He had a whole two days off work, which he spent wandering the village streets with his new louche gait, deliberately scuffed and slouchy. The other young people he saw were, like him, only back for the New Year. Nobody lived here any more. He smoked only when out of his mother’s sight—he wasn’t sure she’d approve, and wanted their time together to be peaceful. She must have smelt it on him, part of the new compendium of scents he’d acquired, but said nothing.

She took him on a walk into the jungle. This would have been a treat a decade ago; now he felt annoyance at the muddy paths and brushing ferns, so unsuitable for city shoes. He sulked a little, he couldn’t help it, as she pointed out wild edible mushrooms, nearly-hidden paths, the small secrets of the jungle she’d gained through working in its embrace almost her whole life.

When they were well out of earshot of the village, she began to tell him things he only half suspected, about how she had brought supplies to the men in the jungle. For all that they were searched, she found ways to hide food and medicine, they all did. “If you were tapping rubber, and a man came up to you and said, Bring me rice tomorrow—well, then, you found a way, or you were dead.” She tucked rice grains into the lining of her shoes, pills into the hollow handles of her tools. “They searched us so thoroughly. Sometimes they even made us take our clothes off.” Those last few words were a rush. She was suddenly embarrassed in front of her handsome son. “But we got through. Those guards. They couldn’t have been as afraid of the British as we were of the Ma Gong.”

He was not as surprised by this as she’d expected, having heard enough stories in the city to know how dangerous the people in the jungle are, the way no one knew exactly how many of them there were, even now, or how many weapons they had—looted off dead Japanese soldiers during the war, it was rumoured. He remembered the rough men and women, and envied them. They were living on their own terms, fighting their own battles.

As they walked back towards the city, she began talking about her own death. This was bad luck, especially during the New Year, and he tried to stop her. “Don’t worry, it won’t be for a while yet,” she ploughed on, sounding like she’d practised this speech. “But when it happens, I want to be buried with your father.”

He couldn’t say anything, he would have choked.

“He’s in Batang Kali. It’s less than an hour from KL. They were all thrown into a shallow grave just outside the town. If you ask around, people will be able to tell you where it is. There must still be people who remember. Twenty-four men shot, just like that, and all our houses burnt. Now the British are going, and we’ll never find out why.”