The Devil's Garden (15 page)

Part III

The Wilderness in the Garden

Today,' declared Professor Tanakadate roundly, ‘is a verry special day.' He twinkled around the table where plates and glassware winked back the light from the flickering oil lamps. It was, Pilchard thought, all inappropriately romantic. ‘Today is day when Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere comes to the Botanic Gardens, the Emperor's Birthday. All races celebrate together happily under Japanese flag and we share a meal as one family.' He bowed his head down slowly towards his magnificently sere, grey
kimono
and then raised his eyes to embrace his somewhat hushed and overheated household, mostly unused to being here at night, this celebratory meal an unwelcome penance. The windows were flung open but not a breath of air stirred the bushes and trees. Inside, the atmosphere weighed on them like a hot, wet, blanket. Lizards chased each other around the dead light-fittings.

In the past, formal dinners had often been served in the house's rather grand, panelled dining room but now fine linen and candlesticks had given way to Robinson Crusoe improvisation. An old damask curtain had been dextrously salvaged from one of the devastated Cluny Road houses and pressed—unpressed—into service as tablecloth. Beneath it, the ancient but rickety table itself had been extended on packing crates and the Indian, Malay and Chinese staff crammed around it, gamely supported the unsure tabletop on their bare legs, the curtain rings digging into their knees. Each place was set with an old jamjar for drinking, polished to crystal perfection, and a wad of newspaper substituted for placemat. Only the Professor gripped an incongruously perfect balloon brandy glass, sole remnant of vanished elegance. In the centre, steamed a heap of chewy manioc bread. As the occupation continued, more and more had to be made of manioc as everything else disappeared even from the black market. Now it made unconvincing loaves, biscuits and brandy but very good glue that served, amongst other things, to anchor the Catchpole wig. Elsewhere in Syonanto had been marches, patriotic songs parroted by schoolchildren, endless waving of flags, the usual tired hypocrisies suffered, without particular rancour, by subject peoples, but nothing so uncomfortable as this forced propinquity of race and class.

The first course, borne in, aloft, by whippet-hipped Ping and Pong, had been a nightmare of mixed crustacean
sashimi
that had appalled all but the Professor. The Indians had been repelled by its rawness and slithery blandness and picked at it with reluctant and disbelieving fingers. Revenge might be a dish best served cold but not shellfish.

‘Prawns. Heads full of shit like Malays.'

The Malays had feared, as always, the introduction of unclean species, liminal creatures that moved between sea and land and were therefore forbidden. They sipped water virtuously from their jamjars, fingered unbreakable manioc bread and argued in whispers over the acceptability of sorting one creature from another on their plates or whether all were now hopelessly polluted. Pilchard had sat queasily and recalled his walk on the beach at Changi and watched reluctantly the Professor's busily clicking chopsticks as they probed and plucked at the meat of crab joints and sockets. Post and Catchpole frowned and nibbled innocently and old-maidishly with dabbing forks. Like Brussels sprouts at Christmas, such food must be faced. Only the Chinese fishermen reached forward eagerly.

‘Chinese eat everything with legs—except table only,' they laughed indifferently, shrugging down the raw ingredients as welcome fuel.

‘Yes! Eat! Eat!' the Professor urged with high crablike waving. ‘Syonanto people are always so polite and shy. Not like Japanese. Eat!'

The Indians' palmwine concession had been abrogated for the day to provide drink for all and Tanakadate swigged happily between mouthfuls—the musty, mildewed flavour recalling student bouts of sake-swilling in fair Kyoto—till his eyes grew misty. Around the table, hands of different colours profited from the darkness to stow food away in pouches and banana leaves or simply dropped the loathsome flesh out of sight onto the floor and Ping and Pong had seized the scarcely depleted platter and carried it away rejoicing like Salome bearing off the head of John the Baptist. All the more for them. Their already-smoking
wok
would soon turn these primitive chopped ingredients into a proper human meal. The Professor smiled benignly through his milky glass like an old man through cataracts.

‘Yes, yes. Please take for your families, for those you love who are far away and so cruelly missed.' He cleared the catch in his throat and gulped more palmwine.

‘I hear,' Catchpole growled authoritatively in Pilchard's ear, ‘that the Japs are shifting more of the Changi prisoners to rest and convalescent camps by the sea in Thailand. Lucky sods! Plenty of food, clean water, decent climate—not like us poor buggers penned up here working our backsides off. They'll do nothing but play football on the beach and go fishing. They even took a piano with them to help pass the time.'

‘How do you know these things, Catchpole?'

He tapped his nose wisely and winked. ‘Be like Dad. Keep Mum'. Sources, old man. Sources. You forget, I have taken over as religious correspondent.'

Like all such institutions, the Raffles Museum received a stream of mail from lunatics of every political, racial and religious stripe—people who found messages from God in every artefact or held themselves to be wronged pretenders to the sacred Riau throne or reincarnations of Queen Nefertiti. It fell to the current ‘Religious Correspondent' to reply to all these in tones of evasive politeness, avoiding giving either offence or encouragement. Pilchard had prided himself on earthing all such enthusiasms with a single, devastating page, known within the confines of the institution as a ‘Fuck Off You Red-Nosed Bastard Letter', that blended high condescension and sneering world-weariness with the lawyer-proof pedantic scholarship and icy politesse that were a form of rudeness. Should any fellow acadenic write in criticism of the museum or gardens they would receive a letter reading, ‘Dear X, In the gretest confidence, I feel I should warn you that someone has been writing absurd and offensive letters to the Director and using your name.' Catchpole clearly operated otherwise.

‘Sauces? There are no sauces,' complained Dr Post, sadly mouth-watering ‘Gravy. Ketchup! Oh my God, HP sauce.'

‘I thought you said, last week, they were to be used to build a canal directly across the Kra peninsula and cut off Singapore's trade for ever.'

Catchpole blushed and bridled. He must be boiling to death under that caked and implausible thatch. ‘
That,
old man, was something quite different. I do wish you'd try to keep up. Priorities change. The war is in constant flux.'

‘Flux?' questioned Post. ‘I had a dose of it at Easter.'

‘Our next course,' said the Professor, bowing to the idea of it, ‘is a gift from General Yamashita from the magnificent herd of deer that eat the grass of the Governor's palace, the same as is eaten today by the General himself. It is to say thank you for the gift of the new Yamashita hybrid of the Tiger orchid that we have developed here and loyally named after him. Thanks to Dr Pilchard, its father.'Applause, laughter.

Ong swept in grandly with plates on which lay two thin slices of crispy-fried venison, arranged to occupy maximum surface area, and completed with bowls of slimy manioc paste. Of late, the plates had seemed to get steadily larger, the portions of food smaller. The whites dribbled and drooled and thought of lost Sunday roasts, pined for gravy and potatoes, missed family rows over the sliced sirloin.

‘Mustard,' whimpered Dr Post in a pang of Surbiton nostalgia. ‘Do you remember mustard? Does anyone? The English sort, all hot, that brings tears to your eyes.' He cried in demonstration. ‘And thick slices of meat with fat. This is so thin it looks like something prepared for a microscope slide.'

The Professor raised his glass again. ‘A toast!'

‘Toast,' Post snivelled tearfully. ‘Proper bread cut into soldiers. Crust! Butter! Butter melting from the heat of the toast. My god, thick-cut marmalade. Now it's always jam tomorrow.'

‘I see some of you made to cry by great, grateful feelings. It brings me such joy to see us united in a common endeavour as all the world around us is disturbed by necessary readjustments and we alone still live and work in harmony inside this garden, an example to the whole Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. To harmony!' Jamjars waved unenthusiastically as he drained his glass and Pilchard—roughly versed in Japanese etiquette—rose and deferentially refilled it from the Winchester bottle on the floor, marked ‘Sulphuric Acid'.

Now the Indians were chattering excitedly, peering at their plates in horror, pushing them away in rejection. ‘Beef!'

‘No.' Pilchard, reseated across the table, hastily mimed soothing but inaccurate moose horns with spread hands. ‘Not beef. Deer. You can eat it.'

‘
Not
beef but very
like
beef, then,' disdainfully conceded a Tamil barrackroom lawyer who otherwise worked on the drains and now burst into watery, bubbling Tamil to his mates. They shuffled themselves rapidly into sects of greater and lesser tolerance, some eating, others not.

Mustafa—previously the driver of the Gardens' tractor, when there had been such a thing, and now acting head of the Malay staff—prodded his own plate unhappily.

‘Islam?' he asked dolefully. Pilchard lay down his fork and sighed.

‘Oh Christ! Why does every little thing have to be so complicated?' Then he caught himself in time and smiled. ‘Yes,' he encouraged smoothly. ‘Islam. You can eat. Islam yes. The butcher was Muslim, too. Completely
halal
.' What the hell was the word for deer?

Mustafa pouted and looked as if he was about to cry through his moustache. ‘Islam?' he asked again in a little boy's voice and wriggled on his seat.

‘Yes, Islam, Islam.' He was tired, had drunk too much. His body, unused to food and drink, was sending agonising shafts of dyspepsia through his guts and he opened his mouth to snap something back—many a true word is spoken in indigestion—and then, from somewhere plucked a soft answer. ‘Well look. I'm not a Muslim myself but I'm sure there's nothing in the Koran against eating deer.' Mustafa reluctantly speared the flesh. Then the word came to him suddenly from somewhere, like a blessing. ‘Kijang,' he said. ‘It's called
kijang
.' Hang on. Maybe that was Javanese not Malay?

Mustafa's mouth snapped shut then gaped in horror. ‘So … is NOT lamb.' His eyes were all betrayed trust, brown pools of shocked innocence. ‘Oh Mr Pilchard how could you lie to us about such a thing when you know our ways?' The scandal buzzed through the Malays. ‘You say is lamb but is NOT lamb. How could you do that? You have betrayed our trust.' They pushed away their plates, sulkily.

‘No, no. Islam … is lamb … Don't you see? I thought … What I meant …'

Catchpole sniggered. ‘Looks like the fasting month has come a little early this year. That's what you get for telling porkies, old man.' A gross feeder, he reached swiftly across to grab the abandoned meat, gripping Mustafa's plate with two hands. Sweat trickled down his forehead from under the wig. ‘Waste not, want not,' chewing greasily and tipping. ‘It's an ill wind …'

Mustafa stared down at a picture in the newspaper marking his now-empty place. Freshly revealed, it showed a dumpy Chinese, caught blinking against the flash of the photographer, like a man snapped in adultery—therefore looking drunk—presenting a huge cheque to smirking General Yamashita, himself in the pose of a man who has won the football pools and is keen to display the figures on it. ‘See!' he sneered. ‘Even when the rest of us are starving the Chinese still have millions.'

‘Pickles,' announced the Professor, happily. ‘We should now eat delicious pickled plums but owing to inconvenient war developments cannot.' But under Ong's directing finger, Ping and Pong reappeared to deal out rings of pineapple like deck quoits. The
Bromelidae
patch had been stripped.

‘Actually, what you were saying about the Kra peninsula, old man, I rather gather that plan has been dropped. All their efforts are going into the capture of your favourite place, Cocos-Keeling, preparatory to the attack on Australia.'

Pilchard was peeved at the gloating voice, chewing through pineapple slush. He turned, irritated. ‘You know Catchpole, I sometimes think that it's not the enemy who really get up one's nose but those who are supposed to be on our side. If even half the things you claim to know are accurate, then the Japs ought to shoot you as a spy. On the other hand, you may just be a complete idiot and one day I will shoot you myself'

‘Well really …'

‘Now that we are all stuffed with refreshing food and joyful to delirium, I should like us all to consider an old Japanese poem that teaches us to be happy where we are and not sad for where we cannot be,' said the Professor, seemingly, to the ceiling, as he dribbled juice and sagged in his seat, ‘for living is an activity that leaves no survivors. It is from eleven hundred years ago from a work of great wisdom, the
Hinky
mond
ka
.' He began to croon in a ghostly chanting voice with lightly bouncing hand-gestures—like the ping-pong ball over the subtitles at the cinema—the sound echoing around the room, seeming to dim the lamps by its insistent rhythms, conjuring spirits out of the woodwork and terrifying the staff with memories of village
bomohs
. ‘
Yononaka wo, Ushi to yasashi to, Omohe domo, Tobitachi kanetsu, Tori ni shi arane ba.'
An unearthly hush fell over the table, as from a magic spell. A quavering hoot and some great insect flapped across the glass of the window as if summoned from Hell, to be beaked away, squirming, by a silhouetted owl. The Professor ran his hands through his long hair and sniffed back tears. In his time at the Gardens he had reverted to civilian hair that now gleamed like snow on wintry Mount Fuji. ‘It is a little hard to translate but something like …' He rose to his feet, ‘I feel life is sorrowful and unbearable but I cannot fly away since I am not a bird.' He stiffened and bowed, fluttered tired arms sadly in emulation of absent wings and walked with unsteady dignity out of the room and upstairs to his quarters. They heard the door shut softly. The protesting creak of springs. Snores followed immediately.