The Yellow Papers (19 page)

‘See? He says he killem. Now he pay.'

‘Get dressed, Corporal, and meet me back here – you've got five minutes. And you,' he told the madam, ‘wait here. I want to see those chickens.'

It only took them a few minutes to drive the three miles to town, but during that time Edward formulated a plan. One of the greatest complaints from the Australians was the food – in British military tradition, they were given breakfast and lunch, but after that there was only bread and jam at around four o'clock, with a cup of tea, and if they were lucky, a bit of cheese. If those chickens weren't too mutilated, they might lift morale by providing dinner for the Australians tomorrow night. As Chen Mu was fond of saying, quoting an ancient proverb,
‘A good fortune may forbode a bad luck which may in turn disguise a good fortune'
.

‘See? See? All dead!' the woman said, pulling Edward into the yard behind the building. ‘Now you pay.'

There was no denying the chickens had been shot – the yard looked like a war zone. Chicken bodies littered the small space, bits of poultry flesh clung to walls and fencing and were already swarming with ants, and feathers drifted and danced on the air currents.

‘I'll give you one rupee for each chicken,' Edward offered, knowing this to be about two shillings – the price they paid for a laying hen back at Walpinya.

‘One rupee?! Ah no! Ten rupees!'

‘Don't be ridiculous, woman!' He counted the dead chickens – eight. ‘I'll give you ten rupees for the lot. Take it or leave it.' And he made to walk out of the yard.

‘Thief!' the woman yelled, but Edward climbed into the vehicle where Winston was still sitting, and started the engine.

‘Okay! Okay! Ten rupees – but you're a thief!'

Edward turned off the engine, took out his wallet and gave Winston two five-rupee notes. ‘This will be coming out of your pay, Corporal. Give it to her, and collect the chickens. And be quick about it,' he said. Ten rupees – not much more than Julia paid to have her hair permed back home, or twice the price little girls no older than eleven charged for their bodies back in Rangoon …

The next evening their Indian cook made a curry out of the undamaged bits, which he augmented with a mountain of vegetables and rice. There wasn't much chicken to go around, but the men were happy as they sat outside to catch the breeze, while kite-hawks swooped for morsels off their plates, and above the slaughterhouse near the camp vultures circled overhead. The same couldn't be said of Corporal Winston, who wasn't enjoying this meal. He'd been started on a course of Neosalvarsan and was at this very moment in the infirmary, vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea and abdominal pain as his body fought the toxic effects of the arsenic the drug contained. He would need up to forty such injections, but Edward couldn't help wonder if even this would curb the corporal's ardour for the brothels of Burma.

Edward was in Rangoon the night the first Japanese bombs fell on Burma. The air raid siren screeched and the men raced for the slit trenches, and soon the
thrum-thrum
sound of a squadron of planes zooming overhead. Back at camp two days later he learned of another Japanese attack four days previously, on the American base at Pearl Harbour. Then the Japanese began daylight raids, flying low over trenches or streets and strafing them from end to end, so that day and night the constant
rat-ta-ta-ta-tat
of American Flying Tigers attacking Japanese planes became part of the sounds of Burma. Many evacuated the cities, and hotels closed down through lack of food. On the wharves, soldiers took over unloading ships in order to get their supplies. On December 25, news came that Hong Kong had surrendered to the Japanese. And still their training continued.

By January 1942 the Japanese were well into Burma, and if the Australian contingent was going to make it through the border into China they would have to leave now, before the Burma Road closed.

For Edward, it only meant one thing – he was moving closer to Ming Li.

15

‘Keep still or it'll get in your eye,' Ming Li snapped, then immediately regretted it. ‘I'm sorry, MeiMei. Just open your mouth a little. It'll stop you blinking.'

She spat on the last of the little block of mascara and worked the brush into it, then applied it to her daughter's eyelashes. ‘There, now look. See how thick they are?'

MeiMei peered into the mirror. ‘Can I wear it every day?'

‘No, you're only fourteen! Not until you're sixteen, at
least
.'

‘Some of the girls at school do.'

‘You're not “some girl”. Now let me do something pretty with your hair.'

MeiMei sighed.

Ming Li brushed her daughter's hair, pretending enthusiasm when in fact she was so tense she could scream. Xueliang was in his study with a man she didn't know. Outside that door their major-domo P'i Gao stood guard; his appearance alone would scare most away. As a young man barely out of childhood, tall and lanky and unsure of his worth, he'd developed alopecia, and as the hair on his head, then his eyebrows and even his eyelashes dropped out, his mother had consulted doctors and made him swallow bitter herbal concoctions of peony and dodder, anklebone and
ho-shou-wu
. But his hair kept falling out and so she'd rubbed chillies and ginger on his scalp and where his eyebrows should be, and his skin had blistered from the treatment until the day he'd said
enough
. Others had tormented him for his appearance, and he'd fought them though he'd always lost, and once he'd had his nose broken. So he'd practised kickboxing and built up his muscles by lifting buckets of water up and down until his arms burnt and shook and the water splashed, but still he'd continued, and with the muscles came confidence. Soon no one would challenge him but still he kept up his training, and even now in the evenings he'd be in the back courtyard practising, though the buckets of water had been replaced by proper weights.

Ming Li guessed the man in Xueliang's office was, like her husband, a member of the Kuomintang, and she suspected that since the fall of Shanghai, Xueliang had engaged in a dangerous game of resistance. She knew it was in her best interests not to know too much, but she also suspected that P'i Gao had become heavily involved in Xueling's activities, though he always acted simply as a major-domo in her presence. But she found this lack of knowledge more frightening than the thought of what could happen to her if taken in for interrogation.

She twisted a handful of MeiMei's hair into a roll and secured it with pins.

‘There. What do you think? Very grown-up.'

The sound of a door opening. Muffled voices, a door shutting.

‘He's gone. Can I go now? Outside?'

‘Who's gone?'

‘That guy who came to see Father.'

‘No one came.'

‘I'm not stupid, Mother. I saw him.'

‘No one came, MeiMei. Do you understand? No one was here today.'

‘Okay then! But can I go outside?'

Ming Li nodded. ‘Only for a short while. Only at the back. And put your coat on.'

MeiMei ran out of the room and Ming Li put away her brushes and the few cosmetics she still had. She had thought her daughter unaware of her ruse to keep her away from Xueliang's office, but the girl was no fool. How much did she know? She was too young to be told of her father's possible activities, but she wasn't blind – each day people they knew disappeared, others were being shot in their very street. Did she believe her parents could –
would
do nothing? Xueliang should talk to her; he'd know how much to tell her.

Cook was waiting for her outside her room.

‘For dinner, Mistress – we need flour. Cabbage too maybe?'

Ming Li nodded. Since the Three Alls Policy, the food and fuel situation had become critical. Long queues and food coupons only produced third-rate goods. Rice was more valuable than gold, flour was bulked up with cement, and meat was practically impossible to get. Only through the black market could she hope for something more substantial. And even though Xueling's silk mills had been seized, still they considered themselves lucky – they, at least, had things to sell, unlike the thousands of refugees living in the streets for whom starvation was all there was.

In Xueliang's study she unlocked the safe hidden behind an everyday scroll depicting a tiger, bought to replace the more valuable one that had hung there before the invasion. The safe held curios, small
objets d'art
that had belonged to both their families, though Xueliang had added to the collection over the years. Now, after nearly five years under Japanese rule, the safe was nearly empty. Only her jewellery collection was still complete, hidden in the hem of her oldest coat in case they had to leave in a hurry. Xueliang refused to allow her to sell any of it as long as they had other items to trade.

‘More already, my Li?' Xueliang came up behind her to see what she would pick. He stroked her hip as he looked over her shoulder – a silent reassurance.

She hesitated over a bronze statuette of a horseman with a spear, then decided on a yellow, white and blue glazed figurine of a woman with rouged lips and a false mole on the corner of her mouth.

‘No, this will fetch more.' He put the figurine back and gave her a round silver box. About two centimetres high with a six centimetre diameter, it was decorated with a gilt floral design around the edge of the lid and sides, and a winged deer, also gilded, in the centre of the lid.

‘But this was your father's, and your grandfather's before that – it's the last such piece you have.'

‘My father would have wanted his family fed. Take it. But be careful.'

The snow was melting and slush mingled with rubbish, making walking hazardous. It was ‘two coat weather' but the air smelt fetid, suffocating. The city was riddled with rats; they darted about in the open, sleek furred and fattened on the smorgasbord of bodies lying everywhere. The lack of gasoline had forced the popular double-decker buses off the streets, and single-decker buses and cars now ran on charcoal that belched dark smoke from stovepipe-like constructions at the front of the vehicles. Large wheelbarrows and carts slowed traffic, and rickshaws flitted like dragonflies through this chaos.

In her oldest coat with a hat pulled low over her eyes, Ming Li pushed her way through the hotchpotch of humanity. A few steps behind, P'i Gao followed – an unobtrusive bodyguard. Past cafés now turned into Japanese massage shops, their walls plastered with posters in Japanese proclaiming ‘Asia for the Asiatics'. Westerners – those that were not Jewish, for they had already been ghettoised in the Hongkew District – skulked about amongst the refugees, their armbands denoting their nationality and their registration number: ‘B' for British and Australian, ‘A' for American, ‘N' for Netherlands. They all wore an expression of grim dreariness, as if exhausted from the effort of carrying on living while waiting for something to change. But Ming Li felt little pity for them. They, unlike the Chinese whose bank accounts had been frozen, were still allowed to withdraw 2000 Chinese dollars a month – about as much as a lowly Chinese earned – from banks that now opened only two hours a day. Ming Li thought of the account Edward had insisted on opening in her name, just before leaving Shanghai for the last time. She knew he'd felt he was looking after her in case he couldn't get back, but she'd interpreted his gesture differently.