The Orientalist and the Ghost (5 page)

‘How do you do, Evangeline,’ I said. ‘You speak English, do you? Terrific. Perhaps we could translate together.’

That solemn creature did not smile back. She responded in a queer-rhythmed English; strangled, with none of the usual Malay-accented warmth.

‘Thank you, but your assistance is not necessary. I taught English for eight years at Kajang High School, so I am more than proficient. Also I don’t think the villagers will want you here. They are very shy of their diseases, and it is hard enough already for them to come here without some white man staring at them too.’

It hadn’t occurred to me that the Chinese peasants might be ‘shy of their diseases’. This more than justified my banishment from the medical hut.
Ah well
, I thought sadly,
farewell, lovely nurses! Back to the company of stinky, grunty, khaki-clad men
…

‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I so wanted to lend a hand …’

I thought the nurses would agree with Evangeline, but Nurse Maddy, staring determinedly at the loose strip of muslin bandage she was rolling up, said: ‘If Christopher wants to help I don’t see why not. We can ask the villagers if it’s OK. Most won’t mind, I’m sure. And if they do then the Pom can step outside during their examination.’

Good old Nurse Maddy!
I thought. Evangeline went a thunderous shade, but said nothing. Only later was I to discover how proud she was of her role as medical-hut translator, and how she wanted it to remain hers and hers alone.

And so began the war of the interpreters.

I embarked upon my career as co-translator a gentleman – politely nodding and smiling when Evangeline saw fit to correct and contradict me. But like most young men I had a lively competitive spirit (it wasn’t my impeccable p’s and q’s that got me promoted to captain of the St Andrews University fencing team!) and my gentlemanly powers could only hold out for so long. The sick villagers became pawns in our quest for one-upmanship; the medical hut, the arena for our grammatical duels and jousts. Together we’d peer at bunions and tonsils swollen to the size of ping-pong balls and listen to descriptions of their physical woes. Then we’d relay what we’d heard to the Red Cross nurses, making sly digs at each other. Our attempts at stealth were laughable. The Red Cross nurses were constantly sighing, eyes lifted to heaven, or exchanging knowing smiles. (To this day I don’t know why they didn’t chuck me out. Perhaps our quarrelling was an amusing diversion.)

More often than not Evangeline was right to correct me.
Your crazy understanding of Cantonese!
she’d hiss.
To you a rash is a headache and a pain an itch
… Our rivalry sometimes took us beyond the bounds of propriety. I
remember
the afternoon Old Lady Wu sat, wheezing, in the examination chair, her lungs drowning in bilious fluids. Her voice like a rattlesnake in her throat, Old Lady Wu described the chronic symptoms that forced her to sleep sitting upright and made her every waking moment a fight for breath.

When she ran out of puff and could no longer speak, I turned to Nurse Josie and confidently said: ‘Old Lady Wu says she coughs up bloody phlegm in the mornings.’

‘Old Lady Wu says her phlegm is bloody all the time. Not just in the morning,’ Evangeline objected.

‘She said her phlegm is bloodiest in the mornings.’

‘No, she did not.’

‘Yes, she did. She said her coughing is worse then too.’

‘Old Lady Wu says her coughing is terrible all the time. See how she is coughing now.’

Old Lady Wu was indeed hacking away as though her lungs were at that very moment disintegrating. I frowned at her for conspiring to give my enemy the upper hand.

‘You wicked children!’ Old Lady Wu wheezed. ‘I am a dying old woman! Stop quarrelling and tell the Foreign She-Devils I want some medicine for my chest!’

I ought to have left the medical hut alone. But I’d caught the fever of competition, and to allow Evangeline such a victory was unthinkable. What made our petty spats even more distasteful was that they were played out against a backdrop of poverty and
life-threatening
illnesses. The urchins that scampered about The Village of Everlasting Peace suffered from rickets and smallpox, their infant tummies a lair of parasitic worms. Chinese squatter women reached old age at thirty-nine with prolapsed wombs, arthritis-stiffened joints and ulcerated legs the gadflies bothered from dawn until dusk. A weeping girl came with a handkerchief bundle containing a dozen teeth that had fallen out, begging the nurses to put them back in her diseased gums. A mother brought us her baby, howling its little head off because his chest, scalded in an accident with a boiling kettle, had had a stinging concoction of mandrake and ginger root massaged on it by a Chinese herbalist (who convinced the mother that fire must be fought with fire, then charged her three
ringgit
for his stupidity).

Most Chinese squatter men distrusted Western medicine and thought it harmful to masculinity. So apart from the odd occasion when a hen-pecked husband was dragged to the medical hut by his wife, my afternoons there were spent largely in the company of women, which was not as tantalizing a prospect as it at first might seem, as, done-in by poverty, the stress of multiple childbearing and lack of access to dental care, the fairer sex of The Village of Everlasting Peace were not that fair. Occasionally there’d be a young girl whose beauty triumphed over the scabs and malnutrition, and though my admiration of these lovelies was innocent enough, Evangeline’s acid-tongued comments made it seem less so.
Interpret with your ears, not your eyes
, she
once
muttered, as though my wistful glances were a molestation. Evangeline was one of those prickly oversensitive types, offended by the male gaze. Had a fortune teller prophesied, in those quarrelsome days, that Evangeline was to be my future beloved, I’d have laughed and demanded my money back. How poorly I knew myself. I used to lie awake on my camp-bed at night, seething over some slight she’d made. (
How dare she belittle me in front of the patients! Arrogant bitch. She never smiles. I bet she hasn’t smiled once in her thirty-eight years! I shall get up early tomorrow and learn more vocabulary. That’ll teach her
…)

The prettiness and Antipodean curves of the nurses were forgotten. Many times the nurses had, in the act of leaning over, afforded me glimpses of the ivory mounds of their breasts, hoisted in no-frills brassières. But this erotic imagery went unexploited as night after night I was consumed by angry thoughts of Evangeline.
I think you’re sweet on Evangeline
, Nurse Josie once whispered, when my rival was out of earshot.
Certainly not!
I spluttered, though the vehemence of my denial didn’t stop my cheeks turning red.

The other night I woke to find Evangeline sitting beside me on the fold-out bed, wonderment in her eyes as she tenderly stroked my brow.
Whatever must she think of me now?
I thought as I lay beneath her watchful gaze. During our love affair Evangeline was the older woman (I used to joke and call her ‘my darling spinster’, ‘my dear old maid’). But time ceased for her at the stroke of
death
, and Evangeline is for ever forty years old. An age I have long surpassed. I glimpsed myself through her eyes – denture-less and sunken-mouthed, my skin like a mottled withered peach – and ridiculous vanity and self-pity flared within. How could she bear to touch me? Her tranquil mood was rare indeed. Evangeline is the most violent and destructive of my ghostly acquaintances – bursting into my council flat like a vengeful hurricane, whipping up apples and satsumas from the fruit bowl and pelting them at me.
What a miracle to have her sitting so calmly beside me
, I thought. Then our amnesty came to an end.

‘I haven’t forgiven you,’ she said.

And not to be outdone, I said, ‘Nor I you.’

Hatred contorted my beloved’s face and she spat viciously in my eye. Then she vanished.

It amuses me now to recall our bickering in the medical hut. The simmering dislike of lust in its infancy. We were unaware of it at the time, but those were our halcyon days.

4

POLICE LIEUTENANT SPENCER
came to my flat yesterday, the bloody hole in his khaki jacket torn by the Communist bayonet that eviscerated him in 1953. When he was alive Lieutenant Spencer was a man of arrogance and violence, but in death he is the epitome of dejection.

‘Where’s me cup o’ tea, Goldilocks?’ he asked.

‘Sorry, Lieutenant,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

The policeman christened me Goldilocks on the evening we first met in The Village of Everlasting Peace. The nickname is long invalid – for there is nothing golden about my locks any more – but this does not discourage use of the misnomer. Spencer always demands a cuppa when he comes, but even when there’s enough left in the teapot I never give him any. He lacks the visceral means to retain beverages, and every sip would seep out of his belly wound and on to my sofa.

I lifted my mug and swallowed some strongly brewed tea, grateful the lieutenant had left his intestines behind. Spencer likes to decorate my flat with garlands of entrails. He dangles them from the light fixtures, or lets them slither across the carpet, like grotesque B-movie snakes. I once saw his guts slinking behind the washing machine, masquerading as one of the water hoses. I once saw them leap from his stomach to the ceiling, like a jumbo-sized umbilical cord connecting the lieutenant to the tiled womb of the kitchen.

We sat quietly together, listening to shifting frequencies of static as my truanting grandson adjusted the radio dial in the bedroom. When he’s not reading library books or meddling with his acne, Adam listens to long-wave stations in Arabic and French and other languages he doesn’t know. Rather queer as far as hobbies go, but I don’t interfere.

‘How are you keeping these days, Lieutenant Spencer?’ I asked.

Spencer began effing and blinding like a cockney barrow boy, which I took to mean ‘Not very well’. Poor old Spencer. His dignity has never recovered since the day his bowels were whipped out by a Communist revolutionary who went by the party name ‘Little Mosquito’. Lieutenant Spencer survived four years in Palestine and two years bandit-shooting in the Malayan jungle (with a decapitated-enemy head count of thirty-seven). He was very proud of his murderous prowess and would sooner have ripped out his own guts than let
a
Communist get his filthy Maoist paws on them. And to rub salt in his already substantial wound, the assassin ‘Little Mosquito’ was a mere fourteen years old; only just graduated from slaying imaginary imperialist pigs in the schoolyard to being kitted out with his own gun and red star beret. It was a rather humiliating end to Lieutenant Spencer’s brutally accomplished career.

Spencer was murdered at the age of twenty-five. When he was alive he was known as a bit of a psychopath (a reputation of which he was very proud, and sustained by routinely capturing geckos in his fist and biting off their tongue-flickering heads). But in his spirit incarnation Spencer’s self-esteem is at a low ebb and he is unthreatening, to say the least. There’s a strained, comic quality to his angst, like the misery of Stan Laurel.

‘You seen Resettlement Officer Dulwich?’ he asked. ‘Posh fatso with whisky blood clots in his eyes. You see ’im, you tell ’im Spencer’s looking for ’im. I ain’t no pederast now. I’ve got me missus down at the Frangipani Club, and what floats Charles’s boat, that’s his business. He’s just me mate. But if you see ’im, you tell ’im Spencer wants a word.’

The true nature of Charles Dulwich’s relationship with Spencer was revealed to me the afternoon I caught them making love in the officers’ bathing hut (oh, how the afterimages of their ugly naked grunty bestiality haunt me!). The love affair was stormy and passionate, and for Spencer one of utter subjugation. In any relationship he who cares least has the most power, and
Charles
didn’t care a fig. When I tell Charles his ex-lover is looking for him, he cackles and says:
What? Old Percival? That little bandit gave him quite a bellyache, didn’t he?
Or he laughs and buzzes like a mosquito.

Lieutenant Spencer pesters me when he visits.
I ain’t heard from Charlie … You tell ’im I’m looking for ’im or what?
I deliver every one of Spencer’s messages to Charles. I am not to blame if he ignores them. I hate acting as go-between for the dead. Surely there’s a more efficient means for the deceased to contact one another – perhaps some directory enquiries of the spirit realm. If Lieutenant Spencer has the metaphysical know-how to disappear and reappear at whim, then he ought to be able to track down Resettlement Officer Dulwich himself without harassing a pensioner drinking his morning cup of tea.

‘Charles was here not twenty minutes ago,’ I told Spencer. ‘He watched me fry some mushrooms and bacon for my breakfast, then left. It’s astonishing that you always miss him. He is here a dozen times a day.’

‘You tell ’im Percy wants a word.’

‘I always do. Why don’t you wait here? He’s bound to turn up before long.’

But Lieutenant Percy Spencer, heartbroken and mutilated, was gone.