My Beautiful Enemy Page 12

  Also I forget how I ended up with a woman called Hanako, out in the shed at the back of the kitchens at the Rushworth School of Arts. I refused to touch her even though Bryant had paid her to fuck me. I think she must have been one of the cooks who’d volunteered to prepare a supper for the victory dance. I only knew her by sight. She was older than me, probably twenty-five, and she had a daughter who’d been born in the camp a few weeks after Pearl Harbor. The daughter sometimes came to the schoolroom with a group of older girls and she’d sit quietly drawing or pretending to read while the older girls did their lessons. Her name was Junko and she had a face as round and pale as a moon. The fact that I knew the little girl made it hard for me to even look at her mother.

  ‘You don’t like me?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I like you.’

  Actually I hated her, I especially hated the effort she’d made to do her hair up and paint her lips. And I hated the way her skin glowed pink from standing over the steaming sink washing all the pots and pans.

  ‘Maybe we can just talk,’ I said, gesturing to her to do up the buttons on her blouse. ‘I need to sit down.’

  We were inside the shed. There was a long box up against the wall where I took a seat and motioned for her to come and sit next to me. I told her there was nothing to be afraid of because I wasn’t going to say anything to Bryant, so she would get her money anyway and she could just say that I had a great time.

  ‘And I’ll tell him myself,’ I said. ‘I’ll say it was the best birthday present anyone ever gave me.’

  Hanako did up her buttons and put on her cardigan. It was cold in the shed but we had to stay there because Bryant had someone outside watching the door ready to yell out when we were finished.

  ‘He say thirty minutes,’ said Hanako.

  ‘Mean bastard,’ I said. I meant it as a joke but I don’t think Hanako thought it was funny.

  I asked her about her family and she told me her father was a laundryman from Neutral Bay in Sydney. He’d been there since 1934 until the day after Pearl Harbor when the police had turned up to tell them to pack a suitcase.

  ‘They very nice,’ she said. ‘They searched the shop and the flat but they very polite. They said how sorry because I’m pregnant.’

  She made a gesture to show me how big she’d been at the time and that’s when I remember throwing up all over my boots. Hanako didn’t know what to do at first but then she took off her apron and handed it to me so I could wipe my mouth on it and blow my nose.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t the food. Actually I didn’t eat anything.’

  ‘That’s why you sick,’ she said. ‘Because you only drink.’

  I stood up and tried to find some way to clean up the mess I’d made on the ground and on my boots. There was a hessian sack hanging from a nail on the wall so I took that down and spread it over the patch of sick. Hanako offered me a dishcloth to wipe my boots.

  ‘I can wash later,’ she said.

  I thanked her and wiped my boots, then I rolled up the dishcloth and her apron in a tight ball and placed them next to her on the long box.

  ‘He doesn’t pay money,’ said Hanako after a long pause.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, standing in front of her. I knew she must have been talking about Bryant but I couldn’t understand what she was doing here if she wasn’t getting paid.

  ‘He promise to take me to Sydney,’ she said. ‘My father too.’

  I still didn’t understand. I asked her what exactly Bryant had told her he would do and she said there were other women as well who all wanted to stay in Australia now that the war was over.

  ‘We want to go back to our houses,’ she said. ‘He can get us papers.’

  I sat down next to her again but I couldn’t think of anything to say because I couldn’t be sure that what Bryant had told her was a lie. Maybe it was true. Maybe he could get them papers. Maybe he knew something none of the rest of us knew.

  ‘You should be prepared,’ I said. ‘In case it turns out he can’t help you.’

  Hanako stared at me in the dark and smiled.

  ‘What choice I have?’ she said.

  ‘I just think you should be careful who you trust,’ I said.

  She thanked me then leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. ‘You a nice boy.’

  When she said that I put my arms around her and clung to her for a few minutes to stop myself from crying, and also because it was so cold. After that I left the shed and went to take a piss in the bush. I must have seen our truck parked on the road on my way back to the hall and crawled into it to go to sleep, because that’s where they found me when we left to drive back to Tatura at four-thirty in the morning.

  ‘How’s the birthday boy?’ said Donohue, shaking me awake.

  I couldn’t talk. I just lay there under the tarpaulin and stared up at the stars.

  Bryant came and leaned his face into mine, his breath stinking of cigarettes and grog.

  ‘You didn’t say thank you,’ he said.

  I stared at him and didn’t say a word. He wore a triumphant expression that made me want to hit him, but in the end I reached both my arms out from underneath the tarpaulin and wrapped them around his neck, pulling him down so that I could kiss him on the mouth. Taken completely by surprise, he fell towards me and I clung even tighter to him, kissing him over and over again and thanking him, while the others screamed with laughter.

  ‘Who said I don’t have any mates,’ I said. ‘You’re my mate. Thank you so much. She was the best fucking root. Like a bloody animal. Thank you and thank you again.’

  Eventually Bryant got free of me and managed to sit himself back up on his seat.

  ‘Yeah well,’ he said. ‘Just so long as you’re grateful.’

  ‘I’m so grateful I could suck you off,’ I said.

  Riley, in the driver’s seat, cackled with laughter.

  ‘You sick bastard,’ said Bryant.

  ‘You might like it,’ I said.

  After that everyone went quiet and then Donohue started to sing. One day he’ll come along, the man I love. And he’ll be big and strong, the man I love. I don’t even think it was directed at Bryant but he suddenly leapt at Donohue and grabbed him round the throat.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ he screamed.

  Riley slammed on the brakes to stop the truck, sending all of us tumbling forward and giving Donohue a chance to get free.

  ‘The thing to remember,’ said Riley, turning around to face us, ‘is that in a few short weeks we’ll all be walking out of Tatura camp for the last time and there’s no way any of us is ever coming back.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ said Donohue.

  Riley didn’t answer for a moment.

  ‘Meaning nothing at all,’ he said eventually. ‘It was just an observation.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ said Bryant, who hadn’t exactly cheered up but was back in his seat and smoking contentedly. ‘Can’t come quick enough as far as I’m concerned.’

  Except that even from where I was lying on the floor I could tell he didn’t really mean it—he would miss the camp the way some people miss home.

  It was dawn when we pulled up at the gates. We scrambled off the truck and filed past the guardhouse just as the sun was coming up over the low hills to the east, turning them pink. After what Riley had said on the road, and because I was still deranged with drink, I suddenly had the feeling I was seeing everything for the last time: fence, watchtower, parade ground, mess hall, all at the point of vanishing. And in that instant I completely forgot my hatred of the place, and my fear of the Japs and my unremitting desire for Stanley, and felt instead a wave of love so powerful I thought I would fall down from the force of it. I must have stopped walking and leaned dangerously because Riley waited behind and helped me to stand up straight.

  ‘War is hell,’ he told me.

  I put my arm around his shoulder and leaned into him as if I was mortally wounded.

  As soon as we were
on the other side of the fence we sensed that some catastrophe had taken place in our absence. Even at that hour there should have been activity around the latrines and the showers, but the place was deserted. We crossed a silent parade ground and arrived back at our quarters where McMaster was waiting to relay orders. There’d been an incident, he said. We were all to report to Compound D immediately. If we needed to piss, like I did, that was too bad. McMaster didn’t know the details any more than we did because he’d only just woken up himself. All he’d heard was that Baba-san was dead.

  Once we’d made our way to the Compound D schoolroom, we discovered that Baba-san’s wife had found him in the night. He’d hung himself from the rafters, with a suicide note and a photograph of the emperor in his breast pocket. He’d used strips of grey blanket knotted together for a rope. Nobody had thought to untie it and take it down along with the body, so the rope was one of the things you kept looking at, almost as if you were admiring his workmanship.

  The other thing that made you morbidly curious was the body. It was laid on top of a row of stools pushed together to form a bench. I’d never seen a corpse. I waited until everyone else had taken a good look and then I approached, feeling a strange excitement. Baba-san’s eyes were narrowly open beneath the lids. I have since seen the Buddha depicted with his eyes barely open, so detached from the world’s suffering that he resembles a dead man. Baba-san’s expression was the same, neither calm nor anguished, but something in between, the expression of someone who is beyond caring.

  It was now a matter of keeping the news quiet until roll call so that Hollows could decide how much he was going to make of the incident, if anything. There was no chance of covering it up. Baba-san was one of the compound leaders. A lot of the Japs had looked to him for help and guidance over the years, and because his wife had found him and seen the truth for herself, there was no chance of passing his death off as a natural one. No doubt Baba-san had thought of all of this when he’d planned his departure. He’d even had the foresight to drape a hand-sewn Jap flag around himself so that his self-destruction could not be mistaken for anything merely personal.

  A few days later Stanley came looking for me, as I’d hoped he would. I was spreading water on the vegetable patch behind the classroom, observed by an old man who came occasionally to give me advice about the garden. Mr Nakadai rested on the schoolroom steps and smoked one of my cigarettes. I glanced up from emptying a bucket of water over the cabbages and found Stanley standing right in front of me, dressed in an approximation of a baseball uniform. He’d even managed to procure a baseball cap from somewhere. I had a sudden desire to grab it off his head and make him wrestle me to get it back, and might have done so if Mr Nakadai hadn’t been watching us so keenly.

  ‘Were you there when they found Baba-san?’ said Stanley.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I came a bit later.’

  Baba-san’s death had not been broadcast in the end, but Stanley had obviously heard all the rumours.

  I handed him a spare bucket and pointed to the tap.

  ‘Was it suicide?’ he said.

  ‘I’d say so,’ I said. ‘There was a note.’

  He went across and filled up the bucket then came back.

  ‘What did it say?’ he asked. I couldn’t tell if he was just curious, or whether Baba-san’s death had affected him more deeply than he was letting on.

  ‘No idea,’ I said. ‘Colonel Hollows took it. Closed the school down too.’

  ‘I heard,’ he said. ‘What did they do with the body?’ He crouched beside the leeks and started to splash water from his bucket around their roots.

  ‘Buried it,’ I said. I knew this because Donohue had been in the burial party. ‘In the field behind the infirmary.’

  ‘No funeral then,’ said Stanley.

  ‘No funeral,’ I said.

  Stanley stood up straight and emptied his bucket on some broccoli plants, spilling half of it on his new trousers.

  ‘Don’t spoil your uniform,’ I said.

  He ignored me and put his empty bucket down. I watched him bend forward to examine the leaves on the broad beans for slugs.

  ‘What’s the point of hanging yourself when the war’s finished?’ I said.

  ‘If Japan lost we were all supposed to die together,’ said Stanley. ‘It was in my report.’

  He looked up at me, disappointed that I didn’t know this already.

  ‘I must have missed that bit,’ I said.

  Stanley watched me cross to the tap and refill my bucket.

  ‘Did you give my report to Hollows?’ he said.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ he said.

  I didn’t answer straight away. I didn’t want to offend him.

  ‘Do you want it back?’ I said. ‘You can give it to the colonel yourself.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You keep it. Something to remember me by.’

  He took out a folded sheet of paper from his trouser pocket.

  ‘I wrote you another story,’ he said.

  He held the paper out to me. Mr Nakadai was up on his feet again and had resumed his inspection of the compost piles. He’d directed me to turn them once I’d finished watering.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I enjoyed the last one.’

  Stanley bowed to me, then to Mr Nakadai. Without another word he marched off in the direction of the mess hall. After a few paces he started to rotate his arms as if he was trying to loosen his shoulders, then he held up an imaginary baseball bat and took a few swings at an imaginary ball. I assumed it was for my benefit, to make it seem like he was unmoved by what had happened to Baba-san, although even I could tell what a blow the old man’s death had been, not just to Stanley but to everyone in the camp. It was as if it had made the defeat of Japan real and final. To those who’d never once entertained the prospect that Japan might lose the war, it must have seemed like the death of hope itself.

  I wanted to go after Stanley and give him the smokes I had on me, but McMaster had his head out the schoolroom window and was calling me to come inside.

  The story Stanley gave me was very short and read like a fairy tale. He’d illustrated it along the side of the page, just as he’d done with the story of the spider thread. I read it later by torchlight in my bunk, after everyone had gone to sleep. It was about a young painter apprenticed to a master who grew jealous of the young man’s amazing skill. The master criticised the student constantly in front of the other apprentices until the young man despaired. Then one day the master told the student to paint a picture of a carp, and the student called to mind the fattest carp in his uncle’s pond and painted it as best he could from memory. Furious at the boy’s precocious talent, the master grabbed the painting and threw it into the water, where, to everyone’s astonishment, the carp came to life and swam away. On the back of the story Stanley had written a woman’s name, Lily Tanaka, and an address in Chicago.

  Stanley had talked about escaping before, most recently in his secret letter, but I hadn’t taken him seriously. It was always hard to tell whether he was showing off or not. Looking back I should have known that the story of the carp contained a message, that Stanley was saying his goodbyes. The address in America was the strongest clue, but even that I failed to pick up on, no doubt because I didn’t want to.

  Escape was a serious business. As far as I knew none of the Japs had ever tried it, let alone succeeded. Stanley, I suppose, had it in mind to show everyone how easily it could be done, if only you had the brains. In this sense his escape bid was more about his vanity than about his dream to reach Chicago. Not that I knew this at the time. Back then I thought Stanley must have lost his sanity. I blamed Baba-san. He’d deliberately set a precedent for boys of Stanley’s temperament to follow, made it plain how much was at stake. For three days after Stanley went missing I survived on almost no sleep. I tossed and turned all through the night, fretting about whether he was dead in a ditch somewhere, either by his own hand or someone else’s. M
y stomach pains and headaches came back.

  When McMaster asked me what the matter was I told him it was my nerves playing up again. ‘Matron Conlon says I need to learn to relax.’

  ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘You’re too young to be rotting away in a place like this. Young fellow like you should be out dancing every night, meeting girls.’

  I thanked him for the advice and tried to finish my morning toast, except that it tasted vaguely metallic and I ended up leaving most of it untouched.

  I wrote Stanley a letter in the schoolroom late that night telling him to contact me as soon as he could.

  Please let me know you’re still alive. A postcard will do. Just a sign that you made it. I love you always, Arthur.

  I read the letter again and again, delaying the moment when I would have to burn it. Before I left the schoolroom to go back to barracks I took Stanley’s secret notebook out of the drawer where I’d hidden it and slipped it into the inside pocket of my overcoat. It was, as Stanley had said himself, something to remember him by. More than that, if Stanley was going to die I wanted to gather everything I could of his together. I imagined that this was somehow the solemn duty of the one who is left behind.

  14

  At the end of the week I watched, along with most of the camp, while Stanley was brought back in handcuffs by a couple of local policemen. It was mid-afternoon. Stanley had been on the loose since the Tuesday night when he’d dug his way out under the wire in the northern corner of the perimeter fence, near the tennis court. It seemed there was a depression in the ground there that had gone unnoticed and Stanley had only needed three or four hours to dig it out as he went, using a kitchen frypan he’d modified to function as a shovel. There was no suggestion that he’d any accomplices or any assistance from anyone inside or outside the camp. Nevertheless, Hollows was very careful to interview all the members of his family and all of the kids from the Jap school with whom Stanley had associated.