Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Judith’s breath hissed in. ‘I see. That’s your last word on the subject, is it?’ and she thought, I’m fed to the neck with this Hindu claptrap. In the back of her mind the outline of an idea had begun to shimmer. Sacrifice?

  It was ten o’clock, local time, when she told the hotel switchboard to put through no more calls.

  Sydney had gone mad with the story – it was being syndicated everywhere – and TV crews were already booked on the first flights out of Australia to Malaysia. The cream on the top, the item that Judith had just telephoned through (having confirmed with the local refugee officials), was that Lady Hobday’s family was not on board the boat.

  ‘Not, repeat not,’ Judith told Bill, who was in the composing room, ‘IN MY PYJAMAS! I hate pyjamas!’ he roared at her, as though she had invented them.

  It was Bill, suffering, ‘but still thinking, dear, still thinking,’ who had also roared, ‘You can’t say in so many words that she suicided! There must be a coroner’s inquiry. You’ll be in contempt of court. Do they have courts up there? Well, you silly bitch, you can be charged with contempt. Now, Lady Hobday, wife of brilliant, senior blah-blah, fell in the drink and drowned, while trying to rescue her children – who were not on board. Anyway, our readers wouldn’t understand that someone could feel strongly enough about their kids to commit suicide for them. They kick ‘em out of home when they don’t get jobs, don’t they? This is Australia, dear. We’ll spill to page three. Tomorrow send us three thousand words on the whole boat people scene – “The Last Casualties of the Vietnam War”, eh? Now, back to page one: Beautiful, young … How do you want to describe Lady Hobday?’

  ‘Beautiful, young will do,’ Judith said.

  At intervals hotel staff members had arrived at her door with message slips that representatives from Time, Newsweek, NBC, The Far Eastern Economic Review were waiting on the line. Bill had cleared it for her to give brief – a maximum of two minutes – radio and TV interviews and was arranging credits, syndication and copyrights at his end. The ABC man in KL had promised to ring back when he had something on Hobday, who was still ‘unavailable for comment’. Two Malay policemen had turned up and had sat smoking and chatting in a corner of the room prepared, it seemed, to wait all night for her to leave the telephone and go with them to the station to sign her statement, as Kanan had already done, they told her. But after an hour they had departed.

  She struggled off the bed and along to Kanan’s room. There was no response to her tapping on his door. ‘Sulk, then,’ she muttered. She stood back from the door, possessed abruptly by a vision of herself kicking it in. The image snapped out. As it did, something else happened. She shouted, ‘I hate you!’ and dashed back and slammed her own room shut.

  She felt pleased with herself now that she had got that sorted out and lay down on the bed to compose, in language of quintessential subtlety and venom, her views of a man whose arrogance was such that he would stand by while a human being destroyed herself, whose ethics were so impoverished that the basic social concept, I am my brother’s keeper, was, to him …

  Several hours later she woke up, still wearing her blue batik dress and cold from the airconditioning, and fumbled her way under the bedspread and blanket.

  Kanan had been awake when Judith knocked on his door and had heard her shout at him from the corridor, as one hears with disinterest the common noises of daily life – traffic passing, or starlings scolding at each other or the transparent, lilac lizards calling ‘chic-chak’ to their mates on another part of the ceiling. He had bathed carefully on returning from the police station and had dressed in the navy silk kurta which Mariam had given him last Deepavali, and he, too, was lying on his hotel bed, thinking. His thoughts moved on and around the changes to his modern history course that he would have to make next semester so that the course would reflect the growing solidarity of ASEAN in the light of the military threat from Vietnam. Mr Hussein, who had come to sit under a coconut tree with him for a while, had mentioned that China seemed to have invaded northern Vietnam that morning, but that reports were still ambiguous.

  ‘China may be our saviour,’ Mr Hussein had remarked.

  ‘Things change,’ Kanan had agreed. And they had smiled at each other for the unspoken – that there were some things which never changed, long term, and that China was one of them.

  ‘The Dragon Emperor used to call it’ (Kanan referred to China’s invasion of Vietnam) ‘ “a dose of frightfulness”. Now Chairman Hua Guofeng says “teaching them a lesson”.’

  And so they had chatted nicely, and Kanan showed Mr Hussein a coloured photograph of baby Indra at which Mr Hussein’s pupils expanded, admiring her buttermilk skin.

  Kanan noted Judith’s remote knocking and shouting, and felt sorry for her.

  Hobday was in his glasshouse at a time when the light made everything green; two more great buds had formed, their tips pointed like the tips of certain cigars before a flame has been held to them. One, this evening, showed a shaving of scarlet where a petal would first unfold. There had been no sunlight on the plants now for several hours and the air in the glass shed was becoming heavy from their carbon dioxide exhalations. It was, of course, still extremely hot. There would be a storm later.

  He heard the double stamp of police boots, then saw them, a metre or so from the door and for a moment he felt the perfect stillness of the air, the equilibrium of things living and things dying, and the silence. Then, as they tapped on the glass – it was not necessary, he could see them, he had turned and was coming towards them – there was flamenco stamping inside his head. One policeman had a white plaited cord running from his belt, over his shoulder; Hobday thought his eyes would burst out of their sockets as he looked at it, as if the whiteness was plucking the eyeballs from his head. They said something, ‘Excellency, it is with profound regret …’ His head was bursting open in showers of red and white. They saw his hand cling to his neck, behind the ear, and heard him say ‘I have a headache. A very bad headache.’

  ‘May we escort you?’ one asked. Hobday nodded.

  In the event they had to carry him, holding him upright between them, each with an arm of his strained tight against their chests, for as Hobday said, several times, ‘It’s very dark. I’m afraid I can’t see.’ And then, when they got him inside the house where the lamps were already lit, he moaned, ‘Oh, the light. The light.’ and screwed up his eyes. A servant had made the spontaneous cry of distress; it flushed the others, seven of them, from the back rooms of the house, so they came running like game pursued. They rushed to open the guest bedroom door and watched, making strange clucks and grunts, as the policemen laid him down in the dark.

  He felt darkness as a palpable presence, like the warm breast of a woman pressed against his temple, then felt her body stretching against him right down his left side. She was big, this woman, as tall as he was. His skin, even those areas of it where he had never before been conscious of the pleasure of touch – his calves, his waist and hips – glowed exquisitely from the warmth of life. As she nestled there, a comfort and a delight to his flank, he fell asleep.

  It was a long time later, he knew, when he awoke and remembered that he had had a pain in his head that had been both visual and auditory, a stamping of Spanish dancers’ feet in the chamber of his skull. There was no pain left now, though his vision was somehow still affected – the guest bedroom looked odd, lopsided.

  Odder still was the fact that old Aunt was sitting beside him on the bed, holding upright an arm, somebody’s arm, and with her fingers as strong as steel springs, was massaging it. He could see her doing it and wondered where she had found this arm – it belonged to a man, it had hairs on it, and a gold signet ring on the hand’s little finger, a ring his father used to wear. Then he realized what had happened to him, that he’d been cut in two, and this manifestation of all that he had so passionately believed, coming as it had in such unexpected form, made him attempt to laugh out loud.

  Aunt dropped the man
’s arm and patted at his face with a handkerchief, then left the room so that he was allowed to contemplate in privacy the experience of loss of half of his body.

  She returned after a while with a Sikh. Hobday had met the fellow at his own cocktail parties and recalled that he was notable for something – cricket? hockey? He was apparently a doctor, too, for he peered with a lighted magnifying glass into the backs of Hobday’s eyes. He did it with as little regard for the living flesh as an art dealer, minutely examining a painting, would think of the atoms that spun inside the paint to make the colour rose, or black. It didn’t matter to Hobday. He didn’t care that the doctor treated him like this, he was merely interested that it should be so.

  After some moments of professional absorption it seemed to occur to the doctor that Hobday was organic, even human, for he smiled down at him. ‘You must rest,’ he said. ‘Please, Excellency, do not attempt to speak. We cannot understand you. It is not such a bad stroke that you have had. In a few weeks …’

  He moved back from the bed and his smile changed to an expression of false cheerfulness. ‘Excellency, it will make you jolly to learn that the King intends to honour you as Tan Sri. My cousin has a Malay friend who works in the Palace.’

  He had already said too much; had, in a good cause, broken a secret, as adults will reveal the nature of a Christmas present a week too early, to calm a child. He ended limply, ‘It will be announced soon in the newspapers.’

  So, I am respectable again, the Malaysians will make me a Lord. No doubt the Australian government will give me something too, in the Queen’s Birthday honours. And when I get home there will be invitations to Government House once more. Hilary and Minou will be pleased. They’re both vulnerable to snobbery. Each in her own way is susceptible to offers of group belonging, group admiration, to that sensation which people so often confuse with the words ‘loved’ and ‘loving’.

  He’d had that frailty, too, although he’d denied it often enough, even to himself. But it had been there always. Delight in belonging to the virile elite, delight in being remarked upon enviously – or even with disapproval – as a man who could demand the body of a girl his daughter’s age. Little Elizabeth. Cold kisses. What power he had felt in owning Minou! The tricks she’d do for him, eager as a circus poodle, while he held the whip.

  Love, he’d called it. The desire and pursuit. The idea of it now presented itself to him as he lay still as a gaudy silken bundle. A package of sorts, wrapped in metres and metres of aged silk. In the middle, he knew, was the mystery that had always evaded him, and all he had to do now was quietly, steadily unwrap it. His fingers moved voluptuously. But the mystery was very small and thickly imprisoned, and with only one arm he soon felt too tired to continue.

  25

  Richard, whose experience in asserting his will upon telephonists was so well developed that it could be called an art, woke Judith at seven – eleven o’clock Canberra time, as he told her. He had wasted two hours of the morning already in trying to find out where she was.

  Yes, David had recovered. It was a very mild case of the mumps and Sebastian had not been infected. And how was she? On the morning radio news programme she had sounded tired, Richard thought. She would be glad to know that there was an excellent front-page display of her story on Lady Hobday’s drowning.

  ‘Did she really chuck herself in the drink to create a diversion, so that the villagers on shore wouldn’t attack the refugees?’ His tone was incredulous.

  ‘I didn’t say that in so many words, did I?’ Judith replied insolently.

  Richard refused to take offence. ‘You implied it pretty strongly,’ he said, and laughed. ‘It coloured the piece no end, too, as you no doubt meant it to.’

  I’m the one who knows why Minou killed herself, Judith thought. And that’s enough for her and me.

  Richard was racing on about how he’d arranged already for a question about the boat people scandal in the House, when it resumed sitting next week. The brouhaha would continue for at least a fortnight, he thought. But to more immediate matters.

  Had she, he inquired – this reasonable and concerned old friend – had she realized that, the Malaysian legal system being based on the British, it would require that she give evidence before a coroner? And that she must therefore be circumspect in any statements she might make on local radio and television concerning the drowning of Lady H? The police hadn’t warned her that the matter was now sub judice? Christ Almighty! He’d look up the relevant section immediately.

  And as she waited, hearing Richard say, ‘Gloria, my sweet, the red file, r-e-d,’ she could visualize his face, his small eyes closed in forebearance, a smile of patience playing on his lips. She thought, I know you. I know the smell of your breath, distinct from any other, when you’ve been drinking beer, and how the rasp of your beard hurts my face if you want sex in the morning and how, lying there, I feel like a piece of raw schnitzel being hammered with a mallet.

  Richard had the lawyer’s trick of being able to maintain a desultory conversation while he was running his eye over a document, and muttered, while he was doing it now, ‘Here we are. How did you get on with Minette, by the way?’

  I loved her, Judith thought. ‘Quite well,’ she replied.

  ‘Was she useful. Before she went for her swim?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She showed me what my life is, how futile. She had the sudden courage of despair – and I’ve got none. I’ll just go on. She knew what a cheat her life was, and theirs too – those exiles who’ve got no hope. What good is a new home, a new country, when you are ripped out of your real setting, déracinée? ‘A comfortable existence.’ She’d said it with such hopelessness.

  ‘She illuminated the situation for me,’ Judith said.

  ‘You came across well, on radio. Sounded caring – that’s the current word. There’s a lot of what passes for uneasy conscience here, I think.’

  Judith thought, For a while. The only people who really care are the ones who bond with the refugees, people like Ralph and Minou. For the rest of us, they’re just a passing disturbance. ‘They’ll get over it.’

  ‘Quite so. Meanwhile, do you think you could debate Australia’s miserly refugee policy with the Minister for Immigration? On TV?’

  ‘I think so. But I’m interested to hear that you now find the policy miserly, Richard. What about jobs for Aussies first?’

  There was a break on their line for a few moments, their words becoming distorted. Both stopped talking. Then Richard said, ‘By the way, I’ve won pre-selection’.

  ‘Richard!’

  He laughed modestly. ‘Come 1983 I’ll be Minister for … oh, I could take Immigration. Or Housing. One of the junior portfolios to start with.’

  ‘No!’ Suddenly she was not in an Asian hotel room with an arrow on its ceiling pointing to Mecca, but back there in the thick of it. Jesus! She could write the policy herself. ‘No! Take Women’s Affairs! And Aborigines! Think how much good you could do for … ’

  The line tangled again, then Richard’s voice abruptly boomed, ‘The boys are very fond of Mrs Jenkins. Our housekeeper. I’ve converted the end bedroom and the study into an apartment for her. She’s a splendid cook. Of course, I’ll be applying for you to contribute to her salary, as your share of the children’s maintenance.’

  ‘Is that so?’Judith said.

  ‘Well, of course, Judith. You don’t imagine that I’m ignorant of the Family Law Act, do you? It will be all perfectly civilized.’

  ‘How dare you get a housekeeper and give her my study!’ She was shouting, but it was into a vacuum. At its perimeter an Australian telephone operator asked, ‘Do you wish to extend, sir?’ Evidently he did not, for after a while a voice broke in saying, ‘Kuala Trengganu? Your Canberra party has disconnected. I have a call from Sydney for you.’

  ‘Put it through,’ Judith ordered. The handpiece gave out fizzes and clicks. She stared hard into its whorls of little holes, thinking, At last. Battle has been declared. The
kids! And the house … He thinks he’s going to get the kids and the house. ‘Come on,’ she said to the telephone.

  She felt that surge of well-being which arrives, from the blue, after a long illness.

  The Coroner’s Court was housed, along with other courts of petty sessions, in a complex of government office buildings on a hill on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. The road there ran through an abandoned rubber estate where the trees had grown lanky and were choked with undergrowth. The inquest was to begin at 10 am and would be brief, Judith had been told. Minou’s body had not been found, in spite of a three-day search and a reward offered to the villagers of the East Coast. Now, five days later, the predations of fish, shrimps, octopus (Turtles? Some, Judith knew, fed not on seagrass but on flesh), made the thought of her recovery unbearable.

  Especially for Hobday, the person most capable of identifying her. He was already saying a few words, apparently, and in another month would be strong enough to be flown home. They’d told him, at last, that Minou was dead and he’d had no relapse.

  Judith sighed, looking out of the window of Sancha’s pale-blue Mercedes as it climbed the road through the pitiless fecundity of the passing landscape. When the trees died the undergrowth and vines luxuriated, while the force that drove both in everlasting competition remained indifferent as to which side triumphed. The life force itself was the only thing that mattered … Judith had been talking to Kanan again; they had avoided speaking of Minou, except once, when he had said, as if it explained everything, ‘She had descendants’. They had run into each other constantly in the past week – at Sancha’s, where Judith was now staying; at the hospital, visiting Ralph; at The Dog, where Judith and Sancha went for a sundowner during ‘crisis hour’ (the time when the servants fed the Hamilton children) and where they were entertained lavishly by a hilarious young businessman called Johnny Kok.