Brian Aldiss - A Rude Awakening

Like a bird to a pool, the image of Margey’s face came back to me, that mysterious oriental face with those slanted eyes, that perfect mouth, the lips in repose like something carved. Only two hours ago I had awakened to find her beside me, and my arm full of cramps because she was lying on my wrist. I lay absorbing the sight of her, the curl of her hair round her ear and neck, the inexplicable curve of her shoulder.

Margey’s room with all its grotty detail was revealed to me in monochrome. Beyond the curtains were a thousand broken rooftops, all with tiles missing. Medan, falling apart at the seams …

My happiness had lasted only a moment. Came the pain, the knowledge that it was Friday, that in three days I would be swept away in one of those directives issuing from the Company Office. I sat up, and she awoke.

Then I’d left her, clung to her and left her, feeling so sick on my way back to the lines that I’d almost have welcomed a few extremists rising before me in the dawn-light and shooting me down into some stinking ditch.

I fell asleep for an hour. But circumstances were already at work to ensure that this was my last peaceful day in Sumatra …

The roofs of Medan were broken and the town was tumbling. Its occupying force was also in ruinous condition.

I had arrived in Medan only six weeks ago, having previously been in Padang or on detachment at Fort de Kock. During those six weeks, I had removed myself as far as possible from the army. It had ceased to have functional point; the closing down of the Fourteenth Army had been the final blow.

Despite my feeling of severance, emphasised by the detachment from my own unit, I could no more visualise myself as a civilian than I could visualise Margey away from Sumatra. The army had bred in me a contempt for the cushy civilian life; perhaps I clung to Margey as part of a more heroic existence.

However that might be, I woke from my sleep with an urgent resolve to marry the girl. Why fucking not? I’d show my mates how independent I was. At least I would see what the score was – and today, before the weekend set in. I would speak to Captain Boyer over the wireless link and discuss the situation with him. With that done, I would face Margey and settle her complaints one way or the other – for her complaints carried weight with me – and then we could go and swim.

I washed the sweat off my face and neck and dressed myself. The billet I lived in was beautiful. The rooms downstairs were high and cool, the staircase had an elegant curl, and there was a carved front door. Before the war, the place had belonged to a prosperous planter who headed for Australia when the Japs arrived and got himself killed in a bar-room brawl in Darwin. Under Jap rule, the building formed part of the Neutrals Camp, where Swiss and Swedes and their assorted women had been confined for the duration. Now it was a sergeants’ billet. I tried out a quick daydream about Margey’s and my living here when the British troops left, complete with bearers to wait on us; but the bearers would not stay still, and became petty officials in the new Indonesian order instead.

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