The Orientalist and the Ghost (22 page)

Shortly after the mass sackings Charles and I were dining on the veranda, serenaded by a vinyl airing of Mendelssohn’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, when Sergeant Abdullah came to see us. He sat with us and accepted a dish of beef stroganoff (a much sought-after and celebrated tinned import) with a
Thank you, Number One Man
. The sergeant ate as if racing against the clock, finishing before Charles and me, then lifting the plate to lick the mushroomy sour-cream sauce. He hiccuped and wiped his moustache with a napkin.

‘We are twenty men less now because of those chicken-shit bastards,’ he complained. ‘Last night my men were doing eighteen-hour shifts. They are falling asleep standing up. I have to run and poke them and
shout
Wakey, wakey!
The village is very weak now. If the Communists wanted to attack they could cause a lot of damage …’ He paused and smiled at me. ‘Number Two Man,’ he said, ‘what do you say to helping us with night patrol? You can go up into the watchtower for a week or two until we recruit more guards. No more check-point duty in the morning and night duty until one or two o’clock instead. What do you think?’

I thought it a silly plan. The Crown Agency for Colonies had employed me for my knowledge of Cantonese; to improve relations between the Foreign Devils and the Chinese. To be exiled in the watch tower would be a waste. Why couldn’t they recruit some boy from a nearby kampong to go up in the watch tower?

‘But I am needed at the check-point,’ I said. ‘There are fewer guards now and none can speak Chinese. It’s taking longer and longer to search the tappers every morning. They are getting to the plantation later and later and losing wages.’

‘Never mind about the tappers,’ said Sergeant Abdullah. ‘They are never happy. Always complain, complain, complain – give me a bloody headache! After what happened it is hard to know who to trust any more. And Pang doesn’t know one hundred per cent if all the traitors have been caught … But we know we can trust
you
, Number Two Man. From the watch tower you can keep an eye on everything that goes on.’

Charles, forelock draped across his sweaty brow, was slumped in his chair, as if flattened by his enormous belly.

‘I think it’s a marvellous idea. A few late nights will do Christopher good,’ he said, as though I were a child. ‘It’s disturbing, the moronic hour he rises every day.’

Sergeant Abdullah nodded, in agreement with anything that would get me up in the watchtower.

I sighed. ‘How long do you need me for?’

After the sergeant went, I lingered on the veranda, but the pleasure of my last sips of beer and Johann Sebastian Bach was impaired by Charles’s saturnine remarks. Dark septic-feathered ravens wheeled overhead as Charles indulged his usual bleakness.

‘They disgust you, don’t they?’ he said. ‘The deceitful guards.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Don’t they disgust you?’

‘No. Every one of us is weak and capable of betrayal. To be disgusted by the guards is to be disgusted by one’s inner self. Nothing sickens us more than what we fear within.’

‘You shouldn’t tar everyone with the same brush as those lily-livered guards,’ I said. ‘I for one certainly won’t be negotiating with any bandits.’

‘How defensive you are, Christopher’ – Charles was smug, as if I’d played into his hands – ‘and how self-assured. Integrity is far easier in theory than in practice, you know.’

I lifted my bottle, draining the last of the yeasty foam. Charles had put me in the mood for the solitude of my hut. As I lowered the empty bottle I saw Police Lieutenant Spencer charging towards us, his pugnacious eyes screwed tight as monkeys’ arseholes, and
swarthy
sweat patches under his arms. The policeman clomped up the veranda steps, shooting Charles a hurt, cuckolded look. He smacked a mosquito imbibing the blood of his neck, and flared his nostrils in my general direction.

‘Gin sling, Percival?’ Charles called cheerily, though his face fell as Spencer stormed the bungalow as if to deal with a hostage-taking situation.

‘Oh, do be careful!’ he cried. ‘My beautiful record!’

There came a hideous warping as the gramophone needle gouged across the vinyl incarnation of Bach’s Suite No. 3 in D Major. Then a satisfied silence. Charles whimpered, and Spencer thudded back on to the veranda, jaw grinding, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, his skin pale and incandescent as candle wax. Spencer was a man tormented by the twin demons of jealousy and opium withdrawal – though I’d no idea of this at the time. Ignorant of his romance with Charles, I hadn’t an inkling that I was a cattle prod to the green-eyed monster living inside him. I thought he had a bee in his bonnet about the classical music.

‘Oh, do sit down, Percy!’ Charles said. ‘What the devil are you so uptight about? Christopher was just leaving.’

This was true: it had been my intention to leave. But it was bloody rude and presumptuous of Charles to voice it for me. I got up and said that Charles was quite right, and with much harrumphing Spencer sat in my chair and began rolling a fag. And off I went, not sorry to leave their company.

The ghost of Charles has since apologized for his bad manners. Of course, Charles’s motives were ulterior to the making of amends; the apology not an antihistamine to his bee-stung conscience (Charles’s conscience is alabaster, devoid of nerve endings), but a knife, prising the lid from a can of worms. He was sitting at the kitchen table at the time, my layabout grandson snoring in the next room. Charles had a napkin tucked in his collar, and was smiling as Winston Lau, the poker-faced chef, stooped over him, ladling rice porridge into his bowl.

‘Gosh, I am sorry for hurting your feelings that night. You went off in such an awful huff!’

‘No, I didn’t. I couldn’t have cared less.’

‘Oh, Christopher, there’s no need to pretend you weren’t upset. I assure you, it was nothing personal. It’s just that three’s a crowd. Especially when the third wheel is a boring puritan. Old Percival may have been the son of a Stepney chimney-sweep, but at least he knew how to have a good time. We got ourselves gloriously drunk, inhaled blue clouds of heaven into our lungs, and fucked and fucked and fucked until we were sick! While you were hunched at your desk, dipping pen nib in ink pot to transcribe your beloved dictionary, Spencer, the naughty snake-charmer, had his underwear round his ankles, ramming his seven inches into my hole. Oh, we were awash with semen and opiates – delirious with pleasure. Ever felt a man’s balls jiggling against your buttocks? Had your shit compacted by a good hard cock shunting against your entrails …?’

‘Certainly not,’ I said. ‘If you had such a wonderful time together, why don’t you go and find Spencer now?’

I sincerely hoped Charles would be hit by a pang of nostalgia for those orgiastic days of yore, and bugger off in search of the lieutenant. No such luck. Charles groped his belly, his pupils vanishing as the whites of his eyes rolled round.

‘Argghh … they got me … the ruddy Reds got me in the guts …’

The accent was more Antipodean than cockney, but Charles chuckled at his poor mimicry. He sipped a spoonful of rice gruel.

‘Hmmm … Winston! This porridge is sublime! You have really surpassed yourself. This is simply to die for!’

Charles’s brow furrowed as his teeth crunched. He plucked a chicken’s foot from his mouth. Winston’s ghost stood beside his sycophant of a master, reptilian and beady-eyed, cold-blooded as a snake.

‘Have I ever mentioned, Christopher, that our friend Winston here was a Communist? Oh, yes! Comrade Winston here was an important member of the village Min Yuen. But we didn’t let politics get in the way of our friendship, did we, Winston? Our friendship transcended petty politics. Comrade Winston here knows of the horrors I endured when the Japs had me imprisoned in Changi. Comrade Winston has seen me in my darkest hour. When I first arrived in The Village of Everlasting Peace days went by when I could do nothing but lie on my bed and dream of liberating thick spurts of blood from my wrists … Oh, come now,
Christopher
, don’t pull that ghastly face! Don’t tell me you’ve never had a touch of the doldrums before. Never ogled the knife drawer with the urge to slash your wrists to ribbons. Anyway, as I teetered at the edge of the abyss, Winston, bless him, made me a gift of some hashish. Deliciously potent stuff that made me dream the sweetest of dreams when smoked before beddy-byes. After that Winston brought me opium and a bamboo pipe to smoke it from; then a beginner’s dose of morphia, which he taught me to inject into my veins. Thanks to Winston I’ve sampled many delights in generous abundance.
Do you remember what a chaste dabbler I was to begin with, Winston?
Good old Winston, that sly fox, he upped the dosages …’

‘Winston Lau turned you into a drug addict!’

The silent angel of death hovered at Charles’s shoulder. Was that a faint smirk I saw on his lips? Surely not. Winston has too much self-control to smirk.

‘I can’t believe you’re so naive. Winston took advantage of you. He was the opposite of a friend. And besides, Charles, you committed suicide in the end. The drugs solved none of your problems.’

‘Oh, shush now!’ Charles flapped his hand dismissively. ‘There’s no need to be so damning. It was a mutually advantageous relationship and the opium served us both well. Communists are against such decadence as a rule, but Winston saw how my depravity could be used against me. As I soared with angels each night, Winston ransacked the office to update the Min Yuen on our administrative plans. A herd of rhinos
could’ve
stampeded through the bungalow and I’d have been none the wiser. But let’s not focus on the negative. Winston was a marvellous friend to me and I am grateful. And let us not forget his excellent culinary skills. The fiery curries of cunning! The dumplings of duplicity! Winston Lau was a loyal servant to the end, and never failed to replenish my veins. Not for decades have I endured the agony of sobriety …’

‘The agony of sobriety! You weren’t the only one the Japs had in the bag, you know. That’s no excuse for the wacky baccy and whatnot. You ought to have been stronger and got by without the drugs. You knew what Winston was up to. You were practically his accomplice. You were just as spineless and irresponsible as the sacked guards. You undermined every effort in the War against Communism. You … you …’

Charles grinned like a cheeky schoolboy. ‘Oh, Goldilocks …’ he sighed, ‘you’re so sexy when you get worked up.’

A quarter to midnight and my granddaughter not yet home. I keep vigil, an abandoned bride with a cheap veil of net curtain over her head, the windowpane a sheet of ice. As I gaze outwards, the dark appears to be in descent, like volcanic ash, mantling the estate below. I indulge a favourite pastime as I wait: rehearsing a telephone call to social services, to be made at a later, as of yet undecided, date.
Julia is becoming worse and worse … Twelve years old and already a tearaway … I am too old to cope … I want her off my hands
.

Imagination is the Devil. Fifty times an hour I hear the rattle of the front door, my granddaughter’s shoes on the mat. The devious shadows beyond the domes of street light metamorphose, assume the form of a twelve-year-old girl, before dissolving into shadow again. Before common sense has a chance to object, I unlatch the window, fling it far and wide, and throw my pyjamaed chest over the sill. The wind buffets the lacy curtains behind me, and I grip the ledge, arms rigid, knuckles white. Electrocuted bride.

‘
Julia Broughton!
’ I holler. ‘
Come home!
’

My plea sweeps over the quietude of the night, soars across the landscape of tower blocks.

Beside me Comrade Kok Sang is laughing. ‘Hah!’ he cries. ‘Your daughter has learnt of what a fiend you are. She is ashamed of her imperialist father. She has run away to join the fight to overcome the poverty of the masses. She is gone for ever and you have only yourself to blame!’

‘Granddaughter, not daughter,’ I correct. ‘My daughter is dead.’

The factory-made curtains flutter, billowing out like a majestic cape. The freezing cold sends a shudder through me, a peristalsis through my core. Comrade Kok Sang laughs a staccato
ha! ha! ha! ha!
comic-book-villain laugh, and I remember a humid night in the watch tower, not four nights after I’d begun night patrol. My rifle was aimed out of the watch tower at a bandit, a mere pygmy of a lad, wriggling under the perimeter fence. The bandit held a bundle of feathers, a
dead
chicken gripped by its wrung neck. The poultry rustler was in trouble, his shirt hooked on a barb of wire. As he struggled to free himself, the bloody-plumaged bird flapped about, brought back to life by its murderer’s panic. The boy was an easy target, a sitting duck, so foolishly close to the watch tower he needed ‘’
is ’ed seeing to
’ (as Lieutenant Spencer would say). And yet the carbine shook in my hands, the trigger slippery with the sweat of indecision.
Shoot him
, I commanded myself,
shoot his foot. One must shoot any bandit on sight
.

‘Why didn’t you shoot him?’ asked an incredulous Special Constable Ahmed when he came to relieve me from night duty.

‘Why the devil didn’t you shoot him?’ yawned a hungover Charles at breakfast.

‘Why didn’t you shoot him?’ scolded Sergeant Abdullah in the afternoon.

‘Why didn’t I shoot him?’ I lament as the clock strikes midnight, fifty years too late.

In the night sky above the Mountbatten estate hovers Comrade Kok Sang, a bright and ghostly constellation, eyes shining like celestial birthday candles.

‘Why didn’t you shoot me?’ He laughs. ‘Why didn’t you …?’

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