The Orientalist and the Ghost (41 page)

‘There’s a curfew!’ one of the policemen shouted. ‘Do you want to get killed? Go home!’

‘Please help me,’ Sally cried. ‘My friend’s trapped in a building near by …’

Sally looked around. Was she still in Chinatown? Which direction was the shophouse? She’d completely lost her bearings.

‘Your friend is lucky to be indoors.’

‘Please. We must help her. I think there were men in there. I think they’re hurting her …’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Delilah was supposed to wait inside. But she didn’t. She lied! She tricked me! If you come with me to Sultan Road I can show you the way from there. It’s …’

‘Where do you live?’ The eyes of the policeman bulged in frustration.

‘Jalan Perdana, Petaling Jaya.’

The policemen had a quick consultation in Malay. The policeman who’d shouted at Sally spoke into his radio transmitter, before speaking again to his colleague. Sally wanted to scream and beat her fists on the ground. They were wasting time. They had to help Frances.

‘You,’ said the policeman, ‘stop crying and get on the back of my bike.’

‘But Frances—’

‘Shut up about your friend. C’mon!’

‘Please!’ Sally
was
screaming now. ‘I can’t leave her!’

‘
Do you want to be left here to die?
’

The policeman’s eyes bulged and a blood vessel protruded in his temple. He yelled so hard that the word
die
came out ragged and hoarse. It was no good. The policemen wouldn’t help her. Sobbing, she climbed astride the back of the bike. She clung to the policeman, her eyes squeezed tight as they swerved off around the rubble in the road. She sobbed so hard that when he dropped her off in Petaling Jaya fifteen minutes later, the back of his uniform was soaking wet. Sally toppled off the bike, pulling down her hoicked-up skirt. She ignored the policeman as he warned her to stay indoors, and stumbled away from the motorbike without thanking him. The police bike revved up and sped back to the rioting city.

In the silence of the yard Sally’s ears buzzed in
memory
of gunfire. Trixie and Tinkerbell trotted up to her, tails wagging, sniffing furiously at the mysterious odours of civil unrest clinging to her clothes. Trixie licked her knee and the rough caress of her tongue set off a fresh wave of tears. But mid-sob Sally had a flash revelation. She’d make her father drive her back to Kuala Lumpur! Yes, that was it! Her father always did what was decent and right. He’d help her rescue Frances.

Sally dashed into the house, the door banging behind her.

‘Father! Father!’ she hollered.

No lights were on downstairs. Odd, thought Sally.
Why has Father given Safiah and Yok Ling the night off?
Spring-heeled, she bounded up the stairs, knocking her shin in a misstep in the dark. On the landing she held the banister, pausing to regain her breath as blood drooled to her ankle. As she stood there, Sally heard a low-pitched moaning coming from the master bedroom. She recognized the sound. Her father had made those same terrible groans of pain when he’d slipped a disc five years ago. Father had injured himself! Or worse, some men in black bandannas had broken into the house and attacked him. Damn those useless dogs! Sally flew to the bedroom and threw open the door.

‘Father!’ she cried.

Mr Hargreaves was not flat out on the bed as she’d expected. On the churned-up sheets was a creature of two heads, its eight limbs tangled up in a fierce,
writhing
knot of pleasure. The room stank like a rabbit hutch, though the windows were wide open. Two dark shapes sprang apart – one of them substantially larger than the other. Sally realized the larger one was her father.

‘Oh!’

She backed out of the room, trying to make sense of what she’d seen. The light clicked on and moments later Mr Hargreaves appeared in the bedroom doorway, tying the cord of his dressing gown. He was as puffed out as an out-of-practice trumpeter, a high colour in his cheeks. His sparse hair was like a halo of feathers that had drifted down upon his balding pate.

‘Petal!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought you were spending the night at Delilah Jones’s.’

Sally frowned at her shoes.

‘Oh, Petal, don’t get upset! I’m sorry that you had to find out this way, but it isn’t as sordid as it seems. Safiah and I are very much in love. In fact, we plan to marry. I know it must be upsetting for you, but Agnes has been dead for over sixteen years now and it’s about time I moved on. I want you to know that you’re still number one, Sally dearest. Do you hear me? You’re still number one! Oh, don’t cry, sweetie, don’t cry. You’ll be grown up soon and off to university. You don’t want me to be lonely, do you?’

Sally stared at her father’s hairy troll’s feet. The toenails were overgrown and needed clipping. He was very neglectful about things like that.

‘Petal? Are you OK? You’ve scraped your knee! And
your
elbow is bleeding. Shall I get Safiah to fetch some antiseptic to clean it up?’

At the sound of her name the servant girl appeared. She wore a bedsheet wrapped around her like a strapless evening gown, her tresses back-combed by Mr Hargreaves’s lust-crazed fingers into a wild lioness’s mane. Daughter’s and servant girl’s eyes met over Mr Hargreaves’s shoulder and Safiah smiled. If her stepmother-to-be had poked her tongue out, then Sally wouldn’t have been surprised. Safiah’s bedsheet slid down her breasts showing the nut-brown aureolae of her nipples. Sally glanced at her father and saw that his robe had come undone, the flabby mound of his belly mercifully overhanging the pubic thicket. Sally remembered the man in the doorway – the way he’d groped himself, eyes leering in the dark.

‘She can’t even speak English,’ Sally muttered.

‘Oh … darling.’

Mr Hargreaves reached out to stroke his daughter’s cheek. She shut her eyes.

‘I think I’m going to bed now.’

Sally went into her room and slammed the door.

During the days of rioting the city was consumed by pyromania. Hundreds of houses were fire-bombed, the streets becoming graveyards of charred chassis and exploded engines, carbonized seat springs and steering wheels. Army jeeps crashed through the defence barricades of Chinese neighbourhoods, soldiers shooting indiscriminately into the windows of shops and
homes
. The wounded lay in the streets, often yards from their families hiding indoors, listening to the cries of pain, too terrified to go and help. Every incarnation of blade flashed through the air, hacking human flesh and bone, the city an abattoir, the gutters flowing with blood. Men were beheaded, dismembered, and women raped, breasts crudely amputated, broken bottles thrust between their legs. In Kuala Lumpur General Hospital every basic necessity was exhausted: beds, surgical dressing, doctors, blood. The hospital morgue was so crowded that corpses dangled from ceiling hooks in plastic bags; were piled three deep on the floor – dead Malays on top of dead Sikhs, dead Chinese on dead Malays. Corpses in the street were doused in petrol and set alight. Corpses were dumped in shallow graves dug in gardens and public parks. Corpses thrown into the muddy Klang River drifted out of the city, a silent flotilla of the dead.

The phone line was engaged when Sally telephoned the Milnars, the switchboards jammed by an avalanche of calls. She crawled on to her bed in her shoes and smoky school uniform and lay shivering, her eyes wide open, for every time she closed them she saw her father and his teenage mistress, or the flames of a city plunged into hell. Later in the night she went downstairs to call Frances again, but got the engaged tone for every number she dialled. When she replaced the receiver she heard Safiah’s ceiling-muffled giggling and her father’s effeminate whinny of submission. She switched the
television
on and turned the volume up high. From the flickering dots of monochrome an apparition emerged. The Tengku. Thickly spectacled, black
songkok
on his silver hair. The Prime Minister (who was not to be Prime Minister for very much longer) was addressing the nation live on air, wiping away tears as he poured out his feelings. Democracy in Malaysia had failed. The Opposition parties were to blame. It was the fault of the Communists.

‘In this hour of need I pray to Allah to secure you against all dangers. At the same time you must look after yourselves. I will do all I can without fear to maintain peace in this country. God bless you all.’

Sally understood none of it. But like many others that night she wept with him, the disgraced Prime Minister an unlikely companion in her grief.

27

THE DOORBELL RANG
when he was on the brink of losing hope. She crossed the threshold of his flat, the missing days trailing like a shadow behind her.

Adam made her a mug of sugary tea, careful not to badger her with questions as she sat and drank. He saw the answers in her anyway: the nights sleeping in doorways and underpasses. She hadn’t washed in weeks and her hair, clasped in a rubber band, was filthy. Her eyes were the place where her estrangement was strongest, though. She’d grown used to her anonymity. Adam wanted to tell her her name, her date of birth. To show her photos of the child she used to be. Reacquaint her with touchstones of her identity – daughter of Frances and Jack; granddaughter of Christopher Milnar; pupil of Christchurch Comprehensive School 1995–1997 – inauspicious as they were.

Julia agreed to stay the night and Adam ran her a hot
bath
, pouring in Radox so the surface floated with snowy mountains of foam. She undressed in the living room, stripped to nakedness with no regard for the privacy of her body. Adam couldn’t believe anyone could be so thin. The shoulder blades jutting like plates of armour, the bony pelvic saddle, her pubic hair so sparse he could see the cleft of her, as though she were a child. Water sloshed as she lowered herself into the tub. As she lay steeping, Adam gathered up her clothes; grey T-shirt, denim jacket and jeans held together by seams of dirt. He emptied the drugs and wallet from her pockets before slinging everything in the washing machine, doubting the garments would withstand the spinning of the drum.

After half an hour Julia climbed out of the bath and, wrapped in a towel, wandered, soapy and dripping, into the living room. Adam brought her Mischa’s left-behind dressing gown, breathing her apple shampoo-scented hair as he helped her thread her arms through the sleeves. He heated a saucepan of tomato soup, ladled it into a bowl for her and watched her swallow a few mouthfuls to be polite. After the soup she asked for a clean tablespoon. She blackened the underside of the spoon with a disposable lighter flame, sucking her thumb that had been seared by the sparking mechanism. She touched a needle to the solution and slowly pulled the plunger so it drank it up. She handed the syringe to Adam.
I can’t
, he said.
I don’t know how
. Julia stood up and tied the cord of the dressing gown around her thigh. She lifted the hem of the
robe
above the crooks of her knees.
Just find a vein
. He knelt awkwardly, staring at the backs of her legs as she talked him through the mechanics of injecting, the syringe hovering by creases of skin, veins silted with deposits of lead. He found a passable vein lower down, tapped the barrel and squirted air from the needle tip. His hands shook as he spiked her, not sure if the needle had gone in too deep or not deep enough. He gave the plunger a slight tug, so a thin ribbon of blood shot up into the solution, then pressed down, aiming for a steady rate of depression. The needle slipped out when the barrel was three quarters empty, dribbling smack down her leg. He’d made a mess of it, but Julia said nothing. He pressed his thumb to the bauble of blood and Julia swayed slightly. She sat on the sofa and closed her eyes, content for the first time since she’d entered his flat.

Adam goes to meet Sally Hargreaves two weeks before Christmas. The city is in the midst of a cold snap, leaves stuck to the pavement by a glittering laminate of frost. Adam wants to buy a Christmas tree for the flat – a real one, that’ll shed pine needles and make a mess. But he doesn’t yet know if Julia will stick around for Christmas and he is afraid of tempting fate. As Adam counts the door numbers to Sally’s house he regrets accepting the invite. When she’d phoned the night before, Adam’s instinct was to decline, to defer meeting her to another time. But her tone was fraught and Adam sensed it had taken her courage to contact him – weeks of
deliberation
. He remembered the black-and-white photograph of the two schoolgirls in the Kuala Lumpur marketplace. He had not known his mother ever to have a friend.

Adam hesitates before ringing the bell. He hears a muffled voice somewhere inside the house –
Coming! Coming!
– then an avalanche of footsteps down the stairs. The door swings open to a heavyset woman nearly as tall as he is, blonde corkscrews springing around her head, bold purple dress dripping colour like feathers. When she sees him Sally Hargreaves forgets the etiquette of answering doors, the how-do-you-dos and so-good-of-you-to-comes. She forgets she is a woman of fifty-three and stares like a dumbstruck teenager. Adam clears his throat, cupped hand lifted to mouth, interrupting the beyond-the-grave reunion of teenage friends.