There was a long delay before he said.
‘Where’s laughing boy?’
‘It’s finished, Ken.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ There was a pause. She wasn’t expecting words of comfort. He was obviously struggling to find the right words. Finally he said, ‘Have you had any luck with your search?’
‘Not much. I’m hoping for more luck in Penang.’
‘Oh, by the way, someone’s been trying to get in touch with you. He’s called a couple of times. A boy called Rory.’
‘That’s strange. He’s a friend of Luke’s.’
‘He seemed a bit agitated.’
‘He’s a bit odd. Tell him I’ll call when I get back if he phones again. I’ll let you know when I get to Penang.’
‘Good luck, lassie.’
The night train to Butterworth raced across the flat rice fields of the Central Plain of Thailand as the huge red sun dipped beneath the western horizon. Laura sat at her table in the first class compartment and was served supper by a smiling waiter. She stared out at the tropical landscape, the sun streaking the paddies red. For the first time since she had left home, she felt content.
She thought about Dad and his words to her about Luke: ‘If he makes you happy, that’s all that matters.’ What an idiot she’d been. She knew now why those words had troubled her so. Dad had known that Luke could never make her happy. But it had taken this trip for her to work that out for herself.
23
Tom quickly got used to the routines of the hospital hut. The patients would be woken early, before the bugle sounded outside for roll call. They were given a similar breakfast to the rest of the men in the camp, but only about half the quantity. One of the orderlies told Tom that the Japanese would not provide rations for those who were too sick to work. Everyone’s rations were reduced accordingly, and the officers had to beg and bargain with the Thais outside the camp for eggs and chickens to supplement the sick men’s food and give them at least a fighting chance of getting better.
During morning roll call all the sick men in the hut listened anxiously to what was going on outside. Often the doctor was called out, and a fierce argument would ensue when he was asked to explain why there were so many sick men. The Ripper would then order him to produce some sick men to make up the work parties. The doctor always refused to do this and was invariably beaten up. The men in the hut could hear the dull thuds as the doctor was kicked and punched. They winced as they listened to his groans and shouts of pain. But after it was over he would stagger back into the hut, his face swollen and bloody. The doctor would dab his wounds with a cloth, straighten himself up, and carry on caring for the sick men as if nothing had happened.
More than once during roll call, a group of guards burst into the hut and pulled out sick men from their beds, forcing them to their feet and shoving them outside into the glare of the sun at the point of a bayonet. Some of these poor wretches could barely walk. They made a pitiful sight, staggering out through the doorway, their skeletal frames unfit for any manual labour. Tom was secretly relieved that he was never picked. Perhaps he just looked too sick and wasted, even by the standards of the camp.
Every day new patients were brought in: victims of tropical ulcers, dysentery, beri-beri, malaria. The ulcer cases were confined to one end of the hut, yet their odours of putrefaction, the sickly stench of rotting flesh still permeated the whole place. The orderlies did their best to ease the suffering of these men. They brought them water, fed them by hand, bathed the sweat from their brows and helped them to the latrine. But they had no medicines to give to them, and many men died every day. They died quietly, without fuss or complaint. Each evening the bodies were taken out of the hut on bamboo stretchers and carried to the cemetery on the edge of the camp to be buried.
Tom found living so close to death terrifying. He knew how near he had been to succumbing. It made him all the more determined to pull through. He was getting better and stronger by the day. The welts and bruises from his beatings were healing gradually, and his fever seemed to have peaked and was on the wane.
‘We’ll soon have you up and out working that cutting again, my boy,’ said Captain Strang one day, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘By all accounts, it is almost finished now. They’re nearly through to the other side.’
Tom groaned.
‘Please don’t send me back there, Doc.’
‘I’d dearly love to spare you, Ellis, but if it isn’t you, it would be someone even sicker than you. And that’s hardly fair, is it?’
‘No, Doc, I suppose not,’ Tom said, looking around the hut at the sick and suffering men.
Tom continued to watch Jim Leech whenever the orderly was in the hut. Leech still avoided Tom and his area of the hut. He would cast a furtive glance in Tom’s direction and then look away quickly if he saw that Tom was also watching him. Tom was becoming increasingly curious and suspicious about the man’s behaviour.
One day when he was chatting to George, Tom stumbled upon something that might explain Leech’s strange behaviour towards him.
‘It’s rotten about your young friend,’ said George to Tom as he was cleaning the wounds on Tom’s back. He was a wiry little man, burnt copper by the sun, and although he was skinny like everyone else, he looked fit and healthy. He was working away energetically at Tom’s back, clearing away the pus so that the wounds would have a chance of healing.
‘It’s terrible … Terrible,’ said Tom. ‘I knew he would never survive in there. He already had
