The Uninvited

by Liz Jensen

  I was actually present when they met. It was a Phipps & Wexman reception. They talked all evening. I saw that they stimulated each other. One minute they’d be serious. The next they’d be laughing. Ideas were bouncing around. It was the kind of exchange I struggle to participate in. It was classic courtship behaviour, but I failed to identify it as such. Later Kaitlin told me this was because I’d been ‘complacent’. I had ‘made assumptions’, and ‘failed to appreciate’ her sexual appetites. I had taken her for granted. I should have been jealous and I wasn’t.

  I asked her: ‘Are you saying I’m to blame for your having an affair?’

  ‘Don’t twist what I’m saying.’

  ‘My intention is to understand the logic. Not just of what you did, but why you hid it from me. I need to know why.’

  ‘Look. Not everything can be explained by some damned behavioural flow chart, OK? And not everyone shares your rule book.’

  ‘It’s not a rule book. It’s just morality.’

  ‘People change, OK? They evolve over time, they want to explore who they might be, as well as who they are!’

  ‘They should just be who and what they say they are.’

  ‘Well one of us failed to do that, OK? One of us committed the apparently unforgivable crime of changing.’

  Her body language and facial configuration told me to leave it there.

  A flock of green birds flew overhead, squawking, then disappeared into the smog coiling around the mountainside. Parakeets. I went and joined Sunny and we watched the glowing tips of the incense sticks.

  He said, ‘Thank you for making me the man. And the insect. What is its name?’

  ‘A praying mantis. It’s called that because it rocks to and fro like someone praying.’

  I like to rock too. It soothes me.

  ‘Ha. A holy insect.’

  ‘Not really. The females devour the males after they’ve mated.’

  He shifts a little, and glances at me sideways. ‘Not my business, Hesketh. But your wife—’

  ‘Girlfriend. Ex. Met someone else.’ I might as well learn to say it aloud.

  He studied his hands. ‘Very sorry. I should not ask.’

  ‘Later she regretted it and wanted us to carry on like before.’

  He looked up and smiled. ‘So the best man won!’ he exclaimed, play-punching me on the arm, American-buddy style. But he might as well have shot me. He meant well of course. He wasn’t to know the appalling nature of what happened. ‘You’re the best man,’ he continued. ‘She saw that, so she wanted you back.’

  ‘But I couldn’t trust her any more. That’s why I live alone.’

  ‘Man of principle. Good.’ I knew he was looking at me. ‘But you miss your son.’

  ‘Stepson. Freddy’s hers. From before we met. He doesn’t know his real father.’

  ‘He still needs you. You know, Hesketh, families are with us all the time.’ He gestured at the shrines. ‘Dead and alive. The ones from the past and the present and the future too. They’re living in us. We can’t escape them even if we want to. They send us signals. This is what holds us together. Blood. DNA, Hesketh. It’s very strong.’

  ‘Freddy and I don’t share DNA.’

  ‘Then you are lucky. DNA is cruel. It makes demands.’ He leaned down and stubbed out his cigarette in a dried pomegranate shell. ‘Hesketh, I am glad it was you they sent.’

  His eyes were glittering again. I looked across and met them for a second. I couldn’t manage any longer. But perhaps there was an exchange of sorts.

  I said, ‘Yes.’ Then in Chinese: ‘Me too.’ I meant it.

  ‘We will say goodbye now. I have told you all I can. Go and do your job. I will stay here. Take the taxi back to the hotel.’ I started to object, but he stopped me. He had his mobile, he said. He would order another car when he was ready to leave. ‘I want to be here for a little longer. To work out what I must do now. But be careful, Hesketh. The spirits are becoming very active.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They are angry and starving. They live in bad conditions. You like the truth. So I will be honest with you. This is not something Phipps & Wexman or any other organisation can resolve. The spirits will do what they came to do. They won’t give up. They are fighting for their survival.’ He sighed, then held out his hand. We shook, then exchanged a small head-bow. ‘It was good to meet you Hesketh. Have a safe journey. Please go now.’

  He called out to the taxi driver, who snapped awake and started the engine. We shook hands and I got in the car and Sunny waved me off. I looked back at him, but he’d already turned away to face the city. Hands in his pockets, shoulders high. On the way back to the hotel, I used my BlackBerry to let Phipps & Wexman know I had identified the whistle-blower. Ashok’s instant reply: You’re the man.

  The best man, according to Sunny Chen.

  The man who won.

  He wasn’t to know.

  As the taxi drove off, I looked back and saw the small figure of Sunny Chen standing like a hunched sentinel at the shrine of his forefathers, near the blown ashes of his little origami self.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hurricane Veronica struck during the night, devastating towns on Ireland’s western shore before strafing its way up the Scottish coast. I woke to its dying howls. When dawn broke I saw that one of the hawthorns had been blown down, its branches scattered across the moor. My roof had lost a few tiles, and a dead sheep lay on the beach. Otherwise, there was little sign of the weather’s passing, save for the sparkle of salt borne by the wind: coarse crystals winking on the slate roof of my cottage and on the granite boulder.

  My living-room smells of damp wool and wood smoke. I’ve put logs on the fire, and from time to time air pockets in the bark detonate like gunshot. It’s already autumn up here: spider season. Because of this year’s wet spring they are numerous and huge, with long legs and bloated abdomens. The structure of each cobweb is the same, but every spider has its own style, like handwriting. Sometimes I sit and watch them at work, single-minded and fanatical. I have to tear myself away.

  The lunchtime news was full of the hurricane damage and the scientific row over whether the freshly replicated CERN results ‘disprove’ Einstein’s theory of relativity. At the end, there’s a small update on yesterday’s ‘pyjama killer’: the girl’s father is still in hospital, while the remaining family is undergoing counselling.

  I’ve been trying to summarise the results of my Taiwan investigation, but my notes amount to little more than a list of Chen’s agitated remarks about the spirit world. I can’t quote this kind of thing in my report. Clients don’t want superstition and uncertainty: they want closure and a three-point plan. I do too. I throw more wood on the fire and watch the sparks. I enjoy starting these miniature contained blazes. I use crumpled newspaper and failed origami figures. I am harsh on my own craftsmanship: a bad fold, the wrong kind of kink, or a small paper tear, and it’s sacrificed. I think of Sunny Chen, burning himself in effigy. The body can disobey the mind, he said. How can that happen? Is it like my nocturnal bouts of Restless Leg Syndrome, where the brain craves shut-down, but the lower limbs enforce their own meaningless, agitated agenda? They are in your blood, he said. Like parasites. But what do they eat, the hungry inner creatures he conjured as his tormentors? I look it up. Rice, says one source. Fruit. Soup. Sweets. Meat. Anything they can lay their spirit hands on, and stuff into their spirit mouths and absorb into their spirit bloodstreams.

  Sometimes a feeling of physical constriction overwhelms me: to use an analogy, it’s as if I’m trapped inside an egg and must burst free. At three o’clock I give in to it and close the Chen file. Shucking on my anorak, I grab my umbrella and push out into open air. I have my routines. Five and a half minutes to the gate. Nine minutes along the sheep-path. A thirty-second pause at the sheer-sided black boulder, then down past the bluff where a row of trees cringe from the wind, and down to the shore. Most of the island is rocky and dry, but in this particular region t
he bog-land absorbs the liquid with the capacity of a sponge. It exhales methane. The fossil gas streams to the surface in tiny bubbles like champagne, then ignites and dances with flickering blue tendrils of light. You can see it now, through the massing late-afternoon dark. In the old days they called it will-o’-the-wisp and conjured goblins to explain it. Other native beliefs: wild fairy children once roamed here. Sometimes they swapped places with humans and lived as changelings.

  According to Japanese lore, if you fold a thousand ozuru, you’ll achieve your heart’s desire. Like most origami aficionados, I’ve folded many more than that, but I’m no closer to knowing what my heart’s desire might be.

  Once, it was simply peace: to be left to myself, as I am now, walking on a moor, with a case to puzzle over.

  The boy changed all that.

  When we lived as a family, Kaitlin would wake him and then leave for work. By the time he was dressed, I’d have Freddy’s breakfast ready on the table. Every schoolday for two years I prepared him a bowl of yoghurt with eleven raisins on top and a four-minute boiled egg. While he ate the yoghurt I put the egg in boiling water and pressed the button on the timer and we’d play ‘the Egg Game’: I’d throw a tea cloth over the timer and we’d each make a ping when we guessed the four minutes was up. If you missed the real ping, you lost completely. The skill lay in being an accurate judge of time. By the time I decided to leave, we had both become extremely good at the Egg Game.

  ‘I know your mum has already talked to you about this,’ I said, after he’d won again, three seconds short of the real ping. But he must have been anticipating the conversation because he slapped his hands over his ears. I continued anyway. ‘We’ve decided not to live together any more.’ It had to be stated. By me as well as Kaitlin. ‘But we’ll still see each other I hope.’ I put the egg in his eggcup and set it in front of him. ‘Mum will pick you up from school today. I won’t see you tonight. But I’ll come by whenever I can. Freddy K?’

  He didn’t answer.

  We had our rituals. One of them was that when I gave him his egg he’d say ‘Foonk-you-fonk-you-fank-you,’ in the deep distorted voice he uses for the archaeopteryx, and then – here was the educational part – I’d say ‘You’re welcome’ or its equivalent in a foreign language, some basic phrases of which I’d looked up earlier. We’d covered over a hundred countries. Then we’d talk about the culture and traditions of the day’s country, and I’d tell him one of its folk tales while he ate. When Kaitlin came home he’d try out that morning’s language on her, or a story. He especially loved Russian, and the story of Baba Yaga Bony-legs, the witch who lived in a house that stood on chickens’ legs. Often he said nyet for no, and da for yes.

  But now he didn’t even say that.

  He just threw his egg on the floor. It broke open and lay there steaming. He refused to speak to me. I didn’t know what to do. So I cleaned it up. A few minutes later Kaitlin phoned to ask how it had gone. When I told her, she said she was coming home.

  ‘It’s best you don’t see him for a while,’ she said when she returned. ‘It only upsets him.’

  I went out and rinsed the mop under the outdoor tap.

  It’s getting darker now, the sky rinsed by the dregs of the hurricane. The scent of wet gorse is vital and crude. I can recognise several bird species now. Black guillemot, cormorant, eider. I’ve seen peregrine falcons too. Here’s what I’d tell Freddy, about birds. I saw some green parakeets in Taiwan, flying over shrines to the dead. In cities, some bird species have begun to imitate electronic devices such as car alarms and doorbells, and even incorporate them into their song patterns. When it comes to ringtones, they favour Nokia. Then I’d ask him: but what if they start to copy a ringtone that is itself a bird-call? Then you might get blackbirds posing as toucans and marsh waders pretending to be mynah birds. Which in turn would copy something else.

  The boy would like that. He’d laugh and you’d see his little teeth. There’s usually a gap somewhere, with a new one pushing through. He doesn’t like brushing them, so to cajole him into it, I used to stand next to him in the bathroom and we’d do it together, trying to hit a kind of synchrony. We’d end up pulling grotesque faces, gurning at the mirror and spitting toothpaste.

  Sometimes we pretended we had rabies.

  My phone vibrates. I pull it out of my pocket and press answer without looking, expecting it will be Kaitlin. I’m hoping that when she’s finished demanding that I fetch the rest of my stuff – something I refuse to do unless she lets me see Freddy – I’ll get to talk to him. As I’m not officially Freddy’s stepfather, Kaitlin is aware of the power she wields.

  But it’s not Kaitlin.

  ‘How’s it hanging, Maestro?’ Ashok Sharma.

  Odd. Normally Phipps & Wexman don’t call me on my mobile: they have a face-to-face policy, and favour Skype.

  ‘It’s hanging well, thank you, Ashok,’ I tell him. I assume the ‘it’ referent is penis-related, in origin. I picture him the way I so often see him on the screen, shirtsleeves rolled up, feet on the desk, slightly pixellated and time-lagged. He once described his skin colour as Starbucks latte, but when I put a colour chart to his wrist he was forced to agree that Sanderson’s Burnt Umber, from the 2003 range, was more accurate. His mother’s family was originally from Mumbai and his father is Kashmiri, but Ashok, whose name means ‘without sadness’, was born in Florida and calls himself Yankee to the boner. This is a pun.

  ‘Er. Reason I’m calling is the guy you investigated on your Far East trip. The Taiwan whistle-blower?’

  Sunny Chen. I quicken my pace.

  I say, ‘You’ll have my report by late tomorrow.’

  Ashok says, ‘About that.’

  I once overheard a colleague referring to Ashok as ‘an irritating jerk’. But I like him. I like his leather and aftershave smell and his playful if somewhat childish nature, and I don’t mind that he calls me Maestro or Spock. When I’m in London, we’ll sometimes go for a drink together by the Thames, where he introduces me as the Pussy Magnet and himself as the Pussy Magnet’s Horny Sidekick, and in between buying drinks for women he wants to have sex with, he tells me about his latest losses on the stock exchange, which he seems to find amusing, like a spectacle he’s not involved in. He sees it as a challenge to make me laugh, and when he succeeds, he punches the air with his fist and shouts, ‘I win!’ and demands that I make him an ozuru as a ‘humour tax’. I’ve worked with Phipps & Wexman for five years and he now has thirteen of them on a shelf next to his family portrait: a set of parents and a big-eyed sister with her husband and four kids. He likes to amuse visitors by pretending to feed the origami birds confetti collected from hole-punchers.

  ‘We’ll have to do some rethinking,’ says Ashok. ‘I’m sorry to lay this on you, but Sunny Chen’s dead.’ I mentally select a sheet of origami paper. I make a frog base. This I double-sink fold, then blintz. ‘You still there bud? You hear what I said? Sunny Chen. Your factory-manager guy. He’s eaten it. I didn’t know how to tell you, so I just thought hey, what can I do. I’ll just come right out with it.’

  I can hear my boss chewing rapidly. So he is eating it too. But Ashok and Sunny Chen aren’t eating the same thing. The thing Sunny is eating is dust, as in ‘biting the dust’. Whereas Ashok has been psychologically dependent on chewing gum since he gave up smoking: ‘eating’ in his case involves spearmint and a gelatine-based product derived from pigs’ trotters. But Sunny Chen is dead. I can be slow to absorb things. Something like this could take a long time to sink in.

  I ask, ‘When?’

  ‘Today. Our morning, his afternoon. At the timber plant. I’m sending his folks flowers on your behalf. It’ll be appreciated, since you hung out with him.’

  I fold some more paper mentally, at high speed. I must be extremely upset. If Kaitlin could see me now, she wouldn’t call me ‘a robot made of meat’. But she might call me an unusually fast walker. Sunny Chen in overalls and a white hard hat showing me round the factory. S
unny Chen in the restaurant, piling on the salt and using the soy bottle like a little watering can. Sunny Chen at the shrines, burning the effigy I made him from the Hell note and talking about badly dressed ancestors eating insects. Sunny Chen’s eyes with tears in them. How I looked at a yellow and blue coach instead, and then folded a praying mantis. I do not know how to behave or what I feel. Perhaps I don’t feel anything.

  But I do feel something, of course. The usual suspects: confusion and overload.

  It was Martin Yeh who was supposed to be dying. Of cancer. Not Sunny Chen, of – what? A heart attack. Of course. I see the da Vinci diagrams. An artery blocking, a ventricle in spasm.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  I’m aware of Ashok taking a deep breath. ‘Sorry to lay this on you too – but the guy killed himself.’ He pauses. ‘As in, suicide.’ I must have made a noise of some sort – a sigh or sob or groan or something. ‘You OK there?’ says Ashok.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jeez. Like I say, I’m sorry. Take your time, my friend.’

  ‘Yes.’ We are not actually friends. More colleagues.

  I stop walking and start to rock. My heartbeat changes. I rock more urgently. I can get overwhelmed.

  ‘How do you know it was suicide?’

  ‘Seems there were witnesses. And CCTV footage. Plus he left a note for his wife. Jeez, man. I’m sorry to break it to you this way. Wish I was there to, I don’t know. Buy you a beer or something. Offer my condolences.’ I turn my face to the wind and breathe in wet air. ‘So what’s your gut feeling here?’