The Compound

   The Compound

   It’s a strange self indulgent feeling, a cross between a prayer- less

Sunday morning, waiting for the newspaper boy to creak the cottage

gate before raising the old brass letterbox that gives birth to the elastic

banded roll of doom and disaster, and the other guilt feeling, the stillness

of a grave-side where the names of relatives children evaporate from the

grey matter.

   The relentless typhoon that had squalled it’s vengeance throughout the

Philippine night had, at last, ceased. The mundane activities of another day

stirred life into the Island, bringing to the rain-pool surface’s a trillion more

 mosquitoes, crackling in the stagnation of liquid typhoid, popping in the

morning heat like Sugar Puffs in a swirling dirty brown bowl.

   Each one an airborne miniature vampire waiting for dusk, and the

unprotected, to fill their empty blood sacs with crimson O,B or Rhesus negative,

they’re not fussy, skipping over the anti-mosquito creams with the ease of

the Dam Busters bouncing bombs.

   I sit quietly watching her.

   The Sunday morning toast is buttered and drips tantalisingly. She sits

cross-legged on her wicker chair, looking like a long black-haired sultry Buddha,

occasionally leaning across the small breakfast table to squirt more camouflage

HP Sauce into her bacon butties.

   Finished, her red nail- polished arched index finger squeakily slides through the

sauce remnants on the plate that gets deposited on her outstretched pink tongue.

  Then, knowingly, she smiles

   She wipes clean her finger on a tissue that defies gravity wedged between

the discarded mango skins of vibrant orangey-yellow, the remembered colour

of the toucan’s bill on the early Guinness railway posters.

   She had long left the poverty of her mother’s Negros Island and the daily

diet of  dried fish, fried til the disgusting odour permeated the small shack

that had been home to her seven siblings. Her table manners had not improved

from those Negros years of scooped grey rice and fish heads, but now she

had acquired a new culinary habit that both fascinated and disgusted me.

   Looking firmly into my eyes to gauge reaction, she tears open the corner of

her bag of Maltesers with her white Filipino teeth, then smiling, she lets half

a dozen chocolate covered malt balls float on the surface of her morning coffee.

   She does this without taking her eyes off mine looking for my approval.

   Her spoon swirls between her long fingers, prodding the brown balls bobbing

on the coffee’s surface, looking like spiked, wartime floating marine bombs lapping

 outside a harbour wall awaiting enemy vessels.

   After a few tantalising minutes, the chocolate starts to melt, the malt sends bubbles

to the surface before she scoops up the reward into her open mouth, the descending

escapees gather into a chocolate goo waiting for a deft swirl of her wrist holding the

coffee cup that concludes her performance.

   She bores of trying to disgust me and leaves me at the breakfast table on the

balcony that overlooks a sparse but strangely interesting compound owned by one

of the wealthy resort hotel groups.

   Here, in this compound, is home to a variety of yard animals and paraphernalia that

comes and goes on a three wheeled bogey pushed by two hotel porters.

   This is now my time.

   My morning of new sounds, new smells like the acrid accent of smouldering vegetation

waste brings a sharp pungency to the nostrils.

      The balcony is now quiet. I watch below, the new banana tree leaves unfold.

   Their pea-green conical ribbed beauty, grace space on a heavenly journey, only

 to be mercilessly scythed by the looping overhead black electric cable.

   These young intrusive banana plants are overshadowed by the hundred year old

Bangkal trees who dwarf all other barked pretenders in the compound.

   I watch the tree lizards, with their tiny suckered toes, jerk in bewildered

 movements, changing colour from leaf green to dark bark-brown, as their tongues

 stab the resting damsel flies who’s gossamer wings protrude the lizards slitted

 mouth.

   These trees have a presence of purpose. Their lower branches that encroach over

 the makeshift basketball pitch are lopped off with machetes for firewood.

    Branches culled over many years leave knarled knuckles on the trunk,

 reminding me of a poem i read somewhere, may have been from the pen of Ted

 Hughes, about a lone weathered blackthorn tree on a Devon moor, hunchbacked

 against a hundred relentless winter storms, it’s one leafless branch held out in

 defiance as a drawn wooden sword in ferocious defiance against the elements

   The compound’s entrance is graced, by a fairly new, erected wrought-iron gate,

maybe, twelve feet wide. Above it’s centre opening is a curved double- arched

section, that if carried wordage, would not look dissimilar to the nightmare of

Belson. The rest of the compound’s exterior fencing is comprised of stained,

dilapidated corrugated iron, held vertically by stakes of bamboo twined together.

   On hearing the whistle of the approaching porters with the loaded bogey, the

young guard swings open the entrance gates that answers the incoming whistle

with a returning oiless squeak, one octave above the porters.

   They enter the compound, past the grey geese pleasuring themselves in the

overnight puddles before the intensity of the morning sun shortens shadows

 and evaporates the water, leaving once moor  cracks in the iron-hard ground.

   The geese toss their majestic wet necks, almost like dipping a hand into Holy Water.

   I often observe men entering the braking sea waves, dipping their hand before making

The Sign of the Cross. Footballers too, touch the turf as they run onto the pitch.

  I wonder if these mystical actions actually stop drowning or broken legs.

  As a kid, i remember seeing my father bless himself with the river’s water before

fishing, and how in his aluminium box of salmon flies there would always be a small

crucifixion, and how strange, I used to think, how a tin box of lethal feathered barbs

could sit comfortably with another medieval form of death.

   As the geese waddle down in their disappearing pool, the compound’s hens strut

under the trees fallen foliage, their trident spurs turn the vegetation, head to one side,

looking for lunch.

   Above the hen’s activities, nailed to the tree, is an empty roosting pole for the guard’s

prized fighting cock, which has been left empty since the demise of the rooster at

last Sunday’s pit fight.

   Other domestic, and some feral, animals prowl around the corrugated jungle.

From my high vantage point, I observe a scrawny, long-backed black cat, snaking

between the bamboo poles, prowling for recently hatched chicks and rodents.

   Mid-morning sees the arrival of two men. One younger than the obvious boss man,

both carpenters, who have come to inspect and select cut lengths of bamboo which

will be fashioned into outriggers for a catamaran they are building.

   The younger lifts a length, maybe twenty-five feet long, one end resting on his shoulder,

whilst the elder carpenter, squints his knowledgeable  eye along the length, gliding

his machete over the growth rings every few feet, chipping away any imperfections.

   The maid arrives.

A Filipino with a mouthful of white teeth that appear as she says ‘Good morning’

in a stuttered broken English, her native indigenous name is unpronounceable,

we call her Mary.

   I watch as she collects the washing, assembles on plastic coat hangers and

leaves to dry in the sun, which is now creeping steadily onto the balcony.

   She knows I watch her.

  She stoops down to retrieve more garments from the plastic bowl allowing me

a tantalising glimpse of her braless boobs. She knows exactly what she is doing,

but never smiles at me once we have exchanged the pleasantries of the day.

My rising sap is slapped in the face when I read her latest tee shirt, proclaiming

‘1+1=3...Jesus is with us’

   Down in the compound pups play silently, cuffing each other, baring immature

milk teeth. Their heavily laden bitch-mother distracts the pups from her teats as

they follow her in the direction of their owner banging their tin feed bowls with,

what sounds like, a big spoon.

   Their owner will fatten-up the pups over the next twelve weeks, this being the optimum

 period for producing tender dog meat. After this time they are taken North, muzzled

with cut-down plastic bottles or tin cans held firmly over their snouts with lengths of wire

 that dampen down the whelps on their long overnight journey to Bagiao.

  Everywhere there are stark posters reminding Filipinas of the likely diseases of

consuming dog meat,that is not only illegal, but in some cases fatal.

   Mary sweeps the tiled balcony, bending to retrieve an escaped Malteser that

had abseiled down the breakfast table, giving me a bonus glimpse beneath the holy tee shirt.

  I watch as the compound’s guard, removes his Rod Steiger sun glasses, and starts

to dig a hole below a bangkal tree, close to the perimeter. He labours with a spade and an

iron bar prising the stones from the baked earth. Now shirtless, he scoops out the rubble

from the hole with a discarded paint tin, before returning from behind his tin-topped

guard hut, holding by the rear legs a two-tone dead pup that he holds up for

me to see, reminding me of my father holding aloft a salmon to be photographed.

 

   The pup is, without ceremony, dropped into it’s stony grave, where the

iron rod curls the dead fur into a crescent, foetal shape.

  The guard shouts out something in Tagalog that she loosely translates,

without any emotion, that the pup had been run-over by one of the hotel’s

courtesy vehicles entering the compound.

  I watch her tall, lean, almost boyish figure leaning on the balcony safety bars

overlooking the freshly dug grave, her long brown fingers mould themselves around

the last remaining Malteser, that protrudes from the inside of her cheek before

joining the other brown delights down her long neck.

   Her manicured fingers fold the now empty Malteser bag into a child-like aeroplane

that she launches towards the compound.

   The plasticized paper bag disobeys it’s folded instructions returning, in flight,

to it’s original shape, before fluttering down to the pup’s grave like a bright

red butterfly.

  She turns, licks the chocolate off her fingers, retreats to the bedroom,

giving me a bored smile and asking Mary to find, and bring to her, her red nail polish

and her Louis Vuitton manicure bag.

Harry Mills 24^th August 2011