Anne Berry - The Hungry Ghosts

Mother is miles away now, on the phone to Beth next door, making her voice all dramatic, the way she does, describing what happened to me. She’s talking about me but…well…the crazy thing is I feel left out, like I’m not really part of her story, that it’s another ‘only son’. I mooch into the kitchen and tell Ah Dang I’m hungry, and can she fix me something. She likes that. Makes her feel all needed. She always grins and wags her head, as if she understands the appetite I’ve got, what a beast it is, and her gold teeth glitter sort of magically.

While she’s getting a plate together, Alice comes in. Up till then Mum’s kept her away. She’s always trying to do that, keep Alice and me separate.You’d think Alice was some kind of snake full of poison. And it’s true, my sister goes into these fits sometimes, yowling and moaning, and you do tend to feel a bit jumpy about her, cos you don’t know what’s gonna come next. But I get it. I know where all that noise comes from, all that rage. I’m jealous of Alice cos I want to scream too, scream until they all cover their ears, and screw themselves up. But I can’t. I just can’t.

‘How are you feeling?’ Alice asks then, and she smiles in that shy way she has.

‘Oh not too bad,’ I mumble, glancing back at her. I don’t think Ah Dang put very much butter in my sandwich and it’s bothering me.

‘Ah Dang can I have some more butter please?’ I ask. I’d like to talk to Alice, but if I take my eyes off Ah Dang, even for a moment, who knows what she might skimp on?

‘ Ai ya, ai ya! ’ mutters Ah Dang, peeling back the top of the sandwich and starting again. She isn’t really angry. She fakes it. She tosses her head, making her plait whisk all over the place, and her hands fly about, and she gabbles in Cantonese, but you can tell. In her eyes she’s still smiling.

‘That’s some bruise you’re going to have, Harry,’ Alice says.

I guess she must have seen it when I turned round.Ah Lee appears then through the back door. She sees all the food out, and me looking worried, and Ah Dang slamming things about. And she gives one of her silly hysterical giggles.

‘ Ai yah! Ai yah! ’ she echoes Ah Dang, and pinches my bare arm. ‘ Fei zhai! Fei zhai! ’ she squeals, and she’s off again.

I know what she said. Fat boy. I hear it lots. The Chinese can’t resist my chubby arms. Can’t stop themselves from pinching me. Even strangers. Pinching me and grinning, ‘Fei zhai, fei zhai’ . I might as well be back at school.You know what it makes me think of.The story of Hansel and Gretel. When the witch locks Hansel up in a cage and every day she brings him lots of food, because you see she’s fattening him up. Fattening him up for the day of slaughter, when she’s going to kill him and chop him up, and pop him into her huge cauldron, and cook him over her roaring fire till he’s all tender and delicious. I like closing my eyes and imagining the witch’s cottage, imagining being with Gretel, deep in the heart of the dark forest, then suddenly the two of us coming upon it. I think about how hungry we’d both be, our bellies rumbling, hungry and tired, with nothing to eat but dandelions and grass. Then we’d step into this clearing and together we’d gasp.

My cottage isn’t made of gingerbread though, because I don’t really like it. It’s built of cake bricks, chocolate, and plain sponge flavoured at least six different ways, toffee and orange, and lemon and mint, and strawberry and coffee. And the bricks are cemented together with butter icing, and jam and cream. The windows are huge glacier-mint squares framed with marzipan. The front door is made entirely of caramel,and the doorknob is a shiny ball of liquorice. As for the roof, it’s tiled in thick slabs of chocolate, milk and dark and white. There’s even meringue smoke coming out of a butterscotch chimney. The biggest problem we have is where to start. I run up to it and take the most enormous bite off a corner brick of rich, moist chocolate. Gretel, she walks nervously up to the door and starts licking it, as if it’s a ginormous lollipop. In my version we’ve virtually polished off the entire building before the witch appears; there’s only a few spadefuls of cake crumb rubble, and some broken chocolate tiles left.While Gretel and I are clutching our stuffed stomachs, the witch throws back a hatch in the floor, made, incidentally, of royal icing, and pounces.

‘ Fei zhai, fei zhai ,’ squeaks Ah Lee again. Pinch, pinch.

And I want to ask, in that voice inside me that never speaks up, ‘Am I ready now,Ah Lee? Am I ready for the pot? Is my flesh plump and juicy enough yet? Are you sharpening your knives ready to slice me up? But I don’t of course. I glance at Alice. In the story Gretel saved her brother, made him hold out a twig to the short-sighted, croaky, old witch instead of his finger, so when she pinched it she thought he was still all thin and stringy. Still, that’s a story isn’t it? Not real life. Not like it is here in the flat on The Peak, where none of us can do anything to put off what’s coming. I think Ah Lee’s finished her pinching now. She’s wiping down the sink.

‘Hmph!’I grunt.Ah Dang’s only put one slice of ham in my sandwich and barely any cheese at all. At this rate I’ll never be ready for the pot. ‘Ah Dang, I’m hungry!’ I wail. I try to imagine what a hungry ghost would sound like.‘I’m really, really hungry! HUNGRY! There’s not enough filling in my sandwich, Ah Dang.’

Then Ah Dang’s cursing me in Chinese and pounding her drum tummy, and picking up the butter dish and hurling it back down, and going at the lump of cheddar as if she’d like to murder it. I look back at Alice and our eyes meet. And Alice gives a ‘hup’ of laughter, and then she claps a hand over her mouth and tries to stifle it.Well, that only makes it worse than ever, because now I’m laughing too, a great boom of a laugh that make my tummy jiggle about under my shirt, like it’s alive and it wants to escape. Alice falls back against the fridge and she’s helpless now, arms limp, head tipping about, and that makes me lose it completely. I shuffle over to her, and my sides are really splitting, my shirt busting at the seams, and Ah Dang’s screaming and brandishing the knife with the butter on it, like she’s going to stab us both. And just for a second I let my throbbing head rest on Alice’s shoulder, and the peals of laughter rock from her into me and back again. It’s good, so very good laughing like that with my sister Alice that I want to sob.

I watch many children come and go before Alice arrives. I observe them through the grid of an air-vent set high into the wall of the morgue.Their heads are dull and ordinary, and I know they cannot sustain me. True, I am curious. But when Alice comes I am spellbound. She appears one afternoon when all the other children have gone, and lies back on a patch of scrubby grass. She is a slip of a thing, pale as a creaming wave, her long hair always moving, her eyes moons of contemplation. It does not seem to worry her that the building above her is growing silent, that soon she will be alone. For a bit she stares up at the sky, follows the occasional fleecy cloud. Then she rolls over and sits up. As she does so, the golden-haired boy in the shadows fades away, as if he had never been.

Suddenly she notices the yawning mouth of the morgue, for the door is partly ajar. I cannot tell how long her eyes are trained on it, but the shadows are lengthening when at last she climbs to her feet. She walks straight to the entrance and shoulders open the rusty-hinged door. It shudders and grumbles and sticks a bit before swinging back. Alice slips through,under the nebulous mantle.She takes a few steps, and then waits for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. She inhales a long, slow breath of stale, dead air. She fixes stains on the floor with her perceptive eyes. She let her fingers linger on walls where the paint is flaking, where the bricks are impregnated with the transience of life.As she listens to echoes of the past, I slide into her and instantly feel my strength returning. I become the scum in her blood. I garland myself with ropes of silver-stranded veins.And in the resonance of each heartbeat I know her every thought,her every memory, her every experience, her every twist and turn of emotion, often before she does, as if they are my own.