The Uninvited

by Liz Jensen

  Small dishes of spicy Szechuan food arrived: squid in black-bean sauce, chicken and chilli, wonton soup, jasmine rice, green tea. He explained them to me in both languages and I memorised the new vocabulary. Then we filled our soy dishes and began to eat. We both got lost in the food for a while. It was excellent.

  ‘Would you say that the mark you showed me is a hand-print?’ I asked after four minutes.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, putting down his chopsticks. ‘It appeared after Ghost Day. You know Ghost Day?’

  ‘Yes. It falls on the fifteenth day of the seventh moon of the lunar calendar.’ His eyes narrowed. I’d aroused curiosity. ‘I have a good memory for anything I’ve seen written down,’ I explained. ‘Especially facts involving numbers.’

  I hadn’t mentioned my PhD in the anthropology of belief systems: as far as Sunny Chen was concerned, I was just a corporate troubleshooter.

  ‘Well you know then, that’s the day we honour the hungry ghosts, in the month when the gates of Hell are opened.’ I nodded. The term Hungry Ghosts was also used to describe the starving victims of the famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward. ‘The spirits wander the earth. They are restless. They need help. They expect us to give it. They scare us. So we do what they want.’ As he spoke, he refilled his soy bowl with sauce, the liquid shooting from the bottle in tiny dark spurts. Like the gyrating lanterns above us, the movement was mesmerising. At one point he picked the little bowl up and tipped its contents directly on to his rice. This seemed to me very un-Chinese: more something a Westerner might do. Soy is very salty, so I wondered about his blood pressure. ‘They can be family members. But they don’t have to be. They need to say something, or they need you to do something for them. Then they appear in your sleep. That’s called tong-mong. You know this?’

  I nodded. ‘Through dreams.’

  There is no Heaven in Chinese tradition. Just different levels of Hell. The spirits that come out around Ghost Month are from the lowest levels of the underworld. Sunny Chen was looking at me intently, as though he had said something momentous which would lead me to a specific conclusion. It didn’t. I can’t play the game where you must guess and guess. I put my chopsticks down and set my small digital recorder on the table between us. The detective at the Fraud Office was right: Sunny Chen’s theory, if I’d read between the lines correctly, certainly fitted with the description oddball. But the anthropologist in me was stirred, and I have learned that when people have something important to say, they often spiral their way into it. I pressed Record.

  ‘Please, carry on.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘The spirits don’t always want the best thing for us,’ Sunny Chen began. ‘If we don’t show them enough respect they need to be . . .’ Here Sunny Chen couldn’t find the word, and set aside his chopsticks to key it into his mobile translation app. ‘Appeased.’ I waited for more. He grabbed the salt dish and sprinkled a blizzard of coarse crystals into his bowl. ‘That’s why we visit their graves and burn Hell notes. Pay them off. Very different from the West.’

  I said: ‘Beliefs are more global than most people realise. Every society has its ways of trying to calm the spirits. Or whatever you want to call them. The Catholics have favours. They’re a down-payment on sins not yet committed.’

  ‘But do they get punished, if they do wrong? If they . . . wait. I must find the word.’ He keyed in another Chinese character, and held the little screen out for me to read.

  Commit a sin/Transgress.

  ‘Yes. But they can confess and seek atonement. Mr Chen, did someone at Jenwai commit a sin slash transgress?’

  He didn’t answer directly. ‘You please one and then you offend another. It’s like being torn into small pieces, you understand?’ I didn’t. Professor Whybray always advised: when in doubt, say nothing. So for a while we ate in silence. Sunny Chen continued to add more salt to every mouthful he took. In between he sipped green tea. ‘I think we make a big mistake about ghosts,’ he said suddenly. ‘We think they are from the past. We think they are all dead. But they are alive. And some of them are not even born yet. They are travellers.’

  ‘Travellers?’

  ‘Yes! They move about.’ His voice caught in a strange choke. ‘They go wherever they like. They enter your body and make you do things.’

  I’m not proud of my reaction, which was to register his welling tears and look away.

  Through the window, forked lightning cleaved a blinding white slash across the sky’s deep grey, chased by the cymbal-crash of thunder. A tourist coach drove past, headed for the National Museum: I recognised the ideograms on its destination plate. Chen’s raw emotion was very desperate. And for me, awkward to contemplate. A behavioural psychologist such as Stephanie Mulligan would have known what to do or say. I did not. So I reached in my briefcase for the lime-green praying mantis I’d pre-creased on Arran and started constructing at Manchester airport. While Sunny Chen recovered himself and paid the bill, I did the last twenty-eight folds and presented the paper insect to him with both hands and a small bow of the head.

  ‘A gift.’

  It seemed to cheer him. ‘I want to take you somewhere,’ he said. ‘I will show you what I mean about the spirits.’

  Outside, we caught another taxi: he had a brief conversation with the driver and we drove through dense Taipei traffic. The rain stopped and the sky cleared. Chen seemed absorbed in his own thoughts. He didn’t say where we were going. The hotels and department stores of downtown gave way to suburbs, then a netherland of factories, silos, warehouses and repair workshops. Finally, after twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds, we took a fork to the right and began to climb upwards into the mountains that ringed the city, heading west towards the district of Yang Ming Shan. Six and a half minutes later the taxi driver asked Sunny Chen a question about the precise location of our destination and he answered distractedly, pointing. The storm had cleared completely, replaced by piercing sunshine. Rocky outcrops and feathered trees and small rubbish dumps exhaling coils of smoke dotted the roadside. Eventually, the taxi took a left turn down a narrow side road flanked with high bamboo. After three minutes and five seconds we slowed and entered a gateway into a concrete car park with weeds pushing through the cracks. The rainwater was evaporating in the sunshine: you could see the rising vapour. The driver parked under a tree with coarsely corrugated fan-shaped leaves and Sunny Chen told him to wait for us. I was pleased by how much Chinese I could understand.

  The shrines hugged the earth, so it took me a while to register what we had entered. There must have been a hundred or so monuments in marble, granite and cement, scattered across the hillside overlooking the city. Up here, we were right on the edge of the fairy ring. Distant enough from the sprawl of humanity to see the scale and enterprise of it. Around us, the sunlight danced on the puddles left by the storm.

  ‘Good feng shui,’ said Sunny Chen, spreading his arm wide to indicate the view. It was spectacular. Beneath a blue sky streaked with wisps of cloud squatted the great urban crater: a centrifuge of money, metal, glass and cement, of malls and sports centres and arterial roads dotted with the pinpricks of cars, emanating a faint hum. A heat-haze scrolled over the glittering ceramic rooftops of the outer suburbs. You couldn’t see any human life from here, but you could do a mental X-ray and sense how the cityscape seethed with it. Taipei is home to four million and counting. I wondered: why has Sunny Chen chosen to take me to a place where the vivid living and the unforgotten dead converge? Far below, black birds whirled above the skyscrapers like coarse flakes of ash. After a few moments we turned and wandered among the family shrines: low, squat constructions with wide thresholds. Some lay crumbling and neglected, while others were lavishly tended ancestral showcases.? The higher surrounding walls featured alcoves containing urns. Stray cats sunned themselves on the cracked slabs, or nudged at the remains of food offerings. After the air-conditioned taxi the air was sweltering. A hot breeze came from the west like the blast of a hairdryer, shaking the black-ste
mmed bamboos and rustling half-burned paper models attached to shrines. Small mounted black-and-white photographs of the dead glinted in the sun, dotted with rainwater. You could see the legacy of Qing Ming, the April tomb-sweeping festival in the form of soggy, charred incense sticks, plastic and silk flowers and the remains of burnt offerings. Streams of red ants transported ancient food crumbs amid faded and rain-damaged cardboard or paper replicas of coveted objects: miniature houses, yachts, cars and mobile phones, all fitting, I supposed, into the cultural category known as popular kitsch. The artistic standard was not high.

  ‘Is this where your ancestors are?’ I asked.

  ‘Over there.’ He pointed to a shrine, studded with photographs, only two of which were in colour. Most of the faces were stern, though one woman wore a half-smile. The men were jacketed, and the women wore cheongsams. None of them resembled Sunny Chen. ‘You don’t expect them to be dressed in rags, do you?’ he blurted angrily. He waved his hand at the photographs. ‘You think they will look like in the photos. Normal size. Wearing smart clothes. You don’t imagine they smell bad. You don’t expect them to eat insects.’

  I waited for an explanation for this bizarre outburst, but none came. His face flickered in an agitated way. Then he reached in his inner pocket and brought out a wad of scarlet paper, ornamented with gold. Hell notes. Each leaf of the pretend currency was covered in Chinese characters. I recognised a few of the simpler ones, such as ‘heavenly’ and ‘respect’. BANK OF HELL was stamped across the bottom of each in English.

  He handed me a note.

  ‘Can you please make me one small man?’ he asked. I couldn’t read the expression on his face. ‘Let us sit there.’ He pointed to a shrine shaded by a feathery-leafed tree with candelabras of furred buds.

  On its low surrounding wall I laid the Hell note flat, folded a line and ripped it to a square. He sat next to me and watched as I folded. The wall was dry, but these were still not ideal conditions. I had no proper work top and the cheap paper dye left red stains on my fingertips. When I’d finished, I handed him the squat figure – boxy limbs, triangular head – and he accepted it with both hands and a jerky nod. The little man glinted red and gold in his palm.

  I hadn’t done a very good job. It was clear he thought so too, because he reached for a plastic lighter, which had the Chinese character for ‘good fortune’ engraved on it, and angled it beneath the man. I was glad he was going to burn it. It’s exactly what I do myself, to poor specimens. It’s what you might call a cathartic ritual.

  But he was hesitating.

  ‘Who is he?’ I asked.

  He laughed. ‘Who do you think?’ he said, igniting the pointed end of the man’s leg. I would have bent it to form a foot, but in these conditions it was too fiddly. A bluish flame crept up the paper limb.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I feared he would burn his skin but he dropped the flaming paper just in time. Together we watched the little effigy blaze, shrivel to a crisp and waft sideways, disintegrating as it went.

  ‘But you do know, Hesketh. Because you are a clever man.’ He spoke urgently. I noted, in my brief connection with his eyes, that they were so dark that pupil and iris merged into one. When people like you their irises grow big. When they hate you they get small. The degree of light must be factored in, but dappled shade is tricky to calibrate. I felt very distinctly that this was a test. No: more than a test. A challenge. More games. More things not said straight. But I’ve studied the tendencies and the rules. ‘He’s the whistle-blower,’ I said. ‘The Jenwai saboteur. The man you want to kill.’

  He didn’t say anything. His jaw was working oddly. Then I realised why. Once again he was in tears. Then it dawned on me, what he was saying, and why it was so painful to him. Of course. Stephanie Mulligan would have spotted it long ago. How do you address a man who has just symbolically set himself alight? We stood there for a long time, watching the ashes of the tiny paper Sunny Chen drift across through the coarse weeds.

  Finally I cleared my throat.

  ‘Do you think your ancestors are angry with you?’

  The laugh came again. ‘Sure, I will have to take the blame.’ I blinked and wiped my brow. An intense, laser-like heat can follow thunder in this latitude. I wished Stephanie Mulligan had not entered my head. But now here she was, judging me and finding me wanting. And behind her, somewhere, was Kaitlin. Different women, both making the same assessment. ‘But it wasn’t my choice. Something can get inside you.’ He was becoming animated. ‘Sometimes it’s asleep. But when it wakes up, it’s in charge. You can’t make the decisions any more. You are a clever man Hesketh, but I am sorry, I don’t think you are the kind of person who can understand what is going on here. How they make you do things. You are –’ he whipped out his mobile and looked up a word. ‘Too rational.’

  He’d made a confession. He’d come to seek atonement. And I was his witness.

  But capitalism employs me, via Phipps & Wexman. Not God.

  I am not sure what ‘too’ rational might mean. But Sunny Chen was right; I have a respect for facts, and the logic systems that connect them. Which is why what he said was immediately unsatisfactory. While whistle-blowers tend to have an inflated view of their own importance, Sunny Chen’s ego was virtually non-existent. I admired him for standing up for the rules. But he didn’t match the profile.

  ‘I’m going to record this,’ I say. ‘For my report.’

  He shrugged. I pulled out my device, settled it on the marble slab between us and pressed the button. ‘This is very bad for me,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not bad at all,’ I countered quickly. I was on safe ground here: this was something I had rehearsed, though not, I’d thought, for him. ‘You’ll get a reward. A generous one. That’s why I’m here. You’ll be a hero.’

  ‘The last thing I want,’ he said in a flat voice.

  When I computed this statement it made a kind of sense. He’d brought down his company. Inevitably he felt torn. Publicly, he’d receive a financial reward as a face-saver for Ganjong, and be hailed as an eco-warrior, a crime-fighter, a corruption-buster, a champion of honesty. But in reality, small, insecure, tormented Sun-kiu ‘Sunny’ Chen was none of these things.

  ‘So why did you do it?’

  He looked uncomfortable and fiddled with a Hell note. ‘I didn’t want to. I can’t explain. Even to myself. I was not in charge.’

  ‘You respect the tradition of ancestor-worship. Do you have any other beliefs?’

  He shook his head absentmindedly and took a drag of his cigarette. ‘No.’

  ‘How does your respect for your ancestors relate to your exposing corruption at Jenwai?’

  ‘I can’t explain.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘I can’t. Just ask me another question.’

  ‘The mark you showed me at the timber plant. Who made it and why do you think it’s relevant?’

  ‘I made it,’ he said. ‘That’s why I wanted the police to take fingerprints. Evidence. But they refuse.’

  ‘You mean those are your own fingerprints?’

  ‘I am not sure. I would like to know.’

  ‘But you just said the hand-print was yours.’

  ‘They make you do things. From the inside.’ He touched his chest.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Them. They’re our blood, but they hate us. They blame us. I can’t explain.’

  I decided to try another tack. ‘Do you consider yourself a moral person?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Do you have views on deforestation? Or the environment?’

  ‘No views,’ he said, gazing into the middle distance. He took another deep drag on his cigarette and shook his head as though to get rid of a fly. ‘I’m just an ordinary person.’

  ‘Ordinary people can have views.’

  He blew out a stream of smoke. When smoke mixes with air it obeys mathematical rules. ‘So as an ordinary person I don’t especially care about the environment.’


  ‘So why did you do it?’

  ‘Pressure.’

  ‘What kind of pressure? Who from?’

  ‘I told you! The spirits! Them!’

  He shook his head, stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. We sat there for a while. Two metres away, a tabby cat with a kinked tail was nursing a litter of black, white and tortoiseshell kittens.

  ‘Do you fear that there will be a reprisal of some kind?’ I asked after a moment. ‘That the Jenwai staff who were exposed might attack you in revenge?’

  He made a noise with his mouth, as if he were stifling more choking. ‘It’s not their business. It is nothing to do with them. You see, it was not me that did this thing. They come in. I don’t know how. Maybe you eat the wrong thing and they get in your blood. Like a parasite. And they make the body disobey the mind. Do you understand?’

  ‘Not yet. But I’m here to try. That’s my job. So I can write my report.’

  He reached for my recorder and turned it off. ‘No. Sorry Hesketh. We finish this now.’ He blew out a thin stream of smoke. ‘I can’t. I don’t understand it myself. I’m not in charge of anything, you see. I am just a . . .’ he trailed off.

  ‘Just a what?’

  He flicked some ash off his sleeve. ‘Just a little man made of paper.’

  Then he stood up. I did too, and made to follow him, but he signalled for me to stay where I was. So I sat down again and watched as he walked stiffly back to the family shrine where he took a wad of red Hell notes from his pocket, knelt to place it on the stone, fanned it out and set fire to it with the plastic lighter. Then he fished in his briefcase for some incense sticks, bowed three times, then placed the incense in a small jar and lit it. His shoulders were shaking.

  The smoke drifted towards me: I smelled sandalwood. I recognised it instantly. Last Christmas when Kaitlin and I rented a cottage in Devon, Freddy insisted on lighting sandalwood joss sticks in every room. Kaitlin’s moods tended to be capricious, but on this occasion the atmosphere was positive. She had drunk four glasses of wine and there was a sheen to her skin that made me want her urgently. My body has a mind of its own and I have learned that when it comes to sex one need not fight this because sex has its own rules. That night she was very receptive and for once she shut her eyes too. But I misunderstood why. I thought she was giving me something, finding a way to join me in what she called the Fortress. But it wasn’t that. The truth was, she’d already begun her affair.