There was no way I could explain that I was perfectly serious. I saw it all coming to me quickly, like a jackpot I imagined myself winning: “Just a minute,” I would say to the fellers at the bar, and while everyone watched I would put a coin—say my last—into a one-arm bandit, yank the lever and watch the whirr become a row of stars as the machine exploded and roared, disgorging a shower of silver dollars.
An old horse out to pasture, he had said; I had not giggled—at that or the bluebells. I believed it because he did. But my version of Elmview, my own funkhole (deep-sea fishing in a silk robe and a velvet fedora, with a cigar in my teeth) made him mad. And what bothered me most was that I could not tell whether he felt mocked because my imaginings were grander than his or because they sounded absurd and he doubted them. I would not have minded his envy, but his doubt would have made my whole plan seem inaccessible to me by encouraging my own doubt.
His grim expression made me say what I at once regretted: “I guess it sounds pretty crazy.”
He did not hear me. Behind me, Yardley was horsing around, bawling a joke: “‘Organ,’ she says. ‘That’s no organ, breh-heh! Looks more like a flute to me!’”
“I take it Singapore’s not a terribly expensive place to live,” said Leigh.
“That’s a laugh,” I said. “It’s probably more expensive than Hong Kong!”
“I’m quite surprised,” he said, lifting his eyebrows. He took a sip of his drink. “Then the salaries here aren’t very, um, realistic.”
“They’re not too bad,” I said. I even laughed a little bit. But I stopped laughing when I saw what he was driving at. “You mean Hing?”
He nodded and gave me the tight rewarded smile of a man who has just tasted something he likes. He said, “You’ve got an amah’s salary.”
“You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” I said. “If you think I bank on—” But I was ashamed, and flustered—and angry because he still wore that smile. He had spent the day in that upstairs cubicle examining my salary. What could I say? That Gunstone had a few hours before thanked me with an envelope of cash? That I was welcome in any club in Singapore, and was snooker champion of one (unbeaten on the table at the Island Club), and knew a sultan who called me Jack and who had introduced me as his friend to Edmund de Rothschild at a party? That once, on Kampong Java Road, where I had my own brothel, I cleared a couple of thousand after pilferage and breakage was settled? That Edwin Shuck of the American embassy had told me that if it had not been for me Singapore would never have been used as a base for the GIs’ “R and R” and Paradise Gardens would not have existed? That I had plans?
I hated him most when he said, with a concern that was contemptuous patronage, “How do you manage?”
My elbows were on the bar, my head in my hands. Far off on a green ocean I saw a yacht speeding toward me with its pennants snapping in the breeze. A man in a swivel chair on the afterdeck had his feet braced on the gunwales and was pulling at a bending rod. Just behind him a lovely girl in a swimsuit stood with a tray of drinks and—I knew—club sandwiches, fresh olives, dishes of rollmop herring, and caviar spread on yellow crackers. The fish leaped, a tall silver thing turning in the sun, whipping the line out of the water. The yacht was close and I could see the man now. It was not me; it was no one I knew. I released my fingers from my eyes.
“Flowers,” said Leigh. Why was he smiling? “How about a drink at the club?”
My girls were fairly well known at the Bandung—“Jack’s fruit flies,” Yardley called them—but no one there had any knowledge of my club work, and how I came straight from the Churchill Room or the Raffles Grill to the Bandung like an unfaithful husband home from his beguiling mistress’s arms. I tried to whisper, “Maybe later.”
Leigh looked beyond me to the others. “Does this establishment,” he said, “have a toilet?”
“In the kitchen,” said Coony, glad for a chance to say it.
Wally pointed the way.
“Does this establishment have a toilet?” said Smale. He guffawed. I wondered if Leigh could hear.
“Calls it a toilet,” said Yardley. “He knows it’s a crapper, but he calls it a toilet. That’s breeding, you understand.”
Frogget went yuck-yuck.
“What’s this club he’s talking about?” asked Yardley suspiciously.
I said I didn’t have the remotest idea.
“You sound more like him every day,” said Yardley.
“Knock it off,” I said.
“Don’t be narked,” said Smale. “He’s your mate, ain’t he?”
“He hasn’t bought anyone a drink yet,” said Coony. “I could tell he was a mean bastard.”
“Did you hear him rabbiting on?” asked Smale.
“I liked the part about him having tea in the pasture,” said Frogget. “That shows he’s around the twist.”
They had heard. They had been talking the whole time but they had caught what Leigh had said about Elmview—a distorted version of it. I had whispered, confiding my hopes; they could not have heard me. But why had I weakened and told Leigh? And who would he tell? He was out of the room; I wanted him to stay out, never to come back, and for his engine to gripe and stop his mouth.
“He’s a pain in the neck,” I said, at last.
“Been in the bog a little while,” said Smale. “What do you suppose he’s doing in there?”
“Probably tossing himself off,” said Frogget.
“You’re a delicate little feller,” I said.
No one said anything for a little while, but it was not what I had said to Frogget that caused the silence. We were waiting for the flush, which you could hear in the bar. The only sounds were the fans on the ceiling and the murmuring of Wally’s transistor. We were drinking without speaking, and looking around in the way fellers do when they have just come into a bar; Leigh might have crept back without pulling the chain.
“So he’s doing your towkay’s accounts,” said Yardley. It was a meaningless remark, but for Yardley an extraordinary tone of voice: he whispered it.
“It’s a very fiddly sort of job,” said Yates after a moment. “You really have to know what’s what.”
“Takes ages to do those sums,” said Smale. “Our accountant told me some days he looks at all those numbers and feels like cutting his throat.”
“You have to pass an exam,” said Coony, staring toward the kitchen. “To be an accountant. It’s a bugger to pass. I know a bloke who failed it five times. Bright bloke, too.”
Yardley called Wally, who was holding his radio to his ear the way a child holds a seashell for the sound. He ordered drinks and when Wally set them up Yardley handed me two gins and a bottle of tonic water. “Pink one’s for your pal,” he said. He glanced toward the kitchen.
“I wouldn’t mind living in Wiltshire,” Smale said. He said it with reverent hope, and we continued talking like this, in whispers. I had not realized just how long Leigh had been gone until I saw that the ice in his pink gin had melted and my own glass was empty.
I climbed down from the barstool and hurried into the kitchen. The toilet door was ajar, but Leigh was not inside. He was sitting on a white kitchen chair, by the back door, with his head between his knees.
“William,” I said, “are you okay?”
He shook his head from side to side without raising it.
“Get up and walk around a bit. It’s cool out back. The fresh air—can you hear me?—the fresh air will do you a world of good. Can you get up?”
He groaned. The back of his neck was damp, the sick man’s sweat made his hair prickle; his ears had gone white. I knew it was his engine.
“He sick-lah,” said Wally, appearing beside me with the radio squawking in his hand.
“Will you shut that fucking thing off!” I screamed. I do not know why I objected or swore. “Get a doctor, and hurry!”
Wally jumped to the phone.
Yardley and the others came into the kitchen as I was helping Leigh up. Leigh’s fac
e had a white horror-struck expression—wide unmoving nose holes—that of a man drowning slowly in many fathoms of water. I had seen these poor devils hoisted out of the drink: their mouths gaped open and they stared past you with anxious bugging eyes, as if they have acquired phenomenal sight, the ability to see far, and see at that great distance something looming, a throng of terrors. Leigh looked that way; he seemed about to whisper rather than scream. He was breathing: I saw a flutter in his throat, and a movement like a low bubble rise and fall in the declivity of his shoulder.
We carried him into the lounge, stretched him out on the sofa, and put pillows under his head. I took off his watch; it had made white roulettes on his wrist, perforations that wouldn’t go away. He looked paler than ever, more frightening in the posture of a corpse. But the worst part was when his legs came alive—just his legs, like a man having a tantrum—and his kicking heels made an ungodly clatter on the bamboo armrest of the sofa.
“Christ,” said Coony, stepping back. Smale and Frogget clamped their hands on his ankles and held them down. The clattering stopped, but the silence after that weird noise was much worse.
I was conscious of standing there with my tattooed arms hanging at my sides, not doing a blessed thing, and I heard a voice, Yardley’s, saying, “See that tatty sofa over in the lounge near the piano? That’s where Jack’s mate from Hong Kong packed it in. It was the damnedest thing—”
I turned to shut him up. But he was not talking; he was standing, expressionless, holding Leigh’s drink, the pale pink gin in which all the ice had melted. He seemed to be offering it to Leigh and though he held the tumbler in two hands it was shaking.
Leigh stared past us, at that looming thing very far off we could not see. I memorized his astonishment. It made us and the Bandung and everything on earth small and unimportant, not worth notice, and we were—for the time Leigh was on the sofa—as curious and baffled as those people on a city sidewalk who pass a man looking up at the sky and look up themselves but are made uneasy because they can’t see the thing they know must be there.
6
THAT WAS how, in a manner of speaking—by the act of dying—Leigh had the last word; though toward the end we tried to take back the things we had said. I have a memory of the six of us dancing around that green sofa in the badly lighted lounge, before the doctor came and took him away, frantically attempting ways to revive him, to coax him back to life so that we could have another chance to be kind to him—or perhaps so that he could amend his last words, which had been “Does this establishment have a toilet?” to something if less memorable, more dignified.
Our reviving methods were the ineffectual kind we had learned from movies: lifting his eyelids (why? did we want to see the eye or not?); plumping his pillow; unbuttoning his shirt; pouring cold water over his face with the Johnnie Walker pitcher; fitting an ice bag on his head like a tam-o’-shanter, and lightly slapping his cheeks while asking persistent questions—“Where does it hurt?” and “Can you hear me?”—to which there were no replies.
The doctor sensibly put a stop to this. “How did he get so wet?” he asked as he knelt and swiftly tinkered with Leigh’s chest and shone a light in his eyes. He held Leigh’s wrist various ways and said, “It’s too late.” It sounded like a reproach for what I had whispered to Leigh—“Maybe later.”
“A lot he cares,” said Smale, muffling what he had said with his hand and backing away from the doctor.
“Is it all right to smoke?” asked Coony. But he had already lit one, which was smoldering half-hidden in his cupped fingers.
“One of you will have to come along with me,” said the doctor, ignoring Coony’s question. The doctor was Chinese, and I think what Smale held against him was his unclinical appearance; he was wearing a bright sports shirt and Italian sandals.
Yardley and the others turned to me and became very attentive and polite, as to the next of kin, offering me the considerate sympathy they had lavished on William, as they had started calling him when he was on the sofa and, most likely, dead. We wore long faces—not sad because we liked him, but mournful because we hated him. Coony put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you okay, Jack?”
“I’ll be fine in a minute,” I said, becoming the grieving person they wanted me to be.
“If there’s anything we can do,” said Yates.
I put on my suit jacket and fixed my tie. I was dressed for a death, buttoning the black jacket over my stomach.
“What are you going to tell his wife?” asked Yardley.
I stopped buttoning. “Won’t the hospital tell her?” It had not occurred to me until Yardley mentioned it that I would have to break the news to Leigh’s wife.
“They’ll get it all wrong,” said Smale. He held my sleeve and confided, “They’ll make it sound bloody awful.”
“Don’t tell her it happened here,” said Coony quickly. “Say it happened somewhere else.”
“During the day,” said Smale. “A sunny day.”
“But in the shade,” said Coony, “of a big Angsana tree. In the Botanical Gardens. While he was—” Coony hit his fist against his head.
“While he was having a good time with the rest of us,” said Yardley. He looked from face to face.
There was a long silence. The doctor was at the bar speaking on the telephone to the hospital.
“Near the bandstand,” said Frogget. “Maybe he tried to climb that hill. And it was too hot. And his ticker gave out.”
“We told him to stop,” said Yardley, sounding convinced. “But he wouldn’t listen to us. ‘Have it your way,’ we said. So off he went—”
“I’ll think of something,” I said, cutting Yardley off. I didn’t like this.
It had all fallen to me. He was mine now, though I had tried several times to disown him. I had not wanted him; I had disliked him from the moment he asked, “Flowers . . . are you a ponce?” And his triumphant contempt: “How do you stand it?” and “How do you manage?” It was as if he had come all that way to ask me those questions, and to die before I could answer.
The doctor clicked Leigh’s eyes shut, moving the lids down with his thumbs; but the lids refused to stick and sightless crescents of white appeared under the lashes. We carried him to the doctor’s Volvo and folded him clumsily into the back seat. I sat beside him and put my arm around him to keep him from swaying. He nodded at every red light, and at the turning on River Valley Road his head rolled onto my shoulder.
“How long have you been in Singapore?” the doctor asked. It was a resident’s question. I told him how long. He did not reply at once; I guessed I had been there longer than him. He drove for a while and then asked when I would be leaving.
“Eventually,” I said. “Pretty soon.”
“Haven’t I seen you at the Island Club?”
“Yes,” I said. “I go there now and then, just to hack around.”
“What’s your handicap?”
“My handicap,” I said. “I wouldn’t repeat it in public.”
The doctor laughed and kept driving. Leigh slumped against me.
In my locked bedroom on Moulmein Green, late at night and so dog tired after driving one of my girls back to her house from a hotel that I collapsed into bed without pulling my pants off or saying my prayers, I had imagined death differently—not the distant horror of the drowning man, but the sense of something very close, death crowding me in the dark: a thing stirring in a room that was supposed to be empty. The feeling I got on one of those nights was associated in my mind with the moment before death, the smothering sound of the cockroach. A glossy cockroach, motionless, gummed to the wall by the bright light, goes into action when the light is switched off. It is the female which flies and its sound is the Chinese paper fan rapidly opening and closing. This fluttering dung beetle in the black room is circling, making for you. You listen in the dark and hear the stiff wings beating near your eyes. It is going to land on your face and kill you and there is nothing you can do about it.
I did not imagine a moment of vision before death, but quite the reverse, blindness and that fatal burr of wings. Leigh’s eyes were not completely closed, the lids were ajar and the sulfurous streetlamps on Outram Road lit the gleaming whites. In the General Hospital Leigh peered past the orderly who pinned an admission ticket to his shirt—number eighty-six, a lottery number for Mr. Khoo—and turned out his pockets: a few crumpled dollars, a withered chit, some loose change, a wallet containing calling cards, a picture of Margaret, a twenty-dollar Hong Kong note, and a folded receipt from the Chinese Emporium on Orchard Road. This went into a brown envelope.
“We’ll need a deposit,” said the nurse.
I took out Gunstone’s envelope, Singapore Belvedere, and handed over fifteen dollars. How do you manage?
“Please fill up this form,” she said.
The form was long and asked for information I could not provide without Leigh’s passport. So with the matron’s permission I went back to the Strand by taxi, told the desk clerk that Leigh was dead, and picked up the passport. “It seems like only yesterday that he checked in,” the desk clerk said; he assured me that he would take care of everything. By the time I was back at the hospital, copying Leigh’s full name, home address, nearest relation, race, and age—he was a year younger than me; the pen shook in my hand—Leigh was staring out of the chilly morgue drawer; after the autopsy he looked much the same, though unzipped, he fixed on that distant thing with the single eye the autopsy left him.
I had forgotten Leigh’s suitcase. After the certificate of death had been made out I picked up the case at the Strand, and at my insistence the taxi driver detoured past the Bandung. As we went past I could see lights burning and Yardley, Frogget, Smale, and the others at the bar, like lost old men, vagrants huddled around a fire late at night, sharing a bottle, afraid to go to bed.
It was after midnight. I did not have the heart to wake up Leigh’s wife and get her out of bed to tell her she was a widow. I locked my door, put a match to the mosquito coil, and knelt beside it. The mosquito coil, lighted to suffocate the gnats and drive the cockroaches away, smoked like a joss stick. I blinked in the fumes and tried to pray; the first words that came to me were, Is this all?