The Orientalist and the Ghost (40 page)

‘Did you know Mr Leung was in prison?’ Sally asked.

‘No! Goodness. I wonder what he’s done. Plotting some Communist insurrection, I expect. I can’t believe our maths teacher’s a jailbird!’

They stopped on the outskirts of Chinatown, on a street where stone sheltered walkways ran along the shop fronts, coloured paper lanterns strung between the pillars. Every shop was shuttered, the doors bolted. Delilah put her hand on the back of Sally’s neck and directed her gaze to the other side of the road, to a rundown building at the end of the row.

‘OK,’ said Delilah. ‘See that teahouse over there?’

‘
That’s
a teahouse?’ said Sally.

The façade was a crumbling mess; corrugated iron blocked the windows and the walls were pockmarked and fatally cracked, as if a bulldozer had charged into it, then changed its mind halfway through the wrecking process.

‘Yes,’ said Delilah. ‘It’s an old gambling house, now a teahouse for the poor. Listen. I want you to bring Frances over here and tell her that Mr Leung is waiting in there for her. I’m going to hide inside and give her a surprise.’

‘And then what?’ asked Sally.

‘And then she’ll be surprised!’

‘I don’t want to do this,’ said Sally. ‘I think it’s a terrible idea.’

Delilah smiled. She rubbed the back of Sally’s neck. ‘C’mon, we’re all the way here now. She’ll see the funny side of it. Afterwards we’ll all go back to mine. Go on now. Don’t be afraid.’ She winked at Sally, then darted across the road and through the teahouse door.

Sally ran in the direction of the blazing sky. The sirens wailed more urgently now, burglar alarms jangling in distress. It was the time of the evening Chinatown was usually at its liveliest, with shoppers and traders haggling and hawker-stall diners hunched over claypot chicken and Hokkien
mee
. But now there was not a soul on the streets. Even the beggars had had the good sense to seek refuge. In the upstairs windows of shuttered shophouses a few
tokays
chewed toothpicks and watched Sally’s lonely progress along Petaling
Road
.
Why’s everything shut?
Sally wanted to shout.
Why’re you indoors?
Three deafening bangs came from somewhere near by, and Sally screamed and crashed to her knees, head in hands, convinced the gunshots had been aimed at her back. She crouched on the ground for a minute, then got up and ran for her life.

Frances stood outside the Fong and Goh Dentists, hands deep in the pockets of her dungarees and her chin cocked like a twelve-year-old boy acting tough. Sally flashed with anger when she saw her. She looked so vulnerable standing alone. How daft of her not to have seen through the lie. Frances, who’d been squinting the other way, turned at the sound of Sally running over. Her expression hardened. Sally stopped about a yard away, not wanting to take any chances.

‘Where is he?’ Frances said.

‘He’s hiding.’

‘Where?’

‘I’ll show you.’

Sally jerked her thumb back the way she’d come and, scowling, Frances hopped over the storm drain into the empty road, suspicious, but reeled-in. They began the journey back abreast of each other but a few feet apart. Though there was no one to be seen, male voices shouted and explosions of shattering glass echoed in the next street. Frances glanced nervously behind them.

‘What’s with this city tonight? Why’s everything on fire? Why’s everyone indoors?’ Sally asked.

‘Don’t you know? There’s a twenty-four-hour curfew!’ said Frances.

‘A curfew?’

‘Yes. Because of the rioting. They said so on the radio and TV. The police’ve got permission to shoot anyone they see on sight.’

‘They won’t shoot us, will they? We’re British after all.’

‘Not me. I’m Chinese.’

Sally was stunned, but she walked on as if her legs were mechanized, carrying her deeper and deeper into her waking nightmare. She knew she’d been stupid to let Delilah twist her arm, but Frances must be absolutely brainless to have known about the curfew and come out anyway. Brainless, or madly in love. Sally had to admit the truth. The sooner the better. But part of her didn’t want to. Part of her was still angry at Frances. Glad to be walking her into Delilah’s trap.

‘How is he?’ Frances asked.

‘He’s OK.’

‘Is he out on bail?’

‘I don’t know – he didn’t say.’

‘He can’t be, if he’s in hiding,’ Frances decided. ‘I can’t believe he was waiting for me outside the school gates like that – it’s so risky!’

Frances was pleased, the risk a proof of love.

‘He wasn’t right by the gates. He was a few streets away.’

‘You said he was outside the school gates.’

The taste of tinned sardines from Delilah’s picnic rose in Sally’s mouth; metallic and acrid, the lick of a rusty blade.

‘Oh, did I?’

Frances stopped in her tracks.

‘You’re lying to me! Henry isn’t out of prison! You’re making it up, aren’t you?’

What better time to admit the truth? To get them both out of this awful mess? But as Sally stared into Frances’s blazing eyes, she flared as though wrongfully accused.

‘Yes, that’s right. I’ve come out when the city’s on fire, risking my neck and getting shot at, just for kicks. What do you take me for? I’m doing this so you have a chance to speak to Mr Leung. Because he wants to see you … though now I don’t know why I bothered!’

Had Delilah been within earshot she’d have given the performance a standing ovation. Where had it come from, this outrage and indignation? This talent for lies? There was a fleeting stand-off, the girls livid and glaring hard. Then Frances backed down. She slumped as if her angry convictions had propped her up.

‘Sorry,’ she said. The vanished guilt returned to Sally with vehemence. ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper the other day. I know now it wasn’t your fault. It was my father. Someone fed him a pack of lies about Henry. Lies that linked him to political extremists and made out he’d been taking advantage of me. None of it is true. He hasn’t touched me; works only for the DAP. But my father went to the police. They arrested Henry, said he was dangerous. But there’s no evidence! Nothing!’

‘Henry’s in prison because of your father?’

Frances nodded wearily and Sally saw the weals of tiredness under her eyes.

‘My father betrayed my mother, and now he’s betrayed me. He hates me because I remind him of her. He wants to ruin my life. He thinks he’s won, but he hasn’t. Now Henry’s back we’ll go away and I’ll never see him again.’

‘Is that why you haven’t been to school?’

‘What’s the point of school any more? I haven’t left my room for days. I haven’t been able to eat or sleep or think … I’ve been waiting for them to let him out. Oh, Sally, I was so afraid Henry would blame me for what my father did, that he wouldn’t want to see me again. But now he’s back. I’m so glad!’

Sally was going to be sick.

‘You should have called me.’

The teahouse was over the road.
Tell her, tell her, tell her
– the syllables had replaced the beat of her heart. But part of her
still
didn’t want to. Part of her was still jilted, writhing with rejection, and wanting to punish Frances for loving the maths teacher. She lifted her arm and pointed to the building of corrugated iron and ramshackle walls.

Tongue numb with dread, she said: ‘He’s in there.’

Frances hugged Sally, her thin arms encircling her neck. Then she bounded across the road to the teahouse.

Sally stared as the door slammed, disbelieving what she’d just done. She heard Delilah’s blasé drawl: ‘My God! She’s so gullible it’s embarrassing!’

‘Delilah! I thought you were going to wait in there for her.’

Delilah was by one of the pillars supporting the stone walkway roof. She strolled over to Sally, staring at the derelict shophouse with a grimace of satisfaction.

‘Wait in there for her? Are you mad! I wouldn’t stay in there a moment longer than necessary.’

‘Why? What’s wrong with that place?’

Delilah snorted. ‘I can’t believe you’re so naive!’

‘What is that place?’

‘It’s where poor girls from the countryside are sold and where city girls with no job prospects end up.’

Sally grabbed Delilah’s arm and squeezed with all the strength in her fingers.

‘We must go and get her!’

Delilah wrinkled her nose, pulled her arm free.

‘Don’t get upset. I had a word with them. They’re expecting her. I asked them to give her a little scare.’

‘A scare?’

‘Nothing less than she deserves.’

Sally lunged at Delilah and shook her with an aggression that startled them both.

‘Help me get her back. Please!’

Delilah’s expression was pure disgust, but instead of struggling she went slack. She tilted her head back, lips puckered as if to kiss her schoolgirl assailant. Then she spat at Sally, a leap of snake’s venom in her eye. Sally let her go and stepped back, rubbing the spittle choking her vision.

‘Go and rescue her yourself,’ said Delilah. ‘You’re
certainly
big enough and ugly enough. Silly Sally! Didn’t take much for you to screw Frances over, did it? Makes me wonder if you’re worth having as a friend.’ She began to walk away.

‘Don’t go!’

Delilah glanced over her shoulder with a toss of chestnut hair.

‘He shouldn’t have treated me the way he did. He really shouldn’t have. Now let’s see how he likes it if someone does to his precious daughter what he did to me.’

The shophouse door swung open when Sally was halfway across the road.
Frances
, she thought and her heart swam with relief.
Let her hate me and hate me and never forgive me, but let her be OK
. But it wasn’t Frances. It was a man. He leant casually against the door frame, eclipsing the light that shone some way behind him. Sally froze. She couldn’t see his face. Darkness crawled over him like insects. Like a beekeeper covered from head to toe in black bees.

‘Hey, English,’ he called gruffly. ‘Looking for your friend?’

‘Yes. Can you get her for me?’

‘Don’t worry about her,’ he said. ‘We’re looking after her.’

Looking after her? Sally imagined several burly men gathered round Frances, offering tea and sympathy. It wouldn’t happen. She had to be in there against her will.

‘Please, mister,’ Sally called, ‘will you let her out?’

‘She’s fine. Come and see for yourself.’

‘Please let her out.’

‘Come here, come here. You girls shouldn’t be out tonight. Don’t you know about the fighting? Come here …’

The voice seemed detached from the man in his purdah of darkness.
Come here, come here
… He said the words again and again, soft and lulling, as if to hush a frightened child. Sally’s feet were bound to the spot. Her eyes dropped from his shadowy face to where his hands were fumbling at his waist. There was an unbuckling, an unbuttoning, a burrowing of his hand inside his trousers as it seized what it sought. The dark shifted, his arm moving in rhythmic unhurried strokes. He talked to Sally as he groped, encouraging her to go to him, sick and cloying, menacing and hypnotic. Perhaps Sally
was
hypnotized because she could only stare and stare. Then the man stepped out of the doorway and the trance was broken. Sally was off, satchel thudding her side as she tore away, the man’s laughter chasing her up the street.

Sally ran through the empty streets of Chinatown. She ran counter to logic, a moth fluttering to the flickering heat of arson and the din of emergency alarms. She’d never run so far and so fast in her life, the piston surge of blood in her heart, legs pumping as she pounded the living daylights out of the pavement. She saw a gang of men carrying goods out through the smashed-up window of an electrical appliances store. A couple of the men were loading a stolen fridge on to a pick-up, and another guffawed laughter as he staggered
down
the road, bow-legged under the weight of an enormous TV. She didn’t stop to ask them for help. She ran on and on, hands clamped over her nose and mouth as she passed a car rolled on its back, dense smoke and coppery flames pouring out of its underbelly.

China Keluar! China Keluar!
A Malay in a black bandanna stood on a fire hydrant, shouting and slashing arabesques with his machete, as though the air were rife with invisible assassins. Beneath him lay a slain man in a bloody shirt, his arms spread in a V and his forehead touching the ground as if in obeisance to the fire hydrant god. The slain man didn’t move and Sally cringed in terror as the black bandanna man yodelled his battle-cry at her and twirled his knife. Sally saw some more bandanna men up ahead and ducked into a cabbage-stinking alleyway, wading through heaps of rubbish bags to the haze of street light at the other end. She tripped on a crate of bottles and skinned her elbow against the wall. She got up and limped onwards, halting mid-hobble as a reverberation came up through the soles of her shoes, the ground rumbling as though in ferocious hunger. The light at the far end of the alley was obscured as a tank of the Royal Malay Regiment thundered by. The alley walls shook with artillery fire as the city came under martial law, and Sally staggered back the way she’d come. The men in the black bandannas were gone and the street was a lawn of shattered glass and broken wood, smashed bicycles and furniture looted then discarded as it was too heavy to
carry
. Every shophouse was in darkness, all harbouring families in whispering huddles, suitcases packed, passports in pockets, ready to escape the country at the break of day.

Sally spotted two men in police uniform straddling motorbikes, walkie-talkies held to their mouths. Broken glass crunching under her shoes, she ran over to them, wailing and waving her arms lest they vroom away. When she reached the policemen she wanted to scream about Frances, but could only pant and gasp. The Malay policemen stared at the white girl, wheezing and flapping like a pigeon in the throes of an asthma attack. Sally arched her back, hands on her knees, lungs wrestling for air. Between each lurch of breath opened narrow windows of opportunity for speech.

‘Please,’ she gasped. ‘Frances …’