My Life as a Fake (16 page)

No sooner had they arrived than Mulaha disappeared into a back room and there was nothing for Chubb to do but wait. His own room was unbearable so he returned to the living room and began to release the windows, but immediately found himself opposed by a wizened Chinese ‘house boy’ who followed behind him implacably shutting everything he opened. Chubb turned on the ceiling fan, the house boy switched it off. Chubb attempted a conversation but the man had no English. He sat down on the clear end of the sofa. No books. No food. No water in sight.

So did he rethink his decision to stay?

Who cares I am boiled alive, said the old contrarian. I had
rickshaws and postmen. This E.S. I did not yet know how to work; I knew I must wait for it. Mulaha was also most
engagé
. No, Mem, I know I complained about the heat, but I was happy as a dog with two tails. Kerosene practically dripping from the boiling iron—not even that could disturb my equanimity.

‘Equanimity’ however, does seem
exactly
the wrong word. I imagine ants and luminescent insects, dispossessed of their thatch, crawling around his feet as he sat there worrying over his remaining currency. Twenty dollars, is this sufficient tea money? No matter what he claimed, it was surely frightening for a man so emotionally exhausted to give himself not so much to the toxic heat but to the buffetings of hope.

The house, he told me, had two bedrooms and a third room, distinguished by a brass padlock, now hanging open from a strong steel hasp. This was where Mulaha had gone, and Chubb now sought him out to ask if perhaps some windows could be opened. But the house boy picked up a bucket, tucked his sarong between his legs and, coming forward like a batsman facing a ferocious fast bowler, began to splash water aggressively towards him. Chubb retreated to the safety of the verandah and here he squatted, native style, with his back pressed against the clapboard wall. In the distance he heard the thwack of a willow bat hitting a leather-cased ball, the first sign that he was on the grounds of a peculiar English school. Staring down into the shadows of the rain forest he was reminded of New Guinea, and when he heard rustling amongst the vegetation he flinched only once, for what appeared before him was a tall man wearing an Australian slouch hat. With the man was a Scotch terrier. When Chubb stood and waved the terrier ran back to his master, yapping fearfully.

The man approached slowly through the scaly shadows,
slapping a leash against his leg. He emerged in a patch of blinding sunlight which revealed a very large revolver in his hand.

The pistol did not really shock me, said Chubb. What I noticed was he had a great big schnozz, Mem, a totally Aussie schnozz, painted white like a parade-ground rock. It made me homesick, so homely and familiar.

Hello there, said the man.

Hello, said Chubb.

I’m David Grainger.

Christopher Chubb.

Yes, but I mean—I’m the headmaster.

Something in the way he spoke should’ve warned me, Mem, but on the other hand he was Australian. I had been so very pleased to hear the accent that now I made a try for one last joke and said, You’ve been shooting rabbits?

Went down like a bag of warm sick, as they say at home. No response at all. Up the steps he came. The communists have just killed a Christian Brother on Penang Hill, he said, as if I were a shit for joking at such a time. They broke into his school and butchered him.

Is that near here?

He didn’t bother answering. Do you have a weapon? he said.

No.

He stepped inside the house and talked to the house boy in Malay. Did not sound a friendly conversation. On and on he went, with the house boy only answering reluctantly. As for the interrogator, his language sounded like it had been learned in Ballarat.

Mulaha he did not speak to. Too polite, perhaps, to cross the threshold of his private room. But he’s only too happy to grill me. Did I understand the country was in a state of emergency? Was I a friend of Cikgu Chomley?

I said we had just met at the E&O. Wrong thing to mention, it seems.

His eyebrows shot halfway up his forehead. No, he cried. Clapped his big freckled hand onto his head.

I tried to make a joke, said the eggs were so bad I would not return.

He gave me a hard look. You’d be surprised how small George Town is, he said. You do Mr Chomley no favour by taking him to the E&O. A reputation can be easily lost.

Only later did I understand that a Tamil would never go to the E&O, and what had happened that morning was generally thought impossible.

He asked me was I a university man.

Sydney.

B.A.?

Already I disliked him.
Kn’ua kuan bo kniua kair
, Mem. Looks high, never looks low. A snob. I told him Ph.D., which was one year short of the truth.

Cricket?

A grade, I said. Like county cricket, Mem, for your information. This was a lie as well.

Grainger looked me up and down as if I were a horse he might buy when the price came low enough. Very good, he said. Please inform Mr Chomley to keep a sharp eye out. The police have shut down the train to Penang Hill. He whistled and his Scottie came running. From his pocket he took a greasy-looking lamb bone which he threw into the long grass. The dog took off with its master close behind him.

A moment later Mulaha emerged, no longer in his suit but dressed in a white shirt and white dhoti. He had bushy black hair all up his legs. Master Grainger, he said with a smirk. They call him Mad Mat.

He said there are communists.

Yes, of course. Shame you told him about the E&O.

Sorry.

Not to worry, but you must never let a dog into the house like that. Not your fault, old man, but best keep the door shut.

I don’t like animals in the house either.

It’s this, you see—what if he had died? More than my job is worth.

Why would he die?

Mulaha looked at me.

Take my word. They die.

I thought that a little strange, Mem. But pick up the pen. Gets better.

To reach this stage of his story had taken until Wednesday night—that is, just four days before I must leave for London with my treasure. We sat by the Merlin Pool all afternoon and took dinner there, but by midnight we had shifted inside to the Highland Stream, where I was still transcribing, no damned end in sight. On and on he went, often repeating himself and circling back to correct some imagined misunderstanding before, finally, continuing.

In Penang, he said, there is also a Campbell Street. The Chinese called it New Street: Sin Kay. But when you say that in Hokkien it can mean ‘fresh prostitutes’ as well. Mulaha told me this at least four times—his good eye glistening, his enthusiasms clear even before I detected his cologne amidst
the flood of kerosene. The delicate little fellow was
kutu embun
, a dew beetle, coming home at dawn each Sunday. Singsong girls his weekly sport-
ah
. As for me, I never visited a brothel in my life. Once, perhaps, in Townsville. It was not the tarts that put me off. It was my fellow patients in the repat. Missing arms and legs, some of them, but they would hobble into town and then come swinging back into the ward boasting about their bloody gonorrhea.
Aiyo!
They had no face, Mem, showing their disease to one another, howling each morning when they peed.

Come, come, said Mulaha Chomley Time for dancing.

No thank you, no Sin Kay for me.

Sin Kay? Sin Kay is finished since the war. But you must visit a certain place. A man in your position. Essential, isn’t it?

His dead eye on me—horrible really, sucked dry of all emotion. This grim organ signified nothing but I supplied a horrid meaning. Made me hot all over.

I asked him what the hell he meant to imply.

Releks
, man, he said. Steady on.

But I could not forget the stories from my sergeant who served in Egypt. He swore men had sex with kiddies.

Promise it is not her?

Pardon?

My girl? My girl is not in a brothel.

He might have laughed at my hysteria but he did not. They say Malaysians don’t touch, but Mulaha took my sleeve.
Releks
, he said, and I took that kindness as my right. I had no idea, Mem, how much worse his own suffering was, could not begin to guess what his dead eye saw as he rode his Vespa around Penang. The blazing body of a Tamil merchant, sitting upright with a violent jerk. Flies crawling on Captain Suzuki’s unwashed arm. The fluttering eyelids of a decapitated head. Blood spurting from a neck, rising as high as the
roof of the Hong Aun Coffee Shop and Hotel. Yes, yes, Mem. I will explain in time.

In my ignorance I was the proprietor of all pain. He held on to my sleeve and guided me down the wobbly steps and along the muddy path. It was dark now and the lights of the school spilled over the queer-shaped hill and brushed the edges of the jungle. I did not have the sense to be afraid.

We let ourselves out the gate and soon were laying a blanket of blue smoke behind us on the road. Malay Village, Shit Stink Gardens, Chinese Cemetery, Rambutan Plantation, then a sign that had been hidden in the morning sunlight: The True Parrot, glowing green above the tops of the rambutans.

Cabaret only, said Mulaha.

What a lie that was, but never mind. We bounced down a dirt track, then navigated an untidy tangle of parked cars and Chinese trucks, walked past the biggest Sikh you ever saw, crossed Sungai Babi by a rickety footbridge. The air here smelled appropriately of beauty and corruption, foetid river-mud and salty sea. I could hear a woman singing ‘Venus,’ and a lovely syncopated piano. And suddenly, without warning, we were on the edge of a dance floor. No roof at all, just a platform of polished concrete above the lapping sea. The moon was huge and mustard-yellow. Bass, drums, piano, this gorgeous Eurasian woman singing. ‘Venus, Venus, if you will …’

Come, said Mulaha, I spend you.

I thought he meant a drink, but when he returned it was to press a roll of something into my hands.

Tickets for the taxi-girls, he said. I spend you.

Then I saw the so-called taxi-girls sitting in a row along the back, a numbered card held in every lap. One ticket per dance, that’s how it worked at The True Parrot. Upstairs some rooms, just like Chusan and other nightclubs in those days.

Ipoh girls, Mulaha said. Jiggy-jiggy isn’t it?

Ipoh, Mem, is the city where these girls are said to come from. They had gorgeous legs showing through their long slit dresses.

Cannot, I said.

How cannot? But he was not interested in my answer for his good eye was already on a tall girl rising from her seat to greet him. Part Malay, lovely almond eyes, a head taller than my jet-black friend, who was in some exquisite way her equal. A lovely, lovely dancer. How I wished to spend my tickets, yet I could not break free of myself. I drank—what else to do-
lah?

Believe me, the shy develop expert strategies, as complex as a molecule of haemoglobin. So when the band finished their set I seized the piano for myself and began ‘In the Mood’ with a few flashy runs, then a low boogie bassline. Shy, not shy, how can I explain it? A show-off. Repeat the bassline but never release the melody, so everyone is waiting for it.

It was Mulaha and his gorgeous taxi-girl, Chubb said, who came to me first. He laid his crisp white handkerchief on the piano and his whisky glass on top. They claim Bertie Limuco had once played that particular piano, but it was well past such polite treatment. Then he stretched out his delicate left hand, the one with the Rolex hanging so loosely from it, and played the single notes of the melody.

Taxi-girls came wanting business-
lah
. I could not look at them. I upped the tempo. Then Mulaha thinks to toy with me, playing the last note of each phrase after the beat. I can smell women’s powder, perfume, the heat of their lovely foreign bodies. Mulaha’s good eye is very bright. Two girls are dancing with a Chinese gangster in a huge white suit.

Then I put both hands to work. Gorgeous little taxi-girl with an ornate kimono—it would be worth a thousand quid
these days—comes and holds a gin and tonic to my lips. I sucked on it as I played. Quinine and gin, they say it stops malaria.

I could go on, but no need. You are a woman of the world, Mem. I made the flowers in the melody and then the band returned and later I made quite different flowers on a narrow hospital bed upstairs. In the middle of my misery I was blessed. Spent all my tickets. First time in a long, long while that I was happy.

We delivered the girls back home to Armenian Street, four of us on a Vespa. Too drunk to fall. I completely forgot my child—but listen. I knew I had been lonely, Mem, yet I had no understanding of my desolation until my skin was finally touched.

It was almost four in the morning and I laboured on, in my room now, driven by a mixture of opportunism and curiosity while Chubb, showing no signs of fatigue, continued with his tale.

It had been at almost the same late hour, though many years before, of course, that Mulaha’s red Vespa had become irretrievably jammed into a deep drain in Penang and, after doing their best to hide it beneath one of those heavy concrete slabs that dot the landscape of Malaysia, the two dew bugs set off on foot towards the Bukit Zamrud English School. They were very drunk indeed.

Coming into the neighbourhood of the E&O, Mulaha suddenly veered away, stabilising himself against the cyclone fence of St Xavier’s School, where he insisted he’d been dux in 1938.

Come, I’ll show you photos on the walls. See how pale they made me look. Special price, I bet you.

They negotiated the rusty latch, but had less success with the school doors, lighting match after match that fell blazing into the wet grass.

It was then that the dog appeared, barking.

This was one of those curs, Mem. You have seen them in K.L.—suppuration, distended teats, no harm in them really. But the Tamil—
wah!
Take this, he cried, and thrust his hand into his rumpled trousers. I told myself, he has a pistol too.

Hand still in pocket, Mulaha came directly at the dog, which bared its yellow teeth and backed itself up under the low branches of a poinciana.

Releks
, I told him, may have rabies-
ah
. The Tamil gave me the dead eye and from his pocket removed—no pistol, thanks to God—something else, small and white. Then he made a gesture, like tossing deck quoits. Good form also. The dog skipped back before sneaking up to sniff the object. I thought it was a stone, but the dog swallowed it down, one gulp.

Watch,
Tuan
, cried Mulaha. He was the Cheshire bloody cat, teeth gleaming in the moonlight. Now, my friend, he said to me, both hands deep and happy in his pockets, kindly to observe what follows.

The dog had changed his attitude. No barking now. Ears cocked, head to one side.

Observe, my friend.

And Mem, the bloody mongrel fell. Like a pigeon from the sky. Good God, man! I said to Mulaha.

Sit, he demanded, not of the dog, but of me, patting a
wooden bench where in daylight you can still see the Cantonese amahs waiting to pick up their charges after school.

Is it dead, I asked. I was not approving. Have you killed it?

You are going to live in my house? I am going to rescue your daughter? Then sit.

We sat side by side a while, the poor dog in the shadow not five feet from us.

You have an enemy, Mulaha said finally.

I was confused, somehow thinking he meant the dog.

I mean the bloody
hantu
who took your baby. McCorkle? Yes or not?

Yes.

Big head on him?

I told you.

Very strong … clever? Seven foot tall you said?

I told you—almost.

And cruel.

Yes.

And what will you do? You must have revenge,
Tuan
.

Had he killed the dog in revenge? All I could see was that lifeless eye. Mulaha, I said, you are drunk.

No, no, listen. Only our first day. You do not yet understand your luck. No-one better than me for you to have met. I will tell you how to solve your problem.

You told me already. We go to the rickshaws. Then we send the parcel.

That does not solve your problem, man. After that what will you do?

I will mail him the E.S. parcel, so you say.

Yes, yes, he will have to come to the P.O. to pick it up, but what will you do then? When you see the bastard, what will happen?

I shrugged.

You too half-past-six. You listen. I know.

Yes.

Do not worry about the bloody dog.

Very well.

You hear my little war story.

Now?

Yes, bloody now. This is why I am called Dato.

All right.

Do you know what Dato is?

No.

It is like Sir or Lord or O.B.E., that sort of thing.

Which one?

Any one. Don’t worry. I am not Dato really. They gave me a medal instead—Panglima. Means bloody nothing. Do you know how old I was when the Japanese invaded? I will tell you, Christopher—twenty-one. I had two good eyes, not like this now. Both straight ahead, like the headlamps of my father’s Humber. I had a very pretty clever wife, Rasathi, a sweet, juicy, slender-waisted girl, not from Jaffna—born on King Street in Penang. It was a
lauoo
marriage as they say. You cannot know how rare love marriages were before the war. Her parents never stopped being offended by the darkness of my skin. My mother-in-law was a light-skinned Jaffna Tamil, just like my father, but she was always drawing attention to her complexion, powdering it to make it even lighter. Also they were Hindu and I was what they call a Rice Christian, my Jaffna grandpa having converted in order to get his education. For all these reasons she thought her family above us, although in reality they owned a little spice shop on King Street while my father had a law degree from Oxford. Also we owned the mansion right on Queen Street, two pharmacies, a big rubber estate down in Segari.

The first Japanese bombers came in over George Town at ten in the morning. My beautiful Rasathi and her maid were packing our trunks for Trinity College, Dublin, where I was to study law. Two minutes later my father’s chambers were bombed to dust, his clerk was dead, my steamer tickets shredded to confetti. He ran into the street to find our saviours and protectors, Australians and British, scattering like panicked chickens. Smoke, fire, awful looting all over George Town. They broke into our beautiful house—Chinese gangsters. Axe brand. That’s what they called these goods when they were sold.

My father was a secretive man, always fearful of the worst. He had been collecting bicycles in preparation. Two hours after the bombing he and my younger brother delivered four of these precious machines to my in-laws’ spice shop. He advised them to immediately set off for Segari. It was a hundred and twenty miles to the plantation.

I was not witness to this conversation, but my in-laws soon rushed into the house on Queen Street and we all began to strap jewellery to our bodies and slip banknotes into shoes. Soon we were prepared but my mother-in-law must first go to the Sri Mariamman Temple across the street. Here she spoke with a certain priest, a well-known supporter of the Indian National Army. She returned with a pamphlet for her husband to read.

So, she asks, why we go to some cowboy town? No need-
ah
. These Japanese soldiers like us.

We were still in Penang three days later when our new
saviours arrived. By noon the beheadings had begun. Then they were stealing bicycles and watches. Then they were raping women in the five-foot ways on King Street. Suddenly my mother-in-law wished to go to Segari, and a little after three we all set off, in the middle of a rain-storm, my wife with our pretty baby daughter swaddled to her chest.

It was the storm that saved us. By dusk we were at the waterfront without being stopped. We took a motorised sampan across to Butterworth. By ten we had covered the twenty miles to Bukit Tambun, where a client of my father’s, a Mr Han, had a truck company. No
more-lah!
Japanese had commandeered the vehicles, Mr Han as well. The family weeping. Poor people. They let us sleep in the garage for the night.

My mother-in-law was in very poor shape for this journey. Her skin was chafed raw by her jewels and her lungs bad. We bicycled an hour next day, yet who could bear to listen to her pain? We came to Pantai Baru, a kind of Chinatown, but some Indian traders too. They had built their wooden houses on stilts along the banks of the river leading to the Strait of Malacca. It was a bustling sort of place, with a pharmacy owned by a cousin, and when he said our women might stay on, my father-in-law and I decided to strike out for Segari where we had a Land Rover.

When I left the next morning I was very proud to see my pretty wife asleep in bed with the baby at her breast.

I felt I was doing a good job of saving my family, but that very day the communists ambushed a patrol of Japanese and killed five of them. Very good, you would think. But nothing could be worse. That night the Japanese arrived in Pantai Baru. They ordered everyone into their wooden houses and then set the village on fire. Anyone who ran from their house was shot. Can’t talk more.

Mulaha spat onto the grass.

Sorry,
Tuan
.

He stood and walked towards the road. I rose myself but he waved me back onto the bench. I turned my back and looked at the lump of dog lying in the moonlight.

When Mulaha sat down he spoke quietly. No point I tell you more, he said, except for this. I would have revenge, you see. That is the point. I would have my revenge and live to see it. I would kill the bastards and not die myself.

He faced me now. I could see the huge furrow of his brow, the one dead eye. See? He pointed at the dog. You thought I was just a Tamil slave.

I had thought no such thing. I said so.

Then I will tell you this: I am Dato Sri Tunku Poisoner, my friend. I am sent from heaven for you. I am the one that you need.