The White Pearl (38 page)

‘They are giving the Keppel docks a hammering,’ Johnnie said. His voice was tight.

‘The
godowns
will be packed,’ Nigel rumbled. ‘Tin, rubber and rice all stacked to transport for the war effort. Troops ready for shipment.’

Connie’s mind filled with images. Of ordinary people. People going about their business along the Tanglin and Orchard Roads.
Sitting in the Alhambra cinema or the Roxy, watching Humphrey Bogart in
The Maltese Falcon
and eating ice cream. Where was the Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas? Where were the air-raid shelters? Ack-ack guns started
to roar defiance.

‘Mummy, look!’

A plane exploded in the sky, falling like a shower of shooting stars, and beside her Johnnie flinched. Flames leaped up from
the ground, and she could feel her son’s excitement radiating heat from his skin. Fitzpayne was sailing
The White Pearl
as hard and as fast as he could, catching every scrap of wind in the sails. He had doused the bowlight, and around them other
boats were doing the same, so that the chances of collision in the narrow sleeve of water suddenly grew high. Only the moonlight
saved them.

‘That is the end,’ Connie said solemnly.

‘End of what?’ Teddy asked.

‘The end of Singapore for us.’

He twisted his face up to look at her, his brown eyes searching her face. ‘Why?’

It was the newcomer, Madoc, who answered. ‘Because there’s no point us going there any more, sonny,’ he said. ‘The Japs will
pour their troops and their guns and their tanks into the city in no time. We’re done for in Malaya.’

‘That’s enough,’ Connie said sharply.

‘But it’s true,’ Madoc’s wife said in a sorrowful murmur. ‘We’re finished.’

Teddy’s head swivelled to face Johnnie Blake as a gigantic explosion somewhere in the docks slammed against their eardrums.
‘I thought we would beat them,’ he said accusingly.

‘Johnnie is not to blame, Teddy,’ Connie reminded him. She put her hand on Johnnie’s arm in the darkness.

‘We didn’t stand a chance.’ He looked down at her son. ‘Not a chance.’ He shook his head in despair. ‘The defence of Malaya
was a low priority among the decision-makers in London who allocate military forces and equipment to this whole damn war zone.
They assumed that we – the RAF – would deal with enemy forces before they even got near Malaya’s shores.’

Teddy’s eyes shone in the moonlight, desperate for more.

‘But how could we?’ Johnnie demanded, his words raw. ‘No decent planes …’

‘But the Brewster Buffalo is …’

‘No, Teddy. It’s a heavy, awkward beast. No manoeuvrability. No match for …’

‘Johnnie,’ Nigel interrupted, ‘no need for this.’

But Connie knew there was a need. They all had to face the truth now – even her son. It was the only way they could make sense
of what was happening and see a way through to the future. The sea around them was littered with the lies of the past.

‘But what about General Percival and our army?’ Teddy whispered, eyes fixed on the fireworks in the sky. ‘Couldn’t they .
. .?’

‘No,’ Johnnie said savagely. ‘Percival was given a ragbag of ill-trained divisions from India and Australia to back up our
boys in the 11th
Division in action at Jitra and Slim River. Look at Singapore now! I can imagine General Percival in his Operations Room in
the hut in Sime Road listening to those bombs falling and cursing his ill luck. He should have been given naval support, damn
it.’

‘He was,’ Connie pointed out. ‘The warships
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
.’

‘But they needed air cover,’ Johnnie explained, gentler now. ‘The aircraft carrier that was coming to give them protection
from air attack ran aground in Jamaica, so the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
were just sitting ducks, waiting for the Japanese bombers to take potshots at them.’ He released a dispirited sigh. ‘We’re
all sitting ducks now. I wish to God I was up there tonight in one of those creaky old Buffaloes.’

‘I’m very glad you’re not,’ Connie said clearly. She stroked her son’s hair, latched her fingers into its curls, and turned
away from the sight of British colonial power on its knees. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘What now?’
Tuan
Hadley demanded.

He sat at the head of the small table in the saloon, his fists large and tight in front of him. Maya observed him closely.
How could a man’s face grow so old so fast? Like the Tamils who worked in the quarries and trudged home covered in a second
skin of grey dust. That’s what
Tuan
Hadley looked like now.

‘I know an island.’ It was Iron-eyes who spoke.

Maya listened with sharp ears. He was leaning his big shoulder against the shiny wall, his hair rumpled, his eyes half hooded
like a tiger’s when it hunts.

No, no, Iron-eyes. You don’t eat me. I run fast.

‘I know an island,’ he told them again, ‘that should be safe.’

‘There are thousands of islands here,’ the
tuan
with the fat belly and the dead wife pointed out. ‘Which one?’

Iron-eyes gave a slow smile.

You no fool me. You smile like a tiger smile.

‘It’s not far – away from the mainland, east of here towards Borneo. Many of the islands are uninhabited, but this one has
a small number of people on it. We could fix up
The White Pearl
’s damage there, get her properly repaired and take on supplies. It would give you time to decide what you want to do from
here.’

His eyes skimmed each person in the shiny belly of the boat, touched
on Razak, then on herself with the smallest of nods.
Why nod at me, tiger man? Because you know I not trust you?
Last and longest he looked at
Mem
Hadley. Into his eyes tumbled a dark blue sadness. Sadness as heavy as the weight on Maya’s heart because now not only her
mother was gone, but her country was gone too.
Mem
Hadley was the only one who understood this. ‘I’m so sorry, Maya,’ she’d whispered as they sailed south of Singapore.

Sweat and fear had started to stamp their feet in the room. Maya could smell them. Next to her stood the
tuan
with the dead wife. Her eyes picked out a trickle of moisture in front of his ear, and his hand left a damp patch on the
map when he placed his palm on it.

Iron-eyes spread out a giant map – he called it a chart – on the table and everyone gathered around, shoulders touching, eyes
jumping from place to place. Nervy as frogs. He pushed his finger over a pretty expanse of blue and jabbed it on blobs of
green, some long and thin, others fat and round, bundled up against each other. Then there were pink sections and yellow sections,
and strange-shaped squiggles that she knew were writing.

‘Understand?’ Iron-eyes checked his listeners.

Everyone nodded agreement. Maya didn’t understand, not one word. Yet she nodded too. But Razak had the courage to ask, ‘Is
the blue bit the sea?’

Beside her the fat
tuan
laughed, and Maya wanted to slap him.

‘Yes,’ Iron-eyes said. ‘That’s correct.’

The sea? So much sea?
She was sure he must be lying.

‘This,’ he said with his finger on a skinny slice of pink, ‘is Malaya.’

Maya gaped. Now she was certain he was lying. That skinny pink tongue could not possibly be Malaya. Malaya was huge, with
forests that were endless. Beaches that made her legs ache they were so long, when she tried to walk them in search of a turtle.

‘This is Malaya,’ Iron-eyes repeated, and she realised with shame that he was saying it just for her and Razak. ‘This is Singapore.’
A stubby little leaf tucked against the tip of the pink tongue. ‘And these are the islands of Sumatra and Java. As you can
see, they are only a step away.’

A very tiny step on the chart, so small she could make it without the boat, without even getting her feet wet.

‘But that means General Tojo will invade Sumatra and Java as soon as they have taken Singapore,’ Fitzpayne added.

‘Just a minute there,’ the pilot interrupted. He shook his golden head and stabbed a finger on the chart, right on the long
green bean that Iron-eyes claimed was Sumatra. ‘The RAF has 225 Bomber Group over there with seventy-five Blenheim and Hudson
bombers. Plus 226 Fighter Group with two squadrons of Hurricane fighters. They’ll make a decent fight of it.’

There was an awkward silence in the room. Everyone wanted to believe Golden-hair. The sea grumbled impatiently outside, and
gave the yacht a jolt to hurry them up. Maya felt her stomach heave.

Iron-eyes took a moment to light a cigarette, to look away from them packed around his chart, and said through the smoke,
‘We all know that Royal Dutch Shell Oil has its main refinery in the city of Palembang in southern Sumatra. To seize oil refineries
is one of Japan’s primary objectives in sending its invasion forces to this region.’ Abruptly he threw across the saloon the
box of matches still in his hand. It knocked against a lamp and made it spit oil, then slid to the floor and hid under a bench.
‘Of course they will damn well invade Sumatra, and your paltry collection of bombers and fighters is not going to stop them,
I’m afraid, Flight Lieutenant Blake.’

Mem
Hadley stared at him, and something Maya couldn’t read flickered in her blue eyes. ‘So what do you recommend we do?’

‘It leaves us with Borneo – which we think has already been invaded – and New Guinea, a journey of several hundred miles.
I am suggesting we take this route,’ his finger crossed the blue, dodging between the blobs of green and yellow, ‘to avoid
Japanese detection. We will travel at night. For all we know, the Japs may get there ahead of us.’

Tuan
Hadley was nodding. So it must all be true. Maya nodded too, and darted a look at the circle of faces. Most were transfixed
by the paper chart on the table but the new man, the one with rabbit teeth and the fat wife, was gazing around the saloon
the way a dog does when it takes possession of a new kennel and cocks its leg to mark its territory. The only other person
not studying the mysterious chart was
Mem
Hadley. She was staring out of one of the moon-shaped windows, her cheeks flushed and her eyes on fire with anticipation.
Whatever lay ahead, she wanted a bite of it.

‘What are you doing?’ Maya prodded her brother in the ribs.

‘Polishing shoes.’

‘You’re not his servant.’

‘He feeds us and he keeps us safe from Japanese bayonets. He doesn’t throw us to the sharks.’

Maya crouched down beside Razak on the deck. He was sitting cross-legged in the cool air of early morning, his black hair
gleaming where the first rays of sunlight ran fingers over it. Everything wanted to touch her beautiful brother. Around him
in a circle sat ten pairs of shoes, five black leather, four brown, one as creamy as milk. She reached out and touched that
one – it felt as soft as a piglet’s ear.

‘Don’t,’ Razak frowned.

‘I’m not hurting it.’

‘It’s polished.’

‘Do these all belong to
Tuan
Hadley?’

‘Yes.’

She slid her hand inside one that wasn’t polished, and it gobbled up her whole fist as though she’d pushed it inside a whale.
She lifted the shoe, inspected its stitching, its flat, obscene tongue, the tiny air holes in the side, the laces squeezed
into a tiny metal clamp at each end. She turned it over and studied its smooth, buttery sole. The shoe was heavy and stank
of white man’s sweat.

‘Why does anyone need so many shoes?’

Razak fixed his eyes on her with reproach and removed the shoe from her hand. ‘Because he’s an important man.’

She leaned forward and spat on one of the polished shoes. ‘You forget, my foolish brother, you forget why we are here.’

‘We are here,’ he said, his face suddenly stern, ‘because our mother willed it.’

‘We are here,’ she corrected, ‘because I willed it. Our mother cursed this woman who killed her, and her spirit will only
rest when we have carried out that curse. I was blind before, but now I have eyes wide open.’ She forced herself to push aside
the memory of
Mem
’s warm, protective arm around her.

Her brother made a noise through his nose. Maya’s spine quivered. It was the noise of disgust an Englishman would make. He
quietly picked up the shoe, wiped her spittle off it and replaced it in the polishing row.

‘We were wrong before,’ he said. His dark eyes turned on her an intense gaze that made her shift her position uneasily. ‘I
didn’t understand. But now I do. Our mother may have given us little when she was alive, but in death she gave us this gift.’
He waved an expressive hand around the boat. ‘This life. I am learning so much.’

‘What kind of thing?’

‘
Tuan
Teddy is teaching me to read English.’

She felt a snake of jealousy coil around her gut. ‘We are nothing to them, less than ants under these big-boat shoes of his.’

‘I am learning to play white men’s games.’

‘What good is that to us?’

‘White men play their games for money.’

His words felt like a beetle’s horny back stuck in her throat. ‘You refused to take
Mem
Hadley’s money when she offered it before.’

‘Little sister,’ he touched her cheek gently, ‘your head is still full of river mud. This,’ he gestured upward to the great
white sails and down to the shoes on the deck, ‘is what our mother’s spirit has bequeathed to us. She knew when she stood
in front of the car, when she felt it crush the life in her and when she uttered the curse, she knew she was giving us all
this.’

‘Razak, have you been chewing on the crazy weed?’

‘No. But I know
Tuan
Hadley’s mind. He says we have to leave Malaya until the war is over.’

‘How long?’

‘He says a year.’

She screwed up her nose. ‘He doesn’t know the Japanese.’

‘Then, he says, we will go back. He promises to give me a good job.’

‘As a rubber-tapper. A tree-milk drinker. You will die out there in the …’