The Hungry Ghosts. Anne Berry
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brow creases in confusion, as if she cannot imagine how it got there.
Days later Alice’s father returns home and is presented with a bag that rattles when he lifts it up. It is full of my pretties. He asks Alice to join him in the lounge. He tells her that he is not angry with her, but he needs to understand why she has broken the decanter.
‘I didn’t break it,’ Alice insists. Her thumb still hurts, though of course it is no longer bleeding. She rubs it unconsciously.
Alice’s father looks so tired. He has dark smudges under his eyes. He presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets for a long moment. I make the chips of glass in the brown paper bag resting on his lap, chink and tinkle. Hearing them sing he drops his hands, and his weary eyes rake the room. They alight on a book, a statue, a carved lantern, a record player, a television, on the Chinese carpet that covers most of the floor, finally coming to rest once more on the crumpled, open-necked bag on his lap. He looks, I observe, as if he has just discovered that life is not what he expected it to be. He looks as if he is staring down, not at a shattered decanter in his lap, but at his own shattered dreams.
‘I didn’t do it,’ Alice reiterates. Her little fingers are crooked now, her face clouded. I explain that I did, but only Alice hears me. Her eyes dart about the room. At last they settle on her father’s drooping head. ‘I’m going to be good now,’ Alice says.
My first night home this week, I’ve been sleeping in Central, down at the office. It could erupt at any time, with each passing day it seems we come closer to the point of no return. And what will become of us then, us few servants of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, holding the fort while the Apaches circle? I don’t hear the approach of the cavalry. We’re on our own, chaps, with only our shadows for company. Myrtle has poured me a large whisky. Don’t ask me how, but I know this is a prelude to one of her talks. I am colourless with exhaustion.My wife is making yet more demands on me.At the end of this God-awful day, she wants the only thing I have left, my attention. I feel the finger of scotch stroke the back of my throat. I wonder if Myrtle realises that I may very well be a target, on some kind of a hit list, that we all might be come to that. She is talking…talking about our daughter, about Alice.
‘She has a violent temper,’ she accuses bluntly.‘She is destructive.’
I haven’t the strength to contradict her.There is violence breaking out everywhere downtown. Real violence. The blood, injury and death kind of violence. The once peaceful streets of the colony blossom with exploding homemade bombs, known to locals as ‘boh loh’, Cantonese for pineapple. Huge banners fly high, damning the British for the pathetically low salaries of the indigenous people, for their draconian working hours, for water shortages and increasing prices. Curfews that transform the colony into a ghost town, teargas, even the threat that troublemakers breaking the restrictions will be shot on sight, serve only to contain the mêlée. But for how long, dear God, for how long? My neck aches and the base of my spine too. I need a hot bath, a good, long soak. There aren’t any showers at the office, and I am aware of the stale odour of a couple of days’ sweat coming from my armpits, my back, under my collar, between my thighs. On and on she goes, damning our ailing daughter.There is the heavy tick of the clock behind us in the lounge. We are on the veranda. It is early autumn, but still warm enough to sit outside for a short while. I used to love the tick of a clock, used to find it comforting. But now it is just a reminder that time is running out. My eyes are stinging and my eyelids are heavy. I am so shattered that I am breathless. I am sitting down, and I am gulping in oxygen as if I am running a race.
‘Frankly, Ralph, I’m not at all sure the Island School is such a good idea for Alice. In the few weeks since she started there her behaviour has been worse than ever, more erratic, more…well…Peculiar. Quite honestly I feel I can’t cope much longer.’ Myrtle pauses to assess the effect her words are having on me.Then, judging it to be safe, with a swift, flirtatious smile, she proceeds.‘I know you may not altogether agree with me, but please Ralph, hear me out. I really do feel that the structure of boarding school might be just what she needs. Alright, I will concede that perhaps the convent wouldn’t be suitable for Alice. But that doesn’t rule out boarding school entirely, now does it?’
The cicadas warble. There is the distant hum of passing cars. A horn sounds a long way off. A dog barks and is echoed with an answer. From where I am sitting I can see at least three cars winding their way up the Peak, and twice that many going down, yellow cones of light sliding along the curling tape of grey road that binds the slopes.There is a double-decker bus too, chinks of warm yellow light threading through the dusk, on route to the Peak Tram terminus I expect. I wonder idly if Myrtle wants to get rid of all our children? Will she carry on until we have none left? The answer is swift, light as warm air, and just as stifling.
She will carry on until Alice is gone. I sip my scotch and watch the coloured lights of Aberdeen harbour winking busily below, and the lambent stars and moon, poised and rigid above. I am so very weary these days.And I am lonely too. It eats like a maggot into my heart, this loneliness of mine. I nod and try to look as if I am taking it all in, as my wife’s voice winds around me. I frown pensively. See, my expression says, I am cogitating, entertaining your suggestion, weighing up the merits of such a course of action.
In reality I am far off. I am reliving the unrest, the coiled spring of tension that lies in wait for me with every breaking dawn. I am thinking about the riots, the faces, distorted and ugly, the gaping mouths that stamp out words, hateful, vicious words, those bent on bloodletting. I think about Central, where often I have enjoyed a coffee at the Hilton, or lunch at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I think of the Cosmo Club too and the Christmas parties we have had there, of the raffles and the paper hats, and of the turkey and Christmas pudding, the thick, steaming gravy, and the viscous yellow custard, so absurd in this land of sun and bamboo and sea. I recall those evil drinking games that I have tumbled unwittingly into after a Cantonese meal, games that have left me legless and the world spinning. I think of my Chinese friends, these men I have grown to love, who understand me better than any Englishman ever could, these men with whom I have spent my precious hoard of free time lavishly, and never regretted a cent of it. I think about the joy I have had rummaging in the alleys, fingering treasures in dusty boxes, imagining who could have created such beauty, such perfection in a past world. I think about the Star Ferries, their dark prows knifing through the sea, how the thrill of that journey over to Kowloon has never quite evanesced for me. I think of the banks and the money rolling in, the obscene amounts of money. And then, I think of the poverty of the locals, of the workforce, the poverty that in truth I have done little to ameliorate.
Finally the image of a small, thin, naked girl, hair, face and flesh ablaze, forces everything else out of my mind. It is a photograph on the wall of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, in its multi-storey setting, high above Central.There are other pictures alongside it but they do not register. It is black and white, this image of the flaming child.The lack of colour does not lessen the horror, rather the stark contrast seems to highlight it. I think she is Vietnamese. I think it was taken during the Vietnamese war. But it really doesn’t matter. It might have been anywhere. Her face is split with anguish. Her mouth is racked into an ‘O’ of agony. She is staring straight into the camera lens as she staggers along the muddy path. Flames lick upwards and outwards from her core, they roar through her silk-black hair, they spark her eyelashes and crackle over her eyebrows, they crust and blister the jelly of her still seeing eyeballs. She holds her hands out pityingly towards…who? The cameraman? The soldiers? God? I cannot free myself of this vision tonight. She haunts me this little girl as she staggers forwards, her arms full of fire, offering up all that she has, offering it up to whoever will take it, offering up her hell on earth.
My wife is speaking again. She talks of the pressure I am under in my job during these unsettled times. She maintains it is vital that I am fit for the task of subduing these red rebels, that both Queen and country are relying on me to restore order to the colony.
‘You cannot afford to be distracted by Alice at times like this,’ Myrtle insists.