My Beautiful Enemy Read online

  It was ridiculous what I did next. Moved by something like a child’s longing to be picked up and held, I crossed the room and closed the door into the reading room. Then I jammed my chair in under the doorhandle and, after I was satisfied that I was safe against unexpected interruptions, I went over to Stanley’s bed and lay down next to him. He was so deeply asleep that he didn’t stir, even when I put my arm around his waist and drew myself in towards his back. I say it was ridiculous, but it was also intoxicating, like being both drunk and abnormally alert at the same time. I stayed there for twenty minutes, long enough to feel the heat of Stanley’s body transfer itself to me and close enough to commit to memory how the whorl of his ear ended in a lobe shaped like a pea.

  Of course now I wonder if he wasn’t awake the whole time and only pretending to be asleep, and whether that somehow explains why his mood was noticeably worse later on that same day. I’d eaten my meal, such as it was, in the small infirmary canteen, where Matron could watch over me. When I came back along the verandah to the reading room I found Stanley sitting on the sofa with his nose in a book. He was eating at the same time, distractedly shovelling in great spoonfuls of shepherd’s pie and carrots. I stood over him and watched.

  ‘You want some?’ he said.

  I told him I’d already had my dinner.

  ‘What did you have?’ he said.

  ‘Custard,’ I said. ‘And something stewed.’

  ‘I can’t stand custard,’ he said. ‘It’s like eating snot.’

  He seemed broody and upset.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

  He was silent. He finished eating and laid his dinner tray on the arm of the sofa, wiping his mouth on his sleeve as he did so.

  ‘Did you ever want to kill anyone?’ he said.

  ‘My father,’ I answered straightaway.

  ‘Why him?’ said Stanley.

  ‘He liked to torment me,’ I said. ‘Punish me for no reason. He’d lock me up in a cupboard and leave me there for hours. So I used to sit in the dark and plot how I was going to murder him and make it look like an accident.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  ‘The country,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Kyushu,’ he said.

  I took down a well-thumbed encyclopaedia that was sitting on the library shelves among the children’s books and opened it at a map of the world. Stanley pointed to a spot near Nagasaki on the green map of Japan and I pointed to a spot in the far north of New South Wales where the country was coloured empire pink.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ I said. ‘It’s a shithole.’

  Then Stanley told me he’d tried to kill one of the boys at his boarding school by pushing him down some stairs. ‘It wasn’t a plan or anything,’ he said. ‘He was just there and nobody was watching.’

  He paused and ran his hand through his hair to push it back off his forehead. He suddenly seemed very old, as if what he was telling me had happened decades ago, when it had really only been a matter of days.

  ‘The headmaster called me in to his office the next morning,’ he said, ‘and I told him the boy had been running and had tripped over his own feet.’

  ‘Did he believe you?’ I said.

  ‘After I sucked his dick,’ he said.

  I looked away, but Stanley had already witnessed my embarrassment and was laughing at me. I think he was pleased that he’d managed to shock me so easily.

  ‘You want me to show you how?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t be disgusting.’

  Later, while we were playing a game of Chinese checkers, he told me that he’d also tried to kill one of his teachers, but when I asked why he just got up and walked out of the room. I waited a few minutes before following him. I found him around the back of the lavatory smoking a cigarette that he must have begged or stolen from over at the Jap ward while I was sleeping. He was crying. He didn’t try to hide it. He let the tears roll down his cheeks and drip onto the front of his dressing-gown.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’ I said.

  He looked away from me and leaked smoke out of his nose and mouth. Before I could stop myself I’d reached over and touched his sleeve, intending to comfort him, but it was as if I’d struck him. He pulled his arm away violently without turning around, so I just stood there and didn’t say another word until he told me to leave.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘And there’s no need to talk to me as if I’m an imbecile.’

  ‘Actually there’s no need to talk to you at all,’ he said.

  I didn’t reply. I decided it was none of my business anyway, what he’d done or hadn’t done. I even suspected that he’d simply made up a story to impress me. I’d lied myself, many times, so I knew how easy it was to get into the habit. I went off to bed and spent a restless night slipping in and out of a complicated dream about May, in which she wanted to know why I’d shot my father dead when he hadn’t done anything to deserve such harsh treatment. I kept on telling her that people like my father were better off dead but she’d refused to listen and in the end I’d agreed to go to the Burmese police to explain my special circumstances and to beg for mercy.

  The next day it was as if Stanley had forgotten the whole episode. I found him sitting up in bed, eating his boiled eggs and toast, smiling at some private joke.

  ‘You look terrible,’ he said, while I hovered in the doorway waiting to be invited in.

  ‘I didn’t sleep too well,’ I said.

  ‘I slept like a baby,’ he said, and then he told me he’d asked Matron Conlon for a discharge. ‘I don’t see the point of staying in bed any longer when I feel perfectly fine.’

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked, dreading the answer.

  ‘I’m going tomorrow.’

  ‘Going where? Are they sending you back to school?’

  ‘They can try. Would you miss me?’

  ‘Not fucking likely,’ I said.

  I crossed the room to pick up my Orwell book off his bedside table where I’d left it the previous afternoon.

  ‘What are you reading?’ he said.

  I sat down next to him on the bedcovers and showed him.

  ‘What’s it about?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve finished.’

  ‘What’s your guess?’

  ‘The dirty work of empire,’ I said, pointing out the phrase that had unsettled me the most when I’d come across it the day before.

  ‘Would I like it?’ he said.

  ‘Depends what kind of stuff you read,’ I said.

  I took down one of his books from the windowsill where he’d piled them up. I stared at the cover illustration and the Japanese characters that spelled out the title.

  ‘That’s Akutagawa,’ he said. ‘He’s pretty good, but I generally prefer American writers to Japanese writers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Americans think big and Japanese think small.’

  ‘And that’s why they’re trying to take over the entire world?’ I said.

  He smiled at me showing off his square front teeth.

  ‘They’re going to lose,’ he said.

  ‘You mean the Japs?’ I said, ‘or the Yanks?’

  He looked at me as if I was mentally deficient. ‘America is the richest country in the world,’ he said. ‘You should see the cars they drive around in and the houses they live in and the amount of food they eat.’

  ‘Did you like it there?’

  ‘I’m sorry I ever left,’ he said, staring at the book by Akutagawa in my lap. I gave it back to him and he returned it to the pile on the windowsill.

  ‘Why did you?’ I said.

  ‘We go where there’s work,’ he said. ‘And my father thought we’d be safer here if there was a war.’

  ‘Bad mistake,’ I said, and regretted it as soon as I saw the scorn on Stanley’s face. ‘I only mean it wouldn’t have made much difference in the end,’ I continued, trying to sound philosophical on his beh
alf. ‘You’d have been interned in America anyway.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ he said.

  We were silent for a minute or so and then I said that I’d dreamed of going to America ever since I was a kid.

  ‘Is it the same as it looks in the movies?’

  ‘Better,’ he said. ‘It’s the best place on earth if you’ve got any kind of ambition or talent.’

  ‘That’s what Bill used to tell me,’ I said. ‘He said I could make a living on the professional tennis circuit there if I was good enough.’

  Stanley looked out the window and shook his head slowly as if I was a lost cause.

  ‘There’s only one game in America,’ said Stanley. ‘I told you that already.’

  ‘Then maybe I’ll switch,’ I said, desperate to win his approval. It was worse than hunger, this longing I had for him to like me.

  ‘The point is I’m not hanging around here once the war’s over,’ I said. ‘Much better to be someplace where there’s real opportunity.’

  Stanley wasn’t listening. He was gazing out at the paddock on the other side of the fence, where at least a hundred white cockatoos had wheeled in low. They were like a huge flying carpet that had settled just above the ground but kept fluttering and lifting at the corners. You could hear them chattering, trying to decide if it was safe to land.

  ‘I’m going to join up,’ he said.

  I stared at him and didn’t know what to say.

  ‘There are plenty of Japs in the AIF,’ he said. ‘Interpreters, intelligence officers, spies.’

  I told him I didn’t think he had a hope in hell of getting a job like that.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, turning to look at me. ‘I’ve already tried to kill two people. They could use someone like me.’

  ‘You’re an alien,’ I said. ‘You don’t qualify.’

  ‘I’ll forge my papers,’ he said.

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not so I refrained from smiling.

  And that’s when Stanley took hold of my hand and laced his fingers through mine, squeezing so hard it felt like my bones were about to snap. I think he meant it as a warning, to show how much violence there was in him, but it didn’t scare me. If anything I enjoyed the pain. When he finally tried to let go I resisted and then he wrestled my arm nearly out of its socket. I fought back, grabbing hold of him with my free arm and dragging him off his bed. For ten minutes we grappled with each other in a contest of wills, without holding back, but without trying to injure each other either, just tussling and flailing blindly around in circles until we both fell exhausted to the floor.

  ‘I won,’ said Stanley.

  ‘Bullshit,’ I said.

  ‘You want to go again one day when we get out of here?’ It was more of a threat than an invitation.

  ‘You’re on,’ I said.

  I scrambled to get up because I didn’t want Stanley to see how close to tears I was. He had in fact won the fight, but that wasn’t the reason I wanted to cry. It was more that I was so uncertain of where I stood with him. One minute he was making jokes with me about Nigel Rutherford and the next minute he was trying to break my hand. And now he’d asked to be sent back to his compound early, when all I wanted was for the two of us to stay in the infirmary for as long as we could, reading and playing cards like two schoolboys on a permanent holiday. It was so much better than being back in the barracks where there was nobody I could talk to about anything of even the remotest interest to me. Of course I couldn’t explain any of this to Stanley because I didn’t know how, and because I was afraid he might dismiss me like some whiny kid he was tired of wasting his time on.

  Later of course it became clearer to me what the real cause of my bewilderment back then had been. Stanley had stirred longings in me that I’d desperately hoped to suppress, because I regarded them as sick. He, on the other hand, seemed to take my perversity for granted, planting a kiss on my cheek as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and making jokes about my love affairs. I’d ended up close to tears because all I really wanted was for Stanley to kiss me again. Even more than that I wanted to kiss him back. That I didn’t tell him at the time, that I tried to hide my feelings, is something I’ve regretted ever since.

  5

  It was not the first time that my longings, as I call them, had caused me to suffer this kind of anguish. Beginning when I was nine or ten years old I’d felt earmarked for trouble. By then I’d outgrown all of the ordinary childhood pleasures. Even now, if I try to remember a time of innocent enjoyment in the things and people around me I can’t. In photographs I’m a scowling infant and child, my brow creased in a permanent furrow. Raised without brothers or sisters in a household full of secrets and silence, I’d learned very young to be secretive and silent myself. My father was a country policeman. He was also a mean drunk, a fact that made me wary of getting close to him or of relying on him for consistent support or affection. My only ally as a child had been my mother, for whom I felt a desperate affection despite my father’s contention that she was a sorry excuse for a woman. It was Doris who’d encouraged my friendship with Bill, our neighbour. She thought the sun shone out of Bill, because of his looks and his education and his beautiful voice. And it was true that, compared to my father, Bill seemed positively saintly.

  So Doris was happy for me to spend most of my free time next door with him, and with his dog Molly. The two of them had first moved in with Bill’s mother in 1939. I remember my first sighting of them cruising up our street in Bill’s dove-grey Buick, Molly with her head stuck out of the driver’s side window so that she appeared to be in control of the wheel. The next morning, as I was leaving for school, Bill had introduced himself to my mother over the top of the hedge that separated our houses and had invited her to an afternoon tea of cakes and pastries he was in the throes of baking himself.

  After that I was always over there; helping him and his mother to reform their garden, assisting in the design and construction of the new kitchen Bill was building by hand—carpentry being one of his many skills. As far as I could tell he did no actual work, living off what he and his mother called their ‘investments’, a notion my father found deeply suspicious. Not that I cared less what my father said about my new friend. To me Bill was like a brother even though he was so much older than I was—twenty-three when I first got to know him—and I regarded him as a sun around which I could revolve forever and ever and never get burned.

  I don’t know exactly how or when things changed between us, but it had to do with the tennis lessons and the new camera Bill bought to take studio pictures. He was a keen photographer, as well as an athlete. I knew this from all the books he had. The whole of the downstairs, where he had his own living room, was lined with bookcases. He even had books standing on the floor in piles, most of them about photography or art or fashion, although there were novels and poetry among them too. He’d shipped them home from London, where he’d lived from the age of eighteen, studying art history and working in a few different casual jobs, the more menial the better he said.

  ‘You’d love London,’ he said. ‘It’s so full of life.’

  His constant complaint about living back home was the deathly silence.

  ‘Why did you leave?’ I said.

  ‘I ask myself that same question every day,’ he said.

  The real reason was his mother, who needed someone to keep an eye on her now that she wasn’t well. His older brothers were all too busy with their own lives, according to Bill, so he’d been delegated to move back home and take on the role of nursemaid.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I needed a rest. And anyway things in Europe were so grim.’

  He taught me to take photos with an old box camera he had. And he let me develop my own prints in the dark room he’d built under the stairs, praising the results so extravagantly I blushed with pride. It was rare for anyone except Doris to tell me that I was good at anything. I took the photographs home with me and stuck them in a scrapbo
ok in categories. There was a section for Molly and a section for trees and a section for still life. Bill had told me to see the subjects as arrangements of light and shade as well as actual objects. This became an obsession of mine for quite a long time, because it was a revelation for me to learn that our perception of even the simplest things was not fixed or straightforward, but open to different interpretations.

  I started to draw at home: cups and saucers, knives and forks, my father’s shoes lined up at the laundry door waiting for me to shine them. For a teenage boy on the eve of a war I was strangely uninterested in fighter planes and battleships, all of the military machinery my school friends liked to sketch endlessly. This was probably due to a ban on such drawings from Bill, who had proclaimed himself a pacifist early on in our acquaintance, and who only got bad-tempered if I mentioned events in Europe.

  ‘I can’t bear to think about it,’ he said. ‘All those mad old men plotting ways to destroy another whole generation of boys.’

  I made a solemn promise to him that I wouldn’t join up no matter what, although secretly I’d decided on the Air Force as my preferred branch of the armed services. Mainly I suppose I was inspired by my father’s scornful dismissal of fighter pilots as degenerate dandies compared to the common foot soldiers.

  My mother saw my drawings of domestic scenes and yelped with delight. She bought me sketchbooks and pencils and encouraged me to think of a career in the arts. My father saw the drawings and said nothing. It was as if they were a foreign language he didn’t understand. When I tried to explain the effects I was after he told me not to waste my breath.