Free The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt by Tracy Farr Page B

to the words in my littlenotebook, whispered them back to the hot air as I heard them, so I remembered the language in some fundamental way, matched it with sounds murmured above and around me in the Singapore of my earliest years.
    The roadside stalls were piled with strange fruits: mangosteen, green oranges, rambutan, durian, bananas, coconuts and piles of glossy scarlet chillies. Over each small stall presided a brown woman, beautiful, smiling, and naked as far as the eye could see as the stall hid the lower part of her, clothed in her batik sarong. The women wore their jet-black hair drawn back severely from generous foreheads, as the Misses Murray had taught us to do for dancing. I wished the Misses Murray could be there to see the lines of women with their ballerina hair and their bosoms on display; how their faces would burn, their eyes pop!
    The pasar was crowded with buyers and gossipers, young mothers with naked brown babies slung in sarongs astride their hips; vendors of sweet drinks, Chinese coolies drawing heavy handcarts loaded with coconuts and bamboo. The Chinese laboured hard and breathed heavily; the Balinese chattered and giggled; an occasional Arab swept by in a long cloak – and ourselves, white skin red with sweating, buttoned up and staring – all of us in the early morning sunlight in the lee of the towering peak. We bought fruit, we became confused with the unfamiliar coins; I tried my notebook Malay on the stall keepers, who laughed and seemed not to understood a word of it. We loaded up with rambutan, bananas and heaven knows what, after the inevitable haggling which, so Uncle Valentine toldme, all Orientals love. A fleet of pony carts carried us back to the jetty with our treasures, then on to a sampan and back aboard the Koolinda , sweaty and hot in our heavy clothes in the heat of the day, ready for the cook to ply us with lunch, and to steam ahead to Singapore.

FATHER
    W e pulled slowly into the thick heat of the port at Singapore, the Koolinda ’s crew milling and busy. Uncle and I leaned against the guardrail, shading our eyes, watching the strange place approach. Uncle Valentine grabbed my arm.
    ‘There he is! Look!’ He shouted, waved both arms in the air. ‘Hi! Charles, hi there! Hi!’
    A tall man, strange to me, looked up at the sound of my loud uncle. He peered through narrow eyes, raised his hand briefly in salute. We watched each other without further signal – my uncle and I from the ship, the thin man from the shore – while the Koolinda was made secure. When, some ten minutes later, we were allowed to disembark and make our way down the gangway, he appeared from the busy crowd, and stood waiting to meet us where we stepped onto land. He shook my uncle’s hand, then turned and clasped me briefly to him, announcing himself as my father.
    He stood back to assess me, as I assessed him. He was immaculate in white ducks, white socks and shoes, and white topee, smoking a fragrant cigar. He did not look likea man who had just two months before buried his wife, but then, what did I know of how such a man should look? He did not speak to me of my mother, so I in turn kept my silence.
    My father waved down two rickshaws to take us from the port. I rode ahead with him; I looked back at Uncle Valentine perched on the seat of his rickshaw, his arm around the waist of my cello case next to him, leaning into her shoulder like a lover. As our rickshaw toiled up a steep hill, Father gave the boy loud directions that sounded to my ears as Go to Tangling Kechil. It was, he told me, the house of an old friend from his Singapore days.
    The McKenzies’ house was a brick bungalow three steps off the ground, its verandah rich with glazed pots planted with masses of maidenhair ferns and other tropical plants I could not name. The glossy leaves and strange flowers seemed faintly familiar, perhaps recalled from early childhood, from faded memories of the garden I had played in.
    The front door opened