“Yes, course I do.” The lights of Kota Libis were large, and they saw people moving about and waiting as the boat did a half-turn ready for the approach. His spent fag dropped into the water. “Where shall I meet you?” sliding an arm around her.
“At seven, outside the photo shop. In the village.”
The lizard hadn’t moved for ten seconds. What sort of a view did it have of her, upside down on the ceiling? “This is a long game,” he said; “it can go on all night.”
“The children play it,” she said.
“Like my mother: she says she used to sit in the kitchen when she was a little girl and watch the clock hands move. It was a game that lasted hours.”
“That would bore me.”
“I like lizards as well,” he said. “Out at my DF I’ve got a pet chameleon, green on top and duck-egg blue underneath. It waddles over the floor every morning and I feed it a saucer of bread and milk. We’re pals now, in fact. He went off for a couple of days not long since, and I thought he’d got eaten by a snake, but then he came back with a female, so he must have been courting. Now I’ve got two of ’em supping at the saucer. I reckon they know when they’re on to a good skive.”
She was laughing, a sort of distrustful giggle, flattening her breasts and sitting up on the bed: “Why do you tell me such stories?” He leapt over the window-sill and sat next to her. “Because it’s good to tell stories. Anyway, that’s the on’y time you like me, i’n’t it?”
He drew her close. “You’re so funny,” she whispered. Many of her remarks seemed like meaningless counters, long since detached from inside her, with no real connection to her own self. These he imagined her having used freely to other lovers she must have had: he recognized and resented them, jealous because they stopped him getting close to her. “That’s better than having a long face all the time,” he said, “like some people I know.”
“But funny people are sadder than anybody.” It was strange to him: her old man had become a shopkeeper, she said — bone-poor, though, at first — from Canton, and he imagined him with a stick over his shoulder, like Dick Whittington, only Chinese, coming south-west in a junk chewing a plug of opium to help him on his way. He saw him as young and steel-faced, hat on his head shaped like a handleless dustbin lid, living off a handful of rice a day and shaking hands with endurance, handsome perhaps, but making a hard go of it in Singapore. The thought was terror to Brian: in Nottingham yes, but he would have died over a life like that, scraping cent by cent from kerb-stall to backstreet shop, which even now, Mimi said, wasn’t all that easy. But Mimi had been to high school, and this difference, with female and Chinese thrown in, not to mention a couple of years in age, had for some time mixed up his attitude towards her, though things between them seemed to be improving at last.
The high school hadn’t lasted long and he was touched by the sad way she had left. A boy-friend who worked for some political party (he was in no doubt as to the sort of party, using his instinct accurately nowadays as to left and right and knowing enough about Mimi) had got her pregnant at sixteen, then disappeared because the British police were after him. The Japs came soon after, and no one had seen him since. They didn’t see the British police for four years either, except in chain gangs.
She sat with legs under her, away from him. He wanted to lean forward and embrace her, but the wish deadened because of the look in her eyes. “You’re the sad one,” he said. “I suppose you get so fed up with having to laugh every night of the week that you can’t even act yourself when you’re with me.” He walked away, sat on the one chair in the room. “So I tell you funny stories to make you laugh. That’s the best way, i’n’t it?”
“Sometimes”—like a child who cannot understand what is being said to it. He said: “I knew a lump o’ wood once that joined the air force and got sent to Malaya. It was a smart and chipper piece, not a big lump of wood, about half a pit-prop, if you want to know, that parted its hair on the wrong side of its head, but still it met a lady pit-prop that spoke Chinese when she was asleep, but when she was awake she spoke slow English and said she loved him. How’s that for a good beginning?” In the teeth of everything, there was a spun-out ebullient story he couldn’t stop himself telling and acting out, as if several whiskies had already taken effect and sparked it off — except that he’d touched none. The story became another limb, crazy and uncontrollable, used without thought, a joyful rigmarole spinning words out of the night of himself. It was a bout of inspired clowning, like a flash of sheet-lightning that opens — and glows metallic and incandescent against the horizon of the mind until the story or clowning has gone.
She was laughing by the end, brought over to him by a short-circuit that avoided the separate complex depths in each of them. It was silence or laughter, and though he could find out little or nothing in face of either, he preferred to see her laughing, which meant at least a warmer welcome. She lay out flat and shook off her pyjamas, naked but for a bangle on her wrist, an oriental maja. Her fleshy nakedness was matched to the damp perspiring night, was connected in some way, he thought, looking up, with the dance of death around the moth lamp of electricity: what the dark bellies of the geckos missed, the sun captured and sizzled to death. He thought back through her nakedness to his sweetheart girl-friends of Nottingham, of how true it was that no matter how many times they had made love together he had never seen any of them completely bare of clothes (except Pauline, his wife, but she did not count), not slept the night and seen them as he saw Mimi now, talking as if her birthday suit were the latest fashion advertised in the Straits Times — something to be shown off and proud of, acquired at enough expense to justify revealing it in the flattering half-light to Brian, for whom she had a sort of love that neither could explain or yet feel compromised by. There was uncertainty as to which was more reaclass="underline" to go slowly through layer after layer of tormenting yet hypnotic cloth and cotton and discover the smooth whiteness with exploring fingers, or take one nakedness straight to the other or your own. It was a matter of climate and locality, a difference as much evident in his own body and brain as between two far parts of the earth: jungle with field, swamp and wooded hillocks, a sea of sharks and sting-rays, to the slow meadow-winding of Midland rivers whose banks were sometimes as heavily clothed as the girl he lay with while watching their heavy cumbersome unwilling serpentining through the winter.
“I’ll make some tea soon,” she said, returning his kisses, “and then we’ll be cooler.”
“It’d need eight pints of beer to stop my thirst, but then I’d be good for nothing!” Tea was a natural division of their meeting time, after which they made love, a ritual evolved through many visits. “When I get back to Nottingham I wain’t be able to drink the steaming mash my mother makes, with sugar and milk. I like it cold and weak now, served up in bowls.”
Her thin arms slid away from his neck: “You’ll soon get back to the English way.” He was used to the rhythm of her voice, so that, while complete sentences registered more quickly, he lost the facility for reading hidden meanings in them, accents and stresses being removed as the need for repetition waned. His dexterity at reading morse rhythms had proved a loss in that it enabled him to master Mimi’s too soon, and because her own language was Chinese, she was able to hide so much in her flat deliverance of English. “I’m not going back to England,” he said.
She seemed surprised. “Why? It’s a very nice country. That’s what it says in the Straits Times!”