Aldiss, Brian W-A Rude Awakening

by A Rude Awakening(Lit)

  'What has happened in your country, who can tell it? My private theory is that the death of George V caused the setting-in of the rot. He was a fine man, soldier, fox-hunter, a real monarch, married to a proud queen. Since then, a decadent excrement, Edward VIII, running away with that poxed-up American bitch, Mrs Simpson it clearly spelt the end of any stable system of fealty, and the loss of respect near and far.' Overcome by emotion, he steadied himself by clutching the desk.

  'How can you capture now, I ask you how can you capture the loyalty of your Indian subjects if your king is intercoursing the orifice off some Yankee cow all the way about Europe? You may think inwardly that I am just one more picturesque Wog, Sergeant you may, you may but I have been on leave all round Europe, yes, all round it, even including the Black Forest, in Germany, and it is simply a despicable place, not so beautiful as Britain, and totally without respects for morals. I could tell you some hair-rousing anecdotes about what happened to me in Europe...'

  He fished out his cigarette case, thrusting fags between my lips and his own. He lit them with his gold lighter, his hand trembling.

  'I speak as one who has uncontrollably good friends in Hampstead Heath, Sergeant. Well, well, that's all over now. Good days are over. I have no optimism, none, none. The British Empire is finish, and I suppose it is for the best.' He patted my arm clumsily. 'You cannot know what a man of sensibilities like me feels, Sergeant. Split apart, split apart absolutely, top to stern. My life finish, and my career. What will India be, alone, after all?... Well, bugger that, and please excuse my outbreak of cursing, but really that familiar lick-spittle little left-wing masturbationer of a corporal, to lecture me about my religion...'

  'Sir, if I might suggest it, despite the regrettable antics of Edward VIII, we have on our hands a case of mutiny. Cpl Kyle has refused to carry out an order. He should be placed immediately under close arrest, pending further proceedings. Otherwise his sort of attitude will spread, sir.'

  Retreating behind his desk, Jhamboo looked out of the window at the weary plane trees, smoking furiously as he did so. Then he turned back to me, giving no sign of having heard what I said.

  'Sergeant, I have behaved disgracefully in front of you. Forgive me. Perhaps you are my enemy, I don't know, but that is not what I wish. You see, I admire the British regular soldier to the highest degree, the very highest... Well, there is a saying, "A rotten fish stinks from the head." Corruption spreads very quickly and the end of everything is in sight.' He appeared wretched, and bowed his head.

  'Sah.'

  'Stubbs, man, make an effort, will you, to treat me just as another man, not as a bloody black officer simply.'

  'Kyle did that, sir, and it marked you a bit.'

  He sat down and became very mild, going so far as to toy with a ruler.

  'I must explain so you will understand. India is about to achieve independence. When independence comes, and the Union Jack is hauled down and burnt, it will mean war between Muslim and Hindu populations and much blood will be spilled. Nevertheless, in policy we shall be pacifistical, and who knows what will become of the excellent British-trained army? I am trained only to be a soldier. Without an army, I am nobody...' Suddenly, he brought a bottle of gin out of the cupboard in his desk, followed by two green-tinted tumblers. He filled them to the brim and pushed one of them towards me.

  'Drink it, drink it, and good health.' He waved his hand, dismissing ceremony. 'You see, I am a rotten Muslim also, to touch this alcohol...'

  'Your good health, sir, and best wishes for the future, sir, whatever it brings.'

  'Thank you, Stubbs, thank you!' His eyes went misty as we raised glasses to each other and drank.

  'You see, what the future will bring is uncertain. The time is out of joint. But at least I stand a fighting chance. Very excellent phrase, that, "a fighting chance". I can possibly survive in the forthcoming Free India if I am retired with a perfect military record. Now, Stubbs, if I have a case of mutiny under my command, then the military record is not perfect by a big chalk. So it is important that this matter of "O" Section and this nasty corporal is kept quiet. You understand?'

  'Perfectly, sir.' The gin took a bit of getting down.

  'Excellent. You see how I would be obliged if you stepped outside this room and never mentioned it again. After all, you go back to Blighty next week, so why should you worry? But it is important to me that my perfect military record is not blotted in the few months left before everything breaks up.'

  'I see how you feel, sir, but discipline will go to pot if the blokes find they can defy orders and get away with it.'

  He drained his glass. 'Yes, yes, perfectly so. But between you and I, the GOC must have been pissed when he thought up the idea of the men planting potatoes. I don't think British troops should have to do such menial things.'

  Evening was coming down. The sun bobbed along a line of distant palm trees on the far side of the disputed potato field; it had lost all power to wound, and mosquitoes were already a-wing. An Indian sweeper was sweeping the road, bent double with his little bundle of twigs. In the office behind me, a clerk was singing. His song floated through the open window.

  We don't know what's coming tomorrow,

  Maybe it's trouble and sorrow

  But we travel along

  Singing a song,

  Side by side...

  I took a couple of minutes off to light a fag and stroll about under the plane trees. The gin had made me feel squiffy.

  'Vaginaphobe,' I said, wonderingly.

  Poor old Jhamboo was in a bad way. He had almost broken down in front of me. He was going to return to what would be a new nation, and I could not muck up his chances, not when he had made a direct appeal to me. Sontrop was in as bad a position it really hit me when he referred to Sumatra as home; but home for him was going to be a stormy place for a long while, if he didn't get killed first.

  The fag tasted good. I rolled down my sleeves as the sun ploughed behind the palms; dusk fell almost at once. After the day's abortive performance, better not to think of Margey's future: nobody knew what was happening in her home of Tsingtao. India, Sumatra, China from that point of view, England was preferable.

  As for all my muckers, crying aloud to get back to Civvy Street, there I reckoned I showed more sense than they. I could not see anything wrong with Sumatra, apart from the fact that we were also in the army. After seven years in the army, three and a half of them abroad, home was an unknown quality... War had changed the whole bloody world.

  'Cushy for some,' said a deep voice, and the clerk from the orderly room, a little stunted chap called Wallace, went by. He had been out from the Blight about five minutes. With his terrible low hairy brow, his glistening nostrils, his blubber tips and stooped gait, one shufti at him would have saved Charles Darwin ten years of intensive research. His greeting a shorthand way of saying 'Good evening, Sgt Stubbs, you bronzed veteran of the toughest campaign of war' was an envious comment on my prospective return home. Yet what could Britain offer that ape which he could not get more of here?

  Ah, Margey...

  If only every screw could have taken place on a broken altar among orchids before a great grinning prostrate idol in marble that would have been perfect.

  I knew she felt something of the same thing about me as I did about her. She loved and wanted me because I was the wrong colour and had funny-shaped eyes and came from England where my father was a bank manager and Winston Churchill a famous old warlord. When we got together, two exotic miscegenies thrashed about in harmony.

  As I ground my cigarette-end under my boot, Jackie Tertis came along, moving among the billets, whistling. I knew what he had been doing.

  'Stubbs. You eating?'

  'Good idea. I'm bloody starving. I've had nothing but a cheese sandwich all day.'

  We walked along in step together. His face worked in a peculiar way which I tried not to notice.

  Again I recalled Tertis as a young innocent private back in India
, breaking out in a muck sweat at the thought of his first gobble-wallah. Now he had three stripes on his arm and belonged to PEA Force, a dodgy action column which worked in liaison with the piratical Dutchman, 'Turk' Eastermann. Tertis was a freckled man with wiry hair; he had supplemented his uniform with brown Yankee ankle-boots, a band of yellow chiffon round his bush-hat in place of a pugharee, and Dutch flashes on his shoulder all highly contra regulations, of course. At his waist dangled a big Gurkha kukri. He really fancied himself these days, did Tertis.

  He slapped me on the shoulder and walked along with his hand still resting there. 'We've got a right bloke in clink today, a bugger called Luat, a captain in the TRI.' The TRI was the Indonesian Republican Army.

  'I don't want to know, Jackie.'

  Tertis cackled. 'Do you know what he was saying, in his bloody krab English? He was appealing to the Atlantic Charter that Churchill and Roosevelt invented back in '41 or some time. We told him that the Atlantic Charter had nothing to do with black bastards like him.'

  He pointed out some blood, drying on the leg of his uniform. 'I was practising my golf on him. Very good shots with a mashie-niblick.' More cackling. 'And there was a cow and another bloke we half-drowned him in one of those Dutch bath-things. I mean, really... Wwrrrrr, he bobbed up with the water streaming off him all purple in the face, then down, you bastard, down, drown, drown!'

  He went through the motions as he spoke, laughing and half-choking. Once Tertis had been known as Baby-face; since then, his little pudgy cheeks had grown heavy and foxy red.

  'It's torture. It should be bloody fucking stopped.'

  He gave me a sneering look. 'Well, just you fucking try to stop it, mate. They deserve it I'll give them fucking Merdeka... You'd lick the arses of these fucking murdering blacks. You're too bloody squeamish to live, you are, Stubbs, you and your bloody arms-deals.'

  'I can remember when you had the decency to be squeamish too, Tertis.'

  'Piss-off! Since then, I've fucking come of age. No soap behind my arse, mate. You'll never know. I swung that fucking golf club to good effect this afternoon, must have broken every stinking rib in that cunt Luat's black body. Plus a few kicks in the goolies for luck. Teach these bastards to shoot us up. Wwrrrrr...' The noise he made was a compound of derision and vomit, as if he could not bear his own secret feelings.

  'You're sick, you bastard! I don't want to hear.' I got away from him and walked rapidly ahead towards my billet.

  'You'd love it too, once you fucking well tried it!' he called out. That flat laugh again. 'Wrrrrrr... Drown 'em, rape 'em, hole in one!'

  Thank God he wasn't in my billet. I slammed the door behind me and went upstairs. The terrible thing was that I knew the violence in my own nature. I believed in part as he boasted, that I might love it if I tried it.

  It was almost getting dark. Up in my room, Ida Lupino's smile was just a blur. I left the light off so that the windows could remain open without too much wildlife bursting in. I stripped down bollock-naked. From my billet, I could see Tertis's torture house in the distance, or part of it at least, glimpsed between other houses. Indonesians were beaten up there regularly. No one said anything. A perverted part of me always wanted to watch. It wasn't every day you got the chance to see some poor naked sod bashed to death with golf clubs.

  In his cups, Jackie Tertis loved to talk about it. Many of the sergeants claimed he was making it all up. That was their defence. I stomped into the shower and leaned against the slate wall. Cold water descended like nutmeg-graters upon my prickly heat.

  When I got to the sergeants' mess for a bite to eat, there was Tertis, boozing and holding forth, his face dark. Charlie Meadows pitched into him, others put their oar in from time to time, but nothing stopped Tertis. He had a long story about a young Malayan girl and two men who had been caught in an ambush the previous evening, one of them the Luat he had mentioned to me earlier. He was very excited and drinking heavily. I tried not to listen as I attacked my soup.

  'We questioned the girl all morning,' he said. 'She was guilty all right confused in her answers. We stripped her off and tied her to the table with her legs open. Wwrrrrr ... Fought like a tiger, she did. We tore every strip of clothes off of her and then raped her, all four of us, and then we mashed her tits and head in with golf clubs. Wwrrrrr...' He coughed and laughed, striking at the air before him.

  Johnny Mercer gave his high nervous laugh, then looked down at his plate.

  'You're a criminal, Tertis, a thug,' said Ferguson, the Scots colour sergeant. 'The GOC ought to know what's going on at yon Eastermann's place. I willne drink in the same room wi' you.' He set down his glass angrily and got up.

  Tertis rose too. 'Forget it, Jock. That's the sort of treatment these people expect don't forget they've been under Jap rule all these years.'

  'Aye, well, we're not Japs, thank the living Christ, and your talk turns my stomach, treating the other sex so shameful.'

  Tertis began to show flecks of spittle on his lips. 'You bloody hypocrite, Jock! Wasn't it you telling us how you'd had a kneetrembler with some bloody Malayan cow in Singapore, up against the fucking walls of the cathedral? Where's the fucking difference?'

  'All the fucking difference,' said Ferguson. He turned to Dickie Payne, who as usual sat there saying nothing, sipping on a beer. 'RSM, how come you tolerate such filth in our mess?'

  Dickie made a slurred but expansive gesture. 'Jackie could be right at that. Murdering buggers.'

  'Ach, that's no' the issue,' said Jock. He marched out of the mess, slamming the door behind him.

  'You've got to civilise them somehow,' said Wally Scubber. It was his sole contribution to the discussion.

  In the silence that followed, Charlie Meadows motioned to Tertis. 'Let's have no more of this kind of talk. Sit down and keep your trap shut. You talk as if you'd gone over the top.'

  'Don't bloody lecture me,' Tertis said. He lurched to the bar, sticking his tumbler out to the mess orderly. While it was being filled with Indian Scotch, he said over his shoulder, 'You're all a lot of old women, that's what. Face facts. Like a pack of fishwives hiding behind your mothers' aprons waiting for Saturday, believe me. Up your pipe! Them two blokes were in possession of Jap machine-pistols, Luat a captain in the TRI. That's not bullshit, you know. Well, is it, it's not bullshit.'

  He wandered back towards the table, where we all sat in embarrassed silence.

  'The RSM's right, they're murdering bastards. Kill you. They were going to chop us, shoot us. They chop you up with knives, malum, that's what the Malays do, chop you up. What were we supposed to do? Catch 'em, let 'em go, like it was some fucking kid game? Butterscotch, marbles?'

  He paused to stare at us. Dickie muttered, 'They do chop you up. Run amok, everything.'

  The remark triggered Tertis off again.

  'You chicken bastards, look at your fucking faces! "Report me to the GOC," he said. You think the old general doesn't know about PEA Force, doesn't know, doesn't laugh? He'd have liked to stuff her himself. Wwrrrrr... "Here's a medal for you, Jackie Tertis, boy, Sgt W/s, medal for gallantry, help yourself, kidder, VC, DSO, DSC, DSM, DDT, you name it, thanks of a grateful nation, upholding the old traditions of the regiment, Ypres, Somme, Dunkirk, Kohima, Mandalay, all the shagging rest."

  'Rape 'em all, kill the fucking lot. Why, even my bastarding father...' He turned suddenly on Mercer, who was eating silently. 'You laugh okay, you think it's funny? Stuck here, us or them? We're sitting on a powder-keg, hundreds of thugs like Luat, all Jap weapons, you think that's funny you're round the twist, not me.'

  Looking down at his plate, Johnny said, 'The powder-keg will be exploded by your sort of mentality.'

  'Ah, that intellectual crap, Mr Schoolmaster, another one. Helping primitive races, I know, don't tell me! You forget there's murder, fucking murder, going on in Sourabaya and Batavia right now. Right, our turn next, our turn for the high jump women trained to kill and all, stab in the back. You, if you'd seen her, Stubby you're al
ways poking some bloody Chink bitch or other you'd seen her stripped, legs open wide, wwrrrr, all helpless, Christ, don't tell me, one more bloody savage bint, you'd have fucking jammed it all the shitholing way up same as us. Well, come on now yeah? Split the bitch in two. Admit it.'

  I stared at the so-called beef on the plate before me. 'Shit in it, for crying out loud, will you? You're as sick as a dog. I can't listen to any more or I'll throw up.'

  He shook a fist at me as I pushed my chair back. 'Fine mates you are! Throw up, then, go on, you fucking pansy, faint, fall over, spew, piss on your frock'

  I left him to it. Mercer barged out of the mess with me. We charged into the open air so fast that we nearly fell over the cesspit, now covered with loose planks.

  'He should be sent home. He needs a trick cyclist.'