again until the day ended. Looking at them, it struck me how deceptive the advertisements were that I had grown up seeing pasted on the walls of musty provision stores next to the faded posters for Tiger Beer and Chesterfield cigarettes; they had depicted voluptuous tea-pickers in clean and brightly-coloured saris, their teeth gloriously white, their noses and ears glittering with gold rings and studs, golden bangles weighing down their wrists.
The workers I was looking at in the valley below were paid badly for doing one of the most mindless, exhausting labours ever devised. From my rambles around the estate, I knew that Magnus was a decent enough employer, providing houses for his workers and basic schooling for their children, but I realised that much of the women’s laughter and singing rising from the slopes was bitter with the harshness of their lives. These women would return every evening to their dirt-floored shacks, their eight or nine or ten children, and their toddy-pickled husbands.
‘A sergeant in the army told me that the day after Gurney was shot, security forces moved in and evicted everyone living in Tras,’ Magnus said.
‘Where’s that?’
‘A squatter village close to where Gurney was killed.’
‘They must have thought the villagers had been helping the CTs.’
‘At least the soldiers didn’t burn their homes to the ground.’ Magnus’s gaze seemed to be resting on another horizon drawn across a different, older world. ‘When I was on commando, I often rode past farmhouses torched by the rooinek soldiers. Sometimes the ruins still smouldered and smoke often plunged the whole veldt into a macabre twilight for days. There were dead sheep everywhere, thick with flies – the Khakis had tied them to horses and pulled them apart. Wherever we rode, the air always seemed to be vibrating with a low, constant humming. Flies made that sound.’ He stroked his chest in a distracted manner. ‘We were filled with such fury, such hatred for the English. . . it only made us more determined to fight them to the bitter end.’ His arm swept across the tea fields. ‘The first batch of seedlings came from the same estate in Ceylon where I had once worked as a prisoner of war. History is filled with ironies, don’t you think?’
Clouds streamed past the mountain peaks, spirits fleeing the rising sun. I imagined I could feel a stirring deep beneath the earth as it sensed the approaching light.
‘I’m going home tomorrow.’ I kicked a pebble and sent it skittering over the ledge. ‘Will you drive me to Tapah? I’ll catch a train from there.’
He glanced at me. ‘What will you do? Go back to your old job?’
‘After the things I said about the government?’
‘There are other gardeners you can get to design your garden, surely.’
‘Not in Malaya. There’s nobody of Aritomo’s reputation. And I don’t want to go to Japan,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I don’t think I ever can.’ The gardener’s refusal had felled a log over my path and I had no idea what to do. ‘Speak to him for me, Magnus. Ask him to reconsider,’ I said. ‘I’ve got money set aside. I’ll pay him well.’
‘I’ve known him for ten years, Yun Ling. Once he’s made up his mind, he never changes it.’
On a ridge not far from us, a pair of storks, their wings edged with a singe of grey, sprang off from the treetops and flew over a hill, heading for valleys hidden from our sight. It was so quiet I could almost hear every downward sweep of their wings, fanning the thin mists into tidal patterns.
Magnus had more divisions to inspect before breakfast, and I told him I would return to Majuba House on my own. I was walking on a footpath between the tea fields and the margin of the jungle when I stopped abruptly. My eyes searched the columns of trees, but I did not know what I was looking for. Turning back to the path, I gave a start. Less than ten feet away, a figure was standing in the shadows. It started to moved towards me. I took a step back, but it kept on coming. It entered a patch of sunlight, and I let out a breath of relief. It was a girl, about nine or ten years old, her face and clothes smeared with mud. She was an aboriginal, and she was crying.
‘Kakak saya,’ she said, her words shuddering out between her sobs. ‘Tolong mereka.’
‘Mana?’ I asked, kneeling to look into her face. I shook her shoulders gently. ‘Where?’
She pointed to the trees behind her. I felt the jungle press in closer. ‘We’ll call the police,’ I said, still speaking Malay. ‘The mata-mata will help your sister.’
I stood up and began walking back to the house, but the girl grabbed my hand and pulled me, trying to drag me to the trees. I resisted, suspecting a CT ambush. I shaded my eyes and squinted at the slopes, but the tea-pickers had not yet reached this section of the estate and there was no sign of any Home Guard. Crying more loudly, the girl yanked at my arm again. I followed her, but froze when we came to the jungle fringe.
For the first time since the war ended, I was about to re-enter the rainforest. I feared that if I went in I would never come out again. Before I could turn around, the girl tightened her grip on my hand and pulled me into the ferns.
Insects ground out metallic, clicking sounds. The cicadas wove a mesh of noise over everything. Birdcalls hammered sharp, shiny nails into the air. It was like walking into a busy ironmonger’s workshop in the back-alleys of Georgetown. Sunlight sifted down through the lattices of branches and leaves overhead, unable to sink far enough to dispel the soggy gloom at ground level. Vines hung from the branches in broad, sagging nooses. The girl took us along a narrow animal track, the stones greased with moss that threatened to send me sprawling at the slightest lapse in concentration. For fifteen, twenty minutes I followed her beneath tree ferns that spread their fronds over us, watering the light into a translucent green.
We emerged into a small clearing. The girl stopped and pointed to a bamboo shack beneath the trees, the roof covered in a balding thatch of nipah fronds. The door was half-open, but it was dark inside. We moved closer to the hut, making as little noise as possible. In the trees behind us, branches cracked and then something heavy dropped to the ground. I spun around on my heel and looked back. The trees were still. Perhaps it was only a ripened durian, its armour of thorns shredding the leaves as it fell. I became aware of another sound running beneath the noise of the jungle, a vibration pitched so low it was almost soothing. It was coming from inside the hut.
The door refused to move when I nudged it with my foot. I tried again, pushing harder this time. It swung open all the way. On the beaten-earth floor, three bodies lay in a moat of blood so dark and thick they seemed to be glued to it. Hundreds of flies crawled over their faces, distended bellies and loincloths. Their throats had been slit. The girl screamed and I clamped my palm over her mouth. She struggled, swinging her arms madly, but I held on to her tightly. The flies rose from the bodies and swarmed to the underside of the thatch roof, blackening it like an infestation of mould.
The smell of food assailed me as we approached the kitchen. Frederic and Emily were seated at the table. They stopped talking and looked up when I entered, the girl peering from behind me. Emily made us sit at the kitchen table, where a planter’s breakfast had been laid out – plates of crispy bacon, sausages and eggs, fried bread and strawberry jam. Frederik poured us tea, sweetening it heavily with condensed milk. I drank a few mouthfuls. The heat spread through my body and stilled my shivering. I told them quickly what had happened.
‘Where’s Magnus?’ Emily’s eyes gouged into mine.
‘Still out in the fields, I think. I don’t know.’
‘Get
