The Orientalist and the Ghost (6 page)

In my early days in the village, I’d often have after-dinner drinks on the veranda with Charles. I enjoyed these boozy soirées, for Charles was a first-rate raconteur, brimful of scandalous tales of expat society;
of
mems
and
tuans
and sin and adultery at the Royal Selangor Club. He gave horrific accounts of his years of wartime jail in Singapore, resurrecting Jap guards from the dead to shout at him in fierce Nipponese accents and twice break his nose. He was also very funny, making extravagant toasts in praise of our dessert of juicy mangosteen, or the song of the mynah bird, or the cyanide capsules gobbled by his jailers upon news of the motherland’s defeat. But Charles’s jollity was short-lived as a few weeks into our acquaintance his miserablist streak asserted itself. To Charles the Chinese squatters were barefaced liars, the government corrupt buffoons and the departure of the British a Sino-Malay massacre in waiting. He ranted on about the failure of Emergency regulations, but had no alternatives to suggest. Dark ravens flew from his soul and shook their ugly malignant feathers over everything. Loath to be infected by his sneery cynicism, I retreated earlier and earlier to my hut. My after-dinner getaway offended Charles. Affecting high spirits, he’d badger me to stay longer. But I’d flee none the less, safe in the knowledge that Charles could not force me to listen. I was wrong of course, for Charles avenges me in the afterlife, making his ghostly appearances day and night, his bleak monologues depriving me of sleep. Hell hath no fury, it seems, like a Resettlement Officer scorned.

Charles and I were playing backgammon in the bungalow on the evening I first met Lieutenant Spencer. The policeman barged in, stomped over to the
gramophone
and shunted the needle off the Puccini opera that Charles had selected.

‘Enough of that poncey shit,’ said Spencer. ‘Let’s ’ave some proper music off the radio.’

‘What am I to do with you, Percival?’ Charles sighed. ‘I know you lack taste, but there’s no need to take it out on my record collection.’

Lieutenant Spencer was five foot seven in jungle boots, stocky, with a criminal photofit face. He joined us at the table, pushing aside a bottle of vermouth and some carved knick-knacks from Borneo to make room for his rolling papers and tobacco pouch. In the bilious shine of the kerosene lamp Spencer reminded me of a muscular, dangerous breed of dog. A pit-bull, perhaps, or mastiff. The music silenced, we could hear the distant rattle of gunfire as the Communists began their nightly jitter campaign against Kip Phillips at the Bishop’s Head plantation.

‘Bloody Reds,’ Spencer said, licking the gummed edge of a cigarette paper. ‘They want expatriating. Send ’em back on the boat.’

‘Poor Kip,’ Charles said. ‘The bandits have put so many bullet holes in his roof the man says he’s living in a colander … I say, Spencer, have you met my assistant, Christopher Milnar?’

It was the first time man and beast had laid eyes on each other, but Spencer quipped: ‘Oh yeah, I know old Goldilocks ’ere from when we was at Eton together. Gave you a good flogging when I was head boy, din’t I?’

We had a good chuckle at this.

‘You written home to Mummy yet?’ Spencer sneered.

I laughed again and said that, yes, I’d written to Mummy thrice weekly. The lieutenant glowered, making it clear that he had the monopoly on my ridicule, and that I was not to poke fun at myself again.

After the ban of Puccini from the gramophone, the remote hail of bullets and delirious shrill of cicada became the music for our drinking party. Charles passed the story-telling reins over to Spencer, who was every bit as engaging as the Resettlement Officer. Chain-smoking and gin-swigging and punctuating every sentence with swear words, Spencer described his six-month stint in an isolated outpost in northern Terengganu, where he went on jungle missions, surviving on tinned stew and edible plants and equipped with nothing more than ‘me tommy cooker, me knife and Bren gun’. After three months of jungle patrol and not one dead Communist to show for it, the District Officer summoned Spencer to his office for a ‘right proper bollocking’.

Spencer was sent back into the jungle, warned that he was on his last chance. He was under orders to report back in ten days, but on his final Terengganu mission he disappeared for two months. After a half-hearted search party returned from the rainforest with one of his boots, everyone assumed Lieutenant Spencer was dead, killed by the Communists or eaten by carnivorous baboons. So when the missing policeman one day walked into the District Office, his uniform in tatters, cheeks smeared with tribal markings, and a
bamboo
spike through his septum, the District Officer was rather surprised. Spencer told him that he’d been living with a tribe of Orang Asli and learning their indigenous ways.

‘Golly! What a marvellous adventure!’ said the District Officer. ‘But seeing as we’re not paying you to go and live with the natives, it’s high time we booked you a one-way ticket back to old Blighty.’

Spencer said nothing and gave a piercing two-fingered whistle. An Orang Asli tribesman trotted into the office, barefoot and naked save for a loincloth, a large canvas sack slung over his shoulder. The tribesman opened the sack over the D.O.’s desk and out plopped eleven severed heads. The decomposing heads thudded and bounced, leaving vile splodges of blood on the D.O.’s paperwork, before tumbling to the floor. Each face wore a death mask of terror and outrage, and one or two, loyal to the end, the beret of the Malayan Races Liberation Army. Lieutenant Spencer grinned as he recounted this moment of triumph.

‘You should ’ave seen his face when them ’eads landed on his desk! He nearly went as yellow as them noggins was! They were like stinky rotten cabbages, and some of them still had their slitty eyes open. I went off and left the D.O. to count ’em up. Took me Orang Asli mate for a slap-up supper.’

The mass-murderer laughed and Charles hooted and thumped a fist on the table. I smiled feebly. For weeks afterwards I had nightmares in which I too was a decapitated skull, rolling about and head-butting my
neighbours
in the darkness of the canvas sack. Nowadays I’m not so squeamish. The souls of the dead leave so many grisly body parts about my flat (chopped limbs and gouged-out eyeballs, and let us not forget the lieutenant’s magnificent flying intestines!) I scarcely lift an eyebrow at dismemberment any more.

On the night of our first meeting Lieutenant Spencer made no attempt to hide his dislike of me. Daggers flew across the table from his piggy eyes and his nostrils flared like a bull hoofing the ground, ready to charge. I had no idea what I’d done to enrage the policeman (only later would I realize that he considered me a love rival for the affections of Charles), and his hostility unsettled me so much that, at the grand old age of twenty-five, I took up smoking. I filched one of Charles’s Lambert and Butler’s and lit up, coughing and spluttering on my first drag. The hell-fire in my lungs was worth it, though, for it erected a literal smokescreen between me and Spencer’s animosity – the cigarette an excellent, if incrementally lethal, prop.

The hours passed and we three Englishmen got drunker and drunker. The instrumentalists changed in the night orchestra, as the gunfire at the Bishop’s Head plantation ceased, and was replaced by the high jinks of the village home guard hurling hats over the perimeter fence. Beneath the guards’ laughter the jungle kept up its creaturely hum.

‘More whisky, Goldilocks?’ asked Charles.

I hiccuped, obfuscated by booze, and wondered how
many
years Charles had been making the nightly sacrifice to Bacchus.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ I replied, lifting my glass and imploring the powers-that-be that my new nickname not catch on.

The mood of the bungalow became smutty and depraved as Spencer moved from tales of bandit-slaying to a torrent of anecdotes about the whores of the Frangipani Club. Gleeful and unabashed, the policeman described each of his intimate encounters with the Frangipani Club prostitutes, naming personal favourites with a heterosexual zeal that smacks to me, in retrospect, as a denial of his feelings for Charles Dulwich (who laughed raucously, not in the least bit put out). I found Spencer’s lewd tales tedious and repetitive. Annoyed by my lack of mirth, Spencer decided I was a virgin.

‘Time you got rid o’ that cherry, Goldilocks,’ said Spencer. ‘Get yerself down to the Frangipani Club, get yerself seen to. They’ve got Malays, Chinks, Indonesians … Whores of every colour of mud.’

‘Godspeed!’ cried Charles. ‘There’s nothing sadder than a twenty-five-year-old virgin.’

They were baiting the new boy and I was naive enough to bite. The assumption that I was innocent of the fairer sex offended me, as did the proposal I remedy this in a house of ill repute. Not once in my life have I visited a brothel. Not even in the fifty years of celibacy that followed the vanishment of my beloved Evangeline (well, fifty years of near celibacy, interrupted by a
shameful
dalliance with one of Frances’s school chums in 1968 – but let’s not go into that). Brothels are raging hotbeds of venereal disease, infested with lice and strains of gonorrhoea that can eat through the toughest prophylactic. (I remember how the Worcestershire First Battalion Regiment scratched constantly at the crabs residing in their pubes.) Though I was unfamiliar with the Frangipani Club and other iniquitous haunts, I was no stranger to the carnal delights of the female flesh. Marion Forte-Cannon would testify to that (once she had ceased, as she had melodramatically declared, the loathing of
every fibre
of my being). As would the many girls who shimmied up the drainpipe to my room in university halls.

‘My dear Lieutenant,’ I said, ‘I believe you’re confusing what it is to be a virgin with what it is to be a gentleman. Never in a million years would I go to the Frangipani Club, for I am the latter, I’ll have you know.’

Charles guffawed and Spencer was silent, nostrils flaring as if from some detonation of rage in the nasal cavities.

‘You saying I ain’t a gentleman?’ he said with a sneer.

How downright stupid that he, who’d just five minutes ago been describing the introduction of ping-pong balls to the delicate regions of a hooker called Heavenly Lotus, was protesting his exclusion from the rank of gentleman.

‘I said no such thing,’ I replied. ‘I merely said that—’

‘ ’Cos you ain’t no better than me, you public-school tosser. You can look down yer nose at the Frangipani
Club
, but you ain’t gonna find no posh ladies and croquet tournaments out here …’

‘Now, steady on, old chap!’ chortled Charles. ‘No one is saying you are anything less than a gentleman. The very thought!’

The humidity merged with the lieutenant’s drunken wrath, creating the atmosphere of a pressure cooker. I was convinced he was going to wallop me. I’d never been in a drunken brawl before (except the time I restrained a wild Max Montgomery from attacking Freddy St Clair at the Fencing Society ball) and had no desire to make up for this lack of experience. I was about to announce that I was off to bed, when there was a knocking at the door. The knocks came in staccato bursts, spaced at intervals.

‘Ah ha! I know who that is!’ cried Charles. ‘Yes, yes, you may enter!’

The door opened and a young Chinese man slipped in like a quick-moving shadow. He wore the latex-splattered uniform of a rubber tapper.

‘Detective Pang, welcome!’ cried Charles.

‘ ’Evening, Detective,’ said Spencer, hostility cast aside as he greeted the newcomer.

The man came and sat at the table.

‘My loving Bolshevik salutes to you, Lieutenant Spencer, Resettlement Officer Dulwich.’

The man’s locution was indistinguishable from that of an Englishman. To hear such refinement from a Chinese squatter was as strange as being spoken to by a cat.

‘Ha, ha, ha, I’ll give you a Bolshevik salute, yer cheeky sod,’ said Spencer, laughing.

‘Assistant Resettlement Officer Milnar, how do you do? I’m Detective Pang.’

The detective and I shook hands.

‘How do you do?’ I said. ‘Crikey. You look nothing like a detective.’

‘Detective Pang is the head of a thirty-strong network of undercover spies in the village,’ said Charles.

‘Thirty-strong!’ I echoed.

‘Whisky, Detective?’

‘Oh, yes. Splendid.’

Detective Pang was as nondescript as the hundreds of other tappers in the village, and I’d no memory of having seen him before. With the bullish Spencer and the barrel-chested Charles either side of him, the detective seemed fragile and bird-boned, as if an enthusiastic bear hug would crush him. His cheekbones were high and feline and the low droopy folds of his eyelids made him seem half asleep (the opposite of vigilant; possibly integral to his success as a secret agent). As Charles ransacked the drinks cabinet for more booze, Detective Pang took a bag of sunflower seeds out of his trouser pocket. He nibbled the seeds as he sipped his nightcap, splitting them open with his teeth and discarding the striped husks on the table.

‘How’s the old intelligence gathering going?’ asked Charles. ‘What have the Min Yuen been up to lately? Spill the beans!’

‘Up to their usual tricks, I’m afraid. We’ve had a
successful
week, though, and have passed on the names of several Min Yuen suspects to Sergeant Abdullah.’

‘Terrific result. Well done!’

‘Ah, we have my wife to thank. The sewing circle she has joined has proved to be a goldmine of enemy information. The wives of the Min Yuen have lips as loose as their morals and are forever bragging of their husbands’ criminal activities.’

The Chinese detective was so well-spoken and refined, I asked him if it was difficult to assume the identity of a common squatter.

‘No, it’s very easy,’ he replied. ‘I chew the betel nut and keep a hog and four geese. I talk with my mouth full and beat my wife. I have built my hovel from the same scavenged rubbish as the other squatters and have cut down on washing. No one here knows us from before, but they assume we’re just random unfortunates caught up in the government resettlement scheme. I only visit the police hut and Resettlement Officer Dulwich in the dead of night. I am rude to the village police, and Sergeant Abdullah has had his men pretend to arrest me on two occasions to place me above suspicion. When you see me in the village, you must never approach me or talk to me, even though you are known for your friendliness, Mr Milnar. If anyone discovers that my wife and I are spies, the Communists will murder us.’