At the police post the tappers handed in their identity cards; the Malay mata-matas kept them till their return from tapping on the estate. The mata-matas searched the tappers, ran their hands over them, undid their belts, looking for rice, meat, bean-curd, cake, tinned food, ammunition, matches, cigarettes, tobacco, a watch, a pen, a pencil, paper of any kind, money, jewellery, an extra garment or towel, a small rubber sheet, string, a fishing hook, a penknife, a piece of soap, medicine pills. They tasted the water in the bottles to make sure it was not sweetened. They shone their torches on the tappers’ shoes to see if they were new. They poked the bicycle saddles, squeezed the tyres. Sometimes they ran their hands through the women’s hair. Neo’s mind, geared to evasion, refused to remember how his wife in Japanese times had smuggled tobacco under a piece of sticking plaster on her belly, and money in her private parts.

A young mata-mata put his hand on Fong Kiap’s belly and she tittered, a chuckling coy sound. The boy grinned, withdrew his hand, and Waved her on. Rubber estate mata-matas were usually slow, indolent boys, hastily recruited from the Malay kampongs, cruel only by fits and starts, when their religious or racial feelings were inflamed. Most days they found it too strenuous to search and waved the tappers on, but they sometimes searched the women,
for their pleasure.

It was Neo Saw’s turn, and Neo, pretending indifference, looked blankly away, feeling the tightening in his heart, the coiled rankling fury which dwelt within him at the sight of another man’s hands upon his woman; rage unbetrayed by tremor or word, endured, as so many things were endured in these days between two terrors, that of the Police, and that of the People Inside.

They passed the police post and the wire gates, and were outside the village and on the road to the estate. A man grinned, a woman jeered. That dawn Fong Kiap had carried out a kati of pork between her thighs, Big Dog Tsou three messages on thin cigarette paper in his mouth, Old Heng’s son an extra pair of drawers, and his mother, who had two other sons with the People Inside, six bullets from a revolver bought from a rapacious mata-mata on estate patrol fifteen days ago.

Neo and his wife, each with a baby tied to the body, with Son and Daughter astraddle the saddle carriers, rode the mile and a half to Division 1 of the Langtry rubber estate where they tapped, bumping and dipping on the uneven road, and came to their portion of trees to tap.