The woman looked at her with incomprehension. ‘You buy frog,’ she said.
Judith shook her off and went to look at the pythons coiled up into beehive shapes in their tiny prisons. Some were ordinary brown-and-black ones, but there were others coloured lemon yellow, and one immense snake whose coils surged and contracted as she approached, trying to move but constricted by wire and iron. Its scales were rose pink, silver and white.
‘We are a horrid species,’ she said to the python.
Looking back towards the shop entrance she had the sensation of being deep inside a cave and wanted suddenly to escape into daylight. As she hurried forward she came upon the shop woman again standing at a wooden table. A set of old-fashioned scales with brass weights was beside her. She had opened the hessian bag and was plucking huge frogs from it. With one movement she decapitated them, with a second stripped the skin from their halved bodies and with a third tossed them on to the scales, where they continued to flex their flayed hind limbs.
‘You buy frog?’ she called. Her hands kept on killing and skinning. Like a machine, Judith noticed.
The little dogs fawned and tried to flirt with her as she dashed out into the street. She thought, They are harmless. Why can’t we be?
Standing there, she remembered that smooth, silverhaired Foreign Affairs man. He’d said, ‘They are wicked people, to our way of thinking. They live with a power structure different from ours and have internalized, as conscience, a different type of authority. Conscience, I feel, defines a culture … For them, family law rather than impersonal, state law is the internalized authority. To us, they appear flawlessly immoral, and I rather gather they hold the same view of us. It’s really a conflict between differing consciences.’ He had gazed at her speculatively, to Judith’s irritation, because clearly he was thinking that she would be an innocent abroad. ‘The temptation for us to condemn them is remarkably strong,’ he said, then added, ‘Oh dear, I do sound like the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church!’
Judith stood outside the pets shop calming her urge to retch. The street was filling with gaudy new motorcars and the pavements were becoming crowded with small, neat, fast-moving people. Chinese girls in pairs clickety-clacked past, as slick and pretty as dolls. Ben, she remembered, had called all Chinese girls ‘Mini Poos’, all young Chinese men ‘Hung Fat’ and he and everyone else had referred to the Malays as ‘the bloody bumis’ – an abbreviation of bumiputera, noble sons of the soil. These mildly unsavoury satires on race were invented by people, unconsciously, to let off steam. Recalling the silly names Judith herself was calmed by them. She set off to find the exact place where they had rescued the Indian, but soon became lost in a maze. There were Chinese department stores, Indian cloth merchants, street markets, curry houses, noodle restaurants, and shophouses in the depths of which Chinese families could be seen engaged in trivial, mysterious activities. The streets smelled sweetly of incense and spices. She walked for an hour. The Indians and the window displays of poisonous-looking delicacies aside, it could have been a hot summer morning in Sydney’s Dixon Street. The mob and the flying boy were lost, like a dream.
She retraced her steps back to the Malaya, thinking it would be time to make some phone calls, to start work.
Three members of the foyer staff rushed at her as she entered. ‘Mrs Wilkes! We have found your luggage!’ They looked almost as triumphant at its discovery as they had on learning of its loss.
The most important male – one wearing a suit not a uniform – led her to the desk where he unfolded a telephone message slip. ‘We rang Qantas for you. Your baggage is located. It is going to London!’ He was overjoyed by his cleverness but skilfully adjusted his face when Judith replied, ‘Shit.’
‘Aaagh?’ he said.
‘How long before I can have it back here?’
He held one hand in the air and rotated it swiftly. ‘Four-five days, la.’ He saw this caused displeasure. ‘One-two days, la!’
On the way back to the Malaya a cloth merchant had beckoned her into his shop with a bolt of pretty fabric.
‘Will this feel hot?’Judith had asked him.
‘Very hot, la.’
‘I want something cool,’ she’d said.
‘Very cool, la. Cool, cool,’ he had assured her.
She thanked the desk clerk now and returned to her room. It took some determination to discover from the telephone company the phone number of the local Reuters representative. Judith began to tremble as she reached to dial the number, imagining that Ben might answer. Then she realized how ridiculous she was being. Ten years ago he had already packed up his flat and was on the point of leaving Malaysia for a new posting in Karachi. A couple of years after that, in the non-member’s bar, a journalist had said, ‘Met an old mate of yours in Bangladesh. Ben … Ben?’ ‘How was he?’ she’d demanded. The man had grimaced. ‘Wanted to get home to London, to his wife and kid. That’s all any of us wanted when we went into a village after the Pakistani army had been through it.’ A sense of betrayal had filled her skin for days; at home she’d been surly with Richard.
A Malay answered the phone and Judith thought, Of course, the Malaysianization programme. She found it a relief to hear a voice which did not chop up sentences as though they were lengths of vegetable to be stir-fried – even when excited, as this one was. There had not yet been a ransom note for Lady Hobday, nor any sightings of her, the syce or the car.
‘But I tell you the government cannot hold the embargo for another day,’ he said. ‘Every journalist from Singapore to Bangkok knows.’ He dropped his voice, as if Special Branch bugs might be hard of hearing, and added, ‘You see, the theory is that this is an act of the dakwah.’
‘The what?’
There was a note of rectitude at the other end of the line.
‘I am a Muslim myself. But these dakwah, they go a little too far. And with the example of Iran …’
Judith did not have even a notebook. On the back of a breakfast menu she roughed out a few paragraphs about the kidnapping of Lady Hobday by Islamic fanatics who objected to her work for the Vietnamese refugees.
9
There was a rain tree in the front of Ralph and Sancha Hamilton’s house. Its trunk was perhaps four metres in circumference but nobody was able to measure it because it was clad with creepers, great-stemmed vines with leaves like breast feathers from huge black-green birds. Its lowest branches, which spread in a straight line twenty metres long, carried whole greenhouses of staghorns and ferns and were mottled with lichens, so that from the ground the tree looked endangered by its own mighty capacity to sustain parasites. It seemed doomed.
From the upper storey of the house, however, one could see its canopy of pale green leaves and its profusion of small pink flowers. From this vantage point the rain tree had an unexpected appearance of gaiety and vitality. Ralph, who knew nothing about trees and flowers, found the rain tree inexplicably attractive and would look at it each morning through the upstairs bedroom window as he was getting dressed.
When the servants reported that snakes were nesting at its base and Sancha had suggested that the creepers, if not the tree itself, should be cut down, he had become enraged and had afterwards felt foolish. He was unaccustomed to shopping, which he regarded as a female occupation, but the next day had gone to a market and bought a mongoose which he had released beside the tree. His tone had held the spite of triumphantly recouped dignity as he said, ‘You see, Sancha?’ when the animal, after only a few minutes, had reappeared from the undergrowth with a snake in its jaws.
This morning Ralph was standing at the bathroom window, which also faced the front garden, dawdling over his shave as he looked at the tree. Sancha was still in bed, where she would stay for breakfast, since the amahs were expert in dressing and feeding the children, despite their resistance. This process was now in train and shouts of ‘I’ll kick you, Ah Moi’ were coming from their bedroom. Like other white children whose mothers regarded the locals with grim pati
ence – it was, after all, convenient to have servants – the Hamilton tribe had become uncontrollable after a fortnight with Chinese nannies. Ralph laid into the eldest boy with his belt every so often, and had accustomed himself to the child’s dislike, which was mutual.
The telephone rang and Ralph said, ‘For Christ’s sake, answer it.’
‘It’s for you, darling,’ Sancha called. ‘Mr Hussein.’
‘It must be about Minou,’ Ralph said. He ran back to the bedroom, holding the towel he was wearing around his waist with one hand and grabbing the receiver with the other from his wife. ‘Selamat pagi, Hus. Apa kabar?’
Mr Hussein from Special Branch did not respond with the friendliness that a few words of Malay would usually elicit from a Malay. Ralph frowned deeply as he listened in silence, saying ‘I see’ and ‘You think a press conference will be necessary?’
He replaced the receiver and stared at Sancha but she might as well have been a blank wall. Then he began to swear.
‘Ralph, please!’ Sancha said.
‘Shut up. I’m thinking,’ he replied.
He returned to the bathroom, finished his shave and took a shower. Always when showering now, his mind, intoxicated by water, roamed freely for a few moments then created an image of Lan. For five minutes her silky little body pressed against him as he stroked a lather of soap and warm water over his chest and belly. When he stepped out on to the bathmat his thinking was focused. Hussein’s news had been good, and bad. Minou had been found, safe, on a beach close to the village of Dungan on the East Coast. She had spent two nights sleeping there, having neglected to cancel her booking at the Pantai Motel in Trengganu, thus alarming its manager, who had contacted the local police. She had, she’d claimed, been waiting for giant turtles. Hussein’s voice had been cool as he said ‘We have informed Lady Hobday for her future reference that no leatherbacks will be coming ashore to nest there for another four months.’ Ralph’s face wrenched itself into a smile. Next to the statistic that Malaysia had the world’s greatest supply of rubber and tin, the turtle-nesting season was the most often repeated fact you could hear in KL. Tourists came from Okinawa and Arkansas to see them. Hussein had not needed to rub it in further but had paused, then said, ‘There was an extraordinary coincidence. On Lady Hobday’s second morning – just a few hours ago – a boat carrying two hundred Chinese from Ho Chi Minh City arrived. There has not been a refugee boat for several weeks. The local villagers were … surprised by this coincidence.’ ‘I see,’ Ralph had replied, holding his breath for the next bit – that the villagers had stoned the boat people. But Hussein had continued, ‘Luckily the Trengganu police arrived quickly and there was no trouble.’ His voice had become friendly for the first time. ‘There have been some irresponsible rumours about kidnapping. Fanatical groups and so forth. The Department of Information will hold a Press conference this morning and explain it was nothing more than a wild turtle chase. Sir Adrian, of course, will not want to be distracted from his duties for a minor matter like this.’ Hussein had that special suaveness of the Malays; he had too the toughness of the Brits who had schooled him during the Emergency in the most efficient way of eliminating Chinese terrorists. He was still rather high on the Communist Party assassination list, people said. Smiling into the telephone he continued, ‘It occurred to me, Ralphie, that you might come along to answer any questions. This is only an informal suggestion, from a friend. You would have to clear it with Sir Adrian, but you could assure him you would be welcome. As well as, naturally, your Press officer. Still Fred Sykes, is it?’ Hussein paused. ‘Such a wellmeaning fellow, Sykes.’
Ralph returned to the bedroom where Sancha, propped on pillows, looked at him in the nervous way he found infuriating. He said, ‘Minou is O.K. She went walkabout for a couple of nights, that’s all. The Malaysian government is angry but they want to keep a very low profile on it. For the time being. They’ve picked me out for a hiding, as Hobday’s proxy, at a Press conference this morning. I’ve been chosen so that they can make their irritation with our miserly immigration policy on the refugees known, without stating it.’ The Press would get the point, Ralph knew, but would probably not report it until there was a more substantial show of irritation by the Malaysian government. They would store it away in memory, however, as a straw in the wind. He could not be bothered explaining all this to Sancha, whose involvement with politics was restricted to ticking the ballot papers every few years.
‘Darling!’ she said.
For a moment her sympathy stirred him and he moved closer to her upstretched arms, then he saw the pelt of long fine hair on them. He sat on the edge of the bed, concentrating on pulling on his socks.
‘I’ll have to have it out with Hobday. Minou is heading for big trouble. This can jeopardize Hobday, me …’ He held his head, thinking, The Malaysian government might choose to make me the scapegoat and demand my recall. His guts began to churn.
Sancha was saying ‘You know, darling, Minou practically ordered me to go with her to the Bellfield camp last week. I told her I wasn’t going to risk my health by traipsing in there to show so-called educational films, which they can’t understand, anyway. She was quite unpleasant about it. She didn’t say anything, but her look! I told her that the Hamilton family does quite enough for the refugees. I mean, look at you. Your tummy trouble. There’s no doubt you caught that up at Pulau Bidong, living on nothing but noodles for days, sleeping on a table.’
Ralph made a gesture of annoyance.
‘The refugees live on noodles. They don’t get sick.’
Sancha replied in a tone which indicated that she was determined to be reasonable. ‘Ralph, they’re used to nothing better’, and he turned to stare at her. He had told her often enough that many of them had been millionaires – bankers, factory owners, film stars – with wealth beyond her understanding. They had lost everything but their courage and their integrity. ‘The bravest people I’ve ever met,’ he’d said. He looked at her now, lying in bed, letting the servants do her job as a mother, too lazy for anything more than tennis and shopping and beauty treatments. The last somewhat ironically named, he thought, glancing at her early-morning face.
‘Darling,’ Sancha said softly. Once she had been so pink and white. ‘You’re like a piece of china,’ he’d said to her, his wonderment at her skin and shiny hair swelling terrifyingly, as he spoke, to another feeling – hostility. He’d had to keep it secret, as he’d fingered the texture of her Italian clothes, him, without even a suit to his name. ‘Ralph’s fiancee is a real socialite,’ his mother had confided to her cronies. But after the headiness of victory in marrying her the maddening excitement – it was like rape, he’d say ‘I’m going to rape you’, and she’d be flattered, eager – had just vanished.
It was weeks now since he had been able to bring himself to approach her obediently outstretched body.
‘Darling,’ Sancha murmured. A flush like an echo of her early pink and whiteness had returned to her cheeks. She was glancing at his crotch which, beneath the blue bathtowel was swollen. He knew her legs would be smooth, because once a month she had the hairs ripped out of them by hot wax, applied by a Chinese masseuse who came to the house. Ralph moved towards her but suddenly his genitals hung dead.
Her pale eyes looked like cold mirrors and he was used to the chocolate colour of Lan’s. ‘Why do you think the French, then the Yanks, fought so hard to keep Indo-China?’ he would joke up at Bidong. Sancha’s appeal abruptly seemed an invitation to something repulsive, like mating with a fish.
He clasped his forearm over his waist and belly. ‘My guts,’ he said, and hurried back to the bathroom.
The slight twinge he thought he had felt disappeared as he locked the door. He spent five minutes standing at the window, looking at the rain tree, and thinking of Lan. When he had first interviewed her as a refugee he had known only that she was a widow and that her child had been murdered by pirates. He had given her a recommendation for priority entry to Australia. W
hen later he had learnt the full story he had advised her never to speak of it again, especially to Minou, explaining, ‘I know she seems sympathetic, but deep down she has one idea only: her own family. The rest of the world comes second.’ ‘Of course,’ Lan had replied, puzzled at his implication that there could be any other way. Minou had once told Ralph that all her family was dead; refugees rarely told the truth, until they felt safe.
He heard the telephone ringing again and Sancha talking animatedly. He went on gazing at the tree’s mysterious vitality while he fingered his belly. There were no terrifying lumps in it, though here and there it jumped and fluttered eerily, like a pregnant woman’s. The Sikh doctor, a man of bovine calm, had looked at him reflectively after the examination and had said, ‘You have an illness of the soul, Mr Hamilton. You aggravate it by alcohol, cigarettes and spicy food. No drug can cure it.’ He tapped his head and his heart. ‘It will become a cancer – what we call a cancer – quite quickly if you cannot resolve this … this problem of conflicting desires.’ He had given an indolent shrug.
Ralph stared at the lovely pink flowers on the rain tree and thought, I will live! I will myself to live! He turned away from the rain tree, flushed the lavatory for effect, and went to see what Sancha was gabbling about on the telephone.
‘Here he is now,’ she said and covered the mouthpiece with her hand. ‘It’s Judith Wilkes. She’s heard the most extraordinary stories about Minou, but I’ve told her it’s all nonsense. She can’t get to the Press conference because she’s got to buy some clothes. They’ve been lost by Qantas, wouldn’t you know? She says she’s beginning to smell.’ Sancha raised her eyebrows at Ralph to indicate that such an admission, from Judith, should be taken seriously.
Ralph smiled involuntarily as Judith went through her patter of introduction. He had imagined she would have the same upper-class nasal twang that Sancha had, but her voice Was soft and breathless, as if each word were snuggled in fur, and despite his decision to dislike her he grinned at her projected presence. He told her everything about Minou’s adventure that Hussein had told him, realizing only at the end of it that he had responded to a professional interviewer’s telephone blarney, and that she had conned him. ‘You smart bitch,’ he thought. Judith was bemoaning her ill-luck in being held up because of the loss of her clothes and typewriter.
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