The Shouting in the Dark (6 page)

The father throws his cigarette butt out of the window and gives a harrumphing sound, like he does in his rattan chair, waking from a stolen nap. Without another word he turns the key in the ignition and drives the car out of the parking lot, in the direction of Ridge Road.

At home he heads to the verandah with his municipal library copy of
Winston Churchill: A Life
under his arm. It's one of the books he smuggles from the town library under his jacket and doesn't ever return. Taking a few extra books each visit, he says, cuts down on driving. A small economy when petrol prices are going through the roof.

Ella looks up
obstreperous
in his
Concise Oxford English Dictionary
and wonders if this was the word he wanted. For
obstreperous
she finds
turbulent
,
unruly
,
peevish
, also
fractious
, which she looks up too.
Fractious
means
brawling
, also
peevish
. What do these long, tough words have to do her? When Dr Fry directs her to the Remedial Class, she goes. The ugly shoes made for her, she wears. The short back-and-sides haircuts she gets at Dad's barber, she takes without complaint even though she'd love long hair like Naomi Salome's. Longer hair would fall into her susceptible eyes, her mother says, and damage them.

The flirty chatter Dawnie in the Remedial Class used to share with her dad when he picked her up from school, she doesn't share with her father, Ella knows this, too. She walks into a room where he's sitting and there's no glance up from his ledgers, no outstretched arm. But why should there be? She knows he doesn't like to look at her. She brings to mind things he doesn't want to see.

And then one day not long after, he does grab her to him, just the once, and it's horrible. In the bright spring light she darts into the main bedroom in her vest and knickers to fetch her school uniform off the laundry pile. He sits pulling on his socks in his armchair alongside, then suddenly stretches out his arms, links his hands around her. Every bristle in his early-morning stubble stands out silvery and clear.

‘Make your mother jealous,' he says, dragging her onto his knee. ‘Show your father how good and developed you are.'

Pinned to his lap she's a lump, squishy but solid. His kneecap is pressed in the soft place between her legs. She has to twist away. But in that second of twisting she brushes by accident against his truss, the dark-yellow pad on its twisted pink nylon belt, hanging in its usual place over the armchair back. She never meant to touch it, never, never. She'd thought he already had it on. That thing's private, he always says, it keeps me in.

Squirming on his kneecap, though, she can't miss it. There it is; the damage is done: it bulges out at her; it brushes against her. She catches just for an instant its sweaty, musty smell.

And as suddenly as he grabbed her, he pushes her away.

But she can't get down so fast as to miss just the flash of a possibility. How it feels for a little girl to be held close and made much of by her father.

‘Let me not bore you, dear Ko, with yet another tale of the warship on which I spent nearly three years.'

The two white-haired men sit in their proscenium of light. They have sat in the same position for every night of Ko's ten-day visit, the longest Ella can remember, the widower Ko on the left, the father on the right. Under the verandah's forty-watt bulb his yellow-white hair, already stained by nicotine, turns a deeper yellow at the crown.

‘Bore me, old man. Pass the bottle and bore me. I miss your stories when I'm away from here, you know, they take me back. We didn't get away from Singapore in time. The
Kampen
got us . . .'

Ella stands at her night-watch spot between the curtains, her elbow on the sill. She is ten now, nearly eleven, but her father still has not let slip his secret. His expected visitor still does not arrive. There's only Ko, his old sidekick, grunting to order as he tells his stories.

The father is like an actor on a stage, she thinks. For years she has thought this. He lights his cigarettes with slow deliberate movements, he draws himself up in his chair. He takes a deep breath, slides the bottle over to Ko, then raises his head, throws his words at the darkness stretching beyond the verandah's earthenware tiles.

Night after night Ella stands and listens. She leans her shoulder against the glass, presses now one ear now the other against its coolness. When the visitor finally comes, she tells herself, she will sense it even before she sees him. She will know to open her eyes and discern his dark shape sliding like a hunter out of the night.

‘Yes, we missed you chaps,' the father tells Ko. ‘Missed the good life around Finlayson Green. Didn't know if you were dead or alive. When Churchill gave up Singapore it was over for our precious
Indisch
empire. It was left to our tiny allied navies, the Dutch and the Australian, the few Polish ships, to hold out against the mighty Japaner. Four hundred years it took to build our empire in the East, in less than forty days it was lost.'

‘How those Japanese wanted to stamp their imperial face on the future,' Ko shakes his lowered head. ‘Why no one else saw it I don't know.'

‘There I was, caught high and dry, sent by the Company to attend the ship-chandlering course in Durban, just at that moment, '42, the East collapsing in my wake. Couldn't even get back to collect my things. Nancy Leong, yes, the very one, the lovely Nancy who went off with that bowlegged Englishman, what's his name, Dartmouth? – she eventually mailed them to me.'

‘All pathways closed to us,' Ko still droops his head. ‘Our Nazi-occupied
vaderland
closed to us— '

‘At such low points,' the father presses on, as if building to a punch-line, ‘Our thoughts of course turned to England, the true heart of the West. So,
listige
Nederlander that I was, nothing doing, I made my way to Scapa Flow, home of the British Grand Fleet. At Scapa Flow were the few warships of the Royal Netherlands Navy left intact after the Germans smashed into Rotterdam. The day I arrived, they were executing manoeuvres with the Australian warship
Nepal
. What a thing it was to join them, eh, those various motley others, some Nederlanders like myself, a handful of Flemings, a few Poles, the officers and ratings both now absorbed like the ships we served into the British Navy. Yet, despite all our losses, those ships of ours I saw were still deft, very deft. Dutch blood's seawater, it truly is.'

‘It must be, Har, it worked for you. You had the luck. We in the
Kampen
— '

‘Luck was to find a ship. On the
Oranje Nassau
at Holyhead, our motley band went for first training, gunnery practice. And then, back at Scapa Flow I stepped for the first time on board my beloved
Tjerk Hiddes
. What a ship she was, compact, quick, sound to the core, British-made naturally though named for our great 17th-century Frisian sea-fighter. On the
Tjerk Hiddes
we steamed through Suez back to the Indian Ocean, detouring via officer training in Madagascar to Trincomalee. I tell you, my friend, that was a boyhood dream come true.'

‘I remember you always did want to go to sea. “My short sight relegated me to second-best, a job in shipping,” you used to say. For me, shipping was always first-best. For the
Kampen
it taught some useful ropes— '

‘Well, yes, dodging Japaner subs in the navy proper I wasn't going to waste a minute bothering about this eyesight of mine, was I? Rubbed my specs clean with spit every morning and got on with it. Couldn't believe my luck. Our first action of course was to help the aircraft-carrier
Illustrious
land troops on Madagascar, oust the occupying Germans. A true blooding. In Antanarivo that following evening we drank several kegs of genever, maybe more, to celebrate our success. Edith the English rose I'd met in Holyhead one Thursday and married five days later sent me a letter to say it was all over after just four months, she'd found someone else, just like Nancy Leong— '

Edith
? Ella asks herself, stands up taller, Or was that name she heard
Ella
? An
English
rose?
Another
wife? Did she mishear something? She remembers that thing he told her mother – strangers can be friends like no others, the lotus smells sweeter than the rose . . .

‘I opened her letter that night,' the father says, ‘But still I felt lucky. I had a ship and I had a victory, I was the luckiest man in the world.'

‘Speaking of genever, Har,' says Ko. ‘You wouldn't have another drop of that good South African fortified of yours? You've a terrific spot on this verandah here, I must say. No wonder it's a fixture for us boys. There I was only last month in Finlayson Green, a stone's throw from where our Seamen's Institute once stood, spending my pension on
pahits
like there was no tomorrow. But there's no point trying to rediscover the old atmosphere, you're right, the spirit's gone out of the place. It was nothing like what we have here on your verandah, though the drink there, I must say, wasn't quite so, ahm— ,' he makes a wry face, ‘Cheap on the tongue.'

The father's hand is raised in the air. Enough, he shakes his head, enough. He doesn't want to hear about the old haunts, unrecognisable now, rebuilt from the ground up, laminated in dirty modern paint. He's seen photographs of the new Singapore in the
Elsevier
. The bustling entrepôt they knew so well, it's changed beyond all recognition. The war wiped it out, the teak-panelled clubs, the ferns in pots on the verandahs, the tall merchant houses with their Victorian turrets and curlicues, the Great World where they danced the night away, they have all been flattened, he knows.

‘Life's too long nowadays, eh Ko?' The father stares down at his planted feet. Both men's crowns are ringed with light. ‘Sometimes, I don't know, I think it might have been better if one of those sharp-eyed Japaner dive-bombers had sought me out. I've lived too long, I've seen enough . . .'

‘My feeling, Har,' Ko nods and shakes his head at once, ‘My feeling exactly. Our generation – we were always out of time. Children of one war, young men in another, old before our time. The world we fought for, it was gone before the war was over. We've seen too much, done too much, for too few returns.'

‘We've done too much? Who can tell? I remember what our Captain the good Klaas Sluijter used to say after heavy action at sea, to lift the men. It's better to do a wrong thing than to do nothing at all. It was a Chinese motto, Lin Yze Tang.
It is better to have lived and lost than not to have lived at all
. How much we all lost, Sluijter too. He was a man of the East, our captain.'

Condensation sticks Ella's cheek to the window. She peers out through eyelids grainy with sleep. The verandah lies in darkness. So she must in fact have slept. The men have gone to bed and she missed their going. This is something guards must learn on sentry duty, she thinks, something her father will have learned keeping watch on the bridge of his blessed
Tjerk Hiddes
, the name he always says with a choke, not only because of the strangled sound of the Frisian. It must be possible to sleep for minutes at a stretch while standing fully upright, leaning your head against the cool surface of the window, or the steel side of your ship.

 

In the queue at the butcher's the father makes a new acquaintance, a retired army major called Tom Watt. Tom invites Har to the monthly meetings of the local ratepayers' association, introduces him there to a friend of his, another steel-haired retired man, a former town planner, Nobby Clark. ‘Don't want to stand outside this community like some foreigner,' the father says, punching his knee. ‘Got to meet the leading citizens, the men of worth. Pitch in, share views. That's how we build the New West here in the Deep South.'

When her father talks about the West, Ella is puzzled. The verandah faces west. Does he mean the distant hills of his view? On winter evenings just after sunset, the horizon is golden with illuminated dust. The west beyond the horizon is far-off though, not here on the doorstep, here where the father is beating his fist.

One night Har treats Ko to a verandah meeting with his new friends. ‘They're relatively young men,
makker
,' he explains at dinner with a snort, ‘if you see what I mean. Nobby wasn't ever tested by war. Tom saw action only in Italy in '45. But they're both good men, worth talking to. They know what we mean when we talk about the war, how it broke our ideals instead of mending them. How it's up to us to refashion law and order here in the only country in the world where the natural rulers stand apart from the ruled.'

Both Tom and Nobby, Har says, are long-time members of the United Party, a weasely outfit, though not entirely misguided. Tom stood for election to the Provincial Assembly once, but was defeated by a sugar farmer with an Afrikaans name. Like Nobby, Tom believes that South Africa should be ruled exclusively by white people, just as the Afrikaner nationalists do. However, he doesn't hate black people in the same way. He'd consider giving them some form of vote, nothing important, to keep them smiling. ‘I switch off when he talks about blacks, Ko, and I'm happy for you to do so too,' the father says. ‘I try not to think about blacks, those hewers of wood, drawers of water. I'm with the Dutch-born Verwoerd, the architect of this great state. Blacks are here to make sure the white republic runs from day to day. They're not members, not citizens. They're after all not western. They don't belong.'

That night Ella moves early to her post at the window. Will her father's stories be different in front of a bigger audience, she wonders, less angry? The men at first are quiet, she notices. They drink quickly, offer the expected praise of Har's view, this incredible tranquillity that no ratepayers' association could begin to pin a price on. Ko talks about his travels, the gaudy new shopping centre in downtown Singapore. Before too long the men are drunk. Their heads hang in unison. Three empty bottles of South African sherry stand on the table between them. The father is the only one still vocal.

‘I sit here often, you know, my friends, looking out,' he says in English. ‘I sit here considering the wreck of the world we knew, how hard we fought to prevent it, how little of what we believed in remains.

‘I remember the final years of the war,'43 to '44, the North Atlantic, that most vital theatre, as the great Churchill said, the true battle for the west. In '43 my
Tjerk Hiddes
and the other N-class destroyers were called from the south to help safeguard the supply routes to Britain. I close my eyes even now and it's like yesterday. The silhouettes of the big German destroyers just visible through the North Atlantic haze, dogging us. Those great merchant ship convoys cutting through the freezing sea, the ships piled high with tanks, trucks, grain. Their speed was incredible, some thirty, thirty-two knots. And then the noise of the Luftwaffe that you heard approaching long before you saw them: the screaming Stukas, the Heinkel bombers' growl, and then the yelling of our turbines as we switched to full speed ahead, anti-aircraft guns thudding. Tom, you won't ever have heard this roar in Italy. The Germans were in full retreat by then.

‘It was my vision of the end of the West, Nobby, Ko, Brother European bent to destroy Brother European, fighting to the death. How do we go on from here? I thought to myself watching those Stukas, frost nipping my fingers. This vital theatre is the death-throe of all we have believed in. And I was right. The last of the West's here on this rim of the African shield. What you see from this
stoep
. At the time of course we carried on, our visions of damnation regardless. We sang to ourselves the refrain of the great English navy song.' He begins to whinny in his throat. Tom beats a languid hand on his armrest. ‘
Ours is not to reason why. Ours is but to do or die.
It kept our spirits up when we most needed it.'

The father breaks the seal on a fourth bottle of Old Brown Sherry. The men raise their heads, hold out their glasses. Ella's cheek has grown cold against the window. She takes her head away from the glass, uses the hem of the curtain to prop her other cheek, a vertical pillow. The father's chin goes up. She sees he's gathering himself for a second wind. Even with more than one listener present, she notices, yawning, he talks over their heads, still addresses his invisible audience arrayed on the dark lawn.

‘Let me tell you about Trincomalee in Ceylon,' he says, ‘the base of that Do-It-Yourself operation I once was part of, the British Eastern Fleet. After Singapore fell, that place became our paradise, our strategic paradise. It has the most beautiful natural harbour you ever saw, all green and blue, shaped like a human hand. The Brits could've packed a whole fleet in there and the enemy would've been none the wiser. The first morning we were there, I see it like yesterday, the HMS
Adamant
slid out from behind a headland like a shark with gloved fins.