The Devil's Garden by Nigel Barley

and studied the pass, gripping the balustrade all the way like a man suffering from vertigo. ‘Stamforod Road?’
    Pilchard bobbed enthusiastically and grinned like a madman. ‘Hai, hai. Stamforod Road. Museum.’ What the hell was it called now? ‘Syonan Hakubutsu Kan.’ The officer’s face lit up. He giggled.
    â€˜Stamforod Road. I think you mean Kempeitei HQ!’ He laughed and slapped playfully. ‘I think you no like Kempeitei HQ!’ Pilchard laughed back, then they both realised they were laughing and being friendly and stopped doing it. ‘Syonan Hakubutsu Kan.’ The officer muttered and looked formally irritated as he squiggled some more spiders on the chit and pushed the paper back into Pilchard’s hand. Then he took the guard’s pineapple, slapped him with casual violence round the face and waved Pilchard dismissively away and went back to looking over the edge, as if deciding whether or not he wanted to jump.
    As he hobbled along, stiff-backed, penguin-like, Pilchard was suddenly aware of other smiling faces. He was barely conscious, unfeeling, could take nothing in but the heat bouncing back from the road. All around, on the railing supports and at shoulder height, were impaled other heads, neatly sliced and trimmed at the neck like fresh-picked pineapples, mouths set in Mona Lisa rictus, skins a variety of shades of chocolate, sepia and yellow—Asian faces of all kinds at varying levels of decay but all tending towards uniform blue-black—death the great leveller. Beneath each was slung a sign in a variety of tongues. The English version read, ‘I was a looter.’ A European head would round out the collection nicely, he thought absently. Pilchard clutched his beans, that now seemed to burn in his hand, fixed his eyes on the road ahead and hurried on towards Lavender. Killing, then looting—two capital offences in a single afternoon—was not a bad score, if he lived to see the end of it.
    A hot wind was gusting along the streets and he was horribly thirsty but Lavender was another place that specialised in the purely professional slaking of thirsts, for the low ramshackle houses had once been the favourite low resort of sexually rampant Australian troops—boys of an age where the male body is simply a noisy device for converting food and drink into lust and semen—now all penned back up in sober Changi chastity. It was clear that the Japanese had not yet taken up the slack but the ethnographer in him wondered whether the girls really even noticed the difference, so crushing was the weight of the military upon Singapore even in peace. In his early days here, like all newcomers, he had come to taste the local wine, excited by the heady eroticism of smooth Asian skin—its pores saturated with spice and coconut oil—the flowing, black hair and had sat, worshipping, before golden calves For two dizzy months they had all been beautiful and then familiarity had set in with its power to sap and drain enthusiasm. He had not come since.
    Many of the bars were shut, seemingly for ever. Passers-by avoided him, afraid of being seen around a European leper, but he felt that, had they known of the thirty cents weighing down his pocket, they would have been on him like a pack of wolves. Most of the buildings here had been blasted by mortar and artillery fire and people were living under sheets in the ruins, taking water from standpipes in the middle of the street and hanging washing out to dry on the shattered roof beams. The markets that had flourished in the streets had withered into parody. A beggar sat smiling in the street and indicated a bloodied kneestump to all comers with the open-handed gesture of one who had just pulled off a difficult conjuring trick while, behind him, a corner stall that had once sold cigarettes now sold cigarette ends for reuse as if this were a totally normally activity. Yet, despite the deprivations, when the