Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [27]
8
Picnic Time
Unable to surrender, Jim returned with his broken bicycle to the Maxteds’ apartment in the French Concession. From then on he lived alone in the abandoned houses and apartments in the western suburbs of the International Settlement. Most of the homes had been owned by British and American nationals, or by Dutch, Belgian and Free French residents, all of whom had been interned by the Japanese in the days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The Maxteds’ apartment house was owned by rich Chinese who had fled to Hong Kong in the weeks before the outbreak of war. Most of the apartments had been empty for months. Although the family of Chinese janitors still lived in their two basement rooms beside the elevator well, they had been completely cowed by the squad of Japanese military police who had seized Mr Maxted. As the uncut lawns grew deeper and the formal gardens deteriorated, they spent their time cooking small meals on a charcoal stove which they set up beside the cement statuary on the floor of the ornamental pond. The smell of bean curd and spiced noodles drifted among the disrobing nymphs.
During the first week Jim was free to come and go. He wheeled his cycle into the lift, rode to the seventh floor and let himself into the Maxteds’ apartment through an unlatched mosquito window on the servants’ balcony. The front door was fitted with a spyhole and a complex set of electrical locks – Mr Maxted, a prominent member of the pro-Chiang China Friendship Society, an organization of local businessmen, had once been the victim of an assassination attempt. Once Jim closed the door he was unable to open it again, but no one called apart from an elderly Iraqi woman who lived in the penthouse. When she rang the bell Jim watched her grimacing into the spyhole, parts of her ancient face semaphoring a mysterious message. She then stood thinking for ten minutes in the stationary lift, immaculately dressed and bejewelled in this abandoned apartment house.
Jim was glad to be left alone. After being knocked from his bicycle by the Japanese soldier he had barely managed to return to the Maxteds’, and he slept on Patrick’s bed for the rest of the day. He woke the next morning to the sound of trams clanking down the Avenue Foch, klaxons hooting from the Japanese convoys entering the city, and the thousands of continually blaring horns that were the anthem of Shanghai.
The bruise on his cheek had begun to subside, leaving his face thinner than he remembered it, his mouth a tighter and older shape. Looking at himself in the mirror of Patrick’s bathroom, at his dusty blazer and grimy shirt, he wondered if his mother and father would still recognize him. Jim wiped his clothes with a wet towel – like Mr Guerevitch, many of the passing Chinese stared at him in a curious way. Nonetheless, Jim realized that there were certain advantages in being poor. No one could be bothered to cut off his hands.
The Maxteds’ pantry was filled with cases of whisky and gin, an Aladdin’s cave of gold and ruby bottles, but there were only a few jars of olives and a tin of cocktail biscuits. Jim ate a modest breakfast at the dining-room table, and then set about repairing his bicycle. He needed the machine to get himself around Shanghai, to find his parents and surrender to the Japanese.
Sitting on the dining-room floor, Jim tried to straighten the twisted forks. His hands fretted at the dusty metal, unable to clench themselves. He knew that he had been badly frightened the previous day. A peculiar space was opening around him, which separated him from the secure world he had known before the war. For a few days he had been able to cope with the sinking of the Petrel and the disappearance of his parents, but now he felt nervous and slightly cold all the time, even in the mild December weather. He dropped and broke crockery in a way that he had never done before, and found it difficult to concentrate on anything.
Despite all this, Jim managed to repair his cycle. He