Empire of the Sun (12 page)

‘You know, kid, you have a talent for getting on people’s nerves. How is it the Japs haven’t picked you up? You must be quick on your feet.’

‘I tried to surrender,’ Jim explained. ‘But it isn’t easy. Do you and Basie want to surrender?’

‘Like hell – though I don’t know about him. I’m trying to get Basie to buy a sampan so we can sail upriver to Chungking. But Basie keeps changing his mind. He wants to stay in Shanghai now the Japs are here. He thinks we can make a pile of money once we get to the camps.’

‘Do you sell a lot of portholes, Frank?’

Frank peered at Jim, still unsure about this small boy. ‘Kid, we haven’t sold a single one. It’s Basie’s game, like a drug, he needs to keep people working for him. Down in the yard somewhere he has a bag of gold teeth that he sells in Hongkew.’ With a knowing smile, Frank raised an oil-stained spanner, and touched Jim’s chin. ‘It’s a good thing you don’t have any gold teeth, or – ‘ He snapped his wrist.

Jim sat up, remembering how Basie had searched his gums. The sound of the truck’s motor vibrated through the metal cabin. He was wary of these two merchant seamen, who had somehow escaped the Japanese net around Shanghai, and realized that he might have as much to fear from them as from anyone else in the city. He thought of Basie’s secret bag of gold teeth. The creeks and canals of Nantao were full of corpses, and
the
mouths of those corpses were full of teeth. Every Chinese tried to have at least one gold tooth out of self-respect, and now that the war had begun their relatives might be too tired to pull them out before the funeral. Jim visualized the two American seamen searching the mud-fiats at night with their spanners, Frank rowing the dinghy along the black creeks. Basie in the bows with a lantern, prodding the corpses that drifted past and exposing their gums…

12
Dance Music

This fearful image dominated the three days that Jim was to spend with the American sailors. At night, as Basie and Frank slept together under the quilt, he lay awake on his pile of rice sacking beside the charcoal stove. Reflected from the portholes and brass handrails, the embers gleamed like gold teeth. When he awoke in the mornings Jim would feel his jaw, to make sure that Frank had not removed one of his molars out of cussedness.

During the day Jim sat on the funeral pier and acted as lookout while Frank rowed to the scuttled freighters. When he began to shiver Jim returned to the cabin and lay under the quilt as Basie sat in the Imperial Airways deck-chair and made wire toys from old pipe cleaners. Basie had served as a cabin steward on the Cathay-American Line, and he treated Jim to the same patter and parlour tricks with which he had amused the young children of his passengers. He made the same effort to ensure that Jim ate his morning and evening meals, while endlessly questioning him about his mother and father. To a large extent Basie had modelled himself on the women passengers he had served, forever powdering themselves in the heat as they lit their cigarettes.

Every afternoon they set off together in the truck and toured the Chinese markets in Hongkew. Here Basie would haggle for a sack of rice and a few pieces of fish, trading packets of French cigarettes from the store of cartons under his bed. At times he would tell Frank to bring Jim over to the vendor’s stall, where the Chinese trader would soberly inspect Jim before shaking his head.

It soon became clear to Jim that Basie was trying to sell him to the traders. Too tired to resist, he sat in the truck between the two Americans, like one of the chickens which the Chinese women carried beside them on the seats of the trams. Already he felt unwell most of the time, but his potential value at least assured him of the meals of boiled fish. Eventually the Chinese traders would realize that a few yen could be made by reporting them to the Japanese.

Meanwhile he avoided Frank’s heavy hands, ransacked his mind for the unusual words which Basie liked to hear him use, and regaled the cabin steward with tales of the grand houses in Amherst Avenue. Jim invented lives of wholly imaginary glamour which he claimed his parents had led. Basie never ceased to be fascinated by these accounts of Shanghai high life.

‘Tell me about their swimming-pool parties,’ Basie asked as they waited for Frank to start the engine before their last visit to Hongkew market. ‘I imagine there was a lot of…gaiety.’

‘Basie, there certainly was gaiety.’ Jim remembered the hours he had spent alone trying to retrieve the half-crown, gleaming at the bottom of the pool like one of Basie’s teeth. ‘They had liqueur chocolates, a white piano, whisky and soda. And conjurors.’

‘Conjurors, Jim?’

‘I think they were conjurors…’

‘You’re tired, Jim.’ As they sat in the truck Basie put an arm around Jim’s shoulders. ‘You’ve been thinking too much, all those new words.’

‘I’ve used up all my new words, Basie. Is the war going to end soon?’

‘Don’t worry, Jim. I give the Japs three months at the outside.’

‘As soon as that, Basie?’

‘Maybe a little more. It takes a long time to start a war, people have a big investment to protect. Like Frank and me and this truck.’

It had never occurred to Jim that anyone might want the war to continue, and he puzzled over the bizarre logic as they set out for Hongkew. They bumped along the dirt road behind the shipyards, through a desolate area of empty godowns, garbage tips and burial mounds. Beggars lived beside the canals in hovels constructed from truck tyres and packing cases. An old woman squatted by the foetid water, scrubbing out a wooden toilet. Gazing down from the safety of the truck, Jim felt sorry for these destitute people, though only a few days earlier his plight had been even more desperate
than
theirs. A strange doubling of reality had taken place, as if everything that had happened to him since the war was occurring within a mirror. It was his mirror self who felt faint and hungry, and who thought about food all the time. He no longer felt sorry for this other self. Jim guessed that this was how the Chinese managed to survive. Yet one day the Chinese might emerge from the mirror.

When they crossed Nantao Creek into the French Concession they saw the first Japanese patrol, guarding the checkpoint on the northern end of the steel bridge. But Basie and Frank seemed unafraid of the armed soldiers –Americans, Jim had noticed, were not easily impressed by anyone. Frank even sounded his horn at a Japanese soldier who strolled into the road. Jim crouched below the dashboard, expecting them to be shot, but the Japanese waved them on with a surly stare, perhaps assuming that Frank and Basie were White Russian workmen.

For the next hour they toured the Hongkew markets, past the hundreds of barking dogs in their bamboo cages, not only the Chinese table-mongrels but spaniels and dachshunds, red setters and airedales released into the hungry streets of Shanghai by their allied owners. Several times they stopped for Basie to get out and approach a Chinese stall-holder, talking in his fluent dockside Cantonese. But no portholes or gold teeth changed hands.

‘Frank, what’s Basie trying to buy?’

‘It looks like he’s more interested in selling.’

‘Why can’t Basie sell me?’

‘Nobody wants you.’ Frank flicked the half-crown he had stolen from Jim’s pocket, and snapped it in his heavy hand. ‘You’re worth nothing. What do you think you’re worth?’

‘I’m worth nothing, Frank.’

‘You’re skin and bone. Soon you’re going to be sick all the time.’

‘If they did buy me, what would they do with me? They couldn’t eat me, I’m skin and bone.’

But Frank declined to answer. Basie climbed into the truck, shaking his head. They left Hongkew and crossed the Soochow Creek into the International Settlement. They drove along the main streets, losing themselves in the traffic on the Avenue Foch, following the slow, clanking trams through the wheel-to-wheel tide of pedicabs and rickshaws.

Jim tried to guide them towards the residential suburbs in the west of Shanghai, telling them about the fine houses filled with billiard tables, whisky and liqueur chocolates. But he guessed that Basie and Frank were killing time before dusk. Soon after six o’clock the light withdrew from the façades of the apartment houses in the French Concession. The two sailors wound up their windows. Frank left the Bubbling Well Road and set off into the unlit Chinese districts of north Shanghai.

‘Frank, you’re going the wrong way –’ Jim tried to point out. But Basie pressed the back of his powdered hand against Jim’s mouth.

‘Quiet, Jim. Silence is a good friend to a boy.’

Jim rested his swaying head against Basie’s shoulder. They embarked on a rambling journey through the narrow streets. Hundreds of Chinese faces pressed against the windows as they edged between the rickshaw and buffalo carts. Jim felt hungry again, and the endless bumping of the wheels over the disused tramlines made him giddy. He wished that they would return to Nantao, to the charcoal-stove with its pot of rice.

An hour later, Jim woke to find that they had reached the western suburbs of Shanghai. The last of the sun touched the rooftops of the Columbia Road. As they cruised past the parked Opels and Buicks of the German compound Basie pointed to the unoccupied houses.

Jim revived, and blew into his hands to warm them. They had completed a pointless circuit of the city, but he realized that he had tempted these devious men with his chatter about the grand life. Like a courier with a party of gullible tourists, he began a commentary on the houses in which he had camped during the past two months.

‘That has whisky and gin, Basie. That has whisky and gin and a white piano – no, just whisky.’

‘Never mind the alcohol. Frank and I aren’t planning to open a bar. Were you a choirboy, Jim? We’ll stand you on the white piano, you can sing “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.’

‘That has a cinema,’ Jim continued. ‘And that one is full of teeth.’

‘Teeth, Jim?’

‘It belonged to a dentist. Maybe there are gold teeth, Basie.’

They turned into Amherst Avenue and drove past the deserted mansions. The electricity supply to the street was still disconnected, and the houses in their overgrown gardens seemed even more sombre in the early evening, stranded here like the scuttled freighters in the boom. But Basie stared at them with obvious respect, as if his years as a cabin steward on the Cathay-American Line had taught him the true worth of these beached hulks. Clearly he was glad to be associated with Jim.

‘You had good sense, Jim, being born here. I admire a boy who appreciates a good home. Anyone can pick his own parents, but to have the sense to see beyond that…’

‘Basie…’ Frank interrupted this reverie. They had stopped under the trees two hundred yards from the entrance to Jim’s drive.

‘Right, Frank.’ Basie opened his door and stepped into the road. There were no Japanese patrols, and the Chinese bodyguards had retreated behind their walls for the evening. Basie pointed to a narrow cul-de-sac that ran between uncut privet hedges towards one of the houses.

‘Jim, time to stretch our legs. Take a stroll up there and see if anyone’s playing that white piano.’

Jim listened to the low but stressed sound of the truck’s engine. Frank sat back in a casual way, but his huge foot was poised above the accelerator. Basie’s pallid face hung like a lantern below the trees. Jim knew that they planned to leave him there. Having failed to sell him to the Chinese traders, they would abandon him to the avenues of the Shanghai night.

‘Basie, I…’ Frank had placed a hand on his shoulder, ready to hurl him into the road. ‘Could we go to my house? It’s even more luxuriant.’

‘Luxuriant?’ Basie savoured the word in the grey air. He gazed at the houses around them, at the Tudor gables and white modern façades, at the replica chateaux and the haciendas with green tiled roofs.

He climbed aboard, and held the door to the frame without engaging the lock. ‘All right, Frank, we’ll look at Jim’s house.’

They moved forward under the trees, and turned into the unguarded drive. As they approached the silent house Jim could see that Basie was disappointed. He eased open the door, ready to seize Jim and throw him out on to his own steps.

Jim clung to the dashboard, and at that moment two figures stepped from the entrance porch. They wore white gowns, with deep sleeves that floated from their arms. Jim was sure that his mother had come home and was greeting one of her guests.

‘Basie! They’re Japs…’

Jim heard Frank shouting, and saw that the two figures were off-duty Japanese soldiers in their military kimonos. The soldiers had seen them, and were bellowing at the open door. A uniformed sergeant emerged from the kerosene light that filled the hall. He stood on the top step, a Mauser holster against his stocky thigh. Frank was trying to reverse the truck when the soldiers in the kimonos jumped on to the running boards and struck with their fists at the glass. Two more soldiers carrying bamboo staves ran down the steps of the porch.

As the engine stalled, Jim felt himself pulled from the truck and hurled to the ground. Japanese in kimonos were running from the house, like a party of outraged women fresh from their baths. Jim sat on the sharp gravel between the polished boots of the Japanese sergeant, whose angry thighs rapped, against his holster. The soldiers had trapped Frank within the cabin of the truck. His legs kicked out as they lunged at him with their bamboo staves, striking his bloody face and chest. Two soldiers watched from the steps of the house, taking turns to punch Basie who knelt at their feet in the drive.

Jim was glad to see the Japanese. Through the open doorway he could hear, between the heavy blows and Frank’s cries, the scratchy sounds of a Japanese dance band playing on his mother’s picnic gramophone.

13
The Open-Air Cinema

His arms warmed by the spring sun, Jim rested comfortably in the front row of the open-air cinema. Smiling to himself, he gazed at the blank screen twenty feet away. For the past hour the blurred shadow of the Park Hotel had been moving across the white canvas. After a long journey through the godowns and tenement blocks of Chapei, the shadow of the neon sign above the hotel had at last reached the screen. The immense letters, each twice the height of the young Japanese soldier patrolling the stage, moved from left to right at a brisk pace, incorporating the silhouette of this slim sentry and his rifle in a spectacular solar film.