The Orientalist and the Ghost

by Susan Barker

  ‘Yes, I led Assistant Resettlement Officer Milnar into the jungle,’ she said, ‘but I had not meant him to be harmed. The bandit he shot was a boy I had grown up next door to in Kajang, and I chased after him to make sure he was OK. I brought Mr Milnar with me so he could help. The trail we followed is used by Communists, but it is also well known to local squatters. I did not know the boy was going to attack Mr Milnar. When Mr Milnar collapsed and the boy began kicking him, I tried to stop him, to pull him off, but then he turned on me. He put the knife to my throat and forced me to go back to the camp with him. I was afraid for Mr Milnar, but I was also frightened for my life and the life of my unborn child.’

  Evangeline went on to say she had stayed, very reluctantly, at the Communist camp, because she knew she would be arrested if she returned to the village, and she did not want to give birth to her baby in a detention camp. She then went to live in Batu Pahat, to work as a housekeeper for a Communist official. Not because she was a Communist, she said, but because he provided a home for her and her child, and she was tired of living in the jungle. The lawyer for the defence was ashen. It was not the defence they’d agreed upon, the script they had rehearsed.

  The next morning the two assessors delivered the guilty verdict and Mr Justice Morrison sentenced Evangeline to death by hanging. Evangeline staggered, then let out a scream. A scream that, The Strait Times reporter claimed, conveyed her anguish to each and every one of us. Evangeline keeled over and the prison wardens caught her arms to prevent her from sinking to the floor. As they frogmarched her to the door, Evangeline turned to the public gallery and called her sister’s name. Grace shouted back at Evangeline, actual coherent words – Wait for me! Wait for me! – and lunged at the balcony rail, heedless of the twelve-foot drop. The missionaries grabbed her arms, so for a moment the sisters mirrored each other, straining against the human shackles that held them back. The prison wardens had little patience with this and dragged Evangeline to the door. They passed the bench where I was standing and Evangeline met my eyes for the first time in over a year. And in that instant I knew she hated me and would hate me to the grave.

  I agreed to take the child out of guilt. Saving the daughter from the orphanage to make some reparation for the nails hammered in her mother’s coffin. Charles laughed his head off when he heard. I was a dunce, a dolt, a dunderhead. The baby was no more mine than Chairman Mao’s. Not that I let his opinion bother me. By then I’d already written my letter of resignation.

  The baby was being looked after by an Anglo-Indian woman, the wife of a Scottish policeman who lived on the outskirts of Jalang. The woman, whose name was Betty, wore a sari as bright as a parakeet and had a smudge of red on her forehead. She fetched my daughter as I waited in the parlour of her house.

  The baby knocked the breath out of me. Betty gently lowered the carrycot to the floor, and the little girl, naked save for a cotton nappy, waggled her feet and threw some punches in the humid air. The baby smiled – not at me, but at the world at large, reaching out her arms, impossibly tiny fingers clutching and pulling at the invisible threads tangible only to the recently born. I smiled awkwardly at my daughter. She made me nervous. She was so fragile. I was bound to snap those little finger joints as carelessly as I’d snapped my reading glasses the week before. (Look, perhaps I ought to come back for her in a couple of years, when she is a bit bigger, I wanted to say.) Betty beamed encouragingly. The baby had a button nose and brown eyes lidded with Evangeline’s epicanthic folds. Her skin was pink-toned like mine, but what settled for me any doubts about paternity were the blonde tufts on her crown (tufts that would darken to black before her second birthday). I peered closer, breathing the milky talcum-powder fragrance of her skin. The sight of my hulking great face must have been disagreeable to my daughter. She whimpered, causing me to fear that she’d sensed my inadequacy as a father. Betty lifted her out of the cot, gold bangles jingling and jangling as she jiggled the baby and cooed.

  ‘Oh, you poor silly thing!’ sang Betty, ‘You poor silly thing! Do you want to say hello to your handsome father?’

  Smiling, Betty held the child towards me. My hands flew up as if to fend off a blow.

  ‘Not right now, thank you. I shall, uh … hold her later …’

  Later, much later, alone together in a Kuala Lumpur hotel room, I would cradle my daughter in my arms for the first time. And my daughter would howl like a human air-raid siren. Later she would vomit out her formula milk and I would bathe her in the sink, hand supporting her weightless skull, terrified of drowning her. Later I would spend a good quarter of an hour grappling with a safety pin, trying to put her in a nappy. Later, in the bleary-eyed hour before dawn, I would stare at her demoniac screaming mouth in awe. Surely this wasn’t normal infant behaviour. What had I done to make the child hate me so? But that was later.

  ‘You do know how to care for a baby, don’t you?’ asked Betty. ‘How often to feed it, how to change a nappy …?’

  ‘I expect I shall muddle through.’

  I realized I did not know her name. I asked Betty what she was called.

  ‘Heavenly Orchid.’

  I sighed. I’d thought Evangeline had more sense than that.

  ‘It’s quite popular for Chinese girls,’ Betty assured me.

  ‘But it’s hardly suitable for a doctor or a lawyer now, is it? We must think of a proper name for her. What names do you like?’

  ‘When it comes to English names I have always liked Frances,’ said Betty. ‘I knew a woman in Penang called Frances who died of typhoid during the war …’

  ‘Frances …’ I said. ‘Yes, I like it very much. I think that is what I shall call her. Thank you.’

  Betty was reluctant to let me go, delaying my departure with advice on feeding times, milk temperature and bum rash. She gave me a knapsack stuffed with nappies and lotions which I strapped on my back. I lifted the cot and Frances waved her arms and legs. As I gave Betty a firm farewell handshake in the yard, two macaques climbed down from the mango trees and stood a short distance behind her.

  ‘Good luck.’ Betty smiled. ‘Good luck.’

  I set off down the hot and dusty road, my daughter, my acquaintance of twenty minutes, swinging in her carrycot by my side. Before the bend in the road I glanced back and Betty was still there in her bright coloured sari, the macaques standing behind her with their tails pointing stiffly in the air. She smiled and waved, and with my free hand I saluted her, before we turned and left for good.

  I peel a carrot with the paring knife, spilling shavings on the chopping board as I dig in the blade. Boiled cabbage, carrots and fried liver is our supper tonight – a supper Julia may or may not come home to eat. Dusk is gathering beyond the window, a landscape of grey. Adam sleeps in the bedroom, has been hibernating under the duvet for thirty days now. They are getting worse and worse, those children. Disintegrating in their separate ways, though I suspect the origins of decay are the same.

  There is a shiver of antagonism in the kitchen, an atmospheric pins and needles. Who has come now? I turn and see and the clocks of Mountbatten strike hard upon my Judas heart. My beloved stands by the table, her frock too thin for the December chill, her furious beauty unmarred by a scowl. The paring knife is frozen in my hand, a carrot shaving caught in the blade. Evangeline stares, her eyes unblinking. And my cheeks flush and my heart flutters as if I have been caught stealing or telling a lie.

  She absentmindedly thumbs the corner of a French textbook, the pages sticky with Ribena spilt by her homework-loathing granddaughter. Who are you? I ask my elusive love. I thought I knew her once, when we met high above the sleeping village, lakes of shadow merging on the rough-hewn walls. But now I don’t know. The silence teems with decades of uncertainty.

  Evangeline’s chest heaves as if she has run a great distance. On the day she died, I wheeled Frances in her pram to the Lake Gardens’ butterfly sanctuary. Frances giggled when the butterflies landed on her, delicate wings opening and shutting, feelers twit
ching, proboscises dipping the nectar of her infant skin. I kept the truth from her for years and years.

  Does Evangeline blame me for what happened to Frances too? So long as I am entombed in flesh I’ll never know. Evangeline flees interrogation, vanishes in the blink of an eye. Only once my heart has ticked to the end of its allocated ticks will I be able to fly off in pursuit of her.

  When that day comes I’ll resist the urge for quarrel and recrimination. Who betrayed whom, and who left whom to die. None of that matters any more. We’ll exist again in our moments of happiness, perfect as snowflakes before they melt.

  The front door slams and Evangeline’s eyes soften in the fading December light. And as the tiles swell beneath us, I savour our precarious truce. It is the closest thing to reconciliation we will have for a long time.

  IV

  20

  ADAM WAS IN the kitchen when the door buzzer went. A pan of spaghetti was boiling on the hob, and the tumble-drier rumbled with gentle thunder, tossing sheets. The radio was tuned into a long-wave French station, the panel debate accompanied by a snake-hiss of static, a high-pitched whine. Adam doesn’t know French. The foreign syllables moved up and down the scale like musical notes; masculine basso, feminine chimes, cymbal clashes of conflict soothed by the mellifluous host. On the way to the intercom he clicked off the radio, silencing his eloquent Gallic guests.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Adam, it’s me, Jules. Can I come in?’

  Adam hadn’t heard his sister’s voice through the intercom before. Disorientated, he said, ‘Jules. You all right?’

  ‘Yeah, fine.’

  ‘Come up.’

  Adam buzzed her in. How did she know his address? Adam had scribbled it down for her soon after his tenancy began, but that had been years ago. He was surprised she’d hung on to it so long, that it hadn’t been lost in the tides of junk that besieged her flat. Why had she come? Money, of course. Irritated, he steeled himself. But when he opened the door, he was so happy to see her his vigilance disappeared. Julia gave him a lopsided smile and walked into his arms. Released from the hug, she conscientiously stamped her shoes on the doormat, peering over Adam’s shoulder and into his flat. The flat was practically a studio, separated from the tiny bathroom and kitchen by folding accordion doors. Everything was clean and functional; the stripped wood floor recently mopped, cushions plumped, and the sofa throw smoothed of wrinkles. The computer desk and bookshelves were dusted, CDs stored in a rack. The dark windows were opaque with condensation coalescing into drips that glided to the sill.

  ‘You like it nice and warm, don’t you?’ Julia said.

  ‘It’s the tumble-drier,’ said Adam, ‘and I’m cooking pasta.’

  Julia sat on the sofa. The naked 100-watt ceiling bulb exposed what the decaying shadows of her flat had concealed: the yellow sclera of her eyes and the bloody-edged scabs that scavenging fingers never let alone to heal. Too much scalp showed in the parting of her hair and as she tucked some limp strands behind her ear Adam saw the cigarette burns bejewelling her knuckles. She was so thin she was painful to look at. A skimpy vest was all she had on under her denim jacket, her skin tinged blue like skimmed milk, ice crystals thawing in the blood.

  Adam offered her a cup of tea, a bowl of pasta (a memory flashed of his sister crying and bolognese smeared, smacked by Frances for playing with her food). But Julia, her appetite blunted for years, wanted only water. Adam went to the kitchen and turned off the gas ring under the boiling pan. He held a glass under the shrieking tap.

  ‘Where d’you sleep?’ Julia called.

  ‘That sofa folds out into a bed …’

  ‘Comfy?’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘You live alone?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No one special in your life, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thanks …’

  Julia took the water, throat undulating as she gulped it down. Adam wheeled the swivel chair out from under the computer desk and sat opposite. Julia was on her best behaviour; back straight and gaze clear and direct, as if Adam were interviewing her for a job. It was false and out of character and Adam preferred the stoned, apathetic mood of her flat. The rims of her sticky-out ears were wind-chapped and raw (ears that, as a paranoid teenager, she’d taped back every night for a year). She hadn’t had a fix in a while – she had that lustre about her. The tiny jerks and tics of a speeding metabolism, aching to be suppressed.

  ‘How d’you know where I live, Julia?’

  ‘You wrote it down for me. Remember?’

  Julia passed him an old bus ticket and Adam recognized his scrawl on the back. She reached sideways across the sofa to place her empty glass on the bookcase. There were two framed photographs on the shelf: one of Julia, aged eight, astride a BMX, a pink-gummed gap in her grin where her eye-teeth had been; and the other of Frances, smiling as she cradled baby Adam, arms bare in her summer dress, dimple-cheeked and youthful under her thick bouncy fringe. Adam had found the photos in one of their grandfather’s shoeboxes after he’d died, but only put them out the week before. Julia glanced at the pictures briefly, disinterested, as if they were of strangers, someone else’s family.

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  Adam shook his head and passed her an ashtray. Ancient shreds of tissue, dilapidated as cobwebs, spilt from Julia’s pocket as she fumbled for her Benson and Hedges. The match flared and the cigarette trembled as she sucked in the flame. Amputated forefinger clamped the filter to middle finger, and Adam stared at the smooth regenerated skin, the severed tip having been reduced to heat and bone-ash in a hospital incinerator over a decade ago. Julia tugged the stream of tar and phenols into her lungs, satiating one of her lesser, legal desires. Adam dislikes the claustrophobia of cigarette smoke and never smokes indoors himself.

  ‘Why’ve you come, Julia?’

  ‘I wanted to see you.’

  A lie. Julia would never travel across the city, hopping on and off buses and navigating unknown streets, for the sake of seeing him alone. He got the feeling that Rob was pacing three floors below, muttering and sneering at Adam’s neighbours as they scurried past him with carrier bags of Marks & Spencer’s ready meals.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Is Rob with you?’

  Julia looked offended. ‘Rob doesn’t know I’ve come here,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ever let him know where you live. Anyway, I’ve left him. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Left him?’ echoed Adam.

  Adam sensed her agitation, sparks flying from nerve endings, flaying her under the skin. She cared about her next fix, not breaking up with Rob. She was too dependent on Rob, and he on her. They were Siamese twins; respiring through the same pair of lungs, the same heart pumping blood around the same diseased body. But even if it were a lie, he couldn’t let her down. Julia had never expressed sentiments about changing her life before. He had to encourage it.

  ‘You can stay here,’ he said. ‘I’ll take some time off work and help you come off. I’ll take care of you.’

  ‘That’s not what I want, Adam.’

  ‘But where else can you go?’

  ‘There’s this crisis centre. They put you on a two-week detox programme, but they don’t have a bed free for another four nights. I’m going to stay in a hostel until then.’

  ‘But why not stay here? It’s safe and clean here. In a hostel you’ll have to sleep in a room with a load of strangers. They let anyone in.’

  ‘I have to do this my own way.’

  Adam was silent, thinking of how to persuade her.

  ‘The hostel is fourteen pounds a night.’

  ‘You can stay here for free.’

  ‘I’ll be using, Adam. I’ll be using till the programme starts.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  Julia coughed into her fist, chest revving like a car that won’t start. She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray.

&
nbsp; ‘Why now?’ Adam asked. ‘Why are you leaving him now?’

  ‘He wants me to go on the game.’

  She wielded the fact bluntly, with no emotion in her voice. Adam had tortured himself with the thought hundreds of times before, but was shocked to hear it said out loud. He realized that, as much as he had hated him, he’d trusted that Rob had some minimal decency. Trusted that he’d never bully Julia into selling herself to anyone who could scrape together a few quid. But it had happened. Julia had left him. But Adam still felt sick.

  ‘Julia,’ he said, ‘stay here. I don’t mind you using.’

  ‘I can’t. I don’t want to mess things up for you.’

  ‘Look at this place. There’s nothing in my life to mess up. Nothing that matters more than you.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Stay for just one night.’

  ‘I have to do this on my own.’

  ‘Promise me you won’t go back to Rob.’

  ‘I won’t, I promise. I don’t want to go near him.’

  It was her earnestness that made Adam doubt her. As a teenager Julia had lied every time she drew breath, without any tell-tale flickers of guilt. He knew that sincere, wide-eyed, clear-as-water gaze. He had two options. Refuse to give her money and risk not seeing her again; or give her money and have her come back. Adam went to the jacket hanging on the back of the front door and rummaged in the pocket. (She hasn’t left Rob – she made it up because she knows you hate him, and now she wants her cash reward.) He opened his wallet. There was roughly thirty quid in there. (She’s already on the game – has been for years. You’re pretending not to know because you can’t stomach the truth.) He scooped out the notes and coins and gave her the lot. (Rob is waiting outside for her. Go to the window. Look …)