My Beautiful Enemy Page 8

  ‘You need to get more first serves in,’ said one of the boys, a clingy kid called Morisaki—Mo for short.

  ‘I know,’ I said. I was sitting next to him at one of the desks, trying to show him all the steps in a long division sum that was giving him trouble. He was small for his age and wore trademark glasses held on with elastic. But he was bright and I was beginning to enjoy teaching him and the others like him, the ones who wanted so desperately to learn that they would arrive at the schoolroom door an hour early every morning with questions about their homework.

  ‘And you need to run faster,’ he said.

  ‘Did I ask for your help?’ I said, sounding angrier than I’d intended. Mo hunched over his work and refused to say another word.

  Nevertheless, I remembered his advice, and on the Friday I managed to break Stanley’s serve twice and take the set. Not that it made any difference to the final result. Stanley had already won the first four matches with depressing ease. We shook hands over the net as usual and Stanley slapped me hard on the back.

  ‘I let you have that last one,’ he said. ‘I could tell you were a bit out of form.’ He spoke loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Within seconds, Mo was by my side patting my arm because he couldn’t reach my shoulder and telling me how well I’d played.

  ‘He beat you fair and square,’ he told Stanley.

  Stanley laughed at him and tried to muss his hair but Mo ducked out of the way, offended.

  ‘Somebody loves you,’ said Stanley, grinning at me.

  I wanted so badly to kiss him at that moment that I had to look away.

  All week I’d been tormented in this fashion. The tennis had become secondary to my obsessive fantasising about what I would do to Stanley the next time we were alone together. The reason I watched the clock all day in a state of nervous anticipation was because I knew Stanley would make his appearance at three o’clock sharp, and that if I was lucky I could watch him through the window of the classroom while the kids packed up their exercise books and streamed out the door. Before the kids’ tennis lessons started he liked to position a couple of boys up one end of the court and practise serving to them. This gave me five minutes to admire the fluid way he moved, the easy way he sent the ball up above his head then came over it with deadly force. It was a thrilling thing to watch. It put me in mind of Bill and I couldn’t help feeling an absurd longing to somehow introduce Stanley to my old friend, offer him up as a true talent, in contrast to my occasional flashes of brilliance. It also made me wonder if Bill had been merely flattering me all along, in order to enslave me. I remembered the pleasure it had given me as a boy, to be watched so closely and praised so fulsomely, and I understood finally that it had not been strictly for my tennis.

  Even while I played against Stanley I was distracted by the sight of him: he had the habit of pushing his hair back off his forehead, and of wiping his palms one by one on his shirt. His gestures often caused me to lose sight of the ball when it came at me and I ended up wrong-footed. Of course Mo was right, I did need to run faster, but that was missing the point of the whole exercise, which was to gaze at Stanley, to drink in the look of him as if it was a drug. Whenever we changed ends I made sure to brush past Stanley’s arm in what seemed a casual way, only to break out into a feverish sweat every time, as if I’d stepped too close to the edge of a drop.

  I was almost glad when Stanley failed to come back the following week, because that meant I could have a respite from the agonising ritual of waiting for him. But I soon found that his absence was a worse torment than his presence. The children missed him too, and complained that the tennis lessons were overcrowded and chaotic without him there to help maintain order.

  ‘Then ask him to come back,’ I said. ‘Tell him I want a re-match.’

  They did as they were told and reported back that Stanley didn’t want to talk to them.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘He’s too busy.’

  Whatever he was busy with it seemed to have brought about one of Stanley’s changes of mood. Later I realised that nobody in the camp was immune from these shifts in the emotional temperature, not even the children. Their attitude could alter from one day to the next, depending on what they’d heard discussed the previous evening in the mess hall, or after lights out in the huts. The battle of Okinawa had been raging since April. Now it was June. News of the unprecedented brutality of the fighting had got through to everyone in some form or another, mostly as rumour and hearsay. It was like an undertow to everything that happened on the surface of their lives, moving silently but with irresistible force, dragging everybody along with it.

  The next time I saw Stanley he was a changed man. He called by the schoolroom during morning lessons, coming in by the side door and pausing to listen to McMaster’s class. I was at the back of the classroom stapling pages to make some lesson books for the younger kids. As soon as I caught sight of him I sensed the difference. There was a sullenness that hadn’t been there before. He came over to where I was sitting and stood next to me in a sulk, his gaze fixed on a point somewhere on the wall about a foot away from my left ear. He had his funeral suit on again, and he’d found a hat to match it, a newish Homburg that he kept touching and tugging at to make sure the brim remained at the proper angle. His dancing shoes were muddy.

  He asked me what I was doing and I showed him. Out the front of the class McMaster was in the middle of a talk about the history of the Royal Navy and how it had always been the real power behind the English throne.

  ‘I won’t be coming to play tennis again,’ Stanley announced to no one in particular. ‘It’s a waste of time.’

  McMaster stopped in mid-sentence and scowled at him.

  In order to rescue the situation I took Stanley by the arm and led him out the door so we could talk in private, and so I could look at him properly.

  ‘Why say that in front of everyone?’ I said.

  ‘Say what?’ said Stanley. He was seething with unfocused rage. I could tell by the way he snatched the Camels I handed to him.

  ‘That it’s a waste of time,’ I said. ‘It’s better than nothing.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ said Stanley. ‘It’s worse.’

  He took a cigarette out of the new pack and lit it without offering me one.

  ‘Why did you tell me you hated tennis?’ I said. ‘You’re a natural.’

  He stared at the burning tip of his fag and scowled as if the sight of it was somehow enraging.

  ‘You don’t know the first thing about me,’ he said.

  I couldn’t tell if he meant this to be a simple statement of fact or a provocation.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘My mistake.’

  He leaned his head right back and exhaled a cloud of smoke upwards into the air where it was immediately sucked away.

  ‘What’s the point in teaching them all that?’ he said.

  ‘All what?’ I said.

  ‘All that stuff about England.’

  ‘It’s history.’

  ‘It’s rubbish. History is what’s happening out there.’ He gestured to the empty paddocks on the other side of the fence. ‘Don’t you worry that the whole thing’ll be over before you’ve had a chance to actually do anything?’

  ‘All the time,’ I said, gazing at him. I wanted to reach out and touch him, but then I remembered the time I’d tried to comfort him back at the infirmary and he’d fobbed me off so forcefully.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, just kicked the dust with his patent leather shoes and blew puffs of smoke out the side of his mouth. When he did speak I could hardly hear what he was saying.

  ‘I’m planning something,’ he said. ‘But I can’t tell you what it is.’

  ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ I said, trying to provoke a smile, or some sign that the old Stanley was still there underneath this new mask.

  ‘We can’t meet again,’ he said, still whispering. ‘Not until this is all over and we can have a proper
conversation.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, lowering my voice too. I was worried now that he was up to something unlawful, something that would get him into real trouble. ‘What’s a proper conversation?’

  He stared at me then with that scornful expression he had.

  ‘If you don’t know that you’re an idiot,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said sourly.

  And then he walked off abruptly without saying goodbye and I was left standing there in the cold wondering what I’d done to make him loathe me so much. If it hadn’t start to rain again at that moment I think I might have stayed out there for the rest of the morning, puzzling over Stanley’s change of heart. He seemed to have turned overnight from a kind of frivolous dilettante into a hard case. I came inside to get out of the wet and found the mood of the room had darkened in my absence, and that one of the older children was crying.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, looking at McMaster to come to my aid, although I could tell that he was just as puzzled as I was. ‘We’ll just have to find someone else who can help out with the tennis.’

  McMaster looked across to the girl who was crying.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, in a voice that was surprisingly composed. ‘I’m just sad all the time for no reason.’

  The other kids stared at her without speaking.

  McMaster surveyed their solemn faces. ‘Is there anybody else who feels the same way?’ he said.

  Nobody said a word. The children sat motionless at their benches, now gazing at the blackboard as if the answer to his question might suddenly appear up there like a coded message hidden in his loopy handwriting. McMaster liked to start each day by writing some pithy quotation up on the board for the children to copy into their books and think about for homework. That day he’d chosen a quote from his favourite writer, H. G. Wells. It read History is more and more a race between education and catastrophe. The children scrutinised the words now with a look of uniform bafflement.

  9

  Stanley had meant what he said. I didn’t see him again because he vanished, not literally, but in the sense that the person I’d known disappeared and was replaced with someone I barely recognised. I saw this new person on the parade ground ten days or so after Stanley had formally quit the tennis club. He was standing with the little gang of Baba-san’s boys while they waited for the head count to finish. The July day was freezing but Stanley and his new friends all stood stiffly to attention in their thin black shirts. They were coatless and hatless, their bare heads pale and smooth as a row of melons. Stanley was the tallest of them. I was shocked to see that he’d shaved off his hair and adopted the gang’s ragtag uniform. He’d reformed the way he stood and the way he moved, in order to make himself more soldierly. When parade was dismissed, he took up the rear behind a boy who was barely half his size, copying the smaller boy’s strut. My first reaction was to laugh but when the little troop came closer I stopped and tried to look soldierly myself. I’d known boys like this at school, wild-eyed and bent on trouble. I knew it was a mistake to provoke them. When Stanley passed by I stared at him, hoping to shame him, I suppose, but he ignored me so completely it was as if I wasn’t there.

  Stanley had nothing in common with those boys as far as I could tell. They were all what McMaster called Jap-Japs, meaning they’d been educated in Japan before the war and had imbibed a lot of that country’s colourful mythology. According to McMaster, Baba-san’s role as the Jap-Japs’ schoolmaster and their spiritual leader was to keep their patriotic thoughts pure, unsullied by foreign influences, unmoved by all the lies and blasphemy that foreigners liked to spread about the ultimate outcome of the war. Baba-san reportedly encouraged the boys to think of themselves as future warriors, willing to go down in flames for their Emperor. McMaster’s theory about Stanley’s defection was that it should have been no surprise to anyone because a boy of Stanley’s disposition finally had nowhere else to go. He said as much one night back in barracks when we were discussing his character.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘What kind of disposition does he have?’

  McMaster had been observing Stanley for longer than I had. He was bound to know more than I did about the evolution of Stanley’s personality.

  ‘It didn’t surprise me that the boarding school experiment failed,’ he said. ‘It was a foregone conclusion. He’s never fitted in here, so why would it be any different anywhere else?’

  We were playing poker after lights out with Donohue and Bryant.

  ‘Mainly because he’s a pansy,’ muttered Donohue, who was on a winning streak and kept on smiling to himself.

  McMaster looked at me over the top of his cards. ‘I suspect he’s like you in that regard,’ he said, which caused an explosion of laughter from the other two because McMaster had failed to register Donohue’s semi-audible contribution to the conversation.

  I slammed my hopeless hand down on the table and took a sip of the rum that Bryant dispensed from his private store every evening.

  ‘He’s smart,’ said McMaster. ‘But not as smart as he thinks he is.’

  ‘Is that what you think I am?’ I said, not meaning to sound belligerent, except that I was on the way to getting drunk and must have raised my voice.

  McMaster told me to calm down, then explained what he meant. ‘Boys like you don’t belong in the army because the guiding principle of the army is mateship and you’re nobody’s mate. I don’t mean that as a criticism,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve hurt his feelings,’ said Bryant.

  He reached out and tried to slap me on the shoulder, but I ducked away just in time. I didn’t like Bryant. I didn’t like the way he was always trying to touch me. He’d grab hold of me whenever I walked into a room and twist my arm up behind my back or grip my head in a headlock. I had to promise him something before he’d let me go, always the same thing. I had to agree to have sex with one of the Jap girls for free, as his gift to me for my eighteenth birthday. He’d arrange the whole thing, he said. Do you promise? he said. Are you a boy or a man? In front of a roomful of witnesses I had to swear to go through with it. And after I’d sworn on my mother’s life, he’d release me and shove a couple of fags down my shirtfront to seal the deal.

  He winked at me now and laid his cards down for McMaster and Donohue to see.

  ‘Cunt,’ said Donohue.

  ‘Watch your language,’ said Bryant. ‘There are children present.’

  He gathered up his winnings and waited for me to shuffle the pack and hand it back to McMaster so he could deal.

  ‘Of course that’s complete bullshit,’ Donohue said to no one in particular. ‘The guiding principle of the army is sexual deprivation. Lock a whole bunch of men up for weeks at a time with no women and of course the result is they want to kill people. It stands to reason.’

  ‘You’re such a crude bastard,’ said McMaster. ‘Not everything’s about sex.’

  ‘Yes it is,’ said Donohue.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ said Bryant, turning his gaze in my direction. He smiled at me, showing a row of tobacco-stained teeth hanging loosely from the gums.

  ‘I agree,’ I said.

  Bryant raised his eyebrows in mock surprise and turned to Donohue.

  ‘He agrees,’ he said.

  Donohue extended his arm across the table and offered to shake my hand, but I declined. I looked straight at Bryant instead.

  ‘You are a cunt,’ I said.

  Bryant chuckled to himself. Then he grabbed hold of the back of my neck before I could stop him.

  ‘That’s precisely what McMaster was talking about,’ he said. ‘That kind of lip is why you don’t have any mates.’

  I struggled to get loose from his grip.

  ‘You gonna stick it in one of the Jap sheilas on your birthday like you promised?’ he said.

  I told him he better get me a pretty one and that made him laugh so much he let me go. For the
rest of the game he kept pointing his finger at me like it was a gun and pretending to shoot.

  I thought a lot about what Donohue had said about the army because it made me realise I wasn’t alone in thinking about sex all the time. In my naivety back then I’d imagined that men grew less and less interested in sex the older they became. But Donohue and Bryant seemed just as preoccupied with their sexual fantasies as I was with mine. I didn’t know what to make of this at first, whether to be disgusted and ashamed on their behalf, or whether to be relieved that I wasn’t the only one. If anything, my experience with May had only made my condition worse, because it had been such a failure. The truth was that May didn’t interest me in a physical sense, no matter how hard I tried to reform myself. Stanley, on the other hand, only had to appear in the mess hall, or out on the parade ground boundary where he and Sawada’s boys did their morning sun worship, for me to feel faint.

  He even came to me in dreams, the way he’d looked in the infirmary, with his hair neatly combed and his green-flecked eyes watching me deal cards in my amateurish way. He talked to me in my dreams. He told me how the art of walking a tightrope was to fix on a point straight ahead of you and forget everything else. If you even think of falling then it’s all over, he said as he demonstrated. I woke up out of these dreams in a sweat because I couldn’t stand to watch him setting out across space with nothing to help him stay up there except his faith in himself. He would take the first few steps, then stop while the rope sagged and rebounded under his weight, and then his foot would slip and that’s when I knew he wasn’t going to make it. I’d be racing to try to break his fall, or I’d be holding onto him afterwards, cradling his limp body in my arms and kissing him. Sometimes, if he was still conscious in the dream, and inclined to do so, he would kiss me back. Clearly the Akutagawa story he’d translated for me fed into these dreams. Stanley was the fictional thief who climbs towards paradise on a spider’s thread. There were times when I dreamed I was waiting for him in the fragrant heavenly garden with the Buddha standing beside me.