The track was dry, a shallow bed of powder, for the monsoon had been over some weeks and the one-season year was three quarters on to Christmas. A hand in pocket, he recognized by the motion of his legs the peculiar swaying walk of his father, though it was hardly noticeable to someone looking at him, and most of it had been eradicated by parade-ground drill in England. But it was there and gave him comfort as he walked in the darkness, accentuating his own self and setting him apart from the camp and all it stood for. A Malay in white shorts and pith-helmet came by like a phantom, and Brian said good night in the man’s own language, a reassurance to both that they were passing human beings and not ghosts. There was no reply to his greeting, and he wondered whether his Malay had been understood. He knew the days of the week and how to count, a few common words of food and drink, a verb or two, but no more. There were classes in Malay at the camp but he couldn’t bring himself to go, was unable to take the learning of it seriously, half thinking that Malay didn’t matter as French and Spanish might, and half not being bothered to master it. He had seen it was easy enough to learn: you could put words together in a string without bothering about such complications as grammar, of which he knew nothing.
The Patani swamps weren’t far off, and vegetable decay, rank and bittersweet at the same time, mingled with the smell of fish and rice being cooked on glowing charcoal fires from huts among the trees. The bungalow was across a clearing, half a dozen rooms on stilts with rotten floors, and a palm-leaf roof that leaked in rainy weather. But the feeling of it, when he was in Mimi’s room drinking tea, or lying with his head across her and his thoughts in comforting oblivion, with the smell of joss impregnated in the wood of the widow’s room and drifting through to them, was of a last refuge, an outpost of his forward-pushing consciousness that in some strange way was similar to certain patches of his life now left so far behind that he couldn’t draw them to him, let alone fit them with words.
He saw a light from the corner window: Mimi’s room. The Chinese widow who let it was on her weekly visit to Muong, and wouldn’t be back until the last ferry — which docked when Brian was to be in camp. He didn’t go up the front steps, but using his guile in case the widow hadn’t yet left, made for the back, kicking his way through the tangled garden and thinking in one panic-stricken moment that he had trodden on a snake. Maybe it’s dead, he told himself, walking along the veranda. He hoped Mimi hadn’t heard him, looked in through the unshuttered window and saw her lying on the bed wearing only the bottom half of her pyjamas, the nipples of her small pointed breasts ready to embrace the roof. She seemed to be staring blankly at nothing, but her eyes moved, and following them, he saw a lizard on the ceiling hunting insects. “Why don’t you climb in?” she said, not looking at him.
He hesitated. “You can see the lizard better from inside,” in a small persistent voice hard to disobey. He leaned his elbows on the sill and smiled: “I’m watching it from here. I’ll disturb it if I come in.” She looked a treat, with her short black hair, a round face with sallowy yet youthful skin, and heavy unmoving eyelids. Like a doll, he’d said at first, but that was for the story-books, the lucky dips of ancient Christmases, a twisted picture of geography given out at his no-good school. He remembered the first night’s dancing at the Boston Lights, talking to her and buying round after round of drinks and wanting to sleep with her, seeing her mouth well shaped by lipstick and strangely angled eyes that looked so profoundly blank in the few seconds when nothing was being said that he felt momentarily panic-stricken on realizing the distance between them both. But that was a few months back, and he knew now that there was no bigger gap between them than had separated him from Pauline at the start of their long bout of passionate courting in Nottingham over four years ago. Even here I can’t get her from my mind, though I’m married, so who can wonder at it? It plagued him like a magic lantern out of control, switching from one thing to another, Mimi to Pauline, then back to the here and now of Mimi, because it was like having the blade-point of an axe paining your lungs to dwell too much on Pauline, and the way he’d betrayed her as soon as she was out of sight.
Returning from the dance hall on that first night, having lost Mimi to her other customers, he separated from the gang he was with on the ferry and walked down to the third-class deck. A small Chinese girl in black sat with legs curled up on a form, twisting her fingers together and holding the entangled result to the light to see what she made of them. Then she got tired of this and began to cry: Brian dropped a handful of coins into her lap and she stopped, her mother wondering what it was that woke her now there was silence.
The boat was in mid-channeclass="underline" Muong like a row of dying embers, while northward the smooth sea was empty for a thousand miles as far as Rangoon and the Irrawaddy. The black lifeline of the opposite shore had long since faded, but for the encrusted lights around Kota Libis pier waiting for the ferry’s touchdown. Back on the first-class deck, stepping over outstretched legs, he saw Mimi gazing at Muong from the rail. The night air was warm and she stood in her yellow dress, clutching a black handbag. “A penny for your thoughts,” he said.
She turned quickly: “Oh, it’s you. I’m sleepy”—and looked back at the water, as if only the ploughed-up phosphorescence of it could give rest from the vivid colours her eyes had been seeing the last five hours.
“Do you work as hard as this every night, then?” He noticed her ear-rings, small yellow lanterns whose shadows were thrown on the flesh beneath her ears by rights from above. “You get tired whether you work or not,” she informed him. He kissed her, felt the touch of cool ear-rings as he drew back. “Stop it,” she said, turning away. “I have to be wide awake with you boys.”
“Not with me,” he said; “I only want to know where you live.” It was beyond him that she hadn’t simulated anger at his kiss — though he expected the going to get harder. But she smiled: “What do you want to know for?”
“To come and see you.”
Instead of resistance, she teased him: “What for?”
He sensed that this sort of humour would never leave her, even when she was tired. It was a mask. Because of it he didn’t know whether to think she was younger, or older, wondered how an invisible listener would have seen it — then spat into the water. “Because I like talking to you, instead of always to the others in camp.” Slyness seemed as good a way to break through as any. Mimi was a giggling child one minute, much younger than him; then was in touch with a life into which he could never reach either because of age, or because she had access to depths that went off at a tangent to his own. Himself, he felt young and old in stages, knew nothing but the fact of being on the boat with her, future and past and everything else obliterated except the lights and water and wooden decks of the ferry-boat around them fastened by booze and sentiment within the prison of himself at nineteen, which didn’t help towards an easy flow of conversation.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he said, taking out a packet of cigarettes. “So I don’t suppose you work.”
No longer smiling, she wouldn’t have a cigarette, so he lit one for himself. “I don’t,” she said.
Not caring about being persistent, he asked: “Can I see you then?”
“If you like.” She was listless, and he hardly noticed her joyless agreement in the surprise he felt at it. The fact that he was taking advantage of her came to him dimly and didn’t bother him anyway. When he didn’t look like speaking, she smiled: “Don’t you want to come?”