Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [24]
Jim pocketed the coin and peered up at the damp walls. There was something sinister about a drained swimming-pool, and he tried to imagine what purpose it could have if it were not filled with water. It reminded him of the concrete bunkers in Tsingtao, and the bloody handprints of the maddened German gunners on the caisson walls. Perhaps murder was about to be committed in all the swimming-pools of Shanghai, and their walls were tiled so that the blood could be washed away?
Leaving the garden, Jim wheeled his bicycle through the verandah door. Then he did something he had always longed to do, mounted his cycle and rode through the formal, empty rooms. Delighted to think how shocked Vera and the servants would have been, he expertly circled his father’s study, intrigued by the patterns which the tyres cut in the thick carpet. He collided with the desk, and knocked over a table lamp as he swerved through the door into the drawing-room. Standing on the pedals, he zigzagged among the armchairs and tables, lost his balance and fell on to a sofa, remounted without touching the floor, crash-landed into the double doors that led into the dining-room, pulled them back and began a wild circuit of the long polished table. He detoured into the pantry, swishing to and fro through the pool of water below the refrigerator, scattered the saucepans from the kitchen shelves and ended in a blaze of speed towards the mirror in the downstairs cloakroom. As his front tyre trembled against the smudged glass Jim shouted at his excited reflection. The war had brought him at least one small bonus.
Happily Jim closed the front door behind him, smoothed the Japanese scroll and set off towards the Raymond twins in the nearby Columbia Road. He felt that all the streets in Shanghai were rooms in a huge house. He accelerated past a platoon of Chinese puppet soldiers marching down Columbia Road, and swerved away showily as the NCO let loose a volley of shouts. Jim sped along the suburban pavements, in and out of the telephone poles, knocking aside the Craven A tins left behind by the vanished beggars.
He was out of breath when he reached the Raymonds’ house at the German end of the Columbia Road. He freewheeled past the parked Opels and Mercedes – curious, gloomy cars which gave Jim all too much of an idea of what Europe was like – and came to a halt outside the front door.
A Japanese scroll was nailed to the oak panels. The door opened, and two amahs appeared, dragging Mrs Raymond’s dressing-table down the steps.
‘Is Clifford here? Or Derek? Amah…!’
He knew both the amahs well, and waited for them to reply in their pidgin English. But they ignored him, and heaved at the dressing-table. Their deformed feet, like clenched fists, slipped on the steps.
‘It’s Jamie, Mrs Raymond…’
Jim tried to step past the amahs, when one reached out and slapped him in the face.
Stunned by the blow, Jim walked back to his bicycle. He had never been struck so hard, either in school boxing matches or in fights with the Avenue Foch gang. The front of his face seemed to have been torn from the bones. His eyes were smarting, but he stopped himself from crying. The amahs were strong, their arms toughened by a lifetime of washing clothes. Watching them with their dressing-table, Jim knew that they were paying him back for something he or the Raymonds had done to them.
Jim waited until they reached the bottom step. When one of the amahs walked up to him, clearly intending to slap him again, he mounted his cycle and pedalled away.
Outside the Raymonds’ drive two German boys of his own age were playing with a ball as their mother unlocked the family’s Opel. Usually they would have shouted German slogans at Jim, or thrown stones at him until stopped by their mother. But today all three stood silently. Jim cycled past, trying not to show them his bruised