“WE’LL GO to a new place today, Phil,” Daud said as she swung her leg over the pillion seat. A flat monotone statement.
She hugged him as she laid her head against his back and asked, “Where, my love?”
“It’s a secret.”
“Come on, tell me, Daud.”
“I too will give you surprises arising out of my secrets.”
It was barbed, like the endless rings of sharp flesh-tearing wires of the war uncoiled all around them as the Japanese approached Singapore. Ominous.
He took her to a coffeeshop near Sepoy Lines and ordered mutton curry, long beans, lady’s fingers and the Indian pancake, roti prata, turning to her to ask if it was O.K. in a cold perfunctory manner. They used to discuss the order, laugh and tease each other for wanting the kambing goreng or onion raita again. Argue whether she should stick to her Catholic fish-on-Fridays.
“Daud,” she said softly, looking deep into him with her blue eyes. “It was a last-minute thing.” A coil of barbed wire sprung loose in her guts as she lied. And she lied again and again, spinning out details, her mind racing, crosschecking, her upper lip taught with concentration, her lower lip curled with the pain of deception and feeling the raging jealousy in him.
Her talking didn’t defuse the tension between them. She wanted to put her clean left hand on his muscular forearm resting on the table and whisper, “I love you, Daud, trust me,” but the words choked in her throat.
“I love you, Daud,” she said with her eyes locked into his when he said goodnight on the road in front of her flat. She saw the tears welling up in him. Suddenly, “Lock the bike. Come up with me.”
He went up to her flat and came to her in a savage hunger and passionate fury that had never erupted in him before. He was blind to all the little things there, the Afghan rug, the tiny Japanese scent bottle, the powder blue of the bathroom, which he would have criticised or praised in his uninhibited style. He was blind to the thin-tensioned skin of her belly, the soft whiteness of the underpart of her upper arms, the fine down on her shins. He did not explore her roundnesses and her creases, all the firm and yielding parts of her in his inimitable way, but thrust like a madman to get under her skin, through her flesh, her body, into her very core.
He was subdued, wilting, exhausted with the fatigue of his emotions when he left as she kissed him at the door, but she knew she had only stopped one little stray rivulet of the flood of a dam that had burst.
Daud broke the cheap coffee cup which had brought him the familiar comfort of its thick rim on his mouth in the haze of his mornings for years in spite of the lacy, unintelligible, utterly Chinese design in green on its outside.
Mrs Sunha heard the crash.
“My late husband used to say … people always say it never rains but pours … you break two plates in one week and there is bound to be another breakage soon. Comes in threes. It’s true. But it’s in the mind. Carelessness comes in waves following worries …”
She went on and on.
PHILIPPA HAD settled down to a pattern of returning one in three of Duncan’s dinners, leading him into new zones of Singapore tastes and environments.
It was to be pork satay tonight, with the thick mashed pineapple dip like the yellowish apple sauce Ma served with roast pork. She had had a really good day at the school. Even Kan Seng had quickened to an appreciation of the rejection of Oliver Twist’s plea for more.
She was laughing with the wind in her hair and the faintest of pink splashes on the clouds of a subtle Singapore sunset as Duncan drove fast with the canvas hood of the jeep down towards the Joo Chiat Road coffeeshop she knew in Katong.
Then she saw him. Somewhere in her subconscious the throb of the bike engine rang bells. She took her eyes off Duncan’s smile and saw Daud, hunched over his handlebars.
She waved spontaneously without hesitation and turned her body round to catch one last glimpse of him. To her horror, she saw the brake lights go bright red and the bike angle over and turn around.
She turned to Duncan at once. “Pull over. A friend has seen me. He’s turned around. On a motorbike …”
Duncan responded with questions in his eyes.
“May I ask him to join us for dinner?” She didn’t expect Duncan to answer. She didn’t wait. “But it can’t be satay babi, pork satay. He’s Malay.”
She saw Daud’s artificial grin and the surprise on his face as he came up to the jeep, now on the road edge, two wheels on the thin dry grass of the verge.
“You spotted me, huh?” Daud said.
“Why … It’s you! Daud Ibrahim … the pumping station,” Duncan said, surprised.
“Ha ha. Yah … It’s me all right, Mr Gudgeon.”
Cold pleasantries as the traffic rushed past them in spurts of headlight brilliance.
Thank you very much, but he had a band practice to go to. Meet later? Thank you, but he had a very early site meeting in the morning. Philippa knew the routine some of the British engineers and architects ran from Antonio’s work patterns. Very early meetings and back home for a hearty breakfast before going into the office. Like the rubber planters’ routine in a way. Antonio said the big breakfast allowed them to have four or five beers with a sandwich only for lunch.
There were streaks of fine lines of red-hot blood in his eyes as he kick-started to leave, staring at Philippa.
His lips were moving. She thought she read what he mouthed. But it was only numbers. It only dawned on her half a mile later that they were the numbers of Duncan’s jeep.
“YOU CAN rescue a curry that has too much chilli or pepper, my late husband used to say,” Mrs Sunha lectured Daud as he ate the warmed-up murtabak he had bought after the band practice.
“I mean resurrect … Bring back to life … Boil it for some time. Then add more santan, the milky white extract from grated coconuts. But you must also add more condiments. If you don’t you’ll only have a watered down curry. You understand what I am telling? Some fennel, turmeric, cardamoms, coriander … balanced. But no chilli. You can almost bring it back to what it was … without the burning hotness …”
“Hmmm … but getting the spices right is not easy, Mrs Sunha. And what if you boil it for a long time? Doesn’t the chilli or the pepper break down?”
“I don’t know. But if it does, so will the other spices and the taste will die, lah!”
“If it’s too hot, it’s just too hot,” Daud said. “There is really no way to keep the taste and kill the fire, is there?”
“GOT ANOTHER band practice on Friday,” Daud mumbled morosely when they next met, after listening in stony silence to Philippa’s explanation about the spontaneous decision to have a bite with Duncan, Tony and Gloria and the Yews after drinks at the S.R.C., with her insides screaming, Barefaced, blatant lies!
She didn’t respond.
Daud did not say anything either.
He was remembering …
When they began going out regularly, the first time Daud had told her he would be tied up, she had gripped his hand, sighed and shaken her head with mock histrionics, saying, “I shall die, my love! The sustenance of my existence will not be there!” They had laughed and she had repeated the I shall die, my love bit many times as part of their delirious, laughing rituals in their swirling, intertwining intimacy.
It worked inside him all that night and through the next day at the drawing board.
“Ye gods!” Richards the European architect gasped, “Mr Daud, this is a sewage pumping station, a functional building, not a bloody prison or morgue! Where’s all that sparkle in you?”
Daud stared at the cartridge paper on the drawing board and fiddled with his wooden tee square.
Richards looked him straight in the eye.
“It’s obvious your heart is not in this shitty building. Anyway, I’m telling Osman to take you off this job. We’ve got a wanted-tomorrow wretched thing thrust at us. Those Adam Road bungalows. Will you brief young de Souza on the pumping station? Osman thinks he’s ready for something bigger.”
Daud dropped his eyes as Richards moved his face, reeking of alcohol, closer to Daud’s.
“Something’s troubling you, old chap,” he said, putting his hand on Daud’s shoulder.
Daud was grateful that it was a toneless statement, not a question. Richards was not like the others, Osman said; there was a certain humanity in the man. A Welshman, Osman said. Daud did not quite understand that.
“EEEEH, INCHE!” the saxophonist complained two nights later, “Please … listen to my sax singing … You’ve gotta’ dance with my sax, man … In this number, you follow me … I lead. Get that!”
“Jimmy, take it easy. Everyone’s got his off nights,” the gruff-voiced band bossman.
“Sorry, Jimmy, my mind drifted.”
“It sure did … all the way to Kota Bharu.”
“Dry up, Jimmy,” the gruff rumble cutting in.
Daud went to the office after the band session. He had the keys because he sometimes came back after dinner to his drawing board. It was about eleven by then. He rang Philippa’s flat. There was no answer. Five times. Then another three times.
Philippa had been pleased when Daud had told her he was busy with another band practice on Thursday. Gloria’s Ma and Pa were down from Malacca for a week, staying with the Hogans, and Uncle Dan Hogan, not really her uncle, had decided to ask a few friends over. Uncle Dan’s ‘a few friends over’ was always an event. She had been in two minds whether to go with Antonio and Gloria to Uncle Dan’s. “Bring your gorgeous blonde sister-in-law, Gloria,” Uncle Dan had said. “I mean it,” he had added, Gloria told her.
She and Daud had been through enough bickerings about the christenings, first communions, confirmations and anniversaries, for her to mention Uncle Dan’s do.
“You mean to say no one dead or marrying or born or circumcised and you’ve got to go?” he had once said to her.
It was a great night. Monteiro on the piano and Lynette’s voice. Still beautiful at her age. Uncle Ramalho’s close-to-the-bone jokes and above all Uncle Dan’s anecdotes of the good old Malacca days, often upsetting the women with his revelations.
“You know, Philippa, your Granpa was a beggar. One helluva flirt. Not that he strayed from the path. But, by Christopher, he traipsed, like a devilish sprite on the verge … Theresa Brito … Or was it Phyllis de Mornay? Philippa de Mornay? Ha ha ha … and he didn’t know the old padre saw him kissing her … in the belukar, the bushes … what was his name? The old padre? Rocker … Russia? Wild, that’s what Fonso was … A tiger …”
“Comes down in the blood, Uncle Dan,” Gloria added, her arm round Antonio.
“No, no, no, no,” Uncle Dan responded at once. “You can always see if it’s a blood thing. If you’ve got your father’s eyes, or hair, you’ve got his ways … spots. Or it sometimes skips a generation … Antonio’s not like old man Fonso …”
Gloria pointed to Philippa and giggled. Then everyone around Uncle Dan laughed.
The party broke up at one-thirty, but Antonio had to have a last one with Uncle Dan and listen to his hilarious stories about the Japs.
He dropped Gloria off first as the Hogans’ place was close to theirs and ran Philippa back to her flat. By the time he got there it was nearly three. She kissed him on the cheek as he muttered, “God! I shall be a wreck tomorrow.”
“You young ones … if you can’t take it.”
“Goodnight, Phil! Ta-ta.”
DAUD CURSED silently to himself sitting on the culvert wall smoking his tenth cigarette. “Didn’t see the number plate.” All British military jeeps looked the same. Every part of his body, every part of his being ached. The huge concrete retaining wall of Eu Tong Sen Villa behind him had been radiating out the heat it had absorbed all day. He was hot with anger and the wall-heat that had seeped into his body for hours. He had looked across the road so many times at his motorcycle in the shadow of the terrace houses and told himself to go home. But he had to know who brought her home.
Mrs Sunha remarked the next night, “I see you have taken up smoking,” in a matter of fact manner as though he now preferred long beans to lady’s fingers. “I’ll put an ashtray in your room.”