Key to the Door

by Alan Sillitoe

  They linked arms and made their way with “Roll Out the Barrel” to the bus stop. Bert was half asleep while the bus crawled into town and only woke up loud and clear when Brian tried to kiss Rachel as well as Edna. Bert pushed him away and they poured on to the Slab Square pavement where the bus route ended. Edna lived at Sneinton and Rachel in the Meadows, so the foursome split up.

  A cold mist cleared the fumes from Brian’s eyes, his body light, though more controllable. He kept a tentacle well-placed around Edna’s waist as they walked and was not afraid of snapping her in two any more. In fact, she gripped tight as well, which made him hope he was in for something good. The streets were empty except for an occasional mob of swaddies making for the NAAFI or YM. They went in a silence of loving expectation past the Robin Hood Arms and turned up Sneinton Dale. He wanted to ask whether she was married and had any kids, but didn’t because he sensed she’d get ratty and wouldn’t answer. A solitary drunk pushed into them and Brian swung to shove back, but Edna dragged his arm and asked him not to be a fool—which was the most definite thing she’d said all evening. They entered a long street of small houses. “You live here?”

  She stopped by one. “Just here.”

  “Can I come in then?”

  “You’d better not. My husband’s at home.”

  “I can’t see any lights on.”

  “Wise guy,” she answered, which retort made him wonder how many Yanks she’d been with, and brought up the hope that he wouldn’t get a dose of the pox. She leaned by the door and he pressed in for a kiss, whispering: “Let’s go up Colwick Woods.”

  “I can’t, duck. It’s eleven. It’s late.” He enjoyed the kisses, for she clung to him and allowed his insistent leg to force hers open. “It wain’t tek long.”

  “I’m sorry, love, I’ve got to go.” But she didn’t pull away, though she pushed his hand gently down when it went too close. “My husband’ll come out.”

  “I don’t care. Come for a stroll to the end of the street.” Someone was walking up the entry, but she seemed not to have heard. “You will if he catches you. Anyway, I’ll get it, not you. Stop undoing my coat, it’s cold.” They buried themselves into another kiss. The stillness and force of their close-pressed kisses drew a haze over him and he felt himself on the razor’s edge of luck, either about to get what he wanted or be sent off alone up the empty street. But he told himself that if he went on trying long enough, even against her quiet entreaties to pack it up, then she would open herself and give in. “No, don’t, duck. Stop it, there’s a good lad. I’d like to, but I’ve got to go in now.”

  Footsteps sounded again from the entry, of someone soft-treading it out to the street. “Come on, Edna, we could have been at Colwick while we was chinnin’.”

  “I’m going,” she said, irritated now. “I’ve got kids to look after.” A shadow stood by them, silent and oppressive. Brian noticed it, felt it must be that of some neighbour out to see if his kid was on its way back from the fish-and-chip shop, though he cursed himself later that this was the first thing he should think of instead of just running like mad out of it. A stinging hammer of hard knuckles hit him between the shoulder blades and he swung round, ducking as he did so to avoid number two, which missed by an inch. The man, unable to brake, lurched against him.

  “Clive!” Edna cried, getting her information out in a fabulous hurry: “Stop it. Come on in. It worn’t owt. I’d only had a drink. He woks at our place.” Brian brought up the full iron strength of his arm into the man’s face before he could draw away, then hit him again and pushed him out towards the gutter, impelled to madness by what seemed the savage wreck of his shoulder blades.

  “You dirty bastard,” the man said, and ran back at him. His fist came up and met Brian in the middle of his forehead, making it feel as if the skin had been pushed into his scalp. Words fused with the pain and starlit darkness of his mind: He’s winning. He wants to kill me! And with both fists ready, he grabbed the man’s shirt and felt it rip as he smashed at his face, then rammed out with his shoulders and forced him away from the housefront, hitting out quickly to give more than he got. The man stood in the middle of the street. “Leave her alone,” he cried, his voice wavering. “Get off.”

  Brian waited with fists raised, though knowing that if he didn’t fight any more the man would be willing to let it drop. “Yo’ leave her alone as well, you daft sod. We’d on’y ’ad a drink.”

  “Ar,” the man said. “I know y’ave. I know all about that.”

  “Well, I’m telling you,” Brian said. He felt a loon standing with fists raised against fresh air; lowered them and walked off cursing his bad luck, determined not to rub the ache at his forehead until he had turned out of the street and could no longer be seen by the squabbling couple behind.

  On Sneinton Boulevard, a wide dark artery of emptiness all to himself, he burned more with rage than the pain of his indecisive fight, could have pulled God out of the sky and given him a good thumping—though what’s the use when there ain’t no God? Belt up, keep calm, then you’ll never come to harm. Yes, I know, he thought wrathfully, lighting a fag, and it’s no use feeling sorry about Pauline having chucked you, either.

  PART FOUR

  The Jungle

  CHAPTER 23

  At nine o’clock one June morning an open fifteen-hundredweight turned from the camp gates and set the heavy tread of its tyres north along the coast road. The sweat on Brian’s face was soon fanned dry by its speed and, one of six, he leaned against the side and took off his bush hat, felt his short fair hair jerking in the wind. He’d been up since five, checking maps, building up the contents of his pack, and stowing the compass where it wasn’t likely to smash or get wet. Shaded under the palms, the long cookhouse went back to sleep after they had eaten and clobbered out.

  He’d thought this day would never come, but now that the powerful rasping lorry engine roared them along towards Gunong Barat he was relaxed, hardly excited at all. Instead, strangely enough, when blue and cloud-reflecting paddy fields fanned out richly eastwards, thoughts and memories of Nottingham pushed into his mind and this dwelling on the past damped the intoxication he’d always expected to feel. He was puzzled, but grunted and lit a fag, bending under the backboard to escape the wind. Pauline came to mind: tall and abstracted as she walked along the privet-hedged pavement of the wide street, her pale face given character by a slight thinness after the baby had been born. Everything that happened to Brian since leaving school, the long four years of work and courting, had led to him marrying Pauline and thinking now: I’m spliced, though it’s never felt like it should, for even when I slept with her on my odd days of leave it only seemed like getting in a bit of rooky I wasn’t entitled to. Even the kid she had ain’t made much of a picture to my mind, so why did I marry her? I needn’t have done, in one way, and I haven’t spent enough married life with her yet to know whether or not I feel good at getting married when I did. Which I suppose is how you’re bound to feel when you come to think about it.

  The sun’s heat, seeming to pierce his skull in spite of the wind, slowly banished the intruding vision, and he was glad to give his eyes up to magic-lantern pictures of Malaya spread all around in colour. They reached the airstrip, and when a plane touched down, the lorry belted forward and slung Baker on to the load of packs. “You louse-bound bastard,” he screamed. “I suppose he thinks we’re just the normal air-force cattle. Why the bloody hell did he have to wake us this morning? I was having marvellous dreams, riding down through Kent with a smashing girl on the pillion. There’s just no civilization left.”

  “Stop your effing griping,” Kirkby growled. “You get on my wick. Why did you bleddy-well come if you didn’t want to?”

  “There are stranger things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Kirkby.” Baker wasn’t capable of sneering, but the angle at which he held his head (really a physical defect due to bad eyesight) and the tone of superiority in his voice often angered those wh
o didn’t know him, or were unable to match this feeling. “Listen,” Kirkby called back, “you’ll get this bloody bayonet up your bleeding philosophy if you don’t sodding-well belt up.”

  “You’re lucky to be here,” Brian said, “after we all lied for you the other day.” Baker, with a sane and self-righteous expression, had been marched into the orderly room on a charge of insubordination against the sergeant who’d said they weren’t to take suitcases back on the boat. Half the signals billet filed in behind to perjure themselves and testify that the sergeant had struck Baker first. So he had got off.

  The silver, geometrically spaced trees of a rubber estate grew miles back from the roadside, and bursting into open land once more, the stink of putrescent mud assailed them from the banks of a wide, shallow, hardly moving river. The lorry wheels treddled loose planks of a pontoon bridge, and Jack the Welshman hurrah-ed ironically on reaching tarmac. Brown pal-thatched huts of a kampong stood away from the roadside, every turn of which brought them nearer to Gunong Barat, so that by mid-morning its dark green humps climbed up and back to the sharp summit fixed against a mass of white-bellied cloud. “It looks beautiful, anyway,” Brian called to Knotman. “I’d never a seen this if I adn’t left Nottingham.”

  “It’s all relative, though,” Knotman said. “When I was stationed near London I used to like going round the East End—White-chapel and Bethnal Green—back along Cable Street. I used to find that inspiring in a strange way. Ever been to Petticoat Lane market? That’s beautiful as well. You ought to live in London when you get back. Get a job there.”

  “I’d like to. I never wanted to stick in one place. I expect there’s lots of small engineering firms in London as ’ud set me on.”

  “Sure. You’re young. Your wife wouldn’t mind a change, would she?”

  “Not if I want it,” Brian said. The broad main street of Balik Kubong was drawn by them like a sleeve, and they were back on the open road. Forking left at Penunjok, the lorry nearly scooped off with a petrol pump. “That bastard wants certifyin’,” Kirkby said. Rubber estates grew thicker around, and the lorry switched north along an unpaved road with a small river to the left—recognized from the map as the Sungei Pawan. The road ended sharply at the jungle’s edge, as if the surveyors had downed tools and refused to go farther at the sudden dispiriting thickness of the forest. Brian was so glad to leave the lorry he almost fell off: “He didn’t kill us, anyway.”

  The taciturn driver spun his lorry around and shot it between the trees, making for the more manoeuvrable spaces of the main road before louder curses got through to him. Brian heaved his pack up, shook it squarely against his shoulders. They were dressed in khaki shirts, slacks tucked in at the ankles to wide-topped mosquito boots, and bush hats. Each shouldered pack was squared by blanket and cape, and Christmas-treed around by a full waterbottle, haversack, kukri, and rifle. Brian looked at the jungle, stood in silence a minute or two as if wondering what he was doing there, and why he wanted to enter that towering wall of trees from which only the sound of rushing water emerged in an unfair tit for tat. So that’s the jungle: he grinned. Where’s all them tropical flowers and Technicolor parrots flitting from tree to tree? What about Tarzan and Martin Rattler, Allan Quatermain and Jungle Jim? Not that I ever believed in all that anyway, at least not after I left school. It was dark green and dull, full of gloom and the uninviting pillars of stark trees.

  They advanced in single file up the bed of the stream. Progress was slow, because the six-stone loads made them almost top-heavy. Slime-covered rocks underwater often upset their balance, and each on the first days at some time capsized into ice-cold water. Subsidiary hills shouldered to two thousand feet on either side, and the rolling jungle on their slopes looked impossible to penetrate. “I’d rather be in Kew Gardens,” Baker said and, as if to prove it, slipped and went down into the water like a raft that held up his pack, rifle, and hat. Brian levered him out.

  Odgeson was supposed to be in charge of the party, a tall thin fair-haired dental surgeon not long qualified and looking little older than the other twenty-year-olds. At the first pause for breath Knotman said, his voice firm yet kept in a narrow edge of respect and gentleness: “If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll be in charge from now on. I’ve done this sort of jungle-crawling before. It’ll be easier that way.”

  Odgeson agreed: “I was going to suggest it anyway”—pulled the two rings of rank from his shoulder straps and fastened them under the band of his cigarette case. They went on, each taking turns to be in front and find safe footsteps through the water. Ground rose slowly, and the tree gap stayed wide enough to let in sunlight, so that while they were often ice-cold to the waist, their shirts fastened heavily against them with sweat.

  Brian was happy with the exertion, careful to place one foot firmly down before swinging to the other. The pack chafed at his back because all food was in tins, and sharp rims came keen against his bones. Talk flew about, laughter ripping along the canyon of the stream, even Baker finding his feet and spirit after a while. It was a picnic, a climb in the woods for the first hours, and when the stream ballooned into a large clear pool of water they stripped to their tanned skins and waded in.

  It was necessary to climb between the trees proper, to outflank a ravine whose sides were sheer for hundreds of feet, a sickle-shaped cleft as narrow as a knife-wound in the mountain slope. Knotman led the way, slung his rifle and drew a razor-edged kukri from its case, parting the bushes for a drag upwards. “Picnic over,” Jack the Welshman said, second in the file. They struggled through damp soil and undergrowth, lifting into shadows and semi-darkness. Above and all round them on the steep slope grew trees and tangles of bushes. Neither Brian nor anyone but Knotman had ever seen the like, and they wondered how they’d get through it. Creepers and climbing plants hung with mosses, and ferns were bound together with long trailers, crossed like webs of rope that some impatient giant had tried making but given up as a bad job. Tall forest trees loomed roundabout, and the thick massive foliage of their tops made a canopy that seemed to have kept the sky back for thousands of years.

  “Why don’t somebody put the light on?” Kirkby shouted. It rained, a steady unobtrusive downbeat of water that ate into all they carried. A path was cut slowly through. Loaded like pack mules, they found the climb exhausting, and after a few hundred feet, each fell into the undergrowth for a rest. Brian pulled clods of red soil from his soaking boots.

  “Come on,” Knotman said. “It’ll be dark soon.” With laughter they were on their way, trying to follow the contour and keep the stream parallel, but in reality travelling eyeless since there was no view and even the compass gave no useful aid. Brian took the lead, wielding his kukri at the creepers, one almost strangling him before he saw it. His arms became leaden and unmanageable, as if held into his body by bandaged wounds. “Have a turn now,” he said to Kirkby. Baker cursed blind in disentangling himself from creepers. They seemed to have it in for him, Brian suggested, and caught at his pack, rifle, arms, and legs. He slipped and began rolling, but latched on to a friendlier vine before he went too far down the hillside. Odgeson and Brian pulled him upright—“like getting a knight in armour on to his horse,” Brian said. “We need a block-and-tackle for this bleeding job.”

  Another hard stretch and they sat down again. It still rained. Brian levered a tin of cigarettes from his pocket, handed them around. Wet soil soaked through to his skin, and a stream of water, collected by some hollow and hoarding leaf in the treetop world above, slid down on to the brim of his hat. What a place! As a child (and more recently) he’d imagined the adventure of living beyond all forms of shelter, himself pitted abroad against the vagaries of God’s earth, and the abiding sensation had been one of comfort and self-possession, of glorying quietly in his solitude. His long nights alone in the DF hut had given him a forerunning taste of the hermit life, but now that he was wet and chafed under the jungle trees and a long way from shelter or bed, the battle against nature seemed more real.
At the same time and in spite of all discomfort, such exposure lit the recesses of his hermit soul with a light that made him feel more equal to himself than he had been before: fag-smoke warmed his lungs, and patterns blown from his lips stayed firm a few seconds in the heavy vaporous air. He sat apart. Hardly anyone spoke, and then in low voices as if trapped in some damp, dusky, and endless cathedral. Brian felt dazed, the first spells of exhaustion having worked their way, after so many months of soft life in camp, to the core of his understanding, so that he found the difference between today and yesterday hard to credit.

  They descended towards the stream and at half-past five laid camp on a flat bed of rock where the river dropped into a waterfall as if pouring itself through a funnel, the banks being only a few yards apart. Brian’s back ached, half-broken and on fire where the rim of the big pack had rubbed all day into him, and stripping off his shirt, he uncovered a wide red sore. Two tins of soaked fags were slung into the water, went bobbing their way towards the long drop of the waterfall. “That’ll be less to carry,” he said, aware again of his back, as if a bite had been taken out of it.