Read Online The Orientalist and the Ghost by Susan Barker - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Susan Barker
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lock slide across the bathroom door. Tears of injustice stung my eyes. I took up my knife and fork and sawed at my stone-cold gammon steak.
‘What does the boy know? The boy knows nothing! He wasn’t even born when Frances ran away!’
No one heard me, of course. No one except mad Grace, who cackled and shimmied, lifting her skirt for everyone to see.
I met mad Grace and the God-botherers Blanche Mallard and Marina Tolbin in the autumn of 1951. I first saw the mission hut as I led a wheelbarrow procession of fence-mending equipment across the village. I knew at once that the hut was no squatter residence, for it had whitewashed walls and a trellis of Honolulu creepers around the door. A picket fence bordered the garden where a Saint Bernard panted in the shade of the papaya tree. An infant chorus of ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ drifted through the wire-mesh windows, bolstered by the operatic, bellow-lunged quavers and trills of what I imagined to be a Viking-hatted Valkyrie. I stopped in my tracks, then yelped as the wheelbarrow behind me ploughed into the back of my legs.
‘Whose hut is that?’ I asked the Tamil at the helm of the incendiary wheelbarrow.
The Tamil squinted over at the whitewashed idyll and said: ‘Ah, that hut belongs to the Jesus People, come to turn the Chinese against the Lord Buddha. Two English ladies. They came last week. They are determined to convert everything that moves. Not even the chickens are safe.’
‘Really,’ I grumbled. ‘Charles never keeps me up to speed on anything these days.’
How had the Jesus People managed to pass through the check-point, build their mission headquarters and begin indoctrination of the villagers without my noticing? I expect I’d been too busy to notice. Two weeks before, fifty army trucks containing two hundred evacuated squatters had rumbled into The Village of Everlasting Peace, and the ensuing chaos robbed me of the opportunity to think of anything else. What a nightmare. The government had sprung them on us with only a few days’ warning. They had to live in tents as bulldozers and gangs of men with parang knives cleared the jungle so there was land on which to build huts.
The newcomers were very unhappy. Silence and hostility greeted my attempts to befriend them. And the few that did open up to me asked me to perform illegal feats.
‘Master, please let my family go back. We’ve never helped the People Inside!’ begged one old lady. ‘You’re a good man. You know we don’t deserve to be here …’
I recited word for word, in Cantonese translation, from
The Handbook to the Briggs Plan
. I sang the praises of resettlement and sanitation, education and medical care; protection from Communist harassment and future prospects for grandchildren. But there was little in the inchoate mess surrounding us to inspire faith in such promises.
The old lady scowled. ‘It will take more than your filthy lies to make me appreciate this dung heap of a concentration camp,’ she said. ‘Heaven has eyes, you know! And in heaven you will be punished, you wicked man!’
Every evening after supper I tumbled on to my camp-bed and slept like the dead. Charles stayed up till all hours, continuing to flambé his belly with brandy, alone but for the orchestral works of dead composers (Lieutenant Spencer was away on a mission to the Batu Caves). Once, passing the officers’ bungalow on a midnight visit to the latrine, I saw Charles whirl by the window in a solitary trance of ballroom dancing, arms encircling an imaginary partner. The next morning he was as sick and grumpy as ever.
What’s so funny?
he snapped as I smiled at the memory of his drunken waltzing. Not that my teetotalism served me any better. My alarm clock woke me long before I’d slept off my exhaustion (how that tyrannical keeper of time clamoured for defenestration!) and my muscles ached twice as much as the day before.
Anyway, let’s return to the Jesus People and their hut.
‘What does the boy know? The boy knows nothing! He wasn’t even born when Frances ran away!’
No one heard me, of course. No one except mad Grace, who cackled and shimmied, lifting her skirt for everyone to see.
I met mad Grace and the God-botherers Blanche Mallard and Marina Tolbin in the autumn of 1951. I first saw the mission hut as I led a wheelbarrow procession of fence-mending equipment across the village. I knew at once that the hut was no squatter residence, for it had whitewashed walls and a trellis of Honolulu creepers around the door. A picket fence bordered the garden where a Saint Bernard panted in the shade of the papaya tree. An infant chorus of ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ drifted through the wire-mesh windows, bolstered by the operatic, bellow-lunged quavers and trills of what I imagined to be a Viking-hatted Valkyrie. I stopped in my tracks, then yelped as the wheelbarrow behind me ploughed into the back of my legs.
‘Whose hut is that?’ I asked the Tamil at the helm of the incendiary wheelbarrow.
The Tamil squinted over at the whitewashed idyll and said: ‘Ah, that hut belongs to the Jesus People, come to turn the Chinese against the Lord Buddha. Two English ladies. They came last week. They are determined to convert everything that moves. Not even the chickens are safe.’
‘Really,’ I grumbled. ‘Charles never keeps me up to speed on anything these days.’
How had the Jesus People managed to pass through the check-point, build their mission headquarters and begin indoctrination of the villagers without my noticing? I expect I’d been too busy to notice. Two weeks before, fifty army trucks containing two hundred evacuated squatters had rumbled into The Village of Everlasting Peace, and the ensuing chaos robbed me of the opportunity to think of anything else. What a nightmare. The government had sprung them on us with only a few days’ warning. They had to live in tents as bulldozers and gangs of men with parang knives cleared the jungle so there was land on which to build huts.
The newcomers were very unhappy. Silence and hostility greeted my attempts to befriend them. And the few that did open up to me asked me to perform illegal feats.
‘Master, please let my family go back. We’ve never helped the People Inside!’ begged one old lady. ‘You’re a good man. You know we don’t deserve to be here …’
I recited word for word, in Cantonese translation, from
The Handbook to the Briggs Plan
. I sang the praises of resettlement and sanitation, education and medical care; protection from Communist harassment and future prospects for grandchildren. But there was little in the inchoate mess surrounding us to inspire faith in such promises.
The old lady scowled. ‘It will take more than your filthy lies to make me appreciate this dung heap of a concentration camp,’ she said. ‘Heaven has eyes, you know! And in heaven you will be punished, you wicked man!’
Every evening after supper I tumbled on to my camp-bed and slept like the dead. Charles stayed up till all hours, continuing to flambé his belly with brandy, alone but for the orchestral works of dead composers (Lieutenant Spencer was away on a mission to the Batu Caves). Once, passing the officers’ bungalow on a midnight visit to the latrine, I saw Charles whirl by the window in a solitary trance of ballroom dancing, arms encircling an imaginary partner. The next morning he was as sick and grumpy as ever.
What’s so funny?
he snapped as I smiled at the memory of his drunken waltzing. Not that my teetotalism served me any better. My alarm clock woke me long before I’d slept off my exhaustion (how that tyrannical keeper of time clamoured for defenestration!) and my muscles ached twice as much as the day before.
Anyway, let’s return to the Jesus People and their hut.
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