The Orientalist and the Ghost

by Susan Barker

  ‘Well, it’s only ten weeks,’ said Sally. ‘That’s no time at all really, is it? You mustn’t over-react. If you weren’t so stubborn things would be easier.’

  Frances said nothing in self-defence. She jerked her chin towards the car parked outside the school gates.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘There’s your driver. He’s probably been waiting ages. You’d better go.’

  The timetable of after-school classes had Frances and Sally studying maths on Monday and Wednesday, science with Mrs McPhee on Tuesday and Thursday, and English literature with the Evil Pritchett on Friday. They also had to report to Mrs Iqbal the librarian every lunchtime, who was to supervise their prep. As the weeks of tuition progressed, a change came over Sally. She began to make sense of the periodic table; the difference between a volt and an ampere; a metaphor and a simile. She began to do some work, handing in the bare minimum at first, then tackling her assignments with genuine pleasure. The only drawback to this awakened love of learning was the stress of keeping it secret from Frances, who was determined to drag her heels. Frances turned up fifteen minutes late for every lesson, with lame excuses about stopped watches and jammed locker doors; she handed in her homework on torn jotter pages, illegible with ink smears and rubbings-out. She dropped an essay on The Taming of the Shrew on the classroom floor and watched with satisfaction as the pages were trampled by the procession of girls on their way to morning assembly. No amount of nagging would make Frances mend her sloppy ways. They could boss her about until they were blue in the face. Frances was adamant she wasn’t going to learn a thing.

  Towards the end of March, Sally went down with stomach flu. The nausea came on during a history lesson, when her forehead became speckled with mysteriously cool beads of sweat. The room swayed as she lifted her hand to ask permission to be excused, and Miss Ng’s voice was dim as an underwater echo. Sally crashed to her knees in the toilet cubicle, hugging the porcelain bowl as stomach contractions purged the enemy within. For a good forty-five minutes she knelt there, head thrust well into the toilet bowl, a lion-tamer tickling the tonsils of the beast. During the break a second-year pupil heard her puking and called the school nurse. Sally was sent home, where she spent the next seven days in the dark seclusion of her room, at the mercy of gastric flu.

  Her stomach roiled like an angry sea, rejecting Yok Ling’s chicken broth with tidal waves of nausea. She was so weak and jelly-limbed that Safiah, the giggling servant girl, had to help her to the bathroom. Every evening Mr Hargreaves popped his head round the door – How’s my petal? Feeling better today? Don’t worry, I won’t come in when you’re so fragile – then quickly retreated from his delirious daughter and her vomit-stained nightie. Frances telephoned twice, but Sally was too wiped out to take the calls. Sally’s immune system bid farewell to the last of the flu germs on Sunday night and on Monday she was well enough to return to school. Frances dashed up to her in class and seized her shoulders as if to check her friend was real.

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re better. I’ve missed you!’

  ‘I’ve missed you too,’ said Sally.

  ‘You’ve lost weight!’

  ‘No! Really?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, loads!’

  Sally decided the week of lying in bed feeling rancid as sour milk was worth the affection on her return. For the rest of the day she and Frances were thick as misfit thieves. There was a change in Frances. She’d let her defences down, stopped acting as if everyone was out to get her. Her aura was no longer spiky and negatively charged. When Sally asked what she’d missed in science, Frances got out her biology notes. The pages were dated and ordered, and the usual spidery madness of her handwriting was tamed, so as not to inflict a headache on the reader. Frances had even drawn diagrams of plants in cross-section, and coloured and labelled the reproductive parts.

  ‘Are these yours?’ Sally asked her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’ve done all the questions … And got some of the answers right.’

  ‘Hard not to when everyone’s breathing down my neck.’

  The last lesson was games and Frances and Sally were in the changing room as the bell went. Already showered and dressed, Frances combed her damp hair and Sally sat on the bench, shrouded in a towel, having successfully passed Miss Van der Cruisen’s post-shower inspection. While Delilah Jones and her clique paraded about the changing room in fragrant clouds of talcum powder, naked and shameless as Lady Godiva, Sally, who found showering after games an ordeal, had devised a showering routine around exposing the least amount of flesh to the least number of people. As Frances crouched to buckle her shoes, Sally sighed at her underwear hanging on the peg and the thought of wriggling into it under her towel.

  ‘Can you tell Mr Leung I’ll be late for maths?’ she said. ‘I’ve still got to get dressed.’

  ‘There’s no maths today. Mr Leung’s not here,’ said Frances.

  ‘But I saw him this morning coming out of the first form.’

  ‘Mrs Pritchett said to say it’s cancelled. We can go home early.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ve got to go and help Madame Tay with the chores.’

  Since when has Madame Tay made Frances do chores? wondered Sally.

  ‘OK, see you tomorrow, then.’

  Alone among the rows of empty pegs and benches and the odd forgotten sock, Sally finished dressing as Miss Van der Cruisen locked up (Last again, Hargreaves!). The bus stop opposite the school had no shelter and as Sally waited there the sun blazed through the cotton of her blouse and seared her scalp with a maddening itch. The other girls at the bus stop were playing leap-frog or spinning in dizzying circles, and Sally watched the mad dance of shadows as she faced the other way. Hurry up, bus, thought Sally, flinching as the girls shrieked like prehistoric birds of prey. As she licked a moustache of perspiration from her upper lip she noticed a thin dark shadow appear alongside her own, appearing so stealthily it seemed to seep up through the ground. The owner of the shadow spoke.

  ‘Hallo, Sal. How’s tricks?’

  Though they sat desks apart in class, it was the first time Delilah Jones had ever spoken to her. Overcome by shyness, her tongue faltered.

  ‘Um, OK.’

  ‘Bloody hot, isn’t it?’ said Delilah.

  ‘Yeah, it’s horrible.’

  ‘The bus is bound to be hotter, though. It’s always like an oven in there.’

  Delilah smiled a jaded smile. Her hair was swept back in a ponytail, and Sally thought there was something of a beautiful hawk about Delilah, with her steeply arched eyebrows and beakish nose.

  ‘Off home, are you?’ Delilah asked.

  ‘Um, yeah. I’m knackered.’

  ‘Me too. I’ve got a ton of prep to do for maths tomorrow, though. It’s going to take me ages.’

  Sally’s wonky smile of sympathy went unseen as one of the girls mucking about behind them banged into Delilah, who stumbled off the kerb into the road. When the girl saw who she’d knocked off balance she gushed apologies, bowing and scraping as she dusted off Delilah’s fallen satchel. The girl’s friends watched in uneasy silence.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Delilah, straightening up and taking back her bag. ‘You could have pushed me into the path of a car.’

  Delilah turned to Sally with a wry smile.

  ‘Don’t you usually have a maths class after school on a Wednesday?’ she asked.

  Sally nodded, surprised that Delilah knew of the affairs of a nonentity like herself.

  ‘Yes, but it’s cancelled. Mr Leung’s not here today.’

  ‘But I saw him and Frances go into the classroom about fifteen minutes ago,’ said Delilah. ‘You’d better hurry. You don’t want to miss your lesson.’

  Sally could see no point in going to a class that had started fifteen minutes ago, but somehow felt as though Delilah had issued her with a command. She thanked her and went back through the gates.

  Sally saw them first through the glass
partition in the classroom door. Frances was sitting in her chair, and instead of pacing about on the teaching platform, frantically scribbling sums on the board as though he’d half an hour to save the world with algebraic formulae, Mr Leung was perched on the edge of the desk next to her. Twenty minutes of the allotted lesson time had passed, but Frances had none of her books out. Mr Leung was talking animatedly, and Frances was very still, as though hypnotized by the wild choreography of his hands. Mr Leung’s voice sounded different, and as Sally pushed open the door she realized he was speaking Cantonese. Mr Leung quickly stood up. He raked his fingers through his sparse crest of hair, his spectacle lenses magnifying his surprise.

  ‘Sally,’ he said, ‘I thought you’d gone home. Is your stomach ache better now?’

  Sally looked from Frances to Mr Leung, from Mr Leung to Frances. Now I understand, she thought bitterly. Frances’s gaze said many things at once – What are you doing here? Go away! I’m sorry – but above all it pleaded complicity. Frances looked sheepish. Frances never looked sheepish – not even after her father had caught her stealing from the Kuan Ti shrine. It doesn’t suit her, Sally thought.

  ‘Come and take a seat,’ said Mr Leung. ‘We got so side-tracked by our discussion that we haven’t even started yet …’

  ‘Actually,’ Sally said, ‘I’m feeling sick again. I think I shall go before I throw up.’

  The hallway was blurred with anger as she marched away from the classroom. Out on the veranda she paused, waiting for the patter of footsteps as Frances chased after her to offer an apology, an explanation. But none came.

  III

  14

  AT TEN PAST eight on Monday evening I left my flat and, chaperoned by stale smoke and the fumes of the unwashed, descended fourteen storeys in the lift. The ground-floor exit doors were smashed, shattered glass cobwebs clinging to the security mesh, and as I pushed through the doors into the night the wind rushed smack-bang against me. I clinched my belt tighter as that frigid mistress slid her icy fingers beneath my coat and chilled my ankles and slippered feet (where a pair of socks wouldn’t have gone amiss). I’d much rather have been indoors with a mug of Ovaltine, toasting my toes by the gas fire. But enough was enough and I had to tell her so.

  The estate was dreary, the tower blocks sequestered by gloom. A gang of Afro-Caribbean lads were gathered under a street lamp, nodding to a couple of boys migrating towards them with larger-than-life limps (what a strange trend it is, this hobbling gait, as if pretending damage from childhood polio). I hurried on, slipper-slapping the paving slabs as I stared into the faces of passers-by, regretting my lifetime’s carrot abstinence as I squinted to see if they were Julia.

  On past the Mountbatten tower, ear lobes bitten by cold. On past the Linton low-rises and the estate mural, a twenty-foot menagerie of many-coloured faces – cocoa brown, lemon yellow and candyfloss pink – smiling widely in multiracial harmony and community esprit de corps (a mural that may as well have been of unicorns and fairies for all the truth it contained). As I took a short cut through the car park of Dr Chopra’s surgery the hairs on the back of my neck stiffened with a prickling discharge of ions. They seemed to stiffen apropos of nothing, but a backward glance confirmed my follicles justified in their behaviour. A man was crouched in the surgery garden, incompetently hiding behind a dead shrub. My heart went shuddery with the memory of my last mugging (on my seventieth birthday, it was, the perpetrators schoolboys, beginner thugs, as eager to get the rite of passage over with as virgins in a whorehouse). Jittery with remembered pain, I quickened my step, but after a second glance at my stalker fear gave way to irritation. Teenage thugs would have been preferable.

  ‘I can see you,’ I muttered in Cantonese. ‘You’re fooling no one behind those bushes. Go away. I don’t have time to talk to you. I am looking for my granddaughter.’

  ‘Ha! So now you know how it feels to have loved ones cruelly snatched from you by Imperialist Oppressors,’ said Comrade Kok Sang of the Malayan Races Liberation Army. Kitted out in red-star beret and olive-green uniform, he leapt from the shadows and sped a few paces closer to me. Heaven knows why he bothered hiding. Perhaps after so many years of sneaking about in guerrilla warfare, stealthiness is second nature. He had a home-made rifle strapped on and the pouches of his terrorist belt were stuffed with ammunition. The poor chap was lousy with jungle sores, but, apart from the weeping lesions, Comrade Kok Sang was in pretty good shape for a bandit. As the cold wind blustered, he shimmered with the heat of equatorial climes.

  ‘There are no Imperialist Oppressors on the Mountbatten estate,’ I said. ‘Nor are there any left in Malaysia.’

  ‘What do you call yourself, then?’ Kok Sang shouted. ‘The people’s friend? Timmy Lo was your friend, wasn’t he? And look what happened to him!’

  I stopped by the estate playground, a demolition site any responsible parent would forbid their child from entering. The swings were broken, chains wound round the frame so the seats were out of reach, and the slide was mangled as if by the jaws of a metal-crushing machine. On the Mountbatten estate the lure of destruction is strong and nothing stays unmolested for long. I circled the knee-high wall, scurrilous with graffiti, and Comrade Kok Sang cleared it in one guerrilla-style leap to land abreast of me.

  ‘You think you are our friend because you speak our language?’ he yelled. ‘That you are one of us because you fornicate with our women? Ha! You speak Chinese like an idiot gargling mud. And our women joke about your clumsy Running Dog technique and laugh at your inferior penis. You will never be anything other than our enemy …’

  I ignored the rest of what he said, not wanting to lend my ears to such nonsense. On the playground roundabout a group of teenagers slouched. As the carousel of thugs revolved I counted six of them, all shaven-headed, their faces so darkly smudged with shadow I couldn’t tell their ethnicity. One of the boys had his arm around a pale wisp of girl huddled against his jacket. Surely not Julia? Faint-heartedness hindered closer investigation.

  I listened carefully to the teenagers’ banter. What aggressive voices they had, snarling at one another as though in a vicious quarrel. They spoke in a hybrid of London slang and West Indian patois I couldn’t make head or tail of. The girl said nothing.

  Tentatively, I called: ‘Julia … is that you?’

  The boys on the roundabout looked over at me. Laughter ensued. Julia … they croaked, Julia … is that you? I wasn’t surprised. It’s the sort of thing one expects from the guttersnipe mouths of Mountbatten. The girl snuggled deeper into her boyfriend’s jacket and said nothing to confirm or deny whether she was Julia. I refused to let the gang intimidate me.

  ‘If you see Julia Broughton,’ I said, ‘tell her her grandfather is looking for her.’

  ‘Yeah, we know dat bitch Jules, we’ll tell her …’ a boy lisped back.

  I left the park. To my irritation Comrade Kok Sang hadn’t gone away. He’d been listening to my exchange with the teenagers with keen interest.

  ‘See! See!’ he cried. ‘The people won’t listen to you! Why should they? Through violence and oppression you stole our land. We are fighting to return Malaya to the people.’

  ‘Malaya was returned to the people a long time ago.’ I sighed.

  Why was I squandering my breath arguing with him? Like all those who died during the Emergency, Comrade Kok Sang is stubbornly resistant to any posthumous historical event. As far as he is concerned Independence never happened. As far as he is concerned the only hope for Malaya is the ascendance of Communism.

  As I continued to search for Julia he bombarded me with insults – Foreign Devil this and Imperialist Oppressor that – taunting me all the way back to my flat. And I knew then that Comrade Kok Sang wouldn’t be gone until his accusations had worn me out, spinning dark Saturnian rings round my eyes, as I suffered late into the night.

  After the kidnapping of Timmy Lo, his wife Mabel sank into a deeply catatonic state, broken by outbursts of wild gibberish about locusts and the
moon. Mrs Lo’s mental deterioration came as a blow to the police, for Mabel had witnessed the bandits in the act of mutilating her husband, and somewhere in her fractured mind was the key to their identity. Mrs Lo was taken to convalesce at the Jalang town hospice, tended to by Spanish nuns in the hope that she would recover her senses. In the meantime the police began an investigation, interviewing villagers who lived near to the unfortunate Timmy Lo.

  As the abduction was a consequence of the bravery Timmy had shown at the village meeting, sick with the guilt of partial responsibility I attended every interview. Inspector Lam of the Special Branch came from Jalang town to head the investigation. The inspector, a Chinese urbanite and middle-aged bachelor, was less than congenial as he went from hut to hut, puckering his nose at the boiled-cabbage smells and the squelch of animal muck underfoot, and frowning at the gurgling toddlers as though they were germ-ridden vermin. Not that Inspector Lam’s disgust made any difference to the villagers’ attitude to the authorities. Even if he’d handed out lollipops and let the snotty-nosed little ’uns clamber up into his lap, the villagers would have remained steadfast in their refusal to talk. They played dumb with a vengeance. The inspector may have worn silver cuff-links and slicked his hair with Yardley lavender oil, but it wasn’t enough to earn the villagers’ cooperation. Inspector Lam went into the interrogations hard and fast, but came out limp and frustrated.

  ‘Did you hear anything the other night?’ he asked Ah Fang, neighbour of the abducted Timmy Lo.

  ‘What night?’

  ‘The night Timmy Lo went missing.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Timmy Lo. The man who lived in the hut next door to you for the last nine months.’

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘You thick-as-pig-shit imbecile! Everyone knows he was your best friend. Tell me what you heard! Did you hear any bandits sneaking into the village?’

  ‘What village?’

  ‘This village! This village! The Village of Everlasting Peace!’