The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
Singapore is swollen. It is bursting with people. There is an embarrassment of people. Una, who has now had almost twenty years to get used to the day-to-day bustle of the place, is astonished. She has stood in the market throng check-by-jowl with any number of vendors and customers, all of them shouting, clamouring, haggling. It is normal for the clack-clack of the abacus beads to be almost inaudible to the visitor, the untrained ear. Un's ear is far from untrained, but these days she cannot hear the clack-clack of those abacus beads over the preternatural hubbub of more voices than ever before.
Una knows well the mixed smells of spices, curried noodles, banana fruits and live chickens. She has seen flower sellers dive out of the way of herds of piglets and pigeons weave through ankles and walk across slippered feet as nothing. She is used to the constant din, the ringing of any number of church and temple bells, gongs and all sorts. But she has never seen or heard the heart of Singapore like this.
This is different. This is not like that. When Una goes to the market she fights her way forward, her basket a weapon to clear space. Sometimes this works. Sometimes she stays exactly where she is, her wicker basket taking up the space that does not exist between her and the man next to her in his banana-hat. Everyone who can get to Singapore is coming to Singapore. They do this because now that the Japanese are in Malaysia the British have begun a series of strategic withdrawals.
They aren't going away, they say. No, the British army is regrouping. Una hopes that in the course of regrouping they find better planes than the Buffalo Brewsters to tangle with the zero-planes. Thinking this feels disloyal to Papatee, who lows forlornly whenever the zeros fly overhead. It's as if he knows the planes that are named after him are too slow and lumbering. As if he is apologising for the failure of a machine he did not make and never asked to share a name with.
She says to Papatee, perhaps in apology, perhaps for something to say, 'The problem with you is that you were named after a butterfly. You're all fine-wrought gentility.'
Papatee, understanding, huffs a buffalo-breathe, warm and moist and seems to say that when the world is at war there are worse things to be than butterfly-wrought and gentle in the face of war. Walter flashes across Una's mind's eye, also bone-gentle with his poet's soul and feline grace. But then Papatee's outsized nose snuffles, warm and placid against Una's middle and she finds the buffalo-truth easier to believe, because surely if everyone were like Papatee, they would not now be at war. Would not be safeguarding Iris's childhood against zero-planes or their food stores against invading masses.
At any rate, Singapore is swollen with people and they have a problem. This happens because even before landing in the jungles of Malaysia, the Japanese shell Johor. They are after the water supply there, and this is not an immediate problem to Una at Trinity House, because Singapore has its own water supply.
Una knows this not because of a sudden and keen interest in hydraulics but because the newspaper blasted it at her just below the article on the strategic withdrawals. Singapore has its own reservoir and under normal circumstances it can negotiate the bustling, hustling, rustling throng that depends on it. The problem is that normal circumstances are dead. Normal circumstances are daily bombed out of existence. It is becoming a normal circumstance to scan the skyline for the blue-banded dragonfly of the zero-plane, to breathe the dust of the bombings. Normal to walk, not through long dappled grass but through the remnants of the docks, of the military institutions, going softly, softly so as not to be cut by the glass, or the burnt and fallen telephone wires. They lie on the road like dead fingers and smell acrid in the dust-heavy air.
Yesterday, coming back from the battle with the market, a man Una buys loose leaf tea from on occasion lunged for her arm and begged her to find out if there was anywhere his asthmatic wife could go to breathe easier. He says he tried asking officials but no one would listen to him, this lined and leathery man who serves tea to Una and Li in white-and-blue china teapots and does not condemn the friendship. A rare breed. The only man with a teashop so hospitable. He tells Una how the officials would not listen to him but he knew Una did mission work, so perhaps if she asks… Una promises to can she not, confronted with years of kindness and generosity between them? But she thinks the best thing is to go into the hills, and the hills are dangerous. She feels sick about this. Sicker that Evelyn Road cannot offer this stranger's wife respite the way it once did all those stranded ACS children. But the dust is coming to Evelyn Road these days too. The air is fogged with it. It drifts on the wind as leaves do, and swirls as graceful as any hummingbird. So that is no good.
No, normal circumstances are dead and now the reservoir is catering not only to the thronging masses but also to the stranded, hungry and displaced who arrive by the hundreds each morning.
They begin to ration water. The dust of the air seeps into Una's skin and makes it papery. It gets under her fingers and into Akela's fur. Papatee is no better, though Nenni does her best to clean him. Iris, always running riot with Puck in the streets, covers herself with it. Her games among the rubble of the bomb-sites exacerbate this. But they do not bathe. None of them.
This is not particular to Trinity House. All across the city pipes crack. Taps fracture. Fissures split reliable pumps. The strain of the zero-planes is telling even on their overtaxed water system. Still the Japanese shell Johor for its water.
As they shell, the rumours increase. The British are coming back. They are coming back with bigger and better planes. They are coming back with an army three times the size of the Japanese army. They will bring unsinkable boats and shells of their own. Una, breathing the competing scents of guavas and bread as she queues outside the bakery, thinks it is like listening to the ACS children competing to tell the best story. She's certain the British will come back, but she has lived through one war and thinks its unlikely they will amass all the forces of the universe to save little Singapore overnight. They will do it in stages, probably, with more strategic withdrawals. That is what Susan Baker would say, if Susan Baker were not dead but with Una in the bakery queue in Singapore.
The causeway falls. At first, for one, long, glorious moment when the canon sounds, they think it is their victory. That the British have come through in their hour of need and now the Japanese have been driven out. But then word comes that it is their causeway, the one to Singapore, in the hands of the Japanese. The turn from relief to terror is dizzying. Una looks at Li and mutely inquires, What now? Iris and Puck are playing chess under the noonday sun, blissfully unconcerned.
What now is that they are alone with the Japanese. Cut off from the world. The British, who promised to protect them, have exploded the causeway and left little Singapore in enemy hands while they regroup. Una did not know she could feel fury so searing. It hisses and spits under her skin like a neglected kettle, like a cat with it's back to the wall. Which, Una supposes, after a fashion, she is.
What now is that Iris must not know of this fury, this calamity, this catastrophe of epic proportions. She must be safe and secure with the freedom to grow as she can. So, Una tempers her fury. She pours it into the piano, swapping Dvorjack's Gypsy Songs for Biblical, the guttural wail of Hear My Prayer, Hear Me O Lord, cathartic under Una's fingers. Psalms always were the place where you could get angry with God. Sheep May Safely Graze becomes Mozart's Requiem, the Dies Irae a spiky, jagged thing like knives. Previously Una would have said Mozart was dangerously catholic. She understands now, the raging fury of so many aggrieved souls. Grieving souls.
Desperate, Una resorts to Berg, to Wozceck. Una loathes Wozceck. Always has. It sounds like cut glass, like gnashing teeth. It is music to rend your soul too, all sharp angles and atonality. It splits the heavens in jagged, fraying pieces. You could slice your fingers open playing Berg, Una often says. This seems right, given the circumstances.
Una plays quieter, but still furious, Ravel's string quartet in F major, the second movement. On piano, unpeddled it sounds at least as staccato as the strings, its tremors the same tremors that jangle and jar Una's nerves. But then she looks at Iris and lets the music dip sweet and low and serpent-sinuous into It Ain't Necessarily So, which has the grace to sound poised while, in fact, the music slithers and slides like an invading army, like a protector crawling away on it's stomach, like an unpalatable truth no one can bring themselves to swallow. She lets the music improvise its way up to waling B flats and into harmonic dissonances that are as interesting as they are discordant, all while Iris and Puck listen, rapt. Sometimes they dance, and Una likes that best, because seeing them like that lets her forget the causeway exploded and they are alone in the world.
When Una looks at Li, she sees Li is doing this too, in her way. Turning her fish-encircled ruby round and round, over and over between her fingers, touching Kuan Yin's lucky head, playing majong with Puck. Even Carl is too angry to be adequately absent-minded. He keeps vigil over them, and he sees that Puck and Akela do it too, and Una feels the weight of it like a comforter but also like an anchor, because it is too heavy and the wrongness of it, of Carl immediate and present and noticing things, makes it feel heavier still.
What now is that they begin to stockpile water. They've been rationing it for what seems a lifetime now, using it only for drinking and cooking. But when Singapore tumbles from British rule that changes. Everywhere pipes crack and fissure. When Una turns the tap in the days before surrender, the water tumbles out, brown and contaminated. The Japanese have not yet got to the Johore water supply, so there is still water, but the bombs take their toll on the Singaporean reservoir, which is anyway working overtime. They boil the water, the kettle always making its whst-whst noise in the kitchen. The mynas learn to copy it. They alternate All My Hope on God is Founded with the whst-whst kettle sound.
Una thinks of Walter and his scant letters, how he wrote once that if you could hear a shell you were doomed. How the rumours ran that shells sounded like boiling kettles. Una wonders how one tells the difference. Perhaps, she thinks, you don't. Perhaps every cup of tea, precious and liquid-gold, is the precursor to a minor apocalypse.
Una, Li and Carl run and run the taps, filling the bath, the sink, the bathroom sink. The water rumbles, plash-plash-splash. When the water tumbles against the porcelain of the tub or the steel basin of the kitchen sink it sounds like Babel coming down around their ears. Or perhaps the beginning of Noah's flood. Iris is beside herself with glee and Puck is, too. He plashes and splashes, splish-splash in the water they are trying to hoard – Isn't this fun? He splashes Iris, who splashes back and soon there is as much water on the floor as in the tub.
The first Una hears about this it is in the scolding Li, white faced and livid, is giving monkey and daughter. Una is feeding the hens at the time. They come out of their kitchen cupboard quarters to bustle and rustle and cluck at her feet, these beautifully sleek white hens with red ruffs. Una shells meal for them and they pluck it, sometimes pecking Una's shoes in error. It smells dusty and of grain, and also of chickens and the nearby tea leaves. A peculiar blend, Una's kitchen, but hers, and sacred.
Then there is a shriek. It is not the gleeful shriek of Puck, nor even Iris's triumphal yell. Una hears it and goes rigid, wonders if murder has been committed. At her feed the hens puff themselves up like balloons and stand there swollen and indignant that dinner is disturbed.
Una drops the meal – cue avian glee – and takes the stairs two at a time. This is not ladylike, but they are in the middle of a disaster so that stopped mattering months ago.
'What were you thinking?' Li says. Una has never heard her like this. 'Do you have any idea what you are doing? What you've done?'
At the bathroom door it dawns on Una that she has rarely seen Li this way. She bristles when they pass a Japanese-run store, and she hisses when passers-by offer judgement on their family, but the white lividity of her as she surveys Puck and Iris is new.
Puck, aware of this, has his arms around Iris. She burrows into Puck, trying to make herself invisible. Both child and monkey are sopping wet, the mat on the floor mottled and blood-black with damp.
Una touches a hand to Li's elbow. Truthfully, though, when she looks at the mess and the waste, the water seeping like overzealous darkling blood onto the floor, she understands. They have heard too much about what happened in China. They live in dread that one day the Japanese will bomb the water supply, and then what will they do, Li, Carl, Iris, Una?
Never mind Puck and the animals. What will they drink? Certainly they won't bathe. They don't bathe as it is. The smell of coconut oil and orchids is a remnant of another lifetime, a sensory tie to the days before the war. Una looks at the water and feels her own hysteria bubbling at low ebb, some internal kettle coming to rise. It's all right for Una. For Li and Carl. They can die of dehydration if it protects their girl. This is the silent, immutable truth of Trinity house.
This is the other.
Iris cannot die.
Una cannot let her die. None of the adults can.
So, Una looks at the gaping wound of the wasted water and feels anger, irrational maybe, but knife-slick and sun-heart-hot threaten. She checks it. Breaths through her nose and counts to ten, to twenty, to fifty. Li is angry enough for both of them.
'Iris,' says Una in warning, 'come out of there now.'
It is important, Una thinks, that they be united in this. Una came upstairs to assess the situation, not to stage an intervention for Iris. Iris looks at Una and Una looks back into wide, beseeching almandine eyes.
'Auntie,' she says, 'we were only playing.'
'Now,' says Una.
Iris trots reluctantly forward, Puck dogging her every step. Beside her, Una feels Li returning to normal, the storm that ruffled the pool of her usual placidity passing.
'You have enough toys without making your own,' she says to Iris.
'But,' says Iris, 'it was there and –'
'No, Iris,' says Una. She edges into the bathroom and kneeling on the damp floor, reaches for the faucet of the bath. Begins to run the water again. Plash-plash-splash goes the end of the world.
'This is important,' she says and turns to look at Iris. She puts years of teaching experience into that look. It is her best and most infamous Do as I've told you and to the letter look. In the ACS playground it has its own student impression. A great compliment.
'The water is not for playing with. Understand?'
There is a long, terse silence in which Iris looks between mother and aunt. She is the image of a drowned rat and Puck is no better. It's an effective look; it pulls on Una and makes her want to extend her arms and cuddle the girl. Wrap her in a thick, woollen towel and feed her a cup of chocolate. Certainly it smothers the rising temperature of her temper. She checks the instinct. Reaches for and holds onto if not her anger then the immovable truth that Iris mustn't die. Sees, out of the corner of her eye, Li do the same. Iris says nothing.
'Understand?' says Li.
Iris, eyes on the floor now, with its dark blooms of water, says, 'Yes. I understand. We won't do it again.'
'Puck will,' says Una, but she is less severe this time. Iris senses this, she sees, and seizes the opening. 'I'll make sure he doesn't, Auntie,' she says and offers her best, most charming smile. Li, Una always says, smiles like a waterlily, delicate and slow blooming. Iris smiles with abandon, like a firework breaking across the night sky. It is an irresistible smile. A coruscation of joy. Harder hearts than Una's can and will, no doubt, succumb to it.
'Come here, Firecracker,' Una says and holds out her arms.
Thwap, thwap, flap goes Iris's dress as she runs barefoot and sodden back into the bathroom and barrels into Una's outstretched arms. This has the effect of making Una also damp but she doesn't mind. She would hang the moon for this child and they all of them know it. Opposite Una, Li shakes her head. But then she comes, cat-silent and graceful across the wet floor and joins them.
'I'm sorry,' says Iris fuzzily into Una's chest.
'Mama's sorry, too,' says Li and touches a hand to Iris's dark, damp head. 'I should never have got so angry. It's hard, little one, very hard at the moment. But that's not your fault.'
'Is it because of the bombs?' says Iris.
Una shivers. This is not because the girl in her arms is soggy and making Una soggier by the second with it. Such potent words from such a little mouth. Little pitchers have big ears, the adults said in bygone days of Una and her contemporaries. Una hugs Iris harder than she intends and prays, sudden and fierce as an arrow mid-flight, God, let her keep her childhood.
'Yes, Firecracker,' says Li and nestles deeper into their triumvirate hug. 'It's because of the bombs, and the war and…' But there is too much to tell it all. Una understands. Because you must not die, Firecracker. Not like this. Not here.
Puck, annoyed at being left alone in the hallway, comes clattering over the floor and hops, uninvited onto Una's shoulder, ensuring she will now be soaked through. No matter.
'I promise,' says Iris, 'to be very good from now on, Mama, Auntie. Forever and always and ever. I won't do another bad thing.'
The women trade smiles over her head. This is made awkward for Una by the fact of a grey, impish monkey on her shoulder, dripping water down the collar of her gown.
'And I promise Puck won't either.'
It's too much. Laughter threatens.
'Forever,' says Una, 'is a long time, Firecracker.'
Li says as she pulls Iris close, 'And anyway, you won't do that at all. You're going to go on exactly as you are, little Firecracker. Forever and always. Promise?'
Iris looks up at Li, and then at Una, and considers this. 'Forever,' she says, 'is a very long time, Mama. Auntie says so.'
Carl's smile and Carl's cheek, Una thinks and tries to shake her head. Puck makes this an impossibility. He's too close on Una's shoulder, closer than air. She cannot turn her head without him batting her.
'Promise?' says Li to her daughter.
Iris, still all imp, says, 'And Puck, too? Can he go on the same as always forever and ever?'
'Well,' says Una, 'let's not get ahead of ourselves.'
Li does laugh. Beautiful, fluted laughter like a windchime. 'Puck, too,' she says.
'Promise,' says Iris.
'Promise,' says Li.
That is not how it happens, as it turns out. Puck, in time, becomes so much more than the mischief-loving, havoc-causing fairy he was named for. Una does not know this. Neither does Li. Neither does Puck.
Parnokianlipstic - Very glad I swapped the poem with a response like this. Originally it was The Magi, but I love this one too, and wanted something less spiky. There really is something rare and wonderful about homemade gifts. I had an aunt that kept me in dressEs and Halloween costumes and doll clothes for years. She had no girls, so I think I was sort of her adopted daughter, so she's a significant influence on Una. I can on,y do the detail work, like embroidery - completely impractical but very lovely! But im reminded too, writing Una's handcraft of an old quilting tradition of stitching a prayer into each stitch, which feels very much what happens with that dress for Iris.
I'm glad Carl works. I always have fun rounding him out and here I really get the sense these three adults are a bit of a balancing act. Take any one of them out of the equation and the dynamic would shift dramatically. (I'm also delighted Fringe and Walter made sense as a reference! I have exactly one person I can talk it's wonderful, universe breaking love stories with!) And in a world full if adversity, love through gifts and these little quiet moments of togetherness seems to be his thing.
All the Singapore writing is heavily influenced by memoirs. It lends itself in all of them go surprising lyricism. But I know what you mean. I've had to work to remember to age this family, because usually when we're in Singapore it's cosy and interwar!