Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  Her silence hit him like a double hammerblow of optimism and despair, a carpenter’s pendulum to stop you doing anything, yet keep you living. Where do you go from the highest point of passion? To sustain it into love would have meant seeing her more often, which, because he was a prisoner, was impossible. He reached the agony of believing that perhaps he had wanted the break to come, because the toil and emotional fight needed to sustain what he may have imagined to be there in the first place was too much for his diminishing energy in the blood-boiling north of Malaya. Maybe she just doesn’t want to see me and that’s that.

  Granted that what the eye didn’t see the heart couldn’t grieve, he realized he was nevertheless doing the dirty of the rottenest sort on Pauline, thought of her often from his far-removed and new-cut stomping grounds of Kota Libis, knowing that while opportunity offered he hadn’t the will to do more or less than accept it. He had neither felt nor heard any angel of moral injury on his silent expeditions through the Patani darkness and swamps to see Mimi, and as long as he didn’t wonder whether or not Pauline was playing the same trick on him, he hardly thought to explore the unfaithful pointers of his own actions. But he was eventually pushed into considering such a possibility when the idea that Mimi could be betraying him crept into his mind. And this was such an enraging idea that he forgot about his injury to Pauline (and maybe hers to him) as soon as it was broached, detesting Mimi for a betrayal he could never have proof of.

  Mimi was strange to him because her one-sided character appeared so complete. Her chief trait seemed one of a lassitude so overpowering that his only reaction to it was anger. He saw no way in which they could really and finally meet in love, his immediate dark reason for this being that they were too much strangers to each other, having been born and reared in different parts of the world. I understood Pauline, he told himself, so why shouldn’t I get through to Mimi? Still, some women are harder to get to know than others—and don’t I know it?—for I was four years with Pauline before we had to run down to the Registry Office and get spliced up. Mimi is too passive, and I want somebody to grind myself to bits on maybe. Don’t be a loon: all you want is to shag yourself silly, you know you do; what brains you’ve got dive overboard as soon as you get a woman hot and undressed in bed. Mimi’s doing it on you, and it’s looped your vanity in a half-nelson. You thought you were all set to make a go of it, live it up for good perhaps, get married maybe (after you’d ditched Pauline, you foul bastard), and fill her with a few kids. Well, think on it: you’ll be back in England in six months and then where will you be with all this humming and aahing? Who knows where I’ll be in six months? I could walk away from this wireless set, tread on a snake outside the door, and be dead before I knew where I was. So all that crap about the future wain’t wash; except I suppose I’ll be back in England soon and loving it up with marvellous understandable Pauline.

  Life on the camp was boring between morse and map-making. Twenty-five dollars a week at eight to the pound was only enough to keep him in cigarettes and odd meals at the canteen, so he couldn’t dazzle himself with the expensive lights of Palau Timur more than once a month. No wonder Mimi’s fed up with me, he reasoned. If dad could send me a few quid every week—like some blokes get—I’d be able to jazz things up a bit. The poor bogger needs every penny for himself, even though he is at work. I don’t expect the couple o’ bob a day I allow Pauline would make much difference to my whooping it up either, because she could do with it, as well as the odd food parcel I’m able to post off now and again.

  The camp cinema had been six weeks closed because the rickety equipment had given out. It was so old they must have got it from the scrap-heap outside some shut-down flea-pit. You could go, of course, to the Nanking Talkies in the village, but it was a dead loss hearing Rin-Tin-Tin barking in Chinese and the man on Movietone News ringing his bell in Hindustani three months out of date, and seeing joss-smoke billowing from Buck Jones’s ivory-handled guns. So he’d sit in the billet, reading for hour after hour until his concentration snapped and he was ready to argue with anyone who happened to be about. No one believed in God, he found, and most would vote Labour if they were old enough. Getting them to admit a monarchy useless proved easy, and from then on, it wanted only half an hour to win them over to a form of Communism terrifying in its simplicity. At the apogee of his boredom he found himself possessed by a wild and compelling gift of the gab, would sit on the end of his bed and talk talk talk on any subject that came into his head, spouting without effort and only realizing afterwards that the boys had actually been listening with enjoyment, had been influenced by his voice, laughing when he said something amusing and nodding in agreement when he came out with the extreme breath of revolution. They’ll believe anything when they’re bored, he saw, exhausted from his peroration, pleased at himself as he fell asleep over his book.

  Baker sent paper aeroplanes flying from his bed, happy when they found landing-grounds on somebody’s book, letter, or face. He captured a large dung-beetle that hovered clumsily around the lights, imprisoned it in a matchbox while searching through his locker for a length of cotton. “Don’t hang it,” somebody shouted. “It looks a strong bastard: make it work.” He tied the cotton to the beetle’s back leg and the other end to one of his paper aeroplanes. “There’s no life in the bloody place,” Baker shouted as he released the beetle. With a buzz like the roar of a minute engine, it soared through the open door and lost itself in the trees. “Funny bastard,” a voice said.

  Brian was calm, halfway through a novel and wanting to finish it, but Baker was in a hard, useless, destructive mood. Someone put “Hora Staccato” on the gramophone, but Baker ripped it off and skimmed it out of the door so that it shattered against a tree. He then sat by the pile of records and slew the fifty of them after “Hora Staccato”—looking at each label before committing it to smithereens. No one thought the records good enough to save, as they were all of tuneless tunes out of the good old days.

  He broke the spell, caught sight of the table on which he sometimes spread a mattress and stretched out when he couldn’t stay awake. On its surface, reaching from side to side of the hut, was a kettle (that would leave a black ring when lifted), a tin of sugar housing a lucky ant or two, a packet of strong Air Ministry tea, a couple of tin mugs with flex around the handles, and a haversack of bread and cheese. Propped in a corner was a loaded rifle whose meat-skewer bayonet had been used to spit holes in a tin of condensed milk also on the table. There were over a hundred .303 rounds in a floor box, fifty more than the camp armoury knew about, hard cylindrical hand-outs with lead noses to punctuate or terminate whatever moved outside or in.

  The music grew back—or he turned round to it, unwilling to be entirely alone. A thought he considered stupid and out of place came to him: “I don’t want to go up to Gunong Barat. The only place I want to be is Nottingham.” It slid the earth from under him, like the trick when someone flicks the cloth from beneath a tableful of pots without disturbing them, the difference being they are nearer the reality of true-grained wood. With the ground insecure, he knew he would still go to Gunong Barat, which, though a self-erected obstacle, had to be crossed nevertheless because he had created it in his own mind as a stepping-stone to the future. In any case, Gunong Barat meant the jungle, a luring and mysterious word that had taunted him all his life from books and comics and cinema, an unknown flimsy world meaning something else, so that it would teach him perhaps whether or not he wanted to enter the real world it sometimes appeared to be screening. Without the expedition there would be no future, only a present, an ocean of darkness behind the thin blue of the day, a circle of bleak horizons dotted by fires burning out their derelict flames.

  He remembered an encounter with Mimi one night on his way back from the Egyptian café. She passed him in the darkness, was a few paces ahead before he called her name. When she turned, his feeling of gladness became one of misery at thinking she might have hoped to pass him unnoticed. “Where are you off at
this time of night?”

  Both were shocked at the meeting: “I’m going home,” she said. “I felt like walking.” She seemed in a hurry and he went along with her.

  “I could do with a stroll as well,” he said, curt and sarcastic, a mood that turned her into a perverse witch, no longer beautiful, and withdrawing. Well, he said to himself, you wanted to get to know her, now you have. She’s a whore, doing it on you. They walked in silence, he feeling a hopeless awkwardness, unable to speak as if his throat were full of soil.

  “I had a hard night,” she told him, walking unconcerned by his side. “An American ship is in harbour, and I’ve danced for five hours. We thought the police were going to come, but the Americans just got senseless and took each other back to their ship.”

  “I’ve been in the canteen,” he said, “playing dominoes.” The turning-off point was reached. A few people were about. A trishaw from the last ferry was taking a drunk back to camp. He wished it were midday and dazzling sun so that the shopfronts would be decked out like open pomegranates, with hair-cream and razor blades, watches and fountain pens, cameras and cheap shirts, fruits and food and people and traffic. He felt uneasy at being alone in a darkness in which you couldn’t really be alone, sensing beneath Mimi’s nonchalance her deeper uneasiness at being with him. Before he could broach the question, she said: “There isn’t a free night this week. Three Dutch ships are coming in and I’ll have to work all the time.”

  He said nothing, regretting that he was unable to make an immediate answer, though knowing it wouldn’t have done much good. Her mind was fixed. Maybe she’s fed up only for the time being and we’ll be on the old footing in a week or two. His notion that she’d found someone else made him sick with jealousy and disappointment, too confused to ask himself what had eaten into their love. I’d seen it coming, and maybe that was what was wrong. “I’m busy myself these days,” he said.

  “We’ll see each other again.” I suppose this is what they call a stiff upper lip, he thought; the stupid bastards. “I’ll let you know when I’ve got an evening off,” she said, almost tenderly. Maybe she’s happy I’m not doing my nut and pasting her all up the road. “I’ve been thinking of taking a job at Singapore,” she went on. “In fact, there’s a good chance I’ll be on my way soon.” This meant little to him: she’d spoken of it months ago, and it might come to nothing. But he said: “I hope you don’t go. I love you too much to let you go as easy as that.”

  “I know,” she said slowly. They kissed passionately, then broke away and walked in their different directions.

  He swore at the night, at himself, at everything under the night moon, his curses hammering at the stockade that had been built around the limit of his words without his knowing it, even before he was born perhaps. I can’t say or do a thing right. Christ, I’d cut my throat if this was the first tart I’d gone out with.

  He was hailed from a passing tri-shaw: “Hey, Brian, you dirty ramrod, where have you been sinning tonight? I didn’t see you in the stews of Pulau Timur.” Belt up, he thought, black as thunder. “If you want a lift, get in,” Knotman went on, “but if you want to walk your feet off your ankles, I don’t give a Gunong Barat.”

  “I heard you the first time.” He relented and sat in the tri-shaw beside him, the padding feet of the coolie clip-clopping along the empty road. “Been to the Boston Lights?” he asked Knotman through the high power of his whisky breath.

  “Not likely. Costs too much. I got me a nice steady girl, Eurasian, nurse at the hospital. Says she loves me and will I marry her? ‘Sure,’ I say, ‘be glad to when I’ve made up my mind.’ ‘You’re unjust,’ she says, ‘you’re persistently procrastinating, like Hamlet’ (she’s an intellectual like me: that’s why we get on so well). ‘It’s hardly fair,’ she says, ‘the way you use me’ (reads The Tatler as well). ‘We should get married, you know.’ We sit in the Botanical Gardens feeding the mokeys: ‘I’m rotten,’ I say to her, shedding tears of blood. ‘I’m the rottenest melon as ever rolled God’s earth; I’m as rotten as they come, so help me bloody God. So you’d better forgive me or I won’t be able to marry you; and stop taking my feed bottle away from me like that, you sly bitch, or I’ll sock you on the jaw.’ ‘I’m finished,’ she says. ‘You treat me worse than any prostitute from the Boston Lights. You only treat me so badly because you’ve lost your self-respect.’ Goes all deep down and perceptive on me, really gets her nails into my inside tripes—metaphysically speaking, of course (I’ve read The Tatler as well). ‘I’m going,’ she says, ‘I’m off. You’ve hurt me too much’—and here’s me rubbing my psychological sores because they’re giving me hell. But she ups and goes, and that’s the way life is with a woman. I meet her at the gate. ‘Where are you off?’ I asks. ‘I was hoping I’d see you again because I forgot to give you the poem I’d written to you.’ (I’m sobbing now, almost anyway.) ‘I’ve been working on it a week and have found it very difficult not to give it you before it was finished. But it’d be a terrible shame if we were to part for ever in this flippant fashion, before you know how much I really love you, and without me having shown you the marvellous poem I’ve been composing for you in my heart these last three months.’ I charm her—you understand? She listens. ‘I’m sorry,’ I says. ‘True love never runs smooth.’ (Her face has traces of smallpox, but I’m crazy about her.) ‘I’d like to hear your poem,’ she says. So we go back to the seat we were on before. I got out a piece of paper, maybe my will and testament, and made up a poem on the spot, anything to save my broken-down future marriage. I’ve been divorced after marriage, which was bad enough because it was against my Christian principles, but never split up in an irreparable divorce before marriage, which would be against my pagan principles. So I make up a poem as Miss Prim-and-Proper waits for the beautiful lines to flow—you know, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and all that crap:

  ‘I’ve loved you, my darling, since birds began to fly

  Since apple-loaves baked in my oven’s eye

  When fires begin you can’t put them out

  With anything less than a waterspout’—

  Well, that was the first verse and it wasn’t bad, being made up on the spot, even though I do say so myself. I’m not a Limey so don’t expect any false modesty from me. But after three more verses it wasn’t so much that my education (or lack of it) began to show as that my upbringing and dirty mind came through, so that, old buddy, I ended up with such a mouthful of barrack-room filth that she fled from me clutching her skirt, and the last thing I saw of my dark little nurse was two tri-shaw wheels going round a corner. I was broken-hearted and still am. I got myself a few drinks to drown my sorrows, because I’m sure I’ll never see my living doll again, and who can blame her? But out of the rotten carcass came forth sweetness, as they say in Sanders of the River—or was it Das Kapital?—and I’m going to start writing poetry as a life of penance. I’m going to be a real poet, even though I do say so while I’m as stoned as an iguana. I’m going to be a writer, get spot cash for deep thoughts. So when you see me tomorrow, remind me of what I say, because if you don’t I’ll forget all about it.”

  Brian guided him to his billet, tipped him fully dressed on his bed, and pulled down the mosquito-net.

  When Brian laughed at his own self-pity the bark of a pariah dog made a duet with him. The music ended and so did his sadness, and with a blank mind he walked to the door and booted it open, shivering as cold air blew into his sweat-ridden shirt. I want to get out of this, he said. Another three months and I’ll be on the boat, thank God. Five hundred yards towards the airstrip was another similar hut where pal Jack, not having to keep an all-night watch, had spent the last eight hours with his head down; and eastwards black humps of forest rolled up to the highest ridges of Malaya. He pissed a tune against a petrol tin to keep himself company, then went back and slammed the door.

  He listened out on frequency: nothing. The whole night sky of South-East Asia was empty of planes as far as he was concerned, but he didn
’t want to go to sleep. As soon as I get my head down, some no-good crippled kite will start belting out an SOS—and then where would all of us be? They’d be dead and I’d be in the glasshouse, but I wouldn’t let them down anyway. He called Singapore and got no answer: five o’clock. They’re asleep, but I don’t want to be, though the only thing that would waken me now is a woman, succulent and willing and fiery, burning for me as much as I would be for her. It doesn’t happen unless you get her that way yourself, though I know Pauline was marvellous, when I’ve got the heart to think back clear enough, adept and full of love when both of us were properly wanted. Well, I could read for a while, but what’s the use of reading a book? They lull you into a false sense of security, as Len Knotman says.

  His head went down on the desk, and in half a minute he was walled-up in sleep.

  Morse came marvellous and sudden-quick, a circular saw out of some rip-roaring operator fresh on the job, singing into the earphones still noosed around Brian’s neck and waking him. Sunlight cut under the hut door like the flame of a blow-lamp, a knife-glare that swamped his brain and pinned him to the foul interior air. Only the morse was clear, piercing beyond tiredness and cold sweat, and without thought he wrote it in the log, ran fingers through untidy hair as other notes jerked into the mêlée at varying scales and strengths. Stations were tuning up, filling the wavelength with staccato importunate utterings of good morning—as if every operator had smelt sunlight at the same time, or sat at his key only waiting for the first one to tap out his call sign before taking a running-jump in with his own rhythmical identity.

  He fastened the door open. Sun, visible above palmtops, pushed an ache of sleep back into his eyes, flooding warmth over him. Long-poled, sparsely set trees stretched thickly to jungle on mountainsides still purple in morning light, while clouds from seaward cast islands of shadow along the wide black canal of the airstrip, leaving a whiter reflection in paddy fields already shimmering to the south. A Dak revved up at the control tower, gleaming silver and going slowly along the runway. It gathered speed with a great belly roar, turned and stood as if for a final indraw of breath. A green light from the tower eased it forward, and it was a few feet off the ground by the time it came level with the DF hut, was soon heavy and slow over the sea towards Pulau Timur, then swinging back low over the trees, heavy with supplies for some distant outpost.