The Orientalist and the Ghost

by Susan Barker

  Charles guffawed and Spencer was silent, nostrils flaring as if from some detonation of rage in the nasal cavities.

  ‘You saying I ain’t a gentleman?’ he said with a sneer.

  How downright stupid that he, who’d just five minutes ago been describing the introduction of ping-pong balls to the delicate regions of a hooker called Heavenly Lotus, was protesting his exclusion from the rank of gentleman.

  ‘I said no such thing,’ I replied. ‘I merely said that—’

  ‘ ’Cos you ain’t no better than me, you public-school tosser. You can look down yer nose at the Frangipani Club, but you ain’t gonna find no posh ladies and croquet tournaments out here …’

  ‘Now, steady on, old chap!’ chortled Charles. ‘No one is saying you are anything less than a gentleman. The very thought!’

  The humidity merged with the lieutenant’s drunken wrath, creating the atmosphere of a pressure cooker. I was convinced he was going to wallop me. I’d never been in a drunken brawl before (except the time I restrained a wild Max Montgomery from attacking Freddy St Clair at the Fencing Society ball) and had no desire to make up for this lack of experience. I was about to announce that I was off to bed, when there was a knocking at the door. The knocks came in staccato bursts, spaced at intervals.

  ‘Ah ha! I know who that is!’ cried Charles. ‘Yes, yes, you may enter!’

  The door opened and a young Chinese man slipped in like a quick-moving shadow. He wore the latex-splattered uniform of a rubber tapper.

  ‘Detective Pang, welcome!’ cried Charles.

  ‘ ’Evening, Detective,’ said Spencer, hostility cast aside as he greeted the newcomer.

  The man came and sat at the table.

  ‘My loving Bolshevik salutes to you, Lieutenant Spencer, Resettlement Officer Dulwich.’

  The man’s locution was indistinguishable from that of an Englishman. To hear such refinement from a Chinese squatter was as strange as being spoken to by a cat.

  ‘Ha, ha, ha, I’ll give you a Bolshevik salute, yer cheeky sod,’ said Spencer, laughing.

  ‘Assistant Resettlement Officer Milnar, how do you do? I’m Detective Pang.’

  The detective and I shook hands.

  ‘How do you do?’ I said. ‘Crikey. You look nothing like a detective.’

  ‘Detective Pang is the head of a thirty-strong network of undercover spies in the village,’ said Charles.

  ‘Thirty-strong!’ I echoed.

  ‘Whisky, Detective?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Splendid.’

  Detective Pang was as nondescript as the hundreds of other tappers in the village, and I’d no memory of having seen him before. With the bullish Spencer and the barrel-chested Charles either side of him, the detective seemed fragile and bird-boned, as if an enthusiastic bear hug would crush him. His cheekbones were high and feline and the low droopy folds of his eyelids made him seem half asleep (the opposite of vigilant; possibly integral to his success as a secret agent). As Charles ransacked the drinks cabinet for more booze, Detective Pang took a bag of sunflower seeds out of his trouser pocket. He nibbled the seeds as he sipped his nightcap, splitting them open with his teeth and discarding the striped husks on the table.

  ‘How’s the old intelligence gathering going?’ asked Charles. ‘What have the Min Yuen been up to lately? Spill the beans!’

  ‘Up to their usual tricks, I’m afraid. We’ve had a successful week, though, and have passed on the names of several Min Yuen suspects to Sergeant Abdullah.’

  ‘Terrific result. Well done!’

  ‘Ah, we have my wife to thank. The sewing circle she has joined has proved to be a goldmine of enemy information. The wives of the Min Yuen have lips as loose as their morals and are forever bragging of their husbands’ criminal activities.’

  The Chinese detective was so well-spoken and refined, I asked him if it was difficult to assume the identity of a common squatter.

  ‘No, it’s very easy,’ he replied. ‘I chew the betel nut and keep a hog and four geese. I talk with my mouth full and beat my wife. I have built my hovel from the same scavenged rubbish as the other squatters and have cut down on washing. No one here knows us from before, but they assume we’re just random unfortunates caught up in the government resettlement scheme. I only visit the police hut and Resettlement Officer Dulwich in the dead of night. I am rude to the village police, and Sergeant Abdullah has had his men pretend to arrest me on two occasions to place me above suspicion. When you see me in the village, you must never approach me or talk to me, even though you are known for your friendliness, Mr Milnar. If anyone discovers that my wife and I are spies, the Communists will murder us.’

  ‘What sacrifices you have made in order to pass yourself off as an ignorant squatter!’ marvelled Charles. ‘Sacrifices of the spirit, as well as in living standards. I propose a toast. To Detective Pang and his efforts in the war against Communism!’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ I cheered.

  We lifted our glasses up to the burning kerosene lamp, and the whisky shone copper and gold. We clinked glasses and a tide of nausea rose within me.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Detective Pang. ‘I am proud to be a Running Dog of Imperialism.’ We all guffawed at this. ‘Seriously,’ the detective went on, ‘I cannot bear to see Malaya – my Malaya – being torn apart by this foolish Communist agenda. It was bad enough when the Japanese were here.’

  ‘I know how you feel, old chap.’ Charles sighed. ‘I was born here too. When I think of the golden, carefree days before the war I could weep …’

  The detective was silent. He had nothing to say about the golden, carefree days before the war. Perhaps he was too young to remember. Spencer was slumped in his chair, eyelids flaccid and shreds of tobacco stuck to his chin. It was gone midnight and the suffocating heat was finally borne away by breezes, perspiration cooling against our skin. The booze had taken its toll on me as well as the lieutenant. Nausea came on like seasickness, and in a fanciful mood I imagined that the officers’ hut was a ship tossed about on a stormy sea (the nautical illusion wasn’t hard to establish, as the walls swayed and waves crashed in my ears). I imagined that Charles was the ship’s captain, and Detective Pang his first mate.

  ‘The trouble with Malaya,’ said Captain Dulwich, ‘is that she has no Nehru or Gandhi to guide her to Independence. The Malays are lazy. Their patriotism is disorganized and they’re not united enough against us. They’re content to be cogs in our system. If the British leave they will flail and founder and the Communists will rush to the fore – just like when the Japs left. The British have no choice but to stay, or else the Communists will have you singing “Raise The Red Flag”.’

  The detective bit into a sunflower seed. He removed the husk from his mouth and let it fall among the other carcasses on the table.

  ‘To defeat the Communists,’ he said, ‘we must turn around the minds of the immigrant Chinese so they are no longer loyal to Red China. Citizenship is the key. Otherwise they are against us. Their collective silence protects the enemy. How else can eight thousand bandits hold the country to ransom? This war will not be won by bullets and bombs, but by the conversion of hearts and minds.’

  ‘Bollocks to the Communists,’ jeered Spencer, snapping awake. ‘Wait until Operation Starvation kicks in and the Reds come crawling out of the jungle for some grub. Me and my men are going to the Batu Caves next week. We’ve got the map coordinates for a bandit camp there. See if I don’t bring back another sack of heads!’

  ‘Not to belittle your efforts, Spencer old boy,’ said Charles, ‘but even if you wiped out every last Communist, Malaya is doomed. The British are leaving and she doesn’t stand a chance without us. There’s no hope of us staying either, for the Empire is rotting, and the rot is incurable and has spread to the bone.’

  Independence, Empire, Communists, Emergency. The words shuffled meaninglessly in my head. I was too drunk to venture any opinions (though I wondered what became of this famous British loyalty when the Japs inva
ded – we certainly scarpered quickly enough then). Charles was born in British Malaya, and died in British Malaya, five years before Merdeka, with the conviction in his heart that the country was damned without Englishmen. Sometimes, when Charles’s spirit comes to pester me, I try to correct this misconception.

  ‘Your predictions about the departure of the British were wrong,’ I tell him. ‘Malaya gained her independence in ’fifty-seven and she’s been managing jolly well ever since. You wouldn’t recognize Kuala Lumpur today, Charles. It’s a world-class metropolis with skyscrapers and stunning modern architecture. There are shopping malls and McDonald’s and tube trains and six-lane motorways … The Chinese aren’t Communists any more, Charles, they’re entrepreneurs! You really ought to go and have a look. I think you’ll be impressed.’

  But Charles is mysteriously deaf to my accolades. Frustrated, I once pinched a travel agent’s brochure and flipped it open under his nose.

  ‘See, this is Merdeka Square, and this fireworks display is for the annual Independence celebrations …’

  Charles yawned, patting his open mouth. ‘Oh, put your story-book away, Christopher. I’m too old for fairy-tales!’

  It’s as if the history of the world ceased for Charles when he passed away in 1953. Maybe all ghosts are impervious to events occurring after their death, their mental ectoplasm is resistant to current affairs. Nearly every day Charles promenades into my kitchen, announcing news fifty years out of date.

  ‘I say! Did you hear they’ve killed the Bearded Terror of Kajang? They’ve strapped his corpse to the bonnet of a lorry and are driving him around the village to show the Min Yuen. Oh, how the mighty idol has fallen …’

  ‘Do you fancy some monkey stew? That imbecile Spencer just shot it on a jungle mission. It was standing on its hind legs and he mistook it for a bandit. Ha, ha, ha!’

  Sometimes I suspect Charles fakes his ignorance of Malaysia’s progress. After all, he can see Adam and Julia (whom he refers to as ‘the spawn of Beelzebub’) and my ageing body (which he calls ‘your withered bag of bones’). Perhaps he pretends not to see the photographs of modern-day Kuala Lumpur because they contradict the gloom-mongering predictions he made five decades ago. The more I think about it, the more likely this seems. Charles does so hate to be in the wrong.

  On the evening of our drinking party Charles ranted on and on. Too drunk to listen, I was oddly transfixed by his nose, which had turned a startling shade of vermilion. Lieutenant Spencer was stuporous in his chair and, though he’d had quite enough, some self-destructive reflex kept him lifting glass to mouth. When he spoke it was in a patois of cockney and pidgin Malay, intelligible only to Charles.

  ‘Mwargh bandits, me and my men’ll sort ’em, makan haji eff off.’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha, quite right, Spencer,’ agreed Charles.

  Only Detective Pang, compulsive nibbler of sunflower seeds, had his wits about him. I glanced at the overflowing ashtray on the table, queasy in the knowledge that many of the nicotine-stained filters were mine. My stomach lurched and I realized I had to leave before I vomited or lost consciousness or worse.

  ‘Goodnight!’ I said, my chair toppling over as I stood up.

  Charles and the detective wished me goodnight back, and Lieutenant Spencer roared at me: Bugger off!

  On the veranda I gulped the fresh night air like water in a land of drought. Bugs chirruped and a nightjar sang, the melody advancing through the treetops in an echolalia of birdsong. A two-man silhouette went by the perimeter fence, carrying rifles. As I stood there my view of the village tilted one way, then the other. I gripped the railing and wondered how the devil I was going to get back to my hut with all the blasted tilting. Woozy-headed, I started down the veranda steps. The next thing I knew I was sitting at the bottom, dazed and discombobulated, my buttocks throbbing as if they’d just had a good old paddle-whacking from the Latin master. I had fallen and my bum had bounced off every step (rendering it swollen and purplish for a week). Whoopsadaisy! I cried. Then I crawled a few yards over the trampled earth and was violently sick.

  I didn’t notice the figure on the veranda until after I’d vomited out the alcohol sloshing about in my stomach. The wooden boards creaked and I looked up, strands of hell-broth hanging from my mouth to the puddle I’d made on the ground. I recognized the height and girth of Charles and the firefly glimmer of his cigar.

  ‘Are you all right down there, Christopher?’

  ‘Right as rain, thanks.’

  ‘I heard you fall down the steps.’

  ‘Nothing sobers you up like a good fall.’

  A loud burp came out of my mouth, catching me unawares. I wiped the stomach bile oozing down my chin on to the back of my hand.

  ‘Well, I’d best be off to bed, then,’ I said. ‘I have check-point duty tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, and the Red Cross nurses are coming. You’ll be assisting them and Evangeline Lim, won’t you?’ He pronounced the syllables of her name in a slow, knowing manner. ‘Evangeline Lim,’ he repeated. ‘She has quite a history, that one. Detective Pang has been telling us …’

  I did not like to hear him talking of her. I did not like it one bit. Another burp came out of my mouth.

  ‘I’d like to take this opportunity to say that it is wonderful to have you here, Christopher,’ he said. ‘I can’t think of anyone better suited to life in The Village of Everlasting Peace.’

  I thanked him and wished him goodnight. Then I crawled all the way back to my hut on my hands and knees, without once looking round to see if the Resettlement Officer was still there.

  5

  JULIA GALLIVANTS ON the estate after dark and there is nothing I can do to stop her. Threaten her freedom and she bucks like a colt, unaware of the injury she could do to an old man like me. When I was Julia’s age I romped on pastures of green. I climbed the highest trees, fished for pike in lakes, and competed in the Middleton Junior School conker tournament. When the rain chased me indoors I assembled model aeroplanes and thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles. These innocent pastimes are unfashionable nowadays. On the Mountbatten estate, glue-sniffing appears to be de rigueur.

  What my hoyden of a granddaughter gets up to night after night I have no idea, but she returns home with the fading aura of an adventuress. Perhaps, through her twelve-year-old eyes, the Mountbatten towers are as magnificent as Babel, and the menagerie of council tenants, with their rainbow-hued tattooed skin and junk-food-fed obesity, as thrilling as the mythical beasts of the Odyssey. Perhaps she believes the glittering fragments of windscreen in the car park are diamonds, and the wacky-baccy smoke drifting from the heavy-lidded West Indians, zephyrs of holy incense. I worry about my granddaughter as she roams the concrete badlands of the Mountbatten estate. I tell her to stay indoors, but off she goes, every night, leaving her orthodontist appointment reminder cards on the mantelpiece to gather dust.

  Waiting for Julia to come home tonight, I watched the street-lamp-lit estate from the living-room window. Fourteen storeys below, people were hunched against the cold, pushing illegitimate sprogs in prams or eating from bags of battered cod and chips. The late-autumn chill seeped through the windowpane and I was glad to be indoors, with every bar glowing on the gas fire, and The Archers on Radio Four.

  ‘Well,’ I said, letting the curtain drop back in place, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. I vote we start without her.’

  Adam shrugged. An apathetic roll of the shoulders is the most the boy can manage these days. I fetched our supper from the kitchen and we dined in our armchairs, with our plates on our laps. I’d cooked gammon steak, tinned peas and carrots, and served it up with slices of buttered bread. Nutritious, well-balanced meals are important for growing children. When I lived alone I never ate such substantial fare.

  As we dug in, the radio drama our substitute for mealtime conversation, the front door banged. Then the bedroom door went as Julia ducked inside without so much as a Sorry-I’m-late. I set aside my plate and went to give the saucy
madam a talking-to. Julia was sitting on her bed in her school blazer, her eyes mean and glittery with cheap make-up, her high ponytail stiff with mousse. She reeked of cigarettes, and her school blouse was missing a button or two, the heart-shaped pendant of her nine-carat Argos necklace visible against her breastbone.

  ‘Julia,’ I said, ‘you were supposed to be home an hour ago. Your supper is ready.’

  ‘I don’t want any,’ she replied.

  ‘Whether you want any or not is beside the point. I go to a lot of trouble to make supper for you and Adam. And why is your shirt torn? They cost eight pounds each, those shirts. Where are the buttons?’

  ‘Dunno,’ she said.

  The teenage ghost of Frances Milnar rolled her eyes.

  ‘From now on you are to come straight home from school. Do you hear me? No more dilly-dallying on the estate.’

  I made up a plate for Julia and put it on the sideboard, but she ignored my calls and stayed in her room. If the girl is this disobedient at twelve, I shudder to think what she’ll be like at sixteen. Marjorie the caseworker says I must persevere, that the most important thing is for a family to stay together. But I am no good with children. It was the same story with her mother.

  By the time I got back to my dinner Adam had nearly finished, and was mopping up the leftover gravy on his plate with his bread. The boy was not alone, for mad Grace, sister of my beloved Evangeline, was dancing in front of the fireplace. Grace was dressed up in her finest cheongsam, the ribbon in her hair like a roosting butterfly with scarlet wings. I sighed. After my tiff with Julia, a visit from the village idiot was the last thing I needed. A daft smile on her pretty moon-shaped face, Grace reached down and lifted the hem of her cheongsam. Back in The Village of Everlasting Peace Grace took up her skirt for any man – Muslim, Buddhist, Christian or Sikh. Evangeline couldn’t leave her sister alone for one minute, as Grace hopped into the jungle scrub with any fella who winked or whistled. Lecherous baying followed her wherever she went. The village children pelted Grace with stones, and women spat at her for encouraging their husbands to philander. Only the God-botherers Blanche Mallard and Marina Tolbin could find it in their hearts to be nice to her, babysitting Grace while Evangeline helped out in the medical hut, grooming her hair with the nit-comb and reciting prayers. Whether Grace’s harlotry was playful innocence or sex-crazed lunacy, I couldn’t tell. But my living room is not a go-go dancing club, and such lewd exhibitionism isn’t allowed. As her skirt went higher I was irritated to see Grace had neglected to wear knickers.