The Devil's Garden (10 page)

As he hobbled along, stiff-backed, penguin-like, Pilchard was suddenly aware of other smiling faces. He was barely conscious, unfeeling, could take nothing in but the heat bouncing back from the road. All around, on the railing supports and at shoulder height, were impaled other heads, neatly sliced and trimmed at the neck like fresh-picked pineapples, mouths set in Mona Lisa rictus, skins a variety of shades of chocolate, sepia and yellow—Asian faces of all kinds at varying levels of decay but all tending towards uniform blue-black—death the great leveller. Beneath each was slung a sign in a variety of tongues. The English version read, ‘I was a looter.' A European head would round out the collection nicely, he thought absently. Pilchard clutched his beans, that now seemed to burn in his hand, fixed his eyes on the road ahead and hurried on towards Lavender. Killing, then looting—two capital offences in a single afternoon—was not a bad score, if he lived to see the end of it.

A hot wind was gusting along the streets and he was horribly thirsty but Lavender was another place that specialised in the purely professional slaking of thirsts, for the low ramshackle houses had once been the favourite low resort of sexually rampant Australian troops—boys of an age where the male body is simply a noisy device for converting food and drink into lust and semen—now all penned back up in sober Changi chastity. It was clear that the Japanese had not yet taken up the slack but the ethnographer in him wondered whether the girls really even noticed the difference, so crushing was the weight of the military upon Singapore even in peace. In his early days here, like all newcomers, he had come to taste the local wine, excited by the heady eroticism of smooth Asian skin—its pores saturated with spice and coconut oil—the flowing, black hair and had sat, worshipping, before golden calves For two dizzy months they had all been beautiful and then familiarity had set in with its power to sap and drain enthusiasm. He had not come since.

Many of the bars were shut, seemingly for ever. Passers-by avoided him, afraid of being seen around a European leper, but he felt that, had they known of the thirty cents weighing down his pocket, they would have been on him like a pack of wolves. Most of the buildings here had been blasted by mortar and artillery fire and people were living under sheets in the ruins, taking water from standpipes in the middle of the street and hanging washing out to dry on the shattered roof beams. The markets that had flourished in the streets had withered into parody. A beggar sat smiling in the street and indicated a bloodied kneestump to all comers with the open-handed gesture of one who had just pulled off a difficult conjuring trick while, behind him, a corner stall that had once sold cigarettes now sold cigarette ends for reuse as if this were a totally normally activity. Yet, despite the deprivations, when the wind blew across, Little India still managed to reek of curried mutton and hot fat. He dodged around Bugis Street with its volatile, patrolling transvestites and headed towards Beach Road where shading trees tempered glittering views of the sea. There stood the arrogant Raffles Hotel, now renamed the
Syonan Ryokan,
still off-limits to other ranks—but Japanese other ranks now—and still striking attitudes behind its luxuriant
Ravenala madagascariensis,
Traveller's Palm—though not, of course, a true palm but related to the banana—its undaunted leaves shuffled by a hot but pleasant wind that buffeted in from the ocean and perhaps reminded it of home. Rickshaws with specially scrubbed pullers were ranged outside—the acceptable face of the East—as large cars purred up under the glass awning, disgorging sleek Japanese of both military and civilian stamp. On the ground floor, the bars and restaurants still hummed with cheerfully non-partisan profit and, in the upstairs rooms with their white telephones and soft furnishings—as was common knowledge—Korean ‘comfort women' were deferentially available to officers around the clock beneath pink lightbulbs It occurred to him that the entire British Empire was really nothing more than the biggest whorehouse in the whole of Asia—one enormous ethnographic seraglio—where the very idea of ‘a good time' was a sad but powerful delusion. And right on cue, the doors flew open and Erica Rosenkranz came clumping down the steps with a young Japanese officer on her arm making that characteristic grimace that, for her, replaced a smile, an opening wide of the mouth with simultaneous peevish crinkling.

As the wife of the erstwhile Austrian ambassador, Erica had officially progressed, in the course of the war, from ‘neutral' to ‘enemy alien', following the
Anschluss
. But the British had dealt kindly with both her and her husband, regarding them as sinned against rather than sinners, arguably innocent victims of a hostile invasion, thereby still allies of a sort, so that her enthusiastic embracing of ‘friendly belligerent' status under the Japanese now smacked of ingratitude. After the Fall, her husband had answered the summons and returned circuitously home to what was now Nazi Germany's new Ostmark province but, since doubts remained over their reception there, they had chosen that Erica should stay just where she was. In age too she had long sought to remain exactly where she was, dressed too young, wore too much makeup, dyed her hair too optimistic a shade. All this went hand-in-hand with a wardrobe of gestures and mannerisms that someone had unwisely told her—at the age of twelve—were winsome. As she approached her fiftieth birthday like an unexploded mine, they were no longer so.

At first, she had filled her dowager time with ladylike shopping and gardening, the delicate sécateur-wielding-in-white-gloves type that fiddled and fussed, more hairdressing than horticulture. Then she had conceived a fancy for botanical drawings, the cultivation of
Nepenthes
pitcher plants, the collection of botanical ephemera and gardening hats. Then she had started coming to the museum and gardens at all hours, seeking out Pilchard and demanding the identification of whatever bunch of leaves she happened to be clutching in her liver-spotted hands. In vain, the resident botanists told her, without conscious irony, that only her fruiting parts were diagnostic. Dr Post quailed before her aggressive femininity and before long, by a series of outflanking manoeuvres, she had wormed her way into becoming a patron of both museum and gardens. Within any public institution, a patron is a ‘friendly belligerent' of the most feared kind for all learned institutions fear the public, as the staff inevitably come to run them exclusively for their own convenience. From there, she had moved triumphantly into occupation of the chair of the Gardening Club and finally the Orchid Club had fallen to her. She now paused on the bottom stair of the Raffles Hotel and shouted across the forecourt, unwilling to step out into sunshine.

‘Dr Pilchard! Come here!' She waved her bag. ‘At once! I have been trying to contact you. My monkey cups have sprung a leak—some disease I think. My urgent calls have gone unanswered for several months.' Pilchard paused and considered. If everyone felt ill all the time, as he did now, the world would be a very different place. Perhaps saints were just men with a good digestion. He might just walk on and ignore her and her monkey cups or pitcher plants. Or there was no reason, now that the world had ended, not to tell the old cow to just get thoroughly and joyfully stuffed. The occupation could yet prove liberating. No reason except a lifelong experience of being taught to seek to please. No reason except that unpredictable Japanese companion who was sucking the debris of terrible English fruit cake out of his teeth, had that haunted look that men often had around Erica and might well want to let out his rage and frustration in slaps and kicks. He sighed and crossed the forecourt, bowed low to him in appeasement though she would think it was to her.

‘I'm so sorry, Mrs Rosenkrantz. I'm afraid I was quite literally detained.'

She pouted. and looked at his legs, devoid of the long white kneesocks that alone made men's legs decent. He was gripped by a momentary fear that she might be admiring them but that, after Changi diet, was mercifully impossible.

‘Oh please don't explain', she crowed. ‘Nowadays it seems everyone has excuses. Excuses are always so boring.' She flapped her sequined bag like a fan, chasing excuses away as you might an irritating wasp. ‘I am sure someone might have given you a message. It is scarcely providing a proper service to the public to just wander off and abandon your post.'

‘I expect you have been overwatering them—your pitcher plants, monkey cups.' It was the catch-all answer to all public enquiries about plants, undeniable since ‘over' was meaningless.
Nepenthes
were amongst the most inept of Nature's plants, given to rot and dehydration, endless trouble to cultivators in their unceasing demands. It was only appropriate that Erica had conceived a predatory empathy for them, enticing victims with their sticky secretions and then devouring their dead flesh. If rumour was to be believed, the presence of an absent husband or, rather, the absence of a present one did nothing to deny Erica a vigorous sexual life. She had scandalously acquired much younger Chinese dance-partners that she had taken openly to the Germania club, there to foxtrot interracially. Such astonishing behaviour had been made comprehensible to the expats by the rumour that she was really from the Italian end of Austria and Neopolitans—as all British and Austrians knew—were scarcely European at all. Her Japanese companion, tired of being ignored in a foreign language, clicked his heels and inclined his head cautiously.

‘Oishi, Captain.'

‘Pilchard, Lieutenant, but different army.'

Erica raised her index finger to her mouth then held it up like a sailor testing the wind and did one of her puckish little-girl-having-sudden-idea expressions. ‘I think, Dr Pilchard, given the inconvenience the Captain has been put to, it would be the least you could do to offer him a personal tour of the museum. My car is just here.'

They were sated with cake and tea, maybe they even had a stimulating cocktail or two under their belts, cooled and rested. Pilchard was hungry, weary, hot and not very well. As the sun beat down with swimming heat on his bare head, the world began to lurch and spin with craziness and the effort of holding things steady was abruptly just too much. Perspiration that he could not spare suddenly douched his back and the air lay heavy and immovable in his lungs. By the time the mist cleared, he found himself already in the car, in the front seat, heading down Stamford Road with the boys' school on the right. His legs were shaking. Voices came from the bottom of a deep well and the nearby sea roared in his ears as in a nautilus shell. He struggled back to the surface and now there were soldiers everywhere, a barrier across the road, some sort of a checkpoint. Over them, towered the authority of the YMCA, an architectural absurdity of half-tudoring—in a country that was innocent of Tudors—turrets and balconies and bay windows and an irrelevant
porte cochère
stuck on the facade like a clown's red nose. On the little green at the front, a crowd of young Chinese men were standing, silent with fear in the hot sun, hands behind their backs—possibly bound—with soldiers strutting up and down. And there, shuffling down the line, was a figure of horror, all in black, hooded—the Grim Reaper. Occasionally, it would pause, stretch out a gloved hand and touch someone silently on the shoulder, claiming a victim for death. The chosen one would be led away and stowed on the back of a truck.

‘Informer,' said Captain Oishi, standing up in the car and beaming with satisfaction. ‘You see the Chinese are keen to work with us to root out antisocial elements. Those criminals will be shot.'

Those, Pilchard suddenly realised, leaning wanly against the hot metal, were not army uniforms the soldiers were wearing but Kempeitei. The secret police. Even the Japs were afraid of them. He plunged deep once more into resigned turbulent dizziness then was swimming up to booming consciousness again. His eyes jerked open. Now there were schoolboys everywhere in thin white shirts and trousers—one, in glasses, painfully lanky, great dark eyes, Chinese hair spikily resisting the imposition of a Western haircut.

‘If I'm staying a few days …' he was saying smoothly to Captain Oishi, speaking with the same excessive plausibility with which—at home—schoolboys presented forged letters excusing themselves from games, ‘… I'll go home first—just over there—and get my things.'

The boy set off with light, determined steps, firmly not looking back. Oishi dithered, seemed to feel an unwilling pang of sympathy, perhaps saw himself ten years ago and hesitated then, clearly anxious not to lose face in front of Erica and this other southern barbarian by shouting, waved to the sentries to let him go.

‘One schoolboy more or less,' he shrugged, laughing, dismissing duty and embarrassment with a casual smile. ‘What difference does that make to the world? What's your name?' he called.

The boy threw a smile back over his shoulder but did not stop. ‘Lee. Harry Lee.'

Pilchard's world dissolved and disappeared again as if sucked down a vast clockwise plughole. Then he felt tiles, cool and solid under his cheek and cold on his bare legs. He was shivering. Looking up, there was the Singapore stone, its Indic script winking ruby red in the last rays of the setting sun that shone through the hole in the roof, still proclaiming its enigmatic message to an uncomprehending world. He was back in the museum. In his hand was a can of beans.

‘Shut?' Erica was saying to someone he could not see in the echoing void. ‘Shut? Well, I really think it's just not good enough. What sort of a place is this? Look at the state of Dr Pilchard, drunk as a lord—
as a lord
—and it's barely mid-afternoon. Make no mistake. I shall be writing to the General about it.' She stamped a little, slingbacked heel right in front of Pilchard's face. ‘The Captain was quite looking forward to a tour. You have disappointed him. He also likes orchids and would love to the see the Gardens. I really think you people might all make a bit more effort. It's so selfish of you. Don't you know there's a war on?'