by Peter Carey
There I was, a white man floating on a pile of sticks. Were they interested in how I got there? No-one asked a question until I had been taken across the mud flats to the village and here, after I had vomited, I was presented to the Raja Kecil Bongsu, who surveyed me very sniffily from his selang. You know selang? It was a kind of bridge that joined two parts of his rather humble house, nothing like the Kaya Kaya’s palace. He was a young man, very delicate. He had long lashes and limpid eyes and a way of speaking Malay which might have made him seem effeminate had I not seen the authority he held over his men. To me he spoke coldly, in a very posh sort of English. Later I heard he had a first from Cambridge.
Where do you come from?
I am Australian.
Where have you travelled from on my river?
I was a Penang school teacher who had run away and been captured in a village whose name I did not know. All I could think might identify the place I had come from was the Austin Sheerline.
The young raja’s eyebrows raised and he cocked his head and then burst into high-pitched laughter. An Austin Sheer-line?
I am positive.
And this Austin Sheerline–wallah, what did you do to him?
This man was like liquid mercury, Mem, one moment whooping like a schoolboy, now narrowing his eyes as if preparing to slit my throat. So I Tuan d him, believe me.
Tuan, I said, I did nothing to the Austin Sheerline–wallah. They have kidnapped my little girl, Tuan, and I came to rescue her.
He has kidnapped your daughter? No! He slapped his side and laughed again, this time at a pitch even higher than before. Oh, he is a fool, he said, a perfect fool. He is no better than a pirate and will not live as long as one. Excuse me, I am not laughing at your cruel loss, but at the ridiculous damned Orang Kaya Kaya. Come, come. You cannot stand down there amongst the hoi polloi.
He now spoke to his men and again I had the sensation of a different personality, clearly authoritive but exquisitely polite.
They will bring you to my house.
My handsome young robbers now returned their krises to their sheaths. What a change in them. This way, Tuan. They led me straight underneath the house, which was supported on high thin stilts, and delivered me to the front steps where, with great ceremony, witnessed by his family and his soldiers, the Raja Kecil Bongsu formally offered me his protection. Could not have said it better if he was the Archbishop of Canterbury.
I was sick and dirty as a pariah dog but I limped up the steps, and the raja personally showed me to a room. You will sleep here, he said. I did not know that I had been given the rumah ibu. This term you will not know. It is a room, of course, a bedroom, living room, and chapel all at once. Because I had been given the rumah ibu the raja and his family must sleep on the verandah. That’s very nice, I said, and may I have a glass of water? I had not the least bloody idea of the extravagance of his gift.
I wanted water? No problem-lah. A very old Tamil woman was sent off and soon brought me not only a glass and pitcher and a large bowl of warm water to wash with, but also a butter box containing some stuff to rub on my injuries. This medicine stank of rotten fish and mango but I applied it as she demonstrated.
My own clothes were very dirty, and when I joined the family in the little dining room it was in a sarong and clean white shirt the most senior wife had provided me.
I had no appetite for their food, so the raja called his youngest wife. Get this man baked beans. Words to that effect. After dinner we retired to the verandah. Not a decent chair, of course. Crossed legs, aching bum. Then what a recital followed: the sins of the Sheerline-wallah. What a rotten egg was this Orang Kaya Kaya, wicked, foolish, a liar and a cheat.
I felt like death, of course, but must pay attention as he recited the crimes of our mutual foe. The Kaya Kaya, so he told me, kept a concubine.
Oh, I said, how terrible.
No, that was not offensive, but he publicly neglected his wife in her favour.
I clucked my tongue.
No, that might have been permissible, but his wife was of royal blood and that was why her humiliation could not be forgiven. It takes a great deal to lose the common people’s love, but this one had done a damn good job of it. Even his own children had lost their respect for him and could be observed walking with their little toes curled up in mocking imitation of his waddle.
You see, said the raja, the people always wish to obey their betters. My men will stay on guard all night for me, but they also know I will not disgrace their good name. That fellow, on the other hand—a famous liar. His people know that. He does not pay his debts. He saw the Austin Sheerline in a showroom in George Town. What a scoundrel. He said he would take it out to give it a test and then he never brought it back. It was a Chinaman he robbed like this. The Chinaman took him to court and as it happens I was in Kuala Kangsar for a polo match, so I stayed on to see what lies he would tell in his defence. It was worse than even I imagined, Mr Chubb. No, he told the magistrate, he had never seen this Chinaman. No, he never took an Austin. He did not even know what an Austin was. Perhaps an Austin was a British Lord? No? A car? He detested cars. If he wished to move anywhere he had people who would carry him, and so on. Well, the sad truth is you can never win a case against a raja and the judge, being a Malay, naturally found against the Chinaman. But there was some justice, Mr Chubb, for very soon afterwards the Austin broke down and of course the Orang Kaya Kaya dare not ask anyone to repair it, certainly not the Chinaman. So the car stayed mouldering by the river through the wet season, at the end of which there was, so I’m told, lawyer vine growing all over it. There it would have rusted into the earth had not the big white mechanic arrived. This white man may not yet know what he has stepped into but he has as much chance of freedom as a crab eating happily inside a trap.
Christopher Chubb then apprised the raja of his daughter’s kidnapping by this same mechanic. He was very forthright, so he says, not withholding any details, and the raja responded exactly as he wished, passionately slapping his leg and saying that the girl must be returned. It was a matter of honour. Also much dishonour for the Kaya Kaya to have his criminality so exposed to those in higher places.
Isolated by both language and his continuing illness, Chubb had no idea of the effect his story had upon the villagers. Though to him they showed no sign of it, they took his sorrow to their hearts. But all he saw the next morning was that shoals of a fish like mullet had just arrived in the river and everybody, women and children too, had been involved first in the harvest and then in the business of laying the catch on racks to dry.
Not until two or three days had passed, by which time the stench of drying fish was carried on the sea breeze through the rumah ibu, did the convalescing Australian stir himself sufficiently to walk down to the mud flats. There he observed two canoes setting off against the tide. Naturally it did not occur to him that their voyage could have anything to do with him, and that night he was mildly surprised to learn that one of the rowers had been the raja himself. Two days later a beaming Kecil Bongsu returned to the village with the news that the kidnapper had been found living in the dense forest about a mile downstream from his shameful master’s palace. Initially they assumed he had run away, but now it appeared that was not true. The girl was with him, as well as a Chinese woman from Sumatra whose husband had been murdered by Ambonese pirates within months of the couple’s arrival in Perak. This woman was clinging to the white man like a leech. They had seen her climbing like a monkey in the tree. As everyone knew women did not climb, they had thought it the most comical event and made many crude jokes about her thighs clamping tightly around the smooth bark, etc. When it was discovered she was bringing nothing down but flowers, this amusement spread up and down the river and people who had never seen the mechanic and his entourage still knew this monkey woman.
Now it seems likely that even as the Raja Kecil Bongsu was telling this story so happily his wives were already disenchanted with their foreign visitor. A Malay woul
d have known not to accept the offer of the rumah ibu; it may be offered, of course, but obviously must be declined. Chubb had no inkling of what he had done and it would be years before he would understand what an outrage it must have been to these wives, who normally regarded this part of the house as their own.
Perhaps, he told me, this is why the men undertook to fetch my daughter. Just to get rid of me, no? But who can say Mem.
On the seventh morning of his stay, Chubb woke to a dreadful shrieking. Monkeys, he thought, and paid no particular attention. Once dressed, he opened a can of Spam and, in the absence of silverware, ate it with his fingers. The screams continued as he washed his hands. Perhaps it was a pig, but his hosts were Muslims so this could not be. He then descended to the sandy compound which was, to his surprise, completely deserted. Now the screams seemed to augur something ill. He hurried towards their source, down to the river, where he found what appeared to be the entire population of the village crammed onto the mud flats with the tide washing around their ankles. Thinking it some religious ceremony, he kept himself respectfully on the outskirts, but once his presence was noted the mob parted and he saw a large cane basket set upon the flats, perhaps two inches of water running through it. The basket was a larger, stouter version of the ones the Orang Kaya Kaya used to keep his chickens safe beneath his house.
To the reader the nature of this animal may be obvious, but it was a dreadful shock for Christopher Chubb to understand that the beast screaming inside this cage was his own beloved child.
He could not bear to hear her terror and so squatted down, moving slowly towards her through the mud.
It’s okay, he said. Everything is fine.
But of course it was not fine at all. When the child saw the hantu stretching out his hands towards her, she froze. And the hantu, taking the silence for acquiescence, reached between the canes to stroke her hair.
The villagers watched the hand reach inside the cage, then heard a cry of pain, and saw the hand jerked back. The child began to shriek in earnest, the basket rocking on the mud flats like a distressed sea creature pulled up from the depths. The villagers stood there still as stones. Only their raja moved, and not very much, although Chubb was chilled by the way in which he stroked his fine moustache.
The raja then spoke briefly—to no-one in particular, it seemed. Then, without so much as glancing at his guest, he and his retainers started back towards the compound.
Once he had gone, Christopher Chubb could not induce a soul to look his way, in spite of which their collective disapproval was as palpable as the cloying heat. Of course their reaction is no mystery. Most of us would feel the same, and the Malays, who are such gentle souls with their own children, had already decided who the kidnapper really was.
They watched miserably as their young men slid cane poles carefully through the basket and then lifted the white girl to their shoulders. Chubb walked beside her as one might accompany a coffin to the grave while by his side the little creature shrieked in outrage at her situation.
At the raja’s house she was first taken to the rumah ibu but then, at the insistence of the wives, was moved onto the verandah. Judging her too fierce to release, they brought a small bowl of black rice pudding and two bananas to set beside her cage.
All this Chubb watched from an awkward distance, keenly feeling the force of the wives’ disapproval, but having no language to communicate the complications of his position. He watched how the women edged towards the cage and how one held out a plastic spoon of the pudding, making small cooing noises until a dirty little hand shot out and snatched the food away. So melancholy was his frame of mind, Chubb told me, that for a moment he was insensible to the presence of the raja at his side.
I have lost face with the idiot Kaya Kaya, his benefactor said in his soft, sibilant way, and if you had not looked into his eyes you could never have gauged his fury.
I am sorry.
You must take her back.
I will not.
For answer, Mem, he gave me the most awful slap across the face. I looked at him then, this man I had once thought effeminate, and understood he might kill me. I am not a brave man, but now there was no choice. I told him I would never give my daughter away. It was a very restless night that followed.
43
The argument over the child’s return was rendered moot next morning when McCorkle himself strode into the compound, trailed by a jostling mob of excited tax collectors. They accompanied him, not in the bullying, sullen way they had escorted Chubb but as an admiring crowd around a gladiator, jealously elbowing one another in order to be closest to their hero and his monkey woman, both of whom were carrying great canvas bags upon their heads.
The young men ushered the giant to Raja Kecil Bongsu’s front steps and there he threw his heavy bag down on the ground.
Tina, he cried. It was the first time Chubb ever heard his daughter’s name.
The child had been sucking on a can of susu but she responded immediately to the call and came running out onto the verandah, the can still clutched in both her hands. The wives had dressed her as a tiny princess in a purple sarong shot through with silver and her tangled hair had been oiled and combed and pulled back in a braid to show off her perfect little ears. At the top of the steps she hesitated, then smiled. But running down the steps she was already shuddering, and as her poise collapsed she buried her face in that massive shoulder and wept while his hands wrapped her shaking shoulder blades.
Like a villain in a village melodrama, her father watched the reunion from behind the verandah shutters. What he saw was intolerable, beyond belief. He had been sustained, until this moment, by his will to save his child from harm, but in defeat his mouth curved downwards, thin as the blade of a kris.
He was hauled out to stand before his rival, whose cold eyes glittered behind slitted lids.
If I see you one more time, said Bob McCorkle, I will destroy you.
You have destroyed me already.
He smiled, Mem, he smiled with pleasure, and at that moment I could have ripped his heart out. Oh, I imagined it—my hand deep inside his chest, his vital organs like warm mud in my fist.
If I could create you, I said, did you never fear I might unmake you too?
He did not answer, but put out his great leg and tripped me up. As I tried to rise he kicked me in the backside and sent me sprawling in the mud. This caused everyone to laugh, my child as well.
I was covered in filth, squealing like a hunted pig. I thought, I will kill him for this moment. I will see him die like a chicken or a dog dragging its legs into the dark.
Chubb now touched the book which had sat there on the table these last three hours. Its binding was both disfigured and beautiful, like the bark of a birch, but also wrinkled and tropical, like a Morton Bay fig. It was mottled, striated, and when he laid his square hand on it and his cracked nails and liver spots made contact with its weathered skin, both book and hand seemed to be related parts of the same creature.
I had been writing so rapidly that my hands were cramping, and therefore was pleased to take the opportunity to lay my thin biro on the table. As I did so he moved the book an inch or two towards me. It was an oddly flirtatious gesture, like a woman teasing with the buttons of her blouse. He began to slide the book back and forth, perhaps taunting me, or merely acting out his indecision—I could not tell—but he passed it through a little spill of tea.
Careful, I said. The tea.
Oh, he said, smiling, it has been through worse than that.
I would change my mind so often on this issue, but at that particular moment I again suspected that he was the author of this poem, and when I saw how gently he took the volume in his hand, I was completely certain.
You liked the little that you read, he asked.
So exactly like a poet, I thought.
He now placed the book directly in front of me, and I frankly told him I hadn’t been able to get it out of my mind.
You were ho
oked, eh?
Well, yes.
Not always so obvious, a great work. You know what I am saying, Mem? What is this mumbo-jumbo? No head, no tail. Very bad-lah. But it has got its claws into you just the same.
He gave the book a sudden push and it was square in front of me. My heart was pounding.
I will leave it with you, he said abruptly.
It was much heavier than I had expected, and very strange to touch—a peculiar texture, slightly oily in places, scaly in others.
I can trust you, no? His emotion was obvious.
Yes, I said, you can trust me.
Then we will meet here in the morning.
I forced myself to wait until the Sikh opened the door for him respectfully, and only when he’d rounded the corner did I hold the poems of Bob McCorkle against my breast.
I opened the volume not at the beginning but somewhere in the middle. It was a curiously old-fashioned hand, very beautiful, with long austere ascenders and descenders and curiously ornate S’s and G’s.
‘—she’s burning, our dew-lap beebee’
That was all I read before Slater dropped companionably beside me, his arm immediately extending along the sofa behind my back.
Ah, Micks!
Furious, I closed the book.
Micks, darling, you’re blushing. He looked at me quizzically, then began searching the empty foyer for a waiter. At least he had not seen the book, or so I thought.
In any case, you have her book back. Well done, darling.
He picked it up, and I confess I loathed the sight of it in his hands.
John, we have no idea whose book this is.
Did old Chubby say it was his?
No, but surely he wrote it. He certainly acts as if he did.
Slater now had found a waitress and was engaged in conversation about his order. Though I waited for him to relinquish the book, his hand was firmly clamped around its spine.
