A Rude Awakening

‘Hello, Fat. Apa khabar? I can’t stop, I want to see Margey. Is she upstairs?’

He made gestures with his hand, as if bouncing a large ball. ‘Yeh, yeh, Margey us stair, she wait you, Missa Stuss. She tink you not come.’

‘Okay.’

I trotted up the stairs to the floor above. Here the empty space had been divided into compartments by sheets of material hung on wires. There were four compartments, each just big enough to house a bed. A further flight of wooden steps, little better than a ladder, led via a hole in the ceiling to the attic. I called Margey. She answered, her face appearing radiant in the gap above, and I went up to her.

We hugged each other on the landing. I lifted her off her feet and kissed her.

From the canteen I had brought her a little present, consisting of a tin of sardines, a tin of gooseberries, a fountain pen, some dates, a bar of chocolate, a bottle of burgundy, and a packet of custard powder. Margey accepted these exotic delicacies with small screams of delight and patted my cheeks. ‘You too kind your Margey! Aei-ya, how I love Bird’s Custard Powder!’

The other day, I came across a photograph I took in Sumatra all those years ago, back in 1946. It shows Margey buying an ice cream from a wooden street stall. Other people loiter about, grinning self-consciously at the camera. There are ruined buildings in the background. Only Margey is elegant. There she stands in a European-style dress, smiling at me. Although I remember her as plump, she looks undernourished. Her face is broad, her eyes large. Her head is slightly on one side, as if mutely appealing to be forgiven some minor offence – or maybe she was just trying to look like Rita Hayworth, her favourite film star. It is hard to realise that Margey is probably still alive, growing older like the rest of us; the present tense lies with that faded snap by the street stall.

She was laughing as we carried the parcel into her little room. She had curled her dark hair. It was naturally straight; now the ends curved upwards like the gables of the Batak house. Her teeth were white and perfect, so that when she smiled, revealing them, corpses stood up and beautiful things happened about her cheeks and the contours of her chin. She put her arms round my neck and nuzzled into my shoulder.

‘Horry, is after nine o’clock and you so late. I think you don’t come. I must eat some supper. You drink too much beer, very bad for you.’

‘Sorry, there was a piss-up in the sergeants’ mess, everyone getting boozed.’ I told her about Dickie Payne driving into the cesspit, and we laughed.

‘You sergeants all drunken filthy men! All soldiers are so horrible. Oh, I hate soldiers! All except you, Horry. You good man. When you don’t come, I afraid you go with that Miss Katie Chae. She very low woman.’ Katie Chae was her pet hate.

I laughed as I handed out cigarettes. ‘I never even saw Katie Chae. I came here straight from the mess.’

No breeze stirred. She kept her window closed at night to shut the insects out and it must have been a hundred degrees under the low roof. She saw I was sweating and said, ‘I go fetch you nice cool beer.’

‘I’ve had enough bloody beer. Make me a coffee and let’s go on the bed.’

She clouted me playfully on the hip. ‘Every day bed, bed – you terrible randy man, Horry. What you think poor Margey’s cunt? Lie down here and have a smoke while I bring you tea. No coffee. Coffee all gone. Why you no bring me more coffee?’

Margey left the lamp with me while she went to prepare the drink.

The attic had been intended for human habitation of a mean order. At the far end of the landing was a cramped area which served as Margey’s kitchen and bathroom. The rest of the space under the roof was occupied by two small rooms separated by wood panelling. The ceiling was plastered; some of the plaster had fallen away to reveal laths beneath.

One of the rooms was Margey’s own. It had a curtained window, the view from which always delighted me with its spectacle of rooftop decay, and a deep sill on which stood a plant and one or two precious possessions. I set the oil lamp on the sill and undressed. Processed beer oozed from my skin as I did so; even the mosquitoes had fainted in the heat.

Margey’s wooden bed was covered with a faded blue quilt, on which I sat to remove my boots. An upturned orange crate standing behind the bed served as a table; on it stood an old alarm clock and a carving of a Balinese dancer which I had given her. Under the bed was a precious metal-trimmed rattan trunk, in which Margey stored her clothes.

On the wall hung a little mirror framed in mahogany with a shelf below. Lipstick stood on the shelf, perfume in a knobbly bottle, and an extravagant manicure set which I had bought Margey whilst on leave in Singapore. A snap of me in swimming trunks was tucked into the edge of the mirror.

The only other items in the room were a towelled bathrobe which hung behind the door and a black and white photograph of Rita Hayworth, wearing an open raincoat and swinging her hips in an inviting way. Margey worshipped Rita Hayworth.

Rolling up my ankle puttees, which I had refused to exchange for gaiters, I tucked them in my boots and set them in one corner. It was good to be in that shabby cubicle, heat or no heat. Yet I, like Margey, had my anxieties. Before stretching out on the bed, I padded over to Margey’s bathrobe and felt in its pockets, dreading to find a french letter or similar incriminating evidence of other men. I found a small tortoiseshell comb, I took it out and turned it over several times. It was something of hers I had not seen before. Who had given it to her?

Slipping it back, I relaxed on the bed, thinking of her, imagining her working by what light came over the top of the wooden partition, boiling water on her tiny charcoal fire. A man’s voice yelled at her in clattering Chinese. She went to the gap and answered. A brief exchange took place before she returned to her stove.

When she entered the room carrying two small mugs of tea, I asked who had called.

‘Is only my brother-in-law, Fat Sian.’ She stood before me, looking down as I sat on the bed, patiently accepting my foreignness.

‘What did he want?’

‘He is only being friendly. Making an enquiry.’

‘Does Fat come up here when you are alone, Margey?’

‘I tell you many time, Horry, but you not believe.’ She stamped her foot. ‘He not come in here, except maybe bring some food. He not fuck me like you think. I not like to fuck Fat Sian – I am good girl with proper education, but you not believe.’

‘But he has fucked you, hasn’t he?’

‘Aei-ya, you damn drunk soldier, how I hate when you make such rude question! Drink your tea.’

In a week, less, all this would be forever beyond my ken. I could never work it all out. The thought made me despair. The muddle of Margey’s psychology and her life-style was at once pain and delight to me.

I knew something of her early history. She loved relating it to me, often with tears running down her face. Margey and her sister, Chin Lim, together with the rest of the family, had lived in a village near to the town of Tsingtao, in Shantung Province, China. That musical name, Tsingtao, ran like a thread through much of Margey’s conversation; it was the place she had loved to visit, the place she longed to get back to, somehow, some time – if she could not get to London, the other city of her dreams, where women were all like Rita Hayworth and everyone lived in gigantic houses complete with cooks, dogs, and horses.

Little did I understand. I was too young. Way deep down inside, I was shallow. I regarded Margey’s vision of Hollywood-London as one more broken dream in a land packed with them. On the other hand, I saw no reason why she could not pack a bag and go back to Tsingtao if she really wanted to.

Margey was not simply a dreamer. She was a practical girl who learned to survive – yes, now I understand. She read the local and Singapore newspapers when she could get hold of them. So she knew that boats and planes went to London regularly. Nothing went to Tsingtao any more. The Japanese had sacked Shantung and now it was in the hands of the revolutionary Communist armies of General Mao Tse Tung. Margey conducted her dreams like her household – practically, and in the midst of chaos.

The Japanese shelled and invaded Tsingtao. Many of Margey’s family were killed, including both parents, her brother, and a rich uncle who had financed the despatch of Margey south, to be educated at Shanghai University. Chin Lim, the elder sister, had just got married to Hwan Fat Sian. Fat had a car. When the Nips were on the march, Fat cunningly exchanged his car for a cart and an ox, which does not need petrol. He loaded both sisters and a few household goods on the cart, and headed for Nanking.

Terrible mishaps befell them. They had to survive both snow blizzards and drought, as well as bands of robbers. After many months of travel, often on foot, they caught a refugee boat sailing down the coast for Singapore. The boat was loaded to the water line. Progress was slow. They arrived in Singapore only a few hours before the British ignominiously surrendered and the Nips took over. The plague of civil disruption pursued them.

Everyone was in a panic, knowing exactly how the Japanese treated the Chinese. Some Chinese gangsters shot dead the captain of the refugee ship, slung him overboard, turned the vessel around, and steamed for Java. There was fighting aboard, with more people flung to the sharks. In the middle of a storm in the Berhala Straits, they ran out of fuel. Some days later, the ship drifted on to a mudbank off the coast of Sumatra. Everyone was starving by then.

‘Oh, I never go on any ship again!’ cried Margey.

Her stories were exciting and confusing. To ask for an explanation merely complicated the issue. Her English was like a half-built house. The kitchen was complete and you were safe in the bedroom; but most of the other offices existed only as foundations.

She could bear to tell me only one episode at a time. So the stories arrived randomly, prompted by chance recollections, recreating in themselves the disorder Margey had lived through. Her confusion became mine. I liked the chaos of her life, thought of it for hours, with admiration, even with envy. My simple experiences were nothing beside hers. She had had more adventures than I’d had NAAFI suppers.

The survivors of the shipwreck waded ashore somewhere near a place called Muaratungkai. By Margey’s account, it was a trecherous strip of coast, and the party she was with became separated from a group which included Fat and his wife. They were arrested by Dutch officials and imprisoned in the town of Palembang, feeling lucky not to be shot as part of an expected Nip invasion. Margey’s party became lost in swampland. Several of them fell ill of fever, some died. The survivors eventually reached a kampong on the banks of the River Hari, where they were able to persuade two Eurasians with a small motor launch to take them to the local equivalent of civilisation. Margey fell sick on the morning of embarkation and so was left behind. She was still stuck in the native village when the Japs, as long expected, invaded the NEI. The Fates had made a mighty journey after Margey, not less than the distance from Morocco to Lapland – which is nothing to a ravening young Fate.

Palembang is an oil town. The Dutch garrison put up some resistance and was annihilated. The Japanese went on a triumphal spree of looting, shooting, and raping. Chin Lim was raped and bayoneted but Fat escaped both fates. Weeks later, he and Margey met up again almost by accident; they reached Medan dressed as coolies, travelling mainly by bullock cart. In Medan, they met other people from Shantung who helped them, and there they weathered out the rest of the war and the time that followed.

The world’s great storm had blown and was still blowing round the globe, a strong Force 6 breeze. Just for a while, there was a lull which becalmed Margey and me, both far from home, in this little stuffy room on the equator.

I had undressed and climbed under the blue cover. She put her tea cup on the window sill before beginning to slip unceremoniously from her clothes. The shadows of the bars of her lamp curved across her naked back as she pulled her blouse off. Away came her European-style brassiere with its red polka-dots (French, all the way from Saigon). Her tender breasts with their little sharp tips swung free as she stooped to remove her peasant-style trousers and then the dainty pair of silk knickers. In the treacly light, that beautiful pale body conquered me. How far beyond all computation that it should be this particular body, shipped all the way from Tsingtao – as unattainable as a figure in a painting – which was snuggling in beside me!

We lay still for the moment, staring innocently up at the swagger of Rita Hayworth.

‘Margey, you are so bloody gorgeous!’ I put an arm round her and made her feel the hardness of my prick.

She giggled.

‘You evil bad man, Horry! All soldiers so terrible randy men, I don’t know. What you think I do with this big terrible thing you have? Where I can put it?’

I showed her.