The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  As we approached the stall there was a European man buying juice for his two children, a boy and a girl around my age. I had not seen the children before, and while I was studying them I missed noticing who their father was. ‘Tan,’ he said to Pa. ‘Davies,’ Pa said to him.

  Whenever I saw them together, which was on the few occasions that Mr Davies came to our house with Mrs Davies, they always called each other only by their surnames. I asked Pa why once, and he said it was an old English tradition that members of the Bar referred to each other in that manner outside the court and ‘my learned friend’ inside the court. I said, so how is it that with Uncle Raja and Uncle Hung Jeuk, it’s different? He said that it was different with them because they were real friends as well as learned friends and that was why I called them uncle. I said, so Mr Davies isn’t an uncle because he’s not your real friend? But he didn’t answer. He just said that it was another tradition that members of the Bar never shook hands, because shaking hands was an old way of showing that you were not carrying a weapon, and members of the Bar trusted each other so much they didn’t have to do that. I said, so Mr Davies is not a real friend but you trust him? Pa said then that I was thinking about all this too much. They are just funny old traditions, he said, from another time and another place.

  I knew my father also had funny old traditions from other times and other places, such as the one with the black armband. He would wear it over his sleeve for one day every year, and that day was always May 30. He said it was to remember the day that British police fired on Chinese workers and students in Shanghai. I asked him what the British police were doing in Shanghai, and he sighed and said it was a very complicated story and one day when I was old enough to understand he would tell me. I thought I was already old enough to understand anything as long as it was properly explained, so rather than leave it at that, and to show him that I was ready for complicated explanations, I asked him if those workers and students had died and if the black armband was to remember them. ‘I wear it to remember China’s shame,’ he said.

  At the sugarcane stall I noticed that Pa and Mr Davies did not shake hands. ‘So who do we have,’ Pa asked him, ‘Thomson or Pretheroe?’

  ‘Judge Pretheroe,’ Mr Davies said. ‘Better make sure you’re on time.’

  Pa smiled. ‘A short trial then, although not necessarily a happy one.’

  ‘How is Mr Liew coming along?’ Mr Davies asked. ‘Is he fit?’

  ‘Toh Kei is recovering well. He’s even gaining weight. How is Na Na?’

  ‘Also recovering. The wounds weren’t serious.’

  ‘That was a stroke of luck for you,’ Pa said.

  ‘Luck had nothing to do with it. We found a surrender pass in Na Na’s pocket.’

  Pa looked surprised. ‘Makes you wonder about a motive, doesn’t it?’

  Mr Davies finished his glass of juice and looked up at the temple under the cliff. ‘History will be made with this case, Tan. And history has no time for idle speculation.’ He collected the empty glasses from his children and handed them back to the juice man. ‘Anyway, in this case Na Na is just the icing on the cake.’

  ‘Chinese cakes don’t have icing,’ Pa said.

  Mr Davies paid the juice man, but his eyes did not leave my father as he did. ‘Judge Pretheroe is not Chinese,’ he said.

  ‘But the assessors will be,’ Pa said, and Mr Davies nodded slowly, turned and walked away, leading his children over to his car.

  Whenever there were terrible events on lonely roads or remote rubber estates, I noticed how when men read their Straits Times they would shake their heads and say to the next man, what’s the world coming to? But no one had an answer to that question.

  What the world came to one day not long before the trial was that horrific event that shook me more severely than any before – more than the Ten Courts of Chinese Hell, more than the Balai of Fire, more than any of the stories of ambushes, village attacks or jungle skirmishes that appeared regularly in the paper. That was the day I read about the little English girl with only one eye. I read that story over and over, unable to comprehend it, unwilling to believe that with so many supreme beings watching over us – God in Heaven, the Jade Emperor, the Goddess of Mercy, the Holy Ghost – such a terrifying thing could take place.

  There was a grainy picture that came with the story of a smiling round-faced Chinese man under an army cap. ‘Shorty Mak, believed to be the leader of the bandit killers,’ the caption read.

  There was another picture of a street of shops before a hill like a Chinese hat. ‘Sungai Siput, bandit hotspot.’

  The morning after that story appeared in the paper, after a night of struggling with the awful images it conjured up for me, I was shaken again, and this time in a particularly physical way. The day started normally enough when I took my only-half-awake self down to see if there was a goose egg for my father’s breakfast. I caught sight of Mr Yew standing on a chair to study our house. He looked straight at me, so there was no pretending I didn’t see him. ‘Jo sun, Uncle Yew,’ I said.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. Whenever I saw Mr Yew he smiled and called me Missy, but that morning he just pushed his tweed cap back and said, ‘This house bad fung seui for me. Block my luck. You tell daddy I buy, okay?’ I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. ‘You tell him, lah. I pay good price. Knock down. Bring good luck for me.’

  I knew Pa would never even think about such a thing without having our mother on hand, but I felt sorry for Mr Yew. For months he had been digging up that garden and still had not found what he was looking for. I remembered the big wooden wok I had seen at the market.

  ‘You should try a dulang,’ I said to him cheerily. ‘I know where there’s one for only five dollars.’

  He pulled his cap back down over his eyes and frowned at me. ‘Dulang, ah?’

  ‘It’s what they used in the olden days.’

  He threw his head back and laughed and almost lost his footing on the chair. ‘Dulang, Missy … dulang.’ He didn’t stop laughing all the way back to his house.

  But it was not Mr Yew who caused me to be so shaken that day. That happened later in the morning in Miss Mak’s class. Miss Mak was not only fierce, she was a big woman, with flabby arms that could inflict extreme discomfort when she caught you with a blow from her long wooden ruler. She wore her hair pulled tight into a bun, the way Chinese married women wore it, although everyone knew that Miss Mak was not in fact married. Why she was not married when she was at least as old as my mother was a recurring source of wonder for me. On her face there was a perpetual scowl, deep lines crossing her forehead and meeting in a knot of creases above her nose, and that morning the lines and creases appeared deeper than ever.

  We were well into a lesson on music when I got shaken. Miss Mak was reading to us from Peter and the Wolf and put the book aside every few minutes to play a record of the music that assisted in telling the story, which was about a boy in Russia who got into strife when he strayed into a forest. It may have been a Russian forest, but in Malaya we knew all about the dangers of such a mistake. In Russia there might have been a wolf, but in Malaya there were tigers, elephants, snakes as big as dragons, bandits of course, and worst of all, ghosts. When Peter strayed into that forest, with the different instruments helping to make it so easy for us to conjure up the scene, we each shuffled a little closer to the next girl and awaited the terrible, but surely inevitable, results of this carelessness.

  Peter’s musical imagery was the string section, which was bright and melodic and made us instantly sympathetic toward him. His grandfather, who warned him about straying, was a bassoon that lumbered like a bear. The wolf waiting for them in the forest was the horns, dark and sinister, such as when the villain made an entrance in an American cowboy film. When she was nearing the end of the story and the wolf was preparing to eat Peter, Miss Mak stopped and played a burst from the drums. It was quite obvious to all what that represented: gunfire.

  Who do
you think that is, she asked us. After a night grappling with images of the little girl that I could not displace from my mind, I put my hand up and said it must be bandits. They must be coming to shoot Peter through the eye.

  Miss Mak went absolutely white. She reached across with that heavy book and whacked me on my ear so hard that I fell out of my seat. ‘You are the bandit!’ she screamed. ‘You are the terrorist! You should be locked up! You … and your father!’ And then she ran from the room.

  When I arrived at my father’s office that afternoon I was still shaking. My eyes were red and my head was aching. He asked me what had happened and I told him about Miss Mak. What did she mean, I asked. Pa didn’t answer, just went straight around to the school and did not come back for an hour.

  He said I would not have to worry about Miss Mak any more as we would be getting a new teacher. I said I was glad because I did not like Miss Mak. Don’t think too badly of Miss Mak, Pa said, she has some problems to deal with. And then he said she wasn’t the only teacher I would not be seeing for a while. He said Mr Ho was too sick now to take our lessons. He had spoken to Ma about it and she would arrange for a new Chinese teacher when she came home with the new baby.

  When he said that I had to stop and think what he meant. New baby? Up until then I had hardly even considered that soon there would be a baby in our house. I knew my mother was carrying one, had even heard its heartbeat, but the actual fact of it living under our roof had not yet occurred to me.

  ‘As we’re talking about the baby,’ Pa said, ‘I have something to show you.’ He took a little box from his desk drawer. ‘B. P. De Silva Ltd, Pivot of Jewelry’ was printed in gold. He opened it up and resting on white satin was a small gold chain with a tiny gold lock. ‘It’s an ankle chain to keep him safe. Or her.’

  What I should call the new baby was something else to consider, and now I could see my father was having the same problem. I couldn’t say ‘it’, as that would suggest the baby wasn’t even a person, but no one knew if it would be a boy or a girl. I knew my parents wanted a boy, but it was bad luck to say ‘he’ before he was born because that could attract the attention of ghosts who were always on the lookout for boy babies to steal. And saying ‘she’ would be worse as I was pretty well convinced that my mother especially had had enough of girls. And to be honest, I was rather hoping for a brother as well. That is, I was until a few days later when I heard something that gave me second thoughts.

  What I heard, what everyone in school heard, was the problem that my father said Miss Mak had to deal with. The bandit who shot the little girl through the eye was her brother.

  33

  PARIS

  Such a colourful article of wardrobe. I would never ordinarily wear such a thing, or buy it for that matter. It was silk, and hand made according to the packet. It must have cost an absurd sum – perhaps as much as thirty or forty pounds. I could never justify such an extravagance on the stipend of an associate professor, but a London barrister, even one who by her own admission takes on too much pro bono work, lives in a different world. A world of swanky Bayswater maisonettes, for one thing; and of confrontational behaviour as a default position when dealing with people, for another. No wonder so many lawyers end up in parliament. No wonder so few associate professors!

  I was coming to a position in my own rather ad hoc relation ship with Su-Lin where I found her style perhaps even more than confrontational. We had now met on half a dozen occasions, and it seemed to me she was becoming quite provocative, and increasingly so the more time we spent together. I was sure this was why she lived alone and (again by her own admission) had few good friends. On the other hand, I should not really have been so quick to judge as I also lived a rather solitary existence myself, but I don’t think anyone I know would be moved to describe me as either provocative or confrontational.

  In spite of my natural reserve (and my sartorial taste) I wore the tie to the opera. It was only good manners to do so, and could perhaps avoid more conflict. I must say, when I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror in the lobby of the opera house – the tie seeming to vault from my otherwise dark-suited chest – I was pleasantly surprised at the effect. So many sombre gentlemen surrounded me. I will admit to feeling a spring in my step that night. Unfortunately, it was not to last.

  It was the first opera I had ever attended. There is no such thing in Kuala Lumpur, and on my infrequent visits to London I could afford neither the time nor the expense for such an indulgence. The Royal Opera House is a grand building, and when I laid eyes on the great Corinthian columns lining the portico I felt I perhaps understood the inspiration for the smaller versions in Su-Lin’s flat. Her enthusiasm for the whole opera experience seemed to know no bounds, and she talked at length about the building, the performances she had been to over the years, the ‘event’ nature of the occasion. The event we were to see that night was Faust, which I must say I was looking forward to. I had not been lucky enough to see Goethe’s play, let alone this opera, but I had enjoyed reading it in an English translation more than once.

  The auditorium was in a great horseshoe, and our seats were at the apex of it, quite far from the stage and high up. Was this ‘the gods’ that I heard so much about? Su-Lin said these were the best seats for viewing the surtitles over the stage, and added that most people would say the acoustics were also better. Were these excuses for cheaper seats, I wondered. Did the extravagances even of London barristers have their limits? It didn’t matter. The effect on me was breathtaking, wherever I sat.

  I knew the story of Faust, which was just as well as the whole thing was in French. I found myself consulting the programme continually to keep up, and studying the translation electronically displayed for me in the surtitles, but soon gave up on these as they merely distracted my attention, and surrendered myself to the spectacle. The acoustics were indeed quite astonishing. When the baritone playing the role of Mephistopheles opened up his lungs I could feel my own chest vibrating.

  It was a long performance – five acts with an interval, truly Shakespearean. We joined the crush at one of the bars and I was moved to accompany her in a glass of wine. She was so enlivened by the performance that, for the entire fifteen minute break, she only stopped talking long enough to take a quick gulp. Back in our seats I could not help taking sidelong glances at her face during the most emotional scenes. It was as if the traditional theatrical masks were fixed to her features, the happy and the sad, always on cue.

  As we filed out she was quiet. At first I thought it was merely due to the hubbub that surrounded us, but she continued to be withdrawn even when we reached the open spaces of the street. It was the after-effect of the performance, I realised. She really was quite overcome with the event, just as she had predicted.

  She said that we were booked in for supper at one of her favourite bistros. It was a short walk to a nondescript entrance next to a garage door, which did not promise much. We descended into a basement again and I was anticipating yet another Fleet Street experience, but was pleasantly surprised to find a bright and cheerful room with blonde timber, starched white tablecloths and a small but bubbly crowd of diners.

  The first thing she did was order a bottle of wine. The service was not exactly overattentive, but I didn’t think that was justification for being as brusque with the waiters as she was. Could I see a pattern here? Was it for men that she reserved her most confrontational exchanges? She seemed to relax a little when the wine was delivered.

  I ordered a simple piece of fish as I was wary of enduring a restless night when I had a full day in the archives ahead of me. She remarked on the plates, that they were hand-painted Italian ceramic, and then withdrew into her thoughts with a shy smile. Yes, a shy smile. It quite disarmed me. I was thoroughly charmed until she told me what she was thinking. It seems she had an ‘interlude’ (her word) with one of the waiters in this bistro at some time in her life, and he had managed to sneak out pieces of the crockery for her. She claimed to have a substantia
l set, even suggested that she would cook an appropriate meal for me at some stage to show them off. I admit to being astounded by this revelation – a lawyer so blasé with the law, so offhand with what could only be described as a confession, in spite of the shy smile. My astonishment must have been all over my face as she retreated a little. It was not a contrite retreat, more a defiant withdrawal. She had spent so much money in this place over the past twenty years, she said, that it was justified. Quid pro quo, she said. A triumph of wisdom over dogma.

  I could see no wisdom in common theft, and I think the evening went downhill after that, such as most of our previous encounters. There was so much to like in this woman, and yet there were other sides to her that defied simple explanation.

  She said she was a dab hand with the pasta herself, continuing on the theme of preparing a home-cooked meal for me on the plundered plates. I said I had so little time left now, and still so much work to do, that I wasn’t sure I would be able to accept such an invitation. It was the truth, although not the whole truth. An application, perhaps she might say, of wisdom over dogma, as I was having second thoughts for a third time now over a relationship with Su-Lin.

  34

  SU-LIN

  When he turned up at Covent Garden in the tie I was encouraged. He even appeared to be more animated, less troubled. He was looking forward to the performance, said he knew the Goethe play well. That certainly surprised me. I was moved to remind him that he had told me he had no time for tragedies, but then thought better of it. After all, if he could not recognise his own captivation with the subject, who was I to play the cod psychologist? I had already failed to encourage him in that direction once.