Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [103]
He drank carefully, then watched the water lap around his case. He had carried the wooden box all the way from Lunghua, holding tight to the few possessions that he had assembled with such effort. He had been trying to keep the war alive, and with it the security he had known in the camp. Now it was time to rid himself of Lunghua and face up squarely to the present, however uncertain, the one rule that had sustained him through the years of war.
He pushed his case on to the greasy surface. In the last moments of the dusk the dead water came alive with roses of iridescent colour. As the box floated away, like the coffin of a Chinese child, the circles of oil raced to embrace it and sent tremors of light across the river.
Jim climbed through the resting prisoners and sat down beside Mr Maxted. He handed him the mess-tin of water and then cleaned the sand from his shoes.
‘All right, Jim?’
‘The war must end, Mr Maxted.’
‘It will, Jim.’ Mr Maxted had revived briefly. ‘We’re going bad o Shanghai tonight.’
‘Shanghai – ?’ Jim was unsure whether Mr Maxted was delirious, dreaming of Shanghai in the way that the dying prisoners in the camp hospital had babbled of returning to England. ‘Aren’t they taking us up-country?’
‘Not now…’ Mr Maxted pointed through the darkness to the collier burning off the mole.
Jim watched the smoke rising from the collier’s bridge and superstructure, everywhere but from its funnel. The fire in the engine-room had taken hold, and the stern of the vessel glowed like furnace coal. This was the ship that would have taken them up-country, to the killing-grounds beyond Soochow. For all his relief, Jim felt disappointed.
‘What about our rations, Mr Maxted?’
‘They’re waiting for us in Shanghai. Just like the old days, Jim.’
Jim watched Mr Maxted sink back among the exhausted prisoners. He had made his last effort to sit upright, trying to convince Jim that all was well, that the good luck and the skill of some unknown American bomb-aimer, which had saved them from being shipped aboard the collier, would continue to watch over them.
‘Mr Maxted, do you want the war to end? It must end soon.’
‘It has almost ended. Think about your mother and father, Jim. The war has ended.’
‘But, Mr Maxted, when will the next one begin…?’
Japanese soldiers were walking along the railway line, followed by Dr Ransome and Mrs Pearce. The corporals shouted to each other, their voices drumming along the rails. A faint rain fell, and the guards waiting by the trucks put on their capes. Steam lifted from the warm rails, as the prisoners rose to their feet and clutched their small children. Voices murmured through the darkness, and wives grasped their husbands’ hands.
‘Digby…Digby…’
‘Scotty…’
‘Jake…’
‘Bunty…’
A woman with a sleeping child on her shoulder seized Jim’s arm, but he pushed her away and tried to steady Mr Maxted. The darkness and the tacky river water had made them both light-headed, and at any moment they would fall across the rails. Led by the three trucks, the prisoners left the embankment and gathered on the jetty beside the ruined godowns. A hundred of the prisoners had stayed behind on the causeway, too weary to carry on and resigned to whatever future the Japanese had prepared for them. They sat in the rain below the railway embankment, watched by the soldiers in their streaming capes.
As the column of prisoners set off, Jim realized that a quarter of those inmates who had left Lunghua that morning had fallen behind. Even before they reached the gates of the dockyard several prisoners turned back. An elderly Scotsman from E Block, a retired accountant at the Shanghai Power Company with whom Jim had often played chess, suddenly stepped from the column. As if he had forgotten where he had been for all the years of the war, he wandered across the stony yard, then walked through the rain towards the railway embankment.
An hour after nightfall they reached a football stadium on the western outskirts