The Orientalist and the Ghost
Read The Orientalist and the Ghost Online
Authors: Susan Barker
About the Book
Malaya 1951, a jungle resettlement camp: young colonial adventurer Christopher Milnar falls passionately in love with a Chinese nurse Evangeline – a fierce flame that ends in tragedy when their camp is attacked by Communist guerrillas and Christopher is violently beaten up.
London: half a century later the ghosts of that time return to haunt Christopher, triggering vivid memories of colonial misconduct and lost love. Forced to confront his past, Christopher agonises over the fate of his beloved Evangeline and the disappearance of their daughter, Frances.
Moving from present day London to the heart of the Malayan jungle in colonial times, THE ORIENTALIST AND THE GHOST is a stunning portrayal of human frailty and lost love.
Contents
I
1
I AM A
man who lives in the company of ghosts. They have me under constant surveillance. They watch me cook my bachelor suppers of processed peas and boil-in-the-bag cod. They watch me take out my dentures and drop them in the tumbler fizzing with Steradent. They watch me undo my fly and tinkle in the lavatory. Some ghosts I loathe and some I fear with horripilation and cardiac strife. Others I quite look forward to seeing. The silent ghosts are preferable to the noisy, garrulous ones.
Aren’t you a lonely old so-and-so?
said Marina Tolbin, the hawk-visaged missionary (who elected to remain sanctimoniously mute in life, but is strangely loquacious in death).
If only that were true
, I sighed,
but you lot never leave me alone
. Charles Dulwich, who drank the hemlock at the age of forty-six (romantically inspired, it seems, by the death of Socrates), crows of his eternal youth and my irreversible decline.
Where
have
all your teeth gone, old boy?
He chuckles.
Be careful now! That cup of tea might overstrain your bladder!
I can only sigh and say:
Do you think I can help this decrepitude? Not all of us have been blessed with an inclination for suicide, you know
.
Such merciless scrutiny! Worse still is when the ghosts relive the last anguished moments before dying (Why? Heaven knows! Perhaps to break up the monotony of being deceased). Nothing is more harrowing than watching Mrs Ho fall to her knees on my bedroom carpet, beating her chest in a masochistic frenzy (
Save my baby! Save my baby!
she screams as the flames devour her). Charles tends to lie quietly on my bed as the poison hastens his departure from the world. It is hardly the most riveting of performances, but if I ignore him he gets upset and goes about slamming cupboard doors and clattering my ironing board.
Sometimes I wonder how all the ghosts came here from Asia. Did they fly across together, soaring over continents and oceans like a diamond formation of migratory geese? Did they book flights on some airline of the paranormal? They complain about the factory greyness of the council estate, the many flights of stairs up to my flat, and of the syringe-strewn public urinal of a lift.
Oh, quit your moaning!
I tell them.
I never invited you here to invade my privacy!
Three weeks ago Adam and Julia came to stay. They are not ghosts, but grandchildren. When they came, flooding my flat with energy and juvenescence, I was not sure if they and the ghosts would see eye to eye.
I
thought the defiant youth of the children would frighten the ghosts away (or that the ghosts would frighten away the defiant youth – which would prove tricky to explain to social services). Fortunately neither child seems to have noticed all the phantoms flitting about. Not Julia with her shy, orthodontic smile and the handstands that flaunt her belly. Nor Adam, a teenager monstrous with acne, who locks himself away in the bathroom for hours on end to mourn his dead mother. However, in a flat as small as mine, it is impossible to keep hidden my dealings with the world of the dead. The children overhear me sometimes, talking in Cantonese or Hokkien or English as I converse with Ah Wing or Lieutenant Spencer. They have learnt not to interrupt, and quietly retreat to the bedroom they share. Julia saw me once, tearful in the kitchen as my beloved Evangeline threw crockery and flayed me with her tongue. Julia came and put her hand on my arm (for at twelve she has not yet learnt the selfish ways of a teenager). The poor child believed the tears were for her mother.
They are hard to decipher, these orphans. They are mysterious in their grief. Julia has hysterical fits of giggling, seemingly over nothing at all, and Adam is enamoured of the locked door and avocado-tiled interior of the bathroom. Sometimes they talk in a language I do not understand, like sparrows twittering in Latin. Adam wants me to buy a television and Julia trains to be an Olympic gymnast in the hallway. When they fight it seems as though they want to murder each
other
, though hours later I open their bedroom door to find the siblings in bed together, weeping in their underclothes (I fear there have been omissions in their upbringing; serious moral omissions). They both wrinkle their noses at the food I cook and they hate boil-in-the-bag cod. I cannot quite believe that they will stay here until they are old enough to leave. That seems like so many years from now …
And what of Frances, the daughter for whom I do not mourn?
Frances has yet to join the band of spirits that haunt my flat. But I know she is coming. Some nights I hear her, as spry flames leap in the hearth and her children sleep in the bedroom next door. I hear her as the residents in the block go up and down, up and down, troubling the lift cables into a rhapsody of creaking. I hear her over the wind, going berserk, like a mad dog let loose at the windowpane. I hear her over the howls of Lieutenant Spencer, his slimy intestines surging from his stomach in a re-enactment of the bayonet attack.
Frances Milnar, go away!
I whisper.
Leave me alone!
For heaven help me, the girl must be bent on revenge.
2
LET US GO
backwards. Quickly backwards. Let us reverse the decline of this ageing body. Let my liver spots fade, my follicles regenerate and my hairline unrecede. Let my skin tauten and tug my wrinkles out of sight. Let my teeth once more submerge themselves in my gums. Let the enamel calcify and fortify. Let my molar abscesses – the evil downfall of my dentition – heal and cast out decay. Let us reverse the crumbling of bones and correct my sinuosity of spine, so I stand tall and erect once more. Let my dying cells heal. Let my dormant member reawaken, and let Eros back in to torment me with libidinous throbs and urges. Let all that is grisly and slack revert to the aesthetics of wondrous youth. Oh, let there be youth! Let us keep going backwards; anticlockwise fifty years. I am a young man again. Do you see me? Gallant, broad and six feet tall. Fine sandy hair and handsome in the
conventional
, matinée-idol way. I am the one in the panama and linen suit, limp and undone in the Turkish-bath heat. The lone Caucasian, lost in the chaos of Kuala Lumpur airport. It is July 1951 and all around me Tamils, Chinese and Javanese are bustling; heaving weather-beaten suitcases and carrying parcels on heads; a sweltering hubbub of exotic noise. Malaya is three years into the Communist Emergency and seven long years from Independence. I am twenty-five – such abominable youth! – and an infatuated scholar of Chinese; an infatuation that led to the learning of three Chinese dialects before venturing beyond European soil. An infatuation that led me to the Crown Agencies for the Colonies, and to the Far East.
The airline had lost my trunk, and a Sumatran in a
songkok
and turquoise pyjamas informed me it had been left in Dubai. He scribbled down the telephone number to call, should I desire to reclaim it, and sent me on my way. All I had were the clothes on my back, my travel-bag (containing flannel, toothbrush and a well-thumbed copy of
The Handbook to the Emergency
) and a heinous throb in the Romanesque cartilage of my nose. The throb was ten days old and was acquired in Richmond-upon-Thames, when I broke off my engagement to the feisty Marion Forte-Cannon.
Oh, Christopher, you are a bore!
Marion had sighed, before launching her small fist into my face. I deserved it. Disgraceful of me to have kept up the whole engagement façade when I knew I was just waiting for the chance to escape. But what’s a chap to do? Fate had
more
excitement up its sleeve than a life of domesticity and high-tea at Forte-Cannon Hall.