The Devil's Garden

by Nigel Barley

  She laughed. ‘You must be Mr Dagama.’ The English was a little stiff, starched, like a governess’s frock, imposing grammar that had been learned not felt.

  ‘No. Mr Dagama has gone. He has not been here for ages. My name is Pilchard.’

  She frowned. ‘But a friend sent me to see him. He described him. I thought it was you.’ She had those little, even teeth only Asians can have and now she used them to bite her lower lip, making her back into an adorable, perplexed child.

  ‘How did he describe him?’

  She laughed again. ‘He said Mr Dagama was tall and skinny with long red hair and a beard like a demon—just like you.’

  ‘Don’t all round-eyes look the same?’ he teased. He was almost flirting—one of the forgotten arts of peace. After so long, it felt good—silly but good.

  She bit her lip again. ‘… and a big nose and bad teeth and ugly. But also young, You’re not young.’ She frowned at the flasks. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m making babies—making new plants with beautiful colours and smells that have never been seen before—or smelled.’

  ‘Hmm. Why don’t plants make noises?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Plants make colours for our eyes, smells for noses, tastes for mouths, why they don’t make noises for ears?’ Pilchard was taken aback.

  ‘Well … I’d never really thought about it. An extraordinary question. I suppose the generation of sound requires rapid vibration, lungs, and plants have no muscles and are therefore only capable of slow motions which …’ She scowled. ‘What noise would you like them to make? Should they hum, or whistle or perhaps …’ He executed a monstrous lipfart and she laughed as would a baby. ‘That would be the raspberries making that noise. Of course, the noise would be louder in the case of mass wisteria or perhaps that’s just begonia’s luck.’

  ‘Why do all men not know they have to make you laugh. They just want to be admired all the time. Men and their ideas and principles. If you tell any man he is irresistible, he will believe you. Plants should make music. They should sing us songs like birds. So do you want to know who is my friend?’

  He was confused by the zigzag of her thoughts. ‘What?’ The penny dropped. ‘Chen Guang? From the mangrove research station?’

  She shushed, nodded and looked around, the lashes heavy on her eyes. The plants might not make sounds but perhaps they had ears.

  He lowered his voice. ‘Let us say, then, that my name is Pilchard but sometimes I am also Mr Dagama. Do you have something for me?’ He had expected some crusty peasant. She dug in her prim little school bag and drew out the same envelope he had given her friend and dropped it down on the wooden workbench, eager to be rid of it. It was rude to look inside but he did so anyway and saw a ruff of greasy money. Less of it than last time but welcome enough. He bowed gallantly. ‘Please say thank you to your friend. What is your name?’

  She looked around wildly. ‘Er … Okid’

  ‘Orchid? What kind of orchid are you? Ground-growing, tree-growing, monopodial, sympodial? I suppose it really doesn’t matter as long as you smell nice and you do smell nice, like vanilla. A Rosa banksiana by any other name …’

  ‘Just Okid. Goodbye.’ She set her head on one side and looked at him the way a puppy does. ‘You’re funny.’ She spun round and took a step straight into Captain Oishi and dropped her bag, spilling its contents on the ground with a little squeal.

  It was as if they were both struck by lightning. Pilchard thought of the French and their coup de foudre. Neither looked down at the bag, just at each other. Time froze, together with their young faces, and the world seemed somehow to wobble and warp around the pair and he was sure he heard the glass panels overhead creak and pop in their frames before reality steadied and hardened back into shape and then they both bent to retrieve the bag and cracked their heads together.

  ‘Ayo!’

  ‘Itai!’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  Even cries of pain carry their cultural load. Before the war, Pilchard had been treated by a Chinese dentist called Ow, who was blissfully unaware of the associations of his name but laughed endlessly over the joke that dentists were people who attacked your teeth with steel spikes then complained that you had holes in them. He slid the envelope deftly inside the dirty book of orchid recipes and crossed over to where the two sat, rocking on the wet cement floor and clutching their heads. Assuming the pose of the blessing Christ on Sugar Loaf Mountain, he offered each a hand and helped them to their feet so that they all ended up in a sort of paternally approving embrace, two infants with wet bottoms being comforted. ‘Miss Orchid. May I present Captain Yoshi Oishi.’

  As they touched fingertips, Captain Oishi felt that a great, roaring wind blew in from the sea, sending loose blossom whirling down on their heads and fluttering their black hair. The universe was heaving a cosmic sigh of relief at finally achieving the statistical near-impossibility of bringing two such fated but distant lovers together.

  * * *

  Sleep came fitfully. School. School clothes. Pilchard drifted back to his primary school, his first traumatic day, painted in primary colours. Across the table, on a long bench sat a little, Chinese girl who would grow up to be called Orchid. She was picking her nose and eating the product. It was all the Prince of Wales’s fault. He had gone off on another of his jaunts around the Empire, somewhere hot to avoid the English winter. The children had to bring in newspaper cuttings and follow his progress every day on a big map pinned on the wall that they had surrounded with crowns wastefully cut out of sticky paper. His naval vessel had started in Sierra Leone—”Principal exports timber, minerals and copra. What is copra?”—Pilchard with his hand in the air, the infant expert on copra and its uses in the manufacture of paint and margarine. He had never eaten margarine. His mother didn’t believe in it even if it was cheaper. It totally lacked a magical quality called ‘goodness’. But then he had never seen a coconut either. It could have been as imaginary as a unicorn.

  As the Prince travelled, faces of happy black children in clean clothes waving Union Jacks spread across the wall towards the games cupboard. He had gone on to the Gold Coast—”Principal exports timber, minerals and copra. What is copra?”—where more people with smooth, shiny faces and very white teeth waved flags and shook hands under palm trees with officials in feathery hats and chiefs wearing big frocks. It was all a bit boring really. You could see the Prince was bored too. Pilchard preferred it when he went to America and they put out a big sign “Hi Ed!” In school they had laughed for days over that. Miss Dixon had explained that the Americans probably meant well but weren’t too bright.

  The map was a big map of the Empire spreadeagled over one wall. The ends looked very far apart but—by some great mystery—actually joined up. The British bits of the world were coloured red. There were lots of them. At the top sat sexless Britannia behind her shield, a coalscuttle helmet on her head, as the different races jostled to pour imperial bounty about her feet.

  His best friend at school, Kevin, was bored with Nigeria—soon it would be “Principal exports timber, minerals and copra. What is copra?”—and colouring in the Prince’s route in royal blue crayon. The chiefs here wore bandages wrapped round their heads. He nudged Pilchard. “I hear,” he said in an offhand, toffee-nosed way that told you this was a joke, “that they’ve just opened a cannibal restaurant. Say ‘is it expensive?’”

  “Is it expensive?” asked Pilchard.

  “Nah. Five bob a head.” He collapsed giggling.

  “All right Kevin. You have something to say. Share it with all of us.” Miss Dixon.

  “No Miss, nothing.”

  “But I insist Kevin. If you want to say something in this class, you put up your hand. Now what was it that was so urgent that you couldn’t wait to put up your hand. Sit up and cross your arms”

  “Well, Miss. Please, Miss.” He opened big, innocent eyes. “Why’s the Empire red?” The children looked up sharply from their crayons.
The chatter died. He had said it in a certain tone they had grown to listen for. They knew this was one of those big, simple questions, the sort grown-ups could never answer, that tied them up in knots.

  “Well, Kevin Matlock.” There was a set smile on Miss Dixon’s face and a bright, empty, lightness in her voice. “By colouring it red you can see how much of the world we rule compared to the French. Their parts are green, you see, and the Italians’ are that nasty grey colour. In our part we bring peace and hope and justice to suffering millions of the subject races. Red is a nice happy colour like pillar boxes and telephone boxes, also Beefeater’s uniforms.”

  Kevin screwed up his face. “But why red Miss?”

  The smile began to erode and be replaced by a very great patience. “Red is for the blood that great men in the past have shed for their country so that children like you could all grow up in safety and freedom.” Pilchard stood up now, put anguished puzzlement on his face.

  “Please Miss,” he piped. “My Dad says red’s for communists. Are we communists then?”

  The patience had gone by now to be replaced by naked authority. “No, we are not communists, thank you very much. Sit down please.”

  “Does it mean the people there would be communists, then, if our soldiers didn ’t stop them? Aren’t the rioters in Freetown communists?”

  “Well … I don’t think that has much to do with it. Sit down please.”

  “Red’s for danger,” said Kevin loudly. “That’s right isn ’t it Miss Dixon? It means people who don’t do as we say had jolly well better watch out.” He bunched his fists across his chest and scowled to screams of laughter.

  “That’s enough now,” snapped Miss Dixon, clapping her hands. “You’ve all read that little red book we have that tells you all about the heroes of the Empire. Red cover, you see. Let’s think about that—who can name them for me?”

  A little girl at the front put up her hand and lisped, “Nelthon.”

  “Good. Any more?”

  “General Wolfe”

  “That’s right. Any more?”

  “Grace Darling.”

  ‘Well done. Any more?’

  Kevin put up his hand. ‘Please Miss, Gracie Fields’ Miss Dixon looked weary.

  ‘You always have to go too far, Kevin. Now stop being silly.’

  “But Miss … Kevin hitched up his trousers with two hands. “It’s not really red. If you look at it properly, it’s pink. But pink’s for sissies, Miss. It’s a girrrls’ colour.”

  Cries of “Errgh!”from the boys.

  “The Empire ought to be blue for boys. Pink,” he sneered. “Pink’s for pansies.”

  Kevin had said a terrible thing—a wonderful thing. Pilchard had laughed, audibly, visibly. Kevin had somehow brought two things together that created a flash of electricity, of power, of liberation. He had made a new world. And then the old world came crashing down about their ears with a sound of thunder and they were held to have ‘made fun of the Empire’. The two were immediately isolated like an infection and marched off for summary court martial by Miss Deedman, the headmistress, and a beating across the bare legs with an old plimsoll—obscurely called Webster—that she kept in her cupboard.

  “Whoosh!”

  Pilchard took his beating first. It stung and he had to blink back the tears. But he was used to beatings at home and, anyway, he was proud, not ashamed. Technically, he knew, he could plead innocence. After all, it was Kevin who had said it, not him. But they had not compromised. They had both stood firm. Really, when it came down to it, for all their blustering, there was little they could do to you as long as you stood firm. And today he had made a second discovery that he would never forget—that there was a difference between that which was really wrong and that which was merely forbidden. Pilchard looked across at Kevin and risked a smile of encouragement that was returned. This could not touch them.

  “Wipe that smirk off your face, Kevin Matlock,” Miss Deedman spat, raising Webster yet again. When she lifted her arm the flesh hung down from the bone and he could see the white hairs in her nostrils quiver.

  “Please Miss,” screamed Kevin, cringing, his face like ‘Desperation’ on the Fry’s 5-boys chocolate wrapper and pointing at Pilchard. “He made me do it!”

  * * *

  Now a time of dry heat came to the city and an unseasonal hot blast blew in from the northwest, dancing in little dust storms along the streets and tugging at the tired red suns that hung, exhausted, from the buildings. Birds dusted themselves in the alluvial sand that accumulated in the gutters where once water had tumbled. In Changi, the civilian prisoners slumped and swore and fought with each other, exploiting every distinction of rank, nationality, religion and age to strengthen division without unity. In the gardens, the grass shrivelled, the tops of the palms bleached and matted and the flow to the lake shrank to a trickle. In the intemperate heat, the heliotropic cat was finally fulfilled and—oblivious to threats—rolled on its back to bathe its belly in sunshine till the fur there smouldered to deepest shades of roasted henna. Catchpole no longer stood at his morning window, encrusted with sleep, and cursed the endless rain. Now he stood and railed against the pitiless heat as the day’s first sweat trickled down his chest and groin. The Professor pottered about in a huge straw hat, as if in early retirement, and planted the fat seeds of slow-growing, bitter cucumbers, a vegetable that retained a suitable moral dimension, against the workshop walls. And the lovers met almost every day, at noon, two merging shadows under the high forest canopy, as Pilchard ceased wrestling with his petulant orchids and left his little back room, with its narrow cot, studiedly unlocked and unvisited. Nothing was said. Everyone knew it was simply the way the world wanted things to be.

  Captain Yoshi Oishi knew little of love. He had been like one of the high-ranking officers billeted in a vast colonial house of which he fitfully used one or two rooms only, the rest left dusty and shut up in darkness as irrelevant to his life. Now, for the first time, he was unlocking new doors, flinging open shutters, tearing off dustsheets, taking possession of himself in his entirety, surprised and enchanted to find the space within so much larger than he had been led to believe, more elaborately figured. He was still at the stage where he totally identified love and powerful visceral sensations, rather than seeing an area of overlap between them whose dimensions waxed and waned with its own internal logic. And he was fascinated with Orchid and had embarked on a voyage of discovery of her body, removing the thick serge knickers and old aertex vests, still with their school laundry numbers, to reveal the different textures, undulations, exudations of her form, the subtle shadings of her skin at the joints, the places where it stretched and moved, tensed by the strong muscles underneath. He wondered at their nesting concavities and convexities. The smooth, arched curve of her neck delighted him. Her eyes were endless fascination. They were Asian eyes but different from the Asian eyes he had known, flatter, more tilted, smaller and darker with a dramatic, diacritical flick at each corner. He adored kissing them and feeling them squirm under his lips yet, as he stared into them, he was puzzled to see nothing but himself reflected. He loved to close his own eyes and nuzzle blindly at her breast like a puppy to its mother.

  ‘Orchid,’ he smiled. They were sprawled in damp, post-coital torpor behind the Orchid House. She was surely younger than him and he felt a guilty tingle of incestuous elder-brotherhood whenever he looked at her. A thought of Erica flashed through his mind and he shuddered. Why did your mind do that—make you think of the one thing you did not want to think of? In answer to his query, it sent him an image of the wind lifting Erica’s skirt to show ribbed support hose.

  Orchid’s voice came from over his head. ‘It is not my real name, you know.’

  He was appalled and looked up. ‘Not your real name? Orchid not your real name? But you are so like an orchid, so slim and fragile and beautiful and …’

  ‘No. It is a name I chose for myself. Do you know what my real name is? It is “hope for a l
ittle brother”. There. My father, like all men, only wants sons, so that’s what they called me. Chinese do that. There was no need for him to do so. I already had an older brother who’s a pig. And now I’ve got a little brother as well. He’s a pig too.’ He laughed and rolled over to reach down into his bag.

  ‘I have something for you, my love—my piglet.’ He had never tried the silly endearments of lovers before. The words were fresh and new and made him giddy. He took out a slip of pure white paper, thick and smooth and soft, lay it gently down on the bed beside her naked body and unfolded it with exquisite care. She stared at it blankly.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It is a poem. A love poem. You will see that I have written it in kanji, Chinese characters, so that you too can read it. Each character I have written on a red rose petal and glued it with manioc paste, in a circle, so that it goes round and round eternally. I did it this morning while I was supposed to be writing a report on the possibilities of balloon warfare. I took the rose petals from the Gardens without permission. I stole a rose from their flower garden! You have already made me a criminal and a bad officer.’ He laughed then saw her sorrowful face. ‘What is it Orchid?’

  ‘Oh Yoshi. I can’t read Chinese. My father does not believe in educating girls and my mother was Christian. It was as much as she could get him to do, to send me to the nuns’ school. I only know a few characters. It was all in English, you see—Shakespeare and Wordsworth and so on. I am so ignorant. But I want to learn everything I can about you. You’re so clever. So tell me. What exactly is balloon warfare?’ She snuggled in closer so that he breathed in her hair, ‘I never even heard of it before. I’m sure you’re the only person in the world who knows about it.’

  He leaned back and swelled with manly pride and sated love. Japanese peppers are hot though small.

  ‘Well … we know that the Americans are developing new explosives and the Germans have pilotless aircraft and rocket bombs but we too have something new that our research scientists are perfecting. It is a marvellous weapon—hydrogen bombs.’ His eyes shone. ‘Balloons, filled with hydrogen, that have already been used with devastating effect against the United States. They can be made in their thousands by our schoolchildren who paste together sheets of tissue paper and varnish them for the nation as they sing patriotic songs. They will be released from the mainland or from submarines and rise to a height of over 30,000 feet to carry fire-bombs or biological agents over enemy territory. A special electrical or clockwork mechanism keeps the balloons at the right altitude by dropping bags of sand if they drift too low and a timer releases their bombs, one by one, over the correct area. Many are killed by the bags of sand alone, dropping from such a height. Then they descend by themselves and finally another bomb blows up and sets fire to the wreckage as they crash in flames. They are such beautiful devices! From Syonanto, using the monsoon winds, they can be used against both India and Australia to bring both to their knees. We are making trials right now. We are very hopeful.’