The Devil's Garden (7 page)

‘We are required to submit figures on the degree to which the campaign to replace British goods at home with Japanese goods is progressing.' They looked at him sourly and said nothing. Everyone knew there were virtually no Japanese goods to replace the British goods with, that the whole thing was empty words. They were expected to survive indefinitely like camels living off their humps yet, among them, HK was the only one with no hump. The others had long prepared for war in depth, had hidden stores in hidden locations to which no one person held a map. True, thanks to informers, the Japanese had tracked down some reserves of the second rank and broken them open, forcing staples out onto the markets but mountains of rice, rivers of soy sauce and lakes of oil formed a whole secret landscape as yet unrevealed. Meanwhile, in the world the public saw, nothing at all was being delivered to their empty warehouses while the whole island was being ruthlessly stripped bare of goods and even scrap to keep Japan going, for the Japanese recognised no basic human needs, in their conquests, that could not be met simply with more submission and flags. Flags had, of course, arrived in large quantities. They all had them outside their shops and, inside, an amuletic photograph of the pinch-faced, weedy Emperor. There was the same one there on the wall, squinting down on them where once Chiang Kai-Sheck had hung from the same rusty nail. Being slightly smaller, it was framed by a rectangle of greasy dirt. HK coaxed.

‘The figures, of course, do not have to be entirely accurate. The marking of a general trend will be sufficient to satisfy the Japanese.' They stared impassively back. Blank defiance. The Japanese had come to him. It was, surely, his personal problem. Not theirs. Everyone knew that the merchants' written records had always been imaginative works of fiction, spun from nothing, conjured up for the tax authorities. The real figures were in their heads. HK began to sweat. ‘Some sort of a gesture is required. That is all.' His voice had taken on a pleading tone and he hated it. One or two of them had picked up on it and begun to smirk at his discomfort. A few years back, when the Japanese had attacked Manchuria, they had held meetings like this—actually in this very room—about the enforcement of the boycott on Japanese goods declared by the firm-fisted patriots of the China Relief Fund. ‘Help Britain and you help China' had been the slogan pushed at them then. But at that time, HK had sat at the bottom of the table and held his tongue. Tongue. His mind wandered. He thought wistfully of the things he had done with Lily last night in a little shophouse in Geylang. At least he could still keep it up, unlike these old men, for all their ground rhino horn.

Loh Ching laid the long nail of an index finger gently on the tabletop like a householder testing the surface for dirt. It had the same effect as if one of the others had rapped on it loudly with a hammer and silence fell immediately. The senior trader. His face was as sere as one of the seven sages, head of the house that the legendary Whampoa CMG—richest man on earth at the time—had founded a century before. He spoke softly, making everyone bow their heads and strain to pick up his words. Serenity was a mark of rank that Loh Ching used to float above the merely material world.

‘We are simple men of business, not of politics. Singapore is not our home. Let us not talk of home. Singapore is nobody's home. We have no roots here. People simply live here to do business. As a young man, Mr Fong embraces … current realities … without the attachment some of us feel to our … older, loyal customers.' HK gushed sweat into his singlet. It was damned hot up here on the first floor of the ‘shophouse. And this was dangerous talk. Anyone here could be an informer. God knows, he was half an informer himself. ‘I have a simple suggestion to make that should render all parties content.' He looked slowly around at the row of bowed heads and respectfully downcast eyes. A suggestion from Loh Ching was as good as an order. ‘I suggest that we should concentrate on selling Japanese goods to the British.' There was a silence in which the street noises became suddenly very obvious, a honking horn, a shouting child.

HK thought desperately. What the hell did he mean? ‘The British?' he said. ‘The British are all sitting with empty pockets in Changi. How can we sell to the British?
What
can we sell to the British?'

Loh Ching smiled patiently and sighed at the obtuseness of others. ‘Perhaps you have not heard what has happened.' Happened? Had something happened? Apart, that is, from the invasion of Singapore—sorry Syonanto—the killing, the terror, the collapse of their whole world. ‘There has been a sign from Heaven.'

‘From Heaven?'

Loh Ching nodded. ‘It was outside the Victoria Theatre several days ago. Stamford Raffles pissed on General Yamashita.' They giggled like schoolboys. He had said ‘pissed' just like that, right out loud. ‘Many people saw it. They say that as the Japanese were attacking his statue, it suddenly came to life, stood up and peed on them to show its contempt. The Japanese were very frightened and tried to shoot Raffles but, of course, the bullets just bounced off and he laughed at them. A man of iron! So they shot many of our people instead, then crept back later and dragged him away to the museum, like mice round a dead cat. It is a clear sign for us that they do not hold the mandate of Heaven, that they will not be here for long, that the British will surely return. As leaders of the community, we must look up to the heavens, not just down at our own feet. We must be ready when they do return.'

Oh God. It was old man's talk. Tea-leaves, omens, looking at clouds. Loh Ching was sitting there chuckling, just like his grandmother would have done over her I-Ching reading, pretending they were still in China—a China most of them had never actually visited. In the old days, there had hung a great, ironwood panel along the side wall, carved with the curlicued ideogram for ‘long life', picked out in gold with the Seven Sages in jade, scattered the length of its sinuousities like pilgrims along a cosmic trail. During the bombardment, it had fallen from the wall and killed a sleeping watchman, lying, in apparent security, beneath it.
Then,
Loh Ching had argued that this had signified the futility of further resistance following lack of foresight. The lesson of his childhood was that there was no point in confronting their credulity. That would make them angry. He must respectfully undermine the old fool from behind. He put a radiant smile of grateful enlightenment on his face, nodded enthusiastically, cringing forward.

‘But the British have no money and we have no goods. How may this be?'

Loh Ching sighed again—a dog barks, the caravan moves on—and smiled like a man finally allowed to lay down his trump card.

‘We shall extend each other credit. It is to be a matter of trust between us, us and the British.'

HK's head was swimming at the pointless stupidity and sentimentality of it all. The blood suffused his face as he raged internally with the urge to shout and bang on the table and make these dozing idiots feel the bite of reality. Then his breathing settled and his eyes cleared. It was like the tune coming through all the background elaborations on one of the jazz records he collected. The elements began to fall neatly into place like the pieces of a jigsaw. There was a scheme here that could work and then, in a flash, he saw it all. The British prisoners had a central fund into which the wealthy had been allowed to pay money. Such small wages and allowances as came from the Japanese were also paid into it. The merchants would supply goods against IOU's guaranteed by the central fund. Colonel Saito, the camp commandant, he knew, would permit it if a sufficient percentage were paid into his own account. Prices could be pitched high and Saito would make sure just enough stuff got through to the prisoners to keep the system going and all sorts of neat little scams could be bolted on along the way. It would increase the sales of Japanese goods in the short term. If the Japanese prevailed, losses would be small and the merchants would be seen as having co-operated in the promotion of their exports and they would still be in business. If the British returned, they would be patriots and receive payment not in the downward-spiralling cherry blossom that was Japanese banana money but aromatically convertible Straits dollars. He inclined his head.

‘As always, Loh Ching sees further than us all.'

* * * 

There was no sign, of course, of the little, single-decker bus that used to run from outside the gates, its patient terminal, so that climbing aboard conveyed the sense of using a taxi. Pilchard adjusted his armband, making sure it was visible to all and kept boldly to the very middle of the road, not wanting some rifle-wielding, sharp-shooting guard in a distant watchtower to suddenly spot him from afar and detect in him an escaping prisoner. His scuffing and insecure sandals gave him an old man's shuffling and apologetic gait—a fitting target for any bored sentry—and his heels pained him, the skin cracked and ridged like cheese graters. At the beginning of all this, the CO of the Volunteer Force had addressed them all and told with medical certainty that they had nothing to fear from Japanese infantry. He had listened with incredulity as it was explained, with complete seriousness, that Japanese were all bandy and physically unable to climb out of a trench so that they would perish, in their thousands, in the roadside ditches, like wasps caught and drowned in an old jamjar. They were short-sighted and with eyes so slitty they could not see at all in the dark or in rain. Good Aryans—no wait that was the other lot—good Britons had nothing to fear from them. That had proved to be untrue. They had pursued the retreating British with admirable agility, both in and out of ditches, and their snipers had acquired a fearful reputation for patience and accuracy in both rain and darkness.

Beneath the coconut trees on either side of the road, ramshackle Malay houses had sprouted and dirty, nostril-probing, naked children gathered to watch him walk past with the hungry eyes of tiger cubs not yet grown big enough to eat him. Pilchard felt horribly alone. Among such Muslim folk, there were no barking dogs, naturally, but even cats had become scarce so close to the wire, transformed readily by the camp chefs into rank ‘catsoulet', ‘catserole', ‘purrgedel' and spicy but gamey ‘tom yumm'. The grubby children were strangely mute. At the capitulation, it was the sudden silence of the Chinese—a people who normally lived life at full volume—that had been the really terrifying thing while, elsewhere in Malaya, loudly jeering Malays and Indians—in that first exuberance of ‘Asia for the Asians'—had spat and thrown stones at the Allied troops as they marched past into captivity and danced with delight in the streets, while villagers had hastened to denounce any Allied forces hiding out in the jungle. It was clear local goodwill could not be taken for granted. Now, they were at the uncomfortable stage of a man waking up from the bleary pleasures of the night to face the intrusion and threat of an alien presence. Yesterday, a boy near the camp had been shot dead for flying a kite. The Japanese, to whom kites were traditional weapons of war, had assumed he must be signalling to someone. Now all children expected to be shot at and childhood was suspended for the hostilities.

The camp around the prison proper covered a vast area, being in fact several army camps collapsed together and penned behind barbed wire. Around the outer fence, left lazily uncleared of brush, was a maze of ditches and crawl-spaces used by the black-marketeers in their nocturnal comings and goings. It was tempting, but too dangerous, to take a short cut through all that tangled
Apama corymbosa
. Yet already, from this distance, he could hear the dull thud of the waves beneath the red cliffs of Tanah Merah, like an artillery salute, calling him down to the southern shore, while the siren rustling of the palm fronds above him spoke of sea and a fresh wind and a distant horizon and he found his steps taking a fork and heading in that direction, eyes suddenly wet with tears at memories of seaside holidays that crowded in unbidden. It took him a good hour to scramble down to the sea, on legs unused now to walking, to a little bay where, he remembered, the sand was purest gold and lapped by gentle waves that faded to a dimpled green. As he stepped out onto the beach and felt the wind that smacked the water, there was a fleeting impression of space and the salt taste of liberty on his lips. That sea there was the same one they looked at in Australia where they were free and there was no real fear—just the petty suburban worries that he would never consider again. Sand, eggtimers, tide, waves—a beach stopped the normal flow of everything, converted the straight line of time's arrow into zigzag back and forth or to circle. It seemed impossible that he could not, by some mere act of will, shift perspective and transport himself across that ocean.

He focused again. The beach had changed. Everywhere were coils of barbed wire rusting on great wooden posts. It was not clear which side had done it. He stopped near the edge of the sand. There could be mines too and any Japanese soldier who saw him here would open fire at once. And then the wind shifted and there came, not the smell of the fresh, open sea but a terrible stench. Pilchard had smelt death often enough in Changi to recognise its clinging, rosaceous scent. Bloated bodies were entangled at the feet of the trestles that held up the wire, dozens, maybe hundreds, half in, half out of the sea, bobbing jauntily in the little waves. The wind carried a castanetting noise, like the busy typing pool of an insurance office at full stretch, that he could not at first identify. Then he realised with horror that each corpse was swarming with a hundred feasting crabs, possibly
Carcinscorpius rotundicauda,
clicking away in frenzy with claws like manic chopsticks. So the rumours had been correct then. The Japanese had taken a terrible revenge for the succour the Singapore Chinese had given their cousins on the Chinese mainland, rounded up anyone on the lists of support organisations, anyone with Triad tattoos, in the end any young men at all who just happened to fall into their hands and brought them to lonely spots like this and Pulau Belakang Mati to be bloodily bayoneted, clubbed to death, machine-gunned along with the Sikhs who had refused to join the INA and the Malays who had so bloodied their noses. He swigged calming water hastily from his bottle, emptying it, and swallowed hard and a trifle unsteadily.