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He then told me he had to ask some questions which might seem unconnected to my case but which could perhaps have a significant bearing on the whole structure of the matter. I realised he was going to talk about Dada again and I immediately felt very uncomfortable especially with my Ma and Da sitting rigid, erect and scared in the courtroom. I tried to do what my lawyer had first counselled me; to tell them my emotions were aroused and I could not control them. I tried to forget my rage but it kept getting in the way like a filter before a camera. The judge asked me why Dada was in a home and when I said I was working all the time and didn’t have much money. He looked at me as if that was a crime. He asked me if Dada’s death had affected me personally and I replied that Dada and I had expected nothing of each other, but he told good stories and he made me laugh and it was a shame when he got sick. We had both got used to our new lives. Mo would never have been able to stay if Dada had still been living there but I didn’t say that. My lawyer had told me not to bring that up. The presiding judge said he didn’t want to dwell on these affairs and asked the prosecuting lawyer if he had any questions for me. The prosecutor half turned his back on me and without looking at me, stated that with the permission of the presiding judge, he would like to know why I had carried on with my vendetta when the first white boy had dropped to the floor and I had gone on calmly to kill his friend. I said, ‘no, it was not a vendetta, it was pure chance.’ ‘In that case why I had taken a knife with me, and why follow the other man with such determination when his friend had fallen. Was this a matter of pure chance he asked? I nodded my head and said yes, very clearly; pure chance, because it was all part of the same moment. The prosecutor then said in a short and terse voice, ‘very good that will be all for the present.’

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‘Yes, your honour’ I said. One time I forgot with all the heat and confusion and called him your worship, then I slipped again and called him ‘your holiness’ and everyone laughed. It took a very long time because the presiding judge included the minutest detail, from the beach house to the car journey, the club, the music, the lights, and the time before the final incident. He dwelled a lot on those moments. The case was strung out like pearls upon a necklace and the details seemed to take for ever. He looked over his glasses at me. The whole time he was speaking, the journalists took notes. I could feel the little woman like a sparrow watching me with an intensity as sharp as Kim Song at my Dada’s wake. Shabela’s wife also looked me over as I answered each detail. And just like the necklace string of islands that danced their whole disparate frame of our identity, that nameless sea of faces, the jury each looked at me with their own separate sense of being. Then they turned one by one like a line of optical dancers back to the presiding judge, who coughed and leafed through his file and peered towards me after every phase of questioning whilst all the time fanning himself and occasionally sipping from his water.

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‘I could have been her step mother , so many times did I share your Dada’s bed.’ ‘They took away my baby’ she whispered. I remember looking at her. The sea was combing in little buttered waves behind the hut. ‘Many bad things have happened in both our houses,’ she said. The presiding judge began to utter his words and ordered that the official proceedings begin. He knew that he did not have to remind the members no matter how many emotions might be aroused, they must discount these in favour of the evidence. He felt that his role was to preside over the trial with impartiality and to consider the case objectively. The jury’s sentence would be made in the spirit of justice and, in any case, he would clear the court room if good order did not prevail among the public if given the slightest reason to do so. People from Europe would be following this trial!!!! Even with air conditioning grumbling away it was getting hotter and I could see members of the jury fanning themselves with bits of paper or those who were judicious enough to have brought fans used them in uniform purpose. There was a constant rustling of paper. The presiding judge gestured to the clerk who immediately brought in bottles of water for the top bench. My interrogation began at once, the presiding judge questioned me calmly and even it seemed with a touch of cordiality. Once again I was asked to confirm my identity and in spite of my irritation, my profession. On the other hand I relaxed, because I thought this was only natural because it would be a serious mistake to pass judgement on someone with a different identity especially on this island. The presiding judge then began explaining what crime had been committed and what I had done, turning to me every three sentences and asking me if that was correct. Each time I replied correct as I had done in the detective’s office.

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She wore a jacket and her hair was back and she carried earrings in the same silver that studded her suit. She levelled her eyes and same precise manner as she had when she told me I would come to a bad end. I remember Shabela who just laughed as though he fancied her. I realised with a start, all the times I had seen her before my arrest and that each time she had given me a warning, at the hut, the restaurant, then the street. She was staring at me with a purposeful look that brought back all those things that I don’t like to talk about. She was very intent with her gaze; maybe she was missing her TV programmes. I could imagine an open magazine alongside her at the café’, a pencil in her mouth; a gatherer of stories from the labyrinth she said controlled us; stories and spiteful whispers, a bit like my Ma with her pursed lips and everything that went before me, severe, unforgiving, and silent except when she spat her barbed comments. ‘I am your mother’s older sister ’ she said

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It was perhaps because of this framing and also because I did not understand the court procedures that I didn’t really take in everything that happened next; the way the jurors were selected, the questions the presiding judge asked my lawyer, the prosecutor and the jury when all the their heads would turn towards the judge at the same time. A quick reading out of the official charges which contained the names and places I recognised and some additional questions for my lawyer that he seemed to brush off when he looked over at me and smiled. Then the presiding judge said we should move on to a call of the witnesses. The clerk read out several names that caught my attention. From amid the crowd of spectators I witnessed only as a shapeless mass. I now watched as each person stood up, one by one, and went out by a side door; my boss and the guy who cleaned, Iskra, Shabela , Jalima, Mo. He gave me a nervous little wave. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed them earlier but then the final defence witness, the friend of Shabela’s wife stood up when her name was called. I recognised her. She was declined Thank God,, I thought ; a life story told without her gushings.

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A clerk announced that the court was in session and it seemed at that very moment, the air conditioning cranked and slowly lumbered into action, filling the chambers with its groan. The judges, two of them in purple besides the one in red came into the courtroom with their files and very quickly took their places on the high platform. A small man in the black robe sat very rigid on the chair in the middle and placed his cap on the bench in front of him. He wiped his small head with a pale blue handkerchief and declared the proceedings officially open. The journalists already had their pens in their hands and all wore the same slightly mocking looks on their faces. This was particularly true of the foreign correspondents. I noticed that the man from Kuala Lumpur was trying to affect the same facial, slightly bored expression. The exception amongst them was one who looked much younger than the others and wore a blue silk suit and floral tie. He had left his pen in front of him on the table and had turned his neck and was staring at me. On his angular face with its shadows and no trace of fat around his collar, I could see his very bright eyes examining me carefully, yet without expressing anything that I could put my finger on. I had the bizarre impression of looking at myself like looking through the lens of a movie camera, as if I was in a film

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The journalist had a kindly face, not like the prosecuting judge who terrified me with his cap beneath his arm almost like a hood and his large book. He shook the policeman’s hand very warmly and again, I noticed that everyone was talking in little groups, calling out to each other and chatting like in a club where everyone is happy to meet other people that they have something in common with. It was like one of those bars that only serve coffee after the football because no one would dare to talk or drink anything else in between.

I could not explain the circumstances that I felt totally alone, that everyone knew someone except me, that they all had something together that I was the intruder. Nevertheless the journalist spoke to me and smiled. He said it he hoped it would go well for me. I thanked him and he added,

‘you know we’ve written about your case, it has exercised the imagination and duress of the nation’

I didn’t understand what he meant. He said the trial would not last long. The turn of the seasons after May is the only time when the judges can get away. They never fail to have a rest after the major trials and then come back refreshed for the slow season and the winter monsoon.

‘I wouldn’t worry ‘ the journalist said. Then he pointed out another  small Malayan man who was standing with the group that he had just left. He was wearing enormous glasses that looked like those artificial ones with wobbly eyes you can buy at the fairground; one of the  places  where old Srino took his old parrot. He looked like he had not missed many meals.

The policeman told me that the man was a special correspondent from Kuala Lumpur and had come especially for my case. It was important that Malaysian justice was seen as incorruptible to the rest of the world.

‘They have asked him to send in your story in double quick time.’ He said.

 I was about to thank him but that seemed ridiculous. If Dada had been here, he would know just what to do. The journalist gave me a friendly little wave and walked away. We waited for a few more minutes in the stifling heat.

He was a little like my father who messed away those years of my growing in his own way. My studies were good; my citizenship was flowering .I was a bright young fellow, my father’s friends, teachers and other managers all said it but the issue was the boy’s grandfather. To even discuss him was enough to give countenance to the traitorous manner in which the lawless treated our island.

My lawyer arrived, flowing in his robes and surrounded by several of his colleagues. Straight away he went over to the journalists and started to shake their hands, even those of the foreign correspondents who previously, if they had noticed me at all, had only glared. They exchanged pleasantries and were laughing together, completely at ease. Then the bell rang in the court room and everyone took his place.

My lawyer came over, shook my hand and advised me to reply to any questions as briefly as possible. He asked me not to offer any additional information and to count on him to do the rest.

To my left I heard the sound of a chair being scraped across the floor a and I saw a tall fat man, dressed all in red and with steel rimmed spectacles, which he constantly removed and replaced from his nose with a hand bearing a heavy gold ring on its final finger. Swag for the pirates I thought or my turn on the boats of a Dayak imagination.

Below and to the right side of the presiding judge, the chief prosecuting lawyer sat down carefully folding his robes beneath him as if he was sitting on a cushion.  I struggled to remember any of the previous conversations with the detective. He definitely would not wear that sort of ring for show. He was far too courteous. He would not mock you with his power.

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He told me that it was because of the newspapers and pointed to a sea of faces sat at a table below the jury box.

‘There they are’ he said. I asked who? And he replied,’ the journalists.’

‘They are here from England, the Daily Express, the Mirror, the Telegraph besides the Sarawak Weekly the Malay recorder and the Borneo Express.

‘What about the London Times’ I asked. He laughed,

‘The British papers are all saying you are a psychopath’ he added.

‘They say you were high on drugs.’

‘That is not exactly true, I was coming down after being high’ I said.

‘Is that going to be your defence ?’  he asked

‘No,’ I said, ‘the slap of history is my defence. Mine was just a chance reaction. If I had not been carrying the knife for a friend, this would not have happened.’

He looked at me and then away. Suddenly one of the journalists was coming over towards us. The policeman knew him. He was Malay. He was middle aged and grimaced slightly and more when he put his foot down on his right leg as though one leg favoured another. It reminded me of the night of Dada’s wake when all the residents of the home trooped and limped sucking on their lips into the room that held the coffin. The journalist had a kindly face.

Twelve

I can honestly say that one season quickly followed the next. No seasons change as many lives as they do here with the days warmer or cooler, rainier or less rain. The monsoon of November is very different from the one of May. As the warmer days approached I sensed that something new was awaiting me. My case was due in the last session of the crown Court which finished in the last days of the month. The proceedings opened with the sun blazing outside the courtroom. My lawyer had assured me that it wouldn’t last for more than two or three days, and besides he said the judges would be in a hurry because it’s the start of the holiday season just after my turn.

I knew what he meant. We were over the worst of the rain and our dry monsoon would soon be upon us. I loved the beaches between April and September. We call them here the light yellow wine. There is more of sunlight even though you always have rain; the sun splits the days and brings us our evenings, like the light that fell that one fateful Sunday with all the huts along the beach glistening and groaning  with an activity and abundance  you can only imagine in November.

At seven in the morning, someone came to get me and the police van took me to the court room. The two policemen showed me into a small room that smelled a bit stale as if the windows had not been opened to the air. On the other side of the door were the sound of voices, names being called out, the scraping of chairs, voices of authority, the kind of commotion that made me think of certain festivals we used to have in our district when the furniture in the room is pulled to one side and re arranged for dancing or when the bride first looks out of the window and flings out her shift of flowers. The policeman told me we had to wait to be called into the courtroom and one of them offered me a cigarette. I said no and showed him the tiny piece of wood stuck between my teeth.

‘I use these now ‘I said. A little while later he asked me if I was nervous. Again, I shook my head and said that in a way I was quite interested in seeing a trial. I had never been in court before. He laughed and said that wasn’t true and laughed again but I just shook my head and said no not serious like this one. Those other times were minor matters, this was the real thing.

‘Yes said the second policeman, ‘ A trial wears you out. I’ve seen innocent guys fly away in their heads because they can’t take it anymore. In the end they accept what they give you just to be rid of it’

After a while a little bell rang in the room. They took off my handcuffs and opened the door and led me into the dock. The room was jam packed. In spite of the blinds, the sun filtered through in spaces and it was stifling hot. They’d left the windows closed for the air conditioning but something wasn’t working properly and everyone seemed to be sweating.

I sat down and the policemen stood on each side of me. It was then that I noticed a row of faces in front of me. They were all watching me. I realised that they were the jury. They all looked the same to me but I could see a scarf here and there, it was only later that I would be able to tell the faces line by line and what they seemed to be thinking. It was like getting on a bus or crowded train to go back to the villages, at first there is just a sea of faces in front of you but after a while you realise each and every definitive trace and feature of every single one. They were all looking to see who the last passenger was as if it was me; like they were craning over to see what was contemptible in the face of a killer. Did I really look like one? They called me baby face at school and on the fish dock but maybe there was something in me that looked like a monster. I did not really know.

I was confused by all the people crammed into this tiny space, everyone seemed to be talking and to know one another, I looked around again and again I could not recognise a single person. It had not occurred to me that most of the people here, all sweating, had come to get a good look at me. No one normally took any notice of me, especially on the markets when everyone was babbling and smoking before the rain. It took some effort on my part to recognise that I was the source of all this commotion.

 ‘There are so many people ‘I said to the policeman.

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She looked away and told him her book was going to draw a line where Islam ran from the peninsula down to Papua New Guinea and no island of our many thousands had remained untouched by the great wind blown out from across the desert. Her book would capture the role of encirclement and plantation and the myth of the woman who brings shame to her family by flying free of the labyrinth. But too close to the sun or too near to the sea’

‘Islam is a beautiful religion,’ I heard my Dada say, ’but it is not mine’

He then told her of his history. Or what he told me he did. She did not shudder nor flinch and denounce him as his own daughter and son in law had had done but a distance grew up between them. We did not see her around much anymore which was a shame. I liked her.

I was back in my cell. There was no way out unless you breathed and wondered at the interminable silence and the long nights of prison with a voice deep and strong within you. Just hearing it sound through all the shapes and patterns within me brings a reminder of not only what you have lost but also what you have been given as the greatest gift, the gift of life itself. 

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When the guard had gone, I looked at myself in my metal dish. It seemed as if my reflection appeared grave even when I tried to smile. They say it’s always like this when people think a lot. Even if you’re happy, you don’t look it because you’re wondering why you’re happy. I remember my Saturdays with Mo. I stretched my face about a bit in front of me and tried to smile but my features still had the same, harsh, sad frown. The day was ending and the hour was approaching that I don’t like to talk about, that nameless time when the sounds of the night rise up throughout the entire prison and you can hear groans and sighs and other sounds where placation or repentance are deemed necessary to express themselves in other machinations of the soul. Then the footsteps away, slow and rhythmic and the cortege of silence died towards the small hours. An occasional cry reminded me of my father’s footsteps on the stairs of the family home.

I walked over to the little window and tried to study my reflection once again but the light was gone. Instead I could see among the dark patterns, the same small serious face that gleamed back at me from the dark. Why should it not be when I was serious as well as my situation? It was all serious. My face could not lie. At the same time though for the first time in months, I could clearly hear the sound of my own voice within me.

It was chiming like a bell and rang, saying, hang on, hang on. Do not deny yourself  anything.It was saying, you are full of richness and spirit.  This experience could serve me as a pirate; a voice strong and resonant, a manner to which I was not accustomed. I recognised it as the voice that had resonated deep and strong within in me throughout my days of remembrance. It was like I had been talking to myself. I realise now what the Dada was saying to me on one of the visits to his nursing home.

He had suddenly sat upright on his bead. He had been lying there as part of his afternoon rest. His eyes were bright but far away,

‘Take comfort, take comfort my people’ he said, ‘your hardship will not last, and neither will you waste away in sadness. Do not let sorrow seize you nor fear that you will not be saved’

He looked straight at me and caught my eye. ‘These are the prayers of every leader ‘he said.

‘They put me in jail after these words. Don’t they know we are all strangers to each other even though we may sing the same song? 

I remember he once had an Indian lover of Arabic descent. She was very beautiful, an older women like him but beautiful; more beautiful than the woman in blue. She was writing a history of caste and practice and the love of Islam in Malaysia. She was saying that Islam runs like a jewel through our history in these islands.

‘Not as pronounced in Sarawak’ my Dada said, ‘We are all in the mix here that is why we wear the colour blue, those high with the fundamentals hate it. It is the colour of muddied blood; the blood of the virgin mother.’ 

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Ships articles ran for two years then and for the Chinese crews they used every hour before they allowed them to sign off. Maybe he was teaching me with his long silences when I moved into his house as though secrets could safely exist in a place of their own company. What he was instructing me was really his own experiences when he crossed rivers and bays and sounds and tended watch below in days of unceasing change that he could never see nor spend time with except for brief spasmodic moments on deck, his cap jauntily set upon his head between the watch bell and the stars.

The woman in blue might have been the daughter in the story from France, the one who threw herself down the well. It would have fitted with her own sense of things never really belonging unless they were about something or someone else.

‘Not a month after the pirates were captured, some hung, others put in camps, then the Rajah took your great grandmother. Oh he was a terror, his wife, the Lady was asleep in their bed, of  silken  sheets when he had her. So it continued even after he ‘put’ her with his Chinese manager. He still came for her. Wives came and went but he always came back to her, well after the boy was born. He came back to her, always insisting.

‘How do you know all this’ I asked her. She pointed a manicured finger to her head.

‘With us Sea Dayaks, the memory never dies. I have known of you since your Dada swore his revenge’

‘Were you one of his girlfriends’ I asked.

‘’He is 25 years older than me’ she said. ’It left him hating all authority’ she said.

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They thought their good son Rama would disown him as well as the rest of the family, the politicians and the State. I was on a journey. Between the hours spent sleeping, remembering things in all their blonde, red and green patterns sometimes shot with gold, reading the French story and watching the light fade in my cell and grow light again with the grey fingers of dawn, I seemed to travel great distances. A distance as real to me as any life I had lived on the outside. I’d read somewhere that people ended up ended up losing a notion of time in prison. That was nonsense. I was realising every moment of my life as time passed through me.

The clarity was like the ice of a cold fish knife held between my thighs and not at all like Iskra the pimp’s little blade used i used on those two poor lost souls. It seemed so long ago. After you had been through one memory after another on a form of trip always tinged by guilt it was made easier by the way the body adapts and encourages you to get around this problem or align your shoulders to stack one upon the other the way they do at yoga. These were my days. Easy breathing days. They became so extended that they ran into each other. My siesta could be my night’s sleep or one day separate me from another by a snooze in the afternoon. The names of the week became lost but not my sense of time. Only Yesterday and Tomorrow became important to me.

One day when the guard told me that I’d been there for over five months I believed him but couldn’t quite understand it, to me it was either five minutes or five years. The same day had played itself out endlessly in my cell and I had set my goals each time by the stars. Maybe Dada knew this and was secretly teaching me from all of his time on the sea with those chartered voyages on tramp ships that ran between these islands and crossed the oceans for years on years. He would have done his own counting. 

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Then there was sleep. In the beginning, I slept badly at night and not at all during the day. Little by little my nights got better and I could also sleep during the day, particularly after I had completed a memory test with all its associated thoughts and feelings and the life of people passing in and out and through me like dancers waltzing across the dance floor or the way we danced in the clubs.

These acute reminders would be tire me and would sleep but I would wake refreshed and start again. It was a case of staging my time after meals and the night winds or the rain to send me dozing off. In the finish I was sleeping between sixteen and eighteen hours a day in preparation for the next bout of memory search for which I needed to be fresh. Apart from visits to the prison yard, I had not time for exercise. Sometimes even visits to the policeman interrogator or my lawyer checking up on me came as a rude interruption. Six hours to spend with my meals, my basic needs and the story of the man from France was more than enough to entertain me.

Between my mattress and the wooden bed I had found  a worn scrap of paper, yellow with age. It was almost completely stuck to the back of the mattress and they must have thought it was a label or description of  the make of the material. It was taken from the Sarawak Times but the date was missing as was the beginning of the article. It was a story that must have happened somewhere in France between the mountains and the sea and no doubt taken place some years before because, as I say, the paper was yellow and cross with brown markings at the creases.

A man left his village in the country north of Marseilles to go down to the sea. He sailed away to make his fortune. Twenty five years later when he returned from America, he was rich and came back to the village with his wife and young child. His mother now ran a Pension there, near to where he was born and brought up on their small farm. He left his wife and son in another hotel and went to his mother’s place to surprise them.

His mother didn’t recognise him when he came in. As a joke he had the idea of asking for a room. He let them see the money and cards he carried in his wallet. During the night, his mother and sister entered the bedroom to rob him and murder him. They beat him to death with a hammer and threw his body in the river which would carry it away to the sea in the same way that he had set off to carry him on his journey and brought him back home again like some maritime romance. When his wife arrived in the morning, holding her little boy by the hand and not knowing what had happened; she informed the mother and sister the real identity of the traveller.

The mother hanged herself and the sister threw herself down a well. I read this story a thousand times and tried to make sense of it. On the one hand it seemed entirely improbable. Who would play a trick on their family like that. And then I thought it was possible. Duplication takes place every day. It all comes about by chance, the same chance as with my actions that fateful Sunday. In any case I thought that the traveller sort of got what he deserved. You should never mess around with things like that. When Ma and Da told Dada out of spite that I had become aware of his real identity and his shame, they said it was when he started getting sick. That was another lie.

‘Sick’ the DaDa said and grunted, ‘Sick that I did not tell you more myself’ but he seemed worried.

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I became such an expert at this that by the end of a few weeks I became a specialist  in every part of the house of my Dada. I could spend hours simply listing everything in my bedroom and putting them in category of order. The more things I thought about, the more they came back to me and not only the things themselves but the thoughts and feeling attached to them. When Mo first came over and we lay on the rug, listening with the night, I wasn’t thinking about his body now but how the rug fitted the manifest of my room, what thoughts I’d had on the bed when I had to leave my Ma’s and Do’s place and my Dada took me in, it was the beginning that became part of the inventory.

Stuff  I hadn’t noticed before or had forgotten now became part of a wider pattern. I realised then that a man could live for a hundred years in prison and still not get past the front door of his own house if he put his mind to it.. If he was an older man, he could spend a thousand years. He would have enough memories to keep from getting bored and how the days stacked together in what the Japanese call Wabu Sabi or joy of everyday life. In one respect this was an advantage. I could think clearer now about why I left my studies and those other silent whispers in that crazed household and those other matters of which I don’t like to speak.

Why does everyone have to speak two languages here? We are not allowed to choose, we have to learn the language of our ethnic group and this is determined by your father but that’s not something I like to talk about either. In my case it was useless.  We are so integrated with the Malays we have forgotten our Chinese and the sea Dayaks are dirt with their feckless ways and Christian culture but this is not how my mother and father viewed the picture. They needed me near.

‘Forty years at sea can absolve you of anything,’ the DaDa said.

 Chinese, Malay or Dayak, nobody was going to teach him to sing. It brought him pain but it was also what made the Kalimantan’s laugh and call him ‘Uncle Sam’ 

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Apart from those problems I wasn’t too unhappy. Time was the big master but once I understood that I was fine. When I saw I could do nothing about the way it was passing through me rather than me journeying through time, then things then became a lot easier. I stopped being bored all together when I  learned how to remember. Sometimes I would start thinking about my room and I would imagine starting at one end of it and walking around in a circle while listing mentally all the things I passed. In the beginning it took no time at all but each time I started to do it again it would take a little longer. And over time walking around my cell as if it was my room and then sitting down on my bed each time I had completed the survey it took a little longer and then a little longer because I would remember all the different pieces of furniture, their colour and texture, soft, hard and any marks, scratches or chips. I concentrated so hard I would have a complete inventory.

And the clock, the clock my Dada used and what he gave me when he had to go up country to the home, the clock he had with him on every ship. He never used the shake man he said. His alarm would always go off in good time. He had that clock since The Brooke’s family had ruled the island and raped his mother. He had it through his marriage and my mother’s early years. The woman in blue told me she could remember every finger of its face and which part of the numerals she scratched. I could see him down below on the Blue Funnell boats, going to the harbour ports of China and Australia and Liverpool and time ringing through every part of him as a marker to his life and what he had done.