Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [97]
Lounging against their vehicles, the soldiers and NCOs of the gendarmerie watched without comment. Well-fed and well-equipped, these security troops so feared by the Chinese were the strongest men whom Jim had seen during the war. Yet for once they seemed curiously unhurried. They smoked their cigarettes in the hot sunlight, gazed at the few American reconnaissance planes and made no attempt to abuse the prisoners or urge them along. Two of the trucks drove through the gates and made a circuit of the camp, collecting the patients from the hospital and those prisoners in the dormitory blocks who were too sick to move.
Jim sat on his wooden case, trying to adjust his mind and eye to the open perspectives of the world outside the camp. The act of walking without challenge through the gates had been an eerie experience, and Jim had been unnerved enough to slip back into the camp on the pretext of tying his shoelaces. Reassuring himself, he patted the wooden case containing his possessions – Latin primer, his school blazer, the Packard advertisement and the small newspaper photograph. Now that he was about to see his real mother and father he had thought of tearing up the picture of the unknown couple outside Buckingham Palace, his surrogate parents for so many years. At the last moment, as a precautionary measure, he had slipped the photograph into his box.
He listened to the crying of the exhausted children. Already people were sitting down in the road, trying to shield their faces from the swarm of flies that had vacated the camp and moved towards the sweating bodies on the other side of the wire. Jim looked back at Lunghua. The terrain of paddy fields and canals around the camp, and the road of return to Shanghai, which had been so real when observed through the fence, now seemed lurid and overlit, part of a landscape of hallucination.
Jim clenched his aching teeth, deciding to turn his back on the camp. He reminded himself of their food supplies in the godown at Nantao. It was important to remain at the head of the procession, and if possible to ingratiate himself with the two Japanese soldiers beside the staff car. Jim was considering this when an almost naked figure in ragged shorts and a pair of wooden clogs shuffled up to him.
‘Jim…I thought I’d find you here.’ Mr Maxted raised his sallow face to the sun. A fine malarial sweat covered his cheeks and forehead. He rubbed the dirt from the open spaces between his ribs, as if to expose the waxy skin to the healing light. ‘So this is what we’ve been waiting for…’
‘You haven’t brought your luggage, Mr Maxted.’
‘No, Jim. I don’t think I’ll be needing any luggage. You must find it strange out here.’
‘I don’t any more.’ Jim peered cautiously at the open fields, their endless perspectives broken only by the burial mounds, and at the secretive canals. It was as if these bored Japanese soldiers had switched off the clock. ‘Mr Maxted, do you think Shanghai will have changed?’
A faded smile, lit by the memories of happier days, briefly eased Mr Maxted’s face. ‘Jim, Shanghai will never change. Don’t worry, you’ll remember your mother and father.’
‘I was thinking of that,’ Jim admitted. His other problem was Mr Maxted. Jim had come to the head of the column, partly to be first in the queue for their rations when they reached Nantao, but also to free himself from all the duties that the camp had imposed upon him. Because he was alone he had been forced to do too many jobs, in return for favours that had rarely materialized. Clearly Mr Maxted needed help, and was hoping that he could lean on Jim.
Doggedly refusing to co-operate, Jim sat on his wooden case thinking about Mr Maxted as the architect swayed beside him. His pale hands, almost worn through by the months of pushing the food cart, hung at his sides like white flags. His bones were held together by little more than his memories of the bars and swimming-pools of a younger self.