“It might be, but I don’t like it.”
“Well, you’ve got to go back,” she smiled. “You promised to send me those books and things.”
He’d forgotten about that: books of sexual technique and contraception. “You know enough of that without me sending you books on it.”
“I like to read about it, though,” she said petulantly; he seemed to be going back on his word.
“All right,” he said; “but I’ve still got a year to do out here. I might even stay on longer.”
Insects were worrying her: she disentangled a sheet and drew it up. “You haven’t got a job in Malaya, so you’ve got to go back.”
“I could get work as a rubber planter. It wouldn’t take me long to learn Malaya, if I really tried.”
“What’s England like?” she asked. “Tell me about England.”
“I don’t know anything about England. But I’ll tell you about Nottingham if you tell me about the jungle. If the insects are bothering you, pull your net down.
“They’re not: they never do. If you became a rubber planter you’d be in big danger.” Neither spoke. They heard the croak of bullfrogs and crickets working their looms of noise in the deep grass outside. Dogs barked from the huts, and the surviving wail of a steamer siren from Muong harbour came, debilitated after its fight with tree shadows and avoidance of village lights. He laughed: “You sound like a gypsy giving me a warning. There’s no danger in being in Malaya.”
The bed creaked as she faced him more fully, her coal-like eyes shining with concern: “You think you’re living in a peaceful country then?”
He smiled — for the benefit of himself. It seemed peaceful enough: tigers, snakes, and a no-good climate, but what did that matter? “It’s O.K.,” he said. “Just take things in your stride, then you’ll be all right. I ain’t been in the jungle yet, but I might even do that soon. Some of us on the camp are thinking of climbing up to Gunong Barat to see what mountain jungle is really like. Uphill all the way, I suppose.” He remembered seeing Pulau Timur for the first time, an island viewed from twenty miles and six thousand feet away as the Avro 19 roared high along the coastal swamps up from Singapore. Pulau Timur was an inanimate crumple of green hills lying in bright blue sea just off the mainland, looking from so high like the plasticine relief models he used to make at school, glittering under the light-bulb of the midday sun.
The Avro closed in low over its port of Muong, climbed the wooded hills behind, and threw a shadow on empty sea to the west. Brian’s stomach didn’t turn willingly with the plane, whose belly seemed to scrape a hilltop when it turned back over the island and descended for a run-in across the two-mile straits. Down over blue water, the runway was like a glistening slice of canal, widening between trees in front. He saw sand under the water, a couple of sampans hastening out of the way, fishing traps sticking from the surface like knives ready for the plane’s belly, then a long sandy beach passed in a yellow line on either side and the engines dipped ominously. This was the moment of fear, when science seemed to desert them and silence take over. Brian looked to the left and saw a huge mountain far off to the north, its grandiose peak pointing skywards, indicating a direction that he’d never before taken note of. The isolation of it reached to something in himself, the solid independent greyness beyond heat and cold, halfway into another world that attracted him, in a few seconds, more than anything else ever had. The far side of the moon seemed as familiar as his own cousin compared to this new dimension of life glimpsed far off beyond the water and coastal swamps. Then the vision went as engines roared and the plane passed over a tarmac road along the shore where cars, lorries, and bullock carts waited for its descent, rolled by a few wooden buildings, palms, ramshackle control tower, until a bump and jerk brought it on to the runway and gave him a feeling of relief to have landed. A few evenings later he stood on the beach watching the sky above Pulau Timur, orange, yellow, green, and bloody colours streaked like a horizontal waterfall over the hills, stretching south to north and boiling away towards Siam and Burma. Palm-trees bent over the water, and night fires burned in fishing villages, pointing to the mountain he had seen from the plane. He had discovered its name: Gunong Barat — the mountain of the west — and seen its height marked on a map as four thousand feet. It stood separate from the main range of Malaya, a series of peaks and humpbacks divided by forest, filled gullies, and watercourses, culminating in one pinnacle that dominated the landscape for miles. On nights of full moon its sharp ridges stood out as if it were an island, rearing up from mangrove swamps, king of the small towns and paddy fields of the coastal plain, far more complex in structure, he saw, than had appeared in one simple glimpse from the plane window. He hoped to be able to climb it, but didn’t suppose the opportunity would ever arrive. It was twenty-four miles north of the camp, covered in thick jungle, trackless, and, he thought, probably wouldn’t be worth climbing anyway. “I don’t know what you want to go up there for,” Mimi said. “Nobody lives there.”
“How do you know? I’ve heard that right on top is a caff where they sell cream buns and coffee, run by a bloke from Yorkshire. He’s been there thirty years and don’t get much trade because everybody thinks nobody lives up there.”
“You’re pulling my leg,” she laughed. “But you don’t know what I mean. There’s going to be a lot of fighting in Malaya because people don’t like the British being here. There’ll be a war.” He knew there might, having read in newspapers of murders on rubber estates, of people being shot for mysterious reasons that the newspapers couldn’t fathom. Not long after coming up from Singapore, he asked a telephone corporal why it was still necessary to put ON ACTIVE SERVICE across all letters, and he replied that the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, supplied with arms during the war by the British, had now turned awkward and didn’t want to give them back, were in fact becoming an anti-British army because they wanted independence. “And it’ll get worse,” the corporal said, a prophet who knew everything. “There’ll be such a bloody bust-up one day, I only hope I’m not here to see it, though I suppose it’s my luck I will be.”
“Well,” Brian said lightly, “maybe I’ll just go back to England as soon as I can and take a nice safe job in some factory or other. Then I’ll be able to send you them books on sex I promised you.” He pulled the sheet gently down and caressed her. “I don’t want to go back, though. I want to stay here for keeps.”
“This isn’t any good for you. What will happen when the fighting starts? Everybody thinks that a Communist army is going to come out of the jungle and kill the British. Nobody can stop them, they think. And maybe a lot of Chinese and Malays will get killed as well.”
“I don’t know. Anyway”—half facetious and serious — “I’m a Communist, so maybe I’ll be all right.”
“You shouldn’t joke.”
“I’m not joking. You ask me to tell you something about England, don’t you?” He lit cigarettes. “The smoke’ll scare the insects away. I come from a scruffy old house in Nottingham, and before the war I remember seeing my old man crying — in tears — because he was out o’ wok and unemployed. He hadn’t worked for years, and there was never any dough and hardly enough grub in the house. The kids were better off, mind you, because they had free milk and a hot dinner every day — they had to mek sure we’d be fit for the war and to fight Communists, the sly bastards. It’s a bit better now, but why should I be against the Communists?”
“I don’t know,” she said; “but you are, aren’t you?”