‘Well now,’ says he to the girl, in a stiff, official voice, ‘what did you want to say to me?’
‘It’s my arms,’ replies Ah Mei. ‘I want to go to the Hospital again. The last medicine was no good.’ She holds up her arms, and round the elbows they are faintly dotted with black and mulberry marks. She says, because Lam and I are strangers: ‘They are leech and mosquito bites when I was cooking for the People Inside.’
Luke turned to me: ‘Somehow I don’t understand what the word “Communist” means to people like her. I wonder whether she really believes in anything? I wonder what was the real reason for her going Inside?’
‘Especially,’ puts in Lam, with a wilfully clever look at Ah Mei’s face, ‘especially after she has been so cooperative and sincere with you.’ All Lam’s words are triple-edged, sheathed in demulcent adjectives. All have hidden meanings. It is obvious that he thinks Luke Davis should have taken liberties with Ah Mei … and if not, what a slow-witted fool he is.
‘You mean such a good stool-pigeon,’ replies Luke; ‘what do you think, Che Ahmad?’
And Che Ahmad says without moving: ‘Don’t think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm.’
Luke turns to Ah Mei. ‘I’ll have you taken to the Hospital later. This lady,’ he points to me, ‘is a doctor, just come to Malaya. Perhaps she will have a look at your arms?’
I straighten up after a look. ‘These are just insect-bite marks. They’ll go. Does she really need to go to hospital for that?’
Luke looks at Che Ahmad, who significantly puts up his thumb. ‘Number One’s orders. You know what he’s like. Never displease valuable informers.’
‘Okay,’ says Luke resignedly, ‘let her go and waste the hospital doctor’s time, then.’
Ah Mei and I look at each other. After a while I pull my mouth together again, guilty of so much secret mirth, and she turns her head but goes on smiling, gazing away and towards the window at the now gathered storm outside. The sudden wind has three times clapped its hands among the coconut fronds, and now springs up the hill and into the room to blow her hair, and behind it large tepid drops of rain spatter in. Ah Mei smiles, happily, for of all the treats which come to her because she is such an excellent informer on her previous comrades, going about in a comfortable police car is her chief pleasure.
- Shonan: Japanese name for Singapore. ↵