East of India

by East of India (retail) (epub)

  Taking the key into the palm of her hand, she slid out from behind a screen of woven matting and made her way to the locked door.

  Earlier that day she had recorded the latest arrival of stock. She particularly remembered a crocodile-skin vanity case full of quality make-up. There had also been a box containing tins of tobacco, another held tins of toothpaste. A torn mosquito net that madam had considered too shabby to fetch good money had been thrown to one side, and when Nadine asked if it could go to the Bamboo House, the She-Dragon had agreed

  Tiptoeing her way, she went back in, carrying the net, and unlocked the store room. She felt her way to the items she wanted, remembering where they were situated, feeling the shapes with her fingers.

  She pilfered a few small items from the vanity case and the boxes, then softly closed the door behind her. She knew where the quinine was kept. The small key nestling next to the door key opened a wooden wall-mounted cupboard.

  Something behind her rustled. Expecting to see an angry figure in the doorway, she turned round. A mongoose ran over her feet and out of the door.

  Heart thudding, she moved quickly, relocked the cupboard and then the door. Everything was wrapped in the mosquito net.

  * * *

  The next morning, with the net bundled beneath her arm, she made her way to the bamboo bridge.

  She exchanged a swift look with Peggy. ‘I’ve brought things,’ she said quietly. Even at this hour one or two officers were still there, sleeping off the excess of the night before.

  ‘Come,’ whispered Peggy.

  Nadine followed Peggy into Lucy’s cubicle. She was sitting up and looking better. Kochi, on the other hand, was clinging to a bamboo upright, her eyes big and staring into space.

  Lucy was trying to tempt her with breakfast, just rice and fruit.

  ‘Kochi is their favourite now,’ Peggy explained, her voice as pinched as her once full cheeks. ‘Do you know how many she had last night?’

  Before Nadine had a chance to guess, Peggy told her. ‘Five! Five!’

  Nadine sat on the floor in native style, her bangles tinkling as they fell down her arm, her painted toes poking out from beneath the hem of her sarong. Kochi pulled away when she tried to pat her shoulder.

  ‘Perhaps if I suggest to madam that the girls take rest periods to help them get over excess use?’

  ‘Would she wear that?’ Peggy looked doubtful.

  ‘It’s a risk I have to take. That poor girl can’t take any more. I can advise madam that she’d be protecting her investment. The officers pay five times what the soldiers pay at their establishment in the town. I’ve seen the accounts.’

  ‘You’ll try?’

  Nadine, feeling sick to her stomach but very determined, nodded. ‘I’ll try.’

  Before she had time to unwind the mosquito net, Rosalyn had poked her head in.

  ‘Ah!’ said Rosalyn, folding her arms and stepping into the already crowded cubicle. ‘I detect a foul smell in here. Please get rid of it so we can all breathe less contaminated air.’

  Nadine glanced at Peggy before directing her comments at Rosalyn. ‘Yes, I know that, Rosalyn, and I’ve been thinking about this place all night. Whatever I decide to do will have an effect on everybody. I believe I have two choices. The first is that I move back in here and take what comes like the rest of you do.’

  Rosalyn’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘That’s right! That’s what any patriotic woman would do.’

  ‘But you will have to forgo the little extras I can get you. Peggy and I agreed…’

  Rosalyn interrupted. ‘We’ve had a meeting. Can you imagine what it’s like having them paw you with their grimy little hands? You’ve got it made and I… we… took a vote.’

  You took a vote, thought Nadine, eyeing the long nose and dark brows. Hearing raised voices, the other girls – those not entertaining officers – had crowded round outside.

  ‘What is the second option, please?’ Rosalyn asked.

  Nadine took a deep breath. This was a gamble that might work to both their advantages.

  Carefully, so as not to smash the quinine, she unrolled the mosquito net. Those who could see what she’d brought gasped with delight. Others behind her who couldn’t see were asking so many questions that Peggy had to order them to be quiet, go away, and not attract enemy attention.

  ‘It’s little enough,’ said Nadine, shooing an insect from her face. ‘But better than nothing. In time I might be able to steal more. It’s getting it here that’s the problem. But…’ She exchanged a swift look with Peggy.

  ‘I’ve got a medicine bag and Nadine’s got a back window. She pops things out and I pick them up and bring them here.’

  A tremor of excitement ran through the girls like a breathless breeze.

  Peggy shushed them again.

  Nadine explained further. ‘We can take advantage of the situation and the storeroom keys that dangle so close to my head. Steal a little, trade a little and perhaps accumulate enough money to buy our way out of here. Remember what Madam Cherry said? Make enough money to cover her costs and we become free – or at least get a transfer into a proper prisoner-of-war camp, if that’s what we want.’

  In her heart of hearts she prayed for rescue to come. The fact that she’d lied about being a virgin could get her killed.

  Stomachs that had already digested a small bowl of boiled rice mixed with a little papaya grumbled a response.

  ‘We’d end up in an internment camp? Like the one they’re building across the way?’

  ‘It might be better than here, and anyway by then we might have set up a good circle of trading contracts,’ said Nadine, finding solace in the plans that whirled round and round in her mind. She frowned. ‘They’re taking their time building that camp.’

  ‘Prisoners are on the way, so I hear,’ said Betty. She grimaced. ‘An officer told me.’

  ‘Is what you are doing not dangerous?’ asked one of the Malay girls.

  ‘As dangerous as can be! I could be shot if I get caught.’

  A hum of noise erupted around her as words were said and translated and decisions made.

  ‘We’ll take a vote,’ said Rosalyn, folding her arms across her bosom.

  Peggy intervened. ‘Sod the vote. We’ll give you a list.’ She glared at Rosalyn. ‘I’m all for getting out of this place as soon as possible.’

  ‘As the senior mistress here…’

  Betty and Peggy burst into laughter. ‘That’s what we all bloody are! Mistresses by nature and whores by circumstance!’

  * * *

  It was Nadine’s day to operate the cash register. The little old woman, though recovered, had hobbled off to the soldiers’ comfort house to help with their laundry.

  Although under strict orders not to leave the till unattended, Nadine went to see Lucy in the small cubicle at the back of the long house.

  ‘I come bearing gifts,’ she said, ‘though most have already been requisitioned,’ she added, indicating the girls out in the common room.

  ‘Were they grateful?’

  ‘So-so.’

  Lucy’s face clouded. ‘A tube of lipstick and a bar of soap won’t lessen their jealousy. They say you’ve feathered your own nest.’

  Nadine set down the fruit, the fresh bandages and the healing balm she’d purloined from Madam Cherry’s locked cache. Lucy was building up quite a little cache of her own inside her new pillow.

  Nadine was less cynical. ‘They’ll stand it. They want to live and they want to escape.’

  She began to cut up a mango.

  ‘So,’ said Lucy, her eyes keeping to Nadine’s face, ‘when is this auction?’

  ‘That depends on how long I can string the She-Dragon along.’ She shivered. ‘Hopefully for ever.’

  ‘Might I ask a question?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You let them believe you’re fresh out from school.’

  ‘I lied. You didn’t tell them?’

  ‘Of c
ourse not. But any Asian man will want proof of your virginity, a red splash on a white cloth so he can boast of what he has done.’

  Nadine sighed, the mango juice running from one corner of her mouth.

  ‘I was hoping he’d be drunk.’

  ‘Think carefully, Nadine.’ Lucy’s lovely face, now healed nicely, took on a worried frown.

  Nadine leaned against the wall behind her and looked outside at the platform that jutted out over the water. Major Shamida’s flute-playing floated in the air.

  ‘I was brought up between two cultures – my father was British, my mother Indian. There was good and bad in both races – it has to be the same here. All we can do is survive. I’m not going to stop thinking on my feet. The longer I hold things off, the longer I’m likely to survive – until the end of this damned war, if possible.’

  ‘Have you heard how the war is going?’

  Nadine shook her head. ‘Judging by the way the Japanese are strutting about I would say that no news is good news. I don’t think things are going well for us, that’s for sure. But we’re not beaten yet.’

  ‘The Americans are bound to retaliate over Pearl Harbor.’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘I wonder what they will do.’

  ‘Something the world isn’t likely to forget in a hurry,’ murmured Nadine.

  * * *

  Close to dawn in the Bamboo Bridge House everyone lay sleeping with the exception of one person.

  Kochi rocked backwards and forwards, her arms wound tightly around her folded legs. She was sitting on the platform protruding over the water at the back of the house just beyond where Lucy slept, and she was talking to herself.

  ‘You know I wanted a white wedding, David, and that I want six bridesmaids. I think they will look lovely in turquoise. What do you think? Pink? No. It should be turquoise. I insist. You think it unfair? No. No, it is not unfair. I became a Christian for you and now I will have the colours I want for my Christian wedding.’

  She burst into a series of tiny high-pitched sounds.

  Lucy heard and lifted her head.

  The muttering went on. ‘It will be all right. I think it was a spear. I saw his face. Or was it more than one? Never mind. The faces all became one. And it doesn’t matter really. Christ forgives sinners, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he, David?’

  Her body heaved with sobs, the sound catching in her throat. She fixed her gaze on the vaporous steam rising from a grey mirror of water, the colour of everything just before dawn.

  Tears streamed down Kochi’s face. There would be no white dress, no bridesmaids and no David.

  She dangled her legs over the edge of the platform. The stream was deep and muddy. Someone had seen a crocodile or alligator swimming there. Nobody quite knew which.

  ‘I am so very sorry.’

  Lucy pushed aside the bamboo screen in time to see Kochi hit the water, a flurry of swirling water and then nothing. Calm. Emptiness.

  * * *

  Madam Cherry had informed Nadine of business with a rich German planter who had supplanted a Dutchman on his own plantation. He was having a birthday party and wanted entertainment. This would be Nadine’s first outside performance. With a bit of ingenuity and a lot of begging, stealing and borrowing, she had made a costume from silk scarves, strands of tinsel and Javanese jewellery.

  Rosalyn was reluctant to hand over a particularly fine sarong with a gold hem.

  ‘Parading yourself like that,’ she spat.

  ‘Doing a recce is more like it,’ said Nadine as she fastened it around her waist. ‘The more dancing I do outside the camp, the more I learn about our surroundings. There’s a lot of jungle to get through. A lot of sea too.’

  ‘Better views than round here then.’

  Nadine grimaced. ‘Never mind a view. We need a boat.’

  Her heart was racing. Time was ticking away and although she tried not to think of what was to come, it was there hanging over her. At least travelling to the party she might have the chance to better survey her surroundings. She needed to escape – she had to escape before the auction, before the truth was found out.

  It was just after breakfast and Madam Cherry was off to collect the fee for this evening’s performance – Nadine’s first.

  ‘You must practise your sringara,’ said Madam Cherry before leaving. She used the Hindi word as though she was the knowledgeable one. Nadine smiled to herself. If she remembered rightly, the word embodied the erotic longings of the dancer for the gods. She’d told the wily woman that it applied to a particular movement, the folding of limbs as a dancer sinks to the floor, the toes pointed, the arms and head still moving.

  Ah, well, she thought, rubbing her hands down over her hips, to work.

  As the sound of the car receded, she took the keys from the hook and headed for the storeroom. Unlike the Bamboo Bridge House and the coolies’ huts and the others being built, Madam Cherry’s quarters were as substantial as those occupied by the Japanese army.

  She smiled at the keys lying in the palm of her hand; the keys to an Aladdin’s cave of stolen, bartered and exchanged supplies.

  The floor of the storeroom was of hard-packed earth. Boxes marked with the international sign of the Red Cross jostled for space alongside bolts of cloth, bicycles, boxes of chocolate, soap, tins of food and bottles of medicine.

  She selected the things she thought the girls in the comfort house needed most: quinine, oil of cloves, something that smelled like witch hazel, bandages, plasters and scissors. One or two of the girls were coming down with malaria. Others had sores, insect bites and private parts that had never been so sorely used and despoiled. Health before beauty; a few tins of food were added plus a reasonable piece of terry towelling. The latter would be ripped up and used for their periods, washed and used again, passed from hand to hand depending on whose time of the month it was; such simple things, but sorely missed.

  Considering madam was out, it didn’t seem much of a risk to wrap the stuff in a square of silk and sling it over her shoulder. Smiling sweetly enough and keeping an air of confidence would get her past the guards.

  No one challenged her. The guards seemed preoccupied with beating the hell out of the Chinese coolies who were thin and skull-faced, their work of building the barbed-wire fences stretching along the road now nearing completion. The rumour was that enemy civilians would be interned there. Word came via an officer keen to improve his English and wanting to impress the girl he was lying with. Peggy was best at this.

  Nadine grinned. ‘Funny that men think blondes are dumb.’

  ‘They speak to you more slowly,’ Peggy had told her. ‘And a clever girl takes advantage of that.’

  Baskets of earth wobbled at the ends of poles carried by the coolies who were building yet more huts. Whilst two held a corner post, the others stamped the earth around its base so it remained standing upright.

  The huts were increasing in quantity: she’d counted six on arrival, and now there were twenty. Woven matting fixed to rough planks formed the flimsy walls. Palm leaves – termed atap – sat multi-layered on the roof. In time they would rot in the high humidity and become home to colonies of insects. The occupants of the new huts would be tormented night and day.

  A lone figure watched from the veranda outside the officer’s quarters, the smoke from a lighted cigarette drifting upwards before his face.

  She glanced only briefly but thought she recognized the flute player, Major Genda Shamida.

  Would he stop her? Search her? Ask what was in the bundle tucked beneath her arm?

  Reasoning that a leisurely pace would not arouse suspicion, she sauntered along, not chancing even a glance in his direction. Her shoulders tensed in anticipation and relaxed again once she’d passed him by and was approaching the bridge.

  Unburdened of tension, she imagined the pleased expressions when she arrived. She smiled. This would work. She was doing something useful.

  Silence greeted her as she slipped her san
dals off at the entrance. She had stopped going barefoot following an incident when a hookworm over a yard long had been pulled from the foot of a Burmese girl named Kiri.

  The other women were all sitting around the walls of the communal room, their expressions blank as though their features had been wiped from their faces.

  A breakfast of rice, dried fish and slices of papaya sat barely touched in tin trays. They were all thinner than when they’d arrived here, but nobody was starving. The officers did not appreciate skinny girls and the little sweetmeats were usually eaten ravenously.

  With a pang of guilt she swallowed the residual juice of her own breakfast from the back of her tongue. She had eaten a piece of cooked pork, its skin smoked to dark tan over a charcoal fire. Madam Cherry lived well. So did those who pleased her.

  The blank faces did not respond to her beaming smile. She assured herself that they would once they saw what she’d brought them.

  ‘Surprise, surprise!’ She set down the offerings.

  Their expressions remained untouched by her exuberance. Before she had a chance to ask why, Lucy slid through the opening at the end of the room. She looked gaunt and unsteady.

  ‘What is it? Are you feeling bad?’

  ‘Kochi threw herself from the balcony and got chewed up by a passing crocodile. She’s gone.’

  Nadine sank to the floor. ‘Why?’

  Betty rounded on her. ‘Why? Because she’d been shagged half to death and whatever ate her was bloody hungry? That’s a stupid question, Nadine.’

  Her breath caught in her throat. Her chest heaved as she wrestled with the overwhelming shock. They were blaming her – because she hadn’t taken her turn. Even the eyes of the Malay girls had hardened with resentment. She was one of them, but not one of them. By her own hand she had contrived to ease her situation. She’d only half-won them round by promises of trading their way out of here.

  It was Lucy – dear, graceful and philosophical Lucy – who poured the necessary oil on the threatening troubled waters.

  ‘It’s not Nadine’s fault. The blame lies with the Japanese.’