Key to the Door (33 page)

He hesitated. “You can see the lizard better from inside,” in a small persistent voice hard to disobey. He leaned his elbows on the sill and smiled: “I'm watching it from here. I'll disturb it if I come in.” She looked a treat, with her short black hair, a round face with sallowy yet youthful skin, and heavy unmoving eyelids. Like a doll, he'd said at first, but that was for the story-books, the lucky dips of ancient Christmases, a twisted picture of geography given out at his no-good school. He remembered the first night's dancing at the Boston Lights, talking to her and buying round after round of drinks and wanting to sleep with her, seeing her mouth well shaped by lipstick and strangely angled eyes that looked so profoundly blank in the few seconds when nothing was being said that he felt momentarily panic-stricken on realizing the distance between them both. But that was a few months back, and he knew now that there was no bigger gap between them than had separated him from Pauline at the start of their long bout of passionate courting in Nottingham over four years ago. Even here I can't get her from my mind, though I'm married, so who can wonder at it? It plagued him like a magic lantern out of control, switching from one thing to another, Mimi to Pauline, then back to the here and now of Mimi, because it was like having the blade-point of an axe paining your lungs to dwell too much on Pauline, and the way he'd betrayed her as soon as she was out of sight.

Returning from the dance hall on that first night, having lost Mimi to her other customers, he separated from the gang he was with on the ferry and walked down to the third-class deck. A small Chinese girl in black sat with legs curled up on a form, twisting her fingers together and holding the entangled result to the light to see what she made of them. Then she got tired of this and began to cry: Brian dropped a handful of coins into her lap and she stopped, her mother wondering what it was that woke her now there was silence.

The boat was in mid-channel: Muong like a row of dying embers, while northward the smooth sea was empty for a thousand miles as far as Rangoon and the Irrawaddy. The black lifeline of the opposite shore had long since faded, but for the encrusted lights around Kota Libis pier waiting for the ferry's touchdown. Back on the first-class deck, stepping over outstretched legs, he saw Mimi gazing at Muong from the rail. The night air was warm and she stood in her yellow dress, clutching a black handbag. “A penny for your thoughts,” he said.

She turned quickly: “Oh, it's you. I'm sleepy”—and looked back at the water, as if only the ploughed-up phosphorescence of it could give rest from the vivid colours her eyes had been seeing the last five hours.

“Do you work as hard as this every night, then?” He noticed her ear-rings, small yellow lanterns whose shadows were thrown on the flesh beneath her ears by rights from above. “You get tired whether you work or not,” she informed him. He kissed her, felt the touch of cool ear-rings as he drew back. “Stop it,” she said, turning away. “I have to be wide awake with you boys.”

“Not with me,” he said; “I only want to know where you live.” It was beyond him that she hadn't simulated anger at his kiss—though he expected the going to get harder. But she smiled: “What do you want to know for?”

“To come and see you.”

Instead of resistance, she teased him: “What for?”

He sensed that this sort of humour would never leave her, even when she was tired. It was a mask. Because of it he didn't know whether to think she was younger, or older, wondered how an invisible listener would have seen it—then spat into the water. “Because I like talking to you, instead of always to the others in camp.” Slyness seemed as good a way to break through as any. Mimi was a giggling child one minute, much younger than him; then was in touch with a life into which he could never reach either because of age, or because she had access to depths that went off at a tangent to his own. Himself, he felt young and old in stages, knew nothing but the fact of being on the boat with her, future and past and everything else obliterated except the lights and water and wooden decks of the ferry-boat around them fastened by booze and sentiment within the prison of himself at nineteen, which didn't help towards an easy flow of conversation.

“Tomorrow's Sunday,” he said, taking out a packet of cigarettes. “So I don't suppose you work.”

No longer smiling, she wouldn't have a cigarette, so he lit one for himself. “I don't,” she said.

Not caring about being persistent, he asked: “Can I see you then?”

“If you like.” She was listless, and he hardly noticed her joyless agreement in the surprise he felt at it. The fact that he was taking advantage of her came to him dimly and didn't bother him anyway. When he didn't look like speaking, she smiled: “Don't you want to come?”

“Yes, course I do.” The lights of Kota Libis were large, and they saw people moving about and waiting as the boat did a half-turn ready for the approach. His spent fag dropped into the water. “Where shall I meet you?” sliding an arm around her.

“At seven, outside the photo shop. In the village.”

The lizard hadn't moved for ten seconds. What sort of a view did it have of her, upside down on the ceiling? “This is a long game,” he said; “it can go on all night.”

“The children play it,” she said.

“Like my mother: she says she used to sit in the kitchen when she was a little girl and watch the clock hands move. It was a game that lasted hours.”

“That would bore me.”

“I like lizards as well,” he said. “Out at my DF I've got a pet chameleon, green on top and duck-egg blue underneath. It waddles over the floor every morning and I feed it a saucer of bread and milk. We're pals now, in fact. He went off for a couple of days not long since, and I thought he'd got eaten by a snake, but then he came back with a female, so he must have been courting. Now I've got two of 'em supping at the saucer. I reckon they know when they're on to a good skive.”

She was laughing, a sort of distrustful giggle, flattening her breasts and sitting up on the bed: “Why do you tell me such stories?” He leapt over the window-sill and sat next to her. “Because it's good to tell stories. Anyway, that's the on'y time you like me, i'n't it?”

He drew her close. “You're so funny,” she whispered. Many of her remarks seemed like meaningless counters, long since detached from inside her, with no real connection to her own self. These he imagined her having used freely to other lovers she must have had: he recognized and resented them, jealous because they stopped him getting close to her. “That's better than having a long face all the time,” he said, “like some people I know.”

“But funny people are sadder than anybody.” It was strange to him: her old man had become a shopkeeper, she said—bone-poor, though, at first—from Canton, and he imagined him with a stick over his shoulder, like Dick Whittington, only Chinese, coming south-west in a junk chewing a plug of opium to help him on his way. He saw him as young and steel-faced, hat on his head shaped like a handleless dustbin lid, living off a handful of rice a day and shaking hands with endurance, handsome perhaps, but making a hard go of it in Singapore. The thought was terror to Brian: in Nottingham yes, but he would have died over a life like that, scraping cent by cent from kerb-stall to backstreet shop, which even now, Mimi said, wasn't all that easy. But Mimi had been to high school, and this difference, with female and Chinese thrown in, not to mention a couple of years in age, had for some time mixed up his attitude towards her, though things between them seemed to be improving at last.

The high school hadn't lasted long and he was touched by the sad way she had left. A boy-friend who worked for some political party (he was in no doubt as to the sort of party, using his instinct accurately nowadays as to left and right and knowing enough about Mimi) had got her pregnant at sixteen, then disappeared because the British police were after him. The Japs came soon after, and no one had seen him since. They didn't see the British police for four years either, except in chain gangs.

She sat with legs under her, away from him. He wanted to lean forward and embrace her, but the wish deadened because of the look in her eyes. “You're the sad one,” he said. “I suppose you get so fed up with having to laugh every night of the week that you can't even act yourself when you're with me.” He walked away, sat on the one chair in the room. “So I tell you funny stories to make you laugh. That's the best way, i'n't it?”

“Sometimes”—like a child who cannot understand what is being said to it. He said: “I knew a lump o' wood once that joined the air force and got sent to Malaya. It was a smart and chipper piece, not a big lump of wood, about half a pit-prop, if you want to know, that parted its hair on the wrong side of its head, but still it met a lady pit-prop that spoke Chinese when she was asleep, but when she was awake she spoke slow English and said she loved him. How's that for a good beginning?” In the teeth of everything, there was a spun-out ebullient story he couldn't stop himself telling and acting out, as if several whiskies had already taken effect and sparked it off—except that he'd touched none. The story became another limb, crazy and uncontrollable, used without thought, a joyful rigmarole spinning words out of the night of himself. It was a bout of inspired clowning, like a flash of sheet-lightning that opens—and glows metallic and incandescent against the horizon of the mind until the story or clowning has gone.

She was laughing by the end, brought over to him by a short-circuit that avoided the separate complex depths in each of them. It was silence or laughter, and though he could find out little or nothing in face of either, he preferred to see her laughing, which meant at least a warmer welcome. She lay out flat and shook off her pyjamas, naked but for a bangle on her wrist, an oriental maja. Her fleshy nakedness was matched to the damp perspiring night, was connected in some way, he thought, looking up, with the dance of death around the moth lamp of electricity: what the dark bellies of the geckos missed, the sun captured and sizzled to death. He thought back through her nakedness to his sweetheart girl-friends of Nottingham, of how true it was that no matter how many times they had made love together he had never seen any of them completely bare of clothes (except Pauline, his wife, but she did not count), not slept the night and seen them as he saw Mimi now, talking as if her birthday suit were the latest fashion advertised in the
Straits Times
—something to be shown off and proud of, acquired at enough expense to justify revealing it in the flattering half-light to Brian, for whom she had a sort of love that neither could explain or yet feel compromised by. There was uncertainty as to which was more real: to go slowly through layer after layer of tormenting yet hypnotic cloth and cotton and discover the smooth whiteness with exploring fingers, or take one nakedness straight to the other or your own. It was a matter of climate and locality, a difference as much evident in his own body and brain as between two far parts of the earth: jungle with field, swamp and wooded hillocks, a sea of sharks and sting-rays, to the slow meadow-winding of Midland rivers whose banks were sometimes as heavily clothed as the girl he lay with while watching their heavy cumbersome unwilling serpentining through the winter.

“I'll make some tea soon,” she said, returning his kisses, “and then we'll be cooler.”

“It'd need eight pints of beer to stop my thirst, but then I'd be good for nothing!” Tea was a natural division of their meeting time, after which they made love, a ritual evolved through many visits. “When I get back to Nottingham I wain't be able to drink the steaming mash my mother makes, with sugar and milk. I like it cold and weak now, served up in bowls.”

Her thin arms slid away from his neck: “You'll soon get back to the English way.” He was used to the rhythm of her voice, so that, while complete sentences registered more quickly, he lost the facility for reading hidden meanings in them, accents and stresses being removed as the need for repetition waned. His dexterity at reading morse rhythms had proved a loss in that it enabled him to master Mimi's too soon, and because her own language was Chinese, she was able to hide so much in her flat deliverance of English. “I'm not going back to England,” he said.

She seemed surprised. “Why? It's a very nice country. That's what it says in the
Straits Times!”

“It might be, but I don't like it.”

“Well, you've got to go back,” she smiled. “You promised to send me those books and things.”

He'd forgotten about that: books of sexual technique and contraception. “You know enough of that without me sending you books on it.”

“I like to read about it, though,” she said petulantly; he seemed to be going back on his word.

“All right,” he said; “but I've still got a year to do out here. I might even stay on longer.”

Insects were worrying her: she disentangled a sheet and drew it up. “You haven't got a job in Malaya, so you've got to go back.”

“I could get work as a rubber planter. It wouldn't take me long to learn Malaya, if I really tried.”

“What's England like?” she asked. “Tell me about England.”

“I don't know anything about England. But I'll tell you about Nottingham if you tell me about the jungle. If the insects are bothering you, pull your net down.

“They're not: they never do. If you became a rubber planter you'd be in big danger.” Neither spoke. They heard the croak of bullfrogs and crickets working their looms of noise in the deep grass outside. Dogs barked from the huts, and the surviving wail of a steamer siren from Muong harbour came, debilitated after its fight with tree shadows and avoidance of village lights. He laughed: “You sound like a gypsy giving me a warning. There's no danger in being in Malaya.”