The houses stood around him in the sun, sealed worlds where he had briefly returned to his childhood. As he set out on the long journey to the Bund he thought of the Japanese soldiers who had fed him from their cooking pot, but he knew now that kindness, which his parents and teachers bad always urged upon him, counted for nothing.
10
The Stranded Freighter
Cold sunlight shivered on the river, turning its surface into chopped glass, and transforming the distant banks and hotels of the Bund into a row of wedding cakes. To Jim, as he sat on the catwalk of the funeral pier below the deserted Nantao shipyards, the funnels and masts of the Idzumo seemed carved from icing sugar. He cupped his hands into a pair of make-believe binoculars and studied the white-suited sailors, as busy as lice, who moved around the decks and bridge. The cruiser’s gun turrets reminded him of the candied decoration on the Christmas cakes whose overripe flavour he had always hated.
All the same, Jim would have liked to eat the ship. He imagined himself nibbling the masts, sucking the cream from the Edwardian funnels, sinking his teeth into the marzipan bows and devouring the entire forward section of the hull. After that he would gobble down the Palace Hotel, the Shell Building, the whole of Shanghai…
Steam throbbed from the Idzumo’s funnels, calmed itself and drifted across the water in a delicate veil. The cruiser had drawn its stern anchors and was swinging on the tide, bows pointing downstream. Having helped to impose Japanese rule upon Shanghai, it was about to sail for another theatre of war. As if celebrating, a regatta of corpses turned on the tide. The bodies of scores of Chinese, each on a raft of paper flowers, surrounded the Idzumo, ready to escort the cruiser to the mouth of the Yangtze.
Jim kept watch for the Japanese naval patrols. Across the river, on the Pootung shore, were the galvanized roofs and modern chimneys of his father’s cotton mill. Jim vaguely remembered his visits there, embarrassing occasions when the Chinese managers paraded him under the expressionless gaze of thousands of mill girls. Now it was silent, and what concerned him was the boom of the sunken freighters. The nearest of the wrecks, a single-funnel coaster, sat in the deep-water channel only a hundred yards from the end of the funeral pier. Its rusting bridge, like a crumbling brown loaf, still held all its mystery for him. War, which had changed everything in Jim’s world so radically, had long since left this forgotten wreck, but he was determined to go out to the ship. Rejoining his parents, giving himself up to the Japanese, even finding food to eat, meant nothing now that the freighter was at last within his reach.
For two days Jim had wandered along the Shanghai waterfront. After being discovered by the Japanese patrol he set off for the Bund. His only hope of seeing his parents again was to find one of their Swiss or Swedish friends. Although the European neutrals drove through the streets of Shanghai, Jim had not seen a single British or American face. Had they all been sent to prison camps in Japan?
Then, as be cycled along the Nanking Road, he was overtaken by a military truck. A group of fair-haired men in British uniforms sat behind the guards.
‘Speed up, lad! Let’s see you look lively!’
‘Faster than that, lad! We won’t wait for you!’
Jim crouched over the handlebars, feet whirling on the pedals. They were cheering and waving to him, clapping their hands as the Japanese guards frowned at this absurd British game. Jim shouted at the disappearing truck, and there was laughter, and a last thumbs-up when his front wheel locked itself in a tramline and pitched him under the feet of the pedicab drivers.
Soon after, he lost his bicycle. He was trying to straighten the front forks when a Chinese shopkeeper and his coolie came up to him. The shopkeeper held the handlebars, but Jim knew that he was not trying to help. He stared into the matter-of-fact eyes of the two Chinese. He was tired and had been slapped enough.
Jim watched them wheel the cycle through the crowd and vanish into one of the hundreds of alleyways. An hour later he reached the Szechwan Road on foot, but the entire financial sector of Shanghai was sealed by hundreds of Japanese soldiers and their armoured cars.
So Jim went down to the Bund to look at the Idzumo. All afternoon he wandered along the waterfront, past the mud-flats where the injured sailors of the Petrel had come ashore and he had last seen his father, past the sampan jetties and the fish market with its pallid mullet laid out between the tramlines, to the quays of the French Concession where the Bund ran out in the funeral piers and shipyards of Nantao. No one molested Jim there. This area of creeks and waste tips was covered with the timbers of opium hulks, the carcasses of dogs, and the coffins that had drifted ashore again on to the beaches of black mud. In the afternoon he watched the Japanese seaplanes moored to their buoys at the Naval Air Base. He waited for the pilots to come out in their flying goggles and stroll down the slipway. But no one except Jim seemed interested in the seaplanes, and they sat on their long pontoons, propellers irritated by the wind.
At night Jim slept in the back seat of one of the dozens of old taxis dumped on to the mud-flats. The klaxons of the Japanese armoured cars wailed along the Bund, and the searchlights of the patrol boats flared across the river, but Jim fell asleep quickly in the cold air. His thin body seemed to float on the night, hovering above the dark water as he clung to the faint human odours that rose from the taxi’s seats.
It was high water, and the seaplanes had begun to circle their buoys. The river no longer pressed against the boom of freighters. For a few moments the surface congealed into an oily mirror, through which the rusting steamers emerged as if from their own reflections. Beside the funeral piers the sampans swayed forward, loosened from the mud-flats even as they filled with water.
Jim squatted on the metal catwalk, watching the water slap at the grille between his feet. From his blazer pocket he took one of his last two liqueur chocolates. He studied the cryptic scrolls, like the signs of the zodiac, and carefully weighed them. Saving the larger, he placed the smaller in his mouth. The fiery alcohol stung his tongue, but he sucked on the dark sweet chocolate. The brown water swelled glassily around the pier, and he remembered that his father had told him how sunlight killed bacteria. Fifty yards away the corpse of a young Chinese woman floated among the sampans, heels rotating around her head as if unsure in what direction to point her that day. Cautiously, Jim decanted a little water from one palm to the other, then drank quickly so that the germs would have no time to infect him.
The liqueur chocolate, and the swilling rhythm of the waves, made him feel giddy again, and he steadied himself against a waterlogged sampan that bumped against the pier. Looking up at the decaying freighter, Jim stepped without thinking into the sampan and pushed out into the jelly-like stream.
The rotting craft was half-filled with water that soaked Jim’s shoes and trousers. He tore away part of the freeboard, and used the pulpy plank to paddle towards the freighter. When he reached the ship the sampan had almost submerged. He seized the starboard rail below the bridge and climbed on to the deck, as the waterlogged hulk drifted on its way to the next freighter in the boom.
Jim watched it go, then walked through the ankle-deep water that covered the metal deck. The river had begun to shift slightly, and the waxy surface was unbroken as it entered the open stateroom below the bridge and ran out through the port rail. Jim stepped into the stateroom, a rusting grotto that seemed even older than the German forts at Tsingtao. He was standing on the surface of the river, which had rushed from all the creeks and paddies and canals of China in order to carry this small boy on its back. If he stepped on to the waves by the port rail he could walk all the way to the Idzumo…
Towers of smoke shuddered from the cruiser’s funnels as it prepared to raise anchor. Were his parents on board? Aware that he might now be alone in Shanghai, on this steamer he had always dreamed of visiting, Jim gazed from the bridge towards the shore. The tide was beginning to run, and the flower-decked corpses were following their heels to the open sea. The freighter leaned in the strea
m, and its rusty hull creaked and sang. The plates sawed against each other, and the trailing hawsers swung across the foredeck, the halyards of invisible sails still hoping to propel this ancient hulk to the safety of some warm sea a world away from Shanghai.
Happily, Jim felt the bridge shudder under his feet. As he laughed to himself at the rail he noticed that someone was watching him from the shipyard beyond the funeral piers. A man wearing the coat and cap of an American seaman stood in the wheelhouse of one of three partly constructed colliers. Shyly, but captain to captain, Jim waved to him. The man ignored him, and smoked the cigarette concealed in his hand. He was watching, not only Jim, but a young sailor in a metal dinghy which had cast loose from the next steamer in the boom.
Eager to welcome his first passenger and crewman, Jim left the bridge and made his way down to the deck. The sailor drew nearer, rowing in strong, short movements, careful not to disturb the water. Every few strokes he looked over his shoulder at Jim, and peered through the portholes as if he suspected that this rusty freighter was infested with small boys. The dinghy sat low in the water, weighted down by the sailor’s broad back. He pulled alongside, and Jim saw a crowbar, spanners and hacksaw between his boots. On the bench seat were the brass rings of porthole mounts prised from the ships’ hulls.
‘Hello, kid – going for a run up the coast? Who else is with you?’
‘Nobody.’ For all the hope of safety that this young American offered, Jim was not eager to leave the ship. ‘I’m waiting for my mother and father. They’ve been…delayed.’
‘Delayed? Well, maybe they’ll come later. You look like you need some help.’
He reached out to climb aboard, but as Jim took his hand the sailor pulled him roughly into the dinghy, jarring his knees against the brass portholes. He sat Jim upright and fingered his blazer lapels and badge. His loose blond hair framed an open American face, but he scanned the river in a furtive way, as if expecting a Japanese naval diver in full gear to break surface alongside the dinghy.
‘Now, why are you trying to bother us? Who brought you out here?’
‘I came by myself.’ Jim straightened his blazer. ‘This is my ship now.’
‘Some kind of crazy British kid. You’ve been sitting on that pier for two days. Who are you?’
‘Jamie…’ Jim tried to think of something that would impress the American; already he realized that he should stay with this young sailor. ‘I’m building a man-flying kite…and I’ve written a book on contract bridge.’
‘Wait till Basie sees this.’
As they drifted from the freighter the American drew on his oars. With a few powerful strokes he pulled the dinghy towards the mud-flats. They entered a shallow creek between the funeral piers, a black and oil-stained channel that wound past the shipyards. The American stared morosely at an empty coffin that had jettisoned its occupant. He spat into it for good luck, and fended it off with an oar. Expertly he steered the dinghy behind the white hull of a mastless yacht lashed to a beached lighter. Hidden below the swanlike overhang of the yacht’s stern, they tied up at a wooden stage. The American looped the porthole mounts on to his arm, gathered his tools together and beckoned Jim from the dinghy.
They crossed the floor of the shipyard, past stacks of steel plate, coils of chains and rusting wire, towards the shabby hulls of the three colliers. Jim scurried along, imitating the American’s aggressive gait. At last he had met someone who could help him find his parents. Perhaps the American and his companion in the wheelhouse had also been trying to surrender? The three of them together would be too many for the Japanese to ignore.
An antique Chevrolet truck was parked under the propeller of the largest collier. They stepped through a missing plate into the hull. The American lifted Jim on to a bamboo platform laid along its keel. They climbed a companionway to the next deck, walked across the wheelhouse and ducked through a narrow hatch into a metal cabin behind the bridge.
Faint with hunger, Jim swayed against the door frame. A familiar scent hung in the air, reminding him of his mother’s bedroom in Amherst Avenue, the odours of face-powder, cologne and Craven A cigarettes, and for a moment he was sure that she would emerge from this dark cubbyhole like the Christmas fairy and tell him that the war was over.
11
Frank and Basie
A charcoal stove burned softly in the centre of the cabin, its sweet fumes lifting through an open skylight. The floor was covered with oily rags and engine parts, brass portholes and stair-rails. On either side of the stove were a deck-chair with ‘Imperial Airways’ stitched into its fading canvas, and a camp-bed covered with a Chinese quilt.
The American flung his tools into the heap of metal parts. His large head and shoulders almost filled the cabin, and he slumped restlessly in the canvas chair. He peered into the saucepan on the stove and then gazed gloomily at Jim.
‘He’s getting on my nerves already, Basie. I don’t know whether he’s hungrier or crazier…’
‘Come in, boy. You look like you need to lie down.’
A small, older man emerged from beneath the quilt and motioned to Jim with the cigarette he was holding in his white hand. He had a bland, unmarked face from which all the copious experiences of his life had been cleverly erased, and soft hands that were busy powdering each other under the quilt. His eyes took in every detail of Jim’s mud-stained clothes, the tic that jumped across his mouth, his pinched cheeks and unsteady legs.
He dusted the talc from the bed and counted the pieces of salvaged brass. ‘Is that all, Frank? That’s not a lot to take to market. Those Hongkew merchants are charging ten dollars for a bag of rice.’
‘Basie!’ The young sailor drove a heavy boot into the heap of metal, exasperated more with himself than with the older man. ‘The boy’s been sitting on the pier for two days! Do you want the Japs in here?’
‘Frank, the Japs aren’t looking for us. Nantao Creek is full of the cholera – that’s why we came here.’
‘You practically put up a sign. Maybe you want them to look for us? Is that it, Basie?’ Frank dipped a rag in a can of cleaning fluid. He began to rub vigorously at the grime that covered a porthole mount. ‘If you want to work so hard try going out there – with that kid watching you all the time.’
‘Frank, we’ve got my lungs, you agreed that.’ Basie inhaled a little smoke from his Craven A, soothing these delicate organs. ‘Besides, the boy didn’t even notice you. He had other things on his mind, boy’s things that you’ve forgotten, Frank, but I can still remember.’ He made a warm place for Jim on the bed. ‘Come over here, son. What did they call you, before the war started?’
‘Jamie…’
Frank threw down his rag. ‘All this scrap isn’t going to buy us a sampan to Chungking! We’d need the Queen Mary out there.’ He treated Jim to a dark glare. ‘And we don’t have enough rice for you, kid. Who are you? Jamie – ?’
‘Jim…’ Basie explained. ‘A new name for a new life.’ As Jim sat beside him he reached out a powdered hand and gently pressed his thumb against the hunger tic that jumped across the left corner of Jim’s mouth. Jim sat passively as Basie exposed his gums and glanced shrewdly at his teeth.
‘That’s a well-kept set of teeth. Someone paid a lot of bills for that sweet little mouth. Frank, you’d be surprised how some people neglect their kids’ teeth.’ Basie patted Jim’s shoulder, feeling the blue wool of his blazer. He scraped the mud from the school badge. ‘That looks like a good school, Jim. The Cathedral School?’
Frank glowered over his heap of portholes. He seemed wary of Jim, as if this small boy might take Basie from him. ‘Cathedral? Is he some kind of priest?’
‘Frank, the Cathedral School.’ Basie gazed with growing interest at Jim. ‘That’s a school for taipans. Jim, you must know some important people.’
‘Well…’ Jim was doubtful about this. He could think of nothing but the rice simmering on the charcoal stove, but then remembered a garden party at the British Embassy. ‘Once I wa
s introduced to Madame Sun Yat-Sen.’
‘Madame Sun? You were…introduced?’
‘I was only three and a half.’ Jim sat still as Basie’s white hands explored his pockets. The watch slipped from his wrist and vanished into the haze of cologne and face powder below the quilt. Yet Basie’s attentive manner, like that of the servants who had once dressed and undressed him, was curiously reassuring. The sailor was feeling every bone in his body, as if searching for something precious. Through the open hatch Jim could see a flying boat about to take off from the Naval Air Base. A Japanese patrol boat had closed the channel, giving a wide berth to the currents that formed huge whirlpools around the boom of freighters. Jim returned to the cooking pot and its intoxicating smell of burnt fat. Suddenly it occurred to him that these two American sailors might want to eat him.
But Basie had removed the lid from the saucepan. A flavoursome steam rose from a thick stew of rice and fish. Basie produced a pair of tin plates and spoons from a leather bag under the bed. Still smoking his Craven A, he served portions for himself and Jim with the deftness of a waiter at the Palace Hotel. As Jim wolfed the hot fish Basie watched with the same wry approval that the Japanese soldier had shown.
Basie tucked into the stew. ‘We eat later, Frank.’
Frank rubbed at a porthole, his eyes on the saucepan. ‘Basie, I always eat after you.’
‘I need to think for us both, Frank. Besides, we have to look after our young friend.’ He wiped a grain of rice from Jim’s chin. ‘Tell me, Jim, have you met any other Chinese big noises? Chiang Kai-Shek, maybe…?’
‘No…but his name isn’t really Chinese, you know.’ The hot food made Jim’s brain swim. He remembered a word his mother had used, which he had always tried to work into his conversations with adults. ‘It’s a corruption of Shanghai Czech.’
Empire of the Sun Page 8