Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [55]
Although his legs were exhausted, Jim was still standing behind the driver’s cabin as they sped towards the gates of the internment camp at Woosung. In his mind, he had identified the Japanese aircraft of the Yangtze plain with his confidence that he would soon see his parents again. A single-engined fighter overtook them and climbed into the late afternoon sky, lifted by the golden glaze on the under-surface of its wings. Jim raised his arms and let the sun fell on the camouflage paint that stained his hands and wrists, imagining that he too was an aircraft. Behind him the Dutch woman had collapsed on the floor of the truck. She lay at the feet of her elderly father as Dr Ransome and the Japanese soldier tried to lift her on to the seat.
They crossed a wooden bridge over the arm of an artificial lake, and passed the burnt-out shell of the country club whose mock-Tudor timbers of painted cement had alone failed to catch fire. The hull of a pleasure launch lay in the shallows, its decks penetrated by reeds that advanced up the beach to the embers of the hotel.
Ahead of them a military truck was turning through the gates of a disused stockyard, through which an even greater fire had recently swept. Bored Japanese soldiers lounged outside the guardhouse, and watched a gang of Chinese labourers nailing lengths of barbed wire to a line of pine posts. Behind the guardhouse was the building contractor’s store, surrounded by piles of planks and fencing timber, and a bamboo shelter where a second group of coolies dozed on their mats beside a charcoal brazier.
The truck stopped by the guardhouse, where the driver and his prisoners together gazed at this desolate site. The former stockyard was being converted into a civilian camp, but no prisoners would be interned here for months. Jim sat between Basie and Dr Ransome, annoyed with himself for assuming that his mother and father would be at the first camp they visited.
A prolonged argument began between the Japanese driver and the sergeant in charge of the camp’s construction. It was clear that the sergeant had already decided that this truck and its consignment of Allied prisoners did not exist. He ignored the driver’s protests and waved his cigarette in a thoughtful manner as he paced across the wooden porch of the guardhouse. At last he pointed to a patch of nettle-covered ground inside the gates, which he had apparently deemed to be a no man’s land between the camp and the outside world.
Dr Ransome peered at the acres of fire-gutted stalls, a burnt-out maze through which cattle had once been steered. ‘This can’t be the camp. Unless they want us to build it.’
Basie’s pale ears emerged from his seaman’s collar. He was barely strong enough to sit upright, but could still catch the faintest scent of an opportunity. ‘Woosung? There might be advantages, doctor…being the first people here…’
Dr Ransome began to help Mrs Hug from the floor, but the Japanese soldier raised the stock of his rifle and waved him back to his seat. The sergeant stood in the nettles, gazing over the tail-gate at the exhausted prisoners. The old women lay in the pools of urine at their husbands’ feet. The English brothers huddled against Basie while Mrs Hug leaned on her father’s knees.
Deliberately, Jim thought of his mother, and of the happy hours he had spent playing bridge in her bedroom. When the tears ran into his nose he sucked them into his parched throat. Could Dr Ransome teach himself how to cry? He looked at the glowing end of the sergeant’s cigarette, and at the warm hearth of the charcoal stove in the twilight. The gang of labourers by the barbed-wire fence were walking back to their bamboo shelter.
‘You’re tiring everyone, Jim,’ Dr Ransome warned him. ‘Sit still or I’ll ask Basie to sell you to the Japanese.’
‘They wouldn’t want me.’ Jim slipped from the doctor’s grasp. He knelt on the bench beside the driver’s cabin. Rocking to and fro, he watched the sergeant lead the two Japanese to the guardhouse, where the soldiers were eating their evening meal. There were bottles of beer