She and Kanan had become reconciled. She supposed that was the word for the feeling of regret and shame glossed over with off-hand familiarities and strained chat that people used when they had been sexually infatuated without the benefit of companionship first, and then had ruptured the sexual bond. He was intelligent, she’d discovered, but he employed that infuriating paradoxical logic of the East which, after a while, brought any conversation with him to embarrassed silence. He could, for instance, make a lucid case for acknowledging classical Hindu thought as the precursor of recent discoveries in radio astronomy: the expanding universe which, in due course, would contract to infinitesimal smallness once more, then re-expand. Brahma, Vishnu, then Siva dancing the cosmos to atoms.
‘It may be a brilliant insight, but you can’t base your life on it. It’s not practical,’ she’d objected, and he’d smiled wistfully. She’d missed the point, he thought, and was doomed to drift along like a rudderless boat, moved by the currents, which she would call ‘the realities’. Perhaps in another life she would have more wisdom.
Wordlessly, they agreed upon one point: they had had a lucky escape from each other.
The Coroner’s Court was a chilled room in a wood-and-fibro barracks-style building. Its wooden verandah was crowded with Indian litigants. They stopped arguing to stare at the unexpected sight of white women intruding here.
A fat Sikh in a maroon turban barred their way. ‘Madam, I know you. Where are we meeting before, please?’
‘You’ve seen me on television,’ she replied. She’d become used to the question in the last few days.
The Sikh laughed, as if he had outwitted her, and wagged a finger. ‘One autograph, please.’ She signed the tatty piece of paper he produced – it looked like his driving licence – and he turned to beam victoriously at another Sikh, obviously his legal opponent.
She was in the witness box ten minutes.
The Coroner, a tired, drawn-looking Indian, asked her only to confirm her statement to the Kuala Trengganu police. When she was through she sat with Sancha on the benches at the back of the court to hear Dr Kanan Subramaniam’s evidence. The tall black man who stepped into the box was a stranger to her – good-looking, even beautiful, with his magnificent eyes and his blue-black mane of perfumed hair, but somehow he had changed. He no longer looked as if he had just stepped down to earth in an envelope of starlight.
‘Let’s piss off,’ Judith muttered to Sancha. Mr Hussein had assured Judith that accidental drowning was the only possible finding, that there was not enough evidence to support a verdict of suicide. She gave Kanan a friendly wave as she left the court with a bow to the Coroner. The bow was a reflex action that surprised and amused her as she did it – it was more than ten years since she had worked as a law court reporter. Sancha did not know that she was meant to bow towards the Bench. The Coroner gave her a dirty look as she passed him, languid but upright.
There had been five airconditioners going full-blast in the courtroom; outside it was repulsively hot and humid.
Litigious Indians were still crowding the duck-boards, giving off odours of curry, tuberose and BO.
‘I’ll be glad to get on that plane this afternoon,’ Judith said with feeling.
Sancha sighed. ‘Half your luck.’
It would be another fortnight before the Hamilton family returned to Australia where, after convalescence, Ralph would join ‘one of Daddy’s companies’. Sancha was not certain which one, or in what capacity. Ralph was jolly lucky that Daddy had been so understanding – jobs didn’t grow on trees, these days. There would be no charges of impropriety against Ralph. His resignation from the Department of Immigration had been accepted, on the spot, as soon as he signed the papers delivered to him in hospital. Already the Hamilton front doorstep was littered with the sandals of dour Malays who squatted by the hour in the Hamilton living room, stitching rattan matting around the rolled-up, gorgeous rugs and the rosewood tables and cabinets. They would disappear from work at noon and sunset when, very faintly, you could hear the muezzins calling from the small mosques you rarely saw in KL but knew about because of this far-away, high-pitched singing. ‘Have you noticed the times when Muslims pray?’ Kanan had asked Judith and when she’d shaken her head had said, ‘The prayer hours mark the passages of the sun.’ ‘So it’s sunworship?’ she’d asked and he had shrugged: ‘It seems like that.’
Sancha and Judith strolled back to the powder-blue Mercedes. Sancha turned on its airconditioning and they sat for several minutes looking out over the lush green city, waiting for the cold blast to dry their perspiration. Then they fastened their seat-belts and as their heads bent together, hands searching for the locking devices, Sancha murmured, ‘How can I ever have self-respect again?’ and they both knew that her real question was, ‘How can I ever respect Ralph again?’
For women of their age and upbringing, a husband had to be a superior, a provider and protector, or he was nothing at all. They were too conditioned in the ways of male dominance to tolerate equality. Off his pedestal of masculinity, he became not an equal but an object of scorn. Like Kanan, when he would not help save Minou. Like Richard, when he was a pompous nobody and she was the centre of attention. It was irrational, but no less real for that.
‘Ralph will do well in business – he’s very clever,’ Judith said. It was the sort of excuse she had made to herself for Richard: ‘Richard is an inspired cook. We’d be living on chops and tinned pineapple if it weren’t for him,’ and ‘I can’t control the children – they only listen to Richard.’ She had encouraged him to bully her, but then had fought back, tooth and nail. That was a paradox. It was too hot to think. And dwelling on it disturbed the alert calm, the well-being, that had overtaken her after Richard’s telephone call to Trengganu, when the war had really begun. Mrs Jenkins, indeed! Judith had created an uproar of urgency in the Tuggeranong Primary School by telephoning David there. Mrs Jenkins pretended not to be angry, when she was, David said. And she wouldn’t let him and Sebastian watch Doctor Who. ‘Is she nicer than me?’ Judith had asked and he’d replied, ‘Aw, Mum. She’s really old and ugly – forty years old.’ Her blood had thumped with gratitude to him.
‘Yes, he is clever,’ Sancha was saying. ‘And he can pick up languages just like that. Johnny says Ralph’s Cantonese is better than his.’
There was an hour’s delay at Singapore airport. Chinese shopgirls, infinitely patient, helped Judith choose computerized models of R2-D2, C-3PO, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Princess Leia Organa – the whole team. In a Dior shop she saw a pair of evening sandals, watermelon pink, with a ribbon of gold for heels. The price was so outrageous it was almost funny. She bought them.
‘One needs an occasional self-indulgence,’ the English matron alongside Judith at the counter confided.
Then, in the transit lounge, Judith saw Minou. She was standing in profile with a group of Chinese men and women, wearing her battlejacket and the black forage cap with green Hermes wings.
Someone opened a door and Judith saw the hot breeze that blew in sweep away the glittering shops and the people. They vanished, and she was standing on the threshold of the world, a vast plain of grassland. In the far distance a figure was walking – strolling – towards her; a figure as flat as a piece of plywood.
Then the door was shut. Minou turned round and faced Judith. She was a full-blood Chinese, probably local. The wings on the hat were blue, not green.
Judith huffed out a breath and thought, That could have been one of your vile practical jokes. To pretend to drown, then turn up in Singapore.
And what if it really had been Minou, alive?
With an effort of mind as prodigious as the effort of body she had made when she had flung the Indian off her in the car, she flung the idea from her. It went spinning away, out into some black space from which it would never return.
On the plane a hostess came undulating down the aisle towards her. The pilot would be happy if Ms Wilkes would join him in the cockpit soon
after take-off. ‘The view is better from up there, of course,’ the hostess said. Then, ‘I saw you on television during my break in Perth. Isn’t it awful, really, about those boat people? I mean, it makes you think …’
‘Oh, yes,’ Judith said. ‘The tragedy is that it’s such a vast problem. There has to be a meeting between heads of state – ours, Vietnam’s, China’s.’ The hostess assumed a mesmerized look of incomprehension.
Judith decided to save her fire-power for the Jumbo captain. She had noticed, as she had boarded, before moving down to the economy section, that there seemed to be quite a few empty seats in first class. But she would allow the pilot his half an hour with a celebrity before she dropped her hint.
Turtle Beach Page 27
