The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  Flattery isn’t easy, though – it takes stamina and fatigue-proof smile muscles. Sometimes the sound of my simpering turns my stomach. But whenever my thoughts turn to quitting, the money reels me back in. We earn three times what you’d get teaching English at some boot-camp conversation school and I am trying to save to travel round Asia. My savings are pretty meagre so far, but another three months or so should do it. Yuji hates the idea of me leaving. I hate the idea of leaving him too; every one of his embraces squeezes a little more of the wanderlust out of me. Still, I am determined to go. I have invited him along, but he needs to think it over. When the time comes I am sure we will work out a compromise. We are too crazy about each other not to.

  I have never known anyone like Yuji before. He’s so energetic, always in motion, too busy living to get dark and analytical. I love that about him. That and the fact he is so handsome it makes my eyes hurt. Yuji says he knew as soon as he was old enough to think that he wasn’t going to be some salaryman. He works for this yakuza faction in Shinsaibashi, riding his motorcycle round Osaka delivering drugs and collecting loan repayments for his gangster boss. Risky as hell, but a damn sight more exciting than kowtowing before some company altar. I am intrigued by what he does, the criminal allure of it, but he rarely talks about his job. I hear more from other hostesses, the girls who’ve had flings with Yuji’s friends. Tales of ex-gang members with shorn-off ears, of bamboo strips driven under fingernails. Yuji laughed and choked on his noodles when I told him this, called my friends gullible. Yakuza mythology or not, hearing about it still quickens the pulse.

  Distance has shown me how weak my bonds to England are, the scarcity of people I care about there. My mum and her boyfriend decamped to Spain while I was doing my A levels (not that I minded – he was too quick to use his fists and she too quick to defend him), and my university friends are all busy pursuing careers in law and accountancy, shifting onto sensible, humdrum wavelengths. I have no grown-up ambitions, no desire to rush back and train to be a barrister or whatever. It’s liberating to think that I am free to roam the world as I see fit.

  ‘Hey, Watanabe. One of these days you’re going to load the dishwasher yourself and give me a heart attack, aren’t you?’

  Watanabe is hunched over a chopping board, his knife a silvery blur as he slices an onion. Watanabe the anaemic kitchen ghost, the teenage catatonic. Did he hear me? Does he hear anyone? The kitchen taps are on full and a potential landslide of dirty plates sits on the draining board. While I am skidding about trying to put things straight Mama-san appears in the doorway, swaddled in a red silk kimono. She surveys the mess, one hand on hip, the other resting against the door frame so the sleeve of her kimono hangs down, cascading embroidered waterfalls and mountain scenery. She is made up geisha-style, her face chalky with powder, her lips nipped scarlet. I admire her flamboyancy, the flair and festivity of her outfits. I hear she was a beauty in her youth – she is still a very striking woman.

  ‘Watanabe: two orders of Kimchee noodles for table thirteen, please.’

  Whenever I give Watanabe a food order I always repeat it twice, popping back at regular intervals to make sure he hasn’t been distracted. Mama-san’s army drill-instructor bark gets it through first time. She sees me scraping pizza crusts into the pedal bin and gives me a frosty nod. I counter with a lukewarm semismile. You’d think we’d be on friendlier terms seeing as I am the girlfriend of her only son. I reckon she doesn’t like Yuji going out with one of her hostesses, or a foreigner, or both.

  ‘Mary, come here.’ She beckons me over to the doorway and directs my gaze to a couple of salarymen fumigating the lounge with cigar smoke. ‘I want you to join those two men over there, Murakami-san and the doctor. It is too quiet a night to have you on bar duty.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Take them hot flannels and a menu. Recommend the teriyaki chicken.’

  ‘Right.’

  Mama-san gives me a quick up-and-down, her gaze hardening as something catches her eye. She pulls at the bottom of my sequinned top, where she’s spied a fag burn. Shit. ‘Mary, do you know how much money our customers pay for an hour of your company?’

  I nod. How can I forget? She only reminds us every five minutes. ‘Yeah … I’m sorry. It’s so small I didn’t think anyone would notice – not in this light anyway …’

  ‘The men who come here pay a lot of money. The least you can do is appear well groomed. Please don’t wear this again. Go.’

  Go? I walk away, indignant. Who does she think she is?

  ‘Oh, and, Mary …’

  What now? I turn back, straining a complaisant smile.

  ‘If Murakami-san starts to blow on your neck, just remind yourself how well he tips for the privilege.’

  The smile vanishes. Three months. I will be out of here by then.

  I walk over to Murakami and the doctor with a tray of sake and neatly rolled hand towels. The two men rise and bow with such exaggerated chivalry that I cannot help but laugh. Stephanie hurries over to join us, autumnal curls tumbling to her shoulders, which are bare in her strapless dress. They bow once more.

  ‘Good evening,’ we chime.

  Stephanie seats herself next to Murakami-san, which saves me from having to deal with the neck-breathing thing. She has been really attentive to Murakami-san lately, ever since the night he promised to pay her tuition fees for this course in homeopathic medicine she wants to enrol on back in Florida. It’s an empty promise, but she treats him like an emperor, just on the off-chance it might be true. Truly heart-breaking to watch.

  I smile at the doctor and sit down, shivering and rubbing at my goose-pimply arms. The air conditioning is really fierce tonight.

  ‘You look lovely, Mary,’ he says. He beams and his eyes stray downwards from my face, making leisurely pauses en route to my knees.

  It’s like cockroaches scuttling over my flesh. Call me naïve, but doctors are meant to be pillars of society; decent, moral and devoid of lecherous impulses. The doctor is not generally like this: usually he’s just chubby and jolly. When I’m around him I always get this urge to reach out and tug at the flesh of his face, which gives the impression of being pliable, like dough. When he laughs he looks like a laughing Buddha, his cheeks bulging, his eyes diminishing into tiny gashes.

  ‘Would you like some sake, Doctor?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says and pounds his chest. ‘Sake makes me strong.’

  A curious theory for a medic, but I smile and pour him a glass. ‘So how has work been lately?’ I ask.

  ‘Very busy. It’s hay-fever season,’ he says. ‘They come to the surgery in droves, wanting to be cured of their red, weepy eyes and dripping noses. “There is not much that can be done,” I tell them, “short of leaving the country until June.”’

  ‘Or wearing a surgical mask,’ I say. I saw two old ladies wearing them on the train yesterday.

  ‘And how is the blossoming poet? Any new haiku?’

  When I first got here I went through this phase of writing bad poetry, haiku that strained for the sublime but were hopelessly mired in the pathetic. Fortunately all my poetry-writing time these days is burnt up by Yuji.

  I throw out something lame: ‘Umeda at dusk, / Vending machines dispense porn, / Like bars of candy.’

  The doctor understands some English and cracks up at the word ‘porn’, clutching at his overhang of belly. ‘Beautiful, Mary, just like Basho.’

  I smile and nudge a ceramic dish of sweets closer to him. Though they are of the boiled variety he takes a handful and crunches them like popcorn. The doctor has a near-insatiable appetite, which he blames on the spirit of a starving Meiji-era peasant he encountered as a child. He says the spirit put a curse on him, so that at every meal he is compelled to eat with the might of ten men.

  ‘Nao,’ Murakami-san says, leaning his silvery head towards us, ‘look at that television over there. Now, don’t you agree that my Stephanie is far superior to any of those models?’

  The TV shows
a model striding down the runway, flaxen hair streaming. A caption scrolls along the bottom of the screen, deconstructing her into the following components: Gretel. Swedish. 18. Aquarius. Volleyball.

  ‘Absolutely! Stephanie and Mary are far more beautiful!’ Dr Nishikogi thunders. ‘These models, pah! Anorexic, every last one of them. Not like Stephanie here – see how curvy she is? Yes, our girls are far more beautiful. And Mary is very clever too. Have you heard her haiku?’

  Stephanie and I exchange furtive winces, to show that we don’t buy any of this.

  ‘Let’s play a drinking game!’ Stephanie suggests.

  Drinking games are the secret money-spinners of this establishment. We play drinking games with cards, dice, ice cubes and beer mats, and sometimes more complicated games involving the phonetic alphabet and obscene hand gestures. The losing salaryman has to knock back his drink and buy the next round. Drinking games never fail to liven things up, getting the salarymen really sluiced and spending extortionate amounts on liquor. The down side is that I often end up getting drunk myself. Lately when I go to get more drinks I water my own whisky right down and charge them full price for it.

  ‘Great idea!’ I say. ‘Let’s play Queen of Hearts!’

  There is a rumble of enthusiasm and Stephanie dashes to the bar to get a pack of cards. We shuffle our chairs closer round the table. Murakami-san’s eyes brighten in anticipation of debauched mayhem. It never happens. The only sure-fire outcome is that he will be completely fleeced.

  I top up our drinks and Stephanie deals the cards.

  I dream about this place a lot. I dream of sloshing whisky into glasses, the hiss and click of a Zippo lighter. I have come to resent the invasion of my subconscious; it’s like doing an unpaid shift in my sleep. I had a horrible dream recently, about one of our patrons, Fujimoto-san. In the dream I was sitting with him, listening to his golfing anecdotes, when his teeth began to fall out. Tapered pebbles of pearl grey hit the varnished wood of the table. I was alarmed but carried on as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening, listening as his words grew thick and incomprehensible. Then he turned to me with a knowing, toothless grin. I jerked bolt upright at that, my heart thrumming in the darkness. Sometimes I wake with dim memories of being kissed by clients, of letting hands roam where they shouldn’t, of being aroused by them. But dreams are often without rhyme or reason; it’s just the brain chewing over the events of the day. I’m no expert on dream analysis, but I’m sure it doesn’t mean I latently crave any of this.

  When I leave Osaka my dreams will teem with foreign landscapes. Vast skies of obscene blue, tortuous valleys and ramshackle villages. Rickety train journeys to bustling cities, dense with heat and people. Sometimes I don’t know what agonizes me more, the itch to take off or leaving Yuji. It mystifies me, his lack of desire to travel. If I stay in one place for too long the world begins to narrow, like the sky viewed through a straw.

  Read on for an extract from The Orientalist and the Ghost

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  1

  I AM A man who lives in the company of ghosts. They have me under constant surveillance. They watch me cook my bachelor suppers of processed peas and boil-in-the-bag cod. They watch me take out my dentures and drop them in the tumbler fizzing with Steradent. They watch me undo my fly and tinkle in the lavatory. Some ghosts I loathe and some I fear with horripilation and cardiac strife. Others I quite look forward to seeing. The silent ghosts are preferable to the noisy, garrulous ones. Aren’t you a lonely old so-and-so? said Marina Tolbin, the hawk-visaged missionary (who elected to remain sanctimoniously mute in life, but is strangely loquacious in death). If only that were true, I sighed, but you lot never leave me alone. Charles Dulwich, who drank the hemlock at the age of forty-six (romantically inspired, it seems, by the death of Socrates), crows of his eternal youth and my irreversible decline. Where have all your teeth gone, old boy? He chuckles. Be careful now! That cup of tea might overstrain your bladder! I can only sigh and say: Do you think I can help this decrepitude? Not all of us have been blessed with an inclination for suicide, you know.

  Such merciless scrutiny! Worse still is when the ghosts relive the last anguished moments before dying (Why? Heaven knows! Perhaps to break up the monotony of being deceased). Nothing is more harrowing than watching Mrs Ho fall to her knees on my bedroom carpet, beating her chest in a masochistic frenzy (Save my baby! Save my baby! she screams as the flames devour her). Charles tends to lie quietly on my bed as the poison hastens his departure from the world. It is hardly the most riveting of performances, but if I ignore him he gets upset and goes about slamming cupboard doors and clattering my ironing board.

  Sometimes I wonder how all the ghosts came here from Asia. Did they fly across together, soaring over continents and oceans like a diamond formation of migratory geese? Did they book flights on some airline of the paranormal? They complain about the factory greyness of the council estate, the many flights of stairs up to my flat, and of the syringe-strewn public urinal of a lift. Oh, quit your moaning! I tell them. I never invited you here to invade my privacy!

  Three weeks ago Adam and Julia came to stay. They are not ghosts, but grandchildren. When they came, flooding my flat with energy and juvenescence, I was not sure if they and the ghosts would see eye to eye. I thought the defiant youth of the children would frighten the ghosts away (or that the ghosts would frighten away the defiant youth – which would prove tricky to explain to social services). Fortunately neither child seems to have noticed all the phantoms flitting about. Not Julia with her shy, orthodontic smile and the handstands that flaunt her belly. Nor Adam, a teenager monstrous with acne, who locks himself away in the bathroom for hours on end to mourn his dead mother. However, in a flat as small as mine, it is impossible to keep hidden my dealings with the world of the dead. The children overhear me sometimes, talking in Cantonese or Hokkien or English as I converse with Ah Wing or Lieutenant Spencer. They have learnt not to interrupt, and quietly retreat to the bedroom they share. Julia saw me once, tearful in the kitchen as my beloved Evangeline threw crockery and flayed me with her tongue. Julia came and put her hand on my arm (for at twelve she has not yet learnt the selfish ways of a teenager). The poor child believed the tears were for her mother.

  They are hard to decipher, these orphans. They are mysterious in their grief. Julia has hysterical fits of giggling, seemingly over nothing at all, and Adam is enamoured of the locked door and avocado-tiled interior of the bathroom. Sometimes they talk in a language I do not understand, like sparrows twittering in Latin. Adam wants me to buy a television and Julia trains to be an Olympic gymnast in the hallway. When they fight it seems as though they want to murder each other, though hours later I open their bedroom door to find the siblings in bed together, weeping in their underclothes (I fear there have been omissions in their upbringing; serious moral omissions). They both wrinkle their noses at the food I cook and they hate boil-in-the-bag cod. I cannot quite believe that they will stay here until they are old enough to leave. That seems like so many years from now …

  And what of Frances, the daughter for whom I do not mourn?

  Frances has yet to join the band of spirits that haunt my flat. But I know she is coming. Some nights I hear her, as spry flames leap in the hearth and her children sleep in the bedroom next door. I hear her as the residents in the block go up and down, up and down, troubling the lift cables into a rhapsody of creaking. I hear her over the wind, going berserk, like a mad dog let loose at the windowpane. I hear her over the howls of Lieutenant Spencer, his slimy intestines surging from his stomach in a re-enactment of the bayonet attack.

  Frances Milnar, go away! I whisper. Leave me alone!

  For heaven help me, the girl must be bent on revenge.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Jane Lawson for her support and encouragement over the years I was writing The Incarnations. Many thanks to Andrew Kidd and Marianne Velmans.

  Thank you to Hubert Ho, Jennifer Yeo, Richa
rd Dudas, Sal Attanasio, Liang Junhong, Julia Wang, Glen Brown, Emily Midorikawa and Zakia Uddin.

  I am very grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for the fellowship that enabled me to keep writing this book, and to Tim Leadbeater and the wonderful staff at Leeds Trinity University. Thank you also to the Arts Council England and the Society of Authors for the grants I was awarded.

  In 2010 I taught English as a volunteer to patients at the Beijing Chaoyang Mental Health Service Centre, and to civil servants at the Ministry of Health in Beijing. I would like to thank all those I taught, for their friendship and the insight I gained into China and their lives.

  Many thanks to my fellow writers at the Beijing Writers’ Group for reading the early chapters.

  Thank you to the Corporation of Yaddo, the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, the Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat, and all the inspiring writers and artists I met on these residencies.

  Thank you, as always, to my father, mother and sister.

  Thank you most of all to Robert Powers, who supported me throughout the writing of this book, and to whom The Incarnations is dedicated.

  About the Author

  Susan Barker grew up in east London. While writing The Incarnations she spent several years living in Beijing, researching ancient and modern China. She is currently based in Shenzhen, China.