The Devil's Garden (27 page)

‘Oops!' Two trim, grey men emerged from the glare and advanced, with the flat gait of middle age, smiling at him, into the clearing. One was European, one Chinese. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. ‘I rather think we owe you an apology. We assumed you were Japanese, you see. The hats, the dark. I'm afraid all your friends are dead. Bit of a balls-up, really. Bad show but can't be helped. Cover up and carry on, as we say in the military. By rights, you shouldn't have been in this sector at all, you know. Now, I'm Major Frobisher, Force 136, Malayan Section and this is my colleague, Chen Guang of the MPAJA. I'm afraid the state of your uniform doesn't permit me to know who you are.'

‘I'm Corporal Higgins, Sir.'

Major Frobisher considered him with distaste. ‘In that case, I think we'd better have a proper salute.'

Subaltern habits kicked in over the fatigue and sheer incredulity. Corporal Higgins shuffled his feet together and saluted through tears. ‘578962, Higgins, Corporal suh!'

Frobisher smiled. ‘That's much better, Corporal. At ease. And now I think we'll all have a nice dish of tea and a little chat and find out just what's going on around here.'

The Chinese soldiers were already briskly dragging the bodies away into the bush like more sacks of flour—potatoes really—whistling as they worked.

* * * 

‘If you want to contact the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army I can fix it.' Orchid smiled at him then looked down as she buttoned her blouse. Captain Oishi was surprised. First, he had not realised that he had been so open, that she knew so much. And then it had been as if his mother had suddenly offered to arrange a commission for him in the Kempeitei or an audience with the Emperor. How could someone who was little more than a schoolgirl fix something like that? A lizard ran across the wall on suckered feet, pumped its body obscenely and laughed at him. The scene should have been post-coital but was not. The pangs of the flesh had no bite and his appetite for sex had shrivelled, while his untasted banana leaf of cold, congealed, fried rice showed that his stomach had joined in the boycott. It was as if he could not even feel his own body.

The smell of burning was blowing across from the west, columns of thick, black, sugary smoke towering up into the sky. The world made no sense any more. The Japanese supreme command had surrendered in Tokyo harbour. It was signed and sealed. He had been ordered to march his men to the cinema and watch the pictures with them—the images of frail, but immensely powerful, little old men in top hats limping like crabs onto the battleship, the strutting, beef- and creampie-fed American sailors and their accomplices in various Allied uniforms that looked like a photo from one of Erica's fancy dress parties. McArthur and that extraordinary corncob pipe, blowing aw-shucks, hillbilly smoke into everyone's faces. At least the Emperor had been spared that final indignity. There had been shouts and screams in the flickering, cinematic darkness, fights had broken out, grown men had collapsed in tears, fisting their own eyes and been trampled underfoot as the audience rushed out. A brisk civilian, shaming the military, had shot himself right there and then in the jostling crowd, his brains blown all over the people around him. Captain Oishi still heard the shot ringing out across the voice of the jolly American commentator who was talking about Commander Perry's flag, fluttering from his ship when he forced the opening up of Japan to the world just ninety-two years before, having been flown out from an American museum to be displayed during the signing ceremony. What sort of a mind had thought of such a thing? What sort of tattered meaning was it supposed to impose on everything that had happened? Craziness.

The Japanese forces still roamed the streets in tanks and trucks in the token name of social order but they were now supposed to be under the command of the British, who were not even there, and were anyway the same British who had already surrendered to them. It felt as if they had been defeated, not in battle, but by an offstage act of administration. The soldiers' faces were white and strained so that, as they peered from the steel hatches of their tanks, they looked like ghosts being sucked down into the jaws of their own growling and chomping machines. And the first thought of the Chinese at the news had been to kill their Malay neighbours and the Malays had killed Chinese and were burning their shops. Meanwhile, the Chinese were killing each other. He wondered who the Indians killed and whose ancient right and duty it was to kill them. Over there, beneath that pall of smoke, people were running mad in the street, mouths drooling and blood dripping from their hands as the soldiers just stood and watched or turned indifferently away. It was no longer anything to do with them. Their minds were thousands of miles from here. He would ask Orchid no questions.

‘Yes. Please arrange it. Thank you Orchid.'

* * * 

‘Where's the old man?' Catchpole had taken to wearing seedy pyjamas around the clock, had given up shaving in victory, listened openly to a Radio India that throbbed and undulated with strange wave phenomena that Pilchard found extremely irritating. The pyjamas were tied with a great bow at the front, making him look like an unlikely Christmas present. Outside in the wider Singapore, civilians had long worn the oddest combinations of clothing remnants, pullovers with shorts, women's blouses and cut-down jodhpurs, great boots, as if on the way to a fancy dress party in a depressed coalmining village.

‘The Professor? I haven't seen him for days. He just went off early one morning.' Tiny Dr Hanada had disappeared too, though that was unsurprising, since he always looked as if he might be about to pop down a rabbit hole.

‘Well, he might have given us back the tuning knob for the wireless before he went. Very selfish of him. He can be very high-handed, you know.' He fiddled at the residual prong with thick pliers. There was a flash and he dropped them and licked his finger. ‘Damn and blast! I got a shock.' The loudspeaker coughed and cleared its throat and resumed more intelligibly. ‘I say. That's fixed it!'

‘
… And I want you to be quite clear. This is no negotiated surrender based on the dropping of the atom bombs, it is a Japanese military defeat, the first time they have ever been defeated in their history. You have chased their soldiers out of Burma and I have instructed all Japanese commanders to make their way to Singapore where I shall receive their formal surrender from Count Terauchi or his representative …'

‘Isn't that Noel Coward's voice?' It drooped with tropical languor and patrician disdain.

Catchpole looked pained. ‘For God's sake. It's Dickie—Lord Mountbatten—the Supreme Commander.' Catchpole spoke as if he were a close acquaintance who dropped by for a noggin on a regular basis. ‘Really old man. I've said it before. You must try to keep up.'

‘…
I assure you I shall put up with no nonsense or impertinence from any of these people, no matter how important they think they are …'

‘Do you suppose, Catchpole, that anyone had given a moment's thought to what happens now? It's a bit like being at school. Your whole world is there. All your achievements are measured by its standards. Your actions are judged by its values. You work your way up to a position of privilege. But when it ends and you get your exam results…what then? You're cast adrift. You have to find a whole new world to move about in, a bigger, nastier one, and go back to the bottom of the pecking order again. It took me years to find out who I was and what I did and now we have to go through all that again. While the Nips were here, we didn't have a whole lot of choice but now we will and I don't really know if I've got it in me to make those decisions any more.'

Catchpole examined the pliers for damage and snapped their jaws in rebuke. ‘If you don't mind my saying so, old man, you worry too much. Everything will go back just as it was before, except that this time we'll not be so damn soft. We'll have learnt our lesson and not let ourselves be pushed around so much.' He arranged his waning multiplicity of chins into a failed thrusting jaw of defiance.

‘But don't you imagine that's exactly what everyone else is saying? I just had a card from my wife. It took ages to get here but I suppose the postal service is nothing to write home about. Anyway, it seems she's not my wife any more. We're divorced. You see, it's already starting. And all this was just a rehearsal that showed governments how far they could go, how much they could get away with. This is the worst century the world has ever known and we're only halfway through it.'

‘Sorry, old man. These things happen even in the best marriages, let alone … Think of the big picture. You're a scientist, a doctor. This is a turning point. Don't you want to see the final triumph of Western reason over all this Eastern nonsense?'

Pilchard groaned. ‘Oh for god's sake. If the West was governed by reason, it's men who would ride horses sidesaddle and bath taps would be designed to be worked by toes not fingers.'

‘
At Port Swettenham, our men are coming ashore in an endless stream and restoring order as they advance. These are difficult times and will call for difficult measures but I know I can count on every man and woman among you in this command.'

Catchpole worried irritably at a broken fingernail with his teeth. ‘Your trouble, old man … gnnnn … is that you think not being involved, standing aloof, makes you better than us patriots, superior … gnnn. It's not the case, you know. The truth is, it's just another form of your damned laziness.' He spat the nail onto the floor and they both sat and looked at it with distaste. The house was a tip, with unchronological crockery lying about unwashed, reeking heaps of sour fag ends. No one was cleaning up any more. All the workers had disappeared. Catchpole was just as annoying amidst chaos as prissy order.

‘Actually, Catchpole, he left a note.'

He sat up and glared. ‘Who?'

‘The Professor.'

‘The Professor? A note?' He frowned. ‘Was it after the nature of being … a er …?'

‘A Fuck-Off-You-Red-Nosed-Bastard letter? No.'

‘I see.' Then. ‘What was in it? Really, Pilchard, as senior curator, you know damned well it should have come straight to me.' He had himself turned red in the nose. The supplementary chins wobbled in a face that had the poxed and overripe complexion of a shrivelled succulent—a cardiac event just waiting to happen. Pilchard retained his calm, knowing that to be far more galling.

Pilchard retained his calm, knowing that to be far more irritating. ‘It was addressed to me. Perhaps you should have the card from my wife as well.'

‘Well, I demand you hand it over at once—the note, I mean.'

Pilchard drew a folded piece of paper from his top pocket, written in meticulous script, each individual letter separately formed as in a demonstration of penmanship. A careful red seal gleamed at the bottom. ‘Or what? Perhaps you will give me a good wigging?' Catchpole blanched at the threat barely concealed in the word. Pilchard felt an obscure inner rage grip him. ‘Keep your hair on, old man. Perhaps I should read it to you? It starts, “Dear Dr Pilchard, Over the past few years we have worked together in circumstances that were difficult for both of us. My own work, of course, has been fatally hindered by the absence of volcanoes in Singapore and I know that you also are not where you might have wished to be. But birds fly up from under one's feet. I have received news that makes it impossible for me to continue, also pointless. I fear we shall not meet again which is a matter of deep regret to me. Please inform Dr Catchpole that I have arranged the outstanding matter of the paper allegedly signed by the Governor and authorising your co-operation … ”'

Catchpole exploded. ‘What does he mean “allegedly”. Damn and blast the man!' He was shaking. ‘I assure you I had that chit from the Governor personally and gave it to the old man with my own hands. I had to fight my way down to the Fullerton building under mortar fire to get it. If he was stupid enough to lose it, you can hardly …'

‘There is more. “Since no one knows where the original of that mysterious paper is now to be found, I have written to the Minister in Tokyo confirming its existence and listing it as an enclosure. A copy of that letter is in the records here. Naturally, the envelope I sent is actually empty but this may spare you all some inconvenience if things develop as I expect them to. It will be just another thing sadly lost in the war, in which we have all lost so much. I would suggest that you retain this letter for your own, personal records, Dr Pilchard, for your own personal protection. It is the moment for us all to seek shelter under a big tree.” It's signed with his seal as you see. I think I'll do as he says and hang on to it.'

Catchpole was thoughtful. ‘I see. And where do you suppose he has gone? Where is this big tree?'

‘I suspect we shall never know. He clearly had no intention of leaving a forwarding address.'

Catchpole sulked briefly, then … ‘Do you suppose he took the tuning knob with him?'

* * * 

‘I am quite unarmed,' Captain Oishi assured them. It was a puzzling scene. In the middle of the mangroves. Across the water, a small hut was built out on stilts over the ooze, on whose platform stood a chair where a white man snipped away happily at the hair of a young Chinese, with flashing clippers, holding up the strands and clearly discussing the desired length and style of cut with great energy. A mound of black locks lay already at their feet and a whole line of other men, carrying enormous guns, waited patiently for their turn.

Orchid had made him park a good mile away and walk the rest of the way and then asked him to wait ten minutes before he followed her in. It was like some children's game of hide and seek and he had somehow feared she would just abandon him here and run away. After all, she had been very sad and serious, held both his hands in hers and looked into his eyes.