Acts of Mutiny (36 page)

Perhaps they did not hear my knock; but they were surely in there, the Cootes. I could hear them. Surely they were. They must be all together playing some game – little high-pitched squeals came out through the wood, child sounds; noises of tension, panting, adult sounds. Well then, I would have my say. I threw open the door.

Neither Finlay, nor Mitchell, but a strange configuration of their parents, an eight-legged, half-naked thing, a crab, jiggling and gasping as it climbed over the edge of the bunk. Clodagh Coote’s eye caught mine. I shut the door and fled.

So the Cootes were exposed by the tide. And Mr Chaunteyman’s
affaire
with Cheryl Torboys was the reef upon which I foundered, cast up on that Asiatic isle.

Changi prison was not nearly as worrying as I had expected. Sometimes it helps to see the face of our terrors. It is only the remembering that hurts.

I remember my mother weeping at teatime in the RAF hotel, and the rain which flooded down in bucketfuls, suddenly, out of a recently brilliant sky. You could set your watch by that tropical drench every afternoon; afterwards, you could almost
see
the plants growing. Little pink lizards would scamper up to the corners of the ceiling. Looking out to sea from that sad, soft corner of Changi village, you might confuse the abating rain with the scuttling of their feet.

When it was not raining, it was always high summer. I had been used to the drab backstreets of Woolwich, with their soot and that stink from the Thames. Now I explored Singapore. I took the bus in with Mr Chaunteyman, past those grim brown walls of the prison. We could see it on our left. It was a cluster of horrible buildings squatting amid the village fields.

The bus would lurch and stagger. It was full of Chinese and Malayans. Mr Chaunteyman would invariably gasp at the fact that they really did live here, these Chinks. ‘You know I can never get over it. They really do all look the same.’ Then he would laugh, and eye up through the window any girls he saw walking along outside with their slit skirts showing off their thighs. ‘And what a same they look! Chicks and dolls and geese better scurry.’ He would whistle roguishly to himself.

One day I pressed the only item I had saved from my suitcase into Mr Chaunteyman’s hand. The shrunken head. He took it with a shocked face which turned into a grin of recognition. ‘Sure. You want me to have it.’

‘I want you to have it,’ I muttered. Once I had passed it on I began to feel at home in the city.

A Chinese painter, set the task of rendering the whole of Woolwich on a tea service, such as my grandfather’s, but forbidden any dirt or grime, must have created Singapore. A thousand views of Woolwich. The dragon Woolwich. The lotus Woolwich, multi-petalled and infinitely expanded. The exotic lifts and bends of the brush, the limpid water-colour shades and hues, the flashes of intensity or transparency, all these were the port’s pattern.

Filthy old Thames lighters, moored up, became bobbing tongkangs side by side on the Singapore river, their milder occupants the rough wharfsiders I had grown up with. Those grim rows of dense South London houses became bright tenements for a pyjama-clad multitude. All the surfaces were pink or blue, or pale or peeling, and from upper windows the endlessly repeated lines of washing poles sketched a street canopy of intimate laundry.

Each roof-ridge, gable, doorway and corner sprouted decoration – in concrete, wood, plaster. Or by the porcelain fixing of a telephone wire. There were great splashes of Chinese writing, red on white, white on red, red on yellow. Every entrance chattered with Chinese speech. Every street was full of bicycles. It was spirited. There were so many people.

It was the busy-ness that endeared the place to me, the sense of purpose and throng – and, yes, I romanticise it. For its inhabitants had their own sufferings and dealt with them one way or another. I felt safe, contrary to my expectations, and much less conspicuous than I did in Powys Street market. Not only was my sight transformed, but the other senses as well. The tiny birds being grilled in rows on handcart kitchens by the bridge smelt strange and tempting. There were fragrant trees with hard and leathery leaves. There were rickshaws, trishaws, trams, cars, vans and carts. And everywhere, once the traffic had passed, there was the sound of rubber thong-sandals, or leather ones, clap-flapping on the ground.

On the third day Mr Chaunteyman told me that Mrs Torboys had to go to the doctor that morning, and then, realising what he had said, made me promise not to repeat anything to my mother. He took me to the Tiger Balm Gardens. Painted concrete figures of, yes, torture and fun. And in the evenings of that lyrical and fraying week, having travelled back on the bus, I would hang about the muddy alleys of Changi village itself, looking for trinkets in the Chinese shop next to the thatched longhouse – where some Malayan families lived on stilts. Behind that there was nothing but authentic jungle. We stayed six days and then flew out by RAF Transport Comet for Adelaide, Mr Chaunteyman’s business, whatever it was, no doubt complete. My account is thus wrenched high out of my control.

I throw up my hands at this point. So much is all I know. That’s all I can tell you. As to the
Armorica
, she must have gone on, in her own way, to Australia. As I went in mine with Erica and Mr Chaunteyman – until we fetched up as I told you near a dump near a crossing, in a cheap rented cabin with splitting walls, marooned. And so my travelling companions dispersed towards their joys and tragedies half a century ago.

As for the loss of record, the missing documentation; no doubt an administrative blunder on some register when the ship was broken up. Most likely an early computer error which became perpetuated. Very probably some day I shall come across an old book of the fifties in which she figures in all her glory. For the present she is a mystery; but a minor one. Hardly a
Marie Celeste
, since it is the ship which is missing, rather than its crew; and the only witness I can supply is myself. As reliable as you may judge. But whatever opinion you form of me, there, in a sudden flight out of Singapore Island it must end. There, in a vapour trail, I must wash my hands of it.

Why then does my recollection of Adelaide flash and streak? That prim, sun-drenched city is established in my mind’s eye – focused, clear as a consequence. Yet, like the picture on an old television set, it gives way now and then. Its bright parks and suburbs are troubled with sheets of flood and inexplicable rain. Its seaside bask is shot through with cold and despair.

Of course there was occasionally rain, sometimes torrential. It could feel cooler, and sharper. But my sense is not of that. It is as though one image is at the mercy of another: inside the water an invisible fire lies. This is not bushfire, that common hazard of the tinder dry, but of something else, smouldering deep down. It is electrical, hydroptic. I cannot tell you about Adelaide without the thought of something terrible happening out at sea. I have four memories.

In the first, I am at a beach. Glenelg, or is it Largs? Men stand outside the hotel bar in their relentless formality of suits and trilby hats, holding empty glasses; across the wide empty road, they lean in ones and twos on the barrier which fences off the beach. The Gulf of St Vincent lies silky green and languid under the glare. Past the curl of desultory wavelets breaking on to the sand, past the paddlers and the few bathers, the pointless wooden pier stretches out towards the horizon, only stopping short at a little makeshift stand with a bleached roof. The children see dolphins and come haring back along the planks to press the shark alarm. Then, to the sound of hooter-whoops, a mother picks up her toddler and strolls out of the sea. It is roasting weather, yet I am shivering desperately, unable to get warm.

In the second, someone drives us across the level plain from the port to the township. We have been on a day-trip to see the yachts. The stink of the canning factory hangs in the air. But looking back through the rear window, instead of those two rust-streaked tower vats raised up out of the flat brown there is the nose of a ship. It stands up vertical, in silhouette, like the towers themselves – and all the ground is awash, as though tiny Dry Creek had burst its banks.

Then, the opening day of the new term, my new school. The headmaster lifts his brown hat to dust his brow. He has fierce tufts of greying hair. There are about a hundred children in the centre of the compound. The headmaster has a cane under his arm.

On the one side stands the cement-white school block, two storeys high. On the other, the concrete shed for lunches. Cement dust is everywhere; it has whitened the hard, bare ground so much that the morning sun glares up into our faces and we screw up our eyes. Builders’ rubble lies in heaps; their machinery is dotted about near the perimeter wire. Beyond that a few huge gum-trees stretch up out of the clay. At least they cannot be new. For everywhere here, whether inside the school compound or beyond, looks to my eye half-finished; because there is no tarmac, nor concrete paving-stones, nor green grass. It is as though they have put down odd buildings and forgotten to build streets.

‘I want all the Catholics over here.’ The headmaster marches to a region over by the shed. A gaggle of children follow him. ‘Presbyterians?’ He paces to the front of the new block. Then nearer the wire. ‘All Anglicans over here.’ Another clump of young bodies – those who know what Anglican means – surges towards him. But he is off again, trouser cuffs flapping round his ankles. He calls the Methodists to the cement-mixer, the Lutherans to the workmen’s shelter, the Baptists and Anabaptists to the pile of breeze-blocks, and the Unitarians to where the bicycles have all been lain down, like a desiccated herd of cattle.

When I am the only one left, nearly crying in the middle, he waves me towards the Anglicans, and I am saved. I see just outside the perimeter a different tree, alive with blossom. On every blossom hangs a milkweed butterfly, feeding, flickering. I am on the
Armorica
again. My bone-dry clothes are soaked with downpour; the tree has burst into flames. Each butterfly is an explosion. We are wrecked and there will be no help for us – for all the water in the ocean.

Last of all, Erica and I are on the veranda of the crack-walled house. When the north wind blows in the afternoon it feels as though an oven door has opened behind the thin strip of houses on the other side of the road. Now there is a red tinge to the clouds.

‘You see that? Here we go again, Ralphie. Let’s get the windows shut.’

Then quite high up the sky streaks with rouge. Before too long there is a dark, red-coloured shadow, looming from the northern sweep over the low roofs opposite. It spreads out. Soon its wings stretch as far as the crossing one way, and right behind the hills the other.

The first fingers of grit come at us, thrusting through the bungalows. They whip our faces and we are driven inside. From the window we watch the full storm build. By a quirk of the air currents there is a succession of dust-devils like pillars of fire, up the dirt road from the crossing. That is the advance guard, stalking sideways. Then the main force hits us full on and we are no longer in any doubt about its intentions. Blasting and stinging at the glazing and brickwork it is like a red mist that has gone out of its mind. It is Australia on the move, all furnaced up, lifted from the rocket-range deserts beyond the black stump and brought down by the baking wind.

Afterwards there is a mess, and we have to clear away, brush off, shovel out, while the wind is set to broil on for another three or four days. Yet I see myself bailing out water instead of sand in the downpour, and the red cloud is a drift of ship smoke on the horizon.

This is a madness of picture postcards. I have become distracted. I believed I had told you everything: of my home in Woolwich, my career. I outlined my service in the Falklands, to make sense of things. I have given you my childhood’s voyage, over half the world. I have confessed to the burnt-out Holden. I have said much, much more than I knew at the start – of love, and my father, and the best room. I told you as clearly as I could how we jumped ship at Singapore.

Then why will the story not arrive at its destination: aboard the Comet next to Erica, clutching my Reader’s Digest Condensed Book from the hotel? However hard I try, I cannot make that plane go south – from Changi to Darwin, and then on to Adelaide’s Edinburgh Airport. The direction is all wrong – a mental compass is awry; and I cannot place Mr Chaunteyman with us at all.

There is a faintness and nausea. I have the sensation once more of hanging, without a body, without a history, above the whole thing – high up with the great seabird, adrift on the upper currents, the albatross, the booby, the frigate bird, or even the legendary roc. It is a terrifying drop. I am returned willy-nilly to our dalliance at Singapore, the row, Chaunteyman’s silver-screen looks, and the mention of Lucas’s new venture. I have deliberately muddled the sequence in my mind. It did not happen as I have described at all.

I see now that I have constructed my whole life precisely in order to avoid seeing. Yes, there were the rows, but Erica did not prevail. Yes, I gave Mr Chaunteyman the shrunken head. But it was at our parting, to protect him from a Changi I had not yet visited; did not visit, in fact, for more than a year. Yes, Erica wept in the hotel there, but not on
this
trip. That was on our return to England, and my memory has tricked me, matched one set of weepings to another.

I have done it before – left out a whole ship. I told you that tale at the start about my battle stress, little thinking that was the regular way of things. Let me make this quite clear. Come alongside me, I have it now. I went
out
through Singapore on the
Armorica
; I
flew home
through Singapore more than a year later. In my premature account of Changi I have confused the two, laying the one direction on top of the other and marrying the events – shaving off loose ends, as we story-tellers will without knowing it. We fool ourselves as well.