The Devil's Garden (20 page)

‘What is this? Something in case the balloon goes up?'

Lieutenant Oishi spun round aghast. ‘Shh! Balloons? What do you know of balloons?'

Pilchard shrugged. ‘It is an expression only, meaning “in case of a major event”.'

Oishi frowned, unconvinced, and batted the question away. ‘Oh, it is a thing…a thing for the General. This is my squad. The orchids are over here.' He led down a path over the other side and soon the vegetation swallowed them up. Since he had met Orchid, he could not bear any thought of unkindness to the plants that bore her name. When he returned to the office, he would try again to perfect the
origami
version of her flower that he had been labouring at, a work of art folded out of drab military circulars. Failed attempts overflowed his wastebasket like tribute. Pilchard peered into the tangled shade. Insects buzzed around them. It was some kind of
Aerides,
a monopodial epiphyte, attached to the bark of a non-shedding tree, long pendulous inflorescences, waxy pink blooms. Hmm. Perfectly standard but, at the Gardens, he had been schooled in sparing the tender feelings of … amateurs.

‘Absolutely fascinating! Highly unusual. But then this is a unique environment. Let me take some samples and I can compare them with our own back at the Herbarium.' He dutifully snicked with the illegal weapon of his penknife. Thus had the great pioneers of his profession whittled and sliced their way to posterity in a dozen hazardous lands. ‘It may be that they are unknown to science. Then we can name them after you, can't we? Let me see. That would make them
oishii
wouldn't it? All those i's in a row.' The Captain glowed and purred with-horticultural pride.

‘Yes. I should like to live long enough to have an orchid named after me.' A simple statement said quite without affectation, unperfumed. Pilchard tucked the samples away in the crash helmet. Once inside, they looked ridiculously small. Ungratefully small. He took more just for the sake of it, trying to make a sort of gracious bouquet of it.

‘I am surprised to see you still here, Captain. I thought you were to go home. Is there some delay?'

Captain Oishi led the way back, taking another, much longer path and avoiding the clearing and his own men. ‘The command of the Seventh Army is still unfixed. I have no orders from Tokyo. And there are matters left from the General that I must finish before I can travel.'

‘And perhaps you have new interests that make you less eager to leave. Orchids, for example.' The young man blushed and laughed in delight.

‘Yes, yes, orchids. I am very interested in orchids. All sorts of orchids.' He looked swiftly sad and snapped off a branch from one of the bushes, shredding the leaves and scattering them miserably. ‘Orchids are very different in books and in the flesh. Of course, in Japan, people do not like orchids so much as here. There it is all
bonsai,
twisted, stunted.' He tied his hands in demonstrative knots.

‘No. I should imagine transplanting them would be very difficult and perhaps they would not thrive there if you took any home with you.'

‘Impossible,' sighed the Captain ruefully. He carried his burden of unwieldy emotions around with him, like a man toting a long plank through a crowded street. They arrived back at the motorbike and Pilchard bowed low to him for the benefit of the other soldiers lounging there and received a smart salute in exchange. He hung the goggles round his neck and braced himself for the clammy humidity of the helmet. Too late, as he placed it on his head, he remembered the samples now falling about his ears. Oishi politely averted his eyes. As he grubbed for them in the mud, a grey, wood-burning truck heaved axle-wrenchingly towards them and stopped. Two Japanese infantrymen jumped down and waved fixed bayonets at the interior, shouting the inevitable, ‘Speedo! Speedo!' Guards were always angry. What were they so angry about? And why were they all in such a perpetual hurry? What did they intend to do with the thirty seconds gained by all that shouting? A group of POWs clambered wearily out clutching Asian hoes. At their head was Major Spratt. He and Pilchard looked at each other and hesitated. One of the guards was already striding across, rifle raised for a blow when Spratt went into a deep reverential bow to Captain Oishi, who further wrong-footed the soldier by saluting smartly so that he fell back, perplexed. Pilchard shook hands in a determinedly civilian fashion.

‘Major Spratt. I thought all officers were excused labour.' Spratt snorted and cast a wary eye at Oishi. ‘Tell that to our Japanese masters. You seem to have done yourself all right. My god, you've got your own motorbike?'

Captain Oishi intervened, ‘As a botanist, Dr Pilchard, would you say those coconut palms over there need to be removed for the proper development of the garden?'

Pilchard looked at the grey, worn men and imagined them hacking away in the broiling sun.

‘No,' he said. ‘I see no need for that. That would be pointless labour.'

‘Shut up, you bloody fool,' hissed Spratt. ‘They'll make us work anyway and if we cut down the trees the men get to keep the nuts and the trunk will give palm wine for a week.'

‘Yes, Captain. I would consider cutting down those trees as essential.'

Oishi smiled and shouted irritated orders at the guards who led the men away, grumbling. They exchanged mute glances of complicity and embarrassment. Pilchard cleared his throat. ‘Thank you,' he said softly. Then, ‘I'm surprised not to have had more checks from patrols.' He lay the plant samples respectfully on the sidecar seat and, settling back onto the saddle with assumed dignity, kicked the engine into reluctant life. He ignored the renewed sharp poking in his buttocks.

‘Your armband,' Oishi pointed. ‘It says you're a German, friend of Japanese people.' He stepped back a pace and saluted again.

Embracing his role, Pilchard heelclicked and
Sieg Heil
-ed parodically—Spratt staring at him in horror—let out the clutch and bounced off germanically down the track and back onto the tarmac humming the Ride of the Walkyries. He clattered along Bukit Timah Road with Wagner pounding in his head until he reached the big crossroads, paused for a moment, then, glimpsing the orchids out of the corner of his eye, switched to soaring
Rosenkavalier
and, on sudden impulse, pointed the handlebars away from the Gardens and turned north, threading out through the traffic heading towards military headquarters. It was as if his heart were infected with the lightness of the love that young Oishi leaked from every pore. Lovers, he decided, were like vomiters. They induced involuntary, sympathetic contractions in everyone who witnessed their spasms. As the morning heat grew, the road shrank down and traffic ebbed to the occasional cart and bicycle. Fields were dotted between the trees, becoming rarer as he moved north with small Malay
kampungs
set back from the road. The vegetation changed. Bigger, older trees. The wind tugged at his thin, worn shirt and rain prickled in the air. There was another POW camp here and occasional work parties trudged along with shovels over their shoulders, prodded and harried out of his official way by guards who watched him with more interest than was comfortable. The men seemed to look like Spratt but a Spratt with all the starch and swagger knocked out of him, mostly bare-chested and scrawny, like skinned rabbits, with eyes that were either dead or burned with hatred or fever. What did they see in him? Not a German but someone pinker and better fed certainly, probably just a collaborator. Is that what he was? Possibly. But one foreign occupation of Singapore did not seem, to him, any more inherently outrageous than another. The British, it was true, at least had to justify themselves—as Protestants—with good works. Yet it was more that—as the conflict widened and became more abstract and algebraic with people fighting others just because they were the friends of enemies—his own loyalties shrank and became more hesitant, less easily engaged, more focused on those around him. Spratt detested the Indian guards in the camp for their reluctance to lay down their lives for his country. Pilchard simply disliked them for what they had done to him and his friends and despised them for believing one fairy story rather than another. Ideologies, myths, imperial destinies—all such nonsense. All his life he had been told that selfishness, cowardice, lack of faith and belief would be the world's undoing. School spirit, patriotism, the reputation of the Museum—it was all the same empty words. He suddenly saw that this was the message of his first day at school. It was noble self-sacrifice, blind courage and the willingness to suspend critical judgement in the name of a greater cause that were actually destroying mankind. It was the people with a coherent vision of things that caused all the trouble because certainty was a form of stupidity. The rest of us, who only managed to make the world intelligible for short stretches, were relatively harmless.

The land on either side of the road became more wooded with scrappy, unhappy-looking trees. He turned off onto an unsurfaced track dusted with sandy soil and glided along smoothly, on hushed tyres, for several miles, over leaf mould until the land beneath him turned sudden black and sullen. There was still the foul, sweet smell of human putrefaction that clung to the branches and leaves from the vicious battle fought as the Japanese crossed the strait from the mainland, a lingering stench of gangrenous flesh turned to mulch, tainted with terror, now being rotted down to anonymous plant food. Big, black birds were circling on the horizon. Something had freshly died there. The earth was crosscut with brackish rivulets and trickling inlets that had to be skirted round or splashed through and when he came to a point where two paths met, he hesitated, his engine suddenly very loud in the forest as he coasted to a stop. Some largish animal skittered away into the wild bushes and he had a terrible urge to look behind him for unseen monsters, as when a little boy lost in the rhododendron garden. He had only been here once before, years ago, and memory was sluggish. His foot engaged the gear but the combination had settled into the sodden soil and he let out the clutch too fast and stalled. In the abrupt silence, his own heart throbbed in his chest, then he saw, tacked to a dispirited tree, one of the Japanese signs he had given Chen Guang and he knew he had found the mangrove research station. Dismounting, he pulled off goggles and helmet, stowed them in the sidecar and set off down the track, the soil sucking at his heels.

After a few hundred yards there was a gate, old but freshly repaired with a big sign proclaiming the reserve in three languages, like a translation test, and threatening dire penalties for trespass. An expensive new lock and chain showed it meant business. Climbing over, he walked towards a simple hut built out on poles over the ooze. The tide was coming in on a black and white world, leached into shades of grey, where mudskippers flapped in the shallow encroachment among the bullyboy crabs and clenched roots He strode up to a door of plain planks and knocked. An old towel was drying over the rail by the water.

‘You should not have come.' The voice was soft behind him. He turned and saw Chen Guang, very close, with another, bigger man behind him. They both held long, sharp
parangs
.

‘What?'

Chen Guang hung a smile on his face. ‘You should not have come without letting us know.' He slid the
parang,
rasping, into his belt. The other man did likewise. ‘We have nothing to offer an honoured guest.' He pushed open the door and led across the room on bare feet to the platform over the water and indicated an old rattan chair. ‘Please sit, Dr Pilchard, or is it Mr Dagama?' The other man hovered uncertainly.

‘I think perhaps it had better be Mr Dagama.'

Chen Guang laughed softly and sat. ‘My boy will bring tea.' Was that boy ‘son' or boy ‘servant'? He spoke to him in odd-sounding Chinese. ‘So…excuse me if I am blunt. Asians are not supposed to be blunt are they? What is it that brings you to our shores, Mr Dagama?' He gestured magnificently across the mudflats. ‘Have you come simply for the view or the rent or to bring me flowers or is it—I wonder—curiosity?' Pilchard smiled. They had checked over the motorbike.

‘Well, perhaps curiosity—a little. I rarely have the opportunity to leave the Gardens and I thought …'

‘We all treasure our tranquillity, Mr Dagama. I believe I told you that. I thought you had understood me. My boy and I rarely have visitors. Your very loud motor bicycle risks disturbing our neighbours. We should not wish to attract attention and so be considered bad neighbours.' There were six chairs on the platform, arranged in a circle. Six. On a shelf by the door were ten cups. But they had no visitors. Something gleamed in the middle of the floor. He stared at it idly till it shifted into focus. Jesus! It was a single rifle bullet encased in brass and copper. The Chinaman had seen it too and seen that he had seen it. They lifted their eyes to stare at each other.

‘I apologise Chen Guang. I too would not wish to be thought a bad neighbour. People should not concern themselves with the business of their neighbours. I have often thought that the world would be a better place if we all minded our own business.' He stooped, picked up the bullet and handed it back to his host, then calmly sat again. His knees were shaking. He realised how easy it would be for him to disappear in this swamp. No one knew he was here. His life, he sensed, depended on the next few minutes. ‘That is the reason I obeyed the Director's personal order, sending me to check on the station today, so that I could confirm that all is well here and spare you visits from others who would be more inquisitive. We have an arrangement, you and I, and, now I think of it, I am a very incurious man.' The tea was brought, allowed to cool in silence, drunk with a polite show of reluctance. Perspiration, fuelled only partly by the tea, flowed down his chest, while outside, over the bleak mud, the rising water swirled in and pooled silently under the platform they sat on. The son—if such he was—ignored the vacant chairs and crouched in a corner in a way that only emphasised his bulk, took the
parang
out of his belt and lay it on the floor declaratively within easy reach. He would be one of the solutions to the problem of Tamil incursors into the mangroves.