Dada 156

‘’I am astounded’ my lawyer continued, ‘by the attitude taken up by my learned friend in referring to the heartless action of placing the old man in the home. Surely if proof were needed of the excellence of such places than we should look no further than on the policy of the government towards these institutions. They are part financed and promoted by Government departments. The seamen in particular upon whom this nation depends also contribute towards them with their pensions But for all his long-windedness, (he skipped the funeral nor did he mention the Dada’s bad blood); did he touch the apex of argument that the prosecutor had used for my communist ‘Chinese’ Dada and his Catholic practices which had led to the strike and traitorous acts that followed. How little he knew of the minimal affect this had had upon a loving grandson in his furious rage as he encountered two innocent white boys in a Chinese club. My brain was threaded. Its membranes felt as if they were left out to dry in the sun or washed away in rivulets by the rain. What with his long words, the endless days and hours, the stifling heat, that clamoured through door and window for entry I found that my mind had gone blurred and that everything was slowly dissolving into a grey watery mess inside. How well I now remembered the policeman’s words, ‘in the end it drains you’

Fifteen

When I was brought back the next day, the air conditioning in court was fully functioning. It needed to be. Even from the prison van I could feel the brightness of the sky and the heat that seemed to penetrate even the metal grilles. It did not matter. As if by rote, the members of the jury were fanning themselves in some sort of expectant rhythm. The speech for the defence seemed to me interminable. At one moment though, I picked up my ears. It was when I heard my lawyer say, ‘yes it is true I killed two men.’ He referred to me as if he was speaking of himself. It seemed so strange .I did not understand but bent to one of the policemen at my side. ‘What is he driving at?’ I raised my finger in the Brief’s direction. The policeman told me to shut up. After a moment he whispered. ’They all do that, it’s called transference. They take on the fact that the jury think it is you speaking, and they are looking at you but is him speaking. Did you used to see all that stuff they did on the fairgrounds years ago. These fellers are not a patch on those acts’ It seemed to me that it was to further exclude me from the case. I wanted to jump up and say, ‘this is me, the Sea Dayak’ but it didn’t seem to matter. I didn’t want to be slung down again like the termination of yesterday’s proceedings. He was a poor ventriloquist, an even poorer image maker and nobody seemed to believe what he was saying anyway; whoever he thought he was. I felt his words dribble away like water in the sand and wished I was at the beach. He hurried through his plea of provocation but without much commitment and with a lot less talent than the flowing phrases and dominant constructions of the prosecutor. ‘He also knew about ‘me’,’ he said. He had closely studied me he said. He turned. ‘Unlike my learned friend I have found something there. Indeed,’ he added. ‘I may say that I have read the prisoner’s mind like an open book’. What he had read there was an excellent young fellow, a steady conscientious worker who did his best by all around him, especially his employers at the fish market. If it had not been for an unfortunate set of circumstances at his parent’s home he would have continued with his studies. I was popular with everyone and sympathetic to anyone’s trouble. Accordingly, I was a dutiful grandson who had supported his Dada when all turned away from him, knowing his time in prison had weakened him and after anxious consideration when he could see him failing, undertook to research the home up the river where he passed his final days as a content old man. He knew that his Dada needed more comfort and security than he his grandson was able to provide.’ Even I was confused by now as to which voice, place or time my lawyer now resided in.

Dada 154

I stood again and tried to explain that it was a culmination because of the sun and water and food and drugs and why I’d woken feeling tired that morning and my mouth bitter, then the fighting and the car ride to the city beneath a wet moon. I pointed at the prosecutor, ‘What about the blood, this lawyer refers to, are we not all mixed on this island?’ I spoke quickly but my words rolled into one another and clashed together like stones. I was conscious that what I was saying sounded like nonsense even though it was true. I heard a gentle laugh come like a breeze across the courtroom and looked up and saw a jury member cover her mouth. She fluttered a handkerchief across her nervous fingers and I thought of Mo holding the silver paper like a grill. The woman in blue looked at me as if to say, ‘I told you so.’ My mother too shuddered again. What I didn’t sing to her nor anyone else was my father’s song. Nor did I point to his absence across the court nor accuse him with his singing lash and the doleful acts of ‘contrition’ .I did not confide in them my terror when I heard his soft footfall on the stairs. I would not demean myself. My lawyer shrugged his shoulders and tugged at his cuffs. He was directed to address the court. All he did was to point out the lateness of the hour. As he pointed to his watch again I was attracted to one of his cuff links that shone a wan gold.it could have been the gold of a European clipper ripe for picking or a Chinese junk waddling like a duck up the straits of Molucca. He asked for an adjournment until the following afternoon. The judge nodded agreement.

Dada 153

The air conditioning had faltered again and the jury were wiping the sweat from their brow in the late afternoon. Most crimes he told them paled into significance besides the loathing inspired by my callousness to say nothing of the damage done to the wider reputation of these islands.. ‘This man who is morally implicated in his grandfather’s death and complicit by his own traitorous activity is no less fit to have a place in the community than those other men he resides with on the dark edge of our society and indeed.’ He returned to the unbroken necklace theme, my Dada’s death, the fight on the beach where Iskra was slashed and full of rage the hunting down and killing those two poor white boys who did nothing more than to be exorbitant with their voices. The murderous silence of the prisoners intentions as he parachuted back to reality amid the paranoid gloom of the drug locally entitled…..’ Here he took a cursory look at his papers, ‘Ya Bang’. ‘Yes ladies and gentlemen I am convinced one siege led to another, just as one fishing boat follows another to the sea that brought those two poor boys to our island and that also led to their deaths by the hand of this murderous son of Sarawak. He raised his voice a tone, ‘you will not find I am exaggerating the case against the prisoner when I say that he is guilty of a series of murders, to be sentenced by this court. I look to you for a verdict accordingly’. The prosecutor paused to wipe the sweat off his face. He then explained that his duty was a painful one but he would do it without flinching. ‘This man has no place in the community whose basic principles of law he flouts with such compunction. Nor heartless as he is, has he any claims to mercy. I ask you to impose the extreme penalty of the law and I do so without qualm. In the course of a long career in which it has often been my duty to ask for a capital sentence, never have I have felt that painful duty to weigh so lightly on my mind as it does with this case. It demands a verdict of murder without extenuating circumstances. I am following not only the dictates of my conscience and sacred obligation but those also of natural and righteous indignation I feel at the sight of a criminal devoid of even the least of human feeling’. When the prosecutor sat down there was that silence. This time it seemed to contain a greater resonance, a meaning beyond shock. I was quite overcome by the heat and drone of his voice and amazement at what I had been hearing. That was not me he was talking about but a shadow, some lurid memory of myself and the Dada he had woven into the fabric of his imagination. The presiding judge gave a low cough and asked me in a short voice if I had anything to say. I rose and as I felt in the mood to speak, I said that I had no intention of killing those white boys. The judge replied that this statement would be taken into consideration by the court. Meanwhile he would be glad to hear before my counsel addressed the court, what were the motives of my crime. So far, he had to admit, he had not fully understood the grounds for my defence.

Dada 152

He said he had studied me closely and that he had found a blank towards those deep and inner feelings that normal people possess. There was no depth to me, no examined life, no feeling for my actions; none of those moral qualities that normal people possess that were demonstrated in my character. No doubt he added we should not blame him for this, he is a poor fish dock worker, who possesses a roof only because of the generosity of the grandfather. We cannot blame a man for lacking what was never in his power to acquire. But in this criminal court any passive aggression must be tested to a series of higher principle, of loftier ideals, to the rule of law and Justice. Gone was the fact that I was intelligent.Now I was just a poor worker down on the dock.. My mother stared impassively ahead. Once my hers eyes strayed in my direction but for the most part she sat erect besides the woman in blue and dabbed occasionally at her face. ‘This man before you is a menace to society because in his own eyes he has done nothing wrong. He has enjoyed himself and now stands before you for something he has done by ‘chance’ The prosecutor spoke again at the great length of my crime. He quoted Russian novelists in the way I had pursued my victims. ‘This man is a menace to our society ‘he repeated again.

Dada 151

That slap across my face was the slap of my own history. I had no regret in rising against it. It was like the raising my own black flag. But the hurt had gone now; now was the time for parlay and illusion. The prosecutor was overdoing it. I would have liked to have the chance of explaining that to him in a friendly sort of way. To say it really wasn’t my fault that the whites had ruled this territory, district and city for so many years over the Malay. Yes, the Chinese came and helped them and when the Indonesians burned our boats we had to act superior because this was still our place. But it did no good to ape any of them because we Dayaks didn’t feel that way about any of it ; especially when they roll out the red carpet of the Malay nation with its laws and state and parliament on the peninsula. Who really listens? It was what the dada hated. As for myself I just wanted to be off and sailing like him across the sea with the Blue Funnel line, but I couldn’t say that either. Not least have I told anyone that it didn’t matter? The Dada said that the sea absolved all beliefs and the only wave you should ever pray to was the God without name, one god and one soul, one love above or below the waves’s and no religion south of the belly. To no one else give mention but love your neighbour. I have never regretted anything in my whole life. Things happen and you react or you don’t react, that is all. You live your life under the sun and the rain and the moments of everyday that give you grace. They are all that matters, Wabu Sabi. I’ve always been too much absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to look anywhere else. Of course after my outburst there was never any chance of me being allowed to clear that up or speak again? The prosecutor was now considering the inner life of my character, what he called my ‘alma’