“I suppose you got more than you bargained for when they sent you out to this bloody pigsty?” He sat on his bed, as if to set his argument in for the evening, when Kirkby only wanted to get back to his western. Yet Kirkby was sometimes flattered when people quarrelled with him: “I enjoy it out here. I’d never ’ave seen this country if I hadn’t joined up, would I?”
Hansford wiped his crutch. “I can think of better ways to see the world than being shipped out like cattle on a troop-ship.”
“So can I, mate. I’d never earn the dough to do it, though.”
“You should sign on,” Hansford said, a dry cocksure assumption that he’d got the upper hand. “Twenty-one years would do you just right.”
Kirkby grinned. “You think I’m loony?” trying to hide irritation behind his grin, but not succeeding. “Three years never hurt anybody.” Hansford descended to the centre laneway: “The best three years of your life, don’t forget.”
“Come off it,” Brian chipped in. “Every year’s the best year of your life.”
“Not if you’re in uniform.” Hansford turned from Brian’s effort to bring the argument against him, and looked hard at Kirkby as if he’d like to hit him but wasn’t sure of the reception he’d get. Brian could have told him. He was madder than Kirkby now, and Kirkby’s grin became genuine because he’d noticed it as well. “The three are going O.K. for me,” he laughed.
“You must have a warped mind,” Hansford threw back. Others were listening, looking up from books, cigarettes, thought, or emptiness. “Not so much of the warped, Hansford,” Thompson, who was in for seven-and-five, shouted threateningly. “As long as my mind’s warped the way I want it to be,” Kirkby said, “I don’t give a fuck. I’ll be going back on the same banana boat as you, but I’m not griping all the same. I like the sun and I like swimming. I even get paid for being here. Not bad for a year or two.” Hansford could not penetrate such satisfaction: “You ought to get a job writing recruiting posters,” he said, and padded down the steps to take his shower. Brian stamped on his fag-butt with bare feet, then pulled on his wellington boots.
Quarter to six: he slung a cape over his shoulders, took up his haversack with: “See yo’ lot in the morning,” and walked into a wall of rain. He couldn’t hear himself think above the noise it made, as it spat out a gust that raced across his mouth. The covered lorry stood fifty yards away, and he climbed in the back. Singing came from a nearby billet, an antidote because so much rain was frightening, gave the impression it would never stop until the universe filled up and the world sank. Coconuts now and again fell like Big Bertha shrapneclass="underline" a quick swish as they came through branches and thumped themselves on to wet soil.
He banged against the cab and sheets of water took to the air as it made for the road. Malayan police at the gate stood under palm-leaf shelters, capes outspread under their glum heads. The lorry roared up the coast road, and all he could see were grey waves, grey clouds, and roaring mist a thousand yards out. He was glad to be leaving the camp and the apprehension that had descended with the first rain. Everything became subdued under it, all inmates on edge waiting for it to end not long enough after it had begun. Out of the crowd he felt better, freer, happy enough to whistle the latest song hit from Radio Seac. Fires, tended by women for the evening rice, burned by the native huts-on-stilts.
From the back he only saw what the lorry left behind, not what its blunt-nosed radiator was heading for — suddenly turning to pass the ramshackle control tower and race up the wet shine of the airstrip that seemed as if it were being laid like a carpet as he looked at it. He was going to the outlying DF hut set in the middle of a vast square paddy field and connected to the runway by a thin path of mud now hazed under needling rain. When the lorry stopped he leapt out, drew the cape about him, and made for the distant hut.
At the same time, the operator he was to relieve began walking towards him. The water was continually pierced with weighted rain, was churned to a murky and cancerous colour, and the earthen lifeline between runway and hut had in places been well eaten into by the force of it. Brian trod slowly to avoid slipping into the three-foot depth on either side, whistling a monotonous tune as if it would help him keep balance. Tall, fair-headed Baker came level, his myopic eyes looking superciliously through the rain, thin lips firmly closed, giving the impression that they were about to break out into a smile, though the opposite was true, for Brian knew he was browned off and dead to the wide after his afternoon grind. “Anything going on?”
“Not much.” Baker spoke tersely, his hat brim uptilted by a gust of wind. “You might as well close down at seven. A Dak coming up from Singapore should be landing in half an hour.”
“He’ll ’ave a job to land in this stuff.”
“Got to land somewhere, the poor mutt.”
“As long as he don’t flatten his snout on that runway,” Brian said. “I wun’t like to try it.” They were already fed up with each other: Brian eager to get into his isolation, Baker to escape from it, so there was no sympathy between them. They passed. On the far shore invisible hands of wind were trying to duck the heads of palm-trees into the water, bending their supple trunks that sprang back time and again in defiant protest. White flashes of lightning skidded across the water, to meet thunder out on the runway.
The hut stood on a square of ground, surrounded by four aerial poles whose wires joined above the middle of the patched and often-mended roof and went down through it into the direction-finding receiver. The smell of water and dampness was so strong that it threatened to block the nostrils, made it difficult to breathe, as if the earth were soil to its core and soaked through and through. Baker had plugged in the speaker, and atmospherics scuffled with the noise of rain by the hut door.
He went in, shedding cape, hat, and haversack, cursing Baker for an idle bastard because he had let rain drip on the accumulators. I suppose he was reading his motorbike catalogues again; the no-good worker should have been a mechanic, not a wireless operator. He struggled with the long heavy boxes on to a form, which he pulled to a dry corner, then signed on in logbook and diary, and called up Singapore to ask the strength of his signals.
The first flexible key-tapping of his nightwatch went out clear and neat, the long and short of each letter piercing his ears with birdlike music, balm to his brain, intoxicating yet sobering, like the first drink of a dipso. He wore his earphones half on and half off, so that while hearing the solid low-pitched thumps of the superheterodyne dots-and-dashes he got the clicking of the key at the same time, as a reassuring echo fed back from desk to ears. He was on his own, and in control of a radio set, had only to press a key for other lonely operators hundreds of miles away to push a hand forward and tap out a reply. Tonight their replies were all but inaudible, just as his own calls to them, he realized, were pounced on over the jungled mountain tops by saw-toothed atmospherics and torn into unrecognition. His beloved fourteen-hour stretch of isolation had begun, and despite rain battering against all sides of the small and flimsy hut, he felt good being at work, and paused from filling in the log to open a tin of cigarettes and have a smoke.