“Considerate bastard,” Jack said. “All for one and one for all. I’d like to have one of them, though. Use its guts for garters, I would.” Brian took down a message from the Dakota while Jack grumbled on, phoned it through to flying control. “I would have taken a shot at them, except that the bastards don’t let me have a rifle. Think I’ll let fly at the officers, I expect. Not that I wouldn’t by mistake, though. ‘Sorry, sir, but my glasses were at the laundry. I’ll aim the other way next time.’ Man, what a life! You should ’ave brought one down with the rifle.”
“Couldn’t be bothered”—flicking an ant away from the sugar. “It was so dark I wouldn’t have seen it.” He hacked off slices of bread and cheese: “Get some o’ this. I’m clambed.”
Jack shuffled back to his hut, cursing the air force, God, and Winston Churchill. Brian swept up and cleared away the breakfast things, dug a hole fifty yards off to bury the week’s tins. Another message rattled in from the far-off Dakota, then Jack was on the phone: “Listen,” he said, so excited it seemed his head was in the earpiece of the receiver, “there’s a great dog, man, about fifty shakes from your wanking pit. Fetch him down with the rifle. My Sten won’t reach or I’d let him have a burst. He’s one of the sods that’s been keeping me awake all night.”
“Wait for the bang then. See you soon.” Sliding one up the spout, he stepped to the door. It was as big as a full-grown Alsatian, and not too far off to be winged at the first crack. He stood perfectly still. Its coat was straggly and white, had a long bony head and the noble face of a handsome outcast that didn’t know what was in store for it. Its eyes looked as if waiting for something to move in the nearby grass.
A perfect target. Maybe I’ll scare it with a shout and get him on the run. He lined foresight and backsight with its right eye and eased on the safety-catch, feeling for the trigger. The dog turned and there was no fear in its gaze, as if it didn’t realize that another animal was so close, though Brian knew it saw him, felt its curiosity and quiet enquiring surprise. His finger was on the rounded steel of the trigger, and he visualized it already with a hole battered into its skull, fallen like a piece of floorcloth after the butt had jerked against his shoulder. He brought the gun down.
The dog moved, and with no thoughts left, Brian followed it into the grass, leaving the radio to fend for itself. A sudden spurt put the dog out of range. He felt the sun pushing at the back of his neck and impelling him towards the trees. A hundred yards off, the dog leapt into the air: I should have got it then — but when he reached where the dog had jumped, his legs and shorts were ripped by barbed wire concealed in the grass, paining as if burning embers had peppered his flesh. He aimed and fired, but the grass obscured his aim. I’ll get it on the dispersal clearing. Stop, he told himself, leave it be, you lousy bastard. Yet he was enjoying the chase, couldn’t force himself to draw off.
Concealed roughage below the waving grass blades buckled his ankle now and again and, falling behind, he expected the dog to wheel out of range and reach the safety of the trees. But it stopped from time to time as if sick, hoping perhaps to lie low and be given up. Brian went on, driven by pain in his legs.
The dog veered from the trees, circled back for the hut, so that all he needed do was wait. Maybe it wanted food. He whistled a tune until it reached the clearing, told himself not to shoot it, but was too weary to listen. On his knees he fired, the noise sharp and great, directly connected to the dog that dropped by the hut door. He circled the hut himself, feeling a black end-of-the-world weariness as he dragged himself, after some minutes, towards it.
In spite of the great hole in its head, which he couldn’t bear to look at, the dog still twitched. He dragged the limp relaxed body ten yards and dug a hole out of the stony ground, half an hour of feverish hacking and lifting because the sun was up and draining rivers of sweat off him. He pushed the dog into the deep trench and shovelled stones and soil in, hating himself for the rottenness of what he’d done. It was impossible not to think thoughts that wouldn’t come to him before but did so now. Christ, I shouldn’t have done it. Useless and mad. I ought to have slung a brick and let it go, not shot it like the cruel and wicked bastard I am. At the set another message came from the Dak, its signals fainter so that he listened hard to pull down the five-figure groups. Out of the biting heat his mind grew cool, drew him back a dozen years to a thundery weekend at the Nook, to a walk across cornfields with grandad Merton to look for Gyp, who was missing after a fearful kicking for nothing at all. The air was heavy with unshed rain and a cool breeze blew — as they tramped by hedges and over stiles. The picture was not clear, needed an effort even to keep it at this blurred pitch, but he remembered at the end of it finding the dog on the railway line, bloody and curled up after being hit by a train. It was impossible to say who had killed it: Merton, the train, God. Who? The family said Merton, and in this case, in spite of the phone call from Jack, anybody with two eyes would have said Brian had done it. And so would he, in their place. But never again, he thought. One dead dog is enough to have to pay for.
At eight-thirty the relief lorry waited at the airstrip, and Kirkby was on his way to take over, a dot seen in the distance as Brian stuffed his haversack with towel and books. Sun scorched his hair and he could smell the sharp stench of sweat from his body when the breeze lifted. Far to the left was the paddy field where the old DF hut had been, though the flat expanse of rice shoots had no aerials now to break the monotony of it. The Chinese peasant guided his oxen through where they had been, and palm-trees on the far edge that had received the full blow of the last monsoon lay like kitchen mops over the water.
Jack came out of his hut and walked in step: “That was a good shot, man. I watched you bring him down. Smack! Keeled over, he did, just like that.”
Brian stopped to light a fag. “Listen,” he said, filled with rage at his own useless cruelty (a dog’s a dog: it’s got to live; even Dave and Colin would admit that): “That’s the last fucking dog I shoot, I’ll tell you that, mate. In fact, it’s the last thing I shoot at all. Christ knows why I killed it; I don’t.”
“Well,” Jack said, subdued at seeing him in this funny mood, “all right, comrade, man, don’t do it. I suppose it didn’t do any good, now you put it like that.”
“Too bleeding right, it didn’t,” Brian fumed. “Roll on the boat, that’s all I can say. This place is beginning to get on my wick.”
“It’s no good letting it get you down,” Jack said. “We’ll be in that steaming jungle next week.”
From watching Baker test his model aeroplane (fuselage and wings were smashed on the second flight, though the engine was saved), Brian saw a letter on his bed bearing a Singapore postmark. It was a note from Mimi, not exactly filled with words of love, but merely saying she was on her way back from Singapore (stopping at KL to visit her parents) to take up her old job at the Boston. Yet because her words were unadorned, his imagination flamed with possibilities, set him cursing at the fact that in only a few days he would be off to climb Gunong Barat. He reflected, though, that such a life of expectation and promise, enabling him to see Mimi for a few days and then make a trip into the jungle, wasn’t such a bad thing. And a couple of months later he would be on the boat, making his way back to Pauline and the kid. He wondered why Mimi had abandoned the idea of Singapore so soon: happen the job hadn’t turned out as she’d expected. Or maybe there hadn’t been work at all, but she’d gone down on the trot with some boy-friend who’d taken a fancy to her at the Boston — who’d packed her up when his ship left. Then again, she could have come back because she missed me. Now you have got a touch of the bleeding sun.