‘I should have brought Radzi with me.’ Felix said, mournfully.
‘One more man would have made no difference in the end,’ said Lydia, ‘and how could you have possibly known?’
Mark left the group and started packing up whatever Giles hadn’t already taken. No one needed to announce that the expedition was over for everyone.
Felix fingered away his tears before they fell, ‘I could have easily got that boy out before those bastards made it up the beach and now he would be free instead of… well, God only knows what the poor kid faces now. Jesus.’
‘But everything is so easy with the gift of hindsight, isn’t it?’ Lydia remarked.
‘What would have happened if we had got him out, do you think, Pappy?’
‘They’d have hunted him down, probably.’
‘Why didn’t he just dig under the door?’
‘Didn’t you see? There was a wall of wood there too.’
Bee waded into the warm water, thoughts of the boy bringing hot tears, homesickness bringing more, wondering what she would be able to tell her parents that wouldn’t get them both into trouble; that wouldn’t get Pappy into trouble. A shoal of small brown fish raced towards her, gathering around her legs, touching her skin. A little way off she could see the silvery flash of several long tom, hunting.
Felix joined her, and placing an arm around her shoulders pulled her to him. ‘What a bloody nightmare. I’m sorry Bee. So sorry you had to see anything like this; that you’ve had to meet people like that.’ He kissed the top of her head. ‘Be good to get home, eh? What I wouldn’t give to see your Nana right now. God I miss her.’
Still watching the tiny fish, Bee nodded, lump in throat, afraid to speak. When finally she was able to say something, she said, ‘That boy was beautiful to look at, wasn’t he? I have never seen someone like that before. He was tattooed?’
Felix sighed heavily and shook his head, ‘I don’t know. That’s how it looked to me. But maybe it was paint.’
‘Will you look for him?’ asked Lydia, from the shore.
Listening, Bee felt hopeful.
‘I wouldn’t know where to start. Will you?’
‘I don’t know.’ Lydia’s eyes were wide and frightened. ‘What about the police? I think we should inform them.’
Felix shook his head, ‘And what good would that do? I imagine Giles has friends in high places. How else will it be possible for him to get the boy away from Malaysia?’
‘You think they’ll leave Malaysia?’
‘He said it was going to be a long journey,’ commented Bee, as she and Felix began wading to shore.
‘Did he say long?’ questioned Felix.
‘He did say journey. To England, perhaps?’ said Lydia.
Felix shrugged, ‘Maybe.’
‘But he could be going there, do you think? He could be found?’ Lydia moved with them as they began to walk up the beach.
Felix frowned, ‘Why ask me? How would I know about any of that?’
‘If Giles goes there I could help you find him. I know where he lives. His mother left the house to him when she died. He would never move. He and his mother were very close. I imagine that is why he apologised… for the comment… I think family matters to him, not that you’d guess.’
‘So you know exactly where we can find him?’ Felix confirmed.
‘Giles? Yeah. He’s always lived there, even when she was alive, a real mummy’s boy. I don’t think it’s far from his research centre. He’s bound to head home at some point. His life is that centre.’
‘Well now, that certainly is something to think about,’ said Felix, ‘Grab your book Bee, if you leave it this time it’s gone forever. There’s no coming back.’ He turned to Lydia, and nodded to Mark still busily packing, ‘And if you two are coming, then get a wriggle on. We’re done. It’s time to go home. I have had enough.’
ARTIFICIALITY
Manufactured colours and shapes, unnatural sounds and smells, man-made light and dark. Cold. It was impossible for anyone to experience the world beyond Pulau Tua as the boy did, a boy whose entire life had been spent amongst trees and pale yellow sand, safely surrounded by family both living and dead.
The days and nights passed gazing across the broad ocean with sea-air filling his young lungs could never have prepared him for such profound change, and nothing that lay ahead would ever equal the horror of knowing that every person ever spoken with was dead. Precious home, loving family, lost forever. But one experience unexpectedly shaped the boy in a way he was able to accept positively, although besides the loss of his family it was the one thing that should have wounded him the most. He had broken the single most important rule of community, an ancient law containing his entire people. He had crossed the sea. He had travelled over that huge entity allegedly consuming all who trespass upon her. He had taken the journey that was both forbidden and impossible. Yet here he was, alive and well. Again he had survived what others had not.
The shock of change was not the equivalent of some ordinary child suddenly finding itself in an alien space ship, for children experience space and strange mutant creatures everyday through the pleasure of television. Inconceivable form beyond understanding is for most people entirely imaginable, because the modern world is forever pushing forward: the unknown is to be expected. Certainly, the reaction of primitive cultures to advanced societies was widely documented, but what of this one? This place, where objects of neither shape nor form relate to anything known, where the first touch of new material might be beyond extraordinary?
Of course the boy had seen many things. He had seen aeroplanes and helicopters. He had watched far away ships cruise slowly on and tracked the progress of bumboats speeding past at a distance. To him, as to anyone else, these were everyday occurrences and things to do with an outside world all knew existed. There was nothing strange about a man in a boat, and to see some giant and noisy thing soar past high in the sky roused no more interest than the storks and sea eagles circling quietly below it. It came yesterday, it would come again tomorrow; it only ever passed by. It was not of their world. Things are as they are, or at least, were as they were.
From the window of a room he had come to appreciate he would not move on from – a place in which he had woken with strings attached to his chest, burka gone, his own sparse clothing gone, all visitors different save for the fat bald one – there was a view. Beyond the thick glass, its solid transparency akin to the bottles now and again littering the beaches at home, he could see trees growing near strange ramshackle buildings, agricultural outhouses that were nothing like the neatly converted manor that held him. He had not been free to explore the manor, but in those few places where it extended into view its white render was sharp against the sky, every part of it seeming ordered and clean. White against light grey; white against charcoal; white against blue.
Whilst the tumbledown buildings were of little interest, the trees were another matter entirely for they formed a copse, small but dense enough to conceal anything directly on the other side. While sitting on the bed with his back propped against the wall, pale green gown tangled about him, the boy often wondered if the copse were a portal back to his homeland, for nothing here was quite as similar as those tightly packed trees, even if their jumbled branches appeared oddly lifeless. But then he’d marvelled as slowly the limbs began to change. From nothing came pink and white blossom, then tiny bright green shoots, all becoming a dense lush green. He would go to those trees, he decided. One day.
Beyond the copse and behind the buildings, the land fell away before rising up into beautiful hillside, different shades of green and brown rolling on as far as the boy could see. On his island, the single enormous hill had been thick with jungle; here it looked as if jungle had been cleared. Is this what was intended for his island? To make it look this way? He longed to be free, to chase across the land he could see, to not be contained within a stark white box. They always seemed to keep him locked i
n, he’d noticed; right from the very beginning. He wondered where he would go if liberty were his. What was beyond those hills?
To the boy, finding himself in a manmade place felt as if he had been born again. This idea of rebirth was so outside his belief system it frightened him and left him feeling adrift and vulnerable as he pondered it. Chilling possibilities swamped him. Sometimes he wondered if the men had actually drowned him that day and he had regenerated somehow, since his memory of the early journey was missing. At other times he suspected he was simply dead, his spirit roaming the afterlife. But most distressing was to think that all he believed in was untrue and there would be no ascension to the sky and blessing from the Moon, no eternity spent as a Star. There would be only this strange torture instead. This dullness. Perhaps, he thought, this was punishment for contemplating murder, and perpetual drowning was a myth. Again, it was hard to accept the possibility of error, but it was possible. Of that, he was living proof. He even considered that maybe he was paying for not fulfilling the Seven Steps to Manhood prior to death, remembering then with relief his mother’s assurances that the Moon understood intention. Dead or alive, there was no need to dwell on that particular worry.
But with too much time to think, the feeling remained and he could find no way of accounting for the sense of rebirth. All things puzzled him; the brightness and variety of colour, regularity of shapes, the feel of the walls and floors, strange pervading smells, clattering noises, utter silence, Stars shining from the ceiling, fruit and meat that looked right yet tasted wrong. Even the water had a peculiar flavour. Only people no longer surprised him, their plainness and variety of colour already accepted and beyond note, language patterns growing equally familiar although not yet understood.
The whitecoats stopped wearing little green masks soon after his arrival and talked to him everyday. On many days talk was all that happened, but others seemed much crueller. When they pierced his skin the boy almost wept, reminded of the first time that particular pain was felt. He‘d hit out, injuring two of the whitecoats while knocking away the tiny shiny sharp stick that was the cause of the problem. He could see it was a small thing, but he hated it. He observed with curiosity that no one seemed angered by his violent reaction. That night in bed, recalling the Steps, the boy decided to regard all other stabbings as a test of bravery. Lashing out had only proved his fear, so from now on he would bear it. Consequently, the thick straps used to secure him after that first single incident became little more than a token reminder of what had been, nevertheless it was a token no one seemed prepared to remove.
Time wandered on and the days varied little. There were so few new things to think about, although it was not so without change there was nothing. For one thing, there was the blood they took. He wondered why sometimes they took it yet other times they pushed colourless liquid into him. Was his own blood being returned, stripped of colour? Was this how the woman who sat on the other side of the huge clear wall made her lips so red? Or were they attempting to make him whiter? But not everyone here was white, so why would they? The clear wall; accepted for what it was he did not know it was unusual, for when everything is extraordinary, nothing is.
*
One day the boy heard a macaque crying elsewhere in the building. He recognised the call instantly and wondered how it could be that a macaque from home could be so near.
The sounds it made were sad, as if dissatisfied with life and calling for the company of friends, hoping for rescue. When the boy loudly replied the macaque answered excitedly, but after being whisked away by grinning whitecoats to a tiny room full of random monkey noises, the puzzled boy chose not to reply again.
Instead he listened to the plaintive cries in cheerless silence, remembering tales he had been told of a time when man and monkey were the same, of how the Moon had separated the two, giving monkeys the physical means to rule the trees before blessing man with the stripes of stealthier hunters, commanding both to sleep in her presence. It was a comfort to remember such things. Although heartbreaking to hear, the more the boy heard the macaque’s cries, the more he understood that he was not dead or reborn, but simply somewhere different, eventually accepting that, for whatever purpose, the outside world had claimed them both. At least with the macaque here and his mother gone the next Step would be possible, he realised. He bided his time, waiting for the right moment to act.
In too many ways life was monotonous, with boredom the boy’s biggest enemy, for rarely did he feel threatened, fear seeming to have dropped away unnoticed like some useless thing. Within months his had become an institutional existence, the safety of routine numbing his will. He accepted his lot. He ate breakfast, lunch and an evening meal; he bathed, exercised, and was taken to various rooms for inexplicable reasons. Yes, they took his blood, measured him, weighed him, plucked hair from his head, swabbed his mouth, shone light into his eyes, and all had become normal. But one day, after an operation privately had upset him a great deal, he was shaken from acceptance. It was all too much; change must come, he decided. He must move forward. So he called to the macaque.
In response, the monkey instantly whirled into a frenzy of vocal excitement. The boy was thrilled but felt guilty for giving such hope; it was likely that neither would ever to be free again and perhaps a return to the jungle was what it now expected. Afterwards, contained in the sound room he knew they would take him too, the boy began to gesture. It was the first time he had tried hard to communicate with anyone. The stunned whitecoats were as excited as the macaque, and it occurred to him then that none had any idea what they were doing. He also understood that this lack of direction provided him with a degree of advantage. One day, when they grew bored of trying to find whatever it was they wanted, they might even let him go. The boy released more and more whooping calls, frantically signalling until finally he was understood.
*
The enclosure was full of branches but they were not real. Some appeared to be from an actual tree and required touch and smell to be certain they were artificial. Others were not disguised at all, just plain metal tubes. Ropes hung in loops like vines, some with hoops attached and a few tied and threaded with fresh twigs in leaf; others dangled freely. The walls were the same plain white as everywhere else in the building, and set into one wall the boy could see a special chamber and guessed it was used to contain the macaque from time to time, for whatever reason. Stains streaked a wide wooden bench, and beneath it on the hard white floor the scant remains of fruit and leaves lay scattered. He felt sorry for the monkey, although the macaque’s cage was far better accommodation than might be found in other laboratories. It was spacious and interesting but to the boy it could only ever be the prison that it was. Above him, high on a branch, the animal was watching.
Sitting down on the bench, the boy began chattering his teeth and making low grunts. The macaque’s face took on a perplexed expression and she cocked her head to one side as if assessing the animal that now shared her space. She was smaller than he expected, perhaps not fully-grown, arousing a new empathy. As the boy began to coo quietly, she clearly recognised the sound as familiar but appeared confused by the fact that it did not come from another macaque. The boy continued with a series of short sounds, gently coaxing friendship from his fellow primate, waiting for the offer of alliance to be reciprocated. All the while, people watched from the other side of yet another clear wall. The boy took no notice, barely glancing in their direction, not understanding the imposition of their observation.
Eventually, the monkey came to him and sat down. The boy reached out and gently lifted the young animal up and with a single twist broke her short neck. After giving thanks for her sacrifice and declaring responsibility for the death, he cried. He had killed many animals for food, but none as part of a ritual, and it touched him deeply. He viewed the warm lifeless body as it lay in his arms, and commanded the spirit to leave and enjoy the freedom that had been stolen from the living self, certain that he had done the right thing,
despite his grief. Whatever comfort her presence may have offered him in his lonely isolation, and however sad he felt at killing her, he knew she would rather be dead than be here. He touched his forehead to hers and dried his tears. The sign of someone no longer in need of a mother’s knee is a person who understands the importance of self-sacrifice, the Second Step.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Giles Patterson lifted a cup to his lips and cautiously sipped very hot tea. The white polystyrene had a used look about it. For once, he took no notice.
He was sitting in his small office, lit only by a dimmed desk lamp and the glare from the screen on his laptop. Giles had been there all evening, his dinner – consisting of an entire packet of chocolate digestives and two packets of salt and vinegar crisps – was barely enough to keep the rumbling from his large stomach. But he was finding it hard to get up and leave. He needed to make sure the results of his latest observations were accurately recorded and the most recent test properly logged. That test. The results confirmed what he already could see for himself, but to have it there in black and white took his breath away.
He leaned back in his seat and stretched his back, the old swivel chair creaking under the shifting weight. It was a far cry from the island, he thought, although he was feeling as hungry as he had during those trying times. The others enjoyed scratching for food on Pulau Tua to supplement supplies, but all Giles had wanted was the comfort of a large steak and ale pie and a pint of bitter. On the island he’d felt grumpy with hunger and, if he were honest, a niggling nervousness regarding his situation, which had been precarious to say the least. But it had been necessary and had proved worth it. He would like to eat steak and ale pie right now. Despite being brought up by a mother who accused others of having ideas above their station while in fact suffering from that very same notion, Giles had never gone in for fancy cuisine, just well cooked British food. Pub food. The sort his mother made when no one was coming: battered fish, stew and dumplings, toad-in-the-hole, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Cassava root, he thought, frowning mildly, who would have thought it could become something as tasty as tapioca pudding? He groaned at the memory of his colleagues eating it as if it were native, as if it made them native, Dear God, he thought, let me never have to see those people again. Or cassava root.