“I’ll never leave Malaya,” he said after.
“You mean you love me?”
“You know I do. It’s marvellous here.”
The next evening he went back to Worthington, had no sooner unloaded his pack than Corporal Williams came to say he was to start operating on the DF frequency in the signals hut. “Give me time to get back to the bleeding camp,” Brian said, seeing he’d be unable to visit Mimi that night.
“Don’t blame me,” Williams said, one of those long-standing wireless-op corporals on whom prolonged morse-taking had acted like shellshock: left him with an apologetic face, a permanent stare, and hands that shook as if he’d got palsy. “A Dakota’s coming up from Singapore. Flying control say you’re to listen out for him.”
He picked up his drinking mug and tin of cigarettes, stuffed them in his small pack, and walked towards signals, dejected and enraged, spoiled by his fortnight of freedom. Hands in pockets, he followed the path through the trees, oblivious to a jumped-up sharp command from the adjutant standing outside the orderly room. “Airman!” he called again when Brian still headed for the medley of different morse-pitches coming from signals. He put his cap on, went over, and saluted.
“Why weren’t you wearing your cap, Airman?”
The sidewalk of the long, single-storied hut of the admin block was raised a foot above the soil on which Brian stood. The adjutant had a sardonic look on his face, fixed as if it had been branded there from birth — the only expression in fact that gave it a glimmer of intelligence. He had what Brian assumed (from his reading of mediocre novels) to be finely chiselled features, though there was no denying that drink and a giving-up of life had left them as blotched and pock-marked as the king’s-head side of an old coin. He wasn’t known for a martinet, was easygoing, almost dead-cush in fact, the more gentlemanly sort of officer who only bothered to pick up a “crime” when he was bored by the dead days of his regular life; the worst sort in a way because you never knew how to take him, were caught unawares like now when you relaxed your alertness and protective screen of cunning.
He had no answer, yet said: “With signals section being so near, I didn’t think it was necessary, sir”—his voice a calculated blend of defiance and regret that he had sinned. In a similar situation Kirkby had a knack of looking as if he’d just finished fourteen days’ jankers, so was half-pitied and merely told off for what “wrong” he had done, but Brian’s face and feelings were too friendly with each other to be much help. I’m not fresh into the air-force school like some, he cursed. I’ve done four years’ work in a factory already. I’m married and got a kid — though you wouldn’t think so, the way I let them boss me around.
“What’s your name?”
I’ll get seven days, I suppose. He could hear Baker laughing from the billet window. “Seaton, sir.”
“Why are you going to the signals section?”
He’ll ask me why I was born next. “I’m on watch, sir.” It’s best to stick it out. As Knotman says: “If you want to fight them, do it on your own terms. Otherwise you’ll lose.”
“Well, look, Seaton, don’t let me catch you outside the billet again without your hat being where it’s supposed to be.”
He walked away, laughing to himself that he hadn’t been confined to camp for seven to fourteen days. If I was the government I’d nationalize the air force and close it down.
He tuned in his receiver, turned the slow-motion dial until, key pressed, the strident whistle of the transmitter crept up on his eardrums. It rose to a shriek, the strong piercing cry of a soul in torment above the Ironside layer, burning the relays of its earthbound transmitter until he lifted his hand off the key and stopped it. He then tapped out a call to Singapore to test his signals strength. QSA 4—QRK 3. Not bad for half-past six.
A message came from the lumbering Dakota high above the backbone of jungle. In work his bitterness was forgotten, and after the plane landed he amused himself by sending poetry from the Pelican book by his set, each letter going out at fast speed, hot sparks burning the brain of anyone who could read its symbols. Word by word, line by rhythmical line, the whole of Kubla Khan found its way from his key, and he felt exhilarated in knowing that such a poem was filling the jungles and oceans of the Far East, coming, if anyone heard it, from an unknown and unanswerable hand. To send plain language on a distress (or any) frequency was, so the Manual of Persecution said, an offence to be tried by court martial, but as far as he knew, all official stations had either closed down for the night or were too far away to receive it. So La Belle Dame Sans Merci also went singing hundreds of miles out into darkness, perhaps reaching the soul of the man who wrote it and maybe also touching the source of golden fire that sent down these words to him in the first place. Dots and dashes went out at a steady workman-like speed, all poetic rhythms contained, even in the sending of one word. The mast top of the transmitter high above the trees outside propagated the chirping noises of his morse, as if releasing cages of birds into freedom.
CHAPTER 20
After a tea of sausages and beans he raced upstairs to get changed. “Tek yer bleddy sweat,” the old man called, when his workboots bashing on the wooden stairs caused the wireless to crackle.
Trousers and jacket hung on a chair-back: a suit his mother had got second-hand for six bob up Alfreton Road, utility blue with faint pin-stripes, shining at joints and not a turn-up in sight. But a suit was a suit and there was a tie and white shirt to make him spruce after a day mixing alum and flour at the shit-smelling pastebins — and five bob in his pocket out of the two pound wage-packet he’d given up downstairs. Stripping off boots and overalls, he whistled a wild jig set to the lyrics of a carefree Friday. The double bed under the window he shared with Arthur and Fred, though he as the eldest had charge of the room. In one corner was a cupboard holding his books, a hundred and thirty-seven, with a list of titles and authors pinned inside, and LONG LIVE STALIN AND RUSSIA chalked up in Russian on the back of the other door — words of magic made up by him from a Russian grammar asked for at the library a few months back. Opposite the window was a desk knocked together as a special favour by the old man, skilfully botched from packing cases and painted dark brown. Above hung a map of eastern Europe, its battleline marked by a band of pencilling. Soon it would be useless, for the grey tide of his constant rubbings-out had edged far towards Poland and Rumania, though in his cupboard was a folded map of western Europe which would complete the picture of Germany throttled — providing the Yanks and British got cracking with that second front.
He opened the cupboard, proud of his collection of books, though he’d read few of them. The combined bulk and story of The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Misérables had kept his desire for reading away from the rest of the stood-up spines. Nevertheless, their existence gave some feeling of refuge from what tempests now and again sprang up (for no reason that he could see) in his brain. Most of the books had been stolen from a shop down town, brought from its endless shelves to the light of day under his shirt, often two or three at a time, costing maybe five bob, while in his hand were a pair from the threepenny box he’d pay for at the office with a nondescript starvo look on his face. He acquired them by the simple action of walking in and walking out Saturday after Saturday, bricks for the building of a barricade against something and someone as yet unformulated and nameless. Shelves grew, became classified into Languages, Fiction, and Travel, made a distinguished graphline along their tops as if to hold down the sombre colours of uneven spines. To run his fingers along them would mean washing his hands again before going out, with the risk of marking his white shirt that he was now pulling over his bare chest.