My Life as a Fake (21 page)

Mr Lim, of course, had been the one who had been killed by pirates. Hearing this story from Chubb, I had assumed that the jagged scars that marked Mrs Lim’s cheek and neck were the consequence of that same assault, but that night on Jalan Campbell I learned this was not true.

The murder of her husband was a total horror, and when his screams had finally ceased and she emerged from the bathing hut where she had hidden from the Ambonese, she discovered that they’d hacked his head and limbs from his body. There are more disgusting details. You will forgive me for omitting them.

The newlyweds had been mining for tin in the upper reaches of the Perak River and as they spoke only Hokkien they had very little communication with the Malays. After the murder, of which she was for a considerable time a suspect, she survived alone for almost two years, living here and there in temporary shelters. She became adept in fashioning the more substantial parts of these structures from nipa palm and rattan, and they were light enough for her to carry from place to place. Though people mostly seem to have been kind, she shrank from society, and at the Orang Kaya Kaya’s compound, for instance, would wait at the edge of the jungle until someone sent a boy out with a banana-leaf parcel of rice or some other food.

Then Mr Bob and Tina arrived and the two of them were almost immediately in the jungle, collecting leaves and flowers, and peeling bark and fibre to make paper for the journals.

They often came across Mrs Lim’s shelters, and Mr Bob would leave food for her. How long this went on for, I don’t know. Some weeks, I imagine.

Mrs Lim had meanwhile been observing the strange white man closely. Naturally she did not understand why he was hunting such inedible things, but she was determined to repay his kindness and therefore secured a gigantic orchid and left it for him in the middle of a path. The orchid’s petals were a dull purple streaked with red, but its peculiar character derived from the strange fat rhizome with which it had grasped the tree, giving the orchid the appearance of a flower-headed snake. That it was also foul smelling did not diminish its appeal to the poet.

Later the same evening, with the stinking flower already in the press, the Orang Kaya Kaya and the priest provided Mr Bob and Tina the four different names by which the tree is known. The Muslim priest, who had considerable botanical knowledge, admitted that he had known the species only from its legendary smell, for the flower itself grows in the very crown, two hundred feet above the jungle floor. This was the first indication of Mrs Lim’s climbing ability, although to call it ‘ability’ is to underplay the role of her extraordinary will.

We might imagine how the pair of them drew closer and ultimately became, unlikely as it might have seemed, a couple. Even before she was so cruelly disfigured, Mrs Lim was never comely. She was short and compact. She had strong stout legs, a rather thick waist, and crooked lower teeth. Mr Bob, we have seen sufficient of—a tall man, handsome in a slightly wild and angry way. That this pair would become lovers might seem unthinkable, and yet it is so.

We can assume the child was jealous at first, but by the time she was rescued from the raja’s compound she and Mrs Lim were fiercely attached to each other. How this came about, I do not know.

Although the eccentric threesome was often fed and sheltered by villagers, for years they lived in the jungle and communicated in a private patois, woven together from English, Hokkien, and Bahasa Melayu. It was during this peripatetic period that they perfected the manufacture of the paper for the journals which would later line the walls of the musty smelling shrine at Jalan Campbell.

Based on the single volume I saw that evening—there were fifty of them altogether—it was immediately clear that the scope and ambition of the work far outweighed the ‘nature notes’ of any poet who ever lived. They were also clearly superior to the nineteenth-century accounts of Raffles and even of Wallace, and one can therefore rightly claim that Tina and Mrs Lim had been partners in one of the great projects of Malaysian natural history.

Leafing through that gorgeous volume, with its pressed flowers and leaves and, with greater frequency as the work develops, Tina’s lovely detailed drawings, I found it apparent that McCorkle’s desire to learn the names of things had developed into a full-blown mania, though it is perhaps unfair to give the name of a disease to such a voracious and enquiring mind.

That these books had travelled through the humid fungal rain forests of Malaya is hard to credit, for the jungle rots and discolours paper as brutally as it does human skin. These volumes, however, showed no signs of the incredible treks McCorkle had led from Kuala Trengganu in the north to Borneo in the south. No razor thorns or cassowary spurs here, no mention of the skin diseases or the event which left its dreadful marks on Mrs Lim.

This, it seems, occurred in November of 1960, by which time Malaya had won independence. Chin Peng and his comrades were still fighting their own revolution, however—reason
enough to stay away from the densely forested valleys near the Thai border. But the strange little family had come here in search of the flowers of the casatta tree and that odd wire-barked shrub with the ugly name of ‘hustt,’ both of which were blooming by the rivers at this season. There was a stream not half a mile away from their campsite, though because its banks were walled with a tangle of rattans and other spiny creepers, they had not yet penetrated to the base of the casatta.

Early one morning, when the river mists still blanketed the jungle, a slight and long-faced Chinese man arrived in the clearing, offering to sell them a chicken. What sort of fool would bushwhack through this wild country and then try to sell a chicken? They were miles from any human habitation.

The man had an oddly belligerent quality, shaking the chicken at Mr Bob as if he was very angry with it.

Mr Bob thanked the man politely and declined his offer. Hearing this, the visitor looked even more displeased. He threw his chicken to the ground and squatted down, curling his long toes in the soft mud. Shortly he was joined by two Chinese and three Malays, much younger men who, like him, were outfitted with machetes, empty bandoliers, and army fatigues.

Huddled with the women inside their little shelter, Mr Bob sharpened his machete.

The six men did nothing. They squatted on the edge of the clearing. One of the Malay boys had a cough.

Ah well, said Mr Bob. He yawned and stretched as he stepped out into the dappled light, machete in hand.

Apa ’nark? he
said. In other words: What do you want?

The long-faced man smiled and held up the chicken.
Minta orang matt saleh
. I wish to be free of foreigners. Once he had spoken the other men rose to their feet and Mrs Lim,
like a hawk escaping from a chicken egg, rushed forth and, just as their machetes were about to strike, threw herself on her protector from behind. Though only five feet tall she tackled him so hard that they landed together in the mud.

Get the fuck off of me, cried Mr Bob, thrashing violently about as she wrapped her compact body around his neck and head.

The assailants were, if possible, even more upset. They shrieked and kicked and struck her with machetes, slashing at her arms and back and face. Then the long-faced man barked an order for the others to withdraw and raised his weapon high above his head, as if to administer the
coup de grâce
.

Seeing this, the
child
threw herself on her exemplar’s head, with the result that the three of them formed a strange, shrieking ball on the muddy earth. The attackers began to argue whether or not to kill the girl and in the middle of this debate Mr Bob rose with a great roar and, having roughly shed his adopted daughter and mistress, knocked the first assassin to the ground. He’d lost his own machete but now captured a new one and, taking advantage of his surprising reach, slashed the long-faced man’s throat. McCorkle roared again, and cleaved the next man down the chest. For a moment the other boys stood still, looking with astonishment at the man’s green innards glistening in the sudden sunlight.

Now, said Mr Bob, you can piss off.

Two of them took the body of the long-faced man while the remaining pair lifted their wounded companion, whose horrible howls echoed for some time through the jungle.

Neither Mr Bob nor Tina felt any pity in their hearts for they had discovered Mrs Lim’s injuries. She was already in that dazed and weakened state which indicates a considerable loss of blood. They had little water to wash her wounds, so
Mr Bob removed her sarong and Tina helped him plaster the gashes with handfuls of mud. Mrs Lim did not once flinch. She lay naked on her stomach, her eyes wide open, staring sideways without expression.

The soil of rain forests is filled with the spores of countless fungi and there are a multitude of horrid diseases waiting to enter the bloodstream, but what else were they to do? McCorkle quickly made a bamboo frame on which to lash the naked, mud-caked woman. She was a tiny thing but dense as a bulldog, and her weight upon his shoulders was considerable. Five hours later he and the eight-year-old girl, the latter now weeping with fatigue, stumbled out of the jungle and onto the main highway to Ipoh. By mid-afternoon Mrs Lim was in a military hospital in Taiping where, though her life was saved, her wounds were badly sutured. The ridged lines across her face would remain, sometimes livid, other times an angry pink, for all her life.

This story was one of many that she and Tina related to John Slater and myself in the middle of that long Thursday night at Jalan Campbell.

Having slept very late on Friday I did not come downstairs until it was already noon. By then I was hungry and had a headache and was not at all pleased to be confronted by Christopher Chubb, who must have been waiting outside the lift doors all morning.

A very foolish act, he announced. He had clearly discovered that the book had been returned. I got you the damn thing, he shouted, entangling himself in a big party of shiny Singapore Chinese—grandmother, grandfather, toddlers. Impossible, he cried. You gave it back to them! He knocked over the smaller toddler but did not appear to notice. He was oblivious of the attention he drew to himself, his big untidy walk, his flailing hands, the space he occupied. Have you any idea, he demanded, of the risk you took? The old bitch could have hacked your arm off.

Let me at least have my cup of tea.

He managed to shut up then, for just a moment, but he did follow me to the dining room, plonk himself down at the banquette, and glare at me, all his old obsequiousness quite burned away. He had become a wild dog, a drunken butler.

You don’t understand them, he insisted.

Put a sock in it, I thought.

These are hard people. He leaned across the table and I understood that he would whine and wheedle and hammer against my resistance until he had bent me to his cause. Mem, you cannot know this type.

I thought, You don’t know who you’re talking to. You have not the foggiest idea.

They are slaves to that damned creature, he continued. What a great egotist McCorkle was. All for art! He drove them through thorns. Thorns three inches long, sharp as bloody razors. You think I am exaggerating. Cuts, calluses. Mauled by a wild pig, I am not joking, my daughter nearly died. Not just her, the pair of them. The bastard bent them, twisted them. They served him and even now that he’s dead and buried they serve him still. Every night, they burn their incense and dust off his memory. And the book, that is the heart of it. They have not the least idea of what it is they guard, but they set its value very high.

Yes, and I plan to make an offer.

They will spit on you.

Wouldn’t it be more sensible to ask me how much?

Everybody knows how much you pay. Twenty guineas, isn’t it?

Mr Chubb, I said nothing about twenty guineas.

But you already had the manuscript in your bloody
hand
. Do you see what a stupid thing you did? You had it for nothing and gave it
back!

I was very posh and frosty with him but of course he made me feel an utter fool. The book was lost and it was my fault completely. How could I have let Slater influence me like that?

They guard that book, you see, he said more gently. Don’t you see, Mem, it will take a lot of talk to get it. We will negotiate, back and forth, forever. You go to market with Mrs Lim and you’ll see what you are up against.

I have only until Sunday morning.

Then you have lost it, simple as that. Everyone has lost.

Give me a figure, I said. What would make them sell?

Oh, twenty thousand pounds.

Of course that number was unthinkable, but even as I began to tell him so, I recognised how stupid this was. Nothing is unthinkable for poetry. I might pay Slater twenty pounds if I liked his effort well enough, but what price would I put on a Shakespeare sonnet? How much for Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Yeats? Why does a grand and wealthy man like Antrim waste his time on a very plain little magazine, postpone his holiday in Italy, come to dinner with wretched snobs in hopes they might give money to a publication they never heard of? Because he is a civilised man, and for a civilised man great poetry is beyond diamonds, and as long as one publishes four times a year there is always a chance of finding it. As I sat there with Chubb it was, by my calculation,
ten o’clock at night in London. Antrim was certainly not a night owl, but I could still politely call him now.

Please order something, I told Chubb.

I abandoned him without explanation and strode to the reception desk where I waited two agonising minutes to attract the attention of the Indian clerk. Finally I was able to give him the London number, and then it was too late to change my mind. I would get the twenty thousand pounds. I was pleased, reckless. The house phone was behind The Pub and the air was already rank with cigarettes and whisky. The instrument was ringing before I reached it.

Seeing me set off on this course, a sober reader might predict the extent of my misjudgement. Let me tell you, it was worse—I had made a complete mess of calculating the time difference. But that was not the least of it. Antrim is meticulous. If you wish to deal with him you must know exactly what you want and why you want it. While he might respect my judgement, he would despise any scent of indecision, what he might call wooliness. As I picked up the receiver I felt myself naked, with nothing to offer except my excitement and anxiety.

Are you all right, he asked.

Bertie, have I woken you?

Sarah, please tell me that you are all right.

What time is it?

Not quite dawn yet.

Oh, Bertie, I am so …

What is it, Sarah? Have you hurt yourself?

Bertie, I have made an extraordinary find. A really, really serious piece of work. When you read it you will not be angry with me.

He immediately became a great deal cooler. Sarah, I did receive your amusing telegrams.

I heard a man cough. Oh Jesus, he has a lover!

Do you think you might have waited to discuss it later?

Bertie, you know I would never do this unless it was absolutely essential.

As I launched into my exegesis of McCorkle’s work, I knew I was ill-prepared for the task. I had only read it once, and in stressful circumstances. I began to flannel and then founder and in the end I could not even be explicit about the money I would need. I said nothing of twenty thousand pounds, only ‘a great deal of money.’

Antrim let me say my piece, and when I finally tailed away he allowed a little silence to follow after.

How very wonderful for you, he said.

Yes, I said, we are about to commence negotiations.

Well, it will be an exceptional board meeting. I’ll be so sorry to miss it.

No, no, everything’s on schedule. I can be in London on Monday, as we agreed.

You know, Sarah, I’m just so very tired. I’m sure the meeting will go perfectly without me.

But you’ll be there. I’ll be on time.

I’m sorry, Micks, really.

There was no point in pleading. I was being punished: I had broken into his personal life, forced my way into his bedroom.

I am truly sorry. I should never have called.

Nonsense. Boofy was such a dear friend, and I am immensely fond of you, and you know how much fun I have had working with you.

I knew he would resign from my board. As I said goodbye I was really on the brink of tears, and although I would not cry I returned to the table with that sick, dead feeling in my gut. It seemed, at that moment, as if I had lost everything:
not only Antrim and McCorkle’s poem, but
The Modern Review
itself.

And there was one more middle-aged man waiting for me, a spider or an angel, with a napkin tucked into his shirt collar and a cucumber sandwich set before him.

Seeing me, he pushed his plate immediately aside and reached across the table to squeeze my hand. There was no precedent for this behaviour.

I will get you the book, Mem. I will bloody well steal it for you.

No, I am not a thief.

Cheh!
Do you wish it to rot there? Imagine how you would feel, all your life! This book rotting in Jalan Campbell and no-one in K.L., certainly not in London, knows it is here.

His face was hard and passionate and for a moment I did think it strange that he should be so fervently committed to his Nemesis. But in truth my thoughts were of myself, for if Christopher Chubb did deliver the poetry I could put together an issue so extraordinary that all the problems would be solved. This strange story, the one I am now telling, would be part of it. As for the poetry, I would not tamper with it. I would not try to civilise it, or argue with it, or straighten out the shocking disconnected bits.

When might you do this, I asked him.

Soon. I cannot know.

This afternoon?

No, later. First I will have to tell you the worst of it.

Worst of what?

My story. The depths I sank to.