“Really?” I said, wondering myself if it was true, and deciding it was not.
“Except for that writing on his arms,” said Coony.
Macpherson, an occasional drinker at the Bandung, came through the door. He said, “Good evening.”
“Hey, Mac, look at this,” Yardley said. He grabbed my arm and spoke confidentially. “This is nothing compared to what they do to some blokes. You learned your lesson. From now on, stick with us — we’ll stand by you, Jack. And just to show you I mean what I say, the first thing we’ll do is get that put right.”
“What’s it supposed to say?” asked Macpherson.
Mr. Tan cleared his throat.
Weeks later, Yardley found a Chinese tattooist who said he knew how to remove them. We met at the Bandung one evening and he looked as if he meant business. He was carrying a doctor’s black valise. But he never opened it; he took one look at the tattoos, read a few columns, and was out the door.
“Look at him go,” said Smale. “Like a shot off a shovel.”
“A Chink won’t touch that,” said Coony.
“So we’ll find a Malay,” said Yardley.
The Malay’s name was Pinky, and his tattoo parlor was in a kampong out near the airport. He was not hopeful about removing them, though he said he knew the acid treatment. But no matter how much acid he rubbed in, he said, I would still be left with a faint but legible impression. And grafting took years.
“Why don’t you just cut your arms off and make the best of a bad job?” said Smale.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked Pinky.
“Can make into something else,” said Pinky. “Fella come in. He tattoo say ‘I Love Mary’ but he no like. So I put a little this and that, sails, what. Make a ship, for a sample.”
“I get it,” I said. He could obliterate the curse but not remove it.
“He puts a different tattoo over it, apparently,” said Yates.
“Only the one on the bottom stays the same,” said Frogget.
“It’s better than leaving them like they are,” said Yardley.
The walls of Pinky’s parlor were covered with sample tattoos. Many were the same design in various sizes. Death Before Dishonor, Indian chiefs, skulls, eagles and horses, Sweet-Sour, Cut Here, tigers and crucifixes, Mother, bluebirds, American flags, and Union Jacks. Behind Pinky, on a shelf, were many bottles of antiseptic, Dettol, gauze, aspirin, and rows and rows of needles.
“You’ll have a hard job making those into ships,” said Yates, tapping my blue curses.
“Do you fancy a dagger?” asked Smale. “Or what about the old Stars and Stripes?”
“That’s right,” said Coony. “Jack’s a Yank. He should have an American flag on his arm.”
“Fifty American flags is more like it,” said Smale.
“Hey, Yatesie,” said Coony, pointing to the design reading Mother, “here’s one for you.”
My arms were on Pinky’s table. “Chinese crackter,” he said. “I make into flowers.”
So I agreed. But on each wrist the wide single column—Remove This and Die—was too closely printed to make into separate flowers. Pinky suggested stalks for the blossoms on my forearms. I had a better idea. I selected from the convenient symbology on the walclass="underline" a dripping dagger on my left wrist, a crucifix on my right.
I went back to Hing’s. I was thankful to climb onto my stool and pick up where I’d left off: vegetables for the Vidia, stirrup pumps for the Joseph B. Watson, new cargo nets for the Peshawar. It was as if I had never been away. But what counted as an event for the fellers at the Bandung and gave the year I was tattooed the same importance they had attached to the year Ogham left and the year the bees flew through the windows — an importance overshadowing race riots, bombings, Kennedy’s death, and the threat of an Indonesian invasion — went uncommented upon by Hing. Gopi said, “Sorry mister.”
Hing’s lack of interest in anything but his unvarying business made him doubt the remarkable. He refused to be amazed by my survival or by the motley blue pictures that now covered my arms. He did not greet me when I came back. He refused to see me as I passed through the doorway. It was his way of not recognizing my long absence: no explanation was necessary. Though he was my own age, his years were circular, ending where they began. He turned the tissue leaves of a calendar that could have been blank. His was the Chinese mastery of disappointment: he wouldn’t be woken to taste it, he wouldn’t be hurt. Some days I envied him.
I moved into the low sooty semidetached house on Moulmein Green, an uninteresting affair which the washing on the line in front gave the appearance of an old becalmed boat. My aged amah found me and turned up with a bundle of my clothes and two of the cats. She wouldn’t say what happened to the others; she reported that no one had been injured in the fire at Dunroamin. My tattoos intrigued her and when her mahjong partners came over she asked me if they could have a look. My kidnaping and tatoos raised her status in the neighborhood. Now and then, for pleasure I had a flutter at the Turf Club, and it was about this time that I persuaded Gopi to be fitted for the brace, but that came to nothing. I slept much more, and on weekends sometimes slept throughout the day, waking occasionally in a sweat and saying out loud, It’s still Sunday, and then dozing and waking and saying it again.
I did no hustling. Every evening I drank at the Bandung and I became as predictable in my reminiscences as the other fellers; the re-creation of what had gone, a continual rehearsal of the past in anecdotes, old tales sometimes falsified to make the listener relax, made the present bearable. I told delighted strangers about “Kinda hot,” the Richard Everett, Dunroamin, and my tattooing. “And if you don’t believe it, look at this—”
My fortunes were back to zero, but as I have said, it was desolation of this sort that gave me more hope than little spurts of success. However uncongenial poverty was, to my mind it was like the explicit promise of a tremendous ripening. I hadn’t regretted a thing. But there was something that mattered more than this, to which I was the only witness. My stories glamorized the terror and often I brooded over my capture to look for errors or omissions. I had proved my resoluteness by surviving the torment without denying what I had done — my house, my girls — and at no moment had I gone down on my knees and said a prayer. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I ought to be forgiven. Forgiveness wasn’t necessary. I had nothing to live down. The charitable loan shark, pitched overboard by his furious debtors, had swum to shore.
9
“YOU DON’T know me,” said the foxy voice at the other end of the phone. “But I met a good pal of yours in Honolulu and he — well—”
“What’s the feller’s name?” I asked.
He told me.
“Never heard of him,” I said. “He’s supposed to be a friend of mine?”
“Right. He was in Singapore a few years ago.”
“You don’t say! His name doesn’t ring a bell,” I said. “What business was he in? Where did he live?”
“I can’t talk here,” he said. “I’m in an office. There’s some people.”
“Wait,” I said. “What about this feller that knows me? Did he have a message for me or something like that?” Brace yourself. I’ve got some fantastic news for you. Ready? Here goes… I braced myself.