“You won’t,” she said.
“I don’t suppose so.”
“You’ll never leave England again. You’ll be too busy working, and enjoying yourself.”
“Well,” he laughed, “you can’t do both.”
She stood up: “I’ll get a tri-shaw to the ferry.”
They walked to the door, looked for a moment at the dim lines and lights of the road that penetrated the heart-shaped shadows like spears and arrows denoting love, yet with no initials. He held her hand, kissed her on eyes and lips, felt the kiss returned and her hand go around him. “Goodbye, Mimi. Look after yourself.” She hesitated, then turned back to him: “What you told me the other night, about up in the jungle, you were brave. I understood. It was marvellous. You were right not to shoot at them.”
He watched her walk to the nearest rickshaw, saw the dim shadow of her light body bend and set itself in the seat. The feet of the man gathered speed between the shafts, soon beyond the range at which Brian, watching from the doorway, could hear. In place of it, another and louder sound, stranger to him yet too real as soon as it was felt, swept over him, a sea from the back of his throat as he turned and walked in the opposite direction.
All day the train took him through familiar landscapes, leaping at first like a straight-lined arrow between rice fields and by the edges of swamps, then towards mountains, twisting and turning like the illustrations of alternating-current theories on the blackboard at radio school. The beautiful names of the country were lit up in the store-rooms of his memory: KEDAH, KELANTAN, PERAK, TRENG-GANU, PAHANG, SELANGOR, NEGRI SEMBILAN — rhythmed out to the thudding self-assurance of stream-driven wheels, an antidote and agreeable opposite to deep jungle rolling beneath waterclouds on mountain tops, and fortified bungalows on village outskirts. The clean, beautifully rounded train wheels were taking him towards Kuala Lumpur in the evening, the big city from which the sun would sink at half-past seven, just as it had twenty-four hours earlier beyond Pulau Timur, when he had watched it from the billet door before going off to see Mimi.
The passing jungle absorbed him, made his mind as blank as if he were drinking water from a stream he wasn’t sure he would see again, so that it was only when he turned his eyes back to the carriage and noticed his webbing and pack straps spilling over the rack and swinging from the regular kick of the train that the fact of his having left Mimi for good rushed into him. Now that the journey had begun he couldn’t get out of the country quick enough, yet his goodbye to her numbed him, rendered him unable to dissect to the bare bones an anguish he knew was useless but that stayed much of the journey with him. Towards dusk, however, the previous fire had left little for his pain to grip on, and Mimi was almost as far apart from him as Pauline had been when he had first danced with Mimi at the Boston Lights over a year ago. As the train drew near to Kuala Lumpur, he felt he had seen the last of her and of Malaya, and sensed the doors of its vivid beauty closing themselves in the immense distance and depth of mountains behind. He sat motionless, apart from the rest of the demob party, gave himself up to the grief of a slow half-swept amputation that grew to hard misery because he did not know to what exactly he was saying goodbye, and hadn’t yet realized the vastness of the other part of his life still to be lived.
At Kuala Lumpur they gathered their kit to cross the dismal platforms towards the night train for Singapore. A transport sergeant stopped Brian and demanded to know where his rifle was. “I haven’t got one.”
“Sergeant, when you address me,” came the barked refrain.
“Sergeant,” he said.
“No one is allowed to travel on the night train without a rifle,” he stipulated. The group of them stood around, awaiting the issue. “I don’t care whether I get on the train or not,” Brian said. You dead-gut, you gestapo-eyed gett, you flap-mouthed effing scumpot.
“You what?”—the fierce face was stuck towards him, smelling of sweat and carbolic soap and sucked-out fags. “Listen,” he said, “for your information, the train going down last night got machine-gunned.”
“We had to hand our rifles in at Kota Libis, sergeant.”
“They’d no bloody right, then. You’d better wait here till I see what’s to be done with you.” He marched to the head of the platform and conferred with an officer. “We’ll miss the blinding boat now,” Jack cursed. “I can see it.”
“They can stuff their rifles,” Brian said. “Next time, I turn mine against that fuckpig — if he’s on the train and we get ambushed, he’d better watch out. By Christ, I mean it. Still, if I don’t get him, maybe the bandits will — one of these days.”
“No such luck,” Kirkby said. “It’s poor bastards like Baker who stop it first. They never get the right ones.”
“Workers of the world, unite!” Jack shouted. “Let’s get on that bloody train.”
The sergeant didn’t look like coming back, so Brian loaded his kit aboard, followed by the others. Each secured a bunk, debouched again to besiege an ice-cream trolley for the night’s supplies.
The train set out, rattling away into the darkness of the wastelands. Brian undressed and climbed into his top bunk, pulling the sheet over him. Some of the others were already asleep, empty ice-cream cartons rolling about the gangway, knocking from side to side like worn-out bobbins at a cotton mill, the ones that had often poured from the backs of lorries on the tips, far away in a half-forgotten world. Sleep seemed impossible, and he lay on his back staring at the ceiling a few inches above his forehead. I’d rather be in bed at home, he thought, with Pauline, and soon will be. I’ll get off the troop-ship in three weeks and get demobbed the next day, will take a flying train down to Nottingham and a taxi to Aspley and — Where will we be that night? Will it be the Barleycorn or the Beacon for a good drink of mild, a laugh and a long talk, a few kisses when we think nobody’s looking?
I’ll see mam and dad as well. Look, dad, I’m back, I’m out of jail, finished, free, paid-up, and ready for a hard job at the factory. Pauline, go and buy me a couple of pairs of overalls, an old jacket and a mashcan, a good pair of boots to keep the suds and steel-shavings out. What number bus do I need to get there spot on at half-past seven every morning? Don’t try and tell me; I was born knowing it. Do you still work in the same shop, dad, carting steel rammel away on that barrow from them auto machines? Is that big bloke with a cauliflower nose still your shop-steward and does he bring the Worker in still every day? Tell him to put me down for the union as well. It’ll be good to meet my old school pals again, back from their own jail sentences by now, I should think: Jim Skelton and Albert, Colin and Dave. Bert as well, when the loon gets finished with the further three years he had, after all, signed on for. He’d go sometime and see Ada and his uncle Doddoe, get a plate of stew and a slab of cake, and listen to Doddoe’s nostalgic curses as he recounted his new adventures as a gaffer down the newly nationalized pit, or told of hair-raising escapades on his recently acquired high-powered motorbike.
I’ll bump into other pals as I charge across to the canteen for my dinner. Or maybe I wain’t bother with the canteen but will go home to mam’s, round the corner and up the street, along the yards and clobbering into the back door. “Hey up, mam,” I’ll shout from the lavatories: “’Ave yer mashed?” “Ay, Brian, my owd duck,” she’ll shout: “I ev an’ all.” And at night I’ll get on the bus back to Pauline, out with the charging mass into fog or sleet (or maybe sunshine, if I’m lucky, though Malaya’s spoilt me for life in that way), smelling the fresh warmth of our room a mile before I get to it, the smell of her powder and kisses as I put my arm around her by the door and pinch her in the right places, dodging out of her way before she tries to crack me one. Over my snap I’ll maybe tell her about the paint and wallpaper I’m thinking of buying, because somebody’s got to get the house fixed up now that Mullinder’s a long time gone, and I’ll be just the bloke for that. I remember the cistern in the bathroom was going rusty before I left and I’m sure nobody’s done much to it, so I’ll start on that first. After tea I’ll be out in the dark rain-soaked streets, passing the beer-offs and fish-and-chip shops with a fag at the slope, smarmed up in my best and heading for the pub to play darts and sup pints with Johnny and Ernie and Arthur, Nan and the rest of them. I’ll spend a night or two helping the union, you can bet, because somebody’s got to do it, and I feel I’m just the bloke for a thing like that. I’ll get to know what’s what as well, pull a few more books into the house to see what makes the world tick, maybe read some of those I nicked years ago. I ain’t let the bastards grind me down in the air force, and I wain’t let them get a look in at grinding me down outside; in fact, if I ’ave owt to do with it, the boot’ll be on the other foot.