means?’
‘No. Actually, I have not thought much about it.’
‘It means, anaesthetised. Or perhaps, unconscious! I have to wonder why a road, or indeed the hill itself, should be given such a name. What, I wonder, happened to make it remain in folk memory as such?’
Yoshiro laughed and was about to reply when an irritated voice interrupted. ‘Papa, really!’ The woman who appeared silently from an inner doorway caused Yoshiro to jump a little in surprise. She was very lovely with an almost voluptuous figure. Her large, soft brown eyes, and thick, waving black hair caught in a loose bun were exotic. Her skin, in the midday light, was a soft, golden-brown. Yoshiro watched fascinated as she walked towards them. She swayed slightly as she walked, making his skin prickle. She was dressed in an old-fashioned batik sarung and a tight fitting, traditional lace baju held in front with a kerongsang, a three-tiered brooch, made of thick gold pins looped to each other with thin gold chains. She looked both shy and amused.
‘I am sorry, sir. My father is an amateur etymologist. He has a thing about words and is always trying to have tourists pronounce Malay words properly.’
‘But the gentleman asked me,’ Rashid defended himself saying, ‘Sir, this is my daughter Salmiah. She tells me what I may or may not do.’
Yoshiro bowed and said, ‘I am pleased to meet you. I am grateful for your father’s information. I will never forget the name now. I have an interest in the history of towns and places I visit - this one is fun.’ He smiled at Rashid and said, ‘You and your daughter speak perfect, grammatical English.’
The woman smiled at him and said. ‘My father insisted on all of his children speaking any language properly. No slang words in our house, so we speak unnaturally well.’ She glanced at her father and shook her head. When she smiled at Yoshiro again his insides took a sudden nose dive then rose to a strange new height. He blinked. She looked startled, blushed and turned towards the office. Rashid, aware of the slight strain in the room, lifted both hands. He raised his eyebrows in a comical gesture and smiled at her retreating back. Abashed, Yoshiro finished drinking his tea and asked for the bathroom and if he could inspect the bedrooms. He was offered the Clifford suite which made him smile. Sir Hugh Clifford had been the last British administrator. The old house really was rundown, but as Rashid had claimed, it was clean.
The bathroom made him blink at the hideous yellow tiles. When he stepped out again, he said, ‘Oh my, are all the bathrooms this glorious?’ He found his question answered by Salmiah who had come silently behind him.
‘Yellow is the royal colour,’ she said emphatically.
‘So,’ he said smiling at her, ‘we all have our bathrooms in royal yellow?’
‘Only if you are the lessee of an old, rather splendid, former British resident’s home,’ she answered. Her lips quivered slightly and Yoshiro met her eyes and held. He felt the shock run down his spine and he blinked again. Her lips curved in a complete smile and he answered with one of his own. Neither of them spoke but something was settled in that moment and he felt a sense of wellbeing. She left him then, saying she had an errand to run. He was suddenly not worried.
He opened the doors to the huge red-tiled balcony which had a view over the older part of the town. He stood quietly looking at the roof tops from the residence. Glancing down, he saw Salmiah step out onto the driveway and watched her for a minute or two admiring her long back, narrow waist and swelling hips, swaying slightly, as she walked down the old road towards the town. His heart beating faster and smiling with pleasure, he booked the room. A boy of about eighteen brought his bags from the car. Rashid, looking on, was interested to see numerous stickers on the worn leather bags the boy carried.
‘What is your work, sir? If you don’t mind me asking. I couldn’t help but notice your luggage tags. Do you speak many languages?’ Rashid asked.
‘Well, yes I do. I studied geology at college and I’ve spent considerable time traveling the world. My father was a diplomat to Great Britain and America for a time, and speaking the local tongue is easier than using a book. I am a mineralogist, by profession and inclination.’
‘We have two large gold mines in Kuala Lipis district now, and a few small ones. The town has always been known for gold. We almost lost it for many years. The present owners have exceptional mines here now, and they would welcome visitors, I’m sure.’
‘That’s interesting. I have heard of them, of course. Maybe I’ll visit if I have time. This is a nostalgic trip. Purely to see the places my father spoke of. Volcanoes are my abiding delight. I’ve just come from Indonesia and, as Malaysia was close by, I decided to come and see the places he talked of. He fascinated me with stories of jungles and animals. Tigers almost in his garden and shooting wild boar from his doorstep I believe.’ He smiled at Rashid. ‘Do you see many tigers in your gardens nowadays?’
‘Goodness, no, sir! I am afraid they have learned to stay in the jungle. We don’t hunt them as the British did for sport. But I won’t deny that some folk do try to get a skin now and then. It is definitely not legal, of course, but well, people…you know?’ Yoshiro smiled, liking the man’s candour.
He went out to the Land Rover he had hired and drove down the narrow road onto Jalan(4) Pekeliling. He followed it until he turned off onto Jalan Bius. The road wound up among the trees and scrub passing the royal Istana and old government bungalows on the right. When he saw the side road, he turned into it and continued along it for a short distance coming to a stop slightly below a large fenced compound. The number on the gate was 55/1. Yoshiro got out of the vehicle and walked a few steps up the driveway to a massive gate. He peered over the steel barrier and saw the house he had come so far to find. He took a deep breath and gazed at the building in front of him comparing it to the black and white photographs in his pocket.
The house was a typical early British government servant design, a square block consisting of a central reception area with a wide staircase. A sitting room, dining room and two bedrooms made up the ground floor. The first floor contained two more huge bedrooms with attached bathrooms and a very large sitting room, a good half of which formed a portico over the drive or carriage-way in front of the house. A veranda ran along the back of the first floor and he could just see a wooden stair leading down to a kitchen and a row of servant’s quarters lining the path at the back of the house. A sweeping driveway split to surround the house coming to a large two-car garage at the back. The extensive gardens were a mass of orchid beds set in formal rows. The gate was locked and a guard house stood near the gate, though empty now he guessed that it would have a man stationed there most of the time.
Yoshiro returned to the car and sighed. How on earth was he to surreptitiously place his father’s ashes in the grave of his first wife and unborn child in that compound? He decided to ask Mac when he saw him. He let the car run silently down the road towards Jalan Bius and stopped near the junction. He pulled the packet of photos from his pocket and studied the faces of the four men pictured. Three men were seated around a low table in a corner of the living room of the old residence. His grandfather was smiling and two relaxed-looking men were laughing heartily. The fourth man was his father who was standing to one side staring at them and he was not smiling. Four harmless-looking men. Four fiends. His hands shook as he replaced the pictures in the envelope and returning it to his pocket he drove back down the hill.
Meeting Mac
Yoshiro ate a meal of surprisingly good curry behind the rest house where some enterprising folk had set up a kind of loose restaurant, and slept well under a voluminous mosquito net. After breakfast, he drove to the Lipis Plaza Hotel. He parked and entered the foyer dimly disappointed with the look of the place. A man in
