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By Root 5944 0

inclined to doubt it. Like everyone else he had, in his time, enjoyed a fair number of sexual dreams. Could it simply be another of these? The orang-utan, a clear symbol of male sexuality, had very likely been furnished by his own sub-conscious. The only trouble with this theory was that when he looked out of the window the symbol was still there, sprawled in the rubber tree and once more drumming idly with its fingers on its bulging abdomen … but never mind, there was no reason why it should not linger after the main vision had evaporated. He began to stride up and down, although rather weakly because of his state of exhaustion, discussing aloud with himself the implications of the strange hallucination from which he had just emerged. He must remember to mention it to Ehrendorf. No doubt the fever had heightened his sensibility, made porous the outer brickwork of his conscious mind!

Presently, though, he found himself climbing weakly back through the slit in his mosquito net, assisted by Cheong who was cooing reprovingly in Hokkien (or in Cantonese, for all Matthew knew), convinced that he had struggled out of bed in his delirium. And Matthew himself was obliged to conclude as he fell asleep again that his fever, far from subsiding, had perhaps taken a graver though not altogether unpleasant turn. But now he dreamed vividly that an old gentleman with a white beard was throwing a net over him: and he made such a good job of trussing Matthew up that for the next few hours he lay there unconscious, hardly moving a muscle. This unnatural stillness puzzled Cheong who looked in on Matthew from time to time throughout the day. But then, with ‘foreign devils’ one never knew what to expect: they were doubtless constructed on different principles from normal, beardless, small-nosed, odourless human beings like himself.

Cheong’s father and two uncles had been shipped to Singapore as indentured coolies before the turn of the century in conditions so dreadful that one of the uncles had died on the way; his father had survived the voyage but the memory of it had haunted him for the rest of his life. He had transmitted his anger to Cheong, describing to him how agents had roamed the poverty-stricken villages of South China recruiting simple peasants with promises of wealth in Malaya together with a small advance payment (sufficient to entangle them in a debt they would be unable to repay if they changed their minds), then delivered them to departure-camps known as ‘baracoons’; once there they were entirely in the power of the entrepreneur for use as cargo in his coolie-ships (each person allotted, as a rule, a space of two feet by four feet for a voyage that might take several weeks). No wonder Cheong was angry when he thought of how these simple people had been swindled and abused, of the thousands who had died like his uncle from illness or by suicide before reaching Malaya and beginning their years of servitude! But what affected him more deeply still was the knowledge that so few people in the Chinese communities of Malaya and Singapore now seemed to remember or care about the exploitation and suffering of their ancestors on these criminal voyages. These things must not be forgotten! Justice demanded that they should be known. With this in mind he had taken in the past few months the first laborious steps in educating himself at a night-school in the city, helped oddly enough by old Webb who had once, as it happened, shipped coolies himself, though only as deck-cargo with the other commodities in which he traded.

‘How strange these people are!’ he thought, looking at Matthew’s immobile form.

‘My dear chap, the way the war is going could hardly be better for us! There is no doubt about it. This time the Japanese have bitten off more than they can chew!’

It was the Major, standing beside Matthew’s bedside with a cheerful expression on his normally anxious face, who had just made this confident assertion. Matthew had just woken feeling much better after his long sleep. Dr Brownley had had a look at him and pronounced himself satisfied: