Key to the Door (37 page)

The youth kicked and struggled. Brian was gone, sent beyond the world and into a dream of primeval vicious light. “Stop it,” Pauline cried. “Stop it.” The words came to him, and his fist, liquid running over the stone of it, held still. “Yo' 'ed enough?” he demanded, releasing the head. The youth groaned and fell.

“Come on,” he said, “let's beat it.” She took his arm and they walked off. “You needn't a done that,” she said angrily. “He'd a gone in two minutes, I'm sure.” She slung his arm from her.

“You weren't courting?” he said.

“Course we worn't. He'd only been sitting with me a minute before you came. He asked me if he could tek me home, and I never answered him.” Brian kept quiet, and she said no more for a while, for which he was glad because he felt tears on his cheeks. He wanted to walk away and never see her again, to bury the shame he felt. A dark wave swamped him, but he needed even more to stay near her, to feel her close because the pain in his heart would then be less. It would tear him apart if he went on his own into the darkness. He kept telling himself to go back and see if the youth was O.K., yet at every genuine agonizing demand he was getting farther away. “I suppose he's all right?”

“I expect so,” she said, taking his arm again. Blood flowed through his pains, an evening on spec at the pictures had ended like this, and he was glad to have fought for this girl, whom he hadn't yet seen in full daylight, and won. “What's your name, duck?” he asked, pulling her to him in a kiss. A car droned by, lights dim towards town. “Pauline,” she said. When he got home and dipped his hands into a bowl of water, the water turned pink. Next morning his face was no sight for sore eyes.

In the drying-rooms Brian would pick up a reject piece of cardboard and test Bill on conventional signs, grid references, scales, and representative fractions, and on how to allow for magnetic variation in true and compass north. The board would become a mass of complex symbols, Chinese to anyone who didn't know what they meant, and Brian also taught him how to make a profile plan from a line across contours, explaining glibly the difference between vertical interval and horizontal equivalents. His knowledge had come from a manual of map-reading discovered one Saturday afternoon in the bookshop down town. He had studied the book passionately for a few weeks, but had forgotten it when his involvement with Pauline began, until Bill had blurted out one morning that he was having a hell of a bleddy time studying for Cert A because he couldn't make head nor tail of maps.

Bill also had volunteered for the double-time of flue-cleaning, but Brian, now working late into the afternoon and having cleared almost one whole side of the stoke-hold (fed up and dead to the wide, choked with soot and sweating like a pig), suspected he'd been set on an easier job, such as standing in the fresh air of the yard and hauling soot-buckets up on the rope, ready for the lorry. Or maybe not. He'd heard the gaffer say he was to help on the right-hand flue later because they hoped to finish it that day so's the stoker could light up straight away. If Bill's shirked, though, he'll get no more map-reading out o' me, the jump-up card. What a pal, though he's a bleddy sight better for a bloke than the no-good gaffers. All they want is higher production and more money in their pockets. They can afford to be patriotic; so would I be. Rawson's supposed to be the best of 'em, but even he's a bastard: Brian had lost his soft first hour of a morning because Rawson had seen and presumably disliked the words
SECOND FRONT NOW
along the bottom of his office map, Brian being told by the cleaning woman that another boy had been sent in from the factory to take his place. Which is all the thanks and appreciation I get for moving his pins to the proper places.

He swallowed a mouthful of dust and kept going, almost at the turning where he hoped to meet Bill Eddison coming up the other side. He was bitterly tired, as if someone or something were pressing cotton wool on to his eyelids, and the temptation to put down his shovel and go to sleep was hard to resist: it was the sort of acrid tiredness that afflicted him most afternoons with a softening of the limbs, a combat to keep his half-closed eyes from completely shutting off the active world. Usually it carried itself on with too much colour in the revealing glare of light or sun for him finally to ignore it, but now pitch darkness was allied to warmth and the soft breath-catching atmosphere of dust that he automatically shovelled into the shallow pan between his legs, and the natural urge was to curl up to the odorous bank of soft soot and say goodbye to the conscious world of his thoughts. But though the undermining desire was there, the words were not, and his fight against the desire gave the words no chance to break through. His simplified existence was kept in balance by the renewed swinging of his spade, its dig soundless when soot lay high, softer than butter to go through, like skimming the top of velvet. The noise was satisfying when bricks were reached, a muffled scooping of the steel blade along them. In some places near the back the soot had solidified into small porous balls, and here it was hottest, an intolerable climax of his flue-cleaning day.

He did a belly-crawl away from the front line every few minutes and lay on his back until hands and knees had cooled, then he rolled over and went forward again. I'll bet there aren't things much worse at sea. You might die quick there in a storm by drowning, but here you could easily snuff it by inches, of consumption—though God knows I can't say which is worse: a life on the treadmill or to be hung, drawn, and quartered. Thank God I don't have to take my pick. A shovel's all I need, so's I can dig myself out of a grave as well as into it like I've done today, or look like doing if I'm lucky and get cracking faster than I'm doing now. It's no good staying here too long, buried like a corpse in the dusty guts of Robinson's old factory, shovelling the gold of my heart out for all I know, hour after bleeding hour where I can't see a thing—though I expect I'd make a good collier. Even though I'm not small, I'm getting practice sticking a thing like this, so if I'm lucky I'll get to be a Bevin Boy instead of being sent to fight the Germans, though I'd rather do neither but go my own way to Kingdom Come.

He was working faster than he'd done all day, driven by some inner motor to a higher speed instead of slackening off, slicing the spade into the last few feet of soot to be cleared, scooping it into the pans, and using the flat of his hand as a sweeping brush to gather into a heap what the spade was too clumsy to reach.

The day had gone: he hadn't seen it get light and wouldn't see it get dark. I'd go off my loaf if it was like this every day. It occurred to him that he was working too fast, heart racing and throat bone-dry, arms aching too much to control. Why? he wondered. What for? he asked himself. Come on, can you tell me that? Why are you going so mad-headed? Why don't you take your sweat, you barmy bleeder? He had already stopped, pushed back the pans, and lay full length, a blissful going like a pint of thick mild into his limbs. What's the point of going so hard? If you don't finish today, you'll finish tomorrow.

But he wanted to get out of the earth, to see daylight and smell fresh air, to walk in the wind-thumped streets even if only to see the odd star above dark rooftops, to be out, away, a thousand miles off. He opened his eyes: “I'll leave this putrid firm. I'll get my release and go somewhere else, even if I have to bike five miles there and back every day. I've had enough of this, one way or another.” The thought made him happy and his spade scooped at the wall of soot. Between lying half-asleep and a refreshed burst of action, his mind had been blank; he wasn't aware of thinking about getting back to work or making a decision—but a spark of life had exploded in his limbs and he was going forward even faster, ripping away the obstacle to he didn't know where.

A spade that didn't belong to him flew past his face and chipped a piece out of the brickwork, and suddenly Bill Eddison's voice bellowed a foot away from the blackness in front: “Well, if it ain't owd Brian! We've finished the bleeding thing at last.” They threw their arms around each other, and went on laughing in their victory.

CHAPTER 19

Alone in the camp library, a mug of tea at his elbow just left by the char-wallah, he unrolled an outline survey map of Pulau Timur. A fresh batch of radio operators had been flown up from Singapore, and fourteen days' leave at Muka holiday camp had at last been handed out to him. He felt fresh after a shower, not yet sweat-soaked from the uprisen sun, dressed in immaculate white shirt and shorts brought back by the Chinese dhobi woman an hour since: his finger traced the coast up from Muong and stopped at Muka—a palm-lined bay facing Gunong Barat across the few miles of flat, variously marked blues of the water. Between swigs of tea his eyes roamed the map: printed in 1940, he noticed, a time for history books—over the hill and far away, an iceberg melted by the ever-turning suns of time, a year he remembered vividly as the date when his cousins Colin and Dave one by one went into the army and one by one, after a few weeks, came out again. He watched them return when everybody else seemed to be going, a strange thing, though underneath his quiet curiosity at their khaki uniforms draped over a chair-back like the skin-trophy of some animal was a profound and unquestionable certainty that they were doing something right and good. Ada helped them, and so did the rest, for both climate and tradition were right for it. Out of a dozen able-bodied men in all remotely connected branches of the family, only two went into the army and stayed, and one was killed in Tunisia. “I told you so,” was the verdict of the rest, who either deserted or found their way into some sort of reserved occupation. It must be a record, Brian thought, for one family. Nobody can say we didn't do our bit for freedom; though what I'm doing here I don't know—except that there isn't a war on.

His world and everybody else's had changed since then, and it had been about time, though his life at the moment seemed like an island set aside from the main coastline of his well-trod continent. Malaya was an interlude, he felt, and he was set out in the blue, like the song that had been sweeping and saturating the country for the past six months: “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” records of it being played in the cafes, whistled, sung, let forth like opium from wireless sets. On Radio Malaya's request programme it was called for by dozens of people, Malays, Chinese, British, week by week, an inundation of names so that eventually the announcer didn't bother to read the list but just let the sugary music fill out over the country. For weeks also Brian hadn't been able to cut it from his mind. One minute he liked the tune, then hated it, but whistled it unknowingly as he crossed the airstrip every morning, walking from the control tower with waterbottle and haversack swinging against his thighs, crossing the burning runway into the scrub-waste of the other side—out, it seemed, into the middle of nowhere, with the blue horizon burning all round.

But in the emptiness a square patch of ground had been cleared and set off for a new DF hut, and it was his work to help two mechanics unpack a straddle of enormous crates and fit hut sides, roof, and aerials into position. The three of them laboured all day in the sun, stripped to the waist and burned brown. The new hut would be a luxury box compared to the old one, set on dry ground and fed by electricity through a half-buried cable alongside a new track that would take lorries right up to the door. The station when finished and fully rigged would be operated day and night, a twenty-four-hour watch whether planes were up or not—though Brian knew that no one would give a sod about a nod or two of sleep at the deepest pitch of the morning. For weeks there had been talk of building a new DF hut, and now, out of the weak-willed climate, one had arrived and was being knit together by plan and numbers as if it were a Meccano set. A new PBX had been set up as well, and several radar devices installed in the runway. There was even talk of replacing the antique control tower by an indestructible skyscraper. The airstrip was being tarted up for a night out—as if for a war or something, Brian thought, a cramp in his guts at the idea of it. Everyone was busier on the camp also, giving it an alien breath of being there for some purpose, which it hadn't possessed when he first arrived. He noticed it caught in the increased rush at meal-times, in the latrines when in a hurry for a shower before dashing off to see Mimi, in the signals section when more channels were being worked than ever before, or in the new smartness of those who worked in the long headquarters hut. Sometimes you'd think a bloody war was already on, except that he felt the main combat as yet to be between himself and the threat of discipline emanating from HQ. The shift workers of the signals section were the last to be touched by it: they were excused all parades and guard duties, allowed in late for meals on production of a chit, which any enterprising wireless operator could take from the signals officer's drawer and sign himself. If the orderly officer came through the billet late in the morning and wanted to know why he was dead to the world and tight-rolled in his sheet, he grunted from under his net that he'd been on watch the night before—so that the OO walked on, a bit quieter, if anything. The seven months' hard studying for a sparks badge certainly paid off.

It was a simple map, and easy to memorize. He sat back in a wooden armchair to drink his tea, and wait in peace until the lorry drew up at eleven to take a gang of them across to the island. A fortnight's leave had been something to anticipate and when that was over he could look forward to operating the new DF hut, and then something else would turn up, and finally he would find himself on the boat chopping the blue waves back to England. Time went faster when there were agreeable events to hope for—when they arrived you noticed that the intervening weeks or months had been killed mercilessly stone-dead, hadn't even the value in memory of the sloughed-off dried skin of a snake.