A Rude Awakening. Brian Aldiss
strip of coast, and the party she was with became separated from a group which included Fat and his wife. They were arrested by Dutch officials and imprisoned in the town of Palembang, feeling lucky not to be shot as part of an expected Nip invasion. Margey’s party became lost in swampland. Several of them fell ill of fever, some died. The survivors eventually reached a kampong on the banks of the River Hari, where they were able to persuade two Eurasians with a small motor launch to take them to the local equivalent of civilisation. Margey fell sick on the morning of embarkation and so was left behind. She was still stuck in the native village when the Japs, as long expected, invaded the NEI. The Fates had made a mighty journey after Margey, not less than the distance from Morocco to Lapland – which is nothing to a ravening young Fate.
Palembang is an oil town. The Dutch garrison put up some resistance and was annihilated. The Japanese went on a triumphal spree of looting, shooting, and raping. Chin Lim was raped and bayoneted but Fat escaped both fates. Weeks later, he and Margey met up again almost by accident; they reached Medan dressed as coolies, travelling mainly by bullock cart. In Medan, they met other people from Shantung who helped them, and there they weathered out the rest of the war and the time that followed.
The world’s great storm had blown and was still blowing round the globe, a strong Force 6 breeze. Just for a while, there was a lull which becalmed Margey and me, both far from home, in this little stuffy room on the equator.
I had undressed and climbed under the blue cover. She put her tea cup on the window sill before beginning to slip unceremoniously from her clothes. The shadows of the bars of her lamp curved across her naked back as she pulled her blouse off. Away came her European-style brassiere with its red polka-dots (French, all the way from Saigon). Her tender breasts with their little sharp tips swung free as she stooped to remove her peasant-style trousers and then the dainty pair of silk knickers. In the treacly light, that beautiful pale body conquered me. How far beyond all computation that it should be this particular body, shipped all the way from Tsingtao – as unattainable as a figure in a painting – which was snuggling in beside me!
We lay still for the moment, staring innocently up at the swagger of Rita Hayworth.
‘Margey, you are so bloody gorgeous!’ I put an arm round her and made her feel the hardness of my prick.
She giggled.
‘You evil bad man, Horry! All soldiers so terrible randy men, I don’t know. What you think I do with this big terrible thing you have? Where I can put it?’
I showed her.
She screamed with pretended laughter. ‘Aei-ya, I am too small girl for that monster thing! Is like a deformity. First I drink my tea, then maybe we try.’
As we sipped our tea, I egged her on with sexy talk in her ear. ‘You just have to concentrate very hard and then it will slip in easily, you’ll see. You may be only a little girl but you have a lovely big slippery hole, haven’t you, all juicy and soft inside, like a tropical fruit?’
‘I am no tropical girl. I am from almost a cold climate just like London. Sometimes in Tsingtao snow falls in winter and makes it beautiful when I am a baby. So I have only small cold hole.’
‘Well, I can warm it up for you. If there’s any snow up there, I guarantee to melt it.’
She pretended to become indignant. ‘Oh, you speak so filthy! What you do in my bed here, you foreign devil rapist-soldier? Get out or I call my auntie! I do not want that dirty big thing up my body or I catch a filthy disease and die, all my flesh fall off my bones.’
What are you talking about? I gave it a wash before I came out, scrubbed it with a scrubbing brush. It’s as clean as could be. I soaped it very carefully under the shower and told it that it would be seeing you this evening – at which news it pricked up its ears immediately.’
She smothered a laugh in her hand. ‘You are mad, you know, really? A grown man to talk with his penis like that. Twenty-three years old! I bet I know what you did, I bet! You gave yourself a good hand-wanking in the shower, isn’t that right?’ By way of illustration, she ran her fingers down my stem as if playing a flute.
‘Is that what Chinese men do?’
‘All the time, all Chinese man, and they don’t care who sees, hand-wanking every day, even inside the fields and paddy-fields. Is disgusting, yes?’
‘I don’t believe a word of it. Only Europeans and Americans wank themselves off. So I’m told. You are a liar, Margey! What about Chinese girls? Do they get up to the same dirty tricks, tickling their sly little clitorises? I believe you told me but I’ve forgotten the details.’
She set down her cup and waved a finger at me. ‘You are typical absolute foreign devil, always thinking every bad thing is invented in London. Gunpowder and writing and hand-wanking are all invented in China, every bit – in Shantung Province, very likely. But China girls they no do hand-wanking.’ She laughed, flashing her beautiful teeth and eyes. ‘They have other naughty habit. I tell you what they do …’
She put her arms round my neck and snuggled down with me until our heads were on the pillow, and her tits on my chest, when she began whispering hotly in my ear – ending by jabbing her tongue into it. The essence of her rude little story, which she liked to tell me, often with amazing embellishments, was that girls in Shantung Province, from an early age, resorted to gherkins, graduating to successively larger and more knobbly ones as they grew up. Grabbing my fingers, pretending they were gherkins, she demonstrated to me exactly how the manoeuvre was carried out, giggling and squirming as she did so.
That was one of Margey’s favourite ploys and, before it became too much for me and I flung myself upon her, she was off in the series of delighted writhes and squeaks which marked her orgasm. To plunge into that sumptuous hole while it was in the throes was my pleasure. Margey squealed and locked her legs round the top of my thighs, under my buttocks. Our bodies became one plunging machine which worked without our volition, powered by sweat and magic. Joy, joy, the whole spirit was bursting upwards like a waterspout!
We lay in each other’s arms, breathing easily and sweating together.
Despite all the hardships she had undergone, Margey was quite plump. Still round her meaty little waist were the marks of the elastic of her knickers.
As I lay with my head on her belly, I caught the aroma of that little bivalve between her thighs. It reminded me of fresh-caught lobster, of the tang of the primordial ocean in which first life was born. With its salts and chemicals, here was where sentient things gave their earliest twitch, long before land took shape.
I could see her face in the half-dark. The bridge of her nose was flat, but the wings of her nostrils, the chiselling of her mouth, the curve of her eyes as they moulded into her cheeks – these things moved me and filled my thoughts with their perfection. Never had I known an English girl I thought half as lovely.
The potence of her attraction lay in her not being English: in her being, not only Margey, but Cathay, far Cathay.
Gazing up at the mottled ceiling, Margey said in a level voice, ‘Nex’ Monday morning, you go Singapore – leave Medan for ever, and catch the big steamer for London. Your poor dear Margey will be broken-hearted. How you think she live in Medan without you?’
I slapped a mosquito which had zoomed in on my arm.
‘My soldiering days are done. I have to go home … I don’t want to leave Medan or you.’
‘Then why you go?’ she asked sulkily. It was a question she had asked before, a question I had endeavoured to answer before.
This time I was spared, at least for the moment. A footfall sounded, the ladder to the attic creaked. I became aware of the world outside; rain was falling, breaking through the oppressive heat. The climber emerged on the landing beyond our room, and a cautious female voice called in Cantonese.
I could distinguish Margey’s Chinese name, Tung Su Chi.
She called a brief answer, propping herself up on an elbow.
The