My Life as a Fake (17 page)

They were burned alive, I told you—
aigh
, the sea at Pantai Baru, blackened wood, bodies, all awash. It was then my left eye turned sideways, not until. Right eye weeping like a child, the other blind and dry with hate.

I had my father’s Land Rover. They stole it and beat me with bamboo. I walked back north along the jungle paths. I could not spit. No, I wept my water.

My brothers had bicycles—not the sports models the Japanese preferred—these models were too tall for the murderers to reach the pedals. At Bukit Tambun my brothers
caught up with me. When I would not return with them to Segari, they made me a black patch for my injured eye, but I tore it off, I would not cover up my hate. It was all that remained of love.

When he crossed at Butterworth, Mulaha learned how low he would have to bow to his conquerors. He did not care, or so he claimed years later, walking along North Beach in the moonlight.

I came back to George Town like a one-eyed worm, he told Christopher Chubb, a corkscrew jigger to burrow through their feet.

Municipal garbage collection was abandoned, so rubbish was piled high in the streets and the air was filled with huge mosquitoes. The house in Queen Street had been looted but he found clean clothes in his father’s press and headed to the E&O. This was where the Japs had billeted their officers, he said. Where
else-ah?
The drains along Penang Road were covered with a thick black slime.

In Farquhar Street he stood directly in front of that exclusive door. Mulaha, the rickshawallahs whispered, circling him. Mulaha, you must go away, they hissed. Don’t turn that eye on them. They will top
you-lah
.

But Mulaha means ‘temper,’ Christopher. Have I told you that?

No.

Yes I did. Same nickname as my father. I was in a temper now, believe me. Then the rickshawallahs fell quiet, said Mulaha, and I immediately saw why. The beheader had come. He was already staring at me from the open door of the Eastern and Oriental Hotel, where you and I first met, where they thought I had no right to be, where my beautiful Tamil mother once danced with Mr Sarkis when he balanced Scotch whisky on his head.

A soldier?

This was a captain in the Japanese Army. He had a wild and straggly beard. His hair was long and filthy. Up his left arm were wristwatches, ten of them at least. His sword was not long but his legs were short and the scabbard scraped the pavement as he approached. I bowed, flopping down on the tarmacadam like a dying fish. I heard that sword skittering towards me, worse than fingernails on a blackboard. And then I smelt him,
Tuan
, and this is how I knew who he was. He stank. He stank like the lowest of the beggars who have ever lived. When I heard the sword drawn from its scabbard, my temper died, I pissed my pants.

Kepara poton
, he asked.

He could not speak properly but I understood him. He meant
kepala poton
. Head cut. Would I like my head cut off.

No,
Tuan
.

He rested the point of his sword against my outstretched arm and drew a thin line of blood to underline my Rolex. I did not require to be instructed further. I removed the watch and offered it. I dared not look up at him, but it is clear he examined the casing closely for he read out the name and address my father insisted be engraved there. Lose your head, my father had said, if it was not screwed on.

Speak English?

Only a little,
Tuan
.

This your house, Rolex-san? Queen Street?

Yes,
Tuan
.

Very well. Chop-chop. We go. Now.

Christopher, there were flies crawling all over him, circling him, a swarm of them swimming inside his pool of stink. Later I heard many stories about him, that he had royal blood, that he had vowed not to wash his body or cut his hair until the war was won, who knows what was true, only that he was a notorious beheader.

Now he was in a rickshaw, his sword resting naked across his lap. He told me run in front of him to lead the way. At Queen Street I opened the door and he took the key and locked me out. I did not know he had taken possession of my home. I imagined he had gone to loot, the bastard. I would skin him alive, I would boil him like a chicken in a pot.

Take it easy please, said Chubb.

No, never. Never
releks
. Not now. Not ever. I know what these monsters do. I know what must be done. We permitted Tatsuki Suzuki to kill our wives and children.

That was his name?

This man, Christopher, this man who took my family’s house, we permitted him to keep chopping off our neighbours’ heads. Where were the English? Absent. The Australians? Gone. We let him do it. We watched him wipe his sword clean with a sheet of white paper. There was no-one better to kill than this filthy creature who slept in my own bed like a parasite inside my bowel. How to kill him, that was all I thought.

There was an old Chinese woman who lived on Queen Street, Christopher. The Chinese have too many babies, don’t need all those girls. This one had been adopted by Hindus and now she made her living cooking
apom
, rice flour, coconut, sugar, Hindu breakfast, very nice. She made it in what we call an
ottu kada
, like a shell on a rock, a rough shack glued onto the wall behind. We never spoke to her before the day my house was taken. But she took me in, Christopher. I slept on the floor beside her in her tiny shed. From there I spied on my own front door, saw the demon come and go, plotted how I would destroy him.

Soon he had a red MG, confiscated from some North Beach
baba
, isn’t it? On the other side of my front door was a man who had one of those papaya and banana stalls. Sundralingham he was called, a handsome fellow with a black moustache. Well, early one morning he accidentally scraped the
MG with his trolley. Poor fellow. He was very frightened and when Captain Suzuki came out my front door Sundralingham immediately confessed what he had done. It was him, no-one else, his fault completely. He was offering his life,
Tuan
, so no-one else would suffer. I watched Suzuki rest his hand on the hilt of his sword but he did not draw it out.

You want
kepara poton
?

No,
Tuan
.

Then you get me musk melon.

What that?

Not monkey fruit. Not this. And he swept half the papayas from Sundralingham’s stand. You get me musk melon. In season now.

Sundralingham knew he was
kepara poton
, for this request was quite impossible even before the war.

Yes,
Tuan
. Tomorrow,
Tuan
.

Next morning he was gone. Ran away or dead, which is it? No-one would lay a finger on his stand. Bananas went black and fell. Papayas rotted and the flies were as thick as on Suzuki. For many, many hours I lay in the
ottu kada
smelling the sickly smell, thinking how stupid we had been to rely on foreigners to protect us. I now understood that it was Malaya we should have trusted. Our country was worth a million English soldiers. She is like those big poison fish that permit a tribe of little fish to swim within their gills. We are the baby fish,
Tuan
, safe in a place which is poison to the Japanese. Everywhere you look at nature you will see a secret way the country can destroy these monsters. There is a weapon in a tortoise or a frog or a toad. Death lives in a worm or grasshopper. See that bamboo over there—just there, Christopher. Touch it. It has silky hair like between a woman’s legs, but I can make a poison from it which will leave you
mabok
like that dog.

I don’t want to poison anyone, said Chubb.

Well, I got to thinking about a musk melon. Anyone could tell you it was impossible, no chance at all. Everything rationed,
one guntang of
rice for every man, that is all. But also there were large Japanese transports landed at the airport and much corruption, and lastly I knew the Chinese gangster Yeoh Huan Choo, known as Potato. Avery tough negotiator, but I borrowed English pounds and three weeks later was the owner of three perfect musk melons, value three hundred pounds, a fortune, but not too much for something impossible.

The next morning, when Suzuki opened my front door he looked down on Sundralingham’s stall. Everything scrubbed, shining, and three musk melons sitting in a field of silver. His eyes popped out.

Surely, Mulaha, he was suspicious?

Of course. If he had not been suspicious it would’ve been a waste of time. He had stolen my house. I hated him. He had not asked me for musk melon, he had asked Sundralingham, but Sundralingham had run away or perhaps was killed or jailed. In any case Suzuki had three perfect musk melons. He shook his finger at me, as if warning me. I looked into his two black eyes and was afraid.

We will share, he said at last. We eat melon together, Rolex-san.

My hands were trembling. I selected a melon but he chose another, with a tiny green blemish. I picked up the knife, cut it, handed him one half. Then he called out to his ugly sergeant, who ran into my house and came out with two of my mother’s best silver spoons. We ate side by side sitting on low metal stools in Queen Street, the smelly beast with his sword resting in the dirt—an insect with a dragging stinger.

Very good, he said. But I could see that he was unsettled. I will come back tomorrow, Rolex-san. We will eat again.

Then he got into his MG and drove away.

The following morning, his sergeant found him in my parents’ bed. He had bloomed in the night, like a chrysanthemum, petals of blood thrusting through his skin.

In the moonlight Chubb saw how bright and excited his friend’s good eye shone. This man, he thought, is too dangerous for me.

Mulaha, all I want is my child.

Yes, you are lucky. She is alive.

I do not want to kill anyone.

Oh, and are you not wondering how this one died?

I suppose you had injected poison into one side of the melon.

But which melon—all three? And what would stop the poison flowing all through the fruit? No, you see, I used the Malay tradition. I prepared the knife. I will show you how to do the same. Can?

I don’t need to know.

In any case, I will show you. For this and fifty-six similar services in defence of my people, the Governor of Penang gave me the bloody Panglima. I had lost our house to the
chettiars
—long story…. I am back to being a
cigku
, one more poor Tamil teacher, like my grandfather.

They had by now reached the front gate of the school and they walked in silence around the dark and airless wall of jungle to Mulaha’s house. Here the host immediately unlocked the heavy padlock—a strange and intimate moment, as if some deep and dreadful knowledge waited inside the locked room, as if they were about to commit a crime or sleep together.

Come in, he said.

Dry bunches of vegetable matter were hanging from the ceiling and stacked in corners. Beneath the window was a grey metal desk, its surface completely covered by books, loose papers, scales, knives, and pieces of native pottery. Shelves filled every wall, crammed with glass jars which had formerly held peanut butter or honey but now bore white laboratory labels of identical size. The odour was overpowering, a smell like that of fermenting tea.

My little hobby, Christopher.

Chubb could recall only a few labels: ‘Cat Fish Gall,’ ‘Sting Ray Spine,’ ‘Dendang Beetle,’ ‘Grasshopper Pesan.’

But he had hundreds of them, Mem, can you imagine? Ants and frogs, and dried-up fish slime. At the time I thought it mumbo-jumbo, but I was wrong. I have read the literature in K.L. Most of these substances would kill you or make you very sick. The powders are the worst—powdered millipede, for instance. A puff of air and you are dead. This was why he would never have a window open.
Cheh!
What sort of maniac was this? You could die of his goodwill.

He had decided for me that I would murder McCorkle. No consultation on this issue. No need to thank him. He would kindly teach me how to do it properly. His point was that I was lucky to have met him, but at five in the morning it hardly felt like luck. He wished to find a dog and show me how to deal with it.

Tired, I said.

Forget the dog then. He would demonstrate how he had killed Suzuki only. I did not wish to know, not then or ever. He showed me the very knife he used on the musk melon. It had been soaked in urine so the poison would adhere. Then he mixed some powder with oil and began to coat one side of it. That was the trick, you see: poison on one side of the knife. Good eye, bad eye. Good side, bad side. He coated the bad side with four different poisons. The smell in the room was very strong and I had a strange taste in my throat. All I was thinking was I must depart.

The following afternoon, Mad Dogs and Englishmen. I walked all the way into George Town and there,
oy-oy-oy
, a long raving letter from Noussette. Page one: I was a leech. She would give me nothing, ever. Page two: I was a liar. She said I had brought McCorkle on myself. Page three was even better: the creature did not exist. She would sue me if I ever claimed that she’d met him in Kings Cross.

What could I say? I was now trapped at the Bukit Zam-rud English School and when the headmaster finally struck I was in no position to refuse his pitiful wages. Mathematics and Physics. Two hundred and fifty dollars a month less board. Chubb here looked down at his dry old hands. No more True Parrot for me—or maybe once. Each night I had to learn the maths I taught the following day.

For almost three months, until the end of the monsoon, Chubb continued at the poison house. He was twice excited by reports of McCorkle and his daughter, but nothing came of them and he quickly gave up hope. For Mulaha it was different: he would lose too much face if his promise was not honoured.

He made me prepare the damned E.S. parcel even though nothing more was forthcoming from the rickshawallahs. I was to kill him this way—no, no, that way. Whenever he
changed his mind he must test the poison on some poor dog or chicken and have me watch it die. I hated to see the suffering. More than once he poisoned himself and then there were great scenes of retching and shuddering in the middle of the night. Never sure if some were not intentional. Three times he got out of taking the cricket team to Kuala Kangsar— severe vomiting at six a.m.—and each time I had to take his place and then I was trapped in the company of the headmaster. David Grainger from Ballan. Must sit next to him. No reading permitted, must listen to the moron talk. ‘The Malay Character’ was his hobby-horse.

Zinc cream all over his stupid nose, Mem, like a bloody sunburned ostrich. He knew nothing of Malaya but had a great terror of
amok
. On and on until the bus stopped unexpectedly. What’s this? What’s this? His first thought, of course, was terrorists.

Nothing, I said. A car broken down.

But Grainger was now standing in the aisle poking his bright white nose over the driver’s shoulder.

A large silver car was stopped at an angle across the road. Surrounding it was a mob of Malays in colourful dress.

Nothing, dear chap? Nothing? It’s an Orang Kaya Kaya!

The thing was this, Chubb explained to me, an Orang Kaya Kaya is not royalty, but almost as good. The title means he’s bloody rich. Grainger immediately roared at the driver. His proper name was Kee Guat Eng but Grainger called him Ah Kee, as if he was a dog.

Ah Kee, door open.

Then the fool went hopping out onto the road like a scavenger that has found something nice and dead to eat.

The crowd opened like a gorgeous poppy and in its centre Chubb saw a tall light-skinned man whose grey hair and white moustache did nothing to hinder an expression of
extreme hauteur. His tartan jacket combined many violent colours, and his loose white silk trousers were fastened by many yards of scarlet waist-cloth. All this he set off with sky-blue canvas shoes.

Before this luminous individual the sheep-coloured Grainger all but prostrated himself. The Kaya Kaya allowed himself a few words in reply before turning to speak to an equerry, thus leaving the headmaster uncertain of whether he should stay or go. Finally he bowed to the Kaya Kaya’s back and boarded the bus. Chubb sighed and put his book away.

I offered him a ride, the headmaster said, but do you know what he told me? ‘I have my own mechanist.’ Ha ha. That’s good, isn’t it? Mechanist. But imagine the piles of dough these fellows have. Travels with his bloody mechanist. Look, there he is.

The bus was pushing slowly through the crowd and as they passed the car—an Austin Sheerline—the great hulking body of the mechanic emerged slowly from underneath and a white face blinked up at them.

Good grief, cried Grainger, a bally Englishman!

It was Bob McCorkle. When Chubb saw him, he cared not a damn about the first eleven or David Grainger either. He rose from his seat and made his way forward.

Stop the bus, he demanded.

You sit, said Kee Guat Eng. Too late already.

Gostan
, please. Meaning: Back up.

But then Grainger clapped a hand on his shoulder. Come, old chap, don’t panic. You must sit down.

Chubb does not seem to have been a violent man, but the bus was now picking up speed and no-one was about to
gostan
for him. So he pushed the headmaster in the chest, just at the moment Kee Guat Eng accelerated, and Grainger followed the laws of first-form physics (M = m × v), tottering
backwards down the aisle with his hands held high and his freckled face contorted in a rictus of alarm.

Sorry, Chubb cried.

For a moment it seemed the headmaster would maintain his dance all the way to the back seat, but suddenly he fell hard upon his tailbone.

Stop the bus, cried Chubb.

Get him, boys, Grainger shouted. Get the cad.

Both orders were obeyed and, as the bus came to a halt, fourteen doe-eyed princes descended on their maths teacher in a wave of soap and garlic, banging his forehead and scratching his face and arms and pounding his body with their bony knees and elbows. Chubb could not bring himself to strike back and so was held prisoner for the headmaster to inspect.

Get up, man.

All Chubb knew was he had to get out of that bus.

In your seat, said David Grainger.

I must get out.

Sir, be seated.

In a display of ingenuity that he was still proud of years later, Chubb doubled over and began to retch.

Open the door, cried the headmaster.

With one bound Chubb sprang out and began sprinting up the dusty Ipoh Road. In so doing he abandoned a notebook full of poetry, three shirts, two pairs of trousers, and his copy of Mallarmé, all of which were in Mulaha’s cottage.

They had only travelled a mile or two past the Austin Sheerline but in reverse it was all uphill and severely rutted from the wet season, with the result that Chubb’s sprint soon became a limping walk and when he arrived at the place where McCorkle had lain so short a time before all he found was a large black oil stain in the dirt. This might have made
another man regret his actions, but Chubb reckoned that so many people could not have been accommodated inside the Austin, and as no-one was visible on the road ahead they must therefore have come from a settlement nearby. There was a large river not far distant, and so he reasoned the Kaya Kaya’s palace was most likely on its bank. Further, there must be a path from here to there. Of course there was no guarantee that McCorkle would be with them, only that so oil-stained a man was unlikely to be welcome inside so grand a motor car.

He found a track which started out smoothly enough but soon became, Chubb told me, a succession of holes filled with mud and water, pretty much what you might expect if you knew it had been constructed and maintained by elephants for their own convenience.

He set off in cricket whites. Six hours later, toward the end of the afternoon, he emerged from the jungle covered with red mud and bitten beyond endurance. In spite of this, he was gratified to find himself looking across a wide, clear river, on the banks of which he could make out, beneath the foliage, houses and orchards and rice fields. It was a splendid view, made all the more so by the crimson streak in the sky above the last spur of a picturesque range of mountains. On the flats stood a number of large palm-thatched houses on stilts, and off by itself, a bright-yellow palace with high-pitched tile roofs and a cross-hatched gingerbread appearance. In the shadow of the palace was the Austin Sheerline.

I closed my notebook, and the extraordinary fellow looked at me with surprise.

It is not the end, he said. There is more to tell.

Mr Chubb, you have talked all day and almost half the night. I need a little rest.

Of course, he said. I will come back at noon.

I did not wait for him to go, but went to the bathroom to scrub the inkstains from my aching hands.