The Kindness of Women by J. G. Ballard Read Free Book Online

hands, as if the entire wall of the annex was about to collapse. They lay beside me, like gold bars in the darkness. Later I would return them to the wall, using the white coal dust as a substitute mortar. With any luck I would be able to revisit the food store without arousing the suspicions of Mr. Christie, a former manager of the Palace Hotel, who guarded these mildewed potatoes and warehouse sweepings with fanatic zeal. If Mr. Christie had his way, the food reserves of Lunghua camp would be larger than the Sincere Company’s department store and all the internees would be dead.
    I pulled the bricks from the soft mortar, steadily enlarging the aperture. The distant lights of the airfield threw silhouettes of the perimeter fence posts onto the wall above my head. A straw sack filled most of the opening, but in the sweeping searchlight I could see the airless interior of the storeroom, a mysterious inner world like the dwarfs’ cottage in Snow White. The heavy sacks slumbered against the walls, and their comforting bulk reminded me of a family of dozing bears. My few doubts about stealing the food were forgotten. Already I thought of crawling into the storeroom and sealing the wall behind me. Peggy and I would sleep there, out of the cold, safe among the great drowsing sacks …
    *   *   *
    A signal flare exploded in the night sky. Its amber light trembled in a halo of white smoke. It fell slowly towards the open ground between the perimeter fence of the camp and the airfield boundary, reflected in the surface of a flooded paddy field.
    Without thinking I stood up, my shadow leaping across the wall of the annex. Fifty feet from me four figures were caught by the intense light, their orange faces like lanterns in the darkness. Two of the men had already climbed through the wire, and a third knelt with one leg through the sagging strands. They shouted to each other above the spitting flare, and the man caught in the wire tore off his shirt and stumbled through the grass towards the paddy field. His shirt hung on the wire like a ragged flag.
    Torches veered across the ground on both sides of the fence. Armed Japanese soldiers stood in the deep grass between the perimeter fence and the airfield. Already the would-be escapers had stopped and were waiting for the Japanese to approach them. The fourth figure stood by the wire and began to disentangle the tattered shirt. When he looked up I recognised the blond hair and pinched face of David Hunter.
    The signal flare fell into the paddy field and was swallowed by its black surface. Taking my chance, I scrambled from the ash tip and darted past the rear door of the kitchens. I tripped over my cinder tin, scattering the precious coke, and stumbled into a torch beam that filled my face. Rifle raised, Private Kimura blocked the path leading to the children’s hut, the night mist rising from his nostrils. Beside him stood Sergeant Nagata, the beam of his torch tapping my head as he watched his men round up the escaping prisoners. When they had been knocked to the ground, Sergeant Nagata beckoned me to him. I waited for him to slap me, but he stared into my face as if he had difficulty in recognising me and found it scarcely conceivable that I, of all the internees in Lunghua, should want to escape.
    *   *   *
    Later we sat on one side of the wooden table in the guardhouse. The Japanese soldiers stood against the wall, their boots covered with wet grass. The camp commandant, Mr. Hyashi, roused from his quarters in the staff bungalows, paced up and down, doing his best to control himself. A former diplomat at the Japanese Embassy in London, he was a small and precise man of painstaking nervousness, the only Japanese civilian in the camp and as frightened of Sergeant Nagata as any of the prisoners. Long pauses interrupted his interrogation, as he formulated the necessary phrases in his stilted English.
    Bored by this time-wasting,