Dada 160

They don’t like to see the face of the condemned man but the executioners will see me. Surely there must be cases when the rope has slipped or the drop is blocked or that chance or luck has played a happy part. It was easier to think of the pirates. Just a slip in the normal processes of justice would have done me. My emotions would have taken care of the rest. The papers often talked of a debt to be paid to society and the debt that must be paid to the one offended. But that sort of talk does not fire the imagination. No, the one thing that counted for me was to make a dash for it and defeat their rules, a mad stampede to freedom along the docks and quays and into the water, shark filled or not; a gamblers last throw. Naturally when the pirates caught you it would be no fun and games but at least there was the chance, kill or be killed rather than this slow and brutal wheel of justice. They deprived you of sex and cigarettes but not of time. Time on the anchor was time on the nail, Dada used to say, a curious in between world of being neither here nor anywhere, not at sea nor port. When a ship’s engines stop beating it loses its soul. But they could not deprive me of his song. I remember him shouting from his balcony and the constant visits from the police. ‘Brothers and sisters’ he would sing, ‘our time grows short and those who own the ships own much. Those who have wives should live as though they had none. Those who mourn for our impending loss should live as if they had nothing to mourn; those full of abundance who are enjoying life should live as though there was nothing to laugh about. For truly now, we have only ourselves to offer this State but only when we have our freedom; a demand from neither Dayak, Malay nor Chinese but from the Borneo seamen ‘