The Incarnations (50 page)

I throw out something lame:
‘Umeda at dusk, / Vending machines dispense porn, / Like bars of candy.’

The doctor understands some English and cracks up at the word ‘porn’, clutching at his overhang of belly. ‘Beautiful, Mary, just like Basho.’

I smile and nudge a ceramic dish of sweets closer to him. Though they are of the boiled variety he takes a handful and crunches them like popcorn. The doctor has a near-insatiable appetite, which he blames on the spirit of a starving Meiji-era peasant he encountered as a child. He says the spirit put a curse on him, so that at every meal he is compelled to eat with the might of ten men.

‘Nao,’ Murakami-san says, leaning his silvery head towards us, ‘look at that television over there. Now, don’t you agree that my Stephanie is far superior to any of those models?’

The TV shows a model striding down the runway, flaxen hair streaming. A caption scrolls along the bottom of the screen, deconstructing her into the following components:
Gretel. Swedish. 18. Aquarius. Volleyball.

‘Absolutely! Stephanie and Mary are far more beautiful!’ Dr Nishikogi thunders. ‘These models, pah! Anorexic, every last one of them. Not like Stephanie here – see how curvy she is? Yes, our girls are far more beautiful. And Mary is very clever too. Have you heard her haiku?’

Stephanie and I exchange furtive winces, to show that we don’t buy any of this.

‘Let’s play a drinking game!’ Stephanie suggests.

Drinking games are the secret money-spinners of this establishment. We play drinking games with cards, dice, ice cubes and beer mats, and sometimes more complicated games involving the phonetic alphabet and obscene hand gestures. The losing salaryman has to knock back his drink and buy the next round. Drinking games never fail to liven things up, getting the salarymen really sluiced and spending extortionate amounts on liquor. The down side is that I often end up getting drunk myself. Lately when I go to get more drinks I water my own whisky right down and charge them full price for it.

‘Great idea!’ I say. ‘Let’s play Queen of Hearts!’

There is a rumble of enthusiasm and Stephanie dashes to the bar to get a pack of cards. We shuffle our chairs closer round the table. Murakami-san’s eyes brighten in anticipation of debauched mayhem. It never happens. The only sure-fire outcome is that he will be completely fleeced.

I top up our drinks and Stephanie deals the cards.

I dream about this place a lot. I dream of sloshing whisky into glasses, the hiss and click of a Zippo lighter. I have come to resent the invasion of my subconscious; it’s like doing an unpaid shift in my sleep. I had a horrible dream recently, about one of our patrons, Fujimoto-san. In the dream I was sitting with him, listening to his golfing anecdotes, when his teeth began to fall out. Tapered pebbles of pearl grey hit the varnished wood of the table. I was alarmed but carried on as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening, listening as his words grew thick and incomprehensible. Then he turned to me with a knowing, toothless grin. I jerked bolt upright at that, my heart thrumming in the darkness. Sometimes I wake with dim memories of being kissed by clients, of letting hands roam where they shouldn’t, of being aroused by them. But dreams are often without rhyme or reason; it’s just the brain chewing over the events of the day. I’m no expert on dream analysis, but I’m sure it doesn’t mean I latently crave any of this.

When I leave Osaka my dreams will teem with foreign landscapes. Vast skies of obscene blue, tortuous valleys and ramshackle villages. Rickety train journeys to bustling cities, dense with heat and people. Sometimes I don’t know what agonizes me more, the itch to take off or leaving Yuji. It mystifies me, his lack of desire to travel. If I stay in one place for too long the world begins to narrow, like the sky viewed through a straw.

I AM A
man who lives in the company of ghosts. They have me under constant surveillance. They watch me cook my bachelor suppers of processed peas and boil-in-the-bag cod. They watch me take out my dentures and drop them in the tumbler fizzing with Steradent. They watch me undo my fly and tinkle in the lavatory. Some ghosts I loathe and some I fear with horripilation and cardiac strife. Others I quite look forward to seeing. The silent ghosts are preferable to the noisy, garrulous ones.
Aren’t you a lonely old so-and-so?
said Marina Tolbin, the hawk-visaged missionary (who elected to remain sanctimoniously mute in life, but is strangely loquacious in death).
If only that were true
, I sighed,
but you lot never leave me alone
. Charles Dulwich, who drank the hemlock at the age of forty-six (romantically inspired, it seems, by the death of Socrates), crows of his eternal youth and my irreversible decline.
Where
have
all your teeth gone, old boy?
He chuckles.
Be careful now! That cup of tea might overstrain your bladder!
I can only sigh and say:
Do you think I can help this decrepitude? Not all of us have been blessed with an inclination for suicide, you know
.

Such merciless scrutiny! Worse still is when the ghosts relive the last anguished moments before dying (Why? Heaven knows! Perhaps to break up the monotony of being deceased). Nothing is more harrowing than watching Mrs Ho fall to her knees on my bedroom carpet, beating her chest in a masochistic frenzy (
Save my baby! Save my baby!
she screams as the flames devour her). Charles tends to lie quietly on my bed as the poison hastens his departure from the world. It is hardly the most riveting of performances, but if I ignore him he gets upset and goes about slamming cupboard doors and clattering my ironing board.

Sometimes I wonder how all the ghosts came here from Asia. Did they fly across together, soaring over continents and oceans like a diamond formation of migratory geese? Did they book flights on some airline of the paranormal? They complain about the factory greyness of the council estate, the many flights of stairs up to my flat, and of the syringe-strewn public urinal of a lift.
Oh, quit your moaning!
I tell them.
I never invited you here to invade my privacy!

Three weeks ago Adam and Julia came to stay. They are not ghosts, but grandchildren. When they came, flooding my flat with energy and juvenescence, I was not sure if they and the ghosts would see eye to eye.
I
thought the defiant youth of the children would frighten the ghosts away (or that the ghosts would frighten away the defiant youth – which would prove tricky to explain to social services). Fortunately neither child seems to have noticed all the phantoms flitting about. Not Julia with her shy, orthodontic smile and the handstands that flaunt her belly. Nor Adam, a teenager monstrous with acne, who locks himself away in the bathroom for hours on end to mourn his dead mother. However, in a flat as small as mine, it is impossible to keep hidden my dealings with the world of the dead. The children overhear me sometimes, talking in Cantonese or Hokkien or English as I converse with Ah Wing or Lieutenant Spencer. They have learnt not to interrupt, and quietly retreat to the bedroom they share. Julia saw me once, tearful in the kitchen as my beloved Evangeline threw crockery and flayed me with her tongue. Julia came and put her hand on my arm (for at twelve she has not yet learnt the selfish ways of a teenager). The poor child believed the tears were for her mother.

They are hard to decipher, these orphans. They are mysterious in their grief. Julia has hysterical fits of giggling, seemingly over nothing at all, and Adam is enamoured of the locked door and avocado-tiled interior of the bathroom. Sometimes they talk in a language I do not understand, like sparrows twittering in Latin. Adam wants me to buy a television and Julia trains to be an Olympic gymnast in the hallway. When they fight it seems as though they want to murder each
other
, though hours later I open their bedroom door to find the siblings in bed together, weeping in their underclothes (I fear there have been omissions in their upbringing; serious moral omissions). They both wrinkle their noses at the food I cook and they hate boil-in-the-bag cod. I cannot quite believe that they will stay here until they are old enough to leave. That seems like so many years from now …

And what of Frances, the daughter for whom I do not mourn?

Frances has yet to join the band of spirits that haunt my flat. But I know she is coming. Some nights I hear her, as spry flames leap in the hearth and her children sleep in the bedroom next door. I hear her as the residents in the block go up and down, up and down, troubling the lift cables into a rhapsody of creaking. I hear her over the wind, going berserk, like a mad dog let loose at the windowpane. I hear her over the howls of Lieutenant Spencer, his slimy intestines surging from his stomach in a re-enactment of the bayonet attack.

Frances Milnar, go away!
I whisper.
Leave me alone!

For heaven help me, the girl must be bent on revenge.

Thank you to Jane Lawson for her support and encouragement over the years I was writing
The Incarnations
. Many thanks to Andrew Kidd and Marianne Velmans.

Thank you to Hubert Ho, Jennifer Yeo, Richard Dudas, Sal Attanasio, Liang Junhong, Julia Wang, Glen Brown, Emily Midorikawa and Zakia Uddin.

I am very grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for the fellowship that enabled me to keep writing this book, and to Tim Leadbeater and the wonderful staff at Leeds Trinity University. Thank you also to the Arts Council England and the Society of Authors for the grants I was awarded.

In 2010 I taught English as a volunteer to patients at the Beijing Chaoyang Mental Health Service Centre, and to civil servants at the Ministry of Health in Beijing. I would like to thank all those I taught, for their friendship and the insight I gained into China and their lives.

Many thanks to my fellow writers at the Beijing Writers’ Group for reading the early chapters.

Thank you to the Corporation of Yaddo, the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, the Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat, and all the inspiring writers and artists I met on these residencies.

Thank you, as always, to my father, mother and sister.

Thank you most of all to Robert Powers, who supported me throughout the writing of this book, and to whom
The Incarnations
is dedicated.

Susan Barker
grew up in east London. While writing
The Incarnations
she spent several years living in Beijing, researching ancient and modern China. She is currently based in Shenzhen, China.

Follow her on Twitter
@SusanKBarker

Sayonara Bar

The Orientalist and the Ghost

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First published in Great Britain
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an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Susan Barker 2014

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