The White Pearl Read Free Page A

dreams at night. He had lived here all his short life, and had no fear of this alien and exotic
     country. He wasn’t afraid of snakes the way she was, a gut-gripping terror that paralysed her, nor did he shiver at the thought
     of one of the Communist agitators in the workforce slitting Nigel’s throat in bed at night.
    This year, there had been numerous labour strikes in the tin mines up at Gambang and in the gold mines at Raub, and now the
     unrest was spreading to the rubber plantations up and down the length of the Malay Peninsula. The demand for rubber for tyres
     and waterproofing had increased in a steady climb ever since the war had started in Europe, and rubber had been designated
     priority cargo for the war effort. America and Britain were clamouring for it. Inevitably the pricehad sky-rocketed. From five pence a pound to twelve pence a pound, and now the labour force that helped to produce it was
     demanding a hefty rise in their meagre wages. She could see their point. It was the Chinese workers who were the troublemakers,
     stirring up the easygoing Malays, but Nigel assured her it would blow over eventually. It was the Japanese, not the Chinese,
     they should be worrying about, he said.
    Connie and Teddy sat in the car together eating the red flesh of the melon, spitting the black pips out of the open windows
     with expert aim, a brief moment of normality in a day that was anything but normal. When she’d finished, she tossed the green
     rind out onto the roadside and within half a minute it was covered in a shiny black coating of ants, their huge jaws capable
     of reducing it to nothing in the blink of an eye. This was a country in which the jungle and its voracious insects smothered
     and devoured everything. Especially tender-skinned white people.
    She wiped her hands on her handkerchief and dabbed at Teddy’s face with it. She smiled at him. ‘Come on, Pilot Officer Hadley,
     let’s go and build you a new Fairey Battle plane.’
    ‘I think a Blenheim will be better. It carries more bombs.’
    She tweaked his chin towards her and inspected the scratch. She must remember to put antiseptic on it. If not, in a day or
     two she could be picking tiny white maggots out of it with tweezers.
    ‘Very well, a Blenheim it shall be.’
    She eased the car forward, filling her mind with concerns about nursing her tyres over the ruts, and with images of miniature
     aeroplane parts clinging precariously together, the smell of cement and the feel of dope flowing smoothly from the brush onto
     the tiny fuselage. Anything to block out the other thoughts. Anything to keep out the sight of a woman on her back on the
     pavement, the soles of her feet streaked with red dust.
    ‘Mummy, why are you crying?’
    ‘I’m not crying.’
    ‘Yes you are.’
    ‘No, sweetheart, it’s just that my eyes are watering because I broke my sunglasses.’
    ‘Will Daddy mind that you broke the car?’
    Oh hell, Nigel loved the Chrysler.
    ‘Don’t worry, Teddy, it can be easily mended.’
    Unlike the dusty feet. Or the pair of bloodshot eyes.

2
    Connie sat in the bungalow in silence. All white men’s houses were called bungalows, however many floors they possessed. Darkness
     squeezed like oil between the wooden slats of the shutters and flowed into the room, filling the slender gap of time that
     lay between day and night in the tropics. The air scarcely grew cooler, but it stopped growing hotter, which gave some sort
     of relief. Outside in the garden and in the lush jungle that skirted it, the night creatures started their endless cries and
     squeaks, booms and chirrups, so loud that they drilled into her mind and splintered her thoughts.
    ‘Just block the noises out, old thing,’ Nigel always told her cheerfully back in the early days when she used to complain.
    Block the noises out. Like she could block out breathing. Cicadas hurled their grating sound into the sultry evening air with
     a frenzied energy, and frogs croaked