Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Her low frame of mind did not improve when she found herself imprisoned in the centre seat of the jumbo’s central block; four metres away some people could see out a window, she supposed. It was as much like travelling as a caesarian section was like giving birth: a painless blank with efficient life-support systems. No conscious terror; no joy, either.

  After a while melancholy gave way to resentment again and she began to brood over the words she and Richard had had on the way to Canberra airport. The row had been evolving through snaps and snarls ever since she had first mentioned that she would return to Kuala Lumpur. And then that morning, like an egg cracking open to reveal the slimed limb of a hatchling monster, it had broken: Richard had come into the bedroom where she was packing, holding her diaphragm between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘You have forgotten this,’ he said.

  She had chosen to pretend he was joking. ‘I won’t be needing it.’ His expression had made her add, ‘Don’t be stupid’.

  With distant disgust, as if the thing were infected, he had dropped it into the suitcase, on top of her portable typewriter, and had walked out. Judith had picked it out and thrown it on the floor. When he came home later to drive her to the airport she had said, ‘I’ve been faithful to you for ten years, and you know it.’

  He had replied, ‘If fidelity could be described as lying flat on your back, composing shopping lists in your head. Kindly remember that I’ve foregone my run around the lake so as to get you to the plane. I’m in no mood for an argument as well.’

  They had driven in silence until the Fyshwick turn-off and there, while they were held up by the traffic, Judith had said, ‘Because I don’t enjoy screwing you’ve bullied and humiliated me for a decade’, and he had grinned.

  ‘You did enjoy it, once. Perhaps you will again.’

  ‘I resent you!’ she’d shouted. ‘I resent everything about you. You patronizing, pompous, boring, macho – phony macho …’

  She had felt sick with rage from Fyshwick to Sydney, not least because they had stopped short, as they always did, of the truth – and so, left unspoken, the truth remained a looming shadow in their minds. Now the recollection of the scene and her return to anger exhausted her. She was too fretful to sleep and too distracted to concentrate on reading, so she watched the in-flight movie, a silly comedy, and made frequent trips to the back of the plane. From a window there she gazed out at the washing-blue sky and down at the desert, its red ripples as orderly as the grooves on the roof of a mouth. The plane’s reflection, down there, cruised steadily; the desert’s vastness and the constant pattern of the plane moving above it created a hypnotic effect. After a while Judith admitted to herself, I’m running away from him. The confession made her feel calmer and she was able to sleep for almost an hour when at last, their chase after the sun failed, night embraced them and the lights were turned down.

  The order to fasten safety belts and extinguish cigarettes wakened her and told her that they were over Singapore. Not long after, on the platform of the stairway leading to alien ground she jerked back from the hot, wet air, then clattered down the stairs.

  I’ve escaped! she thought.

  The tropical night drew images out from oblivion. The airport here was like a partly lit theatre, as visually dramatic with its caverns of darkness and stages of orange light as Kuala Lumpur had been during the nights of riot and arson. There was the same madly exciting smell of kerosene in the air… and there were the sulphur-and-blue painted Neoplan buses. In KL the mobs had flung themselves on buses, howling as they rocked them …

  Judith had met Ben, the Reuters man, that morning at the hospital where they were both after information on the number of casualties. Ben was KL-based, had a car and a curfew sticker for it.

  Standing there in the hospital where people lay on the floor in their own blood, I felt in danger of spilling, like a brimming glass, and he’d said, ‘You’d better stick with me, kiddo. You’re too young to be out on your own in this town.’

  He had food in his flat, he said, but his amah had disappeared and he couldn’t cook. So I fried some eggs for our lunch. He fixed up the spelling on my copy and argued on the telephone with the telecommunications staff to get me time on the wire to Sydney. Then it was night again. We were driving back from a tour of the burnt-out Chinese shophouses. Round a corner we ran into one of the street gangs which the police were not even pretending to control, despite the curfew. There were about thirty Malay boys on the roadway, shouting the slogan of the day, which had been made up after yesterday’s big massacre of the Chinese. They were laughing and yelling, as if they were off on holiday. ‘We’ve got the pigs! Now for the cows!’ Further down the road Ben’s headlights lit up two tall figures – a couple of Indians who must have risked curfew-breaking to check their shop. Suddenly one of the boys from the gang began to run and I saw, as we overtook him, that he held a parang above his head and was rising on his toes. He was flying. The blade swept down and across in one movement and the incredible thing was that the Indian remained standing for a fraction of a second, without his head. ‘A cow! We’ve killed a cow!’ they were yelling. I screamed when the second Indian’s shoulder crashed into mine. Ben had dragged him into the car and he was lying across both of us, blocking the steering. The Malays were whooping at us; they’d almost caught up with the car. I felt suddenly as though I’d lifted out of my body and was flying, too. The Indian was big and fat but there was lightning in my arms; I just picked him up as if he were a parcel and threw him over into the backseat. Ben said, ‘Jesus!’ and then ‘We’re safe, now’. The back window of the car was shattered, where the boys had struck it with their parangs, and the Indian’s turban was covered in glass. He’d pissed himself and I got pee all over my skirt later when I was picking the glass off him. He kept on crying and kissing my hands, saying, ‘Madam, God put strength into your arms’ and then wailing because his father or uncle or somebody was dead, back there. We got rid of him as soon as we could, dumped him outside a police station and drove off. We couldn’t wait. It was if the universe would stop if we didn’t get to Ben’s flat and on to his bed. I don’t think we even spoke until the third or fourth time. Then Ben hugged me round the waist, with his face pressed into my belly and said, ‘Jesus, we’re alive. You saved our lives, kiddo, with that weightlifting act,’ and we started to laugh. I said, ‘I feel as if I’ve known you for ever,’ and he said, ‘Yeah. Mr Singh’ (he meant the Indian) ‘would say that we’d once played together in Paradise.’

  Judith had returned to Richard with a badly bruised shoulder and excuses of being tired. In London she realized she was pregnant and knew – as certainly as she knew that Richard’s embrace, joyfully anticipated all the years they had been engaged, was now unbearable for her – that the child was Ben’s.

  The ground hostess in a snappy batik uniform who had herded them on to the bus leaned down to Judith. ‘Are you feeling unwell, Madam?’ she asked.

  Judith swallowed. ‘I’m fine,’ she croaked, and managed a smile to confirm it.

  She got out of the Neoplan bus and walked into the huge, bright and very clean transit lounge where small, bright and very clean Singaporeans handed out passes and snapped out directions to the shopping arcade. These people were the new Asians, the economic miracle-workers. A perfectly painted doll jabbed a pass into Judith’s hand; she felt her hackles rising. Deep down, I’m a racist, she thought. We all are. In an accessories shop where every article bore the label of Christian Dior or of Pierre Cardin a Dutchman who had been on the plane said, ‘This is not Dior. It is all made in Hong Kong, with fake labels.’ The shopgirl snatched the bag from his hands saying, ‘It is Dior, la! You look!’ and pulled crumpled tissue paper out of the bag to display the ‘Made in France’ sign. ‘Not fake, la!’ she shrilled at him.

  Judith walked away as the girl tried to draw her into the argument; she felt too raw-edged to become involved. She thought, I’m surrounded by aggression. The bright lights of the terminal, t
he sharp, assertive colours of the tarmac buses, the monosyllabic jabbering of the shopgirls … I’m panicking, she thought.

  She got out of the shop. A fear had arisen and would not abate, that something horrible must befall her again, that the exorcism she was seeking would be as painful as the sum of all her guilts for sins against Richard, against Judith-and-Richard, against David – yearning, she’d been, for the courage to get rid of that nodule of flesh. She had never asked advice from friends or relations. It had remained her secret, the amorphous shadow between her and Richard. But one day, she now recalled, she had tried to do something about it. Richard had complained that she no longer treated him ‘like a wife’ – they’d become so delicate, so oblique with each other – and on impulse a few weeks later she had gone to confession. She’d been in Melbourne, reporting on a conference, and had walked in off the street, hatless.

  The priest was very old, she could tell from his faint, old man’s voice and his slow wheezy breathing. In the calm of heavy curtains with the smell of candles and incense she had quietly told him everything. It took a long time. He had not replied for a bit and she’d wondered if he had gone to sleep. Then he said, ‘Child, you have sinned and for that God will forgive you as soon as you ask Him to. But you must also forgive yourself, d’you understand? Your sexual feelings you have as the bounty of God and if you go on abusing this gift, which is also the gift for a woman’s love of man, hating it because you once misused it, you’re sinning against y’self. D’you understand what I’m saying? The sin against oneself brings nothing but sorrows and more sins. D’you get my meaning, child? That you must make atonement with yourself? Atonement. At-one-ment, people used to call it.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ she’d replied demurely. That evening in the pub, she’d made everyone roar with laughter, describing the dust motes that exploded from the curtains and imitating the priest’s quavery voice: ‘Say forty-nine Hail Marys and three hundred and six Our Fathers and give ten dollars to the poor.’ Someone unexpected – a fashion writer – had said, ‘These days, for people like us, things have to pass the intellectual test. If they can’t be intellectually accepted they can’t be emotionally reassuring. That’s the problem for religions, these days.’

  Judith sighed at a windowful of French wines and forced her concentration back to the earlier thought – how horrible this trip would be. But I can bear it, she thought. I can bear anything, these days. As she approached the transit lounge the panic was all but gone.

  She found a seat among the crowd of grey-faced people from Europe who clung to plastic carry-bags of duty-free liquor and cigarettes. They were stunned with fatigue and gave off an air of wretched patience. ‘I’ve been here four hours,’ a woman said. ‘There’s a strike in Kuala Lumpur and all the baggage has got mixed up.’ Judith tried to look sympathetic. ‘You wouldn’t think they’d have strikes in these parts, would you?’ the woman added reproachfully, as if strikes were a unique privilege, reserved for Caucasians.

  A group of men, two foreigners and a Malay, strode down the stairs, laughing and talking loudly. One was telling a story, obviously funny. Judith recognized him as the local ABC representative. She watched him for a while, then decided to introduce herself.

  ‘I’ve come for the boat people story,’ she explained. The other men were from Reuters and Antara.

  Her announcement brought a fresh shout of laughter. ‘Haven’t we all?’

  The Malay, who turned out to be Indonesian, giggled so much he had to be hit on the back by the Reuters man. When he recovered he asked, ‘Where is the President of the International Women’s Refugee Relief Committee? Ha!’

  Judith looked from one to another of them. ‘I’ve been out of touch for twelve hours. What’s up?’

  The Indonesian bent towards her and whispered, ‘Disappeared. Lady Hobday has vanished. Whoosh. Gone with the wind.’

  The Reuters man was swaying around, holding an invisible microphone to his mouth. ‘Good evening,’ he rumbled. ‘And here is the news: the beautiful, young – blah-blah has vanished on the east coast of – blah-blah – while trying to make contact with Vietnamese blah-blah …’ The Indonesian grabbed the microphone from him. ‘Where has she gone? people are asking. And why?’ He paused for effect. ‘Special Branch knows. Kuan Yew knows. But these bloody Singaporeans …’

  ‘Shut up, Moh,’ the ABC man said. ‘You’ve got the whole bloody transit lounge listening.’

  Moh swayed slightly and wagged a finger at Judith. ‘A good Muslim like me can hold a ton of piss,’ he said and sat down abruptly.

  The ABC man pulled his concerned, serious television face out of the air and put it on. ‘That’s the story,’ he said to Judith. ‘Jack’, jerking his head at the Reuters man, ‘got a phone call six hours ago from his local man in KL who’d picked it up from a Special Branch contact. Lady Hobday and her chauffeur have been missing since the day before yesterday, somewhere on the East Coast. They’re searching Kuala Trengganu for her. The villagers there aren’t exactly enamoured of the boat people. They might have …’ He ran his forefinger across his throat. ‘And she’s one of them, you know – she’s half-Chink.’

  Judith said stupidly, ‘I thought she was Vietnamese’ and did not bother to glance at Moh when he put in, ‘No, bloody Chinese. Cunning bloody …’

  ‘What have you sent?’ she asked the other two.

  They exchanged glances. ‘Nobody has sent anything. It’s been officially denied in KL and here, and embargoed by both governments, no doubt at the request of the Australian High Commission.’

  ‘Press freedom,’ Mohammed croaked from below them. ‘You make a Chinese the village headman of this island …’ He looked around at some of the people who were staring at him. ‘ASEAN solidarity!’ he added loudly.

  Judith and the other two ignored him.

  ‘What are you doing here at the airport?’ she asked the Australians.

  The ABC man dropped his voice even lower. ‘We can’t put anything on the wire or over the air or even over the phone, for that matter. But Moh is leaving on the MAS flight to Sydney tonight. He’ll take the stuff down, and our Canberra offices can start stirring from that end.’

  ‘Great,’ she said. She was thinking of the advantage she would have in being on the spot, in Kuala Lumpur. Then she frowned, ‘Actually, I know Minou Hobday,’ she added. ‘I hope nothing has happened to her.’

  The two men became alert. ‘What’s she like?’ they asked at once.

  The Reuters man said, ‘At the High Commission here they say she’s a Saigon bar-girl who’s got the old man by the short and curlies.’

  Judith shrugged: there was no simple way to describe Minou. ‘She’s … different,’ she said, and felt annoyed with herself for the dismissive tone in her voice. It had produced knowing grins from the two men. ‘But I really admire her,’ she added warmly. It was difficult to know if they had heard her, for just then the flight to Kuala Lumpur was announced.

  7

  The Selangor Cricket Club, a well-kept Tudor-style building in the centre of a thriving Asian city, was a place of peculiar charm for Ralph Hamilton. To him, the romance of the British Raj – the rubber boom, the sporting sultans, the servile Chinese – was woven into the fabric, starched and ironed and now worn tissue-thin, of the club’s white damask tablecloths.

  Its back verandah steps led down on to a large, grassed playing field, the padang, also neatly maintained. On the other side of the padang was a busy thoroughfare, Jalan Sultan Hishamuddin, and the Sultan Abdul Samad building, a Victorian Moorish folly of pink-and-white arches and black onion domes, with a clock tower. Despite the royal names, no sultan had been responsible for the construction of street or building. They were the handiwork of the Empire and the names they bore were an example of British colonial finesse – a polite reference by recent foreign rulers to earlier, native ones. Now that the wheel had turned and Malays were once more rulers – if not of their economy, at least of their Constitution – the name-gam
e had taken a new direction. The government of Malaysia was busily stripping the patronyms of colonial administrators from places and replacing them with the names of local trees and flowers. This would, it was felt, encourage in Malay, Chinese and Indian a love of Malaysia, solidarity and nationhood.

  The importance of names in times of flux and reflux was evident too at the Selangor Cricket Club, and added to its mystique. The club was never referred to under that name by Ralph Hamilton or anybody else who took pride in membership or even local knowledge. It was The Dog, a title that had arisen from a pet Dalmatian which a member of earlier years had chained each evening to a front verandah post. He was obliged to do this by a sign of those days which said, people claimed, ‘NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED’.

  A Chinese was now captain of the club’s cricket team.

  On most evenings after work Ralph dropped in at The Dog for a drink, confident of friendly company. He was a man whom other men liked, having maintained, as an adult, the playfulness of boyhood – a love of sports and badinage. And he was a boozer: KL was a boozing town. Head down, he crossed the worn black-and-yellow tiled floor through to the back verandah with its bamboo blinds and its soothing view across the padang to the traffic jam on Jalan Sultan Hishamuddin. The strain that made slashes on his forehead began to smooth away. He usually arrived at five-thirty, when the dusk air felt like warm milk, vigorously stirred inside the club building by rows of ceiling fans, and was punctuated outside by the shrieks of little bats.

  The fans fluttered his fine, fair hair and disturbed the leaves of the pot plants on the verandah, but had no visible effect on the knot of Chinese waiters, who were dressed, like the club’s facade, in black and white. Their hair did not move, nor their expressions. Without shifting their eyes they knew when a member wanted another stengah, or a bender, or a beer. The oldest sporting club in the city had the best waiters and also the best curry tiffin on Sundays.