by Martin Booth
There was a crump. It came from outside the window, to be followed by a liquid spouting noise.
From the salon he could hear shouts and a single, high-pitched scream that was short and sharp and sounded like a steel pin being dragged across glass.
Out of the cabin window he could see Lap Sap Mei Island. On its shore was a flick of light. He automatically counted out loud, like a child waiting for thunder after the lightning.
‘… five, six, sev –’
Another crump. A pillar of water rose three hundred yards short of the Takshing.
‘Christ!’ he said, though there was nobody near to hear him. ‘They’re shelling us!’
As he spoke, one of the Royal Navy craft returned fire. The boom was loud, making the air and the wooden slats on the cabin door vibrate. A billow of grey smoke issued from her gun, the final cords of smoke stringing out on the wind like some deadly ectoplasm. Another shot was fired.
Seated in the salon once more, Sandingham ignored the jingoistic, complaining talk that hummed around him. He ordered a large whiskey from the steward. Now that they were well and truly safe in Hong Kong territorial waters he could let himself go. His hands shook. His eyelid twitched. He could not sit still. The drink would calm him. A pipe could, too, but he was without his emergency supply, which was still folded up behind the cistern in his hotel room.
The Takshing shuddered as her engines were run to their limits.
* * *
That afternoon, Sandingham was summoned back to the house on the Castle Peak Road, the message given to him by a rickshaw coolie at the Macau ferry dock. Presumably, had he reached Macau and collected the opium brick, this coolie would have been his drop on his return.
‘So you could not help it. I know that. Never mind,’ Leung said.
‘What will you do? Shall I go again?’
‘You know what you were to carry for me?’
He nodded. He knew Leung knew he knew. There was nothing to be gained by pretence.
‘Right. And no, you do not need to go. I’ve had a friend bring it in. Another friend,’ he added obviously.
‘If another job crops up…’
He had not told Leung that the Communists had known something about him. That would perhaps be to know too much. It was best he kept this to himself. In any case, Leung was probably aware of the facts already.
‘Not for a long time, Joseph.’
Leung looked at his watch. Sandingham noticed that it was a new Patek Phillipe in silver – no: it would be white gold or platinum – on a black leather strap. He had seen such watches in the window of a high-class jewellery store in one of the expensive shopping arcades in Central District. This was definitely not a watch from one of the jewellers’ shops in Hankow Road.
‘Your bus will be along in less than ten minutes,’ Leung stated pointedly. ‘You’d best get down to the stop by the beach steps.’
As Sandingham was about to step off the patio, Leung said, ‘One thing more, Joseph. As you did not complete the assignment, I shall need back the money you spent on clothes for the trip.’
It came out of the blue. The hair on the back of Sandingham’s neck rose against his collar.
‘I haven’t that kind of money. I do have some left over from expenses.’
It sounded so trite, like an office boy accounting for the petty cash to his manager.
He took out about thirty dollars from his jacket pocket.
Leung accepted this, folding the notes before passing them to a henchman who counted them, then continued, ‘That’s the down payment. I shall need the rest back. A fortnight?’
‘It’s impossible. I can’t even steal that much that quickly.’
He could not afford to lose his temper, but he wanted to.
‘You’ll be able.’
‘What if I can’t?’
‘You will. If not … Ah Moy will be a customer short, will she not?’
At the bus stop, Sandingham raged within himself. His anger took on no firm shape; no definite actions occurred to him. He just stood there in the hot afternoon sun and cursed himself, his luck and the world. And Leung.
Just as the bus pulled away from the dusty kerb he saw, down on the beach, the boy from the hotel. He was playing with another child near the water’s edge. They were guiding toy tanks over a corrugated battlefield. As he watched, the second child hit the boy’s tank with a handful of damp sand. It knocked it over and half-buried it. They both jumped up at the fun of it and, abandoning their toys, ran splashing into the sea.
PART EIGHT
Japan: 1943 — 1945
THE SOUP WAS watery and faintly mauve. Small bits of blanched fibre floated in it along with strips of parchment-like material and some shreds of potato peelings that had not been added for the cooking but later, as an afterthought to nutritional requirements.
Tentatively dipping his metal spoon into the soup, Sandingham made every effort to avoid noticing its colour.
‘Purple death,’ said Norb. ‘You ain’t had it before?’
Sandingham shook his head and asked if it were as poisonous as it appeared.
‘No – does you no harm. Probably does you no good, too. We have it about once a month. Takes its colour from water-lily stems. Them’s the stringy bits.’
Norbert Heybler occupied the tatame above Sandingham’s own. He was a tall and thin New Yorker who had worked for the city transportation department before the war; upon the destruction of Pearl Harbour he had been drafted into the US Navy as an officer in charge of vehicles at a shore base in southern California. After that he had been sent to sea, been sunk off the Philippines, captured in the fall of Manila and since then had done the rounds of five camps – one in the Philippines, one in Formosa, one in Okinawa, one near Osaka and now here. Sandingham had known all this within the first quarter of an hour of meeting him. Like all Americans, it seemed, Norb had told his life story right at the start. If it was a national trait it was one that Sandingham liked: it promoted friendship.
‘It ain’t so bad when you’ve gotten used to it,’ he encouraged Sandingham, seeing that the Englishman was not overly keen to sample the delights of the soup. ‘Think of it just as a food colour. We colour things in the States – you get canned pears that are emerald green. How I could eat a pear right now! You know what I mean?’
Sandingham knew exactly what he meant.
‘You married?’
‘No. Had a broad once. Hung around with her, but she went off with this insurance salesman from Schenectady. I’d known her from high school, too. Still. Just as well. I’m alive and he bought it near Syracuse.’
‘Fighting?’
For a moment, Norb had to think; no one fought there. Then he realised.
‘Hell, no. Syracuse, up-state New York. Icy road and this car of his slips off the carriageway and rolls down a bank. Clouts a wall, flips over. Hits the river. Cracks the ice – early winter, see? Not too thick as yet. Goes straight through. Freezes over on top. Didn’t find him till the level dropped in the summer and the wheels of the car showed through the surface.’ He chuckled. ‘If I’d have married her, it might have been me.’
The logic of this study of potential destiny confounded Sandingham who concentrated instead on the consumption of his purple death.
With his soup swallowed, Sandingham hunched forwards and considered Norb’s attitude to life. Skinny and starving, with ulcers on his back and pains in his swollen joints, he could sit in a prison camp in Japan and cogitate upon how unlucky he might have been to have wed a certain girl in the States and wind up as an insurance representative at the bottom of a frozen river. If that was poor fortune avoided in the past then, conversely, he must think of himself now to be better off. At best, luckier than dead. He was alive and, by his reckoning, he was better off than some: he had no tax affairs to settle with the IRS, no mortgage owed to the First City Bank of Where-he-lived, no wife to worry over (either how she was coping without him or, in his own words, who she was bal
ling in the ‘big brass bridal bed’), no kids to put through college, no accountant or attorney to subsidise, no Blue Cross Plan to pay out. That he now had no doctor to treat the sores on his spine or dentist to extract his rotten molar, nor sufficient food to keep illness and hunger at bay was neither here nor there.
Had Sandingham drawn his attention to these facts he would have been quick to point out that they did have a doctor and a dentist – they did not have drugs, anaesthetics, medicinal supplies and bandages or surgical instruments, but that wasn’t the point. For example, the wagon-train masters hadn’t any of those things either and they had successfully taken their folk over the prairies and the Rockies to the Promised Land, through disease, drought, starvation, Apaches and ‘other hostiles’, flood and vicious mid-continental winters. Norb could quote in detail the stories of Jack London, plot by plot – Tales of the Klondike – and what about the man in To Build a Fire who died frozen to death through his own stupidity? There was always one somewhere worse off than oneself. Sandingham doubted it but marvelled at the pioneer spirit and the optimism of his comrade-in-barbed-wire.
The mention of ice and a North American winter brought back to him the condition of his own surroundings. It might have been warmer in the insurance salesman’s car after the accident. Certainly, it would have been in the old man’s cabin at Sulphur Creek.
He was seated by the hibachi, a small brazier at the end of the barrack room. The Japanese camp commandant had just conceded that it was indeed now winter, the day being 3 January, and had issued them with some fuel. This consisted of three one-hundredweight bags of very small coal particles that had been swept up from the concrete platform where coal was unloaded at the railway station three miles away. Much of the contents of the bags was coal dust and the prisoners who were too sick to go to work had spent the day forming this into balls by mixing it with water and a little clay. The quantity of clay had to be exact – too little and the balls fell apart, too much and they wouldn’t burn. It was an acquired art that only the longer-term inmates had mastered.
The hibachi gave out little heat. To stave off the cold, Sandingham was wearing all his clothes – a fandushi, a pair of trousers, three vests, his two shirts, a padded jacket, his blanket, two pairs of Japanese socks and his clompers. Over his lap he had draped two hessian sacks that he had obtained from the lumber yard. He had been fortunate to be issued with the padded jacket, for only half the prisoners had such a garment and even then the lucky ones were forbidden to wear it outside the camp. He had got his because he was without his own uniform jacket. His clompers were of his own manufacture: they were made from a block of wood shaped to his foot and instep and had as uppers three sheets of hessian and a band of rubber tyre nailed to the soles. He had also been issued with a pair of tabi, but these were too insubstantial to wear in the bitter cold of winter and he had so far only used them in his few first weeks in the camp.
The forty-watt light-bulb dimmed, a guard’s hand somewhere in the camp closing down the power. With several others, Sandingham stood up and left the barrack room. It was dark outside and the wind was blowing down from the hills. It carried tiny flecks of white upon its back.
‘Jezuz! Is it gonna snow tonight.’
They walked down some steps cut into a bank and entered a long covered way. At the midway point to the end barracks they turned left into the latrines. The benjo was simple. There were no urinals or cubicles but just a wall against which one urinated down into a gutter-pipe sunk into cement, and a row of timber, box-like water-closets but with no flushing water. Anything dropped into them fell on to a wide trough and lay there until the civilian cesspit collectors, known euphemistically as ‘the honey bees’, hosed the troughs down into barrels. They were then carted off to the fields, drawn by plodding oxen, emaciated donkeys or equally emaciated children and old folk.
By the time they had completed their toilet it was thinly snowing big flakes that settled on the ground.
‘Hey, Joe – you humping tonight?’ Norb asked Sandingham.
‘All right. Yes.’
‘Your place or mine?’
‘Mine,’ another voice suggested. ‘Foursome is better than a twosome. Reminds me of this high-class knocking shop in Wahiawa. Twelve miles from Pearl. Officers only. Very select. One of them Go-gan paintings on the wall of some Tahitian broad with her bra off.’
‘Okay, Bill. Your place.’
If he had not been a prisoner, Sandingham would have baulked at the close physical company of such men. To be close to them would have aroused him and it would only have taken one of them to wake in the night and sense his rigid penis against his back or thigh, or his hand on someone’s shoulder or arm, for them to have known and subsequently ostracised him. But now there was no fear of that. Had not been for nearly a year.
Nearly a year. He was three days into 1943. It was over a year since the fall of Hong Kong, and Bob’s death and the end of normality. He forced himself not to think of what the past twelve months had brought him – and brought him to in its own vicious manner.
They collected their blankets together – Bill’s was of Australian Army issue and thick with wool: the guards had yet to discover it – and squeezed on to Bill’s tatame, a planked bunk, one of which was designated to each prisoner. To share the meagre supply of bedding and bodily warmth, they had been sleeping in groups since the week before the Christmas they none of them had celebrated except with whispered prayers after the lights had been switched off.
Despite the hardness of the bunk and the fact that Sandingham was second in from the edge – it could have been worse: he could have picked the shortest cotton – he was soon asleep.
The last words he heard were from the man on the outside who muttered, ‘C’mon, guys! Shift in a bit. Share your lice.’
* * *
The snow had lain for more than a week, added to every night by a fresh fall of, at the least, a few inches. It was not the snow that was so bad, however: it was the frost. By day, the temperature barely rose above freezing. If it did, a slight thaw set in, but it only melted the top crust which then iced like glass at nightfall when the air dropped to well below freezing. Walking was treacherous, for one’s bare feet were liable to adhere to the black ice, each step peeling off a layer of skin from the ball of the heel. Taiso was even worse.
Every dawn there was a roll call. After tenko, the prisoners were subjected to half an hour’s taiso, a cruel joke the fates played upon them. The Japanese, believing the best way to keep their PoW workers hale and hearty was to keep them fit, forced physical exercise upon them. The prisoners thus stood in their ranks as for tenko and jumped on the spot, swung their arms, touched their knees – few could make it to their shins, let alone their toes – twisted their hips and, if Pluto was in charge, did twenty press-ups, their hands and toes on the night’s fall of snow, their fingers slipping on the ice and turning blue.
After taiso they were given breakfast. This was usually a bowl of rice-mill sweepings. One had to be careful eating it in case there were small stones in the mix. A shard of gravel could kill if one’s stomach lining was badly shrunk and weakened.
With their fast broken, as the Dutch padre put it without losing sight of the irony, they formed up on the parade ground in their work squads. Sandingham was in Number Two shotai. His group was employed in the timber yards about four miles away on the outskirts of the city. Their work-gang boss, the shotai-cho, was Captain Alex Ryder of the REME who had been shipped to Japan from the camp at Changi, just outside Singapore.
On some days they were marched to the yards, on other days they were taken in a semi-derelict lorry, more rust than steel. With the icy roads slowing their marching rate down, and therefore reducing their working hours, the lorry had been prevalent of late.
On the way nobody spoke. In the late autumn they had joked or chatted quietly, but now there was nothing left. It was more important to bunch down low, reduce the body’s surface area and retain the warmth as much a
s they could, and for as long as possible. Talking expended heat. They just sat on the floor of the truck bed and moved with the motion of the vehicle as it rocked, slewed, crabbed and skidded along the road.
By the time they left the camp the sky was creamy-grey, with the promise of more snow. As they pulled into the timber yard compound the promise was fulfilled and the snow began to fall, rapidly becoming heavy. They jumped from the truck and were directed into the nearest of the three sawing sheds. In there was gathered the civilian workforce, standing in a huddle by the stove.
‘Wuk wun are!’ shouted the hancho, the foreman of the sawmill. This he then translated into Japanese for the benefit of the workers and the three guards who remained at the yard with the prisoners.
Sandingham was amused to note that the order should have come in English first.
Without question or any evident animosity, the Japanese workers made way for the prisoners to join them around the stove. The tarpaulin that served as a door over the entrance to the shed was lowered and the three bare light-bulbs that hung from the roof on flex were switched on. It was almost cosy.
‘We should be singing “Ten Green Bottles” or “Green Grow the Rushes-O”,’ said Alex adding, ‘I was a boy scout once.’
‘With steaming mugs of chocolate and marshmallows on the ends of willow sticks,’ Sandingham mused.
They spent the next few minutes explaining this ritual to the American second lieutenant who was in charge of sawdust. Once he understood, he left the group and swept up more shavings for the stove. With these put on the flames, the smoke thickened and puffed out of a crack in the galvanised tin chimney halfway to the roof. Sandingham watched the puffs, mesmerised by them.
This rest from work was more than welcome. It was, moreover, very rare. The hancho had not given them such a respite before. His decision now was forced upon him by circumstance, for the men had cleared the shed the evening before and they were unable to bring in new timber for sawing because the frost had locked the trunks and rough-cut planks together by freezing the sap. He was banking on the snow ceasing and either a thaw setting in or his requisition for more crowbars arriving from the central stores.