Key to the Door (32 page)

His boots found the path, two feet under the surface. A lit cigarette was soaked and blown across his face, and he spent most of the journey spitting tobacco-bits back at the wind. With the Sten gun looped over his shoulder, he waded slowly, for in some places the path had been washed away, and he floundered almost up to his armpits trying to find it again. He was sweating under the rain, afraid of meeting snakes, remembering the many he had seen and particularly the python splashing not long ago near the hut. Maybe they all swam off to the trees, was a happy though not convincing thought. He swore aloud and talked to himself. It's an adventure right enough, and I'm as far away as I ever wanted to be, about three times farther than Abyssinia, which is sayin' summat, but Christ, I'll be glad to reach that runway where I can't get bitten, and get back to camp where I can swill some tea. He pulled the cape around him to keep out the driving rain. If only the old man could see me now: “What did I tell you?” he'd say. “You daft sod, up to your neck in that rheumatic water. If you like water that much you'd a done better going for a swim in the Trent. I towd yer not to join up. They never did owt for us, so why should yo' do owt for them? Eh?”

A mile trek along the runway was made against a spearhead of wind, and he felt his face being blown out of shape, cape flying back like Bela Lugosi, the vampire-bat man's, hat twisted like an old gold-digger's. Soap bubbles came from the toes of his wellingtons. He was even too fed up to worry about a plane pouring down the runway behind and flattening him. All I want now is a warm billet and a long novel, and a shovelful of grub every four hours to keep me fed. It's an easy life, though, except when a wet sky falls on top of you.

The control tower wasn't much better off than the DF hut. Water poured through the roof, and maps covering the walls were discoloured beyond recognition: Burma was running hell for leather into the Bay of Bengal, and French Indo-China was making a sly move against Singapore. Sumatra was going red, which gave him a laugh, though he thought it was a shame and a waste about the good maps. A large shed opposite the tower, which catapulted a firetender whenever a plane was expected to land, had been blown flat to the ground. That'll cost 'em a bob or two to put right, he smiled. The flying-control officer gave him a few dirty looks because he was dressed in a civvy shirt instead of a uniform, but Brian smoked obliviously in the doorway, feeling the dampness getting into his marrow.

The relief lorry arrived through the mud, Baker landing in a pool of water he couldn't have seen as it pulled up. “Is the camp still there?” Brian asked when he'd finished cursing. “Or has it bin swept away?”

Baker refused a cigarette: “We've got to go back to the hut and bring the accumulators out.”

“You can't get back yet. The paddy field's flooded.”

“The signals officer says we must.”

Brian felt as though he'd been thumped at the back of the head, red stars winking in front of his eyes. “The jumped-up bastard, what does he know about it? He wants to come out and get 'em himself instead of knocking back whisky and cornflakes in his jumped-up mess.”

Baker had been to a public school, was hidebound and full of games, mutinous only within the limits of King's Regulations. “We have to do it anyway.”

Brian came down the steps. “Back through the slosh for a couple of mouldy accumulators.” The lorry took little over a minute to do the runway mile, and Baker was daunted to see the water so high. “Come on then,” Brian called out, already waist into it, “frightened o' getting wet? Don't mind the odd snake: they run away from yo' first.”

“Balls,” Baker shouted, in with a splash. Brian waded quickly, only stopping to point out a gap in the path, feeling more courageous now that someone was with him, and he was in the lead. Still, if you had somebody shooting at you from them trees you wouldn't even think about snakes. “The boys in the hut have been feeling sorry for you, out all night in the floods,” Baker called. The rain no longer drove like needles but splashed against the dull putty of Brian's skin, was unfelt through his fatigue. A snake rippled on the right. “Thanks,” he shouted to Baker.

“We're going to operate the DF frequency from the signals section while the rain lasts. Is there a gap here?”

“No, come on a bit. There, it's not deep, though. They should a bleddy well thought o' that yesterday.” Still, it was good: the signals section was only fifty yards from the billet: he'd be able to nip down the road and see Mimi more often. He unlocked the door of the hut, and the bloated leech swam out again. “The gale blew a tree down on to one of the bashas last night,” Baker told him. “No one was hurt, though.” They lifted the accumulators to a chair. Brian sensed he was seeing the last of the place, that no one would operate from there again. Baker thought they should bring in the auxiliary aerial and went outside to get it, but he let go as if it were electrified: spiders, leeches, centipedes, and scorpions scrabbled for the protection if offered against the flood.

“God,” he exclaimed. “Let it stay.”

I'll be out here another year, and on that boat by next autumn. The thought gave him patience. There's something good about being here, though, and interesting, because in a way I wouldn't have missed it, in spite of what the old man said. After all, there worn't any scorpions in Radford, and I've allus wanted to travel. But what a way to do it! Shouted at like a rag-bag all the time for not wearing a uniform. I wouldn't be seen dead in it, though I have to put it on to get my pay.

He covered the accumulators with his cape (soaked to the skin, he didn't need it any more) and they carried them slowly to the lorry. “Better not slip,” he said, “or you'll get an acid-bath. Imagine gettin' a pension for rheumatics and a scorched arse.” One foot slowly before the other, it took all his will-power not to speed up against the driving rain. “You wouldn't be able to settle down, would you?” Baker said, happy because they were halfway across.

It seemed as if the rain would never end. A glittering sea of blue, equal sky above green hills, and the pastel colours of Muong across the straits, with red and black ships in the harbour and yellow strips of beach north of the town, seemed like a dream already, even vaguer than memories of Nottingham. On fine days it was a treat out at the hut sitting in the basket-chair stark bullock naked to get brown, while some poor aeroplane belted his morse lungs out for a bearing or met report. He'd make a fire and have sardines on toast, wearing down another tin from the endless supplies in the grub chest. Once he'd given a few tins to the Chinese rice sower who drove his ox and plough by the hut, and the man had made him feel foolish by bowing his thanks about half a dozen times. That's the worst of doing a good turn to an ignorant bastard; he ain't got the brains to know that everybody's equal. Still, bowing to them's like shaking hands with us, according to Mimi. The continuous rattle of rain was the only real thing at the moment, a cocoon of water that enveloped his brain and the whole world.

From the back of the lorry he saw the DF hut, a small dark block in the middle of a vast square lake of grey. Then it was out of sight and they were roaring down the runway as fast as an aeroplane trying to take off. Wet and hungry, he would get cleaned up and go to the canteen, drink as many bottles of Tiger Beer as he could take. In a day or two he would see Mimi. Baker prodded him: “You were going to sleep,” he said.

CHAPTER 17

Left from the main road (ignoring a notice saying:
BEYOND THIS POINT OUT OF BOUNDS TO ALLIED FORCES
) meant cutting himself off from the forceful grip of lights and traffic, and entering dark groves of palm-trees. The narrow lane was indented with cart-ruts, and trees rising on either side overlapped it with shadows. He felt a criminal every time he parted from the traffic, committed to some irrevocable step, though in fact he was only going to see Mimi. Walking, he pictured her framed beyond the darkness, behind the fireflies that now and again glittered in pairs and seemed to put out their lamps when he went too close.

Black night was a good camouflage until danger had passed and you could light up again, proving that fireflies knew a thing or two. He pictured her, the collar of a blue kimono dominating the bones of her round face, sitting maybe at her rattan table to make up before he came. Or perhaps, wearing her pyjama dress, she stared vacantly into the mirror, a mirage of green or yellow, at a small face and slow-moving, finely made hands. He couldn't see her features clearly when she was out of his sight: the image shifted or became blurred, taunted him with having no memory. It was the same with most things. After getting back from watch and as the camp came in sight—a score of long huts clear and sharp among slim-poled palm-trees—the airstrip and DF hut he had only half an hour left were already vague and beyond description, shimmering in the open heat and the dreaminess of wide spaces. Absence makes the heart grow fonder only because memory plays you false. The strange, beyond reach whether in the past or future, was always more tasteful than what stood before your eyes, made itself even more illusive if you tried forcing your eyes like antennae into the dim corners of it. He couldn't for instance recall certain parts of Nottingham, or old faces, no matter how much he screwed up his will to do so; yet they would come vividly when he was least trying or expecting them, so sharply that he once stopped tapping morse in the middle of an urgent message and, with an aircraft waiting at the end of his signals, was transfixed until the picture departed. Such visions made the power of his memory seem unreliable and weak.

He stopped to light a cigarette and, in the accentuated darkness left when the match went out, saw the glow from lights in the village. But the dark trees in front gave greater promise, and he walked on. He hadn't seen Mimi for a week, which was bad enough, but worse when measured by the appetite each visit left him with. An application to the signals officer for a temporary all-night pass had been turned down because the reason for asking it had been guessed. Three dollars a day wouldn't cover much more than a weekly visit to the Boston Lights taxi-dance hall where Mimi worked, and in any case there was a one o'clock limit to these expeditions. He was lassoed from left and right by legislation devised by some genius for persecution: permission for this, permission for that—still, what did I expect when I let them call me up? I should have told them I had an old blind mother to support and that I believed in God and Jesus Christ and all that pack of rotters. Then maybe they'd 'ave let me off. And everybody at home used to think I was clever because I read books! Christ, I knew a hundred words of French before I was able to tell my left hand from my right, and I knew the capital of Bulgaria at the same time as I learned to read the clock. Bucharest, wasn't it?

The vision that had stopped his morse dead in its tracks was when he went to get a job at fourteen. I had to have a medical and the eye doctor said to me: “Now look at the circles on that card, son. You'll see that the circles are broken on the left or right side. Starting from the big circle at the top, I want you to tell me what side the gap is on every circle, left or right.” What a laugh. I never felt so ignorant in all my life, though it didn't stop me getting the job.

The track was dry, a shallow bed of powder, for the monsoon had been over some weeks and the one-season year was three quarters on to Christmas. A hand in pocket, he recognized by the motion of his legs the peculiar swaying walk of his father, though it was hardly noticeable to someone looking at him, and most of it had been eradicated by parade-ground drill in England. But it was there and gave him comfort as he walked in the darkness, accentuating his own self and setting him apart from the camp and all it stood for. A Malay in white shorts and pith-helmet came by like a phantom, and Brian said good night in the man's own language, a reassurance to both that they were passing human beings and not ghosts. There was no reply to his greeting, and he wondered whether his Malay had been understood. He knew the days of the week and how to count, a few common words of food and drink, a verb or two, but no more. There were classes in Malay at the camp but he couldn't bring himself to go, was unable to take the learning of it seriously, half thinking that Malay didn't matter as French and Spanish might, and half not being bothered to master it. He had seen it was easy enough to learn: you could put words together in a string without bothering about such complications as grammar, of which he knew nothing.

The Patani swamps weren't far off, and vegetable decay, rank and bittersweet at the same time, mingled with the smell of fish and rice being cooked on glowing charcoal fires from huts among the trees. The bungalow was across a clearing, half a dozen rooms on stilts with rotten floors, and a palm-leaf roof that leaked in rainy weather. But the feeling of it, when he was in Mimi's room drinking tea, or lying with his head across her and his thoughts in comforting oblivion, with the smell of joss impregnated in the wood of the widow's room and drifting through to them, was of a last refuge, an outpost of his forward-pushing consciousness that in some strange way was similar to certain patches of his life now left so far behind that he couldn't draw them to him, let alone fit them with words.

He saw a light from the corner window: Mimi's room. The Chinese widow who let it was on her weekly visit to Muong, and wouldn't be back until the last ferry—which docked when Brian was to be in camp. He didn't go up the front steps, but using his guile in case the widow hadn't yet left, made for the back, kicking his way through the tangled garden and thinking in one panic-stricken moment that he had trodden on a snake. Maybe it's dead, he told himself, walking along the veranda. He hoped Mimi hadn't heard him, looked in through the unshuttered window and saw her lying on the bed wearing only the bottom half of her pyjamas, the nipples of her small pointed breasts ready to embrace the roof. She seemed to be staring blankly at nothing, but her eyes moved, and following them, he saw a lizard on the ceiling hunting insects. “Why don't you climb in?” she said, not looking at him.