Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Minou was seated on the floor near the doorway, leading the singing. As she saw Judith she gave a shout and flung up her arms. The song stopped; hundreds of amazed black eyes stared.

  ‘Judith! Hi! Come in.’ She beckoned, urging Judith to squat down beside her. Then, in a rapid quacking, she addressed her audience. The children cheered and clapped.

  ‘What did you tell them?’Judith asked. She had remained standing.

  ‘That you are my beautiful Australian friend, my sister from Australia.’

  On the drive back into town Minou prattled incessantly. At one stage she scratched her scalp, examined the underside of her scarlet-varnished nails and said, ‘Oh, look. A louse.’ She cracked its body and flicked the tiny broken corpse on to the carpet of the Citroen. ‘I’ll go through your hair tonight. It’s easy to see them in blonde hair.’

  ‘Terrific,’ Judith said, pulling a face.

  Minou looked put out. ‘These camps are very clean and healthy. There’s a bit of TB at Bidong. But no plague.’

  ‘Plague?’

  ‘Yes, la, plague. Do you think plague has vanished from the earth just because you little Australians don’t have it? I used to have injections against it – bi-i-g needles.’

  They rode in silence, Judith feeling inept and bourgeois, remembering that she had seen references to bubonic plague in Vietnam. Presumably the badly crowded camps in Thailand had it. She was startled by Minou’s breaking of the silence.

  ‘Do you ever wonder why you are alive?’ Minou asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean, why your life has been spared and somebody else’s hasn’t?’

  The Citroen had drawn up outside the office block where Judith was to interview the Malay Tunkus she’d met at Jamie’s party. ‘I do,’ Minou said. ‘I think about it often.

  How come I was one of the lucky ones to get out, in April 75, when thousands of others failed?’

  Judith had gathered up her tape-recorder and notebook and was edging along the seat towards the car door, which Bala had already opened. ‘I know the answer,’ Minou continued lazily. ‘I have a purpose. A good purpose.’ She glanced down at Judith’s equipment. ‘You have a function. You overcome other people’s wills, for your job. But it is just a function. You haven’t got a good purpose.’

  Judith replied, ‘I earn my keep.’

  This time, when Minou looked at her, it was with genuine scorn. ‘So does a cow.’

  ‘Bye,’ she added, and turned her head away to look out the other window, across the road, where a white-turbaned man had all sorts of exotic junk laid out on a cloth on the pavement and was waving a brass cobra at a couple of young Australian tourists, dressed as if for bushwalking – with knapsacks, zinc-creamed noses and shorts. People were staring at their hairy legs; only coolies wore shorts in the street.

  19

  She stood there, a cackling gnome, with one stubby hand on the brass knob of the Residence front door, bare feet planted wide, each brown toe separated from its neighbour like small stones spaced regularly in a line. Her black satin trousers were creased sharp, her white cotton jacket with curly frog fasteners was starched. And she laughed at Judith. Her belly jerked up and down beneath the stiff clothing.

  ‘India man,’ she said. And ‘clicket’.

  It took Judith a while to get from her a proper account of what had happened while she had been at Bellfield and later interviewing the Tunkus. It seemed part of the amah’s policy of bullying everyone except Minou to deliver messages at first in code. The old biddy was a master of power games – half a century or more of service to the white misfits, petty tyrants and dreamers whom colonies attracted, had taught her every trick in the servant’s trade of reversing the official order of superiority. At length it became clear that Kanan had telephoned the Residence, inviting Judith to lunch at The Dog that day at 1 pm. After lunch there would be a friendly cricket match between a visiting West Indian team and a scratched-up side of players from The Dog; Judith was further invited to stay on and watch the game, which would end with failing light, at about 5 pm.

  She felt slightly sick; she had not thought of Kanan all morning and now, suddenly … ‘I’ll write the royals story while I’m watching the game,’ she said unnecessarily to the amah, who received this information without a blink. ‘Please get me a taxi.’

  The amah waddled out on to the front porch and shouted ‘taxi’ at a Malay gardener who was clipping the hedge in slow motion. Judith went flying through to her suite, straight to the mirror. Her face, thank God, no longer looked like slightly warmed putty, as it had at six o’clock that morning. She had only ten minutes to repair it if she were to reach the Club by one.

  When the taxi was halfway along Jalan Ampang she realized she had forgotten her notebook and felt for Kanan a surge of resentment for making her rush. The clock on the pink Moorish building on the other side of the padang struck one as her taxi went clatter-bang, and stopped. She tipped the driver too much and hurried up the front steps. A lot of men were seated at the long polished bar, others were strolling towards what she supposed was the dining-room. There were Sikhs, Tamils, Chinese, Tunku Jamie, who lifted a beer glass to her, the West Indians, and a few limplooking British Foreign Office types. Kanan was not in sight.

  He arrived twenty minutes later, at the moment when Judith thought her anxiety and humiliation – the waiters had brought her a fresh lime juice and had exchanged looks when she had tried to pay – would explode in irrational action. That she would smash her glass. Or slap Kanan’s face.

  He came towards her with his palms pressed together, touching his fingertips to his forehead and saying, ‘Sorry, sorry, humble apologies’, and she felt her legs had turned to those of a new-born foal. He had had to visit somebody in hospital on the way to the club. Of course, she understood. She had been enjoying the view and the beautiful blue day. And thinking.

  In the dining-room, which had been modernized to look like any other dining-room, he said, ‘But you’re eating nothing.’ He gazed at her with consternation, as if she were an important piece of machinery that had unexpectedly broken down. He himself had wolfed an assortment of vegetarian curries and had looked with interest at the créme caramel a Sikh was toying with at the neighbouring table.

  Judith, who had talked about Bellfield and abuse of privilege by the royals, was thinking that his hair was too long – he had a blue-black mane – but that it suited him. It was the unstylishly long hair of a man whose self-confidence placed him above fashion, a man who suited himself. She frowned, trying to recall something from the jumble of images she had of Kanan, but they had melted together into an inscrutable mass. It was all just there, a shiny orb in her forehead, with his name written on it, as incomprehensible and fascinating as the rings around Saturn.

  ‘Actually, I’m nervous,’ she said, and blushed.

  His eyes were limpid with sympathy.

  Ralph Hamilton had the wry, satisfied smile of a man who has enjoyed himself illicitly. He had sauntered towards Judith, who was seated on a cane chair on the club verandah and was checking through her morning’s notes. She’d gone back to the Residence to get them, now that Kanan was only a small white figure on the bright green padang, fielding at deep square leg.

  An Oxbridge voice said, ‘Oh, the bugger! He’s dropped it!’ Judith looked round to see a languid young Sikh in a pink turban flapping his hands together in a slow clap. Behind him Ralph was approaching her.

  Ralph dropped his hands on to her shoulders, still under the influence of the sexual arousal, now an amorphous sensuality, created by Lan. There was a shiver of muscles, the involuntary movement of rejection that runs along the flank of a horse when a saddle is heaved on its back. Ralph squeezed the tremor down, then lifted his hands.

  ‘What a suntan!’ Judith said.

  ‘Bidong’s not too bad for some things. I just got back. Haven’t been home yet.’ He squinted across the field towards Kanan. ‘You’re the guest of Dr Midnight, eh?’
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br />   He was so pleased to realize that Kanan, after all his chastity bullshit, had made a play for Judith which she’d accepted, that he felt a genuine current of pleasure in seeing her sitting there. Kanan’s piece of fluff. Her presence was, he felt, a personal achievement for him. His body was easy, too – not a twinge since Saturday. This, with the other physical pleasure – Lan had been half-spavined from it he’d noted proudly when he’d waved her goodbye on the wharf that morning – had created a mood of benevolence in him.

  ‘I hope he’s been looking after you. Let me get you another drink.’

  ‘Just lime. I’m still working.’

  The clock on the Moorish building said 4.45; the sky, which had been cloudless all afternoon, was now a lilac-grey haze.

  ‘I’ll have lime too,’ Ralph said. ‘We’ll have to start drinking properly when they come off, though. Look at the bloody Chinaman!’ He went to the verandah rail, made his hands into a megaphone and roared ‘It’s cricket, not baseball, you Chinese nit!’

  The Sikh drawled, ‘Johnny has given away ten runs this over. Isn’t it?’

  Judith found she loved it all – loved sitting there among the pot plants and the Edwardian white cane furniture, identified as Kanan’s guest, drawn in to his mysterious life. The difficulty of cajoling or threatening Ralph into helping her get in to Bidong had been illusory, she now realized. He was her buddy. They were all buddies on this verandah.

  She asked him about Bidong directly, with confidence in his answer. It was all arranged by the time Kanan came bounding up the steps, his forehead nuzzled to the temple of a West Indian whose arm draped around Kanan’s neck. She and Ralph would leave on mid-morning Thursday, by car. That left two and a half days for more interviews in KL. The timing could not have been better.

  ‘I’ll now have one of those things called a stengah,’ she said, and was arrested and edified by the coquettish choice of her words, and the tone of her own voice.

  Kanan was two metres away, talking to the West Indians, but he was looking at her over their shoulders, his Tutankhamen eyes bright with exertion and admiration. Those black, leggy men in their cream shirts and trousers smudged on the groin where they had wiped the cricket ball, were pawing each other tenderly, making Judith want to pluck Kanan away from them. She felt locked in a battle of wills with them. Then Kanan slapped a man’s shoulder and broke free saying ‘I must wash up’, and Judith leant back, placated. She took a long swig of the whisky soda and smiled at Ralph who raised his glass, grinning.

  The little bats had been out on their evening forage and had been swallowed by the darkness of the sky by the time Kanan, smelling like a flower, returned and dropped into a chair beside Judith.

  What had happened next that night? She could not be certain, even at this point, half an hour after the Residence front door had swung heavily and clicked, shutting out the sweet night with its sickle of moon and Kanan, who had leant up against the white-washed porch saying, ‘I can’t go home. To tell you frankly, I can’t walk.’

  Judith lay open-eyed in the dark, hearing above the noise of the airconditioner words which, when spoken, had knitted the night together with the perfection of a final, central piece in a thousand-shape jigsaw and which now, recalled in the bed of the Australian Residence guest suite, stood out from their context like gems laid on velvet. There had been one bad moment, an instant like biting into a fruit when the teeth and tongue meet rottenness – but it was only a small blemish. It had been late by then and they were all pretty drunk. KL was a drinking and whoring town. As Ralph had said: ‘The colonial tradition bedded in the Asian tradition.’ The Chinese made money to spend it on food, drink and women; the Malays made money to spend it on cars and women. The Indians? Kanan had thrown up his hands. ‘Everything goes on dowry! A daughter is a financial disaster.’ Ralph had laughed: ‘And treated as such.’ There had been silence, Kanan brooding. Then, to Judith, ‘You see, daughters are abandoned. Sometimes.’ ‘Tell her about the city rubbish dumps.’ Kanan had been earnest. ‘No, no. That is an exaggeration, Ralph. It happens rarely these days, and the babies are usually of mixed race.’

  That had not been it. That conversation had been early in the night, at Bangles. The three of them had eaten there, scooping up curry sauce with spongy wads of nan. Ralph and Judith were the only Caucasians in a bright, mirrorwalled room of Indians – Punjabi women in trousers and head-shawls; Hindu women as vivid and shrill as birds; thin men arguing noisily; fat, sombre merchants whose eyes were set in circles of charcoal-coloured skin. A youth had detached himself from a group engaged in some family celebration to approach their table. He had touched his fingertips to his forehead in front of Kanan. ‘I’ve passed you,’ Kanan had said and the boy had returned to his relations, walking backwards and bobbing his head. ‘Bloody guru,’ Ralph had said to Judith. ‘You should see him giving his Patterns-of-Culture lecture. Which acting school did you attend, Kanan?’ There had been a lot of play between the two men, sharpening the thrill of the more elaborate game of feigned disinterest, of formality, of serious discussion between Kanan and Judith, which went on, secretly, like the steady burning of a fuse to explosives.

  After Bangles, it had been ‘somewhere nice for Irish coffee’. The Garden Lounge of the Regent – soft light, plush furnishings, a Filipino combo playing Harry Belafonte songs. Young Malays had strolled past carrying themselves with the elegance of movement which develops in bodies nurtured in fresh air, and accustomed to mats on wooden floors for beds. They wore platform shoes and gold chains on their wrists and ordered cocktails which came in large glasses with slabs of pineapple balanced on the rims.

  Kanan had sat beside Judith and had talked across her to Ralph until Ralph had announced, ‘A piss, old son. Must have a piss.’ and had stumbled out of the rich, imprisoning seat. Judith’s thigh had again grown hot from Kanan’s pressed against hers as it had to be so he could talk to Ralph. She had known he would touch her before he did. But the shock of it, after all.

  Like someone holding a pear, deciding on which surface to bite, he had turned her chin and with slow deliberation had sunk his tongue into her mouth. After a few seconds she had opened her eyes and seen his, wide open all along. With the same leisurely action he had withdrawn from her and had stared down through the glass of the table top, at his feet. He had swayed his head. He’d been becoming more Malaysian as the night went on, forgetting words, breaking his sentences with ‘la!’ and ‘isn’t it?’ and, more often, ‘to tell you frankly’. Then he was suddenly abashed, speechless, at her mercy – the novelty of this was an exquisite sensation. ‘To tell you frankly, I desire you,’ he’d said and made a disconsolate gesture, still staring through the table top on to which they’d spilt peanut salt and had marked with the wet circles of glasses of the beer that had followed the Irish coffees. He’d turned his head to look up at her: ‘You see, my aunt lives with me. She’s very … How can we … ?’ Her voice had been steady: ‘Why don’t you come to the East Coast next weekend?’ ‘Four days! It’s so long.’ Her tone, to conceal the giddying sense of power, had been reasonable: ‘I can’t invite you to the Residence.’ He’d nodded. ‘The East Coast, then’, and his smile, like a strip of white neon surging to full strength, had switched on.

  Ralph’s eyes had avoided theirs when he returned. ‘Listen, old son – the Brass Rail. We need a game of darts and one … final … beer.’ Had they gone by taxi? Judith couldn’t remember at what point they’d dispensed with Kanan’s car. ‘This is a dive, but Zaridah is O.K.,’ Ralph had said as they pushed through into the low-lying smoke and dark of the Brass Rail. It was deserted except for a Malay woman, maybe twenty-five, maybe forty, and some manic Malay boys. They had sounded as if they were on speed, they were shouting and talking so excitedly. There were bogus Englishpub stalls covered in fake leather. Ralph had pulled the Malay woman down beside him on the narrow bench and balanced a beer glass on his forehead to impress her.

  Judith, visiting the lavatory, had been driven
back by the reek of vomit. When she had returned Ralph and the woman were playing darts; Kanan was almost invisible in the gloom of the stall. He had kissed her again. Peeping at him she had seen him glance up for a moment and had realized that Ralph was standing behind her, watching them. She had tried to pull back but Kanan had held her to him, pressing the nape of her neck with his hand. When he’d released her she’d turned immediately and seen Ralph leaning against the woman, one hand cupping her breast. Kanan had not even looked at the Malay. ‘Let’s go, Ralph.’ It had been so calm and so brutal – the woman was just a whore, she could be picked up or abandoned at whim, by Ralph, by Kanan, by anyone. Standing under the lights outside the bar, seeing her own skin pallid and naked under their glare, the portent of that dismissal had struck her. This was the real Asia: infant girls abandoned on rubbish dumps; women murdered for losing their virginity; wives divorced by the repetition of three words; villagers stoning to death helpless people because they were Chinese. No mercy here for the weak. You’d be kissed in public whether you were embarrassed or not. Kissed, killed – it was a matter of degree only, the source was identical, disregard for the unimportant. Playing cricket was important, and being tolerant, being an unpollutable Hindu, a life-tenure academic.

  Ralph had found some last-minute diversion inside the bar and she and Kanan were alone together on the pavement. She had stepped back from him.