The Hungry Ghosts

In addition to this, you and I, Ralph, were called upon to attend many performances celebrating Chinese festivals.I had come to loathe these very public outings. Inevitably you would insist that the children attend, though goodness knew why. I felt they would do very well with the amahs at home watching a bit of Chinese opera. Certainly Alice would. But you were immovable on this, as you were on many issues involving our youngest daughter. So there we would be, in VIP seats at the front row for all to gawp at. Harry, of course, would always sit placidly, entranced by the colourful spectacle, Nicola on her best behaviour at his side. But Alice would fidget incessantly. Never content simply to be near me, she would have to keep tugging on my sleeve, stroking me, resting her head on me, reaching for my hand, tickling it, patting the necklace I was wearing, or the bracelet that adorned my wrist, or twisting the rings on my fingers. On one such occasion, a dragon dance by the harbour side, my patience snapped. Oblivious to the massive, bobbing, brilliant, red head of the dragon, with its swivelling, bulbous eyes, only feet from us, I suddenly sprang up, thrusting Alice from my lap where she had been settling herself.

‘Oh do stop touching me,Alice,for goodness sake!’my voice rang out over the clanging Chinese music, as Alice tumbled to the floor. ‘Leave me alone. For the love of God, get away from me!’

I must have shouted. Faces turned to look at me. Alice righted herself, and gingerly sat once more in her assigned seat between you, Ralph, and me. Locking eyes with you for a second, the look you gave me would have frozen blood. The dragon head bounced and shook, its gaudy finery a blur before me. Its striped body writhed and twisted. Then it froze for an instant, the great head seemingly suspended in the air right before my eye-line. Slowly it blinked its white, fur-trimmed eyelids. And in that moment, I would have liked to dash forwards and gouge its impertinent eyes from their teacup sockets. Like Alice’s, their gaze was far too astute.Then the wretched little man who jigged by the serpent’s side put his hands on his hips and shook with pantomime laughter. Not satisfied with this, he went on to clasp both hands over the mouth that was slashed into his enormous, lobster-pink, papier-mâché globe of a head. He wagged this monstrous mask from side to side, the focus of his slit eyes on me, the butt of the joke. Briefly I glanced down at Alice. Always she was thinking, the wide, solemn eyes seeing everything. Thinking, thinking, thinking! Then the beast shivered and burst once more into life. My daughter had shown me up yet again, in front of all the important guests in the audience. Even the Governor was there, enjoying the jest I presume. It was a high price to pay for losing my control, for letting my guard slip. Alice had humiliated me publicly, before the most important British official on the island.

Our daughter was making life intolerable, Ralph, whether you were prepared to acknowledge it or not. She went for sleepovers with friends, vowing that she wanted to go more than anything she could think of, only to be returned home, sobbing and distraught in the middle of the night. The cause of these upsets remained a mystery both to you and to me. She was beset with night terrors, where she roamed the flat in strange trances, sometimes dragging her mattress great distances to find rest. And being Alice, she was not content to suffer her insomnia alone. Stricken with fear, and knowing very well that she would get no sympathy from me, she would turn instead to you, her beleaguered father, and make you sit up the night with her. She would beg you to tell her that she was not alone, for she felt, she said, as if she was the only person living in the blackness, and that all the world was dead. As a result, struggling with the demands of your high-profile job and little sleep, you were jaded and consequently short-tempered with me. Her selfishness was astounding. But if you tackled her about these episodes, the resulting dialogue simply revealed Alice to be an irrational child, deaf to reason and common sense. Often in the evenings she would scream for me, and when I came running I would find her peering out of a bathroom window at the corridor’s end, mesmerised. She would insist that I look at the sunset, exclaiming that she had never before seen anything so beautiful. She would gasp, and tell me that she could barely breathe at the wonder of it, that it made her want to cry and laugh all at once. After a time, like the villagers charging up the mountain in response to the shrieks of the boy who cried wolf, I would dismiss her summons, or just give her a cursory nod in passing.

I even spoke to you and arranged for Alice to have a dog. Of course at the time I said it would be a family pet and lovely for all of us. It was really for Alice though, to occupy Alice, to absorb her, and perhaps give the rest of us a little peace.We fetched the wretched creature from the Hong Kong SPCA.Alice chose him. If I’m honest I thought him a disagreeable mongrel, quite absurd in appearance—a motley assortment of colours, brown, black, white, grey and even a bit of yellow. He had a feathered tail far too long for the compact body, huge paws, a ragged ear, a long thin snout, and a black tongue which, when it hung out, very nearly trailed to the ground.

‘Really Alice! Why him?’ I asked her, running my eyes over the scrappy mutt. ‘There are others that are so much prettier.’

But true to form, never taking her eyes from the dog she had selected, Alice seemed not to hear me.

‘I shall call him Bear,’ she had announced, as I filled out the paperwork. I resisted the temptation to state the obvious. It was a dog not a bear! I thought it an absurd name. Why not call the thing Rover or Sparky or Rusty? But Alice was adamant. And to be fair, ‘Bear’ did fulfil his allotted task of providing a preoccupation for Alice. It was not unknown for the two of them to disappear for several hours at a time. Though Alice, when present, remained just as challenging.

Why, I asked myself countless times, couldn’t she just take things at face value? Why was she was forever digging under the skin, probing things best left alone.Yet despite this you seemed to relish her company, Ralph. And for her part, Alice would happily have followed her beloved father anywhere. As Alice began her final year at Big Peak School, my relief was palpable. Soon, very soon, she would join her sisters at the convent in England, and then it would just be you, Ralph, and me, and our son of course. I broached this subject one weekend after a particularly good meal, when I knew you were relaxed and mellow and would be most receptive.We were sitting at the dining-room table and enjoying a small cognac with our coffees.

‘It’s probably time for us to make arrangements for Alice to join her sisters,’ I ventured. I waited. There was no response. I took a mouthful of brandy for courage and soldiered on.‘I can hardly believe it, but Alice is in her last year at Big Peak School, and with the problem of finding suitable secondary education here I—’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’you said, uncharacteristically cutting me off mid-flow.

Had you indeed, I ruminated.You continued.

‘I’ve heard they’re opening up a new school on Bowen Road. They’re setting it up in the old British Army Hospital while they make a start building new premises on the terraced slopes above. In time they plan to demolish the hospital entirely, making way for further expansion. I want Alice to go there.’

I drew in a breath sharply.You gave me a quick glance.‘Is there a problem?’ you asked, a dangerous note sounding in your voice.

I felt stunned,as if I had been slugged over the head and temporarily my eyesight was blurred. I tried to hold onto the salient facts.You had been thinking, you had been thinking about Alice, thinking about keeping Alice here with us, despite the chaos she was causing, Ralph, you wanted to send her to a new school they were building, a school I had heard nothing about.

‘But darling,’I said,reaching for the cognac bottle,‘we don’t know anything about this school.’

‘I do,’ you fired back. ‘I’ve been to see the site. Nigel has been telling me all about it.They’re considering sending Christopher and Anita there. Actually, I’m surprised Beth hasn’t mentioned it to you.’

And so was I. Although this could not quite be classed as deception, my friend and neighbour Beth Fielding’s omission to acquaint me with this startling news came a pretty close second in my book. I tipped up the bottle and refilled my glass. ‘I see. Well. Well, well, well.’

‘Myrtle, be honest with yourself,’ you went on as I stiffened in my seat, ‘it would be a disaster sending Alice to boarding school.’ Under your breath you added, ‘I’m not at all sure it’s been a success for Jillian or Nicola either.’

I sipped my cognac, then cradled my glass, slowly swilling round the amber liquid.

‘I feel we should at least discuss it,’ was my face-saving remark.

‘We have,’ you said brusquely, rising from the table.

Tonight Alice is worse than ever. Sometimes you can almost believe she alters with the rising of the moon, a kind of moon-madness. She is like a lone wolf howling and prowling all through the night. Ralph is dealing with her. With Alice his patience is inexhaustible. Harry seeks refuge in my bed.We close our eyes and block our ears.Finally I drift off to sleep. I dream we are on our junk, White Jade, which we have moored in a pretty bay. We are floating on a cobalt-blue sea. I feel the gentle rise and fall of the boat like breath coming in and going out, the rhythmic lift and fall of the thing. The sun is shining. We are fanned by a light breeze. And we are fishing, Ralph and Alice and I. We have cast out nylon lines with hooks knotted at the end of them. We have speared wiggling maggots for bait. Time passes. Ralph catches nothing. I catch nothing.Then Alice reels in a fish. It is several inches long, and it flaps dripping over the wooden deck, the silver scales brilliant as coruscating diamonds kissed by the sun. We all point at the fish as it gulps in air, and slaps and slips about. Our faces are masks of delight. Then quite suddenly the fish starts to inflate, like a silver balloon spiked with prickles. It swells up obscenely until it no longer flaps over the deck. It is a motionless bubble. Its prickles become barbs, hooking into the soft flesh of the damp wood.

‘It is a puffer fish!’ cries Alice in dismay. ‘It’s poisonous!’ She is standing now over the gasping, hideous thing, hypnotised.Then she looks up at me. ‘If you eat my fish you will die, Mother,’ she says, and I wake.

My hands itch all day. When Alice returns from school we have a row. I do not like rowing. Some people can shrug off rows like a dog shaking water from its coat. I cannot. Brutal words stay with me…well…sometimes for a lifetime. I keep count of them. I notch them into the bark of my life, so deeply that they will never grow out. I tell Alice she cannot carry on with her deranged nights. My voice is quite calm, quite steady. I tell her they are taking a dreadful toll on her father. I tell her how hard he works, and that she is making him very ill.And when none of this seems to have any effect, I tell her that she is coming between us, that she is forcing us apart, her mother and her father. Alice’s voice rises up like a snake with its egoistic jingle-jangle, as if she really is the only person alive in the world, and not just through the long, dark nights but through the long bright days as well. My voice shifts key. I feel the ‘demon rasp’ tolling in me then, purifying, abrasive, because Alice smiles a foolish smile. The demon is full of wrath, and he spits words out at the smiling, loon-faced child.

We are in the bathroom, the same bathroom where Alice has summoned me so many times with her games. The window is open and the sky is red. I feel it bleed into me. I am dimly aware that my mouth is still working, and that my voice has grown deep and masculine, a war cry, and that my limbs are flaying. Alice is bold and stands her ground. And still she is smiling, smiling! I want to wipe that smile off her face. I draw back my hand and deal her such a blow across her grinning visage, that she is sent reeling backwards, covering the distance of several feet to the window, sliding down the wall, crumpling on the floor, while incongruously, above her head, Alice’s wondrous sunset is framed. I am transfixed by the white face looming through the long brown hair. The eye is already puffing up. The cheek is split with a deep gash. Her blood is such a vivid shade of red. It dribbles from the wound and down her chin. It drips onto her summer school uniform, flowering on the white cotton.

I think: I am wearing my wedding and engagement rings and they must have cut into her cheek, a marital knuckleduster. I think, I have committed a mortal sin, somehow or other the Mother Superior at the convent back in England will know of it. I am envious of Alice. I am envious of my daughter. Alice, who has roared through so many nights, is silent now. I cannot even hear her breathing. I watch the blood spill and grow more copious. It pools in a crease at her neck. This creates the impression, reminiscent of a horror movie, that her head has been severed from her body, and that, if you push it, it will tumble off and roll over the green, marble-effect rubber tiles of the bathroom floor. I wonder what time Ralph will be home. I have an idea he is out tonight and will not be back until late. By tomorrow it will not look so bad. Besides, a story can be told. I feel sure a story will come that fits my purpose. Alice, I know, will never tell. She will hold it all in, keep it contained. Like Iwazaru, one of the three wise monkeys, she will speak no evil. She will gag herself. I gaze unmoved at the sunset, then my eyes slide downwards and hold Alice’s.

‘At last,’ I say,‘when I come, there is something to see.’ My voice scrapes the silence. My hands have stopped itching. They are trembling now. I need something to steady my nerves.

Nicola—1965

I never really grasped why Jillian made such a fuss about boarding school.True, it was a bit of a blow the parents choosing Gran’s school, it being Roman Catholic and we being…well, heathens. But it didn’t really worry me. I knew we would have a laugh. I told Jillian so, as she sat on her bed, in the flat on The Peak. The Easter holidays were drawing to a close, and she was red-cheeked and wretched. She was flying back to England the next day and I was helping her to pack.

‘In September I’ll be joining you,’ I told her with a grin. ‘We’ll shake things up, Jilly.’ She managed a weak smile.

‘I hate it there,’ she said brokenly.‘I’m miserable.’ She took off her glasses and I saw her eyes were swimming with tears. ‘The nuns are bitches!’

I tossed in a T-shirt with a picture of kittens on it, shunted the case along the bed, and sat down next to my sister. I put an arm over her shoulder. This was an awkward gesture for me. I am not a touchy-feely person. It is nothing personal but I experience a kind of revulsion when things get sloppy. That day there had been a scene at lunch, a spectacular scene. It was a roast dinner. We generally have a roast on the weekends. Jillian, already feeling as if she was fading away, as if she was only half visible, with her return to England imminent, was upset even before we sat down. Alice kept asking her silly questions. What was it like at boarding school? Did she have a boyfriend? Was she excited about the flight tomorrow? That sort of thing. Jillian loathed Alice. She had told me late one night that she would like to slap her, that she could not bear her enthusiasm, her eagerness, her desire to please.

‘She can afford to behave like that,’ Jillian had said bitterly, screwing up her eyes behind their lenses, as she watched Alice chatting to one of the amahs.

I sympathised with Jillian. From time to time Alice got on my nerves too. But it was plain to me that my elder sister hadn’t thought this through. Anyone could see that Jillian’s vendetta against Alice did not work in her favour. For a start it maddened Father, who seemed to feel he had to keep riding to Alice’s rescue, like some paternal knight in shining armour.

‘Why not make a friend of Alice, then make that friendship work for you,’ I suggested reasonably to Jillian.

But to no avail I’m afraid. Jillian’s revulsion for our little sister knew no bounds. She gave long-suffering sighs when Alice walked into a room. On car journeys she insisted on winding up the window, claiming the draft was blowing her hair out of shape, knowing full well that Alice was prone to travel sickness. And she would stoically ignore our little sister when she bounded up to her full of adoring compliments. How lovely Jillian was looking, Alice would say. How she wished her brown hair was fair like Jillian’s, and would Jillian help her pick out some new clothes because she had no idea what was fashionable in London at present. It astonished me that Alice did not seem to realise she was antagonising Jilly. But then she can be a little obtuse sometimes.

So when we all trooped into lunch that day, I had an idea that something was going to happen. Father carved the meat. It was roast beef. Jillian wanted an outside cut and so did Alice. Neither of them liked bloody meat, whereas I liked mine nearly raw. I was happiest with a middle slice, all pink and oozing blood. Father served Alice before her older sister, and Jillian clearly felt the snub. She made up her mind that all the best bits had gone to Alice, and that the cut she was dished up was undercooked. She took Father to task over this, complaining that Alice always got the choicest pieces of meat. Mother piled in.As a matter of course,Harry,son and heir,had been taken care of first. Now he looked perturbed by the delay. Catching his mother’s eye, he was given the go-ahead to start his meal. So while hostilities were breaking out, Harry was slowly masticating a mouthful, like a cud-chewing cow. All the while, his eyes focused hypnotically on two black and silver angelfish, gliding about in a tank, set up on the dresser behind the dining-room table. Then Alice made matters much worse by offering Jillian her meat.Typical.Why couldn’t she just shut up?

‘Here Jillian,we can swap plates if you like,’Alice suggested,lifting her plate and offering it to her sister.

‘I don’t want it now you’ve touched it,’ Jillian cried, shoving the plate back towards Alice, so hard that the piece of crispy outside meat was launched off it, orbited briefly in the air, before landing with a ‘plop’, quite fortuitously as it happened, on Harry’s plate. Harry’s eyes rolled from living fish to dead meat, and stayed glued to the unexpected arrival, his jaws temporarily locked.

‘That was uncalled for,’ Father said angrily, hurriedly flipping over the joint, carving a slice from the other end, and delivering it to Alice’s plate.

‘No,’ pleaded Alice. ‘I don’t mind really. Jillian can have it.’

‘Didn’t you hear me the first time?’ Jillian shrieked, shooting a slaughterous look in Alice’s direction. ‘I don’t want anything of yours.’

Alice began protesting that she hadn’t touched it, so it couldn’t be called hers yet.Then Mother, who kept running a thumb up and down along the blade of her own knife, where it lay at the side of her plate, told Alice to be quiet and to get on with her dinner.The colour was draining from Alice’s face now, and she began clearing her throat as if she had something stuck there. Father wanted to know if she was okay and would she like some water.

‘Oh for goodness sake, if you’re feeling sick,Alice, leave the table,’ Mother snapped.‘You’re ruining everyone’s dinner.You are making us all lose our appetites.’

As Mother spoke, I saw she had taken up her own knife and fork. She was grasping them about their middles as if they were weapons, and then suddenly she threw them tetchily a little way from her, across the table. Her fork struck a serving dish full of vegetables, and her knife clanged against the metal gravy boat.Alice rose slowly from her chair. She looked bewildered, unsure if she should go or stay. Father smiled kindly at her and told her to stay put. Mother looked livid. Jillian slid malevolent eyes towards her sister, but her head remained motionless. Staying calm amidst the storm, Harry was moving his fork imperceptibly to snag Alice’s slice of meat, all his concentration focused then on edging it towards the centre of his plate. At last Alice moved away from her chair and backed out of the room, bumping into the dining-room door once, before turning, opening it and disappearing through it.

‘Come back as soon as you feel better,’ Father called after her.

Alice closed the door with infinite care, as if terrified she would disturb a sleeping baby. After Alice’s departure, I had thought things would improve, and was just tucking into a succulent morsel of red meat when father placed two fat roast onions on Jillian’s plate. Now, if it was a fact known to one and all in our family that Jillian and Alice preferred outside cuts of meat, it was also virtually printed on Jillian’s birth certificate that she hated onions, that no earthly force could induce her to swallow what she described as a single slimy mouthful of them, that even God would have his work cut out if he wished Jillian to polish one off, let alone two. Jillian eyes were riveted on the onions.Mother made a squeaking noise.Harry jumped, and then started mashing up a roast potato with admirable intensity. Father sat back in his chair, and with immense care loaded tiny portions of meat, potato, vegetables and onion onto his fork, patting the whole into a small, sausage shape with his knife, inspecting it for a second, popping it into his mouth, and chewing energetically before washing it down with a glug of red wine. Mother had more than a glug, polishing off nearly her entire glassful. The appearance and following inquiry from one of the amahs as to whether she should clear away, and were we ready for dessert, was met with sour faces, and she quickly scurried off again.

‘I will not eat an onion,’ announced Jillian in a voice of reinforced steel.

This was ignored by Father who made a great drama of having forgotten to say grace, something he hardly ever remembered anyway. He bowed his head piously.

‘Dear God, we thank you for your bounty, for the food on our plates, for the meat, the roast potatoes, the gravy, the vegetables and the onions—’ Father broke off.

He opened one eye. It rotated, taking in Jillian’s raised head, her own eyes held wide open, flashing with defiance, and her folded arms. I ensured Father observed my willing participation in the rare ritual by making quite a drama of unclasping and re-clasping my hands. The fingers of Harry’s hands were plaited together as well. His eyelids fluttered as he snatched sneaky peeks at his food, clearly distressed that the serious business of eating was being held in abeyance for the present. Mother’s head drooped, but I had my doubts that she was lost in prayer.

‘Why were you not praying, Jillian?’ Father demanded, when at last grace was over.

‘I am not thankful,’ Jillian retorted.‘I don’t want to be a hypocrite.’

Mother refilled her glass, and took several gulps in quick succession.

‘I am just going to have a quick word with them in the kitchen,’ she said gaily, her eyes a little too bright, her cheeks inflamed. She rose unsteadily to her feet. ‘These servants need their hands held if they are going to produce a meal that is half decent you know.’ She gave a shout of raucous laughter. No one seemed to share her hilarity. ‘You will sit there until you eat those onions,’ Father decreed to Jillian.

Mother scratched the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other, a nervous habit of hers I’d observed countless times, then made a dive for the kitchen door and was gone.To her credit Jillian slowly ate up everything on her plate…except the onions. Mother reappeared carrying another bottle of wine, hugging it to her under one arm. The remainder of the meal played out in silence, but for the ‘pop’ of the cork. One by one we were excused from the table, all but Jillian. At four o’ clock Jillian was still sitting at the dining-room table, together with her two onions. By now I thought they looked a little dried out. Hovering in the hall, I shot her a sympathetic look through the open dining-room door, which she acknowledged with a flicker of her eyes. Father strode up and down the long corridor seething.Why, he demanded, couldn’t Jillian just eat her onions? They were good onions. They had cost money, money that he worked very hard to make. Perhaps Jillian would like to go out, work hard and make money, so that other people could waste the onions she had bought, he thundered.