The Devil's Garden (3 page)

The area was less a single camp than an assembly of old British barracks, mostly wooden-built, split and rotten, eked out with tents and informal shelters of bamboo and thatch that clustered round the walls of the old prison. When they had marched in—all the men had cried as the women and children followed singing ‘There'll always be an England'—it had been virtually an empty shell but barter, theft and ingenuity had worked wonders and now there were at least basic comforts such as beds, water and zitheringly erratic electricity. Pilchard's collector's heart was gladdened by the rich variety of humanity gathered together: black, brown, yellow, white, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, British, Australian, New Zealand, Dutch, Malay, Javanese, Moluccan, Indian. In Changi, of course, Indians came in two varieties that crosscut all other regional and caste labels—the loyal and the Indian National Army who had thrown their lot in with the Japanese in return for freedom and a vague promise of Indian independence. The former might be smiled at, the latter's stare must be avoided at all costs since they had adopted an almost hysterical brutality as the mark of their bond with Japan. And they specialised not just in beatings but rapes, the sort not done in the hot lubricity of lust but the cold, congealed determination to humiliate and completed by urinating all over the victim.

They had caught Manson alone in his cell in Changi proper and he had been slow to get to his feet. That had been excuse enough. One stood outside in the doorway, smacking a thick bamboo pole in the palm of his hand as the other two taught Manson to respect them. The screams electrified the very air. All other sound died as the prisoners listened but looked the other way. Then the shame, Manson's and their own, as they were unable to meet anyone else's eyes in case they saw themselves for what they were. The Indians had emerged, laughing and swaggering and all three had sauntered off, running their clubs along the stair rails like innocent, little boys playing on railings on the way to school. As the thrumming died away, the sound of Manson's sobs became louder, the very heartbeat of the prison
.

‘Clang! Clang!' There were half a dozen young men, crouching listlessly on the ground under the front of the shelter. Javanese. Asians felt the lack of furniture less than the Westerners. They should have been smoking but cigarettes were an impossible luxury in the camp so their hands rested limp and empty like their eyes. Since his time as resident medic on the Cocos-Keeling Islands, Pilchard had had a special fondness for the Javanese that lived there. In Changi, they were sited beside the Dutch, recalling the way that the Hunnish army had always advanced across the land as a living map of its provinces. Theirs was naturally the worst accommodation, an old workshop where generations of tinkering mechanics had left a miasma of engine grease and rust. As always, he drifted towards it.

It was the privilege of East Indies colonial troops to be issued with high, leather boots that set them off from, and above, local inhabitants. Normally an object of pride, polished and cosseted, they had become a burden among the boot-admiring Japanese whose own feet, it was swiftly discovered, also fitted into them very nicely. The first few months had seen a terrifying series of confiscations, with beatings for thanks, and searches of their quarters that made impossible the normal illegal activities necessary for life. So now the prisoners were forced to roam barefoot, on feet now grown tender from footwear, while the treasured boots lay hidden away and slowly succumbed to rats and mildew. More military idiocy.

At the centre, an older, very dark figure, wearing only a flowery sarong, was the sole moving element. He was hitting a piece of metal with a solid wooden hammer, timing the blows so that they fell rhythmically and humming as he worked, like some Wagnerian dwarf. Pilchard knew Sergeant Dewa was a gong-player as well as an engineer. He circled the men from the rear, greeted, shook hands. None of them bothered to stand, simply reaching up apathetically to limply touch his hand. Finally he moved to the centre.

‘Mas Dewa. What are you making?'

‘Dokter. Toko's arm needs some work.' He indicated one of the men and bashed anew. ‘One of the work parties found a crashed Kawasaki bomber. It didn't need its wing but Toko needs an arm. He lost it in an air raid.'

Toko smiled and held up his limb, now ending just below the elbow. ‘Maybe it's the same machine that took my arm. Now it's giving it back.' He laughed. The artificial arm was a hollow aluminium tube, articulated but lockable at the wrist. On the end was a hand, carved out of wood, very lifelike, but with an extraordinarily exaggerated, erect thumb. Pilchard raised a quizzical eyebrow. Toko shrugged. ‘For the wife,' he explained and everyone laughed again. ‘Better than Nature.'

‘When she sees it,' volunteered his friend, ‘she'll think it's a pity they didn't shoot your dick off too.' Pilchard bent and examined the stump. As a qualified general practitioner, he knew nothing of amputations but it looked neat, a good flap of flesh to cushion the end.

‘Nice work. Who did it?'

‘Some white man.' To him they would all be the same. ‘I never saw him. In those days we had gas.' Now it was a swig of rice toddy, or if you got really lucky, a scanty perfume sprinkling of precious chloroform, hardly enough to make you dizzy. Dewa laid down the hammer.

‘I've got your stuff.' He spoke quietly and pulled an old Player's tin off the shelf over the workbench, took off the lid, fished inside. The two men looked around and shook hands. A small package wrapped in banana leaves, swiftly pocketed, moved one way. A smaller one moved the other. They stepped apart quickly. Finished. All over.

* * * 

Dr Catchpole sighed and ran a tired hand over his sweaty face, taking care not to jostle his wig. He had always hated museum visits by imperial worthies. At least, in the old days, they could only give you a bad report or cut off your funding. They were unlikely to cut off your head. Now they might well do just that. The two Japanese, Professor Tanakadate and tiny Dr Hanada, put their shoulders behind his and shuffled him forward towards the General, like a children's toy. His colleague, Dr Post, lurked treacherously in the background, looking anxious. They bowed. Catchpole bowed a second too late, bowed shallowly, fearful of wig loss, spoiled the effect and got flustered. Around his neck hung a large bakelite hearing aid receiver that amplified speech to the headphone draped over one ear. To improve reception, he pointed it at people, like a box camera, but with overtones of an entomologist staring at bugs through a magnifying glass.

Prof Tanakadate stepped forward smoothly.

‘General. I should like to present my assistant, Dr Hanada, and our partner, Dr Catchpole, the eminent ichthyologist.'

Tiger scowled, he tucked his thumbs into his waistbelt and his voice dipped down into his military growl, a sound like gravel under jackboots. ‘Itchy? What is itchy?' He stared shamelessly at the wig. It looked like a mass of shredded horseradish. That must be itchy. ‘And why are there
gaijin
in the museum? Who are you? What is all this?'

The Professor smiled unruffled and bowed again. ‘The General has perhaps forgotten his old schoolmate. Time has been kinder to him than to me. Tanakadate.' He bowed again, grey, unmilitary hair flopping over his forehead.

‘Eh? Tanakadate? You?' His eyes popped. ‘Forgive me. So many people. So busy. And nowadays everyone where you don't expect them to be.'

‘We are honoured that the General has made time to visit us. Had we known in advance, we might have arranged something more worthy of him.'

‘Why these
gaijin
?' Catchpole, pale expert on tropical fish, had retreated into a still alcove and was to be seen floundering awkwardly back there, in disreputable alpaca, between two refracting glass cases. ‘Why are they not in Changi? Are they German?' He was doubtful about Germans, having fought them in Shantung in the last war but drunk with them while serving as military attaché, in Berlin, before this one.

‘It seems there was an agreement with the … er … outgoing governor that some staff might stay on to help our takeover. Dr Catchpole arranged the whole matter.' He nodded at the chubby figure treading water and peering at them timorously through glass. ‘It is an arrangement that has been greatly to the advantage of Dai Nippon, rather than having them in prison.'

‘So they are collaborators. And Changi is not a prison. It is a processing centre for aliens.' It was a mere administrative reflex, displacing another. He embarked on a swift ill-natured tour, stumping along the wooden corridors, hands clasped behind his back He peered into the library.

‘Books,' he said.

‘There is some disorder while we are moving some of the less academic volumes to the prisoners in Changi.'

‘There are no prisoners in Changi. They are detainees only.'

‘Quite so.'

Tiger grunted and set off again, the floorboards resonating loudly and untigerishly under his boots. Through the ethnography gallery that traced the Malays' endless birdlike ingenuity in teasing twigs and vegetable fibre into human culture.

‘Jungle stuff,' he snorted. Through fish, monkeys and insects to arrive, finally at … ‘Birds,' he nodded and half turned, then frowned and turned back. It was a display of brightly coloured finches or some such, stuffed and spaliered like a Kyoto cherry blossom into a sort of family tree against a backboard. He read aloud. ‘Birds of Cocos-Keeling. Collected by J. Pilchard 1940.' Cocos-Keeling was a place of interest, the new front line, as yet still held by the British, a communications centre, the only place from which the Allies might now attack the Asian mainland by air. A hundred miles closer, on Christmas Island, sat a division of Japanese troops, sharpening their bayonets, just waiting for the order to advance before sweeping on to Australia and final victory. He tapped at the glass. ‘Where is …' he leaned back to see the name ‘… Pilchard?' He looked up. ‘Which one is Pilchard?'

‘Not here,' said Tanakadate hastily. ‘Gone.'

‘In Changi!' sniggered Catchpole from afar, a practised hatdoffer, the class sneak.

‘In Changi or not in Changi?' echoed Tiger sweetly. Tanakadate squirmed and glared at Catchpole.

‘Oh yes. In Changi. I forgot.' Tiger's voice dropped back into military growl. Addressing his ADC, Captain Oishi.

‘Find him. Fetch him. Send him to the Kempeitei next door. Let them ask him some questions about Cocos-Keeling but not about birds. I wish to have everything on this Cocos-Keeling.' He bowed, turned on his heel and stamped out swiftly, hands behind his back, bent forward, the museum staff flocking after like geese. As he passed Raffles he sniffed contemptuously, then dived into the back of the fat, leather-smelling Daimler that was now his. He adored it, shiny and solid as if carved from black marble. Its bench seats made
him
feel well upholstered. ‘Back to HQ!' He settled into his seat. ‘Raffles College!' he added happily, as if they did not know where it was and young Captain Oishi leapt to his place in front and slammed the door in one smooth drill movement. The driver, knowing what the General liked, floored the accelerator and they tipped back into the softened red oxhide and sped off with a gratifying spray of gravel and a cloud of wasteful, blue smoke.

* * * 

Over by the prison wall, Corporal Higgins was snipping away industriously inside a sort of frayed canvas lean-to that looked like a giant's trenchcoat, trimming neatly around the irregular ears of a gnarled Aussie commando, perched on a soap box. Muscularity was a sort of disease that had invaded the man's entire body. He even had clenched, muscular hair.

‘Always hang on to the tools of your trade, lad,' me Dad used to say—not that he meant it in quite
that
way you understand—and it's advice that's stood me in good stead over the years.' He was a tiny, impish wisp of a man, willowy and deft, like a tickbird on a buffalo. The commando was not listening, they never did. It made no difference. Chatter and snip came together even if it went right over their heads. ‘A little more off the top dear?' The commando grunted and groped at his own head with blunt fingers, then shook it. There were no large mirrors in this ‘salon', just a fragment hanging on a string from the doorframe that required a face to be viewed in parts and mentally recombined. The customer stood up, a long way up, reached in his top pocket and took out a single crumpled cigarette, considered briefly but weightily and broke it in half, giving one part to eye-rolling Private Higgins and replacing the other, then lumbered off on splayed feet.

‘Thank you, dear. I'll put it in the vault.' He leaned round the edge of the shelter and called after. ‘Anything for the wife?' The next customer moved forward and slumped on the box, looking around with studied insouciance. Higgins poked fussily into the nest of red hair with scissors and comb. ‘I really am going to have to take my clippers to you dear. You can't keep passing through here and coming out looking like the cat's furball. Even the Japanese are going to notice. Let me at least trim the beard.' Pilchard sat resentfully for several minutes as the scissors teased and snipped, squirming like a little boy suffering the wipe of a mother's spitty handkerchief. Higgins sighed.

‘Oh go on, then.'

Pilchard rose and slipped nichodemously behind the sheet at the far end. On the other side stood the mildewed, stucco wall of the prison, surrounded by a fly-buzzing drainage ditch. He clambered down into the depression and approached the entrance to a big concrete pipe that led through into the storm-drain. It was barred by a grille of iron bars but two were rusted and removable. He lifted and climbed through, set them back in place and twisted their smooth faces outwards to match the rest. The drains were only flushed twice a day to save water so he removed his careworn sandals and splashed barefoot through unpleasant ankle-deep sewage and up, beneath the double outer wall, to emerge behind the latrine sheds in the area known whimsically as Crouch End or Lower Tooting, back into the jail itself. No one was on the lookout for someone breaking
into
a jail and Pilchard knew that security was brutally but only capriciously enforced so that the greatest risk was from a Japanese soldier grabbing a sly cigarette here out of sight. A bucket of water stood ready and he sloshed it, grimacing, over his feet and made his way, heavy-footed, up into the men's section, hauling himself up the stairs by the hot and crumbly iron handrails.