Tiger, Tiger. Philip Caveney

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СКАЧАТЬ rush of perversity took Harry and he moved it away a little. ‘But I cannot give it to my friend yet,’ he continued.

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘First, he would have to say something else for me.’

      Ché laughed merrily. ‘What must I say, Tuan? Another story?’

      Harry shook his head.

      ‘Just one word. Just to prove to me that he has his wits about him. I want him to say “tiger.”’

      Ché’s face fell.

      ‘But Tuan, I cannot! It is unlucky …’

      ‘Oh well.’ Harry feigned disappointment. ‘If you can’t say that one word …’

      ‘But Tuan …’ Ché glanced at his feet. ‘You don’t understand. It is an unlucky word. It brings down the t – the creature’s curse onto your head. Of course, I don’t really believe the old stories, but …’

      ‘You mean … I’ll have to take this marvellous watch back to the shop?’

      ‘No, I … uh … I …’ Ché fixed his gaze stubbornly to the floor, then glanced up at the glittering silver watch in Harry’s grasp. ‘Tiger …’ he mumbled, in a voice that was barely a whisper.

      ‘Oh, you’ll have to say it louder than that,’ chided Harry.

      ‘Tiger! There, Tuan, I’ve said it.’

      ‘So you have,’ admitted Harry. And he gave the watch to the boy. Ché’s misgivings were swept aside by the rush of his delight as he held the watch to his ear and listened to its ticking.

      ‘Oh, Tuan, it is a beautiful watch, the most wonderful watch ever! I can hear it ticking so loudly! Thank you, Tuan, thank you!’ He rushed to hug Harry, tears of gratitude in his eyes. ‘May I take it to show my grandmother?’

      ‘Of course!’ Harry was every bit as delighted as the boy was. Perhaps more so. Ché rushed into the house, yelling for Pawn to come and witness for herself the incredible watch. But once he was gone, Harry felt vaguely annoyed with himself. Why had he taxed the poor little devil so cruelly? Surely, in all the years he’d lived here, he’d learned that the one thing you shouldn’t fool around with were the beliefs that people held dear, no matter how ridiculous they might seem. He had enjoyed giving the present and he had simply wanted to prolong the enjoyment, but it had been a rather thoughtless method of doing so. Still, there was no harm done, he was sure of that. He settled back in his chair and closed his eyes, feeling a deep contentment settle over him. Perhaps he might manage a little nap before breakfast. Yes, why ever not? It had been a good day, so far.

      He slept and dreamed of tigers.

      Melissa gazed critically at her reflection in the hand mirror, as she methodically ran a brush through her long dark hair. She had been sunbathing on the lawn with her mother for most of the morning and had become bored to distraction. Nothing ever happened here. Sometimes she felt moved to screaming, such was her dissatisfaction. It was ridiculous, here she was, a free agent, able to do just whatever took her fancy; yet what use was such freedom when life consisted of nothing but interminable bouts of boredom? Social life in Malaya tended to consist of long periods of lounging. Of course, the background varied from time to time. One could lounge on an idyllic beach, or beside the glittering waters of the local swimming pool … well, for that matter, one could simply lounge in the back garden and have done with it.

      For the more athletically inclined, there was always tennis or squash … good wholesome exercise, nobody could argue with that, but offering little in the way of frivolity. There was really no ‘action’ here. Melissa glanced thoughtfully at a couple of newspaper articles pinned to the wall beside her desk, both of them torn from British periodicals, which were widely available here, but typically several weeks out-of-date. The first cutting showed a photograph of a hippie girl dancing stark naked at an English pop festival. THE GIRL WHO LET IT ALL HANG OUT! blared the headline, while the editorial ran on to describe an orgy of rock music and hallucinogenic drugs outraging the inhabitants of a little village near Glastonbury. The other cutting had a similar theme: TOP POP GROUP IN DRUG ORGY ARREST! and a couple of very familiar faces were pictured being escorted from the doorway of a country house by a pair of burly policemen. Melissa sighed. Britain sounded like a much more interesting place than Malaya and she could hardly wait to experience it for herself. She put down the hand mirror, got up, and strolled to the slatted bedroom window. Peering out, she could see her mother stretched out on a sun-bed, apparently asleep. She lay in the midst of a large empty garden and beyond that lay the silent, sun-baked street and not a soul moved along it in the heat of the afternoon.

      Melissa felt a great silent wave of emotion welling up inside her, but as she had on numerous occasions before, she willed herself to take control of it. There was at least one area of hope on the horizon: the shooting contest in two days’ time. Of course, she had not the remotest interest in shooting, but Bob Beresford would be there, and that particular young man was beginning to receive more and more of her attention as time went by. She constantly found herself thinking about him; worse still, in bed during the long hot sleepless nights, her thoughts turned into the most torrid fantasies, in which he figured prominently. She began to wonder if she was not becoming a little obsessed with him. Her concept of men was still surprisingly girlish, nurtured by the overprotective lifestyle she had experienced in the girls’ boarding school in which she had but lately resided. The fact that she was still a virgin at eighteen was frankly not from choice. She had simply not been given the opportunity of being with boys, right from the age when she was first interested in them, and now that she had ‘done her time,’ that was one matter she intended putting right at the earliest opportunity. At boarding school, nobody would ever admit to being a virgin so great was the shame of it. Free time was often spent recounting lewd adventures with the opposite sex, and though eighty percent of them were undoubtedly pure fiction it was not done to accuse the author of being a liar.

      As a consequence of all this, sex, to Melissa, had taken on the form of a terrifying hurdle over which she must scramble before she could ever hope to enjoy herself. She was not so hardened that sex with just anybody would suffice; but Bob Beresford was lean, attractive, and very manly. She could quite easily visualize herself going to bed with him.

      She felt suddenly ashamed by the openness of her own thoughts and she blushed, glancing around nervously, as though afraid that somebody might be observing her. She moved back to her desk, sat down again, and picked up the hand mirror. She was pretty, there was no doubt of that … but Bob did not seem to be very forthright. It might be up to her to make the first move …

      ‘Melissa? Aren’t you coming out again? It’s beautiful out here.’ Her mother’s voice shrilled from the garden.

      ‘Coming,’ she replied wearily. She put the mirror down on the desk and stood up; but the mirror, dangerously close to the edge of the wood, overbalanced, and fell with a crash onto the tiled floor. With an exclamation of anger, Melissa stooped and retrieved it. There was a wide diagonal crack running across its surface. When Melissa examined her reflection, the two halves of her face did not fit together properly, giving the impression that she was horribly deformed.

      ‘Just what I needed,’ she muttered darkly. ‘Seven years’ bad luck.’

      She dropped the mirror into the litter bin on her way out of the room.

      Haji hugged the darkness to him like a second skin as he advanced cautiously on the sleeping kampong. He was wise enough to know that what had worked before would work again. He СКАЧАТЬ