Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [70]
‘At last…’
‘…that boy…’
‘…running wild.’
These mutters drew an amiable smile from Mr Maxted. ‘Jim, you’re going to be blackballed by the country club. Never mind.’
‘I don’t mind.’ When Mr Maxted stumbled Jim held his arm. ‘Are you all right, Mr Maxted?’
Jim waved to the men sitting on the step, but no one moved. Mr Maxted steadied himself. ‘Let’s go, Jim. Some work and some watch, and that’s all there is to it.’
For the past year there had been a third member of the team, Mr Carey, the owner of the Buick agency in Nanking Road. But six weeks earlier he had died of malaria, and by then the Japanese had cut the food ration to a point where only two of them were needed to push the cart.
Propelled by his new shoes, Jim sped along the cinder path. The iron wheels struck sparks from the flinty stones. Mr Maxted held his shoulder, panting to keep up.
‘Slow down, Jim. You’ll get there before the war ends.’
‘When will the war end, Mr Maxted?’
‘Jim…is it going to end? Another year, 1946. You tell me, you listen to Basie’s radio.’
‘I haven’t heard the radio, Mr Maxted,’ Jim answered truthfully. Basie was far too canny to admit a Britisher into the secret circle of listeners. ‘I know the Japanese surrendered at Okinawa. I hope the war ends soon.’
‘Not too soon, Jim. Our problems might begin then. Are you still giving English lessons to Private Kimura?’
‘He isn’t interested in learning English,’ Jim had to admit. ‘I think the war’s really ended for Private Kimura.’
‘Will the war really end for you, Jim? You’ll see your mother and father again.’
‘Well…’ Jim preferred not to talk about his parents, even with Mr Maxted. The two of them had formed a longstanding partnership, though Mr Maxted did little to help Jim and rarely referred to his son Patrick or to their visits to the Shanghai clubs and bars. Mr Maxted was no longer the dapper figure who fell into swimming-pools. What worried Jim was that his mother and father might also have changed. Soon after arriving in Lunghua he heard that his parents were interned in a camp near Soochow, but the Japanese refused to consider the notion of a transfer.
They crossed the parade ground and approached the camp kitchens behind the guardhouse. Some twenty food carts and their teams were drawn up beside the serving hatch, jostling together like a crowd of rickshaws and their coolies. As Jim had estimated, he and Mr Maxted would take their place halfway down the queue. Late-comers clattered along the cinder paths, watched by hundreds of emaciated prisoners. One day during the previous week there had been no food, as a reprisal for a Superfortress raid that had devastated Tokyo, and the prisoners had continued to stare at the kitchens until late afternoon. The silence had unsettled Jim, reminding him of the beggars outside the houses in Amherst Avenue. Without thinking, he had removed his shoes and hidden them among the graves in the hospital cemetery.
Jim and Mr Maxted took their places in the queue. Outside the guardhouse a work party of British and Belgian prisoners were strengthening the fence. Two of the prisoners unwound a coil of barbed wire, which the others cut and nailed to the fencing posts. Several of the Japanese soldiers were working shoulder to shoulder with their prisoners, ragged uniforms barely distinguishable from the faded khaki of the inmates.
The object of this activity was a group of thirty Chinese camped outside the gates. Destitute peasants and villagers, soldiers from the puppet armies and abandoned children, they sat in the open road, staring at the barbed-wire gates being strengthened against them. The first of these impoverished people had appeared three months earlier. At night some of the more desperate would climb through the wire, only to be caught by the internees’ patrols. Those who survived in the guardhouse till dawn were taken down to the river by the Japanese and clubbed to death on the bank.
As they moved forward to