Island of Demons (7 page)

We spent a happy day visiting the landmarks of the city, crushed side by side in a rickshaw, myself only too aware of the sweat where his thigh pressed against mine. I knew better than to take him to the Raffles Hotel or some other Western haunt where he would feel uncomfortable and eyebrows would be raised against us. The Islamic restaurant in Arab Street met our needs, my first and best mutton biryani, with Hamid soothed by the big
halal
signs in green tiles and being able to eat with his hands, not inconvenient forks and spoons. Then, back to the rickshaw, Hamid with shining eyes and shaking drips of water from his fingers …

“We cannot go to the animal garden,
kakak
, to find monkeys for you to fight with. They do not have one here. Instead we must look for cocks. A friend on the ship gave me an address.”

Ah no. I know what you are thinking but you must remember that I was taking my first halting steps in Malay, a sensible tongue, where Hamid's term,
ayam
, has no hidden undertones or sordid
double entendres
, being merely an innocent thing of beak and feathers. I can be quite sure of that since I had not mastered the word and Hamid had to mime it with elaborate beating of elbows and cock-a-doodle-doing so that the rickshaw-puller, pounding between the shafts, stared round in wonder, stumbled and nearly needed the application of sea slugs.

That afternoon was my introduction to the Malay world. It was not what we did or what befell us for we did virtually nothing and suffered no real events but it was the easy manner of our doing and experiencing nothing that struck me at the time, the absence of any sense that we had wickedly wasted time. We left the main road down by the shore, whirred down a smooth dirt track that ran out in sand and stopped at a simple wooden house on stilts, graced by a little carved tracery over the eaves and windows. Walter would no doubt have been able to tell you exactly the ethnicity of the style. Underneath the house was a mess of wood and bicycles, displaced doors and buckets amongst which children swarmed, a sort of attic in reverse. To one side, a man in a sarong was pouring buckets of water over his own head and slapping his chest as though in self-congratulation. Hamid climbed down and called up at the first floor, like Romeo to Juliet, where a fat woman appeared, knotting her sarong and smoothing her hair. She shouted something back and giggled.

“Javanese,” smirked Hamid, with relief. It appeared that we were in a Javanese
kampung
, a sort of home from home, then. We were welcome and the men were round the back. The Chinese rickshawman sat down on the house ladder and refused all attempts to be paid. We now owed him money and he would not allow this relationship to be so brutally cut. He would sit here until Tuan wanted to go back to the city and then both fares could be paid together. He was, it seemed, now
our
dedicated and loyal rickshawman, nobly refusing all other offers. The woman brought him cold water to drink from a can that made him gush with sweat and waved us again round the side of the house.

About a dozen men were squatting there under a tree, most old, some young, surrounded by cockerels under airy baskets like cloche hats. Their poses struck me at once. There is a posture you find all over the islands, a hunkering down, legs together, the elbows resting on the knees and flapping as from a loose hinge. It is a pose of relaxation but provokes a tension in the thighs, lumbar region and across the shoulders that I immediately yearned to capture with my charcoal. Hamid indicated the tree, lush and big leafed.

“Wherever you see this tree, there are sailors,” he explained. “It has big seeds that float so they use them to stuff the jackets to keep sailors afloat when they fall in the sea. The jackets get broken. The seeds get out. It is a tree we respect, a holy tree, for it saves the lives of sailors.”

There followed a long conversation in Javanese. The woman, embarrassingly, reappeared to bring a single chair and insisted I sit on it in majestic isolation in the shade while I was ignored by the men who seemed locked in some headshaking disagreement with Hamid.

He turned and spoke in Dutch. “There can be no cockfight today,
kakak
.” He smiled regret. “It is an unlucky day for fighting.” He gently pressed the hands of the old men. “
Tidak apa apa
.” No what what. Never mind, it does not matter.

But if there could be no fighting, there was no reason not to examine the birds and they compared them and showed them off with a passion no less intense than that of Vorderman with his Kandinsky and Prokoschka daubings. First, they passed round a magnificent, haughty bird with black plumage, edged at wings and rump with gold feathers like flames, bounced it on the ground, stroked its throat, felt its treading thighs, nodded and Ooh!ed and Aah!ed – or rather Wah!ed – in admiration. Other birds followed, bigger, smaller, some beautiful high strutters, some tawdry street-fighters, arguments raged, cigarettes were flung on the ground, birds squared up to each other – only to be put back under their baskets. They sat a huge cock on my lap and laughed when it pecked me and knocked me off my chair. I laughed too, stayed on the ground and lit a cigarette.
Tidak apa apa
. No what what. Then, they taunted me with the hundreds of different words for type and size and colour of cocks until my head was spinning, then tested me and stamped and cheered when I got one right by sheer luck. No what what. They soothed me again with cigarettes and coffee. The rickshawman crept round the corner and shyly joined us by slow degrees, an expert, it emerged, on betting on bad cocks. Soon we were all sitting in the kicked-up dust as they explained what to look for in a fighting bird. Checking the tight closure of the anus with poking fingers was, it seemed, a key factor. Hang on, said one, what was that smell of fish? It smelled like dirty women. It must, said one wizened man enthusiastically translated by Hamid, be the white man who spent all his time and money with bad, shameless women and ended up with their smell on him. Best keep him away from the cocks. No what what. I tried to get them back to the birds. They smirked, then sniggered, then fell about. No I could not say that.
Burung
“bird” was at best ambiguous, at worst a dirty word. It meant … They pointed between their legs. Back to the cocks. What then of breeding? How was that organised? Well, you could not have hens around really strong cocks. If one had been with a hen, it was weakened, lost the will to fight, would be swiftly defeated. If a hen came here, with all these cocks, Oh God, it would be torn to bits. So, how was it managed? Where did they get their eggs from?

They screamed and slapped their thighs. Hamid reached over, smacked my hand lightly and giggled. I could not use that word like that right out loud, “eggs”. He blushed. It was a slang word for men's balls. Had I, finally, no sense of shame at all, no modesty of language?

***

It was only between Singapore and Batavia that I finally began to sketch Hamid. This did not lead, as I half hoped it might, to some new Luigi-like activity. Across from me in the hot, little cabin, he remained warmly distant and I returned to the familiar sensation of viewing my most selfless emotions as something not to be reciprocated but atoned for. And yet to explore the tilt of his nose, the flare of his nostril, the soft angularity of his neck and the spiky halo of his hair was a protracted act of permitted intimacy. I lay awake at night unsure whether I was being privileged, exploited, treated with sweet compassion or wilfully tormented. I was paralysed by fear of losing his regard and thus my own. As St Paul and Miss Timms would have put it, I
burned
.

The first scattered islands appeared, little clots of sand and palm with a house or two clinging on. I packed my bags, miserable and alone, as we edged through the Buginese sailing fleet of high-nosed vessels with lines of washing where Westerners would have had bunting. I dumped my language notebooks in a grip.
Bunting
was a Malay slang word meaning “pregnant”. I tightened the straps on my linen. Why did they have so much washing, I wondered, when no one wore any clothes? On all sides, bare bums, neither derisory nor seductive but simply nautical and indifferent, welcomed me to the archipelago.

Blasts on the ship's siren bullied the smaller ships out of the way as a very dirty tug with Chinese crew took our bowlines aboard and, appropriately, tugged. Anchors thundered down and we entered that long period on ships where nothing happens and no one can get on or off though gangways are locked in place. The other white passengers from Singapore were virtually unknown to me. Van Gennep had simply disappeared. The Niemeyers were there on deck, the younger children squabbling, the father shouting, the eldest girl in tears. I filled gaping pockets, Anton, Hamid, with apology for my love, given with accompanying ritual minuet. Please I wish to thank you. No, no, I cannot, you are my friend. Yes, yes, even friends have to pay for their rice. No, no, I am ashamed. Yes, yes, it is not for you but your children. In that case, I thank you – you are a kind man. Pocket buttoned. All over.

Hamid took my hand-luggage to the top of the gangway and set it down, unallowed to go any further. For the first time he unashamedly hugged me. There were genuine tears in his eyes that I felt damp on my neck as his cheek touched mine. What was he thinking, feeling? I had no idea. I knew nothing about anything any more. But here was a new place, a whole new world. I could be anything I wanted here. If I chose not to, I need not think about how to capture the light on the waves or the billowing smoke hanging over the stern. I was free. Then, I looked over hugging Hamid's shoulder and, as I blinked away my own tears, there on the dock, by some enchantment, stood two familiar figures – my mother and my father, staring up and frowning.

3

They had come by the quicker Suez route and beaten me by three days, driven, it seemed, by a mixture of parental panic on my mother's and commercial adventurism on my father's part. Largely as a result of the contacts made through my social elevation, he had become interested in colonial wares which, that year, set records in the sugar trade for production and price.

“Who is your friend?” My mother's eyes were, as ever, sharp.

“A bright young man who taught me some very useful vocabulary. The Javanese are, as you see, a hot-blooded race whose passions are easily moved.”

All about us, Javanese, doubtless hot-blooded, were easily moved, indeed running at the imperial trot, carrying sacks, hauling baggage, coiling ropes, sweat flowing over gloriously muscled limbs yet still smiling when their eyes met mine. White overseers ticked clipboards and shouted orders from the shade.

“We are at the Hotel des Indes,” declared father with a certain pride. “Room 374. We'll head off and make arrangements while you check your luggage through the customs shed. They say it will take about an hour. You won't need to hire any of the guides. Just take a car, everyone knows it.” This being a moment of great emotion, he touched me lightly on the shoulder.

“You will not,” urged mother moving off on his arm, “I am sure, allow yourself to become distracted by the … picturesque.” I did not greatly like her choice of the word or the emphasis she put on it as she waved her arm at the male dockside bustle.

In the great echoing hall with its smell of dust and mildew, officials were ready with their regulations and chalk. A British couple were arguing about their luggage: “No, Kitty. There were
three
brown suitcases and the small black one with the dodgy handle”, “Cedric, you know full well that broke in Singers and we got the grey one with the brass fastener”, “Yes but then you bought so much in Cold Storage I had to take it
back
out of the rubbish and use it to put the shoes in”.

My single bag was hauled up onto a bench like an exhibit and I stepped forward. A man with brilliantined hair and a permanent sniff yawned, asked, “Reason for visit?”

Absurdly, I was nonplussed. “Boredom, a sense of loss, perhaps the search for some meaning and inspiration in a pointless life of artistic failure but popular success, also the extreme beauty of your male subjects whom I hope to thoroughly debauch whilst painting them and so liberate myself from shame and frustration at my own disgusting sexual perversion.” I did not, of course, say that, contenting myself with a vacuous “Er … tourism.” Come to think of it, they probably mean the same thing. He yawned, sniffed and sketched a cross on the leather as if in apostolic blessing.

The Hotel des Indes was a brilliant white creation in the new art deco style, a thing of exaggerated concrete horizontality, like the towering superstructure of a vast underground ship. It stood on a busy street just down from the prestigious Harmonie Club whose heavily moneyed members ruled this sprawling colonial domain. Trams, more modern than those of Amsterdam, clanged past it and the parking lot was clogged with the latest American cars. To one side, squatted an immemorial banyan or
waringin
tree, a congealed mass of buttresses and trailing aerial roots, its branches hardly able to bear their own weight. The Javanese, recognising it as a creature of power, whisperingly pressed offerings into the fissures of its trunk It was the haunt of tolerated natives – shoe-shine boys, a bicycle repair man, a seller of fried eggs that turned out to be delicious sweet confections of coconut – offering services that did not impinge on the economic activities of the hotel proper. I knew at once that I would sketch it.

As I approached the doors, my suitcase was whisked away with cries of distress in a process that seemed to involve three Javanese. A white man could not possibly carry such a burden, such a thing could bring the empire to its knees. The staff outnumbered the guests by at least five to one. I clip-clopped across the front hall, all coral and gold stucco, fat lamps, fat furniture and engaged the front desk, a rather odd sight with half a dozen Eurasian clerks working under a Dutch supervisor who was seated – the better to supervise – on a sort of high throne. I explained who I was, who my parents were, had a room been booked? The supervisor looked up. Ah no. That had proved, alas, impossible. Did I not know there was an important governmental conference in progress? Hotel rooms could not be found in Batavia at any price. Instead a day-bed, meaning more properly a sofa that became a bed at night only, had been installed in my parents' drawing room. So there it was. My proud independence had been converted back into sleeping with my parents.