Lizard's Tale

by Weng Wai Chan

  ‘Let him go, Lili,’ she said in a firm but quiet voice. ‘We can’t risk blowing our cover.’

  The three of them stared out the window and watched as Lizard called to a group of boys standing near Tanaka’s. Lili wished she was there with him, to keep him out of whatever dumb trouble he was getting himself into.

  ‘Also, Lizard’s uncle—’ Miss Adelia paused, glancing from Lili to Miss Neha.

  ‘Uncle Archie—he knows Mr Davis,’ said Lili, remembering the message he had given Lizard. ‘Mr Davis is Maximum Ops too, isn’t he? How does Uncle Archie know Mr Davis?’

  ‘Good question. That’s another reason we can’t get involved,’ said Miss Adelia. ‘We don’t know what mission another Maximum Ops division might be running, and we can’t get in their way.’

  ‘You mean Uncle Archie’s mission is to be a prisoner there?’ said Lili, dismayed.

  ‘I don’t know, Lili,’ said Miss Adelia. ‘But, right now, we can’t interfere.’

  Across the road, Lizard opened Miss Neha’s purse and scattered coins into a growing crowd like a flower girl tossing rose petals at a wedding.

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Neha dryly. ‘I’m glad I left my twenty dollar bills in my other purse.’

  Ah Ling and Ah Keung had been on their way to school, but stopped when they saw Lizard throwing coins.

  ‘Tanaka’s has got a new shipment of sweets,’ Lizard yelled in Cantonese. ‘They’re really delicious.’ From his pocket, he grabbed the lollies Brylcreem had given him in the shop earlier, and he flung them in a wide arc. Kids jumped and scrambled to get them before they fell into the drain.

  ‘They’ve got sweets in there,’ said Lizard, tossing the last handful of coins to the growing numbers of kids. ‘Lots of sweets, all kinds of sweets.’

  In the confusion of the kids grabbing lollies and coins, Lizard reached into the work box of a cobbler working in front of the shop next door and took out a heavy pointed tool. He bashed it against the glass near the door handle of Tanaka’s Emporium. The glass smashed, and Lizard reached in and opened the door. ‘Come inside. There’s lots of sweets!’ he yelled as he dropped the tool back in the cobbler’s box.

  The kids followed him inside. Lizard ran to the large glass jar of lollies on the counter and tossed them all over the shop floor. Giggling kids were everywhere.

  The lollies were running out. Lizard looked under the counter and was surprised to see tins of lollies of different kinds on the shelf. He felt sad that Tanaka, a man thoughtful enough to provide sweets for the children of his customers, was involved with the gunjin.

  Anyway, he was here to rescue Uncle Archie. If there were any gunjin here, they weren’t going to kidnap twenty or thirty shrieking children, especially since some adults, who had noticed what was happening, were coming into the shop. Lizard figured the police would arrive soon too.

  ‘Hey, what are you kids up to?’ yelled the man from the shop next door. ‘Where’s Mr Tanaka?’

  Lizard ran to the lift and pressed the button. The usually calm, orderly shop space with its glass-topped counters and cabinets of exquisite silk cloth was filled with children running amok.

  Some of the younger kids had even climbed to the top of the cabinets and started pelting lollies at the adults who had come to sort out the commotion. The hooded man had called Georgina and Lizard an infestation of children, but this was what an infestation of children really looked like.

  When the grill of the lift finally opened, Lizard stepped in and pressed the basement button.

  The riot of over-excited children and cross adults moved out of his view as the lift clanked downwards. It stopped in the basement and Lizard leapt out. But he was too late. The steel cage was empty, and the unlocked chains were lying on the ground. The gunjin had, once again, torn Uncle Archie away from Lizard.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Friend or Enemy

  Lizard lay on his bunk in his cubicle in Tanjong Pagar Road. He stared at a bloody scratch on the back of his right hand. It must have come from the smashed glass of Tanaka’s Emporium door. He picked one end of it, and found a tiny splinter of glass.

  Only two nights ago, like all the nights before that for two years, he had lain in his bunk wondering why Uncle Archie had abandoned him. Now he knew that his uncle had been captured by the gunjin and that he hadn’t chosen to leave Lizard alone. Lizard was tormented by the thought of what they had done to him and of what they might be doing now.

  But why had they captured Uncle Archie? Surely he couldn’t have been their prisoner all this time. As far as Lizard knew, his uncle was just an ordinary British man. But ordinary British men weren’t imprisoned by Japanese spies. Should he have seen the clues when he was young? Maybe he should have realised that it wasn’t normal for a British man to speak several languages, to live in an isolated stilt house on a remote beach with rural villagers as his nearest neighbours.

  Lizard remembered waking one night to hear Uncle Archie speaking in a low voice from his bedroom. He’d got up and found his uncle’s bedroom door locked. His curiosity made him sneak outside to go and look in through the window.

  The moon had been huge and orange that night, lighting a path across the sea that seemed to end at Uncle Archie’s window. The palm fronds high above whispered and rustled in the breeze and the sea shushed rhythmically on the shore as Lizard peered in.

  Uncle Archie was sitting at his table, with headphones on. He was bent over a strange box with knobs and wires coming off it. He spoke quietly into a hand-held device, in between smoking a cigarette. Occasional squeaks and buzzes came from the box, and then a crackly voice. Smoke wreathed the moonlit room. Lizard had hardly ever seen Uncle Archie smoke. The whole thing had looked mysterious. Lizard didn’t understand what was going on, but he knew he wasn’t meant to see it. He had crept back to his room.

  Now, having watched countless American pictures at the Capitol Theatre, he knew the box was a radio set, for talking to people far away. Who had Uncle Archie been talking to, in such a furtive way?

  And all those ‘hunting trips’ when Uncle Archie had been away for weeks—exactly what had he been hunting?

  Lizard wished he had asked more questions. Lili and that silver-haired Miss Adelia were spies. Was it possible that Uncle Archie was a spy too?

  ‘Wei, Lizard-ah, got customer for you,’ came a voice in Cantonese from outside his cubicle.

  ‘Not now, Ah Mok,’ Lizard said, turning to face the wall. ‘I mean it.’

  ‘I think you’ll want to see this one.’ Ah Mok sounded puzzled and amused at the same time.

  ‘No! Go away.’

  ‘It’s like a woman…girl…um, like a Malay woman girl. Asking for you.’

  ‘What?’ Lizard didn’t know any Malay woman girl who would come asking for him, but his mind was taken off Uncle Archie for a moment.

  ‘Yes, well, she is wearing a Malay hijab. She very loud. Talking English. “Lee-zahrd! Lee-zahrd! You know preetty boy Lee-zahrd?”’ said Ah Mok, speaking English in a high-pitched, grouchy way, which gave Lizard a horrible suspicion.

  He sat bolt upright, bumping his head on the shelf.

  ‘Ouch!’ he said, just as a figure in a hijab and a long shapeless tunic pushed past Ah Mok into the cubicle.

  ‘Oh, thank goodness,’ she said, handing Ah Mok a coin and pushing him out. ‘Thank you! Goodbye! Shoo!’

  Ah Mok took the coin, grinned widely at Lizard and left.

  ‘How do the Malay girls stand it?’ grumbled the figure as she ripped the head veil off, revealing red hair tied up in a messy bun.

  Lizard stared, dumbfounded, into the wide blue eyes of Georgina Whitford Jones. The eyes were unmistakable, but her face and hands were an odd, brown-yellow colour.

  ‘I told you I could find you.’ She reached out with a finger and closed Lizard’s jaw for him.

  Lizard leapt off his bunk and ran a hand through his hair. He was terribly conscious of the shabbiness and closeness of his space, his shelf with
his bowl and chopsticks, and the piles of paper and sacking on his bunk. He hoped it didn’t smell too bad (would she notice ginger, garlic, incense, overripe fruit?) and he hoped that she couldn’t hear the raucous yelling in the background that was Cantonese people having a pleasant conversation.

  Lizard seized the singlet he had carelessly discarded and pulled it over his head. He moved a stack of paper under his bunk. His school clothes and—horrors!—his oldest pair of shorts were hanging on a nail under his shelf. Hoping Georgina somehow hadn’t noticed them, he snatched the shorts and shoved them under his bag.

  Finally, he turned, giving his singlet a last tug and his hair a last swipe.

  Georgina watched all his frenzied manoeuvres with a little smirk.

  ‘Missy Georgina!’ said Lizard. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘That was easy. I just came to Chinatown and asked.’ She looked all about the narrow, shabby space. Lizard winced and wondered what the chances were that none of the Chinatown boys would hear about it. Zero, he decided.

  ‘Where did you get that outfit?’ he said, staring at her in fascination. With her head down and in the dappled lights of a Singapore evening, it would be an effective disguise.

  ‘Our room boy at Raffles. He’s so helpful, you just can’t imagine.’ She smiled smugly, and Lizard wondered what she had threatened Roshan with to make him help her.

  ‘And that colour?’ he asked, waggling his fingers in front of his face.

  ‘Paprika and a little turmeric paste. I’ve done it before.’ She studied the back of her left hand. ‘Do you think it suits me?’

  Up close, the colour was jarring and unnatural. He’d only ever seen one person anywhere near that colour, and that person had been suffering from malarial jaundice. Also she had missed a bit just in front of her left ear.

  ‘Lovely,’ he lied. ‘Um…why are you here?’ For the life of him, Lizard couldn’t even guess at the reason for her visit to his extremely un-Raffles-like cubicle.

  Georgina took a step towards him and inspected the shelf over his bed. She smelled of curry powder. It was disturbing.

  ‘Don’t you like me being here?’ Georgina whispered, turning to look into Lizard’s eyes.

  He jerked back, bumping his head on the shelf again and then sat down on his bunk.

  She laughed and sat down next to him. ‘You’re so amusing, Dinesh! I want to know how you knew where I was being held by those horrible Japanese men. You didn’t have anything to do with my kidnap, did you?’

  ‘No, of course not!’ said Lizard, taken aback.

  ‘When I got back to Raffles, I told my father where I’d been held captive. He sent the authorities to Middle Road straight away, and found the place filled with screaming children, but none of those thugs anywhere.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Lizard. ‘I guess they knew you’d set the British on them as soon as you could.’

  Georgina narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Yes, but what about the children? Wouldn’t the Japanese have just slipped quietly out the back and got away? Wasn’t the door locked?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Lizard lied again. He paused, thinking hard. ‘You know how children love lollies. There was a big jar left on the counter. They should be careful of rats too.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Georgina, still staring at him. ‘Anyway, how did you find me in the first place?’

  Lizard didn’t know what to say. Georgina was clever, and if he said anything, he was likely to say the wrong thing and then Lili would get angry. There was not the slightest doubt in his mind that Lili would find out everything he said to Georgina.

  ‘I can’t say,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t you?’ she said, in a steely voice. ‘Perhaps, then, you would like to explain why not to my father.’

  Lizard leapt off the bunk. ‘What? Is he here?’

  ‘No, but he could be,’ Georgina said. ‘I’m such a naughty daughter, leaving the suite hidden in the dinner trolley pushed by our clever room boy. I’m feeling guilty now and I think I’d better go back and confess to my father all about you.’

  Lizard gulped. He had not thought about how much trouble he could be in if Georgina told her father about him. He realised that getting rid of the codebook didn’t mean his problems with the Whitford Joneses were over at all.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, watching his face. ‘I haven’t once mentioned you to my beloved father. Or that officious girl—what’s her name? Something common…oh yes, Lili. It’s all very odd and I want to know what’s going on.’

  Lizard kept his mouth shut.

  ‘I listen to my father talking, you know. It’s to do with the Japanese and the war, isn’t it? He talks to Commander Baxter and I hear what they say. Come on, tell me how you found me after that brute kidnapped me.’ She stared expectantly at him.

  Thinking about ‘that brute’ gave Lizard a burst of inspiration. He said, ‘I followed you. Yes, that’s right. I followed you when that brute grabbed you.’

  ‘Goodness!’ she said, impressed. He was enjoying the glow of her blue-eyed admiration, but those eyes suddenly narrowed. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘They dragged me into a car. A very fast car. Very fast.’

  ‘The truth is, I was sitting at the top of the wall wondering…planning, really, how I was going to rescue you when…’ Lizard couldn’t think of what to say next. Then, with another burst of inspiration, he continued, ‘I saw the car come back up Beach Road from the other direction, more slowly and then I jumped off the wall and followed it and it turned into Middle Road—’

  ‘And then you saw how they had wrapped me in horrible sacking and how they carried me—valiantly struggling—into the shop!’ Georgina finished for him. ‘Aren’t you clever!’

  She reached over with her oddly coloured face and pecked him on his cheek. ‘That’s for you,’ she said, as if bestowing a medal.

  Lizard was stunned. The kiss wasn’t entirely pleasant, with its whiff of curry and condescension. He blushed.

  Georgina didn’t seem to notice. ‘How long have you lived here?’ she asked.

  ‘About two years,’ he said, relieved at the change of subject.

  ‘You know, the first time I met you I couldn’t believe my eyes. At first, I thought you were just another local thief, and I’ve met plenty of those back in India. But then your face! Not Indian, not Chinese, not English. And then your voice! So British. I couldn’t work out where you could possibly belong, but now I see.’ She looked around. ‘Yes. Now I see.’ Her eyes took in the dark blue trilby hanging on the wall, then moved along to the photo of a smiling man in uniform. She leaned in and studied the photo. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Nobody!’ he said fiercely, staring at the photo.

  ‘Nobody?’ asked Georgina.

  Lizard was suddenly panic stricken, as if by denying Uncle Archie, he had somehow lost him all over again. He continued looking at the photo, his eyes tracing the contours of his uncle’s face, and comparing this smiling healthy man in the picture with the haggard figure in chains in the emporium basement. ‘It’s my Uncle Archie,’ he said. ‘I used to live with him.’

  Georgina was quiet for a moment. ‘I have three brothers: Frank, Edward and Everard,’ she said. ‘One by one they were all sent home to England for their education. Sent ‘home to England’, can you imagine, when we were all born in India! They were all as jolly as anything when they left. When Frank came back to New Delhi last year, I hardly recognised him, he was so pale and stuck up.’ Georgina crossed her arms and frowned. ‘When Father wanted to send me to England two years ago I refused. I’d been there once when I was six and all I remember is that it was cold, dreary and grey. Luckily, Mother sided with me and so I got to stay in India.’

  Lizard nodded, wondering what all this had to do with him.

  ‘Anyway, Father says we might have to stay in Singapore for a good while. Something to do with the company. Mother and Father are going to look at a company house in a few days, in a place called Tanglin. It’s quite near C
hinatown so I can sneak out and visit you.’ She reached out and patted his hand. ‘I knew from the very first that we were going to be friends, didn’t you?’

  Lizard stared at Georgina, horrified. ‘But…’ he glanced around at his space. ‘This is Chinatown. It’s lousy! You don’t belong here. You have to leave!’

  He flinched as Georgina rounded on him. ‘Don’t tell me I don’t belong here! I don’t belong anywhere!’ Her lip trembled, but her eyes remained defiant. ‘We can be friends or we can be enemies. You choose.’

  As Lizard looked at Georgina, who was one moment palm sugar and the next razor blades, all he knew was that if Georgina didn’t kill him, then Lili would.

  ‘Friends,’ he gulped. ‘I choose to be friends.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Nightingale and the Gamekeeper

  ‘Excellent work, Lili,’ said Miss Neha. ‘Your copy of the Japanese Navy codebook is a triumph.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ said Miss Adelia, sipping her tea. The three of them were back at the Girls’ Mission School, having afternoon tea in Miss Neha’s study the day after the Tanaka’s Emporium incident.

  Lili and Miss Neha looked at Miss Adelia, surprised, and, in Lili’s case, somewhat dismayed.

  Miss Adelia smiled. ‘The real triumph,’ she said, ‘was returning the codebook so that the enemy didn’t realise it had been copied.’

  ‘True,’ said Miss Neha. ‘Who would suspect children of espionage? And a girl, what’s more.’

  Lili flushed with pleasure at the compliment. Lili had written a complete report for Miss Adelia and Miss Neha, including Lizard’s part in the previous day’s events—this was unavoidable, as they had met him already, so she hadn’t hidden anything. Lili was relieved that they didn’t seem to think he was an enemy spy.

  ‘Well. Neha, I think this outcome more than proves the worth of the S-Stream project, don’t you?’ ‘Guaranteed funding for another year, perhaps?’ Miss Neha took a happy sip of her tea.

  ‘Two years, I’d say,’ said Miss Adelia, reaching for a chocolate éclair. ‘The War Office is very pleased to have the copy of the codebook photographs. Really, these Minox cameras are a wonder!’