The Other Side of Paradise (16 page)

One of the men was calling out. She went back and climbed in again. It was the man in the top bunk. He was crying and moaning and pleading.

She bent down to Roger.

‘What’s he saying … do you know? What does he want?’

‘Very bad pain … needs morphine.’

Morphine? Ray had talked about that, too, when he’d shown her over the ambulance. She searched frantically in the other locker, pulling out dressings and bandages, scissors, bottles and tubes and, finally, a box of ready-filled morphine syringes – the ones that looked like toothpaste tubes with long needles on the end. What had Ray said? Something about the wire loop on the top … why in heaven’s name hadn’t she paid more attention?

The man was screaming now – horrible animal-like screams of torment. She grabbed one of the syringes, took the cover off, trying frantically to remember. Push the wire bit down to break the seal … that was it. Then take it off and stick the needle in … all the way. The man was still screaming and writhing about. She caught hold of him.

‘Keep still!
Keep still!
’

She couldn’t hold him down on her own – he was too strong and thrashing about like a madman, arms going everywhere. She grabbed hold of one arm, stabbed the needle in as far as it would go and squeezed the tube.

After a moment, he stopped screaming and lay still with his eyes closed. Dear God, perhaps she’d killed him? Done it all wrong? Given him too much? Dear God … Then he opened his eyes again, whispered.

‘Thank you.’

Ray had said something else, too – about pinning the empty syringe to a patient’s clothing – only the man wasn’t wearing any shirt or jacket. Instead she used the lipstick in her pocket to write a big M on his forehead and left the syringe stuck into the blanket.

She crouched down beside Roger. ‘I think it worked.’

‘Yes. He’ll be OK for a bit.’

She said, ‘I’m going to get you to the hospital. It won’t take too long. Will you be all right?’

‘Rather … It helps, just having you here.’

Apart from the water and the morphine, she’d been no help at all. Just the opposite. The MO had said the patients were all badly wounded and asked her not to jolt them around. Instead, she’d driven too fast and then gone careering wildly off the road, bumping and bouncing and crashing through trees. Delfryn and the other two must have been killed by the Jap pilot but if Roger and the man in the top bunk died, it would be all her fault.

‘Any more water?’

‘No … thanks. I wanted to ask you, Susan … did you get my letters?’

‘Yes. I’m very sorry I didn’t answer you.’

‘It’s all right. I didn’t really expect it.’

He looked dreadful. Whatever had happened to him, it must be very serious. And he was trying so hard not to make any fuss. She took his hand gently in hers.

‘I expect they’ll send you home to England, Roger, as soon as you’re better.’

‘That’d be jolly nice.’

‘Back to Esher. What was the name of the road?’

‘Esher Park Avenue.’ It sounded like a long sigh.

‘That’s right. Your parents’ll be so pleased, won’t they? And you’ll be able to go for a drink at the Bear.’

‘And the Star. They both do awfully good beers.’

‘Yes, both of them. One after the other. Several pints.’

He said, ‘You’ve cut your head.’

‘I bumped it, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.’

Her uniform, so clean and crisp when she’d set off, was covered in blood, torn and filthy.

‘I have to go back to the cab now, so we can get going. The sooner the better.’

He lifted a thumb, smiled up at her. ‘OK.’

The engine refused to start. It coughed and died several times before it faltered into life. She waited for a few moments until it had settled to a steady note and then backed the ambulance carefully away from the bamboo thicket. The smashed side mirrors were useless, so she had to lean out sideways to see behind. She kept hitting a tree or a bush, having to stop, go forward, then reverse around it – again and again until she reached the road. It was already getting dark.

The rain started then: a monsoon deluge bursting from the skies. Without a windscreen wiper, she was forced to stop. She opened up the top half of the windscreen as wide as it would go and drove on slowly, peering out into the rain. The road became a river, hard to follow; several times she had to halt, climb down and splosh ahead to test the ground to know which way it went.

The Causeway lay before her – more than a mile of it over the Straits to Singapore. No cover, no protection and she would have to switch on the headlamp or risk going into the sea. There must have been another bombing raid because huge orange fires were raging on the island. Go-downs at the docks, most likely, with their stores of rubber ablaze.

She said a prayer to God as she drove on to the Causeway, and then another prayer to the green glass Buddha, in case he could do anything too. Both of them must have listened and done something because the Jap planes kept away. On the other side she followed the Bukit Timah road across the island, drove up the hill to the Alexandra Hospital and stopped outside the main entrance.

People came hurrying out, the double doors at the back were flung open, the steps lowered. She stayed in the driver’s seat, fingers still gripping the steering wheel. After a while, a nurse stuck her head in.

‘You all right?’

She found her voice. ‘I gave one of them morphine.’

‘Yes, we saw. Well done, you.’ The nurse leaned in further. ‘Hey, you’ve been hurt. I’ll fetch a doctor.’

The doctor, when he arrived, was Ray. He didn’t ask any questions. He reached in, prised her fingers one by one away from the wheel, lifted her in his arms and carried her into the hospital.

She lay on a couch in a cubicle and the same nurse stripped off all her sodden, blood-stained clothes and wrapped her in blankets.

‘My word, you’re wet through. Have you been swimming in the sea?’

Another Aussie. They were everywhere.

Presently Ray came back. He leaned over and took a look at her forehead. ‘Seems like you cracked your head hard on something. It needs cleaning up and a couple of stitches.’

He did the cleaning and the stitching – rather more than a couple, judging by the time it took.

When he’d finished, he said, ‘Sorry, I’ve had to cut some of your hair away but it’ll soon grow again. Feeling any better?’

‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you.’

‘That’s good.’

She said, ‘The man in the top bunk – I gave him morphine from one of those things in the locker. Is he OK?’

‘He’s fine. Don’t worry.’

‘Did I do it right?’

‘You certainly did.’

‘Roger Clark … the one in the bunk below?’

‘Did you know him?’

‘We’d met before, in Singapore. Is he all right?’

‘I’m sorry, Susan. He died soon after you got here.’

She put her hand over her eyes.

‘I killed him. And the other one will probably die as well, because of me. I drove like a lunatic, trying to get away when the Jap plane attacked us. It was all my fault.’

Someone rattled the cubicle curtain and a voice said, ‘Doctor, you’re needed urgently, please.’

‘In a moment.’

He sat down on the edge of the couch, took her hands in his.

‘Listen, Susan. You didn’t kill Roger. Get that into your head. He was going to die in any case. He was in a very bad way. You did a hell of a good job getting the ambulance back at all, and thanks entirely to you, one of them has survived. He’s going to pull through all right.’

But she thought of nice Roger and his nice parents in the house in Esher Park Avenue, and the Bear and the Star and the awfully good beer that he would never drink again.

She started to cry.

Nine

SINGAPORE WAS SWARMING
with troops. Shiploads of them arrived at the docks as hordes more retreated across the Causeway. They were camped in parks and gardens and among rubber plantations. Convoys of lorries blocked the roads and servicemen filled the streets, hanging round the bars, crowding the cinemas and the dance halls, monopolizing the taxi girls.

More civilian refugees poured in from the peninsula and some of them arrived on the doorstep at Cavenagh Road. Cousin Violet turned up like a bad penny from Tampin, the Atkins and the Murrays, old friends from Kuala Lumpur, the Randolphs from Kuantan. A spinster aunt had fled in terror from Yong Peng.

The air raids had become much worse: the Jap planes attacked round the clock and bombed and machine-gunned anything and everything they chose – civilian as well as military. Rumour had it that there wasn’t a serviceable RAF airfield left on the island and that the only planes were biplane Tiger Moths. Meanwhile, Raffles still advertised dinner dances in the
Straits Times
and a government poster exhorted people to grow their own vegetables.

The Australian nurse at the Alexandra took the stitches out of Susan’s cut a week later. Her name was Stella and it turned out that she knew Ray Harvey rather well.

‘His family lived near us in Sydney and I trained at St Vincent’s, same as him. All the nurses were dotty about him, including me. He never looked my way, though, more’s the pity.’ She snipped on. ‘Only two more to go. Looks like it’s healed up nicely. When your hair’s grown back you won’t see a thing. You were lucky.’

Luckier than the badly wounded she’d passed lying on stretchers in the hospital corridors. And much luckier than the hundreds of dead lying in the morgue.

The next stitch came out.

Stella said, ‘That bloke you brought back in the ambulance is doing fine now. I thought you’d be glad to hear that.’

‘He seemed so badly hurt.’

‘He was, but he’s being taken good care of. He’ll be OK. The ambulance was in a real mess, you know. Riddled with bullets. It’s a wonder any of you survived.’ Another snip. ‘There you are, that’s the lot.’

On the way out of the hospital Susan ran into Geoff, who wanted to know if she had heard any news of Milly. She hadn’t. Milly would be somewhere on the high seas, sailing away to safety – if her ship hadn’t been sunk by the Japs.

She said, ‘When you see Ray, would you thank him from me?’

‘What for?’

She pointed to the cut. ‘He stitched this for me.’

‘Looks like he’s done a good job. He’s pretty handy with a needle.’

He’d been kind too, as well as handy – she had to confess that. Very kind, actually. Sat with her and held her close while she’d sobbed away like a hysterical idiot. She seemed to remember weeping all over his white coat. She also seemed to remember the blankets falling down.

At sundown, the Cavenagh Road refugees assembled on the west verandah where Soojal and Amith served the drinks – iced lime juice for Cousin Violet and the spinster aunt, Singapore Slings and whisky
stengahs
for the others, except for Grandmother who preferred her
gin pahit
. Hector walked up and down his perch and interrupted rudely in several languages. Her father, when he joined them, brought the latest news and none of it was ever good. Japanese soldiers were now said to be within sixty miles of Singapore.

Mrs Atkins shivered. ‘We heard what they did to people in Ipoh and KL, especially to the Chinese. They cut off their heads and spiked them on stakes, and they raped the women and bayoneted the children. And if the Malays refused to work for them, they were thrashed and tied to trees so the ants got them and they died of thirst.’

Grandmother said coldly, ‘Those sorts of rumours are invariably exaggerated.’

‘Oh, I’m afraid these are true, Mrs Roper. A friend of ours saw Japanese propaganda photographs. It was even worse when they took Hong Kong, you know. They drank all the whisky and went on the rampage. Shot fifty British officers and raped and murdered European women and nurses from the hospitals—’

Grandmother interrupted firmly. ‘We should much prefer not to hear about it, thank you, Mrs Atkins.’

After dinner there was bridge. Her parents made up a four with the Atkins, the Murrays took on the Randolphs. Grandmother and Cousin Violet played mah-jong while the spinster aunt retired to a corner with her embroidery. Susan went out into the garden. It was a clear, star-lit night which meant the bombers would probably come and they would have to sit in the shelter again. It was a real squash with all of them, including Rex and Bonnie and Hector in his cage. She had tried taking Sweep too but he always refused. Not many people had home shelters and the only public ones were muddy dugouts or open slit trenches, half full of water and mosquitoes.

The Atkins and the Murrays queued for long hours outside the P&O shipping office and eventually left on the ironically named
Empress of Japan
, heading for England. The Randolphs hired a launch from Collyer Quay and were taken aboard a Chinese coastal steamer bound for Colombo, and Cousin Violet and the spinster aunt sailed away on a cargo boat going to South Africa. Susan’s mother was finally well enough to travel and her father came home with embarkation papers for a liner sailing to Australia. There was another argument with Grandmother, who eventually gave way when told bluntly that she would be nothing but a hindrance and a liability if she stayed.

A ‘useless mouth’, her father said, not mincing his words. ‘It’s your duty to leave, Mother. Surely you realize that.’

Zhu, her old
amah
, was to go too, but Hector would have to stay behind. There was more argument about that.

‘I couldn’t possibly leave him here, Thomas.’

‘You’ll have to. The shipping line won’t let him on board. No pets are permitted.’

‘I fail to see why. They have parrots in Australia, don’t they?’

As it happened, the liner in question was bombed and sunk by the Japanese before it even reached Singapore.

Their cases – only one small one each – stood ready in the hall while they waited for the next available ship. Susan had packed her memories: her first evening gown, her photograph album, her favourite doll, the childhood books that Nana had read to her.

Ray Harvey telephoned.

‘Geoff gave me your message. Glad you’ve healed up OK.’