Key to the Door (64 page)

Those from the signals billet were rounded up with clerks, cooks, drivers, and orderlies to fill sandbags. Brian had no confidence in what they were being made to fortify, believing that sooner or later, even if they built a stone wall ten yards high, the whole lot would crumble. But he worked hard and for a long time and, though not particularly tired, knew he was in a fever. Sometimes he spoke a word out loud to isolate the sound of his own voice, and once when he got an exact image of it, had to thrust it away for fear of running insanely towards the sea. Surrounded by many people, he felt entirely alone, worked within the clearly defined circle of his own actions. They had been on the go since seven, with only two breaks, and he dug at the sand mechanically, sometimes getting a light shovel that slewed against the embankment, at others finding the load so heavy that some had to be tipped off. His throat ached for a drink of water, a walk under shady trees to spend a few minutes away from filling sandbags. Those farther along the embankment had the worst of the job since they were in sight of the guard-house and had to keep on working, unable to skive off for a drink now and again, as he had done. The sentries were monuments of perspiration. “What did you say?” Kirkby demanded. “Nothing,” Brian replied; “I must have been thinking aloud.”

Down by the long huts a man walked out of the shower-house, a white towel around his lobster body, slopping his feet along in wet sandals and whistling a Malay love-song popular on Radio Timur. It was an image of clarity, but when it vanished, the aches came back into the bones of Brian's chest.

The whole thing won't last much longer, he thought, seeing, even more vividly than Baker's death, the vision of the aeroplane hanging dead between the trees like an enlarged piece of carcass in a butcher's shop. It was clearer in his eye than the face of the Communist he had let loose and the ambush later, something he had dreamed around more than once, seeing the plane hanging between tall buildings—a dead whale blocking streets, and suspended also in Serpent Wood, where he used to play in the past that was no longer an unrememberable dream, its broad fuselage tied between trees above the small brook he spent hours trying to dam and divert until, in the dream, the plane fell to the soil and caused him to wake up.

He felt better, his head no longer a battleground. Each spade of sand seemed lighter in weight, and he no longer pitied either the sentries or himself, but enjoyed the hard manual work because the feeling for it had come back into his bones after he had been so long cloistered at the DF hut. Elated and happy, he paused in digging and looked around at the others, saw how much they had slowed down in their exhaustion. The sun didn't feel harsh to him; trees looked green and cool from a distance, as if even out in the space where he worked they sent some benefit of shade and hidden moisture.

Told to go, he walked off alone through the trees, towards the latrine for a drink and a swill, afterwards to the billet to pick up his eating irons for dinner. The latrine was near the beach and a Malay fisherman walked by with a long net-pole on his shoulder, and over the two-mile water he saw a straggle of grey and black ship in Muong Harbour, and beyond that the colourful line of waterfront buildings looking, he thought, like a row of posh kids' toys on a window-sill. He stood by the barbed wire, hunger and thirst momentarily forgotten, wondering what he was doing inside this fortress, when so many ships were over there, ready to scatter like funnelled and smoking waterbeetles to all parts of the earth. I call myself Communist, and yet I'm slave-laboured into building these sandbag ramparts to keep them out.

“You're not a Communist, Brian,” Knotman had said when they got talking politics the other night. “Not from what I know of you, anyway.” “Well, I'm not part of this system, I'll tell you that.” “I don't blame you,” Knotman went on, “because I don't think anybody would be, in their right mind, but most of the world isn't in its right mind, though I expect it will be one day.” “What do you think I am, then?” Brian asked. “You might be a socialist when you've read more and know a bit about it.” “Hitler was a socialist,” Brian laughed, “a national socialist, and I don't want anything to do with a nut like him.” “He wasn't a socialist,” Knotman informed him patiently, “he only said he was to deceive the workingman. He was sucking up to big business, and they used him to rob the Jews and stamp on the workingman eventually. They fell for it as well. No, if you're anything, you're a socialist-anarchist.” “Maybe,” Brian admitted, but he knew that all men were brothers and that the wealth of the world should be pooled and divided fairly among those who worked, doctors and labourers, architects and mechanics. That's what those on the other side of the sandbags feel, and even though they might not, as Knotman averred, be true socialists, he was still building up sandbags to keep them out. At least, my eyes have been opened. All I've got to do now is learn to see with them, and when one person sees, maybe the next one will as well. “It's a matter of time,” Knotman said, “before the world unites, not only the workers, either. It's taking the long way round to get there at the moment,” he laughed, “but that's a thing that often happens.” “Don't you think you should do something about it, though, to help it?” Brian persisted. “Yes, but no more than you can without being untrue to yourself. History is on our side, so just bide your time: you won't even know when to act; the first thing you know, you'll be acting—and in the right way.” Brian found these words unsatisfactory to his nature, because in the jungle the Communists had acted and he'd seen it with his own eyes, felt their bullets spinning and travelling around him.

He met Mimi at the Egyptian Café the evening before his train left. They sat by the trellis work, next door to crickets and bullfrogs: “Every café has a café of insects and animals around it,” he laughed, spinning the miniature glass of neat gut-rot round in the palm of his hand. He shivered at the coldness of the meeting, thinking how much better it would have been had they, through some accurate and supersensitive whim, decided half an hour ago to stand each other up—for old times' sake.

She wore neither lipstick nor make-up, had her hair tied back to show for the first time how long she'd been letting it grow in the last few weeks. “I didn't want to come,” she said, “but I couldn't help it.”

“Neither could I,” he said. “I feel a rotter, a black-headed no-good bastard.”

“Why?”—her dark eyes opening wide.

“Because I'm leaving you when I don't want to. There's a boat waiting to take me eight thousand miles and I'm not dead keen on going the same way.”

“That's silly.”

“It isn't. I don't want to go. But I've got no will-power not to go. I want to stay here with you. But I know I shan't. I'm going to do something I don't want to do.”

“Everybody has to do that sometime or other. It won't be the first time for you, either. Nor the last.”

“No,” he said, sending a hot needle of whisky down his throat. “It won't, now you come to mention it. Far from it. But I've never felt it as keen as this on any of the other times.” Insects spun like needlepoints through the doors and lattices of the ramshackle café, gathered in clouds around strings of bare light-bulbs. Tables around them were loaded with drinks and noisy jokes: the café had at least one fight a month, every second pay-day, often being put out of bounds, or closed down for a time. “I've got to go soon,” she said softly, hoping he wouldn't make her stay, “to get the next ferry. I'm supposed to be working, and if I don't go I'll lose my job.”

“I'll send you them books.” No tremor came into either voice, though he felt a seal of hopelessness pressing against his throat. “That'll be nice,” she said, “if you mean it.”

“Of course I do. I'll write as well—letters now and again on a Woolworth's writing-pad. Who knows what I'll do? I might even come back in a year—or ten or fifteen years—walk into the Boston Lights and have a couple of dances with you before you know who I am.”

“You won't,” she said.

“I don't suppose so.”

“You'll never leave England again. You'll be too busy working, and enjoying yourself.”

“Well,” he laughed, “you can't do both.”

She stood up: “I'll get a tri-shaw to the ferry.”

They walked to the door, looked for a moment at the dim lines and lights of the road that penetrated the heart-shaped shadows like spears and arrows denoting love, yet with no initials. He held her hand, kissed her on eyes and lips, felt the kiss returned and her hand go around him. “Goodbye, Mimi. Look after yourself.” She hesitated, then turned back to him: “What you told me the other night, about up in the jungle, you were brave. I understood. It was marvellous. You were right not to shoot at them.”

He watched her walk to the nearest rickshaw, saw the dim shadow of her light body bend and set itself in the seat. The feet of the man gathered speed between the shafts, soon beyond the range at which Brian, watching from the doorway, could hear. In place of it, another and louder sound, stranger to him yet too real as soon as it was felt, swept over him, a sea from the back of his throat as he turned and walked in the opposite direction.

All day the train took him through familiar landscapes, leaping at first like a straight-lined arrow between rice fields and by the edges of swamps, then towards mountains, twisting and turning like the illustrations of alternating-current theories on the blackboard at radio school. The beautiful names of the country were lit up in the store-rooms of his memory:
KEDAH
,
KELANTAN
,
PERAK
,
TRENG
-
GANU
,
PAHANG
,
SELANGOR
,
NEGRI SEMBILAN
—rhythmed out to the thudding self-assurance of stream-driven wheels, an antidote and agreeable opposite to deep jungle rolling beneath waterclouds on mountain tops, and fortified bungalows on village outskirts. The clean, beautifully rounded train wheels were taking him towards Kuala Lumpur in the evening, the big city from which the sun would sink at half-past seven, just as it had twenty-four hours earlier beyond Pulau Timur, when he had watched it from the billet door before going off to see Mimi.

The passing jungle absorbed him, made his mind as blank as if he were drinking water from a stream he wasn't sure he would see again, so that it was only when he turned his eyes back to the carriage and noticed his webbing and pack straps spilling over the rack and swinging from the regular kick of the train that the fact of his having left Mimi for good rushed into him. Now that the journey had begun he couldn't get out of the country quick enough, yet his goodbye to her numbed him, rendered him unable to dissect to the bare bones an anguish he knew was useless but that stayed much of the journey with him. Towards dusk, however, the previous fire had left little for his pain to grip on, and Mimi was almost as far apart from him as Pauline had been when he had first danced with Mimi at the Boston Lights over a year ago. As the train drew near to Kuala Lumpur, he felt he had seen the last of her and of Malaya, and sensed the doors of its vivid beauty closing themselves in the immense distance and depth of mountains behind. He sat motionless, apart from the rest of the demob party, gave himself up to the grief of a slow half-swept amputation that grew to hard misery because he did not know to what exactly he was saying goodbye, and hadn't yet realized the vastness of the other part of his life still to be lived.

At Kuala Lumpur they gathered their kit to cross the dismal platforms towards the night train for Singapore. A transport sergeant stopped Brian and demanded to know where his rifle was. “I haven't got one.”

“Sergeant, when you address me,” came the barked refrain.

“Sergeant,” he said.

“No one is allowed to travel on the night train without a rifle,” he stipulated. The group of them stood around, awaiting the issue. “I don't care whether I get on the train or not,” Brian said. You dead-gut, you gestapo-eyed gett, you flap-mouthed effing scumpot.

“You what?”—the fierce face was stuck towards him, smelling of sweat and carbolic soap and sucked-out fags. “Listen,” he said, “for your information, the train going down last night got machine-gunned.”

“We had to hand our rifles in at Kota Libis, sergeant.”

“They'd no bloody right, then. You'd better wait here till I see what's to be done with you.” He marched to the head of the platform and conferred with an officer. “We'll miss the blinding boat now,” Jack cursed. “I can see it.”

“They can stuff their rifles,” Brian said. “Next time, I turn mine against that fuckpig—if he's on the train and we get ambushed, he'd better watch out. By Christ, I mean it. Still, if I don't get him, maybe the bandits will—one of these days.”

“No such luck,” Kirkby said. “It's poor bastards like Baker who stop it first. They never get the right ones.”

“Workers of the world, unite!” Jack shouted. “Let's get on that bloody train.”

The sergeant didn't look like coming back, so Brian loaded his kit aboard, followed by the others. Each secured a bunk, debouched again to besiege an ice-cream trolley for the night's supplies.

The train set out, rattling away into the darkness of the wastelands. Brian undressed and climbed into his top bunk, pulling the sheet over him. Some of the others were already asleep, empty ice-cream cartons rolling about the gangway, knocking from side to side like worn-out bobbins at a cotton mill, the ones that had often poured from the backs of lorries on the tips, far away in a half-forgotten world. Sleep seemed impossible, and he lay on his back staring at the ceiling a few inches above his forehead. I'd rather be in bed at home, he thought, with Pauline, and soon will be. I'll get off the troop-ship in three weeks and get demobbed the next day, will take a flying train down to Nottingham and a taxi to Aspley and—Where will we be that night? Will it be the Barleycorn or the Beacon for a good drink of mild, a laugh and a long talk, a few kisses when we think nobody's looking?