were calls for Selama from the lawn. At last she came out, an apron round her fine red kimono and a feather duster in her hand. ‘You’re dreadful, Dr Pike. Get away with you. My, my, a very bad animal.’
Everybody laughed, except the worm’s host, who looked offended. As for doctor and nurse, it was imperial farce, and the incident restored them. Dr Pike made up a dressing, sent both his patient and his lover away, and found himself able to proceed.
BY TWELVE THIRTY he’d finished. He’d treated three vitamin deficiencies, a lethargy, a broken toe, the child with the paralysis, two toothaches, two animal bites and a knife wound; advised one man to smoke less, another to smoke more; and monitored, through their husbands, the progress of several pregnant women. His last patient left a chicken in a bamboo cage which would answer for tomorrow’s dinner, and which also reminded him of East Anglia, where a parish doctor might find a brace of dead pheasants on his doorstep in lieu of payment.
The worm lay in a dish, faintly convulsing. He spoke to it. ‘What have you been up to, eh? Don’t imagine I don’t know.’ He took his trophy to the larger, mahogany desk in the den, poured himself a Scotch, and turned to his books to attempt identification.
He had small hope. There was such great variety in the forest, so much speciation. Manson’s Tropical Diseases, he knew, was both limited and soggy: the pages clung one to another at this time of year. Usually, he didn’t mind – the rubber company got him new volumes whenever the print started actually coming away. Today, however, it put him out. He unpeeled the relevant chapter and read. For large worms there was always the Hippocratic method, whereby nematodes such as Dracunculus were teased slowly out of the human lymphatic system, poulticed, rolled week by week around a piece of stick. Manson also listed a biblical technique for them: Moses had once nailed a brazen snake to a pole. Though Dr Pike lamented the lack of such kit from his issue, he dismissed these findings as irrelevant. In this part of the world Dracunculus was not a problem.
His own specimen began in a sightless head, was bloody, much shorter, and fringed with liverish stalks. It had visible segments. He imagined sharing his own body with such a thing, while it strove and grew. The sweat broke out again, this time soaking his collar and the armpits of his shirt. He prescribed himself another whisky.
With the usual filariases and helminth infestations, the difficult ulcerations, the mysterious wastings and crippling diarrhoeas, Dr Pike was generally more successful than science alone could have made him. Obvious incurables were packed off to the government hospital in Seremban, but where there was a chance, flair could tip the scales. He did see strange cases, and story-book monsters of the kind that lay in the dish seemed to long to be understood. Sometimes he had literally to wrestle with them; at others they required a long and teasing dance. Dr Pike was prepared to entertain the notion of a medical borderland, and was unconventional enough to meet the jungle half-way.
It was a far cry from an English surgery. The little lurking ticks, the mischievous snails, the local threadlike Wuchererias and Brugias concealed themselves within the abundant Malayan woodland, glued under leaves, afloat in pools, suspended from threads, or cunningly ciphered in the bodies of insects, waiting only to hide yet again in the tissue of a passer-by. They reproduced by threading species and air, being and space in the most ingenious stitchwork. Parasitical colonisation was the defining disease of Malaya, and Dr Pike felt both the worm’s malice, and its repulsive yearning to find a place for itself. Nature, so secretive, so abundant, so enterprising, actually craved attention. The worm desired a name. Dr Pike spluttered into his glass.
The creature was beginning to dull into a mass. There was already a putrid stink to it. It made his gorge rise again, as if today he lacked all stomach for research. To stretch it out and examine it thoroughly, to take the omens, how revolting. Thankfully the Scotch was always in good supply. In the heat it went straight in at the mouth and out at the pores, hardly touching the bloodstream. He splashed in another couple of fingers.
Now Selama knocked on the study door. ‘Stan! I’ve made lunch.’
She served him neat vicarage sandwiches filled with spiced egg. Afterwards they went to the bedroom. He undressed her, and the kimono cascaded round her feet in a silken rush; but when she responded to his embrace and huddled herself close, the room suddenly emptied for him, as though a plug had been pulled, and he was left afloat on nothing. He recalled his lapse of mind on the veranda, that feeling of being lost, disconnected.
‘Sorry. Sorry, dear.’ Horrified, he turned away from her. ‘The bloody Scotch, I expect.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘Stan. It doesn’t matter.’
‘No. I expect not. Sorry. I’m so sorry.’ He couldn’t think. Her body, always so desirable, like a home, a flame, a frontier, had become strange. Because of his failure, she was almost unbearable to him. ‘Must be getting old,’ he said. The forced chuckle sounded like a rattle. His mind offered him only the image of the worm.
She held out a hand. ‘Come. Lie down.’ He obeyed, and allowed himself to be led to the bed and settled. Naked, she lay beside him.
He tried again, pouncing on her, almost; capturing her breasts and kissing them, pressing her belly, prising her legs apart.
‘Stop it! Stan, you pack that up!’
‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’
‘What are you playing at?’
‘Well … Hasn’t done any good anyway.’ The bedroom seemed far away, tinged with a juiceless aerial light, her anger terrible, but so remote. ‘Hasn’t done any bloody good.’
THEY LAY ON the bed, in the heat of the afternoon. He wished he could be sure she was asleep, but fancied she was merely pretending, lying there hating him. After an hour she got up and stretched in front of the window. Her silhouette, the back he knew he loved, the waist, the fullness of her hips, all struck him with fear.
‘Clarice will be here soon, won’t she?’ she said. ‘I’m going to Ibrahim, then. Straight away.’ Her son’s family lived closer to Seremban itself. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow after dark, when your daughter has gone. Don’t worry yourself, though. He’ll bring me.’ She faced away from the doctor as she tied on a batik skirt, slipped into a brown cotton jacket and left the room.
He followed, useless. He found her by the print-strewn dining table, and struggled for words. ‘He’s good to his mother, Ibrahim.’
‘Yes, Stan. He is.’ She picked up one of the plates left from their lunch and placed it waitress-like on her arm. Then she waved her free hand crossly at the strewn cuttings. Outside, it was about to rain again.
‘So what’s happening? Eh, Stan? You tell me what’s happening.’
He had no answer, but only peered down at the evidence he’d assembled. There were reports out of the Straits Times, the Malay Mail, the Tribune, Planter, and clippings, too, from the English Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph – in fact whatever of the Fleet Street press had managed to find its way up to Seremban, hot off some RAF plane into Singapore and already quite overtaken by events. Shamed, he shifted his weight from foot to foot like a schoolboy up before the beak. Selama stacked the other plate on top of the first, and disappeared towards the kitchen.
‘Shall
