The family swallowed their morning rice, shovelling it with chopsticks into their mouths. Neo Saw fed the babies spoonfuls of rice, and later spoonfuls of muddy black coffee streaked with condensed milk. Neo put on his black tapper clothes, stiff with spilt latex. Neo Saw, baby hanging fast to her, knotted her sweat cloth round her head. They took their tapping knives, wheeled their bicycles out of the hut, walked them down the dirt road of the wired-in labour village to the police post guarding the gate. The smaller baby, ten months old, sat astride Neo Saw’s left hip, supported by a piece of cloth which went round his buttocks and over his mother’s shoulder. Daughter, aged eight years, carried the larger baby, aged two years. Son, aged thirteen, came behind, stumbling sleepily, his thin arms wrapped round a bottle of water, the only food or drink allowed out of the perimeter wire fence which surrounded the village.

In the cool, iron-grey softening of dawn, the stars were small, remote, and high. Shafts of pallor surged and ebbed in irregular waves above the trees to the east, and Son remembered a grey-blue balloon he had burst. Wrinkled and small, dark and crumpled as night in a hut, it had laid in his hand. He had blown into it, and it had grown, had swollen and thinned into a translucent sphere, shimmering with silver streaks, as now shimmered, with pale light spurting above the trees in gusts, the orb of a rapidly thinning sky.

In front of Neo walked other tappers, among them Fong Kiap in her dark clothes, wheeling her bicycle. Its chain whirred, a soft, hasty tick and prick of the stillness. Fong Kiap had a large, calm face; she was sturdy and big with child, and from her waddle every tapper knew that she had food hidden between her thighs.

Neo slowed his steps, not wishing to be near Fong Kiap, should the Malay mata-mata at the police post find her out. His thought, of few words, dull and slow, duller now because of the constant fear that was upon him, as upon them all, informed him that it had been thus during the years of the Japanese devils, and that it was natural and wrong that it should be thus again.

Neo and Fong Kiap’s husband had run away together to the jungle to escape being massacred by the Japanese. That was ten years ago. Neo Saw had smuggled food to Neo her husband then. Fong Kiap was now smuggling food to her husband, who had gone back Inside. He had become one of the People Inside, and Neo was now afraid of him, nearly as frightened of his old friend as he was of the Police.

As Neo slowed down, Big Dog Tsou glided past on noiseless feline feet, walking softly, treading a jungle path always, a quiet and dangerous smiling man who collected money and food for the People Inside.