‘What … ?’
‘A few months ago a big boat arrived in rough weather and foundered on that bank. Two hundred people were drowned. The bodies floated ashore into the estuary and along the beaches for days and they were all chewed by fish and shrimps. The people started saying, “The fish has fed on human flesh”, and nobody would buy fish. The bottom fell out of the fish market, which is the economic benchmark here, and the fishermen and their families were starving. The boat people were blamed. They’d been tolerated up till then, but it was war after that. The villagers started pushing them out to sea, and stoning them when they resisted. Mad rumours went round.’ He turned to look aft, the wind licking his silky hair into his eyes: Minou had not followed them. ‘They believe in ghosts. So does she. She told me once that she can hear the people crying for help every time she crosses the sandbank.’ He gave one of his nasty, cheek-crack smiles. ‘Or she says she believes in ghosts.’
The water had changed from the green of the coastal shallows to the sapphire of deep sea. The sky was kilometres high with a diaphanous white mist across it, but still showing blue. They might have been off on a picnic.
And when Judith and Ralph went aft, they found Minou and the Americans playing five-card stud; Minou had won six cans of Coke, and was crowing. The Americans kept up an argot patter – ‘A deuce’, ‘A big lady’, ‘Oh, a puppy foot! She’s leading in puppy feet’. But after an hour or so the monotony of the trip, the blinding dance of the little suns on the surface of the sea and the hot salt air made them droop into silence.
It was almost noon when Pulau Bidong came into view. On the empty, flashing sea its appearance seemed an event which revealed for an instant the mysterious force of creation; it looked as if some giant goddess had turned lazily on her back and exposed one sumptuous breast above the waters. The island had been, of course, a submarine volcano. At the breast’s peak there was a tiny indent now softened and swollen with jungle, once the ditch of a crater.
‘You’ll smell it soon,’ Ralph said.
They were all staring towards the island, as people stare towards their houses after a trip away, cut off from news, suddenly anxious about fires and burglaries and the garden.
‘I hope the new police boss is O.K.,’ Ralph said.
‘He might not let me land.’ Judith muttered, caught up in the general atmosphere of apprehension.
‘He can get knotted.’ Ralph was fussing with the gear. ‘You’re my new assistant, and that’s that. I’ve taken enough shit from the cops out here.’
A crescent of white beach came into view, littered with the skeletons of boats. Behind it there was a building project, the sort of thing that might have been made by a subnormal child it was so obsessive and disordered, a town of toy-sized houses for thirty thousand people, made out of bits of stick and the blue-and-white ersatz hessian of plastic rice-bags. The shanty town occupied the area of flat ground beyond the sand; at its back the mountain rose up sheer. There was a rocky promontory on the southern edge of the beach and on it perched some galvanized iron sheds. The Buddhist temple and the churches, Ralph said.
They were about five hundred metres offshore when the smell of Bidong heaved up at them in a rush, as if the trapdoor to a dungeon had been wrenched open. It was a filthy acrid odour, containing only two elements – woodsmoke and excrement. As the boat drew nearer Judith could see that the beach was fouled.
‘The children do that,’ Minou said. ‘They refuse to use the latrines.’
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of children and a few adults had gathered on a jetty still being built and too short for the trawler, in the shallow water, to reach it.
The water, from a distance, was the colour of lapis and turquoises but changed to a pellucid light green when you looked straight down into it, in the shallows. Through it Judith could see a submarine architecture of destruction – dead coral and sunken boats – on the seabed below.
A sampan was being poled out to the trawler, which had dropped anchor. Minou waved to the throng on the jetty and pointed to the refrigerator. A cheer went up. Ralph was scanning the crowd.
‘Can’t see Lan,’ he said. ‘Listen, Minou, you’re going to be an hour getting that fridge ashore and installed. Judith and I will go on ahead.’ His impatience had given an irritable tone to his voice; he was now scanning the beach.
From the sampan they had to clamber on to petrol drums, then on to the jetty. Hundreds of brown hands were yearning to help them up; Judith suddenly knew what it was to be a beloved member of a royal family. They cheered when she scrambled from one petrol drum to a closer one and cheered more loudly when, panting, she let them lever her up the rail. Then, there she was, standing up – hooray! – an idol, a living fetish object towering above them.
Ralph got up next and it all happened again. ‘O.K., O.K., kids. Let’s get on with it.’ They parted in front of him.
‘There’ve been a few changes,’ Ralph said, as Judith caught up with him. About two hundred children had followed them; the others had waited to help the Americans and to watch Minou. He nodded towards the beach. ‘Cleaned up the black market. The stalls used to be there.’
The police station was a few hundred metres from the beach, to the north, in a coconut grove. The children halted at the roped-off area which marked the grounds of the station. Police with shotguns leaned against the trunks of coconut palms. They were all young, all Malay. They looked unimpressed by the arrival of visitors. One held out the registration book without greeting. As agreed, Judith let Ralph sign first, then scribbled in her name under his. In the column marked ‘purpose of visit’ he had written ‘official’. She put ditto signs, and handed the book back with a smile. The policeman did not respond.
‘Mr Hamilton,’ he said, ‘our new sergeant would like to speak with you.’
A shadow fled across Ralph’s face. ‘Fine,’ he said.
Judith said, ‘It’s very hot, isn’t it?’
The policeman looked at her with unconcealed hostility. ‘This is the tropics. It is always hot.’
A smiling middle-aged man with his shirt unbuttoned at the neck emerged from the wooden station. He had the unnatural casualness and bonhomie of a man superior to his milieu, holding all the cards. ‘Mr Hamilton!’ His arms were outstretched in greeting and his fine teeth bit on an ivory cigarette holder. He turned to Judith, ‘And Mrs Wilkes? A new officer? Delighted, delighted … please.’ He was shepherding them forward into the police station. Mind the step. A calm trip? Frightfully hot. Lady Hobday has the kerosene refrigerator? Excellent. Most welcome.
At the rough wooden table, a shrug – ‘our local carpenters’ – he sat and looked at them, beaming, as if by some trick he had produced them himself out of the air, and wished to contemplate his handiwork in silence. He smiled more at Ralph than at Judith. ‘Of course, you’d like some tea,’ he said.
Judith thought, For Christ’s sake sit still, Ralph.
‘Love some,’ Ralph said. His voice was flat.
The sergeant smiled and nodded. He had really hoped they would want tea; from a corner a young policeman rose and went out through a back door, obedient to his boss’s glance. Judith thought, I mustn’t sound like a journalist, but if I don’t start questioning him in a minute, he’ll start questioning me, and I’ll slip up. Maybe he knows already. I had to give in my passport at the hotel. If Special Branch has checked the guest book there they could have sent a radio message. Do they have radio contact with the mainland? She’d forgotten to ask Ralph. I have illegally entered a prison camp and made a false written statement. Bellfield was different. This is a proper maximum-security gaol.
The sergeant, however, had other things on his mind. For this relaxing noontide, at least, he was not a law enforcement officer at all but more the manager of a charming rural estate. He chatted about a new well that had been sunk, the water pump, and the three babies recently delivered by Saigon’s foremost brain surgeon – a neighbourhood character, they were given to understand. Th
en, to Judith, ‘We have more medical specialists on this island than there are in the whole of the State of Trengganu.’ Smiling and sipping his glass of tea, boasting mildly.
Ralph said, ‘I see you’ve cleaned up the black market.’
The sergeant put down his glass with precision. For a moment his expression became sombre, then, as if recalling his duty to guests, he smiled again. ‘You see, Mr Hamilton, there have been some embarrassments.’
Ralph’s face clenched. ‘What sort?’
He waved the ivory holder in the air, pre-empting the development of alarm. ‘Nothing for you to worry about, Mr Hamilton. My problem … discipline, la.’
It was another fifteen minutes before they could escape. Out in the coconut grove again Ralph said, ‘I’ve got to find Lan.’ His eyes were violent, Judith thought.
The presence of the hundreds of children, who had carried the gear from the jetty and had waited by the roped-off yard of the police station, was suddenly burdensome. Ralph ordered them away with yaps of Vietnamese. He and Judith – alone except for a small band of five-year-olds who stared at Judith as if she were a pink elephant – plunged into the lanes of the shanty town. The heat and the stench were dizzying. They moved between houses made out of bits of bamboo and sacking where people lay listlessly, eyes open, looking at nothing. Judith had a sensation of déjà vu that jolted physically, like the sting from a faulty electric plug. The pets shop again, but here the tiny cages held humans. And from that she knew something else. Eventually, some of these people would be eaten, too – they would be thrown into the sea.
Lan was not in her house. Her neighbour stared at the ground when Ralph questioned her. He seemed to Judith to be asking ‘What’s happened?’ What’s happened?’ The woman shook her head, then pointed in the direction of the promontory.
‘The temple,’ Ralph said, and set out almost at a run.
An old man stood in the doorway of the corrugated-iron shed, his arms folded over his white singlet. Past his shoulder they could see inside to the red-and-gold altar table, shrine, image, paper flowers and silk hangings suspended from nails in the metal walls. Something in his manner, his total calm and sweetness, prevented any argument. Ralph could not enter the temple. Yes, Lan was there but she would not come out. She did not wish to speak to him.
Flaps of skin drooped over the outer corners of the monk’s eyes, closing off the whites and giving him the look of an old, patient monkey.
Ralph stood with bent head, silenced. Then he looked up to snap some question at the monk, who nodded.
‘Police?’ Ralph said in English.
The monk nodded again.
Ralph was off, running now, back along the promontory to the steep track that led down to the beach. He was already halfway along the beach, towards the police station, while Judith was still slipping down the track, hanging on to the coconut trunk that had been laid there to give people a hand-hold. Kids and adults had begun chasing after Ralph, distracted from the marvel of the refrigerator which just now was being carried ashore across the coral and was landed, wah! with a cheer, a metre up the beach. Suddenly the whole beach was a crowd of running, yelling people making for the police station.
Judith looked around for Minou or one of the Americans but they were not in sight. The crowd in the coconut grove was immense now. She hurried along the beach and stood at the back of the gathering, trying to peer over shoulders and heads. The throng was thirty-deep, spilling from the grove to the unshaded beach. They were whispering to each other, weaving their heads like seals, trying to see, too. Then there was a whistle blast, and another. Judith saw a policeman’s hand wave them back and she almost fell as the crowd, with a centrifugal spasm, jerked away from its nucleus.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked a boy, who shook his head to indicate he could not speak her language. She asked another and another. People were beginning to move off. The police were blasting their whistles repeatedly and she now could see their faces, torn open with shouting at the crowd. ‘What’s happened?’
A teenage boy – she realized abruptly that they were nearly all men on this island; the ratio of men to women was about seven to one – said ‘Hit. Hit policeman.’
A Vietnamese – or Chinese – man, was addressing the crowd now, jabbing his hands at the sky. He must have been one of the camp leaders for he’d been pulled out of the crowd by the police. Unwillingly the crowd obeyed him, turned and slip-slopped through the dirty sand, trailing their hands against the coconut trunks, back to the boredom of their cages.
The police had drawn together in a group in front of the station. All of them were smoking and several of them, as they spoke, cast glances towards the room from which, half an hour ago, Judith and Ralph had emerged.
‘May I go in?’ Judith asked.
One of them nodded and averted his head.
Minou and Bobby, the American, were inside already. So were two refugee doctors. Ralph had been laid on the table from which they had drunk tea. One doctor was taking his pulse; the other, with movements as light as a humming bird’s, was fluttering his fingers over Ralph’s exposed abdomen. Below the navel there was a red bruise the shape of an axe-head – no, it was the butt of a shotgun, Judith realized – while the surrounding skin was putty-coloured. Ralph’s eyes were closed and a light sweat covered him. The only noise in the room was his panting and the murmurs of the doctors to each other. As Judith moved to stand beside Minou a cold hand felt for hers. The air was so tight it seemed to be squeezing their temples.
The examining doctor looked up.
‘She might know,’ Minou said.
Everyone – the police sergeant was there, too – turned to Judith.
‘Did this man have abdominal pain?’ the doctor asked.
‘He’s got colitis.’
The doctors exchanged nods that were gravely satisfied. The senior man announced, ‘Ulcerative colitis. His bowel has been ruptured by the blow he received. He now has peritonitis. He must receive treatment immediately.’
Shoulders heaved. They were all, suddenly, taking deep breaths, as though this were good news. And of course, it was. Their fears had been released, the paralysis had changed into a command for action. Treatment immediately: it was three hours by open boat to the mainland, but mentally they had leapt over that.
Minou announced, ‘We’ll get the stretcher’, and took Bobby off with her.
Ralph, abruptly, had become a problem rather than a person, and they moved away from him without bothering to glance back. A new feeling asserted itself in the room: an air of accusation emanated from the police sergeant and from the young Malay officer seated on a chair in the corner. Deepest reproach welled up in his brown eyes and from his swollen, broken lips. He winced as the junior doctor gingerly raised that part of his upper lip which was not purple, exposing the broken front tooth and bloodied gums. The police sergeant stood by, avuncular and protective, gazing balefully at Judith. She turned away.
The senior doctor was still with Ralph, turning his limp right hand as if it were an interesting, piece of driftwood he had found. ‘He also has a broken hand,’ he said.
She looked at him pleadingly and he followed her out on to the verandah.
‘He could die in the next couple of hours. Or he can make a complete recovery, with proper draining and antibiotics. A woman here, last week … ’ The authority left his voice. ‘You see, we have no drugs. Not even alcohol to use as an anaesthetic and disinfectant. I could have operated on her with a fishing knife, but not without some alcohol.’ That note of apology again. ‘Madam, if we could only have Oxo cubes. For the babies – the one to four-year-olds. They are not getting enough protein, their mothers are not strong enough to breast-feed them long. Just some Oxo cubes. It would stop their diarrhoea, which is the beginning of their malnutrition. The adults and older children are all right. But the one to four-year-olds.’
‘Yes. Oh, I’ll try. I’ll get you some.’
‘One case of Oxo cubes p
er week. Please.’
She pulled out her notebook and wrote it down. A policeman from the knot muttering and smoking together began to stroll towards them. The doctor continued blandly, ‘Mr Hamilton will become delirious. Give him small sips of water.’ The policeman paused and strolled away again. Judith wrote down at the doctor’s dictation the name and address of somebody living in Melbourne and promised to contact him or her, with news that their uncle was on Bidong and hoped to be accepted for the USA, but that he could not contact them – letters were difficult.
‘Keep Mr Hamilton as cool as you can. Bathe him,’ the doctor continued. ‘There is a man here with a serious eye complaint. He will lose his vision. Do you think he could …?’
It was Minou who wheedled permission from the police sergeant to take on the boat with them the man, whose eyes were too disgusting to look at, and a girl whose foot was black and swollen up like a hoof.
‘Hospital ship, la,’ she said to the sergeant. And ‘Don’t be made of stone, la’. Two policemen accompanied them, as guards; the man whom Ralph had punched and a second man. They boarded the trawler first and withdrew immediately to the skipper’s cabin, leaving Judith and Minou to oversee the placing of Ralph in the shade of the other sternfacing cabin. And it was Minou who thought of the oil company’s helicopter, used to transport staff to and from the drilling rig, and persuaded the police sergeant to send a radio message to the mainland about it.
It was almost dusk as the boat lurched through the shallows outside the breakwater. The yellow lights from the town and the fishing village opposite it disappeared behind the stones, then sprang back again, brighter and more friendly. Then suddenly they were safe. The estuary was deeply peaceful, its slack water turning from brown to glittering black in the lilac-coloured light.
When, several hundred metres from the wharf, they saw the crowd gathered along the waterfront and above their heads the white rotor, Judith in effect went to sleep. She walked and talked for the next couple of hours but it was not until nine o’clock that night, dining alone with Hobday in the Residence, that she woke up again. Even at the University Hospital, where Sancha, martyred but game, had been waiting and had demanded details from Judith, she had been asleep while she talked.
Turtle Beach Page 22
