From Simone Lazaroo's The Australian Fiancé

Simone Lazaroo's The Australian Fiancé (Sydney: Picador, Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd, 2000), ISBN 0330362003.

... My mother, aunt, uncle and Mrs Quah survive the war to see my tragedy complete itself nearly five years later.

At least this is what they believe.

"Things can't get worse," my aunty whispers to my mother when she thinks I'm out of earshot. "The worst is behind her now."

Their audience crowds me and diminishes me; more, much more than sharing the shophouse with two other families. Too many tongues talk about me, as if rushing to fill my silence. It is another invasion. For I am already desolate, stripped of words in all my languages, unable to speak of what happened to me during the war. (p.15)

... Around Singapore at the beginning of the occupation, there was a Japanese poster of a tidal wave: a swift darkness breaking into a sea of white foam. Beneath it the words:

Awake, asleep, I am again besieged by images of invasion; I am intent on resistance. (p.120)

... The young Eurasian woman ... has felt her own body unfold, fold again. It is partly ... because hers became a body of war, invaded. Performing the unspeakable under the harshest light; a light which fell across her life more darkly than night.

Her hardwearing stuff, the stuff she was made of, wore paper-thin under this light, thinned by force-feedings of exhaustion and fear. Cold metal on the tongue. War tasted like this. Even with the windows closed against the shattering outside, there was always the cooped-up smoke-and-metal taste of her own body: blood and sweat, rising and stinging behind her eyes as she lay pressed into a dark corner under a bed in the row of beds; hiding from soldiers' steel-capped boots drawing closer.

And the stench of another body making war on hers: like a knife between her legs, the blind heedless hack hack hack at her membranes and senses until they hung torn, as white flags disregarded and trampled. The sweet life of all the brothel girls' soft bodies running out onto cold comfortless beds in that room and turning sour. Childhood leaking out of them in clotted sobs, their blood hardening into dark impervious crusts before the blank eyes of the men in uniform who stood over them, belt buckles rattling against their boots.

She'd torn and torn and torn. In the bath afterwards, torn at the clammy imprint of their heavy bodies on hers, the embossed branding of their buckles and badges on her skin. Its tenderness eclipsed by insignia of their metal rising suns, their military precision. Cut off her hair to make herself ugly to them, but still they blunted their nerves into oblivion on her body.

At first, it was more than a body can bear. She couldn't sing the childhood songs her mother or the nuns had taught her, couldn't pray. Stopped praying because she couldn't bear to be unanswered. Stopped praying because it hurt too much to hope.

The knives went even deeper for one girl, past her body and straight to her center until she died. That was when she learned not to be there in that room on those beds. She found ways to go to other places while the soldiers hacked away at her.

She found pictures in old cruise brochures for all the girls to hold up to each other over the top of the room partitions while the soldiers belched and shuddered atop whoever's turn it was that afternoon. Sometimes she held her breath at the beauty of these other places: cities of glass climbing into sky fired with rose-coloured veins like opals; cathedrals that soared into light; blue mountains dusted with snow. Torn and curled at the edges, but a picture of something better to hope for. Those horizons, far off, compressed into pamphlets, were the only desire available to her, then.

She fought her own softness desperately. Fought that which rolled like a die in her belly. Because she wanted to survive.

War, inside and out. (p.120-122)