The Orientalist and the Ghost (12 page)

Hours later I was woken by a banging on my door.
Evangeline
– the four syllables rang out in my mind, preceding any other thought or awareness of time and place. The banging had a knock-on effect in my heart, which gave a succession of shuddery thuds as I tumbled out of bed and groped for my trousers, eyes casting about in the pitch-darkness of my hut.
Who’s there?
I called. I threw the door open on its creaking hinges and saw a girl – not Evangeline – with a shawl over her head, kneeling in the moonlight a few yards from my hut. The shawled girl was sobbing, and when the swinging door banged against the hut wall she glanced up, her face wrenched with grief and sodden with tears. Her eyes were red weeping lesions and her mouth a sobbing wound. In her lap was a bundle of rags.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded. ‘What do you want?’

The young woman didn’t answer, only wept more furiously. It must have been three in the morning and I was more irritated than concerned. I had no telephone and would have to escort the blubbery wreck down to the police hut. I went and crouched by her, touching her shoulder, hoping to reassure her and encourage her to speak.

‘Why did you knock on my door?’ I asked. ‘What are you doing here?’

Her tears were silvery in the moonlight, slithers of glittering brine. Snivelling, fingers trembling as if frostbitten, she fumbled open the cloth bundle in her lap. My head eclipsed the moonlight as I leant to get a better look, squinting to separate what she’d unwrapped from the shadows. What I saw was oddly familiar: thin and pale – like the chopped bones Winston Lau set aside to boil for porridge broth. The acid taste of nausea flooded my mouth as I made sense of what lay in the rags. I swallowed hard.

‘Whose fingers are they?’ I asked.

The slender digits were amputated before the knuckles, pale and blanched, the cloth maroon with blood.

The woman said, ‘My husband’s.’

One of the fingers rolled away from kith and kin, out of her lap and on to the ground. I did not pick it up. The woman wept with hysterical abandon, and I realized that I did not have to ask who her husband was.

II

7

ADAM TAKES THE
bus to see her in the afternoon. Her phone is cut off, so he never knows if she’ll be in. If no one answers the door he waits in the stairway outside her flat until it gets dark.

He knows the way from the gates of the Mountbatten estate with his eyes shut; every block of flats and concrete paving slab, the route mapped in his head. In a few weeks, though, most of the estate will be gone. The council have admitted defeat, admitted that the maze of social planning has failed, gone amok, and are moving in with bulldozers and wrecking balls and a blueprint for regeneration. As he walks to his sister’s, Adam gazes up at the tower blocks earmarked for demolition. He stares at the block where he lived for two years with his grandfather, behind a triple-bolted door on the fourteenth floor. He remembers the baby squall, the racket of other
low-income
lives vibrating through the walls.

Julia knows they are knocking down the estate. The council sent her a letter. She ripped it open and read it, slowly, through pinned pupils. Then she went to the window and opened the curtains for the first time that week, blinking at the landscape of stone. As a teenager she mucked about in the stairways of every high-rise, smoking fags, vandalizing the lifts with felt-tipped pens, daring her friends to bang on letterboxes and run away. The tower she lived in dominates the estate like a concrete tumour. She stared at the charred, burnt-out flat on the twelfth floor, the England flags hanging proudly from window ledges, and the lines of tattered baby clothes. She closed the curtains, murmuring that it was about fucking time. Then she lay on the sofa, on her side in her dressing gown, crossing her arms over her breastbone as if to pull an invisible blanket around her. She sank into the cushions, into the amniotic fluids; seven stone of skin and bones and a map of scarred, misshapen veins. She’s an empty husk of a girl; her body chambers of air, the bowels and stomach barren for days. An abandoned chrysalis, butterfly flown. Adam dreams of carrying her out of there – a recurring fantasy of his – to take her into the car park, into the back of a waiting car. He wants to drive her away from London, lock her in a room somewhere and watch over her as she burns and sweats. He dreams of her rapid recovery, the last beads of poison evaporating from her brow. He imagines her compliant, grateful, determined to help herself – smiling weakly as he
brings
orange juice to her bedside. Adam thinks it through and it seems so easy. But when he sees her it’s the hardest thing in the world. The council aren’t touching Julia’s block – it’s one of the few that they aren’t bringing down. Adam was gutted when he heard.

He stares up at the perpetually drawn curtains on the third floor. He stands there, hands burrowed in his pockets, as swings steered by children flinging their heels fly back and forth across the way. On the balcony passageway outside Julia’s flat a boy crouched in a shopping trolley is launched at the far wall by his friend. The impact of steel against bricks, the juvenile scream and jarring of bones makes Adam wince, but he says nothing as the dazed and injured boy climbs out and his laughing friend climbs in.

Adam knocks on Julia’s door. She answers in a bulky knitted cardigan and jeans. He shifts awkwardly on her doorstep. Every time he sees Julia he thinks she’s grown paler and lost more weight, that her eyes have sunk deeper in her head. In the first instant of reunion Adam sees what others see: the genderless anorexic, the leper queen; the shrink-wrapped skull daubed from a palette of ochre and grey. Then the image is gone and he sees her as Julia again.

‘Happy birthday,’ he says.

‘I thought it was tomorrow.’

‘No, today.’

Julia’s pale eyes flicker towards the carrier bag that Adam has brought.

‘Come in.’

The flat is smoky and smells to Adam of homelessness, though Julia and Rob have lived here for three years. While Julia is in the kitchen, boiling a saucepan of water for tea, Adam opens the curtains, shadows rising up from the carpet like a flock of birds. The carpet, with a pall of fag ends and ash, is studded with glittering ring pulls, and the stains are like dark continents on a map of a foreign planet. On the window ledge, next to an old shoelace tourniquet, a clock ticks loudly, the second hand quivering, powerless to advance. Adam shuts the curtains again, preferring things in the poverty of light.

Julia returns and presents Adam with a chipped mug of tea. They sit opposite each other on the two sagging sofas.

‘Twenty-fucking-two,’ she says, sighing.

‘That’s not old.’

‘Oh, c’mon, I can hear the shovel hitting the soil.’

Sometimes when Adam visits she is agitated, smoking irritably, listening out for a knock on the door. She’ll snap at Adam, spittle flecking her lips as she blames him in some illogical way for her gnawing discomfort. But on her birthday Julia is in a good mood – stoned and calm. Her eyes are tiny pricks of dark in a sea of pale blue; opiates binding to neurotransmitters, corrupting the biochemistry of her blood. Adam has done his research and knows pretty much everything there is to know about her drug of choice – except, of course, how it feels. He wishes her happy birthday and passes her the carrier bag.

‘Oh, Adam, you shouldn’t have!’

Polythene rustles as she peers inside. There are sterile packets of 0.4mm needles, syringes, disinfecting swabs, cotton wool, a bottle of bleach. Julia pulls out the miniature birthday cake in its box; shop-bought confectionery, thick with sugary icing. She reads aloud the piped message.

‘Many Happy Returns, Julia.’

She rips open the envelope of the birthday card with hopeful eyes. There’s nothing in the card but what Adam has written and, briefly pissed-off, her face hardens. Then she smiles and dutifully stands the card on the arm of the sofa.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘That’s really lovely of you.’

She leans over and kisses Adam, her dry lips chafing his cheek as he breathes in mildew and scalp. He thinks of the weeping blister at the edge of her mouth with a guilty shiver of repulsion. Julia sinks back on the sofa, dragging fingers through her limp hair, ploughing furrows of grease.

‘Did Rob get you anything nice?’ Adam asks.

‘Dunno. He went out this morning. Hasn’t come back yet.’

‘How’s your week been?’

‘Oh … OK …’ answers Julia vaguely, her horizon of time narrowed to the hours it takes to score and relieve the pangs of addiction. ‘How’s things with you?’ she asks.

‘OK. Same as usual, I s’pose …’

Adam sips his tea and tastes the sourness of the milk.
So
long as Julia makes the effort to brew cups of tea for him, all is not lost. He watches the bony spider of her hand chase an itch from throat to collar-bone, the bone-white ridge of her knuckles. Julia is ageless and never the same. Sometimes she’s an emaciated child, vulnerable and frail, her thin wrist threatening to snap from the weight of a cigarette. Other times she’s decades older, calculating and mean, looking to cheat you if given half the chance. Today she drifts in between, not quite the hostile stranger, but not quite his sister either.

‘Have they cleared out Granddad’s old block yet?’

‘Yeah. There’s no one left now ’cept for squatters.’

The spider scuttles under the cardigan sleeve and scratches, nails harvesting dead skin. Adam takes the black-and-white photograph he has brought out of his jacket pocket and passes it to her.

‘What’s this?’ she asks.

Adam doesn’t say anything. Julia lifts the photo closer to her face, squints and frowns. Though the picture is turned away from him Adam sees the two smiling schoolgirls made from monochrome patterns of darkness and light. One of the girls grips the handlebars of a bike, her hair dark and feathery, and her freckles paintbrush-splattered flecks. The girl squints, at odds with the glaring sun, and Adam knows that she is his mother at sixteen; nine years younger than he is now, six years younger than Julia. The second girl – an English girl – smiles timidly at the camera lens. The English girl is large, unwieldy, taller by a foot. Her curly blonde hair springs
about
her head like a clown’s wig, every follicle a slave to humidity. Both girls wear a school uniform of a white blouse and a grey pleated skirt. The photograph came with a letter two days ago through the post, and Adam has looked at it a thousand times since. Sunlight from the last century leaps from the faces of the teenage girls. The light glitters from the silver bell of the bicycle, flows through the aperture and into the dark chamber of the camera. Adam thinks of that moment of shutter-click; the moment his mother and her wallflower friend were immortalized in black and white.

‘That’s Mum, isn’t it?’ says Julia.

‘Yeah. It was taken in 1969, in Kuala Lumpur.’

‘Where d’you get this?’

‘The other girl in the photo sent it to me. Says she’s an old schoolfriend of Mum’s. She wrote me a letter, says she wants to meet up.’

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How’d she get your address?’

‘I don’t know … Phone book?’

Julia passes the photograph back to Adam. She takes a cigarette out of the packet on the table and places it between her scuffed lips. She sparks a flame on the disposable lighter, then slouches back on the sofa. The sleeve of her cardigan slides up and Adam sees a rash like a thousand tiny razor nicks on her forearm.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Sally Hargreaves.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Julia says. ‘Mum said she hated that
school
. She said she never had any friends there – that all the other girls were snobs and bitches. It’s weird. This Sally person must be after something.’

‘I don’t have anything to give her.’

‘Then why’s she bothering you? She might be mental.’

‘Since when d’you have anything against mental people? What about your mates? The one who barks at the skirting board and shoots up in his jugular?’

‘Adrian’s Rob’s mate, not mine, and what’s he got to do with anything? I’d leave this woman well alone if I were you.’