The Orientalist and the Ghost (15 page)

‘No, he’s not.’

‘But then he’ll be here by himself. He’ll be lonely without us!’

‘Have you told him?’ Adam asked.

‘No.’

Julia stood up, knocking the edge of her plate so her half-eaten spaghetti on toast overturned on to the carpet. She opened her mouth, as if to object, then closed it. She sat down again. Frances didn’t shout at
Julia
for upsetting the plate. She told them both to go upstairs to clean their teeth while she did the washing-up.

They went up the stairs in silence. Adam was not especially bothered that they were leaving Jack behind. Adam had lived with Jack Broughton since he was two. There was no malice in the man, but no affection either. Jack was selfish like a child and indifferent to fatherhood, even when it came to his own daughter. Adam and Julia brushed their teeth over the bathroom basin. As Julia zigzagged the toothbrush about in her foamy mouth, she kept catching her brother’s eye in the mirror, her gaze exploding with excitement and incredulity. Adam ignored her, but when Julia, a vigorous tooth-brusher, accidentally prodded him with her elbow, Adam cheerfully elbowed her back. Going to Malaysia meant not going to school and Adam suddenly felt freer than he had in months.

After rinsing and spitting they went downstairs, where two leather suitcases sat in the hall. Frances had her summer jacket on and a dash of lipstick on her lips, and was ordering a minicab on the phone. Adam spotted the damp patch on the beige carpet, from where she’d sponged up the mess of Julia’s dinner. He unzipped his rucksack and dumped out his school books. The empty rucksack was abnormally light on his shoulders, so he picked up a travel scrabble set and one of Jack’s paperbacks –
Chariots of the Gods
by Erich von Däniken – to restore it to its usual weight. Julia had fetched her peach drawstring make-up bag from the bedroom. She
was
strictly forbidden from wearing make-up until she was fourteen, but that didn’t stop her from spending her pocket money on cosmetics. Bursting with blusher, glitter sticks and compacts of iridescent beads of powder, the little make-up bag heaved. Julia’s ambition was to be a make-up artist, and most evenings she practised applying false lashes and lipstick, until she resembled a juvenile drag queen.

‘Why’re you taking that crap? You’re not allowed to wear it and you don’t even know how to put it on properly.’

Julia narrowed her eyes at Adam. ‘Shut up, Adam. You’re just jealous because you’re gay and want to wear make-up too.’

‘Julia, for goodness’ sake,’ said Frances, sighing, ‘come here and let me try to get the knots out of your hair. Why don’t you brush it once in a while, eh?’

Julia went obediently to her mother, who rummaged in her handbag for a thin plastic comb. Though Julia was barely eleven she was already inches taller than Frances, who reached up and tugged the comb through her scowling daughter’s hair with fast, efficient strokes. Many times Frances had threatened to take a pair of scissors to Julia’s messy hair, but the thought of the tantrum this would provoke exhausted her.

‘Did you tell our schools we’re going on holiday?’ asked Adam.

‘No,’ said Frances.

Julia’s head jerked back as the comb sank its teeth into a knotty snarl. ‘Owww!’

‘For goodness’ sake, Julia, hold still!’

‘What about the hospital? Do they know you’re leaving?’

‘No.’

‘Won’t you lose your job for that?’

Her lips a thin line of determination, Frances wrenched the plastic comb down the length of her daughter’s hair. Julia’s chin wobbled and her eyes watered. A champion cry-baby, she could weep for hours non-stop, screwing her face up with aggression, howling as salty bombs detonated in her tear ducts.

‘I want to say goodbye to Dad!’ she sobbed. ‘It’s wrong not to tell him. It’s out of order. He’ll be lonely on his own.’

Outside, a cabby honked his taxi horn, engine idling.

Sternly, not a trace of sympathy in her face, Frances disentangled the comb from Julia’s hair and turned Julia to face her. She seized her daughter by the arms, as if to convey her firmness of mind through the grip.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘your father won’t be lonely. He’s got his mates down the Brewery Tap. And I put a six-pack of beer in the fridge. That’ll keep him busy. Come on now, Julia. Don’t be sad. Don’t you want to come on holiday? I’m going to take you where it’s lovely and sunny. You can send your dad a postcard when we get there. And it won’t be for ever.’

Julia sniffled back her tears.

‘Now put your coat on and go outside. The taxi is waiting.’

Julia went to the door, the drawstring bag of
glittering
trophies she was too young to wear dangling at her side. She took her coat down from the hook.

‘You too, Adam,’ Frances said. ‘Coat. Door. Go on!’

Adam went to the hallway, but as he took his coat he glanced back at Frances. He saw her pick up her handbag and breathe a sigh of relief. He saw her take off her wedding ring and put it on the table.

Frances Broughton, née Milnar, was forty-three years old when she left Jack Broughton. It was a decision she arrived at quietly, with no breakdown, no hysterical weeping or prescription of pills. Up until the day they left for Malaysia, Frances had been regular as clockwork; up at six every morning, bran flakes eaten and children’s packed lunches made by half past. She’d tidied up whatever mess Jack had left when he got in the night before (be it empty beer cans or the remnants of a take-away kebab) and was off to work by seven, for eight hours of whatever nurses are underpaid to do. The house was always clean, the clutter picked off the floors, and school shirts ironed and bed-sheets washed. She gave Adam his monthly haircut, took him to the doctor when he was sick, and wrote countless notes excusing him from PE. Every night she battled against Julia’s phobia of soap and water, coercing her into the bathtub (then shouting a checklist of what she mustn’t forget to wash through the bathroom door). She nagged her children half to death and, though she wasn’t affectionate, they sensed they were loved, in a matter-of-fact, unsentimental way. Only Jack she left alone. She
never
forced Jack to have a bath (though he needed one more than Julia) or made him doctor’s appointments (though he woke every morning to murderous coughing fits, catarrh rattling like a caged beast in his chest). Frances left the dirt to accumulate behind his ears. She left him to pass out unconscious on the sofa. She cooked dinner for him, and if he ate it he ate it, and if he didn’t she threw it away. Jack was like some bothersome lodger; a feckless, layabout eldest son. Adam never credited him with the ability to break her heart.

10

THOUGH FRANCES MILNAR
had attended the Amethyst International School for Girls since she was twelve, Sally was her first friend there. Sally was amazed that the other girls didn’t adore Frances as much as she did, but as she witnessed more of her behaviour she began to understand why. First and foremost a child of Kuala Lumpur, Frances was impatient with the Western affectations of her peers. She thought her schoolmates girly and pathetic; scorned the way they swooned over pop stars and fussed over their appearance. Frances was arrogant. She said exactly what she thought, even if it was staggeringly rude. Before Sally arrived, Frances had spent four years wandering the corridors of Amethyst alone; hanging out on the school roof after lunch and sailing paper aeroplanes over her enemies in the yard. Sally couldn’t believe that Frances hadn’t gone to pieces from loneliness – that she hadn’t capitulated to peer pressure and smoothed the
conceited
edges of her personality to make a friend or two. But Frances gave no outward signs of suffering and made no effort to make herself the least bit likeable.
We don’t have time for that
, she snapped at Melissa, who’d brought in a Cliff Richard LP to lend Sally.
Go away!

Frances’s lack of success at Amethyst was academic as well as social, and she was bottom of the class for several years (a position she was ousted from by the arrival of Sally, who bumped her up the rankings to twenty-third place). During lessons Frances wriggled at her desk, yawning and jiggling her foot. She’d spend an entire period diligently unpicking her skirt hem with her compass or gnawing her fingernails to the quick. Frances’s inability to concentrate irritated most teachers (
Miss Milnar, would you share with the rest of the class exactly what you find so fascinating out of the window
). Perhaps Frances’s fidgety attention deficit was due to some learning difficulty (dyslexia, to judge by her spelling). But in 1969 her condition went undiagnosed, as the teachers assumed stupidity and Frances spent her school-days bored.

Frances lived with her English father (a businessman whose business she was unsure of) and her ayah, Madame Tay, above the Good Fortune Fabric Emporium on the outskirts of Chinatown. To get upstairs Sally and Frances had to pass through the fabric store, much to the annoyance of the young manageress (who, after a ten-year-long feud with Madame Tay, made a sniffy show of ignoring Frances).
The
manageress sat on a stool by the cash register, her shapely legs peeping through the slit in her cheongsam as she perused fashion magazines and misted her immaculate beehive with hairspray. The aisles of the Good Fortune Fabric Emporium were lined floor to ceiling with bolts of silk, and the temptation to trail her fingertips along the shimmering rolls was often too much for Sally.
Don’t touch!
the young manageress would shriek, and Sally would whisk her fingers away, as if from hot coals.

The Milnar apartment was a refuge from sunlight, every room a chamber of shadow, redolent of sandalwood and tiger balm. Sally never once saw the window shutters open; it was as if the furniture would disintegrate if touched by light. In contrast to the shady apartment the kitchen, a lean-to of corrugated iron sheltering the sink and stove from the elements, was up on a sunny roof terrace, which overlooked the alleys behind Sultan Road: the slatted metal fire escapes bolted to the backs of shop houses, the dirt-streaked walls, and lines of laundry stiffened to parchment by the sun.

When Sally first met Frances’s ayah she was tending to a pot simmering on the stove and ignoring the flea-bitten stray cats slinking along the balustrade, mewling at the top of their lungs. The kitchen was hot and bright, with bundles of pak choi wrapped in newspaper and a bucket of shellfish on the large wooden table. Madame Tay was in her fifties, and the same height as Frances (though a great deal stouter), with a fiercely
permed
crop of black curls. When she saw the girls she threw down her ladle and spoke to Frances in an abrasive flame-tongued Cantonese, as if severely ticking her off, though she lovingly stroked and petted her teenage charge, eyes shining as she smoothed a flyaway tress. Over her months of visits to Sultan Road Sally discovered the ayah’s affection for Frances was inexhaustible. Madame Tay gave the impression of living for the young girl alone, and Sally came to understand how Frances had acquired her cast-iron self-esteem – her ayah’s constant deluge of love assuring her of her status as a divinity. Frances, the bored, limp recipient of Madame Tay’s fussing, introduced her to Sally and at once the smiling woman pinched Sally’s chubby arm and poked the tubby roll above her waistband. Sally, indignant, widened her eyes at Frances, and Madame Tay accompanied her transgressions with a spitfire of words.

Sally asked what she was saying, and Frances translated.

‘She says that she pities you for befriending a devil like me.’

Most days after school Sally and Frances went to Chinatown, where they weaved in and out of the market stalls of Petaling Street, dodging rickshaws and motor scooters and vegetable carts towed by hunched old men. The market traders hawked their wares at Sally, thrusting at her bamboo-leaf parcels of sticky rice, too-small wooden sandals and, once, an entire roast duck, swinging upside-down by its charred feet.
Hello,
Hello
, English missi! What you wan’ drink, eat? Rambutan for you?
or they’d shout,
Scarf! Scarf! Scarf!
waving the cheap fabric in her face. In the marketplace, where she was known to everyone as the ‘half-and-half girl’, Frances was in her element, skipping from stall to stall and bantering away (
Hello, Ah Wang! How’re you keeping? Sold many melons today?
) and laughing as she translated for Sally what they’d said (
Ah Wang says you’re very big and I’ve got to watch you don’t gobble me up!
). The market was always crowded with haggling customers and traders. Even the beggars of Chinatown had an admirable work ethic, chanting and playing the harmonica, the one-legged man dancing his hopping dance and rattling his bowl of coins in the afternoon heat.

One afternoon Frances took Sally to Slaughter Row, the nickname Chinatown locals had given the arcade of butcher stalls behind Petaling Street. Sally halted at the entrance to the arcade, staring at the rows of butchers industriously hacking away, their knives raised in carnivorous mastery of the lower-animal kingdom.
Go on!
Frances urged her.
You won’t see much from here!
Sally stumbled forward, past the metal coops stuffed with scores of live chickens. The arcade was adrift with feathers – as though in the aftermath of a violent pillow fight – quills sticking to the butchers’ aprons and Frances’s dark hair. The girls stood watching as every few minutes a butcher yanked a squawking chicken out of a coop, deftly chopped off its head, then dunked the carrion in boiling water and stripped off the feathers at
lightning
speed. The stench of carnage was everywhere and by the late afternoon enough poultry had been killed to fill whole sacks with bloody combs and feet. Oh, those poor massacred chickens! There and then Sally vowed to become a vegetarian – a resolution that lasted three days – and swore never to eat fish again either, as there were fish stalls in the arcade, with swordfish and cuttlefish piled up in the stinking heat, gills fluttering in slow suffocation. Slippery fish oil anointed the cobblestones and Sally was splattered with carp juice as a fishmonger shook his wet hands. Ugh! But it was the cow’s head that finally sent her fleeing for the exit. The head sat on a table at the far end of the arcade, flayed of its skin so the pulpy flesh was exposed. The cow’s bloodshot eyes glared accusingly at her, as though she’d been the one who’d murdered it and cut off its head. Hand clamped over her mouth, Sally lurched away. Giggling, Frances skipped after her into the scorching street.