Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [52]
Jim squatted on the white earth, tracing the tyre patterns with a stick. How many times would each tyre have to rotate before it wore itself through to the canvas? The problem, one of a host that perpetually bothered him, was in fact fairly easy to solve. Jim smoothed the white dust and made a start at the arithmetic. He gave a cheer when the first fraction cancelled itself, and then noticed that he was alone in the open sunlight between the truck and the railway embankment.
Tended by a weary Dr Ransome, the prisoners huddled in the scanty shade below the tail-gate. Basie sat slumped inside his seaman’s jacket, and he and the old men looked as dead as the discarded mannequins Jim had often seen in the alley behind the Sincere Company’s department store.
They needed water, or one of them would die and they would all have to return to Shanghai. Jim watched the Japanese on the platform. The meal had ended, and two of the soldiers uncoiled a bale of telephone wire. Kicking a stone in front of him, Jim wandered towards the railway embankment. He stepped across the rails, and without a pause climbed on to the concrete platform.
Still savouring their meal, the Japanese sat around the cinders of their fire. They watched Jim as he bowed and stood to attention in his ragged clothes. None of them waved him away, but Jim knew that this was not the time to treat them to his brightest smile. He realized that Dr Ransome could not approach the Japanese so soon after their meal without being knocked down or even killed.
He waited as the driver spoke to the signals corporal. Pointing repeatedly to Jim, he delivered what seemed to be a long lecture on the enormous nuisance to the Japanese Army caused by this one small boy. The corporal laughed at this, in a good humour after his fish. He took a Coca Cola bottle from his knapsack and half-filled it with water from his canteen. Holding it in the air, he beckoned Jim towards him.
Jim took the bottle, bowed steeply and stepped back three paces. Masking their smiles, the Japanese watched him silently. Beside the truck, Basie and Dr Ransome leaned from the shadows, their eyes fixed on the sun-bright fluid in the bottle. Clearly they assumed that he would carry the water to them and share out this unexpected radon.
Carefully, Jim wiped the bottle on the sleeve of his blazer. He lifted it to his lips, drank slowly, trying not to choke, paused and finished the last drops.
The Japanese burst into laughter, chortling to each other with great amusement. Jim laughed with them, well aware that only he, among the British prisoners, appreciated the joke. Basie ventured a wary smile, but Dr Ransome seemed baffled. The corporal took the Coca Cola bottle from Jim and filled it to the neck. Still chuckling to themselves, the soldiers climbed to their feet and returned to the task of stringing the telephone wire.
Followed by the driver and the armed guard, Jim carried the bottle across the tracks. He handed it to Dr Ransome, who stared at him without comment. He drank briefly, and passed the tepid liquid to the others, helping the driver to refill the bottle from the canteen. One of the missionary women was sick, and vomited the water into the dust at his feet.
Jim took up his position behind the driving cabin. He knew that he had been right to drink the first water himself. The others, including Basie and Dr Ransome, had been thirsty, but only he had been prepared to risk everything for the few drops of water. The Japanese might have thrown him on to the track and broken his legs across the railway lines, as they did to the Chinese soldiers whom they killed at Siccawei Station. Already Jim felt himself apart from the others, who had behaved as passively as the Chinese peasants. Jim realized that he was closer to the Japanese, who had seized Shanghai and sunk the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. He listened to the sound of a transport plane hidden beyond the haze of white dust, and thought again of carrier decks out on the Pacific, of small men in baggy