The Harmony Silk Factory (30 page)

IT WAS JOHNNY who woke us up. He took us half a mile up the beach in the pale dawn and showed us what he had found.

There, left stranded on the shore by the retreating tide, lay Honey. The occasional wave licked at his body as it faded into the sand. He was still fully clothed, his wristwatch glinting softly as it caught the light. His neck appeared black, badly bruised, and his shirt was torn in several places. Nothing remained of his face.

“It’s been eaten by fish,” Peter said quietly.

Mamoru dug a grave at the top of the beach, under the trees beyond reach of the tide. We buried Honey, and Peter said a few words of Christian prayer.

We went back to the camp but none of us was hungry for breakfast.

MAMORU SAYS HONEY must have been so intoxicated with wine that he must have somehow fallen into the sea. We have not spoken about Honey much, though I know that we are all thinking of how Honey could have died. Mamoru’s explanation is convincing, but the truth of it is that no one really knows what happened. No one knows anything anymore.

I FORCE MYSELF TO RECORD THIS.

Circumstances left me with no choice. I could not stop myself.

Finally, I accept my fate.

Last night I decided I could no longer bear this emptiness. I saw Mamoru disappear into the darkened woods. He has taken to doing this every evening, after we eat our supper in terrible silence. Each time he leaves I long to follow him, yet I have been afraid to incur his wrath. What do I have to lose? I don’t know. It feels as if I have lost everything, and yet when I look at Mamoru I still feel the faint pulse of hope, the scent of something new.

In the end I could contain myself no longer. I saw him melt into the trees and I followed him.

I remained twenty yards behind him, treading gently in the dark. It was not a clear night. Clouds drifted thickly over the moon and it was difficult to see where I was going. It was only because of Mamoru’s intense whiteness that I was able to keep sight of him. I could not remember if he was wearing white clothes; I was only aware of the purity of his colour, a strange quality that seemed to absorb what little light there was and make it his own. He walked slowly, picking his way smoothly between the trees as if following an ancient, predetermined path. Not once did he pause or turn around.

Several times I stumbled, catching my foot on tree roots and rocks; each time I had to hurry to catch up with him. Invisible branches slashed at my face and neck and arms like whips. I tasted the saltiness of blood on my lips but still I continued, drawn by the glowing white light ahead of me. I do not know how long or in which direction I had been walking, but suddenly I found myself in a clearing by the house of antlers. Mamoru had disappeared.

I walked slowly around the house, pausing now and again to listen for movement: nothing. I came to the back of the house, and there he was, standing in the moonlight on a stone parapet, hands in pockets, silent as the night that had fallen upon us. He looked like a carved figure, part of that dead house. It was only when he moved and his whiteness shifted with him that I knew for certain that it was him. He became human again, walking until he was at the base of the steps, not ten yards from me.

I came out of the dark, into his light. “Mamoru,” I said.

He turned to face me. “Snow,” he said simply and without surprise, breathing out as if in relief. He had been waiting for me.

I went to him and touched his hand. We sat down on the steps and I put my head on his chest. I closed my eyes. His marble-cool body brought relief to my burning head. We did not speak for a very long time.

“I know you are troubled, Mamoru,” I said after a while. “But Honey’s death was not your fault. You cannot be responsible for everything.”

He put his hand on my brow. “Am I not responsible for the horror of it?”

“What do you mean? You are not responsible for Honey’s death, or the deaths of anyone else. We’ve talked about this before, Mamoru. I know you carry with you what you saw in China, but that was not your doing.”

“Wasn’t it?” he laughed a strange laugh. I could not decipher it.

“No,” I said, sitting up and facing him. “It wasn’t.”

Again he laughed. “How little you know.” His voice sounded hard and bitter.

“I know what you have told me,” I said. “I have no need to know anything else.”

I reached for him in the dark and drew him close to me. I held his head in my hands and kissed it. I kissed it and kissed it some more.

He pushed me away. “Listen,” he said, “you know nothing. You do not know me.”

“But Mamoru,” I said, brushing his neck slowly with the back of my hand, “you have told me everything. I have seen your life through your own eyes. I have told no one about it, nor have you. Only you and I know what has happened in your life.” I tasted blood on my tongue again.

He put his hand on the back of my neck and pulled me to him. He kissed me on my lips, pressing his mouth hard on mine. His coldness stunned my nerves and I could not breathe. I could not even move. He drew away and I gasped for breath.

“Do you really want to see all the things I have seen?” he whispered in my ear.

“Mamoru.”

He gripped my wrists tightly. “I have seen evil inflicted on men, things that you, Snow, could not possibly imagine. I have seen things happen to women too, things that would make you wish the whole world could be destroyed. How could you possibly want to see those things?”

“Mamoru,” I said, “you’re hurting me.”

He was pressing against me, his hard cold body over me. “I have been part of those things, Snow. Nothing can save me from that.”

When he forced his lips upon mine I tasted blood again, flooding into my mouth, choking me. I wanted to die.

I do not know how I finally broke free. I struggled like a wild creature, kicking and spitting and clawing and wailing. I cannot recall how it happened, but suddenly Mamoru had disappeared and I began to run. I was running and Peter was there, calling my name, chasing after me in the darkness. I ran from him as hard as I could but I did not get far. My body was bruised and cut, I could feel every mark on my skin. Peter caught up with me and grabbed hold of my waist. I screamed at him, tearing at his shirt, ripping it from his body. Clouds shifted in the sky, and in the new moonlight I saw that my fingernails made harsh red scratches on his milk-white chest. I stopped kicking and held him like a child clings to its mother, tightly, unquestioningly. His skin was wet.

“There now,” he said softly, stroking my hair.

“Oh God, Peter.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” he said, chuckling.

We stood in a glade, the space around us cleared of thorny shrubs and dead trees and dark undergrowth. I swallowed and coughed spittle and blood, and in my short breaths I caught the soapy scent of wild frangipani. I gazed upwards and saw a white-filled sky.

“We’re in your garden,” I said.

He started to sing his song. I pressed my ear to his chest and heard the song hum softly. It spread itself out to sea, drifting thinly over the waves.

PETER

THIS PLACE IS the
end
. Twenty-two rooms occupied by twenty-two near-fossils, little more than a halfway house in the short journey to the cemetery down the road. The constant stench of frying shrimp paste—which, after all these years, I still abhor—wafts through the corridors, mingling with the ever-present bouquet of old-man’s piss. I keep my windows open, even at night. The mosquitoes may suck the life out of me, but when I die I refuse to do so in squalor. The way this place is run, my beautifully dressed corpse would probably remain undiscovered for several days, by which time the aroma of decaying flesh, stale urine, and rancid seafood would be somewhat unappealing in an enclosed space. Naturally, having the shutters open does have its drawbacks—chiefly, that I am exposed to the most horrific of all the crimes ever committed in the long and unpleasant history of this house: the garden. I gasp every time I look at this abomination of nature; even thinking about it makes me shudder. It consists solely of a large, uneven lawn—
utterly
jejune—bounded by a wire fence, unadorned except for a single, sorry group of sealing-wax palms whose stems have given up the fight to remain red and instead lapsed into a shade of grey, battered into submission by the relentless briny winds. Why are they there? They serve only to obscure the view of the sea from the verandah.

Every morning I wake up with sunlight pouring in through the floor-length shutters. I look out at this barren waste and I weep.

This is the price I have to pay.

Of course the other old boys think I’m completely eccentric in exposing myself to the elements. Sometimes, even the most senile idiot will try, patronisingly, to convince me that it is better to close the windows, as this will keep out the rain and the insects—as if I’ve lost my marbles (hah!) and don’t know what I’m doing. Obviously, I’m not remotely perturbed by this, seeing as I’m already known as the Mad English Devil, an epithet from which I am unlikely to be disassociated even if I do concede the issue of the shutters. As a brief aside, I’ve never been entirely certain of the accuracy of the translation of my nickname from the Chinese—I suspect that Alvaro politely edited the fruitier connotations from the original phrase when he translated it for me. He has this poorly conceived notion that I am to be pitied, being the lone foreigner in this place. And so he tells me things which I know to be untrue—compliments people supposedly pay me, words of admiration, always in Chinese, or Malay, or Tamil. Of course, one must take everything he says
cum grano salis.

It’s only reasonable to expect, I hear you cry, that I should have some knowledge of Chinese after all these years, but I don’t. Not a bit. I have always detested the language; I find it so
trenchant.
And superfluous too, seeing as everyone speaks English—or some form of it—anyway. No, after sixty years of living here, the process of linguistic osmosis hasn’t worked in the way you’d assume. In fact, quite the reverse has happened: I have remained wonderfully impervious to Malay and Chinese, but my English, dear God, has been leached out of me. Some days I can hardly speak. The words don’t follow the sentiments, and recently I have developed the habit of stopping in midsentence. And as for writing, well—this current project is proving to be a real grind, not at all the thrilling adventure I had envisaged.

Still, I persevere.

I do wonder, though, who will thank me when this is finished? Nobody here, certainly, except possibly Alvaro, whose idea it was in the first place—not the idea that the garden should be rearranged (that was undoubtedly mine), but the idea that we, the residents, should ask the Church to make collections in aid of our garden, and that I should be the one to present the new design.

“Oh my dear goodness me,” Alvaro had cried as the idea popped into his thin little head. We had been sitting in the dining room discussing the nonexistent view of the sea, of the grounds, of the spire of St. Francis Xavier through the casuarinas in the distance. Everything was obscured by something, I said, launching into my usual tirade.

“If it were up to me,” I continued, “I would tear down the cow-shed, reposition the laundry room, remove the wire fence altogether, and divide the lawn into sections filled with flowering shrubs—an intricate, exquisite cloisonné pillbox of foliage. There would be sun, shade, and chairs. Water, fishponds. You could sit outside in the evenings and play chess with Gecko, next to a fern-shrouded pool, shimmering and damascene, alive with bejewelled Japanese carp.”

For a few moments, he looked pensive, but then suddenly he became frightfully animated.

“But of course but of course but of course. We could do it, man!” he cried.

“What on earth are you talking about, D’Souza?”

“We could rebuild the bloody garden from top to bottom, and there’s only one person who could do it. You!”

“Me?” I breathed. “
Surely
not me.”

“Of course. With you at the head of our team, who could refuse us? We would say, ‘Give us money. We have the kind services of the world-famous aesthete and connoisseur of dwellings, Peter Wormwood. ’ And they will gladly give it to us!”

Alvaro is the best of the bunch. His natural, hot-blooded enthusiasm is still evident. He must have been quite something in his younger days. Last week I watched him as he tried to change a light-bulb in his room. He placed one foot on the little wooden chair and spread his spindly arms out for balance before heaving up the rest of his body. He rocked back and forth, arms waving, like a Japanese crane in the final throes of its mating dance. Finally he gave up and hopped off the chair, which toppled behind him. I felt a sudden fluttering sensation in my chest as I watched him and knew instantly what would follow. I tried to suppress the horrible, familiar throb in my head by shutting my eyes tightly and listing the things I had had for breakfast that morning: cheap white bread (toasted), a slice of papaya, some rice porridge. Too late, too late. The memory forced its way back into my head, clear as day, as if it were being played out before me. As always, I felt as if I was watching myself in a Technicolour film. In an instant, I was on top of that hill again—I have forgotten its name, but I remember its shape, broad and irregular like an elephant’s head. Johnny is walking ahead of me, so quickly he is almost running. I am struggling to keep up. My shirt is damp with sweat, and beyond the scant shade of my hat the sun is white, mesmerising. By the time I reach the crest of the hill I see Johnny standing on a tree stump ahead of me. He balances on it, swaying gently from side to side, his arms outstretched on either side of him. Against the blue and limitless sky he stands a hundred feet tall. “Come on!” he yells, and I run towards him, my legs suddenly feeling strong again. When I reach him he lets me stand on the stump, gripping my hand to help my balance. The sight before me stretches wider and further than I ever believed my eyes could encompass. “This is it,” Johnny says. “My home, the Valley.”