The Hungry Ghosts

‘Frankly, Ralph, I’m not at all sure the Island School is such a good idea for Alice. In the few weeks since she started there her behaviour has been worse than ever, more erratic, more…well…Peculiar. Quite honestly I feel I can’t cope much longer.’ Myrtle pauses to assess the effect her words are having on me.Then, judging it to be safe, with a swift, flirtatious smile, she proceeds.‘I know you may not altogether agree with me, but please Ralph, hear me out. I really do feel that the structure of boarding school might be just what she needs. Alright, I will concede that perhaps the convent wouldn’t be suitable for Alice. But that doesn’t rule out boarding school entirely, now does it?’

The cicadas warble. There is the distant hum of passing cars. A horn sounds a long way off. A dog barks and is echoed with an answer. From where I am sitting I can see at least three cars winding their way up the Peak, and twice that many going down, yellow cones of light sliding along the curling tape of grey road that binds the slopes.There is a double-decker bus too, chinks of warm yellow light threading through the dusk, on route to the Peak Tram terminus I expect. I wonder idly if Myrtle wants to get rid of all our children? Will she carry on until we have none left? The answer is swift, light as warm air, and just as stifling.

She will carry on until Alice is gone. I sip my scotch and watch the coloured lights of Aberdeen harbour winking busily below, and the lambent stars and moon, poised and rigid above. I am so very weary these days.And I am lonely too. It eats like a maggot into my heart, this loneliness of mine. I nod and try to look as if I am taking it all in, as my wife’s voice winds around me. I frown pensively. See, my expression says, I am cogitating, entertaining your suggestion, weighing up the merits of such a course of action.

In reality I am far off. I am reliving the unrest, the coiled spring of tension that lies in wait for me with every breaking dawn. I am thinking about the riots, the faces, distorted and ugly, the gaping mouths that stamp out words, hateful, vicious words, those bent on bloodletting. I think about Central, where often I have enjoyed a coffee at the Hilton, or lunch at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I think of the Cosmo Club too and the Christmas parties we have had there, of the raffles and the paper hats, and of the turkey and Christmas pudding, the thick, steaming gravy, and the viscous yellow custard, so absurd in this land of sun and bamboo and sea. I recall those evil drinking games that I have tumbled unwittingly into after a Cantonese meal, games that have left me legless and the world spinning. I think of my Chinese friends, these men I have grown to love, who understand me better than any Englishman ever could, these men with whom I have spent my precious hoard of free time lavishly, and never regretted a cent of it. I think about the joy I have had rummaging in the alleys, fingering treasures in dusty boxes, imagining who could have created such beauty, such perfection in a past world. I think about the Star Ferries, their dark prows knifing through the sea, how the thrill of that journey over to Kowloon has never quite evanesced for me. I think of the banks and the money rolling in, the obscene amounts of money. And then, I think of the poverty of the locals, of the workforce, the poverty that in truth I have done little to ameliorate.

Finally the image of a small, thin, naked girl, hair, face and flesh ablaze, forces everything else out of my mind. It is a photograph on the wall of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, in its multi-storey setting, high above Central.There are other pictures alongside it but they do not register. It is black and white, this image of the flaming child.The lack of colour does not lessen the horror, rather the stark contrast seems to highlight it. I think she is Vietnamese. I think it was taken during the Vietnamese war. But it really doesn’t matter. It might have been anywhere. Her face is split with anguish. Her mouth is racked into an ‘O’ of agony. She is staring straight into the camera lens as she staggers along the muddy path. Flames lick upwards and outwards from her core, they roar through her silk-black hair, they spark her eyelashes and crackle over her eyebrows, they crust and blister the jelly of her still seeing eyeballs. She holds her hands out pityingly towards…who? The cameraman? The soldiers? God? I cannot free myself of this vision tonight. She haunts me this little girl as she staggers forwards, her arms full of fire, offering up all that she has, offering it up to whoever will take it, offering up her hell on earth.

My wife is speaking again. She talks of the pressure I am under in my job during these unsettled times. She maintains it is vital that I am fit for the task of subduing these red rebels, that both Queen and country are relying on me to restore order to the colony.

‘You cannot afford to be distracted by Alice at times like this,’ Myrtle insists. She takes a slow meditative swallow of her drink before she speaks again. ‘Neither can I. How can I support you, Ralph, if I am drained dry by our daughter,’ she wheedles, her voice as velvety as moss. ‘And it’s not just that,’ she continues. ‘She is putting such a strain on our relationship, darling.You must see that.We need time to ourselves, time free of endless worries and arguments about Alice. Besides, I am very concerned that her disruptive behaviour may eventually rub off on our son, on Harry.’

Now she is praising a school she has found in the Highlands of Scotland, of all places, an establishment founded on strict principles of discipline and regulation. She is describing its location as if she were selling me a holiday home. The cadence of her voice is very nearly poetic. She paints a scene of rolling heather-covered mountains crowned with garlands of mist, spotted with strutting stags, of the blue-black lochs, ice-cold liquid bodies stretched out for miles, mirrors to the scudding clouds above, of the swarms of midges, and of the banks of virgin snow. I picture Alice in this setting, and marvel that Myrtle believes a remedy can be found for our turbulent daughter so far away, as if geography is the answer.

I turn my whisky tumbler around and around in my hands. The peaty aroma I inhale seems most apt.As the marauding gangs charge through the streets of Central, their war cries a united tirade against colonial rule, my bowels loosen and my legs turn to water. Perched on high in my office I watch the Hong Kong Police, their arms linked, like playground children at their games. Red rover, red rover, let the rioters come over! A human wall barricading the road, poised for the impact that will surely come. A couple of days ago, peering though my binoculars at this brave force, this force whose job it is to repel the wrath of mighty China, I focused on the face of a boy…he was no more than a boy I tell you, a Chinese boy, pitting himself against the rabble, against his own people. For this I know he will earn the title of ‘Yellow Running Dog’, for he has sided with the ‘White-Skinned Pigs’, the European interlopers.

Music thunders out from loudspeakers in Central District, the volume at such a high level you can hear it in the flat on The Peak, as if it is coming from the next room. It drowns out the slogans and propaganda, being broadcast from the communist-owned buildings. People are being attacked.They are being murdered.And a Chinese boy wearing the khaki uniform of the Hong Kong Police Force stands erect, head held high, and blocks their path, while I, Ralph Safford, representative of the British government, look down from my safe offices in the sky, my bowels liquid, my heart pounding too fast, and my hands slick with sweat.

‘Damned communists!’I recall saying conversationally to a colleague on one of the darkest days. I peered down at the advancing, boiling mass, at the bracelet of police standing firm. They were advancing on the Hilton Hotel. If they break through, I thought, terror jerking at my heart, perhaps they will pour up Garden Road, past St John’s Cathedral,and the lower Peak Tram terminus.Then higher,why not, half of the bloodthirsty rabble peeling off up the slopes to Government House to lynch the 24th British Governor of Hong Kong, Sir David Trench,the rest continuing their march on Victoria Peak,where they knew we lorded it over them in luxury.

‘Damned Red Guards with their “Little Red Books”,’I blustered, trying in vain to steady my voice. I gestured at the angry crowds beneath our windows. ‘Not exactly what we Brits would call a Cultural Revolution, eh?’ I managed a chuckle, but the sound was hollow.‘We simply can’t have this sort of thing.After all,these fellows are making trouble on British territory,’ I said, sounding like the stereotype of a stoic British officer in a bad war film. I tried to instil outrage into my voice, fury at this insult to my sovereign Queen. And I very nearly pulled it off.But the sudden slump of my colleague’s shoulders made it clear I was fooling no one. About now, I thought, the film camera should pan to the skies above, buzzing with British warplanes come to put an end to this rebellious nonsense. I glanced upwards, a clear, blue sky, a disarmingly beautiful day on the island of Hong Kong. I wondered if the Chinese boy in his man’s uniform was glancing up too. I wondered if he was thinking that it was a good day to die, to become a sei chai lo, a dead policeman, with no clouds to impede his soul’s flight.

My mind slides forward in time and I am back on the veranda with my wife. I raise my glass and toss back my drink. Myrtle takes it from me. She doesn’t even ask me if I would like a refill. She busies herself with the new decanter, with the ice bucket. I hear the cubes of ice clunk and rattle as they are agitated with the metal tongs. Looking down, I see a brochure Myrtle has deposited in my lap for a boarding school in Argyll. I flip through the pages. They are full of snaps of Amazonian girls with flushed cheeks doing wholesome things. I pause at a shot of one leaping in the air, arms outstretched, hands spread wide.The netball she has just shot is arcing earthwards, about to slip through the goal ring. Her thick black hair is crushed back by the wind.The expression on her face is vicious. I will mow down anyone who gets in my way, it bugles through slit eyes, ballooning cheeks, a funnelled mouth and gritted teeth. There is a malignancy about it, I decide, that I find decidedly distasteful. I toss the brochure onto the drinks table. Myrtle notes my gesture and quickly hands me my drink. She has poured me a stiff measure. If I down this too fast I shall fall asleep. My lips curl upwards longingly at the thought of slumber, of drowning in slumber.

I wonder where it will all end? I overheard talk today of the People’s Republic of China seizing control of the island, taking back Hong Kong from right under our noses. Once a remote, even a ridiculous, idea, this now feels tangible, a very real probability, a probability I am living with every day, down there in Central District. Up here on the Peak, to a great extent the family is insulated. As I listen to Myrtle prattle on about how difficult life has become for her, I smoulder with resentment. I cannot help it. I am in the firing line, the thick of it, not her. For the time being at least, she is tucked up safe in the flat on The Peak, with amahs to care for her. Still, foolish though it may be, I like to believe she’s safe, that Harry and Alice are safe, that the communist agitators will draw the line at charging up The Peak and laying siege to the flat. After all, we are British subjects. I am fighting the urge to laugh at this notion, this notion that because we are British subjects, servants of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, they will tread carefully around us. It will not make an iota of difference to the raging mob down there. No. I take that back. Of course it will make a difference. It will spur them on till they have butchered all the ‘White-Skinned Pigs’.

I must stop this.What with a couple of swift ones before leaving the office, and the hefty measures I am getting through now, I’ve had far too much to drink on an empty stomach. I am growing maudlin. I ignore my own caution and take another slug of scotch. I bare my teeth at the night sky. I can’t concentrate on my wife and her tribulations, tonight of all nights. Why is Myrtle bothering me with this, when what I need is pause, time to regroup, to prepare for the next onslaught, for most certainly it will come. How can I think about Alice’s future—when I’m not sure if any of us even have one.

‘I think it’s for the best,’ Myrtle says again, taking a gulp of whisky herself.Then, when I turn to her, my face blank, she adds a reminder of the subject under debate, ‘Sending Alice to boarding school in Scotland.’ She takes up the brochure, leafs through it, and seizes on the very page with the grimacing netball player that I stumbled on. She brandishes it at me, stabbing a manicured fingernail at the action shot.‘Just look at that,’ she urges.‘That girl wants to win.That could be Alice in a few years from now. Think of that!’

I do not tell her this is the very thing that I am thinking of, this is what I am afraid of. I am too spent to argue. Besides, Scotland seems a long way away tonight, as does England. Sometimes I think I have forgotten what England is like, forgotten that it is home, my country. I feel as if I have been trying to create a little England, here, on the doorstep of China, and that anybody who really considers this will see that it is an impossible task, the work of a lifetime. For what? In just three short decades, as the century closes, China will reclaim her island, and she will probably do a very thorough job of obliterating all evidence of the British, as speedily as she can. And who would blame her?

‘Ralph? Darling, are you listening?’ Myrtle’s voice sounds in my rambling thoughts. ‘About Alice? Scotland? What do you think?’

From somewhere I find the might to withstand my wife’s determination to dispense with Alice. I take a shuddering breath and meet her eyes, my gaze steady.

‘No. It wouldn’t work out for Alice. She would never settle in a boarding school.’ My voice is unwavering.

‘But how can you know that, Ralph, when—’ Myrtle persists.

‘It’s too late,’ I interrupt.‘She has started at the Island School. She has her uniform, her timetable. She may have already made new friends.’This last seems an absurd objection even to me, considering she doesn’t have any old friends to speak of. But I plough on regardless. ‘Moving her now would cause havoc.’

Again Myrtle, eyes alight, starts to argue, and again I break in.

‘That is my final word on the matter, Myrtle.The subject is closed. Alice stays where she is.’ I lower my head and stare broodingly into my glass, daring my wife to speak again. When several seconds pass and she does not protest, I glance up. She is staring moodily ahead, chin up, mouth set. She is furious and I do not care.

The year is drawing to a close when I hear at last that an order has come from Beijing, reining in the insurgents, effectively curtailing the violence and bombings for the present. It seems the riots, that will come to be known as the Colonial Riots, have finally subsided. I feel as if I have been holding my breath all this while, and now I can release it. Again I am looking down on the streets of Central and they are blessedly safe. Of course there is the accustomed bustle of this overcrowded island, but the faces I spot are benign, and the scurrying people are devoid of menace. I indulge myself. I dare to think the troubles are behind us, that the structure is still solid, and that Her Majesty’s Crown Colony has been delivered back to her safe and sound.

I try not to dwell on the lives lost, or on those men, women and children whose futures will forever be blighted by this appalling time. I try to do what I can to improve the lives of ordinary Chinese citizens, driven now by guilt at what I know were the intolerable conditions they had to survive under. I admit, if only to myself, that corruption in both the ruling classes and the police force has been rife. I use what influence I have to combat this. My motives are not entirely altruistic though. I am driven on by guilt.

I have felt the immense might of China bearing down on me, on this tiny island of Hong Kong. And although this servant of the British Empire stood his ground waving the Union Jack, in reality I know that, like King Canute, trying to halt the rising tide, we never had a chance of holding the colony if China had really wanted to take it. Who knows what deals were done behind the scenes to persuade China to stand down when she did. But no matter the reasons, China has decided to let the British play ‘I’m the King of the Castle’ for a short while longer.There is no question in my mind that we are only able to continue with our precarious little lives on her say-so. For years I will toss and turn through sleepless nights, my dreams crowded with the ghosts of people killed and wounded, while I was on duty. I will wonder if I might have done better, if my actions might have been speedier, if more lives could have been saved. When the pats on the back are a distant memory, I will wonder truly if it was all worth it.

Brian—1970

I cast Alice Safford in the role of Abigail in Arthur Miller’s Crucible, because I thought it might bring the kid out of herself a bit. As Head of English and Drama at the Island School, the annual play is my baby, as agreed when I took up the post. I select it, direct it, produce it, sort out scenery, costumes, lighting, programmes, and just about anything else you care to mention. In short, I live it for a term. With the school only open three years, there was a lot riding on this first spring production. I couldn’t afford mistakes. But I just had a feeling that fourteen-year-old Alice was up to the job. She’s so much more grown up than the other girls in her year—intelligent, observant. Even at that first reading there was something in her voice that made me think she could pull it off.Which is more than can be said for Trevor Lang playing John Proctor. But then again, what he lacked in talent he made up for in enthusiasm. And frankly I didn’t have much to choose from, well nobody actually. He was the only boy who showed up to the audition.

Alice was captivating from the outset, endlessly changing, one moment the seductress, the next spitting like a cat, then all wide-eyed innocence. In the court scene, where Abigail drives the other girls into a frenzy, she actually had the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. We even had a few visits from worried parents complaining their children were having nightmares, questioning my choice of play. But if I’d hoped that acting was going to help her overcome her shyness, or curtail some of the strange behaviour she’d been exhibiting at school, I was to be sorely disappointed. Throughout rehearsals and following the success of the play, Alice continued to prove difficult.

She’s not a favourite among other teachers, that girl.And recently, I can’t deny her conduct has been challenging. But what the heck, I like Alice. I don’t mind admitting it either. I like her. Now when I say that, I don’t mean I want to fuck her. Not like some of the older girls. And can you blame me? Sun-tanned legs peeping out from under those flimsy, striped, summer shifts. The zip down the front, with the metal ring through it, that looks like the ring-pull on a can of lager. God, the times I’ve dreamt of easing those zips down, of glimpsing those lacy, little-girl bras, of touching those firm young breasts and…The winter uniform’s not much better either, with the chocolate-coloured skirts, so short that you can sometimes see the crease in the girls’ thighs, and a hint of their curved buttocks beneath the fabric.

They know it too! Ah, believe me, they know what they’re doing to you, as they sashay about this wreck we’re having to make do with. A decrepit army hospital full of ghosts. Well, that’s what the kids say anyway, whispering horror stories to one another about the morgue. Oh yes, we have our own morgue here at the Island School, very handy if any of the kids expire before close of day. Actually most of the students won’t venture anywhere near it. Even Melvin Furse, the Head, hates it, says he can’t wait to have the wretched thing demolished.

I’ve wandered around outside it once or twice, but I’ve never had the desire or the nerve to enter. There is something really menacing about that place. Gives a whole new meaning to the nicknames the Chinese have for us British. Gweilo. A dead corpse that has come back to life, a ghost man, or gweipo, a ghost woman. Apparently, so I’m told, years of oppression earned us such unflattering sobriquets. Still, it’s easy to see how the Chinese populace first coined them, staring amazed as their new white rulers paraded before them like the living dead. The Chinese are a superstitious race.They believe in ghosts.As for me,before I came here I would have said it was all nonsense. Now, I’m not so sure. This entire building has an unsettling atmosphere you simply can’t ignore, a mausoleum, smelling of damp and mould, paint peeling off walls, loggias open to wind and weather. Completely impractical. Furse keeps promising it won’t be long before the new premises, currently under construction on the terraced slopes above us, are completed. Though quite honestly there have been so many delays, I am beginning to feel it will be little short of miraculous when it’s finished.

And yet, I maintain there’s something rather sensual about seeing a lovely girl stroll around this ancient ruin. Echoes of the dying and the dead, screams of agony, groans and sighs, rattling last breaths, mingling with the quick footsteps, fits of giggles, yelps of excitement, and whispered secrets, of ravishing young beauties hurrying to class. Like a film set: the girls playing the leading roles, the ghosts providing all the atmosphere. After all, I’m only flesh and blood, and surely there’s no harm in just looking. Honestly, what man wouldn’t let his eyes rove a bit with those slim hips swinging ahead of him, those breasts glimpsed from open-necked shirts, through the grinning teeth of an undone zipper. Seeing those swells of warm flesh lifting and falling, beads of sweat adorning them like crystal necklaces. They do it deliberately you know. Leaving one too many buttons undone, innocently hooking that ring with a curved little finger and easing it down a few inches, leaning forwards on purpose so that you can’t help but look. What can I say? I’m a good-looking, testosterone-fuelled, young man. But don’t get me wrong. With Alice it’s never like that. She doesn’t flaunt herself, not like the rest of them.

Alice has always been quiet, even from that first day in September when the school opened. Worryingly quiet if I’m truthful. But lately…well, sometimes I think she’ll disappear, drift away if someone doesn’t anchor her down. It’s peculiar. Every teacher has a different story to tell about her lately. But they all agree on one thing—that Alice is skiving classes regularly, and that, when she does deign to show up, inevitably there is trouble. In maths they tell me she’s proving obstinate and unpredictable, that she walked out of class for no reason last week and hasn’t been back since. In French apparently she’s been deliberately obtuse, pretending she can’t understand a word. Last week she smashed a bottle of ink. I’m told it was all over her dress and hands, and that she just stood there staring at it, as if she was in some kind of stupor. At least that’s what Christine Wood the French teacher said. In chemistry she very nearly set fire to her desk a month ago, and now Frank Devine has her sitting at the front of the class, where he can keep an eye on her. In art, her still-life painting is anything but still, I’m reliably informed—things flying about all over the place.

Only last week in the staffroom, Karen Manners, her art teacher, cornered me. I was gasping for a coffee and in a hell of a rush too. But when Karen wants to talk, getting away from her is no easy task. Anyway the upshot is that she told me Alice is always painting the sea, junks and boat people, even soldiers. Japanese, she thinks, she recognises the uniforms. I countered this with some crack about women loving a man in a uniform, which Karen swatted down without so much as the suggestion of a smile.