The Orientalist and the Ghost (9 page)

In the office, Charles was wafted by the scalloped fan as he typed up the weekly village report. The story of Mrs Ho outraged him.

‘We must call her bluff,’ he said. ‘We cannot let a squatter woman hold her life over us as a threat. Nor can we let opium-eating go on in this village.’

Charles assured me that Mrs Ho wouldn’t find out her confidence had been violated. He would see to it that Mr Ho and the other drug fiends were caught in flagrante delicto. As I left, Charles dialled a number on the telephone and barked,
Get me Sergeant Abdullah!
And I returned to my volunteer team, trusting the situation was in good hands.

But there were no arrests. Not the next week, nor the week after that. When I asked Charles why the police were so slow, he spoke of an undercover operation to track down the opium ringleaders.
They’re after the big boys
, he said, with a knowing wink.

Sometimes, when Charles comes haunting, I remind him of his whopping great lies. And he laughs and laughs, holding on to his massive jiggling belly as if it might explode. Charles often sets up his opium-smoking paraphernalia on my sideboard. He is especially fond of an Aladdin’s lamp with a hollow rope attachment, devoting hours to sucking on the brass mouthpiece. Occasionally he uses more sinister tools of the trade – needles and syringes, weighing scales, morphia grains and vials of distilled water. He borrows my necktie to make a tourniquet around the venom depository of his arm. I close my eyes as he injects – I’ve always had a phobia of needles. I plug my fingers in my ears too, for I’ve come to loathe that sigh of intoxication. I have no desire to eavesdrop on his orgasm.

‘This,’ he says, eyes rolling back, ‘is the most powerful weapon in the war against Communism. Not the hundreds of thousands of dollars of government propaganda and all that nonsense about hearts and minds. So long as the Reds want to outlaw this bourgeois indulgence, they’ll never be loved by the Chinese.’

‘Better a Communist than a dope fiend,’ I muttered.

‘Tee hee hee, tee hee hee,’ giggled Charles, shutting his eyes and slumping into the arms of his toxic paramour.

The jungle settlement from which the two hundred newcomers had come was the last remaining source of food for the local Communists. Annoyed about their last supporters being corralled behind barbed wire, the 10th Independent Regiment of the Malayan Races Liberation Army upped their campaign of violence against The Village of Everlasting Peace. Grenades flew here, there and everywhere, blowing up the south watchtower and a few of our men besides. Dr Fothergill became adept at tweezering bullets out of our home guard, getting his patients shipshape so they were back on duty within a week. Conscious of the slit-throat fate of my predecessor, I kept to my hut after nightfall. I was lonely, I suppose, but I much preferred loneliness to boozing till all hours with Charles Dulwich and Lieutenant Spencer, back early from his failed mission to the Batu Caves, and in a filthy rotten mood after one of his squadron had blundered into trip-wire and got his legs blasted off.

One night I was woken by fists hammering my door.
Mistah Christopher! Mistah Christopher!
I fought my way out from under the mosquito nets and groped for the door bolt. There stood Special Constable Tahir, a young Malay of about seventeen, come to tell me I was wanted at the police hut.

‘What for?’ I asked.

Tahir told me they’d arrested a woman and she’d begged for me to be sent for. A week had passed since my visit to the mission and with a shudder I thought of the evil Mrs Ho. I asked Tahir if he knew who the woman was, and he smiled and shook his head.

‘Hurry!’ he said. ‘But first, trousers!’ alerting me to the fact I was stark bollock naked.

Special Constable Tahir and I jogged through the village, chasing the bobbing light of his torch over a steeplechase of ditches and fences. In the police hut, seated at the table, were Sergeant Abdullah, a pretty Chinese girl and the last person I’d expected to see in such circumstances – my medical-hut adversary, Evangeline Lim. Sergeant Abdullah, a night owl who often worked the graveyard shift, was chatting good-naturedly to the girls as we arrived. There was a large mahogany Go board on the table, its jade markers in complicated positions of attack and counter-attack. Sergeant Abdullah was sliding the jade markers about, describing the pros and cons of various moves to his silent guests.

‘Ah! Number Two Man!’ he cheered when he saw me. ‘Come! Sit! Have a cup of tea.’

I sat down, panting slightly after my run. The pretty Chinese girl smiled as if to welcome me, but Evangeline stared into her lap, refusing to lift her eyes to meet my enquiring gaze.

‘What’s going on here?’ I asked as Sergeant Abdullah poured me a cup of lemon-scented tea.

‘We caught these nincompoops sneaking about by the fence
lah
. We searched them, but they had no food. They must have thrown whatever they were carrying over to the bandits. They can’t speak English or Malay. The crazy sister cannot speak at all.’

‘Sisters?’ I said.

‘She,’ Sergeant Abdullah nodded at Evangeline, ‘asked for you. And I thought, well, Number Two Man wakes up so early every morning, he won’t mind coming here to translate!’

I glanced at the clock. It was quarter past two. The crazy sister (who I would later know as ‘mad Grace’) was in her late teens – decades younger than Evangeline, and more like a daughter than a sibling. Grace was as pretty and cherubic as Evangeline was haggard and unlovely. The only likeness between the two was their mysterious smoke-grey eyes. Grace’s smile was that of a simpleton who thought it was perfectly fine to be arrested and brought to the police hut at quarter past two in the morning, as if the sergeant were hosting a tea party in their honour. Evangeline was as tense as her sister was carefree, lifting her chin as if all the dignity she had left was preserved in its tilt.
The
nerve
of that woman
, I thought,
dragging me out of bed just to stick her nose in the air
.

‘Evangeline, why are you pretending you can’t speak English or Malay?’ I asked sternly in Cantonese. ‘You are fluent in both.’

Blushing, she met my gaze. ‘I need your help,’ she said. ‘You have to stop them from sending us to detention camp.’

Her voice shook with humiliation. It cost her greatly to ask for my help, and I admit to a devilish glee. (All those afternoons she’d arrogantly ticked me off in front of the Red Cross nurses! Oh, sweet revenge!) Sergeant Abdullah passed me their identity cards.

‘Evangeline and Grace,’ he said. ‘Family name, Lim. Tahir says the younger one is a slut. Has trouble keeping her legs shut
lah
… Look at their Foreign-Devil eyes. I bet their mother had some leg-shutting trouble around the Holy Joes.’

There was a plate of biscuits on the table. The sergeant offered the plate to Grace.

‘Here you go, chocolate biscuit. See if you have enough teeth in that nincompoop head of yours.’

Grace took a biscuit and grinned. The teeth studding her gums were small as milk teeth, growth stunted to reflect her mental age. Sergeant Abdullah offered the plate to Evangeline, who shook her head.

‘What on earth were you doing out after curfew?’ I asked.

‘My sister ran away,’ said Evangeline. ‘She runs away all the time. I usually tie our wrists together with string
before
we go to bed, so I wake up if she tries to escape. But tonight she cut herself free.’ Evangeline lifted her wrist to show me the loop of string. She then lifted Grace’s wrist, adorned with a similar bracelet of twine. ‘When I discovered she was missing I went to look for her. I had to, Christopher, or else she’d have gone into other people’s huts and got herself into trouble. I found her by the fence. Then the police caught us.’

‘I see,’ I said. The thought of Evangeline tying herself to her mentally handicapped sister every night depressed me. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain to Sergeant Abdullah exactly what happened. You won’t be sent to a detention camp.’

Evangeline’s eyes flashed angrily. ‘He won’t believe me,’ she hissed. ‘My sister and I are guilty to him. Every squatter is guilty to him. He has no respect for us. See how he ridicules my sister. To send us away to detention camp means nothing to him.’

‘Number Two Man, what is she saying?
Caw, caw, caw
– just like a crow.’

Sergeant Abdullah sipped some lemon tea, dunking his moustache in the cup. I glanced at Special Constable Tahir. Could he understand Cantonese? Apparently not. He stood by the door, eyes glazed, lost in cloud-cuckoo-land.

‘One moment,’ I said to the sergeant. Then to Evangeline: ‘What do you want from me?’

‘Tell the sergeant that you met me before in the medical hut. Say that I was desperate for sleeping tablets to drug my sister with. That even when I bind
her
to me with rope she manages to free herself and run away. It’s true, Christopher – I’ve asked for sleeping pills, but they never have any. Sergeant Abdullah doesn’t know that I speak English or help the Red Cross.’

‘You want me to lie?’

‘Look at her,’ Evangeline said, gesturing to Grace. ‘She knows nothing about the Emergency or Communists or the curfew, no matter how many times I tell her. We don’t deserve to be punished.’

So I told Sergeant Abdullah what Evangeline had told me. Of her tying her wrist to her sister’s every night, and of Grace escaping. Then I lied and told him that Evangeline had come to the medical hut several times begging for sleeping tablets to cure Grace’s night wanderlust, and that we had none to give her. Sergeant Abdullah twiddled the corners of his moustache as he listened, and Grace babbled in her own private onomatopoeic language.

‘Grace marches to the beat of her own drum,’ I concluded, ‘and, alas, it is the drumbeat of dementia.’

‘Tell her,’ the sergeant jabbed a finger at Evangeline, ‘happen one time, OK. Happen again, and there will be trouble! Tahir, wake up! Take the time-wasters back to their hut.’

The relief in Evangeline’s face was as fleeting as a subliminal frame in a film. But I saw it. For appearances’ sake I uttered a few words of Chinese and she nodded. Tahir opened the door and the Lim sisters went quickly after him, without a word of thanks or saying goodbye.

The police-hut clock showed half past two. My mind was wide awake and I knew there was no hope of my getting back to sleep. I sighed, stood up and said goodnight to Sergeant Abdullah.

‘Good of you to come, Number Two,’ he replied. ‘I will tell Number One what a good man you are. If it wasn’t for those silly donkeys you’d be having your beauty sleep and I’d be beating Detective Pang at Go.’

In my heart there was a many-feathered explosion.
Detective Pang
? The door to the back room opened and the Chinese detective emerged from hiding. The detective gave me a polite nod and sat in the chair Evangeline had just vacated. I knew he’d heard it all. The walls were as thin as cardboard and no obstruction to even the lowest-decibel murmuring.

‘Pang is excellent at Go,’ said Sergeant Abdullah, ‘but too bad for Pang he is not as excellent as I am!’

Elbows on the table, Detective Pang stared at the arrangement of jade counters on the board.

‘Bold words for a man in such a fix, don’t you think, Christopher?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know the rules.’

‘Rules are important,’ said the detective. ‘If you knew the rules, then you’d appreciate the dilemma I am in.’

I don’t recall what I said to that; I remember only the sensation of draining blood. I mumbled goodbye and stumbled outside, leaving them to their game and Detective Pang to the disclosure of my lie.

* * *

Sometimes, when I am ironing the bed sheets, or jotting the weekly shopping list on the back of a torn cornflakes box, I hear the crack, crack, crack of sunflower seeds. I look up and see the husks fall out of midair, as if from the beak of an invisible parrot, and scatter on the floor. This is the sly method in which Detective Pang makes his presence known. I am not happy about the mess he makes. The seed husks are very difficult to remove, resisting the rotating bristles of my carpet-sweeper, no matter how briskly I trundle it back and forth. Sometimes Pang appears as a detective, eschewing his tapper uniform for a slick brown suit and leather shoes. The detective sits in my armchair, one leg crossed over the other. Cool and debonair.

‘That night was the beginning of the end,’ he says.

‘I know.’

‘You may as well have lit a match and sent the whole village up in flames.’

‘Now, look here,’ I say. ‘How was I to know? It’s irrational to blame everything on me. You had the opportunity to tell Sergeant Abdullah the truth too. But you didn’t.’

Detective Pang does not persist in his allegations, but his silence goads me into a fine old rant. I often get so worked-up that Adam gathers up his books and retreats to the bathroom (to read huddled under a heap of towels in the tub). Detective Pang regards me with mild curiosity as I bluster on in self-defence. The one-sided slanging match frustrates and wears me out – more so than if I were quarrelling with that slippery talk-aholic
Charles
Dulwich. There is power in silence, and yet I cannot shut up. Even when the Chinese detective’s contribution is so negligible I may as well be quarrelling with myself.

6