The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [616]
‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged. ‘Perhaps secret society?’
‘D’you think that was the Singapore Grip?’
But Vera shook her head, smiling. She found his question so entertaining that her impatience with Matthew melted away.
All the booths were full. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to take Matthew back to where she lived. They set out once more into the warm darkness of the city and as they went along Vera tried to prepare him for the shock of seeing the tenement where she lived which was not far from the river at New Bridge Road. Presently, they were standing in front of it. She sighed at the smell of drains and the peeling paint and the huddled shapes you had to step over as you climbed the stairs, by no means sure that she had not made a mistake in bringing Matthew here. How sweet-smelling the air of Tanglin was by comparison! Thank heaven that at least she did not have to share her cubicle with several other people like her neighbours!
Still wondering about the Singapore Grip Matthew followed her along what he supposed must be a corridor, but a corridor in which people evidently made their homes; he found himself stepping over an ancient man with a face like a road map, asleep on the stairs over a pipe with a long metal stem. There was no light to speak of, just one naked bulb at the head of the stairs and a slender shaft of moonlight from a window in the distance … but there was enough to see the darker lumps of darkness that lay in neat rows along the walls on each side. He knew instantly, without knowing how he knew, which of these bundles were property and which were people. There was a smell in the air, too, besides the smell of drains that Vera was worried about … he recognized it, a vaguely smoky smell, as of smouldering rubbish or rags, the smell of poverty.
These walls on each side, however, proved not to be walls at all, but merely flimsy wooden partitions. Originally this floor had comprised perhaps three or four large rooms, but in order to maximize the rent from it the landlord had subdivided it into a vast number of cubicles not much bigger than cupboards, separated from the corridor by hanging clothes or bead curtains. Matthew peered into some of these dark receptacles as he passed by, but one had to go carefully for fear of treading on the hand or face of an exhausted coolie who had slumped out into your path: in one of them a little old lady with her hair in a bun was on her knees, muttering prayers in front of a scroll of red ideographs with red candles and joss-sticks smouldering beside her; in another a family was grouped around a blue flame eating rice. Someone was coughing wearily nearby, a long, wretched, tubercular cough, the very sound of resignation or despair. So this was what life was like here!
Vera’s cubicle, by comparison with the others, was comfortable: it was at the end of the corridor not far from where the only tap dripped into a bucket and it shared half a window with the next cubicle. It was very small (Matthew could have crossed it in one stride) but neat and had a little furniture: the iron bed which for Vera symbolized her Russian ancestry, a table made from the door of a wardrobe resting on a tea-chest, on which, in turn, rested a mirror and a few little bottles of cosmetics. There was an oil-lamp and a Primus stove; biscuit-coloured tatami covered the floor. The clothes passed on to her by Joan hung beside the window (her Chinese clothing had been packed away in mothballs under the bed) with a pair of wooden clogs and a pair of leather shoes neatly arranged beneath them. On the