3b

Rain, thin and web-like, adding to the oppressive nature of the day, has already started with importunate conviction by the time Albert alights from his bus by the Garden gates. The atmosphere is cloying, and Albert, frail and semi-porous, wobbling on incompetent feet, is virtually transfixed (though standing resolutely like a whore). The weather, coupled with the firm and steady greenness of the trees, elicits memories of Burma; of distant, quasi mystical, mythical Japs, buried in tangled undergrowth; of burned flesh and sallow flesh; of damp cigarettes, and dirty, sunburnt faces.

Of moonlit conferences, and sunlit conferences, in dingy, thatched huts.

So that there, thinly and inexpertly disguised as a bandstand, is HQ, venue of so many seismic interludes. Known as the palm-house, it camouflages intensity with soporific calm; no bands have played for decades, no sounds of screeching primates pierced the velvet night for even longer. All is squalid now, dilapidated.

As distant thunder murmurs - or perhaps the sound of gunfire, or of tiger. A languid finger of remembrance tries enticing his desire; there is and can be no escape.

A non-com of unfamiliar face goes by, saluting feebly. Here, where life is lived on tenterhooks, nothing can be guaranteed; nothing is to be regarded as inevitable except the ultimacy of death. But even death itself has a habit of proving elusive until it's least expected, least desired. Like love, he laughs. And wilts in omnipresent green.

My perfect wife and son, he muses. So far away from here. Unreal. Unfelt. Imponderable shadows. Mere vestiges of memory who rise to flail me in my weakness.

An eerie, frigid vision haunts him. His never perfect wife and son lie twitching on the blood-soaked floor, eyes breathless and exuberant, naked flesh marred beyond human semblance, bruised like fruit, and twisted like hair braids.

No, says Albert to himself (a hiss below the range of human hearing). No, I will not allow it, not allow it, not allow it. Repeated like a faulty gramophone record, several times. The last is heard, and people stare, heralding the harsh demise of Burma's steaming undergrowth, of Josephine's and Malcolm's bleeding torpor.

He walks toward the duck pond, his cloistered refuge, where soft-limbed post-industrialists console themselves by means of spuriously rustic forms of meditation. His heart beats faster now, for here it was that in a reverie of long ago, so dim as to defy recollection, so clear as to supersede reality, he first met Josephine, his wife, on a blustery November morning. Here, too - though later - he had kissed her, wooed her, and finally - in an obscure flurry of something akin to passion - engaged her to be his own forever.

Or so he later feared.