The Bandung was a lively place: freshly painted, always full, with free meat pies on Saturdays and curry tiffin on Sundays, and a Ping-Pong table which we hauled out to work up a thirst. A stubby feller named Ogham used to play the piano in the lounge, jazzy tunes until midnight and finishing up with vulgar and patriotic songs. I can see it now on a Saturday night, the room lit by paper lanterns rocked by the fans, Wally in a short white jacket and black tie shaking a gin sling, the main bar heaving with drinkers, all of them regulars, and me in my white cotton suit and white shoes, wearing the flowered open-neck shirt that was my trademark, and Ogham in the lounge playing “Twelfth Street Rag.” Some feller would lean over and say to me, “Oggie could have been a professional, you know, but like he says, that’s no life for a man with a family.”
Ogham pounded the piano at the Bandung and never introduced us to his family, and after he left Singapore there were various explanations of where he had gone. Some said to a London bank, but Yardley sneered, “He was a lush. He got the sack and three months’ gadji and now he’s in Surrey, mending bicycles.” For Yardley no fate was worse. With Ogham gone I hacked around sometimes with the Warsaw Concerto, hitting a sour note at the end of an expertly played passage to be funny, but some fellers said I was being disrespectful to Ogham and I had to stop. Later, an old-timer wandering back through the lounge from the toilet in the kitchen would glance at the piano and say, “Remember Oggie? I wonder what happened to him. Christ, he could have turned professional.”
“Oggie didn’t know whether his arsehole was bored or punched,” Yardley would reply, believing Ogham to be a deserter. “He got the sack and three months’ gadji and now he’s in—”
The day Ogham left he got very nostalgic about a particular towpath he had played on as a child; he bought us all a drink and reminisced. I had never seen him so happy. We listened at the bar as he took a box of matches and said, “The gasworks was over here,” and put a match down, “and the canal ran along what we used to call the cut — here. And—” The scene was repeated with the others, the memory of a picnic or tram ride re-enacted at the bar before their ships sailed.
Many of the regulars at the Bandung started to leave. It was getting near to Independence, and over a drink, when a feller said he was going home you knew he meant England and not his house in Bukit Timah. So the Bandung emptied. On a side road at the city limit, it was too far off the beaten track for the average tourist to find it, and what tourists there were in those days came by ship. I spent most of my free time hustling in bars in the harbor area, places a tourist with a few hours ashore might wander into, or in the cut-price curio shops in Raffles Place. I had earned enough money in my first year to be considered a big spender in the Bandung, and to rent a large yellow house on River Valley Road, with three bedrooms and a verandah supported by solid white pillars, shaded by chicks the size of sails on a Chinese junk. As a bachelor I lived in one room and allowed the other rooms to fall into disuse. I had two gray parrots who pecked the spines off all my books, a dozen cats, and an old underemployed amah who played noisy games of mahjong with her friends in the kitchen, often waking me at three in the morning as they shuffled the mahjong tiles, a process they called “washing the tiles.” The amah had made the bed and fixed breakfast enough times to know that I was not practicing celibacy, and she was continually saying that as a “black and white” she was trained to care for children, a hint that I should get married. She sized up the girls I took home and always said, “Too skinny! You not like hayvie! Yek-yek!”
I believed that I would marry a tall young Chinese girl, with a boy’s hips and long crow-black hair and a shining face; and I’d take her away, the hopeful mutual rescue that was the aim of every white bachelor then in the East. I did not give up the idea until later, when I saw one of these marriages, the radiant Chinese girl, shyly secretive, easily embarrassed, transformed into a crass suburban wife, nagging through her nose about prices in a monotonous voice, with thick unadventurous thighs, a complaining face, and at her most boring and suburban, saying to exhausted listeners in perfect English, “Well, we Chinese—” I had the idea of marriage; as long as I postponed the action, romance was possible for me, and I was happy. Any day, I expected to get the letter beginning, “Dear Mr. Flowers, It gives me great pleasure to be writing to you today, and I know my news will please you—” Or perhaps the other one, starting, “My darling—”
My brief, unrewarding enterprises, evenings calling out “Hey bud” to startled residents walking their dogs, afternoons sailing two fruit flies dressed as scrubwomen (greasy overalls covering silk cheongsams) to rusty freighters — these were over. The Richard Everett episode and the notoriety that followed it singled me out. Fellers rang me up at all hours of the night, asking me to get them a girl, and one of my replies — delivered at four in the morning to an importuning caller who said he hoped he hadn’t got me out of bed — became famous: “No,” I had said, “I was up combing my hair.” In the harbor bars I was “Jack” to everyone, and I knew every confiding barman by name. What pleasure it gave me, knocking off early at Hing’s, to go home and put on my white shoes and a clean flowered shirt and then to make my rounds in a trishaw, a freshly lit cheroot in my teeth, dropping in on the girls, in bars or massage parlors, to see how many I could count on for the evening. The wiry trishaw driver pumped away; I sat comfortably in the seat with my feet up as we wound through the traffic. The sun at five o’clock was dazzling, but the bars I entered were dark and cool as caves. I would stick my head in and say in a jaunty greeting to the darkness, “Hi girls!”
“Jaaaack!” They would materialize out of booths, hobble over to me on high heels, and favoring their clawlike fingernails, hug my big belly and give me genial tickling pinches in the crotch. “Come, Jack, I give you good time.” “Me, Jack, you like?” “Touch me, baby.”
“You’re all flawless,” I’d say, and play a hand of cards, buy them all a drink, and move on to a new bar. Many of the girls were independent, not paying any secret society protection money. I called them “floaters” because when they weren’t floating around looking for a pickup I was literally floating them by the dozen out to ships in the harbor. A great number of them who hung around the bars on Anson Road — The Gold Anchor, Big South Sea, Captain’s Table, Champagne Club, Chang’s — came to depend on me for customers. They were using me in the same way as Hing, to get Europeans, who didn’t haggle and who would pay a few dollars more. The Chinese were after the ang moh trade, and it seemed as if I was the only supplier. I could get white tourists and sailors for the girls as easily as I got the club members who were in the shipping business for Hing. The floaters along Anson Road and the Hing brothers were not the only ones who depended on me; the British servicemen at Changi, the sailors from H.M.S. Terror, the club members and tourists depended on me as welclass="underline" the Chinese who sought the ang mohs were in turn being sought by the ang mohs, and both, ignorant of the others’ hunting, came to me for introductions — finding me they found each other.
But the girls in the wharf-area bars forfeited all their Chinese trade when they were seen holding hands with a paleface. After that, they were tainted, and no Chinese would touch them or notice them except to bark a singular Cantonese or Hokkien obscenity, usually an exaggeration of my virility (“So the redhead’s got a big doo-dah!”), meant as a slur on the girls for being lustful, and on me for a deformity not in the least resembling the little dark bathplug most Chinese consider the size of the normal male organ.