just a rumour, surely.’
‘They’re like schoolboys-lah, looking for buried treasure. If you ask me, I think they just like being away from their wives.’ She opened a cupboard and began packing away boxes of sanitary napkins. Waving a box at me, she said, ‘I hope you don’t think I’m a busybody, because I’m not. But I’ve always been curious – how did you cope, when you were a prisoner?’
‘Many of us stopped menstruating.’
‘It happens. The terrible conditions, not enough food.’
‘Even after I was released, my blood didn’t flow for two, three months. And then one day when I was in my office, it came back, just like that.’ It had caught me unprepared and I had had to ask my secretary for something. But I remembered the relief I had felt afterwards. I could finally accept the fact that the war was truly over. My body was free to return to its own rhythms again.
The smell of disinfectants in the clinic raked up the beginnings of nausea in me; it must have been obvious because Emily looked concerned. ‘You want some Tiger Balm or not?’ she asked.
‘This place, the smells . . . they remind me of hospitals.’
‘Sayang,’ she said, shaking her head regretfully. ‘I was hoping you could help out here.’
‘I won’t be staying here for long.’
I left the clinic, glad to get out into the sun and fresh air again. Returning to Majuba House, I found a rolled-up bundle of papers on my dressing table: the maps and photographs I had left at Yugiri for Aritomo to look at.
The siren calling the workers to muster was sinking away when I left the house the next morning. I stood outside the garage, rubbing my hands. The world was grey and damp. The sound of steady crunching on the gravel came to me a minute later, and then Magnus emerged from the mist, the ridgebacks close behind. On the previous evening I had asked him to show me around the estate but he still looked surprised when he saw me. ‘I didn’t think you’d be able to wake up this early,’ he said, opening the back door of the Land Rover for his dogs. I caught the glimpse of a revolver in a holster under his jacket.
‘I don’t need much sleep,’ I replied.
On the short, rattling drive to the factory, he gave me a quick explanation of how the estate was run. ‘Geoff Harper’s my assistant manager,’ he said. ‘We have five European junior assistants watching over the keranis in the office.’
‘And out in the fields?’
‘The estate’s divided into thirty-five divisions. Each division’s supervised by a kangani – the conductor. Below him are the mandors – the foremen. They’re responsible for their work gang: the pickers, weeders, sweepers. Watchmen make sure there’s no thieving or idling. And I’ve posted Home Guards to watch over them.’
‘There were some children outside the factory when I went past it yesterday.’
‘The workers’ children,’ Magnus said. ‘We pay them twenty cents for every bag of caterpillars they catch in the tea bushes.’
The factory was the size of a wharf-side godown. The coolies were already lined up outside. Kretek cigarettes cloyed the air with the scent of cloves. Magnus greeted them and a senior kangani called out their names, marking them off against a list on a clip-board. It reminded me of roll-call in the camp.
Magnus consulted with the assistant manager Geoff Harper, a short, burly man in his fifties with a pair of rifles slung over his back. ‘All the workers showed up today?’ Magnus asked.
Harper nodded. ‘Rubber price was low.’
‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’
‘We had an ambush last night on the road going into Ringlet. A Chinese couple,’ Harper said. ‘The bastards – pardon me, Miss . . . the CTs – left their bodies hacked into bits all over the road.’
‘Anyone we know?’
‘They were visitors from Singapore. They were driving back from a wedding dinner.’
The tea-pickers marched off to the slopes. I trailed behind the workers entering the factory. ‘Grinders, rollers and roasters,’ Magnus said, pointing to the huge, silent machines lined up inside. The smell of roasting leaves dusted the air; I felt I had pried open a tea caddy. Workers wheeled out racks of tin trays covered with withered leaves curled up like insect larvae. The machines started up a second later, pounding the factory with their racket. Magnus beckoned me back outside.
We went onto a track between the tea bushes. The dogs trotted ahead, noses to the ground. ‘What has the price of rubber got to do with your workers?’ I asked.
‘Geoff checks it on the radio every evening. If it goes up, we know some of our workers will leave to work in the rubber plantations. Most of those who left before the Occupation have returned, but we’re always short-handed.’
‘You employed them again, after they deserted you?’
He turned to look at me, then resumed walking. ‘When the Japs came, I told my workers that they were free to leave. Their old jobs would be available to them once the war was over. I told them I’d keep my promise if I were still alive.’
The ground steepened sharply, straining my calves. Tendrils of steam uncurled off the tops of the bushes. Glancing behind at me, Magnus shortened his stride, which only made me push myself harder to keep up. I was breathing hard when we reached the top of the rise. He stopped and pointed to the mountains.
They had broken out of the earth three hundred miles away to the north, near the border with Thailand, and they stretched all the way to Johor in the south, forming a vertebration that divided Malaya in two. In the tender light of morning, the mountains had the softness of a scene on a silk painting.
‘This always reminds me of the week I spent in China, in Fujian province,’ Magnus said. ‘I visited Mount Li Wu. There was a temple there, a thousand years old – so the monks said. They grew their own tea, those monks. They told me that the original tea tree had been planted there by a god, can you believe it? The temple was famous for the flavour of its tea, a flavour not found anywhere else in the world.’
‘What sort of flavour?’
‘To preserve the innocence of the tea,’ he said, ‘only the monks who hadn’t reached puberty could pick the leaves. And for a month before they started picking, these boys were not allowed to eat chillies or pickled cabbage, no garlic or onions. They couldn’t touch even a drop of soy sauce otherwise their breath might have polluted the leaves. The boys picked the tea at sunrise, just about now. They wore gloves so their sweat wouldn’t taint the flavour of the tea. Once picked and packed it was sent as tribute to the Emperor.’
‘My father thought you were mad to go into tea planting.’
‘He wasn’t the only one who thought so.’ Magnus laughed, plucking a leaf from a bush and rolling it between his fingers under his nose.
Voices and singing floated from the tea-pickers in the valley. Most of them were women, their heads shaded beneath tattered straw hats. Large wicker baskets were strapped to their backs and secured by bands across their foreheads. They collected close to fifty
