Free Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard

them to reply in their pidgin English. But they ignored him, and heaved at the dressing-table. Their deformed feet, like clenched fists, slipped on the steps.
    ‘It’s Jamie, Mrs Raymond…’
    Jim tried to step past the amahs, when one reached out and slapped him in the face.
    Stunned by the blow, Jim walked back to his bicycle. He had never been struck so hard, either in school boxing matches or in fights with the Avenue Foch gang. The front of his face seemed to have been torn from the bones. His eyes were smarting, but he stopped himself from crying. The amahs were strong, their arms toughened by a lifetime of washing clothes. Watching them with their dressing-table, Jim knew that they were paying him back for something he or the Raymonds had done to them.
    Jim waited until they reached the bottom step. When one of the amahs walked up to him, clearly intending to slap him again, he mounted his cycle and pedalled away.
    Outside the Raymonds’ drive two German boys of his own age were playing with a ball as their mother unlocked the family’s Opel. Usually they would have shouted German slogans at Jim, or thrown stones at him until stopped by their mother. But today all three stood silently. Jim cycled past, trying not to show them his bruised face. The mother held her sons’ shoulders, watching Jim as if concerned for what would soon befall him.
    Still shocked by the anger he had seen in the amah’s face, Jim set off for the Maxteds’ apartment house in the French Concession. His whole head felt swollen and there was a loose tooth in his lower jaw. He wanted to see his mother and father, and he wanted the war to end soon, that afternoon if possible.
    Dusty, and suddenly very tired, Jim reached the barbed-wire checkpoint on the Avenue Foch. The streets were less crowded, but several hundred Chinese and Europeans queued to pass the Japanese guards. A Swiss-owned Buick and a Vichy French gasoline truck were waved through the gates. Usually the European pedestrians would have gone to the head of the queue, but now they took their turn among the rickshaw coolies and peasants pushing handcarts. Gripping his cycle, Jim barely held his ground as a barefoot coolie with diseased calves laboured past him under a bamboo yoke laden with bales of firewood. The crowd pressed around him, in a sweat of stench and fatigue, cheap fat and rice wine, the odours of a Shanghai new to him. An open Chrysler with two young Germans in the front seat accelerated past, horn blaring, the rear fender grazing Jim’s hand.
    Once through the checkpoint Jim straightened the front wheel of his cycle and pedalled to the Maxteds’ apartment house in the Avenue Joffre. The formal garden in the French style was as immaculate as ever, a comforting memory of the old Shanghai. As he rode the elevator to the seventh floor Jim used his tears to clean his hands and face, half expecting Mrs Maxted to have returned from Singapore.
    The door to the apartment was open. Jim stepped into the hall, recognizing Mr Maxted’s leather overcoat on the floor. The same tornado that had whirled his mother’s bedroom in Amherst Avenue had swept in and out of every room in the Maxteds’ apartment. Drawers full of clothes had been thrown on to the beds, ransacked wardrobes hung open above piles of shoes, suitcases lay everywhere as if a dozen Maxted families had been unable to decide what to pack at five minutes’ notice.
    ‘Patrick…’ Jim hesitated to enter Patrick’s room without knocking. His mattress had been hurled to the floor, and the curtains drifted in the open windows. But Patrick’s model aircraft, more carefully constructed than Jim’s, still dangled from the ceiling.
    Jim pulled the mattress on to the bed and lay down. He watched the aircraft turning in the cold air that moved through the empty apartment. He and Patrick had spent hours inventing imaginary air battles in the sky of that bedroom above the Avenue Joffre. Jim watched the Spitfires and