The Orientalist and the Ghost (42 page)

‘Sorry!’ Sally exclaims, gaze returning to the here and now, the bright spots of her cheeks brightening. ‘Sorry! How rude of me! You must be Adam. Do come in …’

They smile shyly at each other and shake hands.

In the living room Sally is garrulous with nerves. Had he had any difficulties finding the house? Did he want to take his jacket off? Something to drink? Earl Grey or fruit tea? Rosehip or camomile? Adam reacts to her overbearing chatter with reticence, a knee-jerk shyness that cannot be overcome. This makes Sally even more nervous and forced in her earthy prattling. And so it goes, in ever decreasing circles; an awful pair, incompatible even in their social awkwardness.

After the flurry of tea-making Sally settles in an
armchair
. Wind chimes tinkle outside and under the table the tortoiseshell cat, warm-blooded and muscular, rubs against Adam’s denim-clad leg. Though the sky is overcast and the room quite dark, Sally makes no move to switch on a lamp. She tells Adam of the day she and Frances met, his mother rattling a stick along the railings, tormenting her dogs. How Frances got in trouble with Mr Milnar for stealing little pink cakes from the Kuan Ti shrine. Sally chuckles to recall what lazy and stubborn pupils they were. How had the teachers put up with them? Elsewhere in the house pipes clank, the radiators blasting out heat. Sally wonders if she is boring the boy as she witters on. Tears suddenly spring to her eyes. The boy notices, lays a hand on her wrist.
Are you OK?
he asks. For months Sally has been famished of human touch, but the boy’s hand only makes the hunger worse.
Pathetic
, she thinks,
I am pathetic
.

‘Your mother,’ she tells him, ashamed of her tremulous voice, ‘was such a beautiful, vivacious and forthright child …’

Mr Milnar went to see Sally in Jalan Perdana one evening in June after the O-level examinations. When Sally saw the Morris Minor pulling up outside the gate she nearly fled, afraid the truth had come out about the night of the thirteenth. But Mr Milnar hadn’t come because of that. He’d come because Frances had run away three nights before. Packed a rucksack of clothes and left. He asked Sally if she knew where Frances was,
and
Sally had said she didn’t. Mr Milnar stared at Sally in a very penetrating way. A little too penetrating for Mr Hargreaves’s liking. He asked Mr Milnar if he’d considered the possibility that Frances had run off with the maths teacher.

‘It’s unlikely,’ Mr Milnar had snapped, ‘since the maths teacher is still locked up in jail.’

Safiah came and served them tea before squatting, impish and giggling, in the corner of the room. Meekly, Sally asked Mr Milnar if Frances had been OK on the night of the rioting.

‘She stayed in her room,’ he said. ‘I wanted us to evacuate to Merdeka Stadium but she locked the door and refused to come out.’

Leaving his tea to cool, Mr Milnar continued to interrogate Sally, who blushed and stammered and swore her ignorance. Mr Milnar then changed tack and begged Sally to let him know if she heard from Frances – a plea he would have repeated ad infinitum if Mr Hargreaves hadn’t fibbed that they were about to have supper.

They saw Mr Milnar to the door, where he broke down, babbling his regret that he’d left Frances alone to sulk. Mr Hargreaves was embarrassed. He’d only met Mr Milnar once or twice before, at the Royal Selangor Club.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mr Hargreaves said cheerily. ‘She’ll turn up before long with her tail between her legs! These teenagers often get silly ideas. Don’t they, Petal?’

He rumpled Sally’s hair, then excused himself – said he had a long-distance phone call to make. Sally
watched
from the living-room window as Mr Milnar got in his car. He sat for several minutes with his head bowed over the steering wheel before starting the ignition and driving away.

Pull yourself together
, Sally thinks.
The boy didn’t come here to hear you weep … Sentimental fool
. She smiles and pours more tea in Adam’s cup. She asks after his sister. What’s her name again? What does she do for a living? And what does Adam do? How very interesting …! Two months have passed since she sent him the letter. What had she expected? For the truth of how the friendship ended to come flooding out? For the boy to sympathize? For the boy to unlatch the cage of her guilt so she could fly out and be free? Ridiculous. Sally has lived with her guilt for so long she’d be bereft without it.

Adam stays for two hours. Three cups of tea drained, half a packet of biscuits eaten and a few anecdotes of teenage hijinks divulged – Sally nattering on to keep the silence at bay. As they stand at the door Sally tells Adam that he is welcome back any time. Any time at all. She’d be delighted to see him. And Adam nods so as not to hurt her feelings. The front door closes and Adam is glad to be walking away. She’s a nice woman and it was interesting to hear some stories about his mum. But her company had grown wearying after a while. The visit a waste of his time.

The curtains are drawn when he gets home, the muted TV casting out patterns of light, bathing the sofa
bed
where Julia sleeps in phosphorescence. He hangs his jacket on the back of the door and eases off his shoes. He lies beside his sister on the fold-out mattress, facing the serrated curve of her spine and the pale splash of her hair on the pillow. She wears a grey cotton T-shirt, the duvet over her hips rippled as a dune of sand. Adam realizes he has never known his sister as an adult. What will she be like when she is healthy again? When her personality and desires are no longer suppressed? What will Julia look like with flesh on her bones? He wonders if he’ll ever know. If he is assisting her gradual recuperation or a slow and deliberate suicide.

Whatever his role, Adam is grateful for now that she’s here in his flat. The safest place for her to be. He shuts his eyes and inclines his head so his forehead touches her back, willing her recovery through the cotton of her T-shirt and across the boundary of skin.

THE END

1

The First Letter

EVERY NIGHT I
wake from dreaming. Memory squeezing the trigger of my heart and blood surging through my veins.

The dreams go into a journal. Cold sweat on my skin, adrenaline in my blood, I illuminate my cement room with the 40-watt bulb hanging overhead and, huddled under blankets, flip open my notebook and spill ink across the feint-ruled page. Capturing the ephemera of dreams, before they fade from memory.

I dream of teenage girls, parading the Ox Demons and Snake Ghosts around the running tracks behind our school. I dream of the tall dunce hats on our former teachers’ ink-smeared heads, the placards around their necks.
Down with Headteacher Yang! Down with Black Gangster Zhao!
I dream of Teacher Wu obeying our orders to slap Headteacher Yang, to the riotous cheers of the mob.

I dream that we stagger on hunger-weakened limbs through the Gobi as the Mongols drive us forth with lashing whips. I dream of razor-beaked birds swooping at our heads, and scorpions scuttling amongst scattered, sun-bleached bones on the ground. I dream of a mirage of a lake on shimmering waves of heat. I dream that, desperate to cure our raging thirst, we crawl there on our hands and knees.

I dream of the sickly Emperor Jiajing, snorting white powdery aphrodisiacs up his nostrils, and hovering over you on the fourposter bed with an erection smeared with verdigris. I dream of His Majesty urging us to ‘operate’ on each other with surgical blades lined up in a velvet case. I dream of sixteen palace ladies gathered in the Pavilion of Melancholy Clouds, plotting the ways and means to murder one of the worst emperors ever to reign.

Newsprint blocks the windows and electricity drips through the cord into the 40-watt bulb. For days I have been at my desk, preparing your historical records, my fingers stiffened by the cold, struggling to hit the correct keys. The machine huffs and puffs and lapses out of consciousness. I reboot and wait impatiently for its resuscitation, several times a day. Between bouts of writing I pace the cement floor. The light bulb casts my silhouette on the walls. A shadow of a human form, which possesses more corporeality than I do.

The Henan migrants gamble and scrape chair legs in the room above. I curse and bang the ceiling with a broom. I don’t go out. I hunch at my desk and tap at the keyboard, and the machine wheezes and gasps, as though protesting the darkness I feed into its parts. My mind expands into the room. My subconscious laps at the walls, rising like the tide. I am drowning in our past lives. But until they have been recorded, they won’t recede.

I watch you most days. I go to the Maizidian housing compound where you live and watch you. Yesterday I saw you by the bins, talking to Old Pang the recycling collector, the cart attached to his Flying Pigeon loaded with plastic bottles, scavenged to exchange for a few fen at the recycling bank. Old Pang grumbled about the cold weather and the flare-up in his arthritis that prevents him reaching the bottom of the bins. So you rolled up your coat sleeve and offered to help. Elbow-deep you groped, fearless of broken glass, soapy tangles of plughole hair and congealed leftovers scraped from plates. You dug up a wedge of styrofoam. ‘Can you sell this?’ you asked. Old Pang turned the styrofoam over in his hands, then secured it to his cart with a hook-ended rope. He thanked you, climbed on his Flying Pigeon and pedalled away.

After Old Pang’s departure you stood by your green and yellow Citroën, reluctant to get back to work. You stared at the grey sky and the high-rises of glass and steel surrounding your housing compound. The December wind swept your hair and rattled your skeleton through your thin coat. The wind eddied and corkscrewed and whistled through its teeth at you. You had no sense of me watching you at all.

You got back inside your cab and I rapped my knuckles on the passenger-side window. You nodded and I pulled the back door open by the latch. You turned to me, your face bearing no trace of recognition as you muttered, ‘Where to?’

Purple Bamboo Park. A long journey across the city from east to west. I watched you from the back as you yawned and tuned the radio dial from the monotonous speech of a politburo member to the traffic report. Beisanzhong Road. Heping South Bridge. Madian Bridge. Bumper to bumper on the Third ring road, thousands of vehicles consumed petrol, sputtered exhaust and flashed indicator lights. You exhaled a long sigh and unscrewed the lid of your flask of green tea. I swallowed hard.

I breathed your scent of cigarettes and sweat. I breathed you in, tugging molecules of you through my sinuses and trachea, and deep into my lungs. Your knuckles were white as bone as you gripped the steering wheel. I wanted to reach above the headrest and touch your thinning hair. I wanted to touch your neck.

Zhongguancun Road, nearly there. Thirty minutes over in a heartbeat. Your phone vibrated and you held it to your ear. Your wife.
Yes, hmmm, yes, seven o’clock
. Yida is a practical woman. A thrifty, efficient homemaker who cooks for you, nurtures you and provides warmth beside you in bed at night. I can tell that she fulfils the needs of the flesh, this pretty wife of yours. But what about the needs of the spirit? Surely you ache for what she lacks?

Purple Bamboo Park, east gate. On the meter, 30 RMB. I handed you some tattered 10-RMB notes; the chubby face of Chairman Mao grubby from the fingers of ten thousand laobaixing. A perfunctory thank-you and I slammed out. There was a construction site nearby, and the thoughts in my head jarred and jangled as the pneumatic drills smashed the concrete up. I stood on the kerb and watched you drive away. Taxi-driver Wang Jun. Driver ID number 394493. Thirty-one, careworn, a smoker of Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes. The latest in your chain of incarnations, like the others, selected by the accident of rebirth, the lottery of fate.

Who are you?
you must be wondering. I am your soulmate, your old friend, and I have come back to this city of sixteen million in search of you. I pity your poor wife, Driver Wang. What’s the bond of matrimony compared to the bond we have shared for over a thousand years? What will happen to her when I reappear in your life?

What will become of her then?

1

MARY

Shinsaibashi wakes for business, metal shutters clattering upwards, broom bristles scratching concrete. Dribs and drabs wander round, salarymen reading menus in restaurant windows, high-school drop-outs killing time till dusk. Edged by the aerials and billboards is a sunset the shade of blood oranges.

The building where I work is in the grimy end of the entertainment district. The chef from the grilled-eel restaurant on the floor below us slouches in the doorway, easing dirt from beneath his thumbnail with a toothpick. We nod hello as the sign for the Big Echo karaoke blinks on, and its fluorescent palm trees hum.

The Sayonara Bar is empty; only the spectral drone of Spandau Ballet drifts over the empty stage and dance floor. Every table sits in a pool of jaundiced light, the tasselled lampshades hanging low, making the place look ready for a séance or psychic convention.

In the changing room, shoes, magazines and crumpled balls of lipstick-stained tissue litter the floor. Blouses with deodorant-stained underarms hang from the sagging curtain rail. In the midst of it all stands Elena, peering into the slanting mirror, dotting concealer under her eyes. We bounce smiles and greetings off the glass. My back to her, I start to undress, flinging my T-shirt and jeans onto the mound of clothes in the corner. I zip myself into the gold-sequinned top that Katya lent me and a black knee-length skirt.

Elena budges sideways to give me room at the mirror. ‘Nice sequins,’ she says.

‘I know. Couldn’t get away with it anywhere but here. Did you have a good day?’

‘Same as usual: up at seven to get Eiji and Tomo ready, then I had to clean up after the pair of them …’

Elena is petite, jaded and prone to world-weary sighs. She came to Japan with a TEFL qualification and a four-month English-teaching contract. Six years on, she has a Japanese husband, a five-year-old son and a vast catalogue of cross-cultural grievances. She makes me feel young, lightweight as flotsam. I watch her pull an eyelid taut and drag a sharpened kohl pencil along her lashes.