Highways to a War (13 page)

Langford asked him what newspaper he was on.

“None. I am a news cinecameraman with British Telenews —based here.”

“They call him Crazy Jim Feng,” Mills said. “He likes working in war zones. Likes being shot at. Can’t keep him away from Saigon, and the Borneo border.”

Feng’s smile widened. “We had a good firefight between the Malaysians and Indonesians in the Bau district last night. But it’s bogging down there, now. Vietnam is the place to be.” He offered a pack of American cigarettes, and Langford took one.

Mills immediately held out a lighter; but he didn’t take a cigarette himself. Then he asked: “Have you got anything going, up here?”

Langford told him he’d been freelancing for the Melbourne Age, and had hopes of getting work here for some of the London dailies. While he spoke, he says, he was aware that Mills and Feng were studying him; he describes their faces as showing the concern that people exhibit who have just discovered that a man is seriously ill.

Jim Feng spoke first. “Not easy. Not easy, Mike, selling pics to the Brits from a place like this. They send their own guys if it’s something hot. You really need to be with an organization yourself. And film work’s better than stills.”

He’d never done any news cinecamera work, Langford said.

“You could learn,” Feng said.

Mills spoke now. “Have you got a work permit?”

No, Langford told him. Just a tourist visa.

“I might be able to help you,” Mills said.

Langford asked Mills what he did here.

“I’m with the Australian embassy.”

Jim Feng nodded, grinning with a look of encouragement. “A handy fellow to know,” he said.

Mills glanced at his watch. “I have to be pushing along,” he said. He stood, draining his glass. “There’s someone I believe can help you more than I can,” he told Langford. “Also a diplomat, but a lot senior to me. I’ll talk to him, if you like. His name’s Aubrey Hardwick. He has a lot of contacts.” He smiled suddenly, as though confiding a secret. “Yes: you must meet Uncle Aubrey. He’ll get you fixed.”

TAPE 1: MARCH 17TH, 1965

—Early each morning I come out of the shophouse and head for a swimming pool in the city. I did a regular twenty laps there until recently. Now the starvation diet is beginning to slow me down. But I’m still taking pictures.

 

He loved this time of day, he says, walking through the big fast sunrise and warm air along Boat Quay, finding that the river and the city had been awake before him. His Leica was always around his neck, his camera bag slung from his shoulder. The stuccoed shophouses were pink with dawn, and the dark, spicy cave-mouths in their ground floors were already quick with business.

Chinese merchants drank first cups of tea. Motorized barges, sampans and lighters were moving on the water. The food stalls were open, selling noodles, satay, and the omelette called Foo Yung that was usually Langford’s breakfast, together with coffee of a pungency he’d never known before.

There was a Chinese shoeshine boy operating in the shade of a banyan tree by the steps that went down into the river, and Langford always stopped for a shine, paying too much. The picture he took of the boy is one of the best of his Singapore series. The shoeshine boy had spiky hair, a big grin and a cast in one eye: he was the same boy Langford had first seen tapping his way along the Quay with his rod and piece of bamboo. He worked part-time for a Boat Quay trader, taking orders from customers. The number and rhythm of the taps signaled the goods for sale: chopsticks; woks; rice; radios. Langford was trying to learn this tap-language, and each morning he leaned down and knocked on the box in different sequences.

“Listen, tap-tap boy. What’s this?”

“Chopsticks! Chopsticks!”

“And this?”

“Nothing, Mr. Mike. That nothing!”

They both laughed. The tap-tap boy looked forward to this game: he was the first of Langford’s many street-kid disciples.

 

—I believe I could spend a lifetime getting Boat Quay and the people and the river into my camera. Life was always hidden behind curtains and doors, at home. But the whole of life’s on the streets here.

—I’ve done all the pictures for the Age; what I’m shooting now is just on spec. Don’t know how many rolls of Tri-X I’ve gone through; I’m spending nearly all my money on film. But I don’t always get things as they really looked: as I saw them at the time. That’s what makes me hurry, in spite of the heat. There’s always a more perfect shot than any I’ve got that’s waiting around a corner, or down some steps. Just now and then a shot comes out right, and then it’s all worth it. I’m still learning.

—It’s all to do with light, I realize that more and more. What light does to things: to surfaces, faces, small objects, distances. Light’s everything. light’s my greatest tool. What else is a camera but a light-box?

 

He moved about Singapore in a long waking dream, shooting pictures he’d never sell, in the grip of that fatal obsession which refuses to let things go. He wouldn’t let them dissolve; wouldn’t let them die; wouldn’t ever resign himself to seeing them drift away on the stream. He would capture them all in his light-box.

He wandered; wandered on.

At the back of Boat Quay was Chinatown, stretching to Coll yer Quay and the harbor. Nankin Street, Market Street, Fish Street, Pekin Street, Pagoda Street, Sago Lane: he was lost in dense hot mazes, assailed by the startling stinks of South China, and by all South China’s sounds: the wailing of children and of Shanghai opera; Cantonese pop music; banging of metal; gargling shouts. He drifted through a Singapore that’s gone, but which all lies in front of me now in his pictures. Old Change Alley’s tunnel of trading booths, the merchants in their doorways hissing and cajoling in English, Arabic, Tamil and Cantonese; the white colonial bungalows in Orchard Road, with their deep verandahs and gardens dense as jungles; the warm, thatched nests of the kampongs, threaded through the outskirts. All gone; all captured forever in Langford’s light-box.

This was the end of the wet season, and he sheltered in doorways from the brief storms of the northeast monsoon.

Towering, mile-high, ink blue curtains flew together in the sky at extraordinary speed: as he watched, they met beyond Coll yer Quay and its roadstead, and over flat infinities of harbor. Then the day went black, except for a tarnished band of light along the horizon. The shophouses, rice mills and crumbling godowns cowered; the hundreds of ships in the harbor, near and far, were dwindled to toys; thunder crashed like gunfire; the gutters and alleys became roaring silver rivers, and the upstairs shutter doors of Chinatown banged shut: crimson; green; celestial blue.

But it all ceased in moments. The sun struck out again after last heavy drops, and colors brilliantly returned. A dripping sky-blue shutter or the red flowers of a flame-of-the-forest tree were images exploding on the vision after blindness. He wandered on, through steaming calm.

Old amahs in black pantaloons lit joss sticks in wayside temples, and prayed for prosperity. Young Indian pimps with faces like sly schoolmasters sidled up and murmured to him of virgins, and nice clean English ladies. And Langford talked to everyone: a convention of the Tasmanian countryside which he never thought of abandoning.

He began to be known. Chinese traders greeted him by name, and chatted with him. Malay shopkeepers and their tribes of assistants, who often had no English at all, crowded about him in the alleys where he shot pictures. They would bring out a chair onto the path for him to sit on. Enthroned, he would pass around cigarettes. I see him there, among the broad, smiling brown faces, waving his hands in the way that he had when he was trying to communicate: an outlandish guest in his 1950s cowboy shirt, perfectly happy.

As time goes on, the audio diary and the pictures dwell extensively on the food in the streets.

Spitting, bare-chested, chain-smoking cooks stir sizzling iron cauldrons over open flames, among deadlocked smells of urine and sandalwood, stale cabbage and spices. Honey-glazed roast ducks hang in doorways beside weird sea slugs and dried fish. There are pictures of giant crabs and prawns; of mighty platters of chopped vegetables; of colored Chinese cakes behind glass: a child’s vision of plenty. And no doubt his vision was sharpened by hunger—since for all their cheapness, most of these things had come to be beyond his pocket.

In the first month here he’d eaten well, in the restaurants along Orchard Road; he’d even had curry in the Tiffin Room at Raffles. But now, as the money ran out, he’d taken to eating in the humble open-air places around Boat Quay that catered for poor waterhands. Serenaded by a loud radio broadcasting strangled arias from Shanghai opera, stooped over a wooden table of kindergarten size, like a boy sent to a lower grade for punishment, he was surrounded by coolies in ragged singlets and shorts who shoveled the food fast into their mouths, bent low over their bowls, and stared at him curiously, since no Europeans ever came here. Hungrily, still clumsy with his chopsticks, he devoured his own beans and rice and few shreds of pork, and drank the cheap black Chinese tea.

By the end of March, all he could afford any more was the
makan
cart.

TAPE 2: MARCH 25TH, 1965

—Now that my money’s almost gone, I wait every evening on the balcony for the woman with the
makan
cart. It rides on bicycle wheels; there are lots of these little mobile food stalls stationed along Boat Quay, making tours at regular intervals. Each one specializes in a particular cheap dish. Hers is noodle soup, with chicken and prawns: sustaining. I’ve decided to live on that, until the Age check comes: one meal a day.

—I look forward to seeing the
makan
woman, and not just for the food. She cheers me up. She’s a very short, stocky young Chinese with a snub-nosed face a bit like a Pekingese dog’s: but it’s an attractive face, with a lot of humor in it. She wears a faded blue jacket, black pantaloons and old-style coolie hat; she shuffles along in wooden platform clogs. There seems to be a tribe of these Chinese women hawkers around the Quay, all dressed alike. A small girl trails after her with two buckets to wash the bowls: I listen for the buckets and the clogs, and the
makan
woman’s voice calling her wares in Chinese. She thinks it’s very funny that I bring my bowl to her to be illed, like he rest of the people here; she laughs and makes jokes that I don’t understand.

 

Langford was expecting a second check from the Age at this time: when it arrived, he hoped to live normally again. He talks of phone calls to a stringer for the London
Daily Mail
in Kuala Lumpur, who was promising him casual work; but whether it ever eventuated he doesn’t say. At such times, we come to depend on recurring figures that reassure—and it’s surely a measure of the lonely extremity of his position that he waited as he did for the
makan
woman.

Wu Tak Seng had noticed his frequent descents to the noodle soup cart. For a few dollars, he sold him a device that was used by some of the other tenants: a wicker tray attached to a rope, which Langford was able to let down from the balcony with his bowl and his money. And the tray proved its worth, Langford says, because shortly after purchasing it he fell ill, and grew too weak to get downstairs.

He had a strong stomach, and had not until now caught one of the gastric complaints that most Europeans went through after arrival here. But inevitably, his visits to the cheap eating places along Boat Quay had caught up with him. What he seems to have contracted was no ordinary gastritis but a form of Asian influenza. This was in the week after his meeting with Donald Mills and Jim Feng in the York.

Diarrhea and vomiting kept him to the room: his condition grew worse, and soon he was too weak to get up very much at all. He lay on his narrow iron bed, whose cheap cotton slip was decorated with repeated figures of Donald Duck. The yellow plaster walls had enormous damp-stains; and these, he says, began to take on frightening shapes: he began to hallucinate. Black tea, which he kept by his bed in a big vacuum flask, and his bowl of noodle soup in the evening, were all he could keep down; and after three days he could no longer manage the soup.

There came a time when he drifted, unaware of the passing hours, and only just conscious of day and night. There was no plumbing in his room, so that his situation must now have become unpleasant. He mentions a bucket with a lid which he had to take out and empty, in intervals when he felt strong enough.

And the passages in the audio diary begin now to be more and more disjointed. Spoken in a voice that grows slower and more feeble—coming at times from the edges of delirium—they end by being quite strange. I’m surprised that he didn’t wipe them.

TAPE 2: MARCH 27TH -

—The Age check still hasn’t come. If it doesn’t turn up soon, I’ll be in trouble.

—Getting light-headed, and afraid this may be more than just a gastric wog. Wu Tak Seng just came up to see me. He’s never done this before, but he came to tell me there was no mail for me. Maybe he’s worried about the rent. More likely he’s concerned I’ll get seriously ill, and cause some sort of trouble. He started hinting at this: stood in the doorway in those baggy navy shorts of his, bowlegged. Queer, seeing him here instead of downstairs in the grocery, where he sits all day at the desk with his abacus. He has a big square head, shaven almost bald; lots of gold teeth. He asked me if I wanted help.

—You wa’ me to ge’ do‘tor?

—Cantonese have an accent like Cockney: swallow the ends of their words. I told him I was OK, but he still stood there. He was looking at Diana’s picture, which I keep on the table by the bed. After a while, he said: You nice young gen‘leman. Wrong here. Need be’er place.

—Gentteman! ) I laughed, and told him I liked it here, and that I’d be fine. But he just shook his head, sucked his teeth and shuffled out. Poor Mr. Wu: he’s been kind to me. I hope he doesn’t ask me to go.