Ghosts of Manila Read Free

together with the broth from the cauldron (which is, however, sieved first for stray teeth and bullets and the bones of the middle ear). Then a layer of quicklime is added, together with a covering of soil. To one of the fence posts a crucifix is tied. No-one besides the men ever comes near. Only the dogs approach, slinking and cringing and trembling with hunger at the scent in the air. The reeds whisper in the light, kerosene-laden breeze. Overhead the bleary travellers glance down and glimpse some peasants, perhaps, clinging nobly to their smallholding on the fringes of the city, still carrying on the timeless rituals of seed-time and harvest. Then the memory vanishes as the wheels thud onto the runway, sporadic applause breaks out from the rear of the economy section and the passengers’ adrenaline count soars steeply with the anxiety of arrival.
    Soon the young man’s bones join those of a dozen others, including two children, already hanging in polythene garment bags on a rail in the stockroom. The buyer, another Chinese, will collect them all in a day or two but his visits are becoming less frequent even though theprice for the genuine article has been rising slightly as the market dries up. Rarity value, the men suppose. According to their information many developed countries have stopped importing real skeletons and have gone over to plastic. Or it may be that nations like India, which used to supply the majority of the British market until the mid-Eighties, have instead banned the export of their own ex-citizens. From now on illegal emigrants should be flesh and blood. Perhaps after all it is an uneasy business, smacking too much of Burke and Hare and unquiet graves.
    Swabbing down and sweeping up to the sound of jet aircraft and pop songs the Chinese use a lot of water which runs away under the doors. The dogs wait for the lysol-flavoured runnels, fighting over nearly invisible strands of jelly. A skilled profession is winding down. Two of the men, who in evening light look almost elderly, might well retire. The other two – they are all distantly related to each other by blood or pacts – might stay on in business to fill special orders. One never knows where demand might come from. Only last month a trainee Buddhist arrived with the wrapped body of his master whose last wish had been that his bones might be used for his neophytes’ meditation. Plastic might constitute a memento mori but was hardly as talismanic as the very bones of the teacher. Everyone thought this perfectly proper, including the police who saw no reason to interfere with religious wishes. They had taken their cut and gone their way. That had been good work: the two in the body shop had forgotten to cross themselves and had whistled while they worked. Some jobs just felt right.

2
    W HO COULD remember 199-? Presidential shenanigans, monarchies on the blink. Growing populations of the homeless and workless swirling ever higher as if to swamp the classical columns of the nation states’ capitols, a demotic pollution eating away at the very marble of the seats of government. Wars, famines, fresh prodigies of international terrorism. The usual furniture of world events, in short, being moved about the same old room, while from outside came the rumblings of the familiar volcano or earthquake or disastrous typhoon. All this in that same year plus, of course, a spectacular outbreak of vampirism in a Manila squatter area. That, too, was a recurrent story, certainly no more mythic than wheat futures.
    It was the year in which John Prideaux submitted an unconventional text as his dissertation, having concluded there was no other way of writing it. If it posed as a fictional account it would at least have an edge of readability over the more familiar slabs of word-processorese which passed as anthropology. After all, fact, like justice, was negotiable. People sometimes said that a weakness of much modern fiction was that it tried too hard to be