The Orientalist and the Ghost (23 page)

‘SEE HOW HE
shakes with demons. They do not grant him a moment’s peace,’ whispered Marina Tolbin, the hawk-visaged missionary.

‘The heathen embraces them,’ observed Blanche, best friend of Marina and arch rival in the battle of the sanctimonious. ‘He is a willing host. We have no choice but to perform the rites.’

‘But he does not want the demons expelled. He has grown fond of them and will resist.’

‘True. But we must do our duty. He killed our Humphrey, and next time he might kill a village child.’

Gimlet-eyed and pendulous of jowls, the witches’ coven of two watched me from the living-room doorway. Two battleships in flowery frocks, Blanche’s steel-grey bun imperious on her head, and Marina gorgonesque as ever, her mere propinquity to a mirror enough to crack it.

I was hunched on the edge of my fold-out bed, shivering like an alcoholic in the latter stages of cold turkey. My dentures chattered like a wind-up toy and my hands were suspended midair, as if by invisible strings, twitched by a wicked puppeteer. They are occurring more and more frequently, these shaking fits. I ought to arrange a check-up, but I’ve never cared much for doctors (especially that condescending pill-pusher Dr Chopra). I wanted to tell the missionaries that I hadn’t murdered Humphrey, but I knew my voice would not be steady enough. As I shook, the Sisters Grimm continued to whisper and err, misinterpreting my affliction as Unholy Tenure. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the shaking stopped.

‘Whatever gave you the idea that I killed Humphrey? I can’t even stomach rare steak, let alone decapitate a dog. I dare say the culprit was a bandit, or a Buddhist, fed up with all your baptisms. Or maybe the gambling, opium-eating husband of Mrs Ho …’

The missionaries took no notice of these sensible suggestions. They were convinced it was me and that was that.

‘Ooh, to hear him speak! He is the mouthpiece of Satan!’

‘Beelzebub, master of demons commands his tongue! Let us be upon him.’

They left the doorway, proceeding towards me, the sacrificial victim, defenceless in my flannel pyjamas.

‘The Lord Jesus rebuke you, the Lord rebuke you. In
the
name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk!’ cried Blanche.

Though I’d intended to ignore the silly exorcism, the strangest thing happened. The words of the scripture literally stung my skin, as though I were being rubbed in nettles. I confess I ‘freaked out’ (as Julia would say). Snarling, I lashed out at the missionaries, swinging my arms as if fending off a swarm of killer bees.

‘Bugger off, you vile witches!’ I screamed. ‘You evil crones! Out of my flat! Who said you could come here?’

Marina plucked a vial of holy water out of thin air. She sprinkled a few drops on my forehead, where it hissed and sizzled like hydrochloric acid.

Blanche Mallard, holding the Bible out before her like a shield, intoned: ‘The Lord rebuke thee! O demons, be gone from this man for we go by the commands of God.’

I howled profanities and gouged my cheeks in despair. What had come over me? Perhaps there was a demon or two knocking about inside me after all.

‘O heathen, be strong in the name of the Lord and the power of His might,’ she droned on.

I threw a blanket over my head and hid in the scratchy-wool darkness. The God-botherers broke into a chant, and I writhed under my bedspread, fingers plugged in ears, until I could take it no more.

Determined to scare the missionaries off for good, I threw off my blanket with an almighty roar. A volcano-like venting of fury. And it worked. When I looked
around
me the exorcists were gone and Adam was hovering by the sideboard. As usual the boy was an anaemic, acne-pustuled fright to behold. But aesthetic cruelty of adolescence aside, there was something different about him. It took me a moment to work out what it was. Adam was afraid.

‘Oh, I do apologize, Adam. Honestly, these fits will be the death of me. But as you can see I am quite all right now.’

I stood up in demonstration of my mental and physical well-being, sinews of shame quivering in my legs. The teenager retreated from the living room with cautious backward steps, wary that the beast in flannel pyjamas might pounce upon his vulnerable back.

The bedroom door slammed and I hung my head. And pleased by the deteriorating relations between my grandson and me, my demons gurgled contentedly within.

The watch tower was in the south of The Village of Everlasting Peace, a garret held aloft by rickety twenty-foot-high stilts, yards from the border fence. The tower was roofed by a thatch of palm leaves and widely fenestrated on every side. A ladder, many of its rungs loose or gone astray, reached up to a trapdoor in its floor. The garret, though comprised mostly of windows, was dark and stiflingly hot. The whiff of urine made me think of an aerial latrine.

The afternoon before my first shift Special Constable Ahmed gave me a guided tour. Ahmed and I were the
same
age, but he was already husband to three wives and father to eight children (a feat sanctioned by the polygamous laws of Islam). Though these complex domestic circumstances seemed demanding of a beyond-his-years wisdom and maturity, Special Constable Ahmed was exceptionally juvenile, laughing and farting loudly as he climbed the watch-tower ladder a few rungs ahead of me. Up in the garret I commented on the odour of urine. Ahmed jabbed a finger at a jar in the corner, containing a liquid the colour of bouillon stock.

‘Special Constable Ibrahim’s wee-wee,’ he said. ‘He thought it was wrong to wee out of the window. You can throw it away if you want. He’s gone now. He won’t mind.’

‘How could Ibrahim think it wrong to urinate out of the window, but OK to let bandits into the village?’ I mused. ‘Where’s the moral consistency in that?’

Ahmed shrugged. He pointed to various objects in the room.

‘That is the bell you ring if you see a bandit,’ he said. ‘There are the binoculars … torch … prayer mat …’

My attention strayed to the magnificent view. From our lofty perch the rubbish pyres, stagnant ditches and sullen humanity shrank to insignificance, and the Midas touch of sun on the quarter mile of corrugated-iron rooftops transformed our shantyland into a city of silver. For the first time ever, I thought The Village of Everlasting Peace was beautiful. The opposite view was of the rainforest, stretching for miles and miles, lush and green and many fathoms deep. The canopy was
thickset
and fertile, giving the impression it would spring like moss as I strolled over it, among the frolicking birds of paradise, to the other side of the hills. I leant over the splintered, rough-hewn ledge and breathed a deep breath, inhaling nature at her most exhibitionistic, almost tasting the sap of the hundred thousand trees. In the vastness of the jungle one sensed the presence of the Creator (a feeling this infidel of an Englishman associates more closely with the animist beliefs of the indigenous people than with some bearded chap in the sky). Seeing my reverence, Special Constable Ahmed came and stood by me, sweeping an outspread hand along the scenery, as if conducting an orchestra in slow motion. His fingertips brushed the horizon, where the emerald green of the rainforest met the sky.

‘Bandit country,’ he said. ‘The jungle, not the people, is the Communists’ number one comrade. If there was no jungle to hide the Communists there would be no Emergency. When you see a bandit crawling out of the jungle, you must shoot him …’ Special Constable Ahmed shaped his hand into an imaginary gun and fired it at a skin-and-ribcage dog sniffing at the fence. ‘
Bang, bang, bang!
You see? And if you see any villagers out after curfew, you must shoot them too …’ The Special Constable spun 180 degrees to the village and fired the gun at some chin-wagging old women who were queuing at the standpipe, oblivious of the imaginary bullets speeding towards them. ‘
Bang, bang, bang!
You see? Easy. You’ll like it up here. It’s nice and quiet. The best place in the village.’

‘If this is the “best place in the village”, then how come all the guards have refused to come up here?’ I asked.

‘Refused?’

‘Sergeant Abdullah came to me as a last resort, didn’t he? No one else wants to work here at night. Why?’

Ahmed laughed, nuggets of gold glittering in his back teeth. ‘The other guards are scared. The
hantu
– ghosts – come out of the jungle and visit this watch-tower.’

It was then my turn to laugh. ‘Ah ha, I see. Has anyone actually seen these ghosts?’

‘I have. Ibrahim has. Many people have.’

‘What do they look like?’

‘The same as us, only dead.’

‘How very scary! So how come
you
can stand to be up here and not the other guards? You must be made of pretty stern stuff.’

Ahmed nodded. ‘The
hantu
come to me and I tell them: “You are scary, but not as scary as my wives when they need money to go to market!” ’

‘And what do you suggest that I say when the
hantu
come to me?’

Special Constable Ahmed stared at the jungle, considering what would be appropriate for me to say when encountering the spirit world. ‘They won’t come to you,’ he decided. ‘You are an Englishman. They leave foreigners alone.’

At twilight I climbed the scantily runged ladder to commence my shift in the watchtower. I took up with
me
a flask of tea and a tiffin-carrier of ham and Dijon mustard sandwiches prepared by Winston Lau (the opium-mongering chef had given a rare gem of a smile as he handed me the tiffin-carrier, tickled by the thought of desecrating the Muslim-frequented watchtower with sacrilegious meat). Before I could settle in to my new quarters, though, I had to get rid of Special Constable Ibrahim’s piss-pot, which sloshing jar I carried down the ladder with much disgust. After a good hand-scrub with carbolic soap at the standpipe, I returned to the garret.

I’d expected the vigilant demands of lookout duty to keep me occupied, but the novelty of scanning the jungle scrublands with my binoculars quickly wore off. An hour into my shift I was so bored I wished for the jungle ghosts to change their opinion of Englishmen and come and keep me company (never has the adage
Be careful what you wish for
rung so true!). The night became treacly black and I lit some citronella incense, though the malaria-tainted drinkers of blood and kamikaze moths were undeterred. The night patrol trooped by and I hailed them from my lookout, hoping to engage them in some boredom-alleviating banter. But the exhaustion of an eighteen-hour shift had fleeced them of good humour, and only one or two of them gave me an apathetic wave. Before midnight I got caught short and discovered the illicit pleasure of pissing far and wide out of the window. How satisfying to fire a golden cannonade into the night and hear it patter on the ground twenty feet below! But other than
the
thrill of spending a penny (and I sweat so much in the heat I rarely had the chance to), night-watchman’s duty had few perks and I was driven near insane with nothing to do. When Special Constable Ahmed came at two o’clock from his bar-tending job at the Jalang Club, I damn near hugged him I was so relieved.

The following night I stocked the watchtower with ammunition for the war against tedium: playing cards, a solitaire board and a bag of marbles, Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu
, a Chinese dictionary, a sheaf of paper, a calligraphy brush and a pot of ink. Thus occupied, I found the clock hands shook off their lassitude and resumed a normal pace. However, on my fourth night up in the watchtower I was so immersed in my calligraphy I almost missed Comrade Terrorist Kok Sang of the 10th Independent Regiment wriggling under the fence with a garrotted chicken in his thieving clutches (of course, Comrade Kok Sang was just an anonymous bandit to me then, having only introduced himself posthumously). By the time I’d swapped my calligraphy brush for a rifle and dithered long and hard about whether to shoot, he had leapt into the leafy armour of the jungle. I hadn’t even rung the bell.

I left the watchtower at two a.m., the night hyperactive with cries and croaks and the high-frequency vibrations of the natural world, my embarrassing gaffe at the forefront of my mind. The lights of the officers’ bungalow were blazing and a faint ivory tinkle could be heard – Charles and Lieutenant Spencer still up and no
doubt
tight as bastards. I identified the piano music as Liszt’s Ballad, a favourite of mine, and halted in the moonlight, the melody stirring my senses into an agreeable melancholia. The last time I’d heard the nocturne I’d been sitting on the veranda steps at dusk, striking matches, one after the other, and watching them blacken and shrivel in the heat of a bright orange flame. I was suffering from a bout of homesickness, or, rather, the sickness of unbelonging – of living in the village drowning in bad blood. The music suited my mood. My private thoughts were interrupted, however, by Charles’s heavy tread on the wooden boards behind me. Charles can sniff out sadness like a bloodhound a fox.

‘Music such as this provides sanctuary for the soul,’ he murmured, ‘provides companionship in sorrow and dignifies self-pity. It burns with indignation on behalf of the listener and all the petty injustices he has endured …’

Oh, the black raven doth soar! In a few words Charles had stripped the music of its transcendence and made me feel rather foolish to boot. I saw the lights of the bungalow go out and I wondered if Spencer was under the Resettlement Officer Dulwich’s joyless tutelage, adopting the manifesto of sadness as his own.

Guided by torchlight I trudged on, crossing a footbridge on the brink of collapse, and passing a large pyramid of sawn-off lead pipes left behind by the Public Works Department, toads ribbiting in the pipe-tunnel mouths. Passing the officers’ bathing hut, I
heard
a noise. A snuffling, scuffling noise, as if someone was dragging a corpse around while breathing heavily through a gas mask. Then there came a thwack and an enormous splash as the water barrel overturned. As the hour was too late for bathing, my mind immediately turned to bandits. I’d once transcribed an MCP advisory pamphlet on personal hygiene, with passages on the importance of regular washing, shaving and teeth-cleaning for Communist morale. Perhaps guerrillas were raiding the bathing hut for toothpaste, razors and soap. The noise was rather loud and indiscreet for thieves, though, and I considered it might be some jungle animal – perhaps a trapped porcupine, thrashing about in frustration. Nervous of encountering a bandit’s flashing blade or the sharp quills of a rampaging porcupine, I went round the back of the bathing hut and banged on the wall.