by Peter Carey
Early in the evening Chubb invited me to stroll with him through the soupy air to Jalan Campbell. Never once did I put my notebook away, and as we walked I questioned him about the various names and phrases that had poured from him. Malaysia, once so alien to me, was coming to feel more and more familiar.
We arrived soon enough at the bicycle shop and there, at the very front of the store, behind the glass display case with its violently tangled contents, was Mrs Lim, a large box of chocolates on her lap. At her side was a Chinese boy I had never seen before. Chubb spoke to them in his laboured Malay, and as he did so Mrs Lim unwrapped a chocolate. It was only then, it seems, that Chubb noticed what she was eating, and the sight of this extravagance somehow enraged him.
As he rushed around the display case Mrs Lim’s astonishment was obvious, and it certainly did not diminish when Chubb snatched the box, turned it upside down, and violently shook its contents onto her lap and across the concrete floor.
Chubb spoke a single word. She curled her lip defiantly. The boy began to gather up the chocolates.
Chubb spoke again, much more sharply, and the woman stilled the boy. Perhaps it was the suit that gave Chubb this new authority, or perhaps it had always been like this.
Chubb now barked a question and she glanced towards the back of the store.
Come, he ordered me, and we pressed our way through a tangle of old bicycles into an open space where there was a tap and basin and a rather cruel-looking iron bed, beneath which I spotted an English edition of The Duino Elegies.
Not here, he said, and led me around the corner and up an echoing wooden staircase and there, on the top floor, we stepped into a room the nature of which one could never have predicted from the floor below. It was clean, uncluttered, with a high ceiling and oiled floorboards at least twelve inches wide. The walls were lined with books, not poems or novels or biographies but volumes the size of telephone directories whose spines were marked with Arabic script.
By the window sat John Slater, posing as Somerset Maugham in an artfully woven rattan chair, and at his feet was the girl we had both seen through the window on Monday night. Though I knew she was twenty, in Slater’s company she looked shockingly young, almost a child.
Hello, old chap. Slater and his companion had been looking at a book but now he stood up, rather too quickly, and brought me the volume, as if it were proof of his innocent occupation.
Hello, Sarah. The pages held pressed flowers and leaves, all of them densely annotated. But although I would later regret not having taken the opportunity to study their very particular beauty, all I could think of in that moment was that Slater had thoroughly deceived us. I was not only angry but rather sick at heart to see him paying court to a child, and he all old and yellowish, with wrinkling folds of flesh above his collar.
She says her father made this, he said.
I saw not the book but his slack, sensual mouth and shifty eyes. I was so very sorry he had soiled our new-born friendship, rescuing and betraying me within three days.
There are fifty more just like it, he said.
You bastard, I said. I should slap your face.
He took me by the arm, as he would a pretty woman at a cocktail party, and led me quietly to one side. I’m truly sorry Micks, he whispered, but in a moment you will understand.
It’s pretty bloody clear already.
Shut-up. You have no inkling of what this is. Micks, this entire room is a bloody shrine to Bob McCorkle. He rolled his eyes, but this was more likely a habit of his reflexive mockery and I am sure he did not mean to undercut the notion, for there was something rather excited in his tone. Look, he whispered.
I found myself confronting a peculiar little altar where a thin line of fragrant smoke was rising from a pale-pink joss stick. Beside it were three small ceramic objects—idols, I suppose one would call them—and, in a gaudy frame, a newspaper photograph of a severe and handsome white man whose long black hair was swept back from a high forehead.
This is him?
I picked up the frame and for the first time looked into Bob McCorkle’s eyes, staring at me from under a veil of fifty-five screen dots. I would prefer it, said its creator, if you did not whisper.
I was explaining to Sarah, Slater said, that this is Tina’s father.
He isn’t, said Chubb.
‘Bapa,’ said Slater, means ‘father,’ as we both know.
Chubb looked to the girl and she, now seated in the large rattan chair, smirked at him. Even thus contorted her features were extraordinarily beautiful, with limpid brown eyes and clear olive skin. It was really impossible to say what race she might be.
Chubb snatched the framed photograph from me, and the girl stiffened.
This is not your father, said Chubb, as you damn well know.
Are you her father, old man?
Chubb hesitated, slipping his right hand in his jacket pocket. If I was, he said, I would not want you courting her like some debauched old toad in a Beardsley print.
Now, steady on.
No, you steady on-lah. At the airlines, is it! But you cannot have her even if she wants you to. You own us all, is that it? Suit, chocolates, God knows what else you paid for. Ada gula, ada semut. Where there is sugar, there are ants. One more old white man come to Asia buying sex.
Sarah, Slater appealed to me.
But as seduction had really been his life and art, I did not see what I could honestly offer in his defence.
Chubb turned back to the girl. You trust him, is it?
The girl stared back implacably.
Chubb threw up his hands. I’m tired, he said, sick and tired of my boh-doh bloody life!
Again she smirked. She was a bad girl, that was clear, but who could know if she understood what he was getting at.
You realise how I work, yes or no? You see me with the stupid bloody bicycle. I am a scholar, isn’t it? First-class honours. First-class. Then why am I here? For who? For what? You think I’m Chua Chen Bok? Buy you a bloody mansion with my bicycles?
Now listen, old man.
Chubb wheeled around. You defend her, Slater?
Yes, exactly.
Then buy her, he said abruptly. Good price.
Whatever was happening, it was terrible to see: a man crumbling to dust before my eyes.
Buy them all, he shrieked. One price-lah. Very cheap. The garbage of my life—women, bicycles, vulcanizer, everything.
He looked around wildly, as if searching for something or someone to smash and hurt. He was not yet old—just on fifty I would reckon—and now he spun around and snatched a single volume from the shelf behind him.
I knew what it was. When I saw the cover, grey and wrinkled like the bark of a tree, a thrill ran through my body. Then I heard a howl of outrage from the girl, saw a rictus of triumph on Chubb’s face.
There now entered a new ingredient into this chaos—the scarred woman appeared at the top of the stairs, crouched low, a rusty machete in her hand.
Jesus, I said.
As Chubb turned to confront her, the girl rushed to take possession of the book—but the papery sweep of her slippers betrayed her and he flung her brutally aside. There was a loud clatter as a silver kris fell to the floor.
I say, said Slater.
The girl darted for her weapon, but Chubb kicked it from her hand. The girl cried out and the kris skittered like a puck across the floor and clattered down the stairs. At the same time the queerly twisted little warrior advanced into the room, swishing the rusty blade in front of her.
I was a complete and utter coward, but John Slater, to his great credit, calmly stepped into her path.
Give it to me, nanny, won’t you? There’s a darling.
The blade was swishing fast as a propeller yet he offered a hand to her.
The woman paused, her eyes dangerously bright. I swear I saw her calculating whether it might be worth it just to kill us all.
There we are, nanny, Slater cooed.
She lowered he
r weapon but did not relinquish it or abandon her sense of readiness. Slater never took his eye off her but he spoke to Chubb, who was holding the book against his chest like a missal.
Give her back the book, Christopher.
This is not your business, Slater.
Put it back. Do as I say.
They don’t understand a word of it, said Chubb, neither of them. He jutted his round chin like a stubborn boy. Try them on your own stuff. I wish you luck.
Just lay it down, Chris.
Chubb then cast a sharp look in my direction as if to say Look how thick it is! So much poetry! I could not tell if he was celebrating or taunting me. You wish, he said to me, that I should leave this here to rot?
I dared not speak.
One could tell he was afraid of the Chinese woman but it was also clear that she was losing some of her resolve, for when Chubb rushed past she did not slash at him.
If the murderous kris and the machete had not indicated the value of that single volume, the triumphant look in Chubb’s eyes now left no doubt. As he clattered down the stairs, I thought: Fucking hell, what an issue I will have! For I knew that what he was escaping with was the life’s work of the creature known as Bob McCorkle, although had his name been revealed as Rumpelstiltskin I doubt I would have cared.
He will burn the bloody thing!
This was the first time I heard the girl’s speaking voice, and what a surprise it was, this rather rough Australian accent coming from her lovely face.
You bastard, she shouted, we will have you killed. And then she also dashed towards the stairs, where Slater, I am pleased to say, obstructed her.
Now, now, my sweet, he said, patting her slender shoulder. Mr Chubb is a man of letters. He will not burn a single couplet, I promise you. My friend Sarah is going to make sure of it.
He already killed my bapa.
Slater turned back to me. In his eyes there was an odd, excited light. You do understand, don’t you?
I know. It is Bob McCorkle.
Hearing this name, the girl for once looked at me directly. You knew Mr Bob, Mem?
Behind her back, Slater was making dramatic signals which I could not understand.
I have read some of his poetry, I told the girl. I would like to read more. I would like to see it published in a book.
Yes, she said firmly, that is what we want. He was a genius.
Good, I thought. This was moving far better than the krises and machetes might have predicted.
Please show Miss Wode-Douglass the journals, Slater said quickly You really must see them, Sarah, they’re truly extraordinary. That’s what I’ve been doing. It’s not what you think at all.
He was a genius, Tina said, as if daring me to disagree.
Yes, but I must find Mr Chubb.
It is dark, the girl said. He could be anywhere. How would you find him now?
He can only be in one place, I said, and I will go and see him there.
It was Thursday at eight o’clock. Suddenly it seemed I had all the time in the world.
41
The stolen book was fat with poetry, pulpy, puffy interleaved with small blue markers. I found it laid enticingly before me in exactly the place the reader will have already predicted: on a coffee table in the foyer of the Merlin. Yet even as Chubb lifted a napkin to reveal his treasure, I knew I might not yet possess it, not until I had recorded every remaining detail of his damn history.
The man is not the poems, he said, sliding his hand across the wrinkled, almost iridescent binding. Who can say what sort of being he was, Mem? Not me. He was the joke, and the joke cannot love its maker. So when he had me in his power he showed no mercy. He persuaded the Kaya Kaya I was a hantu!
Obediently, I uncapped my pen.
The Kaya Kaya was a good enough fellow, he said, but McCorkle filled his ear with poison. Tie him up, lock him up. And so they put me beneath one of the thatched houses where they kept the chickens in their baskets. The baskets were lifted up beneath the floor so the pythons could not reach them in the dark. No such privilege for me. They tied me to a foundation post. Mosquitoes. Sand flies. That was not the worst of it. Since the war I had a fear of jungles in the night.
One day I was a chalk-wallah in Penang. Next morning I woke to find myself shamed by my own piss. I was bruised, broken, covered with red soil, swollen up from my bites. It was the villagers who came for me, but it was that bastard in his mechanist’s overalls who was their supervisor. Did I say he had shaved his head again? He was so hard and shiny, Mem, like bone, and if he was a figment of my imagination he was a nastier thought than any I’d ever had.
They set me on a large lanchut, a miner’s wash box, and bound me to it with rattan. Alamak! I thought they meant to drown me in the river like a witch! I pleaded with him as a fellow poet, Australian, Christian. He was deaf to me.
And my dear child was at his side. And she was my child, Mem, I saw the proof of it in that grey and misty light, not in her beauty—all that was from Noussette—but in two tiny freckles, just here, and here, on her upper lip. See, I have the same. My mother also.
This I tried to tell her, that she was my blood. Yet when I pointed at my lip she became frightened, pushing her face against McCorkle and wrapping her arms around his great hairy fencepost of a leg. I begged him to set her free. The request amused him.
Malays are geniuses with rattan and these lads did a thorough job of binding me to the lanchut. So firmly was I held that they could now turn me upside down. They slid two thick bamboo poles through rattan loops and carried me down to the river like a shrieking, shitting pig. There I saw what they had planned for me—’raft’ was too fine a name for this tangle of sticks. Flotsam! As likely as not populated by water snakes and rats and starving fire ants still stranded from the monsoon. This pile of debris they had moored to their bathing box with a length of rattan and now they carried me out through the shallows and lashed me and my box on top of it, and once that was done they pushed me out, no word of warning, no bye-bye, no curse, or trial, or sentence. Two of the young men waded out beside me until my craft began to spin in the current.
I twisted my head towards the bastard.
God help me, man, I called.
The mongrel did not move a muscle of his cruel and handsome face.
At my feet I had seen a little chee-chuk scuttling around the branches. While the current took us with a lurch, the lizard and I, the young men waded back to the pretty little village where my daughter had already turned her back on me. I rotated like a leaf. Mist lay across the water and lapped the edges of the jungle. It was a beautiful sight, except I was on my way to death. It was a case of telur di hujung tanduk, an egg teetering on the tip of a horn. I had no clue of how far away the ocean was, but it did not matter. My raft was breaking up. A large branch drifted loose. This was minutes from the start. My chair tilted. I am not a brave man, Mem, but it was not myself I cared for now, it was my darling little girl. What purpose would she serve for him when I was not alive to torture?
How I did love her, love her without relent or hope of return. What is Auden’s line? ‘If equal affection cannot be,/let the more loving one be me’?
Christopher Chubb coughed, perhaps in embarrassment.
I asked him did he not, just sometimes, hate her a little.
Instead of answering he chose to tell me how the mist burned away, how the sun tormented him. He had no doubt that he would die.
I tried to rock my box, he said, and I would happily have tipped myself into the river and drowned if I could have. The thought of the cool yellow water was much to be desired. Then a single bee came to torment me. This was not one of those black-and-yellow bees like you have in England. It had pale-blue stripes. Cruel and beautiful, isn’t it? Once he had circled me a time or two he settled on my face, where he began to drink my sweat. The bee was very small and my body was working very hard, producing as much sweat as he might need. Why would he ever leave me? My hands were bound. I could do noth
ing more than bat my lashes and blow through my nose, none of which annoyed him very much. If they had, of course, he would have bitten me.
I will not bore you with self-pity, Mem. Some time, a little after noon, I fainted.
I awoke with a blinding headache to see the river was flying at a fantastic rate. It was nearing dusk, and there was no heat in the sun, not that it mattered, for I had so much still in my own body. The banks were crowded with casuarinas, mangle groves, nipa palms, and another palm—don’t know its name—which towered over them all. Noisy as a market place with screeching birds, and behind this I could hear the pounding of the sea in which, I supposed, my end would come.
Seagulls came to look at me and I feared they would peck my eyes, but they let me off. The raft was floating lower now and my shoes were shipping water. I was travelling backwards and could not see how far I had to go when all of a sudden I was brought to a violent stop by what appeared to be a picket fence.
42
It was the year before Malayan independence, said Chubb, the modern age. Who could believe the squabbling that still went on amongst the aristocracy? How they fought-lah. So many of them! But it was exactly this situation that saved me. This Raja Kecil Bongsu had driven fat bamboo poles across the width of the river and was exacting a tax from the communists and smugglers and others who used it for business of their own. There were gateways made with floating logs and these were guarded by his men. I do not understand what the Raja Kecil Bongsu was doing in such a place, if he had fallen out with the Sultan or simply liked the scenery. No way of me knowing. But he had built a fort out on the mud flats between two rivers and here his young soldiers lived in a hut whose walls were six feet thick and eight feet high. They carried krises in their silver sashes. No-one to tax? No worry-lah. They would fight each other. They slept tucked in along the walls for at high tide the floors were two feet under.
They had built a watchtower, but the ladder had been burned so it was no longer used. I don’t know how long I was bumping against the pickets before they spied me. A great shouting mob of them came splashing through the river just on dusk. They gave not a bugger for my sunburn or my headache. They pushed and pulled me and when I would not come from my box they took out their krises and cut me free. Not such a favour, Mem, for it was clear they meant to tax me blind.
