by Susan Barker
Not all the ghosts are as bothersome as Charles (thank God). Most of the visitations are silent, isolated fragments of the past, recurring in the here and now, before dissolving into nothingness. Sometimes the Sikh guard stands sentinel outside the hallway cupboard, rifle slung over his shoulder, his skin slick with equatorial humidity. Sometimes the pretty girl with the plaits bends in front of the fireplace, washing potatoes as the gas valves hiss. The girl, absorbed in rinsing mud off a potato, then looks up, startled, and the potato once again makes that eternal leap of lust, as though I were a handsome young man of twenty-five, and not the rheumy-eyed old devil lying in ambush in the bathroom mirror. Every day dozens of the not-so-dearly departed come to my living quarters, whatever non-corporeal substance they are made of transfiguring into ephemeral scenes of the past. Every single Godforsaken day. Pity this old man, for they will never let me forget.
The bicycle bells trilled and the bamboo flautist performed his folk-song, and Charles clapped his hands and shouted, Boy! and a sulky-mouthed Malay presented himself in the doorway. Charles barked an order to the youth, who disappeared, then reappeared with two glasses on a teakwood tray; all sensual hip movement and demurely lowered camel lashes. He had the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen, and had obviously been destined to be a seductress of the highest order, though some unhappy quirk of fate made him a boy instead, which was of no good to anyone (or so I naively thought at the time). He served us our drinks and lemon-barley water spilt everywhere.
‘That vain creature is incapable of putting anything down without sloshing it,’ Charles said crossly.
He barked again to the boy, who sulked out on to the veranda. Seconds later there was a flutter above Charles’s head as a fan of fluted paper wafted the air, disturbing his pale Byronic curls. The fan was attached to the ceiling and was moved back and forth by a length of string. The string descended to the veranda, where it ended in a loop secured around the big toe of the servant boy. The servant boy sat on a chair, swinging his foot and simmering with humiliation. I thought the contraption vulgar and decadent and very clever. Under the fluted paper breeze Charles tippled on gin and lemon barley and enlightened me about my future duties as Assistant Resettlement Officer.
Evening came and consumed Malaya with a rich and sultry darkness. As Charles lit an oil lamp a powerful siren tore through the village.
‘Seven p.m. curfew,’ Charles said. ‘All the villagers are confined to their huts from now till five a.m.’
‘Does the curfew apply to us as well?’ I asked.
‘No. Though to stray beyond the fence after dark might be damaging to your life expectancy.’ Charles gave a rueful chuckle, like a host regretting the north-facing aspect of the guestroom.
We dined on the veranda, the kerosene lamp bringing in moths from far and wide. How the winged fiends rejoiced, pirouetting and colliding midair, their shadowy doppelgängers looming on the walls. We dined on quail-egg soup, duck in ginger and hoi sin sauce, jasmine rice and a dessert of lychees and rambutans, served to us by Winston Lau, the cook. Once he’d put the plates on the table Winston retreated to the shadows, hungering for leftovers and resenting what mouthfuls we ate.
Much of the village could be seen from the veranda. One could see as far as the perimeter fence, where armed guards strolled by on night patrol. Tilly lamps illuminated the outermost foliage of the jungle; threshold to the land of scorpions, flying reptiles and orang-utan (and other beasts of razor teeth and poison stings in my wildlife encyclopaedia of South East Asia). The jungle was nature at its most terrible and prolific. Beneath the tranquil surface of leaves it lay in wait, claws protracted.
Candle- and lamp-light leaked from hut doorways and the ventilation gaps under the roofs. Charles told me how the Chinese families lived in those huts in the hours of curfew; how they piddled in buckets and slept back-to-back on thin reed mats, always breathing the breath of others. The look on my face betrayed my disquiet, and Charles quickly reassured me that the squatter culture is very different from ours, and the Chinese are less desirous of privacy.
No sooner had we laid down our forks than Winston Lau swiped our plates and substituted them with tall warm bottles of Tiger beer. The presence of the beer, or perhaps the hiss of liberated carbonates as bottle opener detached cap, soon enticed a gang of Malay Special Constables. They had a slow, languid walk and carefree laughter, as if the rifles they wore were for hunting squirrels. They laughed to hear who I was – as though I were the incarnation of some joke they’d heard about Englishmen – and introduced themselves melodiously; a barbershop quartet of Abdullahs and Mohammeds. They bantered with Charles in Malay and accepted his offer of beer – anticipation of this offer having brought them over in the first place. They drank with drowsy smiles and I found it hard to imagine them chasing bandits or shooting guns or being anything other than good-natured and lazy.
After they had gone I began to yawn – mad, despotic yawns that wrenched my mouth into a fathomless cave. The night was syrupy with heat and the mosquitoes had savaged me, leaving my skin a hideously itchy, bumpy terrain. I scratched, irresponsible as a dog with fleas, until my arms became swollen and bled rubies of blood.
On my hundredth yawn Charles stood up and announced he would put some music on. ‘Jolly good,’ I murmured.
In his absence the throb of my pulse, made loud and authoritative by alcohol, came into the foreground. The night shuddered with it, the pulsations so forceful I imagined that they were external to me, emanating from the creatures in the jungle undergrowth. ‘Violons dans la nuit’ started up on the gramophone and the veranda swam in an adagio of strings. Charles returned and, standing before me, made a speech welcoming me to Malaya, a fiendish halo of moths fluttering about his choirboy curls. The speech touched and saddened me and as we clinked together our warm bottles of Tiger beer I was oddly stricken. I told Charles I was going to bed soon after that. The gramophone hissed as we said goodnight, the needle bumping over the empty vinyl at the end of the record.
Later that night I lay in the dark of my hut, on a camp-bed mattress that bore the stains of my predecessor like some lesser Turin shroud. (I flipped the mattress but on the other side found stains of a more sinister and ambiguous nature.) Mosquitoes droned beyond the net, the minute bristling of insect legs and antennae seeming to reside inside my ears. The mattress was slack and weak-sprung and I made a thousand revolutions in my sleeplessness, a human tombola trying to outwit the heat. As I lay there, sweat pooling in the hollows of my flesh, I pined for England; for a temperate climate and Greenwich Mean Time. I thought of Marion Forte-Cannon and hoped her hatred of me would not last, and that she would find another man to marry (old Marion did, thrice over, each husband wealthier than the last). I thought of Charles and his platypus nose, the broken veins in his face like contour lines on a map for alcoholics. I thought of my predecessor Ah Wing, murdered by the Communists, his throat slit so deeply he was near beheaded. They threw his corpse across a path at the Bishop’s Head plantation and though four hundred tappers had filed past it on their way home from work not one of them reported the crime back at the village. (Kip Phillips, the plantation manager, discovered poor old Ah Wing that evening, fire ants crawling over him, his spilt blood as thick as treacle.) I thought of my trunk and possessions, my books of Chinese calligraphy and folk-tales, being hawked in a marketplace somewhere in Dubai. I thought of the busy day ahead of me and the necessity of sleep. But dawn came and the sky lightened. And that first night in Malaya I never slept at all.
3
LAST NIGHT I dreamt I was a wild hog, careering through the jungle. Squealing and galloping as fast as my trotters would carry me, rattan vines lashing me and tree roots snaking across the trail. Behind me came the stampeding of jungle boots and the shouts of huntsmen in Malay and Cantonese, upper-class English and cockney slang, united in the waving of axes and bamboo spears. My heart was an organ of impossible loudness, louder even than my abattoir squeals, and through sow eyes I saw my snou
t, whiskers of grey and the rounded tusks of my savage underbite. I ran and ran, and made piggy retching sounds as the jungle breathed its primordial breath. The trail widened into a small clearing, the canopy soaring up into a cathedral of leaves. My stumpy legs buckled there and I belly-flopped upon the springy moss. I squeezed my eyes shut. What a way to go, I thought, as the jungle boots stomped into the clearing, the shouts became cheers, and the first sharpened stick of bamboo pierced my flesh.
The imaginary pain woke me, sent me flailing upright on the brink of cardiac arrest. As I wheezed and clutched at my chest, Charles Dulwich sat on the end of my fold-out bed, guffawing and dabbing at spectral tears of mirth.
‘That was hilarious!’ he said. ‘That was the funniest nightmare you’ve had in a long time! Not even safe in the arms of Morpheus, are you, now?’
Charles brandished an opium pipe and was blowing mauvish smoke about the living room. I was too breathless to reply, my pyjamas clammy with the sweat of my subconscious trauma. The mantelpiece clock said it was five past three. Somewhere on the estate a police siren whooped. I ignored Charles and clambered out of bed.
Light shone beneath the door of my old bedroom (now taken over by the orphan siblings) and I heard the rustle of a swiftly turned page. The boy was up reading again. I ought to have told him, as his legal guardian, to get some rest for school. But Adam hasn’t been to school in weeks. Julia is out of the door at eight fifteen every morning (odd socks on, buttered toast in her mouth, the knot of her school tie dangling halfway down her shirt) but her lazy brother stays in bed till noon. When he eventually wakes he’ll go to the bathroom and meddle with his acne in the mirror for twenty minutes or so. Then he’ll sit by the gas fire for the rest of the day, reading his library books. For, though a truant, Adam is a bibliophile truant, an omnivorous reader of D. H. Lawrence, Basic Plumbing Skills Parts I and II, Harlequin romances and lurid horrors with blood-splattered jacket designs. As much as I admire his autodidactic streak, he really ought to be in school. ‘An O level or two won’t do you any harm, Adam,’ I tell him. But I don’t go on. The boy is old enough to make up his own mind. Besides, one must be grateful he’s not a yob. Every child on this estate seems predestined for a life of thuggery – even the most angelic youngsters growing up into thieves and drug addicts and racialists who persecute the Somalis and the Kapoors who live above the shop.
I wasn’t keen on the boy loafing about the flat at first. But I’ve grown used to Adam and his strange antisocial habits – just as he has grown used to mine. He has seen how I rage at the Chinese Detective Pang, how I weep and cower when Evangeline batters me about the head with the frying skillet. When the harassment gets a bit much I go to the kitchen, or climb inside the hallway cupboard. Or Adam might take his book and read on the lavatory. Poor Adam. The school has sent me letters, but what am I to do? I can hardly drag a fifteen-year-old there by the ear, now, can I?
Fortunately Julia (or Jules, as she prefers to be called) never misses a day of school. She likes it there so much she won’t get home until eight thirty most nights. ‘Homework club,’ she tells me. ‘Smoking club, more like!’ I say. Her navy blazer and grubby mitts reek of nicotine. I told her there’d be no more homework club for her with that carry-on, so now she comes home smelling of spray-on deodorant and spearmint gum. Julia is a mucky little miss. There’s always dirt under her nails and tide-marks on her neck. Run her a bath and she’ll splash about for two minutes, then yank out the plug and put her nightie on. And don’t get me started on her teeth. Whatever must her teachers think?
Seeing as the boy never goes to school anyway, I left Adam to his nocturnal reading and went to the lavatory. I assumed the position and waited a good long while, but there wasn’t a drop to be had from the old codger. My bladder is always sending me false alarms, and in the meantime I stand about shivering and risking hypothermia.
When I returned to the living room Charles said, ‘Looks like the old plumbing’s gone kaput. I dare say you have a kidney infection. You stink of wee-wee!’
I ignored him and huddled under my blankets. Charles began humming some jaunty swing tune, an old favourite on Radio Malaya. I could hear the click of the opium pipe against his teeth, the suck and blissful exhalation. He was wearing that ghoulish smile of his, green and sickly with opiates.
‘Tell me, Christopher,’ he said, the timbre of his hum carrying over to the spoken word, ‘do you have an unconditional love of life?’
‘I don’t have an unconditional love of anything,’ I said.
The springs of the fold-out bed creaked as Charles made himself nice and comfy.
‘Really? Not even for that Jezebel, that sly fornicatress and common harlot Evangeline Lim?’ He chuckled. ‘You never knew the pain was going to last this long, did you? How long have you been suffering for now? My gosh! Half a century or more! You thought you would get over it, in six months, a year. But here you are, an old man, and the pain is still with you, just as sharp and sweet and excruciating.’
I sighed and pulled the blanket over my head. The old dope fiend does get on my nerves.
‘Tell me honestly, if you knew fifty years ago, on the day you nearly died, that you were never going to be happy again, that the rest of your life would be lived in the shadow of your pain, wouldn’t you have wished yourself dead? Wouldn’t you have slashed your wrists with a razor in the officers’ bathing hut? Or leapt from the watchtower with a noose round your neck …’
Ever since he drank the hemlock in 1953, Charles has rather fancied himself as something of a dark prince. I refuse to flatter this delusion.
‘Suicide is childish,’ I said. ‘It’s pathetic and cowardly and vain. I may not have an unconditional love of life, but I do have an unconditional adherence to it.’
‘Hah!’ Charles laughed. ‘That’s just the kind of Goody Two-Shoes answer I’d expect from you. Well, let me share with you the good news: your days of adherence will soon be over!’
Charles began humming that jaunty swing tune again, but it faded away after a few bars. He stayed at the end of the bed, smoking quietly for the remainder of the night. I knew this because I was unable to sleep until the sky went grey. I lay shivering under my blankets, the icy slivers in my marrow refusing to thaw. I blamed Charles for my insomnia and wished him gone. You aren’t my boss any more, Charles Dulwich! I thought crossly. You are long dust and bones, buried in the ground. I’m not sure if he heard me or not, but, as I said, he did not go away.
My first days in The Village of Everlasting Peace were miserable. I’d always been a happy-go-lucky chap, but the filth and squalor and bouquet of human sewage gave rise to an uncommon feeling of despair. I was homesick, puffy and itchy with mosquito venom. The Malay policemen called me ‘Mistah Ingerris!’ and made fun of my sunburnt skin, which peeled away in leprous shreds. The villagers laughed at me too. They tittered to hear my Cantonese, swinging like a wrecking ball between pidgin dialect and keen grammatical preciseness. I set out on a quest to speak more colloquially, unlearning the rules learnt at university and appointing every villager as my teacher. I consulted rubber tappers about verb usage while probing their socks for smuggled rice at the village check-point. I had children correct my pronunciation as we tore about, chasing geese for shuttlecock feathers. Here and there I made a friend, and it made all the difference to village life. Before long the plywood shacks assumed the guise of normality and the barbed wire looping the village seemed as natural as the rattan vines choking the rainforest, and less of a man-made means of segregation.
Each day in The Village of Everlasting Peace began with the four a.m. trill of my alarm clock. I’d yawn and stretch and pull a cord so the gauzy layers of the mosquito net lifted to the ceiling. Then, after tethering the cord to the frame of the camp-bed, in my underpants I’d pad in the dark to the officers’ bathing hut (the village was still under curfew, making an encounter with any young lady unlikely). The bathing hut contained a large barrel from which I would scoop water to rinse
away the night’s stickiness. I always bathed in the light of a battery-operated torch hanging from the ceiling, and never alone, for as soon as I started ladling water over myself a family of ribbiting toads would pitter-patter out from behind the barrel to accompany me in a good splashing. (Over the months I became rather fond of my amphibian friends and was aghast when one day at tiffin Winston Lau brought out a plate of tiny roast cadavers, proudly telling me of the trap he’d rigged up behind the barrel.) Goose-pimply from my bath, I’d shave with the aid of a communal cut-throat razor and rusty mirror, the sky lightening to reveal the eerie mists hanging over the jungly hills. Back in my hut I’d open a tin of peaches, spearing up the pieces with my penknife and drinking the syrupy juice. I’ve always been a lover of the early dawn. My mind is sharpest before the sun has risen. Seated at my slanting desk I’d study Mandarin, or translate the propaganda leaflets of the Malayan Races Liberation Party, until the klaxon wail announcing the end of curfew. Then I’d leap into my shirt and trousers, looping the braces over my shoulders, and hurry on down to the check-point.