“I don’t want to attract any sort of attention,” she says. “It’s like walking on pins out there in case you run into a Jap. Father’s gone to Macau. He wanted me to come, but I didn’t want to.” She walks over to the window. “He’s worried about me,” she says, looking down and fingering the cloth of her skirt. “If they win, they’ll be brutal beyond belief.”
“How did you get here?”
“I had Angeline’s driver bring me. We’re camping out at her place on the Peak, although the whole Peak is supposed to be evacuated by now. They think it’s too exposed, but we’ve managed to stay undetected, and it’s quiet up there. She has the dogs and her houseboy along with the amahs and the chauffeur so we have some protection.”
The upper class always do what they want, he thinks, inappropriately.
“It’s nerve-racking, like playing a game of poker,” she says. “You never know when you’re going to be stopped, and people are turning against each other. Old Enderby was roughed up by some Sikhs because they said he looked at them funny. That lovely old man.” She stops suddenly. “How are you feeling? Here I am going on about the outside and you’re all…” Her voice trails.
“Evers is dead,” he says. “But you didn’t know him. He was with me when the bomb got us.”
Trudy looks at him, blank. “You’re right,” she says. “I don’t know him.”
“I want all the news,” he says. “Do you have any? ”
“Angeline says that we’re not doing very well. Apparently they expected the Japs from the south, by the sea, but they came from the north instead and just breezed right through the defenses there. And it’s really awful outside.” Her voice hiccups. “I saw a dead baby on a pile of rubbish this morning as I came here. It’s all around, the rubbish and the corpses, I mean, and they’re burning it so it smells like what I imagine hell smells like. And I saw a woman being beaten with bamboo poles and then dragged off by her hair. She was half being dragged, half crawling along, and screaming like the end of the world. Her skin was coming off in ribbons. You’re supposed to wear sanitary pads so that… you k now… if a soldier tries to… Well, you know. The locals and the Japanese both are looting anything that’s not locked down, and thieving and generally being impossible. They’re all over the place in Kowloon, running amok. We’re thinking about moving out to one of the hotels, just so we’re more in the middle of things, and we can see people and get more information. The Gloucester is packed to the rafters but my old friend Delia Ho has a room at the Repulse Bay and says we can have it because she’s leaving to go to China. We can share the room with Angeline, don’t you think? And apparently, the American Club has cots out and people are staying there as well. They have a lot of supplies, I suppose. Americans always do. Everyone wants to be around other people.”
“I suppose that’s a good idea,” Will says.
“Dommie says it’s only a matter of time before the Japanese have the whole island, so he says it really doesn’t matter.”
“That’s hopeful. Always the optimist.”
“I don’t think he really cares.” Trudy laughs, a shrill sound. “He’s just waiting to see what side he should join. He’s learning Japanese at a fast clip.”
“You know what a dangerous thing he’s doing. It’s not a matter for laughter.”
“Oh, bother!” Trudy comes and sits down next to him. “Your injury has quite done away with your sense of humor. Dommie is a survivor, just like you and me, and he’ll be fine. When can you leave?”
“I think soon. And they’re eager to be rid of me. There are people with far more serious injuries, I imagine.”
“But can you walk and all that? ”
“I’ll be fine,” he says shortly. “Don’t worry about me.”
Dr. Whitley discharges him with reluctance.
“If it weren’t for Trudy,” he says, wrapping fresh bandages around Will’s abdomen and knee, “I would never let you go. I know she’ll take care of you.”
Trudy is sitting at the foot of the bed.
“And the little fact that you have too few beds,” she rejoins. “Will here is taking up valuable space. I’m on your side, Doctor. I was a nurse for two weeks. Remember? ”
The doctor laughs. “Of course. How could I forget?” He turns serious. “Trudy, you must change the bandages daily, and you must cleanse the skin and the wounds with a solution of water and peroxide that I’ll have the nurse make up for you. No matter if Will says he doesn’t need it, you must do it without exception.”
Trudy nods. “I’ll be a model of reliability and efficiency,” she says.
Once at Angeline’s, she sets him up in bed although he feels fine. Their room is messy, with her clothes spilling out of a suitcase onto the floor and her toiletries scattered on the windowsills, the bathroom basin, the bed. There are model airplanes strung from the ceiling and a wooden desk piled high with schoolboy mysteries.
“Whose room is this? ”
“It’s Giles’s-my godson, did you know him?”
“I’ve never met him.”
“He’s always away at school and now they’re having him stay for the meantime with Frederick ’s family in England until this all settles down.”
“Oh,” he says. The room is streaked with dusty light from a window. “I’m not an invalid, you know,” he says. “I could probably walk to Central and back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “You’re to take it easy.”
But he is better, and she sees it, and soon they venture out, to see empty roads, closed storefronts, people scurrying from place to place, not looking anywhere but at the ground.
“There’s been an incredible amount of looting,” she says. “And the government is rationing rice. It’s been rather amazing. I was walking down Gloucester Road and I saw police firing their guns in the air to disperse a crowd, and I wondered, where do those bullets go? When they come down, if they hit someone, can’t they kill somebody that way?”
“Trudy, darling. You always think of what nobody else thinks about.”
“And probably for good cause,” she says. “I’m rather an idiot about everything.”
They walk farther.
“It doesn’t feel like our town anymore, does it?”
“It’s too dreary.”
They link arms and go home, where Angeline is crying in the cellar and the amahs have made a small meal of rice and Chinese vegetables dotted with salted pork. They eat and drink weak tea, feeling the invisible constraints of the reality around them.
The next few days are Spartan and regulated, lived as if they might be the last, heightened with the surreal. They eat to sustain themselves, listen to the radio for the latest news, and go to the distribution center for supplies, which are given out sporadically and randomly. One day it’s bread and jam, another it’s bananas, and then it’s flashlights. They take what they can get and go to the black market for the rest as, between them, Trudy and Angeline have a lot of cash. At the black market in town, the atmosphere is tense, the buyers irate at the prices and shouting insults at the vendors, a few having the grace to look embarrassed behind their tables of random goods-the tins of potted meat, the small bags of sugar, the cooking utensils. The price of rice is at an all-time high, and it is as precious as gold. The ground shakes intermittently and the night is lit by fire. They see piles of dead bodies and weeping women beside them. Dominick stops by with provisions he’s got ahold of somehow, and they have the delicacy not to ask. He tells them to stay at Angeline’s for as long as possible. They have not been bothered and that is a good sign. There are a few other families holding fort at their homes as well. Will’s injury makes it impossible for him to go anywhere too far. Angeline’s driver manages to procure the newspaper most days, and the news is grim-the Japanese advancing inexorably and surprisingly fast.