Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [121]
A marked smell hung in the room, one he had never noticed during all the years of the war, at once enticing and ambiguous. He realized that it was the odour of Mrs Vincent’s body, and for a moment he imagined that she had returned to the camp. Jim stretched out on Mrs Vincent’s bunk, and balanced the tin of Spam on his forehead. He surveyed the room from this unfamiliar angle, a privilege he had never been allowed during the war. Tucked behind the door, his cubicle must have resembled one of those ramshackle hutches which the beggars of Shanghai erected around themselves out of newspapers and straw mats. Often he must have seemed to Mrs Vincent like a beast in a kennel. It was no wonder Jim reflected as he perused a copy of Life, that Mrs Vincent had been intensely irritated by him, wishing him away even to the point of hoping he would die.
Jim lay on her straw mattress, smelling the scent of her body, fitting his hips and shoulders into the shallow mould she had left behind. Seen from Mrs Vincent’s vantage-point, the past three years appeared subtly different; even a few steps across a small room generated a separate war, a separate ordeal for this woman with her weary husband and sick child.
Thinking with affection of Mrs Vincent, Jim wished that they were still together. He missed Dr Ransome and Mrs Pearce, and the group of men who sat all day on the steps outside the foyer. It occurred to Jim that they might also miss Lunghua. Perhaps one day they would all return to the camp.
He left the room and walked down the corridor to the rear door where the children had played. The marks of their games – hopscotch, marbles and fighting tops – still covered the ground. Jim kicked a small stone into the hopscotch court and deftly flicked it around the squares, then set out on a circuit of the deserted camp. Already he could feel Lunghua gathering itself around him again.
As he approached the hospital he began to hope that Dr Ransome would be there. By the entrance to Hut 6 a rain-soaked pierrot costume of the Lunghua Sophomores lay in a muddy pool. Jim stopped to clean the Spam tin. He wiped the label with the ruff of the costume, remembering Dr Ransome’s lectures on hygiene.
The bamboo shutters were lowered across the windows of the hospital, as if Dr Ransome wanted the patients to sleep through the afternoon. Jim climbed the steps, aware of a faint murmur within the building. When he pushed back the doors a cloud of flies enveloped him. Maddened by the light, they filled the narrow entrance hall, as if trying to shake off the foul odour that clung to their wings.
Brushing the flies from his mouth, Jim walked into the men’s ward. The decaying air streamed down the plywood walls, bathing the flies that fed on the bodies piled across the bunks. Identifiable by their ragged shorts and flowered dresses, and by the clogs embedded in their swollen feet, dozens of Lunghua prisoners lay on the bunks like sides of meat in a condemned slaughterhouse. Their backs and shoulders glistened with mucilage, and the splayed mouths in their ballooning cheeks still gaped as if these bloated men and women, dragged from a banquet, were gripped by a ravenous hunger.
He walked through the darkened ward, the tin of Spam held tightly to his chest, breathing through the magazines cupped over his mouth. Despite their caricature faces, Jim recognized several of the prisoners. He searched for Dr Ransome and Mrs Vincent, assuming that the bodies were those of the Lunghua internees who had fallen behind during the march from the stadium. The flies festered over the bodies, in some way aware that the war had ended and determined to hoard every morsel of flesh for the coming famine of the peace.
Jim stood on the steps of the hospital, looking out at the deserted camp and the silent fields beyond the wire. The flies soon left him and returned to the ward. He set out for the kitchen garden. He walked among the fading plants, wondering whether to water them,