The Orientalist and the Ghost

by Susan Barker

  ‘What happened to you, Grace? Who did this to you? Have you no pride?’

  Grace’s eyes clouded over, her face as pale and empty as the moon. I bristled at the inconvenience of having to escort her back to her hut. It never occurred to me that Grace might have been the victim of a sexual assault, or in need of medical attention. Attitudes to such things were different then. I doubt the police would’ve shown much sympathy anyway. Grace didn’t seem the least bit traumatized and was known for her promiscuity. Manacling her elbow, I steered Grace in the direction of her home – a good ten minutes’ walk away.

  As I tugged her along Grace stumbled with none of the virtue implied by her name. We hadn’t got very far when a figure came hurtling out of the darkness. My Evangeline, cloaked in moonshadow. Barefoot, frantic and wild-eyed in my torchlight. She panted, shuddering hard, but she didn’t pause to recover her breath. She flew at us, swinging her arm and striking Grace’s cheek with the whipcrack force of her open palm. Grace bucked like a horse startled by lightning, wrenching her elbow from my grip. She turned to flee but Evangeline lunged, grabbed a fistful of her dress and fell on her, pushing her younger sister to the ground. Evangeline pummelled Grace with bare-knuckle punches, the poor simple girl wailing and fending off the blows with flailing arms. Evangeline was a blur of violence, a creature of eight arms, her face hideous with rage. I was afraid she’d lost her mind. I girdled Evangeline from behind, pinning down her arms and hauling her off her sister. Unfortunately for Grace, Evangeline clutched a handful of her hair, dragging Grace along with us through the dirt. When I finally freed Grace’s tresses from Evangeline’s fist, the kicking, screaming momentum of aggression shifted on to me. She thrashed like a hell-cat in my arms, kicking my shins with her bare heels.

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’ I gasped as she battered my sternum with her elbow. ‘The guards will hear and you’ll be sent to a detention camp.’

  Evangeline stiffened at the mention of detention camp. Wary of a resurgence of violence, I kept hold of her, clamping her arms in my backwards embrace. The tenseness of her body dissolved into shaking, her breath coming in sharp sobs. The worst of the hysteria over, I twisted Evangeline to face me.

  ‘See those huts over there?’ I nodded to the hunched, misshapen row of shacks a stone’s throw away. ‘Everyone who lives in those huts is now awake. The commotion you made woke them.’

  The thin wail of an infant drifted through the dark. The windows were dark gaping mouths and the sensation of being watched was overwhelming, as if every pair of eyes delivered a tiny electric shock. Grace huddled in the earth, whimpering and rocking back and forth on her heels. Her knees were grazed and dirt-encrusted, her face a bloody swollen pumpkin. She cowered from her sister, touching the raw and tender spot on her scalp from which her hair had been torn. Evangeline trembled, not far off whimpering herself.

  ‘I am sick of this!’ she said. ‘I am sick of looking after her. I forget to lock the door just once …’

  I concede I had seen none sicker than Evangeline. Resentment poisoned her blood, and the violence had purged her of not one drop.

  ‘Well, what good will come of beating your sister to a pulp?’ I hissed. ‘For goodness’ sake pull yourself together. Now is not the time. Look!’

  Scything along the darkness of the trail were three circles of torchlight, swaying in the distance like luminous spectres. Fortunately, Evangeline’s breakdown was not so severe that she didn’t grasp the urgency of our situation. Over there, she said, pointing towards a ditch. Together we shoved and bundled the cowering Grace towards the chest-high trench. Evangeline and I lowered ourselves in and Grace fell in after us with a splash. The errant sisters and I crouched ankle-deep in the filthy water, the surface a flotilla of mosquito larvae, effluent scum and other vile flotsam. The stench made me gag, and I held my nose so the odour was less pervasive. Grace grizzled softly and Evangeline silenced her, clamping a hand over her mouth and muttering fiercely in her ear.

  The guards had seen us jump down into the ditch. I knew it in my bones. My eardrums were taut with listening for footsteps, waiting for the swoop of torch beams upon us as we squatted like dirty animals in our hiding place. Paranoia taunted me with illusory sounds: whispers of Mistah Ingerris and the tittering of guards sneaking up to the ditch. However, when the night patrol did eventually pass us by (much louder than the phantom footsteps of my imagination) the tenterhooks withdrew from my heart. They were a procession of men dead on their feet; somnambulists, their numb muteness only broken by the odd wheeze, a tarry cough. When they were far enough away I climbed out of the cesspit, shoes squelching, the foul wetness clinging to my trouser turn-ups. I then lent a hand to Evangeline and Grace and helped them out too.

  I saw the Lim sisters back to their hut in a furious silence. How had they managed to embroil me in such a shambolic episode? I didn’t utter a word to Evangeline, whom I blamed entirely for everything, and Evangeline knew better than to speak to me. The mooncalf Grace smiled as she followed us, the throb of bruises all she retained of the night’s misadventures. I said a few terse words in parting at their door – Make sure this never happens again – before turning my back. It was remarkably cold of me, but I wanted my displeasure to be known and was determined to wash my hands of the pair thereafter.

  That night I slept fitfully, in a turmoil of dreams. I dreamt the guards of The Village of Everlasting Peace filed into my hut, a dozen or so men, with gouged hollows where their eyes ought to have been. They gathered around my camp-bed, where I lay terror-drenched and paralysed, their empty sockets glaring at me.

  I dreamt I was up in the watchtower and a gigantic moth flew in; a lepidopterous beast with the wing-span of a serpent eagle. The moth flew in wild circles, then crashed into the kerosene lamp so it smashed to the floor and set it on fire. The moth dive-bombed me and I remember the shiny armour of its thorax and the blue iridescent beads of its eyes, bulging large as apples. I drove it off with a calligraphy scroll, beating at its wings so the scales disintegrated into mottled-grey powder, which, falling, invigorated the kerosene flames like some flammable dust.

  I dreamt I lay in the darkness, breathing in the hot viscous air, when a whorish naked Grace lifted my mosquito net and climbed on to my mattress. Grace straddled me, sheathing me, sliding her tight slippery warmth up and down on my Judas erection. I lay back in horror and arousal as Grace writhed, moaning in the throes of lust. She molested me with damp stumpy hands, groping my chest and leaning close so I could smell the sour-milk smell of her succulent flesh. She bit my cheek, pressed her parted lips to mine and probed me with her muscular tongue. I could not fight her off. Invisible forces pinned me down as Grace the succubus, the harlot-rapist, leant back, moaned and fondled her small breasts, clenching and quickening her rhythm, manipulating me towards an orgasm filled with incestuous sickness.

  I dreamt that a stranger came and slid a sheaf of papers under my door.

  I woke to a hot bright morning. Flies attracted by the lingering stench of ditch buzzed merrily about my feet. A trip to the bathing hut was in order. As I yawned and stretched and collected my towel I saw, with a strange sense of déjà vu, an envelope bearing my name on the floor. I dropped my towel and pounced upon the letter. And it wasn’t until I was tearing open the seal that I realized how many questions I had and how badly I wanted answers.

  16

  CHARLES DULWICH APPEARED by the fireplace in his seersucker suit, Little Lord Fauntleroy curls poking out like the springs of a disembowelled clock, a dangerously smug smile on his face.

  ‘Guess who I’ve just seen!’

  The gas fire was off to save money and I sat in the armchair under a pile of blankets, my breath a pale cirrus mist. Charles, the lucky bugger, was immune to the bitter chill. Whereas I’d lost sensation in my toes, Charles was sweating like a pig on a spit. He plucked a hanky from his pocket and delicately patted his forehead. A drop slid down the slope of his nose to the tip, where it hung with a menacing quiver be
fore plummeting to the carpet.

  ‘Aren’t you going to guess?’ he asked.

  I had better things to do than play Charles’s silly guessing game. For the past five minutes I’d been trying to drink my toddy of hot milk and whisky. My hand trembled as I gripped the mug, the amplitude of shaking increasing the higher the mug was lifted, until boiled milk slopped over the rim and scalded my knuckles. At this point the mission had to be abandoned and the mug lowered to the safety of the trestle table.

  ‘Spoilsport,’ Charles accused.

  The children were asleep in the bedroom and I was loath to wake them by quarrelling with Charles. Julia has been so naughty of late that every night she sleeps peacefully under my roof is a blessing.

  ‘I haven’t the foggiest. Who d’you see?’

  ‘Guess. It won’t be any fun if I just tell you!’

  I was dubious that there was any fun in it for me at all, but I said: ‘Police Lieutenant Percival Spencer.’

  ‘Ha, ha! Old Periwinkle! I haven’t seen the Boy Wonder and his amazing flying intestines for half an eternity.’

  ‘He was here looking for you the other day …’

  ‘Have another guess!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Charles …’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Kip Phillips from the Bishop’s Head plantation …’

  ‘Ha, ha! Wrrrong! Guess again.’

  ‘Give me a hint. Was he Chinese, an Englishman or Malay?’

  ‘The person, who is of the non-male gender, is of Chinese blood.’

  My heart gave a nasty lurch. ‘Evangeline?’

  A vampire feeding on the anxiety of others, Charles smiled, then sank his fangs in deeper. ‘Haha, you wish! I haven’t seen that knackered old donkey and her mad trollop of a sister since heaven knows when.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you would kindly refrain from speaking of her like that.’

  ‘Oh, c’mon, Christopher, she was hardly a paragon of feminine virtue. You do know about the slutty Lim sisters and the Japanese, don’t you?’

  Blankets tumbled to the floor and my dressing gown came agape as I stood up and pointed to the door.

  ‘Shut up! Get out!’

  Charles was not remotely cowed. ‘Calm down or you’ll wake the snivelling brats next door,’ he said. ‘Seeing as you’re so hopeless at guessing, I will describe her. She is as tall as your armpit and seventeen years of age. She has raven silk hair and almond-shaped eyes; hazel and gold-flecked in sunshine, deepest brown in the shade. Tawny-limbed and no breasts to speak of. Her school uniform a grey pleated skirt and cap-sleeved blouse … Have you guessed who she is yet? Here’s another clue: she was smoking one of your cigars. Yes! The disobedient child was blowing smoke rings out of her bedroom window and across Sultan Road for everyone to see. Really, Christopher. Just because she was born out of wedlock doesn’t mean you ought not to teach her some manners.’

  I was winded, my solar plexus punched by an invisible fist. Weak-kneed, I sank down on to the armchair again.

  ‘Frances.’

  ‘Yes. Well done. Got there eventually.’

  ‘But how did you recognize her? You’ve never seen Frances before. You died when she was a baby. Your lives scarcely overlapped.’

  I often forget that common-sense logic is irrelevant in the topsy-turvy realm of the dead.

  ‘Of course I recognized her,’ Charles said impatiently. ‘She has her mother’s scheming slitty eyes.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘I spoke to her first. I said: “Your father won’t approve of you smoking, young lady.” ’

  ‘And she said?’

  ‘She was foul-spoken as a drunken sailor on shore leave. She told me to fuck off and mind my own business, because her father was dead!’

  ‘No,’ I protested limply.

  ‘Yes!’ Charles was saucer-eyed in faux-astonishment. ‘Seventeen years old and swearing like a trooper! What kind of school have you sent her to, Christopher? A finishing school for scrubbers and fishwives? You should demand your fees refunded. I said to her: “You cheeky cow! Your father is not dead, but living a life of impoverished misery on a council estate in east London with your bastard son and feral slut daughter …” “He’s not my father!” quoth she, a patricidal rage in her eyes. “He is a liar, a murderer and a Foreign Devil!” Then she stubbed her cigar out on the wall and left the room.’

  Oh, those terrible teens! Frances was a delightful child, who liked nothing better than to sit on Daddy’s lap and listen to Orang Asli folk tales, but as soon as she hit puberty she became a stranger. I remember the brooding silences that stretched for weeks on end, her secret world of Chinese whispers with Madame Tay. Her cold shoulder, her eyes a perpetual roll of contempt. Sometimes I’d forget, reach out and pat her head as our paths crossed in the hall. Only to be reminded of the status quo by a shudder of repulsion that tore my heart in two. My child rejected me and my pitiful stabs at affection. Avoiding her lessened the pain, so I kept to my study. I kept myself aloof.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ said Charles, ‘whatever did you do to make your daughter hate you so?’

  And leaving that knife twist of a question lingering in the air, Resettlement Officer Dulwich vanished from the fireplace in a clichéd puff of smoke.

  Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to reverse the chronology of blunders. But time moves stubbornly forwards, distancing me from my crimes, yet bringing them closer, to greater prominence in my mind. My darling Frances. If only I could atone for what I have done. But you never gave me the chance.

  I stowed the letter in my trouser pocket, reading it in spare moments throughout the day, sneaking it out like an alcoholic with a secret hip flask. I pored over the letter while supervising a bare-chested volunteer team, machetes hacking at undergrowth that had sprung up overnight (as if the Communists had scattered magic beans by the fence). I shuffled the pages in the bungalow while Charles had his afternoon siesta, snoring like a wildebeest in his rattan chair. By dusk the letter was worn from handling – from my habit of furrowing the pages between finger and thumb, so they puckered with crow’s feet and furled at the edges (and now, after many decades, the document is soft as suede, the ink faded, and each page in quarters, detached along the folds).

  That evening the letter accompanied me to the watch tower – garret of light adrift in the sea of night – to be read in the paraffin-lamp haze, my shirt clinging like damp papier mâché to my back. Over the years I have memorized every sentence, and do not have to retrieve the letter from its shoebox in the hallway cupboard to see the script that blossomed from the fountain pen. Every word echoes in the authorial voice, sombre with the dark annals of history. The years have not lessened its impact.

  Christopher,

  My sincere condolences over the failure of the village meeting. I want you to know the meeting was destined to fail. Earlier that day bandits waylaid the tappers at the Bishop’s Head plantation as they carried their pails of latex to be weighed at noon. The People Inside ushered them to a clearing and warned them of the consequences should anyone cooperate with the plans for the village council, slitting the throat of a dog in demonstration of what they would do. Why Timmy Lo did not heed these warnings I do not know. But he is now dead.

  I write to you, Christopher, because it is barely six o’clock in the morning and already rumours of you and the Lim sisters are flying about the village. I write to you because I do not want to involve the police in this matter. Before I discuss last night’s imprudent actions, however, I want to address a conversation I overheard between you and Evangeline Lim in the police hut, on the night of 12 September. No doubt you are aware that I overheard you both. Perhaps you are wondering why I did not report you …

  Detective Pang made me feel like an ant scurrying about beneath a magnifying glass. When one considers this goose-pimply sensation of being under surveillance, what happened next that night seems downright absurd. However, the birth of love is often coupled with the d
emise of reason. And as I hover in the shadows, watching over my younger self, I can pinpoint the very beginning of the demise. It began with the creak of wood.

  The creak came from a ladder rung. The noise startled, but did not alarm me, as no bandit would be stupid enough to climb up to the watch tower, and I assumed it was a guard or policeman too lazy to announce himself. I peered through the open trapdoor at the shadowy figure ascending in the darkness. ‘Who is it?’ I called. ‘It’s me,’ came the reply, and I remember how my heart sank and lifted at the same time.

  Evangeline surfaced, levering her body through the trapdoor on arms so thin I feared they’d snap. She clambered on her knees, then to her feet. She gazed at me, self-consciously running her fingers through her cropped hair. I thought of my resolution to have nothing more to do with her. I thought of the letter and how incessantly she’d been on my mind since I’d read it. I knew then I had no hope of keeping my resolution, less than eighteen hours old. Evangeline was fated to enter my life, with or without my consent.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘Why not just turn yourself in to the village police and be done with it! And where is Grace? Run away again, I suppose.’

  ‘Grace is with the Jesus People tonight,’ said Evangeline.

  Evangeline’s trespassing into the watch tower evoked the memory of a long-forgotten childhood sweetheart, the stubborn, freckled and marmalade-pigtailed Myfannwy Price, who braved verbal abuse and the pelting of apple cores to climb up to my tree-house and declare her true love. The past was recurring, though in its repetition my heroine was decades older and dressed not in knee-high socks and gingham party frock, but a worn cotton smock ready for recycling as dishcloths. My eight-and-a-half-year-old Princess of Pembroke-shire had come back to me as an eccentric Queen of the Orient, the freckled beauty of yore reincarnated with craggy eyes and a thin and down-turned mouth. The paraffin lamp cast my beloved in an unflattering light, darkening the mauvish bruises under her eyes, deepening the time-furrowed wrinkles. But if I could go back I would change none of it. I would have Evangeline before me again in all her haggard glory. I would not have it any other way.