The Orientalist and the Ghost Read Free Page B

came into the foreground. The night shuddered with it, the pulsations so forceful I imagined that they were external to me, emanating from the creatures in the jungle undergrowth. ‘Violons dans la nuit’ started up on the gramophone and the veranda swam in an adagio of strings. Charles returned and, standing before me, made a speech welcoming me to Malaya, a fiendish halo of moths fluttering about his choirboy curls. The speech touched and saddened me and as we clinked together our warm bottles of Tiger beer I was oddly stricken. I told Charles I was going to bed soon after that. The gramophone hissed as we said goodnight, the needle bumping over the empty vinyl at the end of the record.
    Later that night I lay in the dark of my hut, on a camp-bed mattress that bore the stains of my predecessor like some lesser Turin shroud. (I flipped the mattress but on the other side found stains of a more sinister and ambiguous nature.) Mosquitoes droned beyond the net, the minute bristling of insect legs and antennae seeming to reside inside my ears. The mattress was slack and weak-sprung and I made a thousand revolutions in my sleeplessness, a human tombola trying to outwit the heat. As I lay there, sweat pooling in the hollows of my flesh, I pined for England; for a temperate climate and Greenwich Mean Time. I thought of Marion Forte-Cannon and hoped her hatred of me would not last, and that she would find another man to marry (old Marion did, thrice over, each husband wealthier than the last). I thought of Charles and his platypus nose, the broken veins in his face like contour lines on a map for alcoholics. I thought of my predecessor Ah Wing, murdered by the Communists, his throat slit so deeply he was near beheaded. They threw his corpse across a path at the Bishop’s Head plantation and though four hundred tappers had filed past it on their way home from work not one of them reported the crime back at the village. (Kip Phillips, the plantation manager, discovered poor old Ah Wing that evening, fire ants crawling over him, his spilt blood as thick as treacle.) I thought of my trunk and possessions, my books of Chinese calligraphy and folk-tales, being hawked in a marketplace somewhere in Dubai. I thought of the busy day ahead of me and the necessity of sleep. But dawn came and the sky lightened. And that first night in Malaya I never slept at all.

3

    LAST NIGHT I dreamt I was a wild hog, careering through the jungle. Squealing and galloping as fast as my trotters would carry me, rattan vines lashing me and tree roots snaking across the trail. Behind me came the stampeding of jungle boots and the shouts of huntsmen in Malay and Cantonese, upper-class English and cockney slang, united in the waving of axes and bamboo spears. My heart was an organ of impossible loudness, louder even than my abattoir squeals, and through sow eyes I saw my snout, whiskers of grey and the rounded tusks of my savage underbite. I ran and ran, and made piggy retching sounds as the jungle breathed its primordial breath. The trail widened into a small clearing, the canopy soaring up into a cathedral of leaves. My stumpy legs buckled there and I belly-flopped upon the springy moss. I squeezed my eyes shut.
What a way to go
, I thought, as the jungle boots stomped into the clearing, the shouts became cheers, and the first sharpened stick of bamboo pierced my flesh.
    The imaginary pain woke me, sent me flailing upright on the brink of cardiac arrest. As I wheezed and clutched at my chest, Charles Dulwich sat on the end of my fold-out bed, guffawing and dabbing at spectral tears of mirth.
    ‘That was hilarious!’ he said. ‘That was the funniest nightmare you’ve had in a long time! Not even safe in the arms of Morpheus, are you, now?’
    Charles brandished an opium pipe and was blowing mauvish smoke about the living room. I was too breathless to reply, my pyjamas clammy with the sweat of my subconscious trauma. The mantelpiece clock said it was five