Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [138]
Jim climbed through the fence and ran down the cinder track to the camp hospital. Men with spades stood in the cemetery, shielding their eyes from the unfamiliar daylight. Had they dug themselves free from their own graves? As he neared the steps of the hospital Jim tried to control his trembling. The bamboo doors opened and a swarm of flies fled through the air, their feast-days done. Brushing them from his face, over which he wore a green surgical mask, was a red-haired man in a new American uniform. In his hand he carried an insecticide bomb.
‘Dr Ransome…!’ Jim spat the blood from his mouth and ran up the rotting steps. ‘You came back, Dr Ransome! It’s all right, everyone’s coming back! I’m going to get Mrs Vincent…!’
He stepped past Dr Ransome into the dark, but the physician’s hands gripped his shoulders.
‘Hold on, Jim…I thought you might be here.’ He removed his mask and pressed Jim’s head to his chest, inspecting the boy’s gums and ignoring the blood that stained the crisp fabric of his US Army shirt. ‘Your parents are waiting for you, Jim. Poor fellow, you’ll never believe the war is over.’
Part IV
42
The Terrible City
Two months later, on the eve of his departure for England, Jim remembered Dr Ransome’s words as he walked down the gangway of the SS Arrawa and stepped on to Chinese soil for the last time. Dressed in a silk shirt and tie, and a grey flannel suit from the Sincere Company’s department store, Jim waited politely for an elderly English couple to make their way down the wooden ramp. Below them was the Shanghai Bund, and all the clamour of the gaudy night. Thousands of Chinese filled the concourse, jostling among the trams and limousines, the jeeps and trucks of the US military, and a horde of rickshaws and pedicabs. Together they watched the British and American servicemen moving in and out of the hotels along the Bund. At the jetties beside the Arrawa, hidden below its stern and bows, American sailors came ashore from the cruiser moored in mid-river. As they stepped from their landing craft the Chinese surged forward, gangs of pickpockets and pedicab drivers, prostitutes and bar-touts, vendors hawking bottles of home-brew Johnny Walker, gold dealers and opium traders, the evening citizenry of Shanghai in all its black silk, fox fur and flash. The young American sailors pushed past the sampan men and shouting military police. They tried to stay together and fight off the crowd so eager to welcome them to China. But before they reached the first set of tram-tracks down the centre of the Bund they were swept away in a convoy of pedicabs, their arms around the bar-girls screaming obscenities at the sleek Chinese pimps in their pre-war Packards, down from the blocks in the back-alley garages of the Nanking Road.
Dominating this panorama of the Shanghai night were three cinema screens which had been set up on scaffolding along the Bund. In collaboration with the US Navy, the Nationalist general who was the military governor of the city had arranged this continuous screening of newsreels from the European and Pacific theatres, in order to give the population of Shanghai a glimpse of the world war that had recently ended.
Jim cleared the last step of the swaying gangway, and looking up at the trembling images, which were barely strong enough to hold their own against the neon signs and strip lighting on the hotel and nightclub façades. Fragments of their amplified sound-tracks boomed like guns over the roar of the traffic. He