‘Anyone can go into a trance,’ he had said to her.
Sunset blossomed in the picture window of Judith’s room. She was between sleep and wakefulness, physically inert. She looked at the sunset that filled her room without seeing it; the gaudy veil of that other world was still binding her eyes.
He had asked, ‘What do you feel?’
‘I’m frightened.’ As if she had to tell him.
‘Frightened of poor people enjoying themselves? If they were not so crushed by life they would be more moderate in their enjoyments. We Hindus …’ he had looked secretly proud and embarrassed again, ‘we Hindus take a pessimistic view of life. It must be lived, that is all. These things, these hours of release, make it seem more bearable.’
She had shaken her head. ‘I can’t think like that. I believe that if life is unbearable, change the system, do something to make it bearable.’
‘Make it?’ He had laughed. ‘Come and dance.’ His body was already swaying, like that half-naked boy’s whose pectorals had the smooth, rounded shape one saw on ancient Hindu statues. The nipples were small, hard currants. Those statues invented nothing, she saw. They captured these strange, suave bodies and these thousands of years of dancing away anxiety. Dancing the universe to atoms, he’d said.
Judith blinked. She could see the sunset now. She turned to the bedside table, taking up the cablegram first. It would be from Bill, she knew, and she grimaced while opening it. It read: ‘EXCELLENT BACKGROUNDER STOP IN LINE WITH MY POLICY OF LAISSEZ FAIRE YOU CAN GO INCOMMUNICADO FOR AS LONG AS NECESSARY’ She panted out the breath she had been holding: he realized I was in a knot. Then she had another good thought – I won’t have to write up that gruesome festival. I can forget about it.
The telephone slip said that Mr Richard Wilkes had called and requested his call be returned. His voice saying ‘Wilkes speaking’ had that heavy, purposeful tone which Judith used to think was manly. ‘David has the mumps, my love,’ he announced.
From some musty locker-room of distrust she found herself shouting at him across four thousand kilometres: ‘I don’t believe you! He hasn’t got mumps!’
There was a lapse in communication, caused either by a hitch in the line or his instant anger. She did not care which. He was millions of kilometres away, this disembodied bully. She’d escaped from him.
‘He has got mumps, Judith. Sebastian will get them too.’
She knew what would be next. ‘I’m not coming home,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to take time off and look after them yourself.’
‘I thought that would be your attitude. I’ll tell David you’re too busy with the Vietnamese.’
Judith replied calmly, ‘Tell him what you like. You’ve devoted yourself to belittling me in their eyes.’ Then abruptly, ‘We both know why. There’s no point in going on.’ She slammed the receiver down and fell back on the bed, laughing. She’d done it! The words rehearsed over and over … ‘By the way, Richard, there’s something I feel I should tell you …’ And after the initial explosion they would sit down together, rational adults, and discuss what would be ‘for the best’. They would have to keep it entirely entre nous, of course; explain that they were separating just like everyone else; that marriage was impossible these days when roles were so confused, in this interregnum in social history; that they were victims of societal instability …
She was trembling, holding a scream inside herself, but with sudden relief tears rushed out of her eyesockets and sluiced down her face. She sat down, heavy, tired, like a sick person and wept. She felt neither happy nor sad now, only stunned by what she had done. Her head felt drum-full and pulpy as a tomato.
In the bathroom mirror her face gave her a fright: her eyelids were puffed and her mouth had been pulled out of shape into an oblong opening. When she blew her nose grey particles of incense came away in the kleenex. What had someone said? For a fortnight after Thaipusam the incense you’ve absorbed through your body membranes continues to work its way out. The incense penetrates the tissues. The way the drum music did, and the other things, the spears, the heat.
The telephone rang while she was drying her hair after showering. For a moment she thought ‘Kanan’, but it was the receptionist saying, ‘Canberra, Australia, calling. Connecting you now.’
Richard said, ‘I will find you a flat next week, Judith. Our separation can begin as from Wednesday, the day you left. We can be divorced by February next year. You will, of course, be wanting to move to Sydney or Melbourne, having complained for years that you’ve only stayed in Canberra because of my job. I will get custody of the children, naturally. You can see them in school holidays – if you wish.’ And he hung up.
‘Well,’ she said aloud. ‘Well, will you now?’ She felt peculiar, as if her mind had climbed out of her body and was perched over on top of her suitcase, on the luggage stand, watching her. She moved around self-consciously as it continued to observe her going about the business of grooming and dressing as if everything were normal.
Outside it was growing dark; the moonless sky was filmed over with the reflection from city lights caught in the humid air. Judith checked her face once more in the bathroom glass: she no longer looked as red and swollen as a screaming baby. Clean hair, clean clothes, fresh make-up. She was outwardly all right. She had dropped Visine into her eyes four times and the whites were now clear and glassy. She wished she could stop the sensation of being in two places at once – inside her skin and elsewhere, flitting around the hotel room, in bed on Sunday morning trying to read the newspapers, with the kids climbing all over her and complaining, ‘You never take us to the swimming pool’. But the feeling would not go away, so as two identities she caught the lift to the foyer and asked directions to Campbell Street.
‘You catch taxi, la!’ the commissionaire ordered, and finger-snapped one out of the air.
The cab driver had ‘Wo Hai Bei-jing’ – ‘I love Peking’ as he explained – playing on his radio. He sang along with it, driving with one hand, with the other lighting a cigarette, adjusting the nylon-furred animals that bobbed from his rear-vision mirror.
‘You eat Penang fried oyster,’ he said. He swerved the car to a stop adjacent to one of the first of the pavement stalls in Campbell Street. ‘All foreign peoples eat Penang fried oyster.’
Judith did not argue. She was not hungry, not even sure why she had come down here where traffic fumes billowed over the steamed chickens, red ducks, squid, shallots, noodles, lemon grass, satay roasting on charcoal fires, and all the other Chinese-Malay-Thai ingredients hanging in the glass cases of lamp-lit stalls. It was a largely Chinese food area, a place of frenetic noise and activity. Whole families of Chinese children rushed out from glaring neon-lit rooms behind the stalls, ordering customers to sit down, eat laksa, drink lime juice, try chilli crabs. Judith let them push her around, shouting to their parents the names of dishes they had decided she should eat. They banged things down on the table – little bowls of chilli and soy sauce, jabbed their fingers at cylindrical containers of chopsticks, indicating she should use them, quacked, yelped, and were off again after new quarry. It was comforting to submit responsibility to this clamorous authoritarianism. She was watching the people going by, and knew she was watching for Kanan, and that he was not there.
Her food was growing cold. The tepid, greasy soup seemed a final injustice. A few tears of self-pity dropped from her cheeks on to its orange, coconut-milk surface and lay there, trapped in the oil. She pushed the bowl away and a Chinese girl said, ‘You no eat chilli. You cry,’ and thrust a warm face-cloth into her hands.
She managed to eat some of the glutinous oyster omelet and drink an iced lime juice. Then she wandered off down the row of stalls, staring past the glass cases of squid and ducks at the customers seated behind them. People said, she now recalled, that if you sat long enough at the Campbell Street stalls everyone you knew in Kuala Lumpur would eventually come there to eat. But he was not eating there tonight.
I’m alone, s
he thought. No husband, no children. The sensation was that she had been physically ripped, and that her habits of dependence on Richard and the boys had become close and ghostly, like the phantom limbs of amputees. It was not the way she had pictured it. She had imagined, once she had had it out with Richard, that she would feel light and free. The irritations of motherhood – the sticky fingers, the noise, the Saturday afternoons spent in movies called Battlestar Galactica, instead of in art galleries – were nostalgic memories now. She wondered how they would talk about her to their friends when she was an arthritic old lady and they had just rung her to say that they were too caught up at work to visit her this Christmas. ‘She never had time for us when we were young. She was always impatient. A real bitch.’
She realized that a man in a white singlet with a cleaver in his hand was addressing her: did she want to try his squid? Judith shook her head vehemently, and felt abruptly as if she had shaken a single, unsuspected coin from the pocket of a dress. ‘Bugger Richard,’ she muttered. ‘I’ll get custody.’
The stall holder pulled a face and glanced at the boy standing next to him, a warning that here was another deranged tourist.
At nine o’clock she caught a taxi back to the Malaya and rang the Australian Residence. Minou said ‘Don’t. Don’t tell me,’ about Thaipusam, then asked, ‘When are you moving in here? Tomorrow? That would be great. We’ll have dim sum breakfast in town.’
‘Actually, I’d like to go to Mass,’ Judith said.
‘Mass! Ooh, la, I haven’t been for years. We’ll both go.’ The idea became an exciting excursion for Minou, and for Judith, also. She too had not been for years.
After Minou put down the telephone, still rolling her eyes at Judith’s peculiar outburst about the Hindu festival and wanting to get it out of her system by going to Mass, Hobday had said, ‘We all believe in sympathetic magic. And it’s no bad thing, either, as long as you recognize it for what it is.’
Minou pouted because she did not understand what he meant. ‘Convent girls never leave the church, they just become feminists. I learned that in Australia,’ she replied challengingly. ‘I’m a Buddhist, at heart’ she added.
Hobday nodded, tolerant. Minou was what she said she was at any given moment. He was pleased that she was going to Mass, for although Buddhist at heart, a visit to church might rekindle in her an enthusiasm for Western ways – she’d spent six years in a convent school herself. Since they’d arrived in Malaysia, six months ago, Minou had become increasingly ‘oriental’, sometimes speaking to him not in English or French, but in Cantonese, without realizing it. And she was redeveloping old superstitions. He’d caught her out secretly counting things for lucky signs, and eschewing clothes of a certain colour. She would never admit to any of this, which, if questioned, she passed off as unconscious caprice.
But it was there all right, as exotic and unnerving as the thing she was doing again now, slowly and carefully, to him. Which Mrs Wilkes had interrupted.
16
‘I’d imagined it would be the same as it was at school. I thought I’d slip back into a routine,’ Judith said as she and Minou shuffled out along with the Goanese ladies in saris and the Chinese businessmen with blue mohair suits and digital wrist watches, their spiky hair glued with brylcreem.
Neither Judith nor Minou had taken confession. ‘It seemed so flat,’ Judith added. ‘I’d even forgotten it isn’t in Latin these days.’ She had thought, This is like sex without lust, like Richard and me, and had been utterly bored from the first words of English. The sermon, mercifully brief, had been on the topic of racial harmony, with references to our unfortunate brothers and sisters who were cut off from Christ by the delusions of other ‘religions’; the necessity of enlightening them without breaking the law (Render unto Caesar) by proselytizing among Muslims. And so forth.
Minou maintained the look of secret amusement she had worn throughout the service. She thought she should tell Judith the Buddhist saying, ‘You cannot step in to the same river twice’, but could not be bothered. Instead she said, ‘I thought you’d bore a hole in the priest, la, you stared so hard at him.’
‘He came as a bit of a shock.’
They exchanged grins and Minou jabbed Judith’s ribs with her elbow. ‘Shut up, whitey,’ she hissed. She could roll her eyelids down as if they were canvas blinds.
Judith thought, She’s going to curtsey to him.
‘A beautiful service, thank you, Father,’ Minou said.
The priest swayed his head. ‘Delighted you are coming, Madam. And you, also,’ to Judith, ‘are being most welcome in our congregation.’ His sermon had been couched in the same Goanese English, making it even more remote and meaningless.
‘Just like a black-and-white minstrel,’ Minou said before they were quite out of his earshot. Then, ‘And here is my Bala. You know, he’s only nineteen and already he has a son, la.’
The Indian syce ducked his head, overcome with modesty. Minou transformed herself into Lady Hobday as she reached the black limousine. ‘Bala loves driving Adrian’s car,’ she confided to Judith, in the tone adults use to praise children in their hearing.
‘Where is His Excellency?’ she asked the syce when she had finished her routine of arranging her legs and skirt as if television cameras were ranged waiting for her signal to roll.
‘He is marking time for you at the Merlin Hotel already, Madam.’
‘Best dim sum breakfast,’ Minou assured Judith.
‘I stayed there, once,’Judith said. ‘It was the only high-rise hotel in KL then. It had the biggest, gaudiest restaurant I’d ever seen – like a warehouse decorated with red and gold, and there was an ornamental pond.’ Ben and I ate there, the next morning, she thought. It had been empty except for some American tourists. A man had pleaded reasonably with the waitress, ‘Look, can’t we just have eggs-and-corfee? You know, eggs?’ The woman with him had started to cry. He’d said, ‘We’ll get out of this country. Damn the curfew. We’ll go to the airport. Today.’ She and Ben had exchanged glances; they did not want to get out.
She did not listen as Minou talked about the merits and demerits of the city’s other eating houses: the Malacca Grill at the Hilton, the Ranch at the Regent where all the waitresses were dressed as cowboys, the snake restaurant, the Mongolian bear’s paws restaurant, the noodle palaces. People said Kuala Lumpur, a Chinese city, was one huge cafeteria.
‘I’m getting divorced,’ Judith said abruptly. ‘That is, my husband wants to divorce me.’
Alert, hostile eyes regarded her. ‘Oh, really?’ After a silence Minou added, ‘You’ll be on the loose, then. I’ll have to find you a new man.’
Judith studied her hands. So this was it: hostility, humiliation. This was the first taste of what she could expect when she returned home.
The road outside the Merlin was being dug up and the car lurched like a ship at sea. Their shoulders bumped together for a moment.
‘He wants custody of the children,’ Judith said. ‘But he’s not going to get it. I’m going to fight.’
Minou looked her up and down. ‘Custody. That’s easy, la. The mother always gets custody. A few tears for the judge is all you need.’
Judith glanced at Minou’s composed, unlined face. ‘It’s not that easy.’
Minou replied, ‘Just steal them. And fly to the States. If he tries to steal them back …’ She shrugged.
‘Shoot him, I suppose?’
‘Why not? I would. Husbands are a dime a dozen, but children … We have a saying …’
Judith ceased to listen to the wisdom of the East. ‘Do you have children?’ she cut in.
Minou’s eyes shuttered, that same, quick barricading of herself she had executed before, back in the Lakeside, in Canberra. ‘I think so,’ she replied coolly and Judith, looking at her, suddenly felt something about Minou which made her, without realizing what she was doing, draw back, as one does from a corpse.
‘I’m not as lucky as you,’ Minou added. ‘I can’t j
ust ring up and talk to them. I don’t know where they are.’ She looked bored, sitting there in her elegantly arranged raw silk dress – Lady Hobday waiting for her chauffeur to open the door of the limousine – while Judith said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry … I didn’t realize.’
Hobday was flirtatious during breakfast. It was a skill he used to imagine he had lost much earlier than hope, which had finally abandoned him during those terrible years in Saigon. One day he had said to Hilary, ‘This bombing of Cambodia. We are accomplices to murder. As an ambassador, I am no better than a mercenary thug.’ She had said something scornful and rallying in reply.
His conscience had roared day and night until it exhausted him and he had found himself no longer wicked, merely absurd and empty. And everyone about him was equally shrivelled and foolish, so that life became a continuum of intense boredom. He alleviated it, late at night, in his bedroom, by getting drunk on liqueurs. He would sing to himself sometimes, songs he remembered from university footballing days, ribald Elizabethan ditties – ‘May her bouncing buttocks be marble’ – that sort of thing.
She was an ordinary girl, a typist, perhaps one of his typists. He didn’t pay much attention, so long as the work was properly done. She was walking down a corridor in front of him one morning when a movement of the flesh under the fabric of her skirt had drawn his attention. He had touched her. Not on the buttocks – he was not that sort of man – but on the soft upper arm. She had glanced up at him with the look of alert opportunism he remembered in girls’ faces from twenty-five years ago. He had made some trifling remark, to cover his embarrassment more than anything else, and she had leaned her head to one side in that coaxing, submissive way, making her earlobe brush the collar of her jumper – that’s right, he was back in Canberra and it was winter. He’d thought then, Flirting is like riding a bicycle. You don’t ever lose the knack, you just lose the inclination.
Some months later when he had encountered a scruffy little girl with bare feet arguing with a policeman on the steps of Parliament House, where he had just come from briefing his Minister, he had recognized her accent and on impulse had teased her with the greeting they use in Saigon. She had unleashed a stream of street-Vietnamese on him which he could not understand. The policeman was looking puzzled and dangerous. Hobday had replied, in French this time, ‘If you can find some shoes I’ll take you to lunch and you can explain your problem to me then.’
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