Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

“Very amusing,” he said, when I finished, his understatement contradicting the honking laughter he couldn’t suppress. “Have a drink?”

“ Thank you.”

“Actually, I’m hungry,” he said. “No time for breakfast this morning. Ruins the day, don’t you find?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “That’s what I try to tell these skippers I deal with. Give a seaman a slap-up breakfast and he’ll do a fair day’s work. Cut down on his lunch, but don’t ever tamper with that breakfast of his!”

“My idea of a really topnotch breakfast is kippers, porridge oats, eggs, and a pot of tea — hot and strong.” He smacked his lips.

“You’re forgetting your fruit juice — juices are very important. And choice of cereals, some bubble and squeak, huge rashers of bacon, or maybe a beefsteak and chips, stack of toast, hot crumpets, marmalade. Boy!” The feller was nodding in agreement and swallowing. “It’s a funny thing, you know,” I went on. “These ship chandlers don’t supply fresh juice — oh, no! Course the fresh is cheaper and the fruit grows locally. They give you this tinned stuff.”

“You can taste the metal.”

“Sure you can!”

“Potatoes make a nice breakfast,” he said, still swallowing.

“Hashbrowns — fry ’em up crisp and hot and serve them with gouts of H. P. Sauce.”

“I’m famished,” he said, and looked at his watch.

“Me too,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind a big English breakfast right this minute. I envy the seamen on some of the ships I supply.”

“All the same,” he said, “it sounds an expensive meal.”

“Not on your nelly,” I said, and quoted some prices, adding, “I buy in bulk, see, so I can pass the savings on to the customer. I still make a profit — everyone gains.”

“It sounds frightfully reasonable.”

“And that’s not all—”

Our drinks arrived, and the ladies resumed their bowling. The feller said, “I’m just the teeniest bit browned-off with my own chandler. What did you say was the name of your firm?”

I explained Hing’s name on my card by saying he was a partner who came in handy when we were dealing with Chinese accounts — I’d known him for years. “Like I say, we’re an unusual firm.” I winked. “Think about it. We’ll see your men get a good breakfast. Oh, and if there’s anything else you require— anything at all —just give me a tinkle and I’ll see what I can scare up. Cheers.”

He rang the next day. He offered me a chandling contract for three freighters, a couple of tankers, and two steamships of modest tonnage that did the Singapore-North Borneo run. At the end of the conversation he hesitated briefly and murmured, “Yesterday, um, you said anything , didn’t you?”

“You bet your boots I did.”

“Um, I was wondering if you could help me out with something that’s just cropped up this morning. One of our freighters is in from Madras. Crew’s feeling a bit Bolshie about going off tomorrow to the Indonesian ports. We’d like to cheer them up a bit, um, give them a bit of fun without letting them ashore. Are you in the picture?”

“Leave it to me,” I said. “How many guys are you trying to… amuse?”

“Well, it’s the Richard Everett. She’s got, say, twenty-three able seamen, and—”

“You’ve come to the right man,” I said. “How about a coffee? I’ll explain then.”

“ Lunch ,” he insisted, pleased. “At the club. And thanks, thanks awfully.”

AT THAT PERIOD in my life, my first years in Singapore, I enjoyed a rare kind of happiness, like the accidental discovery of renewal, singing in my heart and feet, that comes with infatuation. It was true power: mercy and boldness. I felt brave. I didn’t belittle it or try to justify it, and I never wondered about its queer origin. I was converted to buoyancy, and rising understood survival: the surprise of the marooned man who has built his first fire. I had turned forty without pain, and until Desmond Frogget came I was the youngest drinker in the Bandung.

The Bandung was a lively place: freshly painted, always full, with free meat pies on Saturdays and curry tiffin on Sundays, and a Ping-Pong table which we hauled out to work up a thirst. A stubby feller named Ogham used to play the piano in the lounge, jazzy tunes until midnight and finishing up with vulgar and patriotic songs. I can see it now on a Saturday night, the room lit by paper lanterns rocked by the fans, Wally in a short white jacket and black tie shaking a gin sling, the main bar heaving with drinkers, all of them regulars, and me in my white cotton suit and white shoes, wearing the flowered open-neck shirt that was my trademark, and Ogham in the lounge playing “Twelfth Street Rag.” Some feller would lean over and say to me, “Oggie could have been a professional, you know, but like he says, that’s no life for a man with a family.”

Ogham pounded the piano at the Bandung and never introduced us to his family, and after he left Singapore there were various explanations of where he had gone. Some said to a London bank, but Yardley sneered, “He was a lush. He got the sack and three months’ gadji and now he’s in Surrey, mending bicycles.” For Yardley no fate was worse. With Ogham gone I hacked around sometimes with the Warsaw Concerto , hitting a sour note at the end of an expertly played passage to be funny, but some fellers said I was being disrespectful to Ogham and I had to stop. Later, an old-timer wandering back through the lounge from the toilet in the kitchen would glance at the piano and say, “Remember Oggie? I wonder what happened to him. Christ, he could have turned professional.”

“Oggie didn’t know whether his arsehole was bored or punched,” Yardley would reply, believing Ogham to be a deserter. “He got the sack and three months’ gadji and now he’s in—”

The day Ogham left he got very nostalgic about a particular towpath he had played on as a child; he bought us all a drink and reminisced. I had never seen him so happy. We listened at the bar as he took a box of matches and said, “The gasworks was over here,” and put a match down, “and the canal ran along what we used to call the cut — here. And—” The scene was repeated with the others, the memory of a picnic or tram ride re-enacted at the bar before their ships sailed.

Many of the regulars at the Bandung started to leave. It was getting near to Independence, and over a drink, when a feller said he was going home you knew he meant England and not his house in Bukit Timah. So the Bandung emptied. On a side road at the city limit, it was too far off the beaten track for the average tourist to find it, and what tourists there were in those days came by ship. I spent most of my free time hustling in bars in the harbor area, places a tourist with a few hours ashore might wander into, or in the cut-price curio shops in Raffles Place. I had earned enough money in my first year to be considered a big spender in the Bandung, and to rent a large yellow house on River Valley Road, with three bedrooms and a verandah supported by solid white pillars, shaded by chicks the size of sails on a Chinese junk. As a bachelor I lived in one room and allowed the other rooms to fall into disuse. I had two gray parrots who pecked the spines off all my books, a dozen cats, and an old underemployed amah who played noisy games of mahjong with her friends in the kitchen, often waking me at three in the morning as they shuffled the mahjong tiles, a process they called “washing the tiles.” The amah had made the bed and fixed breakfast enough times to know that I was not practicing celibacy, and she was continually saying that as a “black and white” she was trained to care for children, a hint that I should get married. She sized up the girls I took home and always said, “Too skinny! You not like hayvie! Yek-yek!”