Anne Berry - The Hungry Ghosts

I know it is ironic for someone cheating death, but I settle at last on a morgue, the morgue of a British army hospital. Perhaps I have more in common with the dead than I realise. It is a gigantic red-brick building, three storeys high, with tiled floors and wide staircases.The patients’ wards, the operating theatres, the laboratories and the offices, which nestle within it, are bordered by long corridors, open to the elements but for the arched colonnades that line them. There are smaller barrack blocks standing on the terraced slopes above it. The edifice is reassuringly solid, rooted comfortingly, as I still am, to the earth. It rises grandly from its site in Bowen Road. My morgue lies in a roomy basement at one far end of the hospital. It is quenched of light.

This then is how I come to stave off death, with nothing but my will for weaponry. And it is how, paradoxically, I find myself housed in a sepulchre of death. Above me a battle rages, but I choose to reside below with the defeated.They lie stiffly in the tenebrous ward that all mankind must come to, with their shattered bones and gory stumps. Some have empty red sockets where the jelly of an eye once swivelled, some ragged flesh where once an ear thrilled to the music of life, some scorched bloody caves, where tongues wagged and lips were bellows, pumping the body’s elixir of oxygen. Beneath their shrouds I trace the puncture patterns of bullets, reliving the impact of each one, the flesh yielding with a judder to their sting.

These then are my playmates, my companions, these cold rigid cadavers. Sometimes I concentrate very hard and jerk their waxy limbs.I make their petrified,pale eyelids twitch.As I move over their ruined bodies like a lover, my presence soft as gentle rain on their ugly wounds, they tell me their sad tales of death. They speak of lovers left behind, of mothers longed for, and of filth and gore and carnage.They tell me how they grew fluent in the language of horror, of shrieks torn from bodies racked with pain, of groans dredged up from a Hades of everlasting torture, of grief that had not the luxury to linger.Theirs was a lottery of limbs yielded up to blade and bomb and bullet, their drama, the inestimable tragedy of war. And in turn I croon them to sleep with memories of breath, and the urgency of it, and the beat of blood, and the flood of sensation, and the tick of life. I tell them stories of our junk, Heavenly Sea , bucking and pitching across a bowl of liquid gold. I recount how my father, a simple fisherman, was taken by the Japanese, a suspected informer for the Gangjiu Dadui, one of the Chinese resistance forces. I confide my yearning for the inconstant ocean, the salt smack of her rough embrace. I impart that it was the South China Sea that bore me up, when my child’s body grew weary with its chores.

So we share our burden of loss, the dead and I, robbed of our lives and of our loves. Once, one of my soldier playmates is brought to the morgue, like me hovering in the half-light between life and death. Before he slips away, he makes a gift to me of his ethereal British army jacket.

‘To shield your modesty,’ he says, insisting as he departs that he no longer has a need for it.

Then a dawn breaks, that is marked by a ringing silence. Gone is the clattering, booming, jarring disharmony of war.The staccato guns have stopped firing. The crescendo of marching feet is stilled. The medley of horses’ hooves is muffled.The dreadful ululation is spent. My dead companions no longer come to see me, and the building above my head grows thick with quietude. I am thinning with loneliness, for dust motes and dried blood make for poor company. Curious, I creep out of obscurity. It is dusk. I alight on a curve of railing. I am aware that time has rolled by and all is changed. I stare down the skirt of the mountain at the harbour,Victoria harbour. I see it transformed, the dimpled sea freckled with crafts of every imaginable shape and size. Ribbons of road packed with cars and lorries and buses wind about the slopes. There are more buildings beaded with lights than I could ever have dreamt of—buildings so tall they seem to brush the clouds. I am blinded too by the shimmering pictures facing some of the tall towers, pictures that bounce out across the water, luminous sea snakes, electric colours that crackle and spit into the night. Lin Shui’s life is faded now, like an old book left in the sun and rain too long. Some days I allow myself to drift towards death.When I do, I think I see a small boy crouching in the shadows, an urchin with hair of spun gold, and skin that shines like varnished teak. He is barefoot and clad in black rags. I start to sink into the soporific infinite blackness at the centre of his eyes. And he stands and smiles, and opens his arms to me in greeting. Like a moth drawn to a flame, I am drawn to him. But always just before he enfolds me, I rouse myself and kick out.

My voice might be weaker but still it cries, ‘I am not ready yet. Not yet.’

Then one day the children come. Among them is Alice.

The one person you can reliably guarantee will be missing from a funeral is the deceased. Then why, at the funeral of Ralph Safford, did I have the distinct impression that two people were missing? I suppose that my charge, Lucy Holiday, the deceased’s sister, was largely responsible. I had been employed as a carer for Lucy for several years now. Childless, widowed, in her eightieth year and in fragile health, Lucy defied expectations, clinging tenaciously onto life. On the day of her brother’s funeral, Lucy, with her wisp of wild, white hair, and bright, periwinkle-blue eyes, was enjoying a rare moment of lucidity. She sat in her wheelchair alongside the pew-end, humming tunelessly to all the hymns, her eyes darting around the congregation, and alighting first on one face then another.

At length, she gestured for me to lean closer, and closer still, then whispered in my ear in her scratchy-record voice, ‘Ingrid, where is Alice?’

To which I naturally replied, ‘Who is Alice?’

She fidgeted with the fabric of her black polyester dress, and rubbed her matchstick legs before answering, and so long was she that I couldn’t help wondering if I’d lost her again.‘Alice is my niece,’ she said at last, on a rising note of triumph.

‘The daughter of your brother Ralph?’ I sought confirmation.

Lucy nodded her affirmation. I was puzzled. As far as I knew, Ralph Safford only had three children. I had met the family a few times since they settled in England four years ago. I recalled the first occasion being held at the Saffords’ home, Orchard House, at a party to celebrate their return from abroad. Besides this, Lucy had spoken of them, if not often, certainly enough for me to be well acquainted with their names. Jillian was the eldest, and Nicola the middle child, while Harry was the baby of the family. But of this ‘Alice’, up to now I had heard nothing. With Lucy’s customary fits and starts, I had also gleaned a little of the deceased’s life, certainly enough to whet my appetite for more. Here, it seemed, was no ordinary man. Apparently Lucy’s brother and his family had lived overseas, in the then British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, where he had been employed by the government. ‘A high-ranking official,’ Lucy had confided to me with a knowing wink, on more than one occasion, often adding enigmatically, ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’ Quite what this meant I did not know. However, it only seemed to enhance the impression that Lucy’s brother had been out of the ordinary. Apparently too, the Saffords lived at one of the most enviable addresses at the summit of Victoria Peak. This, Lucy had explained, was the highest mountain on the island, and was known locally simply as ‘The Peak’. I had also discovered that Ralph and his wife Myrtle only returned to England a year or so after Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997, though it seemed the children departed some time earlier. But of Alice, until today, there had been no mention. I was intrigued. However, the middle of a funeral service was neither the time nor the place to probe family history, unearthing who knew what skeletons. So when Lucy asked me yet again where Alice was, I did my best to bring the matter to a close for the present.