The Harbour

by Francesca Brill

  Stevie clutched Hal to her and laughed out loud. It was all so ridiculous. All of it. All the stupid plans and the secrecy and the plotting. All the talking, all the fighting, all the killing. Ridiculous.

  ‘What’s wrong with that? Why are you laughing, are you mad?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with that. Except that it didn’t work.’

  Margaret was looking up at her from under long, pale lashes. She was whispering so quietly it was just sounds carried on a breeze. Stevie stepped closer to the little girl. ‘What’s that, Margaret?’ But she wasn’t talking, she was singing. It was the same thing over and over in a tuneless wheeze. ‘One two three four five, once I caught a fish alive.’

  Stevie glanced at Phyllis, who pulled Margaret closer to her and said, ‘She’s been singing it since we left. When the soldiers stopped us she just kept singing. I think that was why they let us go. I thought at first they were going to – that the worst was going to happen.’ Phyllis pulled the torn dress across herself in a vain attempt to cover the damage. ‘They held me so hard and they were shouting and they tried to pull Margaret away from me but she held on and was singing. It was her favourite nursery rhyme, you know. When she was a baby.’

  And then Phyllis’ body just contorted in on itself. She was in the grip of terrible spasms but no sound came.

  There was only the whisper of ‘One two three four five’ from Margaret’s pale lips.

  Stevie reached out and, with one arm tight around Hal, held Phyllis with the other and felt her convulsions vibrate through her. She stood her ground, containing them, while Phyllis’ stoic, brittle self was drowning.

  And inches above their heads Victor’s long, skinny arms waved gently in the tree – a nightmare flag of surrender.

  The floor of the main room was littered with dreaming bodies. Phyllis and Margaret had been given the best spot, by the niche where the house god squatted, unblinking and useless. In the moonlight Stevie sat with her back against the wall and looked closely at her battered, American passport, at the photo of a younger, less knowing and less weary self. Stevie considered her as distantly as one might an old school friend with whom one had lost touch.

  She remembered going to the photographer’s studio in Utica to have the picture taken. It had been a cold day and when she’d taken her hat off her hair had stuck to her head in the shape of its crown. The photographer had flirted with her and she had blushed and shivered under the sudden hot lights. The smile in the photograph was wholesome, yes, but also alert and shadowed by a wilfullness. She knew she wasn’t much to look at, her mother had told her enough times, but she wasn’t going to let that mar the picture. She was going places after all. That was what the photo was for. And that passport had been a kind of totem to her. As long as she had it she knew who she was and everybody else knew too and she would be safe, protected by the invisible shield of being an American.

  Taking her dark blue gabardine coat out from under the other clothes that made up her pillow, she found the hem and began unpicking the stitches. The thread wouldn’t come at first, but as she tugged, it eventually gave. She pulled out just enough to allow her to tuck the passport in between the lining and the coat. As she slipped it into the gap she knew she was peeling away a part of herself. For all her vaunted independence this small book had been part of her courage. She was letting it go. So who was she now?

  She woke to a piercing scream. She was clutching her coat in her arms. In the gloom before dawn she strained to identify the shadowy figures shuffling in the room. The movements were urgent but oddly quiet. There was another scream and Stevie understood it was Margaret, her young voice incoherent with fear. Stevie scrambled to her feet in time to see Phyllis, with Margaret clinging to her skirts, being manhandled through the door by several Japanese soldiers.

  ‘No. Stop. What are you doing?’ she yelled.

  Phyllis turned her head towards her as she was pushed through the doorway. ‘It’s all right, I knew they’d come for us. We’ll be fine.’ She was amazingly calm, almost serene. ‘And by the way, I thought you should know, I never liked Sylvia.’

  It took Stevie nearly all day to cross the city – a journey which before, in her other life, would have taken half an hour. Before haunted her; when there had been food and drink and cocktails and music. When there were tailors to make you copies of dresses and there was a piano bar and olives. When there were markets and movies and orchid corsages. Before lay over everything she saw like a double exposure.

  She had left at dawn. The tyre tracks of the truck that had taken Phyllis and Margaret away were still warm as she ran out of the gates of the compound. The smell of hot rubber mixed with jasmine made her feel slightly nauseous. Or maybe that was simply the lack of food.

  It had been only a few hours since her journey back to Lily’s compound from the hospital, but the fresh damage to the streets made negotiating them complicated. It was a dreamscape in which familiar roads ended in a pile of rubble and well-trodden alleys no longer existed. Apartment buildings had sunk into the ground, and everywhere there were fires. A haze of dust hung and swirled, obscuring things, melting their edges like a snowstorm. At one point Stevie stumbled over something that gave as her heel dug into it. She looked down. An arm, perfect but for the mangled stump where a shoulder once was, lay as if carelessly dropped. The palm of the hand faced upwards, the fingers curled over on themselves.

  She saw several military vehicles cruise along the devastated streets but nobody stopped her. The blister swelled again on the ledge of her heel. She ran and when she couldn’t breathe she walked, until she was heading up the steep slope of the hill. She imagined that maybe Harry was standing by his window, miraculously better, his bad arm in a sling but better, and that he could see her as she came back to him. She tried to walk with a positive swagger and lifted her head so he could read how much better things were and how he shouldn’t worry for Hal and her.

  When she reached the hospital she raced across the gravel past the ambulances and made straight for Clarke-Russell’s office, surprised when nobody challenged her. He was at his desk as she knew he would be, exhaustion etched in the lines on his face. He looked up, wearily, as she came in. And again she was sideswiped by the sensation that everything familiar was altered. He was and was not himself. His features had slipped into a new alignment.

  ‘There was nothing I could do. I’m sorry,’ she said.

  As he stood up he was shaking his head. ‘No, I’m sorry. We think he’s been taken to Argyle, to the officers’ camp.’

  Stevie wondered what he was talking about. ‘They’re not going to take Margaret to a military camp, she’s only eight.’

  ‘Margaret?’ His daughter’s name seemed to puzzle him.

  ‘There was no time. They just came and took them. It was over so fast. They didn’t even have time to take any clothes. But Phyllis was calm, she said something about knowing they’d come. They’d been stopped at a checkpoint in the afternoon, you see, and she had actually told them her name and given the address of where they were headed and everything.’

  As Clarke-Russell understood what she was telling him, he swayed and had to support himself with his palms on the desk in front of him. ‘I see.’ He stared at the pile of orderly papers, the lowlands of a defeated bureaucracy.

  His voice was changed and halting. ‘I was afraid that might – I’m so tired.’ The glimmer of weakness in him frightened Stevie almost more than anything else.

  He looked over to her and, remembering, he pulled himself upright again. ‘Stevie, it’s Harry, there was a nasty moment last night. They asked all of us, everybody here to sign a pledge not to attempt an escape. He wouldn’t sign. I tried to convince him but it was point-blank refusal. You know Harry, stubborn as a mule.’

  Clarke-Russell was still talking as Stevie turned and ran. The corridor stretched out, endless, she couldn’t move fast enough.

  His bed was empty. The bedclothes were coiled like a skin, shed on the floor
. The dent of his head was in the pillow. Her hands flew to her mouth, an instinctive suppression of a scream. There was a movement in the periphery of her vision. She spun around and in the other bed where Ken should have been, a bald middle-aged man writhed, his face completely covered in bandages. Then she saw she had been mistaken: he was not bald – the whole top of his scalp was missing.

  Stevie backed out of the room and Clarke-Russell caught her as she fell.

  The cup was hot in her hands. The steam warmed her face and she was glad of it. The tea itself was dark and bitter. But she understood it wasn’t the drinking that mattered. It was about the ritual of it. The making and the receiving and the time it allowed for both parties to somewhat recover themselves. Clarke-Russell sat opposite her. They were in the nurses’ social room. There were several scratchy armchairs and in the corner was a shiny wooden phonograph on spindly metal legs.

  His voice was soothing, practised from years of telling people bad news. ‘It was always only a matter of time for him, you must have known that. If those gendarmes or Kempeitei or whatever get half a chance they’ll have us all.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘They’re supposed to be the new civilian police force. But they answer to the military. It’s a sham, naturally, to make the population feel they’re under Japanese governance, not just army law. They’re known for their ruthlessness. Brutal chaps to put the fear of God in you. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of them.’

  ‘What about you? Did you sign?’

  ‘Yes, I signed. I’m not a soldier.’

  ‘What will they do to him?’

  Clarke-Russell sighed and coughed before he spoke. ‘Listen, my dear, we are led to believe that people are being held according to international law as prisoners of war. They say the rest of us are free to go about our business.’ He leaned forward, frowning. ‘Harry’s friend, the plump chap – who is he?’

  ‘Mr Takeda? I don’t really know. He’s something to do with business development here. He works for a company that make lenses for glasses. They’ve known each other a long time. They knew each other in Japan.’

  ‘Yes.’ Another audible exhalation. ‘It’s not clear whether Harry will be helped or compromised by his connections. Be very careful.’

  ‘He’s been kind.’

  ‘Nobody will like the idea that Mr Takeda might offer some protection to his friends. The gendarmes would take badly any perceived threat to their authority. As for us – well, knowing the enemy isn’t always read as straightforwardly as it might be. Just watch out. People might think he’s trying to put one over on them.’

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Not him, his Japanese friend. And they might be right.’

  Stevie bowed her head over her tea. There was a cloud of scum riding on its surface. Suddenly disgusted, she put the cup down on the table beside her.

  Clarke-Russell’s hand was hot and dry on hers. ‘When they come for me you must not under any circumstances attempt to do anything.’ The palm of his hand radiated heat. ‘Don’t try to communicate with me. Don’t send food and hide what you have.’

  She surprised herself with how long it took for the reality of what was happening to sink in. She really could not comprehend it. There must be a way to get to Harry. There must be a way to find Phyllis and Margaret. There must be a way to stop this ludicrous situation. How could it be that life as they knew it had just stopped? Like a clock or a heart, halted. She remembered something.

  ‘Sergeant Ramsay, did they take him with Harry?’

  He shook his head. ‘The infection was overwhelming. It might even have been for the best.’

  She was a long way into town before she came to a standstill, so stricken that she could hardly see. Everything was blurred by the haze of fear. She did not notice the slim Japanese man, suave in his well-cut suit, who had followed her since she left the hospital. He stopped too, at a discreet distance, and examined his fingernails. Across the street a Japanese soldier walked past, dragging an elderly Chinese woman behind him on a string. Like a dog.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The days passed in a kind of trance. It seemed marvellous that normal activities were still undertaken. They went to whichever market was rumoured to have food for sale. They bought it and they cooked it and they ate it. They washed themselves and their clothes with care, using as little soap and powder as possible. They adapted to the new world order and didn’t indulge too much in the luxury of analysis or prognosis. Stevie became obsessed with anxiety about running out of powdered milk for Hal. Lily was irritated by it.

  ‘If you had breast-fed him like a normal person you wouldn’t be having to worry about it.’

  And, unusually, Stevie felt she had nothing to say. The hospital had assumed and she had assumed and before there had been a chance to think otherwise Hal had been taken away and given a bottle and she had been left to soothe her milk-swollen breasts with cold flannels. Oh for that milk now. She was condemned instead to scour the devastated city in search of it, climbing over the impromptu barricades of fallen buildings, and bartering her watch without a second thought when the price quadrupled overnight.

  Every time she ventured forth it was into a different landscape. As in a nightmare where a place is familiar but altered, she could never depend on a certain building or turn in the road to be quite how she last left it. And everywhere the flag of the Rising Sun insulted her. It flew from every conceivable place, tattooing the island. The first time she had seen the harbour after the surrender she had taken a route through what was left of Victoria Square and had paused for a moment to get her bearings in the rubble. Glancing out at the water she had seen the masts of sunken and scuttled ships lying at tipsy angles, reaching up to the sky like so many gravestones. No less moving were the carcasses of cars lying in the road like prehistoric animals, useless and mysterious. And the burned-out and looted shops, naked and open to the elements.

  Fires still burned and there was danger not just from the Japanese soldiers but from the mobs of ruthless Chinese looters armed with axes and staves. The second time she went out of the compound in search of milk, the sudden thump of an explosion shook her, the ground beneath her feet shifting with the vibrations. Walking into the odd silence that followed, she turned the corner of the Central market on Queen’s Road. There was a huge crater where the shell had just exploded. Outside a restaurant a table set for dinner was covered in what at first glance looked like linen. It was a snowdrift of plaster.

  She waded through a shimmering sea of shattered glass and then she heard the screaming. Glancing up, she saw a small crowd of people trying to rescue a man who hung by his hands from the balcony of a house. He was making a terrible noise although his mouth had gone, and his leg was attached to his body by the thinnest thread of flesh. He was silhouetted against a spectacularly beautiful scarlet sunset. Everywhere there was living flesh reduced to messy smears. Mangled, twisted, torn, blackened and contorted bodies lay in a jigsaw puzzle on the shards of glass.

  Stevie’s unwavering focus on her mission insulated her from the worst of what she had seen. Finding a tin of milk was a victory and she watched over those tins as closely as she watched over Hal and would have fought over them as fiercely. They represented her ability to keep him alive.

  She lost the energy to write anything down. There were moments of intense wondering – where was Jishang? Did he know what was happening in Hong Kong? Did he ever think of her and worry? And Declan? Was he filing great stories while she was chasing tins of food? Her instinct to bear witness was as sharp as ever and the noise and destruction all around took root in her. She told herself she would remember enough when the time came. For now, each day was about survival not testimony.

  One evening Mr Li, Lily’s father, talked about his fighting days in Manchuria at the beginning of the Japanese invasion in 1931. He spoke in a low voice and Lily translated. Their voices were a murmur in the cold night.

  ‘As each wave of Japanese s
oldiers came we shot them down and then the next wave came, climbing over the dead bodies, and we shot them down, and then the next and the next until the river was full to ground level with bodies. Then they walked over them to the other side where we were. And then we ran. They’ve been fighting like this for years. We knew, so why didn’t the British?’

  The next night he packed up and went to sleep at his brother’s furniture shop. It wasn’t open for business and there was nothing much left to pillage but it was his duty to safeguard the family’s concerns come what may. There was no conversation or speculation between the women left behind in the compound. It was enough that they lived through the day.

  One night, a cool evening, Stevie settled Hal in his basket. She borrowed a cardigan of Lily’s which only a few weeks ago she would have sneered at for its being pale pink, but for which now she was unreservedly grateful. She began to help Mrs Li bring the rice to the table. As soon as she heard the voices, she knew. The men were hurling words at each other with a heavy incoherent ostentation. The tone was transparent. They were drunk and out of control. They kicked open the gate and stood, wide-legged and swaying for a moment before the man at the back pushed them forward and they were in the compound.

  The women froze – a tableau of domesticity. The steam from the rice bowl warmed Stevie’s face. A small table was set in the courtyard. Lily and her mother were already seated. Stevie was poised to serve the food. It could have been anywhere at any time. The shouting started up again and one of the men stepped towards the women, his gun in one hand waving erratically around the yard. He glanced several times over his shoulder at his baying companions. They were pack animals, primitive and pumped up with the renegade spoils of war. There was no doubting their intentions. No need to share a language. The communication was clear – as predators they circled their prey.