A Different Sky (48 page)

‘We came back as soon as we dared after the Japanese left, but Belvedere had already been occupied by squatters.' Rose held her son's hand, stroking his fingers, conscious above all that he was beside her. Mavis added a spoonful of condensed milk to the tea and poured it into cracked mugs; she had lost weight and her clothes hung pitifully upon her.

‘We had to fight for this room. Three families were in here, and we bribed them to vacate it with almost everything we had. We have to
queue to use our own bathroom and it's filthy beyond words.' Rose burst into tears, the shock and relief of seeing Howard opening a floodgate of feeling.

‘Cynthia and Wilfred share the room with us.' Mavis pointed to a curtained-off section behind which a mattress could be seen. Over tea the women told him how, after the surrender, Wilfred had been repatriated from Burma with other POWs. Wilfred now resembled a walking skeleton, Rose whispered with a shudder.

‘Cynthia knows best how to handle him. She's working part time now, so that she can nurse him back to health.' Rose stared at her son in growing concern, her throat constricting with emotion, her eyes filling again with tears. He was gaunt, his eyes sunken and, even though he was standing before her, appeared more absent than present in a way she could not explain. Although she knew nothing of his lost years in the jungle, the imprint of experience was stamped on his face.

Later, at Rose's direction, Howard went into the garden to find Wilfred sitting by the mangosteen trees. The shed Howard had used for assignations with ugly Nona so long ago still stood but now, he saw, a family lived in it. Wilfred sat unmoving, one thin leg crossed over the other, staring blankly ahead into the gnarled depths of the orchard. As Rose had said, the bones stuck out all over him, the flesh of his face was sucked away, his hair had thinned and some of his teeth were missing. He turned his head as Howard approached, and with a look of amazement stood up to embrace him tearfully.

‘Both of us back from the dead,' Wilfred said, wiping his eyes on the back of his hand.

For some time they sat in silence and Howard was startled when, unprompted, Wilfred began to speak, staring ahead without emotion. ‘They did terrible things. We were kept in small cages in the sun without water; you could not stand up, you could not lie down. A few days of it and your legs no longer worked. Men dug their own graves and were shot beside them. We watched and then buried them as we were ordered. Even if they were still alive, we still buried them. One man opened his eyes and said, please . . . please. We buried them all.' His voice sank into silence. Howard wished he knew what to say, what emotion to feel, but everything seemed to happen at a great distance from him; he was distant even to himself.

As the days went by Howard felt a shift within himself. Nothing yet seemed real; the abundance of light still hurt his eyes, the threadbare food his mother and Mavis produced seemed decadent after the fare in the jungle camp. He was by turn irritable and tearful, angry and depressed. He knew he should be glad to be back and yet Belvedere's ragged population, always milling around him, his mother and Mavis's effort to resurrect the polite remnants of their old life, their concern at his refusal of a mattress and his preference for sleeping on a bare floor, their constant fussing and worry, flooded him with anger. Cynthia examined him and dosed him, like Wilfred, with precious quinine and vitamin B brought from the General Hospital. Within days he felt physically stronger, but his mind was still dull and confused. Often a sense of panic ran through him; without Wee Jack to guide him, he was lost. He waited, sure the man would contact him, but Wee Jack did not come. Then, he wondered if he should search out the office in Middle Road that he knew the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army now occupied, but he did nothing. He did nothing but lie on the floor of Rose's room staring at the ceiling, or sit silently on the bench beside Wilfred. Hours passed, days passed in this limbo, and he was happy to float in nothingness, waiting for the lost parts of himself to return, if they ever would.

It was weeks before he finally made his way to Mei Lan, to the house on East Coast Road, propelled more by obligation than emotion, and by Cynthia's constant urging. She had told him about Mei Lan's imprisonment and her suffering at the hands of the
kempetai
. In the end he went to Little Sparrow's house to please his sister. Again, he knew he should feel some emotion at the things Cynthia told him, but whatever had once tied him and Mei Lan together, he felt sure had loosened. There was little transport about and he walked a distance before finding a rickshaw, feeling weak and dizzy, but pushing himself on. When he reached the house he found a girl of eight or nine playing outside, digging up shoots of tapioca.

‘She's inside,' the girl replied to his query and led him up the steps, the muddy tuber still in her hand. Howard followed her, surprised to find himself feeling apprehensive; he wondered suddenly what changes he would find in Mei Lan. As he climbed the steps his head reeled again from the exertion of his journey.

Mei Lan appeared from an inner room, and stood unmoving before him. Unexpectedly, his heart constricted violently and the emotion
locked inside him for so long, which he had thought was unreachable, flooded through him again. It was not just the pale frailty of her, her hair cropped brutally close to her head, but the dullness of her eyes that made him feel something was gone from her, just as it was gone from Wilfred. For a moment the sense of separation dropped away and he wanted to take her in his arms. Almost immediately the moment faded and he kept his distance, knowing instinctively that formality was best. The child still stood beside him, staring curiously up at them both.

‘Go and ask Ah Siew to bring some water for the visitor,' Mei Lan told the child, leading Howard into a small back room where Little Sparrow sat sewing buttons on a dress. The woman withdrew to a basket chair on a narrow veranda, but kept glancing over her shoulder to where they sat, as if to guard against impropriety.

‘She has been good to me,' Mei Lan told him, looking at Little Sparrow's back.

‘How long did they keep you?' he asked almost below his breath, unable to stop the question but dreading to hear her answer. For a moment she was silent, her eyes lowered to her folded hands and he noticed how tightly her thin fingers were clenched.

‘They told me it was sixty-five days. They only let me out to pay Grandfather's part of the $50 million donation, some of which I managed with that jewellery Second Grandmother always carried upon her. I couldn't raise the whole amount, but they didn't bother me again.' Her voice was toneless and he saw how she trembled.

‘Every day I still expect them to knock on the door,' she whispered. Her life limped along, the mechanics of it propelling her forward each day, but something essential was absent. In a stream near the East Coast house she has seen the bleached skull of a dog, caught and held by weeds growing near the bank. The skull lifted and moved in the current but could not break free, the dark empty sockets of its eyes staring up at her. That was how she felt, like a heap of pared bones under water, drifting aimlessly back and forth in the swell. There was nothing left to build upon; nothing left to restore. Cynthia had given her some herbal medicine that she said would take the worst dreams away, but even in daylight Mei Lan still lived in Nakamura's shadow.

Already, Howard knew they would have to relearn each other all
over again; the people they had been were vanished. Even though Mei Lan appeared connected to the everyday world, he saw she lived hidden within herself, her memories a coffin from which she could not escape. His own harsh experiences in the past three years gave him some insight into the spectres that must haunt her. Some part of himself, he realised now, must have resisted Wee Jack and the indoctrination of the camp. Something within him had remained inviolable for, compared to all he intuitively sensed about Mei Lan's ordeal, he saw that slowly he was already struggling free of those jungle years. Thoughts he recognised as his own had begun to flow through him again. Eventually, he would reclaim himself, whereas the pitiless decimation Mei Lan had endured had done its work too well, robbing her of herself.

‘Where did you hide?' she asked. Even as he told her of his forced residence in the jungle she seemed preoccupied, her thoughts far away so that he felt she only waited for him to fall silent.

‘War Trials have begun,' Mei Lan told him when he stopped speaking. ‘I have been called as a prosecution witness. The British Government have given me a medal, but for what I do not know. For surviving when others died? They're really giving it to Grandfather, for standing up to the Japanese and always supporting the British.' Mei Lan gave a short bitter laugh.

She knew he wanted to reach out, to touch her, to reclaim her, but between them now there was the distance of strangers. She wondered how she could feel so little when before she had felt so much. Nobody knew the details of what had happened to her in those weeks at the YMCA, not even Ah Siew. Locked too deep for retrieval, the words would not spill out at her summons. The old
amah
had nursed her silently, never enquiring, massaging almond oil into the scars, feeding her ginseng scrounged from goodness knows where. At night the comfort of Ah Siew's light snoring came to Mei Lan as she slept. The old woman was there when she awoke with nightmares and screams of terror, night after night. Ah Siew boiled up the precious herbs Cynthia had given, an ancient potion for sleep, but even when Mei Lan drowsed, oblivion never pulled her completely into its bottomless void. Each night she must navigate the darkness of her mind, held hostage by unspeakable memories. For many weeks after being released from the YMCA she lived as a ghost in the East Coast Road house, seeing nothing, passing as if invisibly from room to room, from hour
to hour. Nakamura stood everywhere, pulling her back into his dark arc as she tried to live again.

‘They have also given me a scholarship to Oxford, to study law. My departure has been delayed so that I can give evidence at the trial; that is what the Governor wants. He himself asked me to be a witness. I will leave for England after the trial. I don't know how long I'll be away; two or three years, maybe longer.' She looked at him suddenly with the direct appraisal he knew from before, assessing his reaction to what she said. He nodded, knowing they had no control over what had happened, nor over what was now being shaped.

‘I will be at the trial, they always allow spectators,' he promised.

‘I'd rather you did not come,' she replied, averting her eyes.

Thoughts of the trial pressed heavily upon Mei Lan, but the day finally arrived when she must make her way to the court, to face Nakamura again. It was an effort to dress, and Ah Siew fussed anxiously about her. At last, the old
amah
left the room, and Mei Lan sat down at the dressing table and picked up the silver-backed brush that had once been her mother's. As a child she remembered watching it slide through Ei Ling's lustrous hair; now it was heavy against her own head. With imprisonment she had lost so much hair and weight and her health had been slow to return; the birthmark was even more prominent along the fragile line of her jaw.

The door opened and Greta appeared; a shy child of eight, with plaits of hair pulled up high either side of her head. Greta was Little Sparrow's youngest child, born many years after the daughter, Ching Ling, who had quickly followed Bertie, and with whom she had lived quietly in the East Coast house. Although still very young, Ching Ling had been married the previous year. The matchmaker had come forward with a suitable groom, the son of a school inspector, and Little Sparrow accepted immediately, relieved to see her eldest daughter securely settled.

Greta was technically Mei Lan's half-aunt, but it was impossible to think of her in this way. Since Mei Lan's arrival in the East Coast house the child, constantly usurped in her mother's affections by Bertie, had turned to Mei Lan for affection, slipping into her bed at night, demanding stories before sleeping and the goodnight kiss her mother so often forgot to give her since the return of her brother.

‘Why can't Bertie go away now that the war is finished?' Greta asked, clambering up on to the bed.

‘Your mother had to give him up when he was a baby and now she has got him back it would be difficult for her to do that,' Mei Lan explained, replacing the silver brush on the dressing table and observing herself in the full-length mirror. Ah Siew had chosen a simple white dress for her to wear, the only good dress in the cupboard. Her arms stuck out of the short sleeves like two thin sticks and the colour did not flatter her paleness. She opened the dressing table drawer to find a pin to keep the neck of the dress together, and pulled out not the tin of safety pins but the wooden case with the compass Howard had given her so long ago.

‘What's that?' Greta scrambled off the bed as Mei Lan turned it over in her hands.

‘It's a compass,' Mei Lan explained, opening the box and seeing once again the smooth dial of the instrument, its needle steadfast as ever, pointing in the direction of Belvedere.

‘Where did you get it?' the child asked.

‘Someone gave it to me years ago,' Mei Lan replied but there was no longer the quickening that would once have gripped her at the thought of Howard. The compass and all that went with it belonged to another life. She remembered Howard's visit a few days before and felt a great tiredness, and knew she did not have the strength to recover the mercurial emotions she had once known so well.

‘What does a compass do?' Greta insisted.

‘It points you in the right direction,' Mei Lan answered dully, staring down at the needle but seeing for herself no clear course ahead.

There was the sound of a car drawing up and Greta rushed across to the window. ‘They've come for you,' she said, pulling excitedly at the curtain.