Free The Orientalist and the Ghost by Susan Barker

Lowering my wheelbarrow, I instructed my team to make a start on the fence-mending without me (they veered over to the shade of the tulang trees for a siesta), then went to call on the missionaries. Nearing the cottage, I was cheered to see pots of scarlet hibiscus in the garden and the flower beds damp with the promise of further tropical bloom (a refreshing change from the yards of weeds and chicken shit). The Saint Bernard panted and thudded its tail, and one of the missionaries, Blanche Mallard, came out to greet me. Blanche was tall and sturdy and the bun on her head was like a grey ball of yarn.
    ‘Christopher Milnar, I presume,’ she said, and we laughed and shook hands. After introducing herself and Humphrey the Saint Bernard to me, she invited me into the front room of the hut, where a dozen village children sat around a low table, colouring in pictures of biblical scenes and drinking orange squash. Religious tapestries hung on the walls and geckos darted to and fro, forked tongues flickering at spiders and flies. Chalking a prayer on to the blackboard was the second missionary, Marina Tolbin, a woman so ugly and hirsute I felt physically ill. Even now I remember her in chilling flashbacks of protruding teeth, furry moustache and moles like netherworldly creatures on her chin. It didn’t take a qualified doctor to see that Marina had some hormonal imbalance or thyroid disorder. I squeaked ‘Hello’ and Marina stared wordlessly back.
Miss Tolbin is mute, the poor dear
, said Blanche, and I admit to a guilty relief that I was spared the ordeal of conversing with her.
    Marina regained the ability to speak when she died. After a lifelong vow of silence it seems she has a lot to get off her chest. Her ghost pops up on the lavatory when I am in the bath and jabbers non-stop. Blanche is her favourite topic of complaint.
    ‘Blanche always has the final say-so,’ she says, ‘and I have no say-so at all. She always takes charge of the exorcisms, even though I’ve frightened away hordes of demons in my time.’
    I do wish she’d respect my privacy. I feel quite self-conscious performing my mandatory soap-and-loofah routine with Marina nattering on the lavatory. When Marina Tolbin was alive I thought her silence was of the utmost spiritual kind: a sacrifice of words so she could commune more devoutly with the Lord. But now Marina speaks aloud her cogitations, I know they scarcely deviate from the fatuous.
    As the village urchins coloured-in scenes from the
Life of Christ
, Blanche praised their work in fluent Cantonese (
Very good, Ling Li, aren’t you a clever girl!
) and gently discouraged acts of sacrilege (
Oh, no! The face of Jesus Christ is never blue … Blue is better for the sky
…). Marina Tolbin refilled glasses with orange cordial, as if afraid the little guests would run away if they were for a moment empty. The children were well behaved, except for one pipsqueak of a boy whose hand was down his trousers groping his juvenile tackle. Blanche scolded the boy. He was
not
to touch himself there!
Never, ever!
The boy removed his hand and Blanche nodded, satisfied, then told me that she and Marina were having trouble with a villager.
    ‘Miss Tolbin and I experienced many trials during our long years as missionaries in Hong Kong,’ she said, ‘but never one such as this.’
    Blanche led me through a click-clacking beaded curtain into the kitchen, where a Chinese woman sat at the table, the shrivelled newborn in her arms suckling at a bottle of milk. Like most women in our village, she was downtrodden and dirty, attending to her chores with a throng of little ’uns under her feet. The woman made a furious row when she saw me. She leapt up, spitting and cursing my ancestors. The baby squalled, shaken in her arms. Milk squirted from the teat of the feeding bottle and on to my cheek.
    ‘Traitor!’ she shrieked at Blanche.
    ‘But he is not a policeman,’ said Blanche.
    ‘I know who he is!’ the woman