The Devil's Garden (19 page)

‘Orchid,' he smiled. They were sprawled in damp, post-coital torpor behind the Orchid House. She was surely younger than him and he felt a guilty tingle of incestuous elder-brotherhood whenever he looked at her. A thought of Erica flashed through his mind and he shuddered. Why did your mind do that—make you think of the one thing you did not want to think of? In answer to his query, it sent him an image of the wind lifting Erica's skirt to show ribbed support hose.

Orchid's voice came from over his head. ‘It is not my real name, you know.'

He was appalled and looked up. ‘Not your real name? Orchid not your real name? But you are so like an orchid, so slim and fragile and beautiful and …'

‘No. It is a name I chose for myself. Do you know what my real name is? It is “hope for a little brother”. There. My father, like all men, only wants sons, so that's what they called me. Chinese do that. There was no need for him to do so. I already had an older brother who's a pig. And now I've got a little brother as well. He's a pig too.' He laughed and rolled over to reach down into his bag.

‘I have something for you, my love—my piglet.' He had never tried the silly endearments of lovers before. The words were fresh and new and made him giddy. He took out a slip of pure white paper, thick and smooth and soft, lay it gently down on the bed beside her naked body and unfolded it with exquisite care. She stared at it blankly.

‘What is it?'

‘It is a poem. A love poem. You will see that I have written it in
kanji,
Chinese characters, so that you too can read it. Each character I have written on a red rose petal and glued it with manioc paste, in a circle, so that it goes round and round eternally. I did it this morning while I was supposed to be writing a report on the possibilities of balloon warfare. I took the rose petals from the Gardens without permission. I stole a rose from their flower garden! You have already made me a criminal and a bad officer.' He laughed then saw her sorrowful face. ‘What is it Orchid?'

‘Oh Yoshi. I can't read Chinese. My father does not believe in educating girls and my mother was Christian. It was as much as she could get him to do, to send me to the nuns' school. I only know a few characters. It was all in English, you see—Shakespeare and Wordsworth and so on. I am so ignorant. But I want to learn everything I can about you. You're so clever. So tell me. What exactly is balloon warfare?' She snuggled in closer so that he breathed in her hair, ‘I never even heard of it before. I'm sure you're the only person in the world who knows about it.'

He leaned back and swelled with manly pride and sated love. Japanese peppers are hot though small.

‘Well … we know that the Americans are developing new explosives and the Germans have pilotless aircraft and rocket bombs but we too have something new that our research scientists are perfecting. It is a marvellous weapon—hydrogen bombs.' His eyes shone. ‘Balloons, filled with hydrogen, that have already been used with devastating effect against the United States. They can be made in their thousands by our schoolchildren who paste together sheets of tissue paper and varnish them for the nation as they sing patriotic songs. They will be released from the mainland or from submarines and rise to a height of over 30,000 feet to carry fire-bombs or biological agents over enemy territory. A special electrical or clockwork mechanism keeps the balloons at the right altitude by dropping bags of sand if they drift too low and a timer releases their bombs, one by one, over the correct area. Many are killed by the bags of sand alone, dropping from such a height. Then they descend by themselves and finally another bomb blows up and sets fire to the wreckage as they crash in flames. They are such beautiful devices! From Syonanto, using the monsoon winds, they can be used against both India and Australia to bring both to their knees. We are making trials right now. We are very hopeful.'

‘Yoshi, darling. You are so clever! How do you ever think of such things?' Her eyes were bright and admiring and her hand was—most excitingly—stroking the hairless muscularity of his inner thigh. ‘But I can't think what it would look like. Draw it for me, darling. That's right. Just here on the back of this piece of paper. Lovely!'

* * * 

Professor Tanakadate leaned over the breakfast table, gathered his workaday kimono about him and sat back to light a cigarette—a sort of oriental Noel Coward—to take away the taste of the endless manioc paste. They had grown so bored with it that they had just used it to create a model of a volcano, the Professor explaining its inner workings with congealing slime and demonstrating the erosive effect of rainfall with the Flit gun filled with water. Its ruins lay before them—
magma cum laude
—on a chipped non-tectonic plate of blue PWD china. He drew the moral, as in one of his lectures at the university.

‘That is why the eruptive as opposed to the sedimentational model of atolls such as Cocos-Keeling has attracted more support. But perhaps one day we shall go there together and do joint research and finally settle the matter.' He sighed and eased stiff thighs. ‘But before that, I have received an unusual request from Captain Oishi at the new Shinto temple. It seems they need a botanist you see—like yourself. Not a vulcanologist, like me. I expect it's a matter of trees, plants, grass—what to plant, how to get a satisfactory display at all seasons—you know the sort of thing.' Pilchard made a questioning face. ‘Apparently Captain Oishi asked for you specially. You can use the motorbike.'

In a lean-to out front, stood a raddled BSA motorbike combination, painted matt grey and looted from God knew where, that served as the Gardens' only official transport. It too leaned from the fact of the third tyre being the wrong size. Pilchard knew that riding it would be an adventure, a welcome excursion from the confinement of the Gardens, his first real journey since release from Changi, but …

‘But I am not a real botanist. It is just that, out here, we all have to turn our hand to whatever crops up—botany, zoology, anthropology, geology …'

‘Then this is what has cropped up.'

‘But we have no petrol.'

The Professor smiled. ‘I have two gallons … tucked away? Is that the expression? Yes, tucked away in my bedroom. Under the bed.' He gestured upstairs with his head.

‘You keep petrol under the bed? What about the fire risk?'

The Professor shrugged. ‘When there are so many easy ways to die, one more or less seems unimportant.' He rattled the matches roguishly.

‘But it's endless trouble what with the roadblocks when they see a
gaijin
riding a bike. I wouldn't get through. They'd take the motorbike. You would have to come with me.'

‘This conversation sounds like a British song I learned in school called “There's a hole in the bucket”. If you take the goggles and crash helmet and wear an armband that I shall give you, they will not notice what you are.'

And so it was that, the next morning, Pilchard left the Gardens from the northern gate, relishing the sound and the surging vibration of the old engine between his legs and hammered on rattling pistons up towards Bukit Timah, where the stench exhaled by the camp on the old Sime Road golf course wafted foully across from behind screening trees, restoring the animality that humans habitually denied and reducing them to it and nothing else. A sweet compound of woodsmoke, toothrot, farts and despair, it was somehow far worse than that he remembered from Changi, the boiled-down essence of human misery choking in its own filth. Perhaps it was simply that it had had—how long?—eighteen months more to mature and fester. Being mainly for Eurasians rather than whites, camp conditions were much more relaxed in Sime and many proud Brits had suddenly discovered multiracial skeletons in their fitted, pukkah closets and rattled them at the Japanese in their haste to be reclassified. He turned off onto the rutted, dirt track that led to the MacRitchie reservoir, grateful for the cleansing breeze that blew off the water. Each time he hit a bump, the ruined saddle poked sharp metal into his backside. There had been a lot of heavy traffic, army trucks mostly, churning up the soil to the unsightly morass of water and weed that he thought of as ‘a French lawn'. Quite a few were parked there, some with the big rubber bladders on the roof they used to run them on coal gas and idle soldiers were just lying around. There is nothing so dangerous as idle soldiers. All the uniforms made him nervous and he retained the helmet and goggles as a mask.

It was around here that he had served most of his short, sharp time in the Volunteer Force during the battle for Singapore. He had seen the craziness of it all—the men having victoriously fought lethal hand-to-hand engagements with the Japs being then ordered to retreat and offering easy targets for their planes as they made their way bunched along the open roads. The insanity of Dalforce—Chinese volunteers without uniforms, just a bandana and an armband, fighting off Nippon Imperial Guards with old shotguns and
parangs
and the odd grenade after a few weeks' limp-wristed training in the woods. Being totally divided between communists and nationalists, they had to fight in separate sections and often preferred shooting each other to killing the designated enemy. British officers, not too sure about their own backs, indulged their private sympathies by issuing the nationalists three times as many bullets as the communists. He had himself seen the famed Madame Cheng, over sixty years old, fighting hand-to-hand alongside her husband, dodging from tree to tree and spitting out invective and bullets against the Japanese as only a very angry grandmother could. There were other things he wanted more clearly to forget. He fought off a flashback, refused to see the tying of survivors to trees to be bayoneted, the hanging of mutilated body parts of Allied conscripts in the branches like Christmas decorations by chortling Japanese troops. It seemed fortunate that the human mind adjusts by being no more capable of recreating, from afar, the true feeling of horror than it is the sensations of ecstasy or gratitude. Then suddenly the fresh, friendly face of Captain Oishi, blushing under long eyelashes, was there and immediately banished the Japanese of his recollection and he pulled the suffocating memory with crash helmet and sticky goggles from his face.

‘Dr Pilchard. Thank you for coming to Syonan Jinja. Here, the souls of the dead are transformed into land-protecting spirits.' He bowed, contrary to regulations, though less to Pilchard than to the idea of spirits, then hesitated. ‘To be honest, I had not expected to see you so soon. I had thought, perhaps next week …' The ground behind him had been cleared and finely landscaped and rose towards an arched wooden bridge, painted bright red, that crossed one of the many small inlets of the reservoir. Where it touched the ground at both ends, pink irises had flowered as though its colour had bled, diluted, into the earth and water. Beyond it, stood the Shinto shrine itself, a series of pavilions, some without walls, some hidden behind fences, with thick, thatched roofs and innocent wooden pillars, that explored various shades of muted grey. A snaking path, paved with polished pebbles, led off, under a stone arch like a Chinese character, among bamboo and large rocks. In the midst of it, a man was washing his hands methodically, like a surgeon, at a fountain hewn from a single block of granite. Captain Oishi's eyes followed his gaze.

‘The stones were intended for the filtering of the city water but now we have a better use for them.' By the bridge, a bank of
bonsai
trees and tortured flower arrangements displayed the results of a contest among Japanese forces and showed rain-flecked photographs of bashfully grinning winners. So peaceful, so far from war. The Captain posed winsomely before one of them—standing laughing to attention—two intertwined
Cymbidium dayanum
tweaked up into a slim tower of blossom.

‘This is mine,' he preened, unconsciously stretching up with his own thin neck. ‘In the most modern style.' His hushed voice indicated the daring of it. ‘My teacher in Kyoto would say
too
modern. Honourable mention.' The long word attacked him like a foreign enemy.

‘Splendid! If cameras were permitted, I would take your picture. My congratulations. Orchids taken from the wild, I presume?' Pilchard bowed again. Now to business. ‘Captain Oishi. The Professor sent me here but I don't know how I can help at all. After all, I know nothing of Shinto gardens, Zen gardens, Buddhist gardens—whatever it is that you require.' He arranged goggles in crash helmet, folded in the soaking earflaps and tucked the package neatly under one arm, like a medieval knight waiting to be cast in brass. ‘I am sure it involves rather more than the planting of a flower clock or a lush, herbaceous border. But rocks, gravel, trees, the religion of Nature,
ikebana
flower arrangements—I have no idea what is the correct relationship of it all. It is like asking me to cook and serve a Japanese formal banquet.'

Oishi laughed lightly, covering his mouth with one hand. ‘Oh Dr Pilchard, I realise that. We have not brought a southern barbarian here to teach us about Shinto.' He would repeat that one back at the mess and make all the other officers laugh too, maybe even Mother back home in Kyoto. ‘In the course of our work we have disturbed certain orchids that I should like you to look at. Please to follow.' He led down a path, torn through rampaging bamboo and ferns. After several hundred yards, they came out into a clearing where twenty or more burly Japanese soldiers, stripped to the waist, were working at digging an enormous excavation. It is always ill-advised to dig a hole next to a reservoir and they spent more time bailing out water than digging. As he stepped out into the clearing, they looked up, bathed in perspiration, surprised, assumed expressions of extreme unfriendliness, some stretched out a hand for their rifles, then saw Oishi and grumbled quietly among themselves. A colder sweat trickled down Pilchard's back. To one side, a dozen or more aluminium containers were stacked in a pile, roped together, snarling with ideograms. You never saw Japanese troops doing physical labour. That was for POWs, or—sometimes just out of spite and contempt—for the Indian National Army.