Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [84]
‘Of course, Dr Ransome.’
‘Do you want the war to end, Jim?’ Dr Ransome often seemed doubtful about this. ‘A lot of the people here won’t last much longer. You’re keen to see your mother and father again?’
‘Yes, I am. I think about them every day.’
‘Good. Do you remember what they look like?’
‘I do remember…’ Jim hated lying to Dr Ransome, but in a sense he was thinking of the photograph of the unknown man and woman he had pinned to the wall of his cubicle. He had never divulged to the physician that these were his surrogate parents. Jim knew that it was important to keep alive the memory of his mother and father, in order to sustain his confidence in the future, but their faces had become hazy. Dr Ransome might not approve of the way in which he was tricking himself.
‘I’m glad you remember them, Jim. They may have changed.’
‘I know – they’ll be hungry.’
‘More than hungry, Jim. When the war does end everything is going to be very uncertain.’
‘So we should stay in the camp?’ Jim liked the sound of this. Too many of the prisoners talked about leaving the camp without any real idea of what would happen to them. ‘As long as we stay in Lunghua the Japanese will look after us.’
‘I’m not sure that they will. We’ve become an embarrassment to them. They can’t feed us any longer, Jim…’
So this was what Dr Ransome had been leading towards. Jim felt a quiet tiredness come over him. His long hours spent hauling the buckets of sewage, planting and watering the crops in the hospital garden, pulling the ration cart with Mr Maxted, had been part of his attempt to keep the camp going. Yet, as he had known all along, the supply of food depended on the whim of the Japanese. His own feelings, his determination to survive, counted for nothing in the end. The activity meant no more than the movement in the eyes of the Belgian woman who had seemed to come back from the dead.
‘Is there going to be any more food, Dr Ransome?’
‘We hope some will come through. The Japanese can no longer feed themselves. The American submarines…’
Jim stared at the polished toecaps of his shoes. He wanted his mother and father to see them before they died. He rallied himself, trying to summon his old will to survive. Deliberately he thought of the curious pleasure the corpses in the hospital cemetery gave him, the guilty excitement of being alive at all. He knew why Dr Ransome disliked him digging the graves.
Dr Ransome marked the exercises in the algebra textbook, and gave him two strips of rice-paper bandage on which to solve the simultaneous equations. As he stood up Dr Ransome removed the three tomatoes from Jim’s pocket. He laid them on the table by the wax tray.
‘Did they come from the hospital garden?’
‘Yes.’ Jim gazed frankly at Dr Ransome. Recently he had begun to see him with a more adult eye. The long years of imprisonment, the constant disputes with the Japanese, had made this young physician seem middle-aged. Dr Ransome was often unsure of himself, as he was of Jim’s theft.
‘I have to give Basie something whenever I see him.’
‘I know. It’s a good thing that you’re friends with Basie. He’s a survivor, though survivors can be dangerous. Wars exist for people like Basie.’ Dr Ransome placed the tomatoes in Jim’s hand. ‘I want you to eat them, Jim. I’ll get you something for Basie.’
‘Dr Ransome…’ Jim searched for some way of reassuring him. ‘If we told Sergeant Nagata about the thousand-yard range…the Japanese wouldn’t shoot down any more planes, but they might give us some food…?’
Dr Ransome smiled for the first time. He unlocked the medicine cabinet and from a steel cash box he removed two rubber condoms.
‘Jim, you’re a pragmatist. Give these to Basie, he’ll have something for you. Now eat your tomatoes and go.’
26
The Lunghua Sophomores
‘We’re the Lunghua Sophomores,
We’re the girls every boy adores,
C.A.C. don’t mean a thing to me,
For every Tuesday evening we go on a spree…’
As he crossed the parade ground towards E Block, Jim paused to watch the Lunghua Players rehearsing their