The Orientalist and the Ghost (32 page)

* * *

Three hours later I was in the witness stand, an exhumed corpse of a man, describing my relationship with Evangeline from beginning to end, omitting nothing, except that I had loved her.

The lawyer for the defence said that my testimony was motivated by revenge for a love affair gone sour. Evangeline had not lured me into the jungle. Fuelled by one-man heroics, I had chased after the bandit alone. The consequences of my stupidity embarrassed me, so I blamed Miss Lim. I was confident the assessors would not believe him. His was the strategy of the desperate, of a side with nothing to lose. As her lawyer made these audacious claims Evangeline seemed dissociated from the proceedings, as if she wasn’t listening. What a coincidence, I said, for Miss Lim to vanish on the night of my attack. What a coincidence for me to have stumbled upon the corpse of Detective Pang on my own. The lawyer continued to accuse me, and though I didn’t lie once, when I left the stand an hour later I was trembling with shame.

When Evangeline stood in the dock I was struck again by how old and plain she was; a woman not a single head would turn for in the street (except mine, of course: my head will never cease to turn for her). Though English was the language of the courts and it would have been in Evangeline’s favour to speak it, she used an interpreter and testified in Cantonese – a decision that baffles me to this day. When the prosecution asked her to confirm or deny whether she was a Communist, Evangeline denied it. Though
she
had been forced to live among the Communists she’d never met the witnesses. She accused them of perjury; identifying her as Small Cloud to receive free pardons. They were out to save their own skins, she said, and not to be trusted. Evangeline’s defence was a denial of everything. When the prosecution cross-examined her about the night I was stabbed I expected the lies to continue. But they didn’t.

‘Yes, I led Assistant Resettlement Officer Milnar into the jungle,’ she said, ‘but I had not meant him to be harmed. The bandit he shot was a boy I had grown up next door to in Kajang, and I chased after him to make sure he was OK. I brought Mr Milnar with me so he could help. The trail we followed is used by Communists, but it is also well known to local squatters. I did not know the boy was going to attack Mr Milnar. When Mr Milnar collapsed and the boy began kicking him, I tried to stop him, to pull him off, but then he turned on me. He put the knife to my throat and forced me to go back to the camp with him. I was afraid for Mr Milnar, but I was also frightened for my life and the life of my unborn child.’

Evangeline went on to say she had stayed, very reluctantly, at the Communist camp, because she knew she would be arrested if she returned to the village, and she did not want to give birth to her baby in a detention camp. She then went to live in Batu Pahat, to work as a housekeeper for a Communist official. Not because she was a Communist, she said, but because he provided a home for her and her child, and she was tired of living
in
the jungle. The lawyer for the defence was ashen. It was not the defence they’d agreed upon, the script they had rehearsed.

The next morning the two assessors delivered the guilty verdict and Mr Justice Morrison sentenced Evangeline to death by hanging. Evangeline staggered, then let out a scream. A scream that,
The Strait Times
reporter claimed,
conveyed her anguish to each and every one of us
. Evangeline keeled over and the prison wardens caught her arms to prevent her from sinking to the floor. As they frogmarched her to the door, Evangeline turned to the public gallery and called her sister’s name. Grace shouted back at Evangeline, actual coherent words –
Wait for me! Wait for me!
– and lunged at the balcony rail, heedless of the twelve-foot drop. The missionaries grabbed her arms, so for a moment the sisters mirrored each other, straining against the human shackles that held them back. The prison wardens had little patience with this and dragged Evangeline to the door. They passed the bench where I was standing and Evangeline met my eyes for the first time in over a year. And in that instant I knew she hated me and would hate me to the grave.

I agreed to take the child out of guilt. Saving the daughter from the orphanage to make some reparation for the nails hammered in her mother’s coffin. Charles laughed his head off when he heard. I was a dunce, a dolt, a dunderhead. The baby was no more mine than
Chairman
Mao’s. Not that I let his opinion bother me. By then I’d already written my letter of resignation.

The baby was being looked after by an Anglo-Indian woman, the wife of a Scottish policeman who lived on the outskirts of Jalang. The woman, whose name was Betty, wore a sari as bright as a parakeet and had a smudge of red on her forehead. She fetched my daughter as I waited in the parlour of her house.

The baby knocked the breath out of me. Betty gently lowered the carrycot to the floor, and the little girl, naked save for a cotton nappy, waggled her feet and threw some punches in the humid air. The baby smiled – not at me, but at the world at large, reaching out her arms, impossibly tiny fingers clutching and pulling at the invisible threads tangible only to the recently born. I smiled awkwardly at my daughter. She made me nervous. She was so fragile. I was bound to snap those little finger joints as carelessly as I’d snapped my reading glasses the week before. (
Look, perhaps I ought to come back for her in a couple of years, when she is a bit bigger
, I wanted to say.) Betty beamed encouragingly. The baby had a button nose and brown eyes lidded with Evangeline’s epicanthic folds. Her skin was pink-toned like mine, but what settled for me any doubts about paternity were the blonde tufts on her crown (tufts that would darken to black before her second birthday). I peered closer, breathing the milky talcum-powder fragrance of her skin. The sight of my hulking great face must have been disagreeable to my daughter. She whimpered, causing me to fear that she’d sensed my inadequacy
as
a father. Betty lifted her out of the cot, gold bangles jingling and jangling as she jiggled the baby and cooed.

‘Oh, you poor silly thing!’ sang Betty, ‘You poor silly thing! Do you want to say hello to your handsome father?’

Smiling, Betty held the child towards me. My hands flew up as if to fend off a blow.

‘Not right now, thank you. I shall, uh … hold her later …’

Later, much later, alone together in a Kuala Lumpur hotel room, I would cradle my daughter in my arms for the first time. And my daughter would howl like a human air-raid siren. Later she would vomit out her formula milk and I would bathe her in the sink, hand supporting her weightless skull, terrified of drowning her. Later I would spend a good quarter of an hour grappling with a safety pin, trying to put her in a nappy. Later, in the bleary-eyed hour before dawn, I would stare at her demoniac screaming mouth in awe. Surely this wasn’t normal infant behaviour. What had I done to make the child hate me so? But that was later.

‘You do know how to care for a baby, don’t you?’ asked Betty. ‘How often to feed it, how to change a nappy …?’

‘I expect I shall muddle through.’

I realized I did not know her name. I asked Betty what she was called.

‘Heavenly Orchid.’

I sighed. I’d thought Evangeline had more sense than that.

‘It’s quite popular for Chinese girls,’ Betty assured me.

‘But it’s hardly suitable for a doctor or a lawyer now, is it? We must think of a proper name for her. What names do you like?’

‘When it comes to English names I have always liked Frances,’ said Betty. ‘I knew a woman in Penang called Frances who died of typhoid during the war …’

‘Frances …’ I said. ‘Yes, I like it very much. I think that is what I shall call her. Thank you.’

Betty was reluctant to let me go, delaying my departure with advice on feeding times, milk temperature and bum rash. She gave me a knapsack stuffed with nappies and lotions which I strapped on my back. I lifted the cot and Frances waved her arms and legs. As I gave Betty a firm farewell handshake in the yard, two macaques climbed down from the mango trees and stood a short distance behind her.

‘Good luck.’ Betty smiled. ‘Good luck.’

I set off down the hot and dusty road, my daughter, my acquaintance of twenty minutes, swinging in her carrycot by my side. Before the bend in the road I glanced back and Betty was still there in her bright coloured sari, the macaques standing behind her with their tails pointing stiffly in the air. She smiled and waved, and with my free hand I saluted her, before we turned and left for good.

I peel a carrot with the paring knife, spilling shavings on the chopping board as I dig in the blade. Boiled
cabbage
, carrots and fried liver is our supper tonight – a supper Julia may or may not come home to eat. Dusk is gathering beyond the window, a landscape of grey. Adam sleeps in the bedroom, has been hibernating under the duvet for thirty days now. They are getting worse and worse, those children. Disintegrating in their separate ways, though I suspect the origins of decay are the same.

There is a shiver of antagonism in the kitchen, an atmospheric pins and needles. Who has come now? I turn and see and the clocks of Mountbatten strike hard upon my Judas heart. My beloved stands by the table, her frock too thin for the December chill, her furious beauty unmarred by a scowl. The paring knife is frozen in my hand, a carrot shaving caught in the blade. Evangeline stares, her eyes unblinking. And my cheeks flush and my heart flutters as if I have been caught stealing or telling a lie.

She absentmindedly thumbs the corner of a French textbook, the pages sticky with Ribena spilt by her homework-loathing granddaughter.
Who are you?
I ask my elusive love. I thought I knew her once, when we met high above the sleeping village, lakes of shadow merging on the rough-hewn walls. But now I don’t know. The silence teems with decades of uncertainty.

Evangeline’s chest heaves as if she has run a great distance. On the day she died, I wheeled Frances in her pram to the Lake Gardens’ butterfly sanctuary. Frances giggled when the butterflies landed on her, delicate wings opening and shutting, feelers twitching,
proboscises
dipping the nectar of her infant skin. I kept the truth from her for years and years.

Does Evangeline blame me for what happened to Frances too? So long as I am entombed in flesh I’ll never know. Evangeline flees interrogation, vanishes in the blink of an eye. Only once my heart has ticked to the end of its allocated ticks will I be able to fly off in pursuit of her.

When that day comes I’ll resist the urge for quarrel and recrimination. Who betrayed whom, and who left whom to die. None of that matters any more. We’ll exist again in our moments of happiness, perfect as snowflakes before they melt.

The front door slams and Evangeline’s eyes soften in the fading December light. And as the tiles swell beneath us, I savour our precarious truce. It is the closest thing to reconciliation we will have for a long time.

IV

20

ADAM WAS IN
the kitchen when the door buzzer went. A pan of spaghetti was boiling on the hob, and the tumble-drier rumbled with gentle thunder, tossing sheets. The radio was tuned into a long-wave French station, the panel debate accompanied by a snake-hiss of static, a high-pitched whine. Adam doesn’t know French. The foreign syllables moved up and down the scale like musical notes; masculine basso, feminine chimes, cymbal clashes of conflict soothed by the mellifluous host. On the way to the intercom he clicked off the radio, silencing his eloquent Gallic guests.

‘Hello?’

‘Adam, it’s me, Jules. Can I come in?’

Adam hadn’t heard his sister’s voice through the intercom before. Disorientated, he said, ‘Jules. You all right?’

‘Yeah, fine.’

‘Come up.’

Adam buzzed her in. How did she know his address? Adam had scribbled it down for her soon after his tenancy began, but that had been years ago. He was surprised she’d hung on to it so long, that it hadn’t been lost in the tides of junk that besieged her flat. Why had she come? Money, of course. Irritated, he steeled himself. But when he opened the door, he was so happy to see her his vigilance disappeared. Julia gave him a lopsided smile and walked into his arms. Released from the hug, she conscientiously stamped her shoes on the doormat, peering over Adam’s shoulder and into his flat. The flat was practically a studio, separated from the tiny bathroom and kitchen by folding accordion doors. Everything was clean and functional; the stripped wood floor recently mopped, cushions plumped, and the sofa throw smoothed of wrinkles. The computer desk and bookshelves were dusted, CDs stored in a rack. The dark windows were opaque with condensation coalescing into drips that glided to the sill.