The Fan Tan Players, page 33
Three days later the Japanese held their victory parade. Two thousand Imperial Army soldiers, led by Lt. Gen. Sakai on a white horse, marched through the streets from Victoria to Happy Valley. On January 3rd, Iain together with 2800 other British, American and Dutch nationals were ordered to gather themselves at the Murray Road parade ground. From here, they marched the eight long miles to Stanley peninsula.
Iain’s thoughts were interrupted by the sudden sound of loud voices. Six guards burst into the room. Stepney tried to scramble out of bed but lost his balance and fell. One of the Formosans held Stepney to the floor as another brought the butt of his rifle down on Mr. Yorkie, crushing its little head.
Iain sat up and held his arms out in self-defence, but the guards grabbed him by the hair and pulled him through the door. He felt a boot thud into his ribs. He tried to work out what was happening, why he was being dragged away, and then he realized that they were taking him towards the Indian quarters. Suddenly, he remembered Hoarde’s words see you by the India hut and with a wave of anger he knew how he’d been betrayed.
Seconds later, he stood before a mound of freshly excavated earth. The radio that they’d buried was in pieces and sitting on the top soil. In the shadows he saw a man with a beard hovering, a look of triumph flashing in his eyes. ‘‘Hoarde, what the hell have you done?’’ he yelled. ‘‘Hoarde!’’
10
Nadia spent a miserable night in the hills. She was expecting Father Luke to pick her up at eight o’clock, but that was still two hours away. At daybreak the storm clouds shook the trees with thunder. Under a steady downpour, American B25s and P-40s flew in off the coast heading towards Victoria harbour. Within minutes the barrage from the anti-aircraft guns could be heard in the distance, followed by the flattening whoomp and budung of exploding bombs.
Cheeks wet from the rain, Nadia, with the mountains as her backdrop, watched the internees from a treetop perch. She looked though her spyglass. The men and women were marching in a line, queuing for their breakfast, mostly barefoot, wearing old vests and scarves as headgear to keep out the rain. Some sagged, unable to get their breath; a few squatted down to rinse their utensils in the rain puddles or in billycans; the rest remained erect, like flimsy saplings, dull-eyed yet resilient as the weather washed over them. Instinctively, a few ducked each time an Allied pilot flew overhead. Once in a while a Formosan guard fired a potshot into the sky.
With the American air raids concentrating on the Wanchai district, Nadia began to wonder what prevented the B25s from dropping bombs onto Stanley itself. After all, it was positioned next to a military barracks. Shouldn’t the internees have painted white crosses on their roofs? And why, she looked on in sudden horror, were there machine gun platforms on top of the old colonial gaol? Didn’t international law forbid the use of anti-aircraft fire from within internment camps?
Nadia put the spyglass away and stood up.
Her mind scampered. The whoomp and budung in the distance carried on unabated. She pursed her lips. Her eyes locked on a black finger of billowing smoke across the water. A terrifying premonition struck her like the haunting splinters of a dream. The bombs were falling like raindrops.
Some of the internees placed bets on how long Sutherland would last this time; one Dutchman offered 2-to-1 odds that he might survive the week; some wagered whole tins of creamed corn that he’d be dead by the morning. It was rumoured that Hoarde had been offered his freedom by the new commandant; sanctuary for revealing the whereabouts of the all-important wireless. The internees had yet to learn that Hoarde’s head had been removed from his shoulders an hour after first light – punishment for being an uragiminomo, a snitch – and his body thrown off the cliff.
Up in the sky the crows cawed and flew in predatory circles. Bits of Hoarde’s stringy guts were dangling from their crimson beaks.
The door was sealed with a wooden latch. On the narrow altar table, Iain made out a set of scalpels and rubber tubes. The light from the oil lamp licked the darkness.
Using a pulley, they hung him by his hands from the ceiling. Arms tethered above his head with binder twine, they hoisted him aloft. His dangling feet were bound, coated up to the ankles with molasses; in the recesses behind his knees they attached sharpened chopsticks, preventing him from drawing up his legs.
Below him, a metal oil drum, where inside, a knot of ravenous, busy rats threw themselves against the slippery-steel inner-lining.
The pulley block creaked as they relaxed the rope and began to lower him into the oil drum. He began to grunt and struggle.
‘‘Save your strength,’’ said Takashi, seated in a Meiji dragon chair. ‘‘You are going to need it.’’ He was smiling. ‘‘Many years ago, you remember? You found a man in the sewers wiss his foot eaten away?’’
‘‘You can’t do this. The Geneva Convention states – ’’
‘‘You are a spy, Mr. Suzzerland. We found you wiss a radio. Yamashita-san, my predecessor, naturally had no knowledge of dis, but I’ve kept files on you for some time now. I can do anysing I want to you.’’
The rats became a jumbled gnarl of black matted hair. They sprang like leaping fish, yellow teeth gnashing. The vibrations made by their clawed toes passed over the room.
‘‘I also know,’’ Takashi continued, ‘‘about you having an ally outside of the camp. A girl dressed as a priest, no less.’’
‘‘That’s pure nonsense.’’
‘‘I can assure you she will be dealt wiss too. But first maybe I will let my guards have some fun wiss her, no?’’
Iain lowered his eyes, saw his toes begin to creep down towards the rim of the barrel. Now, he could see their shiny black marbles staring up at him. The rats could smell the molasses and climbed onto their hind legs, baring their razor blade fangs. The rope groaned. He tried to sway his body, tried to dislodge the knot that bound his wrists together, but the twine held; the fastening was too secure.
The rats jumped, snapping wildly at the air. They clawed at him but his toes were still just a few inches out of reach. He watched a rat’s mouth quickly open and close. Seconds later it leapt again.
Iain’s body tensed.
His ankles crashed loudly against the sides of the drum.
Nadia flinched at the sound of bombs falling and to the shboom of artillery fire to the east, angry and muffled. Once in a while the sky juddered and popped with a powder-cloud of black smoke. Not convinced she could see everything from her perch, she climbed off the tree and crawled under the palm fronds to see the reddening dawn and an American P-40, its tiger shark mouth aglint, spraying ships with tracer fire. Higher up, a B25 was dropping 500-lbers onto the Japanese Naval Headquarters across the harbour.
Flattening herself against the tall grass, Nadia grabbed her spyglass and watched the fighter twist and spin from its ground attackers, its single engine howling as it made dive after dive. Within moments, the P-40 was joined by a twin and the pair of fighter planes, dancing and swerving, peppered the ships with their payload.
Nadia watched, transfixed, a lump of fear in her throat. This is not good, she said to herself, not good. She looked down towards the camp and saw the internee children being ushered into F Block, while the Sikh guards fired their rifles into the mackerel sky.
Suddenly, there was a new and terrible noise, much closer than the others. Nadia lowered the spyglass and saw a number of Japanese soldiers gathered at the machine gun platform at the top of the prison roof. They were firing at the planes.
It took the P-40 pilots some seconds to realize they were under attack from a fresh position. They pivoted, flew low, and poured a stream of 7.9mm shells into the prison walls.
The machine-gun battery on the roof kept firing.
‘‘Bawzhemoy,’’ said Nadia. ‘‘They don’t know it’s an internee camp.’’
She watched in horror as the P-40s climbed and lifted into the red skies.
Seconds later, a team of soldiers were pulling an anti-aircraft gun into the garrison forecourt.
‘‘Bawzhemoy,’’ Nadia repeated, shaking her head.
The soldiers hoisted the type 88 75mm AA Gun into position.
Before she could stop herself, Nadia was on her feet, running down the hill.
She was seventy yards from the camp. Fifty. Twenty yards now. The P-40s wheeled round, ready for another flyby.
Fingers outstretched, she began gesticulating at the planes, swatting at them to stop. Her hands grasped at air.
She could see the P-40s coming in low, off the Tai Tam Bay, a hundred and fifty feet above the trees, flying through a cloud of flak.
The AA Gun opened fire.
Its blasts shook the earth beneath her feet.
The P-40s loomed, shark-teeth snarling, coming in quick and shallow. Nose-mounted machine guns rattled off, shuddering the air. Nadia saw the fitted bombs detach themselves from the underwing racks. The bombs spiralled, spinning out of the cloudless blue like ospreys diving for eels. There was a low, inhaled whistle. Triple plumes of smoke.
The bombs smashed into the camp and its prison buildings. The explosions rocked the ground. Nadia’s stomach, chest, soul emptied. The world broke apart before her eyes.
Lumps of earth and airborne dirt rained from the sky. The force of the explosion lifted Nadia off her feet and threw her to the ground, ripping through her like a thermal surge of solid air. She wanted to get up quickly, but found that her head was spinning and the breath had been snatched from her chest. She blinked, blinked again, suddenly realizing that everything had gone horribly quiet. No machine-gun fire, no crump of bombs, nothing at all. Instead there was a sharp restless hissing in her ears, a thick white noise cutting off sound.
Neck and shoulder muscles rigid, she tried to stand again but toppled over from the rippling shockwaves. Frantic, she got herself upright and as her ringing ears began to clear she heard again the whoomp and budung of the 500lb bombs and the stuttered pounding of the AA Gun. The image of the prison building breaking apart, shooting up smoke and dust and debris, followed by the fireball and the razor-sharp blanket of heat came flooding back to her.
She shook her head to get rid of the paralysis cottonwooling her brain and within seconds was running down the hill again. Sprinting with her eyes down against the sun’s glare, she crossed the road, passing the screen of blue hydrangea. At the camp gates one of the gate sentries was sitting, his back to her. His head was blown off. The other guard was nowhere to be seen. She rattled the double gates but they wouldn’t budge. The barriers were drawn shut.
‘‘Open up!’’ she shouted and began struggling with the barrier again, hoping it would yield. It wouldn’t budge. She tried to bypass the lock and crawl underneath the metal frame, but got stuck halfway and had to pull herself back out again. ‘‘Come on, you bloody thing, open!’’ she cried, kicking at the fence with her heel.
Slowly, Nadia realized there was no way through. But then, seconds after, she began to make out a ring-ding-dang noise coming from behind the trees. It was the clanging bells of the garrison fire truck making its way up the hill. She went and hid in the undergrowth.
Moments later she followed the fire truck through the double gates and into the camp, circling the forecourt. Trees were on fire. Bodies lay burning. The heat was unbearable; it felt as though the sun had opened its mouth.
Sheets of white ash covered everything. Her eyes began to sting from the saltpeter. She ran her sleeve over her face, puffing. It was hard to breathe.
Down the slope, a quarter mile to the south, Nadia saw the soldiers from the Japanese garrison pouring out from their digs. Some were in their uniforms, others were half-naked, dressed in their fundoshi – sparse little loin cloths. They were shooting blindly into the sky.
A man raced past her, arms raised to protect his head. She chased after him. ‘‘Iain Sutherland,’’ she shouted into his ear. ‘‘Where is he?’’
‘‘This way,’’ the man replied, squinting as aircraft bullets peppered the building opposite. The man didn’t stop running. He stretched out his hand and she took it. They arrived in C and D Block.
Nadia looked up towards the second-floor of C Block. There was no sign of people being inside and the windows had been blown out. ‘‘Iain!’’ she cried. She wiped the sweat off her face with the back of her hand. She tried again, ‘‘Iain!’’ She pushed through the door regardless. In the darkness she could make out that the staircase had fallen in, battering a crater in the floorboards big enough to fit a lorry. She cupped her fingers and called through them ‘‘Iain!’’ she shouted, but nothing stirred. She groped about in the darkness for a while but found nothing. There could have been trapped bodies in there, but she had no way of telling. Nadia retreated outside, unsure where else to look.
Nadia began to despair. She knew Iain was hurt, she could sense it, feel it in her bones. ‘‘Iain Sutherland!’’ she cried. ‘‘I’m looking for Iain Sutherland!’’ She pummelled the wall with the flat of her hand in frustration.
‘‘They all got out,’’ said someone to her left. A group of people were helping to console a few of the survivors of B Block, kneeling on the muddied ground wrapping wounds.
‘‘I’m looking for Iain Sutherland,’’ she said again.
‘‘Have you tried the prison?’’ A voice replied from behind. It was one of the female internees helping with the wounded. ‘‘I heard he was taken by the guards this morning.’’ Nadia felt a wave of hope replace her exhaustion and fear. ‘‘You’d better prepare yourself,’’ the woman continued. ‘‘A bomb hit it a few minutes ago.’’ Nadia’s hope dissolved.
Her pulse rate rocketing, she reached the prison enclosure. An inferno was still blazing two buildings away; bodies were being dragged through windows and down ladders, most of them lifeless, asphyxiated from smoke. She heard the fires spit and pop. A horrid fear gripped the base of Nadia’s throat. ‘‘Let me through!’’ She yelled, pushing hard, getting nowhere. ‘‘My husband is inside! LET ME THROUGH!’’
A few people breached the shattered building, racing through the gap. Nadia shoved past the melee and clambered over the rubble. Masonry broke off in her hands. She feared the building might collapse around her. The east and north walls of the jail had crumpled, its square roof erased. As Nadia took in the wreckage she saw prison cells blown open by bombs, blackened limbs sprawled all over the place, a man dangling from a telephone wire.
A metallic voice came through what sounded like a tannoy system. It was a Japanese guard speaking in English through a funnel-shaped loudhailer. He was giving orders, urging people to stay out of the prison compound, warning of the dangers of exposed gas lines and falling debris. She was fighting back tears now, desperate.
She peered through countless ironwork windows. A pall of smoke and brick-dust shrouded everything. Water gushed over the floor from a splintered main. It was hard to breathe. He’ll be fine, she told herself, he’ll be a little bruised, but fine. She pushed aside scorched brick and stone, searching from room to room, trusting her instincts, all the time reaching, stumbling, sweeping the dirt from her eyes. From somewhere she heard a cry of pain. It came to her with a far-away thinness. Then a distraught voice was screaming, ‘‘I’m coming, darling! I’m coming!’’ Only later did she realize these were her own frantic cries.
Inside a cubicle at the end of a long corridor, she found a metal oil drum, a few mangled rats, some burning embers. And in a puddle of black blood, like an upturned waterspider, there lay a severed hand. She shrank back.
She was standing at the edge of the bomb rubble, peering into the darkness of the smoke-filled room. Papers and documents lay scattered, flying about with every gust of wind. Nadia turned slowly and saw a body covered in ash. His limbs were drawn across at odd angles, like a dead dog on the side of the road. Cautiously, she rolled the body onto its front and saw the face of a Japanese guard. She let out her breath.
A moment later a shadow twitched in the corner of the room and she thought saw something move. A foot, followed by a knee and a darkly stained thigh, slipped in and out of the gloom. It was a man.
He was lying motionless on the floor, his blackened face facing away from her. There were glossy pools of debris all around him, red as printer’s dye.
Drawing the cassock above her shins, she knelt down, wiped her hands on her front and pulled at the man carefully. His back was sticky and slick with blood. She tried to turn him over. His left arm was missing, blown off just below the shoulder. She shuddered. A swirl of wind nudged his hair. She caught her breath.
It was Iain.
Where her fingers touched, his body was as warm as her hand; he was still breathing. Nadia removed her cassock and began to tear the fabric into long strips. She drew the sleeve of his shirt back. When she saw the exposed bone, she pressed the cloth to the stub of his arm. The purple flesh was mutilated and ripped above the elbow.
Despite the pressing she’d made he continued to bleed profusely. With the cassock now soaking, Nadia began removing the obi sash which was wrapped round her breasts. Soon her hands were drenched to the wrist-bones. Hastily, she made a tourniquet and folded swathe after swathe over the wound, six layers thick, coiling it tight. Then she found a short stick and tied it to the tourniquet with a square knot; she twisted the stick until the bleeding subsided. In the darkness Iain’s face looked gaunt and his skin pale, as thin and fragile as volcanic ash. Fastening the stick securely in place, she rolled him very cautiously onto his front and turned his head towards her. ‘‘Iain,’’ she pleaded, ‘‘Iain, look at me. You have to wake up.’’ His breath came in small bursts. ‘‘Iain!’’ she repeated.
