Down in the garden a large, black iron boat had been run up the beach to the grass and was secured there by steel hawsers. It was one of the early arrivals, back in 1978, before the flotilla had become an armada. The hotel had bought it to convert it into a mini-bar, but it had been there months and no amusing redecoration was as yet in progress. The idea had become rather tasteless in the interim.
Behind this boat the beach was littered with skeletons of other, less substantial craft, the flat-bottomed river boats that became floating coffins when the seas got rough, or when the pirates off the coast of Thailand gave chase in their swift, well-armed trawlers. Some of the ribs were charred: the refugees had learned quickly that it was safer to burn their boats than to face being pushed out to sea again.
‘I saw that one come in,’ Ralph said. He indicated a monster’s ribcage. ‘They’d been attacked six times by pirates and were all half-mad. The first group of pirates had been in a hurry and had cut the women’s earlobes off to get their earrings. In later attacks, when the Thais found nothing to pillage, they simply raped and drowned a few more. The boat would have been pushed off, but they were so crazy they scared the tripes out of the villagers, who thought they were jin and went for their lives. I couldn’t accept any of them – brains scrambled. They had sunstroke, too.’
‘What’ll happen to them?’
Ralph shrugged. ‘The Swiss might take them eventually – Switzerland accepts only physically handicapped refugees, which might be stretched to include mentally handicapped.’ Since they had arrived the aura of hidden rage that had enveloped him had dissipated. He was now openly irritated, and more human. He had cocked an eyebrow, watching a man in a sarong who, directly in front of them, was squatted down on the beach. The man stood up holding his sarong gingerly and went to the water’s edge. A stubby snake lay curled in the sand behind him. The man splashed water on his bottom with a cupped hand, and strolled away.
‘That’s an efficient discouragement for walking along the beach at night in the moonlight, past their village,’ Ralph said. He turned to Judith,’… if that’s what you were thinking of doing.’
‘Did Kanan tell you he’s coming up?’
Ralph put on an unnaturally noncommittal expression. ‘He indicated … something.’
Judith felt again an irrational surge of liking for him. It increased later that night.
‘We’ll have a decent meal before we go shopping,’ Ralph said. ‘It will be our last good feed for a while.’
When they handed in their room keys at the desk they asked again about Lady Hobday. Her driver had returned to the hotel (he was staying in the servants’ quarters), bringing word that she wanted her room kept for several days, but that she might not be sleeping in it that night. ‘She must be staying in Kuantan,’ Ralph said loudly. Earlier a group of Special Branch men had been drinking in the Turtle Bar, just along from the reception desk. The walls had ears in Trengganu, Ralph had muttered.
When he and Judith moved away from the desk he said, ‘Jesus, I’d feel happier if she had the syce with her on the beach tonight. She sounded more hysterical than usual when I spoke to her on the phone this morning. Silly bitch. Oh, sorry.’
The town’s apartheid came into focus at dinner. It was necessary to search for a Chinese restaurant of any type and none could be described as superior or attractive; they were, rather, apologetic. Foods forbidden by The Book were not allowed to sully the town’s market, Ralph explained, and the ingredients for Chinese cooking were sold in a street of narrow shops in the Chinese ghetto. In KL whole barbecued pigs hung on hooks just a few metres from the noisome goat and cow carcasses in the Malay butcher stalls and you could buy a snake or a tortoise to stew, right next to a Muslim stall of fish-with-scales. They found a place lit with neon lights and with a dirty tiled floor and ate their way through an indifferent assortment of unclean meats – crabs, pork and cockles. ‘Too many chillies in the halal joints. My gut, you know,’ Ralph explained,
Then they went shopping. Like most men, Ralph was an incompetent shopper, Judith noticed immediately. He went into a daze as he stood, too large for the alleys designed for women and small women at that, gazing at the supermarket shelves. They had to take all the food they would eat in three days on Bidong, he said.
‘Tell me what the cooking facilities are and I’ll know what to buy,’ Judith said, but Ralph continued shuffling from one foot to another, picking up then replacing tins of camp pie and of lychees. The display was a hodgepodge of imports.
‘You’ve done this twenty times. What do you normally take?’ she asked at last. The supermarket was hot and had a pervasive smell of dirt and mildew. A Malay was thinning out the grime on the floor with a charcoal-coloured rag and a bucket of black water.
‘Normally, I just buy luxuries,’ he said. ‘Fresh fruit, toiletries, Coke, cigarettes. I live on rice and noodles, like the rest of them, out there. I just take …’ he dropped his head and she saw the look of someone discovered in a shameful but tenderly held vice, ‘black-market stuff.’ There was that pause during which people assess what damage they had done to themselves by a confession. ‘I was hoping you might take some stuff for me. Women’s stuff’ He had steered Judith to within a few metres of the cosmetic section, apparently unconsciously, but now he turned deliberately towards the glass cases of face creams, lipsticks, powder compacts and nail polishes. The brands were Shiseido, Revlon and Max Factor. A Chinese shopgirl was waiting, alert and with an inner glow from the intuition that she was about to make a sale.
Judith murmured, ‘You said the police may search us when we arrive.’
He replied, speaking into his chest. ‘Yes, but there’s a system. I’ve secured one of the cops.’
‘If anything goes wrong, you’ve got diplomatic privilege. I haven’t. I can be arrested.’
His lips barely moved. ‘You won’t have to carry it. Just buy the stuff It looks suspicious if I buy that junk.’ He pulled at his earlobe and stared straight at her forehead. Judith could feel the shopgirl’s curiosity about this domestic disagreement boring into her back.
‘What, then?’ she muttered.
‘Everything. One of everything. Get that Japanese stuff – it’s the right colour.’ Aloud he said, ‘Get whatever you like, then, Sweetie-pie,’ with a good imitation of a husband abandoning the effort to reason with his wife. He spent two hundred Malaysian dollars on the fripperies she chose.
When they emerged into the hot dirty street Judith felt as if she were breathing again, suddenly, and that oxygen had rushed to her brain, making her light-headed. ‘I hope she’s worth it, whoever she is.’
‘She is. Thanks.’ He glanced around at the Malay boys who were lounging on the steps of the supermarket, laughing and chatting, but never for a moment – you saw, if you had the nerve to pause and observe them – missing one movement that you made. Their bodies were always relaxed but alert, and you could feel them watching you with the backs of their heads. ‘You must assume up here that any unusual behaviour gets reported to Special Branch,’ Ralph said.
Maybe this was true; she had no way of knowing.
He dropped his head again and Judith suddenly understood, with a spasm of pain for him, that his fears were a fantasy, that the cloak-and-dagger nonsense over the cosmetics for his girlfriend was a deliberate self-deception, an attempt by him to feel at risk for her. He was proving, in this make-believe, how much he loved her, trying punily to live up to her courage. Judith marvelled at him, then abruptly her sympathy changed to envy. Men like him had love affairs all the time, whereas she, only once, with Ben, had experienced that incandescent excitement. And had been forced to disown it ever since. She sighed, then remembered: in two days Kanan would be here.
‘Come on, comrade. Let’s have a drink,’ she said.
There was only one table left in the Turtle Bar when they arrived back at the motel. The crowd was pulled in there by a Tamil singer who accompanied himself on an organ. His voice was as rich as a cello
. He sang American love songs to a room full of men: Judith and the barmaids were the only females present. The Special Branch group, who had been drinking all evening, were now very jolly.
‘Out to Bidong in the morning?’ a couple of them called to Ralph and pulled faces.
‘There’s a new police chief,’ a big Sikh in a white turban said, and wagged his finger at Ralph.
‘What does that mean?’ Judith asked.
Ralph crouched over his beer. ‘Probably …’ he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together rapidly. He was distracted by his own thoughts, hunched up and debating with himself. He said abruptly, ‘You know, I’m going to leave Sancha. As soon as I get Lan to Australia. I’m going to resign. We won’t have a red cent, but …’
She listened to an outpouring that was like a breached dam, interrupting only to ask, ‘Have you told Kanan?’, to which he nodded. ‘He disapproves.’ ‘And Sancha?’ Ralph shook his head. ‘She’s guessed.’
In her room later she thought of the similarity of his reckless course and Hobday’s: anger, then love of an intensity great enough to drive both of them to social crimes. Hobday had been enraged by the war, as he’d told her; Ralph, by its aftermath. His hard and penetrating grey eyes had looked straight into hers as he’d said, ‘I can’t bear it any more. I can’t bear the human suffering. I usen’t to be a softie. I’ve punched in heads myself, oh, well, years ago. But now, when I see people in pain … I get so angry’ Each had been gripped by that anger you saw in week-old babies – rage at impotence. And each had transformed it into the second tyranny, love. Perhaps that was it: you had to experience the first before you could feel the second: Mars and Venus, Hobday had said. And Siva – destruction and sexuality, all-in-one. She thought of Kanan again, who appeared never to have been angry in his life. They’d talked of Kanan down there in the bar.
‘Kanan thinks I’m sick because I’m collecting bad karma in the camps,’ Ralph had said. ‘He says that the untouchables are untouchable because they mix with death. They’re the butchers and animal-skinners. He says that the work I’m doing means I am breaking caste, and for that you go to hell and are reborn as a leper. Or something.’
They had both felt tormented, sensing in the exotic web of language a thread of truth, the fact that Ralph’s job was brutalizing. ‘The bugger is so modern in some ways. But he lives by the Bhagavad-Gita, you know.’
‘Whatever that means,’Judith had replied and they’d both laughed with relief at breaking the spell, and had gone on to talk of the little restaurant that Ralph and Lan would open – she’d cook, he’d serve.
‘I’m only infatuated with Kanan,’Judith told herself now, lying in bed beneath the arrow that pointed to Mecca. ‘Whatever that means.’
21
The wharf was on the southern bank of the Trengganu River, the town side, a few hundred metres from the market, so it was not surprising that banana leaves, coconut husks and other vegetable refuse from the markets floated nearby. Minou wrinkled her nose at the floating rubbish, indicating, in particular, that her sensory organs were highly sensitive and, in general, that she was still in a difficult mood. The coolies, four of them groaning and shouting contradictory orders at each other while they dislodged the refrigerator from the back of the truck, had dropped it rather heavily on the wharf and this had caused Minou’s first flare-up. Her fastidious nose-screwing now signalled that other people might feel the rough edge of her tongue.
She, Ralph and Judith stood in the shade of a small shed at the shore end of the wharf, which was made of grey wood with splinters like darning needles. Across the slack water of the estuary, on the north bank about a kilometre away, was a large fishing village, its ramshackle thatched huts partly hidden by hundreds of small boats, as disordered and poverty-stricken as the dwellings in front of which they were moored. There was the sea smell, the market smell – predominantly dried fish – the smell of richly polluted mud, the stink of the goats wandering around picking at garbage, and the sharp reek of hot coconut oil coming from a stall just across the road where a Malay boy was frying roti chanai. Ralph, Judith and Minou had breakfasted there, at seven o’clock, when their boat was already half an hour late. Silent men had watched them eat; some wore haji skull-caps. They sat with their gnarled feet pulled up on the benches, dragging smoke past teeth that had brown grooves of accumulated tar. They had responded to smiles with a nod, turning their heads sideways, like ravens. Judith had felt the exposed skin on her arms creeping. Not that any of the men had looked at it, rather the reverse: they had averted their eyes from her bare arms. Minou was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a scarf over her head, like all the other women.
‘For Christ’s sake don’t touch anything with your left hand,’ Ralph had muttered. They had eaten rice out of banana leaves and crisps produced from glass jars opaque with dirt. Whining Arabic music filled the stall, muffling the monosyllabic comments the Malays had made to each other about the foreigners.
‘If that boatman doesn’t turn up in ten minutes … ’ Minou now said. She poked the toe of her navy espadrille at the hessian around the refrigerator. ‘I’m going to hire a different boat.’ She looked at Judith. ‘There might not be room for you.’ She gave one of her crocodile smiles. ‘Tough titty,’ she added and turned to speak sharply in Malay to a peasant woman who was fingering the refrigerator. The woman pulled her hand away and looked at Minou with sullen eyes.
‘You slept badly?’Judith said lightly.
Minou replied ‘Ouf!’ at the inanity of the question. ‘And where are the Yankees?’ she demanded from Ralph, staring at him as if the Americans – immigration officials who regularly shared the Bidong boat with Australians – were his responsibility and he had mislaid them.
Then the boat arrived, a fishing trawler pitched high at stem and stern, and the whole process of shouting, groaning, and screaming from Minou began again when it seemed the coolies would drop the refrigerator in the water, or crash it into the trawler’s cabin.
By the time it was tied down on its side on the afterdeck and all the other gear had been loaded and stowed in the shade of the narrow cabin, the Americans had turned up. They sauntered along from the markets carrying braces of live chickens tied by the feet, which they tossed on the deck, and pineapples still on their stalks, which they put in the shade, and copies of Time and Newsweek and the morning newspapers, which they handed out with that easy American confidence that any gift of theirs will be welcome. Everyone was now smiling. Even the coolies managed grunts of pleasure as Minou passed around banknotes. The three Americans called Judith ‘Ma’am’, assumed she was another immigration officer, announced they had hangovers, and stretched out on the deck with towels over their faces.
‘Goodbye, world,’ one said as the trawler pulled out from the wharf.
At the stern of the boat there was a platform of slats extending a metre past the trawler’s waterline.
‘Come and sit here,’ Minou called to Judith. She giggled. ‘If we have to do pee-pee, we do it here, through the slats. I have got champion aim, la. When the sea is rough … ouf! Ralph,’ she raised her voice from its little-girl whisper, ‘have we got life-jackets?’
‘We won’t need them today,’ he replied.
Minou frowned, still in a high state of nerves. She was dabbing Judith’s nose with sun-block and smiling on-and off brightly. Her quick, cute smiles were more pathetic than irritating. She kept on glancing towards the breakwater at the mouth of the estuary. ‘It was calm early in the morning, but it always is. Do you think … ?’
The sea on the other side of the breakwater was the marvellous celadon green Judith had seen already, but it was now humping in waves more than a metre high, some of them creaming at their crests and bursting against the rock wall.
‘That’s the sandbank,’ Minou said. She stared towards the heaving water, then swiftly looked away again.
‘Bobby’, Ralph jerked his head at one of the prone Americans, ‘was swept overboard there a few weeks
ago.’ His old, angry smile was back. He and Minou looked at each other, sharing some frightful secret knowledge.
‘Are you going to be seasick?’ Judith asked.
Minou’s face had turned yellow and she was shivering. She opened her lips to speak then snatched back the breath into her throat. They were just nosing through the gap in the breakwater. Suddenly the trawler’s bow jerked upwards and spray broke on to the deck. The Americans woke up, saying ‘Shoot!’ Then there was pandemonium as two more waves broke on the bows and the chickens, squawking, began floating along the deck and the pineapples and a case of Coke came tumbling out of the cabin.
‘Get inboard!’ Ralph shouted. Minou and Judith barked their shins as they scrambled for’ard, cringing from the whip of salt water. Through the glass at the back of the cabin they could see the boatman struggling to keep the trawler’s bow to wind as he negotiated the channel through the sandbank. There was a soundless whack! The boat shuddered and they were all knocked sprawling. One brace of fowls rose in the air and fell, helpless with their tied legs, into the dumping water. They floated, a fluffed ball of white feathers, a giant daisy, for less than a second then, as Judith stared after them, disappeared underwater. She turned to Minou, who had grabbed her hands, and the look in her eyes made Judith’s scalp tingle.
‘Can you hear them? Can you? I can see them,’ Minou said.
It all lasted less than two minutes, then they were clear of the bank and the fowls were ten metres away, lolling on the wave crests, small now with their wet feathers, and dying. Minou had rolled herself into a ball, her forehead pressed on to her bent knees.
‘It’s all right now,’ Judith said.
Minou’s whole torso jumped when Judith touched her shoulder. She continued cowering, curled up against the world. Ralph beckoned Judith away and they lurched for’ard to the bows, their ears buffeted by the wind. They had to crouch in the shelter of the gunwale to talk. ‘She always hates that sandbank, but I’ve never seen her so bad before,’ he said. ‘That’s the famous sandbank.’
Turtle Beach Page 21
