Key to the Door (48 page)

PART FOUR

The Jungle

CHAPTER 23

At nine o'clock one June morning an open fifteen-hundredweight turned from the camp gates and set the heavy tread of its tyres north along the coast road. The sweat on Brian's face was soon fanned dry by its speed and, one of six, he leaned against the side and took off his bush hat, felt his short fair hair jerking in the wind. He'd been up since five, checking maps, building up the contents of his pack, and stowing the compass where it wasn't likely to smash or get wet. Shaded under the palms, the long cookhouse went back to sleep after they had eaten and clobbered out.

He'd thought this day would never come, but now that the powerful rasping lorry engine roared them along towards Gunong Barat he was relaxed, hardly excited at all. Instead, strangely enough, when blue and cloud-reflecting paddy fields fanned out richly eastwards, thoughts and memories of Nottingham pushed into his mind and this dwelling on the past damped the intoxication he'd always expected to feel. He was puzzled, but grunted and lit a fag, bending under the backboard to escape the wind. Pauline came to mind: tall and abstracted as she walked along the privet-hedged pavement of the wide street, her pale face given character by a slight thinness after the baby had been born. Everything that happened to Brian since leaving school, the long four years of work and courting, had led to him marrying Pauline and thinking now: I'm spliced, though it's never felt like it should, for even when I slept with her on my odd days of leave it only seemed like getting in a bit of rooky I wasn't entitled to. Even the kid she had ain't made much of a picture to my mind, so why did I marry her? I needn't have done, in one way, and I haven't spent enough married life with her yet to know whether or not I feel good at getting married when I did. Which I suppose is how you're bound to feel when you come to think about it.

The sun's heat, seeming to pierce his skull in spite of the wind, slowly banished the intruding vision, and he was glad to give his eyes up to magic-lantern pictures of Malaya spread all around in colour. They reached the airstrip, and when a plane touched down, the lorry belted forward and slung Baker on to the load of packs. “You louse-bound bastard,” he screamed. “I suppose he thinks we're just the normal air-force cattle. Why the bloody hell did he have to wake us this morning? I was having marvellous dreams, riding down through Kent with a smashing girl on the pillion. There's just no civilization left.”

“Stop your effing griping,” Kirkby growled. “You get on my wick. Why did you bleddy-well come if you didn't want to?”

“There are stranger things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in
your
philosophy, Kirkby.” Baker wasn't capable of sneering, but the angle at which he held his head (really a physical defect due to bad eyesight) and the tone of superiority in his voice often angered those who didn't know him, or were unable to match this feeling. “Listen,” Kirkby called back, “you'll get this bloody bayonet up
your
bleeding philosophy if you don't sodding-well belt up.”

“You're lucky to be here,” Brian said, “after we all lied for you the other day.” Baker, with a sane and self-righteous expression, had been marched into the orderly room on a charge of insubordination against the sergeant who'd said they weren't to take suitcases back on the boat. Half the signals billet filed in behind to perjure themselves and testify that the sergeant had struck Baker first. So he had got off.

The silver, geometrically spaced trees of a rubber estate grew miles back from the roadside, and bursting into open land once more, the stink of putrescent mud assailed them from the banks of a wide, shallow, hardly moving river. The lorry wheels treddled loose planks of a pontoon bridge, and Jack the Welshman hurrah-ed ironically on reaching tarmac. Brown pal-thatched huts of a kampong stood away from the roadside, every turn of which brought them nearer to Gunong Barat, so that by mid-morning its dark green humps climbed up and back to the sharp summit fixed against a mass of white-bellied cloud. “It looks beautiful, anyway,” Brian called to Knotman. “I'd never a seen this if I adn't left Nottingham.”

“It's all relative, though,” Knotman said. “When I was stationed near London I used to like going round the East End—White-chapel and Bethnal Green—back along Cable Street. I used to find that inspiring in a strange way. Ever been to Petticoat Lane market? That's beautiful as well. You ought to live in London when you get back. Get a job there.”

“I'd like to. I never wanted to stick in one place. I expect there's lots of small engineering firms in London as 'ud set me on.”

“Sure. You're young. Your wife wouldn't mind a change, would she?”

“Not if I want it,” Brian said. The broad main street of Balik Kubong was drawn by them like a sleeve, and they were back on the open road. Forking left at Penunjok, the lorry nearly scooped off with a petrol pump. “That bastard wants certifyin',” Kirkby said. Rubber estates grew thicker around, and the lorry switched north along an unpaved road with a small river to the left—recognized from the map as the Sungei Pawan. The road ended sharply at the jungle's edge, as if the surveyors had downed tools and refused to go farther at the sudden dispiriting thickness of the forest. Brian was so glad to leave the lorry he almost fell off: “He didn't kill us, anyway.”

The taciturn driver spun his lorry around and shot it between the trees, making for the more manoeuvrable spaces of the main road before louder curses got through to him. Brian heaved his pack up, shook it squarely against his shoulders. They were dressed in khaki shirts, slacks tucked in at the ankles to wide-topped mosquito boots, and bush hats. Each shouldered pack was squared by blanket and cape, and Christmas-treed around by a full waterbottle, haversack, kukri, and rifle. Brian looked at the jungle, stood in silence a minute or two as if wondering what he was doing there, and why he wanted to enter that towering wall of trees from which only the sound of rushing water emerged in an unfair tit for tat. So that's the jungle: he grinned. Where's all them tropical flowers and Technicolor parrots flitting from tree to tree? What about Tarzan and Martin Rattler, Allan Quatermain and Jungle Jim? Not that I ever believed in all that anyway, at least not after I left school. It was dark green and dull, full of gloom and the uninviting pillars of stark trees.

They advanced in single file up the bed of the stream. Progress was slow, because the six-stone loads made them almost top-heavy. Slime-covered rocks underwater often upset their balance, and each on the first days at some time capsized into ice-cold water. Subsidiary hills shouldered to two thousand feet on either side, and the rolling jungle on their slopes looked impossible to penetrate. “I'd rather be in Kew Gardens,” Baker said and, as if to prove it, slipped and went down into the water like a raft that held up his pack, rifle, and hat. Brian levered him out.

Odgeson was supposed to be in charge of the party, a tall thin fair-haired dental surgeon not long qualified and looking little older than the other twenty-year-olds. At the first pause for breath Knotman said, his voice firm yet kept in a narrow edge of respect and gentleness: “If you don't mind, sir, I'll be in charge from now on. I've done this sort of jungle-crawling before. It'll be easier that way.”

Odgeson agreed: “I was going to suggest it anyway”—pulled the two rings of rank from his shoulder straps and fastened them under the band of his cigarette case. They went on, each taking turns to be in front and find safe footsteps through the water. Ground rose slowly, and the tree gap stayed wide enough to let in sunlight, so that while they were often ice-cold to the waist, their shirts fastened heavily against them with sweat.

Brian was happy with the exertion, careful to place one foot firmly down before swinging to the other. The pack chafed at his back because all food was in tins, and sharp rims came keen against his bones. Talk flew about, laughter ripping along the canyon of the stream, even Baker finding his feet and spirit after a while. It was a picnic, a climb in the woods for the first hours, and when the stream ballooned into a large clear pool of water they stripped to their tanned skins and waded in.

It was necessary to climb between the trees proper, to outflank a ravine whose sides were sheer for hundreds of feet, a sickle-shaped cleft as narrow as a knife-wound in the mountain slope. Knotman led the way, slung his rifle and drew a razor-edged kukri from its case, parting the bushes for a drag upwards. “Picnic over,” Jack the Welshman said, second in the file. They struggled through damp soil and undergrowth, lifting into shadows and semi-darkness. Above and all round them on the steep slope grew trees and tangles of bushes. Neither Brian nor anyone but Knotman had ever seen the like, and they wondered how they'd get through it. Creepers and climbing plants hung with mosses, and ferns were bound together with long trailers, crossed like webs of rope that some impatient giant had tried making but given up as a bad job. Tall forest trees loomed roundabout, and the thick massive foliage of their tops made a canopy that seemed to have kept the sky back for thousands of years.

“Why don't somebody put the light on?” Kirkby shouted. It rained, a steady unobtrusive downbeat of water that ate into all they carried. A path was cut slowly through. Loaded like pack mules, they found the climb exhausting, and after a few hundred feet, each fell into the undergrowth for a rest. Brian pulled clods of red soil from his soaking boots.

“Come on,” Knotman said. “It'll be dark soon.” With laughter they were on their way, trying to follow the contour and keep the stream parallel, but in reality travelling eyeless since there was no view and even the compass gave no useful aid. Brian took the lead, wielding his kukri at the creepers, one almost strangling him before he saw it. His arms became leaden and unmanageable, as if held into his body by bandaged wounds. “Have a turn now,” he said to Kirkby. Baker cursed blind in disentangling himself from creepers. They seemed to have it in for him, Brian suggested, and caught at his pack, rifle, arms, and legs. He slipped and began rolling, but latched on to a friendlier vine before he went too far down the hillside. Odgeson and Brian pulled him upright—“like getting a knight in armour on to his horse,” Brian said. “We need a block-and-tackle for this bleeding job.”

Another hard stretch and they sat down again. It still rained. Brian levered a tin of cigarettes from his pocket, handed them around. Wet soil soaked through to his skin, and a stream of water, collected by some hollow and hoarding leaf in the treetop world above, slid down on to the brim of his hat. What a place! As a child (and more recently) he'd imagined the adventure of living beyond all forms of shelter, himself pitted abroad against the vagaries of God's earth, and the abiding sensation had been one of comfort and self-possession, of glorying quietly in his solitude. His long nights alone in the DF hut had given him a forerunning taste of the hermit life, but now that he was wet and chafed under the jungle trees and a long way from shelter or bed, the battle against nature seemed more real. At the same time and in spite of all discomfort, such exposure lit the recesses of his hermit soul with a light that made him feel more equal to himself than he had been before: fag-smoke warmed his lungs, and patterns blown from his lips stayed firm a few seconds in the heavy vaporous air. He sat apart. Hardly anyone spoke, and then in low voices as if trapped in some damp, dusky, and endless cathedral. Brian felt dazed, the first spells of exhaustion having worked their way, after so many months of soft life in camp, to the core of his understanding, so that he found the difference between today and yesterday hard to credit.

They descended towards the stream and at half-past five laid camp on a flat bed of rock where the river dropped into a waterfall as if pouring itself through a funnel, the banks being only a few yards apart. Brian's back ached, half-broken and on fire where the rim of the big pack had rubbed all day into him, and stripping off his shirt, he uncovered a wide red sore. Two tins of soaked fags were slung into the water, went bobbing their way towards the long drop of the waterfall. “That'll be less to carry,” he said, aware again of his back, as if a bite had been taken out of it.

“So will that,” Knotman said, putting his cigarette to a bloated leech fixed on a good feed at Baker's shoulder. Shirts and trousers hung over bushes, and more leeches were found: sometimes they didn't drop, but burst, leaving a copious fall of blood on arm or leg. Knotman said they should haul in a stock of wood for the night fire, and a blaze was going by darkfall. “It'll be a bloody long time before we reach the top at this rate,” Baker said. He stood by the stream, gazing into thick shadowy jungle on the other side. “What did you expect?” Knotman asked. “A piece of cake?”

“No,” he shot back; “a cable railway.”

“You're not in Switzerland,” Odgeson laughed.

“I can't see us reaching the top tomorrow, either,” Knotman said. “At this rate it'll take three or four days.” Jack had finished eating, was polishing his twelve bore, pulling it through and clearing soil from the barrel. “I could dig a coal mine under this quicker than we're climbing it.”

“What they ought to do,” Brian said, “is burn all this down with flame-throwers and grow lettuces. Or build roads so's cars could run over it at sixty miles an hour.” Supper finished, they hung mosquito-nets from overhanging branches and made beds beneath—two beds sleeping two in each. Brian didn't see any reason for two being on guard, but Knotman thought it wise, so nobody argued. “Two in a bed,” Baker said. “It's a pansies' paradise.”

“At least you'll get summat out o' this trip then!”

“Balls, Seaton,” he shouted back.

Brian was on guard with Knotman at midnight, sitting on a rock a few yards apart and stilled by a heaviness of unsatisfied sleep. Brian kept his rifle upright and head leaning out for it as he slowly lost consciousness. The crack of a twig came from the opposite bank—so close and overhanging in the darkness he felt he could stretch out his arm and touch it—once he woke up. Knotman had already heard the shrubbery rustling, seen a large cat poised in the low flames of the fire. They aimed at the same time. Brian joyfully let go five shots, glad to have noise in the oppressive darkness filled only by the stream rushing into the suicide dive of the nearby falls. The shots echoed into the surrounding mountain slopes like God's whips trying to drive away darkness, and presumably the animal they saw slipped unnoticed away. The others didn't stir, and Brian in the silence paraphrased some lines he remembered from Dante's
Inferno
, a book he'd collared from the camp library months ago, and had read in fits and starts at the DF hut: