The Orientalist and the Ghost (28 page)

Fearing Marina had lost her mind, I rushed to the Jesus cottage. Blanche was kneeling in the garden, where Humphrey’s headless cadaver lay in a pool of blood.

‘I forgive them for what they have done,’ she said, sad but resolute. ‘I forgive them and love them even as they cast stones at us. I will continue to do my duty and save their damned souls from the conflagration of Hell.’

Poor old Humphrey. Never again would he lie, panting, in the shade of the papaya tree or … Come to think of it, that was the only thing I ever saw old Humphrey do. I helped Blanche indoors and brewed her a pot of tea. Then I went to notify the police. An hour later Marina returned with Humphrey’s head. The missionaries weren’t so sentimental that they wanted to give Humphrey a Christian burial. When some villagers knocked at the door and timidly asked permission to cook Humphrey’s remains (offering to bring portions of the cooked meat for the bereaved), they let them (though they declined to partake in the feast). After
Humphrey’s
corpse was carted away in a wheelbarrow, Blanche and Marina shut themselves away for the rest of the day, the evangelical zeal knocked out of them.

The demise of Humphrey disturbed me. How awful to think the perpetrators were still at large in the village. Assisting the Red Cross on their rounds, however, I was cheered to see, recovered and pottering about, villagers who had been feverish and shaking days before. Even Charles was well enough to resume his rattan throne and boss the sarong-wearing servant boy, who pouted as he served his master glasses of medicinal gin.

That evening I paced the watch tower restlessly, as if allergic to keeping still. I’d seen Evangeline in the back of the Red Cross van that afternoon as Nurse Perdita and I were taking an inventory of stock. The runaway debutante was counting vials in the medical refrigerator when Evangeline climbed into the van to fetch some antibiotics for the Aussie nurses. As Evangeline took a bottle of pills, she whispered in Cantonese that the missionaries had agreed to take Grace for the night. Then she was gone, out into the midday sunshine. Removing her head from the refrigerator, Perdita remarked that I was looking frightfully pleased with myself. Then she smiled and batted her lashes (for the ex-society girl had her singleton eye on me). I couldn’t wait for the evening. After days of touring the stifling huts and breathing sickness into my lungs, I was drained, conscious of my own mortality. What could be more rejuvenating than to take my beloved into my
arms
and breathe the fragrance of her skin? To lose myself in her embrace and dissolve the boundaries between us. As I paced the watch tower, impatient for her, I saw a movement from the corner of my eye. I lifted the binoculars and focused the lenses on the boundary fence. A bandit was crawling into the village.
What fool does he take me for?
I wondered. (Of course, Comrade Kok Sang of the 10th Independent Regiment was right to take me for a fool; my mind had hardly been on the job.) The man was struggling, his jacket snagged on the barbed wire. I snatched the rifle and calmly aimed it at the bandit’s foot. Though I’d had some shooting practice with the home guard, I’d little confidence in my marksmanship. I’d expected to miss. I’d expected merely to make a loud bang and frighten him away. So I was surprised to squeeze the trigger and, along with the gunpowder blast, hear a human cry of pain. The muscles of my face hardened as I lowered the gun.
So that’s what it feels like to shoot a person
, I thought. I did not feel guilty or upset. Only the desire to shoot again. The injured bandit was now crawling backwards, out of the village. I couldn’t see where the bullet had gone in. I rang the alarm bell to alert the guards and aimed my rifle again. Loud footfalls came hurrying up the rungs of the ladder. Evangeline threw open the trapdoor in a breathless panic.

‘Don’t!’ she cried.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I’ve caught a bandit.’

Evangeline wrested the gun from me and rushed to the window. An empty jacket hung from the fence like
a
drab abandoned chrysalis. The bandit was nowhere to be seen. A commotion of voices could be heard, coming from somewhere near by. The guards were shouting in Malay.

‘Oh God,’ I said to Evangeline, ‘we’ve got to get you home. This place will be crawling with guards in a minute.’

Evangeline was unconcerned by the guards. She turned to me, eyes blazing.

‘What have you done?’ she screamed. ‘What have you done?’

18

ADAM AND JULIA
lost interest in the Friday-night film and drowsed on the sofa, Julia worn out from a hard day’s truanting and Adam from compulsive page-turning and bibliophile flights of the mind. Julia hugged a cushion, legs curled under, bottom resting on her heels. Adam dozed with his head thrown back, throat exposed, as if bared to a knife. There was an enchanted quality to their slumber, as if they’d taken a bite of the same poison apple, or the sandman had sprinkled them with magic dust.

The wind gusted by the fourteenth floor, swift as a greyhound racing round a track. The TV signals blustered away, the picture a cryptic fuzz, every other word a mystifying buzz. My grandchildren had been watching a Hollywood action movie starring some indestructible hero with an East European accent. A hail of bullets perforated the static, whizzing and
pinging
and defying the laws of physics. Special effect. Explosion. Special effect. Explosion, explosion, explosion. None of the pyrotechnics disguised that the film was a very dreary affair.

I shuffled over to the TV and clicked off the volume. Then I sat and watched the children as they slept. Adam has the beginnings of a moustache, faint as caterpillar fur on his upper lip. I’d teach him how to shave, but it’s optimistic to expect a boy who’s worn the same holey jumper for six weeks running to pick up a razor.
Adam, you tramp! You stink!
complains Julia.
Have a bath!
Advice she ought to follow herself. The odours of the estate cling to my granddaughter. Fags, epoxy resin and fish-and-chip wrappers. Both children are a source of olfactory offence. They make my flat smell like a homeless shelter.

A helicopter plummeted from the sky, propellers thrashing wildly as it spiralled across the TV screen. A stuntman dived from the hatch, machine guns blazing in freefall. The rip-roaring action sequence shuddered on the fluorescent screen, the living room strobe-lit, the aerial a lightning rod in an electrical storm. And as I watched the film, with no idea who were the goodies or who were the baddies, my estranged daughter appeared.

Nothing could have prepared me for it. My heart arrested for a count of three, and my breath stalled in my throat.

‘Frances,’ I wheezed.

‘Father,’ she said coolly.

She wore her school uniform, her skin pearly and phosphorescent, as if she too were a discharge of speeding cathode rays. Strands of her dark pageboy hair hung in her eyes and the smattering of freckles on her nose. How old was she? Thirteen? Fourteen? The same age as her acne-blighted agoraphobic son? I knew from the supercilious look on her face that the Cold War had begun. The years she was a distant stranger under my roof.

Frances interfered with the TV signals, the picture deteriorating into a meteor shower on the moon. Twenty-five years had gone by since I’d last seen her. She was a beautiful child. A sanctimonious child, disdainful of the compromises I’d made to give her a comfortable childhood. Able to live by her convictions because her sheltered life threw up no challenges to them. She turned to watch the sleeping siblings and I saw the profile of her snub nose.

‘My children do not look well.’

I was startled to hear her call Adam and Julia her children. How could this virgin child claim that those two strapping adolescents were the product of her taut, never-lived-in womb? Adam and Julia were her siblings, her classmates, her peers. Never her children. My daughter fixed me with her critical gaze, and I knew no punches were to be pulled.

‘You have not been feeding them,’ she accused.

How outrageous! Child or not, one could not deny her maternal ferocity.

‘Of course I feed them. What do you take me for?
Julia
always has her porridge in the morning, and I cook them both supper in the evening. I try my best, but it is difficult to raise children at my age. Adam won’t go to school and Julia comes home when she pleases. Believe me, I’d put them over my knee and give them a good spanking if I could … But my arthritis is bad this winter and my wrist seizes up.’

Adam stirred. He opened his eyes and looked at me. I half-expected him to see his mother and make some loud exclamation of surprise. But he didn’t. This must have made our quarrel appear somewhat one-sided.

‘Look what you’ve done! You woke my son,’ said Frances. ‘Why does he look so pale and sickly? Why are his eyes so haunted and bruised?’

Her hands were on her hips; on her face, a look of anger. For a child of four foot ten and a hundred and one pounds she was very intimidating. Not even the demure lace frills of her ankle socks diminished the effects of her sabre-rattling.

‘Adam refuses to go outdoors,’ I said. ‘He has decided to renounce the world and live an ascetic life of the mind. I have reported him to social services but they say there’s nothing they can do.’

Now Julia woke, her eyes lazy and slitted like a cat in the sun. Brother and sister slouched as they watched me, loose-limbed as two abandoned marionettes.

‘You were a terrible father,’ said Frances, ‘and now you are a terrible grandfather.’

‘Now, hold on a minute …’

‘This flat disgusts me. There is damp everywhere and no food in the cupboards.’

‘Frances …’

Her young eyes glittered with contempt. ‘You took my mother away from me.’

‘Frances,’ I pleaded, ‘you judge me too harshly. I had to make some very difficult choices. I agonized …’

‘Why are you crying, you selfish man? Your tears won’t bring my mother back.’

I lost my temper. There is only so much blame I am prepared to take. ‘Get out, get out!’ I shouted. ‘You ignorant child. Go away!’

The look on her face was murderous, just like the time I told her she was grounded until the O levels were over.

‘Go away? And leave my children in the care of a mad old man! You are unfit to serve as their guardian.’

‘Mad, am I? Who is the pot to call the kettle black? If you’re so concerned about the welfare of your children why did you kill yourself? That was jolly selfish of you, wasn’t it? If they’re miserable and motherless and stuck with me in this damp council flat, then it’s your fault. They had nowhere else to go.’

I’d hoped to draw Frances’s attention to her hypocrisy, but she wasn’t listening. Her twelve-year-old daughter had risen from the sofa and had lifted a porcelain Buddha from the mantelpiece – one of my few souvenirs from Malaysia.

‘Shut up!’ she shrieked. And smashed the ornament against the gas fire.

Julia fled the crime scene, the holy Siddhārtha in smithereens. Adam winced from the safety of the sofa.

Frances shook her head, her mouth a thin disapproving line. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ she said.

And satisfied with the seeds of malice sown, my estranged daughter vanished, leaving me with Adam, who stared into the fuzzy vortex of the television screen as if therein lay the solution to our broken home.

‘What have you done?’ Evangeline screamed.

What had I done?

She grabbed the torch and jumped down the trapdoor. What had I done?

‘Evangeline,’ I said, ‘wait!’

Her gaze was black as thunder, irritated and impatient.

‘What’s going on? Do you know that bandit?’

‘Yes. I have to go after him and see if he is OK. He won’t make it back to the camp with a bullet in his side. He will die.’

I stared at Evangeline, not caring a damn whether the bandit died. The only thing that mattered to me were the fractures that had appeared in the truth. She had tricked me into thinking she was someone she wasn’t.

‘You’re a Communist.’

‘No. You must trust me.’

‘Bloody hell! How can I trust you? You have been coming here to distract me, haven’t you? So guerrillas can sneak in and out of the village. You’ve been lying to me.’

The truth occurred to me as I spoke it. I was furious enough to hit her. I’d have given anything to have her come back to me, to hear her vehement denial and whispered love. But Evangeline’s priorities lay elsewhere. She started down the ladder.

‘Wait! The guards are by the fence. They will shoot you!’

There was a clatter as she slipped down a few rungs in her haste. A gang of guards stood where the bandit had been, rifles aimed at the scrubland, bickering like old women about whether to go and hunt for him. I bounded down the ladder after Evangeline, knowing that if they saw her alone they would shoot. When I reached the ground Evangeline was racing back into the village. I chased her along the main trail to a section of fence dangerously close to the police station. Evangeline was squeezing through a hole with the skill of a contortionist when I caught her up. I expected her to fly off again once she was on the other side, but she turned and lifted the chicken-wire mesh so I could follow. Then we ran together, across the no man’s land and into the jungle.