Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [61]
Jim helped Basie and Dr Ransome to drink, and then sat on the opposite bench. He turned his back on the camp, on the British prisoners and their children. All his hopes rested in the landscape around him, in its past and future wars. He felt a strange lightness in his head, not because his parents had rejected him, but because he expected them to do so, and no longer cared.
19
The Runway
In the hour before dusk they entered an area of abandoned battlefields nine miles to the south of Shanghai. The afternoon light rose into the air, as if returning to the sun a small part of the strength it had cast to the indifferent fields. The terrain of trenches and blockhouses seemed to have sprung fully armed from Jim’s head. A tank sat like a wheeled shack at the junction of the Shanghai and Hang-chow roads, the sun’s spotlights shining through its open hatches. The trenches hunted among the burial mounds, a maze lost within itself.
Beyond the crossroads a wooden bridge spanned a canal. Its white piles, from which the rain had leached all trace of resin, were as soft as pumice. The driver folded his map, and fanned himself with the canvas wallet, reluctant to risk his wheels on the worn timbers. Mrs Hug and the English couple sat at the back of the truck, their shadows reaching across the white beds of the drained paddy fields. Jim brushed the flies from Dr Ransome’s face and patted his head. He imagined that he was one of the shadows, a black carpet lying across the tired land. A mile to the south, between the burial mounds, he could see the tailplanes of a row of parked aircraft, feathers of bone against the darkening air. Jim studied the aircraft, recognizing the plump fuselages and radial engines. They were Brewster Buffaloes, a type of American fighter that had been no match for the Japanese.
Was it here, among the burial mounds, that the American aircraft waited before taking off into his mind? However, the Japanese driver had also seen the tailplanes. He threw down his cigarette and shouted to the guard, who had jumped from the truck and was testing the rotting planks of the bridge.
‘Lunghua…Lunghua…!’
The engine started, and the driver turned east at the crossroads, setting course for this distant airfield.
‘We’re going to Lunghua Airfield, Dr Ransome,’ Jim called between his knees. The physician lay on the floor beside Basie and the Dutch woman’s father, watching Jim with his single eye. ‘There are Brewster Buffaloes – the Americans must have won the war.’
Jim let the warm air rush into his face. They approached the military airfield, the largest grass aerodrome that he had seen near Shanghai. There were three metal hangars, and a wooden engineering workshop built in the former car-park of Lunghua Pagoda. Dozens of aircraft were drawn up on the tarmac beside the hangars, high-performance fighters of advanced design. The three Brewster Buffaloes, their American markings painted out, sat by the edge of the field. A team of engineers with a powerful crane lifted an anti-aircraft gun to the upper decks of the stone pagoda.
The driver stopped at a checkpoint, where Japanese soldiers manned a fortified emplacement. As the sentries paced about in the dusk their corporal spoke into a field telephone. They were waved through to the perimeter road. The rutted surface had been stiffened with straw matting, churned to a pith by a convoy of vehicles loaded with building stone. A truck swayed past them with a cargo of roofing tiles torn from the tenements of the Old City.
Pairs of armed guards patrolled the perimeter road, their bayonets cutting the sombre air. Two single-engined transport aircraft were parked on the edge of the field. Accompanied by his ground crew, a Japanese pilot spoke to two fellow officers