Free Ghosts of Manila by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

and commonplace event.’
    ‘Don’t misunderstand,’ Sharon said to Ysabella when they were eating mangoes buried in chipped ice. ‘People here may seem forgiving and unjudgmental to the point of moral lethargy, but they don’t forget.’
    ‘Exactly’, said Crispa. ‘So wasn’t I right? A vile five minutes, a miserable month, but it set us all up with capital. Surely in England they have the idea that justice involves redress as well as punishing the offender?’
    ‘They’re pretty hooked on punishment, actually. We’re Protestants, you know. Forget tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. We think things like confession and forgiveness are soft and Roman.’
    ‘But doesn’t the offender compensate his victim?’
    Ysabella had some vague idea that a recent British government had been keen to make criminals pay with more than their freedom. Perhaps that was drug barons, and their loot went to the government rather than to their victims? She felt whirled about by the edges of things not touching in their customary places, by shifting boundaries. ‘What about impoverished rapists, then?’
    ‘There’s always natural justice. It runs riot in the provinces. People put curses on them and they get hacked to death with bolos. Or someone sets fire to their house with or without their children inside… Why this sordid topic? Sharon tells me your work is excellent.’
    ‘That’s because I’ve yet to do any.’
    And indeed that was the problem: yet another thing whose shape was different here. When she had put archaeology into her bag in London it had been a neat package of known dimensions, of familiar colour, shape and heft. What she had taken out in Manila had become mysteriously misshapen in transit. Armed looters fought over sites. Museum directors went absent on field trips. Second-rate stuff was put on display while really interesting and valuable pieces were ‘re-assigned’ elsewhere and became suddenly unavailable for study.
    ‘Sharon tells me you’re not married?’
    ‘Not yet, anyway.’
    All three of them would be much the same age, she thought. Small talk that ought to lead somewhere, only I’m too weary. Or too grand. Or too lazy to work up emotional ties for a year only to have to ingest them all again when I pack up, like a spider eating its own web. Conservation of energy. An elderly disdain; and yet here we are, late twenties, early thirties. Prime time. Or maybe that, too, slotted differently here. Maybe here it was already over. Hugh would have said dourly: ‘Everything always is,’ as part of their conspiracy of nostalgia, of eheu fugaces which was supposed to make sex tender so long as the talisman stood in the corner making a noise like wingèd chariots or grim reapers. Actually (she could now think, safely eight thousand miles away from him) the great drawback to sacred rites was that the more solemn and special they were, the more one’s attention was distracted by the priest’s crumpetlike complexion, by the embarrassing way his eyelids fluttered like those of a school chaplain feigning prayer. Hugh was doubtless another explanation for her being in Manila. A good reason for being cross with herself, if so. I only want the experience, she thought, never mind the details.
    But details there were, as remorseless as an endless succession of small dishes which stubbornly refused to amount to a meal. Both her hosts were activists and let fall succulent morsels of this and that, appetisers from a banquet to which Ysabella didn’t quite want an invitation. Crispa was doing research on the ‘comfort women’ used as slaves-cum-prostitutes in World War II, groping about in the black sack of history hoping to pluck out a few reliable names, some grey-haired survivors whom the Japanese Government might be shamed or cajoled into compensating. Sharon was lobbying her senators anddiplomats to force the Philippine Government to provide adequate protection for female overseas workers presently