Sayonara Bar

by Susan Barker

  I put the phone down in its cradle, then took it off the hook. Only when I heard the dial tone purling did I understand what I had done. My God, there will be repercussions, I thought. But only if I remain an employee of Daiwa Trading. And that was that. I decided to tender my resignation the very next day.

  I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. As tap water drummed the aluminium base of the kettle, I experienced the onset of a mild panic attack. What had I done? What company will want to employ a middle-aged salaryman changing jobs mid-career? I lit the hob and put the kettle on to boil. I thought of the savings that I had in the bank and assured myself that I would survive for a year or two, provided I stuck to a frugal existence. But everyone needs a job. Everyone needs purpose in one’s life and a means of contributing to society. I recalled the position in the fishmonger’s I had found Mariko. What law decrees that I must push a pen for a living? A community needs fish just as much as it needs accountants. Why not have a job that lights up a different province of the brain entirely? It was a radical idea and I had to stand by the window to allow it time to sink in. A whistle, low at first, then rising to a persistent shriek, interrupted my thoughts. The time it took for the kettle to boil was all the time it took for me to become accustomed to my new plan. I brewed a cup of green tea and took it upstairs with me, to drink while I finished painting the spare room.

  How much has changed in these past weeks. The more I think about it, the more I can see the good that has come out of my dalliance with Mariko. Though cleaning up in her aftermath has been time-consuming, the experience has made me think. One ought to be careful about whom one invites into one’s home. Mariko was a short, sharp lesson in the perils of being too quick to befriend. I shall be much more mistrustful in future.

  My heart is mending fast, though. Can you believe that I have almost forgotten her face? Her delicate features, once so sharp and real, are now fickle and ill-remembered, drifting into nebulous imprecision. A train journey into Shinsaibashi is all that I need to rectify this. But why would I want to do that? This amnesia ought to be encouraged. And as I told you earlier, I never want to go near The Sayonara Bar ever again. In a roundabout way all that happened with Mariko was what I deserved, for being inconsiderate enough to visit a hostess bar in the first place.

  How silent it is at night, as if I am deaf to the world. Perhaps I have mentioned this before, but I feel closest to you at night. This is strange because night-time is when you used to be at your most distant, always leaving our warm bed to pace about downstairs by yourself. But let us not dwell on the past. I made you unhappy once. I know that now. And I promise I will never make you unhappy again. I want nothing more than for us to continue to live in peace. Let this night and the silence last for ever.

  But the silence is broken. Did you hear that? Out in the garden? A sound that demands investigation. See how clumsily I push back my chair. How my bare feet stick to the linoleum, every tacky step reminding me the floor needs mopping. It is almost as though I move in a dream as I open the back door to step beneath a sky dense with stars, damp blades of grass stroking me underfoot. Even the goosebumps beneath my pyjamas do not seem real. The only thing that is real I advance towards now. As I kneel down upon our newly made plot of earth and lower my ear to the soil, I hear it clearly and, enchanted as ever, I close my eyes. For the cello is singing: a midnight sonata in D minor. A melody you have played for me before.

  Read on for an extract from The Incarnations

  Available Now!

  1

  The First Letter

  EVERY NIGHT I wake from dreaming. Memory squeezing the trigger of my heart and blood surging through my veins.

  The dreams go into a journal. Cold sweat on my skin, adrenaline in my blood, I illuminate my cement room with the 40-watt bulb hanging overhead and, huddled under blankets, flip open my notebook and spill ink across the feint-ruled page. Capturing the ephemera of dreams, before they fade from memory.

  I dream of teenage girls, parading the Ox Demons and Snake Ghosts around the running tracks behind our school. I dream of the tall dunce hats on our former teachers’ ink-smeared heads, the placards around their necks. Down with Headteacher Yang! Down with Black Gangster Zhao! I dream of Teacher Wu obeying our orders to slap Headteacher Yang, to the riotous cheers of the mob.

  I dream that we stagger on hunger-weakened limbs through the Gobi as the Mongols drive us forth with lashing whips. I dream of razor-beaked birds swooping at our heads, and scorpions scuttling amongst scattered, sun-bleached bones on the ground. I dream of a mirage of a lake on shimmering waves of heat. I dream that, desperate to cure our raging thirst, we crawl there on our hands and knees.

  I dream of the sickly Emperor Jiajing, snorting white powdery aphrodisiacs up his nostrils, and hovering over you on the fourposter bed with an erection smeared with verdigris. I dream of His Majesty urging us to ‘operate’ on each other with surgical blades lined up in a velvet case. I dream of sixteen palace ladies gathered in the Pavilion of Melancholy Clouds, plotting the ways and means to murder one of the worst emperors ever to reign.

  Newsprint blocks the windows and electricity drips through the cord into the 40-watt bulb. For days I have been at my desk, preparing your historical records, my fingers stiffened by the cold, struggling to hit the correct keys. The machine huffs and puffs and lapses out of consciousness. I reboot and wait impatiently for its resuscitation, several times a day. Between bouts of writing I pace the cement floor. The light bulb casts my silhouette on the walls. A shadow of a human form, which possesses more corporeality than I do.

  The Henan migrants gamble and scrape chair legs in the room above. I curse and bang the ceiling with a broom. I don’t go out. I hunch at my desk and tap at the keyboard, and the machine wheezes and gasps, as though protesting the darkness I feed into its parts. My mind expands into the room. My subconscious laps at the walls, rising like the tide. I am drowning in our past lives. But until they have been recorded, they won’t recede.

  I watch you most days. I go to the Maizidian housing compound where you live and watch you. Yesterday I saw you by the bins, talking to Old Pang the recycling collector, the cart attached to his Flying Pigeon loaded with plastic bottles, scavenged to exchange for a few fen at the recycling bank. Old Pang grumbled about the cold weather and the flare-up in his arthritis that prevents him reaching the bottom of the bins. So you rolled up your coat sleeve and offered to help. Elbow-deep you groped, fearless of broken glass, soapy tangles of plughole hair and congealed leftovers scraped from plates. You dug up a wedge of styrofoam. ‘Can you sell this?’ you asked. Old Pang turned the styrofoam over in his hands, then secured it to his cart with a hook-ended rope. He thanked you, climbed on his Flying Pigeon and pedalled away.

  After Old Pang’s departure you stood by your green and yellow Citroën, reluctant to get back to work. You stared at the grey sky and the high-rises of glass and steel surrounding your housing compound. The December wind swept your hair and rattled your skeleton through your thin coat. The wind eddied and corkscrewed and whistled through its teeth at you. You had no sense of me watching you at all.

  You got back inside your cab and I rapped my knuckles on the passenger-side window. You nodded and I pulled the back door open by the latch. You turned to me, your face bearing no trace of recognition as you muttered, ‘Where to?’

  Purple Bamboo Park. A long journey across the city from east to west. I watched you from the back as you yawned and tuned the radio dial from the monotonous speech of a politburo member to the traffic report. Beisanzhong Road. Heping South Bridge. Madian Bridge. Bumper to bumper on the Third ring road, thousands of vehicles consumed petrol, sputtered exhaust and flashed indicator lights. You exhaled a long sigh and unscrewed the lid of your flask of green tea. I swallowed hard.

  I breathed your scent of cigarettes and sweat. I breathed you in, tugging molecules of you through my sinuses and trachea, and deep into my lungs. Your knuckles were white as bone as you gripped
the steering wheel. I wanted to reach above the headrest and touch your thinning hair. I wanted to touch your neck.

  Zhongguancun Road, nearly there. Thirty minutes over in a heartbeat. Your phone vibrated and you held it to your ear. Your wife. Yes, hmmm, yes, seven o’clock. Yida is a practical woman. A thrifty, efficient homemaker who cooks for you, nurtures you and provides warmth beside you in bed at night. I can tell that she fulfils the needs of the flesh, this pretty wife of yours. But what about the needs of the spirit? Surely you ache for what she lacks?

  Purple Bamboo Park, east gate. On the meter, 30 RMB. I handed you some tattered 10-RMB notes; the chubby face of Chairman Mao grubby from the fingers of ten thousand laobaixing. A perfunctory thank-you and I slammed out. There was a construction site nearby, and the thoughts in my head jarred and jangled as the pneumatic drills smashed the concrete up. I stood on the kerb and watched you drive away. Taxi-driver Wang Jun. Driver ID number 394493. Thirty-one, careworn, a smoker of Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes. The latest in your chain of incarnations, like the others, selected by the accident of rebirth, the lottery of fate.

  Who are you? you must be wondering. I am your soulmate, your old friend, and I have come back to this city of sixteen million in search of you. I pity your poor wife, Driver Wang. What’s the bond of matrimony compared to the bond we have shared for over a thousand years? What will happen to her when I reappear in your life?

  What will become of her then?

  Read on for an extract from The Orientalist and the Ghost

  Available Now!

  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.

  About the Author

  Susan Barker was born in London in 1978 to a Chinese Malaysian mother and an English father. Aged twenty-five, she completed the acclaimed novel Sayonara Bar (‘Funny, crisply written and engaging’ Times), followed by The Orientalist and the Ghost (‘Sharp and original’ Guardian). While writing her third novel The Incarnations she spent several years living in Beijing, researching modern and ancient China. Follow her on Twitter @Susankbarker.

  Also by Susan Barker

  The Orientalist and the Ghost

  The Incarnations

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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  SAYONARA BAR

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 9780 552 77240 2

  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473509566

  Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday, a division of Transworld Publishers

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Doubleday edition published 2005

  Black Swan edition published 2006

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  Copyright © Susan Barker 2005

  The right of Susan Barker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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