Saint Jack (8 page)

“So he's doing your
towkay
's accounts,” said Yardley. It was a meaningless remark, but for Yardley an extraordinary tone of voice: he whispered it.

“It's a very fiddly sort of job,” said Yates after a moment. “You really have to know what's what.”

“Takes ages to do those sums,” said Smale. “Our accountant told me some days he looks at all those numbers and feels like cutting his throat.”

“You have to pass an exam,” said Coony, staring toward the kitchen. “To be an accountant. It's a bugger to pass. I know a bloke who failed it five times. Bright bloke, too.”

Yardley called Wally, who was holding his radio to his ear the way a child holds a seashell for the sound. He ordered drinks and when Wally set them up Yardley handed me two gins and a bottle of tonic water. “Pink one's for your pal,” he said. He glanced toward the kitchen.

“I wouldn't mind living in Wiltshire,” Smale said. He said it with reverent hope, and we continued talking like this, in whispers. I had not realized just how long Leigh had been gone until I saw that the ice in his pink gin had melted and my own glass was empty.

I climbed down from the barstool and hurried into the kitchen. The toilet door was ajar, but Leigh was not inside. He was sitting on a white kitchen chair, by the back door, with his head between his knees.

“William,” I said, “are you okay?”

He shook his head from side to side without raising it.

“Get up and walk around a bit. It's cool out back. The fresh air—can you hear me?—the fresh air will do you a world of good. Can you get up?”

He groaned. The back of his neck was damp, the sick man's sweat made his hair prickle; his ears had gone white. I knew it was his engine.

“He sick-
lah
,” said Wally, appearing beside me with the radio squawking in his hand.

“Will you shut that fucking thing off!” I screamed. I do not know why I objected or swore. “Get a doctor, and hurry!”

Wally jumped to the phone.

Yardley and the others came into the kitchen as I was helping Leigh up. Leigh's face had a white horror-struck expression—wide unmoving nose holes—that of a man drowning slowly in many fathoms of water. I had seen these poor devils hoisted out of the drink: their mouths gaped open and they stared past you with anxious bugging eyes, as if they have acquired phenomenal sight, the ability to see far, and see at that great distance something looming, a throng of terrors. Leigh looked that way; he seemed about to whisper rather than scream. He was breathing: I saw a flutter in his throat, and a movement like a low bubble rise and fall in the declivity of his shoulder.

We carried him into the lounge, stretched him out on the sofa, and put pillows under his head. I took off his watch; it had made white roulettes on his wrist, perforations that wouldn't go away. He looked paler than ever, more frightening in the posture of a corpse. But the worst part was when his legs came alive—just his legs, like a man having a tantrum—and his kicking heels made an ungodly clatter on the bamboo armrest of the sofa.

“Christ,” said Coony, stepping back. Smale and Frogget clamped their hands on his ankles and held them down. The clattering stopped, but the silence after that weird noise was much worse.

I was conscious of standing there with my tattooed arms hanging at my sides, not doing a blessed thing, and I heard a voice, Yardley's, saying, “See that tatty sofa over in the lounge near the piano? That's where Jack's mate from Hong Kong packed it in. It was the damnedest thing—”

I turned to shut him up. But he was not talking; he was standing, expressionless, holding Leigh's drink, the pale pink gin in which all the ice had melted. He seemed to be offering it to Leigh and though he held the tumbler in two hands it was shaking.

Leigh stared past us, at that looming thing very far off we could not see. I memorized his astonishment. It made us and the Bandung and everything on earth small and unimportant, not worth notice, and we were—for the time Leigh was on the sofa—as curious and baffled as those people on a city sidewalk who pass a man looking up at the sky and look up themselves but are made uneasy because they can't see the thing they know must be there.

T
HAT WAS
how, in a manner of speaking—by the act of dying—Leigh had the last word; though toward the end we tried to take back the things we had said. I have a memory of the six of us dancing around that green sofa in the badly lighted lounge, before the doctor came and took him away, frantically attempting ways to revive him, to coax him back to life so that we could have another chance to be kind to him—or perhaps so that he could amend his last words, which had been “Does this establishment have a toilet?” to something if less memorable, more dignified.

Our reviving methods were the ineffectual kind we had learned from movies: lifting his eyelids (why? did we want to see the eye or not?); plumping his pillow; unbuttoning his shirt; pouring cold water over his face with the Johnnie Walker pitcher; fitting an ice bag on his head like a tam-o'-shanter, and lightly slapping his cheeks while asking persistent questions—“Where does it hurt?” and “Can you hear me?”—to which there were no replies.

The doctor sensibly put a stop to this. “How did he get so wet?” he asked as he knelt and swiftly tinkered with Leigh's chest and shone a light in his eyes. He held Leigh's wrist various ways and said, “It's too late.” It sounded like a reproach for what I had whispered to Leigh—“Maybe later.”

“A lot
he
cares,” said Smale, muffling what he had said with his hand and backing away from the doctor.

“Is it all right to smoke?” asked Coony. But he had already lit one, which was smoldering half-hidden in his cupped fingers.

“One of you will have to come along with me,” said the doctor, ignoring Coony's question. The doctor was Chinese, and I think what Smale held against him was his unclinical appearance; he was wearing a bright sports shirt and Italian sandals.

Yardley and the others turned to me and became very attentive and polite, as to the next of kin, offering me the considerate sympathy they had lavished on William, as they had started calling him when he was on the sofa and, most likely, dead. We wore long faces—not sad because we liked him, but mournful because we hated him. Coony put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you okay, Jack?”

“I'll be fine in a minute,” I said, becoming the grieving person they wanted me to be.

“If there's anything we can do,” said Yates.

I put on my suit jacket and fixed my tie. I was dressed for a death, buttoning the black jacket over my stomach.

“What are you going to tell his wife?” asked Yardley.

I stopped buttoning. “Won't the hospital tell her?” It had not occurred to me until Yardley mentioned it that I would have to break the news to Leigh's wife.

“They'll get it all wrong,” said Smale. He held my sleeve and confided, “They'll make it sound bloody awful.”

“Don't tell her it happened here,” said Coony quickly. “Say it happened somewhere else.”

“During the day,” said Smale. “A sunny day.”

“But in the shade,” said Coony, “of a big Angsana tree. In the Botanical Gardens. While he was—” Coony hit his fist against his head.

“While he was having a good time with the rest of us,” said Yardley. He looked from face to face.

There was a long silence. The doctor was at the bar speaking on the telephone to the hospital.

“Near the bandstand,” said Frogget. “Maybe he tried to climb that hill. And it was too hot. And his ticker gave out.”

“We told him to stop,” said Yardley, sounding convinced. “But he wouldn't listen to us. ‘Have it your way,' we said. So off he went—”

“I'll think of something,” I said, cutting Yardley off. I didn't like this.

It had all fallen to me. He was mine now, though I had tried several times to disown him. I had not wanted him; I had disliked him from the moment he asked, “Flowers . . . are you a ponce?” And his triumphant contempt: “How do you stand it?” and “How do you manage?” It was as if he had come all that way to ask me those questions, and to die before I could answer.

The doctor clicked Leigh's eyes shut, moving the lids down with his thumbs; but the lids refused to stick and sightless crescents of white appeared under the lashes. We carried him to the doctor's Volvo and folded him clumsily into the back seat. I sat beside him and put my arm around him to keep him from swaying. He nodded at every red light, and at the turning on River Valley Road his head rolled onto my shoulder.

“How long have you been in Singapore?” the doctor asked. It was a resident's question. I told him how long. He did not reply at once; I guessed I had been there longer than him. He drove for a while and then asked when I would be leaving.

“Eventually,” I said. “Pretty soon.”

“Haven't I seen you at the Island Club?”

“Yes,” I said. “I go there now and then, just to hack around.”

“What's your handicap?”

“My handicap,” I said. “I wouldn't repeat it in public.”

The doctor laughed and kept driving. Leigh slumped against me.

In my locked bedroom on Moulmein Green, late at night and so dog tired after driving one of my girls back to her house from a hotel that I collapsed into bed without pulling my pants off or saying my prayers, I had imagined death differently—not the distant horror of the drowning man, but the sense of something very close, death crowding me in the dark: a thing stirring in a room that was supposed to be empty. The feeling I got on one of those nights was associated in my mind with the moment before death, the smothering sound of the cockroach. A glossy cockroach, motionless, gummed to the wall by the bright light, goes into action when the light is switched off. It is the female which flies and its sound is the Chinese paper fan rapidly opening and closing. This fluttering dung beetle in the black room is circling, making for you. You listen in the dark and hear the stiff wings beating near your eyes. It is going to land on your face and kill you and there is nothing you can do about it.

I did not imagine a moment of vision before death, but quite the reverse, blindness and that fatal
burr
of wings. Leigh's eyes were not completely closed, the lids were ajar and the sulfurous streetlamps on Outram Road lit the gleaming whites. In the General Hospital Leigh peered past the orderly who pinned an admission ticket to his shirt—number eighty-six, a lottery number for Mr. Khoo—and turned out his pockets: a few crumpled dollars, a withered chit, some loose change, a wallet containing calling cards, a picture of Margaret, a twenty-dollar Hong Kong note, and a folded receipt from the Chinese Emporium on Orchard Road. This went into a brown envelope.

“We'll need a deposit,” said the nurse.

I took out Gunstone's envelope,
Singapore Belvedere
, and handed over fifteen dollars.
How do you manage?

“Please fill up this form,” she said.

The form was long and asked for information I could not provide without Leigh's passport. So with the matron's permission I went back to the Strand by taxi, told the desk clerk that Leigh was dead, and picked up the passport. “It seems like only yesterday that he checked in,” the desk clerk said; he assured me that he would take care of everything. By the time I was back at the hospital, copying Leigh's full name, home address, nearest relation, race, and age—he was a year younger than me; the pen shook in my hand—Leigh was staring out of the chilly morgue drawer; after the autopsy he looked much the same, though unzipped, he fixed on that distant thing with the single eye the autopsy left him.

I had forgotten Leigh's suitcase. After the certificate of death had been made out I picked up the case at the Strand, and at my insistence the taxi driver detoured past the Bandung. As we went past I could see lights burning and Yardley, Frogget, Smale, and the others at the bar, like lost old men, vagrants huddled around a fire late at night, sharing a bottle, afraid to go to bed.

It was after midnight. I did not have the heart to wake up Leigh's wife and get her out of bed to tell her she was a widow. I locked my door, put a match to the mosquito coil, and knelt beside it. The mosquito coil, lighted to suffocate the gnats and drive the cockroaches away, smoked like a joss stick. I blinked in the fumes and tried to pray; the first words that came to me were,
Is this all?

The next day I awoke as if after a binge, with that feeling of physical and mental fragility, exposure, distraction—the knowledge of having done something shameful which refuses to be summoned up: of having revealed my closest secret which now everyone knew except me! And then I remembered Leigh, not as a corpse; it was an uncharitable intrusive thought, something connected with the smile he wore when he had asked, “How do you manage?” A picture of his dead face followed.

So more as an act of penance than out of any curiosity, I opened his suitcase and picked through it. Each thing I found made me sad; nothing was concealed. There were tags and labels on the case, the traveler's campaign ribbons, K
HAO
Y
AI
M
OTOR
L
ODGE
, H
OTEL
B
ELA
V
ISTA
—M
ACAU
, and the luggage tag from the airline with the destination lettered sin. Here was a sock with a hole in the toe, a pathetic little sewing kit, some salt tablets, a packet of Daraprim, very wrinkled pajamas with a white-piping border, his human smell still upon them. In a paper bag from the Chinese Emporium there were a set of screwdrivers, a new shaving brush, some Lucky Brand razor blades. There was a wrapped parcel of batik cloth from another shop, probably a present for his wife, and stuck to the parcel were two receipts for the cloth, but giving different prices, the lower faked price to fool the customs official in Hong Kong and avoid a few dollars' import duty. At the bottom of the case was a detective novel with a grisly title that described Leigh's own death, an eerie coincidence italicizing the improbable fraud of one, the pitiful condition of the other. He was in the morgue drawer, and here was his poor bundle of effects: this was all.