Authors: Alan Sillitoe
The bed creaked as she faced him more fully, her coal-like eyes shining with concern: “You think you're living in a peaceful country then?”
He smiledâfor the benefit of himself. It seemed peaceful enough: tigers, snakes, and a no-good climate, but what did that matter? “It's O.K.,” he said. “Just take things in your stride, then you'll be all right. I ain't been in the jungle yet, but I might even do that soon. Some of us on the camp are thinking of climbing up to Gunong Barat to see what mountain jungle is really like. Uphill all the way, I suppose.” He remembered seeing Pulau Timur for the first time, an island viewed from twenty miles and six thousand feet away as the Avro 19 roared high along the coastal swamps up from Singapore. Pulau Timur was an inanimate crumple of green hills lying in bright blue sea just off the mainland, looking from so high like the plasticine relief models he used to make at school, glittering under the light-bulb of the midday sun.
The Avro closed in low over its port of Muong, climbed the wooded hills behind, and threw a shadow on empty sea to the west. Brian's stomach didn't turn willingly with the plane, whose belly seemed to scrape a hilltop when it turned back over the island and descended for a run-in across the two-mile straits. Down over blue water, the runway was like a glistening slice of canal, widening between trees in front. He saw sand under the water, a couple of sampans hastening out of the way, fishing traps sticking from the surface like knives ready for the plane's belly, then a long sandy beach passed in a yellow line on either side and the engines dipped ominously. This was the moment of fear, when science seemed to desert them and silence take over. Brian looked to the left and saw a huge mountain far off to the north, its grandiose peak pointing skywards, indicating a direction that he'd never before taken note of. The isolation of it reached to something in himself, the solid independent greyness beyond heat and cold, halfway into another world that attracted him, in a few seconds, more than anything else ever had. The far side of the moon seemed as familiar as his own cousin compared to this new dimension of life glimpsed far off beyond the water and coastal swamps. Then the vision went as engines roared and the plane passed over a tarmac road along the shore where cars, lorries, and bullock carts waited for its descent, rolled by a few wooden buildings, palms, ramshackle control tower, until a bump and jerk brought it on to the runway and gave him a feeling of relief to have landed. A few evenings later he stood on the beach watching the sky above Pulau Timur, orange, yellow, green, and bloody colours streaked like a horizontal waterfall over the hills, stretching south to north and boiling away towards Siam and Burma. Palm-trees bent over the water, and night fires burned in fishing villages, pointing to the mountain he had seen from the plane. He had discovered its name: Gunong Baratâthe mountain of the westâand seen its height marked on a map as four thousand feet. It stood separate from the main range of Malaya, a series of peaks and humpbacks divided by forest, filled gullies, and watercourses, culminating in one pinnacle that dominated the landscape for miles. On nights of full moon its sharp ridges stood out as if it were an island, rearing up from mangrove swamps, king of the small towns and paddy fields of the coastal plain, far more complex in structure, he saw, than had appeared in one simple glimpse from the plane window. He hoped to be able to climb it, but didn't suppose the opportunity would ever arrive. It was twenty-four miles north of the camp, covered in thick jungle, trackless, and, he thought, probably wouldn't be worth climbing anyway. “I don't know what you want to go up there for,” Mimi said. “Nobody lives there.”
“How do you know? I've heard that right on top is a caff where they sell cream buns and coffee, run by a bloke from Yorkshire. He's been there thirty years and don't get much trade because everybody thinks nobody lives up there.”
“You're pulling my leg,” she laughed. “But you don't know what I mean. There's going to be a lot of fighting in Malaya because people don't like the British being here. There'll be a war.” He knew there might, having read in newspapers of murders on rubber estates, of people being shot for mysterious reasons that the newspapers couldn't fathom. Not long after coming up from Singapore, he asked a telephone corporal why it was still necessary to put
ON ACTIVE SERVICE
across all letters, and he replied that the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army, supplied with arms during the war by the British, had now turned awkward and didn't want to give them back, were in fact becoming an anti-British army because they wanted independence. “And it'll get worse,” the corporal said, a prophet who knew everything. “There'll be such a bloody bust-up one day, I only hope I'm not here to see it, though I suppose it's my luck I will be.”
“Well,” Brian said lightly, “maybe I'll just go back to England as soon as I can and take a nice safe job in some factory or other. Then I'll be able to send you them books on sex I promised you.” He pulled the sheet gently down and caressed her. “I don't want to go back, though. I want to stay here for keeps.”
“This isn't any good for you. What will happen when the fighting starts? Everybody thinks that a Communist army is going to come out of the jungle and kill the British. Nobody can stop them, they think. And maybe a lot of Chinese and Malays will get killed as well.”
“I don't know. Anyway”âhalf facetious and seriousâ“I'm a Communist, so maybe I'll be all right.”
“You shouldn't joke.”
“I'm not joking. You ask me to tell you something about England, don't you?” He lit cigarettes. “The smoke'll scare the insects away. I come from a scruffy old house in Nottingham, and before the war I remember seeing my old man cryingâin tearsâbecause he was out o' wok and unemployed. He hadn't worked for years, and there was never any dough and hardly enough grub in the house. The kids were better off, mind you, because they had free milk and a hot dinner every dayâthey had to mek sure we'd be fit for the war and to fight Communists, the sly bastards. It's a bit better now, but why should I be against the Communists?”
“I don't know,” she said; “but you are, aren't you?”
“That's what you think.”
“All the rest of the British are.”
“Don't be so sure. I'm not. I can tell you that. I've got a mind of my own.” His serious mood was shattered by Mimi's serious face, by some air bubble that broke in the bloodstream of his imagination. “So if you know any true-red Communist wants to buy a Sten gun and fifty rounds of ammunition, tell 'im I've got one. If he can't afford to buy it all at once, he can pay me ten dollars a week. Or a crate of Tiger Beer now and again.”
“You're crazy,” she laughed. “I've never met anyone so crazy.”
“I'm a no-good loon, and that's why you love me, i'n't it?” he said, kissing her mouth, neck, and breasts, pressing her scarcely perceptible nipples in a black rage of passion, a bolt of lightning forcing his hand around the back of her. She broke away and reached for a dressing-gown: “Get undressed. I'll fetch some tea, and we can drink it in the dark.”
Silence was the melting away of a stockade that released his thoughts. They came like pictures from the past, less clear than reality, though more definite than dreams, but at the same time more tribal than thoughts, let in by a disabled present. The darker, more tangible tide of Nottingham streets and people sent tentacles to the jungled hills of Malaya, assailing him at their own select times, sometimes infecting him with the poison needle of nostalgia, though often with a whirlpool of dislike and determination never to go back there if he could help it, to let its huge sprawling mark shrink and rot in some far-off lumbered-up corner of his memory. Reactions were strong because at twenty the future did not exist: present passions were based on what had gone before, and Nottingham found it easy to jostle Malaya from his brain.
He unbuttoned his shirt, sat listlessly on the bed waiting for her to come back. Unlike in the wireless hut, he hated to be alone hereâas if dangerous ghosts were waiting to spring from each corner. It was a strange room, too filled with the personality of someone and something else, a staging post through which many peoples had gone before. He smiled: well, you couldn't blame anybody for that. It smelt of perfume and perspiration, talcum powder and musk from the outside trees, blended with a subdued odour of Patani mud and joss. His hand touched the bed where Mimi's warm body had lain, and he lay back deeper in a foreign land than he'd ever imagined and smiled to think he hadn't been far wrong when he swore to grandad Merton as a kid that he'd go one day to Abyssinia. I expect he'd a bin satisfied wi' this, right enough. “The dirty young bogger,” he'd have said. “Trust 'im to get 'old of a woman as soon as 'e gets there! He's a chip off my block, all right.”
The tray made a faint rattling along the veranda, night music muted by the soft tread of her returning bare feetâcareful for splinters in the worn boards. He listened in a daze, as if the sounds concerned only some far-off neighbour of himself, was abstracted and motionless almost until she reached the door; then, still without waking, merely as if his state of abstraction had quickened, he slipped off his shorts and pulled the sheet over him, reaching for a cigarette to which the match flared as Mimi's hand put out the light. The last sight as he lay back at ease was of the gecko shooting forward and devouring a mosquito that had been whining up to then around the room for blood. The skin behind his shoulder itched slightly, so he was sure the mosquito had had plenty, and he grinned at the thought of part of himself being twice removed in the depths of another gut, like that far-fetched tale about Jonah fast in the raps of a whale.
She set the tray on the floor, and he felt her breathing as she bent over to give him tea. “Marvellous,” he said as they drank. “I'm croacking to death.” She crouched by the bed, laying the tea aside after one sip, and putting her arm on him. “Brian, Brian,” she whispered. There was no tone in the words, and he didn't understand them. “What's up?” he said loudly. “You think the bullfrogs'll get yer?” His tea had gone in one gulp. “I can't tell what I think,” she said. “Neither can I,” he answered, disturbed because he knew he should be able to. Maybe he could, yet wouldn't. Thinking was like swimming under water: you have to develop a knack of doing so while holding your nose so that you don't drown. If you couldn't think sometimes, you floated, but that was no good, for all the colours and delights of the world were often under the surface: rocks and seaweeds, watersnakes and fantastic fishesâdreams and cartwheels of the imagination. But he couldn't swim under the water at will: mostly, when he tried, his lungs and ears seemed ready to explode, and he surfaced quickly to get out of danger. Sometimes, though, he stayed under long enough to enjoy sights and sensations, and he felt that if he concentrated on breaking over the effort and fear he would eventually be able to master it. Thought was like this, almost as impossible to master as the water, yet always drawing him as if holding out the promise that one day he would be able to descend safely into his own mind, much farther down than he was able to now.
His hand roved up and down her, along the smooth skin of a backbone that seemed well marked because he couldn't see it. She laughed: “I've got you in a hurry at last.”
“I was thinking,” he said, half teasing her but keeping his hand around. “I'm always in a hurry, you know that. We've been 'ere hours already, and I've got to get back soon.”
“It's silly,” she said, “and sad for me.” He didn't know whether she meant it or not, but couldn't care now because she stood up and put off her dressing-gown, and he knew them both to be enflamed and ready, feeling her hand at his groin as she lay beside him. The sensation turned him into a lion of kisses, and his past and present merged and were conquered so that there weren't two places on the earth for him but one, united by the flames and aches that both of them were scorched with, streets and green jungle joined into one moment of now.
“You're my love,” he said, “and this is the only way I can really understand you.” Maybe time and places were joined for her, too. “I love you, I said.” Silence between themâMimi never spoke when they made love: words stood no chance against the orgiastic working of her limbs and body.
Both were still, as if drawing breath before the fire. Life in the trees outside was a roar over their peace, filling the room with sounds, bullfrogs mating, crickets by the thousand spinning miniature klaxons as if at some voiceless football match, and the dull and distant noise of breakers burying grey heads in the sand at all they had seen below them on their journey across the shameless seaâthe common speech of the night air in Malaya.
He lifted his body and thrust forward.
CHAPTER 18
I've only to say I hate Nottingham, he thought with a silent ironic laugh, for all the years it's put on me to come into my mind as clear as framed photos outside a picture-house. He was in Radford at fifteen, going to work on Easter Sunday to clean the boilers and chimney flues while the fires were out, a volunteer because double-time was paid and he was saving up for a bike. One and five an hour instead of eightpence ha'penny was corn in Egyptâor would be if you got it all the time. He left the house while the night was black, making his way along silent streets at half-past five, avoiding deadheaded lamp-posts for fear of knocking himself flat. A fine rain fell and he pulled up his coat collar, shivering at the sudden impact of water, yet happy because he hadn't far to walk. Seaton had told him not to go in: “You don't need the money all that much, my lad; and you'll work hard enough when you're older.” He recognized the onus of unnecessary overtime that Brian was going into blithely, and took on his own shoulders and into his own heart the distaste his lad should have felt but couldn't. To Brian it seemed a step forward, to work when hardly anybody else was and win the self-esteem of double-time.