by Nigel Barley
He awoke in terror and the knowledge that he was no longer alone in the house. Motes of dust twirled in the sunlit air leaking through the blinds but the silence had a deliberate premeditated sound. The Three Bears had returned. He no longer remembered the sugary ending of the fairy tale of his childhood but it was a good bet that, according to the original version of the aptly-named Brothers Grimm, he was about to be consumed by them. Surreptitious noises are always much more audible than blatant ones. The skulking menace crept softly along on the other side of the bedroom wall, the length of the tight and creaking corridor, and entered the kitchen. There was a soft tinkle as the cutlery drawer was pulled open. He could picture whoever was out there looking down on the gutted rice pudding tin and observing its freshness. Who’s been eating my porridge? There came a click that he recognised unmistakably as the sound of a rifle being cocked, then soft shuffling coming closer and he stared in horror at the slow clockwise turn of the doorknob. It was flung open and a screaming Japanese soldier leaped in, rifle raised to fire. Pilchard had his tin of baked beans still clutched in his hand and—unthinkingly—flung it like a grenade in full-force cricket delivery. The soldier just had time to look briefly surprised and fire his rifle into the pink glass ceiling light as it struck him straight between the eyes and he shimmied to the floor—knocked for six—beaned—in a parody of a stage swoon. Pilchard was out of bed in a flash, looking down on the sprawled figure. As a soldier, he should—he knew—now make sure, seize the rifle and stick the bayonet, snarling, into his victim’s chest with applied body weight, twist and withdraw as they taught you in the OTC but it was somehow different doing it to a prone man rather than a sack of sawdust. As a doctor, he should ascertain whether he was still alive and offer succour. But there could be no talking his way out of this. The line between assault and murder was irrelevant to the Japanese so he must act like a museum curator and just put as much distance between himself and the scene of a crime as possible. He stepped over the still-prostrate form and set off towards the back door, hesitated, hand on doorknob, and came back. The tin of beans was dented but unbroached. He retrieved it.
Outside, a Raleigh bicycle was leant against the wall in dowager shades of British Racing Green. He noted the pared saddle and Sturmey Archer gears with approval, another dream of childhood. Clearly this was loot to be taken back and, anyway, according to the new morality, anything not in actual use was unwanted by its owner. On the rear pannier was a steel helmet, a tinkling symbol that he flung into the bushes, then cocked a bold leg over the crossbar and pedalled away, hell for leather, towards the concealing city.
* * *
On the whole, Captain Oishi disliked the military. Raised modestly by a hushed and widowed mother in Kyoto, surrounded by priests and cherry blossom and ancient temples, he was at heart a gentle soul and he struggled to keep the distaste he felt for the General off his face. The army had taught him the conformities of swearing and gambling and visiting prostitutes with publicly feigned enjoyment but brought few deeper changes or accomplishments to set beside his university studies in calligraphy. And he was instinctively kind. Occasionally he had ended up comforting the comfort women who sobbed on his slim shoulder as the meter of fleshly pleasure ran unheeded. He had been puzzled to find himself sleeping with the Austrian female, Erica. They had all been at the Raffles Hotel, she with a group of his fellow officers all loud with drink, worrying at bowls of peanuts with unwashed fingers. As a young man trained to be solicitous of the needs of older people, he had been sent to find her a tonic water. Rank was never totally ignored, even on such informal occasions, and youthfulness was always punished ruthlessly by messmates. She sipped it and made a sour face. But then it was a sour drink.
‘Young man, when I ask for a tonic water, I expect it to come with gin in it. When I ask for a gin and tonic, I expect it to come with two gins in it. Also there is no ice. Instruct that short barman to fill a tall glass with ice and pour it in.’
He had approached the protesting barman, an ensoured Chinese, and coaxed gin, glass and supplementary ice cubes from him as he railed against wasteful Western ways. ‘Ice. Ice. White people. Always they ask for ice. Japanese do not ask for ice. I have no more ice. At least, I have ice but not frozen yet. Do not tell others to come to me for ice’—and given them to her.
‘This is special,’ he had explained earnestly. ‘Asian peoples do not take ice. They only have ice for you.’ At which she had screeched with laughter, pinched his cheeks and begun singing some silly song about the stars being out tonight and telling if it was cloudy or bright and that had been it. It had been most interesting to see blonde pubic hair, though he pushed away the thought that, in that dim, curtained light, it might just have been grey.
The General was away supervising some tunnelling work down by the docks. The General was keen on tunnelling and preferred always to do it alone. Captain Oishi liked orchids and reading. Their interests did not greatly intersect, but, as in any successful marriage, that was quietly accepted.
A great, grey trunk had been delivered from Professor Tanakadate at the Museum, labelled ‘Cocos-Keeling’ and set by the door. He had been resisting it all morning, eyeing it shyly through lowered lashes, like a boy eyes a girl across the floor at a school dance, as he busied himself with tedious paperwork. He finally dumped it all in his wire out-tray. Now he deserved a little treat. He went over and looked down on the exotic box with a little tickle of nervousness. A box was exciting. You never knew what could be inside.
The tin trunk, of Birmingham manufacture, bore the stencilled name of RA Pilchard. He approached as you might an unexploded bomb, examining it carefully from all sides before he undid the straps riveted to the lid, unclicked the hasp, opened it slowly. The interior was painted in swirly, fake woodgrain of an almost ginger colour. Gummed on the inside lid was a list of folders, each tied with beige tape. They seemed to have been roughly rummaged through by someone in search of valuables—that would be the Kempeitei—papers were scattered everywhere and out of order. Checked against the list on the lid, some folders were missing entirely. The only unmolested one was labelled Raffles. He took it out and laid it gently on the desk and pulled one end of the tape so that the bow unloosed and the flap popped enticingly open like—he thought—a tightly unlaced bosom in an American film. He spread out the fan of loose sheets, settled neatly in his chair and began to read.
* * *
Pilchard could feel the muscles in the small of his back going into seizure, unused to such exercise. His body was beginning that slow process of betrayal called ageing. He tried to keep his mind busy. In younger days he had been an excellent cyclist and in the blank year after graduation, he had sold encyclopedias door-to-door from the back of his bike—a sort of encycled encyclopedia—reading the books in the long breaks between sales, sucking in yet more pointless information. The war seemed to have wiped all such knowledge away. He knew nothing. He was an empty vessel. He had no idea how to survive. Everywhere on the houses, fluttered little Japanese flags, squares of white with a red blob in the centre like used Elastoplasts. As he pedalled through the fishing village of Bedok, there were gradually more people on the streets, more signs of life struggling to resume, also more Japanese resisting that normalisation. He knew he was required to bow deeply, with alleged respect, to all of them, a requirement which was difficult to satisfy on a bicycle with a crossbar. Differences in interpretation would obviously exist and, sooner or later, one of them would object to his wobbled, sketchy nod of the head and step out into the road, with hand raised, to stop him for routine humiliation, violence and confiscation. He was too noticeable, anyway, on a fine bike like this that would invite envy and risk being remembered. In Katong, he passed the big, fake-Elizabethan mansions—some with rampaging rhododendrons but most razored to the orders of snake-fearing mems—facing out to sea and all looking incongruously like Surrey golf clubhouses, favoured by the wealthy, but all now with their Japanese staff cars parked shinily outside,
chauffeurs polishing and posing. Finally, he halted in front of one of the big peranakan houses, doubtless the fancy seaside villa of some Chinese merchant, climbed stiffly off and leant his machine, with deep regret, against a wall that swarmed with bright ceramic tiles of chipped dragons and cracked bats. It shut off a large private garden shaded by various varieties of Banksia—what optimists termed ‘trees of Heaven’ and pessimists ‘turd trees’ from their elongated flower spikes. The bicycle would not stay there long. Within hours it would be broken down—frame, saddle, tyres and resold all over the island. Flat inner tubes at inflated prices. Already, a teenage boy in Oxford bags was eyeing it with blatant interest, from between the parted shutters of the first floor. Then a big American saloon screeched to a halt beside him and a young Chinese in a skimpy suit climbed out, reached back for a briefcase, glared at him and flounced into the house with shouting and gesticulation. Everyone lived with their old resentments. Pilchard shrugged and clutched his tin of beans and started walking again, while civilians dodged around him with downcast eyes as if he were excrement left embarrassingly on the pavement.
At this hour of the afternoon, the brothel-dwellers of Geylang had barely got out of bed to rest. By some odd numerical convention, only the hotels in even-numbered lanes were for whoring, odd numbers being reserved for perfectly respectable small businesses. A headache nested with insidious softness behind his eyes. Girls of all shapes and sizes were staggering about in various stages of careless undress, spitting and coughing over cigarettes, rubbing at eyes made sore by too much makeup and bar fug, groaning and snarling, scratching themselves between the legs. Later they would slurp down noodles outside the stews.
It was a relatively muted area at the moment, off duty, though later the dregs of the army would sink down here, as always, to be debauched and cheated in a token manner. Geylang had been servicing lascars and rolling sailors—all at sea on land—for a hundred years. At this hour, it was not to be expected that they would look after the passer-by with casual lust or even commercial appraisal and, as Pilchard passed by on his lonely Odyssey, the residents could not be bothered to make even a fleeting show of desire or desirability and, for his part, he felt no more attraction than he would at the zoo. He remembered vaguely that, in the best Japanese brothels, even those around Middle Street, normal practice, at the turn of the century, had actually been to exhibit the girls in cages so that they might be closely examined by the rising sons among their clientele who would then select one by lighting his pipe and passing it to her. A consenting puff sealed the deal and the pipe was passed back politely and silently to its owner. Sex would then be conducted in a series of mute thrusts into an appropriate orifice, even through the bars, without the exchange of a single word, since that would constitute excessive familiarity. How to suck seed in business. He realised, with sudden insight, that men do not pay prostitutes for having sex with them, they pay them for going away quietly afterwards without making a fuss about it, which was why non-communication was an honoured tradition here. Now all those highly reputed houses of ill repute had gone, swept away after the First World War as the Japanese became obsessed with their nation’s image in the world. He felt a sudden weary urge to just sit and eat his beans but knew that the rice-pudding was more than enough, swinging, as it was, in his shrunken belly like a cricket ball in a sock. Anyway, later he might be really hungry for who knew when he would eat again? How would he buy food? For his medical services in the camp, he had received a stipend of 10 cents a month. In his pocket, nested a princely thirty cents. He realised that imprisonment, with its guarantee of one bad meal a day, had been freedom of a sort. Now he was turned loose and become immediately the slave to his own needs.
In front of him lay a major bridge over the Kallang river—at this season a thick, malodorous trickle—with troops clustered around the checkpoint like flies on a dead dog. He sighed. This would mean trouble but trouble that could not be avoided, since, if he headed upstream, the river divided into two which would mean two checkpoints not one and each less busy so with fewer distractions for the sentries. A bullock cart lumbered up with a load of pineapples, blocking passage and halting all traffic as the soldiers helped themselves to fruit despite the wailing protestations of the Indian driver. He slipped the beans inside his shirt, took a deep breath and marched towards them all in the blank heat. Close up, the river smelt really bad, worse than he had ever known. The breakdown in sanitation affected the whole city then, not just Changi.
In an odd little Geylang dance, more a hokey-cokey really—left leg in, left leg out—he bowed deeply, shimmied his armband at them and fished out his chit from left breast pocket, presenting it bowed and two-handed. The soldier, a dumpy little man with a damp, worried look and a pineapple, fretted over it, pushed him roughly to one side. ‘Speedo! Speedo!’ and began shouting.
‘Don’t know your pass from your elbow?’ muttered smiling Pilchard, visually all teeth and subservience.
A thin-lipped officer stopped looking over the edge, came across and studied the pass, gripping the balustrade all the way like a man suffering from vertigo. ‘Stamforod Road?’
Pilchard bobbed enthusiastically and grinned like a madman. ‘Hai, hai. Stamforod Road. Museum.’ What the hell was it called now? ‘Syonan Hakubutsu Kan.’ The officer’s face lit up. He giggled.
‘Stamforod Road. I think you mean Kempeitei HQ!’ He laughed and slapped playfully. ‘I think you no like Kempeitei HQ!’ Pilchard laughed back, then they both realised they were laughing and being friendly and stopped doing it. ‘Syonan Hakubutsu Kan.’ The officer muttered and looked formally irritated as he squiggled some more spiders on the chit and pushed the paper back into Pilchard’s hand. Then he took the guard’s pineapple, slapped him with casual violence round the face and waved Pilchard dismissively away and went back to looking over the edge, as if deciding whether or not he wanted to jump.
As he hobbled along, stiff-backed, penguin-like, Pilchard was suddenly aware of other smiling faces. He was barely conscious, unfeeling, could take nothing in but the heat bouncing back from the road. All around, on the railing supports and at shoulder height, were impaled other heads, neatly sliced and trimmed at the neck like fresh-picked pineapples, mouths set in Mona Lisa rictus, skins a variety of shades of chocolate, sepia and yellow—Asian faces of all kinds at varying levels of decay but all tending towards uniform blue-black—death the great leveller. Beneath each was slung a sign in a variety of tongues. The English version read, ‘I was a looter.’ A European head would round out the collection nicely, he thought absently. Pilchard clutched his beans, that now seemed to burn in his hand, fixed his eyes on the road ahead and hurried on towards Lavender. Killing, then looting—two capital offences in a single afternoon—was not a bad score, if he lived to see the end of it.
A hot wind was gusting along the streets and he was horribly thirsty but Lavender was another place that specialised in the purely professional slaking of thirsts, for the low ramshackle houses had once been the favourite low resort of sexually rampant Australian troops—boys of an age where the male body is simply a noisy device for converting food and drink into lust and semen—now all penned back up in sober Changi chastity. It was clear that the Japanese had not yet taken up the slack but the ethnographer in him wondered whether the girls really even noticed the difference, so crushing was the weight of the military upon Singapore even in peace. In his early days here, like all newcomers, he had come to taste the local wine, excited by the heady eroticism of smooth Asian skin—its pores saturated with spice and coconut oil—the flowing, black hair and had sat, worshipping, before golden calves For two dizzy months they had all been beautiful and then familiarity had set in with its power to sap and drain enthusiasm. He had not come since.