He fixed his eyes on what was visible of the blade, which stayed so long in place that he had a desire to laugh at the possibility of it’s being glued there, resisting this weakness because it would rob him of strength. The man grunted and kicked, swayed the trapped arm and struck out with the one still free, but Brian ignored the smashing of his ankles, and the kris didn’t stay long enough in place for the man to think of trying to reach it by the blade-end. The more Brian ground his teeth and pressed, the easier it became to make his attacker drop the kris. It seemed a stupid task, as if the man’s arm would break, because all the brute force of his labouring days was behind the pressure and he knew that no one could stand it for long. He wanted to laugh and let the arm go, tell the man to blow town and not be so bleeding daft. The kris slid into the leaves and he pushed the man back, rammed like lightning with his fist and boot, then drew away. His fear returned now and, gasping and stumbling against his pack and rifle, he watched the man free himself from the bush and search among the undergrowth.
Brian picked up the rifle: he’s a nut case and might try something else, but if he does I’ll bash him over the skull with this. I’ll plaster his loaf all over the trees. Why did he want to come for me like that? He drew back the bolt, slotted it in, a mechanical noise whose significance he only realized as its clear echo died away, retrieving a picture of a dog by his DF hut lying like a length of rag and floorcloth with a hole in its head. The Chinese dropped the kris, stayed a dozen yards off with lifted hands, close enough for Brian to see the left side of his lips twitching on an otherwise hard and resigned face. What’s he put his hands up for? Why don’t he get running? He drew back the catch to safety, unwilling to press the trigger by accident and be brought up for murder: that’s a charge Odgeson wain’t be able to put me on. The silence grew: Brian shifted his stance, cracked twigs.
“Ger moving,” he said, half afraid the man might be crazy and make another rush. “Piss off”—threatening to kill him should he refuse.
Words as if spoken by another person deep in his own mind told him he was a bandit, though Brian repressed the thought as being the safest thing for the man before him, and for himself. Maybe he doesn’t understand English: “Scoot, for — ” But the man lost his bewilderment and neutral face of capture, turned and leapt along the level of the jungle, scrambling away fast. Brian stood, still and frozen, then his hand shook, and he held the rifle between his legs while he leaned against a tree to light a cigarette. A plane droned overhead, but he was too shaken to look, could only stare at the soil and undergrowth. The war in Malaya and all he’d heard of it seemed to have no relevance in this forest foreclosed with darkness and humidity, and he told himself that maybe the man had a hut and garden nearby and thought he was someone who had plundered it last week, so had been waiting in ambush for him to come back.
Weakened by legs that seemed turned to rubber, and a sensation of chaos and death — he sure wanted to kill me, by the look on his mug — he made his way towards where he had parted from the others. Maybe the man had been a bandit, but Brian threw the idea away, then drew it back and hung on to it as though, should this be true, it might turn out to mark some saving of his sanity, to be the salvation of his soul in some unpredictable manner. In any case, he wouldn’t have been a bandit but a Communist. There was a difference — that much he easily saw. The picture that crossed his mind was of a gloomy autumnal dinner-hour opposite the factory canteen a few years back during the war, a composite memorial of many dinner-hours spent in that way. A Communist speaker stood talking about the Soviet Union bleeding to death in the good fight against the German Nazis and Italian Fascists, saying it was time Britain and America started that second front now, when a voice from the crowd heckled: “Why aren’t yo’ in the army, mate?” But somebody capped the heckler with: “Why aren’t yo’?”—which stopped his gallop with even bigger laughs.
Brian leaned against a tree, screaming with laughter, a mad humorous rage tearing itself out: “And I let him go! Odgeson and all you bastards, I let him go because he was a comrade! I didn’t kill him because he was a man.” The certain knowledge that he had been a bandit was a fist that made him lie down in the soil, curl up, and go on laughing, separate from himself yet unable to look on, roaring at the outcome of his own safety, no matter what the man had been. The bastard, though, I should a pulled the rifle up to my shoulder and pinned him to the soil with a bullet like he would have done to me with his kris if I’d given him half the chance. He smoked a cigarette: I’d better get back and see if the others have found the plane. But if any clever bastard says to me: “Why aren’t yo’ in the army?” I’ll give him the biggest mouthful he’s ever heard. He walked on, quiet in his tracking for fear that other bandits were about, and that if there was a next time he might not be so lucky. Stone-cold with horror, he suddenly recognized the nacelle where he had parted from the rest, an aluminium case holding a complex aero-engine whose image vividly recalled the click of the safety-catch a few minutes before. He bounded up the bank, beyond the sinister machine-product, towards where he hoped the others would be. Without forethought, he fired off rounds into the treetops and sky, let fly half a dozen rapid shots at what ghosts and remnants of his conscripted mind the sight of the Communist had let loose. He emptied the magazine, lobbing the rest more carefully at manufactured shadows between the trees, each round buried into some distant invisible soil or trunk after a heyday crack that seemed powerful enough to scare and weal the whole range of mountains. “What did you do in the war, dad?” “I caught a Communist and let him go.” “What did you do that for, then?” “Because he was a man.” And not everybody’ll look at me gone-out. “Brian, my lad, I’m proud o’ you,” the old man would say.
Calmer now, though still bright-eyed (I feel like a paper lantern, all hollow and lit up), he made his way along the hillside. Odgeson, Baker, and Cheshire walked a few paces in front, making so much noise they didn’t hear him trailing them. “Hey,” he shouted. “Seen owt yet?”
They gathered into a group. “We heard some shooting over there, so we’re heading for it in case it’s Knotman’s mob.”
“It was me,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “A bloke came for me, a bandit I suppose, because he bolted when he saw I’d got a rifle. I didn’t hit him, though.”
“It sounded like a machine-gun,” Cheshire said. “You must a been cross-eyed not to bring him down.”
Odgeson looked serious: “We’d better stay close and watch out. There aren’t enough stretchers for all of us.”
“Knotman shouldn’t be too far away, with the army,” Baker called from behind. “Shall I get them on the blower?”
Odgeson thought not. “They won’t be listening anyway, so let’s get moving and not have so many questions.”
“He’s coming out of his shell on this trip,” Brian said to Baker as they trekked on. “These pally bastards allus turn out to be the worst.”
Baker was close behind and replied: “My old man says that in the Great War they used to shoot about ten officers a month. The Germans got the rest of them.”
“It didn’t mek much difference,” Brian said. “They kept scraping ’em up from somewhere.”
“The reason the war ended, though, was because they were running out of officers, not because they didn’t have enough bods like us. I’ve been to a public school, Brian, but I’m just a slave like you are.”