His world and everybody else’s had changed since then, and it had been about time, though his life at the moment seemed like an island set aside from the main coastline of his well-trod continent. Malaya was an interlude, he felt, and he was set out in the blue, like the song that had been sweeping and saturating the country for the past six months: “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” records of it being played in the cafes, whistled, sung, let forth like opium from wireless sets. On Radio Malaya’s request programme it was called for by dozens of people, Malays, Chinese, British, week by week, an inundation of names so that eventually the announcer didn’t bother to read the list but just let the sugary music fill out over the country. For weeks also Brian hadn’t been able to cut it from his mind. One minute he liked the tune, then hated it, but whistled it unknowingly as he crossed the airstrip every morning, walking from the control tower with waterbottle and haversack swinging against his thighs, crossing the burning runway into the scrub-waste of the other side — out, it seemed, into the middle of nowhere, with the blue horizon burning all round.
But in the emptiness a square patch of ground had been cleared and set off for a new DF hut, and it was his work to help two mechanics unpack a straddle of enormous crates and fit hut sides, roof, and aerials into position. The three of them laboured all day in the sun, stripped to the waist and burned brown. The new hut would be a luxury box compared to the old one, set on dry ground and fed by electricity through a half-buried cable alongside a new track that would take lorries right up to the door. The station when finished and fully rigged would be operated day and night, a twenty-four-hour watch whether planes were up or not — though Brian knew that no one would give a sod about a nod or two of sleep at the deepest pitch of the morning. For weeks there had been talk of building a new DF hut, and now, out of the weak-willed climate, one had arrived and was being knit together by plan and numbers as if it were a Meccano set. A new PBX had been set up as well, and several radar devices installed in the runway. There was even talk of replacing the antique control tower by an indestructible skyscraper. The airstrip was being tarted up for a night out — as if for a war or something, Brian thought, a cramp in his guts at the idea of it. Everyone was busier on the camp also, giving it an alien breath of being there for some purpose, which it hadn’t possessed when he first arrived. He noticed it caught in the increased rush at meal-times, in the latrines when in a hurry for a shower before dashing off to see Mimi, in the signals section when more channels were being worked than ever before, or in the new smartness of those who worked in the long headquarters hut. Sometimes you’d think a bloody war was already on, except that he felt the main combat as yet to be between himself and the threat of discipline emanating from HQ. The shift workers of the signals section were the last to be touched by it: they were excused all parades and guard duties, allowed in late for meals on production of a chit, which any enterprising wireless operator could take from the signals officer’s drawer and sign himself. If the orderly officer came through the billet late in the morning and wanted to know why he was dead to the world and tight-rolled in his sheet, he grunted from under his net that he’d been on watch the night before — so that the OO walked on, a bit quieter, if anything. The seven months’ hard studying for a sparks badge certainly paid off.
It was a simple map, and easy to memorize. He sat back in a wooden armchair to drink his tea, and wait in peace until the lorry drew up at eleven to take a gang of them across to the island. A fortnight’s leave had been something to anticipate and when that was over he could look forward to operating the new DF hut, and then something else would turn up, and finally he would find himself on the boat chopping the blue waves back to England. Time went faster when there were agreeable events to hope for — when they arrived you noticed that the intervening weeks or months had been killed mercilessly stone-dead, hadn’t even the value in memory of the sloughed-off dried skin of a snake.
Already “Roll on the Boat” had become a catch-phrase of liberation: if capable of flying an Auster or Tiger Moth, he would have sky-written it above the sloping greenback of Pulau Timur — but contented himself with sending it by morse during what seemed the empty hours of his nightwatch, only to hear the initials ROTB throatily repeated from some half-asleep operator at Karachi or Mingaladon, a quartet trail of four-letter symbols piped out of electrical contacts by a heart-guided but distant hand. Locked fast in the Devil’s Island of conscription, everyone wanted to go home, to drop gun, spanner, morse key, pen, or cookhouse spatula, and bat like boggery to the nearest blue-lined troopship. Inconspicuous chalk marks behind their beds digited the months already served, as well as giving the current demob group ready for release, and after a while the figures looked to him like some magical transposition of formulae for exploding the atoms that held their prison bars in place.
He held himself from the gala of hope and speculation, living too much in the present to imagine going back to Nottingham. Not that hooks didn’t exist to draw him there, for he had been married to Pauline nearly a year before leaving England, and she had a kid of his to keep her company while he was away. On the other hand, he had spent no more than a few weeks with her, and there had been no real married life between them yet. She was no great letter-writer, and a year apart was too long a time to keep the ropes fast around him. He was unable to make chalk marks at the back of his bed, though he knew to a day that ten months of his time abroad were still to be somehow gone through, and that to exhibit these future scars called for a waste of energy and spirit that he couldn’t bring himself to spare so easily.
He grew turbulent and black, ready to smash down the peace of this long hut walled up with books because he didn’t know the reason for it. The sound of lorries lassoing the MT section with noise, and gangs passing by to the NAAFT, didn’t draw him out of it. “That’s wonderful, Brian,” Mimi said when he told her of his fourteen days’ leave. “You haven’t had a holiday since you came.” He wondered why she was so happy: she’ll miss me, after all, as well as me missing her. Yet his suspicions never lasted long, and her response reassured him, gentle and concerned as she lay on the bed and leaned over to kiss him. A blind urge to contrariness took hold of him, a hatred of the death-like placidity that seemed to lurk at the heart of her, and without waiting for the kisses he sat up and pulled her down, pressing the immobility of her mouth against his own to kill the passion in himself in an effort to get at hers.
She drew back, seeing all, he thought, yet giving nothing. “I’ll be away for three bloody weeks,” he shouted. “Are you bothered or aren’t you?”—immediately regretting the explosion of his big mouth. This wasn’t the way to go on, her silence and eyes were telling him. What is, then? Christ Almighty, what is? He had to be satisfied with the act of love alone, and it wasn’t enough.
“I’m sad as well, Brian.” Her smooth nakedness rubbed against him, dispelled the stabs of his deeper gloom. “I wish you weren’t going.”