Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Prideaux didn’t have Manson-style snuff action in the can, but he did have a body. A voice on the phone had woken him in the old Flower Palace in Bangkok. Sound and lighting were goofing off somewhere in town so he and Pete Rivett the cameraman dressed and got into their hired Simca.

  ‘It’s at moments like this one pauses for thought,’ Prideaux said, his hand on the ignition key. Outside, Patpong’s nightlife thudded and flashed. ‘When gumshoes are woken amid bachelor sleaze with anonymous tip-offs of corpses, they know their first duty’s to tell the cops. But they, like us, want a scoop and a headstart.’

  ‘So let’s go.’

  A white tourist stood woozily on the kerb and urinated at the passing cars. Prideaux stared without seeing him.

  ‘Okay, John,’ Rivett had said, ‘it’s a set-up. Your caller’s a cop who’s sick of us interfering, right? We go out, we find the bod, and suddenly whango, on come the headlights. “Why you no tell us? Since when you do Thai police work? Maybe you the ones who kill.” That’s always possible.’

  ‘But maybe it’s also that final damning piece of evidence we need.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Pete said. ‘So we risk it. We go.’

  In the adrenal, neon-lit night beyond the car windows a thousand reasons for not going winked with mocking clarity. Apprehensively Prideaux had started the Simca, shamed into action as, without knowing it, men are shamed into gallantry. He, as they, retained a small rage tucked away. It knew that Pete Rivett was braver because stupider. After all, he had only come up with one possible scenario. Prideaux could think of dozens.

  In the film, the sequence was climactically stark, short, gaining everything from his loss of nerve.

  ‘A midnight caller told us where one of Toytime’s victims had been dumped.’

  The V/O accompanied some wild footage shot from the same car on another night. Girlie bars streamed past. Revellers lurched. Traffic melted like tears, highlights rolling off cellulose curves and stippling glass.

  ‘If true, this was not work for a British film crew but for the Thai police. If false, the information could be a trap set for meddlesome foreigners. Given what we already knew about the involvement of at least one senior officer we dared not trust the police.’

  By now the car was in open country, heading down the airport road, shot three nights later when nerves had recovered and no hue and cry had started. Oh – Prideaux told Pete – he repeated it. Twice, actually. He said the next turn after Sukvannet. There’s a gas station serving the village road and the klong running parallel to it. Drivers stop in front, boatmen tie up behind. Burnt out a couple of months back, he said. There, right behind the facilities, you’ll see.

  They almost missed the garage, dark as it was, and swung off across the apron, tyres poppling on char and scraps of rusty metal. We’ll have to try and get it in one pass, Prideaux said, stopping abruptly like a motorist who knows he’s taken a wrong turning. If it’s an ambush we want it on film. Shoot from the back seat, right hand side. According to him it’s behind the truck, wherever the f-, ah, yuh.

  On the film the light sidles over the oval end of a rusting petrol tanker hunkered down on its brake drums in crusted puddles of wire and carbonised rubber. The relic slides past, industrial dinosaur, all blacks and greys and curved ribs as if dug out of the La Brea tar pits. Then a blotch of white. Someone is watching, casually, sitting on the rusty springs of the driver’s seat down on the ground. The camera doesn’t stop but drifts past, catching the whole child, leaving the individual eye to pick for ever the detail which burns. For Prideaux the instant he saw him was no different from the thousandth time that versions of him had curled up on the cutting-room floor. It was the right leg, not broken he was sure but flopped over with a child’s flexibility, the inside edge of the sneaker flat on the concrete forecourt. It was the most defenceless object he had ever seen, this thin brown leg, so assertive in its vulnerability that it obviously longed to be free of the upper half of the body which was so clearly dead. The boy’s head was tilted forward so the features were foreshortened and no expression was readable. He was examining the hand lying in his lap. The other was palm up beside the seat. In the shadow cast by his own features the mouth was pouchy or swollen or protrusive. As the camera passed it took in the yellow ligature around his neck, visible from the side, a rolled bandanna or Scout scarf, it looked like.

  Go go go – Prideaux said, hyperventilating, although he himself was driving, and took off like a lunatic, throwing Pete into a heap of power packs and film canisters. This would be the moment for the actinic flare of headlights, the hail of bullets.

  ‘Our unknown informant had not lied.’

  ‘The child’s body had been left exactly where we were told.’

  Head bowed, the meditative small figure went on sitting in Prideaux’s mind, foot bent over, palm outflung. Was still there twenty years later although by now he had stiffened into an emblem, the rigor vitae having set in which afflicts those doomed to live only in survivors’ minds. The little body exerted a terrific gravitational pull such that unlikely moments and extraneous topics would be dragged inwards to confront it. It was he who sat in London restaurants and offices, listening to executive mouths deny him a hearing even as they chomped and sucked and swilled. Prideaux shielded him from executive eyes, denying him to all but a couple of waverers who might finally have been convinced.

  ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. I don’t know what to say. God, John, it’s. I mean. The best thing you’ve done. In its way. It’s just gotta be shown. But it can’t be. No way can we put that out.’

  This went on. Then one day Prideaux showed it to a friend of Pete Rivett’s, an American cameraman who had freelanced Tet and sold ABC its best footage of Hue. ‘Yeah,’ he said at the end, stubbing out a Camel in the armrest tray, ‘can we run it again?’ There were only the three of them in the viewing theatre. The second time around he said ‘You didn’t like Bangkok, right?’ He was talking to Pete.

  ‘I didn’t like the story.’

  Prideaux heard this as a betrayal. ‘Who did?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure. But it shows in the camera. It’s not as good as your Cambodia thing. Or the money scam. Loved that. Nobody in Nam who didn’t know that was going down. Sniffing out that account, what was it called, Prysumeen? Righteous stuff. But this thing don’t cut the mustard. It kinda doesn’t matter in the same way.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter?’

  ‘It’s not news, not like the others. What you’ve got here’s a slimeball running a business for scuzzbuckets. Could be anyone, anyplace, doing a little free enterprise on the edge of a war zone. Sure, it’s gross, but it’s one guy in a million catering for five guys in a million. A real pity he’s American, John. Y’understand what I’m saying? “The Master Sergeant”. Ex-GI. Troops on R&R. War orphans. It’s all claiming to be up there with My Lai and Calley but it’s not. That was about what constant fear and danger and grief can do to your average down-home cracker when he reaches breaking point in hostile territory. He goes amok, right? But your guy’s an entrepreneur, not a combat victim. Sure do wish he’d been French or Australian. Or a Brit, ’n I sure wish we could say his clients were chiefly foreign correspondents and cameramen stead of grunts on R&R. Cos I reckon the typical GI, even if he has been in firefights in the last few months, ’s no more likely to want to snuff kids in a heavy sex scene than the typical film crewman who’s been filming those firefights. ’ts what I think.’

  It was what Prideaux was thinking, too, only hadn’t known until that moment when he sat in the viewing theatre with a draining sensation. The child was never to have his posthumous justice, then. Or maybe the journalist would be denied his next palm.

  ‘’nany case the title’d have to go. Too close to that Rod Steiger thing. The Sergeant. Now that. Shit, that opening sequence. That landscape. Henri Persin, beautiful camerawork. “I wanna see this place CLEAR! CLEAR! CLEAR!”, the whole method bit, great movie.’

  Only those with Prideaux’s arroga
nce could have understood what it was to aim for a masterpiece each time rather than for the respectably cumulative, the solid, which builds a professional reputation. It was as if he might always have given up after three films, having tried that medium, conquered it, retired disdainfully leaving the field free once more for the less talented to plod on, slowly filling their bookshelves with bronze statuary and citations sandwiched in lucite slabs. There was no provision inside him for his own miscalculation. Outright failure could always be smudged, glossed as merely a matter of ill-informed opinion. But misjudgement, wrong reading… How wrongly could one read the boy on the charred seat, the lolling sneaker? His next documentary was about the popularity of bingo, a sociological sign of the times in working class Britain. It was thought amusing in a melancholy sort of way, without the expected patronage, full of striking images. Vietnam was over, so Nixon’s bombing of Hanoi in that Christmas week of 1972 seemed like the gratuitous start of an entirely new war. Twenty years later strange relics still survived those times, occasionally exploding with disabling force. Among this buried ordnance was always the sight of the bleakly moated US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square. The golden eagle still spread its wings on top. The hedges down below, once trampled into matchwood by anti-war protesters and police horses skidding on toy marbles, had long grown back. Only for a few would it forever remain Genocide Square.

  Documentaries, documentaries.

  Those with somewhere to go, go. Those without do supplementary degree courses in their forties. The documentaries had taken him everywhere and nowhere. Maybe anthropology would be a staid enough discipline on which a wayward traveller might hone a working lifetime down into a few slender rules with which to puncture stay-at-home academics. John Prideaux, the man with the producer’s ticket, was long since played out and washed up. In theory he too should have matured into a mouth, wining and dining young hopefuls who nowadays didn’t even have to book a viewing theatre to get their stuff seen. They produced cassettes from every pocket like cigarette packs, fed them into players, flooded your office with instant sound and images before you could say ‘Make an appointment with Jackie, ’kay?’ In practice, mouths were mouths because supplicants couldn’t look them in the eye; couldn’t raise their own vision beyond the lips spilling smoke and phrases like ‘Can’t use it, I’m afraid,’ or ‘The idea’s got legs but the film just stands still.’ Or just ‘Jesus, have I got problems enough with the union.’ Besides, British TV documentaries had long since ossified into two or three versions of the same film, which Prideaux supposed was a slight advance on the radio documentary which existed in only one version endlessly repeated. (‘Do you one in a morning, single-handed, any subject you like,’ he’d once told a radio producer. ‘Step one is to send down to the music library for a remotely relevant theme song. For instance, anything to do with the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange or higher finance you have to get Abba going “Money, money, money”. It’s compulsory. You play a wodge of that at the beginning, that’s three minutes’ script time saved. You go on putting musical bites in at regular intervals and the half hour’s already down to twenty-two minutes. You send someone out into the street to get some vox pops, any old brainless opinions, it doesn’t matter. Cut those in and you’ve dropped to eighteen minutes. Then you ring up one of your list of tame experts to find his viewpoint and book him. You work out what the opposite view would be and find another expert to espouse that. That’s called balance. Then all you need is a third expert who can say ‘But as usual the truth probably lies somewhere between. Meanwhile, the City …’ and it’s a wrap. Do it in my sleep’.)

  Where did bitterness reside, hidden away beneath weary amiability until no single incident remained, only a no-go area like a bruise which even lovers respect? And did it not transmute private failure into a noble blur, the righteousness of far-off times? After all, John Prideaux was vaguely known – if at all – as a bleeding heart from the Vietnam Era, back around that time. Didn’t he kill himself? Wait a bit, maybe that was James Mossman, someone else for whose fundamental decency the world’s grief had proved too much?

  Where, come to that, did failure itself lie except in the ghost which Prideaux knew gibbered just off-screen in all his work, the spectre of inconclusiveness? The media wanted their stories cut and dried: narratives which began in mock puzzlement or affected ignorance, proceeded with the panache of revelation and closed with hard words and cell doors. A wrong righted. Or rights exposed as wronged. But the child sitting for ever in the burnt-out garage, twenty years dead, staring at his lap as if he knew it had betrayed him, was not a matter of injustice. He was a tiny event. That was what happened when. When wars broke out; when monsters became organised; when Prideaux went belatedly to Indochina. Like his unshown film, the child was yet another of its maker’s absences.

  11

  THE DIGGING in San Clemente was progressing. The pit was now too deep for two men comfortably to work in at once so Eddie Tugos, Billy, Bats and Judge took turns with the spade while the others squatted around the edge taking nips of gin and offering advice. When they encountered a large stone or the corner of a seam of stiff clay they plugged away with one of the iron fencing posts they had stolen months earlier from the Tan mausoleum. Now and then Nanang Pipa took a few minutes away from her frenetic hemming and edging to come out and cast a foreman’s eye over her workers’ progress. Like many Filipinos Eddie referred to his wife – only half in jest – as Si Kumander. Mrs Boss now looked down towards her husband’s bald spot.

  ‘It’s coming along,’ she conceded. ‘Slowly.’

  ‘How much deeper do you want the damn thing, anyway? All we’re digging is a hole to shit into, not a well.’

  ‘Remember the floods, Eddie. Even up here it gets bad. You want it all backing up into the kitchen? Just a bit further.’

  ‘You’re going to have to line it,’ pointed out Bats. ‘Otherwise the sides’ll start crumbling until one day when you’re comfortably engaged the whole lot’ll drop straight through with you on top.’

  ‘Really?’ said Nanang Pipa. ‘Is that true, Eddie?’

  ‘Well,’ said the hole.

  ‘Best thing’s hollow blocks. You’ll need about a hundred.’

  ‘A hundred?’ Nanang Pipa eyed the mound of spoil and tried to imagine a pile of a hundred hollow blocks. It seemed to her their volume would greatly exceed that of the hole. ‘And how much would that cost?’

  ‘They’re, what, about four pesos each these days.’

  ‘Four hundred pesos just to line it?’

  ‘Excluding a couple of bags of cement and some sand. They’ll have to be properly laid and grouted. When I was in the DPWH we used to –’

  ‘Probably about seven hundred, then. Plus what, the bowl?’

  ‘No problem with the bowl. We can get that from the Chinese over the wall. Even their dead have bowel movements, you know. It makes you think.’

  ‘It’s still a lot of money. But if we’re going to do it at all we’re going to do it properly.’

  ‘We?’ queried the hole.

  The sides of the pit now needed expanding to accommodate the lining of hollow blocks. Through the window Pipa covertly watched the men glumly chopping at the edges, effectively filling in again much of the depth they had already achieved. Behind her the sewing machines whirred. A boy was on his knees on the floor trying to fit a consignment of T-shirts into a cardboard carton a couple of sizes too small. Bolts of cloth lay in gaudy bolsters on every available ledge. The sewers worked without stopping, without resting. Beneath their hands the cloth flowed like sheets of factory dough, falling in flakes and roundels and tubes, ruffed and puckered and frilled, so that what emerged from the process seemed to be formed of a different substance.

  Tucked away in one corner a youth was hunched over a tiny, ancient Yamato edging machine. Rey was the chop-chop boy, fitting together leftover flitches of cloth of different colours, patterns and quality and assembling the patchwork into children’s T-shi
rts and shorts. These were the cheapest garments of all, the very end of the range, and went for only nine or ten pesos. They sold well, and not just because of the low price. The chop-chop boy was inventive, artistic even. His little T-shirts were halved and quartered in different colours, lengthwise or horizontally. Their backs might be pink, their fronts blue. Diagonal stripes met patchwork hems. Arm cuffs were variegated scraps neatly joined. Rey giggled a lot and had a flair for smutty repartee. Early that morning Nanang Pipa had given him a heap of old material she had unearthed. When shaken out it had been revealed as a dozen rectangles of coarse cloth: flour sacks which had been unpicked and laundered long ago. Rey was now incorporating these wittily into the kids’ clothing. The red and blue print would fade with washing, no doubt, but meanwhile it was merry to include among the other scraps of material the defunct Grains Authority’s stern warning Huwag mag-aksaya, ‘Do Not Waste’; or the printed promise ‘Self Raising’, strategically positioned across the front of some child’s shorts.

  As eyes accustomed themselves to dimmer light they would perceive that Rey was not after all the lowliest member of the co-operative. At his feet on the red floor-waxed concrete sat a ten-year-old girl with a withered leg. She was cutting into tiny rectangles the scraps which even Rey couldn’t use and sewing them into patchwork mats. Sometimes she made circular potholders instead. The whole room hummed with work and proximity.

  The sight and sound of the digging outside suddenly affected Nanang Pipa with a melancholy unease. It had to do with precariousness, a reminder that any improvement, any embellishment, any expense was in the long run wasted. This was not her land. It was her house only to the extent that she had scavenged the posts and boards of which it was built. Things were going well: out of nothing they had made work and out of work they made a living, something which eluded plenty of people in San Clemente. But where was the feeling of security this ought to be bringing? It was a dangerous illusion to think of this place as a village. In reality it was a collection of shacks on a skiddy hill. Any pretence that it had the permanence implied by words like ‘village’ or even ‘settlement’ was nothing but self-deception. Only a couple of days ago she had been down in Sta. Cruz (on Dasmariñas, to be exact) scouring Chinese hardware shops for an acetylene lamp to use during brownouts. Seeing a crowd on the bridge she had joined it. On the west side of the estero all the squatters between Dasmariñas and Escolta were being evicted. Their shanties, which staggered out on dogleg pilings over the miasmic water, were being demolished. The most impressive thing was the silence in which onlookers and evicted alike watched the destruction of their homes, and which cut the scene out of the surrounding city’s din. As if they, too, were affected by it (for probably half of them lived in similar shacks) the gang of municipal workers were not even talking or calling out among themselves. The only sounds were the clatter of their hammers and crowbars, the groan of tin roofing, the pop and snap of boards. A rusty sheet of metal which everyone could recognise as an oil drum opened out and beaten flat slid into the treacly water and vanished. Huge belches of gas from the disturbed mud roiled up. The workers were watched by an overseer sitting atop the cab of a truck; a dozen armed police stood nearby. Meanwhile, the evicted waited in a silent line with their possessions piled around them: trussed fowls, a piglet tied to a table leg, rolled mats, the whole shabby interior of scratch living exposed to the sun and the onlookers’ gaze. Why did they stand and watch? she wondered. But there again, how could they not? Someone had to bear witness, as at an execution, even though the end was foregone.