I didn’t think much of the village: no pub, no school, no church, it was nothing like the picture-postcard villages I’d seen with my father in the south and west of England, in the Lakes and in Wales. But the air was good. It felt good to be in the air. Apart from a straggle of wind-blown hawthorn around the pond, there were no trees, and the hedge at the side of the road had been layered into a dense gnarly scrub. Nothing until the horizon, in any direction. Only sky. I was in it, and it felt good.
So I’d unpacked the rucksack onto the bench, taking my time, salving the pain in my chest before setting off. I heard a vehicle approaching and hadn’t bothered to turn and look, until it noisily slowed and stopped right next to me.
It was a little country bus. There was a hiss and the door opened. No one got out. The bus was idling and rumbling and throwing out a fume of blue diesel smoke. I straightened up and peered in and realised it was waiting for me. Indeed, collapsed into the hedgerow there was an iron post with a sign and a timetable attached to it.
‘Are you getting in?’ a voice said. ‘This is a bus stop.’
The driver, a very fat woman trussed up in a council uniform, leaned across her steering-wheel to see what I was doing. She narrowed her eyes at the bottles on the bench. For a fanciful moment, I thought she’d taken me for an old-fashioned tramp, a knight of the road.
‘No, thank you, no I’m not,’ I said, and then, as an automatic after-thought, ‘where are you going?’
‘It says on the front. Grimsby.’
The word seemed to hang in the air. I could taste the salt in it, in the air and in the word. I could hear gulls in it, in the air and in the word. Whether she sensed my hesitation or saw a shadow of indecision on my face, the woman squinted at me and then she turned and stared through her windscreen, at the long empty road ahead of her, at the absence of anything but sky.
‘Where are you going then, if you aren’t going to Grimsby?’ she said. ‘There’s nowhere else.’
Nowhere else. Nowhere else but Grimsby.
I could have changed my mind and got on board. For a blinding moment I could have climbed on the bus with my rucksack and never come back. I think I turned and moved to stuff the provisions into the rucksack. Yes, I started to shove in the cheese and bacon and sausage, the bottles of port... until I slowed down and stopped and thought of minor details, like the Daimler, and my passport, and other reasons why I couldn’t leave for good. Minor details. Juliet. The boy.
‘Thank you,’ I said to the woman. ‘Not today. I’m staying around here.’
She was nosy. There was no one on the bus, she had time to be nosy and no other passengers pressing her to drive on. ‘Around here? Where?’
Nowhere else. As though this was wilderness and Grimsby the promised land. I gestured vaguely down the road behind her, where the lane fell away and vanished into the valley. ‘Down there,’ I said. ‘I’m staying at Chalke House. It’s down in the woods.’
Her face froze. Her lips whitened. A grenade of anger detonated inside her. If she hadn’t been strait-jacketed into her bus-driver’s uniform, she would have launched herself out of her seat. Instead. she crunched the bus into gear. And just before she pressed the button to hiss the door shut, she hissed at me, ‘Whoever the fuck you are you can tell the mad fucking bitch and her mad fucking boy they can both fucking rot in hell and...’
The bus lurched away. A plume of stinking black smoke billowed from it. It plunged and stalled and plunged, like a buffalo with a pride of bloody-faced lions clawing at its haunches. I watched it go. It made the air horrible. It made the clean salty air horrible, and even the sky.
I sat on the bench and waited, until I thought that the smoke of the bus and the woman’s words had faded.
The smoke faded. A minute or two after the bus had gone, the Lincolnshire wolds were as sweet as ever before, as sweet as the long-ago days when never a bus or an indeterminate Humber or Hillman had exhausted its fumes into the enormous air. But the woman’s words did not fade. All of their poisonous hatred stayed in my ears, in my mind, as I packed the bag and walked painfully, slowly, down and down through the woods... towards the nowhere else... towards Chalke House.
MIDNIGHT. A DRY wind through dense, dry branches. Juliet had listened to my carefully edited account of the expedition to the village. I’d heard my own voice slurring with the port on my tongue, and sometimes my words were lost in the movement of the leaves. Midnight. The room was dark and still and her eyes were drooping. I wanted to be in bed with her. As a post-script, to compare my quest for gin with its Borneo equivalent, I was embroidering the end of the story. ‘A flying coffin... the quickest way to get to Miri, the nearest place to get supplies of alcohol and...’
Her eyes flicked open. Her body stiffened. She stared into my face, as though she’d never seen me before and I was an intruder in her house, and then she was looking over my shoulder, into the shadows of the room.
‘Juliet? What did I say? Are you alright?’
‘Sssh.’ She was holding her breath. She was staring towards the doorway behind me. Holding her breath. No, her nostrils were flaring, her lips opened, and she was testing the air like a dog. She stared past me, every muscle in her body tensed. ‘Lawrence? Lawrence, is that you?’
His voice was quiet but very clear. ‘Who else could it be?’
I turned to see him come in. He’d been standing in the darkness of the hallway, I couldn’t tell how long he’d been there and listening. Inhaling deeply, Juliet said, ‘Lawrence, have you been...? I wish you wouldn’t, you know it upsets me.’ At the same time, as he loomed close and tall and bony, I could smell an after-shave which wafted in all the space around us.
He ignored her. He said to me, ‘I’ve been listening to your story. About the village up there, and the people in it. That’s why we don’t go.’
He remained standing, a gangly, awkward figure in nothing but a pair of underpants. It was uncomfortable, for me and his mother, because we were sunk into the sofa and our faces were level with his knees and he was an enormous man-boy, big and hairy and yet only a gawky boy who’d blundered into the grown-ups’ world... difficult to explain, but he was simply too big to be so naked with us, in his little boy’s pants. If only he’d sat down on another armchair or even knelt on the floor... but he filled the space with the body of a man and the gracelessness of a boy, with his teenage odour and the waft of his father’s cologne. And he was holding something. A box.
‘What were you saying just then?’ he said. ‘About a coffin? What’s a flying coffin?’
‘It’s just a nickname,’ I said, ‘for the speedboat which goes up and down the river, from Marudi to Miri on the coast of the South China Sea. It’s long and very streamlined, kind of tubular, like a jet plane on the water. It goes really fast. It takes about thirty or forty passengers, you sit in rows like in a plane, and it feels a bit closed in, kind of claustrophobic, as you look out of the little portholes and see the riverbank zooming by.’
Juliet was listening too, but she was looking at her great near-nude son as though she could hardly believe such an ogre could be hers. The box he was holding, it had once held the pieces of the model Phantom he’d built.
‘The flying coffin?’ I went on. ‘Well, from time to time there’s an accident. The boat’s whizzing along and it hits a log. The Baram river is full of logs, logging is the main business upstream and there are some hefty bits of driftwood half-submerged in the water. So the boat hits a log, it turns over and sinks, with everyone inside it. No one gets out.’
He didn’t say anything. He was cradling the box to his stomach.
‘Is that the bird?’ I said. ‘What are you doing with it?’
He opened the box and held it towards my face. It didn’t smell bad, although the swift had been dead for days. The mutes which had dried and caked and powdered around it gave only a whiff of animal fustiness. And the bird, so small, so thin, no more than a mummy... there was nothing much left of its marvellous little body t
o make an odour of any kind. If, soon after the swift had died, a bluebottle had come into the box to take a look, it had gone away without bothering to leave an egg and a squirm of maggots.
He shrugged and put the lid back on. ‘I tried to keep it alive,’ he said. ‘I caught some insects and put them into the box, but it wouldn’t eat anything. I didn’t want to tip it outside for the cat to find. I wanted to keep it. So I just kept it. It’s dead now.’ He held the box to his face and sniffed it. ‘It doesn’t smell of much. I thought it was going to, that’s why I squirted a bit of Dad’s stuff on it...’
‘Put it outside.’ It was Juliet, trying to sound assertive without unsettling him. ‘Just leave it in the long grass, and it’ll be gone by morning.’
‘No,’ he said. He smiled at me, the nicest and warmest smile he’d bestowed on me since I’d been there. ‘I was going to take it to the greenhouse, so it could be with the others, I was going to climb up the vine to the nests and put it somewhere. But you gave me a better idea...’
‘Lawrence, where are you...?’ his mother began. But he’d crossed the room and was out of the French windows before we could heave ourselves out of the sofa.
The storm, the storm we’d been so casually invoking. It started with a skirling in the beechwood, like a jazz drummer teasing the skins with his brushes. And then there was a broiling of wind in the branches. And no sooner had the boy stepped out of the house, but there was a magnesium flare of lightning and a clap of thunder which rocked the house.
Still no rain. Me and Juliet, we stood outside, expecting a torrent. We didn’t follow the boy, we didn’t need to. In the flutter and blaze of light, we could see him as clearly as if he were spotlit on-stage.
He went down to the pond. Like some kind of boy-god, born of the storm in all his nakedness, he took the bird out of the box and floated it onto the water.
It drifted away from him. A Viking funeral, a body launched into the underworld or the hallowed halls of Valhalla? A corpse relinquished to the sacred waters of the Ganges? Whatever the boy was thinking, in the half-baked notions of his teenage mind, he slid the swift towards the middle of the pond.
It rocked there, very gently. There was a long, holy moment. And then, two things happened. The rain started, a sweet summer downpour. And the bird disappeared, to join its brothers roosting in the muddy bottom... a swirling commotion of the water, which sucked it down and gone.
Chapter Nineteen
ENTRAPMENT. I’D EXPERIENCED it in Borneo. The institutionalised entrapment of mosque, school, alcohol.
Possession. The never-changing of seasons. Mosque, school, alcohol.
Another orang putih had said to me... when she’d come to stay for the weekend and was so pissed I’d had to grab her, just in time, from swaying off my balcony into the mangrove swamp, and I’d steered her to the toilet where she’d sat down and fallen fast asleep... she’d said, when I’d shaken her awake and helped her off the toilet and collapsed her onto my sofa... ‘It’s rehab, me and you Christopher and all the other ex-pats... why did we come out here? Running from something, hiding from something? Borneo is rehab...’
Borneo. A blur of days and nights, and weeks and months and years. I’d gone out with a two-year contract, thinking it would be more than enough for me to live cheaply and save some money and see something of south-east Asia. I was still there six years later. What happened to the time? There were no seasons, so what difference did it make if you rolled out of bed, hung-over, and sloped into school on a morning in February or May or October? No difference, it sounded and smelled and looked the same, every day. The mosque was mumbling in the darkness before dawn, it was muttering in school from six-thirty to seven-thirty, there were prayers and Koranic verses from the loudspeakers in every corridor and every classroom and even in the canteen nearly all the time. And then the call to prayer at twelve-thirty, at three in the afternoon and at six-thirty and at seven. After that, in the gathering darkness, every evening and much louder on a Thursday evening, there was chanting and reciting from the tower of the mosque, for an hour or two or three...
Every day. Relentless. Repetitive. The same. The same. The same. The fucking same.
Borneo. A magical word, like a word from a dream... a blurry, repetitive dream, in a long, hot night. The timelessness of sleep, punctuated by odd, mismatching, uncomfortable images.
My first day in school, I’d walked into the principal’s office and he’d waved me to sit down while he scanned my letter of introduction. He was a fierce-looking man, an Iban with a scowly moustache pasted onto his mouth, and behind him, through the window behind his desk, such a rain-lashed morning that the palm trees were thrashing as though they would snap. I was nervous and excited, I was in the tropics, in a rainstorm on the edge of the rainforest. But what did he say to me? What were the first words I heard in my employment as an English teacher in magical, mysterious Borneo?
‘Sut dach’i y bore ma?’ He’d looked up at me and grinned and asked me how I was this morning... in Welsh. He’d done his Master’s degree in Aberystwyth, and thought I’d be impressed.
My head-of-department, the most urbane of men, had a degree from Loughborough and a Master’s from York. Looking glum one day, he told me he’d been to a funeral at the weekend. His three-year-old niece had been killed. By a falling coconut.
The school cleaner, whom I befriended and teased as she swabbed the corridors with a fragrant mop, was recently widowed. With her husband, an official in a government department, she’d travelled to Venice and Rome and Florence, but now she was a cleaner, since he’d been half-eaten by a crocodile somewhere upstream.
Things didn’t match. The dream was a warm, friendly blur, but it was shot through with jarring, unfriendly images.
We would have a school assembly, all fifteen-hundred boys and girls and a hundred teachers gathered for a pep-talk from the principal. One morning, it was the turn of the discipline-teacher to rant about the scourge of drugs, the danger of un-Islamic substances smuggled into the country from the dangerous world beyond. He’d brought a unit of young policemen with him. To warn the impressionable teenagers of what might happen if they got mixed up with the infidels who were threatening the health of the nation, the policemen propped up a lifelike, life-size dummy of a man and thrashed it so hard with a rattan cane that the hall echoed with the thwack of it and a pall of dust rose into the slowly-swirling overhead fans.
But, at the back of the room, I noticed a group of teachers unimpressed by the display. They were huddled over something more interesting in the local newspaper: a full-page photograph of a python, so bloated it was unable to move and surrounded by sight-seers... protruding from its mouth, the feet and legs of a girl it had swallowed.
Marudi, Sarawak, Borneo. I got into my routine. It was a kind of hypnosis, so comfortable and all-enveloping that it might have been torpor. School, my goofy boys and the loveliest funniest girls. My colleagues, the meticulous Chinese with their staccato voices ringing from the classrooms, the diffident Malays whispering insha’allah to excuse their institutionalised procrastination. School, and a sleep in the afternoon, and then a bicycle ride through the kampongs, where the dogs snapped and snarled at my wheels and the kids called out ‘Hello Mr Chris’ as I went wobbling by. Home for a shower, the noodles I cooked. And alcohol.
Alcohol on my balcony. Alcohol, with the river slithering by, and who-knows-what-else slithering in the mangroves which tangled in the stilts of my house. The python? Replete with another child it had smothered and crushed and swallowed whole? The crocodile? Which took dogs and pigs and sometimes, on an especially bountiful day, a fisherman who’d leaned carelessly into the water?
I didn’t care. I’d perfected my gin stengah. With the supplies I’d got from Miri, on a hurtling ride to the city and back in the flying coffin, and with ice from the nearby kedai (ice was ayer batu,‘water stone’), I would settle on my balcony and relish my nightly three or four or five thirst-quenching drinks. More than thi
rst-quenching, they would sink me so deeply and blurrily into my easy-chair that the forest was a spangle of fireflies, the sky a sparkle of stars.
Much later, too late, off to bed... stark naked under the fan, more or less comatose and too pissed to be troubled by mosquitoes. A few hours of snoring, sweaty sleep, and the next day would start all over again – my alarm call at five o’clock, the muttering of the mosque and me cursing and rolling off the bed and under the shower, for another morning in school.
February? May? August? October? No difference. The mosque and the hangover were always the same. The same. The same. The fucking same.
Possession. It was a kind of madness. It was surreal, a very nice trap. I knew every sound and smell. I knew every ant and spider and chick-chak in my bathroom. I liked my colleagues, some of them liked me. I’d learnt the long, complicated names of all my students. I knew enough Malay to make them laugh and to rub shoulders with shopkeepers in the town, with the people in the kampongs, with people whose grandparents had been head-hunters. So who cared what day it was, or which month? The very language was unfussed by the importance of time. The verbs had no tenses. Why would you need them? In the present tense you’d say ‘I go’. In the past you’d say ‘I go’ and toss in the word ‘yesterday’. To express the future, you’d say ‘I go’ and throw in the word ‘tomorrow’.
Time... nothing but a gentle collision of yesterday and today and tomorrow. Its passing was marked by mosque and school and gin. Simple.
Possession. Sometimes the students were possessed. It happened now and then, frequently enough to be unremarkable. Without any warning, in the middle of a lesson, a girl would start moaning, and then shouting, and then screaming and pulling off her tudong. The other girls would start too, and it might spread from classroom to classroom until all the girls and even a few of the women teachers were screaming. They called it ‘hysteria’. The male teachers, led by the Islamic Religious Knowledge department, would quell it with barking cries over the Tannoy and prayers at full-blast. Prayers... they always worked, loud and long and dinning, to drive out the evil spirits which had crept out of the jungle and into the school.
The Waking That Kills Page 13