The Rice Paper Diaries (15 page)

‘Enjoying the view?’ I say to him, shifting Mari onto the blanket so she can crawl around.

‘Yes, not bad.’

He’s so insipid. Makes you wonder what he’d say if he were lined up in front of a firing squad.
Yes, thanks
.
Not bad. So-so.
Some nights I wake up in a sweat and determine to go over there to Bungalow D with a knife from the kitchens and slit his bloody throat. Maybe I will, yet, once the garden’s summer crop is over and done with.

‘Ta
-
da, Ta
-
da!’ Mari has found a white pebble and is waving it at me with one hand. She loses her balance and falls over. She opens her mouth to cry.

‘Here you go, Mari,’ Oscar says. He picks up a twig and scrapes out a pattern in the sand. ‘Look, isn’t it pretty?’

‘Pitt
-
y,’ Mari says. She takes the twig and scrapes her own line in the sand. ‘Pitt
-
y.’

Elsa is swimming now. I can see her arms lifting rhythmically in and out of the water. She is moving further and further away from the land. On the beach, one of the guards is nudging his colleague and pointing.

‘What’s Elsa up to?’ Oscar sits up and puts a hand over his eyes, scanning the horizon. ‘She’s too far out.’

‘She’ll be all right,’ I say, passing another twig to Mari, who sits up on her bottom and starts drumming the earth with both of them. ‘Ta
-
da, ta
-
da. Ta
-
da. Pitt
-
y.’

I pick up a handful of sand and run it through my fingers to amuse her.

‘But she’s such a long way out,’ Campbell says again. He looks orange from top to bottom in this heat, with his hair and freckles and burned skin. Sweat is running off his forehead.

‘I told you,’ I say
.
‘She always comes back.’

‘If you say so.’ He leans back on the sand, but he is still peering out over the water to where her head bobs up and down.

Two of the guards are walking down the beach, kicking sand with their boots. Oscar is sitting up again.

‘Elsa,’ he says.

His fear is infectious. Other people are starting to look in the same direction, murmuring to each other. Children run into the water, pulling each other’s arms and pointing. Mari starts to cry, not a baby’s cry for milk, but a loud toddler’s urgent yell, right in my face. I move away from her on the blanket, but she follows me around from corner to corner, yelling and screaming. ‘Ta
-
da. Ta
-
da!’ and waving a stick in my face, almost poking my eye out.

‘Mari!’ I say, and take the twig off her. She starts bawling then.

One of the guards has walked into the shallows. The water is over his boots and halfway up to his knees, seeping through his trousers.

‘Ta
-
da!’ Mari yells.

There is a lull in the tide, that moment where it rests on itself before turning back inland. Everything is still, apart from Elsa’s dark head on the surface of the water. She must be a mile out. Behind her lies the low reach of the land on the other side of the bay. It is scrubby and wooded, with few buildings.

The guard standing in the water fires his gun straight up into the air. A few people jump and Mari stops crying.

Elsa turns and starts swimming the other way, back towards the beach, her arms rising and falling strongly and evenly.

‘Thank God,’ Campbell says, resting back on his elbows again.

‘See?’ I raise my voice so he can hear me over the din that Mari’s making. ‘She always comes back.’

30
th
August

I wake early. I know straightaway something is wrong.
Afterwards I will wonder what it was that signalled trouble. Whether there had been a humming in the air that was denser than usual, or the muted sound of stems and stalks splitting, falling over themselves like a breaking wave. I pull my trousers on and head over to the garden in my bare feet.

As I come round the corner past the American quarters I see them. Greenfly. Blackfly. Pests of every description. The ripe, glowing skins of my fruit and vegetables are covered in them. I lift a cabbage leaf. The underside is spotted with eggs. I can hear them cracking open, I swear it, and the insects coming out, stretching their legs, taking a great gulp of air, and then starting to suck the sap out of every last leaf.
There isn’t a single plant in the entire garden that isn’t withered and ruined. Bamboo poles that have fractured under the weight of falling beans poke out of the ground like chopsticks. Rows of corn that have come away from the vine are bent over. They look as if they are about to keel over completely, stalks spread out to either side of them like raised hands. Surrender. Underfoot, foliage that has acted as groundcover since the spring has either been eaten by the flies or died off in the space of a few hours.

The queue that was gathering for morning congee outside the canteen has turned to watch. Kob and Fuji appear. Fuji is grinning. Perhaps it’s not the ending he expected but he evidently finds it pleasing all the same. This will make him look good back in Tokyo.

Campbell comes over.

‘Bad luck, Tom,’ he says.

‘It’s not just the veg,’ I say to him. ‘There’s something else down there.’

‘What?’

But Kob has already seen what’s there.

‘Hands above your head!’

One of the guards raises his bayonet and trains it on me.

Kob is staring at the soil between the rows of dimpled Chinese melons and dried
-
up pawpaws. The sun is up, blinking out a morse code on the wrought metal and wire that stick out of the ground like old bones. Kob pounces. He shouts out to the guards. They move quickly, making their way along the furrows that I first made with my clumsy bare hands. For a while all that can be heard is the scraping of shovels as they slice their way through them, turning up roots, bulbs and seeds as they go. Other guards follow them up and down, examining the earth, turning it over again in places with their fingers.

Once the first plug is found the rest seem to rise to the surface of their own accord. Cables and wires are brought up and held out at arm’s length like a human sacrifice. The guards put them in the wooden crates at Kob’s feet, and go back to look for more.

When they have finished, he calls me over. I start walking. Nothing else moves, apart from the sun. The prisoners, guards, Elsa, Mari, Campbell, even Mimi – their faces all have a rigid, surprised look, as if someone has brought a movie to an abrupt halt, and they are stuck in the freeze frame. I’m the only one who keeps on moving through real time. I stare at them as I pass. Mari’s tiny fingers reach out to me. Her fingernails need cutting. Elsa usually does it with her own teeth because there isn’t a pair of scissors small enough. Mimi’s hair is a mess. Someone must have got her out of bed in a hurry to come and see this. Oscar Campbell is the biggest surprise. He looks if he’s about to cry.

I stand close to Kob. He is shorter than me, and I know he hates having to look up at me.

‘You were trusted,’ he says.

My mouth is dry.

They march me over to the Jap headquarters and leave me with armed guards in the room where we used to play bridge. There are empty glasses on the sideboard. Through the open window I can hear a child playing outside one of the bungalows, a rubber ball smacking against concrete over and over.

By the time they come back I reckon they must be planning on taking me to Tytam Bay, where the tides are strong and southwesterly. I’ll bet they’re going to shoot me and leave my body to rot in the sun, then let the sea carry it away. It makes me think of the crosses we were given at Sunday school when I was a boy, made of dried
-
out palm leaves with points sharp as nails. We used to run down to the beach after chapel and stick them in the sand and wait for the incoming tide, thinking the water would turn them green again, but it didn’t. All we woke up to the next day was a soggy mess of crosses sticking out at awkward angles, and by the following day they had been washed out to sea.

Turns out it’s not the beach we’re headed for, though. When we come out of the house I’m prodded in the backside and told to keep moving. We proceed along the road we call Roosevelt Avenue past the Dutch block, the ration shed and the warders’ quarters, until we come to a barred gate that I’ve never been through before.

It is opened from the other side, so we can walk straight through it, into the prison.

September 1942

Ein Tad, yr hwn wyt yn y nefoedd

sancteiddier dy enw

deled dy deyrnas

gwneler dy ewyllys

megis yn y nef

felly ar y ddaear hefyd…

I can do most things in English, except pray.

I am in a dark room, alone. It is small. If I reach out my arms I can touch the walls on both sides. There are no windows. The door is locked. The air smells stale, as if it has only just been vacated by someone else. I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark, but they don’t. I hear nothing. I see nothing.

I guess that the blackness has a reason; to make me lose track of time. So I count, inside my head. I put a finger to my wrist and estimate the length of seconds, minutes, hours. I don’t let myself sleep.

… dyro i ni heddiw

ein bara beunyddiol

a maddau i ni ein dyledion

fel y maddeuwn ninnau i’n dyledwyr…

On the second day there are noises outside my cell. People talking. Keys are jangled. I get to my feet, walk over to the door. I am swaying. I am thirsty. They shake the keys again, as if they are about to open the door. Then they walk away.

I keep counting. I am so thirsty. I run my hands down the walls. They are damp, I lick my fingers. The dirty water makes me retch.

When I am not counting, I am praying. When I’m not praying, I’m counting.

… ac nac arwain ni i brofedigaeth

eithr gwared ni rhag drwg

canys eiddot ti yw’r deyrnas…

On the third day they come to the door again. They do exactly the same as yesterday.
Talk loudly and rattle a bunch of keys.
I stay sitting on the floor, waiting for them to go away again. But this time they don’t.
They open the door and order me out.

I walk in front of them down a narrow corridor. It is all light.
The door at the end is opened from the outside and then there is more light. It makes my eyes water.
White concrete, white sky, white sun. The prison exercise yard. I am the only person in it, apart from the guards. They manoeuvre me out of the doorway with the butts of their guns, then retreat and close the door.

I hear footsteps behind me, but they are oddly weightless, like a child’s pattering. Several of them. I turn round as they jump at me.

Dogs. Two dogs. The pet wolfhounds. They feel as high as my chest, and they are leaping, snapping at my hands and legs. I put my hands out and stumble backwards. They rip and tear the bare skin on my ankles. Their teeth sink into the flesh.

I look down and am surprised that it doesn’t hurt more. It should hurt.

I hear laughing. The guards looking out of
barred windows.

The pain hits just as one of the hounds, black and white with a black patch around his eye, jumps straight at my throat. I put up a hand. His bite is large, taking in my whole palm. I feel blood running down my fingers. It is warm.

They are growling, circling me, ready to charge again, when the door is opened and a voice shouts out and they run to it.

A guard comes out and gestures to me to go back inside.

I walk back along the corridor in front of him. I know which room they are taking me to because the door is wide open. I don’t want to go back into the darkness. I try to memorise the light as I walk through the doorway: its reflection on the white walls, the sound of it, the feel of the day on my skin. The blood from my savaged hand is running down my leg now, dripping onto the floor. They push me into the room, but they don’t shut the door. I go to the far end, turn round, and sit down against the wall. I look out of the doorway at the light. My breathing becomes slower.

Just as my eyes are about to close, there is a clap. The door is slammed shut, from the inside. All is blackness again.

I can’t see anything.

A hand grabs my hair, puts a knife to my throat. I wait for the metal to cut me open. I think I want to be dead, to stop feeling my heart beating, frightened.

Then I hear a voice.

‘Get up.’

It is Kob. I struggle to my feet.

The door is opened again. Two guards come in. One of them puts a blindfold over my eyes. They kick my bitten shins as we walk down the corridor.

Outside there’s an engine running.

‘Where am I going?’
The voice feels like mine, but it doesn’t sound like it.

I am dragged up onto the back of a vehicle. I am pushed into a sitting position on a hard seat.