alive and breathing and real and only a few miles away. ‘Hey old girl... hey, we gotta look after you, make sure you’re good to go. Maybe not today, or even tomorrow, but let’s make sure you’re up and running. We might want to get out of here.’
In a moment I’d felt for a lever under the steering-wheel and pinged open the bonnet. I slipped out of the car, moved around to the chromium radiator and heaved the bonnet open. A cavernous space, sooty and oily... the mighty engine, lovely, ugly, a mysterious mass of machinery, a Daimler which had swished hundreds of dead bodies to be buried or burned and swished my father from cemetery to cemetery all over England and France. I knew enough to find the dipstick and check the oil; of course it was fine, my father’s meticulous maintenance. I unscrewed the radiator cap, and of course the level of the water was fine. And so, leaving the bonnet yawning open, I slipped back into the car and turned the key.
Tick, tick. Tick – the fuel pump. Wait a few seconds. I pressed the ignition button. The engine shuddered and coughed... sweetly slumbering, stirred into life.
Silent, almost silent. A whisper in the woodland. Hardly a sound. No one could have seen or heard what I was doing. But, as I got out of the car and walked around to watch the engine throbbing like open-heart surgery, a haze of blue smoke rose from the exhaust pipes and into the surrounding trees...
Chapter Eight
‘C OLOUR-BLIND ? Y OU took Lawrence out of school because he’s colour-blind?’
Juliet had had a bit too much to drink. My fault really. It was quite late at night and we’d been sitting and talking in her living-room. The three of us had had dinner together, fillets of white fish she’d dug out of the freezer and done very simply with a few potatoes and peas, and then Lawrence had gone up to his tower. He was still sulky with me since the incident with the swift in the morning, and he’d looked sideways at me and his mother as we shared a bottle of white wine. So, after the meal, he’d sloped off to his own room.
And then Juliet and I had moved to the comfy old sofa near the open French windows. As dusk dissolved into twilight and became a deep, almost purple-black night, as the darkness of the trees gathered like a blanket around the house, we sat and talked. In the afternoon, during my communion with the car, I’d felt that I’d descended into a lower world, a soft and suffocating underworld... and now it was as though the woman and I were sinking deeper still and drowning in our cosy cushions.
Perhaps it was the gin. She’d made me a gin and tonic when we first sat down together, but I’d made the second one and the third. I’d been telling her about my life in Borneo. She listened with real interest, her pointy face close to mine, her squirrel face with its anxious eyes and quickly nibbling movements of her lips, her twitchy nose. She blinked a lot and she laughed abruptly. I told her about the school I’d been teaching in: a government secondary school in a logging-town called Marudi, miles inland from the coast of the South China Sea, on the banks of the enormous Baram river; I described my students, teenage boys and girls from the kampongs in the forest and along the forest tributaries, how they sat in their dusty classrooms with the fans stirring lazily overhead, the boys in the front rows in their neat white shirts and black songkoks , the girls in their crisp white tudungs in rows at the back. An Islamic school, in a strictly Islamic society, in which every lesson, every meeting and function was started with a prayer and finished with a prayer... where the boys and girls studied together but couldn’t sit side by side in the same classroom and had to be segregated into different rows.
‘They call me Mr Chris. I’m the only orang putih , the only white man in the school. When I go into class they all stand to attention and they chant in unison “Good morning, Mr
In a moment I’d felt for a lever under the steering-wheel and pinged open the bonnet. I slipped out of the car, moved around to the chromium radiator and heaved the bonnet open. A cavernous space, sooty and oily... the mighty engine, lovely, ugly, a mysterious mass of machinery, a Daimler which had swished hundreds of dead bodies to be buried or burned and swished my father from cemetery to cemetery all over England and France. I knew enough to find the dipstick and check the oil; of course it was fine, my father’s meticulous maintenance. I unscrewed the radiator cap, and of course the level of the water was fine. And so, leaving the bonnet yawning open, I slipped back into the car and turned the key.
Tick, tick. Tick – the fuel pump. Wait a few seconds. I pressed the ignition button. The engine shuddered and coughed... sweetly slumbering, stirred into life.
Silent, almost silent. A whisper in the woodland. Hardly a sound. No one could have seen or heard what I was doing. But, as I got out of the car and walked around to watch the engine throbbing like open-heart surgery, a haze of blue smoke rose from the exhaust pipes and into the surrounding trees...
Chapter Eight
‘C OLOUR-BLIND ? Y OU took Lawrence out of school because he’s colour-blind?’
Juliet had had a bit too much to drink. My fault really. It was quite late at night and we’d been sitting and talking in her living-room. The three of us had had dinner together, fillets of white fish she’d dug out of the freezer and done very simply with a few potatoes and peas, and then Lawrence had gone up to his tower. He was still sulky with me since the incident with the swift in the morning, and he’d looked sideways at me and his mother as we shared a bottle of white wine. So, after the meal, he’d sloped off to his own room.
And then Juliet and I had moved to the comfy old sofa near the open French windows. As dusk dissolved into twilight and became a deep, almost purple-black night, as the darkness of the trees gathered like a blanket around the house, we sat and talked. In the afternoon, during my communion with the car, I’d felt that I’d descended into a lower world, a soft and suffocating underworld... and now it was as though the woman and I were sinking deeper still and drowning in our cosy cushions.
Perhaps it was the gin. She’d made me a gin and tonic when we first sat down together, but I’d made the second one and the third. I’d been telling her about my life in Borneo. She listened with real interest, her pointy face close to mine, her squirrel face with its anxious eyes and quickly nibbling movements of her lips, her twitchy nose. She blinked a lot and she laughed abruptly. I told her about the school I’d been teaching in: a government secondary school in a logging-town called Marudi, miles inland from the coast of the South China Sea, on the banks of the enormous Baram river; I described my students, teenage boys and girls from the kampongs in the forest and along the forest tributaries, how they sat in their dusty classrooms with the fans stirring lazily overhead, the boys in the front rows in their neat white shirts and black songkoks , the girls in their crisp white tudungs in rows at the back. An Islamic school, in a strictly Islamic society, in which every lesson, every meeting and function was started with a prayer and finished with a prayer... where the boys and girls studied together but couldn’t sit side by side in the same classroom and had to be segregated into different rows.
‘They call me Mr Chris. I’m the only orang putih , the only white man in the school. When I go into class they all stand to attention and they chant in unison “Good morning, Mr
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