Down by the long huts a man walked out of the shower-house, a white towel around his lobster body, slopping his feet along in wet sandals and whistling a Malay love-song popular on Radio Timur. It was an image of clarity, but when it vanished, the aches came back into the bones of Brian’s chest.
The whole thing won’t last much longer, he thought, seeing, even more vividly than Baker’s death, the vision of the aeroplane hanging dead between the trees like an enlarged piece of carcass in a butcher’s shop. It was clearer in his eye than the face of the Communist he had let loose and the ambush later, something he had dreamed around more than once, seeing the plane hanging between tall buildings — a dead whale blocking streets, and suspended also in Serpent Wood, where he used to play in the past that was no longer an unrememberable dream, its broad fuselage tied between trees above the small brook he spent hours trying to dam and divert until, in the dream, the plane fell to the soil and caused him to wake up.
He felt better, his head no longer a battleground. Each spade of sand seemed lighter in weight, and he no longer pitied either the sentries or himself, but enjoyed the hard manual work because the feeling for it had come back into his bones after he had been so long cloistered at the DF hut. Elated and happy, he paused in digging and looked around at the others, saw how much they had slowed down in their exhaustion. The sun didn’t feel harsh to him; trees looked green and cool from a distance, as if even out in the space where he worked they sent some benefit of shade and hidden moisture.
Told to go, he walked off alone through the trees, towards the latrine for a drink and a swill, afterwards to the billet to pick up his eating irons for dinner. The latrine was near the beach and a Malay fisherman walked by with a long net-pole on his shoulder, and over the two-mile water he saw a straggle of grey and black ship in Muong Harbour, and beyond that the colourful line of waterfront buildings looking, he thought, like a row of posh kids’ toys on a window-sill. He stood by the barbed wire, hunger and thirst momentarily forgotten, wondering what he was doing inside this fortress, when so many ships were over there, ready to scatter like funnelled and smoking waterbeetles to all parts of the earth. I call myself Communist, and yet I’m slave-laboured into building these sandbag ramparts to keep them out.
“You’re not a Communist, Brian,” Knotman had said when they got talking politics the other night. “Not from what I know of you, anyway.” “Well, I’m not part of this system, I’ll tell you that.” “I don’t blame you,” Knotman went on, “because I don’t think anybody would be, in their right mind, but most of the world isn’t in its right mind, though I expect it will be one day.” “What do you think I am, then?” Brian asked. “You might be a socialist when you’ve read more and know a bit about it.” “Hitler was a socialist,” Brian laughed, “a national socialist, and I don’t want anything to do with a nut like him.” “He wasn’t a socialist,” Knotman informed him patiently, “he only said he was to deceive the workingman. He was sucking up to big business, and they used him to rob the Jews and stamp on the workingman eventually. They fell for it as well. No, if you’re anything, you’re a socialist-anarchist.” “Maybe,” Brian admitted, but he knew that all men were brothers and that the wealth of the world should be pooled and divided fairly among those who worked, doctors and labourers, architects and mechanics. That’s what those on the other side of the sandbags feel, and even though they might not, as Knotman averred, be true socialists, he was still building up sandbags to keep them out. At least, my eyes have been opened. All I’ve got to do now is learn to see with them, and when one person sees, maybe the next one will as well. “It’s a matter of time,” Knotman said, “before the world unites, not only the workers, either. It’s taking the long way round to get there at the moment,” he laughed, “but that’s a thing that often happens.” “Don’t you think you should do something about it, though, to help it?” Brian persisted. “Yes, but no more than you can without being untrue to yourself. History is on our side, so just bide your time: you won’t even know when to act; the first thing you know, you’ll be acting — and in the right way.” Brian found these words unsatisfactory to his nature, because in the jungle the Communists had acted and he’d seen it with his own eyes, felt their bullets spinning and travelling around him.
He met Mimi at the Egyptian Café the evening before his train left. They sat by the trellis work, next door to crickets and bullfrogs: “Every café has a café of insects and animals around it,” he laughed, spinning the miniature glass of neat gut-rot round in the palm of his hand. He shivered at the coldness of the meeting, thinking how much better it would have been had they, through some accurate and supersensitive whim, decided half an hour ago to stand each other up — for old times’ sake.
She wore neither lipstick nor make-up, had her hair tied back to show for the first time how long she’d been letting it grow in the last few weeks. “I didn’t want to come,” she said, “but I couldn’t help it.”
“Neither could I,” he said. “I feel a rotter, a black-headed no-good bastard.”
“Why?”—her dark eyes opening wide.
“Because I’m leaving you when I don’t want to. There’s a boat waiting to take me eight thousand miles and I’m not dead keen on going the same way.”
“That’s silly.”
“It isn’t. I don’t want to go. But I’ve got no will-power not to go. I want to stay here with you. But I know I shan’t. I’m going to do something I don’t want to do.”
“Everybody has to do that sometime or other. It won’t be the first time for you, either. Nor the last.”
“No,” he said, sending a hot needle of whisky down his throat. “It won’t, now you come to mention it. Far from it. But I’ve never felt it as keen as this on any of the other times.” Insects spun like needlepoints through the doors and lattices of the ramshackle café, gathered in clouds around strings of bare light-bulbs. Tables around them were loaded with drinks and noisy jokes: the café had at least one fight a month, every second pay-day, often being put out of bounds, or closed down for a time. “I’ve got to go soon,” she said softly, hoping he wouldn’t make her stay, “to get the next ferry. I’m supposed to be working, and if I don’t go I’ll lose my job.”
“I’ll send you them books.” No tremor came into either voice, though he felt a seal of hopelessness pressing against his throat. “That’ll be nice,” she said, “if you mean it.”
“Of course I do. I’ll write as well — letters now and again on a Woolworth’s writing-pad. Who knows what I’ll do? I might even come back in a year — or ten or fifteen years — walk into the Boston Lights and have a couple of dances with you before you know who I am.”