by Susan Barker
Most Chinese squatter men distrusted Western medicine and thought it harmful to masculinity. So apart from the odd occasion when a hen-pecked husband was dragged to the medical hut by his wife, my afternoons there were spent largely in the company of women, which was not as tantalizing a prospect as it at first might seem, as, done-in by poverty, the stress of multiple childbearing and lack of access to dental care, the fairer sex of The Village of Everlasting Peace were not that fair. Occasionally there’d be a young girl whose beauty triumphed over the scabs and malnutrition, and though my admiration of these lovelies was innocent enough, Evangeline’s acid-tongued comments made it seem less so. Interpret with your ears, not your eyes, she once muttered, as though my wistful glances were a molestation. Evangeline was one of those prickly oversensitive types, offended by the male gaze. Had a fortune teller prophesied, in those quarrelsome days, that Evangeline was to be my future beloved, I’d have laughed and demanded my money back. How poorly I knew myself. I used to lie awake on my camp-bed at night, seething over some slight she’d made. (How dare she belittle me in front of the patients! Arrogant bitch. She never smiles. I bet she hasn’t smiled once in her thirty-eight years! I shall get up early tomorrow and learn more vocabulary. That’ll teach her …)
The prettiness and Antipodean curves of the nurses were forgotten. Many times the nurses had, in the act of leaning over, afforded me glimpses of the ivory mounds of their breasts, hoisted in no-frills brassières. But this erotic imagery went unexploited as night after night I was consumed by angry thoughts of Evangeline. I think you’re sweet on Evangeline, Nurse Josie once whispered, when my rival was out of earshot. Certainly not! I spluttered, though the vehemence of my denial didn’t stop my cheeks turning red.
The other night I woke to find Evangeline sitting beside me on the fold-out bed, wonderment in her eyes as she tenderly stroked my brow. Whatever must she think of me now? I thought as I lay beneath her watchful gaze. During our love affair Evangeline was the older woman (I used to joke and call her ‘my darling spinster’, ‘my dear old maid’). But time ceased for her at the stroke of death, and Evangeline is for ever forty years old. An age I have long surpassed. I glimpsed myself through her eyes – denture-less and sunken-mouthed, my skin like a mottled withered peach – and ridiculous vanity and self-pity flared within. How could she bear to touch me? Her tranquil mood was rare indeed. Evangeline is the most violent and destructive of my ghostly acquaintances – bursting into my council flat like a vengeful hurricane, whipping up apples and satsumas from the fruit bowl and pelting them at me. What a miracle to have her sitting so calmly beside me, I thought. Then our amnesty came to an end.
‘I haven’t forgiven you,’ she said.
And not to be outdone, I said, ‘Nor I you.’
Hatred contorted my beloved’s face and she spat viciously in my eye. Then she vanished.
It amuses me now to recall our bickering in the medical hut. The simmering dislike of lust in its infancy. We were unaware of it at the time, but those were our halcyon days.
4
POLICE LIEUTENANT SPENCER came to my flat yesterday, the bloody hole in his khaki jacket torn by the Communist bayonet that eviscerated him in 1953. When he was alive Lieutenant Spencer was a man of arrogance and violence, but in death he is the epitome of dejection.
‘Where’s me cup o’ tea, Goldilocks?’ he asked.
‘Sorry, Lieutenant,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’
The policeman christened me Goldilocks on the evening we first met in The Village of Everlasting Peace. The nickname is long invalid – for there is nothing golden about my locks any more – but this does not discourage use of the misnomer. Spencer always demands a cuppa when he comes, but even when there’s enough left in the teapot I never give him any. He lacks the visceral means to retain beverages, and every sip would seep out of his belly wound and on to my sofa.
I lifted my mug and swallowed some strongly brewed tea, grateful the lieutenant had left his intestines behind. Spencer likes to decorate my flat with garlands of entrails. He dangles them from the light fixtures, or lets them slither across the carpet, like grotesque B-movie snakes. I once saw his guts slinking behind the washing machine, masquerading as one of the water hoses. I once saw them leap from his stomach to the ceiling, like a jumbo-sized umbilical cord connecting the lieutenant to the tiled womb of the kitchen.
We sat quietly together, listening to shifting frequencies of static as my truanting grandson adjusted the radio dial in the bedroom. When he’s not reading library books or meddling with his acne, Adam listens to long-wave stations in Arabic and French and other languages he doesn’t know. Rather queer as far as hobbies go, but I don’t interfere.
‘How are you keeping these days, Lieutenant Spencer?’ I asked.
Spencer began effing and blinding like a cockney barrow boy, which I took to mean ‘Not very well’. Poor old Spencer. His dignity has never recovered since the day his bowels were whipped out by a Communist revolutionary who went by the party name ‘Little Mosquito’. Lieutenant Spencer survived four years in Palestine and two years bandit-shooting in the Malayan jungle (with a decapitated-enemy head count of thirty-seven). He was very proud of his murderous prowess and would sooner have ripped out his own guts than let a Communist get his filthy Maoist paws on them. And to rub salt in his already substantial wound, the assassin ‘Little Mosquito’ was a mere fourteen years old; only just graduated from slaying imaginary imperialist pigs in the schoolyard to being kitted out with his own gun and red star beret. It was a rather humiliating end to Lieutenant Spencer’s brutally accomplished career.
Spencer was murdered at the age of twenty-five. When he was alive he was known as a bit of a psychopath (a reputation of which he was very proud, and sustained by routinely capturing geckos in his fist and biting off their tongue-flickering heads). But in his spirit incarnation Spencer’s self-esteem is at a low ebb and he is unthreatening, to say the least. There’s a strained, comic quality to his angst, like the misery of Stan Laurel.
‘You seen Resettlement Officer Dulwich?’ he asked. ‘Posh fatso with whisky blood clots in his eyes. You see ’im, you tell ’im Spencer’s looking for ’im. I ain’t no pederast now. I’ve got me missus down at the Frangipani Club, and what floats Charles’s boat, that’s his business. He’s just me mate. But if you see ’im, you tell ’im Spencer wants a word.’
The true nature of Charles Dulwich’s relationship with Spencer was revealed to me the afternoon I caught them making love in the officers’ bathing hut (oh, how the afterimages of their ugly naked grunty bestiality haunt me!). The love affair was stormy and passionate, and for Spencer one of utter subjugation. In any relationship he who cares least has the most power, and Charles didn’t care a fig. When I tell Charles his ex-lover is looking for him, he cackles and says: What? Old Percival? That little bandit gave him quite a bellyache, didn’t he? Or he laughs and buzzes like a mosquito.
Lieutenant Spencer pesters me when he visits. I ain’t heard from Charlie … You tell ’im I’m looking for ’im or what? I deliver every one of Spencer’s messages to Charles. I am not to blame if he ignores them. I hate acting as go-between for the dead. Surely there’s a more efficient means for the deceased to contact one another – perhaps some directory enquiries of the spirit realm. If Lieutenant Spencer has the metaphysical know-how to disappear and reappear at whim, then he ought to be able to track down Resettlement Officer Dulwich himself without harassing a pensioner drinking his morning cup of tea.
‘Charles was here not twenty minutes ago,’ I told Spencer. ‘He watched me fry some mushrooms and bacon for my breakfast, then left. It’s astonishing that you always miss him. He is here a dozen times a day.’
‘You tell ’im Percy wants a word.’
‘I always do. Why don’t you wait here? He’s bound to turn up before long.’
But Lieutenant Percy Spencer, heartbroken and mutilated, was gone.
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.’
