by Susan Barker
That evening I paced the watch tower restlessly, as if allergic to keeping still. I’d seen Evangeline in the back of the Red Cross van that afternoon as Nurse Perdita and I were taking an inventory of stock. The runaway debutante was counting vials in the medical refrigerator when Evangeline climbed into the van to fetch some antibiotics for the Aussie nurses. As Evangeline took a bottle of pills, she whispered in Cantonese that the missionaries had agreed to take Grace for the night. Then she was gone, out into the midday sunshine. Removing her head from the refrigerator, Perdita remarked that I was looking frightfully pleased with myself. Then she smiled and batted her lashes (for the ex-society girl had her singleton eye on me). I couldn’t wait for the evening. After days of touring the stifling huts and breathing sickness into my lungs, I was drained, conscious of my own mortality. What could be more rejuvenating than to take my beloved into my arms and breathe the fragrance of her skin? To lose myself in her embrace and dissolve the boundaries between us. As I paced the watch tower, impatient for her, I saw a movement from the corner of my eye. I lifted the binoculars and focused the lenses on the boundary fence. A bandit was crawling into the village. What fool does he take me for? I wondered. (Of course, Comrade Kok Sang of the 10th Independent Regiment was right to take me for a fool; my mind had hardly been on the job.) The man was struggling, his jacket snagged on the barbed wire. I snatched the rifle and calmly aimed it at the bandit’s foot. Though I’d had some shooting practice with the home guard, I’d little confidence in my marksmanship. I’d expected to miss. I’d expected merely to make a loud bang and frighten him away. So I was surprised to squeeze the trigger and, along with the gunpowder blast, hear a human cry of pain. The muscles of my face hardened as I lowered the gun. So that’s what it feels like to shoot a person, I thought. I did not feel guilty or upset. Only the desire to shoot again. The injured bandit was now crawling backwards, out of the village. I couldn’t see where the bullet had gone in. I rang the alarm bell to alert the guards and aimed my rifle again. Loud footfalls came hurrying up the rungs of the ladder. Evangeline threw open the trapdoor in a breathless panic.
‘Don’t!’ she cried.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I’ve caught a bandit.’
Evangeline wrested the gun from me and rushed to the window. An empty jacket hung from the fence like a drab abandoned chrysalis. The bandit was nowhere to be seen. A commotion of voices could be heard, coming from somewhere near by. The guards were shouting in Malay.
‘Oh God,’ I said to Evangeline, ‘we’ve got to get you home. This place will be crawling with guards in a minute.’
Evangeline was unconcerned by the guards. She turned to me, eyes blazing.
‘What have you done?’ she screamed. ‘What have you done?’
18
ADAM AND JULIA lost interest in the Friday-night film and drowsed on the sofa, Julia worn out from a hard day’s truanting and Adam from compulsive page-turning and bibliophile flights of the mind. Julia hugged a cushion, legs curled under, bottom resting on her heels. Adam dozed with his head thrown back, throat exposed, as if bared to a knife. There was an enchanted quality to their slumber, as if they’d taken a bite of the same poison apple, or the sandman had sprinkled them with magic dust.
The wind gusted by the fourteenth floor, swift as a greyhound racing round a track. The TV signals blustered away, the picture a cryptic fuzz, every other word a mystifying buzz. My grandchildren had been watching a Hollywood action movie starring some indestructible hero with an East European accent. A hail of bullets perforated the static, whizzing and pinging and defying the laws of physics. Special effect. Explosion. Special effect. Explosion, explosion, explosion. None of the pyrotechnics disguised that the film was a very dreary affair.
I shuffled over to the TV and clicked off the volume. Then I sat and watched the children as they slept. Adam has the beginnings of a moustache, faint as caterpillar fur on his upper lip. I’d teach him how to shave, but it’s optimistic to expect a boy who’s worn the same holey jumper for six weeks running to pick up a razor. Adam, you tramp! You stink! complains Julia. Have a bath! Advice she ought to follow herself. The odours of the estate cling to my granddaughter. Fags, epoxy resin and fish-and-chip wrappers. Both children are a source of olfactory offence. They make my flat smell like a homeless shelter.
A helicopter plummeted from the sky, propellers thrashing wildly as it spiralled across the TV screen. A stuntman dived from the hatch, machine guns blazing in freefall. The rip-roaring action sequence shuddered on the fluorescent screen, the living room strobe-lit, the aerial a lightning rod in an electrical storm. And as I watched the film, with no idea who were the goodies or who were the baddies, my estranged daughter appeared.
Nothing could have prepared me for it. My heart arrested for a count of three, and my breath stalled in my throat.
‘Frances,’ I wheezed.
‘Father,’ she said coolly.
She wore her school uniform, her skin pearly and phosphorescent, as if she too were a discharge of speeding cathode rays. Strands of her dark pageboy hair hung in her eyes and the smattering of freckles on her nose. How old was she? Thirteen? Fourteen? The same age as her acne-blighted agoraphobic son? I knew from the supercilious look on her face that the Cold War had begun. The years she was a distant stranger under my roof.
Frances interfered with the TV signals, the picture deteriorating into a meteor shower on the moon. Twenty-five years had gone by since I’d last seen her. She was a beautiful child. A sanctimonious child, disdainful of the compromises I’d made to give her a comfortable childhood. Able to live by her convictions because her sheltered life threw up no challenges to them. She turned to watch the sleeping siblings and I saw the profile of her snub nose.
‘My children do not look well.’
I was startled to hear her call Adam and Julia her children. How could this virgin child claim that those two strapping adolescents were the product of her taut, never-lived-in womb? Adam and Julia were her siblings, her classmates, her peers. Never her children. My daughter fixed me with her critical gaze, and I knew no punches were to be pulled.
‘You have not been feeding them,’ she accused.
How outrageous! Child or not, one could not deny her maternal ferocity.
‘Of course I feed them. What do you take me for? Julia always has her porridge in the morning, and I cook them both supper in the evening. I try my best, but it is difficult to raise children at my age. Adam won’t go to school and Julia comes home when she pleases. Believe me, I’d put them over my knee and give them a good spanking if I could … But my arthritis is bad this winter and my wrist seizes up.’
Adam stirred. He opened his eyes and looked at me. I half-expected him to see his mother and make some loud exclamation of surprise. But he didn’t. This must have made our quarrel appear somewhat one-sided.
‘Look what you’ve done! You woke my son,’ said Frances. ‘Why does he look so pale and sickly? Why are his eyes so haunted and bruised?’
Her hands were on her hips; on her face, a look of anger. For a child of four foot ten and a hundred and one pounds she was very intimidating. Not even the demure lace frills of her ankle socks diminished the effects of her sabre-rattling.
‘Adam refuses to go outdoors,’ I said. ‘He has decided to renounce the world and live an ascetic life of the mind. I have reported him to social services but they say there’s nothing they can do.’
Now Julia woke, her eyes lazy and slitted like a cat in the sun. Brother and sister slouched as they watched me, loose-limbed as two abandoned marionettes.
‘You were a terrible father,’ said Frances, ‘and now you are a terrible grandfather.’
‘Now, hold on a minute …’
‘This flat disgusts me. There is damp everywhere and no food in the cupboards.’
‘Frances …’
Her young eyes glittered with contempt. ‘You took my mother away from me.’
‘Frances,’ I pleaded
, ‘you judge me too harshly. I had to make some very difficult choices. I agonized …’
‘Why are you crying, you selfish man? Your tears won’t bring my mother back.’
I lost my temper. There is only so much blame I am prepared to take. ‘Get out, get out!’ I shouted. ‘You ignorant child. Go away!’
The look on her face was murderous, just like the time I told her she was grounded until the O levels were over.
‘Go away? And leave my children in the care of a mad old man! You are unfit to serve as their guardian.’
‘Mad, am I? Who is the pot to call the kettle black? If you’re so concerned about the welfare of your children why did you kill yourself? That was jolly selfish of you, wasn’t it? If they’re miserable and motherless and stuck with me in this damp council flat, then it’s your fault. They had nowhere else to go.’
I’d hoped to draw Frances’s attention to her hypocrisy, but she wasn’t listening. Her twelve-year-old daughter had risen from the sofa and had lifted a porcelain Buddha from the mantelpiece – one of my few souvenirs from Malaysia.
‘Shut up!’ she shrieked. And smashed the ornament against the gas fire.
Julia fled the crime scene, the holy Siddhārtha in smithereens. Adam winced from the safety of the sofa.
Frances shook her head, her mouth a thin disapproving line. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ she said.
And satisfied with the seeds of malice sown, my estranged daughter vanished, leaving me with Adam, who stared into the fuzzy vortex of the television screen as if therein lay the solution to our broken home.
‘What have you done?’ Evangeline screamed.
What had I done?
She grabbed the torch and jumped down the trapdoor. What had I done?
‘Evangeline,’ I said, ‘wait!’
Her gaze was black as thunder, irritated and impatient.
‘What’s going on? Do you know that bandit?’
‘Yes. I have to go after him and see if he is OK. He won’t make it back to the camp with a bullet in his side. He will die.’
I stared at Evangeline, not caring a damn whether the bandit died. The only thing that mattered to me were the fractures that had appeared in the truth. She had tricked me into thinking she was someone she wasn’t.
‘You’re a Communist.’
‘No. You must trust me.’
‘Bloody hell! How can I trust you? You have been coming here to distract me, haven’t you? So guerrillas can sneak in and out of the village. You’ve been lying to me.’
The truth occurred to me as I spoke it. I was furious enough to hit her. I’d have given anything to have her come back to me, to hear her vehement denial and whispered love. But Evangeline’s priorities lay elsewhere. She started down the ladder.
‘Wait! The guards are by the fence. They will shoot you!’
There was a clatter as she slipped down a few rungs in her haste. A gang of guards stood where the bandit had been, rifles aimed at the scrubland, bickering like old women about whether to go and hunt for him. I bounded down the ladder after Evangeline, knowing that if they saw her alone they would shoot. When I reached the ground Evangeline was racing back into the village. I chased her along the main trail to a section of fence dangerously close to the police station. Evangeline was squeezing through a hole with the skill of a contortionist when I caught her up. I expected her to fly off again once she was on the other side, but she turned and lifted the chicken-wire mesh so I could follow. Then we ran together, across the no man’s land and into the jungle.
Before that night my acquaintance with the jungle was limited to my Sunday hiking expeditions with Kip Phillips, the rubber-plantation manager. Kip was a splendid host to the rainforest, and we hiked deep in the jungle, where the canopy was so dense it was like rambling through a twilight realm. As he guided me through the labyrinth of leaves, Kip would show me a tiny exquisite flower hidden amid the mass of vegetation and teach me its Latin name, or he’d squat by a cluster of fungi and with a chuckle indicate a jungle tortoise’s teeth marks in a mushroom. Kip was forever handing me strips of bark and sticky buds that gave off strange medicinal aromas when rubbed between my fingertips. He’d list the ailments they treated and describe the techniques of preparation. But mostly we hiked in silence, the forest floor breathing its muggy halitosis of rotting flora and fauna, clinging to Kip and me till we were damp-skinned as amphibians. Some of the trees were more than a century old, and as my gaze travelled up the colossal trunks I’d be dizzied and awed.
Though peaceful and companionable, our hikes were never completely free of anxiety. Wary of Communist ambushes, Kip insisted on rigging me out in one of his home-made bullet-proof vests and he was never without a rifle, which he aimed at the slightest trembling of foliage, finger hooking the trigger and a fierce look in his eyes. One afternoon a pygmy squirrel made the mistake of cavorting too noisily in some bushes. Before I’d even registered the disturbance, Kip had cocked his rifle and sent a bullet through its tiny rodent heart.
‘Bloody Reds,’ hissed Kip, quaking with fury and remorse. ‘They’ve turned this jungle into a bloody war zone.’
The jungle at night was a different world: dark and subterranean, as if we’d descended into the bowels of the earth, the sweltering heat rising from rivers of molten lava. Evangeline ran ahead along the claustrophobic trail, the stiff branches she charged through whipping my face and arms. Through the shrinking tunnel of leaves I stumbled after her and the flashlight, struggling to keep up. Parasitic vines slithered from the treetops, hairy tendrils flaying my shoulders and neck. Shallow roots and buttresses tripped my every other step.
‘Evangeline!’ I shouted. ‘Slow down.’
Her torch hung by her side, illuminating the ground as she waited. From the waist up she was shrouded in darkness. As soon as I caught up she was off again.
‘Evangeline, stop!’ I panted. ‘What the hell has been going on over the past few weeks? Why’ve you been coming to the watch tower? I want to know the truth.’
‘We can talk later. We have to keep going. I have to make sure he made it back to the camp.’
‘Camp? Evangeline! Are you taking me to a Communist camp? Are you out of your mind? I’ll be killed!’
Evangeline stopped and turned. She squeezed my shoulder with her small callused hand.
‘Please, Christopher,’ she said. ‘I will not let anything happen to you. I have to know how badly he is hurt. Come on …’
For another twenty minutes or so we continued to beat a path through the jungle. Darkness devoured the way we had come, the gallery of foliage shifting to conceal the trail. But even if it had been daylight I doubt I would have known the way back to civilization. The wild bandit chase disorientated me, as if I’d been blindfolded and spun around for a game of blind-man’s buff. The maze of leaves narrowed, became more convoluted, and eventually we came up against a wall of jungle so dense we could only progress an inch at a time, battling against the sharp-clawed undergrowth. The rot of organic matter intensified in the knot of jungle, as if it concealed some carnivorous rafflesia with bloody meat in its jaws. Smothered by leaves, the torchlight was no brighter than the belly of a firefly.
‘Are we lost?’ I asked Evangeline.
‘No, keep going,’ she said. ‘It will open up again soon.’
She was right. After five more minutes of undergrowth thick enough to asphyxiate a man, it came to an end. We tumbled into a clearing, hands and faces marked by stigmata from the foliage; the cuts of thorns and grass-blade nicks. For a while we could do little more than tremble and take insatiable breaths of air, gulping it down regardless of the poisonous stench.
A shimmer of moonlight came into the clearing. I looked up and saw an aperture in the rainforest roof, framed by a silhouette of leaves. As the pounding of my heart subsided, the high-decibel clamour of invisible insects teemed in my ears. There must have been a million of the critters, oscillating their creepy-crawly parts so the stridulations merged into
that of one solitary beast. There came a blood-curdling monkey screech and the arboreal croak of tree frogs. When Evangeline skimmed the flashlight along the periphery of the clearing, spiders and scorpions scuttled back into hidy-holes to watch us out of crepuscular eyes. The torch beam darted nervously, as if Evangeline feared that if it were to settle for more than a second it would set the leaves ablaze.
‘Looks like he isn’t here,’ I said.
‘If he was badly injured he would have collapsed on the trail,’ Evangeline conjectured. ‘We have not seen him, so he must be OK.’
‘We can go back, then.’
‘No.’
‘What?’
Evangeline turned her back on me. She flicked the torchlight on and off, reminding me of how the village police flashed their torches at a bush of scintillating fireflies, mimicking their mating call (they claimed this made the flies sexually frustrated).
‘What’s going on?’
Evangeline ignored me. I strode over to her and put my hands on her shoulders, confident my touch would snap her out of her strangeness.
‘Don’t touch me.’ She pulled her shoulders free and moved away.
‘Evangeline, what the hell is going on? You must tell me, this minute!’
The torch clicked off, plunging us into blackness. I saw the dark shape of her, pacing through the kettle-steamy heat, the shadows of the clearing parting for her, as if to avoid contamination. I reached out, raking the empty air, then grazing the thin cotton of her dress.
‘I said, don’t touch me.’
I lowered my hand. Cantonese? Why was she speaking in Cantonese? Our language was English. Moths stirred in the recesses of my stomach. Why was she acting like this?