‘Get the meal!’ He gestured with the knife to the pan of rice. ‘I’m hungry.’
She noticed he had on a different wristwatch with a silver-metal bracelet. She wondered if he had stolen it or bought it at a shop? She had not been into a shop since she and Elizabeth had been taken shopping by Mrs Hammond. Her heart leaped at the idea of going back to a world where there were shops and cinemas and people not interested in politics and power. She just wanted to live an ordinary life, have a boyfriend, have fun.
Josef had brought them to this camp and kept them penniless. It was fear — fear for her mother, fear of the terrorist leader — that had prevented her from trying to escape, and fear, she thought, kept many of the young men they recruited there under his domination.
Early in their confinement she had tried to follow one of the men who, she realised, formed a link in a sophisticated postal system, a series of jungle runners who, each keeping to their own section, passed messages across vast and complex territory. She had hidden on the first part of the jungle track she had seen one man use, hoping gradually to build up enough knowledge to take her mother and find a way out of the jungle to a roadway. Once on a road she had been sure she would find someone who would help them.
The smooth-faced Heng Hou had caught her, stepping out of the jungle into her path. His face had been impassive as he came towards her and she felt stricken to stone by his implacable evil. When he took a second step towards her it had felt like a death sentence, and when his eyes moved over her, from face to breasts to sarong and feet, she had felt naked before him and had thought he would rape her and then kill her.
‘If you try run away again,’ he had said gently, ‘I first cut your mother’s toes off, then her feet and so — ’
She had screamed aloud as he suddenly raised and sliced down his hand like sweeping knife.
‘And so ... and so ... and so!’ The hand sliced and sliced again. ‘In small bits, very slow.’ He had smiled, and the smile had widened into a grimace, showing his teeth and the whites of his eyes so he looked like an old threatening Chinese god. Lee had turned and fled back to the camp.
After Heng Hou anyone else was a lesser evil, she had thought. But now, facing Josef, she wondered if his evil was not even greater, for he was working against even his own mother and sister.
She stood up, her lips in a twisted sneer of defiance, and walked around the table towards him until the point of the knife touched her chest. ‘Run out of buried arms to bribe the communists with and run out of credit with the Hammonds? Back at Rinsey, all of them — that’s my guess.’ She looked up at him defiantly.
He laughed at her now, and caught her chin in one great grip while teasing the knife tip across her stretched throat. ‘Now we’re fishing, aren’t we, little sister, because you don’t know anything! Do you?’
‘We don’t know truth, that’s for sure! We only know what you told us.’ In spite of the punishing grip on her jaw, her fury drove her on. She threw out a hand, gesturing towards the burned-out huts that had been classrooms as well as offices and dormitories. And what these fanatics tried to indoctrinate everyone with. They need classes in common sense, not dazzling with the mystic powers of communism. They need their eyes opened to see you and Heng Hou are just thieves, gangsters, murderers, making trouble and war for your own ends — gain, money.’ She lifted both her hands in front of his face and drew the fingers of one hand across the palm of the other in a gesture of greed.
He clamped her jaw tighter, closing her mouth completely. ‘You here to do as you told, not talk, not make trouble!’
‘Josef!’ Their mother had pulled herself up and was standing weak and trembling by the table. ‘You leave your sister alone. She good girl — ’
‘Oh! I know, not like me!’ He sounded and acted like a petulant boy as he released Lee but hurled the knife so it quivered upright deep in the surface of the tabletop.
‘I didn’t say,’ his mother denied, looking down at the knife just a handspan in front of her.
‘No, you never say, you good Chinese mother!’ Lee defended her, but, poking herself in the chest, shouted at him, ‘I say! I say! I say you liar, cheat!’ She sought for more words. ‘Rotten bastard!’
He laughed now. ‘All Chinese when you angry! You know the only thing that’s kept you alive these times is that you’ve amused the men with your bad language and your outbursts.’
‘You know something?’ She poked her chin forward at him. ‘I know that! I work at it! But that over now ... ‘
There was something in her voice, some knowledge she was keeping to herself, hinted at in that touch of self-satisfaction laced in the half-finished sentence.
‘What you up to? What do you know? Have you seen someone from outside?’
‘That’s your problem, isn’t it! You don’t know!’
‘I know if you could have found your way out of the jungle after the raid, you’d have gone. When the camp was empty there was no one to stop you, was there?’ He explained their behaviour aloud, made the statement, but watched Lee with narrowed, piggy eyes, ever suspicious.
She stared back straight into his eyes, mocking but revealing nothing of the decision to remain in the camp so Heng Hou would not send his men out searching the area.
‘So,’ he went on, ‘this camp is over, but soon we have another — soon I take you there. Heng Hou, he likes your cooking, your cleaning ...’ His lips began to curl in amusement as he listed their chores, ‘your washing, your sewing, your nursing ... and — this time perhaps I’ll say yes — your fucking.’
‘No!’ The scream startled both of them. ‘No! Never!’
Their mother stood and used the last of her energy on the protest, banging the table with her fists. ‘I kill!’ Crying at the threat she had made, she repeated in an anguished whisper, ‘I kill.’ Then she crumpled to the floor.
Lee was by her side once more, feeling her forehead, cradling the small, limp form. Sure her mother was unconscious, she hissed at her brother, ‘Soon she too will be dead if I don’t get her proper medicine and to hospital. I think she has pneumonia.’
She tried a new ploy, wheedling for more information. ‘Why can’t you take us back to the Hammonds now? Mr Hammond would make you new manager at Rinsey — all would be as before. Mother could spend her last years in some comfort — we would live in our old bungalow. These murdering bandits — ’ she paused to throw a scornful glance around the camp — ‘they hate you, they despise you, have just used you, and you’ve made us serve them, you’ve kept us prisoners here.’
‘I don’t want as before!’ He stooped and spat the words into her face. ‘They — ’ he too indicated the departed communists — ‘Heng Hou himself promised me Rinsey, for mine! I don’t want to go back as before.’ He pranced away, tugging his forelock. ‘Yes, Mr Hammond, No, Mr Hammond — and his wife!’ He spat into the pan of soup his sister had been preparing. ‘I hate! I kill her, too.’
‘Too?’ Lee repeated the word in disbelief.
‘Too, meaning also?’ she asked, thinking he might be like his mother in one way — he too said unguarded things.
‘Everyone kills these days,’ he bluffed.
‘Hammonds, though — if you’ve killed any of the Hammond family! I ask you?’ She paused, desperately trying to remember what the soldier had been saying before the attack came, then added, ‘Even your mother would not forgive that.’
‘Rinsey is finished anyway, burned up,’ he added sullenly, ‘like this camp.’
She knew he was lying. Knew what the soldier had said before he was shot had not meant Rinsey was finished. Anguished she tried to remember exactly what the English soldier with Elizabeth’s photograph had said? That the Hammonds were back. He had spoken of Liz. Yes. ‘Liz would never forgive me if anything happened to you two’ — and Mrs Hammond? Lee groaned aloud as she could not remember — and what if he had looted the photograph? There was no way of knowing.