The Painted Cage - 1986

Century Hutchinson Ltd

Extract

From Chapter One

They had come at nine-thirty that morning for her, two warders with a rikisha.  The day was bright and cold.  A wind from the sea cut across The Bluff, there was no warmth from the sun.  They set off in procession slowly, one warder in front, the other behind.  It was easier to run and walk with a riskisha.  Amy watched the stress upon the runner’s shoulders beneath his short cotton coat.  He shivered in the wind, his feet bare and in rough straw sandals.  He was a thin fellow with a consumptive cough, yet he might live longer than she.  The brutal simplicity of his life now seemed a thing to envy.  Amy smoothed down a pleat of her skirt, her clothes were those of mourning.  The oilskin hood of the rikisha  was up, she could not see much of the road.  People stopped and stared.  She had no wish to see their faces.  The Native Town was quiet, the deadness of the New year holidays still thick upon the trade, but in the Foreign Settlement all was life; a ship with the mail was soon to dock and called loudly from the bay.  Amy Redmore was pulled slowly don to the post office end of Main Street.

She concentrated on her face, so that it might be like a Japanese face, a smooth wall before emotion.  This was how she must be throughout the next weeks, devoid of expression.  Cruel eyes would search her now; they would knead her for cracks from which to squeeze out the soft, naked grubs of truth.  Their truth.  She drew back in the darkness of the hood then, under the rickety oilskin ribs that reminded her of bat’s wings.