Less than a dozen were at the camp, leaving a free beach most of the time, and good service in the dining-room. “The lap of luxury,” Brian said to Knotman, who threw back a Penguin book by way of reply: “Read this while you’re here.”
On the second afternoon those in the camp set off for a swim in a mountain pool on the other side of the island. Brian stood up on the lorry, between an urn of lemonade and a box of sandwiches. A long band of yellow beach ran along the northern shore of the island, ending in the jungled prominence of Telebong Head light. Brian searched out some secluded spot in case Mimi should visit him as promised, though he became pessimistic about it as soon as he saw a cove beyond the farthest village, an ideal place, with a few rocks on either side and palms set behind.
The lorry climbed steeply beyond Telok Bahang, away from the sea and up a looped road with hillside falling hundreds of feet down to the valley. Clusters of huts lay in clearings by a stream snaking through bushes and speckles of sun. A Chinese woman was gathering wood: she was toothless and bald, her face brown and sexless with age, and she straightened her doubled back to smile as the lorry passed. Brian waved, felt the pendulum of his spirit move between desperate unfulfilled answers and happiness.
The hill blocking their view fell away at the road’s next bend, so that before and below was a vista of paddy fields, a sheet of bright dazzling green stretched taut, dotted here and there with the brown patch of a village. A flat plain rolling beyond to the darker green of mangrove swamps ended in a blue haze at the sea-horizon. This also brought happiness, for paddy fields meant people working for food, though the vision of it quickly faded as the lorry changed gear and began to descend.
Halfway towards the plain it pulled into the road-side, where a stream came under a wooden bridge from up the mountain and quarrelled between rocks on its way to the fields. Brian dropped from the lorry, followed the stream up course, and reached a large clean pool held in by a horseshoe of cliff, silver fishes turning under its cool surface. The watershed towered two thousand feet above, and the stream came down through forest and gully, making an entrance into the pool where he was standing. Isolation, until the others came shouting in behind, shooting their naked bodies into the pool, which was quickly filled.
George, a warrant officer up from KL for seven days, also came into their billet. He’d not long since been SWO at Kota Libis, so Brian already knew him as a man who must have reached his rank merely by having been in the air force thirty years — certainly not by bullying or ambitious bum-crawling. He was more like the harmless, kindly, nondescript bird-fancier at a branchline ticket-office that British pictures like to show as the typical workingman than the usual sort of sergeant-major. Nothing bothered him, and he was so innocuous he didn’t even possess a sense of humour — having enlisted to avoid the trivial worries of civilian life, or maybe he had just drifted into uniform with no design whatever. He obviously carried out his routine admin duties with some efficiency, though at Kota Libis he was little in evidence as warrant officer, sitting day after day in his office reading an Edgar Wallace with as much wide-eyed intent as Brian remembered his uncle Doddoe used to scan the racing paper, though in the latter case with narrowed eyes and for only a fraction of the time because Doddoe had somewhat more work to do. “What does it matter how you live as long as you live in reasonable comfort?” George said one day, taking his socks off before going down to the beach. “I’ve got fair pay, grub, clothes, and a bed to sleep in. In return I do some work (only a little, though, he winked) and lose my independence. You can’t have it fairer than that, can you, lad?” He filled the bowl of his large pipe with such complacency that Brian felt like kicking his teeth in. He’s dead, the dead bastard, the brainless old bleeder. He’s a natural-born slave. “It don’t sound a good life to me,” he said. “Maybe not,” George answered, unruffled at what Brian saw as the greatest insult, “but I chose it, didn’t I?” Some people ’ud choose prison if they could get a cup of tea, he thought. George was of medium height, bald and pot-bellied and spindly-legged, wore bathing trunks and resembled a white ant grown to a man. He took up his towel and went out, leaving Brian to read. Christ, he thought, he’s been in this mob thirty years, and I’m only just twenty. I hope I’m not as dead as he is in thirty years. I wonder if Len Knotman will end up like that? Though I don’t suppose so because his time’s up in a year, and then he says he’s getting the hell out of it back to Canada, where he can get a job up north and be a free man again. “I’ve learnt to know what freedom means in these last eight years,” Knotman had said to him. “And the bloke who doesn’t learn that, sooner or later, isn’t fit to be on the face of the earth, because they’re the types that end up as the enemies and persecutors of those who know what freedom means.”
At five o’clock he lay on the beach, a coolness coming invisibly in from greying sea. Baker waded in from a swim, maddened by horseflies spotted on to his legs like currants, skeins of blood running from each as they chewed his flesh by the mouthful, having hovered in wait by the water’s edge. “They’re like flying leeches,” Knotman said. “Ever had a leech on you?” He lay against the rocks, having swum himself out for the day, bush hat on the back of his head though the sun was well down behind the island. “No, I ain’t,” Brian answered, slinging a fag over.
They smoked in silence. Gunong Barat lay to the north, a black aggressive monolith coming out of the mainland twenty-odd miles across the water. Brian wanted to ascend through its wet forests (leeches or no leeches, snakes or tigers or elephants — it didn’t matter), to test his strength on its steep incorrigible slopes. Hard labour would be needed, but the claws of endurance would goad him on, turn him into a treadmill of effort as he struggled up. This revelation grew indistinct and gave way to grandiose speculation as to what it would be like to use the distant encircling vision of its eyes from four thousand feet. “I’ve thought a long time about trying to climb that mountain over there.”
“What’s to stop you?” Knotman said lazily.
“Nothing, I suppose. It wouldn’t be easy, though. A bloke in the billet came down from Burma the other day and flew over it: he said it’s up to its neck in thick jungle.”
“It would be an experience,” Knotman said. “You can’t leave Malaya and not know what the jungle’s like.”
“What is it like?” Brian asked.
He laughed: “Like a woman maybe — deep, dark, and hard to know. Dangerous as well, if you don’t watch your step.”
“It might not seem like that to me,” Brian said, having already told Knotman he was married and seeing no reason to switch the subject so abruptly.
“It did to me. I had eight years solitary — meaning one woman. Then I got out quick.”
“I was talking about Gunong Barat, though. Why does it have to be like anything?”
“Because it does. Otherwise it’s got no meaning. And everything means something.”
“All right,” Brian said. “I give in. What does Gunong Barat mean?”
“You mean what does wanting to climb it mean? I read once that you only climb mountains when you’ve got no ambition, but think you might as well get something out of life. Of course it’s different with you: you’re just an idealist, meaning you give in to worldly values without dirtying your hands on them.”