Spirit House

by Mark Dapin

  ‘Mei-Li snuffed out the opium lamp. She let my hands go further in the dark, but not by much. Lim climbed on top of Bathurst Billy, and I heard the door creak. It only opened a couple of inches, but I was waiting for it, and I watched Chinese Frank slide in on his belly and slither towards Bathurst Billy like a yellow-bellied black snake.

  ‘Bathurst Billy had left his rifle by his side. As Chinese Frank reached for the stock, I pushed Mei-Li away, jumped up and stamped on his hand. Chinese Frank looked up at me down the barrel of my gun. It was the first time I had pointed it at another human being.

  ‘The rest of the rickshaw men came rushing in, but backed off when they saw the gun. Mei-Li and Lim stood up slowly and walked to the door.

  ‘“What’s the joke, Frank?” I asked him. “Were you going to butcher us, or just steal our money?”

  ‘Bathurst Billy was up by now, too, poking his rifle at every man and his shadow.

  ‘“We need your guns,” said Chinese Frank, “to fight the Japanese.”

  ‘I laughed.

  ‘“We’re here to batter the Nips for you,” I said. “And anyway, they’re not coming.”

  ‘“We have begged the government for arms,” said Chinese Frank, “but the Chinese are not even permitted to join the militia. We have nothing but kitchen knives and clubs. But we will cave in their skulls with rickshaw shafts. We will gouge out their eyes with soup spoons.”

  ‘“Who are you, Frank?” I asked him.

  ‘“I am the organiser of the All Chinese Union of Rickshaw Men,” he said. “This is our headquarters.”

  ‘“He’s a commo,” said Bathurst Billy. “Shoot him.”

  ‘I wasn’t going to shoot him – at the time I didn’t reckon I’d ever shoot anybody, I didn’t think I had it in me – but I wasn’t about to let him go either. It was no bloody joke trying to crawl off with a digger’s weapon. We were supposed to guard them with our lives, not hand them over to the first boong sheila who turned the bloody lights out. All the bloody Japs would have to do was parachute in a regiment of Tokyo Roses and we’d all be disarmed and dead by morning.

  ‘And even if Chinese Frank hadn’t planned to knock us – and, in fairness, I reckon he was just going to knock us over the head with a big stick and drag us out into an alley – we would have been chucked in the bloody boob for losing our guns. They’d’ve locked us up in Changi and thrown away the key, ha-bloody-ha-ha.”

  Jimmy paused.

  ‘In history, that’s called “an irony”, David,’ he said.

  I nodded, as if ironies happened to me all the time.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Jimmy, ‘once you’ve got a weapon in your hands, you’ve got to do something with it, otherwise you feel like a right bloody galah. If you don’t actually fire the thing, you can at least wave it around a bit to make other blokes do what you want. So we used ours to herd Chinese Frank and the rickshaw men away from the sheilas and down the stairs. We were going to give them up to the wallopers and see how they liked it, but Chinese Frank was babbling on about how Mei-Li was his sister and they’d both escaped from Nanking after the Japs had cut the head off their old man and raped their mother to death while they’d watched from under a woodpile, and the only thing they wanted to do was die fighting the Japs but the Poms wouldn’t trust them with the keys to bloody shithouse. He kept offering more and more money for the bloody guns, until I asked him how many members he had in his organisation, which must’ve been richer than the Transport Workers Union in Australia.

  ‘“You have met them all,” said Chinese Frank. “It is a difficult industry to organise. Hengwah unite only with Hengwah, and Hokien with Hokien. The towkay are ruthless and many singkeh smoke chandu. When we strike, people say, ‘It’s a good thing. Get those cockroaches off the roads.’ But we will all die soon anyway. Do you have grenades? Could you give us grenades?”

  ‘“Let’s take him to the jacks,’” said Bathurst Billy. “They can shove a grenade up his Chinese arse.”

  ‘Chinese Frank stared at him, not angry or frightened, just caught.

  ‘Now I was a union man, the Zayde was a union man, all the cabinet makers were union men, but I’ve never known any blokes who needed a union worse than the poor bloody rickshaw pullers. And you can’t give up a bloke for trying to pinch a shooter to knock the bastards who killed his mother.

  ‘“Why don’t we all have a smoko,” I said, “and I’m not talking about bloody chandu.”

  ‘So we made a durry each and calmed down a bit, and everyone started speaking more slowly and Bathurst Billy stopped shouting, and Chinese Frank said we were all on the same side, and he knew he’d done the wrong thing, and Mei-Li and Lim came downstairs and looked at us with their sad brown eyes, and Bathurst Billy said, “Ah, let’s just piss off and forget it, but if we hear of any digger getting robbed of his rifle, we’ll smash up every bloody rickshaw and rickshaw man from here to Sago Lane.”

  ‘We weren’t too far from Sago Lane but it tickled Bathurst Billy that there was a road by that name in Singapore, so he said it whenever he got the chance.’

  *

  Mrs Ethelberger was a mysterious figure. Although I’d been told I had met her, I didn’t remember her at all. When I heard her name, it made me think of an overcooked beef pattie in a stale roll, sprinkled with potpourri and topped with a pickled herring. Grandma had been playing pinochle with Mrs Ethelberger and had come home to mix matzo meal with eggs to make knaidlach. She asked Jimmy about his tests. He said he’d been passed as fit for overseas service.

  ‘I’m off to North Africa,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ said Grandma.

  ‘There’ll be plenty of those,’ said Jimmy. ‘Blood up to my boots.’

  ‘Nisht! ’ said Grandma. ‘Enough.’ Grandma squinted at me.

  ‘I saw plenty of boys in school uniform today,’ she said.

  I ran my finger over a pattern in the wallpaper.

  ‘Short pants and straw hats,’ she said.

  ‘That’d be the private schools,’ I told her. ‘They went back early.’

  ‘And the yeshiva boys,’ said Grandma.

  ‘The yeshiva’s a private school too,’ I told her.

  ‘When do you go back to school?’ she asked.

  ‘After the break,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t need an education to carry a rifle,’ said Jimmy. ‘There’s plenty of professors in the boneyard.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he got you any lunch,’ said Grandma.

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Grandma, ‘you silly old fool.’

  Grandma gave us bagels with cream cheese and gherkins.

  ‘Beats bully beef,’ said Jimmy, smearing cheese over the bristles around his mouth.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Grandma. ‘And you should shave more.’

  ‘I’ve got no more to shave,’ said Jimmy. Grandma brought us tea in a pot.

  ‘Mrs Ethelberger says you were with that gonif Mendoza on Anzac Day,’ said Grandma.

  ‘Well, Mrs Ethelberger must’ve been there too,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘I hate that mamzer,’ said Grandma. ‘He gives us all a bad name.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jimmy. ‘The Jews were very popular with everyone until Mendoza came along.’

  Grandma kissed her teeth.

  ‘You don’t care,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t bother you that a man’s a murderer, as long as he buys his round. I don’t know how I managed to find a yiddisher husband who’s a shikker.’

  Grandma waited for Jimmy to finish his bagel, then asked, ‘So what did the doctor say about your heart?’

  Jimmy wiped his whiskers with his handkerchief.

  ‘He couldn’t find it, love,’ he said. ‘You stole it away, years ago.’

  Jimmy stood up at the table, pressed his hand to his chest and, in a deep, soaring voice, sang all three verses of ‘The Rose of Tralee’.

  ‘What’s that got to do with the price of fish?’ asked
Grandma.

  She went to hang the washing on the hoist, and Jimmy poured himself a second mug of tea.

  ‘When did the real war start?’ I asked him.

  ‘The real war?’ said Jimmy. ‘Soon enough. We made Chinese Frank our personal rickshaw man, although I never felt right about riding the poor bugger like an animal. He pulled us all around Singapore, showed us the sights of the city. The seat was narrow for two normal-sized blokes, but Bathurst Billy squeezed in next to me like a Siamese twin. All the time Chinese Frank kept asking us for arms and ammo, but we hardly had any ourselves. He tried his trick on a couple of Tommies, but they got the joke too. It was the bed that gave him away. You just can’t have a knocking shop without one.

  ‘Chinese Frank used to pull us to the taxi dances at the New World amusement park, under the flame of the forest trees on the esplanade, where there’d be girls wrapped up like Christmas presents with red ribbons in their hair. You could buy a book of five tickets for a dollar and use them to pay for a dance. Bathurst Billy said the sheilas there were like taxis because they’d always take you on the longest root for your dollar, but he never went with one himself. We’d been told ninety-nine per cent of the local women had VD. Bathurst Billy was a betting man, but he said only a mug would put a quid on those odds, although he might be tempted to drop a shilling each way, just in case it came in. He never would’ve gone with Lim, he said. He knew it was a joke, just like I did. Anyway, he’d heard Chinese sheilas had slanted holes. I think he’d just lost his nerve, to be honest.

  ‘When Chinese Frank wasn’t trying to persuade us to steal a field gun from the armoury, he’d tell us about the life of a rickshaw puller, how they suffered in their feet and in their belly, and their own hearts attacked them. They were robbed by other Chinese, or stabbed for not running fast enough. Tuam and mem fought them over their fares, peons harassed them, samseng beat them, the Sikh police arrested them, motor cars ploughed into them. They measured their lives in pipes. People said they were lazy, opium-addicted fan-tan gamblers and hoons, but they worked like dogs at a pace they called “dog-trot”, and no one but another puller could understand.

  ‘After the last strike, he said, many of the men packed their boxes and boarded steamers back to China, to fight the Japanese. The Party – although he never used that word – had ordered him to stay behind and organise.

  ‘“He’s just trying to convert us to commo-ism,” said Bathurst Billy, but he always gave Chinese Frank the spare change in his pocket, and told him to buy maa mee or satay for Lim.

  ‘I asked Chinese Frank if Mei-Li was working. He said she cooked porridge for the congee hawker, and baked mooncakes for the cake seller. She also cleaned the lodging house, where forty coolies slept on shelves in the wall or mats on the floor. At university she had studied to be a doctor but now, like the others, she was waiting to die.

  ‘“And kill,” said Chinese Frank. “Mei-Li is ready to kill.”

  ‘I remembered her soft hands, so light against my chest.

  ‘“If you like her,” said Chinese Frank, “you could give her your pistol.”

  ‘But we just laughed at Chinese Frank. We felt like we were missing the war. We knew the Japanese could never take Singapore, because it was guarded by sixteen-inch guns that could destroy a warship twenty miles into the ocean. But the only warships in the ocean were the Royal Navy’s unsinkable force, which the Japanese air force bloody sank the same day they tore into the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor.

  ‘Once they’d sunk the unsinkable, they came down the peninsula to preg the impregnable, and it was on for big and small.

  ‘It turned out to be us that didn’t know up from down. The Nips landed in the south of Thailand and the north of Malaya. We went up there to meet them, and we blued with them a couple of times, and I thought we did all right. I’d never been to war before, but it looked to me like we held our own.

  ‘But the Japs did know how to fight after all. They’d never bloody lost a war. The whole of Nippon was run by the army. It was their show.

  ‘We thought they’d come by sea, not by jungle and river. They cycled down the Malay Peninsula. Can you imagine that? They bloody cycled, like it was a weekend in the country. You’d never’ve thought you could cycle against tanks and planes, but then we didn’t have any: we were told tanks’d be no use in Malaya, and Stalin needed all our planes for Russia.

  ‘When the Japs ran out of road, they dumped their bikes and slipped into the jungle, dismantled their field guns and carried them in pieces. When they came out the other side, they just stole more bikes. They went around us and suddenly they were behind us. They circled us, cut our supply lines, and we had to fight our way backwards just to keep on retreating.

  ‘But we retreated and retreated, over the causeway and back to Singapore. The city was on fire, the Japs were bombing it to buggery, and our air force never arrived. There was a blood storm in the air like dust. The streets were crowded with reffos from Malaya, living in tents and under trees, as if they’d all rounded themselves up in the same place to die.

  ‘We blew up the causeway so the Japs couldn’t cross from the mainland, but they just jumped into their little boats and came in from the sea after all. So we were trapped on an island. We were told we’d have to fight to the last man, but suddenly we were ordered to stand down. Nobody could believe it. We weren’t allowed to die.

  ‘It wasn’t like we wanted to give up our lives for the planters or the boongs, and most of the blokes couldn’t give a rat’s arse for the Chinese, but we were supposed to be fighting to buy time for Australia to prepare herself for the Nips to swarm down the Dutch East Indies to Darwin. We weren’t defending Singapore and the Raffles bloody Hotel, we were fighting for our mothers and fathers and wives and children in Sydney. That’s why we would’ve never surrendered. Everyone in our unit wanted to fight on. But the only blokes who did were men like Chinese Frank.’

  ‘What was it like being in a battle?’ I asked.

  Jimmy looked out of the window and across the road to the tatty house where the frummers lived and stared into the cornered eyes of their Moshiach. ‘We were the first Aussie infantry battalion to fight the Nips. We ambushed the bastards at Gemencheh Bridge in Malaya, on 14 January 1942. There were hundreds of them, off to conquer the world on their bloody bicycles. We were hiding in the bush at the edge of the road, watching them laughing and singing and pedalling along like performing monkeys. And once the bridge and the road in front were both full of Japs, we blew the bastards back to their ancestors. Everything – trees, rocks, bridge, Japs, bikes – went up into the air and landed in the river like it had fallen from a plane. The noise was like the end of the world, an explosion, then fire, and crowds of men screaming: barbecued men, cooked men, filleted, wrapped and roasted men. We made a dinner for the devil, David, and I’ll never forget the smell.

  ‘We broke cover firing, me and Bathurst Billy on the Tommy guns, the artillery on the Brens, bowling hand grenades like cricket balls. We blew them to pieces, literally pieces: arms and legs and feet and heads, and other pieces I’d never seen before, like hearts and intestines and brains and lungs. We didn’t stop firing, and they barely started. They just lay there wriggling and struggling, and then they died.

  ‘The heat of the explosion welded them to the frames of their bikes. It was like they were half-man, half-bicycle, bodies with wheels, rickshaw men. And I was shooting and shooting and shooting, and in my mind I was yelling, “Fuck, I’m alive! I’m alive! I’m alive! I’m so fucking alive! And he’s dead! Look! He’s fucking dead! His head’s come off! He’s dead and I’m alive! Fucking look at the cunt! He can’t even fucking walk! He’s got no legs! Oh wow wow wow wow wow! Those bombs are so beautiful! Like fireworks full of feet!”’

  ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ he cried. ‘I’m aliiiiiiiiiiiiiive!’ he screamed. ‘I’m aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!’

  His teeth were grinding and his mouth was twisted and his eyes were crying, as Grandma came hobbl
ing in from the backyard. She grabbed Jimmy from behind and threw her arms around him, wrestling him until he was still.

  ‘It’s all right, love,’ she said. ‘Alles gute. It’s finished. You’re alive.’

  *

  The carriage clock chimed the hour.

  ‘I’ve got to go for a stretch,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Stretch’ was one of the words he used when he meant ‘drink’, so I got dressed for the RSL, but when we reached Bondi Road Jimmy headed downhill, away from the Club.

  ‘When Singapore fell, it was bloody chaos,’ he said. ‘Some men ran for the harbour and stormed the boats. The worse types went wild in the city, looting the godowns, raping the boongs, shooting out windows. But the lowest of them all was General Gordon bloody Bennett, the commander of the 8th Division, who ordered us blokes to march into camps with the Japs, while he and couple of fucking officer mates slipped out of the country, once we’d signed the surrender.

  ‘After the ceasefire, there was silence. It was like the bombing and screaming had been the weather, and now the season had changed. The air smelled of wet wounds and dried sweat and burned flesh and lost blood.

  ‘Eighty-five thousand of our troops – three less when you take out Bennett and his cronies – handed over their arms to thirty-five thousand Japanese. And, at first, it looked like we’d been beaten by about six of the buggers, because you hardly even saw a Jap in Singapore.

  ‘The next thousand days, I don’t think about,’ said Jimmy. ‘Not on bloody Anzac Day, not ever. But the day we surrendered comes back to me every morning of my life. We were fit and healthy and armed. We could’ve disappeared into a cellar. We could’ve been night scavengers, shadows, ghosts. We could’ve found a tunnel or a cave, lived under the Chinese, waited for calm weather then crossed the straits with a fisherman. I had a Tommy gun. We were fighting troops. We could’ve shot our way out. I’m not talking about everyone – maybe just me and Bathurst Billy. I’m not saying we should’ve fought to the last man. I’m not even saying we should’ve bloody fought at all. It’s just that everyone had to make their own decision. But all of us gormless bloody Greyhounds made the same one. We all surrendered.’