“That’s what you think.”
“All the rest of the British are.”
“Don’t be so sure. I’m not. I can tell you that. I’ve got a mind of my own.” His serious mood was shattered by Mimi’s serious face, by some air bubble that broke in the bloodstream of his imagination. “So if you know any true-red Communist wants to buy a Sten gun and fifty rounds of ammunition, tell ’im I’ve got one. If he can’t afford to buy it all at once, he can pay me ten dollars a week. Or a crate of Tiger Beer now and again.”
“You’re crazy,” she laughed. “I’ve never met anyone so crazy.”
“I’m a no-good loon, and that’s why you love me, i’n’t it?” he said, kissing her mouth, neck, and breasts, pressing her scarcely perceptible nipples in a black rage of passion, a bolt of lightning forcing his hand around the back of her. She broke away and reached for a dressing-gown: “Get undressed. I’ll fetch some tea, and we can drink it in the dark.”
Silence was the melting away of a stockade that released his thoughts. They came like pictures from the past, less clear than reality, though more definite than dreams, but at the same time more tribal than thoughts, let in by a disabled present. The darker, more tangible tide of Nottingham streets and people sent tentacles to the jungled hills of Malaya, assailing him at their own select times, sometimes infecting him with the poison needle of nostalgia, though often with a whirlpool of dislike and determination never to go back there if he could help it, to let its huge sprawling mark shrink and rot in some far-off lumbered-up corner of his memory. Reactions were strong because at twenty the future did not exist: present passions were based on what had gone before, and Nottingham found it easy to jostle Malaya from his brain.
He unbuttoned his shirt, sat listlessly on the bed waiting for her to come back. Unlike in the wireless hut, he hated to be alone here — as if dangerous ghosts were waiting to spring from each corner. It was a strange room, too filled with the personality of someone and something else, a staging post through which many peoples had gone before. He smiled: well, you couldn’t blame anybody for that. It smelt of perfume and perspiration, talcum powder and musk from the outside trees, blended with a subdued odour of Patani mud and joss. His hand touched the bed where Mimi’s warm body had lain, and he lay back deeper in a foreign land than he’d ever imagined and smiled to think he hadn’t been far wrong when he swore to grandad Merton as a kid that he’d go one day to Abyssinia. I expect he’d a bin satisfied wi’ this, right enough. “The dirty young bogger,” he’d have said. “Trust ’im to get ’old of a woman as soon as ’e gets there! He’s a chip off my block, all right.”
The tray made a faint rattling along the veranda, night music muted by the soft tread of her returning bare feet — careful for splinters in the worn boards. He listened in a daze, as if the sounds concerned only some far-off neighbour of himself, was abstracted and motionless almost until she reached the door; then, still without waking, merely as if his state of abstraction had quickened, he slipped off his shorts and pulled the sheet over him, reaching for a cigarette to which the match flared as Mimi’s hand put out the light. The last sight as he lay back at ease was of the gecko shooting forward and devouring a mosquito that had been whining up to then around the room for blood. The skin behind his shoulder itched slightly, so he was sure the mosquito had had plenty, and he grinned at the thought of part of himself being twice removed in the depths of another gut, like that far-fetched tale about Jonah fast in the raps of a whale.
She set the tray on the floor, and he felt her breathing as she bent over to give him tea. “Marvellous,” he said as they drank. “I’m croacking to death.” She crouched by the bed, laying the tea aside after one sip, and putting her arm on him. “Brian, Brian,” she whispered. There was no tone in the words, and he didn’t understand them. “What’s up?” he said loudly. “You think the bullfrogs’ll get yer?” His tea had gone in one gulp. “I can’t tell what I think,” she said. “Neither can I,” he answered, disturbed because he knew he should be able to. Maybe he could, yet wouldn’t. Thinking was like swimming under water: you have to develop a knack of doing so while holding your nose so that you don’t drown. If you couldn’t think sometimes, you floated, but that was no good, for all the colours and delights of the world were often under the surface: rocks and seaweeds, watersnakes and fantastic fishes — dreams and cartwheels of the imagination. But he couldn’t swim under the water at wilclass="underline" mostly, when he tried, his lungs and ears seemed ready to explode, and he surfaced quickly to get out of danger. Sometimes, though, he stayed under long enough to enjoy sights and sensations, and he felt that if he concentrated on breaking over the effort and fear he would eventually be able to master it. Thought was like this, almost as impossible to master as the water, yet always drawing him as if holding out the promise that one day he would be able to descend safely into his own mind, much farther down than he was able to now.
His hand roved up and down her, along the smooth skin of a backbone that seemed well marked because he couldn’t see it. She laughed: “I’ve got you in a hurry at last.”
“I was thinking,” he said, half teasing her but keeping his hand around. “I’m always in a hurry, you know that. We’ve been ’ere hours already, and I’ve got to get back soon.”
“It’s silly,” she said, “and sad for me.” He didn’t know whether she meant it or not, but couldn’t care now because she stood up and put off her dressing-gown, and he knew them both to be enflamed and ready, feeling her hand at his groin as she lay beside him. The sensation turned him into a lion of kisses, and his past and present merged and were conquered so that there weren’t two places on the earth for him but one, united by the flames and aches that both of them were scorched with, streets and green jungle joined into one moment of now.
“You’re my love,” he said, “and this is the only way I can really understand you.” Maybe time and places were joined for her, too. “I love you, I said.” Silence between them — Mimi never spoke when they made love: words stood no chance against the orgiastic working of her limbs and body.
Both were still, as if drawing breath before the fire. Life in the trees outside was a roar over their peace, filling the room with sounds, bullfrogs mating, crickets by the thousand spinning miniature klaxons as if at some voiceless football match, and the dull and distant noise of breakers burying grey heads in the sand at all they had seen below them on their journey across the shameless sea — the common speech of the night air in Malaya.
He lifted his body and thrust forward.
CHAPTER 18
I’ve only to say I hate Nottingham, he thought with a silent ironic laugh, for all the years it’s put on me to come into my mind as clear as framed photos outside a picture-house. He was in Radford at fifteen, going to work on Easter Sunday to clean the boilers and chimney flues while the fires were out, a volunteer because double-time was paid and he was saving up for a bike. One and five an hour instead of eightpence ha’penny was corn in Egypt — or would be if you got it all the time. He left the house while the night was black, making his way along silent streets at half-past five, avoiding deadheaded lamp-posts for fear of knocking himself flat. A fine rain fell and he pulled up his coat collar, shivering at the sudden impact of water, yet happy because he hadn’t far to walk. Seaton had told him not to go in: “You don’t need the money all that much, my lad; and you’ll work hard enough when you’re older.” He recognized the onus of unnecessary overtime that Brian was going into blithely, and took on his own shoulders and into his own heart the distaste his lad should have felt but couldn’t. To Brian it seemed a step forward, to work when hardly anybody else was and win the self-esteem of double-time.