A restless languor informed their tasks; sharp scrimmage of abuse; the puncture petulance of muttered curses and chopsticks thrown to fall from table to floor; a foreshortened, cropped insolence in replies; fingers cut while chopping cabbage; privies fouled; a hen running loose and headless, spouting blood; a girl fainting at the well drawing water, and others swearing that they had seen a weed-clammy frog-faced demon with long webbed claws snatch at her, and refusing to draw water until Rosie herself bent over the eye of the well, and peered at the sparkle swinging its lacy net of light in mockery of her. ‘There is no face, only the reflection of the sky,’ said Rosie.

Then a child strayed to the privy in the iridescent heavy moonlight and the next day was ill, and the mother distraught complained that the moon devils had drained him of blood. And Mother Wu killed a chicken and muttered spells, and rubbed her magic bezoar stone (a vitreous marble with red flecks) upon his body to draw the devils out.

And then the women dreamed, and told their dreams aloud, stacked on the planks as bundles, visited by ghosts and dead ancestors and knives dripping blood, until the policewomen grew thin and nervous and huddled by twos peering in the dark, seeing devil shapes behind the canna lilies, and lurking in the blue shadows of the elongated coconut palm trees; hearing ghosts laugh among the hens.

Only two were immune, stolid and unconcerned in the mounting hysteria, Rosie Yip and Fong Kiap, jailer and jailed, each serving her destiny, both of fertile flanks and the long patience of breeders. Fong Kiap’s embroidery was adamant to disorder, and she crooned to her child ‘Oh, sayang sayang’, until Mother Wu, now come out of hospital, warned her not to call out loud her love in that soft Malay word become a Chinese word, sayang, which means beloved, lest the devils hear and take the child away. No, let her beat him and call him ugly names, that the devils may despise his flesh.

And then suddenly it was round Fong Kiap that they clustered, the crapulous with terror, the whining, the tremulous, and Mother Wu now sat by Fong Kiap hour after hour, mumbling softly. From the still core of their unconsented accord eddied billow-spreading confusion, a whirlpool of smothered chaos which sucked in all the females of the camp. Among these were:

Boh Heng, six years detained for possession of a small communist paper flag forbidden, found in a drawer. It was a flag not forbidden in 1945, when her son bought it and forgot it in the drawer, where it was found in 1949 by an informer. And now whenever her case came up for revision it was turned down, until she had accepted voluntary repatriation, a device whereby Chinese born in Malaya could choose to go to a China they had never seen.