“Aren’t we?” I said, looking around the room, but there was no stopping him. He is, I suspect, excited now that there is every possibility of our garden being transformed. I suppose it is only natural that he expects the interior of the house to match its eventual exterior. Some hope.
We were dropped off by the Stadhuys, the journey having lasted a mere quarter of an hour (though, as always, it felt much longer, what with the constant grizzling from the back of the van). Our minders — three earnest volunteers, sixth-form boys from the church school — greeted us and quickly took charge of those unfortunates in wheelchairs. There followed the usual cacophony: who wanted to do what where when etc. I stood apart from this unsightly melee, taking stock of the “Red” Square. I never thought of the square as being particularly red when I first saw it more than fifty years ago. The colour of the Stadhuys was, I think, truer to its original then — a weatherworn terra-cotta, red only in the sense that an Etruscan urn is red. Now, meticulously repainted by the town council, it looks too shiny and too orange. Given the nationalistic evangelism of the town council, I doubt very much that this colouring was a subtle hommage to its Dutch heritage. Christ Church is, of course, properly red, built as it is of laterite. When I first saw it, I was struck by the richness of its colour, which spoke of all the warmth of these new tropical lands. I discovered only recently that the red stone is only a façade, a pretty cladding over the church’s true fabric of bricks imported from Holland. Suddenly it appeared colder, more foreign; a fake. Not that it makes much difference anyway, seeing as we are actively discouraged from visiting this great bastion of Dutch Protestantism. As if to spite me, our church is, in contrast, a dull nineteenth-century monstrosity — built, naturally, by a Frenchman.
I followed the others acquiescently into the new shopping precinct, a frightful collection of fluorescent-lit shops selling an array of plasticky objects of virtu. I endured, as usual, the tediously unimaginative taunts of “Mat Saleh,” spat at me by bored adolescents. It has always baffled me how the name of a minor Malay nationalist who fought against the British came to be a term of cheerful abuse, hurled with alacrity at any passing Caucasian. If memory serves me correctly, Mat Saleh died in vain, shot by the British Army. Independence didn’t come to this country for another sixty years after his death; he was hardly a hero. I never used to experience these vulgarities — not even after Independence, when so many people were fiercely proud of their new country. I cannot recall when the insults first began — in the seventies, I suppose. So inured am I by twenty years of these moronic taunts that I scarcely notice them nowadays. I did, however, notice what the other old men were buying: Christmas-tree angels dressed in the costume of Straits Chinese; boxes of vile-smelling durian cake, tied with bows; dodol, that gum-rotting confection of condensed palm sugar; lengths of violently red-coloured paper—“for cutting into animal shapes,” Gecko told me. He also bought a CD of Christmas music which had, on its cover, a group of smiling, vacuous American teenagers whose gleaming teeth betrayed a startling overconsumption of calcium. It included such songs as “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and “¿Mamasita, Dónde Está Santa Claus?”
“What on earth are you going to play this on?” Alvaro demanded of Gecko.
“My radio,” he said with utter certainty before wheeling himself away in his shiny new wheelchair.
