by Susan Barker
‘Stop that, Grace!’ I scolded. ‘For heaven’s sake, behave yourself! Put your skirt back down.’
The silly goose ignored me, dancing to the jaunty dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dah of The Archers’ theme tune, lifting her skirt and wiggling her bottom, as if to warm it by the fire. Adam stood up.
‘Do you know what Julia gets up to after school?’ I asked him. ‘Do you know who her friends are? I’m going to telephone their parents and find out what’s going on.’
Blank-faced, Adam clattered up his empty plate and cutlery. The boy does a good impersonation of a deaf mute when it suits him.
I wanted to shake him, but instead I lowered my fork and said: ‘It won’t do for you to be this way, Adam. I won’t be here for ever, and you must look after your little sister when I’m gone. You must look after her and love her. If you do one thing in your life, Adam, you must love someone. Love is the only thing that matters.’
No sooner had I said the words than I was ashamed. They must have seemed insincere to a boy to whom I so seldom spoke. I think my candour was inspired by mad Grace, flaunting the sacred flower of her femininity by the fireplace. She reminded me of Evangeline and her daily battle to keep her younger sister out of the scrub. The strength of her devotion.
Adam looked me in the eye and spoke for the first time in weeks, the donkey bray of adolescence catching me unawares. ‘Like you loved my mum?’
Then he left, and I heard the lock slide across the bathroom door. Tears of injustice stung my eyes. I took up my knife and fork and sawed at my stone-cold gammon steak.
‘What does the boy know? The boy knows nothing! He wasn’t even born when Frances ran away!’
No one heard me, of course. No one except mad Grace, who cackled and shimmied, lifting her skirt for everyone to see.
I met mad Grace and the God-botherers Blanche Mallard and Marina Tolbin in the autumn of 1951. I first saw the mission hut as I led a wheelbarrow procession of fence-mending equipment across the village. I knew at once that the hut was no squatter residence, for it had whitewashed walls and a trellis of Honolulu creepers around the door. A picket fence bordered the garden where a Saint Bernard panted in the shade of the papaya tree. An infant chorus of ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ drifted through the wire-mesh windows, bolstered by the operatic, bellow-lunged quavers and trills of what I imagined to be a Viking-hatted Valkyrie. I stopped in my tracks, then yelped as the wheelbarrow behind me ploughed into the back of my legs.
‘Whose hut is that?’ I asked the Tamil at the helm of the incendiary wheelbarrow.
The Tamil squinted over at the whitewashed idyll and said: ‘Ah, that hut belongs to the Jesus People, come to turn the Chinese against the Lord Buddha. Two English ladies. They came last week. They are determined to convert everything that moves. Not even the chickens are safe.’
‘Really,’ I grumbled. ‘Charles never keeps me up to speed on anything these days.’
How had the Jesus People managed to pass through the check-point, build their mission headquarters and begin indoctrination of the villagers without my noticing? I expect I’d been too busy to notice. Two weeks before, fifty army trucks containing two hundred evacuated squatters had rumbled into The Village of Everlasting Peace, and the ensuing chaos robbed me of the opportunity to think of anything else. What a nightmare. The government had sprung them on us with only a few days’ warning. They had to live in tents as bulldozers and gangs of men with parang knives cleared the jungle so there was land on which to build huts.
The newcomers were very unhappy. Silence and hostility greeted my attempts to befriend them. And the few that did open up to me asked me to perform illegal feats.
‘Master, please let my family go back. We’ve never helped the People Inside!’ begged one old lady. ‘You’re a good man. You know we don’t deserve to be here …’
I recited word for word, in Cantonese translation, from The Handbook to the Briggs Plan. I sang the praises of resettlement and sanitation, education and medical care; protection from Communist harassment and future prospects for grandchildren. But there was little in the inchoate mess surrounding us to inspire faith in such promises.
The old lady scowled. ‘It will take more than your filthy lies to make me appreciate this dung heap of a concentration camp,’ she said. ‘Heaven has eyes, you know! And in heaven you will be punished, you wicked man!’
Every evening after supper I tumbled on to my camp-bed and slept like the dead. Charles stayed up till all hours, continuing to flambé his belly with brandy, alone but for the orchestral works of dead composers (Lieutenant Spencer was away on a mission to the Batu Caves). Once, passing the officers’ bungalow on a midnight visit to the latrine, I saw Charles whirl by the window in a solitary trance of ballroom dancing, arms encircling an imaginary partner. The next morning he was as sick and grumpy as ever. What’s so funny? he snapped as I smiled at the memory of his drunken waltzing. Not that my teetotalism served me any better. My alarm clock woke me long before I’d slept off my exhaustion (how that tyrannical keeper of time clamoured for defenestration!) and my muscles ached twice as much as the day before.
Anyway, let’s return to the Jesus People and their hut. Lowering my wheelbarrow, I instructed my team to make a start on the fence-mending without me (they veered over to the shade of the tulang trees for a siesta), then went to call on the missionaries. Nearing the cottage, I was cheered to see pots of scarlet hibiscus in the garden and the flower beds damp with the promise of further tropical bloom (a refreshing change from the yards of weeds and chicken shit). The Saint Bernard panted and thudded its tail, and one of the missionaries, Blanche Mallard, came out to greet me. Blanche was tall and sturdy and the bun on her head was like a grey ball of yarn.
‘Christopher Milnar, I presume,’ she said, and we laughed and shook hands. After introducing herself and Humphrey the Saint Bernard to me, she invited me into the front room of the hut, where a dozen village children sat around a low table, colouring in pictures of biblical scenes and drinking orange squash. Religious tapestries hung on the walls and geckos darted to and fro, forked tongues flickering at spiders and flies. Chalking a prayer on to the blackboard was the second missionary, Marina Tolbin, a woman so ugly and hirsute I felt physically ill. Even now I remember her in chilling flashbacks of protruding teeth, furry moustache and moles like netherworldly creatures on her chin. It didn’t take a qualified doctor to see that Marina had some hormonal imbalance or thyroid disorder. I squeaked ‘Hello’ and Marina stared wordlessly back. Miss Tolbin is mute, the poor dear, said Blanche, and I admit to a guilty relief that I was spared the ordeal of conversing with her.
Marina regained the ability to speak when she died. After a lifelong vow of silence it seems she has a lot to get off her chest. Her ghost pops up on the lavatory when I am in the bath and jabbers non-stop. Blanche is her favourite topic of complaint.
‘Blanche always has the final say-so,’ she says, ‘and I have no say-so at all. She always takes charge of the exorcisms, even though I’ve frightened away hordes of demons in my time.’
I do wish she’d respect my privacy. I feel quite self-conscious performing my mandatory soap-and-loofah routine with Marina nattering on the lavatory. When Marina Tolbin was alive I thought her silence was of the utmost spiritual kind: a sacrifice of words so she could commune more devoutly with the Lord. But now Marina speaks aloud her cogitations, I know they scarcely deviate from the fatuous.
As the village urchins coloured-in scenes from the Life of Christ, Blanche praised their work in fluent Cantonese (Very good, Ling Li, aren’t you a clever girl! ) and gently discouraged acts of sacrilege (Oh, no! The face of Jesus Christ is never blue … Blue is better for the sky …). Marina Tolbin refilled glasses with orange cordial, as if afraid the little guests would run away if they were for a moment empty. The children were well behaved, except for one pipsqueak of a boy whose hand was down his trousers groping his juvenile tackle. Blanche scolded the boy. He was not to touch hims
elf there! Never, ever! The boy removed his hand and Blanche nodded, satisfied, then told me that she and Marina were having trouble with a villager.
‘Miss Tolbin and I experienced many trials during our long years as missionaries in Hong Kong,’ she said, ‘but never one such as this.’
Blanche led me through a click-clacking beaded curtain into the kitchen, where a Chinese woman sat at the table, the shrivelled newborn in her arms suckling at a bottle of milk. Like most women in our village, she was downtrodden and dirty, attending to her chores with a throng of little ’uns under her feet. The woman made a furious row when she saw me. She leapt up, spitting and cursing my ancestors. The baby squalled, shaken in her arms. Milk squirted from the teat of the feeding bottle and on to my cheek.
‘Traitor!’ she shrieked at Blanche.
‘But he is not a policeman,’ said Blanche.
‘I know who he is!’ the woman shouted. ‘Even worse than a policeman. You’ve betrayed me! Jesus whore!’
I promised the woman that her troubles wouldn’t go any further than the mission kitchen, and eventually she was calm enough to sit and jig her whimpering baby (though it was clear from the murder in her eyes that if she hadn’t had a whimpering baby to jig she’d have done some serious violence to Blanche).
‘This is Mrs Ho,’ Blanche whispered. ‘Her husband is an opium-eater and she is afraid he will gamble the baby away to fund his addiction. She wants the mission to adopt the child, to save him from a life of serfdom. But this is impossible! Miss Tolbin and I are too busy to bring up a child.’
‘Opium is a police matter,’ I said, sotto voce, ‘and gambling is illegal in this village …’
‘Stop whispering in your Foreign Devil tongue!’ interrupted Mrs Ho.
‘Mrs Ho,’ I said, ‘do you really want to give your baby away?’
‘Better to give my baby to a good home than have him gambled into a bad one.’
‘But surely it is better to keep your baby? Surely it is better to cure your husband’s addiction?’
‘One word to my husband and I will kill myself,’ Mrs Ho said calmly. ‘Then you’ll have six children to find homes for.’
‘Suicide is sin, Mrs Ho,’ said Blanche, equally matter-of-fact.
‘I promise to become a Christian and worship your Jesus God if you adopt my baby.’
‘Mrs Ho, God does not bargain,’ Blanche replied firmly. ‘Faith is unconditional. When you are a Christian you will learn this. If you say your prayers every day, then the Holy Spirit will move within you. He will lend you the strength to overcome your problems.’
Mrs Ho was dissatisfied with this. There wasn’t the time to wait for the Holy Spirit to move within her. The Jesus People had to take her baby now! She threatened to take her life once again and my patience snapped.
‘Here’s the solution,’ I said: ‘we arrest this husband of yours for the opium-eating and send him to prison. Then you and your children are safe. And we’ll give you food rations to compensate for the shortfall in income, so you won’t go hungry. Now, isn’t that better than suicide?’
Mrs Ho’s chair flew backwards as she stood up. She screamed, hexing my manhood with infertility (a hex that failed – my manhood is obviously a potent force to be reckoned with) and howling that if anything happened to her husband she’d set fire to the Jesus Whores’ hut and poison their dog. I feared for her crying baby as she thrashed in her selfish commotion. I promised not to say a word to the police and pleaded with her to hold the baby properly. But Mrs Ho wouldn’t listen. Her tantrum chased me back through the strands of beaded curtain.
The classroom was silent but for the scratching of pencils. The circle of little ’uns looked up at me, eyes blazing with curiosity. I hoped that none of Mrs Ho’s children had overheard the horrific threats their mother had made.
‘It’s no good. The kitchen is amok with demons!’ said Blanche, as she walked me to the door. ‘Such a furore! I only hope we can baptize Mrs Ho before it is too late!’
Blanche then invited me to join her congregation on the coming sabbath, but as I’d not been on speaking terms with God since the war I had politely to decline.
After saying goodbye to Blanche, I crouched in the garden to pet Humphrey the Saint Bernard, who thumped his tail, his pink tongue hanging out of his mouth. The poor old chap was dying in the heat. Why had no one thought of shearing his shag-pile fur? As I made plans to get hold of some clippers I heard a baby-voiced whispering. I turned to find myself eye-level with two urchins, peering at me through the fence pickets like midget jailbirds.
‘If we go into that hut will the Jesus People give us orange drinks?’ one of them asked.
‘Yes … but I advise against it,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Oh, tell us, tell us!’ they cried.
I stole a cautionary glance back at the mission door.
‘The orange drink is a witch’s brew,’ I said, ‘a magic potion that will make you go to them every single day and listen to Jesus stories. It is too late for the children in there now. But you two must run and save yourselves …’
I thoroughly enjoyed my macabre joke, but had forgotten how susceptible the Chinese are to supernatural tales. The children listened wide-eyed, then one of them pointed over my shoulder and they both squealed. Their fear was strangely contagious and I hesitated to look round. Under the pink blooms of the Honolulu creeper trellis stood Marina Tolbin, holding a tray of orange squash. The urchins fled, leaving me to stand and shake my head and tut: ‘Really, these children ought to learn some manners.’
The servant boy was on the bungalow veranda, sitting on a rattan chair and swinging his foot (the big toe of which was tethered to the ceiling-fan contraption) in a monstrous fit of the sulks. Around the side of the bungalow scuttled a headless chicken, fountains of blood spurting from its severed neck as chef Winston Lau chased it with a cleaver. The servant was so consumed by sulking he barely looked up.
In the office, Charles was wafted by the scalloped fan as he typed up the weekly village report. The story of Mrs Ho outraged him.
‘We must call her bluff,’ he said. ‘We cannot let a squatter woman hold her life over us as a threat. Nor can we let opium-eating go on in this village.’
Charles assured me that Mrs Ho wouldn’t find out her confidence had been violated. He would see to it that Mr Ho and the other drug fiends were caught in flagrante delicto. As I left, Charles dialled a number on the telephone and barked, Get me Sergeant Abdullah! And I returned to my volunteer team, trusting the situation was in good hands.
But there were no arrests. Not the next week, nor the week after that. When I asked Charles why the police were so slow, he spoke of an undercover operation to track down the opium ringleaders. They’re after the big boys, he said, with a knowing wink.
Sometimes, when Charles comes haunting, I remind him of his whopping great lies. And he laughs and laughs, holding on to his massive jiggling belly as if it might explode. Charles often sets up his opium-smoking paraphernalia on my sideboard. He is especially fond of an Aladdin’s lamp with a hollow rope attachment, devoting hours to sucking on the brass mouthpiece. Occasionally he uses more sinister tools of the trade – needles and syringes, weighing scales, morphia grains and vials of distilled water. He borrows my necktie to make a tourniquet around the venom depository of his arm. I close my eyes as he injects – I’ve always had a phobia of needles. I plug my fingers in my ears too, for I’ve come to loathe that sigh of intoxication. I have no desire to eavesdrop on his orgasm.
‘This,’ he says, eyes rolling back, ‘is the most powerful weapon in the war against Communism. Not the hundreds of thousands of dollars of government propaganda and all that nonsense about hearts and minds. So long as the Reds want to outlaw this bourgeois indulgence, they’ll never be loved by the Chinese.’
‘Better a Communist than a dope fiend,’ I muttered.
‘Tee hee hee, tee hee hee,’ giggled
Charles, shutting his eyes and slumping into the arms of his toxic paramour.
The jungle settlement from which the two hundred newcomers had come was the last remaining source of food for the local Communists. Annoyed about their last supporters being corralled behind barbed wire, the 10th Independent Regiment of the Malayan Races Liberation Army upped their campaign of violence against The Village of Everlasting Peace. Grenades flew here, there and everywhere, blowing up the south watchtower and a few of our men besides. Dr Fothergill became adept at tweezering bullets out of our home guard, getting his patients shipshape so they were back on duty within a week. Conscious of the slit-throat fate of my predecessor, I kept to my hut after nightfall. I was lonely, I suppose, but I much preferred loneliness to boozing till all hours with Charles Dulwich and Lieutenant Spencer, back early from his failed mission to the Batu Caves, and in a filthy rotten mood after one of his squadron had blundered into trip-wire and got his legs blasted off.
One night I was woken by fists hammering my door. Mistah Christopher! Mistah Christopher! I fought my way out from under the mosquito nets and groped for the door bolt. There stood Special Constable Tahir, a young Malay of about seventeen, come to tell me I was wanted at the police hut.
‘What for?’ I asked.
Tahir told me they’d arrested a woman and she’d begged for me to be sent for. A week had passed since my visit to the mission and with a shudder I thought of the evil Mrs Ho. I asked Tahir if he knew who the woman was, and he smiled and shook his head.