Brian Aldiss - A Rude Awakening

Lighting up another cigarette, I glanced at my wrist. Two watches were strapped there. One was a beauty in a black gunmetal case; it had been made in Holland. Unfortunately, it did not work very well. The other was an expensive Indian watch with a red sweep second hand, which looked good although it kept poor time. Taking a mean reading, I decided it must be eight-fifteen or eight-thirty, or perhaps a little later. I could soon leave politely and go and see Margey.

The party was nominally in my honour, since I was flying home in only four days’ time; but there would be another party in the sergeants’ mess on the following night, just as there had been one the night before.

The winged shitbag was a terrifying mass of claws and antennae and legs, not to mention four stubby wings, with which it was whipping my lifeless Indian beer into foam. Its body comprised a chunk of chitin and armour-casing, from which a mass of pubic hair burst in all directions. It was a perfect scale model of a tank squashed in a bramble bush. Fixing two dull black eyes on me, it redoubled its efforts to home in on my flies or throat.

‘The Chinks are really beaten, schmashed, just like the Dutch … I mean, the Dutch are practically a tropical race too, they’ve lived here for centuries …’

The ‘ Terang Boelan ’ record finished. I was able to hear Charlie Meadows again, still talking about army conduct. A good man, Charlie, and an old Burma hand. But Jackie Tertis kept butting in.

‘That’s okay as far as it goes, Charlie, but take it from me that no native population has ever yet been kept down by leniency. You must show ’em a firm hand. That’s all they respect. By God, if I had my way …’

‘Thank heavens, you aren’t going to get your way, Jackie,’ Charlie said mildly. Jackie Tertis was a slightly built man; unlike the rest of us, he was always dapper, his uniform always smartly pressed. Tertis was different, leading his dark sexless life under another star. The sun which baked most of us a solid brown had turned Tertis a hot foxy hue. He was always stoked to furnace temperature.

Wally was the temperature of cold Irish gravy. Blowing cigarette smoke over me, he continued his lecture.

‘Horry, you’ve been away from home too long, talking about getting demobbed here! There isn’t a man in this mesh tonight that wouldn’t give his head to go home next Monday in your place. I’m telling you this for your own good, Horry … These little Chink hoors with all their dirty shexual habits …’

Just for a moment, Wally Scubber interested me more than the winged shitbag. The latter had dived to the murky depths of the Indian beer to see if glass-drilling operations would get it anywhere. ‘What dirty sexual habits do you happen to fucking well have in mind, Wally?’

His mottled face was lopsided with reproof, as if he suspected that we were talking at cross-purposes.

‘There I think you know better than me, Horry, isn’t that right? I don’t wish to be spesh – speshicif – give details, but Chink girls aren’t brought up like English girls, are they? No churches or schools or – general discipline. No knickers. Bloody slant-eyed hoors – it’ll spoil you, Horry, onnis, going with your Chink bit down in the bazaar. When you meet up with some nice English girl …’

I belched and heaved myself out of the chair.

‘Finish up my beer, Wally, there’s a good lad.’

I handed him my glass, which vibrated with the enraged activities of the shitbag. I wove my way across the room. ‘You cunt, they do wear fucking knickers,’ I announced to the assembled company.

Johnny Mercer’s laughing face loomed into mine. Johnny was shorter than I, a red-faced, rat-faced Cockney who made an indifferent RASC sergeant.

‘I was watching you catch that bit of wild life in your beer, mucker,’ he said. ‘It reminded me of what the old Venereal Bede said about human existence, that it was like some horrible hairy flying abomination belting in through one window of a great hall straight into some poor cunt’s wog beer.’

He started howling with his homemade brand of laughter, and I joined in. Smiting him on the shoulder, I pushed through the crowd towards the mess door. It stood open to let the heat and smoke out. I blundered through, emerging almost at a trot into the steaming night.

You could tell blindfold that Medan was just one degree off the equator. The air suppurated like primaeval broth. A million monstrous little things unknown in England expressed their beings in sound so urgently that it was hard to know what was air, what noise. I stood there, swaying slightly, and flipped my fag-end away into the night. Its parabola was cut short in mid-air. Something had gobbled it up before it fell.

The headlights of a battered fifteen-hundredweight truck penetrated the darkness and moved down the road from the direction of the guardhouse.

They turned uncertainly in at the mess gates, revealing themselves as two eyes the colour of mule urine. They backed away to one corner of the enclosure. There was a smashing sound, sustained and quite leisurely, as the fifteen-hundredweight struck our old wooden summerhouse and ignored it. RSM Dickie Payne was returning, drunk as always.

I stood there listening with remote pleasure as Payne drove forward and then, presumably more by accident than in a spirit of revenge, back again, continuing the demolition of the summerhouse. Johnny Mercer staggered out of the mess to see what was going on.

‘ Merdeka! Our beloved RSM still battering his way through life … I need a pee …’

He turned to a nearby bush. The sound of his urine streaming on the grass reminded me of similar needs. As I moved to one side of the building, lobbing my tool out, the RSM’S vehicle swerved forward again. The glow of his headlights swept the ground ahead.

Two frogs lay clasped together, one on top of the other, in a shallow puddle – it had rained heavily at sunset. The frogs were motionless, staring ahead into a cold Nirvana of amphibian copulation. I directed a scalding jet of piss on them with such force that they were flipped over, showing their death-yellow bellies. I laughed as I pissed, churning them up, watching them struggle.

The damned truck was nearly on me. I was so taken up with the frogs that it almost ran me over.

‘Payne, you pissy-arsed fuck-pig!’ I yelled, jumping backwards as the ghari reared forward.

Payne had the truck door open, holding it with one hand while he steered with the other. He was half falling out of the cab as he backed the truck towards one side of the mess. He shouted something incoherent as he shot by, sweaty face gleaming.

And then the amazing happened. At the time, standing there clutching a dripping prick, I thought only how appropriate it was that the rear end of the truck should begin to sink slowly into the ground. The RSM’S response was to rev his engine. The ground collapsed. The truck settled down on its haunches, cab rearing into the air. Mud splattered from its still-spinning front wheels.

Cursing, Dickie Payne fell clear, landing on hands and knees in my pissy puddle among the frogs. He scuttled away into the bushes while the engine died. As the truck sank backwards still further, the yellow beam of the headlights swung upwards till it illuminated the top branches of a nearby tree. With avian imprecations, a terrible feathered thing took flight and clattered into the darkness.

Johnny was at my side, laughing as if his ribs were trapped in a suit of armour. ‘The bloody cesspit’s caved in!’ he kept saying. ‘The bloody cesspit’s caved in! Isn’t that just like life?’

This statement, no less than the truth, somehow settled the question of whether or not I should hang around the mess. Politeness had kept me there; after all, they were standing me a farewell party. But there had been a similar thrash the night before, and another was planned for the day after, all three being designed as a wet run for a grand party on Saturday night – which, it was foreseen, would be traumatic enough to require a succession of tailing-off parties, continuing long after I had flown to Singapore to catch the troopship.