Diamonds in the Dust Read Online Free PDF Page B

base of the trunks. School started for Teddy at eight o’clock in the morning and finished at one o’clock, to avoid the worst of the exhausting heat of the afternoon. In the car the air was as oppressive as Connie’s thoughts.
    Listen, white lady.
The words hissed through her brain.
    “Nothing lasts here.”
    She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She felt Teddy’s gaze turn to her, and he tucked his hand between the seat and her damp back, something he did only when he was worried.
    “Won’t we last?” he asked.
    “Of course we will, sweetheart. So will your friendship with Jack. I only meant . . .”
Oh Christ, what did she mean?
“I only meant that the tires wear out quickly on these rough roads. Cars break down easily.”
    “Is that why you had the crash today? Did the car break?”
    “No, darling. It was an accident caused by another nasty car, but don’t worry about it. We’ll get the dents mended and we’ll be fine. Now tell me what happened with Jack.”
    “His Brewster Buffalo shot down my Fairey Battle.”
    Connie’s heart sank. Her young son had spent all of last weekend building the airplane out of balsa wood with painstaking care, the tip of his tongue clamped between his small white teeth. His dogged patience amazed her. The results were sometimes a little rough and ragged at the edges, but they were all his own work and Connie was immensely proud of his sticky little fingers. Since the war in Europe started two years ago in 1939, her son had become obsessed with airplanes, his bedroom walls covered in recognition charts. He could name every aircraft in the sky the way other people named birds.
    “Don’t worry, Teddy, I’ll help you build a new one.”
    She pulled over to the side of the road and dropped ten cents into her son’s hand. This was one of their rituals. Each day on the journey home from school Teddy bought a slice of fruit from the roadside stall. It stood next to a small shrine that was constructed out of brightly painted stones and adorned with frangipani flowers, a small blue statue of a Hindu goddess, and a bowl of colored rice. A rat, fat and bold, sat on its haunches beside the shrine, munching on stolen rice grains.
    Teddy skipped over the ruts to the fruit stall and pointed at two large slices of watermelon. She watched him chatter away to the man serving on the stall—Teddy’s command of the Malay language was far superior to her own. He seemed to absorb the strange words as readily as her pillow absorbed her strange dreams at night. He had lived here all his short life, and had no fear of this alien and exotic country. He wasn’t afraid of snakes the way she was, nor did he shiver at the thought of one of the Communist agitators in the workforce slitting Nigel’s throat in bed at night.
    This year, there had been numerous labor strikes in the tin mines up at Gambang and in the gold mines at Raub, and now the unrest was spreading to the rubber plantations up and down the length of the Malay Peninsula. The demand for rubber for tires and waterproofing had increased in a steady climb ever since the war had started in Europe, and rubber had been designated priority cargo for the war effort. America and Britain were clamoring for it. Inevitably the price had skyrocketed. From five pence a pound to twelve pence a pound, and now the labor force that helped to produce it was demanding a hefty raise in their meager wages. She could see their point. It was the Chinese workers who were the troublemakers, stirring up the easygoing Malays, but Nigel assured her it would blow over eventually. It was the Japanese, not the Chinese, they should be worrying about, he said.
    Connie and Teddy sat in the car together eating the red flesh of the melon, spitting the black pips out of the open windows with expert aim, a brief moment of normality in a day that was anything but normal. When she’d finished she tossed the green rind out onto the roadside and within half a minute it was