He could see a wall of bamboo, a high woven roof. Then he focused on someone very close to his side, someone — making free with his body. The face and the voice all came together. ‘Liz!’ he shouted. ‘Liz!’ The sound started in his mind like a triumphant shout, but came from his throat like the rasping of a rusty knife on an old dry brick.
‘Alan? Alan!’ This was the yearning voice! Now her anxious face peered down at him as if hope was some strange creature she was afraid to look for.
‘Alan?’ The word was all caution. He saw how she slowly allowed herself to recognise the light of rational life in his half-opened eyes. He saw her face transformed as finally she saw he knew her. ‘Alan, my darling ... Oh! I didn’t think we’d ever really look at each other again.’ She pressed her face close to his. ‘Oh! Thank God, thank God! If there’s no more than this, I thank God!’
He did not understand, remembering her finger along his ribcage. What was she saying? There was to be much more!
‘I knew if I loved you enough you wouldn’t go from me.’
He felt her tears hot on his cheeks and he tried to move a hand to touch her, but she rose too soon. ‘I must tell the others.’
She ran to the doorway from the sleeping bench where he lay against one wall. He felt bereft as she left; turning his head to watch, he was alarmed when she seemed to drop out of sight from the door. Then he remembered native huts he had seen high on stilts. He had not realised that some might have such noble-seeming proportions inside. The room where he lay seemed enormous and airy, with pleasant filtered sunlight.
He heard her calling, ‘Lee, Ch’ing, Pa Kasut! He’s come round! He’s come back!’
Then her head reappeared in the doorway. Alan felt his mind light up, and as she ran across to him he thought she was like a girl in an English buttercup field with the sun behind her — and he lying in the grass.
‘Will you try a proper drink?’ She took up a small cup and dipped it into a bowl. Then she was back by his side supporting his head, letting him sip from the cup. ‘This is what the Sakais have brewed, it’s kept you alive.’
He was aware of the strange sensation of hair all around his lips as he drank. After she had taken the cup away he tried to lift a hand to feel. He wondered at the slowness of the hand that came eventually from his side upwards. He wondered at the hand. Did those elongated, skeletal fingers belong to him?
Liz watched with a beaming smile and, as one after another climbed up into the room, she gestured to them, drew them over to the sleeping bench. ‘He’s moving,’ she cried, ‘he’s moved his hand — and he knows me. He knows! Oh, Lee, thank you! Thank you, Ch’ing! Thank you, Pa Kasut!’
They came and peered at him. He peered solemnly back. He remembered the Chinese faces of Lee and her mother. There were many native faces, men wearing crossed bandoleers of tiny multi-coloured beads, women wearing colourful sarongs, some from the waist, some tied above their breasts. All were strangers — but all kind, all smiling.
‘Pa Kasut.’ Liz indicated the oldest of the men, who came forward nodding and smiling with great satisfaction.
‘Good! Good!’ he proclaimed and motioned with his fingers to his mouth. Alan nodded and Pa Kasut grinned broadly and ordered his women to go and prepare food, hurrying after them down the ladder like a fussy chef after his underlings.
When Alan had drunk, he tried her name again. ‘Liz.’
It was better this time, recognisable. He looked at the other girl. ‘Lee.’
They all laughed as if he had told them the funniest joke in the world.
They propped him up a little and gave him a different drink, goat’s milk with a curious warm aftertaste like alcohol. It was so good, it warmed his stomach. He lifted a hand again and touched his beard. He remembered something of being in a raid, a jungle camp, the shooting, but it was vague, blurred as a misted window. ‘How long?’ he asked.
‘Many weeks.’
‘Where?’ He queried his surroundings with his eyes.
‘We’re safe,’ she told him. ‘A Sakai hill camp. Lee says it’s beautiful; I haven’t looked around much.’
‘You remember telling us to hide under our big bed?’ Lee knelt by Liz’s side at the bench. She nodded for him as she saw recollection in his eyes. ‘Then when the communists came back and you were hurt ... ’ She paused to draw her hand across the top of her head in the direction of the bullet that had scored Alan’s skull. ‘Then we hid you.’
With a great effort Alan brought his hands together in the Eastern manner of thanks. Lifting one hand to his head, he found and traced the smooth scar starting just right of centre and running back and across through his mass of hair. He was surprised that the sensitivity of the wound still bordered on pain.
Liz watched him realise the injury and the seriousness of it, how close he had come to death.
‘Here’s your food,’ Lee said, going to help the women carry the cooking pots in. ‘Pa Kasut will have prepared it. He has a wonderful knowledge of plant medicines. His mixture my mother is sure saved your life.’
As the days passed, Alan began to realise how much he owed to all these people, both the Guisans and the Sakais. He also began to feel that if there was such a place as heaven on earth, then this was probably it.
With Liz to help him first to drink and eat, then to sit and finally to take his first steps across to look out of the door, paradise indeed felt very close.
The hillside had sections of the ground cleared around it to allow the Sakais to grow their haphazardly broadcast crops of tapioca and maize, and the hut was built on stilts some ten feet from the ground. This gave a unique view of the jungle below. They could overlook the mass of variegated greens and the many trees blossoming in the canopy, never seen from the ground, only suspected by their perfume.
From above it was possible to realise how, with no winter to dictate their cycle, trees blossomed and fruited to their own individual rhythm. Each one in its own season produced flowers in masses of white, pink, scarlet or yellow. Yet more glorious Technicolor was poured from the outcrops of rock around the camp, where creepers in all the colours he last remembered seeing in nasturtium beds back in England vied for attention.
‘How on earth did they get me up here?’ Not just the steepness of the slopes but the ladder from the ground made him ask. The descent to ground level still looked formidable to him.
Liz laughed. ‘They carried you, of course, all trussed up like a hammock, hung from poles.’ She finished the sentence hardly aware what she said, for his expression had changed to one of complete anguish. He staggered as if some awful pain had stabbed him through, threatening to bring him to his knees, to fell him. Alarmed he might tumble, she pulled him away from the doorway.
‘What is it?’ she asked, grasping tight, almost shaking him in her alarm. He steadied himself again but held his head in his hands and groaned.
‘I’ve just remembered Danny. Danny ...’ For a moment he had to search for his second name. ‘Danny Veasey. He was killed on the op before I got this.’ His hand went to his scalp. ‘I ... carried his body.’ He looked at her now with urgent questioning. ‘What happened to his body? God! It wasn’t just left?’
‘No.’ She re-emphasised the word as he looked at her with some doubt. ‘No. There was a military funeral; I read it in the Straits Times. One man missing, one man killed. Major Sturgess went to the funeral.’
‘The major ... and, I suppose, Sarge Mackenzie and the lads, but I should have been there.’ He went back to sit on his bed.
‘I should have kept the newspaper, there was a full report. It was — ’ She broke off, reliving the trauma of that first evening she had believed Alan dead.
‘I should have written to his mother.’ His voice was low, thick with regret.