Читать книгу The Hungry Ghosts - Anne Berry - Страница 11

I watch many children come and go before Alice arrives. I observe them through the grid of an air-vent set high into the wall of the morgue.Their heads are dull and ordinary, and I know they cannot sustain me. True, I am curious. But when Alice comes I am spellbound. She appears one afternoon when all the other children have gone, and lies back on a patch of scrubby grass. She is a slip of a thing, pale as a creaming wave, her long hair always moving, her eyes moons of contemplation. It does not seem to worry her that the building above her is growing silent, that soon she will be alone. For a bit she stares up at the sky, follows the occasional fleecy cloud. Then she rolls over and sits up. As she does so, the golden-haired boy in the shadows fades away, as if he had never been.

Suddenly she notices the yawning mouth of the morgue, for the door is partly ajar. I cannot tell how long her eyes are trained on it, but the shadows are lengthening when at last she climbs to her feet. She walks straight to the entrance and shoulders open the rusty-hinged door. It shudders and grumbles and sticks a bit before swinging back. Alice slips through,under the nebulous mantle.She takes a few steps, and then waits for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. She inhales a long, slow breath of stale, dead air. She fixes stains on the floor with her perceptive eyes. She let her fingers linger on walls where the paint is flaking, where the bricks are impregnated with the transience of life.As she listens to echoes of the past, I slide into her and instantly feel my strength returning. I become the scum in her blood. I garland myself with ropes of silver-stranded veins.And in the resonance of each heartbeat I know her every thought,her every memory, her every experience, her every twist and turn of emotion, often before she does, as if they are my own.

When at last she leaves, I go with her. We dawdle along Bowen Road. We wait for the Peak Tram, a funicular green cab with the cream roof to come and haul us up The Peak.We leave the terminus and stroll up a long road, past a shop called the Dairy Farm, then along a path to Alice’s home. All this is new to me. The people hurrying by, their clothes, their colour too, for up here most of them are white-skinned, the cars and buses and lorries, the houses and the flats. Hers is a top-floor flat, as large as a palace. Surely, I think, several families live here. But I am wrong. There is only one. The flat is filled with beautiful things too, the kind that an emperor might own. Carvings and paintings, jade and ivory, snuff bottles and fans, books and carpets, and shelves crowded with fine porcelain. But there is no emperor, just Alice’s family, the Saffords, and some servants to care for them, Ah Dang and Ah Lee. When I was alive there was only my father to care for me. And even then, as far back as I can recall, it had really been my job to look after him. Like me, Alice has a father, Ralph, but unlike me she has a mother too, Myrtle.And Alice has a younger brother, Harry, and a small dog she calls Bear. Alice has two sisters as well, who are being educated in England. It seems strange to me that, with so many people about, Alice should be lonely. But she is. I feel it. Still, it is lucky, because it means that she will probably welcome my company.

Together we decide that we do not like attending classes in the school that has been set up in my old army hospital. This is not because I believe education has no worth. My father was a wonderful storyteller and valued learning above all things. When we returned from a night’s fishing I would lie down, the rising sun warming the deck under me, and he’d sit beside me. He’d puff on his clay pipe and after a bit the stories would come. He taught me to read and write too, and together we delighted in the words of the great poets and philosophers.

But the smell of death emanating from the morgue has started to make me fret. No, it is life that beckons to me now. I find myself wondering if the novelty of being alive again, albeit through the medium of Alice, will ever wear off. Somehow, I doubt it. So we abandon dusty studies in favour of exploration.We have to be careful where we go, for there is trouble on the island. The tense atmosphere reminds me of the weeks leading up to the outbreak of war. I overhear Alice’s father saying that some of the Chinese people are unhappy about working conditions, and that they believe the British are taking advantage of them. Some days there are riots, people shouting slogans and fighting, even bombs exploding and causing dreadful injuries. It seems strange though that this time the enemy is not the Japanese, but the British.

Despite these disturbances, Alice and I do not curtail our outings. We visit the Tiger Balm Gardens, or we take a ferry to one of the outer islands, or we walk the length of Shek O Beach, or Silvermine Bay, kicking up the sand, or we catch a bus to Aberdeen and watch the boat people, my people, for a while.This last stirs up memories of Lin Shui for me. Sometimes I am certain I spot my father, scrambling about the rigging of one of the great junks, the rust-brown sails flapping and rippling under him, his long, silver hair swept up into a bun and skewered with a netting needle, as was his habit. Sometimes I see a young girl, just like me, her life shrunk to the wooden decks that enfold her, her days spent riding the waves, mending nets, patching sails, cooking, washing pots and pans, and doing her family’s laundry.And I wonder if she realises how fine this life of hers is, if she values it as she ought. Sometimes too, I see the shadows of my ancestors and I know they are lying in wait for me.

Of course there are some advantages to being ‘undead’,for example I no longer feel hunger. I share with Alice what it is to need neither food nor drink. She joins me, fasting for long periods, till her head is light as a feather, and she trips about as if she is stepping onto clouds.When she grows dizzy and black shapes detonate before her eyes, I have to remind myself that Alice is only human and must eat to live. I prompt her then to feed, reminding myself that I am leasing her body. But while Alice fasts, her brother Harry feasts until none of his clothes fit him.

The flat on the Peak is emptier than I thought it would be, reminding me sometimes of the morgue. Alice’s father is rarely at home, working constantly. Alice’s mother, though sometimes in the same room, feels far away. I am envious of Alice having not one but two sisters. But I find even this, when they return home for the holidays, is not as I imagined it. Late one night we chance upon Jillian in the kitchen. She is surrounded by tins and packets and jars. She is stuffing food into her mouth, slices of bread slathered in chocolate spread and jam and peanut butter, cramming in biscuits and cakes and crisps and chocolate. In between mouthfuls she is gulping juice and milk, and brightly coloured drinks that bubble and fizz, as if infused with life force. I amuse myself by causing one of the tube lights in the kitchen to flash for a time. Jillian barely glances up. Instead, as it flickers, Alice’s oldest sister looks as if she is jerking about like a gluttonous puppet, her blonde hair flying. Alice is pofaced, but I think it is very funny.

All the while, fearless nocturnal cockroaches scuttle about. Emerging from the drains they feast on smears and crumbs. Most are on the floor, though a few, braver than the rest, scrabble around on the work surfaces.Their antennae swivel.They are well fed these cockroaches, the size of Hong Kong dollars. Their beetle-brown bodies gleam in the glow cast by the fluorescent tubes. Fine hairs sprout from their busy, spindly legs. The wings of one that is trying to clamber up the slippery sides of a glass whirr madly. It lumbers into the air and flies about, rebounding off cupboard doors and tiled surfaces, before landing to gobble afresh on a fast-melting square of chocolate. They look as shiny as vinyl. Alice flinches. Jillian pauses in her gorging, just long enough to bring a clenched fist down on it. We hear the ‘squish’ as its mushy body is crushed. Jillian glances cursorily at the base of her fist. She wipes off the stuff that looks like yellow pus on a kitchen towel, and starts guzzling again.

‘What are you doing?’ Alice wants to know, the juices running into her own mouth at the sight of all that food.

Startled, Jillian jumps and turns on Alice. She cannot have known we were here, watching her.‘Shut up,’ she hisses, a chocolaty dribble running down her chin. ‘Shut up and get out.’ The face of one of the amahs appears like a ghostly apparition at the window in the back door. It is Ah Dang, her plait unravelled, the top buttons of her tunic undone. She looks first sleepy-eyed, then amazed, as if she thinks she might still be dreaming. Despite this, her face registers concern, probably at the prospect of the morning’s clean-up job. Meeting Jillian’s incensed glare, wisely she elects to creep away.

‘You’ll make yourself sick if you eat all that,’ says Alice prophetically.

And that is exactly what Jillian does.When she has eaten so much that she seems barely able to walk and keep it all contained, she flicks off the kitchen light, staggers through the dining room, and down the long, dark corridor to the bathroom.We follow her and see her stumble inside, slam the door, and switch the light on.A thin, yellow stripe at the base of the door filters into the dimness.We hear Jillian lock it behind her. Then she begins to retch. For a long while she vomits and chokes. The sounds are harsh. They splinter the night. I am amazed that no one wakens at the din. Alice crouches in the murk listening to her sister disgorging herself,and her mother snoring. A few times Bear approaches her, but then he senses my presence and slinks away again, hackles high. Several of the corridor windows are open, and a welcome breeze is cooling the flat.The cicadas trill. Their song rhythmically swells and then subsides.The taps snort out water. The toilet flushes. Then silence. The cicadas too are momentarily still, as if in anticipation.The bathroom door slams open, hitting the wall with a resounding ‘thwack’. A square of light falls into the darkness, with the silhouette of Jillian squinting at its centre. She is not wearing her glasses.

‘Bitch,’ she fires into the corridor. She stinks of bile. She wipes the back of a hand over her mouth, gives a brittle laugh and flicks off the light. The darkness springs back. I remember what it is to be starving, the acid ache of it. I remember not knowing if I would eat again. I remember that food haunted my dreams, that it had the power to bewitch me. Jillian feels her way like a blind man past Harry’s bedroom to her own, goes in, the door thumping shut behind her. Still Alice huddles in the blackness. Bear growls softly. Some time later, after several unsuccessful attempts, a key turns in a lock and scratches the dark. The front door swings open. Nicola appears with a boy in tow, silhouettes in the lobby light. Entwined they fall back against the front door, closing it with their bodies. They tumble onto the Persian rug in the shadowy hall. There is a lot of grunting and struggling. Clothes are tossed aside. White bits swim into sight. Buttocks, an erect penis, a breast, an upright V of splayed legs.They are made luminous in the moonlight, these infrequently seen body parts. The dog watches cocking his head in puzzlement.

‘For Christ’s sake stop fucking about and put it in,’ snarls Nicola. The tone of her voice is bored and irritable.There is a bit of adjustment, then a good deal of rocking and panting, followed by a breathy cry. A few seconds pass. ‘Get off me, Mick. I think I’m going to be sick,’ groans Nicola. The boy, Mick, leaps up obediently. He begins tugging on his jeans. Nicola is slower to get up. She pulls on her pants and smoothes down her skirt. ‘I’m tired, so can you just fuck off now,’ she says opening the front door, unceremoniously showing the boy out, and shutting it firmly behind him. Without bothering to put on the lights she weaves her way down the corridor, never noticing Alice hugging the blackness to her. She vanishes straight into the room she shares with Jillian.

Alice’s mother, Myrtle, is on next.Her bedroom door opens slowly, and for a few seconds she stands swaying in the doorway. Then she steps gingerly into the stream of moonlight. She is wearing a pale dressing gown.There is a metallic sheen to it. Her hair is loose, falling about her shoulders. Her gait is unsteady. She finds her way to the bamboo-clad bar in the hall. She also seems to want invisibility, and does not bother with the lights. She fumbles with the sliding door of the bar, grabs a bottle, unscrews the top and takes a greedy gulp. With it clutched to her chest, she treads with the care of a tightrope walker back to her bedroom, and quietly closes the door.

‘While my father is away,’ whispers Alice, whose father is on a business trip in Singapore, ‘the mice come out to play.’

Later Alice drags some pillows and blankets into the corridor, and nestles by a bookcase that borders one of the walls. She cannot see the titles in the half-light, but she touches the hard spines of the books, and follows the contours of the lettering printed on their covers with an index finger. Much later, when I levitate out of Alice to glide along the ceiling, until I am floating just above the drinks cabinet, Bear cautiously nears my host. He sniffs her bedding warily, until he is satisfied it holds no trace of me.Then he nudges his way into the makeshift bed. Not satisfied with his proximity to Alice, he nuzzles at the bent arm at her side. Alice, half asleep, starts, her eyes springing open. Then in a wave of recognition she enwraps Bear, her dog,and draws him close to her.At length they sleep,Alice dropping off first, Bear rolling his eyes upwards and baring his teeth at me once, and then again, before finally settling down. I peer at them with bafflement at first, and then with something very like resentment. Alice’s face is calm, like still water. Her arm rises and falls gently as the dog’s lungs fill and deflate. Soon their rhythmic breaths interlock, fitting together like pieces of a puzzle, and their two hearts fall to beating in unison. I am covetous of their shared warmth, their joint slumber. Seeing their bodies spooned together makes me recall the taste of the Chinese speciality, Bitter Melon.

On the bar is a cut-glass decanter. Dipped in moonshine, the diamond panes glint like silver sequins. Although the decanter looks heavy, I am positive I can shift it. I condense myself and slither between it and the smooth, plastic surface of the bar. I radiate heat, drawing it from Alice, from the dog, from the air, and concentrating it, as you might do with a glass concentrating the energy of the sun to make fire. I distil the moisture of the night, sucking it up from the dew-soaked air. Soon the plastic is wet and slippery. I feel the decanter move then, just an inch or so. After that it is easy, one inch more and more and more. Now nearly half of the crystal sphere hangs over the edge of the bar. The liquid inside it sloshes and slops, a storm in a bottle. I draw every drop of it into the unsupported half of the glittering bulge. The bottle vibrates a moment. Then it arcs and plummets, splitting into pieces against the wooden floor with a heavy crash.The liquid bursts, liberated briefly before it pools. The dog snarls. Alice shifts drowsily. I hear a whimper coming from one of the bedrooms. I think it may be Harry.Then the hush slowly unfurls again.

In the morning though it is anything but quiet.A shaft of sunlight falls on the jagged pieces of the fractured decanter. It makes a wondrous dazzlement of them. I am delighted by the eye-catching trinkets I have brought into being. Surprisingly,Alice’s mother is not impressed. She shrieks at Alice. The dog scurries away, head down, tail between his legs. The amahs raise their hands to their mouths, and insist they know nothing of how the decanter came to be broken. But when Ah Lee hunkers down and begins to pick up splinters of glass, Alice’s mother grabs her shoulder and gives it a little shake.

‘Alice will do this,’ she cries. ‘She will collect up every bit of it in a bag, and when her father comes home she will show it to him.’ She lets go the shoulder and swoops on Alice. ‘You will tell him what you have done. Do you understand me,Alice?’ Myrtle Safford’s face looks flushed. It is fast becoming the colour of raw meat. Her fingers work busily at the embroidered sleeve of her blouse. She is bound to pull a thread if she persists in picking at the fine handiwork, I think.

‘I did not break the decanter,’ Alice says, on her feet, head held high, facing her mother. She repeats this several times.

‘Do not lie to me,’ Myrtle interrupts her. Her eyes look dry and sore, the lids drawing in sharply, as if the bright sunshine is hurting them.

Jillian materialises wearing one of her father’s old shirts. Her apathetic flint-grey eyes scan the tableau, amahs askance, mother enraged, Alice defiant. She wags her head slowly, knowingly from side to side. ‘I have a sore throat,’ she grunts, her hand stroking her collarbone. She yawns expansively, steps carefully over the broken glass, pushes past the amahs, and on into the dining room. ‘I need some breakfast. I’m starving,’ she mutters over her shoulder.

I cannot help wondering if she will throw it all up again later on. Nicola does not make an entrance. I expect she is tired after the previous night’s exertions. Harry peeps round his door, surveys the scene, and vanishes like a timorous mouse. It is plain to me that Alice is agitated. She does not seem the least bit thrilled with my achievement. She stoops and picks up a piece of glass.While her mother is shouting, she pushes the ragged point of it into the tip of a thumb. Ah Lee bursts into a fit of nervous giggles.

‘Mo lei tau!’ Ah Dang mutters.

Alice looks down and notes there is blood on her hand. Her brow creases in confusion, as if she cannot imagine how it got there.

Days later Alice’s father returns home and is presented with a bag that rattles when he lifts it up. It is full of my pretties. He asks Alice to join him in the lounge. He tells her that he is not angry with her, but he needs to understand why she has broken the decanter.

‘I didn’t break it,’ Alice insists. Her thumb still hurts, though of course it is no longer bleeding. She rubs it unconsciously.

Alice’s father looks so tired. He has dark smudges under his eyes. He presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets for a long moment. I make the chips of glass in the brown paper bag resting on his lap, chink and tinkle. Hearing them sing he drops his hands, and his weary eyes rake the room. They alight on a book, a statue, a carved lantern, a record player, a television, on the Chinese carpet that covers most of the floor, finally coming to rest once more on the crumpled, open-necked bag on his lap. He looks, I observe, as if he has just discovered that life is not what he expected it to be. He looks as if he is staring down, not at a shattered decanter in his lap, but at his own shattered dreams.

‘I didn’t do it,’ Alice reiterates. Her little fingers are crooked now, her face clouded. I explain that I did, but only Alice hears me. Her eyes dart about the room. At last they settle on her father’s drooping head. ‘I’m going to be good now,’ Alice says.