Waking early, he was glad to be getting out of the forest. Now that there was no such obsessive goal as reaching the peak, he felt its spirit imposing too heavily on him, saw the jungle for the desert it was, a dull place because no one of flesh-and-blood lived there. All you could do was burn it down, let daylight and people in; otherwise it was only fabulous and interesting when written about in books for those who would never see it. Still, he’d always be able to say he’d been in the jungle, tell anybody who asked that the best thing was to leave it alone, but that if you had to see it you should get a few thousand feet up and look down on it. He could easily understand how the jungle would drive you crackers if you had to stay there too long; how its great forest-mind could eat you up with the dark grin of possession. He sent a nub-end spinning into the stream, watched it taken to where they would follow.
They descended by the winding defile, taking to jungle at midday to avoid stone-faced waterfall cliffs. The panic flight of tin-footed minuscular fugitives sounded on the foliage roof, a commencing tread of raindrops before the full weight of water crashed on to them, spattering hats and finding a short-cut to their skins. Soil and leaves made anchors of their boots as they slithered down, edging back to the stream. Brian shouted through the wall of rain: “One minute dry; the next drenched.” Baker, only a foot away, heard nothing.
“That was a big piss,” Knotman said when they stood by the stream. Clouds were scattering, and shirts steamed on bushes in the returning sun. An Avro 19 droned like a silverfish high overhead towards Burma, and Brian waved in greeting. Brown water swirled at their thighs as they slowly descended, and when the sun burned, Brian’s shirt felt pasted to his shoulder blades, a poultice that increased the aches instead of lessening them. By map and compass they were close to where the lorry had brought them nearly a week ago. A score of tins remained, dragged up and down the mountain for nothing. “We might as well dump ’em,” Kirkby suggested.
Knotman didn’t agree: “You’ve a month’s rations there, in right-little tight-little England.”
They came out of the jungle. Stubbled, tired, bush hat pulled down, Brian felt he could have travelled for weeks more, until he reached the dam over the stream and collapsed on to its concrete platform, held there for a minute by a wild saw-toothed cough that left him without breath, sitting still and trying to bring trees and sky back into focus. He watched the others emerge: Jack with his shirtsleeve torn away; Knotman limping because he hadn’t had his boots off for days; Odgeson chalk-white and walking carefully as if afraid he might fall, while Kirkby and Baker looked fit by comparison.
Odgeson went to the planter’s house and telephoned for a lorry from the camp. They set off four miles to meet it at the main road, a slow straggling file all but done for after the rapid descent. Brian was at the end of his strength, faint itches chafing at various parts of his body where leeches still fed. I don’t feel as though I’ve got enough blood left to keep myself going, never mind them, the greedy bastards. I’m pole-axed, and wish I was in Nottingham out of this blood-sucking sun, back where it’s cool and my brain will clear so’s I can start to think, pick up the bones of my scattered thoughts. I’ll be twenty-one next year, and an old man before I know it.
Packs were swung like corpses on to the waiting lorry, helped by a sergeant who had come up for the ride, the same who had got Baker in trouble outside the admin hut last week. “There’s a war on,” he told them. “It started while you were away. We thought you might have got caught up in it.”
“What sort of a war?”
“The Communists are at it, trying to throw us out of the country and take over. They’ve killed a lot of people already.”
The lorry drove south along the main road, through villages and rubber plantations, the sea a perfect blue sheet to the right, sky equally blue and empty overhead. A breeze cooled them and took away the heavy smell of soil and sweat. No one spoke. Brian leaned back with eyes closed, wondering at the sergeant’s words about a war with the Communists in Malaya.
CHAPTER 24
Almost every day of his life Brian had heard his mother say she was going to pack up and leave Harold Seaton. But she never had, and on those days when there was no cause to say it, she dwelt on the still-hot embers from other quarrels. Before coming to work this morning Brian had a real set-to with his father. The house had been a boiling sea of sabre-toothed rows this last week because Seaton had been observed by a neighbour drinking in a Lenton pub with a woman he’d knocked-on with before he met Vera: black-haired, inscrutable Millie from Travers Row — now long since married herself. Not that such a brazen cheeky-daft outdacious baggage would let anything like that stop her, Vera raved when Seaton came home all fussy and pleased with himself, unsuspecting that a neighbour had got in with a colourful story half an hour ago. In times past, fed up to the teeth and eyeballs with him, the whole family had heard Vera say he could clear off and get another woman for all she cared, but now that there were reasonable grounds for thinking that he might, the house witnessed pitched battles that even made the money quarrels of the dole days look like the pleasant tit-for-tat of a lively courtship.
It gave Brian something to think about during the long hours of watching the dead-slow traversing of his piece-work milling machine. He fixed an aluminium elbow into the jig, released the lever, and sent it towards the revolving cutters, making sure that the sudpipe was well aimed against it — otherwise it might seize-up and spray hot metal against his skin. His mother had kept up her tirade for days, even though Seaton had promised faithfully never to see Millie again. Brian asked his mother to pack it up now, saying it was no use going on and on and keeping the house in misery, but she replied: “Why should I? He’s allus bin a bogger to me, and this is the last thing I’m going to stand for from ’im, especially now yo’ lot’s growing up.” So Seaton went on being put through the mill, using a rare control and saying nothing because he knew himself to be in the wrong, until this morning when he was dragged into the blackest and most impressive rage Brian had ever seen and threatened to bash Vera’s head in. Brian stood between them intending to bash his in if he laid a finger on her. “He thinks you’re still a baby and can’t stick up for me,” Vera bellowed, halfway between rage and tears. She was triumphant: “I allus said he’d have to watch his step when you grew up. Now he knows what I mean.” Brian was baffled, caught in a fire of despair, knowing he wouldn’t be able to do much if the mad eyes and beefy fists of his father made a move. “Christ,” he shouted, his voice brittle, “can’t you both act better than this? It’s about time you learned more sense.” Maybe they caught the impending crack of his spirit; for the raw feelings of cold and early morning were drawn from all three gradually as tea was mashed and poured out. No one spoke, but twenty minutes later Seaton had been thawed by a fag, and his good morning to Vera was almost cheerful — though it stayed unanswered.
Brian was glad to get away, pedalling his bike along Castle Boulevard, playing the fast and tricky daredevil between cars and buses to keep his mind blank. Speed brought drops of water to his eyes and cheeks; the spring air was fresh and cold, good because the world was waking up with the buds and blue sky. High above, on a wall of rearing sandstone rock, towered the Castle, an art museum and prison for deserters. It crouched like a spider with the beaten soul of the city in its mouth, a Union Jack fluttering on high. Brian cycled as part of the river of people flowing to work along the traffic artery far below, happier when once he’d passed it by and was already halfway through Canal Street. It seemed that the war was finishing, that soon the world would open for travel like a South Sea pearl. He could save money and go to France or Italy, free because call-up would stop with the battles. Yet perhaps it wouldn’t be as good as he imagined: Edgeworth’s would lose its War Office contracts and he’d be slung on the dole like his old man had been, unable to get a job anywhere, trapped for life in a queue every Tuesday and Thursday for a few measly bob to starve along on. Starve-along-Cassidy, that’s what I’ll be. “Don’t believe it, though”—an uncluttered stretch of cobbled short-cut allowed him to talk aloud as if before an audience — “the soldiers’ll be back and wain’t stand for dole queues any more, government contracts or no. They’ll get the Reds in and then we’ll have plenty of work. Yo’ see’f they don’t. And not all of Fatguts’s spouting about good old England and all that rammel will stop ’em either.”