Brian waited with fists raised, though knowing that if he didn’t fight any more the man would be willing to let it drop. “Yo’ leave her alone as well, you daft sod. We’d on’y ’ad a drink.”
“Ar,” the man said. “I know y’ave. I know all about that.”
“Well, I’m telling you,” Brian said. He felt a loon standing with fists raised against fresh air; lowered them and walked off cursing his bad luck, determined not to rub the ache at his forehead until he had turned out of the street and could no longer be seen by the squabbling couple behind.
On Sneinton Boulevard, a wide dark artery of emptiness all to himself, he burned more with rage than the pain of his indecisive fight, could have pulled God out of the sky and given him a good thumping — though what’s the use when there ain’t no God? Belt up, keep calm, then you’ll never come to harm. Yes, I know, he thought wrathfully, lighting a fag, and it’s no use feeling sorry about Pauline having chucked you, either.
PART FOUR
The Jungle
CHAPTER 23
At nine o’clock one June morning an open fifteen-hundredweight turned from the camp gates and set the heavy tread of its tyres north along the coast road. The sweat on Brian’s face was soon fanned dry by its speed and, one of six, he leaned against the side and took off his bush hat, felt his short fair hair jerking in the wind. He’d been up since five, checking maps, building up the contents of his pack, and stowing the compass where it wasn’t likely to smash or get wet. Shaded under the palms, the long cookhouse went back to sleep after they had eaten and clobbered out.
He’d thought this day would never come, but now that the powerful rasping lorry engine roared them along towards Gunong Barat he was relaxed, hardly excited at all. Instead, strangely enough, when blue and cloud-reflecting paddy fields fanned out richly eastwards, thoughts and memories of Nottingham pushed into his mind and this dwelling on the past damped the intoxication he’d always expected to feel. He was puzzled, but grunted and lit a fag, bending under the backboard to escape the wind. Pauline came to mind: tall and abstracted as she walked along the privet-hedged pavement of the wide street, her pale face given character by a slight thinness after the baby had been born. Everything that happened to Brian since leaving school, the long four years of work and courting, had led to him marrying Pauline and thinking now: I’m spliced, though it’s never felt like it should, for even when I slept with her on my odd days of leave it only seemed like getting in a bit of rooky I wasn’t entitled to. Even the kid she had ain’t made much of a picture to my mind, so why did I marry her? I needn’t have done, in one way, and I haven’t spent enough married life with her yet to know whether or not I feel good at getting married when I did. Which I suppose is how you’re bound to feel when you come to think about it.
The sun’s heat, seeming to pierce his skull in spite of the wind, slowly banished the intruding vision, and he was glad to give his eyes up to magic-lantern pictures of Malaya spread all around in colour. They reached the airstrip, and when a plane touched down, the lorry belted forward and slung Baker on to the load of packs. “You louse-bound bastard,” he screamed. “I suppose he thinks we’re just the normal air-force cattle. Why the bloody hell did he have to wake us this morning? I was having marvellous dreams, riding down through Kent with a smashing girl on the pillion. There’s just no civilization left.”
“Stop your effing griping,” Kirkby growled. “You get on my wick. Why did you bleddy-well come if you didn’t want to?”
“There are stranger things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Kirkby.” Baker wasn’t capable of sneering, but the angle at which he held his head (really a physical defect due to bad eyesight) and the tone of superiority in his voice often angered those who didn’t know him, or were unable to match this feeling. “Listen,” Kirkby called back, “you’ll get this bloody bayonet up your bleeding philosophy if you don’t sodding-well belt up.”
“You’re lucky to be here,” Brian said, “after we all lied for you the other day.” Baker, with a sane and self-righteous expression, had been marched into the orderly room on a charge of insubordination against the sergeant who’d said they weren’t to take suitcases back on the boat. Half the signals billet filed in behind to perjure themselves and testify that the sergeant had struck Baker first. So he had got off.
The silver, geometrically spaced trees of a rubber estate grew miles back from the roadside, and bursting into open land once more, the stink of putrescent mud assailed them from the banks of a wide, shallow, hardly moving river. The lorry wheels treddled loose planks of a pontoon bridge, and Jack the Welshman hurrah-ed ironically on reaching tarmac. Brown pal-thatched huts of a kampong stood away from the roadside, every turn of which brought them nearer to Gunong Barat, so that by mid-morning its dark green humps climbed up and back to the sharp summit fixed against a mass of white-bellied cloud. “It looks beautiful, anyway,” Brian called to Knotman. “I’d never a seen this if I adn’t left Nottingham.”
“It’s all relative, though,” Knotman said. “When I was stationed near London I used to like going round the East End — White-chapel and Bethnal Green — back along Cable Street. I used to find that inspiring in a strange way. Ever been to Petticoat Lane market? That’s beautiful as well. You ought to live in London when you get back. Get a job there.”
“I’d like to. I never wanted to stick in one place. I expect there’s lots of small engineering firms in London as ’ud set me on.”
“Sure. You’re young. Your wife wouldn’t mind a change, would she?”
“Not if I want it,” Brian said. The broad main street of Balik Kubong was drawn by them like a sleeve, and they were back on the open road. Forking left at Penunjok, the lorry nearly scooped off with a petrol pump. “That bastard wants certifyin’,” Kirkby said. Rubber estates grew thicker around, and the lorry switched north along an unpaved road with a small river to the left — recognized from the map as the Sungei Pawan. The road ended sharply at the jungle’s edge, as if the surveyors had downed tools and refused to go farther at the sudden dispiriting thickness of the forest. Brian was so glad to leave the lorry he almost fell off: “He didn’t kill us, anyway.”
The taciturn driver spun his lorry around and shot it between the trees, making for the more manoeuvrable spaces of the main road before louder curses got through to him. Brian heaved his pack up, shook it squarely against his shoulders. They were dressed in khaki shirts, slacks tucked in at the ankles to wide-topped mosquito boots, and bush hats. Each shouldered pack was squared by blanket and cape, and Christmas-treed around by a full waterbottle, haversack, kukri, and rifle. Brian looked at the jungle, stood in silence a minute or two as if wondering what he was doing there, and why he wanted to enter that towering wall of trees from which only the sound of rushing water emerged in an unfair tit for tat. So that’s the jungle: he grinned. Where’s all them tropical flowers and Technicolor parrots flitting from tree to tree? What about Tarzan and Martin Rattler, Allan Quatermain and Jungle Jim? Not that I ever believed in all that anyway, at least not after I left school. It was dark green and dull, full of gloom and the uninviting pillars of stark trees.