Empire of the Sun. John Lanchester

sat still, as the slightest move would produce a short pause followed by violent retribution. The previous year, when he was ten, Jim had nearly given Yang a heart attack by pointing his metal Spitfire into the face of a Japanese corporal and chanting ‘Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta …’ For almost a minute the corporal had stared at Jim’s father without expression, nodding slowly to himself. His father was physically a strong man, but Jim knew that it was the kind of strength that came from playing tennis.

      This time Jim merely wanted the Japanese to see his balsa aircraft; not to admire it, but to acknowledge its existence. He was older now, and liked to think of himself as the co-pilot of the Packard. Aircraft had always interested Jim, and especially the Japanese bombers that had devastated the Nantao and Hongkew districts of Shanghai in 1937. Street after street of Chinese tenements had been levelled to the dust, and in the Avenue Edward VII a single bomb had killed a thousand people, more than any other bomb in the history of warfare.

      The chief attraction of Dr Lockwood’s parties, in fact, was the disused airfield at Hungjao. Although the Japanese controlled the open countryside around the city, their forces were kept busy patrolling the perimeter of the International Settlement. They tolerated the few Americans and Europeans who lived in the rural districts, and in practice there was rarely a Japanese soldier to be seen.

      When they arrived at Dr Lockwood’s isolated house Jim was relieved to find that the party was not going to be a success. There were only a dozen cars in the drive, and their chauffeurs were hard at work polishing the dust from the fenders, eager for a quick getaway. The swimming-pool had been drained, and the Chinese gardener was quietly removing a dead oriole from the deep end. The younger children and their amahs sat on the terrace, watching a troupe of Cantonese acrobats climb their comical ladders and pretend to disappear into the sky. They turned into birds, unfurled crushed paper wings and danced in and out of the squealing children, then leapt on to each other’s backs and transformed themselves into a large red cockerel.

      Jim steered his balsa plane through the verandah doors. As the adults’ world continued above his head he made a circuit of the party. Many of the guests had decided not to appear in costume, as if too nervous of their real roles to cast themselves in disguise. The gathering reminded Jim of the all-night parties at Amherst Avenue which lasted to the next afternoon, when distracted mothers in crumpled evening gowns wandered by the swimming-pool, pretending to look for their husbands.

      The conversation fell away when Dr Lockwood switched on the short-wave radio. Glad to see everyone occupied, Jim stepped through a side door on to the rear terrace of the house. He watched the line of weeding women move across the lawn. There were twenty Chinese women, dressed in black tunics and trousers, each on a miniature stool. They sat shoulder to shoulder, weeding knives flashing at the grass, while keeping up an unstoppable chatter. Behind them Dr Lockwood’s lawn lay like green shantung.

      ‘Hello, Jamie. Cogitating again?’ Mr Maxted, father of his best friend, emerged from the verandah. A solitary but amiable figure in a sharkskin suit, who faced reality across the buffer of a large whisky and soda, he stared down his cigar at the weeding women. ‘If all the people in China sat in a line they would stretch from the North to the South Pole. Have you thought of that, Jamie?’

      ‘They could weed the whole world?’

      ‘If you want to put it like that. I hear you’ve resigned from the cubs.’

      ‘Well …’ Jim doubted if there was any point in explaining to Mr Maxted why he had left the wolf-cubs, an act of rebellion he had decided upon simply to test its result. To his disappointment, Jim’s parents had been surprisingly unmoved. He thought of telling Mr Maxted that not only had he left the cubs and become an atheist, but he might become a communist as well. The communists had an intriguing ability to unsettle everyone, a talent Jim greatly respected.

      However, he knew that Mr Maxted would not be shocked by this. Jim admired Mr Maxted, an architect turned entrepreneur who had designed the Metropole Theatre and numerous Shanghai nightclubs. Jim often tried to imitate his raffish manner, but soon found that being so relaxed was exhausting work. Jim had little idea of his own future – life in Shanghai was lived wholly within an intense present – but he imagined himself growing up to be like Mr Maxted. Forever accompanied by the same glass of whisky and soda, or so Jim believed, Mr Maxted was the perfect type of the Englishman who had adapted himself to Shanghai, something that Jim’s father, with his seriousness of mind, had never really done. Jim always enjoyed the drives with Mr Maxted, when he and Patrick sat in the front seat of the Studebaker and embarked on unpredictable journeys through an afternoon world of empty nightclubs and casinos. Mr Maxted drove the Studebaker himself, a trick of behaviour that seemed exciting and even faintly disreputable to Jim. He and Patrick would play the untended roulette wheels with Mr Maxted’s money, under the tolerant smiles of the White Russian bar-girls darning their silk stockings, while Mr Maxted sat in the office with the owner, moving around other piles of banknotes.

      Perhaps, in return, he should take Mr Maxted on his secret expedition to Hungjao Airfield?

      ‘Don’t miss the film show, Jamie. I rely on you to keep me up to date with the latest news in military aviation …’

      Jim watched Mr Maxted sway along the tiled verge of the empty swimming-pool, curious to see if he would fall in. If Mr Maxted was always accidentally falling into swimming-pools, as indeed he always was, why did he only fall into them when they were filled with water?

       3

       The Abandoned Aerodrome

      Pondering the answer, Jim stepped from the terrace. He ran across the lawn past the weeding women, sailing his aircraft over their heads. The women ignored him, their knives stabbing at the grass, but Jim always felt a faint shiver of horror when he strayed too close to them. He could visualize what would happen if he fainted in their path.

      At the south-west corner of the estate was Dr Lockwood’s radio mast. A section of the wooden fence had been displaced by the stay-wires, and Jim stepped through the gap on to the edge of an untended field. A burial tumulus rose from the wild sugar-cane at its centre, and the rotting coffins projected from the loose earth like a chest of drawers.

      Jim set out across the field. As he passed the tumulus he stopped to peer into the lidless coffins. The yellowing skeletons were embedded in the rain-washed mud, as if these poor peasants had been laid out on pallets of silk. Once again Jim was struck by the contrast between the impersonal bodies of the newly dead, whom he saw every day in Shanghai, and these sun-warmed skeletons, every one an individual. The skulls intrigued him, with their squinting eye-sockets and quirky teeth. In many ways these skeletons were more alive than the peasant-farmers who had briefly tenanted their bones. Jim felt his cheeks and jaw, trying to imagine his own skeleton in the sun, lying here in this peaceful field within sight of the deserted aerodrome.

      Leaving the burial mound and its family of bones, Jim crossed the field to a line of stunted poplars. He climbed a wooden stile on to the floor of a dried-out rice-paddy. The leathery carcass of a water buffalo lay in the shade under the hedge, but otherwise the landscape was empty, as if all the Chinese in the Yangtze basin had left the countryside for the refuge of Shanghai. Holding the balsa aircraft over his head, Jim ran along the floor of the paddy towards an iron building that stood on a ridge of higher ground a hundred yards to the west. Overgrown by nettles and sugar-cane, the remains of a concrete road passed a ruined gatehouse and then gave way to an open sea of wild grass.

      This was the aerodrome at Hungjao, a place of magic for Jim, where the air ran with dreams and excitements. There was the galvanized hangar, but little else remained of this military airfield from which Chinese fighters had attacked the Japanese infantry columns advancing on Shanghai in 1937. Jim stepped into the waist-high grass. Like the water in the sea at Tsingtao, below the warm surface was a cool world touched by mysterious currents. The bright December wind buffeted the grass, patterns swirled around him like the slipstreams of invisible aircraft. Listening carefully, Jim