by Susan Barker
The peasants yielded not one speck of useful information, goading Inspector Lam into a beetroot fury and bringing out his violent streak (though my stern throat-clearings made him limit his abuse to one strike per interviewee).
At the end of the day the inspector declared: ‘Never have I met such simpletons. I’d rather ram a goat-pen stake through my head than return to this resettlement camp again.’ And hailed a trishaw back to Jalang town.
The following day a government courier cycled over to The Village of Everlasting Peace with a parcel of mimeographed questionnaires – one for every household. The questionnaires asked two questions:
Do you know who kidnapped Timmy Lo?
Do you know who is helping the Communists in the village?
I helped with the distribution, reading out the questions to the illiterate villagers, and the next day the sheets were collected in a secret post-box so as to safeguard anonymity. Resettlement Officer Dulwich and I upturned the metal box and sifted through the mound of white paper that fell on to the floor of the officers’ bungalow. Three quarters of the questionnaires were blank. A few villagers had taken the trouble to write messages in English – Death to Imperialists! Die! Die! Bloody bastard liars! – with liberal dosings of the f-word. More specific allegations were made in Chinese – for example (translated): The person helping the Communists in The Village of Everlasting Peace is that big-nosed devil Christopher, and what’s more he is having homosexual relations with Prison Officer Dulwich. Many used the paper to showcase their artistic talents, with drawings of elephants, the honourable Chairman Mao and a monkey on a unicycle. The most cooperative reply was written in tidy cursive and said, We are very sorry but we do not know who kidnapped Timmy Lo or who is helping the Communists in The Village of Everlasting Peace, from Miss Mallard and Miss Tolbin – which was no help to us at all.
The failure of the questionnaires was the final straw for the District War Executive Committee. The collective silence of The Village of Everlasting Peace calls for a collective punishment, they said. The hours of curfew will be brought forward from seven o’clock in the evening to two o’clock in the afternoon. The period of extended curfew is to last for a week. And guess which unlucky bugger was appointed harbinger of the bad news …
I stood in the back of a pick-up truck as it bumped over the rutted, debris-strewn trail and around the village. I read out the government directive in Cantonese and Hokkein translation through a loudspeaker, until I was reciting it verbatim. As the afternoon sun flayed my shoulders and my voice boomed, villagers surfaced in doorways to howl in outrage (Two o’clock! Two o’clock! Curse that Timmy Lo for making all this trouble for the village!) and children threw stones at my back. The buxom Aussie nurses Madeleine and Josie, both of whom are deaf to Cantonese, came out of the medical hut and waved as if to a passing dignitary. In the shadows behind them stood my beloved Evangeline, her arms crossed and lip pensively bitten. The First Battalion Worcestershire Regiment were in the village to work on the school hall, which was progressing at a rate of one plank per week. They hooted and wolf-whistled when they saw me, one soldier yanking down his khaki pants and mooning me from the rooftop. The truck bounced through the check-point and out to the market gardens, the thankless task of spreading bad tidings not yet done.
Round and round the village we went, and I repeated the news of the punishment curfew until my throat was parched and my tonsils ached. Confusing the messenger with the origins of the punishment, villagers clobbered me with the evil eye, and by the time the truck stopped outside the police station and the tail gate was let down for me I was giddy with heatstroke and in very low spirits after my hour as the object of communal hatred and blame.
The day after news of the disciplinary curfew had been loudspeakered about the village, the siren blared at quarter to two. Sergeant Abdullah and I inspected identity cards at the check-point as the rubber tappers and hoe-carrying market gardeners trooped back into the resettlement camp for fifteen hours of stagnating under hut arrest, the children unable to play Bandits versus Colonialists (or the ever-popular Tarzan versus the African Devils), the mothers and fathers unable to play mah-jong with the neighbours or go for a twilight constitutional. Eyes narrowed to slits as identity cards were handed to me for inspection. Gobbets of betel-nut juice were spat on the ground by my feet.
Irritated, I turned to the moustache-twiddling sergeant and said: ‘Why are they angry at me and not the men who kidnapped Timmy Lo? Don’t they care that a man’s life is at stake? Over one thousand people in this village and not one of them has had the guts or integrity to come forward with information. Timmy Lo was one of the people. Yet none of them cares whether he lives or dies.’
‘Timmy is already dead lah,’ Sergeant Abdullah said. ‘Why keep him alive? What good to the Communists is a man without fingers? Just another mouth to feed.’ He clapped my shoulder in friendly condolence. ‘Ah well, Timmy is in the arms of his Lord Buddha now.’
The kidnapping of Timmy Lo wasn’t the only affair to bludgeon village morale, as during the week of curfew Detective Pang and his network of undercover spies made an unsettling discovery. Let me first of all say that in 1952 terrorist attacks on resettlement camps reached a crescendo as the Malayan Races Liberation Army reacted furiously to the segregation of the squatter community. The Village of Everlasting Peace, however, had a relatively easy time of it, with only the odd sporadic grenade exploding over the perimeter fence, and not one throat-slitting since that of my predecessor, the late Ah Wing.
One evening Kip Phillips, manager of the sandbag-fortified, trip-wire-booby-trapped Bishop’s Head plantation, drove his armoured truck over for a round of gin slings with Charles and me. As the gramophone needle lifted from the last strains of ‘Clair de lune’ and the mechanical whirring of insects reclaimed the night, Kip Phillips patted his bullet-proof vest – a frequent unconscious habit of his – and said: ‘Quiet, this village. Almost too quiet, if you know what I mean …’
Kip Phillips was correct in his suspicions. Detective Pang’s investigation into the charmed, incident-free nights of the home guard was already under way. And what he discovered had us reeling in shock.
Twenty of our home guard had made a nonaggression pact with the regional regiment of the Malayan Races Liberation Army – a complicit agreement that bandits be let in and out of the village, and the home guard in exchange be spared gunfire and all the other little skirmishes that make night patrol so perilous. Every night for months the Reds had had free rein of The Village of Everlasting Peace, consorting with the Min Yuen, stealing and extorting, and having sex-famished reunions with lovers and wives.
A list of names was compiled and the treacherous guards arrested. As the accused were handcuffed and marched out of the village some frothed at the mouth, swearing innocence in the name of Allah. Others went willingly, smiling as if to say, Ah well, the game’s up … The strong-arm of government censorship prevented the debacle of the corrupt guards from reaching the national news. But nothing could stop the news of the bloody cull from reaching the ears of the villagers. Many cackled in glee. Good for nothing matamata! Betraying their country because they’re too lazy to fight! I felt terrible for those villagers who’d wanted protection from the Communists and had been badly let down.
Shortly after the mass sackings Charles and I were dining on the veranda, serenaded by a vinyl airing of Mendelssohn’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, when Sergeant Abdullah came to see us. He sat with us and accepted a dish of beef stroganoff (a much sought-after and celebrated tinned import) with a Thank you, Number One Man. The sergeant ate as if racing against the clock, finishing before Charles and me, then lifting the plate to lick the mushroomy sour-cream sauce. He hiccuped and wiped his moustache with a napkin.
‘We are twenty men less now because of those chicken-shit bastards,’ he complained. ‘Last night my men were doing eighteen-hour shifts. They are falling asleep standing up. I have to run and poke them and shout Wakey, wakey
! The village is very weak now. If the Communists wanted to attack they could cause a lot of damage …’ He paused and smiled at me. ‘Number Two Man,’ he said, ‘what do you say to helping us with night patrol? You can go up into the watchtower for a week or two until we recruit more guards. No more check-point duty in the morning and night duty until one or two o’clock instead. What do you think?’
I thought it a silly plan. The Crown Agency for Colonies had employed me for my knowledge of Cantonese; to improve relations between the Foreign Devils and the Chinese. To be exiled in the watch tower would be a waste. Why couldn’t they recruit some boy from a nearby kampong to go up in the watch tower?
‘But I am needed at the check-point,’ I said. ‘There are fewer guards now and none can speak Chinese. It’s taking longer and longer to search the tappers every morning. They are getting to the plantation later and later and losing wages.’
‘Never mind about the tappers,’ said Sergeant Abdullah. ‘They are never happy. Always complain, complain, complain – give me a bloody headache! After what happened it is hard to know who to trust any more. And Pang doesn’t know one hundred per cent if all the traitors have been caught … But we know we can trust you, Number Two Man. From the watch tower you can keep an eye on everything that goes on.’
Charles, forelock draped across his sweaty brow, was slumped in his chair, as if flattened by his enormous belly.
‘I think it’s a marvellous idea. A few late nights will do Christopher good,’ he said, as though I were a child. ‘It’s disturbing, the moronic hour he rises every day.’
Sergeant Abdullah nodded, in agreement with anything that would get me up in the watchtower.
I sighed. ‘How long do you need me for?’
After the sergeant went, I lingered on the veranda, but the pleasure of my last sips of beer and Johann Sebastian Bach was impaired by Charles’s saturnine remarks. Dark septic-feathered ravens wheeled overhead as Charles indulged his usual bleakness.
‘They disgust you, don’t they?’ he said. ‘The deceitful guards.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Don’t they disgust you?’
‘No. Every one of us is weak and capable of betrayal. To be disgusted by the guards is to be disgusted by one’s inner self. Nothing sickens us more than what we fear within.’
‘You shouldn’t tar everyone with the same brush as those lily-livered guards,’ I said. ‘I for one certainly won’t be negotiating with any bandits.’
‘How defensive you are, Christopher’ – Charles was smug, as if I’d played into his hands – ‘and how self-assured. Integrity is far easier in theory than in practice, you know.’
I lifted my bottle, draining the last of the yeasty foam. Charles had put me in the mood for the solitude of my hut. As I lowered the empty bottle I saw Police Lieutenant Spencer charging towards us, his pugnacious eyes screwed tight as monkeys’ arseholes, and swarthy sweat patches under his arms. The policeman clomped up the veranda steps, shooting Charles a hurt, cuckolded look. He smacked a mosquito imbibing the blood of his neck, and flared his nostrils in my general direction.
‘Gin sling, Percival?’ Charles called cheerily, though his face fell as Spencer stormed the bungalow as if to deal with a hostage-taking situation.
‘Oh, do be careful!’ he cried. ‘My beautiful record!’
There came a hideous warping as the gramophone needle gouged across the vinyl incarnation of Bach’s Suite No. 3 in D Major. Then a satisfied silence. Charles whimpered, and Spencer thudded back on to the veranda, jaw grinding, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, his skin pale and incandescent as candle wax. Spencer was a man tormented by the twin demons of jealousy and opium withdrawal – though I’d no idea of this at the time. Ignorant of his romance with Charles, I hadn’t an inkling that I was a cattle prod to the green-eyed monster living inside him. I thought he had a bee in his bonnet about the classical music.
‘Oh, do sit down, Percy!’ Charles said. ‘What the devil are you so uptight about? Christopher was just leaving.’
This was true: it had been my intention to leave. But it was bloody rude and presumptuous of Charles to voice it for me. I got up and said that Charles was quite right, and with much harrumphing Spencer sat in my chair and began rolling a fag. And off I went, not sorry to leave their company.
The ghost of Charles has since apologized for his bad manners. Of course, Charles’s motives were ulterior to the making of amends; the apology not an antihistamine to his bee-stung conscience (Charles’s conscience is alabaster, devoid of nerve endings), but a knife, prising the lid from a can of worms. He was sitting at the kitchen table at the time, my layabout grandson snoring in the next room. Charles had a napkin tucked in his collar, and was smiling as Winston Lau, the poker-faced chef, stooped over him, ladling rice porridge into his bowl.
‘Gosh, I am sorry for hurting your feelings that night. You went off in such an awful huff!’
‘No, I didn’t. I couldn’t have cared less.’
‘Oh, Christopher, there’s no need to pretend you weren’t upset. I assure you, it was nothing personal. It’s just that three’s a crowd. Especially when the third wheel is a boring puritan. Old Percival may have been the son of a Stepney chimney-sweep, but at least he knew how to have a good time. We got ourselves gloriously drunk, inhaled blue clouds of heaven into our lungs, and fucked and fucked and fucked until we were sick! While you were hunched at your desk, dipping pen nib in ink pot to transcribe your beloved dictionary, Spencer, the naughty snake-charmer, had his underwear round his ankles, ramming his seven inches into my hole. Oh, we were awash with semen and opiates – delirious with pleasure. Ever felt a man’s balls jiggling against your buttocks? Had your shit compacted by a good hard cock shunting against your entrails …?’
‘Certainly not,’ I said. ‘If you had such a wonderful time together, why don’t you go and find Spencer now?’
I sincerely hoped Charles would be hit by a pang of nostalgia for those orgiastic days of yore, and bugger off in search of the lieutenant. No such luck. Charles groped his belly, his pupils vanishing as the whites of his eyes rolled round.
‘Argghh … they got me … the ruddy Reds got me in the guts …’
The accent was more Antipodean than cockney, but Charles chuckled at his poor mimicry. He sipped a spoonful of rice gruel.
‘Hmmm … Winston! This porridge is sublime! You have really surpassed yourself. This is simply to die for!’
Charles’s brow furrowed as his teeth crunched. He plucked a chicken’s foot from his mouth. Winston’s ghost stood beside his sycophant of a master, reptilian and beady-eyed, cold-blooded as a snake.
‘Have I ever mentioned, Christopher, that our friend Winston here was a Communist? Oh, yes! Comrade Winston here was an important member of the village Min Yuen. But we didn’t let politics get in the way of our friendship, did we, Winston? Our friendship transcended petty politics. Comrade Winston here knows of the horrors I endured when the Japs had me imprisoned in Changi. Comrade Winston has seen me in my darkest hour. When I first arrived in The Village of Everlasting Peace days went by when I could do nothing but lie on my bed and dream of liberating thick spurts of blood from my wrists … Oh, come now, Christopher, don’t pull that ghastly face! Don’t tell me you’ve never had a touch of the doldrums before. Never ogled the knife drawer with the urge to slash your wrists to ribbons. Anyway, as I teetered at the edge of the abyss, Winston, bless him, made me a gift of some hashish. Deliciously potent stuff that made me dream the sweetest of dreams when smoked before beddy-byes. After that Winston brought me opium and a bamboo pipe to smoke it from; then a beginner’s dose of morphia, which he taught me to inject into my veins. Thanks to Winston I’ve sampled many delights in generous abundance. Do you remember what a chaste dabbler I was to begin with, Winston? Good old Winston, that sly fox, he upped the dosages …’
‘Winston Lau turned you into a drug addict!’
The silent angel of death hovered at Charl
es’s shoulder. Was that a faint smirk I saw on his lips? Surely not. Winston has too much self-control to smirk.
‘I can’t believe you’re so naive. Winston took advantage of you. He was the opposite of a friend. And besides, Charles, you committed suicide in the end. The drugs solved none of your problems.’
‘Oh, shush now!’ Charles flapped his hand dismissively. ‘There’s no need to be so damning. It was a mutually advantageous relationship and the opium served us both well. Communists are against such decadence as a rule, but Winston saw how my depravity could be used against me. As I soared with angels each night, Winston ransacked the office to update the Min Yuen on our administrative plans. A herd of rhinos could’ve stampeded through the bungalow and I’d have been none the wiser. But let’s not focus on the negative. Winston was a marvellous friend to me and I am grateful. And let us not forget his excellent culinary skills. The fiery curries of cunning! The dumplings of duplicity! Winston Lau was a loyal servant to the end, and never failed to replenish my veins. Not for decades have I endured the agony of sobriety …’
‘The agony of sobriety! You weren’t the only one the Japs had in the bag, you know. That’s no excuse for the wacky baccy and whatnot. You ought to have been stronger and got by without the drugs. You knew what Winston was up to. You were practically his accomplice. You were just as spineless and irresponsible as the sacked guards. You undermined every effort in the War against Communism. You … you …’
Charles grinned like a cheeky schoolboy. ‘Oh, Goldilocks …’ he sighed, ‘you’re so sexy when you get worked up.’
A quarter to midnight and my granddaughter not yet home. I keep vigil, an abandoned bride with a cheap veil of net curtain over her head, the windowpane a sheet of ice. As I gaze outwards, the dark appears to be in descent, like volcanic ash, mantling the estate below. I indulge a favourite pastime as I wait: rehearsing a telephone call to social services, to be made at a later, as of yet undecided, date. Julia is becoming worse and worse … Twelve years old and already a tearaway … I am too old to cope … I want her off my hands.