back his head. She slapped him across the face and screamed, ‘Stop it! Hasn’t there been enough of this for one day?’
As Marlowe raised an arm to brush her away, Papa Magellan ducked through the door, suddenly active, and clutching Johnson by the shoulder pushed him towards the outside door. ‘Go on, get out of here for God’s sake!’ he said. Johnson threw one terrified look over his shoulder and scrambled through the door and out into the fog.
There was quiet except for Marlowe’s heavy breathing. Maria was not crying this time. Her face was flushed and her eyes were flashing. ‘What is wrong with you?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘Do you want to hang some day? Can’t you control yourself? Is your answer to everything violence?’
Marlowe stirred and looked down at her. He swallowed hard and said, ‘When I was a kid my father wanted me to be a doctor. He was a wages clerk, so I had to be a doctor. I didn’t want to be one, but that didn’t make any difference. He beat me all the way through school until one day, when I was seventeen, I discovered I was stronger than he was. I slammed him on the jaw and left home.’
He fumbled for a cigarette with shaking hands and continued. ‘There was a Chinese officer in charge of the prisoners at that coal mine they sent me to in Manchuria. Li, they called him. A little name for a little man. He had a complex about his size, so he didn’t like me because I was big. I used to work in a low level, up to my knees in freezing water, for twelve hours a day. Sometimes if he didn’t think I’d worked hard enough, he used to leave me in there all night when the others were brought up. I still get dreams about that. He used to turn up in the middle of the night and call down the shaft to me, his voice echoing along the passage. Other times he’d have me strung up and he’d beat me with a pick handle.’
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