by Peter Carey
Have you read any of it, John?
Do you recall the photograph, in the little shrine? I showed you. That was Bob McCorkle.
You believe that?
Yes.
You’re not being delusional?
This made him rather irritated. Well, how about this: we can say that the man in that photograph is Tina’s father.
John, I don’t think that’s true.
Not only is he the father, but the girl was with him when he wrote the bloody poetry. Don’t make faces, Micks. The book is hers, darling, no matter how you quibble. It is certainly not yours or mine. We have to give it back, even though you obviously don’t wish to. Remember what you said when you left her?
That I would find Chubb.
You know what she understood, that you were rescuing her book.
Oh, John, don’t be a beast. Please. I reached for the book but he moved it beyond my reach.
Sarah, you are behaving as if you are going to publish this work. Have you been sending wires to Antrim?
How do you know that?
Let’s say you were going to publish it, or some of it. You would have to deal with the estate, don’t you think?
Tina?
That’s her name, yes.
Do you think she would permit it to be published?
Would she permit it? Darling, you’re bonkers. Of course she would. Did you not see how proud those two women are of Mr Bob?
Whoever he is.
Yes, whatever.
Why didn’t they do it before?
They are hardly intellectuals. How could they know where to begin?
Just like Bob McCorkle’s sister.
What are you talking about?
I picked up my notebook and was able to quote him Beatrice McCorkle’s actual words: ‘I am not a literary person myself,’ I read, ‘and I do not feel I understand what he wrote, but I feel that I ought to do something about them.’ That is what Beatrice McCorkle wrote to Weiss.
What are you saying—that it’s a fake and therefore public property? If you want it, Sarah, you have got to ask permission. You can’t just steal it for the glory of the empire.
You did read my telegram.
I don’t give a fuck about your telegrams. You have to pay them the courtesy of making an offer.
Yes, but first I must read it.
I reached for the book, but he would not relinquish it.
Micks, listen. They are poor people in a bloody bicycle shop. You cannot treat them this way.
All right, I said, standing up. Come on.
Come on what?
Let’s do the business.
Now? They’ll have their door shut.
Then we’ll knock on it, I said.
And so, with Slater finally granting me possession of the book, we marched out into the night.
44
Of course I did not come to Jalan Campbell with the slightest intention of surrendering the poetry. I did not know how I would manage to retain it, only that I was an editor and that finally it must be mine. On entering the Moorish colonnade from the west end, I could see that the bicycle shop, far from being closed to me, was open wide, bright white neon flooding the footpath where the mad Mrs Lim and Tina sat sucking down their bowls of soup.
It will always feel far too familiar to call the girl Tina, for that would suggest an intimacy we will never share and a fondness I am very far from feeling. It is simply that I do not know her by any other name, not even now.
When I extended my hand to shake, she abandoned her soup to Mrs Lim and deftly, without a word yet spoken, snatched the volume from my grasp.
Jesus, I cried.
Slater immediately set a warning hand upon my shoulder, but when I turned to him for support he was completely passive, grinning like an idiot.
The hard-eyed thief—she was wearing the same white blouse and grey skirt which had earlier given such a girlish cast to her beauty—placed her booty on the top of the dusty glass display case and slowly checked each page—for what? Jam spots?
I asked her was anything missing.
She was solemn in return. Your orang puteh friend, she began.
My what?
She means Chubb, old girl. White man.
Yes, she said to me, your friend Mr Chubb stole a page last week.
She held out the book and I could see the butt of the missing page, presumably the ‘sample’ he had brought to the hotel.
You have bisnis with me, she said. Not him.
This at least was encouraging. I tried to smile, though I am not very good at that sort of thing and doubtless I looked as grotesque as a de Kooning. Well, I said, I am the editor of a poetry magazine.
Yes. Her eyes were dark, unblinking. But first, she said, I roll down the door. Please be quiet-lah. Better the old man stay asleep. Too angry otherwise.
Slater and I waited amongst the tangled bicycles while the two women rolled down the door and padlocked it. Then, without my having had a chance even to whisper my outrage to Slater, they switched off the long neon light and shepherded us through to the back of the store where a reedy breathing told me Christopher Chubb was asleep in that hard bed. The air was alive with oil and petrol, but as they led us to the stairs up which Mrs Lim had made her machete charge the smells began to change. Inside the shrine the air was once more scented with pine and sandalwood and that other lovely smell, the aroma of libraries in country houses, thousands of spinster books with their pages chastely jammed together.
Slater and I waited in the foreign darkness while the two women closed off the stairwell with what seemed to be a heavy trapdoor. I had a moment of claustrophobic panic and wondered where the machete was. But then they turned on the light and Mrs Lim set up two folding metal chairs, one in front of the other like on a bus.
You sit now.
I sat behind Slater as Tina stood before us holding the book against her breast. Mrs Lim stood a little to one side. She was unarmed. We have bisnis now, she said, making it sound actually threatening.
Slater turned around in his chair, rolling his eyes like a naughty school boy. Bisnis, he said to me.
Tina meanwhile gestured to the walls of books. This is our family, she said.
Oh dear, I thought. Please, no. This sort of reverence really makes me sick.
Our ancestor, Mrs Lim explained.
I was beginning to understand how tiresome this negotiation might prove to be. I wished there were someone I could roll my eyes at, but Tina had me pinned.
Bob McCorkle had his country stolen, she said. He came here, knew no names, nothing. Our job has been to gather all the names for him.
All the names, said Slater, how extraordinary. Do you really mean that, Tina? The mind boggles.
Of course Slater was making fun for my benefit, but at the same time he was succeeding in flattering her.
Bob McCorkle is the tree-ah, she said, we are the roots. These poems are the flowers. You know what I am saying? When that old man steals this book, he has broken the flowers from the tree. You understand?
I could have done without the metaphors but was very interested to note that Chubb was not thought to have written anything at all.
Slater was obviously noticing the same thing. So the poetry is yours, he said, to sell or not to sell?
We will never sell this book, she bristled, not ever. We would die first.
I was speechless, literally. How in the world could one deal with such an ignorant and stubborn little girl?
Yes, said Slater, but I am sure you would sell the right to publish the words in a book?
For answer she turned to me. Memsahib, you brought your magazine here. The Modern Review, isn’t it? When Mrs Lim gave it to me she said a lady wished to do some bisnis with me. Then you start to do bisnis with the old man. Maybe you thought you get it cheaper. Cheh! It is never his to sell.
Well, first I would like to actually read the poetry. I can’t talk about it before I know exactly what it is.
&nbs
p; Bob McCorkle is a genius, don’t worry.
Don’t you think that’s for me to decide?
Oh no, but you will be able to read soon. Mrs Lim and I have seen your magazine. What we could not know from that: how much money you would pay us?
I laughed. Tina, I’m afraid that poets don’t make very much money, nor their editors.
Yes. She smiled impatiently. But Bob McCorkle is a genius, isn’t it?
Even geniuses don’t make a lot of money.
She stared accusingly at John Slater. But you are rich.
Oh no, not at all.
I saw your hotel. You bought a suit, chocolates, nice clothes for me.
Nice clothes?
Well you see, dear, I have made some money writing novels. Bob McCorkle would not think well of me.
A genius would sell even more! She was close to tears.
Tina, I said, please. We must all relax. I will read the poems.
No, not please. You do not understand. Please, Mr Slater, she said, please turn around. Close your eyes.
Slater turned in his chair to face me, his face now rather pale and serious as he hissed, What is she doing?
I had thought she wanted privacy in which to weep but I was completely off the track for now, without a single word of excuse or explanation, with nothing more than the quiet rush of cotton brushing naked skin, the girl shed her skirt and blouse. My first thought was what a splendid, perfect body, sturdy yet refined, narrow waist but robust hips, nothing weak about her. But then I saw what she was showing me was not the mound of her pubis but the nature of her skin, which was mottled with scars as dense and as widely distributed as those on a rubber tree. It was not in the least disgusting, only strange, so strange in fact that it has never left my mind and I have spent considerable time since with books of tropical dermatology, examining gruesome photographs of trichophyton and miliaria and all the wood allergies for which the Malay Peninsula is famous. Most of these tend to present themselves as red and raw and ugly, whereas Tina’s skin appeared thickened, callused in places like the sole of a foot. The insides of her thighs showed a grey lace-like pattern that was alien and beautiful at once, as if not only her mind but also her body had been singed by the poet’s extraordinary will.
Slater was staring over my shoulder and I knew that he was looking at her reflection in the window.
Don’t, I said.
But then she was dressing, still speaking to me: We helped him make his poetry. We gave everything. Now we must have money.
How could I not be moved by that body—and angered by it too, to see it so abused and used by her protector. You must let me read the work, I said. I have to judge myself.
You will not be disappointed.
Without reading it I cannot discuss money with you.
She stared at me, not so much hostile as stubborn. Here, she said suddenly, thrusting the book upon me.
My hands once again responded to the disturbing organic softness of the thing.
You can read it now, she said.
Now?
In this room.
I can no more read under supervision than a dog can eat while being watched.
You see? Tina said.
At the best of times my attention flickers and fades, and in order to pay proper attention I require not only solitude and silence, but also a pen to help fix my skittering mind onto the page. And now, at what I hoped would be the most important reading of my life, I had to contend with Tina’s constant interruption, pacing feet, insects in my hair and ears, a tangled and eccentric handwriting and, not least, the panicked feeling that this might be my only chance to judge the work. It was like standing on a New York window ledge far above the street, the wind blowing, pages rattling.
But even here, in these appalling conditions, it was clear that this work was outside the law of taste and poesy. Whoever he was or had been, Bob McCorkle was indeed a genius. He had ripped up history and nailed it back together with its viscera on the outside, all that glistening green truth showing in the rip marks.
What a bloody battle it has been, and all through the combat the personae of the poet rage like a Hindu hero, many-limbed, a swirling figure, at once God and Fool. ‘Not a word was known to him and twenty four years gone.’ To say that the poet had attempted to create a country may sound simply glib, until you understand that this is exactly what he has done, and so deeply, and in such breadth that he sends you, as Pound will, back to the library of Babel, deep into the histories and theologies and dictionaries, like Hobson-Jobson with its treasury of jamboo, jumboo, lac, and kyfe. It was so far beyond what I had promised Antrim, ‘beyond’ in that it was previously unimaginable. This was worth being born for, this single giddy glimpse, on this high place, with the sound of my own blood singing in my ears.
It was with great reluctance that I gave up the volume to its custodians, who wished me not only to assess the financial value of the work but to listen to their own versions of the history. They were anxious to correct false impressions I may have gained from Chubb. Thus I was torn from the presence of this great book and transported back to the Kaya Kaya and the jungles of Perak. Not for the first time, I judged it politic to uncap my pen.
45
Mr Lim, of course, had been the one who had been killed by pirates. Hearing this story from Chubb, I had assumed that the jagged scars that marked Mrs Lim’s cheek and neck were the consequence of that same assault, but that night on Jalan Campbell I learned this was not true.
The murder of her husband was a total horror, and when his screams had finally ceased and she emerged from the bathing hut where she had hidden from the Ambonese, she discovered that they’d hacked his head and limbs from his body. There are more disgusting details. You will forgive me for omitting them.
The newlyweds had been mining for tin in the upper reaches of the Perak River and as they spoke only Hokkien they had very little communication with the Malays. After the murder, of which she was for a considerable time a suspect, she survived alone for almost two years, living here and there in temporary shelters. She became adept in fashioning the more substantial parts of these structures from nipa palm and rattan, and they were light enough for her to carry from place to place. Though people mostly seem to have been kind, she shrank from society, and at the Orang Kaya Kaya’s compound, for instance, would wait at the edge of the jungle until someone sent a boy out with a banana-leaf parcel of rice or some other food.
Then Mr Bob and Tina arrived and the two of them were almost immediately in the jungle, collecting leaves and flowers, and peeling bark and fibre to make paper for the journals.
They often came across Mrs Lim’s shelters, and Mr Bob would leave food for her. How long this went on for, I don’t know. Some weeks, I imagine.
Mrs Lim had meanwhile been observing the strange white man closely. Naturally she did not understand why he was hunting such inedible things, but she was determined to repay his kindness and therefore secured a gigantic orchid and left it for him in the middle of a path. The orchid’s petals were a dull purple streaked with red, but its peculiar character derived from the strange fat rhizome with which it had grasped the tree, giving the orchid the appearance of a flower-headed snake. That it was also foul smelling did not diminish its appeal to the poet.
Later the same evening, with the stinking flower already in the press, the Orang Kaya Kaya and the priest provided Mr Bob and Tina the four different names by which the tree is known. The Muslim priest, who had considerable botanical knowledge, admitted that he had known the species only from its legendary smell, for the flower itself grows in the very crown, two hundred feet above the jungle floor. This was the first indication of Mrs Lim’s climbing ability, although to call it ‘ability’ is to underplay the role of her extraordinary will.
We might imagine how the pair of them drew closer and ultimately became, unlikely as it might have seemed, a couple. Even before she was so cruelly disfigured, Mrs Lim was never comely. She was short and compact
. She had strong stout legs, a rather thick waist, and crooked lower teeth. Mr Bob, we have seen sufficient of—a tall man, handsome in a slightly wild and angry way. That this pair would become lovers might seem unthinkable, and yet it is so.
We can assume the child was jealous at first, but by the time she was rescued from the raja’s compound she and Mrs Lim were fiercely attached to each other. How this came about, I do not know.
Although the eccentric threesome was often fed and sheltered by villagers, for years they lived in the jungle and communicated in a private patois, woven together from English, Hokkien, and Bahasa Melayu. It was during this peripatetic period that they perfected the manufacture of the paper for the journals which would later line the walls of the musty smelling shrine at Jalan Campbell.
Based on the single volume I saw that evening—there were fifty of them altogether—it was immediately clear that the scope and ambition of the work far outweighed the ‘nature notes’ of any poet who ever lived. They were also clearly superior to the nineteenth-century accounts of Raffles and even of Wallace, and one can therefore rightly claim that Tina and Mrs Lim had been partners in one of the great projects of Malaysian natural history.
Leafing through that gorgeous volume, with its pressed flowers and leaves and, with greater frequency as the work develops, Tina’s lovely detailed drawings, I found it apparent that McCorkle’s desire to learn the names of things had developed into a full-blown mania, though it is perhaps unfair to give the name of a disease to such a voracious and enquiring mind.
That these books had travelled through the humid fungal rain forests of Malaya is hard to credit, for the jungle rots and discolours paper as brutally as it does human skin. These volumes, however, showed no signs of the incredible treks McCorkle had led from Kuala Trengganu in the north to Borneo in the south. No razor thorns or cassowary spurs here, no mention of the skin diseases or the event which left its dreadful marks on Mrs Lim.
This, it seems, occurred in November of 1960, by which time Malaya had won independence. Chin Peng and his comrades were still fighting their own revolution, however—reason enough to stay away from the densely forested valleys near the Thai border. But the strange little family had come here in search of the flowers of the casatta tree and that odd wire-barked shrub with the ugly name of ‘hustt,’ both of which were blooming by the rivers at this season. There was a stream not half a mile away from their campsite, though because its banks were walled with a tangle of rattans and other spiny creepers, they had not yet penetrated to the base of the casatta.