My Beautiful Enemy

by Cory Taylor

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  ‘Stop talking,’ he said, and then he kissed me hard on the mouth.

  ‘Don’t,’ I pleaded once he’d stopped kissing me. ‘Please.’

  He fell to his knees and unbuttoned my flies and the next thing I came in his hand so fast he didn’t even have time to get a proper hold of me. I remember at that point I leaned down and hauled him to his feet and held onto him so tight he couldn’t move.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, burying my face in his neck. I was trying not to cry.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said.

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ I said. I wanted to say other things as well, like how my prick had been hard the whole time I was watching him on stage, and how I lay awake at nights remembering the way he’d looked when he was naked and Matron Conlon was washing him down. And I wanted to plead with him to give up Sawada because nothing good would come of it. I had to convince him that his only real friend in the world was me. But there wasn’t any time, because as soon as he heard his mother calling him from inside the hut, Stanley was gone.

  Two days later I went to see Matron Conlon about my weak ankle. I’d rolled it jumping down from the table on the night of the concert and it had been swollen ever since. She told me that Stanley’s mother had swallowed a bottle of detergent on the night of the concert in the hope that it would kill her.

  ‘Poor woman,’ she said whispering and tapping her fingers on her temple. ‘She’s not the full shilling.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ I said.

  Matron Conlon drew in a breath. ‘It’s four years,’ she said. ‘It takes its toll. She’s not been right in the head since they got here.’

  She pressed around the base of my ankle to see if there was anything broken.

  ‘Are you looking after that lad of hers?’ she said.

  When I didn’t respond she looked up at me. I must have been blushing because she put her hand up to my cheek in a motherly way.

  ‘I’m doing my best,’ I said, allowing her to stroke the side of my face the way she liked to. I didn’t mind. It wasn’t as if she meant any harm by it, not like Bryant.

  ‘I wish I could save every last one of them,’ she said. ‘They’re just kiddies.’

  She gave me a dreamy smile and looked down at my ankle again, pressing around the scar from my motorbike accident. ‘It’s a weakness,’ she said. ‘There’s no cure for it.’

  I wasn’t sure whether she meant my ankle, or my other affliction.

  ‘It isn’t easy,’ I said. That was the closest I ever came to confessing my real feelings for Stanley to anyone.

  Matron Conlon put her fat finger to her lips and winked at me boozily. Then she laughed and told me she had a brother who was like me.

  ‘He’s in the priesthood,’ she said. ‘Best place for him.’

  12

  Stanley’s secret report was fifty pages of tiny lead-pencil scrawl, written in a hand-made notebook the size of a cigarette pack. In a preamble he described in stilted half-sentences how he’d decided to spy on his fellow Japanese. A lot of them posed, in Stanley’s words, a danger to themselves and the other internees because of fanatical belief in the divine powers of Emperor Hirohito. In the front of the notebook he had made a list of his targets in alphabetical order starting with Baba-san and ending with Sawada. He’d addressed the report to Colonel Hollows personally and marked it Top Secret, in a gesture that I couldn’t help feeling was meant to be comical.

  In fact the whole tone of the writing suggested to me that Stanley intended the report as a joke. He’d written out long conversations between Baba-san and Maeda and between members of the Sawada gang, to whom he gave code names like The Fox and The Raccoon, but the more I read the more convinced I was that he’d made up the dialogue himself in an attempt to shape it and make it more dramatic. For this reason I decided that even if it was half-true, the report was completely useless. I even wondered if the whole thing hadn’t been designed as a slap in the face to Colonel Hollows, in which case it would be better not to pass it on to him at all. I knew the colonel more by reputation than by direct contact, but I’d been told he had an unpredictable temper and absolutely no sense of humour.

  The letter Stanley had written to me was in the same tiny scrawl, although its tone was more sincere. At the top of the page he’d written Destroy This After Read and then he’d tried to explain the cause of his unusual behaviour over the previous few weeks.

  I’m sorry if I was stranger to you, but I can’t tell anyone, not even my family, about my secret mission. I never joked when I told you I wanted to be a spy, but unfortunately when I offer my idea to the colonel he turned me down flat. It wasn’t very clever of him actually, because there are secrets in this camp that none of you chaps knows anything about. You are blind and deaf to the real life of the people in here, so you need to pay more attention. I have another thing to tell you. I’m going to break out of here soon. When I do I’m going back to America so I can study and become a successful man. So I hope you too will come and play tennis there. I look forward to seeing you become a champion. Good luck, your friend Stanley.

  It affected me the same way each time I read it, especially the part about Stanley’s plan to go to America. I didn’t know any more than he did what was going to happen to the Japs after the war, but I feared the worst. Given this I found Stanley’s optimism about his future unbearable. At the same time I couldn’t help but pray for a miracle, not just for him but for me as well. I tried not to think too much about my prospects once the war was over. The photography studio wasn’t realistic because I had no money and no track record. And my old dream of playing professional tennis was equally unlikely. Stanley’s belief in me was so touching that, instead of destroying his letter the way he’d instructed me to, I wrapped it around the notebook and kept the package hidden in a drawer in the schoolroom that nobody ever opened.

  I didn’t write back to him. I was afraid to. I persuaded myself we’d have other chances to meet now that Sawada was locked away. I assumed, I suppose, that Stanley would seek me out in order to let the general populace see I was in favour again, and that all I had to do was wait for him to appear at the schoolroom the way he had before. I even hoped that our daily tennis matches would resume, because I longed to have the pleasure again of watching him through the schoolroom window. In the meantime I continued to pour my desires into poetry whenever I had the chance. McMaster had read a few of my earlier efforts and, as editor of the camp magazine, he’d encouraged me to submit some poems. I don’t have any of these late epics in my possession now but I remember they were mainly about universal brotherhood and love, two of the schoolmaster’s favourite topics.

  McMaster was very complimentary. He was an enthusiastic contributor to the magazine himself. He wrote comic-strips mostly, for the amusement of younger readers. Bryant was his harshest critic, particularly if the butt of the comic-strip joke was a big, burly guard like himself, as it often was.

  ‘Don’t you think your eagerness to crawl up the collective arse of the Japs is a little excessive?’ said Bryant. He was unpacking the fags and stockings he’d just picked up in town from his supplier.

  ‘No more than your devotion to robbing them blind,’ said McMaster.

  Bryant peered at us through the sheer stockings and smiled.

  ‘Simple supply and demand,’ he said. ‘The poetry of the marketplace.’

  He grabbed hold of my copy of the latest Tatura Tatler and before I could stop him he started reading my contribution out loud.

  I dreamed of a world of brothers;

  A country where no borders divide man from man,

  woman from child, husband from wife.

  ‘Give it back to him,’ said McMaster, seeing how impotent I was to stop Bryant. He was at least a foot taller than me and held the magazine above his head where I had no chance of reaching it.

  ‘What are you?’ he said. ‘A fucking commo?’

  ‘Giv
e it back to him,’ McMaster said again, this time as a threat.

  Bryant threw the magazine over my head, too high for me to catch, and it landed a few feet away, near McMaster, who picked it up and handed it to me.

  ‘You can’t touch me,’ said Bryant, glaring first at McMaster then at me. ‘None of youse can touch me.’

  ‘One of these days,’ said McMaster. ‘It’s only a matter of time before you get what’s coming to you.’

  Bryant laughed with his tongue sticking out like a dog’s, then he put the stockings right up to his nose and sniffed the scent of them.

  ‘Don’t I fuckin’ know it,’ he said.

  Three days later the war officially ended. The first I heard of it was at morning roll call when Colonel Hollows got up on a special podium to make the announcement. The way he worded the news was confusing. He said that Japan had officially accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and agreed to an unconditional surrender. He then paused and cleared his throat as if overcome with emotion. Following a moment of uncomfortable silence he pocketed his notes, tapped the microphone a couple of times then spoke into it haltingly.

  ‘I know how many of you have waited for this day with a sense of disbelief and dread,’ he said. ‘To those people I give my word that no recriminations or acts of vengeance against you will be tolerated. This war has raged across the world for too many years already. It has taken the lives of too many innocent people. Let us not allow this spirit of violent hatred and fanatical destructiveness to dictate our behaviour here in this place at this time. Instead let us begin today the long process of returning the world to peace and civility.

  ‘To those of you who, like me, have looked forward to this day with a sense of relief and deep sorrow I plead with you to act generously and in a spirit of reconciliation. Nothing can be achieved in the weeks and months ahead unless we decide to put aside our differences and embrace each other as fellow human beings, regardless of race or creed or religion. I firmly believe that this is the only way forward for all of us here, and indeed for the entire world.’

  When he stopped speaking there was a silence unlike any I had ever experienced before. It was as if the air around us had suddenly thinned, and we were floating. Apart from the wail of a baby there wasn’t a single human sound. The silence went on for so long and was so intense I wondered whether anyone had understood the meaning of the speech. Colonel Hollows must have had similar doubts because he tapped the microphone a second time before leaning into it and shouting.

  ‘The war is over. We have won a great victory.’

  In an instant explosion of joy Riley danced around me, kicking up the dust with his boots and making wild noises. He grabbed hold of me and made me dance with him and then we embraced and fell over together.

  We weren’t the only ones making fools of ourselves. A few of the women were wheeling each other around and crying while their kids stood by and watched, confused about whether to try to comfort them or not. When I got to my feet I looked for Stanley in the crowd and saw him propping up his mother who leaned into him as if she might be about to faint. His uncle Shigeru and the rest of the family were standing in a line, shoulder to shoulder, their arms around each other. They were all laughing and crying at the same time.

  Up on the podium Colonel Hollows was waiting now for a radio operator to set up the microphone so it could pick up a special recorded broadcast of the emperor announcing the surrender. At a sign from the operator, Hollows called for everyone to pay attention again and remain silent if they wanted to hear the emperor’s words for themselves. What followed was as confusing for those of us who understood no Japanese as Hollows’ speech must have been for those who didn’t understand English. The emperor spoke in a strange, high-pitched monotone, like a nervous girl. I watched the faces in the crowd for some sign of a reaction, but there was none, only universal puzzlement. At the end of the speech there was another long silence, then the sound of sobbing drifted across the parade ground as numbers of men and women broke down.

  Baba-san was one of them, so was Maeda. A while later, after everyone else had drifted away and gone back to their huts, the two old men were still sitting on their haunches in the dust, refusing to move. When Sturgess, one of the gunners, yelled at them from the watchtower to follow orders and return to their compound, they ignored him. Eventually it was Stanley who intervened. He stood between them and the watchtower and told Sturgess to please lower his rifle. Then Stanley turned to the old men and bowed. Whatever he said next it worked. They stood up and dusted themselves off and allowed Stanley to lead them away to their quarters.

  Later I heard from Riley that Stanley had volunteered to go to the cells with a few of Baba-san’s boys, to tell Sawada that the war had ended. Sawada had apparently shown no emotion, but the others had cried like babies and could not be persuaded to stop. The next time I saw them as a group was about a week later, after their leader had been released. They were all standing around waiting to see Sawada loaded onto a lorry with his belongings. They had abandoned their black uniforms and lost a lot of their insolence, even if a few of them still had the same joyless countenance as before. As soon as their friend appeared, flanked by two transport guards, they all bowed, Stanley included. Then they lined up along the inside fence. I was on the outside where the truck was waiting. Sawada glanced at me as he passed, his lizard eyes as expressionless as ever. Even so I experienced a pang of sorrow at the sight of him. He was pale and undernourished from refusing to eat and his shaved head was blue from the cold. He was technically too young to be going to the single-men’s camp but his record of defiance and rebelliousness had weighed against him and Hollows had sought special permission to have him moved.

  His mother was standing at the fence too, alongside the boys. She was a tiny woman, already grey-haired and hunched although she couldn’t have been more than forty years old. When the truck drove off with her son in the back of it she called out his name over and over again, and then she trotted along, crying and calling out, until she reached the corner of the fence and could go no further. A few moments later the lorry reached a bend in the road and disappeared in a cloud of powdery dust, leaving her standing there all alone. I watched her fall to her knees and beat on the ground with her fists.

  The boys were crying too, but silently, all except Stanley. He was dry-eyed and smoking a fag in the way he liked to now, dangling it from the corner of his mouth. I think he thought it made him look tough, but every time I saw him do it I wanted to laugh because this gesture, like all of the others he practised, was an act. I knew that because I tried the same tricks myself, in order to seem tougher than I was. Before he left that day he approached the inside fence and waved to me across the twenty yards or so that divided us.

  ‘You still giving tennis lessons?’ he called out.

  I waved back and told him to drop round to the schoolroom whenever he felt like it. ‘Maybe you could coach me,’ I said. Then I told him to step back or I would have to wake up the gunner.

  Stanley did as he was told, and when he was a good fifty feet away he shouted out.

  ‘Is that far enough?’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said.

  ‘Shoulders back,’ he said, mocking my habitual slouch. He wanted to draw attention to me to entertain the other boys. He didn’t mean any harm, I could see that, but I was still hurt by how he could switch from being someone who had made me come in his hand to being someone who mocked me in public. Again I understood that this was part of his survival strategy, but it confused me nonetheless. The next minute he was telling the boys he was getting together a baseball team to take on the Formosans and he was going to call it The Yankees, after the greatest baseball team in the world.

  ‘Anybody want to come over to the winning side?’ he said.

  None of the boys wanted to. I could tell by the way they were glancing at each other as if they were ashamed. Then one of them said something in Japanese and started to walk away and the others fo
llowed him. Stanley trailed along after them, one of the group, but unlike them in every way. As if to emphasise the point he turned back after he’d gone a few paces and gave me a stiff salute. It made me think of a sailor on the deck of a sinking ship.

  13

  I’d telephoned May as soon as I could after the news of the surrender, expecting to find her still at the farm, but the farmer’s wife said she had gone home to Melbourne. A couple of days later I received a parcel from her with a note saying she’d tried to call me but hadn’t been able to get through.

  I’m sorry, but I can’t come to the victory dance with you. I’m staying at home in case we get some news about Owen. I hope you have a very happy birthday. Please wear this and think of me. All my love my darling, xxxx May.

  She’d also included a black and white photograph of herself and on the back she’d written Me in my new dress. It’s baby blue, the same colour as your beautiful eyes. The dress had a high waist and a full skirt that came down to the calf. In it May looked full-figured and somewhat old-fashioned, like Little Miss Muffet, or Cinderella before the ball. I kept the photograph under my pillow along with her previous letters, but I never looked at it. And I never wore the tie she’d sent for my birthday either, even though it was silk and obviously expensive, because I decided that after what Stanley had done to me at the back of his hut, I didn’t deserve to own it. That night, after I’d received the parcel, I sat in the schoolroom and wrote May a letter. I thanked her for the present and then I said I thought it would be better if we didn’t see each other again. I was drunk at the time, as I was most nights by then, but I still had the presence of mind to burn the letter afterwards in the rubbish bin and scatter the ashes at the bottom of the steps, making sure to stamp them into the dirt with my boots before I left.

  The dance was the day after my birthday. Under the circumstances I was glad to be going without May. It meant I could get loaded with Donohue and Bryant and the others before we left, and not have to worry about anything that happened after that. I can’t remember how it was that we all got permission to be out all night, but I think it was one of the rare occasions when Hollows arranged a group of trusties to act as guards for the night.