THE QUARRY man said since it was only limestone he would blast it out with a mudpack. This meant the explosive would be put on the outside and covered with mud. The noise it made would be louder than with explosives, which were detonated in holes drilled into rocks.
“And lots of wind,” the quarry man said. Tony laughed. He thought of little Eva’s constant wind. Pressure wave was what they had called it at the technical college.
There was a shack near the rock. The foreman had spoken to the occupants and had arranged to put plywood sheets in front of the windows. In a way the surface explosion was better because there would not be little pieces of flying rock fragments.
The limestone rock was blasted the next morning while they crouched well back from the rock. They felt the wave of air pressure run through their hair and ripple on their skins. Then Tony went into the shack and checked if there was any damage. Nothing. It had been the right decision. He walked back to the road where his men were removing the shattered rock.
Half an hour later Tee, the squatter occupant of the shack, came running up to him clutching four dead chickens. He exploded into a torrent of Chinese which Tony didn’t understand. After about a minute he realised Tee was abusing him in Hainanese.
One of his men translated. “All his chickens have died. Twenty-two of them.”
“Hell, the pressure wave,” Tony thought.
That was how a whole series of arguments began.
Tee found himself a lawyer. Not just any old lawyer but that fellow Siva on Hale Street whom Tony, with his scant knowledge of the legal fraternity, regarded as the parallel of a Saville Row of lawyers in Ipoh. He had met the bugger at the F.M.S. bar one Sunday after they had drawn stumps on the Padang. Nice guy, but as sharp as a packet of razor-blades. Man with a big thirst.
The long-drawn business erupted with tempers flying on the site outside Tee’s shack between him and Ng. Ng refused to pay the compensation and Tony fought him tooth and nail, not so much on the legal issue but on the humanitarian grounds of Tee’s loss.
Tony lost his usual calm and burst out, “If they were Cantonese, you would have paid. Just because they are Hainanese, you …”
“Shut your bloody foul mouth, Tony!”
Tony had hit hard below the belt. His words had another stab beyond the intra-Chinese clan and dialect divisions that he only realised after lashing out. At that time, in Ipoh, it was highly probable that Tee, a Hylam, as Tony called the Hainanese, could be a communist. Like Tit.
Tee, who did not speak English, stood in the doorway of his shack and watched the two of them arguing, his face inscrutable.
A letter from Siva finally tipped the scales and Ng agreed to pay. Ninety percent only. Siva agreed on behalf of Tee.
The planned celebration of Ng’s and Tony’s race winnings two weeks earlier had had to be postponed, so when the dead chickens affair was settled Ng threw a dinner party and included Siva, the Hale Street lawyer.
Tony was as tense as a pregnant woman who had waited for nine months all through the dinner. Only the ‘victory chicken’ with its crisp sweet skin brought him to earth for a few minutes. He saw how well Ng and Siva were getting on and knew they would all end up in the cabaret. Mimi’s cabaret.
At the back of his mind was a news report in the Straits Echo, the Penang newspaper which was subjected to the perennial crack that it was the week-late echo of the Straits Times of Singapore. He had read one day, tucked away at the bottom of a page, a report that the title of Tolley’s Brandy Queen of Ipoh had been won by Miss Mimi Tan. It gnawed at him.
He saw Mimi come up to them even before his eyes had adjusted to the dark. She was as beautiful as he remembered her. She was glowing. A little plump. She sat down beside him at once and looked for his hand under the table. They asked politely after each other as the band was taking a rest.
When the music started she arranged to meet him the following night as they danced. She had been booked out for the last hour, she said. They danced to This Can’t Be Love, holding each other close. She whispered in his ear that she had missed him so badly.
She left them at eleven o’clock. Tony saw her go up to a table across the dance floor opposite theirs and a young man stood up. They talked briefly and left the cabaret together.
Mummy Chin came up and spoke to him.
“Why you don’t come nowadays?”
“No time, no money, lah.”
“Mimi very sad you no come.”
“But she has many friends.”
“Yes. After winning the Tolley’s Brandy Queen. Now that fellow Sum, he take her home almos’ every night.”
All the joy racing through him upon seeing Mimi and holding her close to his body again suddenly drained away. He tossed in bed all night, his imagination running riot.
He questioned Mimi about Sum as soon as she got into the car the next night. She grinned. “Don’t be so jealous. You are my only man, Tony. I must tell you about him. He’s my saviour.”
“Your what?”
“The fellow who saves me from a lot of trouble. After I won the Queen contest, everyone thought I was the most beautiful girl in the cabaret.”
She paused but Tony didn’t say anything.
“Everybody wanted to sleep with me. Most of all Sum.”
Tony took his eyes off the road to look at Mimi. She was smiling, looking pleased with herself.
“Rich tin miner’s son. He always wants the best. Whether it’s shoes or brandy or food or a woman.”
“And so? Did he get the …”
She put her hand on his thigh, “Tony darling, please listen.”
“I knew he had one special girl friend. She’s a stenographer in the Kinta Electrical Distribution Company. What he really wanted was to boast about getting me. So I made a deal with him.
“I would say that he took me to bed, if he booked me out regularly. I said that if he booked me out often, my status in the cabaret would go right up. That pleased him of course. I also told him I knew his best girl. That upset him. I said I wouldn’t breathe a word to her. I needed the booking money, I said.”
She looked at Tony to see how he took her story.
There was a half smile on his face.
“You can be a dangerous woman, can’t you?”
“Men are so stupid,” she said.
He did not ask the obvious question.
But the warmth of her body and the passion in her kisses swept away all the doubts that had tortured him the night before.
He drove home that night pensive. It had been a long time. He now could stand off and look at Mimi after all those months apart.
They began to meet again at irregular intervals. Damn the spies, he said to himself. He would sign them in as Mr and Mrs de Souza again. But Mimi said they could go to her room in Menglembu. “The fellow’s left the front room,” she said.
“But that makes it all the more dangerous, darling.”
Mimi smiled at him. “No. He was withdrawn because you have been pardoned by the communists.”
“Hah?”
“Yes. In fact they now believe you are a possible recruit. They say you are with the people.”
“And how the blazes did this …”
“Because they say you have a Chinese girlfriend.”
“Ha ha ha …”
“And because they know how you fought for the compensation for Mr Tee.”
“How did they find out about …”
“Mr Tee was there.”
“The beggar! He made out as if he didn’t understand a word of English.”
One day, after it was all over and they were eating a delicious meal of rice, freshwater prawns, turtle soup and vegetables at a roadside stall, Mimi suggested they needed a real break. They had not spent enough time with each other, she said.
“Why don’t we spend a week in Cameron Highlands?”
“I have to go away for about two days. We are tendering for a job in Telok Anson. It’s a big one. Have to look over the whole road line,” he said to Gloria.
“Mr Ng, I have to go to Malacca. About four or five days. There’s some dispute about my late uncle’s property which has taken so long to settle …” he said to Ng.
They spent five days in a small clean hotel on the main street of Tanah Rata, in the mountains of the Main Range.
Both Tony and Mimi had known the secondary jungles of Malaya. She in her childhood, in the village north of Ipoh, playing around the fruit trees, the mangosteens and rambutans and in between the clumps of bananas and tall stands of bamboos on the fringes of rubber smallholdings. He, surveying the routes of new roads, following streams to trace their lines of flow through the jungles, feeling hanging creepers brush against his arms, seeing squirrels scurrying up trees as he walked, catching glimpses of colourful birds, hearing grunts of unseen wild boar disturbed by their slashing at branches with their parangs.
But in the mountains of Cameron Highlands they entered the primeval jungle together, hand in hand, for the first time. There in the dark of the equatorial jungle they found each other again.
They walked from sunlight into the darkness and dampness, feeling they were thrusting themselves into the womb opening of some monster, smelling new scents, listening to occasional screeches of insects and cries of birds punctuating the stillness. Stepping on thick beds of rotting leaves and snapping twigs, yielding to the weight of their bodies. Huge towering cylinders of tree trunks rose thick and round and solid on all sides of them, masculine, foreboding, disappearing into the mass of dark foliage above. They saw boulders, great gashes in them, from which grew thick tangles of pale green ferns and waxy dark leaves. Jungle orchids wrapped onto tree branches, their roots hanging down in the damp air. Tree ferns with delicate fronds, like graceful nymphs in the harsh jungle.
They pushed their bodies through the thinner branches and brambles, gripping and snapping off twigs with the sap trickling down their hands. They felt water dripping on their faces, their arms. The long wet grass blades and leaves brushed against their legs and soon the cloth of their trousers was clinging to their thighs, wet and sticky, mixed with the sweat of their exertions.
They went uphill, slowly, without hurrying, panting, sucking in the cool damp air, pausing now and then to get their breath back. Mimi’s face was flushed. Perspiration clouded her eyes.
In the dark distance of the equatorial monster’s womb they heard the wak-wak calling of the gibbons.
Up and up they went, up the jungle-clad mountain, up the same tracks animals and aboriginal men had trod for centuries, till they reached the summit, exhausted, where the air was cool but with the same cloying dampness everywhere.
There was nothing else after they arrived at the peak. They were still surrounded by the thick round shafts of trees and the primeval rainforest still enclosed them. They could see no further than when they were in the valley. There were only tiny pinholes in the roof of foliage that blocked out the sunlight.
One morning, after a day exploring the jungle, she said to him, “You know, my shirt was all torn and my back is full of scratches. You must choose a smoother tree next time, darling.”
They laughed and from the mountains of their ecstasies and laughter they descended to the plains and the muddy paddy fields with their lazy rivers, where the sun was burning hot and the clouds boiling up like steam in the sky. Back to Ipoh.
SIVA SAT in his Hale Street office sipping coffee. It was too early to get started. He liked to thaw out slowly. Anyway it was too early for visitors. He knew his first fixed meeting was at ten.
He would have to watch Dickson’s balls. One could get really screwed up by Dickson. He could take Rao’s crackling fast bowling, but Dickson’s spinners were another kettle of fish. Slimy things. Last week he had hit one of Dickson’s damn things, but with the edge of his bat, and the wicket keeper was there with his dirty big hands. Must have an early night on Friday. No drinking at the Station Hotel bar. I’m not going to let that European bugger mess up my season average on Saturday.
There was a tap on his door. The office peon was not in yet. Only the kerani was in.
“There’s a woman to see you, sir,” the kerani said.
“So early. Who’s she?”
“A Miss Tan. She insisted, although I told her it was …”
“All right, Mr Lee. Ask her to come in.”
An attractive Chinese woman in her twenties, tall, well built, smartly dressed in a tight flowered cheongsam with a slit on the side showing more thigh than most middle-class women would dare to.
“Mr Siva. Thank you for seeing me so early. Without an appointment. It’s only a small thing I want.”
Then he remembered her. The girl at the cabaret. Mimi Tan.
She said she wanted to change her name by deed poll. He got such requests at times. He had stopped asking why. Their explanations were either so long or so patently untrue.
He asked Lee in and gave him instructions. When the discreet Lee came in with the papers, he raised his eyebrows in a deliberate exaggerated way behind the woman’s back. He put the form down on Siva’s desk but with it was an old file.
Siva took his cue from the kerani. His eyes widened when he read the title of the file.
“Miss Tan, you’ve been here before. Four years ago.”
Mimi Tan smiled. “Yes. Same thing.”
“You changed your name to Tan then, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why again, then?”
“I was going to live with a Mr Tan then. Now I’m going to live with a Mr Rosario.”
“Indian?”
“Yes.”
Not Rosario the schoolteacher, Siva thought. Perhaps it’s that young bloke I met the other night. Of course. She was dancing with him like a leech. Poor sucked one. He’s not the sucker. He smiled at his private joke. She’s the leech. None of my business. Could sign her name as his legal wife though. Hmmm …
“You realise that changing your name does not make you …”
“Mr Siva. It’s only for social reasons. I’m sure you understand how other women can be so …”
“Yes. Yes. As long as you know what you’re doing.”
He talked to Fred about it. Fred had been around the courts a long time.
“Diabolical! It must be one of those Cantonese women’s diabolical schemes,” Fred said, sucking at his pipe.
THE WAR in Europe was bad. In Malaya they were building pillboxes on some beaches. A lot of British soldiers had moved into Ipoh. There seemed to be troops on war exercises all the time.
Tony got a telephone call from Dymond.
“How’s Kuala Lumpur?” he asked. Dymond had been posted to Selangor.
“Bloody awful. I miss Ipoh. It’s just the right size town. Seremban was too small. Everyone knew where you were the night before. K.L.’s too big. Everybody I have to deal with is a stranger. Ipoh’s just right.
“But I didn’t ring you to go on yakking away about Ipoh, Tony. It’s like this. I was talking to MacDuff of Perak Hydro. He was in K.L. He was saying that … Oh. You know he’s number one in the Perak Volunteers, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Well, anyway, Alan, that’s MacDuff, was saying he was looking for some good chaps for his Engineers. I thought of you at once. I know you’ve got little kids and the bloody Chinaman towkay of yours will be most reluctant to give you time off and all that, but you’re just the man for Alan, Tony. High time blokes like you did your bit for the Empire. Why don’t you give him a ring? He’s expecting you to call him.”
“I’ll think about it, Mr Dymond.”
“For Chrissake! This is not the time to shillyshally around. You blokes got to do your bit. You ring MacDuff, Tony. Now!”
He wanted to say, you’re not my boss now, you colonial bastard, but he said, “Okeydoke.”
Dymond rang off with a farewell after a “Hrmmmff.” Tony grinned. That was clever of me to say it that way, he said to himself.
To his surprise Ng agreed wholeheartedly.
“Hoi! The contacts you’ll get, man. Do you realise how much the military spends?”
So Tony joined the Volunteers.
TONY GOT up on the morning of the eighth of December feeling he could take on the world. Gloria was almost ready for Christmas. She had made a huge sugee cake and two fruit cakes. Alfonso was just over two years old and they were sure he would understand what Santa Claus was all about this year. Philippa had said she may come up to Ipoh sometime in December.
As he walked out of the bedroom to the dining room for breakfast, a motorcycle roared into their driveway at full throttle. He went out to the verandah and saw one of Ng’s men.
“Gila! Madman!” he shouted at him in Malay. “You’ll kill yourself.”
The man saw Tony come to the top of the steps and drove right up to the steps, stopped his motorcycle, took an envelope out of his shirt pocket and put it up in the air, saying, “Very urgent,” in Malay.
Tony went down and took the envelope from him.
A one line scrawl: “Very Important. Must see you first thing in the morning. Will be at the usual coffeeshop at seven thirty. M.T.”
Tony looked at his watch. It was seven twenty. He told Gloria something very urgent had come up and he had to go now.
“I’ll get something to eat somewhere or other,” he mumbled in reply to her protest that he couldn’t go out with an empty stomach, kissed her quickly on the cheek and left.
Mimi was there when he arrived, eating chee cheong fun with a cup of black coffee on the marble-top table in front of her.
He could not make out whether her soft hello was sad or happy. Her eyes had an urgency in them.
“What’s the emergency? I thought you had …”
“Order something.” She pointed to the coffeeshop boy who was already standing behind him waiting for an order.
“Are you O.K.?” he asked, after giving his order.
“Yes. So far so good.”
“What does that mean, Mimi?”
“Listen. I have news that will surprise you. Give you a bit of a shock.”
He waited. He could read nothing more than the nervousness in her eyes. She smiled.
“I am going to have a baby. Your baby.”
“What?”
Mimi was glowing with pride and happiness now.
His nights with her, were few and far between nowadays, raced through his mind. Then he remembered Tanah Rata. She had said it was safe, even making a joke of it, calling it ‘a good Roman Catholic time’, and he had abandoned his usual caution.
He cursed himself inwardly. All that intuition he was supposed to have had not worked. Now it occurred to him that it couldn’t have been the right time. Only the week before …
“Are you pleased, Tony?” There was a tremor in her voice.
God! The girl’s frightened to tell me, he thought. His heart went out to her. A surge of emotion swept through him. He saw her alone in the world. Wanting to cling to him but never daring to ask him to take her as his wife. Nor to be his mistress for life. And now out of her love for him, she was struggling, gasping for air.
He looked into her eyes, not saying anything.
“Tony?” she asked as he stirred his coffee incessantly in silence.
He reached out for her hand under the table and squeezed it.
She smiled and whispered, “Tony. Your child.”
Waves of thoughts like the sea beating on the beach came endlessly into his head. From a thousand different directions. Entangled with the sudden realisation of how much she loved him was anger that she had trapped him into giving her the baby. The next instant an understanding of her risk of losing him swept away his anger.
It had pleased him how calmly she had taken their separation after the shooting business, unlike what he had heard of Cantonese women from the contractors. Wong’s rejected woman had thrown a ghastly scene at the office one day. He had watched with disgust as Ng held her and she raved at Wong, and prayed he would never be in that vulnerable position. Mimi must realise that the gravity of her news had pushed him to the brink.
“It’s you in me now, Tony.”
The waves were dashing him from side to side. He felt he was being torn in two. He loved her. But …
His whole life was teetering on an edge.
As he sat silent, still distractedly stirring, he was as frightened as Mimi was. As intimate as they were spiritually, neither could be sure of the other’s reaction that morning. They sat holding hands under the table across a chasm.
As the waves buffeted him he grabbed at a diversion and spoke.
“Why all the urgency to tell me, darling?”
“Because I thought I may never see you again. You may be called up and sent away to Kelantan.” Her eyes moistened.
“Called up?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“That war has broken …”
“War?”
“Yes. The Japanese bombed Singapore last night. And landed at Kota Bharu.”
“Good God! No!”
“It was on the radio early this morning …”
“Landed at Kota Bharu?”
“Yes. They have invaded us. Will you be called …”
“I don’t know.”
New storms broke out in his head. Gloria. The children. Eva still a baby. Philippa, there in Singapore. The Japs actually bombed Singapore. And got past the British guns on the beach in Kelantan.
He stared at his coffee and shook his head in disbelief.
“And they say the Japanese crippled the American Pacific fleet.”
“What?”
“The American fleet. In Hawaii. Almost wiped out.”
The terrible horror of war suddenly descending on them was real. It was here. Not like reading about the Seigfried and Maginot lines in Europe. It was upon them here in Malaya. Now.
“I’ve known it for two months, Tony. I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Huh?”
She saw what she’d said had not registered.
“The baby. Our baby.”
“It’s …”
“I’m sorry I have to tell you now when …”
It finally dawned on him that she wanted the baby to be born.
He recalled the night a year or more ago when Mummy Chin talked about her girls.
“Two girls away this month having children. And now so busy with the British soldiers these days. They want the babies. It is for their old age, they say. Someone to look after them. But they tink it’s so easy. When the child is small, easy. But after … so much susah, trouble. No father. But some get money from the father. Sometimes. Not so easy, lah.”
“Mimi. Do you know how much it will cost? With you not working too. I’m getting my bonus at Chinese New Year. When are you going to stop work? Will you go back to the village?”
The string of questions released his tension.
“I don’t know, Tony.”
“Please think about it.”
“I have. But I still don’t know.”
They were silent.
“Are you happy, Tony?”
“Yes, my darling.”
That was the last time they saw each other.
The war swept down the peninsula with the fury and speed of a forest fire. The bombing caused damage which contractors like Ng were called in to repair with hastily drawn up contracts. The priorities were all wrong for Tony to be enlisted. MacDuff knew he would leave a gap in the system if Tony was pulled in.
Philippa telephoned Tony at the office and talked for dollars and dollars of time to him. Pa had asked her to persuade him to bring the family down to Singapore as soon as possible.
“Any fool-idiot can see the British are being whipped in the jungles by the Nips. It’s only a matter of time,” she said. “We’ve got to get the family together. Down to Singapore. They’ll never take Singapore. It’s a fortress.”
Philippa had found a house and Pa and Ma, Catty and Vera were going down next week. Barnabus and Alexander had decided to stay put in Malacca. It was a big place in Singapore. In Katong. There was a room for Antonio and his family. It would be a bit cramped, but the family would be together.
He agreed. Ng called him a stupid chicken. They walked out of their house with the children whimpering and got on the next train to Kuala Lumpur, booking the connecting train to Singapore.
DESPITE ADAM ROSARIO’S faith in the fortress, Singapore fell to Yamashita’s army and they spent three and a half years under the oppressive force of ‘The Great South East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ of the Japanese Occupation. There was confusion everywhere in Malaya but the Japanese tried to restore order and reactivate the administrative systems as soon as possible.
In Ipoh the Registry of Births and Deaths resumed its operations as did many other departments necessary to twentieth century life. And the Roman Catholic Church continued to administer to its flock as it had done for four hundred years in Malaya and for nearly two thousand years in Europe.
The Japanese made completely random decisions on who they thought were threats to them, allowed Father Glineur who had been the parish priest of the Ipoh Catholic Church for donkey’s years to stay out of the prisoner-of-war camp.
The old man was surprised one day when a young Cantonese woman came to him in early 1942 and asked him to baptise her child. She produced some document which he found difficult to read with his failing eyesight. But he thought it said she was Mrs Rosario. And the birth certificate also said Rosario.
He praised the Lord that His missionaries were bringing the oriental heathens into the church, and as he poured the Holy Water over the red-faced child’s head he saw that this little one didn’t look quite like a Chinese. “I baptise thee Toni Mary Rosario.”