Tiger, Tiger

Tiger, Tiger

Philip Caveney

Copyright

This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

First published in 1984 by Granada Publishing

Copyright © Philip Caveney 1984

Philip Caveney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design layout © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780246124739

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2015 ISBN: 9780008133283

Version: 2015-04-15

A glossary of foreign terms is provided at the end of the book

Dedication

MARION BURNS.

ROBBIE ROBINSON.

Good friends both, sadly missed.

This book is for them.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Two

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Glossary

Keep Reading

About the Author

By Philip Caveney

About the Publisher

ONE

Chapter 1

The afternoon sun was still fierce. Haji lay stretched out in the shade of a bamboo thicket, his head resting on his great paws. Aligned with the shadows cast through the bamboo screen, the jet-black stripes that crisscrossed his tawny body served to render him virtually invisible. He lay stock-still, but for all that he was not comfortable. There was a dull ache of hunger in the pit of his stomach and his right forepaw throbbed relentlessly where the spines of a tok landak had struck him some weeks ago. He had long since chewed the protruding ends away, but the barbed heads had remained buried deep in the flesh of his foot, where they had begun to suppurate. The earlier agonizing pain had given way to a constant nagging ache that was with him every moment of the day and night.

He was an old tiger, and sixteen years of prowling swamps and jungles without serious harm should have taught him more caution. But the hunting had been bad for a long time now and the porcupine’s succulent flesh had been a tempting proposition. Perhaps Haji was simply not as fast as he had once been. At any rate, in attempting to flip the spiny creature over onto its back to expose the vulnerable underbelly, something had gone wrong. The tok landak had scuttled away to safety, leaving Haji roaring with pain and frustration. Since then, the hunting had not got any easier.

Haji lifted his head slightly and stared through the screen of bushes into the kampong, twenty yards to his right. A large group of Upright cubs were playing a noisy game of Sepak Takraw, kicking a rattan ball to each other over an improvised net. The cubs were very skilful and the ball rarely touched the ground. The frenzied cries and shouts of their strange squeaky language echoed on the still air. Haji’s yellow eyes took in every movement. He watched with curiosity and a little fear; he feared the Uprights as he feared anything which he did not readily understand, but something had called him from the depths of the jungle this day and he had forsaken the constant hunt for food in order to travel out into patches of secondary jungle and scrub. He knew he would not rest easy until it was done. Now, here he lay, closer to the Uprights’ lair than he had ever been, and there was nothing for him to do but lie silent and still while he watched.

The Uprights had always mystified him: these strange hairless creatures that walked on two legs, possessed incredible powers, could march around the jungle, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a bigger and stronger creature was lying mere inches from where their tiny feet trod. On the few occasions when Haji had actually made his presence known, the Uprights had all reacted in a variety of extraordinary ways. Some had simply fled, howling and screaming in a most curious fashion, while others had clambered clumsily onto the branches of nearby trees. Most confusing of all, two of these uprights had on separate occasions produced some black sticks that roared fire at Haji, a moving fire that seemed to tear at the bushes and earth, shattering it into abrupt movement. On these two misadventures, it had been Haji who chose to run away, for such things were not then within the range of his experience. He knew now that the black sticks carried death to those animals who did not run quite fast enough, though he could not comprehend how such a thing might be brought about. Once, while Haji had been painstakingly stalking a large rusa, an Upright had approached from another direction, pointed his black stick at the beast, and the roaring fire had struck the rusa so hard that his whole body shook. Then he had fallen, as dead as a stone.

Haji put out his long rasping tongue and licked absentmindedly at his paw. The action revived fresh spasms of pain from the wound and he growled softly at the discomfort. It hurt his pride to think how clumsy he’d been with the tok landak, but it was a pride tempered with healthy respect. He would have to be very hungry indeed before he tackled another of the wretched beasts.

An extra loud yell from the cubs focused his attention, and suddenly something crashed down into the bushes by his side, startling him and almost putting him to flight. But he caught himself as he realized that it was just the rattan ball, which had sailed over the heads of the nearest cubs and come to a halt mere feet from Haji’s outstretched paws. He sniffed at it suspiciously, but it lay quite still and harmless and he relaxed again. After a few moments, there was a pounding of naked feet on earth and one of the cubs approached the undergrowth. He snatched up a length of stick and began to poke around in the bushes, probably more wary of snakes than of anything else. He did not see Haji lying in the shade of the bamboo. Haji watched with calm interest. The Upright was small and carried no black stick. He seemed to offer little threat.

The other cubs began to shout and wave. Tired of the game, they were moving on. They beckoned for the lone cub to accompany them, but he pointed into the bushes and jabbered something in his curious high-pitched voice. Evidently the rattan ball belonged to him and he wanted to retrieve it. The others wandered away and it was very quiet now. The Upright turned back and began to employ the stick more aggressively, muttering softly to himself as he searched. He moved a few steps nearer to Haji and looked there, stooping down on one knee and pushing the thick leaves aside with his bare arm. He was so close now that Haji could smell his half-naked little body; the faint odour of sweat drifting from beneath his armpits; the aroma of rice and cooked meat on his breath. Now, the cub’s gaze fell on the bamboo thicket. Through the gaps in the upright stalks, he could perceive the shadowy sphere that was his ball. With an exclamation of relief, he moved forward and thrust an arm into the thicket to try and retrieve the ball. It was quite a stretch.

Haji gazed at the little brown hand as it grasped the ball, no more than two feet from his own paws. It was a strange-looking arrangement, more like a soft brown crab with wriggling feet than anything else. But it gripped the ball surely and snatched it out from the cover into sunlight. The cub got to his feet as though to walk away, but then he hesitated, sniffing the air suspiciously. He gazed intently into the thicket, scratching his head in puzzlement. Then he sank down again onto one knee, reached out to push the screen of bamboo aside …

‘Ché!’ A mother’s voice from somewhere in the kampong. ‘Ché!’ The cub frowned, half turned, stared off into the jumble of tumbledown dwellings as though reluctant to answer his mother’s call. He turned back to the bamboo, reached out his hands again …

‘Ché!’ Again the call, more insistent now. It was time to eat, or wash, or sleep. The cub’s tiny fingers, curled around the stems of bamboo, slid gently away. With a sigh, he collected his ball and trudged wearily homewards, forgetting now the unfamiliar odour that had initially roused his curiosity.

Haji watched the cub walk away into the lengthening shadows of late afternoon. Soon, the sun would die bloodily on the horizon and the brief twilight would come and go in silence. In the high-stilted kampong houses, oil lamps would be lit and prayers would be muttered to safeguard the villagers from the demons of advancing darkness. And for Haji, the long night’s hunt would begin.

He got to his feet and, silent as a ghost, he limped away.

Harry ‘Tiger’ Sullivan was occupying his favourite table at the Officers’ Mess, Kuala Hitam barracks. It was a table like all the others, but it was placed in a strategic position where the sitter could take in every corner of the Mess at a glance. Harry had been using the same table for something like eighteen years now, and it was an unspoken custom in the Mess to leave it free whenever Harry was around. In retirement, he used the table as often as he had when he was a Lieutenant Colonel with the resident regiment, the Fourth Gurkha Rifles. He had now been retired for five years but was as much a central figure at the Mess as he had ever been. Nobody would have dreamed of questioning his presence there.

Trimani, the white-coated Tamil barman, approached the table with the customary chilled glass of ‘Tiger’ beer. The care and reverence with which Trimani went about the task made it almost a religious ceremony. The glass was wearing a clean towelling band to make it more agreeable to the touch.

‘Thank you, Trimani.’ Harry put a hand into the breast pocket of his cotton jacket and pulled out a leather wallet containing five cigars. He extracted one, cut the end with a silver gadget he always carried, and placed the cigar between his lips. Trimani was waiting with a match and Harry puffed contentedly, releasing clouds of aromatic smoke.

‘The Tuan has had a good day?’ ventured Trimani politely. Like every other aspect of the ceremony it was a habitual question.

‘Very good, Trimani, thank you very much.’ And Harry dropped a fifty-cent coin into the barman’s silver tray. With a respectful nod, Trimani retired to his usual place behind the bar.

Harry sighed. The truth of the matter was, of course, that it had been a bloody boring sort of day. Most days for him had been bloody boring since he had left the forces; or more accurately, since he had been obliged to leave the forces. He had always felt bitter about that.

Harry was sixty-seven years old, but few people would have thought it. He was a thin wiry individual with not a pound of excess fat on his body. Though iron grey, his hair was thick (and a shade on the long side by forces standards) and his moustache was immaculately trimmed. He was undoubtedly the most popular officer that the regiment had ever possessed, and he was regarded now by the men with a peculiar kind of affection that elevated him almost to the role of a mascot. His connections with the Fourth went back a long way. He had originally served with them as a junior officer in India during the Burma campaign, where he had steadily risen through the ranks. He had come across to Malaya with them in 1948, where he commanded them during the ten-year ‘confrontation’ with the Communist terrorists. He had seen the task through admirably, and had expected to move on with them to Sarawak in 1962 to help quell the Brunei Revolt. But a medical examination had discovered a tricky heart problem and he had been promptly – and rather unceremoniously, he thought – dumped in favour of a younger man. Shortly after that, he had been ‘bowler-hatted’, though he had moved heaven and earth in an attempt to stay in longer. It had been to no avail. He was sixty-three years old and, whatever his views concerning his own health, he must stand aside and give somebody else a chance. And so, reluctantly, he had settled down to enjoy an idyllic, well-pensioned retirement.

And that was where his problems had really begun. A man who had spent his life with energy, authority, and decisiveness did not take very kindly to lazing about on beaches or beside swimming pools, and there was not a great deal more to do in this lonely outpost. Situated in the Dungun district of South Trengganu, on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, the area was little more than several isolated kampongs, the barracks and a few accompanying dwellings, dotted at intervals of a mile or so along the main coast road to Kuala Trengganu, the state capital. All around lay thick and virtually inaccessible jungle. The barracks had been established as a forward grouping point in the campaign against the C.T.s, who had known only too well how to use the jungle to their own advantage. But the emergency had officially ended in 1960, and most of the troops had been dispatched back to the main barracks in Singapore. Now Kuala Hitam was maintained by what amounted to a skeleton crew; worse still, recent rumours of major cutbacks in the Gurkha regiments had become more than just rumours. The numbers were to be whittled down to a mere ten thousand men. For the rest, the prospects were nothing more than a meagre pension or redundancy payment and a one-way ticket back to their homes in India, where they were expected to pick up from where they had left off in 1940. The decision meant inevitable poverty and heartbreak for the majority of men, but, as always, the Gurkhas had accepted their fate with quiet humility. Now it was simply a question of waiting. Harry shared the feelings of regret, but was unable to change anything. His voice, which had once carried so much power in these matters, was now rendered useless; a vague, impotent whimper.

Harry raised the glass of beer to his lips and drank a silent toast to an old adversary, the head of which glowered down at him from above the doorway of the Mess. The taxidermist, as usual, had done a good job, but somehow they were never able to capture that certain look. The tiger’s eyes were blind glass, staring vacantly down at the peaceful crowd below. The expression of feral rage was totally contrived. He had died with a look of complete peace on his face; and, in dying, he had gazed up at Harry, seeming to ask, Why?

‘Because you’re a cattle-killer,’ Harry had answered in his mind, knowing in his soul that this was not really the truth. His words had rung hollow, and after some deliberation, he had had to admit that the months of trailing and tracking and sitting up nights over the stinking carcasses of slain cows and goats had all been done in the name of ‘sport.’ Cattle-killing was merely the excuse, a means to an end. The look in that dying tiger’s eyes had shaken him badly. He could not rid his mind of the image for days afterwards, and he had never gone hunting again. That had been back in 1958. He still cleaned and oiled the rifle regularly, more from force of habit than from any conscious intention to use it again. He had impulsively bequeathed the trophy to his regiment, having no desire to put it in his own home. He had realized too late that the beast would always be there in the Mess, staring down at him in silent accusation. Thus, another little ceremony was born. A toast from one tiger to another. After all, it was the death of this cat and many others like him that had earned Harry his nickname; what more fitting celebration than to drink to the creature in ‘Tiger’ beer, that infamous beverage that was both the delight and the ruin of the armed forces in Malaysia?

The beer was a delicious shock to his dehydrated insides. He set the glass down carefully and tilted back his head a little, allowing the electric fan above him to direct a cooling breeze onto his face and neck. He closed his eyes and gave a small sigh of contentment.

‘Bloody hell, Trim, pour me a big one! I’ve got a mouth like a badger’s bum! Oh no, you don’t, lads, the first round is mine …’

Harry opened his eyes again, the peace and quiet having been rudely shattered by an unfamiliar Australian voice that had all the delicacy of a drum kit falling down a flight of stairs. A small group of young officers had just trooped into the Mess, headed by somebody who was a stranger to Harry. He was a tall athletic fellow, with close-cropped fair hair. Evidently a civilian, judging by his sloppy T-shirt and blue jeans; even out of uniform, military men maintained a certain bearing that was unmistakable.

‘Now, alright, Jim, what’re you having? What? I should bloody well say so! And how about you? Aw, for chrissakes, have whatever you like! No, no, honestly … make that a double, Trim, and make sure it is a bloody double, too! Have one yerself while you’re about it …’

Harry frowned. There was not a man in the world who could call him a racist. After all, he had worked side by side with the Gurkhas for half his life, and he thought them one of the most agreeable races he had ever encountered. Likewise, he loved and respected the Malays, Indians, and Chinese who peopled the Peninsula; the homely Burmese people he had met in the war. He had even come to honour the Japanese nation against whom he had fought for so long. But try as he might to be fair and totally objective, he could not bring himself to like the Australians. He imagined that, somewhere, there must exist an antipodean male that was not loud, boorish, and obsessed with booze and dirty stories. Unfortunately, he had yet to meet this man.

‘Here, this one’ll kill ya! There’s this bloke, see, goes to the doctor cause he can’t get it up anymore. His sheila’s goin’ berserk with ’im, reckons he don’t love her anymore. Anyway, the doctor tells ’im to drop his trousers and when he does, the bloke’s got this great big …’ The rest of the story was obliterated by a burst of raucous laughter from the young officers.

Harry was quietly outraged by this lack of respect. In his day, a certain restraint had always been observed around the Mess; it had been a place where gentlemen congregated. Of course, there had always been room for a certain amount of high-spirits, but the telling of off-colour jokes in a voice loud enough to wake the dead seemed to illustrate just how drastically standards had dropped in the last decade. What seemed most upsetting to Harry was the fact that the young officers were openly encouraging this oaf to do his worst. Well, it was plain that somebody had to draw the line, even if it simply meant removing oneself from the scene of the outrage as quickly as possible. Harry drained his glass, banged it down on the table with just enough force to turn a few heads at the bar. Then he stood up, nodded curtly to Trimani, and strolled out of the room. Trimani smiled apologetically as Harry passed by him. He, at least, understood.

Outside, the night was humid and cacophonous with the chirping of a myriad insects. Some large fat moths flapped vainly around the lantern that overhung the entrance to the Mess. The grizzled old trishaw man who had appointed himself Harry’s customary driver for this journey eased his creaking vehicle around to the base of the white stone steps. In the glow of his oil lamp, beneath the wide brim of his coolie hat, the man’s wizened face looked almost skeletal. He grinned gummily.

‘Selamat petang, Tuan. You leave early, yes?’

‘Yes, we leave now.’ Harry smiled warmly at the old Chinese man, whose name he had never enquired after. He could never remember Chinese names anyway. ‘Tonight not good for me. Too noisy.’

The driver nodded. He too was a seeker after peace and understood only too well. He waited patiently while Harry climbed into the seat, then gratefully accepted the cigar that was passed to him. He leaned forward as Harry’s lighter flared, and inhaled with slow satisfaction. Then he leaned back, removed the cigar, and grinned again.

‘Good,’ he murmured. ‘Good cigar. I thank the Tuan.’ He engaged his sandalled feet on the pedals and his skinny legs performed the motion they had been making half his life. The trishaw accelerated away from the Mess, crunching on the gravel drive and then turning out onto the deserted road, its lantern blazing a lonely message in the darkness. They began to pick up speed, the wheels making a dry whirring sound as they sped past the black silhouettes of secondary jungle that flanked their path. Riding in this way, smoking with his old travelling companion, Harry felt a peculiar peace settle around him, and he found himself wishing that time could be suspended, and that this long gliding ride through the night might somehow last forever.

Chapter 2

Haji was still patrolling the western end of his extensive home range. It was always necessary to keep on the move, because potential prey soon became alerted to his presence in an area and promptly moved on. It took Haji around ten to twelve days to complete a trip around his territory, which consisted of a rough triangle of fifteen square miles. Right now, he was prowling the secondary jungle that ran beside the coast road, for he had long ago learned that troops of monkeys often chose to congregate there, thinking themselves safe so near to the wandering grounds of the Uprights. When they thought themselves to be beyond danger, they sometimes got careless and were slow to react to an unexpected attack … but tonight, Haji was out of luck. Somehow the monkeys had got wind of his notion and stayed safely in the topmost limbs of the Meranti trees.

Haji was unhappy, but quite used to such hard times. Even when the hunting was good, he could expect eighteen unsuccessful stalks for each triumph. The rest of the jungle creatures conspired against him. The monkeys gibbered his presence from the tall trees and the birds, hearing this, quickly took up the cry. The rusa uttered their distinctive ‘pooking’ sound to alert their brothers, whenever their sharp noses picked up the merest trace of that distinctive, musky, tiger smell. Hampered as he was by his wound and his advancing years, Haji was doing well to bring down one kill in thirty, and in between he could expect nothing but long bouts of frantic hunger. When at last he did succeed in killing something, a rusa, a wild pig, sometimes even a fat seladang calf (provided he could snatch the creature away from its massive, highly aggressive parents) then he would gorge himself until his stomach was a bloated obscenity, consuming maybe eighty pounds of meat in one sitting. It had been three days since he had devoured what remained of his last kill, an insubstantial mouse deer that hardly warranted the effort it had taken to stalk it. But hunger dictated its own rules and the instinct for survival kept him moving.