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

children’s hut, regaling Peggy and an astonished Mrs. Dwight with the saga of my attempted escape.
    *   *   *
    On the following day the first American daylight raid took place over Shanghai. From airfields near Chungking, Flying Fortress bombers attacked the dockyards at Yangtzepoo. At last the war was coming home to the Japanese. As they strengthened the antiaircraft defences of Lunghua airfield all concern for the escape attempt was forgotten. After a night in the guardhouse cells the three men returned to convalesce on their bunks in E Block. A shocked David Hunter, his face still bruised, watched me from the window of his parents’ room, refusing to wave back to me as I stood on the parade ground.
    To my relief, no one learned of my attempt to break into the food store. The Japanese cemented the bricks into the wall, assuming that the escaping prisoners had tried to supply themselves with rations for their long cross-country walk to the Chinese lines four hundred miles away.
    To anyone who would believe me, I pretended that I had joined the escape party at the last moment. Mrs. Dwight expected nothing less, but Peggy shook her head over my boasts in her kindly, sceptical way. She knew that I was too wedded to Lunghua to want to leave it, that my entire world had been shaped by the camp, and that I had found a special freedom which I had never known in Shanghai.
    One day the war would end, but for the time being I was busy learning to cope with the stony couple whose room I shared. Around my bunk I constructed a small hutch, where I tried to re-create the peaceful interior of the food store. Sitting on the ash tip as Mr. Sangster tossed the evening’s coals at my feet, I waited for the American bombs to set fire to the sky and thought of the white dust and the cracking coffins in the Avenue Edward VII.
    Below me the fresh mortar marked the outline of a secret door into an interior world. Far from wanting to escape from the camp, I had been trying to burrow ever more deeply into its heart.

3
    THE JAPANESE SOLDIERS
    Everyone was shouting that the war had ended. Prisoners leaned from their windows, waving to each other across the parade ground and pointing to the sky. Peggy Gardner and a delegation of missionary women gathered outside the guardhouse and peered through the door at Sergeant Nagata’s ransacked desk. I stood by the open gates of the camp, looking at the dusty road that followed the long arm of the Whangpoo River towards the south. The August sky was veiled by layers of haze that enclosed the empty landscape like an immense mosquito net. Threads of cloud ran through the pearly light, stitching the sky together. Vapour trails left by the American reconnaissance planes dissolved over my head, the debris perhaps of gigantic letters spelling out an apocalyptic message.
    â€œWhat do they say, Jamie?” Peggy called to me. “Is the war really over?”
    â€œAsk Sergeant Nagata. I’m going to the river.”
    â€œSergeant Nagata’s not here anymore. You can go back to Shanghai now.” She plucked at the patches on her dress, sorry to see me leave but not yet sure that I had the necessary nerve. “If you want to…”
    â€œI’ll come back tonight. Wait for me at the hut.”
    For all the excitement, no one was in any hurry to evacuate the camp, as Peggy had noticed. For days we had listened to rumours that the Americans had dropped a new super-bomb on Japan, destroying the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Some of the prisoners even claimed to have seen the bomb flash. The squadrons of B-29s had broken off their attacks on Lunghua airfield, but armed Japanese soldiers still waited by the antiaircraft guns. One morning we woke to find that Mr. Hyashi and the guards had vanished, slipping away under the cover of the night curfew. We stood by the perimeter wire, like children abandoned by their teachers and unsure whether to leave the