Dead in the Dog

As she watched, trying to project hatred across the space, a battered pre-war Plymouth pick-up came from the latex-processing sheds on the other side of the road and crossed into the drive to the next-door bungalow. The trees obstructed most of her view, but she could just see the driver get out and run up the verandah steps. After spending most of his life in the East, Douglas Mackay seemed impervious to the heat, which made most Europeans slow-moving. She had no quarrel with Douglas, more a mild pity for his weakness in dealing with his domestic life – though she was in no position to criticize in that direction, she thought cynically.

As she leaned on the varnished rail, one of her fingers found a deep scar in the tropical hardwood. It had recently been painted over, but her gaze automatically moved up the planked wall of the bungalow at the end of the verandah. Here were a row of similar marks and she knew that Douglas’s bungalow had even more. They were bullet holes, a legacy of the last terrorist attack on Gunong Besar, earlier that year. Thank God she had been away on a shopping trip in Singapore – at least, that’s what she had told James.

If she had been here and survived, nothing would have stopped her from getting the next Blue Funnel boat home from Penang. As it was, her dear husband had had a tough job persuading her to stay, even though no one had been hurt – apart from a couple of rubber-tappers being killed down in the worker’s lines across the road. A pity that bitch next door hadn’t stopped a bullet, she thought vindictively. If the CTs hadn’t been disturbed by the chance arrival of an armoured patrol on night exercises from Brigade, maybe she would have been. So might James and Douglas, she supposed, but somehow that possibility didn’t tug too much at her heart strings.

As it was, the attackers must have been a pretty small bunch, as they scarpered as soon as the Aussies poured out of their Saracens – she had thanked the good-looking captain personally a week later, in the back of his car behind the club. The two planters had blasted off a few rounds into the darkness just before the troops arrived and certainly James had basked for weeks afterwards in The Dog, as the hero of Gunong Besar – fighting off the Communist hordes like some gunslinger in a Western film. Secretly, when her initial terror had subsided, she rather admired him for a while, until she saw the extra attention that his fame gained him from the women in the club, which soured her back to her normal dislike of her husband.

Downing the last of her tepid drink, she walked barefoot back into the lounge to retrieve her shoes, one from under the settee, the other from near the unused piano, where it had come to rest after bouncing off her husband’s neck.

Going through another door at the rear of the lounge, Diane went into a corridor which led to the dining room, guest bathroom and two spare bedrooms. She turned left to reach their own at the farther end. Like the rest of the rooms, it had no ceiling, the partition walls stopping eight feet up. The high, raftered roof was common to all the rooms, to allow as much circulation of air as possible – though privacy was a problem on the rare occasions when they had visitors staying, especially ones who became vocally amorous in bed.

She dropped her shoes on the floor and walked past the white tent of their mosquito-netted bed to reach the bathroom at the back. Inside there was a white-tiled floor and a washbasin against one wall. Opposite were three doors, one to a toilet, the other to a cubicle with a chipped cast-iron bath and the third a shower. Anxiously, Diane went to the damp-spotted mirror over the basin and stared at her face while she fingered her cheek. No doubt about it, there was faint blue bruising within the reddening – she could even make out two lines where the swine’s fingers had struck her. As the sarcastic bastard had suggested, tomorrow would require some careful adjustment of her make-up, before she went to the club that evening.

With a sigh, she stripped off her dress of cream raw silk and dropped it into the straw laundry basket, along with her white bra and pants, ready for the dhobi-amah to collect. Going to the shower door, she opened it cautiously and stared at the bare cement floor, which sloped down to a drain pipe in the centre, emptying on to the ground beneath the house. Once she had been confronted by a snake which had crawled up the pipe – her screams had brought Siva running, who had been greatly impressed by her nudity, especially the blonde pubic hair, which he could hardly believe. As she dived for a towel to cover herself, the Tamil had calmly picked up the serpent and thrown it through the window.

‘Only wolf snake, Mem. Not poisonous,’ he had said, but ever since she had peered suspiciously around the door before venturing in to stand under the lukewarm spray that came from a tank of rainwater behind the roof.