The Harbour

by Francesca Brill

  ‘You love Field?’

  Stevie could not answer. She almost couldn’t understand the line of questioning. She had anticipated many versions of this encounter during the previous sleepless night but she was not prepared for this.

  Now the question came from behind her, Nakmura’s voice this time. ‘Do you love Major Field?’

  Stevie’s internal struggle was compounded by fear. What was she supposed to say? What did they know? What had happened to the tub of lard, to the radio part? How incriminated would Harry be by her attempt to get it to him? Why were they asking her this absurd question? And with such urgency? Why the hell should she tell these men her private feelings?

  ‘Do you love Field?’ Nakamura again, insistent. ‘Do you love that man?’

  Her voice emerged loudly and clearly. She looked Shigeo directly in the eye for the first time, sitting forward and returning his intensity.

  ‘Yes, of course I love him. I love Harry Field.’

  Shigeo received this incongruous confession of love with equanimity. He glanced at Nakamura. Stevie sat back a little in her chair, the chill of the metal frame seeping through her shirt. She felt feverish and weak.

  Shigeo’s voice was quiet and lisping again, almost weary. ‘Ask her about him.’

  Nakamura flicked open a notebook that he took from his breast pocket. For a hysterical moment Stevie imagined he had pulled out the pistol. She glanced over her shoulder wanting to see the bullet before it hit her. But a series of questions flew at her instead.

  ‘Why was Field in Chungking?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘When did he go to Singapore?’

  ‘As far as I know he hasn’t been there.’

  ‘What is his relationship with Takeda-san?’

  She shook her head, thinking fast, not wanting to implicate Takeda in this situation but aware that she must say something. ‘They know each other from Harry’s time in Japan.’

  ‘When was he in Shanghai?’

  ‘I’m not sure exactly. Many times.’

  ‘What was he doing there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Who are his contacts among the Communists?’

  ‘Communists? Why would he contact them?’

  Acutely aware of Shigeo’s eagle stare, Stevie felt sweat spread across her body, clammy and cold. And still Nakamura’s voice came at her, an onslaught of question marks.

  ‘How do you find food? What money do you have? Who is helping you?’

  Stevie, her hands clasped in her lap, dug her thumbnails into the back of her hands. The sharp pain was preferable to the dull ache of her head as she fought a kind of numbness brought on by the increasing hopelessness of her situation.

  ‘How much money did Major Field pay you?’

  She gasped, affronted. ‘He doesn’t pay me. I make my own money. I’m a writer.’ And then for good measure, ‘I’m famous in America.’

  She regretted it instantly. A new awareness flickered across Shigeo’s face.

  The afternoon light had faded and in the dim room the three figures waited, suspended for the next move. A chess game with no clock. Shigeo broke the tension by making a dismissive gesture to Nakamura, waving his hand in the direction of the door. Galvanised, Nakamura instantly stood up. Bowing to his senior officer, he walked the length of the room, his heels clicking on the polished wood floor.

  Shigeo waited until the door was shut before he pushed back his chair, almost wearily, and moved out from behind the desk. He went to the nearest window and stood there, looking out into the bare courtyard below.

  Stevie counted the pounding beats in her chest. There was something different in the room now, a creeping presence that she thought might choke her. When he spoke he did so in English without turning from the window, as if she were an afterthought.

  ‘Now let’s see. You came to China in 1935.’

  Was this a trick? ‘Actually in 1936.’

  ‘You came to Shanghai and married Mr Wu Jishang in 1940.’

  ‘Nineteen thirty-nine.’

  It was the suddenness that frightened her the most. Before she knew it, he was standing right above her, his knees almost touching hers.

  ‘So you are famous. You think Japan afraid of America? Do you? You are fool.’

  He waved his sheaf of papers at her. The flapping of the paper got louder and louder. It was the unbearable sound of bird’s wings. She had had enough.

  Standing up, she said, ‘Don’t call me a fool.’

  She saw it happen. She saw the glimmer of light in the back of his eyes burn brighter. She saw the moment in which he gave himself licence. There was an infinitesimal moment of suspension and then he put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back down into the chair. Standing two inches away from her he put his hand to his trousers and began undoing the buttons at the fly.

  The heat of him was on her face. The smell of him was all around, sour from a long day, the carbolic of soap mixed with something sweet and vain, some kind of cologne. She stopped breathing. She was nothing. There was only a rushing of blood, a firing of muscles, a tension of ligaments and nerve endings. Everything was opaque and at the same time sharp in its detail. His hand reached inside his trousers. His other hand gripped the back of her head. He moved another step closer. The weight of his hand was forceful, insisting. Her mouth was on his flesh. She gagged. She was suffocating. Her eyes were so tightly shut that only other sensations continued the narration.

  Soon he pulled away. Still holding her by the hair with one hand, he dragged her to her feet. The sting of the slap was a shock. She opened her eyes and she saw hunger for power. She saw evil. As real as the floor beneath her feet and the darkening sky beyond the windows. In that moment she knew her fate and she knew her choice. Later she tortured herself – why didn’t she just run for the window and jump through it? She could have flown out in a shower of glittering glass and ended it all right there.

  The business was dispensed with fast. He was practised. The mechanics were vile and banal. He threw her against the desk, bent her over so her face was twisted hard on the red leather. One hand stayed fast on her head, fingers twined tight into her hair. With the other he tore at her clothes. She was silent. She was nothing.

  He was done. She heard him walk away and opened her eyes on to the scratched blood-red leather of the desktop, a pen rolling back and forth back and forth in an echo of movement. She didn’t move a muscle. Instinct kept her still, playing dead. She heard his footsteps falter. He must be at the door. The ceiling fan whirred. The silence weighed heavy.

  His voice came as if from another planet, making its way through the treacle air.

  ‘You are fool, see.’

  She heard the sound of the door opening. The click of the lock. Then silence again.

  She might never have moved again but she heard more footsteps. Drawing herself up and leaning against the table she sensed the presence of someone else. She turned around, aware that her underwear was ripped and hanging around one ankle. From the door Nakamura, not surprised at the state of her, made a surreal bow. She stepped out of her underwear and, unsure what to do with it, picked it up and bundled it tightly in her hand. She walked towards the chair and collected her handbag. The clasp was stiff and she struggled for a moment before opening it. She pushed the torn testament to her shame into its depths.

  ‘You are free to go back to your beautiful boy, Miss Steiber. Who, by the way, is not of course Chinese; British, maybe? American? We shall see.’

  And what she said was ‘Thank you.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Afterwards she walked blindly under the burning sun, knowing only that she must get clean. Stumbling over a kerbstone, she glimpsed an open tap in the shadow of a narrow alley. She crept into the shade and, cupping the water in her hands, she tried to remove all trace of her assailant from her body. She scrubbed her skin raw and she knew, somewhere ancient, that she would never be the same again. As the cold water soa
ked through her skirt and down her legs she registered the murder of her old self. And what she thought was – who am I now?

  Walking again, like a ghost through places where once there had been walls, she felt a shameful gratitude that he hadn’t killed her. And then like a blow, she understood that he had not shown her mercy, he had let her live because she was insignificant. He was not afraid – she was nothing in his universe. There was no need for him to expend more thought or energy on her. He had extracted what he required – his dominance and her submission.

  After some time she registered a familiar doorway. Jishang had taken her there a couple of times before they had established the habit of going to Yang’s boat. The building was undamaged, the entrance low-slung, sharing a doorstep with a Shanghai restaurant. She did not question why her tortuous route had delivered her here and she did not hesitate. Stepping inside the smoke-filled, claustrophobic room, she almost cried out with relief. Not waiting for her eyes to acclimatise, she stumbled towards an empty day bed. There were no discreet curtains here, and she felt no need to hide herself, just a compulsion to forget. It wasn’t defeat she felt but despair. Self-annihilation was the only thing she craved. There they were, the same men. The same closed shutters. The same opium equipment on the same low tables. She reached out her hand for the pipe.

  A knife tore through the hanging nappies. The gendarmes were on a mission to destroy. They pulled every drawer out of every cabinet and emptied the contents over the floor. There were snowdrifts of documents. They plunged their knives into cushions, adding a greyish sludge of feathers to the drifts of paper. They ripped a deep, clean wound through the mattress in Hal’s pram. Lily held the crying baby tightly in her arms, crooning words of comfort as much to herself as to him. Her mother, the old lady, lay huddled in a corner of the sleeping room. She had barely moved from there since the night of their ordeal at the hands of the drunken soldiers. Her face was turned to the wall as she braced herself against the blow she dreaded. It didn’t come. The men left without threatening the women and took nothing with them. As an exercise in terror it was perfectly effective.

  Standing in the shambles left by the gendarmes, strips of nappies hanging from the washing line like bandages, Lily could not calm Hal. She was angry with Stevie. What business of hers was it to go running around after the English in the first place? Maybe if she hadn’t gone to the hospital she wouldn’t have known where to go looking for Harry. Maybe they could have just waited with their heads down until the storm had passed. Then there would never have been the summons to the Supreme Court. Where was she? She did not dare to turn her mind to the possibilities. Her fear was making her angry. She had been left with a mute mother and a screaming baby who didn’t belong to her. Stevie had a job to do right here and Lily was bloody well doing it for her. Or rather, failing to do it well enough. Hal had been howling for hours, which was not like him. Usually he accepted distraction or consolation quickly and easily. But nothing would satisfy him today. He had cried so hard she had thought he would be sick. What the hell was she supposed to do?

  Harry could feel the damp of the earth seeping through his pyjama bottoms. The sounds of voices came and went. The bar of light crept across the dirt floor as the hours passed. His shoulder ached and he had stopped trying to slap away the mosquitoes. Occasionally he changed position. His mind was numb but he had faith that because he could talk to his captors, he would be able to communicate to them, letting them know that there was no need to treat their prisoners in such a brutal way. Soon, he was sure, they would be given some basic comforts. Food. Washing facilities. This apparent brutality would turn out to be just a result of the chaos of the early days. He knew there were other men in other huts on the military base and he did not doubt that he would soon be able to secure a more comfortable existence for them all. His admiration for the Japanese was profound as was his belief that they were innately decent human beings working to a different but equally honourable set of principles. Yes, they could be heavy-handed at times. There was nothing to be said in defence of the massacres or the disgraceful acts of terror in China, but he was convinced these were individual breakdowns in order and not the manifestation of a policy. As men they were all soldiers and mutually respectful of each other. He felt certain they would be fair-minded in victory. It was only a matter of time.

  He was really very thirsty.

  When the door was thrown open Harry was blinded momentarily by the intensity of the light. It had been nearly two days and his throat was too dry for him to speak. He bowed. The soldier held out a tin cup towards him. Harry reached for it and as his fingers touched the cool tin, the soldier pulled it away, emptying the water out on to the ground. Harry watched the water fizz momentarily as it drained into the earth. Believing it to have been an accident, Harry looked back up at the soldier – he was laughing at him. In that moment a new understanding overwhelmed him and his legs buckled. From the ground Harry felt the door swing closed again and he thought for the first time in his adult life that maybe the weight of the darkness would kill him.

  He closed his eyes.

  He was in his bedroom at home and his brother was holding the eiderdown over him and lying on top of it with all of his ten-year-old weight. He was suffocating. He couldn’t call out, the dense fabric was in his mouth. Roger bounced up and down, holding the cover tighter and tighter. There was no light. There was no air. There was nobody to hear him anyway. Nanny was in the kitchen and his parents were elsewhere, going about their urgent and mysterious lives. It was just him and Roger. And Roger was killing him. With superhuman effort eight-year-old Harry twisted out of his brother’s grasp and slid off the bed, gasping for breath. Cheated, Roger yelled a war cry.

  Harry ran out of the door, sliding on the linoleum, along the corridor and down the stairs. He was almost flying. The telephone was in the hallway. He picked it up.

  The operator’s voice, a distant echo, said, ‘Hello? Hello?’

  Harry rasped into the receiver, ‘Help. Police.’

  ‘Police?’

  ‘Yes. Police. They have to arrest my brother. He’s trying to kill me.’

  Roger had now reached him and Harry dropped the receiver and ran again. Out into the garden across the drive and on to the pale-green grass. Through the hydrangea beds, huge purple blooms swiping at his face, and finally out into the orchard. Panting and nauseous, Harry stopped. He waited, braced for the next attack, but oddly Roger didn’t come. Harry gradually calmed down. His pulse stopped racing. He could see the bare branches of the apple trees and he felt the sting of his twig-whipped shins.

  Later, it was impossible to tell how much later, Harry was hungry. He ventured back through the bushes. As he stepped on to the lawn he saw the car, black and shining in the weak autumn sunshine. This was confusing enough but he noticed that the passenger door was open and as he began to run he saw his father hunched over the steering wheel. When he was close enough to touch the door he stopped. Roger was lying on his father’s lap, his face buried, and he was howling a strange animal cry. His father glanced up with unseeing eyes. There were tears all over his face and running down his neck. Harry, terrified, turned and ran right back to the end of the orchard. He squeezed his small body as tight into the boundary wall as he could and, holding his knees to his chest, he willed his fear away. After a while he was distracted by a spider devouring a fly and he stayed there quite lost until he heard the heavy stamp of his father’s approach. The strangeness was confirmed when he saw that his father was walking through the mud between the trees in his city shoes. Harry stood up.

  He could never remember exactly what words were used but his father broke the news of his mother’s death with characteristic bluntness. And Harry did not know how to find a reaction to it. Empty and afraid, the little boy nodded. And the man, bereft and inadequate, turned on his city heels and walked back through the trees.

  Harry was brought back to reality by the blinding light from the door of the hut. When it cl
osed again, there was a basket lying on its side where it had been thrown.

  He crawled towards it, his bad arm useless. A ball had rolled out of it, and picking it up, he identified it as a peach. It wasn’t until he had bitten into it and felt the juice assuage the dryness of his throat that he was persuaded he wasn’t hallucinating. Despite knowing better he swallowed the velvet-skinned fruit almost whole. Then, still on his knees, he explored the basket, animated by a kind of desperation.

  There was a tub. Of what? Lard? Groping at the lid, his fingers were too weak to get purchase and twist it open. With one last effort he gritted his teeth. He levered the lid off. It spun out of his grasp and skidded over the dirt floor into a corner of the hut. He was about to discard the tub when he noticed that the label was peeling slightly. He held the unlikely tin close to his face. The label was definitely not secure. He lifted the edge and slowly peeled it back. There was a piece of skinny, pale-blue airmail paper hidden under the label. Harry carefully pulled out the delicate whisper from elsewhere and, holding it towards the ray of light that came from under the door, he read words that were as nourishing as food, in handwriting as familiar as his own.

  Darling, we’re fine. Plenty of milk supplies. Hal is bonny as hell and I’m fashionably slim. Be safe. We’re waiting for you.

  The door burst open. He put the note in his mouth and swallowed. Now the words would really be part of him. The flimsy paper dissolved almost without effort, as if designed to be disposed of in this way. He had time to half-rise from his knees before the open-handed blow from one of the soldiers threw him back on to his hands and knees. Looming above him, another of the men casually kicked him in the small of the back. Harry fell forward. The pain burned through him. He was on fire. Those swallowed words couldn’t protect his body from the onslaught. He thought maybe it would never end.

  Hal had cried himself to sleep but Lily couldn’t stop pacing. She walked up and down, up and down. She walked to keep herself calm, to prevent the fear from taking hold; its clammy hand hovered over her with every step she took across the yard. Across and back. When Chen sidled in through the gate and closed it tightly behind him she barely broke pace. She glanced at him long enough to ascertain that he was in one piece, then kept on walking.