The Orientalist and the Ghost (30 page)

My heart shrivelled up in hopelessness. I thought of the jungle-craft that Kip Phillips had taught me on our Sunday-afternoon hikes; how to make a rodent snare; how to build a fish trap out of twigs; how to identify edible fungi and so on. I remembered Kip telling me, as we huffed and puffed up a steep trail, that if one is lost in the rainforest the wisest thing to do is to bang a stick on a tree buttress, as a buttress can amplify a bang so it travels for a distance of three miles. Kip had demonstrated with his rambling stick, striking the buttress of
an
ancient tree as though it were a gong. The effect was loud as gun blasts.

‘If you are lucky,’ said Kip, ‘a search party will take a compass bearing of the bang and come and rescue you. But be careful!’ he warned, wagging his finger. ‘Buttress-whacking is a means of communication for the Reds. You might accidentally bang out a secret Communist code!’

The most formidable buttress in the clearing lay just beyond a fly-buzzing thicket. The buttress was four feet in height; a sinuous wing of wood, strange and extraterrestrial. I was weak and enervated and every movement brought great pain. But if anything could amplify a bang to within range of a search party, that buttress was it.

I dragged myself on my back, inch by painstaking inch, the angry mouth of my wound screaming in protest. As the heat of the day mounted, more and more flies came out of hiding to buzz under a nearby thicket. The thicket was en route to the buttress and, as I heaved myself along, a few flies drifted over to me, translucent wings whirring. I furiously batted them away, repulsed by the thought of them laying eggs on me and fly larvae burrowing into my wound. Halfway to the buttress, searing pain forced me to stop beside the fly-besieged shrubs. Gritting my teeth, I willed the pain to subside so I could move on. It was then that I noticed the leather flask, half buried in the mulch under the thicket. The Hallelujah refrain from Handel’s
Messiah
chorusing from above, I grabbed the flask,
unscrewed
the lid and tipped the contents down my parched throat … only to splutter and cough and spit it all out again. Whisky! – as filthy and acrid as petrol. I tossed the flask aside and lay on my back again, head turned sideways to see what else was hiding under the thicket. And as I stared and stared through the branches and maelstrom of flies, the nest of shadow stirred and became a human face.

I turned away and gazed up into the lofty marquee of leaves. Then I turned back, to check what I’d seen was real and not a hallucination. The dead man was covered in flies. They crawled out of his parted lips and roamed the contours of his face and glassy eyes. The flies droned and droned, and I stared and stared, my breathing ragged. I felt the kiss of flies on my cheeks, but did not brush them away. The putrescence that had lurked in my nostrils since entering the clearing the night before suddenly had a new significance. I dry heaved, once, twice, but my empty stomach had nothing to offer the soil. The man had not been dead long – his skin undecayed, waxy and pale. The corpse was too thin to be Timmy Lo, and too recent a kill. The worms had made a banquet of Timmy weeks and weeks ago.

Then recognition came. Triggered by the sharpness of his cheekbones and vulpine tapering of his face. Slowly, the death mask began to correspond with my memory of the last time I’d seen the face alive. The corpse stared at me with dead eyes.

‘Well, Detective,’ I murmured, ‘you were wrong about Evangeline not being a Communist. You were about as
wrong
as you can get. Why ever did you write that letter?’

Then it occurred to me Detective Pang hadn’t been wrong. He hadn’t written the letter. He wasn’t the only person in The Village of Everlasting Peace literate in English. I knew of at least one other person – skilled enough to teach the language to high-school students, no less. The intention of the letter, according to its author, was to warn me away from Evangeline. Yet by convincing me of her non-involvement with the Communists and making me sympathetic to her plight, it had succeeded in doing the opposite. If the true aim of the letter had been to pave the way for love and deception, then it had accomplished this very well.

I ask Detective Pang about the letter when he comes to my flat. The detective pretends not to hear, preferring to scatter sunflower-seed husks over the carpet, or retune the dial of the kitchen radio to shrieking paranormal frequencies. I suspect he is embarrassed that Evangeline discovered, then assumed, his true identity. Poor old Detective Pang. So good at his job until they found him out. Did they march him into the jungle at gunpoint? Or was he lured to the imperialist slaying ground, as I had been, by some treacherous village floozy? Detective Pang is very reticent on the subject of his death, so I doubt I’ll ever know.

After travelling with me from Kuala Lumpur to London in 1980, Evangeline’s letter now lives in a shoebox in my hallway cupboard. The document is an
antique
now; fallen to pieces, burnt by air to the colour of straw. Once upon a time reading the letter upset me and I’d lie awake for hours afterwards, full of scalding emotion and eruptions of bile. But not any more. Before I left The Village of Everlasting Peace in 1953, I investigated Evangeline’s background, consulting official documents and villagers who had known her. The letter had given a factual account of the events of Evangeline’s life during and shortly after the war. Her epistolary revelations were true, the only falsehood the
nom de plume
.

Clever Evangeline. Not a week goes by when I don’t take that letter from the shoebox and turn the pieces over in my hands. By now I know the damn thing by heart. Every loop of handwriting and dot and dash of punctuation. Every lapse of grammar, misspelt word and inky smear. I know that letter better than the wrinkles of my own face. It’s all I have left of her, you see.

I let the branches fall and obscure the detective once more. Then I continued dragging myself to the buttress – much to the chagrin of my boot-clobbered back and screaming wound. The throb in my side had a speeding tempo, a diabolical rhythm, and progress was slow. When I reached the buttress I collapsed against it, ear pressed to the wood, as if listening for a heartbeat. My poor broken body was spent and I hadn’t even begun.

There was a heavy stick within reaching distance. I grasped it in both hands and beat the buttress with
force
. The thwack of it resounded through the jungle, and I was certain every creature within a quarter-mile radius had heard. Heartened, I beat out a slow arduous rhythm, with a long recuperative pause between each bang. I feared the hollow thuds would summon axe-wielding Communists to come and finish the job. But it was a risk I had to take. As the hours passed and the patterns of light shifted across the ground, strength faded in my arms and my palms were slippery with weeping blisters. But whenever I felt the urge to give up, I’d think of the corpse under the shrubs and hit the buttress with renewed vigour. So long as I had the stick in my hand and was able to bang it, I had a lottery ticket and a chance to live.

All of my human will was condensed into hitting the buttress. I thought no profound thoughts about the nature of life and death. Had no memories of England, or my childhood, or my dear old mother and sisters. I thought only of pain and endurance and Evangeline. The monotonous rhythm was hard to sustain and I was kept going by contradictory desires – the desire to see Evangeline and resume our love, and the desire to have revenge upon her. ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’ as sung by the First Battalion Worcestershire Regiment echoed in my head. Even after a fitful mid-afternoon doze, the song was there upon waking, like a headache that wouldn’t go away.

The day passed in stark thirst and pain, and by dusk my arms were useless – any noise I made inaudible beyond the clearing. I lapsed back into delirium and
Detective
Pang crawled out from under the shrubs to offer some words of encouragement. But it was no good. No one had come. The battle was lost. Darkness was returning me to the womb of the earth and I was certain that the violent fragrance of decay came as much from me as the murdered detective.

So I tossed the stick aside, the clearing as black as the bottom of a grave, each passing minute another spade-ful of soil.

19

TENDRILS OF SMOKE
unfurled in my nostrils and I sneezed awake. Cold grey dawn and excruciating pain. My body slumped against the buttress; bones aching, every cell of me panting with thirst. To have survived another day left me underwhelmed, to say the least.

My eyes were blurred as steamed-up glass, and I blinked and blinked, afraid the loss of sight was permanent. Slowly the fog lifted and I saw a man standing in the clearing. I squinted at his muddy boots and woollen socks. Camouflage uniform and bull-neck. Gold buzz-cut capped with an olive beret. Part Billy Bunter, part snarling pit-bull face. The man dragged on his cigarette, then blew the smoke up towards the hole in the canopy, as if puffing a signal for help. Lieutenant Spencer grinned like a pumpkin on Hallowe’en.

‘Hello, Goldilocks.’

Size eleven boots rooted to the ground, the
lieutenant
flickered like a candle flame in a draught. It occurred to me then, with sinking heart, that my deus ex machina was a hallucination. The stiff hinge of my jaw creaked to let out an enquiring croak. Spencer dragged on his roll-up and squinted at me, piggy-eyed, as his nostrils spurted smoke.

‘Wotcha doing lying on the ground for?’

The bloodstain spread from sternum to groin, my clothes filthy and dark, I patted my wound and smiled with a touch of pride. Trying to focus on the lieutenant gave me a splitting headache. His face shifted as if viewed through a kaleidoscope; a slowly revolving Picasso of eyes and jug ears, stubbly chin and nose.

‘That pansy little cut!’ scorned the mouth on his forehead. ‘The village ain’t even a mile away. You could have hiked it. Took me twenty minutes to get here.’

The pain surged in offence. I gritted my teeth, my hand closing around the large stick I’d tossed near by.

Lieutenant waggled his roll-up at my clenched fist. ‘Little drummer boy, are we now?’

The policeman laughed as I lay debilitated by my near-fatal stab wound. I’ve never understood the urge to mock a man when he is down. What a cheaply won sense of superiority. The tinnitus of flies gathered around the thicket. I pointed my stick and said the detective’s name.

The lieutenant jerked an eyebrow. He crouched by the shrubs, lifting the branches to peer underneath. He stared for a good long while, then let out a low whistle.

‘Dearie me,’ he said, ‘now that ain’t a pretty sight.
Your
old slyboots girlfriend do that to him, did she?’

He flicked his cigarette butt under the bushes. Was Evangeline back in the village? The question was a strangled whimper in my throat. The lieutenant came and squatted by me. He flipped open his knapsack and uncapped a water canister. He tilted the canister to my lips and I gulped and gulped, water streaming down my chin. Oh, it was glorious! Spencer laughed and I didn’t care. I couldn’t gulp it down fast enough. I could feel my stomach bloating and my cells hydrating one by one, intoxicated by the elixir of life.

‘Well then,’ said Spencer when the water was gone, ‘s’pose I ought to piggyback you home. But first things first …’

The lieutenant delved into the knapsack once more and removed a first-aid kit. He took out a small glass vial and a syringe. He tugged a hanky from his pocket – crumpled and filthy, as if used to polish his boots – and gave the needle tip a wipe.

‘Now then, Christopher,’ he grinned as the needle pierced the foil lid of the vial, ‘have I got a treat in store for you!’

The voyage out of the jungle came to pass in a dreamy haze. The good lieutenant and I were weightless, borne along by a flock of angels and harpsichord music. The savage undergrowth parted like the Red Sea as the lieutenant cradled me in his arms. Why he grunted, cursed and wheezed as he did was a mystery to me.

The weeks of hospitalization were also hazy. Sterile
sheets
replaced the decaying jungle soil and my bloodstained clothes were exchanged for a backless hospital gown. They pumped me with donated blood, and tubes drip-fed me and rinsed the septicaemia from my arteries and veins. For a while my kidney flailed and floundered, the medics uncertain whether it would heal and resume functioning.

Every night I woke in an orgy of screaming, clawing the bandages from my mid-section, convinced that maggots had infested my wound. I slapped the nurses who came to calm me and head-butted the night porter, disturbing the other patients on the ward. The hospital staff wanted to bind me to the bed like a mental patient, but Charles made a fuss and had them move me to a private room. During the day hallucinations and spells of madness enlivened my drug-fuddled state. I confused the nurses tending to me with Evangeline and, forgetting her betrayal, would pull them to me and kiss them full on the lips. I’d pinch their bums and slide my hand inside their brassières during my sponge baths (which, to my mortification, I mistook for caresses of a more intimate nature). Convinced one long-suffering female doctor was the love who’d forsaken me, I chucked my dinner tray at her, splattering her with peas and gravy, and shouting every disgusting insult that came to mind. Thank God those nurses had a sense of humour. When I recovered they’d tease me. They’d wink at me and say: ‘No kiss for me today, Christopher?’ And I would blush, grateful they’d seen the funny side.