The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  I was not about to ask my mother if we could keep geese, so one day in my father’s office I told him what Mr Ho said. But that was before we went to Penang and Ma came down with her mysterious ailment, and after that there was simply too much else to think about.

  My father was driving me home one afternoon when he told me he had come to a decision concerning my new duties. I was sure this would mean the kitchen, working under Ma’s critical eye when she returned, closer to the sting of her rotan. I had been dreading this day. As we drove into the garage I heard what sounded like a discordant chorus of old car horns.

  ‘Come with me,’ Pa said. ‘I want to show you something.’

  He led me down behind the garage, and there behind a screen of chicken wire were three loud, fat, white and brown geese.

  ‘We’re only keeping them until New Year when I have plans for them,’ he said. ‘In the meantime you can see what you can learn. Your new duties are to feed them and change their water every day.’

  This was simply marvellous! Not only had I avoided the dreaded kitchen duties, I had my own pets.

  Children in the English books we shared always seemed to have pets. The Secret Seven had one. The Famous Five was actually four children and a dog called Timmy. However, although there were plenty of watchdogs and birds for fattening up, I didn’t know any Chinese with an animal kept strictly as a pet. I wanted my own Timmy so much I collected the little plastic Scotties on a string around the neck of my father’s Black and White whisky bottles, but I had not been holding my breath.

  ‘They like food scraps,’ Pa said. ‘You can get them from Ah Mun Cheir. Help her prepare the vegetables every night and collect the scraps.’

  One thing I knew from all my English books was that pets had names. ‘What should I call them?’ I asked. ‘Can one be Timmy?’

  Pa raised his eyebrows. I don’t think he had seen that one coming. ‘Well … they’re all female, so you’ll have to give them girls’ names.’

  Girls’ names? I was thinking along the lines of Cherry Ames and Mary-Lou, and was just running through my other favourite Enid Blyton characters when I had a sudden inspiration. ‘I’m going to call them Sahm, Ji and Ging.’

  He looked at me with a frown before nodding. ‘I suppose that’s what they’re here for,’ he said. ‘Just don’t get too attached to them.’

  That night, as I helped Ah Mun Cheir pick the leaves from ong choy for the first time in my life, I realised what he had done. Here I was, helping in the kitchen, happy to do the very thing I had long been dreading. It just seemed like my father had a gift for convincing people to see things his way.

  I fed the scraps to Sahm, Ji and Ging a piece at a time and watched carefully. I wondered if Mr Ho would allow me to ask him what it was about them I was supposed to be observing, or if that was something else I was not yet ready to understand.

  9

  PARIS

  Interestingly, she would not be drawn on the question of faith. Perhaps it was too early. Perhaps she would have an opinion when she was finished reading it, although lawyers are usually not of such a mind to willingly explore the metaphysical. The same could be said of historians, so we were a likely couple to be investigating such matters.

  While my mother was alive faith was not a topic even for consideration. Her own was in her science, as she says, and mine was nowhere to be found beyond the gates of my Catholic school. Any time I brought home a question regarding Catholic beliefs I was sat down and lectured about ‘folk tales’, as my mother called them, and ‘magic spells’, which was how she referred to prayer and other liturgical matters. When it came to any discussion about heaven, she said, I was to ignore it, unless it was to do with astronomy. I remember her once saying hell was geology, which she obviously intended as a joke as she found herself most amusing. I remember it because my memory does not extend back to a time when she laughed much at all. After she died I found myself under Uncle Beng Woo’s roof, another melancholy house, and this time surrounded by that peculiar Chinese amalgam of beliefs, with Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, all commingling, conflicting and confusing a twelve-year-old nonbeliever.

  I called her chambers a second time, even though I was aware that it could give the appearance of over-eagerness. Barrister-at-law, her card said, so she was no doubt a busy woman. She was not in, and they asked me to leave a contact number. I was still reluctant to do so. I was feeling vulnerable, even more than usual, and felt the need for control. It was two days before I managed to get through. I expected I was being tiresome by now and that she would move to brush me off, but I was surprised to find her keen to meet again. She suggested an interesting wine bar near her chambers where we could talk over a glass or two. I told her I rarely imbibed, but would make an exception as it was half a century between drinks. She laughed, and I imagined it in her eyes, and then she gave me an address in Fleet Street.

  I could not believe my own eyes when I fetched up outside the same dreary place the well-meaning folk from the college had taken me to just days before. It seemed that I must have been wrong on that occasion: there must be no more decent places than the Vino Veritas in Fleet Street after all. Mercifully she was in the bar itself rather than down in the dank and cigar-polluted basement. Upstairs was gloomy enough with sufficient heavy oak for a reasonable medieval library. The entire room was one large nicotine stain, a stain that had not been attended to since the Blitz. The clientele was similarly sombre. I have never seen so many suits that ran the gamut of colour merely from black to charcoal grey, and three-piece, most of them, in spite of the time of year. The single concession to colour and movement was a soundless television screen that nobody watched.

  Su-Lin was perched on a stool at the end of the bar with her arm raised like a meerkat. Without the arm I should not have distinguished her through the hubbub of conspiratorial nodding heads. She was as darkly dressed as any of the men. I have no recollection of what she was wearing on the night of the Gresham College address. It could have been black then as well, but her face had distracted me, as it did now. She was twisting a glass of red wine with her fingers around the stem. Could it be possible she was as nervous as I? Surely not. She was a barrister, after all. She asked me what I would like. What is your tipple? is how she put it. She said they had wine from the length and breadth of the European Union, although she advised steering clear of Hungary. I thought it wise to start with an orange juice. It had been some months since I had touched any alcohol and decided to slide into it adagio, so to speak.

  I told her I had been here the last time we met, to which news she nodded and offered that everyone finds themselves at ‘the V’ sooner or later. A haunt for the disreputable, she said with a wink, although these days only of the law variety. Before the Fleet Street papers had all upped and moved digs out to Wapping, it had been a kind of no-man’s-land between the press fraternity and that of the law, where journalists and lawyers cross-fed each other with inside information. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

  Now I sensed why the air of intrigue. ‘Fraternity’ was most apposite, she said, as I could no doubt see for myself. She was the only woman in the room. Women were banned until twenty years ago. It took a decision by the House of Lords to overturn it, and that was why it was her regular. It still, she began to say, and then corrected herself: I still get up their noses.

  I sensed that we were both reluctant to move on to the subject at hand. After fifty years, what was the hurry? She asked if I would like something to eat, a bar snack perhaps. There was a menu card headed ‘May we temp you’. She said she had pointed it out to them weeks ago, even made a joke of it (‘I have no desire for a temporary position’), and advised me that the fare was no better than the spelling or the punctuation. Bad grammar school boys, she said, and loudly enough for the man behind the bar to hear her.

  I found myself compelled to gaze on her, but was wary of being ‘caught’ doing so. Not all women appreciate being admired, being the object of the male gaze, what
ever the motivation. If I had been caught, and asked, and if I was honest, I would have said that I was partial to the way her lips moved, the way her nose scrunched and her eyebrows danced, and especially the way her eyes twinkled. That is if I was being honest, although clearly such honesty has no place so early in a relationship. I had never said such things to any woman in my life, and to this one not for some time yet.

  I cannot believe it is really fifty years, she finally said when there was a hiatus. Fifty-three, I said. Someone must have changed the clocks. I asked her how long she had lived in London. Almost as long, she said. She came over when just nineteen to read law, and stayed. She returned to Malaysia only rarely these days; sisters and brother all overseas, the new Chinese diaspora. She asked if I ever went back to Papan. The customary shiver coursed down my spine and I covered the speechlessness with a clearing of the throat and a brisk shake of the head. I could see she was discomfited as she quaffed just a little too much red wine in one mouthful and turned away to cough into a handy tissue.

  Now there was another hiatus. I could not avoid it any longer. I asked if she had been reading it.

  Yes, she said with a husky wheeze, but just the first act. She said she had read as far as my mother’s treatment of the guerrilla with a gunshot wound during the war against the Japanese.

  Toh Kei, I said, and she nearly dropped her glass.

  10

  My ‘midnight clinic’, as I called it, became a regular affair. Far too regular, as I am now aware, for the presence of the guerrillas to be unknown in the town. Still, nobody mentioned it, not even Mrs Tay, who could not have been unsuspecting from the state of the clinic when she arrived early in the morning at a time when I was still trying to catch up on my lost sleep. It became a sort of unspoken routine as I took advantage of her by leaving the night’s mess to be cleaned up, and she would duly do so before I came downstairs in the morning. A safe secret is a secret not shared, and Mrs Tay had a husband and two young children to protect. Often she would bring the children for Ah Ming to look after during the day. The little girl, six years old, liked to play with baby Paris. Her four-year-old boy, the precocious young Johnnie, was a different matter and required Ah Ming’s best efforts.

  I did not see Bintang during all this time, although Shorty occasionally put in an appearance. It eventually reached the point where the midnight clinic had to be curtailed except in cases of emergency, so many ‘visitors’ were there. With Papan as isolated as it was, we decided it was safe, and possibly actually safer, to have them attend the clinic during normal hours. The ailing guerrillas changed into civilian clothes, arrived unannounced and mixed with the regular patients. Initially I failed to even recognise them, but a sharp eye could catch the revolver bulging in the pants pocket and the pervasive green pallor from the lack of sunlight they endured while living for so long in their hidden camps.

  Their ailments tended to be of a different nature as well. Regular patients at the clinic presented with predominantly minor afflictions caused by malnutrition, as well as cuts and bruises and the like, and especially common were maternity cases. Even the arrival of the Japanese did not seem to curtail the birth rate, at least not in the vicinity of Papan. On the other hand, the guerrillas suffered a variety of complaints from their harsh living conditions, particularly all manner of skin infections and malaria. Thankfully I saw no more cases of bullet wounds. Virtually every case required the administration of a drug. Officially drugs were not available as the Japanese army had a monopoly on their supply, and presumably their approved use. However, almost anything could be had on the black market. In Ipoh I was able to trade fresh vegetables from my flourishing garden for such precious commodities as M&B antibacterial tablets, sulphur ointment for skin infections, and especially for quinine. Bigger towns in Malaya, such as Ipoh, suffered from the endemic food shortages to a considerably greater extent than we in the small villages. The bigger the town, the bigger the problem, particularly when there was a garrison of Japanese troops monopolising the supply, and in Ipoh the typical diet consisted of tapioca, tapioca and more tapioca, which meant that beri-beri verged on endemic in such places.

  After nearly six months, what had begun as emergency care for one wounded man had blossomed into a daily sick parade. I never knew how many guerrillas were in the camps in the hills, not even how many camps there were, but I saw dozens of different faces, some on a regular basis. The journey down from the hills to my house must have been some kind of diverting milk run, although in saying that I make light of their illnesses. Not one appeared at my clinic without a very good reason for being there. However, all this activity could not go unnoticed indefinitely. The Japanese ruled Malaya with both an iron fist and a vast network of informers, and I know now that Papan was not immune. An informer could expect privileges that were most tempting in that time of deprivation, especially when there were children’s mouths to feed, and it is not for me to point the finger.

  Early one morning, when what appeared to be an entire company of Japanese soldiers arrived in lorries and closed off the town with a roadblock, it became obvious to all that we were under strong suspicion.

  The soldiers, coarse, thickset and with bayonets fixed, formed up across the road. All doors and shutters quickly closed. Not a townsperson was to be seen. I was peeking through the slits of my upstairs window shutters. I expected to be searched. I expected every house in town to be searched, but I was confident there was nothing out of the ordinary to be found under my roof beyond a supply of ill-gotten medicines, and they would surely not attract trouble. Listening to the BBC was a hanging offence, but buying drugs on the black market was not even cause to raise an official eyebrow. In any case, the search did not eventuate. At least, not on this occasion. Orders were screamed at the soldiers and they began marching in formation down the middle of the street. When they got to the end, at the foot of the hills, they broke ranks and trudged off into the forest, half a dozen columns of men in as many different directions, and were soon gone completely.

  The roadblock remained in place for three days. The town came to a virtual standstill as no one was prepared to take their chances out on the street. Ah Ming and I stayed upstairs with Paris and only ventured down to collect water, not even to go to the jamban. Every now and then we would hear gunshots somewhere in the hills. A couple of times we heard repetitive firing, what sounded like a battle. I could not help wondering how many of my sick boys were in need of my attention somewhere up there.

  Eventually the Japanese reappeared, emerging from the jungle in dribs and drabs, their uniforms no longer quite so smart. They did not march back through the town, the lorries went to fetch them, and it appeared to me that was because they did not want the many dark bundles the men were carrying to be seen.

  Although a search failed to eventuate it was quite obvious that things could not return to the way they had been. Two soldiers were left at the entrance to the town, standing as sentries, and were replaced twice a day for the next week. Normal activity in the town resumed, warily at first. I imagined Shorty and his men carrying their wounded on stretchers for miles through the jungle to another of their sympathetic medical practitioners in some isolated village far away. I wondered if there really were any other sympathetic medical practitioners, or if I was the only one fool enough to get involved. I hoped there were, because the chances were probably high that Bintang would again be among the wounded.

  After a week the sentry duty was relaxed. A single soldier was posted at sunrise and removed at sunset. It must have been quite a battle they fought in those hills, I thought, if the Japanese army was no longer willing to brave the perils of a night in sleepy Papan.

  Two weeks later I thought my midnight clinic was reopening for business when I received a nocturnal visit from a man I had not seen before. He was a good deal older than most of the men from the hills, and he was neither wounded nor did he appear particularly unwell. He said he was thirsty and I gave him a mug of water. He must have b
een parched as he drank three full mugs before he would say anything else. For the sake of convenience, I gave him the name Minum, which is Malay for drink.

  He told me there was to be a new arrangement. Only the very worst cases would now be brought into town for my attention. He said he had been sent to learn the basics of the treatment I had been providing, and would return as many times as that required. I asked him what training he had already, and he said he was one of the regiment’s ‘barefoot doctors’. His use of the word ‘regiment’, which I had not heard from them before, made it sound like they had a regular army up there in the hills. It is, he said proudly. The Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army. He even snapped a strange kind of salute for me with a clenched fist. Minum was a very earnest fellow.

  As a barefoot doctor, I discovered, he had received training in traditional medicine, meaning Chinese herbs, acupuncture and diet. He was a well-educated Chinese, perhaps even a scholar, I thought from his correctness of speech and rather polished manner. When he had occasion to write me a note, whether in English or Chinese (which I did not understand), I found his handwriting to be verging on calligraphy. He had a good understanding of basic anatomy, and was quick to pick things up. It required only a couple of visits for me to show him how to adminster quinine with a hypodermic syringe, and to recognise the different diseases of the skin, which accounted for the bulk of problems he would face. I gave him as much of my reserve of quinine and other medicines as I could spare, and wished him well. I did not see him again for years. Unfortunately, what I did see again much sooner than that was one of the bottles of quinine I gave him, a bottle that, as I was soon to learn, could be readily traced back to my door.