Free A Tree on Fire by Alan Sillitoe Page B

is only a mask for a cretinous disposition.
    The guts of his motor-bike dropped out above the high gorge of the Indus, and he picked it up bodily and threw it hundreds of feet towards the water, so that it narrowly missed a floating raft on which some family had spread their pots and tents.
    Weeks later he reached Bangkok, and at Cook’s found three dozen letters from his parents begging him to come home. In one sense he was heading there, but not in the way they expected. They filled him with rage, then profoundly depressed him. He was getting out of their clutches at last. The fact that they’d done so little for him since he was born except send him to live with moronic relations was beginning to make them feel guilty, and so they didn’t want to lose him – which made him feel free and happy as he tore the letters up.
    In Saigon he got work with the American ‘advisers’ typing inexplicable orders for the replacement of lethal supplies to the South Vietnamese army – in those early days. His genial and generous employers said his job could only be temporary, until he was politically ‘cleared’ by an organisation in Washington. For some reason he was not ‘cleared’, and regretfully told that he must go. He picked up his pipes and tobacco, helped himself to the contents of an unguarded cash-box, and walked out at six o’clock one evening. Two minutes later a tri-shaw loaded with TNT was pushed into the main door of the building, and no one inside escaped death or injury.
    He was pulled from his mosquito-net next morning and questioned by American detectives, but he was too innocent for any blame to be laid on him. The astuteness that enabled him to see what was going on in South Vietnam also persuaded him to keep his mouth shut when speaking to people or being interviewed, as he was now, by two intelligent numskulls. He answered slowly and reasonably, as if to comprehend yet stay out of trouble merely showed an absence of passion. While talking he dimly sensed that he would acquire this passion only when he had lost both these talents. He was blessed with the good sense of a young man with a conventional upbringing suddenly out on a limb and doing something unusual – he reflected while travelling deck-class to Hong Kong. The rusting steamer slid through oily blue water under a sun that blistered down for six days. After a few hours he found it necessary to escape from the overcrowded decks, and the only way to do this was by taking refuge in himself. He knew what the boat must look like from shore or passing ship, having seen one once going down the Saigon river – a dilapidated steamer of four thousand tons whose decks, funnels and superstructure were completely hidden by human beings. Nothing else could be seen, not an air-vent, porthole, or derrick.
    He gave English lessons in Hong Kong and caught a mild venereal disease from one of his earnest and beautiful slit-skirted pupils who only wanted to learn phrases of endearment for her work with those American advisers recuperating from their assistance to South Vietnam. He regretted that the lessons had taken such a practical turn, but was able to get his ailment cured in Japan, the next stop on his world tour, where he got respectable work lecturing on English literature at certain universities. He waited there for a visa that would allow him to pass through America on his way home, the whole journey having taken a year out of his life.
    Leaning over the parapet of the bridge with Mandy he still hadn’t sorted out his impressions, even though a year had passed and he had reached the ripe age of twenty-five. The sheer built-up sides of the river had been left mildewed by the outgone tide, its water licking fitfully way out in the sand of Boston Deeps. Traffic stifled the air with fumes and thunder, and a coastal barge worked itself towards a quay downstream. Mandy had forgotten the fight with her father at home,