Key to the Door

  “Witty bastard”—but he said no more. Baker had been quiet and withdrawn on his arrival at radio school back in England, still unsocial even after eight weeks’ squarebashing. Now his silence seemed to have become a ruse, Brian thought, a tactic of breeding employed when he was pitched into a bunch of noisy strangers whose language he hardly understood. But he could now harangue and barney like an old sailor when he chose to. The door slammed and wheels skidded in the dust, rolled towards the guard-room. Brian sat down for a smoke, and a big pack landed at his feet, then a small pack and waterbottle, a bush hat without badges, two tins of cigarettes, and a couple of Penguin books. While the owner of these belongings began to climb aboard, Brian read a title: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and wondered what it could be about.

  “Grab hold of that lot and give me a pull up.” The lorry gathered speed, and he was trotting behind. Brian and Eric Baker shot out their hands, tugged until the late arrival’s body had more weight over the backboard than towards the ground, when he fell safely into his possessions and sat on the wooden plank to open a tin of cigarettes. “I hope this is the gharry for Muka,” he said, handing them around.

  “It is,” Brian told him, accepting. “Thanks a lot”—shielding a light towards his face. “You got fourteen days as well?”

  “Just about. I’m posted here when I get back. I came up on a plane from Changi this morning. You three in signals?” He’d be medium in height, Brian saw, bull-like and stocky, and about thirty-five years old. He covered the tufts of his bald head by the bush hat that had landed over Brian’s shoe like a hoop-la ring at a fair, wore a pair of khaki slacks, service mosquito boots into which went the bottoms of his trousers, and a white-drill five-dollar shirt—the cheapest possible way to be out of uniform, in fact. His rolled-up sleeves showed thick hair, and a chest of it at the open neck of his shirt. On his left arm was tattooed a naked woman. A regular, Brian deduced. Must have been in ten years, and with a tan like that he ain’t new to Malaya, either. He had a face about to turn florid, red at the cheeks despite his tan, a heavy moustache streaked with grey, and light brown eyes suggesting that he once had sandy hair. Yet beneath all this was an air of youthfulness still, of intelligent and simple living that Brian had noticed in other regulars who existed in a closed world and were easygoing until they became NCO’s. (He suspected that the one opposite was, yet couldn’t be sure, and felt uneasy because of it. Should he address him as Tosh, or not?) He had a narrowness of purpose and a broad humour which came from having no cares in the world—though outside in a civilian street and suit they seemed to be going through life in a dream.

  The lorry roared through the village, its swift rush drying sweat patches on every shirt. “I’m in signals as well,” he said when Kirkby answered him, “so I suppose I’ll be working with you lot when I get back. Knotman’s my name, Corporal Knotman to the CO but Len to you lot. I don’t believe in discipline and bullshit, stripes or no stripes.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Baker said. “Where will you be working?”

  “Telephone exchange. I was a wireless op once in aircrew, but I lost my stripes when they found they’d got too many of us. They wanted to put me peeling spuds in the cookhouse, but I ended up as a telephonist-erk, a regular in the good old FBI.”

  Kirkby took to him: “What’s the FBI?” he grinned.

  “Freebooters’ Institute. Federation of British Imperialists. Footsore, Ballsed-up, and Inked-out of your fucking paybook. Ten bob a day and all found, including the crabs. I’m dead beat,” he said. “I was up at four this morning.”

  “That makes two of us,” Baker put in. Knotman pulled a bottle of Chinese rice-spirit from his pack. “Have some of this. It won’t rot your guts. It’s best whisky, but I carry it in this hooch bottle so that I don’t have to offer it to bastards I don’t like. They think I’m doing them a favour, in fact, when I don’t push it their way, and that makes them begin to like me. But by then it’s too late.” Brian took a swig, so did Kirkby. Baker decided to wait a while. “Too late by then, Shag,” Knotman said. “Always take what’s going and you won’t go far wrong. You might have a heart attack in five minutes and be crippled for life. I was weaned on loot.”

  “Where you from?” Brian asked, detecting some peculiarity of accent.

  “Canada, but I’ve been in Limey-land eight years, so I reckon I’m the same as you now.” He stuffed the bottle in his bag and sang in a gruff but tuneful voice, as they sped along between palm-trees and beach until Brian, Pete, and even Baker joined in. It was difficult to tell whether Knotman was drunk or just whacked-out—though it might have been a mixture of both plus an armature of back-logged work unwinding in his brain. They followed his words and caught on to fresh verses, roaring loud as the lorry entered Kota Libis and turned in at the pier gates, where turbaned customs officials stopped looking into bags and cases to see what the wind had brought in.

  Brian stood by the rail to watch green water tracking towards Muong. Three large junks, heavy with flour sacks and rubber, headed in the same direction, huge patched sails so slow in the water that they seemed not to be moving at all and reminded him of a poem he’d read a few days since about seeing old ships sail like swans asleep. They were like that, he thought, though at the same time resembling swans that had been in a fight and were creeping inch by inch towards the safety of a harbour. Knotman stayed on the lorry, head in hands for a while, then stared back at the long mainland line of beach as if uninterested in where he was going.

  The boat went between anchored ships with such smooth precision that it seemed to be on train tracks placed invisibly under the water. As it slid towards the pier, Brian heaved himself back on to the lorry. Knotman was alive again, sat with beefy arms folded looking at Malays and Chinese going up the gangways with bundles and baskets. “Christ,” Baker said, “they’re like flies. Thousands of them.”

  Knotman’s face lost its expression of sleep: “Ever been on the London subway at eight in the morning? This is as graceful as a Covent Garden ballet compared to that.” Cars packed on deck slowly unwound and the lorry drove cautiously along the pier, headed through the town, and took to a wide ramparted boulevard leading by villas on to the coast road. All were bareheaded for fear their hats would blow across the beach and out to sea. The town gone, a series of blue bays stretched beyond. When one was left behind, the driver rode his vehicle up the dividing spur before another, and from the short tarmac stretch at the top could be seen other bays and spurs still to be crossed. Then the lorry slid into the steep bay-gully immediately in front, and at the bottom was a sheaf of sand between two heaps of rock, with palm-trees along the banks of a stream. A Chinese family sunbathed by a bungalow, and on the beach children fled from each other into the water. The blade of sea broadened, narrowed to a saw-edge because of tree trunks, disappeared, and the lorry was upward climbing again. “Marvellous,” Knotman said, passing his bottle around. “Let’s drink to it. Anybody who won’t is dead from the neck up. Why didn’t you tell me Pulau Timur was this good-looking?”

  “I couldn’t get a word in edgeways,” Brian said, handing the bottle to Baker. Marvellous, and he didn’t need Knotman to tell him because he’d allus thought so. Who or whatever made this must have had good eyes, wielding his brush over such bays and washing broad streaks of sea around them; and a giant fist to punch the land so that hills came up from oblivion, the same hand throwing jewels along the valleys that turned into temples. Ships sailed from the old kingdom of Barat and anchored in the streets between island and mainland, and a town grew up on the neck of land that was sheltered. Such permanent and colourful scenery, the full depth and meaning of its long life in comparison to his own, the warmth lavished on it by the sky, and the smaller lives he knew to exist in every branch and grass blade that made up the greenery and in the blue that denoted the sea, made him think of death and dying. Overwhelming beauty brought overwhelming sorrow. He stared before him, seeing the hills and ocean no longer
—only the sentence that had fled from somewhere for refuge in his own mind.

  Muka was twelve miles from town, several cream-coloured two-storied buildings set a hundred feet above the rocks and beach. “There was nothing like this in Kenya,” Knotman said.

  “How long were you there?” Brian asked. They were directed to an upper storey in the central block.

  “Couple of years.”

  “You bin in the jungle?”

  “I went hunting once.”

  “Bag anything?” Baker enquired.

  “Yes: my big toe and a group-captain. Nothing living, though. This looks like it.” They climbed the concrete stairway: “If you slip on this after a few bottles of Tiger Beer, you’ll break your legs.” They had a billet to themselves, and a Chinese to do their laundry for a dollar a week, as well as someone to make their beds, clean shoes, and bring in morning tea for another dollar. These deals settled, they ambled down the rocky path for a swim.

  Brian ran into the sea, as if out of the death of the land, to save himself in forests of salt water dragging grittily over his face, falling into it at fifty yards free and releasing his weight against the water until he became a log and felt sand on the bottom scratching along his shoulder blades and spine. It was as far away from morse code as it was possible to get, water pressing milk-warm and forceful even at the palms of his hands and trying to get in, so that he hit the surface near to bursting and opened his mouth, burned by the sun that had waited to grip his hair plastered flat and hard. Eyes still closed, he made a guess as to whether he was turned towards sea or land. If I’m facing land, Mimi will come and see me. If I’m looking out to sea, she’ll give me the go-by. He stared at the black sails of a loaded junk entering the straits a mile from the beach, and before he had time to speculate further, Baker made a dive at his legs and took him under. Brian lashed out with fists and surfaced, getting Baker round the waist and pressing him off balance, chin into stream, until his adversary’s weight fell from his grasp. Brian held him down, but soon he was up again, fists pounding the malleable surface.

  Less than a dozen were at the camp, leaving a free beach most of the time, and good service in the dining-room. “The lap of luxury,” Brian said to Knotman, who threw back a Penguin book by way of reply: “Read this while you’re here.”

  On the second afternoon those in the camp set off for a swim in a mountain pool on the other side of the island. Brian stood up on the lorry, between an urn of lemonade and a box of sandwiches. A long band of yellow beach ran along the northern shore of the island, ending in the jungled prominence of Telebong Head light. Brian searched out some secluded spot in case Mimi should visit him as promised, though he became pessimistic about it as soon as he saw a cove beyond the farthest village, an ideal place, with a few rocks on either side and palms set behind.

  The lorry climbed steeply beyond Telok Bahang, away from the sea and up a looped road with hillside falling hundreds of feet down to the valley. Clusters of huts lay in clearings by a stream snaking through bushes and speckles of sun. A Chinese woman was gathering wood: she was toothless and bald, her face brown and sexless with age, and she straightened her doubled back to smile as the lorry passed. Brian waved, felt the pendulum of his spirit move between desperate unfulfilled answers and happiness.

  The hill blocking their view fell away at the road’s next bend, so that before and below was a vista of paddy fields, a sheet of bright dazzling green stretched taut, dotted here and there with the brown patch of a village. A flat plain rolling beyond to the darker green of mangrove swamps ended in a blue haze at the sea-horizon. This also brought happiness, for paddy fields meant people working for food, though the vision of it quickly faded as the lorry changed gear and began to descend.

  Halfway towards the plain it pulled into the road-side, where a stream came under a wooden bridge from up the mountain and quarrelled between rocks on its way to the fields. Brian dropped from the lorry, followed the stream up course, and reached a large clean pool held in by a horseshoe of cliff, silver fishes turning under its cool surface. The watershed towered two thousand feet above, and the stream came down through forest and gully, making an entrance into the pool where he was standing. Isolation, until the others came shouting in behind, shooting their naked bodies into the pool, which was quickly filled.

  George, a warrant officer up from KL for seven days, also came into their billet. He’d not long since been SWO at Kota Libis, so Brian already knew him as a man who must have reached his rank merely by having been in the air force thirty years—certainly not by bullying or ambitious bum-crawling. He was more like the harmless, kindly, nondescript bird-fancier at a branchline ticket-office that British pictures like to show as the typical workingman than the usual sort of sergeant-major. Nothing bothered him, and he was so innocuous he didn’t even possess a sense of humour—having enlisted to avoid the trivial worries of civilian life, or maybe he had just drifted into uniform with no design whatever. He obviously carried out his routine admin duties with some efficiency, though at Kota Libis he was little in evidence as warrant officer, sitting day after day in his office reading an Edgar Wallace with as much wide-eyed intent as Brian remembered his uncle Doddoe used to scan the racing paper, though in the latter case with narrowed eyes and for only a fraction of the time because Doddoe had somewhat more work to do. “What does it matter how you live as long as you live in reasonable comfort?” George said one day, taking his socks off before going down to the beach. “I’ve got fair pay, grub, clothes, and a bed to sleep in. In return I do some work (only a little, though, he winked) and lose my independence. You can’t have it fairer than that, can you, lad?” He filled the bowl of his large pipe with such complacency that Brian felt like kicking his teeth in. He’s dead, the dead bastard, the brainless old bleeder. He’s a natural-born slave. “It don’t sound a good life to me,” he said. “Maybe not,” George answered, unruffled at what Brian saw as the greatest insult, “but I chose it, didn’t I?” Some people ’ud choose prison if they could get a cup of tea, he thought. George was of medium height, bald and pot-bellied and spindly-legged, wore bathing trunks and resembled a white ant grown to a man. He took up his towel and went out, leaving Brian to read. Christ, he thought, he’s been in this mob thirty years, and I’m only just twenty. I hope I’m not as dead as he is in thirty years. I wonder if Len Knotman will end up like that? Though I don’t suppose so because his time’s up in a year, and then he says he’s getting the hell out of it back to Canada, where he can get a job up north and be a free man again. “I’ve learnt to know what freedom means in these last eight years,” Knotman had said to him. “And the bloke who doesn’t learn that, sooner or later, isn’t fit to be on the face of the earth, because they’re the types that end up as the enemies and persecutors of those who know what freedom means.”

  At five o’clock he lay on the beach, a coolness coming invisibly in from greying sea. Baker waded in from a swim, maddened by horseflies spotted on to his legs like currants, skeins of blood running from each as they chewed his flesh by the mouthful, having hovered in wait by the water’s edge. “They’re like flying leeches,” Knotman said. “Ever had a leech on you?” He lay against the rocks, having swum himself out for the day, bush hat on the back of his head though the sun was well down behind the island. “No, I ain’t,” Brian answered, slinging a fag over.

  They smoked in silence. Gunong Barat lay to the north, a black aggressive monolith coming out of the mainland twenty-odd miles across the water. Brian wanted to ascend through its wet forests (leeches or no leeches, snakes or tigers or elephants—it didn’t matter), to test his strength on its steep incorrigible slopes. Hard labour would be needed, but the claws of endurance would goad him on, turn him into a treadmill of effort as he struggled up. This revelation grew indistinct and gave way to grandiose speculation as to what it would be like to use the distant encircling vision of its eyes from four thousand feet. “I’ve thought a long time about trying to climb that mounta
in over there.”

  “What’s to stop you?” Knotman said lazily.

  “Nothing, I suppose. It wouldn’t be easy, though. A bloke in the billet came down from Burma the other day and flew over it: he said it’s up to its neck in thick jungle.”

  “It would be an experience,” Knotman said. “You can’t leave Malaya and not know what the jungle’s like.”

  “What is it like?” Brian asked.

  He laughed: “Like a woman maybe—deep, dark, and hard to know. Dangerous as well, if you don’t watch your step.”

  “It might not seem like that to me,” Brian said, having already told Knotman he was married and seeing no reason to switch the subject so abruptly.

  “It did to me. I had eight years solitary—meaning one woman. Then I got out quick.”

  “I was talking about Gunong Barat, though. Why does it have to be like anything?”

  “Because it does. Otherwise it’s got no meaning. And everything means something.”

  “All right,” Brian said. “I give in. What does Gunong Barat mean?”

  “You mean what does wanting to climb it mean? I read once that you only climb mountains when you’ve got no ambition, but think you might as well get something out of life. Of course it’s different with you: you’re just an idealist, meaning you give in to worldly values without dirtying your hands on them.”

  “So what? Can’t you do it just because you want to?”

  “If you like. I expect you can buy a map in Muong. They’ve got everything taped there. Then you can see what you’ll have to cover to get to the top. Can you read a map?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ask for a week’s leave then and shin up. Get Baker and Kirkby to go with you.” The mainland was darker, a solid lowdown horizon more important than the distant skyline of the mountains because it was close and immediate. “Start thinking about it seriously,” Knotman went on, now encouraging where before he had been diffident. “The three of you should be able to do it as easily as going for a swim—or taking a pull of whisky.” He passed the bottle: “A sundowner?”