Aldiss, Brian W-A Rude Awakening

by A Rude Awakening(Lit)

  In the confined space, it was rather easier to cuddle Raddle than not. I put my arm as far round her waist as it would go, which was somewhat less than half-way. She was fun, I thought, and really not bad-looking. Her hair was pretty. And curly. She was very animated. Her accent was attractive. As she moved my hand to her breast, Boyer cut off the supply of Lehar to announce, 'I could tell you something about Chinese girls, Stubbs, believe me. They've got no blithering passion, no passion at all.'

  'You think so, sir?'

  'No blithering passion. Utterly submissive, brought up since birth to be utterly submissive. It's an akkis an accident of history. The sayings of Confucius analects, I believe they are really. Analects, Stubbs.'

  'Sir.'

  'Why, in China proper, where the feet of the women are still bound'

  'Oh, shewt up about the blewdy Orientals, can't you, Maurice, mmm, I like it; more... What do you know about it really? Oh, yes, more of that. Harder. I've had my teeth full of Orientals. Oh, ooh, you brewt, ah...'

  'Darling, what I'm saying I'm only saying the women have no passion, no response. Christ, this car's abnormally smoky... They just lie there, flat as a pancake, no interest, no initiative. Analects. Not like you, darling. Where are we?'

  'Medan, sir.'

  'I know we're in bloody Medan...'

  The world beyond the car was a world away. I was vaguely conscious of darkness, trees, a glimpse of sky, and lanterns burning in huts of kampongs. Raddle pressed against me on one side, Boyer on the other, and we sipped at the Black Tartan Wombat in turns as my free hand slid up her skirt. Boyer and I began to sing unpremeditatedly as one.

  I love a lassie,

  A bonny black Madrasi,

  She's as black as the fucking ace of spades...

  We collapsed into giggles. Silence fell. I was there. Her lips clamped themselves to mine. We sped on through the thick night as if the driver intended taking us back to Tokyo and was not stopping till he hit the Ginza. My hand was trapped deep in Raddle's oleaginous organ, which felt endless. Boyer dropped into a slumber on my shoulder. Existence struck me as extremely comical, if smoke-filled.

  'Something tells me I can't stop feeling your vagina,' I murmured, indistinctly.

  Raddle removed her tongue from my mouth in order to remark, 'Maurice, I think I'm going to be sick again...'

  Pulling my hand away with a mighty slurp, I grabbed Boyer and shook him in fear, 'Maurice, Maurice, sir, for fuck's sake, wake up she's going to pewk again.'

  He started laughing stupidly, saying in a Scots accent, 'Aye, weel, she was aye a passionate wee woman...'

  Fortunately, at that moment a green wire double gate materialised in the dark before our bonnet. We stopped with a tremendous jerk. Raddle was ejected out of the side door, a parabola of vomit springing from her lips to disappear beyond human ken into the equatorial night.

  'I think I'll have a pee,' said Boyer, 'but remember what I say about the analects. Bloody stupid word, when you come to think...'

  I jumped out and had a pee too. Only in the middle of it did I take in the scene. We had arrived smoking at a Dutch enclave entirely surrounded by a high wire perimeter. On the other side of the gate was a guardhouse, complete with business-like guard with rifles and searchlights. Both rifles and searchlights were turned on us and our various bodily fluids. An electric generator hummed in the background, adding to the general obscene noises of the jungle close at hand.

  When Raddle had recovered sufficiently from her gargantuan vomiting operation to start swearing at the guard in Dutch, the gate was opened and we drove in, surrounded by our private smoke-screen.

  The realisation struck me that we must be some way out of town. To my saturated senses, it appeared strange that there were bungalows here with bright lights burning, and music playing on verandahs, and people dancing both indoors and under the trees. Such gaiety was paradoxical after the ride through darkness, as if one went back in a time-machine through the Jurassic and arrived at Las Vegas.

  The car stopped right in the middle of the revels. We tumbled out, coughing. A band was playing, a man's voice bawled, 'It brings back a night of tropical splendour, It brings back a memory', and then we were submerged in laughing faces which shone in the dark.

  Huge Dutchmen, all six foot seven, pressed Amsterdam beer and sausages into our hands. A barbecue party was in progress; figures ran insanely among low trees. Someone I recognised. He waved. Oh, yes, that chap. Sontrop. I flung him a salute and nearly fell over.

  Boyer and Raddle started dancing to the music, entrusting what was left of the Black Tartan Wombat to me. I sat down at a trestle table and lit a cigar, fighting off dizziness. People were talking to me, but I took no notice.

  Some while later, Sontrop came up with a friend. Although he carried a can of beer, he spoke with his usual sober courtesy. 'It's pleasant to see you here, Horatio. The Dutch are always delighted when their allies, the British, are personally friendly. This is my friend Hendrick. Hendrick Nieuwenhuis. May we enquire what you do here so late and so far from home?'

  Hendrick bowed to me, smiling politely.

  I gestured with the cigar. 'You see, it's simple really, I mean life's only complex on the surface, because underneath it's well, it's a lot more complicated, but we won't go into that, but I want to marry Rosey I mean, Margey. I want to marry Margey.'

  What else was said escapes me; I was trying to puzzle out why I felt unable to rise from the bench. I ate five sausages for their medicinal value.

  The conversation perhaps went on for some hours. The next bit I remember was Hendrick saying, 'We are planning a little crocodile-shoot tomorrow. Perhaps you will care to come with us?'

  'Don't know how to shoot crocodiles, don't be silly.'

  'It's just like shooting people. We give you a carbine your revolver is no good for crocodile-shooting.'

  'Okay, thanks. Fun. I'd like to bring Margey along. Hey, Ernst, you taking a girl with you?'

  Sontrop looked at me and said, without anything you could call a change of expression, 'I am a practising homosexual.'

  I did not know what to say to that.

  'Practice makes perfect,' I said.

  With a violent crash, Captain Boyer landed almost at my feet. I went on hands and knees, bending over him, trying to listen to his heartbeat. His shirt was wet with sweat. Ernst and Raddle pulled me up. I still had the bottle.

  'He's not dead, you fewl, Stewbbs,' she said to me, looking red-eyed, 'only dead-drunk. So much for the fewking analects. Help me get him to bed, if it's all the same to you.'

  With a certain amount of aid from Sontrop, mainly of an advisory kind, Raddle and I heaved Boyer into a nearby bungalow. He came round sufficiently to make declarations of love and sing in a phlegmy voice as the three of us tottered into a rear bedroom. The room contained little more than a wooden double bed, the statutory mosquito-net, and a bare lamp bulb which glared down on the scene, making the eyes ache.

  Boyer lay back and opened his eyes. Full of innocence, they seemed to look for protection from the bastion of his nose. He started to take his trousers off.

  'I'll leave you two now,' I said. 'Good-night, sir, sleep well. Bon voyage, Raddle, tomorrow.'

  'Wait outside,' she said urgently as I passed her. Sontrop went out. I went out and slammed the door. It was dark in the hall. I leaned against the door, drawing on my cigar, trying to gather my wits. From their various points of dispersal, they told me that I was stuck in this parody of a concentration camp for the night, that most of the Dutch here were in festive mood because they were leaving on the Van Heutsz on the morrow, and that if I was not careful I would get a lot more of Raddle than a fistful of pubic hair and labia.

  Through the flimsy door, I heard her trying to rouse Boyer.

  'Come on, you bastard, darling, never mind the words, show the action.'

  'Oh, Raddle, darling, darling Raddle, you know I love you devotedly but I can't, I just can't ... too much alcohol ... putteth off from t
he performance... drown my sorrows...'

  'If it's our last night, don't mewk about, then. Lewk, lewk, I strip off! Rouse yourself! Observe my figure, fewk you!'

  'Oh, lovely, let me feel, oh, Raddle, how I'll live without you...'

  Pounding, sucking noises, as of two goldfish colliding in anger. 'Rise up, you blewdy tiddler!'

  'Oh, oh, too far gone... Black Wombat...'

  'Oh, you sod, you British sod, you fewking drunkard sod from Roehampton! How you like if I go and get your hulking great Sergeant Stewbbs to make love by me if you are incapable?'

  'No, no, darling, my precious, listen, Stubbs good man, good chap in Burma, you weren't in Burma blithering nightmare Stubbs doesn't love you...'

  He muttered something about 'Chink girls', to which Raddle replied impatiently and jumped off the bed.

  I moved. Another door led off the cramped hall. I opened it and slipped in fast. Deep breathing. Someone was asleep close by my right elbow. A person not a cobra, thank God. Cobras don't grunt as they exhale.

  Darkness. I began to cough and had to smother my mouth with my hand; the fingers and thumb smelt strongly of something semi-delectable. Peering back through the door, which I held ajar, I saw Boyer's door flung open with a crash. Raddle emerged, her face black with frustration. The navy blue dress was open all the way down, to reveal secrets of nature at their most titanic. Ida Lupino would never have appeared in such a state.

  As Raddle moved from the room at a canny trot, she seized some of the wiring which ran down the wall to the light switch and pulled hard. The wiring came away in her hand, bringing the overhead bulb down with it. The light sparked and went out. She charged along the hall, scattering wires, and disappeared into the clamorous night, for all the world like a bull leaving a china shop after having tasted porcelain for the first time in its life.

  Instinct suggested that Raddle would not be back. Leaving the heavy sleeper to continue his act, still thoughtfully sniffing my hand, I tiptoed into the other room. Woozy sleeping noises emerged from Boyer's huddled shape. I climbed on the bed beside him, my boots to his face; I pillowed my arms beneath my head, shut my ears to the racket outside, and was enclosed by a suffocating sleep in which cars, planes, and towns burned down all round.

  6

  As the years of the war continue to float downstream, releasing themselves from memory into history, it becomes increasingly easy to sentimentalise them. The antidote is to recall one marked aspect of war years everywhere: how often one was awakened from deep sleep by someone shouting or someone shaking, or by a combination of the two.

  Whoever was shaking me was not shouting. His silence was compensated for by sheer rudimentary vigour; I might have been a coconut palm in the grip of a starving Neanderthal. Groaning, I sat up and was motioned to keep quiet. I did not know where I was or what time it was. Both my watches had stopped. It was still dark, or barely light, and I could not recognise the man who stood over me.

  Now that I was awake, he released me, bending to whisper in my ear.

  'Coffee, two minute,' he perorated, and crept out of the door.

  I instantly lay down to sleep again; the swine had the wrong man. Then a perfume caught my senses. I opened one eye. A woman's head lay close by mine.

  With a certain sense of dja vu, I heaved myself up again and this time came more fully awake. Orientation returned. I was on Captain Boyer's wooden bed. He was there and the woman Raddle was with him. They were both tucked inside the mosquito-net. I was outside the net. They had changed ends, either out of respect for my feelings or because they could not stand the smell of my feet. Gingerly, I climbed off the bed. It was obvious that some well-intentioned Dutchman was going to take me back to my billet in Djalan Sennal Road.

  Staggering to the window, scratching and yawning sickly, I stared out at the tropical world beyond. The great light was about to bound into the sky. Terrible things were already mating or feeding in the branches of trees, celebrating the fact in querulous voices. Apart from the bed, the room was unfurnished. (Writing now, I know why: the Japanese had looted the furniture off the Dutch and the British had looted it off the Japanese.) In one corner, under the window, a metal trunk stood on its end. On top of it were a pink china figurine of a woman dancing, a cracked hand-mirror, a lipstick, and a pink comb with some teeth missing. I stared at them for a long time, whilst trying to get my lungs back into operation.

  As I used the comb, my mind chugged into action along a branch line. I was looking at all the possessions that Raddle had acquired, or managed to hold on to, in the last four years. Today was Saturday, the day she sailed for the Netherlands and a new start in life. I went to have a good look at the pair of them, Raddle and Boyer, sweating together under the net. They were lying face to face, breathing into each other's open mouths. Boyer was half-dressed. Raddle had everything off. She looked as defenceless as a rather mountainous old dog.

  I thought well of her. Pissed though she was, maddening though Boyer had been, she had gone back to him. Just for the last time.

  What a fewking world... Faithfulness, hopefulness, and charitableness, and the greatest of these was faithfulness, if you could possibly manage it.

  As I rammed my bush-hat on and tiptoed for the door, a calendar caught my eye. Write Boyer a note. Must speak to him before he flies back to Padang. Well remembered, Stubbs. Marry Margey, get her to hell out of this equatorial hell-hole.

  I took the calendar off the wall, got a pencil from my pocket, and scrawled him a few lines, politely thanking him for a pleasant evening, wishing his light o' love a pleasant voyage on the Van Heutsz, and asking to meet him at the company office at fifteen hundred hours. It was a miracle of composition, all things considered: a microcosm of the world in three sentences.

  The calendar showed a view of the centre of Edam, with a canal of that blue generally held in reserve for picture postcards of the Mediterranean. It was designed for 1939, the year the world stopped. I left it on top of the mosquito-net, message downwards, and hoped that Boyer would not be too hungover to read it.

  The RAPWI camp lay embalmed in cool dawn air. The trees were absolutely still. On a wooden chair, a garment lay forsaken. The ashes of the barbecue fire were leprous, as if someone had been burning snake skins. The only movement came from a thin smoke, which withered and died among the branches: it rose, not from the barbecue, but from our black car. The vehicle stood where we had left it, grey cumulonimbus issuing from its gaping windows.

  Just looking at the car made me feel worse. Turning my back on it, I stretched experimentally; I had been lying on my revolver all night, too besotted to move. A dead feeling pervaded me. Not only was I alone and among strangers, I hardly knew myself.

  There was a movement at one of the bungalows. A figure appeared on a verandah and beckoned. When the gesture was complete, he still stood there, hand in air. As I moved slowly in his direction, another man came out of the bungalow and stood looking grimly ahead. They waited for me side by side.

  They were young and Dutch. It crossed my mind that I had seen one of them before somewhere, but they conformed very much to a pattern, being tall, fair, tanned, dressed in jungle greens, stern, alert. When I reached them, one said, 'Hello again.' The other shook my hand and said, 'Jan de Zwaan.' He gave me a tin mug of coffee.

  Letting slip the moment in which I could appropriately have said something in reply, I was condemned to silence. I drank. Sweet disgusting liquid seeped through all the furry obstructions in my mouth and throat, and coursed down into my stomach. The novel and, on the whole, welcome illusion of being alive overcame me. I let out a sly fart which immediately poisoned the air. The two grim young men did not twitch a muscle. Necessity was at work: I squeezed out a second fart, repressing the guilty smile on my face.

  As I finished the coffee and returned the piyala, de Zwaan picked up something from behind him and swung it from one finger. It was a Jap aviator's leather cap. 'Okay, we go,' he said.

  He and the other man mo
ved forward, and I fell in beside them. It would be a relief to get back to the billet.

  Parked under linden trees was an old battered army truck. At a sign from de Zwaan, the three of us climbed into the cab. When the engine started, I looked out anxiously, expecting everyone to wake in their bungalows and curse us for murdering sleep. Nothing stirred.

  Bumping slowly forward, we arrived at the gates. A guard came up smartly to let us out, and followed us with his red- rimmed eyes as we drove through the entrance. Oh yes, I thought, this was where Raddle threw up, bless her, and I looked for the place in the grass. But the dholes and hyenas would have cleaned it up. Besides, the episode belonged to an earlier stretch of history.

  We moved down the road at a fair rate. Already day had dawned. This was the brief hour of spring. Natives in wicker hats guided bullock-carts or moved among the fields. Palms dwarfed their grouped figures. Over everything lay a faint mist, with radiance at work behind it. Vague in the distance were Sumatra's high mountains.