Key to the Door (38 page)

Already “Roll on the Boat” had become a catch-phrase of liberation: if capable of flying an Auster or Tiger Moth, he would have sky-written it above the sloping greenback of Pulau Timur—but contented himself with sending it by morse during what seemed the empty hours of his nightwatch, only to hear the initials ROTB throatily repeated from some half-asleep operator at Karachi or Mingaladon, a quartet trail of four-letter symbols piped out of electrical contacts by a heart-guided but distant hand. Locked fast in the Devil's Island of conscription, everyone wanted to go home, to drop gun, spanner, morse key, pen, or cookhouse spatula, and bat like boggery to the nearest blue-lined troopship. Inconspicuous chalk marks behind their beds digited the months already served, as well as giving the current demob group ready for release, and after a while the figures looked to him like some magical transposition of formulae for exploding the atoms that held their prison bars in place.

He held himself from the gala of hope and speculation, living too much in the present to imagine going back to Nottingham. Not that hooks didn't exist to draw him there, for he had been married to Pauline nearly a year before leaving England, and she had a kid of his to keep her company while he was away. On the other hand, he had spent no more than a few weeks with her, and there had been no real married life between them yet. She was no great letter-writer, and a year apart was too long a time to keep the ropes fast around him. He was unable to make chalk marks at the back of his bed, though he knew to a day that ten months of his time abroad were still to be somehow gone through, and that to exhibit these future scars called for a waste of energy and spirit that he couldn't bring himself to spare so easily.

He grew turbulent and black, ready to smash down the peace of this long hut walled up with books because he didn't know the reason for it. The sound of lorries lassoing the MT section with noise, and gangs passing by to the NAAFT, didn't draw him out of it. “That's wonderful, Brian,” Mimi said when he told her of his fourteen days' leave. “You haven't had a holiday since you came.” He wondered why she was so happy: she'll miss me, after all, as well as me missing her. Yet his suspicions never lasted long, and her response reassured him, gentle and concerned as she lay on the bed and leaned over to kiss him. A blind urge to contrariness took hold of him, a hatred of the death-like placidity that seemed to lurk at the heart of her, and without waiting for the kisses he sat up and pulled her down, pressing the immobility of her mouth against his own to kill the passion in himself in an effort to get at hers.

She drew back, seeing all, he thought, yet giving nothing. “I'll be away for three bloody weeks,” he shouted. “Are you bothered or aren't you?”—immediately regretting the explosion of his big mouth. This wasn't the way to go on, her silence and eyes were telling him. What is, then? Christ Almighty, what is? He had to be satisfied with the act of love alone, and it wasn't enough.

“I'm sad as well, Brian.” Her smooth nakedness rubbed against him, dispelled the stabs of his deeper gloom. “I wish you weren't going.”

“So do I.”

“No, you don't. It's good for you to have a rest. You need it. You work too hard, much harder than the others.” Maybe she's right: them fourteen-hour stretches are driving me round the double bend and halfway up the fucking zigzags, though on the other hand it's nothing at all when you come to think on it. “They run a bus from Muka,” he grinned. “I'll be able to see you every night at the Boston Lights—if you can spare me a dance.”

“Yes,” she said vaguely, unanswering, a neutrality he would never be able to break down—though he'd never stop trying. She placed her hand in his groin, but he was stone-cold, and his black mood returned, filling him with an impulse to smash her for trying a trick like that. “You got a better idea, then?” he asked roughly.

Her hand pulled away. “Come and see me if you like.” An endless tape, he thought, that wants snipping with scissors, then maybe it'll finish and begin to give off the real thing. A wind roughed-up the treetops outside, a nervous agitation that completed nothing. He sat on the edge of the bed and reached for his shirt. “Don't bleeding-well put yoursen out, will yer? If yer don't want me to come, say so.” She gripped him tight, her lips between his shoulder blades before his shirt could swing into place. “I've got a better idea.”

“I don't give a sod.”

“I'll come out and see you at Muka. We can find a lonely spot on the beach for a picnic. I'll take the morning ferry and then the bus. How do you like that?”

A blinding flash caught her in the face, knocked her against the wall. When the knife fell deeply enough between them, all was well. Her small fists struck back, and they were holding each other on the bed, buried under a tree of kisses while the wind moaned outside.

He walked to the billet for his pack. Pete Kirkby and Baker were due out on the same lorry. Baker was a Londoner (his old man a Stock Exchange fluctuator who had made a small fortune), tall with steel-grey eyes, short-sighted under rimless spectacles, fair hair shorn to a crewcut. “Any sign of the lorry yet?” Kirkby asked.

“It's on the airstrip running races with its shadow to pass the time away,” Brian said. Baker fell back on his charpoy, worn out after a night on watch: “All I want is sleep. I'm browned off with sending morse night after night.”

“I was up as well,” Kirkby said, stuffing trunks and slippers into his pack; “took a thousand-group message from some whoring slob at Singapore at four this morning. It was wicked. The bloke there was too shagged to send and I was too wanked to get it. I nearly went up the pole. We didn't finish till six: two solid hours. If this leave hadn't come I'd have fastened myself to a transmitter and switched the power on.”

Baker gathered his aeromodel plans and stowed a supply of balsa strips into his case, hoping to finish a new design in time for a competition. As he looked through the open doors, there was a glaze over his eyes that had gone beyond fatigue, a puzzling stare such as might precede a fit of madness and set him running into the breakers for a longer sleep than he really needed. He was undisturbed by a fly that crawled over his knee. Brian felt he had been miscast as a wireless operator: his morse lacked rhythm, leapt from his key-contacts in a way that jangled the ears of operators trying to receive it several hundred miles away. He disliked the discipline of radio procedure, possibly because he'd had too much of similar endurances at the minor public school he often boasted of having been to. He was contemptuous of wireless operating, saying that if you had a natural sense of split-timing and a parrot-sized memory to hold all the rules and pages of Q-signs, then you had reached the limits of your job—which as far as he was concerned made it work for inferior minds since it gave a satisfaction too complete to be valuable or exhilarating. His passion was for a deeper form of life, engines, motorbicycles, model aeroplanes, something unpredictable in motion and performance to be made out of bits and pieces. According to his story, he had been a madman on the dirt-track in England, splitting the silence of Surrey back-lanes on Sunday afternoons with an equally daredevil girl riding pillion and screaming into his ear for him to do a ton. His low forehead, aquiline nose, and thin straight lips gave an impression of a supercilious pride that often drew anger when others in the billet suspected it might be justified, though the haughty look was little more than a mask of control over fires of recklessness burning underneath.

Kirkby folded a wad of redbacks into his wallet, and they went out to the lorry. Baker wore a bright green floral shirt open at the chest and flapping down over Betty Grable shorts, a Christmas tree of cameras and luggage. They sat fifteen minutes on the open back, raging against the dilatory driver who'd vanished behind the cookhouse. “We'll miss the ferry if he ain't careful,” Kirkby groused. “We could a made our own way and bin over at Muka hours ago.” Baker launched into a bout of singing in response to Brian's remark that Muka would be paradise without a squeak of morse for fourteen days.

He reached into his pack for a white trilby, which he bashed into shape and put on. “For Christ's sake, stop your row,” came a shout from a nearby billet. “I'm trying to get my head down.”

“Belt up,” Baker railed, “and get some overseas time in. You pink-kneed ponce.”

“Bugger off,” the voice called back, a little wearier for not having the blazing sun overhead or such a well-developed string of hackles as Baker. “I've been out here five years.”

“Tell me another,” Baker shouted. “I was in Baghdad before you were in your dad's bag.”

“Witty bastard”—but he said no more. Baker had been quiet and withdrawn on his arrival at radio school back in England, still unsocial even after eight weeks' squarebashing. Now his silence seemed to have become a ruse, Brian thought, a tactic of breeding employed when he was pitched into a bunch of noisy strangers whose language he hardly understood. But he could now harangue and barney like an old sailor when he chose to. The door slammed and wheels skidded in the dust, rolled towards the guard-room. Brian sat down for a smoke, and a big pack landed at his feet, then a small pack and waterbottle, a bush hat without badges, two tins of cigarettes, and a couple of Penguin books. While the owner of these belongings began to climb aboard, Brian read a title:
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
, and wondered what it could be about.

“Grab hold of that lot and give me a pull up.” The lorry gathered speed, and he was trotting behind. Brian and Eric Baker shot out their hands, tugged until the late arrival's body had more weight over the backboard than towards the ground, when he fell safely into his possessions and sat on the wooden plank to open a tin of cigarettes. “I hope this is the gharry for Muka,” he said, handing them around.

“It is,” Brian told him, accepting. “Thanks a lot”—shielding a light towards his face. “You got fourteen days as well?”

“Just about. I'm posted here when I get back. I came up on a plane from Changi this morning. You three in signals?” He'd be medium in height, Brian saw, bull-like and stocky, and about thirty-five years old. He covered the tufts of his bald head by the bush hat that had landed over Brian's shoe like a hoop-la ring at a fair, wore a pair of khaki slacks, service mosquito boots into which went the bottoms of his trousers, and a white-drill five-dollar shirt—the cheapest possible way to be out of uniform, in fact. His rolled-up sleeves showed thick hair, and a chest of it at the open neck of his shirt. On his left arm was tattooed a naked woman. A regular, Brian deduced. Must have been in ten years, and with a tan like that he ain't new to Malaya, either. He had a face about to turn florid, red at the cheeks despite his tan, a heavy moustache streaked with grey, and light brown eyes suggesting that he once had sandy hair. Yet beneath all this was an air of youthfulness still, of intelligent and simple living that Brian had noticed in other regulars who existed in a closed world and were easygoing until they became NCO's. (He suspected that the one opposite was, yet couldn't be sure, and felt uneasy because of it. Should he address him as Tosh, or not?) He had a narrowness of purpose and a broad humour which came from having no cares in the world—though outside in a civilian street and suit they seemed to be going through life in a dream.

The lorry roared through the village, its swift rush drying sweat patches on every shirt. “I'm in signals as well,” he said when Kirkby answered him, “so I suppose I'll be working with you lot when I get back. Knotman's my name, Corporal Knotman to the CO but Len to you lot. I don't believe in discipline and bullshit, stripes or no stripes.”

“I'll believe it when I see it,” Baker said. “Where will you be working?”

“Telephone exchange. I was a wireless op once in aircrew, but I lost my stripes when they found they'd got too many of us. They wanted to put me peeling spuds in the cookhouse, but I ended up as a telephonist-erk, a regular in the good old FBI.”

Kirkby took to him: “What's the FBI?” he grinned.

“Freebooters' Institute. Federation of British Imperialists. Footsore, Ballsed-up, and Inked-out of your fucking paybook. Ten bob a day and all found, including the crabs. I'm dead beat,” he said. “I was up at four this morning.”

“That makes two of us,” Baker put in. Knotman pulled a bottle of Chinese rice-spirit from his pack. “Have some of this. It won't rot your guts. It's best whisky, but I carry it in this hooch bottle so that I don't have to offer it to bastards I don't like. They think I'm doing them a favour, in fact, when I don't push it their way, and that makes them begin to like me. But by then it's too late.” Brian took a swig, so did Kirkby. Baker decided to wait a while. “Too late by then, Shag,” Knotman said. “Always take what's going and you won't go far wrong. You might have a heart attack in five minutes and be crippled for life. I was weaned on loot.”

“Where you from?” Brian asked, detecting some peculiarity of accent.

“Canada, but I've been in Limey-land eight years, so I reckon I'm the same as you now.” He stuffed the bottle in his bag and sang in a gruff but tuneful voice, as they sped along between palm-trees and beach until Brian, Pete, and even Baker joined in. It was difficult to tell whether Knotman was drunk or just whacked-out—though it might have been a mixture of both plus an armature of back-logged work unwinding in his brain. They followed his words and caught on to fresh verses, roaring loud as the lorry entered Kota Libis and turned in at the pier gates, where turbaned customs officials stopped looking into bags and cases to see what the wind had brought in.

Brian stood by the rail to watch green water tracking towards Muong. Three large junks, heavy with flour sacks and rubber, headed in the same direction, huge patched sails so slow in the water that they seemed not to be moving at all and reminded him of a poem he'd read a few days since about seeing old ships sail like swans asleep. They were like that, he thought, though at the same time resembling swans that had been in a fight and were creeping inch by inch towards the safety of a harbour. Knotman stayed on the lorry, head in hands for a while, then stared back at the long mainland line of beach as if uninterested in where he was going.