The lorry roared through the village, its swift rush drying sweat patches on every shirt. “I’m in signals as well,” he said when Kirkby answered him, “so I suppose I’ll be working with you lot when I get back. Knotman’s my name, Corporal Knotman to the CO but Len to you lot. I don’t believe in discipline and bullshit, stripes or no stripes.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Baker said. “Where will you be working?”
“Telephone exchange. I was a wireless op once in aircrew, but I lost my stripes when they found they’d got too many of us. They wanted to put me peeling spuds in the cookhouse, but I ended up as a telephonist-erk, a regular in the good old FBI.”
Kirkby took to him: “What’s the FBI?” he grinned.
“Freebooters’ Institute. Federation of British Imperialists. Footsore, Ballsed-up, and Inked-out of your fucking paybook. Ten bob a day and all found, including the crabs. I’m dead beat,” he said. “I was up at four this morning.”
“That makes two of us,” Baker put in. Knotman pulled a bottle of Chinese rice-spirit from his pack. “Have some of this. It won’t rot your guts. It’s best whisky, but I carry it in this hooch bottle so that I don’t have to offer it to bastards I don’t like. They think I’m doing them a favour, in fact, when I don’t push it their way, and that makes them begin to like me. But by then it’s too late.” Brian took a swig, so did Kirkby. Baker decided to wait a while. “Too late by then, Shag,” Knotman said. “Always take what’s going and you won’t go far wrong. You might have a heart attack in five minutes and be crippled for life. I was weaned on loot.”
“Where you from?” Brian asked, detecting some peculiarity of accent.
“Canada, but I’ve been in Limey-land eight years, so I reckon I’m the same as you now.” He stuffed the bottle in his bag and sang in a gruff but tuneful voice, as they sped along between palm-trees and beach until Brian, Pete, and even Baker joined in. It was difficult to tell whether Knotman was drunk or just whacked-out — though it might have been a mixture of both plus an armature of back-logged work unwinding in his brain. They followed his words and caught on to fresh verses, roaring loud as the lorry entered Kota Libis and turned in at the pier gates, where turbaned customs officials stopped looking into bags and cases to see what the wind had brought in.
Brian stood by the rail to watch green water tracking towards Muong. Three large junks, heavy with flour sacks and rubber, headed in the same direction, huge patched sails so slow in the water that they seemed not to be moving at all and reminded him of a poem he’d read a few days since about seeing old ships sail like swans asleep. They were like that, he thought, though at the same time resembling swans that had been in a fight and were creeping inch by inch towards the safety of a harbour. Knotman stayed on the lorry, head in hands for a while, then stared back at the long mainland line of beach as if uninterested in where he was going.
The boat went between anchored ships with such smooth precision that it seemed to be on train tracks placed invisibly under the water. As it slid towards the pier, Brian heaved himself back on to the lorry. Knotman was alive again, sat with beefy arms folded looking at Malays and Chinese going up the gangways with bundles and baskets. “Christ,” Baker said, “they’re like flies. Thousands of them.”
Knotman’s face lost its expression of sleep: “Ever been on the London subway at eight in the morning? This is as graceful as a Covent Garden ballet compared to that.” Cars packed on deck slowly unwound and the lorry drove cautiously along the pier, headed through the town, and took to a wide ramparted boulevard leading by villas on to the coast road. All were bareheaded for fear their hats would blow across the beach and out to sea. The town gone, a series of blue bays stretched beyond. When one was left behind, the driver rode his vehicle up the dividing spur before another, and from the short tarmac stretch at the top could be seen other bays and spurs still to be crossed. Then the lorry slid into the steep bay-gully immediately in front, and at the bottom was a sheaf of sand between two heaps of rock, with palm-trees along the banks of a stream. A Chinese family sunbathed by a bungalow, and on the beach children fled from each other into the water. The blade of sea broadened, narrowed to a saw-edge because of tree trunks, disappeared, and the lorry was upward climbing again. “Marvellous,” Knotman said, passing his bottle around. “Let’s drink to it. Anybody who won’t is dead from the neck up. Why didn’t you tell me Pulau Timur was this good-looking?”
“I couldn’t get a word in edgeways,” Brian said, handing the bottle to Baker. Marvellous, and he didn’t need Knotman to tell him because he’d allus thought so. Who or whatever made this must have had good eyes, wielding his brush over such bays and washing broad streaks of sea around them; and a giant fist to punch the land so that hills came up from oblivion, the same hand throwing jewels along the valleys that turned into temples. Ships sailed from the old kingdom of Barat and anchored in the streets between island and mainland, and a town grew up on the neck of land that was sheltered. Such permanent and colourful scenery, the full depth and meaning of its long life in comparison to his own, the warmth lavished on it by the sky, and the smaller lives he knew to exist in every branch and grass blade that made up the greenery and in the blue that denoted the sea, made him think of death and dying. Overwhelming beauty brought overwhelming sorrow. He stared before him, seeing the hills and ocean no longer — only the sentence that had fled from somewhere for refuge in his own mind.
Muka was twelve miles from town, several cream-coloured two-storied buildings set a hundred feet above the rocks and beach. “There was nothing like this in Kenya,” Knotman said.
“How long were you there?” Brian asked. They were directed to an upper storey in the central block.
“Couple of years.”
“You bin in the jungle?”
“I went hunting once.”
“Bag anything?” Baker enquired.
“Yes: my big toe and a group-captain. Nothing living, though. This looks like it.” They climbed the concrete stairway: “If you slip on this after a few bottles of Tiger Beer, you’ll break your legs.” They had a billet to themselves, and a Chinese to do their laundry for a dollar a week, as well as someone to make their beds, clean shoes, and bring in morning tea for another dollar. These deals settled, they ambled down the rocky path for a swim.
Brian ran into the sea, as if out of the death of the land, to save himself in forests of salt water dragging grittily over his face, falling into it at fifty yards free and releasing his weight against the water until he became a log and felt sand on the bottom scratching along his shoulder blades and spine. It was as far away from morse code as it was possible to get, water pressing milk-warm and forceful even at the palms of his hands and trying to get in, so that he hit the surface near to bursting and opened his mouth, burned by the sun that had waited to grip his hair plastered flat and hard. Eyes still closed, he made a guess as to whether he was turned towards sea or land. If I’m facing land, Mimi will come and see me. If I’m looking out to sea, she’ll give me the go-by. He stared at the black sails of a loaded junk entering the straits a mile from the beach, and before he had time to speculate further, Baker made a dive at his legs and took him under. Brian lashed out with fists and surfaced, getting Baker round the waist and pressing him off balance, chin into stream, until his adversary’s weight fell from his grasp. Brian held him down, but soon he was up again, fists pounding the malleable surface.