Chapter 10: Bradford, Stanton Reach, Malaya

I had heard the drums and I learned long ago what they meant was happening. And I knew enough of what had been going on to know who they were likely being beaten for now. There had been a time, up to the arrival of Jim and the Stantons, that the drums had beaten for me. And they had taken everything from me, left me bare, with no pride or inhibition left. That is why I had so easily gone to Jim—that I had seen and understood his need. And that I had let him use me without reservation. After the time on the altar in answer to the drums, there are no inhibitions or reservations left.

I couldn’t just turn a blind eye to this now, though.

I ran out into the forest to where the ceremony was occurring. I wanted to intervene, but when I arrived, I saw and heard how willingly and eagerly Damian was participating. How aroused he was. And if I intervened, the crowd of young Malay and Indian men, who looked up to Fahmeed as a liberator and who were as completely under Fahmeed’s spell and caught up in the ceremony as Damian was, might turn nasty—might even hurt Damian. I didn’t trust Fahmeed. The plantation workers were generally peaceful people, but Fahmeed had a strong influence over them.

I cursed my ineffectiveness and stood there, fuming, as the ceremony progressed. But soon I realized with disgust that I was stroking myself. I had wanted Damian and was more than a bit in love with him since the first moment I saw him—even when he was a younger boy. Now—seeing him held upon the alter and so joyously and wantonly taking the repeated fuckings of the men in the circle—I was almost overwhelmed by my desire to have him—more so than my instinct to drag him away from the ritual being played out before me.

I was helpless to stop stroking myself and moaned as I felt my seed rise and spout, falling over the ferns of the jungle floor.

Then I stood there, torn. I realized that all of the young men had now taken Damian and the first wild heat of the ceremony had cooled. Fahmeed was not done, I was sure, but I had seen enough and stepped out of the jungle into the clearing.

“I will take Damian home now,” I said, and all eyes—previously locked onto the writhing moaning, marble-white body of Damian, turned on me. “It’s time he went home,” I repeated, walking up to the altar under Fahmeed’s steely gaze and releasing the gold hoops that held Damian to the altar posts and pulling him off it and onto his feet.

“No,” Damian moaned. “The forest, I must find every tree in the forest and join with it.”

“There are too many trees,” I said. “You must rest now.” He was completely hypnotized and unable to think for himself. Fahmeed had stopped his humming and the drum was silent, so I hoped Damian would soon regain his senses.

Fahmeed didn’t make a scene; he just stood there, smirking, and watched me as I took Damian up in my arms and we left before turning to his followers and telling them, “I am the tallest tree in the forest.” As the drums began again.

Damian was still dazed when we reached the great house, and after I put him to bed beneath his mosquito net, I locked the shutters on the French doors leading to the veranda so no one could enter from there, and then I locked his door. I took up my place in a chair in the corner of his room to sleep. I ached to have him. I had no doubt I could have taken him then and he’d have been willing. But I told myself I didn’t want him like this.

For a while Damian was quiet, then he tossed and turned, throwing off the mosquito net several times, with me putting them back in place, before he sank into a profoundly deep sleep. Once he did that, I felt it was safe to leave him alone. I slept on a sofa in the lounge room in the great house, not wanting to return to my own bungalow until I had confronted Fahmeed in the morning.

“You will not use Damian in your ceremonies again,” I said to him as he stood in the kitchen in his sarong.

Fahmeed laughed in my face.

“Jim will soon be gone,” I reminded him, “and I will still be here. If you must have your European sacrifice, take me again.”

Fahmeed merely laughed at me, at that offer. I knew that he would not want me if he could have young Damian. I knew there had to be another answer. And I knew what the answer was, even then. But a shirked from it, hoping there was another way.

I hurried back to my bungalow to wash and change before returning to collect Damian and take him out into the plantation to help with the day’s work.

When I returned, Jim met me at the door. “Fahmeed says you interrupted a ceremony he was conducting last night, Bradford,” he said, still looking slightly groggy. I was sure Fahmeed had drugged him the previous night.

“He was using Damian in the ceremony,” I said cautiously.

“Fahmeed says Damian asked to be included and that you spoiled the ceremony by dragging him off.”

“Fahmeed is using Damian.”

“He says it was a celebration of the earth, an event sacred to the Malays.”

The local Malays practiced a mixture of Mohammedanism and primitive animism, and the ceremony Fahmeed was conducting was of his own devising and nothing to do with the Malays’ spiritual beliefs. And I was shocked at Jim’s attitude toward Fahmeed’s control of Damian. But I wasn’t arguing with my employer just then.

I only had enough will to look him in the eye and mutter, “You have fucked Damian now. You no longer care how Fahmeed uses him. You have had what you obsessed over. Damian is more an impediment to you now than an object of desire, isn’t he?”

Jim merely smiled blandly at me and said, “You should remember your place. Some day you will go too far. The shares in the plantation that Stephen gave to you would not protect a dead man.” And then he turned and walked away, the threat hanging there in the air. And I knew that, with James Feathergill, it was not an idle threat.

Each night I lay in my bungalow, tense in the darkness, listening for the drums, knowing Fahmeed would use Damian again. During the day, I managed to keep Damian away from Fahmeed by taking him out into the plantation and working him hard.

But he had the heat of men in his blood now. On the second day after the ceremony, I lost sight of him during the morning. At the lunch break, when the cook came out to the workers with his small cart, and all of them were gathered together, I asked if any of them had seen Damian. Several smiled and pointed in the direction of where the jungle joined the plantation, and indicated I needed to go back that way, half a mile. I rode back along the line of trees that had been freshly scored, with the coconut collecting cups placed on each tree to catch the latex that bled from the scored trunk.