Maya bit into the warm chapatti she’d bought from a street stall with her morning’s pittance, and headed home. She found the harbour busier than usual. She scoured the river, its surface the colour of a mud slide, and spotted the newly arrived ships. Military ones, grey as river eels. So more British uniforms in town, more guns, more drunks. Would the white man never tire of his game of war? It was like opium to their weak minds, exciting and addictive. But Malaya didn’t want their gunboats any more than it wanted their chickenpox or their net curtains.
She shrugged her narrow shoulders and trotted along her street, eager to reach home now that she could be certain her mother would not be there to shout at her or take a stick to her. Maya would have vanished from Palur years ago if it hadn’t been for Razak. She glanced up at the sky. Good, she nodded, rain was coming. It meant she could wash her hair before … Something twitched in her mind, and a cold sickness hit her stomach. At first she had no idea why and glanced quickly around her. What had changed?
Then her eyes registered the blond head in the street. In this narrow, crowded world of jet-black hair, of skins darker than tea, of broad cheekbones and wide nostrils, the woman with the golden hair and pale, delicate features stood out in sharp contrast. Instead of the bright sarongs and kebayas that surrounded her, she wore a crisp cream linen dress and picked her way in white leather shoes. She looked like a fragile egret in a world of crows.
Maya knew her at once, like she knew the lines on her own hand. It was the white woman who had driven the car that had killed her mother. She had just walked out of her mother’s house and hurried past Maya, close enough to touch her arm, but the woman saw only another dark anonymous face in a forest of dark anonymous faces.
‘Razak!’ Maya called, alarmed, and sprang quickly through the open door.
The room had been dipped in darkness. A black mood hung in the air and brushed against her face, as sticky as cobwebs. Whatever had happened in here had changed everything, and she could sense her world tipping off centre.
‘Razak!’
Her twin brother was seated on the mat, surrounded by his butterfly cases, his hands clenched together as though holding themselves from lashing out. He stared at her the way he’d stare at a stranger.
‘Razak, what did the white woman want?’
‘Forgiveness.’
‘Did she beg for it?’
He shook his head in an angry gesture. ‘No. She tried to buy it.’
Maya crouched down beside him, her voice eager. ‘How much?’
Razak scowled at her and turned away, but she seized his shoulder and shook him. ‘How much did you accept?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You fool!’
‘That white woman killed our family. We owe respect to our mother’s spirit.’
He glared blindly out at the street, seeing things that Maya could only guess at. She sighed softly. Razak had no idea how beautiful he was, far more beautiful than she would ever be. The gods must have been drunk when they spotted the new-formed twins in her mother’s womb, and decided to have some sport at the humans’ expense. They stirred their fingers in the mix and gave all the beauty to the male twin and all the brains to the female one. Maya could still hear them laughing some nights, harsh, rattling roars in the heavens, but she didn’t curse them. She loved her brother too much for that.
Each morning she enjoyed the sight of his deep golden skin, his impressive black eyes that were incapable of hiding any of the emotions that poured through him, and his thick black hair and straight, strong limbs. Only his mouth let him down. It was red and full, much softer than her own, more vulnerable. It upset her sometimes to look at it because it revealed how easily he could be hurt. That frightened her. It was why she had stayed in Palur.
‘Respect?’ She demanded. ‘For our mother? For the woman who sold my body to the highest bidder when I was ten years old, and who beat your legs with a stick till they were black and blue and you couldn’t stand? Respect for her?’
‘Shut up! Take back your words.’ He swung around to face her, his eyes wide with anger, but Maya knew it was not at her. It was at their mother, for dying. For living. ‘She was not well,’ he insisted. ‘Not herself.’
‘How could she be well,’ Maya asked, running a soothing hand down his arm, ‘when every cent you or I could earn or beg or steal she spent on the happy-pipe?’
He sank his chin on his chest. ‘Don’t, Maya. Show her spirit the respect it deserves as our mother.’
Maya fell silent. She didn’t want to upset him. That was when she noticed the straw hat on the floor, winking at her in the dim light as if calling her name. Maya picked it up, felt the quality of its brim and popped it on her own head, grinning at him.
‘Look, Razak, do I look like the white lady?’
‘Take it off. It’s bad luck.’
She took it off quickly. ‘What did she offer?’
‘Money. I burned it. And she offered a job.’
‘A job?’
‘On the Hadley Estate.’
‘Did you accept?’
‘No. I would not dishonour our mother’s peace of soul.’
‘Did she offer anything for me?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. She’s forgotten me and remembered only you.’
‘She spoke to you at the accident so she wouldn’t forget.’ His voice held pity. She’d have preferred anger.
She undid the knot on her sarong and extracted the gold pin. ‘Look.’
He stared at it without asking where it came from. ‘It will pay for our mother’s funeral.’
‘No.’ It came out of her as a wail of dismay.
‘Yes.’ He reached over and took it from her. ‘Thank you, Maya. Terimah kasih. It will help the journey our mother’s soul must make.’
It will line the priests’ pockets, Maya thought, but kept it miserably to herself. For a long time the two of them sat in silence, indifferent to the heat and the insects, their thoughts entwining together. Gradually Maya sensed the blackness lift in the dingy little room.
‘So you didn’t accept a job from her either?’
‘No. I will not work for this Constance Hadley, nor help her in any way.’
Maya shifted closer to him on the mat, pushing aside his pieces of wood, and wrapped her arms around his neck. ‘We will not help her, my brother.’ She leaned forward and whispered in his ear, ‘But if you do as I say, we will destroy her.’
‘Don’t you want it?’
A drunk hung onto the edge of the shoddy stage, his head wobbling unsteadily, and wafted a dollar bill in the air as if the smell of it would entice Maya over. She gyrated her tiny hips playfully in his direction, and he added another dollar to the offering.
The stink of cigarette smoke and the musky odour of cheap sex stifled the air in The Purple Pussy nightclub. It was a trashy place, its lights kept low to hide the seediness of its interior, and its prices kept high to line Hakim’s pockets. Its beer was watered. Maya hated it here. The stench, the sweat, the stares. Already naked from the waist up, and moving in time to the music that seeped out of an upright piano at the side of the stage, she spun on the spot, so that her gauzy little skirt lifted up high enough to reveal that she wore nothing underneath. The flash of dark, secret hair between her thighs made the drunk groan and hurl a ten-dollar note onto the stage.
Slowly, tantalisingly, she lifted it from the floor with her toes and, standing on one leg, she raised the foot clutching the money high in the air behind her, stretching her legs wide apart, at the same time dropping her head and arms to the floor, the curtain of her hair masking her face. Applause and shouts rattled the walls, and the drunk banged his fists on the stage. It was what they wanted. No face. No name. Just a female body. It wasn’t just Malays who came to The Purple Pussy; at least half the patrons were white. The two men at the front table were obviously military types, though out of uniform, and the quiet one who invariably sat at a table in the far corner, his back to t
he wall, had a married look about him. He never drank more than two whiskies and never applauded, just watched the stage with sad eyes.
The Purple Pussy prided itself on providing something for all tastes. There were strippers of all skin colours: black, brown, yellow and even white – a skinny Russian girl who had travelled down from China. There were ladyboys more beautiful than the girls, and an assortment of acts of young men, oiled and acrobatic, who wrestled and threw each other across the stage. One Siamese girl performed a python act, and a tall Ethiopian strutted the stage with a whip and a submissive band of naked slaves, male and female, who whimpered and moaned.
She flicked off her tiny skirt to roars of approval, and performed a slow, sensuous dance for them which always heated their blood and got them ordering more drinks. Hakim would be pleased with that. He may even let her keep the ten dollars. She left the stage and scurried, still naked, to the communal changing room backstage. Everyone was crammed into it, taking clothes on or off, men, boys and girls all fighting for the mirrors. No one took any notice of nudity. The odour of sweating bodies was intense.
Maya rescued her sarong from the floor. She wanted to make her escape with the ten dollars before Hakim caught her, but as she started to push her way to the door she saw the Russian girl crying in front of a broken scrap of mirror propped on a shelf. As she dabbed at her tears she was coating her cheek with a heavy layer of face paint, covering a dirty bruise that looked fresh.
‘Hakim?’ Maya said.
The girl nodded. No need to ask why. Hakim could always find an excuse if he was in the mood to use his fists.
‘Are you all right?’ Maya asked.
The girl shrugged. There was something so broken about her that Maya could imagine Hakim being tempted to finish the job. Like putting a wounded bird out of its pain.
Maya hesitated. ‘You ought to give this up,’ she said. ‘Before he ends up killing you.’
The girl turned and smiled at her, a sweet expression on her pale face that irritated Maya because it was so resigned to her misery. ‘Tak. No.’
‘There are other clubs.’
‘I’ve tried them,’ she said in accented Malay. ‘They’re no different. Anyway none of us will be here much longer.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’ll be marching in here soon.’
‘Who?’ Maya tucked her money into her sarong knot, impatient to end the conversation but curious about what the girl meant. ‘The police are paid off by Hakim. Don’t worry, they won’t mess with him.’
The Russian sighed before returning to her mirror and her bruise. ‘The Japanese, of course.’
‘What?’ Maya held her breath.
‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘No.’
‘They’ve been stomping over China for years. Now they’re getting ready for Malaya.’
Maya laughed, relieved. ‘No, you’ve heard wrong. That tiger will never dare to put its claws in the British.’ She started to move away. She didn’t like what this girl was saying.
‘I’m warning you, I’ve seen them,’ the Russian continued in her soft tones. ‘I’ve seen what they did to people in China. You don’t want to be here when they march in.’
Maya could hear the catch of tears in her throat. Lightly but firmly she turned the girl around and gave her a smart shake. ‘Stop that! Stop it, you hear me? The British are dog shit, the way they have stolen our country from us, but they have a giant army. They have guns and hundreds of planes. I see them in the sky. No one can ever beat the British.’ She released her grip on the girl. ‘Malaya is safe, I promise you.’
5
Fifty miles south of Palur, in a ramshackle wooden building that clung to the banks of the muddy Sungai Lereh river, Morgan Madoc threw a naked man out of an upstairs bedroom window. It was dark outside, the jungle’s nightly chorus vibrating the sultry air, but the splash was audible as he hit the water.
‘Can he swim?’ a native girl on the bed asked, horrified.
‘Who cares?’
Madoc seized the man’s clothes from the floor, removed a fistful of Malay dollars from the wallet he found in the jacket and a cheap pocket watch from beside the bed and then tossed the rest out of the window after their owner. The shirt flapped its arms briefly, then fluttered in defeat down to the waves and, in the smear of yellow light that floated on the surface of the river, Madoc took pleasure in watching both shoes sink at once.
‘Don’t let me catch you here again!’ he yelled.
There was no answer from the darkness. He couldn’t hear splashing. But maybe the man was a strong, silent swimmer. Or maybe not. Madoc shrugged his broad shoulders, closed the window and turned to the girl.
‘What happened?’
She was naked. Her slender, caramel-coloured legs were still sprawled across the clean white sheet, her hands rubbing at her throat. A vicious red mark stretched from one ear to the other like a noose and she was coughing with a soft little bleat. It reminded Madoc of the newborn lambs on his father’s farm in the Brecon Beacons when he was a child. A lifetime ago.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
‘Me OK. He like it rough.’
He ran an expert eye over her limp figure and nodded to himself. Except for her neck, no harm done. For a twenty-eight-year-old she still looked good, small and neat with not a ripple of fat on her. Not to his liking. He preferred something with a bit of solid flesh on it that you could really grab hold of, but his customers liked the girls to look like twigs. Breakable. With luck, he could still pass her off as eighteen for another year or two, as long as she kept those blasted black eyes of hers tucked away behind her long lashes. Her eyes carried her whole life in them.
‘I’ll send up your next Johnny, then,’ he told her.
She twitched her shoulders. ‘Something for me first, tuan, boss?’
He didn’t like wasting his good stuff on the girls, but her eyes were jumping like crickets and she looked as if she might not last the night without it. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a couple of hand-rolled ganja-weed cigarettes – kept there for special clients – tossed them on the bed sheet and watched her scramble for them. Immediately she lit one from the oil lamp on the dresser and closed her eyes with secret pleasure as she inhaled, drawing the drug deep into her lungs, swilling it round her bloodstream like sugar in tea. Madoc snorted in disgust. For much of his forty-four years he had been smuggling opium in rickety boats up and down the west coast of Malaya, but not once did he touch the poison itself. He’d seen what it could do. Destroy a man’s life. Rot his mind. Only fools and losers fell into that pit.
‘You’ve got five minutes,’ he said, and went downstairs.
The bar was busy tonight because it was pay day at the logging camp upriver. Madoc stood at the top of the stairs for a moment, lit himself a Craven A and let his eyes roam over the smoky barroom below. OK, so it wasn’t the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, but it was his. He grinned to himself. This place felt wild and lawless, packed with men with money in their back pockets and one thing on their mind: how fast they could spend it.
Morgan’s Bar was more than ready to relieve them of their hard-earned cash. The girls in the upstairs rooms were doing fierce business, and in the bar the drinks couldn’t flow fast enough. Most of the customers upstairs were Malayans who, as Muslims, didn’t imbibe alcohol. But there was a bunch of rowdy Chinese loggers who were stirring up a handful of white men who had rolled in, already well oiled. Madoc drew on his cigarette and narrowed his eyes against the smoke; it was one of the bull-necked Brits he’d hurled into the river. He shrugged indifferently. It wasn’t the first white man he’d killed, and sure as hell it wouldn’t be the last.
He shouldered a path across the wide room, slapping backs and exchanging greetings with his customers in fluent Malay, before he slid behind the bar where a middle-aged white woman was mixing a lime juice and lemonade for a wiry Tamil with severe pockmarks on his face. She was a big woman, full-
breasted and a behind like a hippo’s, but she stood no nonsense from the other side of the counter. She filled the small space, and as Madoc edged past her, he couldn’t resist a quick squeeze of her buttocks, her flesh heavy as a sun-warmed melon in his palm. He could feel her skin moist with sweat under her cotton skirt before she reached behind and swatted his paw away. She didn’t even jog the bottle in her other hand.
‘Madoc,’ the Tamil logger, moaned, ‘keep your greedy hands off Kitty while I’m talking to her.’
‘Take no notice of the Welshman,’ Kitty chuckled. ‘I don’t.’
Madoc scooped up a good bottle of saké from beneath the counter, brushing the back of his wrist over one of her sturdy calves as he did so, and headed out the other end, raising the flap of the counter to emerge among the drinkers.
‘Kitty could always complain to her boss,’ he joked over his shoulder.
‘But you’re her boss,’ the logger pointed out.
‘Exactly.’
‘I’ll tell my husband one of these days,’ Kitty threw after him, laughing. ‘Get him to thump you, Madoc.’
‘That will be interesting.’
The woman swivelled her eyes across to where Madoc was heading towards a table at the far end of the bar where three men in clean white shirts were seated, and then back to him. For a moment their gaze snagged on each other, and she blinked a silent warning to him. Be careful. He tipped her a nod, then sauntered over to the table where the three men were sitting. They were Japanese.
‘More saké, gentlemen?’ he suggested in English, and placed the bottle in the centre of the table. He ousted a nearby drinker from a chair and hitched it up to join the quiet group of white shirts. ‘Enjoying your evening?’
The White Pearl Page 5