And now it was night, dark swallower of the jungle, the huts, the roads, and the barbed-wire fences, and too late for Meng to go home. He would have to wait in town till the curfew lifted. He wandered on the five-foot way and squatted with his back against a damp, fungus-eaten wall, and waited for dawn and the first bus drawling along the roads not yet flayed by the sun.
But Big Dog Tsou, back in the small wired-in village, had come in the previous afternoon to Meng’s house, for Meng paid a larger subscription, being a weigher, and Big Dog Tsou wanted him to buy some medicines the next day, for the People Inside. ‘He has already gone to town, to see a doctor,’ his wife told Big Dog Tsou. And Big Dog Tsou wondered, knowing Meng healthy and avaricious.
At night Meng was not back. Big Dog Tsou, from the coffee shop of the village, rang a coffee shop in the town. Coffee shops are useful places: they relay telephone messages, they are accommodation addresses, they are underground post offices, and every small town, every village, has at least one, if not two, three, or four coffee shops.
A young waiter, with sleek, brilliantined hair, in which he wore a large clip, and slippers on his feet, ambled out of the coffee shop in the town, and went strolling round the police station, and leaned against the fence, hands in pockets, enjoying the cool night. The prostitutes who waited for the Malay policemen to come out, passed and re-passed in front of him, plunging deep glances in his eyes, giggling and nudging each other. But he went on chewing gum indifferently, and it was he who saw Meng stagger out of the station, look fearfully round him, and sidle away to crouch in the five-foot way, to wait for the dawn bus back to his wired-in village.
- Sayang: darling, beloved. ↵
4
THE PEOPLE INSIDE
Being the diary of communist terrorist (C.T.) chan ah pak, Wanted List No. 0789, member of the 10th Independent Regiment of the Malayan Races Liberation Army, in operation in the jungles of the State of Johore, Federation of Malaya.