“So what? Can’t you do it just because you want to?”
“If you like. I expect you can buy a map in Muong. They’ve got everything taped there. Then you can see what you’ll have to cover to get to the top. Can you read a map?”
“Sure.”
“Ask for a week’s leave then and shin up. Get Baker and Kirkby to go with you.” The mainland was darker, a solid lowdown horizon more important than the distant skyline of the mountains because it was close and immediate. “Start thinking about it seriously,” Knotman went on, now encouraging where before he had been diffident. “The three of you should be able to do it as easily as going for a swim — or taking a pull of whisky.” He passed the bottle: “A sundowner?”
Knotman was not the wild impulsive drinker he had seemed at first, his boozing having enough method to be a helpful and enjoyable habit. The impression bossed Brian that Knotman had developed, through the jungle of years and circumstance, a sort of calm and order into his existence, a compromise between strange perplexity and wakeful eyes, whereas Brian at the moment saw life as something you bashed into without thought or consideration either for others or for yourself, because he had neither the time nor the intelligence to manage things better. Everybody’s different from each other, he thought, and I know for a fact I ain’t got the wisdom of Knotman. I wonder whether I’ll be cleverer, though, by the time I’m his age?
Between bouts of swimming, after a fight with the swell of the tide — near to panic on the last hundred yards to his depth — Brian sat on the beach and, joined by Baker, built castles in the sand. Each structure was enclosed by a complex zigzag of exterior moats, and endless tunnels led from one system to another beneath the medieval story-book designs. They sat with the patience and built-in delight of children, creating edifices out of sand, using skill to keep lines angular and embankments firm. Before climbing back for tiffin at midday they would watch the tide come in, its advance-guard of foam creeping nearer by the inch to the outer wall of fortifications. The first wall crumbled like bread, Brian feeling a quiet I-told-you-so satisfaction at the unalterable laws of the slow war of attrition between earth and water. Artifice made the contest more exciting: tunnels built out to the water led under the highest towers, so that they collapsed while the tide was still some feet away, a subtle fuse of destruction that gave great delight when it worked cleanly.
Mimi came to see him once during his leave. He hadn’t expected her at all, had given her up with bitter disappointment because his holiday was nearly at an end, so that she appeared almost as a disturbance in the calm atmosphere of Muka. But when he saw her standing by the gate in a blue flowered dress, a yellow parasol on her shoulder, holding a straw picnic bag in one hand and waving to him with the other, it was as if excitement punched him under the heart: suddenly filling the gaps of what was an obviously thin existence when she wasn’t nearby.
They shook hands, laughing because such stilted formality made it seem as if they hadn’t seen each other for years. “You didn’t expect me, did you?”
“Too true, I didn’t. I nearly gave up hope — which means I’m glad to see you.” She explained how late she’d been sleeping after long and heavy nights at the Boston, her serious face more placid than when she sat unspeaking. They stopped at a stall in the village to buy bottles of beer, plantains, and oranges. An old Malay passed, driving a bullock cart loaded with coconut husks; he wore sari and sandals, and brown ribs at his chest stuck out like a lesson in anatomical engineering. Brian reached for her hand. The curve of the open and deserted coast, like an ivory boomerang held in the cool blue teeth of the sea, took on a flesh-and-blood feeling of reality now that she was with him. “Don’t you think it’s the best scenery you’ve ever seen?” She walked sedately a few paces off, swivelling the opened parasol on her shoulder so that the shadow of its hood rippled on the road as if taunting their walking feet to come under it out of the sun. “Yes,” she said, “it is good”—with a sincerity that for once satisfied him.
They turned on to the beach at Telok Bahang. The high forested hill of Muka rose leftwards, topped by the white pinnacle of a lighthouse. He led her to the cut-off beach seen from the lorry, over an arm of rocks, to a hummock of untouched sand. Mimi looked through his pack as soon as they sat down. “You naughty boy,” she laughed, “you didn’t bring a swimming suit.”
“Who needs one here?” He pulled off shorts and shirt, felt the sun rush against his flesh like warm water. “You’ll soon be as brown as a Tamil,” she said, looking at him. “You were fair and white when I first saw you.”
“Well, which do you like best?” unbuttoning the back of her dress.
“Black,” she said. “I want you to be like a Negro. Leave me alone,” she giggled. “I can manage.” The top part of her dress spread around, one petal fallen from the flower of her. “I can’t get as black as a Negro,” he said. “I would if I could, though, to make you happy.”
“I am happy,” she said lazily.
“Happier, then. Maybe I’ll rub boot-polish all over me, if that’ll satisfy you.”
“I wouldn’t like the smell.” She drew Chinese lettering in the sand.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“It’s a poem: ‘Poppies live best in a blue wind.’”
“Funny poem.”
“I read it in a book.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means what it says.”
“What’s a blue wind, though?”
“What poppies live best in,” she said.
“I don’t get it. I’ll bet you aren’t writing that at all.”
She rubbed it out. “Yes, I was. Why, don’t you like it?”
“I do.” He felt foolish and clumsy. “I don’t know what it means, but it sounds good.” They lay close to each other, and he thought it strange, his brown arms around her pale, almost tawny flesh. Her nakedness had no relation to the sun, whereas his had longed for it, taken the full rush of its energy and heat during his year in Malaya, and held it like a power for good. His body was lithe — sinewy arms and broad chest tapering to thin loins, and Mimi’s body was strangely cool to the touch, sun-rejecting, alert to his caresses and graceful in slow movements of reaction that tore passion out of him. The sea knitted its quiet feet into the sand, withdrew, came back with a slow hiss one tone below the wind, an echo and at the same time a forerunner of its chafing at the tree-tops behind. He felt locked in a timeless dream of sun, water, and sand, held by forest and sky and boulders and the cream-like water they suddenly ran into, away from the enervating sting of the sun and the subtle ache of satisfied loins. He caught her from behind, flattening her breasts in the spread of his fingers. Coconut oil on her hair mixed with salt water, and rubbing his face into it, he savoured the whole familiarity of her who lay beneath. In the long moment he dragged her laughing away into the gritty foam, and beyond into clear water, swimming back later to eat sandwiches and drink beer. He lit a cigarette, noticing that when he struck a match its flame was invisible because the outside heat was so intense. They slept naked, and when she nipped his thigh to wake him up he leapt after her along the sand, over boulders and into the shade of trees. A livid green snake ran off from them, its body effortlessly curving through leaves and twigs, no visible source of energy carrying it along. Trees like endless columns rose above, shutting out sky from the flowerless jungle. When they ran to the warm sand, a predatory urge came into his lions. She drew him into the shade of a rock, roused again by the blind inconsiderate animal force of his lust, her caresses sluggish until the overpowering crisis came into them, the orgasm beginning in her like the quick pleasure of warmth after the whole body had been unknowingly cold without.