Acts of Mutiny

by Derek Beaven

  ‘And I remember, you know, Penny, they weren’t going to waste any ships defending Aussie, if it came to it. They weren’t, after all. They’d have let us go down; you know that, don’t you? And you know something else? When a nice little radioactive cloud comes drifting over my house one day, I’m going to say: It’s all right, I’m a Commonwealth citizen. They’re only doing it to look after me.’

  That night, Penny lay again in Robert’s arms in the cramped confines of the lower bunk in her cabin. She dreamed of Hugh. It was quite definitely Adelaide, although in truth she knew nothing of the geography of that place, beyond the little maps he had sent her. She looked around in terror, and noticed the low, gentle buildings of the city, the wide streets, the subtropical greenery fanning and fringing up here and there under the fair blue of the sky. No one else was troubled. No one else seemed to realise the threat from Hugh.

  Men in suits with open necks and trilby hats leaned on rails under the sunshades that ran above the pavement on one side of the road. There were cars of an unusual design, and different markings on the tarmac; and none of the crush of London. She felt it could never rain. She began to walk. The air was warm and sharp, flavoured with cigarette smoke.

  Oh, yes, they had landed. She found herself running. She ran and ran until it was night and she was somewhere in the suburbs which looked like a broad open place with low houses and hardly any pavements. And then she was in a strange house with no stairs and Hugh was slapping her back and forth across the face while Joe was forced to watch. He slapped her hard on the cheek, until it bruised. He was furious with her. She could feel the stinging throb of it in the bone. Her ear rang with the buffeting. Someone was calling out Robert’s name. And then he bundled her into another room where there was a bed. There he raped her, and Robert was nowhere to be found.

  She woke, and Robert was there, in the dark, next to her. Burying her sweat-laden brow in the nape of his sleeping neck, she pulled in great lungfuls of air from the warmth between their bodies. It was the smell of his skin that was such a comfort, quite different from any flavour of Hugh.

  But the dream. It was so shocking, Hugh behaving like that. It was not the Hugh she knew, the man she had lived with all these years. She felt so guilty, betraying him like this, the father of her children. He was not so bad a man. It was the war that had made him difficult. Things had happened he had not told her about. He was not an easy man, not a happy man. Now she was doing this to him.

  Robert stirred in his sleep, turned over in the cramped cot and threw his arm around her. Very quietly in the dark she traced with her hand where the sunburn had been along the surface of his arm. To her mind’s eye it still glowed. She had begun by thinking that sex was for him, Robert, a gift, a pledge. She had looked forward to it, yes, but really it was for his sake. Whereas it had turned out, to her extraordinary surprise, to be like nothing she could ever have imagined: it was absolutely for her. It was delicious, intimate, loving. It was something that rested like a pearl at the centre of everything.

  Then at last the dream fell into its rightful and shocking place. Part of her had always hated sex, intensely; but she had always explained that away: No, it’s just his way, he loves you really; he can’t help it after what he’s been through, it’s really your duty, Penny, as his wife …

  Robert had shown her something different. There was a world of relationship in which cruelty had no place. It was true. Lying here, they were the living proof. She had never known. How stupid and naive it sounded. But genuinely, absolutely genuinely, she had never known. Or simply never allowed herself to know. Why, that realisation changed everything. At last she permitted herself to see her husband for the man he was.

  Frightened and exuberant, she clasped her lover in her arms.

  55

  A fisherman stands in a bamboo boat, rowing forwards with crossed oars. Like an image on rice-paper, his little craft slips on the lake between two generous brush strokes of separated land, wet, leaking in. He leaves a scatter of ripples which never quite catches him up. I am looking out from the Armorica’s starboard beam. We are moored at the wharf in Singapore, and today’s afternoon rain has just cleared.

  The evening is warm, perfumed, and streaked with yellow light. We are at the Equator, among the Spice Islands. But these are my last moments on the ship whose lovely lines, romance and stability problems have preoccupied me day by day, hour by hour for the weeks of my voyage. I am saying goodbye to her.

  So delicious is the picture that I have to pull myself up – to remind myself that I have left out the fear. I did not stand at the rail in equanimity. My gut churned inside. Everything was unravelling, slipping away. We had been disastrously ashore. In minutes we should be off to Changi. Because, after all her impassioned scenes, Erica had finally made him agree to take us with him. And therefore I was helpless. For nothing had been done, and still that whispering voice at the back of my mind squeaked faintly on and on, shriller now, like Silver’s twisted parrot, getting louder. I was frightened for Finlay, she had made me very wretched. I was frightened for the ship. And I was furious with Erica.

  ‘They wouldn’t let me in on my own. With the boy. What does that make me look like? Eh, Dave? What does that make me? I had to push my way in.’

  She had taken me by the hand and shoved past the uniformed attendant. So we had found the lovers dancing cheek to cheek in the faded splendour of the Raffles Hotel. Caught behind the fan palms at afternoon tea.

  ‘Honey, it was just one dance.’

  ‘Dance, my eye. Tip of the iceberg, more like.’

  ‘Honey, it’s all OK.’

  ‘Oh, that’s what it is, is it?’ Icy with rage she had marched him out until we found ourselves in the crowded Chinese streets. Cheryl was left to settle the bill. Then Erica started in earnest.

  ‘Making me wait. Telling me you had to see a contact. You and your contacts. Me and Ralph’ve been walking round this God-forsaken place since ten o’clock this morning. Contact!’ She was working herself up. The crowds gave us a wide berth. Chaunteyman was frightened; yes, I could tell by his eyes, he was frightened. He looked like a schoolboy up before the beak.

  ‘Hey, honey, it’s nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. She’s just a friend.’

  ‘Oh, it’s called friendship now, is it? All this time I’ve been thinking she was my friend. You take me for such a fool, don’t you? Just because you’ve been to these places and done things. Just because you can pull strings. Or your old man can, to pull his spoilt little boy out of all the holes he digs himself. Don’t imagine I don’t know, Dave Chaunteyman. You think I’m stupid, don’t you. You think I’m rubbish. Well, you’re not pulling my strings no more, Mr Lieutenant-Commander or whatever it’s supposed to be. Business. You call that business? I call it funny business. You think I’m just some tart you can pick up and put down whenever you like. You didn’t have no business here in the first place.’

  ‘Erica, I swear. I have to see people. Government people.’

  ‘How much of her have you seen? That’s what I’d like to know. How much has she had on display these last couple of weeks? I want to be told, Dave. I mean it. You tell me just what’s been going on.’

  ‘Honey, the kid. Can’t all this wait?’

  ‘How can it wait? How can it wait when the blimmin’ ship sails tomorrow. How can it wait? Dave! Look at me! Look at me, why don’t you!’

  Passers-by stared.

  ‘If you’d just let me speak—’

  ‘Now I know why you’ve been so off with me recently, don’t I. Well, if you think you can just pack me back on that boat while you hang around here trying to have it off with that fancified slut you’ve got another think coming.’

  I tried to detach myself from them. It was going to be a long one. She had momentarily desisted but I knew it. We walked on in silence. I hardly noticed the streets, their doorways and traffic, nor the people parting to gaze at us wherever Erica stopped to begin again. She would reach a new pi
tch of feeling and then suddenly refuse to budge. And he would look around helplessly and try to take her arm. I had seen it all before. The row reminded me only of Woolwich – another man, another river. We moved on. And on.

  It was late in the day. ‘Come on, honey. We need to be getting back.’

  ‘You two go on. I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘How can we, then?’

  ‘Go on. You don’t care about me. I’ll find my own way, thank you very much. You don’t want me spoiling things for you. Too common, isn’t it. Too common for the likes of you. But not vulgar enough, eh? Eh, Dave Chaunteyman?’

  ‘Erica, come on. How many more times do I have to tell you it was nothing. A crazy moment. We just forgot ourselves a little.’

  We were not far from the waterfront now. A cooking stall made out of a bicycle had live crabs from the afternoon’s catch hanging from its hood. Girls stood around on the slight slope. Over the tops of the darkening greenery Mr Chaunteyman noticed a British destroyer, fiddling about close to one of the offshore islands.

  ‘Hey there. Look at that. Sniffed up our wake out of Trincomalee, I shouldn’t wonder.’ He pointed, then recollected himself. ‘C’mon, son. We’d better be finding our way home. You can see why it is guys take to the water, can’t you?’ He began moving me along again.

  ‘I mean it, Dave.’ I knew Erica was standing stock-still, behind us. I could feel the distance stretching as we walked. It was a battle of wills. Eventually I looked back. To my relief she had started to follow, but slowly, fifty paces behind, keeping us in sight. We stopped. He tapped his foot. She stopped too. We continued. And again she followed. We stopped. The same thing. Three more times. Eventually, by the bridge, we waited it out. But she waited too. After five full minutes he broke and went back, towing me by the wrist. ‘OK. What do I have to do?’

  ‘I’m not getting back on that ship.’ She was twisting the handles of her bag in front of her. The string was visible through the breaks in the imitation leather.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not getting me back on that ship. I mean it. Not if you’re staying here.’

  ‘But, honey.’

  ‘I know what you’re like. You’re a liar, Dave. That’s what you are. You’re a liar. Business. You haven’t got no business here.’

  ‘Erica, I—’

  ‘You’re not government. You’re not big time. You’re nothing. All right, you’ve got the money, so you say. Dealer! You’re just a sort of playboy. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? You live in a dream world. A boy’s world.’

  ‘Honey, listen. I do have this deal to close. It’s real important. For you and for me. For us.’

  ‘Oh yes. Well, you can tell me what it is then, can’t you?’

  ‘It’s classified.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We need the money for Australia, you and me. I promise you.’

  ‘You’ve been watching too many movies, Dave. It’s all gone to your head. And it’s went and gone to mine as well. More fool me. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe any of your tosh any more. About being an observer. All this Pentagon this and Uncle Sam that. If it’s anything at all it’s under the counter. Eh? It is, isn’t it. It’s a fiddle. It’s something they’ve got on the ship along with all that caper they had the meeting about. That had you rattled, didn’t it? Mucked everything up? What was you in? Something smaller. Guns, is it? Guns for the Commies?’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Am I? You going to tell me different then?’

  ‘Honey, I can’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Why did you do it, Dave? Why did you bring me all this way?’

  ‘You’ve got to believe me.’

  ‘You know what Harry used to say before he met you? Never trust a Yank. That was before you bowled him over, eh? “No formalities, Harry. Call me Dave, old boy.” He used to say England was just a front-line aircraft carrier as far as the Yanks was concerned. That’s why they come cosying up, he used to say. Well, I got sick of Navy talk. Boat this, deck that. Like living in a blimmin’ ship all the time. Like everything politics and fighting. Drove me crackers. I just wanted to be loved, didn’t I?’ She sniffed and rummaged for her hanky. ‘But he was right. I’m your front line, aren’t I, Dave? Expendable. Pity he didn’t remember it himself. He’d have done anything for you, you know? In his way. And look what I’ve gone and done to him. Love! D’you know how you make me feel now? You make me feel used. Worn out. Just like I’m your rotten landing strip. So he was right about something, then, wasn’t he?’

  ‘C’mon, honey. Don’t run a scene. People are watching.’

  ‘Let them. I hate myself.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you.’

  ‘You can’t. Not now. Not any more.’

  ‘Let me try.’

  ‘Take your hands off me. I tell you I’m not getting back on that boat!’

  She won. We got back on that boat only to leave it. At the last minute the company sold the berth in our cabin and gave us a deadline to be out. So it was with a heart full of grief and agitation that I found myself staring out over the harbour, while Erica was packing up the last of our things. Finally I went below, and pretended half-heartedly to help. Before we disembarked, I made a last bid for Finlay. What did I hope to do: make up, swear friendship, exchange addresses and promise to write ever after? Or vent my revenge before disappearing without trace? Erica protested, but I roamed off, my feelings swathed about me like a magician’s cloak. Finlay was nowhere to be found in her usual haunts. She must be in her cabin, then, that place I had never been invited to, never been deemed worthy of.

  Perhaps they did not hear my knock; but they were surely in there, the Cootes. I could hear them. Surely they were. They must be all together playing some game – little high-pitched squeals came out through the wood, child sounds; noises of tension, panting, adult sounds. Well then, I would have my say. I threw open the door.

  Neither Finlay, nor Mitchell, but a strange configuration of their parents, an eight-legged, half-naked thing, a crab, jiggling and gasping as it climbed over the edge of the bunk. Clodagh Coote’s eye caught mine. I shut the door and fled.

  So the Cootes were exposed by the tide. And Mr Chaunteyman’s affaire with Cheryl Torboys was the reef upon which I foundered, cast up on that Asiatic isle.

  56

  Changi prison was not nearly as worrying as I had expected. Sometimes it helps to see the face of our terrors. It is only the remembering that hurts.

  I remember my mother weeping at teatime in the RAF hotel, and the rain which flooded down in bucketfuls, suddenly, out of a recently brilliant sky. You could set your watch by that tropical drench every afternoon; afterwards, you could almost see the plants growing. Little pink lizards would scamper up to the corners of the ceiling. Looking out to sea from that sad, soft corner of Changi village, you might confuse the abating rain with the scuttling of their feet.

  When it was not raining, it was always high summer. I had been used to the drab backstreets of Woolwich, with their soot and that stink from the Thames. Now I explored Singapore. I took the bus in with Mr Chaunteyman, past those grim brown walls of the prison. We could see it on our left. It was a cluster of horrible buildings squatting amid the village fields.

  The bus would lurch and stagger. It was full of Chinese and Malayans. Mr Chaunteyman would invariably gasp at the fact that they really did live here, these Chinks. ‘You know I can never get over it. They really do all look the same.’ Then he would laugh, and eye up through the window any girls he saw walking along outside with their slit skirts showing off their thighs. ‘And what a same they look! Chicks and dolls and geese better scurry.’ He would whistle roguishly to himself.

  One day I pressed the only item I had saved from my suitcase into Mr Chaunteyman’s hand. The shrunken head. He took it with a shocked face which turned into a grin of recognition. ‘Sure. You want me to have it.’

  ‘I want you to have it,’ I muttered. Once
I had passed it on I began to feel at home in the city.

  A Chinese painter, set the task of rendering the whole of Woolwich on a tea service, such as my grandfather’s, but forbidden any dirt or grime, must have created Singapore. A thousand views of Woolwich. The dragon Woolwich. The lotus Woolwich, multi-petalled and infinitely expanded. The exotic lifts and bends of the brush, the limpid water-colour shades and hues, the flashes of intensity or transparency, all these were the port’s pattern.

  Filthy old Thames lighters, moored up, became bobbing tongkangs side by side on the Singapore river, their milder occupants the rough wharfsiders I had grown up with. Those grim rows of dense South London houses became bright tenements for a pyjama-clad multitude. All the surfaces were pink or blue, or pale or peeling, and from upper windows the endlessly repeated lines of washing poles sketched a street canopy of intimate laundry.

  Each roof-ridge, gable, doorway and corner sprouted decoration – in concrete, wood, plaster. Or by the porcelain fixing of a telephone wire. There were great splashes of Chinese writing, red on white, white on red, red on yellow. Every entrance chattered with Chinese speech. Every street was full of bicycles. It was spirited. There were so many people.

  It was the busy-ness that endeared the place to me, the sense of purpose and throng – and, yes, I romanticise it. For its inhabitants had their own sufferings and dealt with them one way or another. I felt safe, contrary to my expectations, and much less conspicuous than I did in Powys Street market. Not only was my sight transformed, but the other senses as well. The tiny birds being grilled in rows on handcart kitchens by the bridge smelt strange and tempting. There were fragrant trees with hard and leathery leaves. There were rickshaws, trishaws, trams, cars, vans and carts. And everywhere, once the traffic had passed, there was the sound of rubber thong-sandals, or leather ones, clap-flapping on the ground.