The Heart Radical

by Boyd Anderson

  I was on my feet for two and a half hours in the end, with a twenty minute tea and toilet break for jury comfort and to assist their ability to concentrate for a period more arduous than even the lengthiest instalment of a TV soap.

  Hooray Henry, of course, really had the last word. He reminded the jury again that even though they may have accepted that our clients and their families and countrymen may be an oppressed minority, victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity, they were charged with supporting armed resistance and violent struggle against a legitimate government, which equated to endorsing terrorism, and was an offence under British law.

  I was about to comment on the term ‘legitimate’, which was at the very least a moot point in the case of the regime in Pakistan, but I was slower to find my feet than one of my colleagues who had the same point to make. Finally, after nearly three months, the matter was in the hands of the jury.

  In the corridor outside the court I was surprised to find Paris Thumboo waiting for me, his smile even brighter than the tie he was again sporting. He shook my hand so vigorously I thought it would come off. I was surrounded by colleagues at the time, including barristers and solicitors, and the corridor was a crush of public bodies. Paris seemed to be quite oblivious to all this commotion when he said to me, ‘There’s a lot of your father in you.’

  It was not the first time he had said it, and the other instance had provoked in me certain emotions, but I have no rational explanation for what happened next. There, in a crowded corridor, hemmed in by so many people, and in my wig and gown – I began to cry.

  Kennedy QC, another female barrister appearing for one of the other two defendants, saw what had happened and rushed me back through the doors to the courtroom. She asked me if I was all right, whether I was injured in some way. Paris came in after us. I convinced Kennedy that I was unscathed and managed to compose myself. I said it was merely the pressure of the morning’s events, the long trial, and so on. She was not convinced, of course – Kennedy knows me better than that – but accepted what I said and left us alone.

  Paris sympathised with me about the stress such a case could put one under. He thought for a moment, and then added, ‘If stress can produce such a result as this morning’s speech, then I will from now on be seeking to put myself under more of it.’

  He said it with such a straight face, but then the corner of his mouth twitched, and we both burst into laughter. It was left unsaid, but I suppose we both found ourselves tickled by the inclusion of both this man and ‘stress’ in the same sentence.

  He took a deep sigh before puckering his features up into a frown. ‘I have to leave tonight to go back to KL,’ he said with unconcealed regret.

  ‘I haven’t finished your mother’s document yet,’ I said. ‘I’ve been so busy over the past weeks, what with this trial, and one thing and another, I’ve simply not had the time.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Please … finish it in your own time. It’s only a copy, and I’m happy to leave it with you.’ He shuffled just a little closer to me. ‘I am still interested to have your opinion of it. In fact, I am even more interested now.’

  And then he hugged me. He wrapped his arms around my gown and squeezed me, and it was the warmest I had ever felt him. To be honest, it was the warmest I had felt myself since … I really cannot remember.

  And I certainly could not remember the last time I cried.

  My father said that as I was no longer receiving tuition from Mr Ho, for the time being I should do all my Chinese practice with him in his office, including recitation, which meant that now I was to spend every afternoon after school there until our mother returned and made other arrangements. Pa was fluent in Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin, and as he had once worked for the government in China, he was also proficient in written Chinese. He had even managed to pick up a smattering of Shanghainese, which was rarely to be heard in Malaya, and he once told me that when you did hear a lot of Shanghainese being spoken it sounded like a swarm of bees was in the room. It was obvious that he would not have much time to spare for this, not least because the trial was looming, but I liked the idea of having my father for a teacher.

  When it came to the time in the lesson for reciting, he said, I should go out to the courtyard where I would not disturb anyone. What about rhythm and balance, I said. Mr Ho kept me in time with the tap of his pencil – who would do that for me outside? Pa took me out the back and showed me a very useful method for doing it all by myself. He stood in the courtyard and recited the first three verses of the Sahm Ji Ging in perfect rhythm, all thirty-six words like powerful metal clicks, even better than I had ever heard Mr Ho. He kept time by marching on the spot like a soldier, three falls of the foot each accompanied by a word and then a fourth as a break between the lines. It was the first time I realised my father even knew the Sahm Ji Ging, let alone how well he knew it. I tried it myself, marching to the beat of my words, and made a discovery. Suddenly the Sahm Ji Ging was not so difficult because it had now actually become fun.

  Pa asked me how many words I knew. ‘Two hundred,’ I said proudly.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Do all two hundred ten times before you come inside.’

  ‘How many do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘All of them,’ he said.

  All of them? It had taken me more than two years to learn two hundred. How many were there?

  ‘Well over a thousand,’ Pa said. ‘So start practising.’

  Well over a thousand! The figures quickly rattled around my brain. At the rate I was going, that meant I would be learning until I was eighteen! My mother was married at eighteen. Did that mean I would have to keep practising until I was married?

  ‘Just think of how much you are going to know when you are eighteen,’ Pa said. ‘You’ll be so smart by then that getting married won’t even enter your head.’

  Two thousand words later I went back inside. Uncle Hung Jeuk was now sitting across the desk from Pa in his own personal cloud of cigarette smoke, so I went straight to my little table without a word.

  ‘Practise your writing quietly now,’ Pa said.

  ‘First the eye, then the ear, then the hand,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said. ‘Is that what old Ho has been teaching you?’

  ‘How did you know?’ I asked.

  ‘You and I have the same teacher,’ he said, and then turned to Pa. ‘Where is Ho, anyway?’

  ‘He’s unwell,’ Pa said.

  ‘Yes, so I’ve heard. But he’s not at home. I called around to see how he was the other day and he wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there for a while, they said.’ He reached into his pocket and took out another of his Chinese books. ‘I wanted to talk to him about this. A bit too modern for my limited vocabulary. Nobody seems to know where he is. He’s been behaving rather peculiarly of late. I’ve told him a hundred times he shouldn’t live in that hovel of a room. Cheek by jowl like that, bound to catch something horrible. Won’t take a penny from anyone. Too jolly proud for his own good.’

  A thought then seemed to strike him. He reached across the desk for my father’s hand. ‘Listen … he’s not gone back into … you know. He wouldn’t do that, would he?’

  My father shook his head decisively. ‘No. Apart from anything else, his health’s not up to it.’

  ‘Yes … but he can be stubborn sometimes.’

  I stood up to get a look at the book. Uncle Hung Jeuk slid it across the desk away from me, his hand over the cover. ‘Not for young girls.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The Flowers of Shanghai,’ he said.

  Uncle Hung Jeuk seemed to have so many surprising interests. ‘Do you like flowers, Uncle Hung Jeuk?’

  ‘It’s not about flowers,’ Pa said. He held it up and pointed to the five characters of the title. ‘Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. I don’t want to confuse her, Humphrey, and I’m certainly not going to start censoring books now.’

  ‘What are sing-song girls?’ I said.r />
  He opened his mouth to say something, but then thought better of it and put the book aside again, face down. ‘Back to this Larkin business,’ he eventually said to Uncle Hung Jeuk. ‘Sunday, you say?’

  ‘Yes, but he insists it be private,’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said. ‘Secret, if you will. For obvious reasons, I suppose. You can’t meet here. I suggested the Ipoh Club or the FMS. Too public. He said St John’s church. Handy to both, as it happens, but a bit unorthodox. A bit eldritch, as my old Uncle Jock would say.’

  ‘Or very cloak and dagger,’ Pa said.

  ‘Well, he is Special Branch, Casey. Or mata-mata gelap, as the Malays call them. Eyes that see in the dark. On the other hand, it may just be absolution he’s after. That’s a thought, isn’t it? Special Branch could do with a bit of that, couldn’t they.’

  ‘Couldn’t we all,’ Pa said. ‘What time?’

  ‘He said after matins.’

  ‘When might that be?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’ Uncle Hung Jeuk said. ‘Means morning, doesn’t it? Must be the morning hallelujah. Ask your daughter. She goes to a church school. Don’t you, pretty Su.’

  I was still occupied with trying to work out what a sing-song girl could be.

  ‘Wrong church,’ Pa said.

  Uncle Hung Jeuk shrugged at me. ‘Ah, well. Let’s hope ours is the right one. I think we’re going to need God on our side.’

  That Sunday my father was caught by surprise. Mei and Li cycled off to visit friends, and then both the servants told him it was their day off, which meant there was no one to look after me, and he had to go to church. Which is how I first came to meet the man I later grew up calling Uncle John.

  On that Sunday he was Mr Larkin. He did not become Uncle John until after the trial when he stopped working for the government and became one of my father’s closest friends. When he became Uncle John he visited us often, sitting on the veranda with my parents and drinking whisky. In those days my mother would make an excuse about dealing with servants or some other pressing matter and take herself off to bed, but Pa and Uncle John would sit out on the veranda for hours. I could hear them from my room, and I would lie there in bed listening to their voices, loud one moment and soft the next, and their laughter cutting through the still night like animal calls. ‘John Larkin doesn’t know his way home,’ Ma used to say about him then. And Pa would say, ‘John Larkin doesn’t have a home,’ which confused me at the time because I knew where he lived.

  In those later days he was also a regular at the FMS with Pa and Uncle Hung Jeuk, but I imagine before that, when he was still Mr Larkin to me, he was more an Ipoh Club sort of a person. The Ipoh Club, perched above the Padang and keeping watch over the town, was where the Europeans in white suits met to drink and play their peculiar games with even more peculiar names, such as volunteer snooker or carom billiards. Some nights they held dances and wore stiff black suits and brought their stiff white wives in dresses that floated on the breeze. On the opposite side of the Padang, where the Ipoh Club could look down on it, was the FMS.

  But that was after the trial. Before the trial he was Mr Larkin, and even my father had not met him until that Sunday in the church.

  Late in the morning, around the time church services would be winding up, there was heavy rain; so heavy that no one who didn’t really have to set foot outside their door would think of doing so, but Pa really had to. He drove slowly to his office, peering through the wipers and ploughing through small lakes that had collected on the road. He stopped at the end of Hale Street and we jumped onto the wet seat of a trishaw. Curled up behind the cover and trying to stay dry, it occurred to me that I had never seen my father so keen to do something so unusual as visit a church.

  The trishaw man pedalled us around behind the Ipoh Club and then beneath an avenue of trees until a steep red roof and white windows slowly emerged through the gloom. The car-park was empty and no one was around, nor even inside, although the tall Gothic doors were wide open.

  It was a long church, certainly a lot bigger than our school chapel. Near the altar were a few rows of pews, but behind them and laid out right back to where we stood, was a motley collection of benches and chairs. We sat on two of them close to the side wall and waited.

  This was a different church to any I had been in before. For one thing there was no gruesome crucifix behind the altar. Jesus was not to be found here anywhere that I could see, nor Mary Mother of God. I had been told churches like this existed.

  ‘Is this a Protestant church?’ I whispered to Pa.

  ‘Church of England,’ he whispered back.

  ‘Is that like Protestant? Sister Mary Agnes told me I should never go into a Protestant church.’

  ‘Shh,’ Pa said.

  There was no need to whisper, there was no one to hear us, and not only that, the rain rumbling on the roof was louder than anything below a shout, but I had always been told to be quiet in church. And then I found there was someone there after all. I neither saw nor heard him arrive, but a man had suddenly appeared and was now sitting right next to my father.

  ‘Tan?’ he said. ‘John Larkin.’

  He used his full name and held out his hand to show Pa there was no weapon in it, so I understood at once he was not a lawyer. He had fair hair, but his skin was darker than most of the English in Malaya, about as dark as a rickshaw puller. When he caught sight of me a troubled look descended over his features. And then he nodded.

  ‘You brought your daughter. Good idea. Good cover.’

  He looked around the church and slowly relaxed. ‘I know you’ve only got a week, but I can’t get involved. My superiors would take a very dim view if they knew I was assisting you in any way at all.’

  ‘Whatever you can do,’ Pa said, ‘it will be greatly appreciated.’

  ‘I owe him my life, you know. If it wasn’t for him … well, I think you do know. He deserved to get his Military Cross.’

  ‘You did your best, I’m sure. He doesn’t care about the medal.’

  ‘No, I don’t imagine he does.’ Whatever was worrying Mr Larkin must have slipped from his mind, because he began to smile. ‘Toh Kei, Na Na and Shorty Mak … what a crew. Sometimes I think they were the best years of my life. They were certainly the hardest.’

  ‘Hard times, if you survive them, usually are.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. I used to call them the triad. They were so close. Of course, what they really were was an old-fashioned triangle, like one of these American films, or some News of the World scandal. I don’t suppose too many people know that about Toh Kei, how charming he can be at close quarters. Shorty, on the other hand … It’s a pity about Shorty. He was a good fellow in those days. Now he’s just a … well, we all know what Shorty Mak is these days. I brought something for you.’ He took a book from his coat pocket. ‘Have you read this?’

  Pa looked at the cover. ‘The Jungle My Refuge. What’s it about?’

  ‘It’s Joe Spencer,’ Mr Larkin said. ‘He was out there the whole war, longer than any of us. Not up here, down in Johore. It’s a jolly good read. Makes it all sound rather romantic.’

  ‘Perhaps they were the best years of his life, too,’ Pa said as he passed the book to me to hold.

  ‘They thought they could just take over, you know. Toh Kei, Shorty … all of them. Thought that with the Japs out of the way they could just stake their claim like the Indonesians. But we outfoxed them. Got them to swap their weapons for medals and a victory parade in London.’

  ‘I thought you said they were your friends.’

  ‘Well, you know what they say about love and war. Mind you, they did plenty of their own foxing. Only handed in some of their weapons. We should have counted them. If they had resisted us coming back this could be a Chinese state right now.’

  ‘A Chinese communist state?’ Pa said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not?’ Mr Larkin said. ‘The whole of Asia could be a Chinese communist state soon, the way things are goin
g. Anyhow, we’ve learned our lesson. Friends become enemies. Be careful who you arm. Won’t do that again in a hurry.’

  He leaned back and folded his arms and stretched his legs out in front of him. ‘This place was once a noodle factory, did you know that? The Japanese turned it into one and chopped up all the pews for firewood. More constructive application of resources I suppose some would say. Worse than that will happen in this country when we leave. Everyone’s doing their best to pretend it’s all business as usual, but it’s the phoney war all over again. Have you heard they’ve called a general election for this month back home? Next thing you know Churchill will be back and he’ll start rattling his sabre and make it into a real war. What you need is in the book.’

  Pa took it from me and opened the cover. A sheet of paper was folded inside. He was about to take it out when Mr Larkin closed it again.

  ‘Look at it later,’ he said. ‘Everything’s there … dates, times. I’ve even included a bonus for you. A bit on the Batang Kali incident.’

  ‘Batang Kali incident?’

  ‘You’ll see. They covered it up. You may find it useful. If you don’t mind, burn it when you’ve read it. Not the book, of course. I must go.’

  He was very tall when he stood up, as tall as Uncle Hung Jeuk, and as slim, but with broad shoulders. From where I sat he didn’t look like any Englishman I knew, not even the ones in the film in Papan – he looked more like one of the actors from an American film. We followed him to the door. He picked up an umbrella and looked out through the rain.