The Orientalist and the Ghost (29 page)

Before that night my acquaintance with the jungle was limited to my Sunday hiking expeditions with Kip Phillips, the rubber-plantation manager. Kip was a splendid host to the rainforest, and we hiked deep in the jungle, where the canopy was so dense it was like rambling through a twilight realm. As he guided me through the labyrinth of leaves, Kip would show me a tiny exquisite flower hidden amid the mass of
vegetation
and teach me its Latin name, or he’d squat by a cluster of fungi and with a chuckle indicate a jungle tortoise’s teeth marks in a mushroom. Kip was forever handing me strips of bark and sticky buds that gave off strange medicinal aromas when rubbed between my fingertips. He’d list the ailments they treated and describe the techniques of preparation. But mostly we hiked in silence, the forest floor breathing its muggy halitosis of rotting flora and fauna, clinging to Kip and me till we were damp-skinned as amphibians. Some of the trees were more than a century old, and as my gaze travelled up the colossal trunks I’d be dizzied and awed.

Though peaceful and companionable, our hikes were never completely free of anxiety. Wary of Communist ambushes, Kip insisted on rigging me out in one of his home-made bullet-proof vests and he was never without a rifle, which he aimed at the slightest trembling of foliage, finger hooking the trigger and a fierce look in his eyes. One afternoon a pygmy squirrel made the mistake of cavorting too noisily in some bushes. Before I’d even registered the disturbance, Kip had cocked his rifle and sent a bullet through its tiny rodent heart.

‘Bloody Reds,’ hissed Kip, quaking with fury and remorse. ‘They’ve turned this jungle into a bloody war zone.’

The jungle at night was a different world: dark and subterranean, as if we’d descended into the bowels of the earth, the sweltering heat rising from rivers of
molten
lava. Evangeline ran ahead along the claustrophobic trail, the stiff branches she charged through whipping my face and arms. Through the shrinking tunnel of leaves I stumbled after her and the flashlight, struggling to keep up. Parasitic vines slithered from the treetops, hairy tendrils flaying my shoulders and neck. Shallow roots and buttresses tripped my every other step.

‘Evangeline!’ I shouted. ‘Slow down.’

Her torch hung by her side, illuminating the ground as she waited. From the waist up she was shrouded in darkness. As soon as I caught up she was off again.

‘Evangeline, stop!’ I panted. ‘What the hell has been going on over the past few weeks? Why’ve you been coming to the watch tower? I want to know the truth.’

‘We can talk later. We have to keep going. I have to make sure he made it back to the camp.’

‘Camp? Evangeline! Are you taking me to a Communist camp? Are you out of your mind? I’ll be killed!’

Evangeline stopped and turned. She squeezed my shoulder with her small callused hand.

‘Please, Christopher,’ she said. ‘I will not let anything happen to you. I have to know how badly he is hurt. Come on …’

For another twenty minutes or so we continued to beat a path through the jungle. Darkness devoured the way we had come, the gallery of foliage shifting to conceal the trail. But even if it had been daylight I doubt I would have known the way back to civilization. The
wild
bandit chase disorientated me, as if I’d been blindfolded and spun around for a game of blind-man’s buff. The maze of leaves narrowed, became more convoluted, and eventually we came up against a wall of jungle so dense we could only progress an inch at a time, battling against the sharp-clawed undergrowth. The rot of organic matter intensified in the knot of jungle, as if it concealed some carnivorous rafflesia with bloody meat in its jaws. Smothered by leaves, the torchlight was no brighter than the belly of a firefly.

‘Are we lost?’ I asked Evangeline.

‘No, keep going,’ she said. ‘It will open up again soon.’

She was right. After five more minutes of undergrowth thick enough to asphyxiate a man, it came to an end. We tumbled into a clearing, hands and faces marked by stigmata from the foliage; the cuts of thorns and grass-blade nicks. For a while we could do little more than tremble and take insatiable breaths of air, gulping it down regardless of the poisonous stench.

A shimmer of moonlight came into the clearing. I looked up and saw an aperture in the rainforest roof, framed by a silhouette of leaves. As the pounding of my heart subsided, the high-decibel clamour of invisible insects teemed in my ears. There must have been a million of the critters, oscillating their creepy-crawly parts so the stridulations merged into that of one solitary beast. There came a blood-curdling monkey screech and the arboreal croak of tree frogs. When Evangeline skimmed the flashlight along the periphery
of
the clearing, spiders and scorpions scuttled back into hidy-holes to watch us out of crepuscular eyes. The torch beam darted nervously, as if Evangeline feared that if it were to settle for more than a second it would set the leaves ablaze.

‘Looks like he isn’t here,’ I said.

‘If he was badly injured he would have collapsed on the trail,’ Evangeline conjectured. ‘We have not seen him, so he must be OK.’

‘We can go back, then.’

‘No.’

‘What?’

Evangeline turned her back on me. She flicked the torchlight on and off, reminding me of how the village police flashed their torches at a bush of scintillating fireflies, mimicking their mating call (they claimed this made the flies sexually frustrated).

‘What’s going on?’

Evangeline ignored me. I strode over to her and put my hands on her shoulders, confident my touch would snap her out of her strangeness.

‘Don’t touch me.’ She pulled her shoulders free and moved away.

‘Evangeline, what the hell is going on? You must tell me, this minute!’

The torch clicked off, plunging us into blackness. I saw the dark shape of her, pacing through the kettle-steamy heat, the shadows of the clearing parting for her, as if to avoid contamination. I reached out, raking the empty air, then grazing the thin cotton of her dress.

‘I said,
don’t touch me
.’

I lowered my hand. Cantonese? Why was she speaking in Cantonese? Our language was English. Moths stirred in the recesses of my stomach. Why was she acting like this?

‘What’s come over you? Why are you being so cruel?’

‘Do you find me cruel?’ Cantonese again. ‘How come you feel the little cruelties so much more keenly, Christopher? What about the cruelties that you help inflict? What about imprisoning people in a concentration camp? Surely that is worse.’

I was furious. What had politics to do with us?

‘This again! I thought we’d taken care of this! You know I am just doing my job.’

‘And does doing your job mean you no longer have a mind of your own? If you had any conscience you would have left months ago. Instead you look about the village and pat yourself on the back for a job well done.’

‘This is stupid, Evangeline. It’s ridiculous to blame me. Everything – the Emergency, Resettlement, the New Villages – is beyond my control. I am not the British Administration. I am just one man. I am here to do what I can, day in, day out, to protect the villagers from the Communists and make life better for them.’

‘Don’t you ever question what you do, day in, day out? Villagers are dying because of how lousy the conditions are, because of what the British Administration has done. Because of what you – glorified prison warden – help to do.’

I took a deep frustrated breath. ‘We are working hard to return Malaya to its people,’ I said, ‘to make her independent. This is the reason I came here. It’s wrong to make a scapegoat of me.’

‘If you don’t see the harm of your actions, then you are blind.’

‘Blind? Don’t talk to me about blindness, Evangeline. The Communists have brought nothing but suffering and misery to the people. More so than the British.’

‘I am not a Communist.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you are just the Communists’ whore.’

This viciousness brought a stab of sweetness. We circled each other like warring tigers, our faces masks of darkness, from which the voices of strangers emerged.

Evangeline laughed. ‘That’s more like it, Christopher. Now you’re being honest! Why are the men never whores? What name is there for a man who lies to a woman about taking her back to his country to get what he wants? Lies, lies, lies … You make me sick.’

‘I never lied. I meant every word.’

‘And I am not a whore.’

‘Then, I don’t understand. If you hate me so much, and think me a prison warden, then why did you come to the watchtower? For yourself? For the Communists? How do you know that bandit? Why are you talking in Chinese? For whose benefit? Is he near by?’

Silence.

‘Come on, Evangeline. We are above this, you and I. Turn on the torch and let me see your face. I don’t believe you hate me. I don’t believe this is you.’

Silence.

‘Do you love me?’

Silence.

‘Come on, Evangeline … turn on the torch and let’s go back.’

There was a faint breeze, the stirring of conscience. A sharp intake of breath, and like the shattering apart of glass the tension broke. Evangeline was crying. A victory that brought me no joy. She hid her face in her hands and shook.
Now we can go back
, I thought grimly, and moved to steady her in my embrace. But before I reached her there was crashing in the undergrowth. And before I could turn to see what was going on, one side of my body was overwhelmed by pain and I was screaming on the ground. Never in my life had I known such agony. The whole of my consciousness was subjugated to it, and I was only dimly aware of myself writhing and screaming, and of the boot viciously kicking my back. After a while the kicking went away and I lay in the clearing, stunned and breathing stunted breaths. I called for Evangeline, but she was gone. The moon had gone too and the clearing was so dark I couldn’t tell whether my eyes were open or closed.

I lost consciousness and, when I came to, the clearing was suffused with the grey light of dawn. Pain shrieked below my ribs. I gritted my teeth and lifted my head a fraction of an inch, almost expecting to see a crimson mist above my torso; a fine nimbus of blood. My shirt was soaked red and cleaved to my skin, resisting slightly
as
I pulled it up. The wound was three or four inches long and scalpel-thin. What had been lacerated? Kidney? Liver? Spleen? There were some dark leaves stuck to the skin surrounding the wound … Oh, no, not leaves, but leeches! – pulsating as they drank from the gash. Nauseated, I tore the blood-glutted leeches off me, ripping them to bits where the suckers remained stubbornly welded to my flesh. I wiped the slime and leech-muck off my fingers and on to the soil. Then I lay very still, so as not to aggravate the pain. It was very cold and damp and I realized it was raining, the canopy drumming as raindrops slid from one leafy precipice to the next. Through the hole in the rainforest roof, drops like shards of glass fell and stung my eyes.

The pain came and went in powerful tides. When it was at its worst it induced in me a dazzling synaesthesia, a magnesium flare in my mind. And in the split second that white light drenched my consciousness came numbness and ephemeral reprieve. Then the pain would surge again from nothing, igniting nerve endings one by one.

As I lay there in the spitting rain, I fell prey to hallucinations. I imagined the nearby bushes were shaking as Evangeline and my assailant hid, gloating and spying on me. I heard their laughter in the percussion of the rain and glared at the offending bushes, jaw clenched in anger and humiliation. Minutes later I imagined that Evangeline crept into the clearing to kneel beside me. She took my hand and pressed it to her soft cheek, weeping for forgiveness. The
Communists
had taken Grace hostage, she said, and had forced her to betray me. But now she was back and would never leave me again. She wept and covered my face with kisses moist with tears and begged and begged me to forgive her. And, weeping too, I forgave. I forgave and forgave and forgave until my heart bled with joy. Then my beloved was gone, and my joy turned to bitter disappointment because Charles Dulwich had replaced her, puffing on a cigar and lording it over the clearing in his rattan chair. Charles gave me a stern talking to. Serves you right for being such a dupe! What did you expect, taking up with a low-breed Communist bitch? Haven’t you learnt by now that humans are born into this world to cheat and lie and damage one another? It was the first and last time in my life that Charles’s pessimism has ever consoled me.

After an hour the rain stopped and sunshine sifted through the mosaic of branches and leaves. The miracle of the sun on my skin lent me the strength to prop myself up on my elbows – a manoeuvre that was agony, but rewarded me with the feeling that I was alive. Had the rain continued to batter me I’m sure I’d have lost my will to live and quickly died. I looked around the clearing, defeated. To claw my way out of that fortress of leaves, as I had clawed my way in, was impossible. I couldn’t even stand. As the sun heated the jungle, steam rose from the soil and the rotting odour strengthened. Here and there the canopy dripped, and to my left a trickle of rainwater slid down a liana vine. Slowly, agonizingly, dying of thirst, I dragged my carcass
towards
the vine. But when I was halfway there the trickle dried up and I collapsed, flat on my back once more, exhausted by mere inches of progress.

The canopy twittered with birdsong and crashed as some tree-bound creature hurtled from bough to bough. How I envied the wildlife up there in the parapet of leaves. The canopy was the zenith of the rainforest, a leafy amphitheatre of exotic feathers and finery. As I lay amid the millipedes and grubs I was keenly aware that I’d sunk to the very depths of the jungle hierarchy; the morass of decomposition, the strata of decay. When it comes to death, nature is ever fair and egalitarian, and if I were to die in that clearing, earthworms and saprophytic fungi would reduce me to the same nutrient-rich soil that every dead animal becomes. The only possible deviation to this fate would be if I were to be swallowed by a giant python. Then my masticated remains would reside briefly in its carnivorous intestines, before being shat out on to the forest floor.