  Judith took Sancha by the arm and steered her towards the changing sheds. People fell back for them to pass.

  Sancha began to tremble as they entered the shed, then sat down suddenly on the cream-painted benches inside. She was spattered with blood and yellow-green guts and shit. The mixed colours dribbled down her thighs and chest, like child’s waterpaint flung about in a tantrum.

  ‘Look at what I’ve done!’ Judith felt ill at the sight, and from the knowledge they both shared that it was no snake that Sancha had battered to death.

  The changing block was empty, except for the Malay girl attendant who had followed them in from the door, curiously, then shrank back again on flopping sandals. The tiles and paintwork were clean, but the wet concrete gave the place a graveyard smell.

  After some minutes Sancha was quiet, and Judith was able to coax her to her feet and lead her to a shower. She emerged smiling apologetically, restored.

  ‘Jude, I’ve been desperately worried about Ralph. He’s got ulcerative colitis, you realize. The doctor has told him that if it gets any worse he’ll have to have surgery. One of those ghastly bag things.’ She sniffed, then began to cry again. ‘Ralph says he’ll kill himself if that happens.’

  Judith hugged her.

  ‘It’s beastly. And he’s so beastly,’ Sancha said. Her eyes were bulging with indignation. ‘It’s these refugees. Ralph’s so bloody romantic! He hero-worships some of the men. I think he’s gone crazy.’ She tensed and relaxed her long fingers. ‘He’ll do anything for them. He’s taking things from the house – from our house – for them. You know that hairbrush? I’d hidden it. I’ve lost so much recently – clothes, a radio, my Piz Buin sunblock that I had to order from Singapore. And I know Ralph is taking them. I hid that hairbrush. He’s been through my drawers to find it.’ She was ploughing her hair with her fingers. ‘You don’t know how dangerous what he’s doing is. It’s absolutely forbidden to give or take anything from the refugees. Even letters. The camps are virtually prison camps. The police regard the boat people as criminals. If any of the women are caught smuggling they get their heads shaved. The men get beaten up. And bloody Ralph! He could have us all thrown out of the country at forty-eight hours notice.’

  Judith hugged her again. They were both dumb with bewilderment; but Judith, at another level of her mind, was committing all Ralph’s indiscretions to memory. If Minou failed her on the camps, then Ralph …

  After a while Sancha said, ‘I’m not much of a hostess. You’ve only had one swim so far.’

  Beneath their umbrella Tunku Jamie was explaining something interesting to the English schoolgirl. Her pink baby lips were parted and her eyes wide; Jamie’s diamonds throbbed with rainbows as he talked.

  13

  When Kanan said that after the visit to the polyclinic he would be dining out and probably would not be returning to his house to sleep, Auntie pressed her palms to her temples then flung herself down to a corner of the kitchen floor where she crouched, as if warding off blows.

  ‘Mr Adultery!’ she wailed. ‘The night of the spears begins and he pollutes himself. He drinks poison, he eats cow flesh, he fornicates with casteless women on the very night the Goddess gave the spear to Lord Subramaniam. Already the Lord is riding out on his peacock, preparing to vanquish the demon king with his invincible Vel. But does Mr Atheist pray for victory? Does he want human beings to be saved from the forces of evil? Oh, no! He goes out to indulge his body in filth!’

  She had quite a lot to say on this theme; Kanan went on correcting his third year students’ essays on twentiethcentury cultural interchange.

  Five years ago he would have failed the lot, but the rules were different now and it was his duty as senior lecturer in modern South-East Asian history to find reasons for passing them. One boy had written ‘The re-birth of Islam as the World Rel
igion, led by Colonel Gaddafi of Libya’ (he had written Gaddafi’s name in Arabic script) ‘and pushed forward by the Great Revolution, which will take place when the self-styled Shah is exiled from Iran,’ (he had written ‘Iran’ in Arabic script) ‘will provide the solution to the non-Malay problem in Malaysia.’ The boy’s father was a Minister.

  Kanan sighed and drained his glass of tea.

  Auntie leapt up and put the kettle on for a fresh pot. ‘You work too hard, nephew,’ she said. ‘A man must work, work, work to feed his family.’

  ‘Your sons work harder than I and they are not paid thousands,’ Kanan said.

  Auntie shook her head in disbelief as she held the match to the gas-jet between fingers like charred sticks.

  ‘You are talking about wages now, nephew? How it is possible that you worry about the wages of rubber tappers and you don’t care about the demon Bhasmasura? Ill will come of it.’

  She repeated this last phrase often during the afternoon until Kanan, who knew that cosmic justice was not an idea but a fact and did not like Auntie’s reminders of this, said, ‘Be quiet or I will send you away from my house.’

  At times during the same afternoon – particularly after the Hamilton children were delivered to the club – Judith thought, I must go back to the hotel and get some sleep. But Sancha’s continuous chattering and the stream of introductions she forced upon Judith detained her. The heat did, too. The sky was a white fog by two o’clock and shadows had turned pale. People levered themselves from suncouches, their faces fuchsia-coloured from dilated capillaries, and stumbled into the chemical-tainted water to emerge not much wetter than before their plunge. Each swim provided a revival of energy for Judith, a sense of well-being that dissipated quickly, leaving her body processes working on a lower plane. She thought, I should not have sent that cable, and, If I don’t rest I’ll get panicky again. But the heat was a phantom boulder pinning her to her chair.

  At four o’clock there were, abruptly, no more shadows. The sky had become livid. A crackle of crystal-pink lightning ran through the storm clouds, for a moment giving a neon glare to the pool and the drooping banana palms.

  ‘The bumiputeras will be turning up now the sun’s gone. We’ll pick up your dress from the pub, first. Come on,’ Sancha said.

  ‘Australia calling you two times,’ the man at the hotel desk said. ‘Urgent, urgent problem.’

  ‘It’s your children. Something must have happened,’ Sancha said, ‘Perhaps a car …’

  Judith telephoned Richard from her room. When there was no answer she telephoned a Canberra neighbour, who reported that she had seen the family an hour ago, looking normal.

  ‘Perhaps I should ring his office,’ Judith said, but Sancha was looking anxiously at the sky and the Hamilton children had begun to vandalize the hotel’s furniture. ‘Oh, tomorrow,’ Judith added.

  There were forty-eight green-paned windows in the Hamilton house and they had to call the servants, who were officially on holiday, to help them rush around shutting each one before Judith could accept Sancha’s invitation to take a nap in the guest bedroom. Its airconditioning muted the children’s noise, but nothing could protect her senses against the energy of the storm. The house shuddered from each burst of thunder and the dark bedroom jerked like a disco under strobe lights. At every lightning flash the bedside telephone rang.

  ‘Don’t answer it,’ Sancha had warned Judith. ‘You could be electrocuted.’

  Judith lay staring at the light pulses on the green panes, thinking that most humans had lost the emotional stamina for this sort of climate. These storms pull us back to the era of caves, but we haven’t got the wherewithal now to enjoy or defy them.

  The rain stopped and she opened the windows. It was still dark outside, the sky draining from the purple of the storm to the pale grey of twilight. She lay down again and must have slept for she found herself back in the pets shop, with its disgusting caged-animal smell. She moved her hand across her breast and unexpectedly felt membrane and spiky bones. Touching the knitted mess she released from it a sour smell so piercing that her whole body made a huge jump back into consciousness.

  The room was quite dark now but she could see clearly the thing that had attached itself to her breast and she shrank backwards from her own body-walls. As she clawed at it, it clung tightly and she heard it scream. She shouted to Sancha who ran in and said, ‘Oh God! It’s a bat!’

  They unhooked it at last and Sancha, holding it by a wing-tip, flushed it down the lavatory.

  ‘It must have been sick,’ Sancha said. ‘Bats only come into the house when they’re sick. You’d better have a brandy,’ she added, looking at Judith’s face.

  They had several, downstairs in the drawing room, before they set out for dinner. The room’s stone floor was covered with rugs as rich and vibrant as stained-glass windows, and there were Chinese antiques – marvellous rosewood tables and carved cupboards decorated with gold leaf.

  ‘You’d go crackers here if it weren’t for the shopping,’ Sancha said. She gave a long-suffering look at a red lacquer cabinet, ‘But the prices!’ One had to thank Heaven that the nouveaux riches Chinese had not yet twigged to the value of carpets and antiques, Judith was given to understand. But when they did …

  The storm had cleared out the sky, which was needlepricked all over with stars in its western quarter, and blazing with a full moon in the east. In the moon’s white glare the shadows of the giant trees were as black as the shadows of midday.

  Sancha was saying, ‘It would take more than the bloody bumis to put me off driving.’ At the wheel of her Mercedes she had become the chin-up, square-shouldered white woman battling the tropics. Only the timid and the extravagant bothered to have chauffeurs. She went on, in a tone of less conviction, ‘You don’t have to go to Thaipusam, if you’re too tired. People say it’s pretty ghastly. The devotees go into a trance and stick things into themselves.’

  The brandy had flowed in a soothing tide through Judith’s system; the Mercedes’ airconditioning helped. ‘I feel great now,’ she said. She clicked her fingers and turned up the volume on the cassette deck and she and Sancha sang along with Rod Stewart – Judith boisterously, because Richard would not allow ‘your regrettable taste in music’ at home.

  ‘This is just their KL pied-à-terre,’ Sancha explained, rolling her eyes as the car crunched over raked gravel and the proportions of Jamie’s house came into view. ‘Jamie’s in timber. His father, the sultan, has absolute control over the lands in his State. He’s let Jamie chop down the jungle and ship it off to Japan. There’s nothing the government can do to stop him.’

  The house was large for a house but modest for a palace; there were plenty of servants. Two Malays, wearing silverwoven tunics over their black trousers, bowed to Sancha and Judith at the front door and showed them into a reception room with chandeliers, fake Chippendale and a dead cockroach, Judith noticed, almost concealed by the fringe of a silk carpet. Sancha muttered to a third Malay, who announced them.

  Jamie came forward with outstretched arms.

  There were about thirty people in the room, all Malay except for an English couple, and all as similar as beer bottles on a shelf, within the limits of their sex. ‘They intermarry a good bit,’ Sancha had said.

  Jamie steered Judith around, introducing her to his wife, Faridah, and then Billy and Alisja and Anwar and Mudzaffah and Charles, saying things like ‘Alisja is just over from Oxford for a few weeks’, and ‘Billy’s in base metals’, and that somebody else normally lived in France. The men gave their knowing frog-prince smiles and the women, arch and roguish-looking, inclined their heads. Judith knew she looked like Orphan Annie, in her makeshift clothes, and smiled back defiantly.

  Jamie then abandoned her to someone he referred to as ‘Tunku Berenice, my naughtiest cousin’, who at once said, ‘What a cute dress. Did you buy it locally? How brave!’ She glanced down at her own little bit of Nina Ricci. Hobday had said to Judith yesterday, ‘The revoluti
on in Malaysia will be against the royal families. That’s off the record, too.’

  Another silver-uniformed servant, with bare feet, offered sherry. A man near Judith turned to her saying, ‘She’ll know. She’s Australian. How much do you think they’d want for Leilani?’

  ‘I don’t follow horse-racing,’ she said. He looked puzzled, then turned away.

  The naughtiest cousin’s eye was wandering. Sancha, a few metres off, was giving an animated demonstration of how she had killed the cobra. We’ve been summoned here to amuse them, like dwarfs, Judith thought. The idea tickled her.

  ‘Why are you the naughtiest cousin?’ she asked.

  The Tunku, who said ‘Call me Bibi’, laughed and tossed her head. Her hair was cut into the soft little curls which were the rage in Europe. She might have been any age between twenty-eight and forty-three, a woman past the luminosity of youth and in her physical prime.

  ‘I’ve had rather a lot of husbands,’ she said gaily and paused. Her vivacity, which had the magnetism of a child’s, moderated. ‘I work, these days. I’m a counsellor-therapist at the Human Relationships Centre. It’s very important, very fascinating work. We get all sorts of people – business managers, students, housewives. You know, middle-class people.’ She said ‘middle-class’ eagerly. It proved her sincerity, Judith gathered, her devotion to the wretched.

  Bibi added, ‘I’ve had a lot of therapy, myself. I had primal in the States, with Janov. And I’ve done TM, of course, about ten years ago, and I’ve been into Subud …’ Her little hands fluttered, displaying rubies in a bunch. She gazed into Judith’s eyes. ‘I was a searcher for many years. But not any more!’ She was almost singing. ‘I’ve found my level!’ She threw back her head and laughed. Her amusement amplified Judith’s own sense of vitality. The last time she’d heard a laugh of such pagan robustness was from an old nun at school who used to take them fishing down on the rocks at Rushcutters Bay.