Free The Orientalist and the Ghost by Susan Barker Page B

us!’ they cried.
    I stole a cautionary glance back at the mission door.
    ‘The orange drink is a witch’s brew,’ I said, ‘a magic potion that will make you go to them every single day and listen to Jesus stories. It is too late for the children in there now. But you two must run and save yourselves …’
    I thoroughly enjoyed my macabre joke, but had forgotten how susceptible the Chinese are to supernatural tales. The children listened wide-eyed, then one of them pointed over my shoulder and they both squealed. Their fear was strangely contagious and I hesitated to look round. Under the pink blooms of the Honolulu creeper trellis stood Marina Tolbin, holding a tray of orange squash. The urchins fled, leaving me to stand and shake my head and tut: ‘Really, these children ought to learn some manners.’
    The servant boy was on the bungalow veranda, sitting on a rattan chair and swinging his foot (the big toe of which was tethered to the ceiling-fan contraption) in a monstrous fit of the sulks. Around the side of the bungalow scuttled a headless chicken, fountains of blood spurting from its severed neck as chef Winston Lau chased it with a cleaver. The servant was so consumed by sulking he barely looked up.
    In the office, Charles was wafted by the scalloped fan as he typed up the weekly village report. The story of Mrs Ho outraged him.
    ‘We must call her bluff,’ he said. ‘We cannot let a squatter woman hold her life over us as a threat. Nor can we let opium-eating go on in this village.’
    Charles assured me that Mrs Ho wouldn’t find out her confidence had been violated. He would see to it that Mr Ho and the other drug fiends were caught in flagrante delicto. As I left, Charles dialled a number on the telephone and barked,
Get me Sergeant Abdullah!
And I returned to my volunteer team, trusting the situation was in good hands.
    But there were no arrests. Not the next week, nor the week after that. When I asked Charles why the police were so slow, he spoke of an undercover operation to track down the opium ringleaders.
They’re after the big boys
, he said, with a knowing wink.
    Sometimes, when Charles comes haunting, I remind him of his whopping great lies. And he laughs and laughs, holding on to his massive jiggling belly as if it might explode. Charles often sets up his opium-smoking paraphernalia on my sideboard. He is especially fond of an Aladdin’s lamp with a hollow rope attachment, devoting hours to sucking on the brass mouthpiece. Occasionally he uses more sinister tools of the trade – needles and syringes, weighing scales, morphia grains and vials of distilled water. He borrows my necktie to make a tourniquet around the venom depository of his arm. I close my eyes as he injects – I’ve always had a phobia of needles. I plug my fingers in my ears too, for I’ve come to loathe that sigh of intoxication. I have no desire to eavesdrop on his orgasm.
    ‘This,’ he says, eyes rolling back, ‘is the most powerful weapon in the war against Communism. Not the hundreds of thousands of dollars of government propaganda and all that nonsense about hearts and minds. So long as the Reds want to outlaw this bourgeois indulgence, they’ll never be loved by the Chinese.’
    ‘Better a Communist than a dope fiend,’ I muttered.
    ‘Tee hee hee, tee hee hee,’ giggled Charles, shutting his eyes and slumping into the arms of his toxic paramour.
    The jungle settlement from which the two hundred newcomers had come was the last remaining source of food for the local Communists. Annoyed about their last supporters being corralled behind barbed wire, the 10th Independent Regiment of the Malayan Races Liberation Army upped their campaign of violence against The Village of Everlasting Peace. Grenades flew here, there and everywhere, blowing up the south watchtower and a few of our men besides. Dr Fothergill became adept at tweezering bullets out of our home guard, getting his patients shipshape so they were back