The Orientalist and the Ghost (14 page)

‘What did she say?’ Sally asked, as Safiah crouched by the door jamb.

‘She says she is very happy here. She likes working for you and Mr Hargreaves very much.’

As they drank their lemonade and chatted, Frances laughed to hear that Sally had quit boarding for good at the age of eleven. Though Frances had spent her childhood in Kuala Lumpur, when she was ten her expat father (
He’s English, but I don’t look half-caste, do I?
) sent her abroad to be educated in Hampshire. Frances did not adapt well to boarding school life. She returned to Malaysia for the Christmas holidays and when the holidays were over refused to go back.

‘I climbed up on to the roof of my house, and stayed up there for two weeks. I threw stones at anyone who tried to climb up after me. My father thought I was on hunger strike, but my ayah secretly brought me a plate of noodles twice a day. In the end my father promised not to send me back to boarding school in England and I climbed down.’

‘How did you go to the lavatory?’ asked an incredulous Sally.

‘I had a chamber-pot. Madame Tay emptied it for me. Or I’d chuck it out in the street.’

Sally gazed admiringly at Frances, who held her cake in both hands and nibbled it like a monkey, her eyes glittering with disobedience and adventures to be had. Frances asked Sally where her mother was. With downcast eyes and a sorrowful tone of voice cultivated over many years of practice, Sally told Frances that her mother was dead. Agnes Hargreaves had died in childbirth, and Sally had never known her. Telling people about her dead mother used to be Sally’s guilty pleasure.
Poor motherless Sally Hargreaves
– it was almost a mark of distinction. Accustomed to the awkwardness and pity of others, Sally was sorely disappointed by Frances’ reaction.

‘Mine too!’ she cried triumphantly. ‘I could tell, you know,’ Frances added, ‘that you had no mother.’

This irritated Sally. She demanded to know how.

‘Oh, I always can.’

Then, very abruptly, Frances scraped back her chair and said that she had to go and visit her mad
aunt
, because the nuns wouldn’t let her in after six.

Sally walked her to the front gate.

‘Do come for tea, next time you visit your mad aunt,’ she said.

Frances shrugged and said: ‘I only see her once a month. That’s about as much as I can stand.’

She gave a little wave as she slipped out of the gate and Sally was crestfallen. But no sooner had Frances started off down the road than she turned round again and, skipping backwards a few steps, shouted: ‘Why don’t you come with me to Chinatown tomorrow? It’s a lot more fun than around here.’

Sally nodded and Frances smiled, dimpling her cheeks, her little vampire teeth on display.

‘See you in school!’ she cried.

And Frances ran off to the hospice, leaving Sally to latch the front gate, her fingers trembling with joy.

9

‘ADAM … JULES AIN’T
here.’

Rob surfaced in the doorway, squinting as if the daylight corroded his retinas. The chain was broken and the door opened narrowly, Rob’s plimsoll and bony shoulder wedged behind it – a feeble precaution against forced entry. When he saw it was Adam he eased up, lifted his hand and scratched his red-rimmed nose, the sleeve of his baggy jumper swamping his thin arm.

‘Where’s she gone?’

‘Shops.’

‘Shops?’ Adam echoed.

‘Yeah.’

The tarry edges of Rob’s teeth showed themselves, his tongue slothful in his mouth. He’d answered the door because he’d expected someone else and he wanted Adam gone as quickly as possible.

‘When will she be back?’

‘Hard to say. This evening?’

Rob’s squint eased up and Adam could see the pale blue of his irises, his pupils microdots of dark. Rob is a decade older than Julia and over the years has come to look more like her brother than Adam ever will. They have the same eyes, the irises haloes of splintered ice, the same dirty blond hair in lank ponytails; the same rotting teeth and matching his ’n’ hers trackmarks. They’ve succumbed to the same degree of weight loss, a similar bone structure emerging underneath; identical bumps of skull and hollows beneath the temples, as though they were a twin birth, delivered by forceps squeezed too tight. No matter how alike they look, though, they will never be equals. Rob scores for Julia, fixes for her, looks after her. His fists have pummelled her stopped heart back from the brink of death (after delivering the shot that nearly killed her). Adam hates him. He hates the obnoxious swagger of him. He hates that his sister is so dependent on this weasel of a man.

‘D’you mind if I wait inside?’

The words almost stuck in Adam’s throat. He wanted to barge past Rob and find his sister. But things aren’t so easy. Rob only has to click his fingers and Julia would agree never to see Adam again.

‘Would if I could but I’ve got some mates round. Sorry, Adam.’

Adam heard the low thudding music and murmur of voices coming from the living room. He’d seen these get-togethers before, where everyone’s slumped about like they’ve got muscular dystrophy, staring at their
shoelaces
for hours on end. He knew then that Julia was in there, and had to remind himself that she was not some victim. For all he knew she’d remembered he was coming and asked Rob to send him away.

‘Tell her I came, then.’

‘Will do. I’ll get her to give you a call.’

No such thing had happened in the last three years, but Adam nodded and Rob lifted his hand in a swift, mocking salute, before letting the door slam shut.

After leaving Julia’s, Adam went over to the Mountbatten high-rise, the keys to his grandfather’s old flat jangling in his jacket pocket. The rehousing of the tenants was nearly over and outside the tower block a large council sign gave notification of demolition on 28 January. The main entrance was locked, and Adam strolled backwards, craning his neck to take in the twenty-eight floors.

He did a tour of the ground floor, peering in the windows, hands cupped around his eyes. Stripped of furniture, most rooms were stark as prison cells, though a few of the walls had been transformed into graffiti canvases; egos unleashed from spray-cans in a chaos of tags. Some of the graffiti was very impressive – works of imagination and skill – and Adam wondered why the artists had gone to so much effort, knowing that in eight weeks the tower would be rubble and dust.

Adam pushed open a window with a broken lock, climbed up and jumped down on the other side. He
went
up the fourteen flights of echoing stairs and down the corridor to the flat where he’d lived with Julia and his grandfather. He twisted the key in the lock and went inside for the first time in eight years.

Everything was the same and not the same. The left-behind furniture was the same, the upholstery in the same dilapidated condition as when they’d lived there, but the rooms were smaller, as if the ceiling had descended and the walls inched stealthily inwards. Adam wandered from room to room, memories of living there stirred up by the cracks in the bathroom tiles and the rings of limescale in the kitchen sink. The room where he and Julia had once slept, side by side on the narrow beds, smelt of unwashed bodies, and in the bathroom stale piss choked the throat of the toilet. Adam stood in the kitchen, remembering the silent leakages of gas from the faulty cooker, and the charred patch on the ceiling where the flames in his grandfather’s frying pan once leapt five feet high. The silence of the fourteenth floor suffocated Adam, and he heaved the force of his hearing into it, ear-drums taut, listening for footsteps, or voices, or the distant slam of a door. But there was nothing, not even the wind.

In the living room Adam lowered himself into the armchair where he once sat for seven- or eight-hour stretches, every day for two years. His elbows jabbed the armrests and his head settled in the hollow in the floral upholstery (a perfect fit – as if the chair had been waiting eight years for the prodigal grandson’s return). Spurred by the physical déjà vu, Adam tried to
re-enter
the mind of that sullen fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old boy. He no longer understood what motivated his exile, what day-to-day endurance such loneliness demanded. The other armchair used to be his grandfather’s. Adam remembered the never-ending melodrama of the old man’s imagination; the invisible cast of thousands, persecuting him for hours on end. Years after his death Adam still wakes in the night to the old man’s bewildered croak. When this happens his stomach bottoms out, and for a moment he believes he’s trapped in the council flat again, as his grandfather paces, shouting at nobody in the room next door. Adam is frustrated at his younger self. He and Julia didn’t have to live like that. But he hadn’t known any better. He’d been too afraid (and, Adam suspects, not quite right in the head himself).

But there were lulls to the madness, tranquil interludes during which Adam’s grandfather was genuinely likeable. Sitting opposite Adam, his cardigan buttoned up over his shirt, slippered feet shuffling closer to the gas fire, Christopher Milnar would remark:
Look at you reading those books! You’ll be as clever as old Socrates before long
… But his grandfather never pressured him to go to school, just as Adam never pressured his grandfather to see a doctor about his illness. The two hermits just left each other to get on with it. Occasionally Christopher would talk about Frances. How she broke his heart when she ran away and how he hired a private detective to track her down. When he discovered, a decade later, that Frances was in London, he moved to
England
to be near her and his baby grandson. Christopher wrote letters seeking reconciliation and sent her cheques for hundreds of pounds on birthdays and Christmases. Frances returned the letters to sender via the Royal Mail and refused to let her father see his grandchildren. Adam’s grandfather kept up his letter-writing campaign for fourteen long years – until Frances’ death in 1995.
That stubborn child never did tell me what I’d done wrong
, he grumbled to Adam,
but I wouldn’t let her forget me – not so long as I had money to spare for postage
…

Adam knows how stubborn his mother could be. More than ten years have passed since they walked out on Jack Broughton. He doesn’t remember the date exactly, but knows it was springtime, after the clocks had gone forward. Frances broke the news to them one tea-time, when he and Julia were sitting on the sofa, eating from plates of spaghetti on toast on the low coffee table. Julia was engrossed in whatever was on the telly, and spaghetti hoops slid off her fork prongs, staining her school blouse with splotches of tomato sauce. Frances was perched on the arm of the sofa, not eating, not watching TV. She was wearing her nurse’s pinafore, which was unusual, as Frances always changed as soon as she got in from work (before she opened the bills or put the kettle on – as if she couldn’t stand the lingering odour of hospital and sickness). Adam noticed that Frances still had on her stark white uniform, with the clip-on watch hanging upside-down from her pocket,
but
said nothing. He was unhappy at school and said less and less back then.

The front door slammed and Jack passed by the window, a bounce in his stride as he set off for the pub. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets and the wind lifted his sandy hair from his receding hairline. Adam glanced up as Jack went by, then returned his attention to the telly, unaware that he’d just seen his stepfather for the very last time.

Frances lifted the remote control and clicked off the TV. The children’s heads snapped irritably towards their mother.

‘Oi!’ said Julia. ‘I was watching that.’

‘Listen,’ said Frances. ‘We’re getting out of here. We’re going to Malaysia. I’ve packed our suitcases. We’re going tonight.’

‘What?’

Adam shook off his television stupor.

‘Are you serious?’

Of course she wasn’t. Adam knew that people didn’t just walk out of everyday life like that. Especially not their mother.

‘Yes,’ said Frances.

‘Are we going tonight? By aeroplane?’ Julia squealed.

‘Yes.’

‘For how long?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Just for a holiday?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘More than a fortnight?’

‘I haven’t decided yet.’

For the first time in months Adam looked carefully at his mother. At the sprinkling of grey in her hair, and her eyes dark and haggard with sleeplessness. But he knew better than to be deceived by her shattered appearance. Frances was ready for the children’s protests. She was ready to put up a fight.

‘Are you having a mental breakdown?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Then why are we running off to Malaysia?’

‘I am sick of things the way they are. It’s time for a change.’

‘Bit of a drastic change, though, isn’t it, taking us to Malaysia?’

‘It’s what I want to do.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting that we have school?’

‘If you’re so worried about school, Adam, you can stay here with Jack.’

Adam shut up. He wasn’t
that
worried about school.

The mention of Jack set Julia off. ‘Is Dad not coming?’