The Devil's Garden (2 page)

‘Have him melted down for scrap,' he hissed through his smile. Captain Oishi made a brisk military note.

Then Tiger frowned and pouted. There was a flash of gold over there in a glass case. He walked over and peered through the glass. Gold jewellery from Sumba or Sumbawa or somewhere—he was too vain to wear his glasses—the names now irrelevant anyway. They would all soon be changed to Japanese names, all swept away with the rest. Tiger was partial to gold. In a cave in the Philippines, he had several tons of it, looted from various local conquests, melted down and turned into trim little ingots, together with a gold Buddha figure that residual superstition prevented him from pulping. When transport became more assured, it should be sent back to Tokyo—well most of it. The gold Buddha he would certainly keep for himself—possibly more, depending on which way the political wind was blowing. The prisoners who had buried it had all been discreetly disposed of. Perhaps it might be safer here, in Syonanto, where he could keep his eye on it. In the interim, his ADC would call round tomorrow to pick up those trinkets that had found pleasure in his sight.

But wait. There were white faces back there, surely British faces. What were they doing in
his
museum?

* * * 

‘It's not just the books, Major,' corrected James Pilchard. ‘The books are fully formed. They can stand on their own two feet. They will survive somehow. There's the matter of a large metal trunk that's missing. It's my ethnographic and ornithological notes—fragile, unborn, full of unmade choices. If they get mishandled, they could be lost for ever.' He wondered why he was making all this fuss but there were some things you just had to hold on to even while the world was collapsing around your ears—
because
the world was collapsing around your ears. He could see that Spratt was one of those people who had learned to enjoy the misfortunes of others. The war must have come as a great comfort to him.

Major Spratt looked out through the hut window and across the burning parade ground, as he had looked out over so many parade grounds in the East, and sighed. He had reached the age where a man's nose begins to collapse into formlessness and, with the little moustache underneath, it looked as if he had a mouse hanging down the middle of his face. He drew on his empty pipe and conjured up ghostly memories of the taste of real tobacco and the smell of his leatherette-upholstered Ford Prefect back in Aldershot. He did not like James Pilchard. He did not like his attitude. He even made ‘sir' sound like a sneer. A stuck up, arrogantly dishevelled young man with a terrible lack of team spirit and no awareness of military priorities. He had a beard dammit. A reddish, curly beard, untrained, untrimmed. He had not so much grown a beard as just stopped shaving. Spratt recognised the control of hair as the clearest mark of the control of body and spirit. And Pilchard was public school and only in his mid-thirties. He looked at you with that superior leer they all had, imagining the rules did not apply to them. Spratt was a grammar school boy, an insider on sufferance only. Good enough for the colonial army but not—it had always been made clear—Sandhurst material. It would not be the worst loss of the war that Pilchard's bird notes should go astray. He probed the pipe bowl with the blunt end of a pencil, then remembered that it was empty.

‘Ornithology? No need to get in such a flap. Not, strictly speaking, my pigeon, old boy.' He smirked and savoured the joke. ‘From every perspective a civilian matter. Feel free to have a word with General Yamashita if you want.' He stifled a grin. The Japanese did not allow contact between POWs and civilian internees. If they even knew Pilchard was here in the camp, outside Changi prison proper, they'd have kittens, turn nasty like as not, dish him out a good beating. He might even end up in Outram Road. People tended not to come back from Outram Road. Still, at least he wasn't collaborating with the Japs like the rest of that shower from the museum and the water and electric wallahs.

In the hot Singapore sun of the square, two sweating men—one scraggy and bare-chested, the other pot-bellied and bear-chested—were flinging armfuls of books from the back of a Public Works Department truck into an improvised handcart. They tossed them deliberately high—windmilling in the air—to land with the sound of softly cracking spines and tearing paper. Spratt resumed smoothly.

‘I can assure you, the museum's library will be treated with the greatest possible respect. Normally, of course, it would have been proper form to contact you first, you being senior museum officer, but these are not normal times. Colonel Saito was keen for us to get our university going, the Kempeitei secret police wanted the books out to make room for the possible overflow of their own files from next door. You should consider yourself lucky. The College got taken over entirely. And the Stamford Road YMCA is no longer big enough what with …' his voice fell and he blushed, ran his hand nervously over his own fresh-barbered chin, ‘… their sorting out of the Chinese. It was important to strike while the iron was hot. I have thousands of men sitting around with their hands in their pockets. It's a matter of keeping them busy, not letting them brood and get slack, a matter of the utmost military importance. You can't expect to waltz in here and go on about a load of blasted notes about tweetie-birds.' He paused and puffed himself up. Pilchard winced. He knew what was coming. It came with tooth-grinding inevitability. He watched Spratt turn it into a sequenced military exercise as he paused, stiffened and thrust out his jaw in Churchillian bulldog parody. ‘Don't you know there's a war on?'

All over the globe, the question was being used to justify acts of cultural vandalism. The fine china of civilisation was everywhere being smashed in military target practice or debased for the slopping out of army latrines, its embroideries ripped up to provide bandages and canteen dishcloths, its museums converted into military offices where daily orders were tacked up on the Georgian furniture.

‘It's the Australians, of course, who are the main problem—well enough in a scrap, I grant you, but not sound like your English Tommy. Basically, they're a bunch of bolshie bastards.' Pilchard looked at the men unloading the books. Tommies they might be but they were enjoying the sacrilege of it, smirking with deliberate malice as they lobbed the odd bigger volumes overarm like grenades. There could be no going back now. It would not be the same world after the war and there would be bolshie bastards to spare everywhere. He studied Spratt curiously, like a specimen, saw the confused class hostility in his eyes and was amused to know himself a class impostor. If Spratt had known that Pilchard was a scholarship boy, from a home poorer than his own, he would not have disliked him any the less, for it. The British would turn on each other all right after the war but little men like Spratt would not be the ones left to tell the world to get its hair cut. It would be mob rule. He tried a different tack.

‘The index cards, the lists of what was in the library, surely you brought those? The books were arranged by subject and carefully subcategorised alphabetically …'

‘Just books,' said the major truculently and turned away. It was impossible of course but, at some level, he always feared that Pilchard
knew
. Spratt had seen his moment of triumph in quartermastering. Then he had met his Waterloo. For two glorious years he had been Officer Commanding (Butter) in Aldershot, towering over pyramids of bright yellow tins and then his world had fallen apart. The British Army was a global operation whose tendrils stretched to embrace the icy wastes of Arctic and Antarctic as readily as they gripped the globe's equatorial paunch. And all army posts required butter on their toast. Tinned butter that soothed British palates in such climatic extremes required careful formulation, developed over years of slow experimentation. A special Arctic blend ensured spreadability at -40°C while a tropical version still held solid at 40°C above. And then, in a still inexplicable moment of distraction, he had confused the consignments. In Arctic Baffinland, for three months, they had received butter that could only be worked with power tools while, in Kuala Lumpur, it sloshed from the tin as a greasy liquid that only the Indians enjoyed. The humiliation, the joy of his enemies, especially the Officer Commanding (Jam and Condiments Various), still woke him red-faced and heart pounding in the middle of the night. There had been an enquiry, harsh words in his file and they had laughed and posted him out east to learn what climate and quartermastering could do to each other, expiation through perspiration. To him, it was still a greater shame than the fall of Singapore for, at least, when he handed over three years of military supplies—lock, stock and oil barrels, all intact—to the Japanese, they had been in apple-pie order. He was sure they respected him for that.

‘The orders just said books.'

* * * 

As a child, James Pilchard had been greatly impressed by imperial pomp and circumstance, as known chiefly from the church parades of the Boy Scouts. His collecting had begun with the postage stamps of empire, a rare blaze of colour in a Birmingham childhood composed otherwise of muted greys. Most, of course, bore the stuffy, decollated profiles of King George and Queen Mary, like china dogs on the mantlepiece, but there was enough background variation—plants, animals and exotic vistas—from around the empire to stimulate the interest of a bookish boy with no brothers and sisters. The stamps had fired in him the urge to travel and he liked to think that this had refuted the old adage that ‘philately will get you nowhere'. Collecting had continued to relieve the dullness of a medical degree, a vocation which, in his family, seemed the epitome of learning and respectability. But he had been cruelly disabused by his time in Singapore, first by the obsessive mediocrity of colonial life with its tin trumpets and tin gods and then by his service in the Volunteer Force, lasting two appalling weeks during which the stammer that had afflicted him most of his life completely disappeared. Much of it had been spent lying flat on the ground as, above him, bombs tumbled, like shiny black rat droppings, from the backsides of invulnerable aircraft. He had seen selfless heroism of course but sadly misapplied, as men laid down their lives to protect the strategic installations that their comrades, the following day, would be ordered to lay down their own lives to destroy. In the middle came a very awkward and unacknowledged period of ‘realignment of the front' where both sides suddenly realised that something must be wrong because they were now both trying to blow up the same targets. That 130,000 Allied troops had surrendered to 30,000 Japanese that they could have simply kicked to death, argued that something was badly amiss at staff college and Spratt was a good example of his kind—pompous and resolutely stupid, an ocean-going buffoon—fit to be impaled on a pin and set in a glass exhibition case of military idiocy as the specimen type. The old description of the army as ‘lions led by donkeys' popped up in his brain from somewhere. He was sure the British commander had contemplated the total cock-up with something like ‘I blame myself for all this, chaps. But you, of course, will be the ones paying for it.' The very best specimens, the highest-ranking officers with the fancy plumage, had been shipped off by the Japs months ago. No one knew where. Perhaps they had been shot. The men all rather hoped they had.

He was back in Bukit Timah. They were hot and filthy, tired after a night sleeping fitfully under trees, being eaten alive by mosquitoes. It was not clear which of them was supposed to be in charge. In the Volunteers, pulling rank was considered bad form so decisions sort of just happened by default. At dawn they had broken open tins of bully beef and eaten flakes of stale meat enrobed in fat and salt, so that now they were thirsty. There was a noise down there by the road and suddenly Japanese were running along the tarmac, crouching low, trundling two heavy machine guns between the ruins of a light-engineering works. He had never actually seen Japanese before and he tried to fix them in his mind. They could have opened fire with their old WWI rifles, killed a couple of them maybe, before the machine guns found them with the inevitable outcome they had been watching for days. As good as dead. As bad as dead. They kept quiet. The soldier out front seemed to hear a noise, turned, shading his eyes with one hand, then smiled slowly. There was a little Chinese boy, quite naked, standing half-hidden in the ruins watching him. The soldier laughed, bent down and made clicking tongue noises as you might to a nervous cat and beckoned with his fingers. The little boy looked at him, eyes wide with fear and then his face broke into a broad smile and he stepped out unsteadily into the sunlight. The soldier raised his rifle and shot him dead with a single round through the forehead
.

Pilchard blinked and wandered out over the square. He could feel a tremor running through his arms and hands. From afar, he spotted Sergeant Fukui, a thoroughly nasty ex-greengrocer from Osaka, who loved to make trouble. He was doing his rounds, hitting people, kicking things over just for the fun of it, a couple of beefy Korean conscripts, acting as a sort of mute bodyguard, dogging his steps. He had passed Pilchard in the prison proper earlier, pausing to receive the obligatory bow, when he had dropped by to torment an unfortunate prisoner named Churchill, and might just remember him. Pilchard ducked behind a shed until he had passed, looked at the sun to judge the time. He had to be back in jail for the midday meal and he had a couple of calls to make along the way. Strictly speaking, he was probably still in the military as a Volunteer, should have saluted Spratt, stamped his feet, all that other nonsense like in the OTC. Too bad. A while ago, the Japanese had ordered all officers to remove insignia of rank and it had created a pleasing anonymity, almost invisibility, like a big city in a blackout as if everything henceforth was off the record. Pilchard had retained khaki without badges, like a defrocked scoutmaster. But you could still tell who was who. Authority brought a walk, a look, a tone of the voice even when opposing the authority of others. He, himself—he knew—had it whether he liked it or not.