He broke the spell, caught sight of the table on which he sometimes spread a mattress and stretched out when he couldn’t stay awake. On its surface, reaching from side to side of the hut, was a kettle (that would leave a black ring when lifted), a tin of sugar housing a lucky ant or two, a packet of strong Air Ministry tea, a couple of tin mugs with flex around the handles, and a haversack of bread and cheese. Propped in a corner was a loaded rifle whose meat-skewer bayonet had been used to spit holes in a tin of condensed milk also on the table. There were over a hundred.303 rounds in a floor box, fifty more than the camp armoury knew about, hard cylindrical hand-outs with lead noses to punctuate or terminate whatever moved outside or in.
The music grew back — or he turned round to it, unwilling to be entirely alone. A thought he considered stupid and out of place came to him: “I don’t want to go up to Gunong Barat. The only place I want to be is Nottingham.” It slid the earth from under him, like the trick when someone flicks the cloth from beneath a tableful of pots without disturbing them, the difference being they are nearer the reality of true-grained wood. With the ground insecure, he knew he would still go to Gunong Barat, which, though a self-erected obstacle, had to be crossed nevertheless because he had created it in his own mind as a stepping-stone to the future. In any case, Gunong Barat meant the jungle, a luring and mysterious word that had taunted him all his life from books and comics and cinema, an unknown flimsy world meaning something else, so that it would teach him perhaps whether or not he wanted to enter the real world it sometimes appeared to be screening. Without the expedition there would be no future, only a present, an ocean of darkness behind the thin blue of the day, a circle of bleak horizons dotted by fires burning out their derelict flames.
He remembered an encounter with Mimi one night on his way back from the Egyptian café. She passed him in the darkness, was a few paces ahead before he called her name. When she turned, his feeling of gladness became one of misery at thinking she might have hoped to pass him unnoticed. “Where are you off at this time of night?”
Both were shocked at the meeting: “I’m going home,” she said. “I felt like walking.” She seemed in a hurry and he went along with her.
“I could do with a stroll as well,” he said, curt and sarcastic, a mood that turned her into a perverse witch, no longer beautiful, and withdrawing. Well, he said to himself, you wanted to get to know her, now you have. She’s a whore, doing it on you. They walked in silence, he feeling a hopeless awkwardness, unable to speak as if his throat were full of soil.
“I had a hard night,” she told him, walking unconcerned by his side. “An American ship is in harbour, and I’ve danced for five hours. We thought the police were going to come, but the Americans just got senseless and took each other back to their ship.”
“I’ve been in the canteen,” he said, “playing dominoes.” The turning-off point was reached. A few people were about. A trishaw from the last ferry was taking a drunk back to camp. He wished it were midday and dazzling sun so that the shopfronts would be decked out like open pomegranates, with hair-cream and razor blades, watches and fountain pens, cameras and cheap shirts, fruits and food and people and traffic. He felt uneasy at being alone in a darkness in which you couldn’t really be alone, sensing beneath Mimi’s nonchalance her deeper uneasiness at being with him. Before he could broach the question, she said: “There isn’t a free night this week. Three Dutch ships are coming in and I’ll have to work all the time.”
He said nothing, regretting that he was unable to make an immediate answer, though knowing it wouldn’t have done much good. Her mind was fixed. Maybe she’s fed up only for the time being and we’ll be on the old footing in a week or two. His notion that she’d found someone else made him sick with jealousy and disappointment, too confused to ask himself what had eaten into their love. I’d seen it coming, and maybe that was what was wrong. “I’m busy myself these days,” he said.
“We’ll see each other again.” I suppose this is what they call a stiff upper lip, he thought; the stupid bastards. “I’ll let you know when I’ve got an evening off,” she said, almost tenderly. Maybe she’s happy I’m not doing my nut and pasting her all up the road. “I’ve been thinking of taking a job at Singapore,” she went on. “In fact, there’s a good chance I’ll be on my way soon.” This meant little to him: she’d spoken of it months ago, and it might come to nothing. But he said: “I hope you don’t go. I love you too much to let you go as easy as that.”
“I know,” she said slowly. They kissed passionately, then broke away and walked in their different directions.
He swore at the night, at himself, at everything under the night moon, his curses hammering at the stockade that had been built around the limit of his words without his knowing it, even before he was born perhaps. I can’t say or do a thing right. Christ, I’d cut my throat if this was the first tart I’d gone out with.
He was hailed from a passing tri-shaw: “Hey, Brian, you dirty ramrod, where have you been sinning tonight? I didn’t see you in the stews of Pulau Timur.” Belt up, he thought, black as thunder. “If you want a lift, get in,” Knotman went on, “but if you want to walk your feet off your ankles, I don’t give a Gunong Barat.”
“I heard you the first time.” He relented and sat in the tri-shaw beside him, the padding feet of the coolie clip-clopping along the empty road. “Been to the Boston Lights?” he asked Knotman through the high power of his whisky breath.
“Not likely. Costs too much. I got me a nice steady girl, Eurasian, nurse at the hospital. Says she loves me and will I marry her? ‘Sure,’ I say, ‘be glad to when I’ve made up my mind.’ ‘You’re unjust,’ she says, ‘you’re persistently procrastinating, like Hamlet’ (she’s an intellectual like me: that’s why we get on so well). ‘It’s hardly fair,’ she says, ‘the way you use me’ (reads The Tatler as well). ‘We should get married, you know.’ We sit in the Botanical Gardens feeding the mokeys: ‘I’m rotten,’ I say to her, shedding tears of blood. ‘I’m the rottenest melon as ever rolled God’s earth; I’m as rotten as they come, so help me bloody God. So you’d better forgive me or I won’t be able to marry you; and stop taking my feed bottle away from me like that, you sly bitch, or I’ll sock you on the jaw.’ ‘I’m finished,’ she says. ‘You treat me worse than any prostitute from the Boston Lights. You only treat me so badly because you’ve lost your self-respect.’ Goes all deep down and perceptive on me, really gets her nails into my inside tripes — metaphysically speaking, of course (I’ve read The Tatler as well). ‘I’m going,’ she says, ‘I’m off. You’ve hurt me too much’—and here’s me rubbing my psychological sores because they’re giving me hell. But she ups and goes, and that’s the way life is with a woman. I meet her at the gate. ‘Where are you off?’ I asks. ‘I was hoping I’d see you again because I forgot to give you the poem I’d written to you.’ (I’m sobbing now, almost anyway.) ‘I’ve been working on it a week and have found it very difficult not to give it you before it was finished. But it’d be a terrible shame if we were to part for ever in this flippant fashion, before you know how much I really love you, and without me having shown you the marvellous poem I’ve been composing for you in my heart these last three months.’ I charm her — you understand? She listens. ‘I’m sorry,’ I says. ‘True love never runs smooth.’ (Her face has traces of smallpox, but I’m crazy about her.) ‘I’d like to hear your poem,’ she says. So we go back to the seat we were on before. I got out a piece of paper, maybe my will and testament, and made up a poem on the spot, anything to save my broken-down future marriage. I’ve been divorced after marriage, which was bad enough because it was against my Christian principles, but never split up in an irreparable divorce before marriage, which would be against my pagan principles. So I make up a poem as Miss Prim-and-Proper waits for the beautiful lines to flow — you know, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and all that crap: