The Orientalist and the Ghost (25 page)

I often forget that common-sense logic is irrelevant in the topsy-turvy realm of the dead.

‘Of course I recognized her,’ Charles said impatiently. ‘She has her mother’s scheming slitty eyes.’

‘What did she say?’

‘I spoke to her first. I said: “Your father won’t approve of you smoking, young lady.” ’

‘And she said?’

‘She was foul-spoken as a drunken sailor on shore leave. She told me to fuck off and mind my own business, because her father was
dead
!’

‘No,’ I protested limply.

‘Yes!’ Charles was saucer-eyed in faux-astonishment. ‘Seventeen years old and swearing like a trooper! What kind of school have you sent her to, Christopher? A finishing school for scrubbers and fishwives? You should demand your fees refunded. I said to her: “You cheeky cow! Your father is not dead, but living a life of impoverished misery on a council estate in east London with your bastard son and feral slut daughter …” “He’s not my father!” quoth she, a patricidal rage in her eyes. “He is a liar, a murderer and a Foreign Devil!” Then she stubbed her cigar out on the wall and left the room.’

Oh, those terrible teens! Frances was a delightful child, who liked nothing better than to sit on Daddy’s
lap
and listen to Orang Asli folk tales, but as soon as she hit puberty she became a stranger. I remember the brooding silences that stretched for weeks on end, her secret world of Chinese whispers with Madame Tay. Her cold shoulder, her eyes a perpetual roll of contempt. Sometimes I’d forget, reach out and pat her head as our paths crossed in the hall. Only to be reminded of the status quo by a shudder of repulsion that tore my heart in two. My child rejected me and my pitiful stabs at affection. Avoiding her lessened the pain, so I kept to my study. I kept myself aloof.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Charles, ‘whatever did you do to make your daughter hate you so?’

And leaving that knife twist of a question lingering in the air, Resettlement Officer Dulwich vanished from the fireplace in a clichéd puff of smoke.

Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to reverse the chronology of blunders. But time moves stubbornly forwards, distancing me from my crimes, yet bringing them closer, to greater prominence in my mind. My darling Frances. If only I could atone for what I have done. But you never gave me the chance.

I stowed the letter in my trouser pocket, reading it in spare moments throughout the day, sneaking it out like an alcoholic with a secret hip flask. I pored over the letter while supervising a bare-chested volunteer team, machetes hacking at undergrowth that had sprung up overnight (as if the Communists had scattered magic beans by the fence). I shuffled the pages in the
bungalow
while Charles had his afternoon siesta, snoring like a wildebeest in his rattan chair. By dusk the letter was worn from handling – from my habit of furrowing the pages between finger and thumb, so they puckered with crow’s feet and furled at the edges (and now, after many decades, the document is soft as suede, the ink faded, and each page in quarters, detached along the folds).

That evening the letter accompanied me to the watch tower – garret of light adrift in the sea of night – to be read in the paraffin-lamp haze, my shirt clinging like damp papier mâché to my back. Over the years I have memorized every sentence, and do not have to retrieve the letter from its shoebox in the hallway cupboard to see the script that blossomed from the fountain pen. Every word echoes in the authorial voice, sombre with the dark annals of history. The years have not lessened its impact.

Christopher
,

My sincere condolences over the failure of the village meeting. I want you to know the meeting was destined to fail. Earlier that day bandits waylaid the tappers at the Bishop’s Head plantation as they carried their pails of latex to be weighed at noon. The People Inside ushered them to a clearing and warned them of the consequences should anyone cooperate with the plans for the village council, slitting the throat of a dog in demonstration of what they would do. Why Timmy Lo did not heed these warnings I do not know. But he is now dead
.

I write to you, Christopher, because it is barely six o’clock in the morning and already rumours of you and the Lim sisters are flying about the village. I write to you because I do not want to involve the police in this matter. Before I discuss last night’s imprudent actions, however, I want to address a conversation I overheard between you and Evangeline Lim in the police hut, on the night of 12 September. No doubt you are aware that I overheard you both. Perhaps you are wondering why I did not report you …

Detective Pang made me feel like an ant scurrying about beneath a magnifying glass. When one considers this goose-pimply sensation of being under surveillance, what happened next that night seems downright absurd. However, the birth of love is often coupled with the demise of reason. And as I hover in the shadows, watching over my younger self, I can pinpoint the very beginning of the demise. It began with the creak of wood.

The creak came from a ladder rung. The noise startled, but did not alarm me, as no bandit would be stupid enough to climb up to the watch tower, and I assumed it was a guard or policeman too lazy to announce himself. I peered through the open trapdoor at the shadowy figure ascending in the darkness. ‘Who is it?’ I called. ‘It’s me,’ came the reply, and I remember how my heart sank and lifted at the same time.

Evangeline surfaced, levering her body through the trapdoor on arms so thin I feared they’d snap. She
clambered
on her knees, then to her feet. She gazed at me, self-consciously running her fingers through her cropped hair. I thought of my resolution to have nothing more to do with her. I thought of the letter and how incessantly she’d been on my mind since I’d read it. I knew then I had no hope of keeping my resolution, less than eighteen hours old. Evangeline was fated to enter my life, with or without my consent.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘Why not just turn yourself in to the village police and be done with it! And where is Grace? Run away again, I suppose.’

‘Grace is with the Jesus People tonight,’ said Evangeline.

Evangeline’s trespassing into the watch tower evoked the memory of a long-forgotten childhood sweetheart, the stubborn, freckled and marmalade-pigtailed Myfannwy Price, who braved verbal abuse and the pelting of apple cores to climb up to my tree-house and declare her true love. The past was recurring, though in its repetition my heroine was decades older and dressed not in knee-high socks and gingham party frock, but a worn cotton smock ready for recycling as dishcloths. My eight-and-a-half-year-old Princess of Pembroke-shire had come back to me as an eccentric Queen of the Orient, the freckled beauty of yore reincarnated with craggy eyes and a thin and down-turned mouth. The paraffin lamp cast my beloved in an unflattering light, darkening the mauvish bruises under her eyes, deepening the time-furrowed wrinkles. But if I could go back I would change none of it. I would have Evangeline
before
me again in all her haggard glory. I would not have it any other way.

‘Look, I don’t want to lose my job over this,’ I said. ‘Go back to your hut or I’ll call the guards.’

Evangeline was deaf to my empty threat. ‘Did the way I beat my sister last night disgust you? Did it sicken you?’

‘I was unimpressed, to say the least. And I’m even less impressed by your compromising me – for the third time no less! – by violating Emergency regulations to sneak up here.’

‘I went to the Jesus People today and told them that I cannot cope with Grace any more. I told them of the bad feelings I have towards her. They said they would take her for the night, to give me time alone to read the Bible and find God. The Jesus People say that once I have found Him I will learn to love my duty to Grace. But I have been reading and reading, Christopher …’ she laughed bitterly, ‘and He is nowhere to be found.’

‘Well, you certainly won’t find Him up in this watchtower,’ I said. ‘Though, I dare say, if you continue to sneak about the village after curfew, the guards will pump you full of lead and then you’ll make his acquaintance in Kingdom Come.’

Evangeline was unflinching at the prospect of being gunned down by the Security Forces. Her forehead shimmered in the heat and her eyes blazed like someone in the grip of an
idée fixe
.

‘They tell me God will cure me of my resentment,’ she said, ‘but it is getting worse and worse. I have to do
everything
for Grace. Every day I wash and dress and feed her. I cannot leave her unattended for a second, or she will wander into people’s homes and make a mess and steal their food. I have constantly to keep her away from the men who think her body is the property of the masses. Grace will always be a child. She will never grow up and live apart from me. I told the Jesus People that sometimes when I hear her breathing next to me in the night I wish for it to stop. I think how easy it would be to put a pillow over her head. They told me God will save me, God will give me strength, but …’

I bit my tongue. Evangeline was on the verge of tears and experience had taught me a few sympathetic words would be enough to trigger the deluge. Call me coldhearted, but if there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a weeping woman. From age eleven onwards I’ve had the good sense to recoil from this childish medium of self-expression. Yet all the women I’ve known turn on the sprinklers with shameless abandon – well into old age! After all Evangeline had survived during the war, I was shocked that the mundane burden of caring for her sister threatened to bring her down. The Village of Everlasting Peace was overrun with downtrodden humanity and the Lim sisters were no worse off than anyone else.

‘I appreciate it must be hard taking care of your sister,’ I said, ‘but you really have to pull yourself together, Evangeline. Everyone in this village has a tough life of it. There are women with a tribe of little ’uns to look after and no husband to help them because
he’s
buggered off into the jungle to join the People Inside.’

I’d hoped to lessen Evangeline’s self-pity by reminding her of the hardships of others. But this only stoked the embers of her rage.

‘What do you know, Christopher? What do you know of our lives! I have seen how tough
your
life is, you and your fat alcoholic friend gorging yourselves on roast duck and listening to music on your veranda …’

Her arrogance was breathtaking. Who was she to accuse me of leading a life of privilege? Evangeline had violated several Emergency regulations to come and harangue me in the watch tower and yet had the audacity to behave as though she were in the right.

‘Do you honestly think I am living it up here in this village? I work damn hard – for sixteen hours a day or more, mucking in wherever I can. I even live in a wooden hut just like the rest of you.’

‘But you are not like the rest of us. You can walk in and out of the gates when you want. Go wherever you want at any time of day or night. You are so proud of yourself! You think yourself so moral and worthy to be here, to be friendly to the natives, but you are just a tourist.’

‘Really? A tourist? And what kind of holiday destination is The Village of Everlasting Peace? Do you honestly think I have come here for pleasure? To see the sights?’ I was spitting with rage, a baptism of salivary flecks. ‘What do you want me to do? Relinquish my British citizenship and become a bloody rubber tapper?’

‘I want you to make me feel alive again.’

I stifled a nervous laugh, the statement of desire immediately changing the atmosphere from one of conflict to aching uncertainty. Evangeline’s gaze was riveted to mine, her pupils engorged by the stimuli of darkness, challenging me to look away. I felt as gawky as a schoolboy to whom women are a species apart. Self-conscious of everything, from the epiglottal slam as I swallowed, to my bony, oversized wrists dangling at my sides. My breathing was laboured, the thudding valves of my heart loud as galloping hoofs. The chasm between two statues standing apart to the intimacy that Evangeline had insinuated seemed too wide, too perilous, to leap. Though Evangeline had spoken her desire, her body language was that of a fortress dense with invisible thorns. Where was the permissive pout? The seductive quirk of the eyebrow and the coquetry that made the transition to romance a thing of ease?

I had begun to wonder if I had misinterpreted her meaning, when, in a fever of doubt, Evangeline said: ‘What is wrong? Am I too old?’

‘No, no,’ I said, shaking my head.

I closed the distance between us in a stride. Too shy to look Evangeline in the eyes I reached for her hand. I lifted it, cradling it in both of mine. I caressed her palm with my thumb, tracing the fate, life and heart lines, stroking her fingers, each crease of joint, up to the seamstress calluses that sat roughly on her fingertips. I bowed my head, pressed my lips to her palm. Then
I
kissed her mouth and I still remember the softness of her lips, and my relief that we had begun.

Like you, Christopher, I am aware that the police are often too quick to send villagers to detention camps without sufficient evidence, and I wanted to investigate the background of Evangeline Lim before deciding whether to report the incident. The findings of the investigation are as follows:

The Lim sisters are orphans. During the Occupation their parents were murdered by the Japanese – their throats slit because of rumours that their father, a furniture-shop owner, belonged to a secret society that raised funds for the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army. There is no record of Mr Lim having been a member of any secret society and it is likely the rumours were fabricated by the Kempeitai informers, for reasons unknown
.

After the murder of their parents both sisters were forced to work in a comfort house for Japanese soldiers. They were enslaved there for a year or more, but a few months before the end of the war they managed to escape. They fled from Kajang to the jungle, to the Chinese squatter camp of Jing Jang, to live with their maternal grandmother, Old Mother Wu
.