The Orientalist and the Ghost (35 page)

‘She’s gone mad!’ said Frances. ‘Who does she think she is?’

Another volley came in through the window and scattered, pinging over the floor. Sally stood to one side and Frances dived into the bathroom, from which came the sound of gushing water.

‘Oh my God!’ said Sally. ‘You aren’t …’

Water slopped over the rim of the bucket as Frances reentered the bedroom and marched to the window, stony-faced with intent. She heaved the bucket up to the ledge and flung out the contents with all the strength in her arms. An amorphous wave leapt through the air, momentarily liberated from gravity, before crashing down in the street.

Delilah screamed as though impaled by a bucket of knives. Everything clung to her: hair plastered to her scalp; black velvet dress sopping wet against the willowy length of her. She had the slippery look of a new-born calf, soaked in the amniotic fluids. Her collar-bones stuck out like angry blades, her ribs prominent as her chest heaved in fury. She seethed up at them, spitting with her eyes. Sally guessed that the water had sobered her up. Faces appeared in the upstairs window of the gambling house across the street. Delilah plucked at her evening dress, sodden against her thighs, as if she couldn’t believe her humiliation was real. In one ruthlessly efficient act
Frances
had reduced Delilah to a B-movie swamp creature. It couldn’t be done. Yet it had been.

‘If you dare come here again, I’ll chuck another bucket over you!’ threatened Frances.

She slammed the shutters, what became of Delilah on the street no longer her concern. Light from the bathroom slanted across the bedroom floor. The girls stared at each other, stunned by what had just happened. Then they dissolved into giggles, tension dissipating.

‘Did you see her face?’

‘She looked like she was going to explode!’

‘Like a human volcano …’

‘Has she gone? Quick, check!’

‘She’s gone!’

‘She must hate us! She’ll get us back at school.’

‘Who cares! It was worth it!’

They sat up in bed, too keyed-up to sleep, giggling and chatting away the hour before dawn. Sally listened as Frances’s breathing deepened into sleep, and awake alone she saddened. She knew the revival of intimacy would be gone when Frances woke to the new day and remembered her affections now lay elsewhere.

22

THE CROWD AT
King’s Cross is chaotic, a rummage sale of coats and scarves. Tides of commuters, minds elsewhere, navigate the crush of winter bodies on autopilot. Outside, traffic grinds, indicators flash, and the evening is cold and drizzly black.

Adam drifts along the edges, where the homeless huddle on the pavement, shaking coins in styrofoam cups. He is weary enough to drop down among them, to hide in the hood of his jacket and watch the march of rain-soaked shoes, the puddle splatters on the back of nylon tights. But he goes inside the station and stands by a ticket machine, staring through the smokescreen of commuters until the dealers emerge. Deals are negotiated with a flicker of eye contact, foil packets removed from the underside of tongues and slipped into open palms; tickets to oblivion exchanged for cash. A young junkie, a necrophiliac’s pin-up girl,
straggles
in dazed circles, a wanderer lost in the human forest. Adam is sure he’ll see Julia if he hangs about for long enough; that she will turn up,
like a bad penny
, as their grandfather used to say.

But he doesn’t see Julia. The person he sees is Mischa. Taller than most of the crowd, with his dark, scruffy mop of hair, the strap of his laptop case cutting across his leather jacket. Adam’s heart stutters as he shouts his name, for a moment overjoyed. (What are the chances! Here in the rush-hour stampede!) Then he sees Mischa’s reluctant smile and is hot with shame. Mischa swerves towards Adam, greets him with a hug. Adam asks how he is, and Mischa is an explosion of words: travels overseas, manic busyness, the strange quirks life has thrown up. He hasn’t changed, his mind scattered and bright. Adam shakes at his own selfishness. Why can’t he be happy that Mischa is happy? Instead his throat is clamped tight with the knowledge that he hasn’t been thought of in months. Everything that is awkward about Adam rises to the surface. When it’s his turn to speak he cannot think of a single thing to say. With nervous effort, he strings together maggoty sentences, as Mischa nods, politely overlooking the stammering errors of speech. He has to catch a train to Oxford and rushes away, suggesting they meet after his return. Adam leaves the station, Julia forgotten.

23

‘LEMME SEE YOUR
finger.’

‘No. Get lost.’

‘C’mon … give us a look …’

‘Adam,
no!
Get off me!’

The doctor had instructed that the finger be cleaned and disinfected three times a day. But after an evening of kisses and cuddles, strawberry ice cream and maternal repentance, Frances withdrew again to her room. Check-up appointment: forgotten; thrice-daily cleaning of the wound: forgotten. Julia swallowed the kidney-bean-sized painkillers morning, noon and night, but ignored the bandages, let the once sterile dressing get filthy and frayed. She developed a phobia of what lay beneath, of letting anyone touch her hand. Out of sight, out of mind, was her attitude. When Madame Tay chased her with antiseptic and a roll of lint, Julia fled downstairs to the fabric store and crawled
under
the cashier desk, from where she observed the beehived manageress smiling as her decades-old enemy waddled up and down Sultan Road calling Julia’s name. Frustrated, Madame Tay enlisted the help of Adam, who thoroughly enjoyed the sanctioned beating-up of his sister, toppling her to the floor in a flying tackle and sitting astride her chest as she screamed herself blue in the face. He pinned down her wrists as Madame Tay squatted and unwound the dirty bandages,
ai-ooo ai-oooing
as she tended to the pus-oozing stump. Julia screamed and kicked throughout the ordeal, her ribcage crushed by eight and a half stone of brother, her face, contorted by a deep irrational fear, twisted as far from the mutilated finger as her neck tendons would allow. When it was over Julia wept bitterly, stormed away from the scene of her violation, antiseptic wafting from the clean swaddling of bandages.

In the bedroom at night Adam rapped his knuckle against the bedstead.

‘Julia, Julia, hear that …?’ he’d whisper. ‘That’s the ghost of your finger, come back to haunt the bleeding stump …’

He kneaded grains of cooked rice into pellets and scattered them on Julia’s bedsheets so she yelped, disgusted, as they squidged against her thighs.
Yuck, what’s this?
she exclaimed. Adam said they were flesh-eating maggots, attracted by the rotting-meat stench of her hand. Julia chucked the rice maggots at her brother as he lay sniggering into his pillow.
Sicko
, she hissed.

Had they been in England Frances would have
spanked
Adam with a hairbrush for tormenting his sister. But they weren’t in England, and Frances rarely saw her children, as she rarely left her room. She began sleeping in an old nightie from her adolescence, dug out of her chest of drawers, the once virginal white cotton faded to the colour of dead grass. The bodice flattened her breasts and the collar of lace ruffles choked her neck. Dark patches of sweat blossomed under the arms and the garment was irresistible to stains. But Frances was as attached to the nightie as Julia to her bandages.

One morning, a week after the accident, Adam stumbled, yawning, into the hallway bathroom and saw the sink was clogged with black stuff – as if the plughole had coughed something nasty out of its depths. The substance looked tarry, like the residue from a smoker’s lung, but when Adam touched his fingers to it he felt the dry and splintery texture of chopped hair. Cut tresses wreathed the dais of the wash basin and were strewn across the tiled floor. On the toilet-seat lid was a knife – one of Madame Tay’s vegetable-chopping knives, dark wisps feathering the blade. Adam grabbed the wooden handle and went in search of his mother.

Frances was at the breakfast table, drinking a glass of soya-bean milk. Her once shoulder-length hair was shorn to a spiky mutilated inch, with a few neglected strands dangling at the back and the shoulders of her decrepit nightgown sprinkled with sawn-off tufts. Madame Tay was scooping the black caviar of seeds out
of
a halved papaya, and Julia munched on a banana, staring at her mother’s hair. Adam laid on the table the weapon Frances had used to massacre her locks, thinking it a miracle she hadn’t scalped herself.

‘You look really stupid,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you use scissors like a normal person?’

‘It’ll look nicer once you’ve trimmed the sticky-out bits,’ reassured Julia. ‘I’ll do it for you if you like.’

Madame Tay slid the plate of papaya over to Frances. Frances lifted a slice with her fingers, sank her teeth into the succulent orange flesh and stared through her son as if he wasn’t there.

‘You’ve made a mess of the bathroom. There’s hair everywhere!’ he said. ‘You should clean up after yourself!’

There were echoes of Frances’s
Change your socks! Eat your broccoli! Don’t put that chewing-gum behind your ear!
in his voice, and this depressed Adam. He was only fourteen. Whether Frances noticed that he’d inherited her nagging streak he couldn’t tell. But true to the reversal of roles, she ignored him.

Later that morning, while Frances was brushing her teeth, Adam sneaked into her bedroom and stole her hand-luggage bag. He and Julia unzipped the holdall and shook out the contents on to the floor of their grandfather’s study. There was a purse with no money or credit cards in it, tampons, lip salve, cherry Strepsils, money-off coupons for Daz Ultra and Weetabix, and some headphones stolen off the plane. No passports and no return tickets. They checked every compartment twice.

‘I reckon we should go to the British Embassy,’ said Adam, crunching a Strepsil lozenge, mouth a-swim with cherry-flavoured saliva. ‘Say our mum’s gone schizo and kidnapped us. They’ll give us free tickets back to London.’

‘She hasn’t gone schizo, Adam.’

‘Yeah, she has. Why d’you think she chopped off her hair? The voices told her to do it. I think we should go to the police.’

‘No way. They’ll arrest her.’

‘She deserves to be arrested.’

‘No, she doesn’t!’

‘Look what she did to your finger.’

‘She didn’t do it on purpose. Maybe she’ll get better soon. Maybe Madame Tay can help us …’

‘You must be joking! Madame Tay
likes
it that she’s gone crazy. She wants Mum to stay here
for ever
. We have to tell someone what’s going on.’

‘Oh, please, Adam, not yet. There must be something else we can do.’

‘Like what …?’

Julia told Adam her idea, and Adam told Julia it was stupid and would never work. He refused to participate. At noon they played blackjack as they waited for Madame Tay to serve lunch. Frances sleepwalked into the room and sank, yawning, into a chair, her face puffy and seamed with pillow creases. Adam could see the cloudiness in her eyes, the veil suspended between her and reality. Frances was punch-drunk, her brain soupy in the tropical heat. She’d sit through the meal as if she
were
dreaming it. Adam wished his sister luck. Madame Tay came down from the kitchen with a tray of skewered grilled chicken and a dish of peanut sauce. Satay was Julia’s favourite food. It was as if Madame Tay’s telepathic powers had rumbled Julia’s plan, then shown her how best to sabotage them. As her mother and brother each plucked a kebab from the tray Julia stood up.

‘I’m not eating,’ she announced. ‘I’m on hunger strike.’

Frances dipped her chicken in the peanut sauce and twisted the skewer to coat the charred meat.

‘Did you hear me? I said I’m on hunger strike,’ Julia repeated. ‘I’m not eating until you take us back to England.’

Frances regarded her daughter through the tired holes of her eyes. She chewed and chewed and chewed, then swallowed.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Starve yourself, then.’

‘I will!’

Julia stomped and slammed out of the room.

After lunch Adam found her sitting on her bed, in optimistic spirits, despite the lacklustre reception of Operation Hunger Strike.