Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

Our reviving methods were the ineffectual kind we had learned from movies: lifting his eyelids (why? did we want to see the eye or not?); plumping his pillow; unbuttoning his shirt; pouring cold water over his face with the Johnnie Walker pitcher; fitting an ice bag on his head like a tam-o’-shanter, and lightly slapping his cheeks while asking persistent questions—“Where does it hurt?” and “Can you hear me?”—to which there were no replies.

The doctor sensibly put a stop to this. “How did he get so wet?” he asked as he knelt and swiftly tinkered with Leigh’s chest and shone a light in his eyes. He held Leigh’s wrist various ways and said, “It’s too late.” It sounded like a reproach for what I had whispered to Leigh—“Maybe later.”

“A lot he cares,” said Smale, muffling what he had said with his hand and backing away from the doctor.

“Is it all right to smoke?” asked Coony. But he had already lit one, which was smoldering half-hidden in his cupped fingers.

“One of you will have to come along with me,” said the doctor, ignoring Coony’s question. The doctor was Chinese, and I think what Smale held against him was his unclinical appearance; he was wearing a bright sports shirt and Italian sandals.

Yardley and the others turned to me and became very attentive and polite, as to the next of kin, offering me the considerate sympathy they had lavished on William, as they had started calling him when he was on the sofa and, most likely, dead. We wore long faces — not sad because we liked him, but mournful because we hated him. Coony put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you okay, Jack?”

“I’ll be fine in a minute,” I said, becoming the grieving person they wanted me to be.

“If there’s anything we can do,” said Yates.

I put on my suit jacket and fixed my tie. I was dressed for a death, buttoning the black jacket over my stomach.

“What are you going to tell his wife?” asked Yardley.

I stopped buttoning. “Won’t the hospital tell her?” It had not occurred to me until Yardley mentioned it that I would have to break the news to Leigh’s wife.

“They’ll get it all wrong,” said Smale. He held my sleeve and confided, “They’ll make it sound bloody awful.”

“Don’t tell her it happened here,” said Coony quickly. “Say it happened somewhere else.”

“During the day,” said Smale. “A sunny day.”

“But in the shade,” said Coony, “of a big Angsana tree. In the Botanical Gardens. While he was—” Coony hit his fist against his head.

“While he was having a good time with the rest of us,” said Yardley. He looked from face to face.

There was a long silence. The doctor was at the bar speaking on the telephone to the hospital.

“Near the bandstand,” said Frogget. “Maybe he tried to climb that hill. And it was too hot. And his ticker gave out.”

“We told him to stop,” said Yardley, sounding convinced. “But he wouldn’t listen to us. ‘Have it your way,’ we said. So off he went—”

“I’ll think of something,” I said, cutting Yardley off. I didn’t like this.

It had all fallen to me. He was mine now, though I had tried several times to disown him. I had not wanted him; I had disliked him from the moment he asked, “Flowers… are you a ponce?” And his triumphant contempt: “How do you stand it?” and “How do you manage?” It was as if he had come all that way to ask me those questions, and to die before I could answer.

The doctor clicked Leigh’s eyes shut, moving the lids down with his thumbs; but the lids refused to stick and sightless crescents of white appeared under the lashes. We carried him to the doctor’s Volvo and folded him clumsily into the back seat. I sat beside him and put my arm around him to keep him from swaying. He nodded at every red light, and at the turning on River Valley Road his head rolled onto my shoulder.

“How long have you been in Singapore?” the doctor asked. It was a resident’s question. I told him how long. He did not reply at once; I guessed I had been there longer than him. He drove for a while and then asked when I would be leaving.

“Eventually,” I said. “Pretty soon.”

“Haven’t I seen you at the Island Club?”

“Yes,” I said. “I go there now and then, just to hack around.”

“What’s your handicap?”

“My handicap,” I said. “I wouldn’t repeat it in public.”

The doctor laughed and kept driving. Leigh slumped against me.

In my locked bedroom on Moulmein Green, late at night and so dog tired after driving one of my girls back to her house from a hotel that I collapsed into bed without pulling my pants off or saying my prayers, I had imagined death differently — not the distant horror of the drowning man, but the sense of something very close, death crowding me in the dark: a thing stirring in a room that was supposed to be empty. The feeling I got on one of those nights was associated in my mind with the moment before death, the smothering sound of the cockroach. A glossy cockroach, motionless, gummed to the wall by the bright light, goes into action when the light is switched off. It is the female which flies and its sound is the Chinese paper fan rapidly opening and closing. This fluttering dung beetle in the black room is circling, making for you. You listen in the dark and hear the stiff wings beating near your eyes. It is going to land on your face and kill you and there is nothing you can do about it.

I did not imagine a moment of vision before death, but quite the reverse, blindness and that fatal burr of wings. Leigh’s eyes were not completely closed, the lids were ajar and the sulfurous streetlamps on Outram Road lit the gleaming whites. In the General Hospital Leigh peered past the orderly who pinned an admission ticket to his shirt — number eighty-six, a lottery number for Mr. Khoo — and turned out his pockets: a few crumpled dollars, a withered chit, some loose change, a wallet containing calling cards, a picture of Margaret, a twenty-dollar Hong Kong note, and a folded receipt from the Chinese Emporium on Orchard Road. This went into a brown envelope.

“We’ll need a deposit,” said the nurse.

I took out Gunstone’s envelope, Singapore Belvedere , and handed over fifteen dollars. How do you manage?

“Please fill up this form,” she said.

The form was long and asked for information I could not provide without Leigh’s passport. So with the matron’s permission I went back to the Strand by taxi, told the desk clerk that Leigh was dead, and picked up the passport. “It seems like only yesterday that he checked in,” the desk clerk said; he assured me that he would take care of everything. By the time I was back at the hospital, copying Leigh’s full name, home address, nearest relation, race, and age — he was a year younger than me; the pen shook in my hand — Leigh was staring out of the chilly morgue drawer; after the autopsy he looked much the same, though unzipped, he fixed on that distant thing with the single eye the autopsy left him.

I had forgotten Leigh’s suitcase. After the certificate of death had been made out I picked up the case at the Strand, and at my insistence the taxi driver detoured past the Bandung. As we went past I could see lights burning and Yardley, Frogget, Smale, and the others at the bar, like lost old men, vagrants huddled around a fire late at night, sharing a bottle, afraid to go to bed.

It was after midnight. I did not have the heart to wake up Leigh’s wife and get her out of bed to tell her she was a widow. I locked my door, put a match to the mosquito coil, and knelt beside it. The mosquito coil, lighted to suffocate the gnats and drive the cockroaches away, smoked like a joss stick. I blinked in the fumes and tried to pray; the first words that came to me were, Is this all?