Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

The next day I awoke as if after a binge, with that feeling of physical and mental fragility, exposure, distraction — the knowledge of having done something shameful which refuses to be summoned up: of having revealed my closest secret which now everyone knew except me! And then I remembered Leigh, not as a corpse; it was an uncharitable intrusive thought, something connected with the smile he wore when he had asked, “How do you manage?” A picture of his dead face followed.

So more as an act of penance than out of any curiosity, I opened his suitcase and picked through it. Each thing I found made me sad; nothing was concealed. There were tags and labels on the case, the traveler’s campaign ribbons, KHAO YAI MOTOR LODGE, HOTEL BELA VISTA — MACAU, and the luggage tag from the airline with the destination lettered sin. Here was a sock with a hole in the toe, a pathetic little sewing kit, some salt tablets, a packet of Daraprim, very wrinkled pajamas with a white-piping border, his human smell still upon them. In a paper bag from the Chinese Emporium there were a set of screwdrivers, a new shaving brush, some Lucky Brand razor blades. There was a wrapped parcel of batik cloth from another shop, probably a present for his wife, and stuck to the parcel were two receipts for the cloth, but giving different prices, the lower faked price to fool the customs official in Hong Kong and avoid a few dollars’ import duty. At the bottom of the case was a detective novel with a grisly title that described Leigh’s own death, an eerie coincidence italicizing the improbable fraud of one, the pitiful condition of the other. He was in the morgue drawer, and here was his poor bundle of effects: this was all.

I dressed, practicing how to tell his wife what had happened. The suitcase caught my eye; I opened it again and sorted through it quickly, lifting everything out a second time and shaking the clothes. There was no money in it! I had told the desk clerk at the Strand he was dead, but only later picked up the suitcase. After I had left with the passport they had gone up to his room and robbed him.

The phone crackled; Hing fretted beside me; Gopi watched. I said, “Listen carefully. Yesterday I was with your husband at the Botanical Gardens. Wait a minute — listen. It was a beautiful day—”

It was a suffocating day, producing the feverish symptoms of a fatal illness in me. I had picked up my car at the garage, we had all met at the mortuary, and we followed behind the hearse — polished and sculpted like an old piano — attempting funereal solemnity by keeping our faded elderly cars in file, my chugging Renault, Yardley’s blue Anglia, Hing’s Riley (he sat in the back seat with Little; a Malay drove), Mr. Tan and Wallace Thumboo in an old Ford Consul, Yates in his boxy Austin, and the others trailing, impossible to see in my rear-view mirror. We hit every red light, getting hotter and sicker at each stop, and we lost the hearse (I could see Yardley irritably pounding his palm against the steering wheel) at one junction when it speeded up and ran on the yellow.

Gladys was with me. I had guessed in advance that only men would be there, and that didn’t seem right. Also, I had to drop her off at a hotel immediately afterward, an appointment of long standing I had only noticed that morning in my desk diary. Gladys was fanning herself absent-mindedly as I drove, and quickly against her chin at stoplights, making that fluttering I dreaded, the papery burr of beating cockroach wings. I told her to knock it off. That and the heat oppressed me. We were not in sunlight, but sweating in the mid-morning Singapore veil of dim steam that makes a gray tent of the slumping sky and nothing on the ground solid. There was nothing worse, I was thinking, than a cremation on a hot day in the tropics. It had all the inappropriateness of a man puffing on a pipe in a burning house. I vowed that I would spare myself that fate.

The crematorium off Upper Aljunied Road was a yellow building, with a chimney instead of a steeple, on a low hill, in a treeless Chinese cemetery, a rocky weedy meadow of narrow plots, stone posts as grave markers, figured like milestones turned on a lathe, an occasional angel, and worn cement vaults with peeling red doors, set in scorched hillocks: a whole suburb of trolls’ huts, clustered there in the kind of chaotic profusion that matched their lives, sleeping families on shophouse floors, and now, head to toe, beneath those posts and stones. Here and there was a high vault with a roof, fenced in from the others, the graveyard equivalent of a towkay ’s mansion, which might almost have borne a nameplate, The Wongs, Chee’s Tower , or Dunroamin. All this was hazy in the steamy air and when I looked back, obscured by the dust cloud our procession of cars was raising on the road that wound up to the crematorium. The chimney was not smoking. Some distance away, in the middle of the cemetery, a ghostly white-shirted party with umbrellas open stood slightly bowed before a vault mound. They could have been praying, but they weren’t. Stooping reverentially, they began to let off firecrackers.

“Can’t they stop those little bastards?” said Yardley, rushing up to me after we parked. Our dust cloud descended, sifting down on us. He looked at Gladys and suppressed another curse. “We can’t have that nonsense going on during the service.”

The Chinese mourners were lighting packets of fifty with the fuses knotted. The noise carried in steady burps; there were flashes and delayed bangs.

“Bloody—” Yardley turned and stalked away growling.

“To amaze the gods,” Gladys said. “Very lucky to have big noise. Also can make devils piss off.”

The other fellers came over to us.

“Are you okay, Jack?” asked Coony.

“I hope it doesn’t rain,” said Smale, leaning back and squinting at the sky.

We looked at him.

“It’d ruin it,” he said nervously. “Wouldn’t it?” Was he thinking of the fire that could be doused, or was it that fear of excessive gloom that fellers associate with rain at funerals?

“It won’t rain until October,” said Yates.

The two Hings were in white, their terrifying color of mourning, white cotton suits and straw hats, carrying umbrellas, looking wretched. Mr. Tan wore a black tie. Because of the appointment, Gladys wore a bright green dress and carried a large handbag; her face was a white mask with wizard’s eyes. Big Hing cracked his umbrella open, shook it, and walked in oversized shoes toward the building, holding the umbrella upright, but bouncing it as he walked. The rest of the Chinese followed him.

I asked the hearse driver what we were supposed to do. He said four of us were to carry the coffin into the chapel; the priest would take care of the rest. I objected to the word “priest” to describe an effeminate Anglican cleric of perhaps thirty, blushing in the heat, his cheeks pink, and wringing his hands by the crematorium door; in his white smocklike surplice he eyed Gladys disapprovingly, like a spinsterish intern about to check her for the clap. I beckoned to Yardley and the others and said, “Look alive.”

I had known most of them for fourteen years; I had drunk with them nearly every night at the Bandung. Only that. I had never seen them all together, assembled in daylight away from the Bandung. So I was seeing them for the first time. They were strangers who knew me. The bad light of the Bandung had been kind to Yardley’s liverish pallor, a tropical sallowness in an unlined face; Frogget looked bigger and hairier, and his tie was frayed; Yates I noticed had freckles, and his glasses had slipped down his nose from his perspiring; Smale’s hair was reddish — I had always thought of it as brown; Coony’s hair was combed straight back, the shape of his head, and his lower lip, which always protruded when his mouth was shut, was dry for once. None of them was standing straight; they were self-conscious in their suits, in unfamiliar postures, and Yardley’s leaning — one shoulder higher than the other — made him appear unwell.