Paul Theroux - The Consul's File

'And the things she lost were never found. It was uncanny, as if she just wished them away. He said she didn't miss them.

'Then, on one of these expeditions she lost the paraffin. Doesn't seem like much, but the place was full of leeches and a splash of paraffin was the only thing that'd shake them loose from your arms or legs. They both suffered that weekend and didn't find the island either. Then, the next weekend, she lost the compass, and that's when the real trouble started. Instead of pitying her, or getting angry, or ignoring it, old Parrish laughed. He saw how losing the compass inconvenienced her in her map-reading, and she was so shaken by that horrible laugh of his she was all the more determined to do without it. She succeeded, too. She used a topographical map and somehow found the right landmarks and led them back the way they'd come.

'But Parrish still laughed. I remember the day she lost the car-keys — his car-keys, mind you, because she'd lost practically everything she owned and now it was his stuff up the spout. You could hear old Parrish half-way to Malacca. Then it was the malaria tablets. Parrish laughed even harder — he said he'd been in the Federation so long he was immune to it, but being young and new to the place she'd get a fever, and he found that screamingly funny. This was too much for her, and when his wedding ring just went missing — God only knows how that happened— and Parrish just laughed, that was the last straw. I suppose it didn't help matters when Parrish set off for the courthouse in the morning saying, "What are you going to lose today, my darling?"

'Oh, there was much more. He talked about it at parties, laughing his head off, while she sulked in a corner, and we expected to find him dead the next morning with a knitting-needle jammed through his wig.

'But, to make a long story short, they went off on one of their usual expeditions. No compass, no paludrine, no torch — she'd lost practically everything. By this time, they knew their way, and they spent all that Saturday bushwhacking through the ulu. They were still headed in that deliberate way of theirs for the monkey island, and now I remember that a lot of people called him "Monkey" Par-rish. She claimed it was mythical, didn't exist, except in the crazy fantasies of a lot of sakais; but Monkey said, "I know what you've done with it, my darling — you've lost that island! " And naturally he laughed.

'They were making camp that night in a grove of bamboos when it happened. It was dusk, and looking up they saw one of those enormous clouds of flying foxes in the sky. Ever see them? They're really fruit-bats, four feet from tip to tip, and they beat the air slowly. You get them in the ulu near the coast. Eerie, they are — scare the wits out of you the way they fly, and they're ugly as old boots. You can tell the old ones by the way they move, sort of dropping behind and losing altitude while the younger ones push their noses on ahead. It's one of the wierdest sights in this country, those flying foxes setting off in the twilight, looking so fat and fearsome in the sky. Like a bad dream, a kind of monster film — they come out of nowhere.

'She said, "Look they're heading for the island." '

'He said, "Don't be silly — they're flying east, to the coast."

' "There's the light," she said, "that's west." She claimed the bats preferred islands and would be homing in on one where there was fruit — monkey food. The wild monkeys slept at night, so they wouldn't bother the bats. She said, "I'm going to have a look."

' "There's no torch," he says, and he laughs like hell.

' "There's a moon," she says. And without another word she's crashing through the bamboos in the direction the foxes are flying. Parrish — Monkey Parrish — just laughed and sat down by the fire to have a pipe before bed. Can you see him there, chuckling to himself about this wife of his who loses everything, how he suddenly realizes that she's lost herself and he has a fit of laughter? Great hoots echoing through the jungle as old Parrish sees he's rid of her at last!

'Maybe. But look at it another way. The next morning he wakes up and sees she's not there. She never came back. At first he slaps his thigh and laughs and shouts, "She's lostl " Then he looks around. No map, no compass, no torch — only that low dense jungle that stretches for hundreds of miles across the top of the country, dropping leeches on anyone who's silly enough to walk through it. And the more he thinks about it the more it becomes plain to him that he's the one who's lost — she's wished him away, like the wedding ring and the torch and the fifty-dollar bill. Suddenly, he's not laughing any more.

Tm only guessing. I don't really know what he was thinking. I had the story from her, just before she left the country. She said there were only two monkeys on the island, a male and a female, bickering the whole time, like her and her late husband. Yes, late husband. No one ever found him — certainly not her, but she wouldn't would she?'

'Is she one of yours?' they'd ask on the Club verandah when a white girl went past. Nothing salacious intended: they were just wondering if she was American. It was in this way — a casual inquiry to which I did not have an answer — that I discovered Linda Clem. We assigned names to strangers, a tropical pastime, nicknaming them at a distance; she was 'The Flower of Malaya'. For a brief period I found it hard to think of her and not be reminded of that disappointed ghost the Malays believe in, who is known simply as Pontianak, 'The Ghost'. Pontianak has a pretty face and is always alone. She takes a trishaw, but when it arrives at the destination and the driver asks for the fare, the seat is empty, Pontianak is gone. Or she stops a man on a jungle path — something Malay women never do— and asks the man to follow her. The offer is not usually refused, but when she turns to go the man sees she has an enormous hole in her back. Then she melts away. At night, before heavy storms, she can be heard weeping in the banana groves. Pontianak is the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth and she has been sighted from Kota Bahru on the north coast to Kukup in the south; the Javanese know her, so do the Sumatrans. She gets around, but what does she want?

Linda Clem got around, and she had Pontianak's melancholy. It seems to come easily to most women — there is a kind of sisterhood in sadness. She was a teacher. That word, so simple at home, spells disaster in the East. They have such hopes; and it always ends so badly. She taught English, most of them do, never asking themselves what happens when a half-starved world is mumbling in heavily-accented English, 'I want—' She struck me as accident-prone, but I suppose that was her job, her nationality, her boy-friend.

She was a plump, graceless soul who hated her body. She had fat legs and a bottom only a Chinese upholsterer could have admired. But she had a pretty face with slightly magnified features, and she had long beautiful hair. Within a week of arriving she was in a sarong — ill-fitting, but it took care of those legs. Withing a month she was on the arm of a boy vaguely related to the Sultan, a cousin of a cousin, known locally (but inaccurately) as 'Tunku', The Prince. He was a charming idle fellow who owed money at every Chinese shop in town.

A hopeless liaison: he wanted to be American, she aimed at being Malay — the racial somersault often mistaken for tolerance. It was usually inverted bigotry, ratting on your own race. I saw their determined effort at affection, strolling hand-in-hand across the maidan, or at the Club social evenings — evidently she thought she was teaching us a thing or two about integration; and at City Bar, smooching under the gaze of the Chinese secret society that congregated there. I guessed The Prince was using her money — she looked credulous enough to loan it to him. -How pathetic to watch the newcomer, innocent to the deceits of the East, making all the usual mistakes.