Brian Aldiss - A Rude Awakening

‘You take me with you London, darling. You and me very good each other, all time have fun and make love. How you think you can live in foreign country without me?’

‘Don’t cry, Margey. Honestly, I think about the problem all the time. I don’t know what to do. Try to understand. My time is up. Christ … All my mates think I’m mad because I don’t want to go back to the Blight. My time is up, I’m time-expired. I’ve served my seven years and I’ve got to return to Civvy Street. That’s orders. I couldn’t live on in Medan even if I wanted to.’

She put her hands up to her cheeks, gazing down at her toes. The moth crawled on to her neck and she brushed it away. Rain fell solidly outside as if it would not be content until it broke down every rotten roof in Medan. Our small lamp-lit drama was wrapped about in liquid sound.

Margey suddenly climbed back on the bed, wrapped the sheet about us both, and tucked my shrivelled prick into the palm of her hand.

She spoke confidentially, as if she did not wish Daisy to hear.

‘One man tell me you can get army discharge in Singapore. Singapore belong Britain. Prenty British in Singapore. You get job in big firm like Cable & Wireless for good pay. I come along too, look after you, like first-class China wife.’

Speaking, her face filled with the vision of us together in a place at peace, and she smiled, showing those delicious teeth. At the same time, she gave my prick a playful squeeze.

I lay back, staring at the lamp on the sill with the packet of Bird’s Custard Powder beside it. If only Margey would shut up …

‘Who told you I could get demobbed in Singapore, Johnny Mercer?’ It was a possibility I had never mentioned to her.

Instead of answering the question, she bent and kissed my idling organ.

‘I show you many pleasure in Singapore. Is great good city, maybe next best in the world after Tsingtao and Peking and London and Paris. We can have much fun. Horry, you know, all time go many parties, live in big new flats now they build in Bukit Timah Road. I not tease you or look at any other man. Do you hear? No feel any penis except this lovely one all the time.’

It at least began to show enthusiasm for the proposed regime.

‘I’ve got to get back to my fucking family, Margey. Orders are orders. I can’t explain. It’s how things are. I don’t run the bloody world … Listen to that fucking rain …’

‘Fuck the fucking rain!’ Margey looked angrily at me, pulling her ugly Temple Watchdog face. She knew I dreaded her temper. ‘Why you mention about your family? You no care them – you bad drunk son! You never write any letter your mother or papa. We go Singapore, just you and I, then I learn speak much more good English and love you every way, like a slave, okay? That really is best for you, I know.’ She struck her bosom angrily. ‘My god, Singapore is lucky place of the Far East.’

That was a matter of opinion, though it was hardly the moment to argue with her. As far as the British were concerned, the whole disaster of Singapore stood out as a prime example of their failure to understand or care about any race East of India. During the nineteen-thirties, it had been fortified up to the eyeballs so as to be impregnable from the sea; in the nineteen-forties, the Japanese walked in through the back door and the Singapore garrison feebly surrendered. They surrendered to an enemy they had always regarded with contempt, a race of little men hardly worth fighting.

I had personal feelings about Singapore. When 2 Div finally pulled out of Burma, the Mendips had been given five weeks’ rest in Calcutta, and then our brigade had moved to Madras to undergo amphibious training with 26 Div. We were limbering up for the infamous Operation Zipper; our task was to take the impregnable Singapore from the Japanese by seaborne invasion! Bloody madness. Fortunately, Harry Truman got his finger out and dropped the A-bomb in the nick of time. We were spared our seaborne massacre and shipped over to Sumatra to repatriate Japs instead.

The war had been mad enough, with its interlocking maze of arbitrary decisions, but it was merely a consequence of the lunatic peace which had preceded it. What vain hopes Singapore represented in that direction! Its fortifications cost the British taxpayer twenty million pounds sterling, a fortune indeed in the twenties; and in the very week when those fortifications were started and the first stone laid, the financial wizards in London lent the Japs twenty-five million pounds sterling to build a navy with which to destroy Singapore and the rest of Britain’s power in the East. What a masterpiece of imperial idiocy! No wonder we lost the bloody empire!

Well, I write this a long time later, and Singapore, that elegant rat-race, has now gone its own way, free of British control. I have the advantage of hindsight. But it’s easy enough to see how such lunacies repeat themselves. The Soviet powers build up their vast armaments steadily year by year, while the West subsidises them to do so; Poland alone has been given (‘lent’ is the technical term) millions of deutschmarks with which to buy agricultural machinery. When the Warsaw Pact countries attack us, we shall all be astonished and indignant, forgetting how for years we have been sharpening the razors with which they cut our throats. Every decade, the distinction between war and peace becomes less, their yin-yang relationship more obvious.

But all I said to Margey at the time, as she clutched my prick and the moth singed itself on her lamp, was, ‘Fuck Singapore!’

She began to sob – another liquid sound far more noticeable than the others surrounding us.

‘Oh, pack it in, Margey. I love you but my fucking time is up. It’ll break my heart to leave you but that’s the way it is. Kismet.’ Checking my watches, I worked out that it must be eleven o’clock, give or take ten minutes. The rain was dying out.

Margey turned away from me and curled up in a foetal position, still sniffing.

‘You say you love your Margey, so you say. You say you like be in the East, so you say. Then why you go England? Now you must decide! For safety sake, since Medan is so dangerous, we go Singapore short time, okay, you and I? Later time, when Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek throw out the rebels from China and law-and-order come back, then I take you Shantung, show you Tsingtao. We can go on the railway train! I have a pre-war timetable in my trunk. Is easy journey!’ She sat up, smiling again, stretching out her arms as if to embrace all China. ‘Aei-ya, Horry, just you think! You can see the Yellow Sea and those occasional beaches like I told you, with all the trees with flowers on when spring comes down from the mountains. I bet you like that, Horry, I really bet!’

‘Yeah, I would.’

Yeah, I would like it. Sweat rash apart, yes, I loved the East: I loved the extraordinary people, the muddle, the failure, the hope, the climate, the ghastliness, the perennial courage, the lack of pretension. Everything was much more real and exciting than anything I had known in England. But …

And Margey. Temper apart, yes, I loved Margey. She was so vulnerable, yet so bouncy, oppressed yet serene. She embodied in her frail plump self the whole teeming confused Chinese nation, that extraordinary half of the globe, that secret and alluring half, which existed almost like a female counterpart to the gun-toting, overcoat-clad West. Passionately, I longed to know her and, through her, her people better. I longed to dive deeper and not be jerked suddenly out of context like a carp out of a pool. But …

‘Oh, you so insc’utable! You say nothing!’ She kicked her savage little feet under the cover. ‘You say you love me, you no love me – jus’ because I China girl, I got yellow skin, you fool ignorant soldier!’