by Susan Barker
‘Hurry!’ he said. ‘But first, trousers!’ alerting me to the fact I was stark bollock naked.
Special Constable Tahir and I jogged through the village, chasing the bobbing light of his torch over a steeplechase of ditches and fences. In the police hut, seated at the table, were Sergeant Abdullah, a pretty Chinese girl and the last person I’d expected to see in such circumstances – my medical-hut adversary, Evangeline Lim. Sergeant Abdullah, a night owl who often worked the graveyard shift, was chatting good-naturedly to the girls as we arrived. There was a large mahogany Go board on the table, its jade markers in complicated positions of attack and counter-attack. Sergeant Abdullah was sliding the jade markers about, describing the pros and cons of various moves to his silent guests.
‘Ah! Number Two Man!’ he cheered when he saw me. ‘Come! Sit! Have a cup of tea.’
I sat down, panting slightly after my run. The pretty Chinese girl smiled as if to welcome me, but Evangeline stared into her lap, refusing to lift her eyes to meet my enquiring gaze.
‘What’s going on here?’ I asked as Sergeant Abdullah poured me a cup of lemon-scented tea.
‘We caught these nincompoops sneaking about by the fence lah. We searched them, but they had no food. They must have thrown whatever they were carrying over to the bandits. They can’t speak English or Malay. The crazy sister cannot speak at all.’
‘Sisters?’ I said.
‘She,’ Sergeant Abdullah nodded at Evangeline, ‘asked for you. And I thought, well, Number Two Man wakes up so early every morning, he won’t mind coming here to translate!’
I glanced at the clock. It was quarter past two. The crazy sister (who I would later know as ‘mad Grace’) was in her late teens – decades younger than Evangeline, and more like a daughter than a sibling. Grace was as pretty and cherubic as Evangeline was haggard and unlovely. The only likeness between the two was their mysterious smoke-grey eyes. Grace’s smile was that of a simpleton who thought it was perfectly fine to be arrested and brought to the police hut at quarter past two in the morning, as if the sergeant were hosting a tea party in their honour. Evangeline was as tense as her sister was carefree, lifting her chin as if all the dignity she had left was preserved in its tilt. The nerve of that woman, I thought, dragging me out of bed just to stick her nose in the air.
‘Evangeline, why are you pretending you can’t speak English or Malay?’ I asked sternly in Cantonese. ‘You are fluent in both.’
Blushing, she met my gaze. ‘I need your help,’ she said. ‘You have to stop them from sending us to detention camp.’
Her voice shook with humiliation. It cost her greatly to ask for my help, and I admit to a devilish glee. (All those afternoons she’d arrogantly ticked me off in front of the Red Cross nurses! Oh, sweet revenge!) Sergeant Abdullah passed me their identity cards.
‘Evangeline and Grace,’ he said. ‘Family name, Lim. Tahir says the younger one is a slut. Has trouble keeping her legs shut lah … Look at their Foreign-Devil eyes. I bet their mother had some leg-shutting trouble around the Holy Joes.’
There was a plate of biscuits on the table. The sergeant offered the plate to Grace.
‘Here you go, chocolate biscuit. See if you have enough teeth in that nincompoop head of yours.’
Grace took a biscuit and grinned. The teeth studding her gums were small as milk teeth, growth stunted to reflect her mental age. Sergeant Abdullah offered the plate to Evangeline, who shook her head.
‘What on earth were you doing out after curfew?’ I asked.
‘My sister ran away,’ said Evangeline. ‘She runs away all the time. I usually tie our wrists together with string before we go to bed, so I wake up if she tries to escape. But tonight she cut herself free.’ Evangeline lifted her wrist to show me the loop of string. She then lifted Grace’s wrist, adorned with a similar bracelet of twine. ‘When I discovered she was missing I went to look for her. I had to, Christopher, or else she’d have gone into other people’s huts and got herself into trouble. I found her by the fence. Then the police caught us.’
‘I see,’ I said. The thought of Evangeline tying herself to her mentally handicapped sister every night depressed me. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain to Sergeant Abdullah exactly what happened. You won’t be sent to a detention camp.’
Evangeline’s eyes flashed angrily. ‘He won’t believe me,’ she hissed. ‘My sister and I are guilty to him. Every squatter is guilty to him. He has no respect for us. See how he ridicules my sister. To send us away to detention camp means nothing to him.’
‘Number Two Man, what is she saying? Caw, caw, caw – just like a crow.’
Sergeant Abdullah sipped some lemon tea, dunking his moustache in the cup. I glanced at Special Constable Tahir. Could he understand Cantonese? Apparently not. He stood by the door, eyes glazed, lost in cloud-cuckoo-land.
‘One moment,’ I said to the sergeant. Then to Evangeline: ‘What do you want from me?’
‘Tell the sergeant that you met me before in the medical hut. Say that I was desperate for sleeping tablets to drug my sister with. That even when I bind her to me with rope she manages to free herself and run away. It’s true, Christopher – I’ve asked for sleeping pills, but they never have any. Sergeant Abdullah doesn’t know that I speak English or help the Red Cross.’
‘You want me to lie?’
‘Look at her,’ Evangeline said, gesturing to Grace. ‘She knows nothing about the Emergency or Communists or the curfew, no matter how many times I tell her. We don’t deserve to be punished.’
So I told Sergeant Abdullah what Evangeline had told me. Of her tying her wrist to her sister’s every night, and of Grace escaping. Then I lied and told him that Evangeline had come to the medical hut several times begging for sleeping tablets to cure Grace’s night wanderlust, and that we had none to give her. Sergeant Abdullah twiddled the corners of his moustache as he listened, and Grace babbled in her own private onomatopoeic language.
‘Grace marches to the beat of her own drum,’ I concluded, ‘and, alas, it is the drumbeat of dementia.’
‘Tell her,’ the sergeant jabbed a finger at Evangeline, ‘happen one time, OK. Happen again, and there will be trouble! Tahir, wake up! Take the time-wasters back to their hut.’
The relief in Evangeline’s face was as fleeting as a subliminal frame in a film. But I saw it. For appearances’ sake I uttered a few words of Chinese and she nodded. Tahir opened the door and the Lim sisters went quickly after him, without a word of thanks or saying goodbye.
The police-hut clock showed half past two. My mind was wide awake and I knew there was no hope of my getting back to sleep. I sighed, stood up and said goodnight to Sergeant Abdullah.
‘Good of you to come, Number Two,’ he replied. ‘I will tell Number One what a good man you are. If it wasn’t for those silly donkeys you’d be having your beauty sleep and I’d be beating Detective Pang at Go.’
In my heart there was a many-feathered explosion. Detective Pang? The door to the back room opened and the Chinese detective emerged from hiding. The detective gave me a polite nod and sat in the chair Evangeline had just vacated. I knew he’d heard it all. The walls were as thin as cardboard and no obstruction to even the lowest-decibel murmuring.
‘Pang is excellent at Go,’ said Sergeant Abdullah, ‘but too bad for Pang he is not as excellent as I am!’
Elbows on the table, Detective Pang stared at the arrangement of jade counters on the board.
‘Bold words for a man in such a fix, don’t you think, Christopher?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know the rules.’
‘Rules are important,’ said the detective. ‘If you knew the rules, then you’d appreciate the dilemma I am in.’
I don’t recall what I said to that; I remember only the sensation of draining blood. I mumbled goodbye and stumbled outside, leaving them to their game and Detective Pang to the disclosure of my lie.
* * *
Sometimes, when
I am ironing the bed sheets, or jotting the weekly shopping list on the back of a torn cornflakes box, I hear the crack, crack, crack of sunflower seeds. I look up and see the husks fall out of midair, as if from the beak of an invisible parrot, and scatter on the floor. This is the sly method in which Detective Pang makes his presence known. I am not happy about the mess he makes. The seed husks are very difficult to remove, resisting the rotating bristles of my carpet-sweeper, no matter how briskly I trundle it back and forth. Sometimes Pang appears as a detective, eschewing his tapper uniform for a slick brown suit and leather shoes. The detective sits in my armchair, one leg crossed over the other. Cool and debonair.
‘That night was the beginning of the end,’ he says.
‘I know.’
‘You may as well have lit a match and sent the whole village up in flames.’
‘Now, look here,’ I say. ‘How was I to know? It’s irrational to blame everything on me. You had the opportunity to tell Sergeant Abdullah the truth too. But you didn’t.’
Detective Pang does not persist in his allegations, but his silence goads me into a fine old rant. I often get so worked-up that Adam gathers up his books and retreats to the bathroom (to read huddled under a heap of towels in the tub). Detective Pang regards me with mild curiosity as I bluster on in self-defence. The one-sided slanging match frustrates and wears me out – more so than if I were quarrelling with that slippery talk-aholic Charles Dulwich. There is power in silence, and yet I cannot shut up. Even when the Chinese detective’s contribution is so negligible I may as well be quarrelling with myself.
6
EVERY MORNING I cook porridge for Julia. And every morning my granddaughter pads to the kitchen, sleepy and sloe-eyed, in school uniform and stockinged feet, to watch the bubbling alchemy of oats and milk on the stove. The child is good as gold before she leaves for school, as if her rebellious alter ego has a lie-in while the rest of her washes, dresses and gears up for the day. No matter how bothersome my spectral guests the night before, I never fail to rise for porridge duty at quarter past seven. The wholesome nourishment of oats and a few morning pleasantries: this is my contribution to Julia’s upbringing before she dashes out of the door.
As Julia spooned up her piping hot breakfast this morning, I wondered what she’d thought of Malaysia. Had she felt any connection to the land of durians and rafflesia and Chinese ancestors? Were there any genealogical stirrings, echoes of recollection in the portion of her DNA returned to its country of origin? Nervous of triggering painful memories, I’d avoided speaking of Malaysia before. But as several months had passed, and the worst of the grieving was over, I tentatively asked my granddaughter if she’d liked it over there. To my relief there were no tears or distress.
Julia licked her spoon and said: ‘Malaysia was very hot. I had jet lag and couldn’t sleep for weeks. Madame Tay took me to do outdoor t’ai chi in the park to make me sleepy. In the park there was this pond with hundred-year-old turtles in it. I was stroking one of the turtles and it bit my finger off.’ Julia showed me the forefinger of her left hand, severed above the topmost joint. Really. Hundred-year-old carnivorous turtles. What a lively imagination she has! Adam says the finger was slammed in a door.
‘Did your brother like it there?’
‘Dunno. Adam had diarrhoea and prickly heat. He had jet lag too, but he didn’t want to do t’ai chi. Said it was girly.’
‘Did you get on with Ayah?’
‘She was scary! She nagged Mum like she was a child.’
‘Oh yes, she’s an old battleaxe, isn’t she?’
Madame Tay was my daughter’s ayah for sixteen years – an ill-chosen surrogate mother who taught Frances to be scornful of her English father. I’d have sacked the conniving witch, if Frances hadn’t loved her so.
‘Mum reckoned she’s going to die soon anyway.’
‘Julia. You mustn’t talk like that!’
Heaven forbid! The thought of Madame Tay levitating about my council flat gives me the screaming habdabs. Let us pray that her potions of belladonna and bat’s gonads help her outlive me by years.
After scraping her bowl clean Julia went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and metal brace, a task she performs with such vigour the bristles of her toothbrush are splayed flat within a couple of weeks. After she’d rinsed, gargled and spat, Julia grabbed her satchel, shouted, ‘ ’Bye, Granddad,’ and tore out of the door. I watched from the kitchen window as she crossed the estate, tall and raw-boned, with a gangling, clumsy stride (she must have inherited that gaucheness from her father; Frances was very graceful at that age). I watched my granddaughter lope away, knowing she will return to me tonight a different girl. Resentful and sullen. A stranger. Outside my flat Julia belongs to the estate. To the smashed-up telephone boxes and stolen cars. Until she straggles home again my granddaughter belongs to whatever claims her. And I fear there are many things eager to claim the likes of a twelve-year-old girl.
At least I don’t have to worry about Adam running wild. Though that’s not to say the boy’s not a worry. It’s not normal for a fifteen-year-old boy never to speak, not have any friends and rarely go outdoors. Yesterday, returning from his weekly trip to the library, Adam came home reeling under the weight of an 18-inch black-and-white TV. I’d never owned a television before and wasn’t sure if I wanted the so-called ‘opium of the masses’ in my living room. But keen for Adam to have a hobby other than reading I said, You can put that on the sideboard. Adam had cleaned out his post-office savings to make the junk-shop purchase, and at first I feared he’d been fleeced. He sculpted an aerial out of a wire coat hanger, then spent half an hour twisting it about until there was a picture decent enough to watch. The first programme we saw was a quiz show (which, owing to the on-screen blizzard, seemed to have been filmed on location in Siberia). I enjoyed the quiz very much, and when Charles Dulwich came strutting along, scandalized by our new acquisition (I say! What the devil’s that? Where’ve you hidden the projector …?), I was so engaged in the number puzzles and the witticisms of the host, I ignored the peeved Resettlement Officer until he went away.
When our nicotine-stained angel came home she gave a whoop of delight and sat down on the sofa in her puffa jacket. I’d cooked sausages and mash for dinner, and we ate with our plates on our laps, spellbound by the snowy landscape of the TV screen. In the flickering monochrome light I could see the fluctuating emotions on my grandchildren’s faces: Julia giggling at every comic moment, widening her eyes at the slightest bit of dramatic suspense; Adam blushing, eyes downcast during romantic clinches, smiling darkly at tragic happenings. For three hours we sat in the living room, suffused in the glow of cathode rays. And despite my initial reservations, I am quite looking forward to the same again tonight. How nice it was to have the three of us spending time together, like a family.
After I’d lied to Sergeant Abdullah to protect the Lim sisters, I was certain that Detective Pang had reported me. I steeled myself for the tap on the shoulder, the summons to the police hut. But none came. Why was my day of reckoning not forthcoming? Had Detective Pang decided my storytelling was for a good cause? The best way to eliminate my suspense was to ask the man himself.
As Detective Pang had warned me not to approach him in public, there were few opportunities to talk to him. But about a week after our encounter in the police hut I saw him alone, dragging a billy goat by the horn along a deserted trail. The goat was stamping its hooves and kicking up a spindrift of dust, and the detective was hitting the struggling creature with a bamboo carpet-beater. The goat dropped to his knees and Pang’s thrashings became so vicious I thought the bamboo carpet-beater would snap. Why was the detective putting so much effort into the cruel performance when there were no witnesses to his imitation of a villager? I took a deep breath to shout his name, but the cry froze in my throat as a man wielding a broom ran over to him. I recognized the man, for Ah Yeop was a known Communist sympathizer (and latterly one of my spectral interlopers, forever bragging about
the three sons he sacrificed to the Malayan Races Liberation Army and their collected acts of terrorism). When I saw Ah Yeop I knew my chance to find out why Detective Pang hadn’t reported me had passed. I watched instead as the Min Yuen member and undercover spy beat the goat unconscious, then hauled the creature away by its hind legs.
On rainy days the villagers couldn’t go rubber tapping. They could do little more than shake their fists at the disobliging sky and curse the day’s lost wages. It was on such a day of rain and idleness that I filched a heavy padlock and took it over to Evangeline’s hut, dashing through the drowned village in thonged slippers, through crashing sheets of rain. The torrential rampage made a mud slide of the path, and more than once I slipped and soiled my trousers. My umbrella sprang a leak, and by the time I reached Evangeline’s hut I was woefully drenched.
I peered through the wire netting of the window to make sure I had the correct hut. Grace was sitting on an upturned beer crate and sucking her thumb, and Evangeline’s head was bowed as she worked at a Singer sewing machine, inching a length of fabric under the quick-stabbing needle, her foot tapping the pedal as the bobbin of thread spun round. Evangeline made her living as a seamstress, going from door to door collecting clothes for mending and taking orders for made-to-measure garments. But clothes were not a priority for the impoverished villagers and Evangeline had a hard time making ends meet. When Grace saw me she took her thumb out of her mouth and cooed. Evangeline glanced up from her sewing, surprised, then self-conscious. When she opened the door her face was lined with irritation. I shut my broken umbrella and regretted not asking permission to visit. The rain pelting the zinc roof was loud enough to wake the dead, and we shouted to communicate.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in English.
‘I’ve brought a padlock for your door, to stop your sister from escaping again. I’ve brought tools too, and I can fix the brackets if you like.’