Island of Demons (6 page)

***

The coast of Ceylon appeared in the early morning light as a thin moustache on the lip of the ocean. Little boats swept across our prow like swifts, manned by joyful people. Tones of magenta, cinammon, Aztec gold and – appropriately enough – Indian yellow. Already I was translating it into the painting I would have made of it and sadly aware that the achieved painting would bring me more pleasure than the actual experience. Innocence was fled.

On cue, Van Gennep appeared and leant on the rail, chewing a cheroot.

“I wondered, old man, if you were up for a bit of how's-your-father like in South Africa?” he whispered. Why did he whisper? No one was there but us. “Van Hunks gave me another address.”

I gave what I hoped was a withering glare. “No thank you.”

“No need to be prissy about it, old man. It wasn't my fault it turned out the way it did. Anyway, from what I hear, you've made the adjustment. But maybe you're right. I wouldn't put it past Van Hunks to pull the same trick again. A sort of double bluff. One hell of a card-player Van Hunks.” He shook his head, savouring it.

“Er … where exactly did he suggest one went.”

Van Gennep tapped his nose – a gesture that recalled Luigi. “Ah! A bit complicated. Got it all written down but I'd never forgive myself if you went on your own and got into trouble because I wasn't there to watch your back, as it were. Perhaps you should stay on board and draw the seagulls. I think I'll try for a bit of time alone with the number one Niemeyer girl. I think I'm well in there.” He puffed up like pastry in the oven.

“Is that possible? Doesn't her father keep her under lock and key?” His confidence was irritating. His motives disgusted me.

He grinned. “Normally yes. I grant you. But Miss Timms is taking her on the cathedral and tea tour and I'm going to attach myself as escort to beat off the lustful natives. Strictly between you and me, I have high hopes.” I pictured him fumbling, hot-crotched, under the tea table while smirking over the fine china. None of my business.

I did not, of course, stay on the boat. Instead, I was an ideal tourist. I admired the stripy extravagance of the Jami Ul Alfar mosque with its red and white brickwork; I ruminated poignantly, in ancient buildings, on the arms of the Portuguese, overlaid by those of the Dutch, overlaid by those of the British. I watched the little boys running on the beach screaming with joy as their kites battled the wind to get airborne. I soaked in the sounds of normal life as in a warm bath. Then, as I was passing the verandah of a large hotel, I heard my name being called.

“Mr Bonnet! Mr Bonnet!”

It was Miss Timms, dressed all in white, like one of the Niemeyers. She waved me over.

“Oh, do join me Mr Bonnet. Have some tea. Fresh Ceylon tea. Quite delicious.” I looked down. Three dirty cups. She fussed at a boy – dressed like an extra from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta – called over for fresh china and hot water. The furniture was all bamboo and rattan, warped and wobbly from the sea air with minimal privacy achieved by the insertion of potted palms. “A slice of walnut cake, Mr Bonnet? I am afraid you have to order a whole one and it is such a waste!” She sliced like a carpenter sawing a plank.

“You are alone, Miss Timms?”

“Oh yes.” She looked coy. “The young people have gone off to have their fortunes read in the bazaar and left me to recover. There is so much to see here. It is all too much excitement. Normally, I do not approve of superstition, you understand, but it is only a little harmless fun for the young people. At the house in Stoke Newington the missionaries ran a summer fair with a fortune teller: Mrs Gibbs, normally a quite serious lady, dressed as The Amazing Madame Zodiac. It was such fun. She told me I would go on a long journey and meet a dark stranger. Well, that at least was true!” The house? Not, I presumed, a Van Gennep house. “I must say, they have been gone quite a while. I was beginning to worry a little, Mr Bonnet.”

“Where exactly did they go?”

She looked confused, and reacted to the confusion by pouring more tea into the already abandoned cups. “Well … I am not entirely sure. Lieutenant van Gennep had an address from a fellow officer.”

“I see.”

She looked around at all the English tea-takers and dropped her voice. “I know it is a lot to ask, Mr Bonnet, but I wonder if you might see if you can find them. Quite frankly, I hesitate to confront Mr Niemeyer without his daughter.”

So there I was, in a strange city, charged with the protection of a young girl's honour and a missionary's shame, coerced by a morality that sneered at my own feelings, indeed, regarded my tenderest emotions as criminal. Why should I collaborate in such hypocrisy? Why did I not declare proudly who and what I was? I decided it could do no harm to take a walk in the immediate environs of the hotel. It would set Miss Timms' mind at rest and would otherwise achieve precisely nothing. I turned down a side road, then another, then another and found myself swiftly lost in a seething warren, some sort of market, echoing with sound and smells of sea and land. The stalls were so close together that I had to push between them, heaps of nameless vegetables, piles of cheap mattresses and oil lamps, a woman was gutting a fish. Suddenly, my passage was barred by a big man, a big man with a evil-looking monkey on his shoulder.

“Yes, sahib, yes.” He showed big crunching teeth. “Portrait. I do portrait for loved ones back in Blighty.”

“No thank you.” I was coolly firm. Then, I added foolishly, “I am not British.” He seized on it as the start of a negotiation.

“Where you from? From French? Spanish? Maybe you American? It not matter. My portraits work in all languages. Ha, ha! You make picture with monkey. Back home, they like.”

I tried to work my way past him but he locked in place and began to howl.

“No, please don't push me. You hurt me! Show me some respect. I old man!” He must have given some order to the monkey for, without warning, it suddenly jumped from his shoulder to mine. Unbalanced, I twirled round, trying to dislodge the beast which responded by leaping on top of my head and ripping at my hair.

“Ow! Ow!” I spun like a Dervish, cannoned into a cheap liquor store, sloshing neat alcohol down my shirt, ricocheted and sat down into a pile of curry paste. I desperately tried to loosen the creature's scrabbling paws and it responded with nasty screaming bites to my own fingers and face. Now the stall owners launched their own complaint, shouting and waving fingers in my face while an old woman began to belabour me with an enormous fat-soaked spoon and I sprawled back into other forms of curry as the monkey, no observer of Queensbury rules, continued to bite and scratch. A man who had no part in it came up, raised my glasses gently and poked me very deliberately and factually in the eye before going away and I howled louder and fell back again as glass crashed and warm oils seeped and oozed and then, thank God, there came police whistles, thudding boots, comforting khaki uniforms. I was seized by two skinny constables, lifted to my feet and presented to a dumpy sergeant, with a swagger-stick, who might have been the head-waggling brother of the chief steward.

“What is all this mess and noise?” he waggled. “Why are you disturbing these good people?” He sniffed alcohol fumes. “Are you drunk?”

“The monkey,” I slurred through puffy lips. “I was the one attacked.” We looked. There was, of course, no monkey, its owner having wisely decamped at the onset of the forces of law and order. The stall owners shrugged. “Monkey? What monkey?” They rolled their eyes and shook their heads. “He is crazy,” they seemed to say, “crazy as the Widow Traverso.”

“Look,” I said. “I am from a ship, the
Bethoen
, down in the harbour. I was assaulted.” I slithered in spilt curry paste and nearly fell, clutching a policeman for support.

“Drunk!” shouted a small man at the back, a barrack-room lawyer. “He is drunk! He is not even English whose right it is to enter the market drunk and break things and insult people.”

“I think, sahib, you must pay these good people for the damage you have done and then my men will escort you back to your ship. It is not good to come here and do bad things. You, who are a man of learning from his wearing of glasses, should know better.” He waved his cane. “We have these sticks for whacking wicked fellows.” He whacked a stall top in demonstration. “It is either paying or whacking.” It was paying.

I arrived back at the ship in time to see Miss Timms serenely climbing the gangplank with her two lost sheep – now found – in tow, all three aglow with feigned innocence and spotless white linen. At the top, I was greeted by a grinning chief steward, who looked me up and down and winked. Black eye, bites all over my face and neck, stinking of alcohol, trousers torn and besmirched fore and aft, escorted by two huge, panting, dark policeman. Now that was his idea of a satisfactory day ashore.

***

It finally occurred to me that, in shunning the chief steward, I was denying a part of myself that I would do better to embrace, at least metaphorically. So I confronted him, staying boldly in my cabin in face of his towelling perversities. He spoke excellent Dutch. His name was Anto and he was from Central Java, Solo – more properly Surakarta – proud cradle of Javanese high culture. He was actually a very nice man. He was married with three beautiful children – “But of course Tuan, all men must marry” – but since he was much away from home he had needs, needs that he preferred to satisfy with his own sex. This enabled him to stay faithful to his wife since only relations with women counted. Did she know this, Anto? Perhaps, but, in a marriage, Tuan, some things are best left unsaid. And while he was away, was she free to … ? Absolutely not. If he even suspected anything of that sort, he would beat her within an inch of her life, so great was his love for this woman. And now, Tuan, this business of you and me. Ah no. I shook my head. It had been a moment of madness from my too great affection for Hamid. Tuan really liked Hamid then? Then things could perhaps be arranged so that he should become, again, my friend. I had been too crude. He had been startled and ashamed. He was very young. The pocket gaped in expectation and was fulfilled.

The next day Hamid served me coffee and was all smiles. He put his hand chastely on my shoulder as he poured. Matters had been explained to him by Anto. Of course, he was my friend just as before. Being my friend seemed to mean that he was prepared to flirt with me and roll his eyes at any suggestive remark, to look over his shoulder smiling to see whether I watched him as he walked away. He would hold my hand, interlacing his little finger with mine, as he did with his friends in the village, when we walked together. He chatted happily to me – told me of his life in Java, his hopes and dreams for his children, his excitement at the approaching end of this his first voyage. I loved his beauty and his innocence and he accepted my admiration without offence and, alas, without consequence. I realised that I was trapped, not at all unhappily, in a medieval romance of courtly love. This must stop. And yet … it enabled me to savour and express my own most delicate feeling, notably a delicious pain and required me to do absolutely nothing. I was a part of the human race again, more, almost family, for he called me
kakak
, “big brother” and as a sign of his affection came to rub sea slugs in my face.

“It is
minyak gamat
,” he explained, “from an island to the north. It cures everything, all wounds, all skin diseases. There is a story.” All good medicines, in Java, come with a story. “Once there was a fisherman who trod on a sea slug and it oozed all over his leg and set so hard he could not get it off. So, in his anger, he took a machete and chopped up all the sea slugs he could find around his boat. When he came back the next day, the pieces had all joined up again, healed and bore no scars. So, people realised the oil from the slug made the body heal itself.” He daily rubbed generous amounts into my wounds in a curiously maternal way. It stank like rotten fish. “What a monkey hurts, a sea slug heals.” For him, it was all part of the neatness and balance of life, a divine design that worked. For me, it was his gentle fingers that healed.

For the rest of the ship I had ceased to exist, bearing my albatross of shame around my neck. Van Gennep evaded me, seemingly always at the elbow of paterfamilias Niemeyer and complicit in his looks of contempt. From the troubled and guilty eyes of the eldest daughter, I suspected his pursuit might be progressing nicely.

At Singapore, Miss Timms left us with a clutter of old bags and umbrellas, being met by a choir of Chinese children on the quayside who sang Christmas carols in the hot sun in incomprehensible English. “Ha car hear all anger sing, Gory toad a nude porking.”

She expressed her thanks by throwing down handfuls of boiled sweets rather as Cleopatra must have cast down rubies from her scented barge. “I have not quite forgiven you for your conduct in Colombo, Mr Bonnet. At a time when I was in need of your help as a good Samaritan you chose, instead, to go off and become drunk as the Prodigal Son.”

I thought of the many complexities of the story of the monkey and decided that the strength of her compassion greatly exceeded that of her comprehension.

“I sincerely apologise Miss Timms.”

She softened at once. “Well, that being the case, no great harm was done.” She looked down and clasped her handkerchief to her nose. “Do you know, Mr Bonnet, I am suddenly aware of the most appalling smell. I do believe they have stored my luggage next to some fish that was not at all fresh and it has become permanently tainted.”

I had arranged to meet Hamid just beyond the dock gates of the new terminal building and far from the prying eyes of Van Gennep and other Pharisees. It was my first time in a large Southeast Asian city and I was alive to sights, sounds and sensations crowding in on me, the sheer number of people, the density of the throng, the mix of Chinese, Indian and Malay under a European flag. Only later would I learn that what I saw as Malays shivered into a dozen other identities: Buginese, Boyar, Madurese, Dayak and so on.