‘Tigers down there,’ one said. ‘Plenty.’
Some of the jungle rivers were as dark as black coffee, flashes of water winking up at them like eyes here and there from places where the streams widened and the overhanging trees were parted.
‘Yellow men live in there,’ the co-pilot said and they both laughed, lords of the air and of the land below. ‘Eating monkey food.’ Roars of laughter.
‘Now China won’t help them any more. Won’t send them any more rifles.’ Chuckles for this, then, ‘China is a conservative power these days. Russia at her front door, Vietnam at her back, India looking in the window. There’s no time to export revolution now. The yellow men hide in our jungle, eating berries.’
At the coast they flew out to sea for a few kilometres, stared down at the million suns dancing there, and hovered above a grey leaf: just a fishing trawler.
‘They’, meaning the boat people, ‘try to land on our rig,’ the co-pilot said.
‘What happens to them?’Judith asked.
‘It’s company policy to give them food and water.’ He turned to the other man and their glances interlocked.
But for all that they were good-natured men, well-paid and well-fed and tolerant because of it. As the co-pilot helped Judith out of the helicopter and they stood on the tarmac with their hair turned crazy from the air currents of the dying rotor he said, guarded and slightly off-hand, ‘Tonight, would you like…?’
‘I’m going out tonight,’ she said. He looked her up and down furtively, and nodded. It was extraordinary, she thought. Two propositions in twelve hours. A friend had once told her, ‘Women are the real controllers of sexuality. If a woman is having an affair and is sexually aroused, every man in sight senses it and finds her attractive.’
Kanan would be arriving at lunchtime, by taxi. All her plans – to spend the night on Bidong, to return by boat to the mainland that morning, writing up her notes on the way – had been thrown out by Ralph’s illness. And there was the other thing right now: how to look Minou in the eye? In three days Minou would be back in KL and Aunt would be telling her, ‘Master in bedroom with girl. Kiss kiss.’ She’d make those disgusting gurgling sounds in her throat, describing the lipstick on Hobday’s mouth. And then? Perhaps one of those confrontations à trois, with Judith and Hobday explaining that nothing had happened. Minou would never believe them. Lady Hobday she’d be – as dignified and enraged as she had been at the funeral, a thousand-times born, a thousand-times wronged.
‘Ooh, la, you look as if you’ve been up all night,’ she said as Judith arrived after a bravely steady walk across the tarmac to the Citroen. One quick look at Judith’s hair. ‘Have a shower and I’ll blow-dry it for you when we get back to the hotel. With your beau coming’ (Judith had told her about Kanan in the heat-craze of the trip from Bidong with Ralph) ‘you don’t want to look as if…’
‘As if?’
Minou grinned. Perhaps she knew already; perhaps Hobday had told her over the telephone. There was no shade; the car had been parked in the sun and the heat inside it was buzzing, like a swarm of bees – that swarm she had seen before. Judith closed her eyes, stunned by a premonition.
‘I spoke to the hydrographic survey people this morning,’ Minou was saying. ‘You can use their telex machine to send a story to Sydney. The office will be open all weekend.’
‘Thanks.’ Judith had to struggle with the feeling that she and Minou were enemies again. ‘I haven’t written the bloody thing yet,’ she added, compelled to be forthcoming, appealing for sympathy in this show of frankness, a play-act that had nothing frank about it. The special attentiveness of people who are lying and who dislike each other. On the boat yesterday it had been so different. Judith had said, ‘It’s as if I’m having blackouts. I’ll be concentrating on something when suddenly I’ll think, “Has David got enough clean shirts for the week? Has Richard remembered to buy mandarins for their lunch boxes?” I feel like an insect, which looks as if it’s doing things it wants to do, collecting food and building a web out of spit, but all the time there is this undercurrent of anxiety; it’s not thinking of itself at all, it’s considering its eggs and how to preserve them. Everything women – mothers – do is affected by that nagging responsibility to house, children …’ she’d sighed. ‘I think about how, if I bring off this job up here, I can become bureau chief. Then I can choose my own hours and I’ll be able to look after the kids properly, on my own. I’ve known for years I’d have to split from Richard. And then I tell myself that’s nonsense. I want to do this job well because I’m ambitious. I love it when people say, “Judith Wilkes? The journalist?” All that motherly, female-instinct stuff is probably just conditioning from the nuns, and my family and …’ She had gestured out to sea, as if society had stood there. ‘I’ll just never know. I’ll never bloody well know.’ Minou had pushed her forehead into Judith’s shoulder, as a dog will comfort its owner with a caress.
And now it had all been swept away by that idiotic experiment with Hobday, that moment of vulnerability.
‘Actually, I wish Kanan weren’t coming. I’ve got so much work to do,’ Judith said.
Minou kept her eyes on the road ahead; there were a lot of bicycles and goats and chickens wandering around. ‘Cold feet?’ Her tone was derisive.
‘Of course not,’Judith replied sharply. They let the matter drop.
When, at twelve-thirty he walked into the motel lobby, his shoes making exploding noises on the tiles, his head turning from side to side with that vague, superior air he had and when, on seeing her his face lit up with easy confidence, Judith knew she was terrified. He claimed her, with that look of delight.
The motel restaurant, like its rooms, was decorated in shades of green ranging from the virulent emerald of the matchboxes, with their illustrations of a white leatherback turtle, to the dark bluish-green of the fabric on the seats of cane dining chairs and upholstered benches, and the murky green of the carpet. Kanan had put on – from a clairvoyant vanity? – white clothing so that he dazzled in this cool, dark room. Judith, in a blue batik dress, and Minou, in denim overalls with a gold spanner brooch pinned on the bib, were visually swallowed by the colours of the furniture. But Kanan shone.
He looks like a gorgeous white heron with a couple of brown quail, Judith thought. The idea took the edge off her nervousness and she was able at last to look at him and grin, which he interpreted, she guessed, as eagerness. They began talking of Ralph, and Bidong and the police chief – Minou and Judith animated, entertaining him. His amiable, reserved manner tended to make those around him seem like garrulous clowns. The more one talked, the deeper his silence, the more enigmatic his thoughts, the more beautiful the composure of his features – and the more ominous one’s feeling that he, alone, was in control. He’d made no remark when Judith had told him that the room she’d booked for him was next door to her own. Perhaps he would expect her to go there with him after lunch! She should not have grinned at him.
Judith looked down through the glass of the tabletop at his long legs stretched straight and crossed at the ankles, and her eye darted from his knees to his crotch. It told her nothing about him. She felt reassured by the ordinariness of the white cloth, with its spokes of creases radiating from the centrepoint across his thighs and upwards, towards his hip-bones, just like any other pair of trousers. But then, when she looked up, she found he had been watching her and that his face with its scrolled lips and nostrils was full of contentment.
Minou said, ‘I’m going to the beach when we’ve finished lunch.’ She poked a rubbery square of bean-curd with her spoon. ‘I feel so fed up, after yesterday, and this morning.’ What had happened this morning? Her expression was almost tearful. This was a new act, Judith guessed, a variation of Minou’s ‘I-can-see-ghosts’ role which she played so effectively on the boat, crossing the sandbank. Yet it was as impossible to ignore her demand for their care as it was to ignore the smell of fire in a house.
‘Why? What’s wrong?�
� Judith felt genuinely alarmed by those trembling lips. Even Kanan was leaning forward, attentive.
Minou gave a sigh that exhaled world-weariness. ‘You see, Mama and the boys are coming. At this moment they are at sea.’
She had their full attention now and she knew it. She went on rapidly, hot with the burden of her emotions, projecting them around the lunch-table, netting her audience so that suddenly they were not thinking about what she was saying but were being gathered in to her, willingly. Her glance flicked from Kanan’s to Judith’s face and back again. ‘Look, they will come to the turtle beach – the boat captain is experienced, he’s done ten runs already to Malaysia, I heard on Bidong yesterday. And that beach is the best one for larger boats. It has the deepest water close to shore. That’s why the turtles like it, no? But this is the problem. I went there this morning and yesterday morning, at dawn. And this morning I was just standing near the coconut trees when …’ She lent to Kanan and tapped his shoulder with her index finger. ‘Special Branch. Nice Mr Hussein from Special Branch came up behind me. “Lady Hobday,” he said, “you are coming very often to this beach. Are you expecting some friends?” He looked back over his shoulder at the village. Then he said, “It is my duty to tell you that the people in that village have sworn that no more refugees will land here. There are police in the area, but … I advise you to leave this beach. Please do not return to it.” And he watched me until I got in the car and drove off.’
She looked from one to the other, her eyes saying, I’m desperate.
‘I must go back there this afternoon.’
Kanan dropped his chin on his chest.
Minou added, ‘I know they are coming. Today. I can feel it.’ The coins she had thrown that morning had made the hexagram Heaven, the Creative Force, and Water, The Abysmal: conflict. But this had changed to Breakthrough. Water, the abysmal element, had been very strong: it had ruled in Breakthrough. The Book was never wrong. It had told her, ‘Do not alienate inferior persons, for they become useful.’ She’d acted on that already: Bala, whom she’d sent off for the day, had a young Indian friend who was a nightwatchman and who needed money. It had not cost much, the thing she’d got Bala to get for her, from the nightwatchman. ‘You must help me to trick Mr Hussein,’ Minou said. ‘You see, Malays are hot-tempered, but they cool down quickly. If you give them a surprise, something unexpected, they forget they are angry.’
They sat there, their voices stolen. Then Judith said, ‘You think if the three of us …?’
‘Yes. Yes. If the three of us go we are just making a picnic. Swimming …’
‘You cannot swim from that beach, it’s too dangerous, isn’t it?’ Kanan said.
‘O.K., la. Building sandcastles. Looking for shells.’
‘Sunbaking,’ Judith put in, then blushed. Kanan? Sunbaking? He was almost black.
‘If you wish to sunbake,’ Kanan said, and smiled indulgently.
‘Shadebaking’ Judith corrected herself. It was an apology to him, to his race, and by making it she felt her resistance to him drop away. His admiring look hugged her to him like an encircling arm.
‘Yes. I’d love to lie there on the beach with you. There are some palm-leaf shelters.’
And the beach would be deserted at this time of day. In front of the village the fishermen would be mending their nets or painting the boats with pitch, and the women would be drying shrimps, spreading them with hands splayed into fans, over mats laid out on the sand. But otherwise they would be alone on kilometres of cream-coloured sand. And Minou. She could amuse herself somehow.
‘So you’ll come?’ Minou faced one, then the other, pulling from them an agreement to something unstated, something greater. They nodded, ensnared by their own desires into her tangle. They wanted to caress each other, not to outrage proprieties, of course, but to lie together in the shade with the light breeze off the sea on their half-naked bodies, to prepare themselves for tonight. To achieve that they were conceding something, making a promise to Minou the nature of which was still obscure to them.
‘I’ll show you something when we get there,’ Minou said. The abrupt tone of confidence in her voice made Judith uneasy. For one second she thought, Minou’s got a gun. If the villagers make trouble she’s going to shoot at them. Then she realized that was ridiculous; it was the pilots’ chatter about rifles that had dragged up the idea to the surface of her mind.
Minou drove past the roadside scrub and parked the car in the discoloured sand at the top of the beach where the coconut palms, stately and voluptuous as beauty queens, cast down a pale-grey shade, like X-rays, from their distant plumes. It was high tide. The sea was motionless, then it gave a sigh and stretched a few more centimetres up the sand and collapsed, exhausted. There was nobody about for half a kilometre. Off to the north, in front of the village, a few people were wandering around the beached boats and the spread nets and the racks of fish that, split open to dry, had turned opaque and yellow like chamois leather and were already as stiff as boards. It was siesta time, full tide of heat and quietness.
Minou said, ‘Now I’ll show you.’ She opened the Citroen’s boot with the pride of a girl opening for the dazzlement of friends the box containing her engagement ring.
At first Judith could not make it out, this flabby orange thing. Then she saw the oars and the air pump. There were silvery coils of rope, a grappling iron, a whistle.
‘And flares. The flares come with it,’ Minou said.
‘Where did you get it?’Judith demanded.
‘I just got it, la. It will hold twelve people. Will we inflate it now? It only takes a minute to inflate. I did it in the hotel room last night and it blew up so quickly that it knocked over a stupid table lamp. The manager is going to charge me ninety bucks, the crook, for smashing it. I told him I was skipping and my rope caught on the lampshade. Then I couldn’t deflate it – I had to jump on it for twenty minutes. I kept thinking nice Mr Hussein will come to the door and say “Lady Hobday, why are you filling your room with a rubber dinghy? I advise you …”.’ She made his hand and head movements.
Kanan was examining the stencilled markings on the dinghy’s flabby walls.
‘This is from the Navy,’ he said.
Minou nodded smugly.
‘Possession of such things by civilians …’ Kanan said. He was actually frowning; Judith had never seen him frown. ‘Minou,’ he continued, ‘you have diplomatic immunity, you can disregard our legal system if you wish. But Judith and I …’ His hands flew apart, helpless and and appealing to her to understand.
‘O.K., O.K.,’ Minou said. ‘We’ll leave it here until we need it.’ She smirked. ‘I suppose you two want to go for a walk. I’ll just hang around here.’
When Judith and Kanan reached the beach proper he said, ‘I can go to gaol as an accessory to theft for that.’ He looked into her face, wanting her support. Judith felt it flow from her in a rush and suddenly his hand was lacing hers. They had halted, he had turned her shoulders and his huge eyes were steady mirrors above hers. Then he moved back.
‘Khalwat’ he said.
‘We can get into trouble for almost anything this afternoon,’ Judith murmured. The local newspapers in the past few days had been full of stories about the offence of khalwat, close proximity between the sexes. Vigilante groups were on the lookout for couples committing this crime against Islamic decency.
Kanan shrugged. ‘This is a police state.’ It was nothing more than an observation from him.
‘Bloody Minou!’ Judith said. ‘Getting that thing stolen.’ She walked along, kicking up sand that was as soft as talc. ‘But you’ve got to admire her flair,’ she added.
Kanan looked amused. His lips parting in mild derision seemed to indicate that for him flair, virtuosity, prowess, whatever she liked to call it, involved not vision and recklessness, but skill, restraint, training, self-awareness, controlled and absolute concentration. She realized abruptly that he was a true conservative.
The palm-leaf
shelters constructed by the villagers for turtle-watching tourists became dilapidated between seasons, and since there were still three months to go before the first of the giants would come labouring up the beach by moonlight, nobody had yet felt the need to start repairing them. The rattan mats which served as walls were torn or missing, and the palm-frond roofing had come adrift. Dried branches hung listlessly from the roof edges, creaking and hissing in the breeze. Fifty metres from the car and still a long way from the village they came upon a shelter in good order, walled on three sides with new rattan, a lair from which they could view the sea, concealed, except from someone standing directly in front of them. As they spotted it, they forgot Minou and her stolen dinghy.
They padded into its dark, rustling shade as unhesitatingly as a hunting pair pad to their cave to enjoy the kill. In silence. And in silence lay on their towels, then turned to drink each other up, eyes, skin, hair. It was another world, a dream-life in here, enclosed, sealed in. There was nothing else, neither sun nor sea, no heat or cold, only the warmth of mouth-on-mouth, the flow of energy between their eyes and the flow of each others’ warm breath. His pad of tongue and the slippery-sweet membranes of his mouth welded with and became her own, seeming as if touched for the first time. That straight pipe of flesh that pressed against her was burning, calmly, as her own small, stiff rod burned calmly. She wanted more than anything to take him in her mouth and knew that she would, later, in the night-time. Strong, dizzying scent came from his hair and clothes.
She felt as languid as one does part-waking from a dream and falling back into sleep. She dropped away from him on to her back on the sand, knowing that somehow in the minutes or hours that had passed with no sense of passing, her mind had been unlocked, that he had enraptured her, as the truly beautiful can do. You see a great painting or a famous view and suddenly everything is washed away, you have no name nor country; your mind has stopped.
She knew that tonight, with him – he was becoming ‘him’ again – it would be all right.
Turtle Beach Page 24