The Orientalist and the Ghost (21 page)

‘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!’

The peasants yielded not one speck of useful information, goading Inspector Lam into a beetroot fury and bringing out his violent streak (though my stern throat-clearings made him limit his abuse to one strike per interviewee).

At the end of the day the inspector declared: ‘Never have I met such simpletons. I’d rather ram a goat-pen stake through my head than return to this resettlement camp again.’ And hailed a trishaw back to Jalang town.

The following day a government courier cycled over to The Village of Everlasting Peace with a parcel of mimeographed questionnaires – one for every household. The questionnaires asked two questions:

Do you know who kidnapped Timmy Lo?

Do you know who is helping the Communists in the village?

I helped with the distribution, reading out the questions to the illiterate villagers, and the next day
the
sheets were collected in a secret post-box so as to safeguard anonymity. Resettlement Officer Dulwich and I upturned the metal box and sifted through the mound of white paper that fell on to the floor of the officers’ bungalow. Three quarters of the questionnaires were blank. A few villagers had taken the trouble to write messages in English –
Death to Imperialists! Die! Die! Bloody bastard liars!
– with liberal dosings of the f-word. More specific allegations were made in Chinese – for example (translated):
The person helping the Communists in The Village of Everlasting Peace is that big-nosed devil Christopher, and what’s more he is having homosexual relations with Prison Officer Dulwich
. Many used the paper to showcase their artistic talents, with drawings of elephants, the honourable Chairman Mao and a monkey on a unicycle. The most cooperative reply was written in tidy cursive and said,
We are very sorry but we do not know who kidnapped Timmy Lo or who is helping the Communists in The Village of Everlasting Peace, from Miss Mallard and Miss Tolbin
– which was no help to us at all.

The failure of the questionnaires was the final straw for the District War Executive Committee.
The collective silence of The Village of Everlasting Peace calls for a collective punishment
, they said.
The hours of curfew will be brought forward from seven o’clock in the evening to two o’clock in the afternoon. The period of extended curfew is to last for a week
. And guess which unlucky bugger was appointed harbinger of the bad news …

I stood in the back of a pick-up truck as it bumped
over
the rutted, debris-strewn trail and around the village. I read out the government directive in Cantonese and Hokkein translation through a loudspeaker, until I was reciting it verbatim. As the afternoon sun flayed my shoulders and my voice boomed, villagers surfaced in doorways to howl in outrage (
Two o’clock! Two o’clock! Curse that Timmy Lo for making all this trouble for the village!
) and children threw stones at my back. The buxom Aussie nurses Madeleine and Josie, both of whom are deaf to Cantonese, came out of the medical hut and waved as if to a passing dignitary. In the shadows behind them stood my beloved Evangeline, her arms crossed and lip pensively bitten. The First Battalion Worcestershire Regiment were in the village to work on the school hall, which was progressing at a rate of one plank per week. They hooted and wolf-whistled when they saw me, one soldier yanking down his khaki pants and mooning me from the rooftop. The truck bounced through the check-point and out to the market gardens, the thankless task of spreading bad tidings not yet done.

Round and round the village we went, and I repeated the news of the punishment curfew until my throat was parched and my tonsils ached. Confusing the messenger with the origins of the punishment, villagers clobbered me with the evil eye, and by the time the truck stopped outside the police station and the tail gate was let down for me I was giddy with heatstroke and in very low spirits after my hour as the object of communal hatred and blame.

The day after news of the disciplinary curfew had been loudspeakered about the village, the siren blared at quarter to two. Sergeant Abdullah and I inspected identity cards at the check-point as the rubber tappers and hoe-carrying market gardeners trooped back into the resettlement camp for fifteen hours of stagnating under hut arrest, the children unable to play Bandits versus Colonialists (or the ever-popular Tarzan versus the African Devils), the mothers and fathers unable to play mah-jong with the neighbours or go for a twilight constitutional. Eyes narrowed to slits as identity cards were handed to me for inspection. Gobbets of betel-nut juice were spat on the ground by my feet.

Irritated, I turned to the moustache-twiddling sergeant and said: ‘Why are they angry at me and not the men who kidnapped Timmy Lo? Don’t they care that a man’s life is at stake? Over one thousand people in this village and not one of them has had the guts or integrity to come forward with information. Timmy Lo was one of the people. Yet none of them cares whether he lives or dies.’

‘Timmy is already dead
lah
,’ Sergeant Abdullah said. ‘Why keep him alive? What good to the Communists is a man without fingers? Just another mouth to feed.’ He clapped my shoulder in friendly condolence. ‘Ah well, Timmy is in the arms of his Lord Buddha now.’

The kidnapping of Timmy Lo wasn’t the only affair to bludgeon village morale, as during the week of curfew Detective Pang and his network of undercover spies
made
an unsettling discovery. Let me first of all say that in 1952 terrorist attacks on resettlement camps reached a crescendo as the Malayan Races Liberation Army reacted furiously to the segregation of the squatter community. The Village of Everlasting Peace, however, had a relatively easy time of it, with only the odd sporadic grenade exploding over the perimeter fence, and not one throat-slitting since that of my predecessor, the late Ah Wing.

One evening Kip Phillips, manager of the sandbag-fortified, trip-wire-booby-trapped Bishop’s Head plantation, drove his armoured truck over for a round of gin slings with Charles and me. As the gramophone needle lifted from the last strains of ‘Clair de lune’ and the mechanical whirring of insects reclaimed the night, Kip Phillips patted his bullet-proof vest – a frequent unconscious habit of his – and said: ‘Quiet, this village. Almost too quiet, if you know what I mean …’

Kip Phillips was correct in his suspicions. Detective Pang’s investigation into the charmed, incident-free nights of the home guard was already under way. And what he discovered had us reeling in shock.

Twenty of our home guard had made a nonaggression pact with the regional regiment of the Malayan Races Liberation Army – a complicit agreement that bandits be let in and out of the village, and the home guard in exchange be spared gunfire and all the other little skirmishes that make night patrol so perilous. Every night for months the Reds had had free rein of The Village of Everlasting Peace, consorting with the
Min
Yuen, stealing and extorting, and having sex-famished reunions with lovers and wives.

A list of names was compiled and the treacherous guards arrested. As the accused were handcuffed and marched out of the village some frothed at the mouth, swearing innocence in the name of Allah. Others went willingly, smiling as if to say,
Ah well, the game’s up
… The strong-arm of government censorship prevented the debacle of the corrupt guards from reaching the national news. But nothing could stop the news of the bloody cull from reaching the ears of the villagers. Many cackled in glee.
Good for nothing matamata! Betraying their country because they’re too lazy to fight!
I felt terrible for those villagers who’d wanted protection from the Communists and had been badly let down.