by Martin Booth
After dozing, he lit a cigarette and puffed at it, still lying on his back. The sun was warm on the door of his room and he could hear the metal crickling as it expanded in the late day’s heat. Soon it would cool again, once the sun had set behind the school at the rear of the hotel, across the street. He could hear pupils playing basketball in the playground behind the high stone wall. The ball bounced hollowly upon the concrete court, echoing in the confines created by the wall.
Smoke rings wafted up from his mouth and did not disintegrate until they reached the plaster above his head. The door acted like a radiator, transferring its heat inwards.
He stood up and stripped himself bare. In the tiny bathroom, he turned on the shower and let it run before standing under it. The plumbing ran down the outside of the wall and the first few minutes of water would be piping hot from the sunlight.
Once beneath the cool jet, he reached for the carbolic soap he used. It was hard as pummice and just as gritty. With it, he scoured his body.
The area of his stomach was, he thought, rougher than when he had last washed. As the soap ground over it, flakes peeled off like sunburnt skin. Where it came away, it left a red blotch that was not raw but looked as if it should be. When the soapsuds wormed in under his fingernails, they stung like acid.
Refreshed, he put on the cream cotton shirt he’d stolen from the Canton, having saved it for several days and resisted the temptation to wear it. He had wanted to sport it that afternoon, to see Francis Leung, but thought better of it. If he saw Sandingham so nattily dressed, Leung might assume he didn’t need the money so badly. Now he wore it not just because it was cool and smart but also because it gave him some self-esteem. He had been neglecting himself of late, he knew that. The opium did it, in part.
The first-floor lounge verandah was open and a temporary bar had been set up just inside the french doors. Two Australian officers, the captain and a lieutenant, were drinking beer and scotch chasers with a few of the other ranks downing glasses of local lager. Many of the troops in the hotel had gone off for the evening, most likely to see what delights the redder areas of Kowloon and Hong Kong-side might have on offer. A few younger ones with girls at home or a fear of a dose of the clap had stayed.
Sandingham took out a dollar bill and bought himself a beer. With it, he went out on to the balcony and leaned on the parapet near but not too close to the two officers. They were talking about sheep rearing in voices that had the nasal drawl of the true-bred Aussie. At a lull in their talking, Sandingham broke into their conversation.
‘Heading for Korea?’ he asked, pointlessly. Where else would they be going? One could hardly hold full-scale manoeuvres in a British colony of three hundred and ninety-eight and a half square miles on the rim of a none-too-friendly Communist China.
‘Reckon we are!’ replied the captain. Then he said, ‘You live here?’
‘Since 1947,’ answered Sandingham. ‘Not all the time in this hotel, of course. I’ve moved about a bit.’
‘You work out here?’
‘I’m retired out here,’ Sandingham said ambiguously. He was hardly of the age for a pension and he saw the captain throw an intimate, quizzical glance to his fellow officer and wondered if these two slept together. Probably not: Australians had too much of a masculine reputation to admit, even in private, that they were little queers like him. He let his eyes drop. Military uniforms were far better fitting in the fifties than they had been in the war and he noted with mixed emotions the tight fabric and firm, fleshy muscles beneath.
He must not have another beer: it would be a penance for allowing such thoughts to run in his head. He must not submit to the temptation. That was vital. It was also part of the excitement.
‘What did you do out here before you retired?’ the lieutenant asked, Sandingham catching the ironic twinge in his words that even a deep Australian accent could not cover.
‘I was in the army. Then I was caught, taken prisoner. Of the Japanese.’
This changed the two officers’ approach. Suddenly they were curious, interested, concerned for detail and truth about internees and their lives. They ordered three more beers and sat on the wall of the verandah between the pots of bushy chrysanthemums and pried into Sandingham’s war years.
At first, he was pleased to tell them of the glory and the horror, the pain and the courage, the degradation and the spirituality and gut survival instinct of imprisonment. Within fifteen minutes, though, they were probing deeper and he was remembering, through the beer and the opium of the previous evening, what it had really been like.
‘Is it true they tortured you just to get details about who kept a diary?’ they asked.
The enquiry broke something in Sandingham’s thoughts. He knew how a splinter of bamboo, a fragment of glowing charcoal or a ten-cent firecracker up your anus could feel.
‘Wait a moment!’ he burst out. ‘Just hold on! Why do you want to know this? What is it to you? You’ll not be facing this up in the hills around Panmunjong or wherever. You’ll have comfy personnel carriers to kip down in and mobile hospitals ten minutes away by helicopter. There will be Coca-Cola and whiskey and fur-lined boots in the winter.
‘You know what we had? A canvas sheet, a crumpled pack of field dressings and a clapped-out ambulance if we were lucky. Our Albion was seven years old, a stripped first gear, a nonexistent clutch, rock-hard springs and bullet holes down the right side by the time … And we had stale water and sod-all booze except what we could scrounge or “liberate” and my boots were hard as wood. In the summer we sweated; in the winter we froze. And that was on active service. After being captured …
‘You buggers haven’t an idea. Not an inkling. And you never will have. Your war is a luxury battle alongside what mine was. You’re all god-damn generals in cosy HQ billets by comparison.’
The lieutenant stood up slowly, easing his feet on to the ceramic tiles of the balcony. He put his beer down on the wall very gently, as if taking care not to spill a drop or even disturb the scanty froth. His friend put a restraining hand on his arm, but he shook it off with a quick jerk. He took a step towards Sandingham and stood close before him.
‘You said it all, Pom? Enough? Anything else you want to add to that?’
Sandingham said nothing. Nor did he ready himself to flinch. Pain was nothing. The punch would come: it always did. What was the good of ducking?
‘Leave him, Dave. The ORs’ll see you.’
He spoke quietly so that the other ranks in the lounge wouldn’t hear, but his words were to no avail.
The lieutenant turned his head halfway and stage-whispered, ‘Stick it, Craig! Now,’ he faced Sandingham again, ‘let me remind you of something. You Poms and a few Canadians and some half-trained local volunteers lost this scrappy bit of China in eighteen days. Eighteen days! Christ! You couldn’t even hold out against a bunch of bloody Japs for three weeks. Surrendered on Christmas Day. What an achievement, eh! What a fucking joke! I reckon the Indian troops you had must have fallen about with mirth at that one. The great Englishmen, the backbone of the British Raj – shot to fuck in eighteen days. Poms! Jesus!’
He stepped back and lifted himself on to the verandah wall again.
No punch came.
Sandingham said nothing. He held his glass and looked into it. It was shaking very slightly. Tiny ripples ringed in from the sides and met in a miniscule maelstrom in the centre.
In that little whirl of beer he saw Baz’s face: Baz, whom he hadn’t seen and who had been gone for years. It was looking up, but it was seeing nothing. There was sand in his hair. He could hear waves and voices screaming nothing and he saw the beer darken into blood.
He did not put his glass down. He simply let go of it. Before it smashed on the tiling, he was into the Australian’s chest, fumbling at his tunic buttons, at the breast pockets. Slowed by the beer and chasers, the lieutenant lost his balance and toppled half backwards. One arm, flailing sideways for a grip, punched one of the big plant pots ove
r the side. It hit the edge of a two-foot-wide sill, broke into three and shattered on the hotel drive below. A cacophony of Cantonese broke out from the ground floor and the bellboy, in his white uniform and pork-pie hat, came running into sight to look up at the cause of the crash.
The two Australians were grappling with Sandingham. Somehow, the junior officer had succeeded in getting one leg over the wall and was sitting astride it, his feet curved round, gripping the stonework like a polo player his pony. They had managed to get Sandingham into the centre of the verandah when, of a sudden, he went limp and ceased all resistance. This confused the officers who let go of him. He just stood there. He made no attempt to leave or renew his attack. They edged round him cautiously, as if expecting him to spring back to action: he might have been a bear in a flimsy catch-net. Half a dozen ordinary soldiers stood watching. Not one had come forward to assist his superiors: rank and file troops are people and officers are different, to be kept at arm’s length.
‘All right! Back to your beers!’ ordered the lieutenant. ‘Show’s over.’ Then, so that Sandingham couldn’t hear, he added, ‘And leave the poor bastard alone.’
Together, they left the verandah in Sandingham’s sole occupancy.
It was some minutes before he moved. The veins in his neck throbbed and his thumb was weeping from under the nail. Small spatters of blood dotted the cream shirt. He stood at the verandah wall and peered across the road to the hillside opposite. In the fading evening light it appeared buff-brown and bleak. Torn through it was a funnel-like fissure cut by centuries of tropical rainwater.
* * *
Strung between bamboo poles bracketed to the side walls of the flat roof of the hotel were run lines upon which the laundry amahs hung the residents’ washing. Wherever there were no clothes hanging, the roof was taken up by rows and rows of potted plants – geraniums, asters, chrysanthemums, small azalea shrubs, miniature palms and kumquat bushes.
The plants were meticulously and jealously tended by the hotel gardener who slept on the narrow landing at the head of Sandingham’s backstairs escape route. He regarded all visitors to the roof with suspicion, particularly the children of the European guests, whom he abhorred. The gardener was a Communist who habitually wore the dark blue clothing so common over the border in China. He tolerated Sandingham, but only barely. He often watched him through the corner of his eye as he was bending double over some plant or other, trussing it to a cane to guard it against the ravages of a storm or, worse, a typhoon. It was not that he was a man dedicated to his plants: they were merely the way by which he kept his rice bowl full and his head dry in the wet summers and warm in the cold of winter. Sandingham had learnt not to trust the man, although when he at first moved into the hotel he had sought to be pleasant to him; after all, he had known Communists as friends and partisan allies.
Sandingham borrowed some clothes pegs from one of the amahs. She was a young girl, new to the staff of the hotel, who giggled shyly at him as he requested them in Cantonese. He smiled back at her but noticed, as he did so, the disapproval of the other, older amahs. Their washing drying in the warm wind of the heat-hazy afternoon, they took their young colleague aside and, under their breaths, lectured her to beware the Englishman whom they all called ‘Hiroshima Joe’. He was a little touched in the head, they explained. A simpleton. That was the phrase they used. He overheard them, translated their words to himself and fully understood.
He had had to scrub hard to remove the blotchings of his blood from the weave of the cloth and now, with the cream cotton shirt flapping and billowing in the breeze, he was all but done in. He felt his arms aching from the exertion and he walked slowly to the parapet, nursing each elbow in his palms. Once there, he leaned casually over and surveyed the length of road at the front of the hotel. Distantly, he could hear a brass band playing and knew that it heralded a Chinese funeral procession making its way towards the public death-house unobtrusively tucked into the side of a hill down by Nathan Road.
Often he had passed the single-storey building with its tiled roof traditionally curled like a temple at the corners and ridge ends, smelling the soapy air that was made of bodies being boiled to the bone for the rapid burial of the poorer deceased. By cooking the tissue off, the bereaved did away with the need to own or buy an elaborate underground vault in which to allow the departed to rest for seven years, putrifying slowly in accordance with the divine laws of nature. Instead, the process of degeneration and, therefore, entry into the hereafter was greatly accelerated. The seven years disposed of in as many days, the mourners could return in a week or so for the bones, which they could then stash in the family bone pots. At least, that was what Sandingham had been told happened.
During the war years he had dreaded the place, often wondering how long it would be before he was reduced to a fatty scum on the surface of one of the boiling cauldrons. There had been times when such a finale to his life had seemed just hours, even minutes, away. On the rare occasions when he had been let out of the camp under escort, usually to be ‘interrogated’ – the Japanese euphemism for ‘beaten’ – he had been marched or driven past the place and had known what it was then. The interpreter had more than once pointed out the landmark. In his deepest nightmares, he was in there, alive yet forking his own body into the Irish stew of corpses.
The funeral parade drew nearer and began to pass the hotel. Two of the kitchen staff, resting on the roof in their white aprons and with their hands as blanched as a cadaver’s from washing salad vegetables, sauntered across to gaze down on the spectacle.
It was not a grand funeral. The deceased had not been very wealthy but he had had enough put by to pay for seven floats, two bands and four professional mourners. Perhaps his investment in gold teeth had been the source of finance. His body was in a polished, ovalesque coffin built in cross-section rather like a four-leaf clover. It travelled in a lavish, sleek-black Studebaker with a hearse rear adaptation; behind walked the paid mourners, his immediate family and then his friends – not more than thirty in all – his closest of kin dressed in white and the rest with black silk ribbon tied around their arms or hanging as little flags from their jacket collars. The floats were fifteen-feet-high flats of flowers surrounding characters painted in scarlet, and each was propelled by a street-trader’s tricycle wired to the back. To Sandingham they seemed for all the world like bizarre stage sets.
The bands wore white uniforms piped in dark blue and played in total disregard of each other. The foremost band was playing a slowed-down version of ‘Yankee Doodle’ on western brass instruments while the second ensemble, fifty yards behind, fluted out a haunting Chinese melody on traditional pipes and silver, elongated trumpets that held reeds rather than simple cupped mouthpieces. A man in a tattered T-shirt, baggy shorts and plimsolls carried a huge red paper orb, six feet in diameter, on the top of a vertical pole over his shoulder; from the interior of the globe a ladder projected upward through a hole in the top. This was for the devils to ascend – or the spirits. A framed photograph of the dead man was resting on a rack on the roof of the hearse.
The procession continued past for five minutes, then was lost to sight under the arch of the railway bridge.
Below on the front lawn was the boy. Sandingham had seen him as soon as he had settled himself on the parapet wall. He was not playing with his army toys but had in his hand a small crimson racing car which he had been sending careering down the rain gutter on the bank of the sloping hotel drive. Each time it reached the bottom it would crash into the metal grid over the outflow pipe, and the boy had been running beside the car, helter-skelter down the concrete in disregard of arriving taxis or the hotel shooting brake. The boy was standing on the stone wall in order to get a better view of the funeral, the car gleaming redly at his feet.
The high-pitched wail of the sona, a sort of Oriental oboe, had attracted several of the Australian troops out as well, curious to see what the noise was about. Now that the cortege had gone from sight they dri
fted back in ones and twos into the shade of the lobby, returning to their lagers and egg sandwiches. For most of the day so far they had been cleaning kit for inspection. A senior officer’s presence was anticipated for the evening, when they were to be briefed in the hotel lounge from which, for an hour, the civilian residents had been told they had regretfully to be excluded.
One soldier had not re-entered the comfort of the building. He had stopped by the boy and was now, as Sandingham watched, holding the red racing car and commenting upon it. Even though he was three floors up, Sandingham could hear snatches of the soldier’s conversation.
‘That’s a nice car you’ve got there.’
‘It’s an Alfa Romeo,’ replied the boy.
‘I had one of them once. And a blue BRM.’
‘I’ve also got a Ferrari.’
A Kowloon bus went by and Sandingham lost the thread of their intercourse. Other traffic prevented him from hearing more but he continued to regard the pair with emotions that were a mixture of envy, hatred, love and yearning. The soldier, a private, could not have been more than nineteen, if that. He was tanned and muscular in the way that young men are who live physical lives: a healthiness glowing in him. He had short, mousey-brown hair but, from his elevated position, Sandingham could not see his face. His sleeves were rolled up tightly above the elbow as if he, too, had been doing his laundry. In his imagination, Sandingham could smell the young man – a mingling of Brasso and blanco, gun oil and leather polish, sweat and uniform.
The soldier was fumbling in his hip pocket. At last he drew out a wallet and flipped it open, showing something to the boy, who laughed, then ran into the hotel. The Australian soldier remained. In less than a minute, the boy was back with an envelope. He tipped its contents on to the wall and a breeze from the passing of a lorry blew the envelope down into the street. Sandingham could see a winged circle printed on the whitish-blue paper – it was a Pan American World Airlines envelope, filched by the lad from the rack in the lobby.