Ghosts of Manila (26 page)

‘M
INIMALISM
’, wrote Ruth, ‘is a bit of a bore, don’t you think?’ Many thousand miles away her father slanted her letter to the light by the window. Outside, the traffic roared and honked and smoked. ‘We’ve been doing Steve Reich’s
Six
Pianos
&
for the first three minutes you think Golly, how pretty, how complex. Then you begin to wonder if Bach didn’t say it all a lot more tersely in the C minor prelude of WTC Bk 1. After ten minutes you want to scream
Where’s
the
beef!!?
Plenty of sensibility, interesting sonority, ingenious cross-rhythm etc, but it’s all just language without substance, I swear it is. It’s the development I miss, real musical thinking which drags you along &
makes you go Yes, that’s a new thought, rather than Yes, that’s a new effect. Oh, did you know? They want Jess to go to New York for a year. I don’t suppose she’s told you. I’m betting she won’t come back, what do you think? Poor Mum. Underneath all that conferencing & power dressing they’re restless & uneasy, these TV execs. I think they’re frightened everyone’s suddenly going to decide it’s a nice sunny day and stop watching. It isn’t a nice sunny day here in Durham. The rain falls & falls & everything’s chill & skiddy & old people break their hips on the pavement outside Tesco’s & I know why you’re in the tropics.’

Lately Prideaux was wondering whether after all he’d been such a failure as a father. Weren’t Ruth and he in regular touch, writing each other affectionate, easy, amused letters? Other parents he knew received nothing from their children away at university but occasional
poisonous telephoned demands for funds. Imperious or wheedling, these were not always telephoned, either, but might be voicelessly faxed or E-mailed. The cry in the night which had once brought parents stumbling sleep-drugged from bed for months on end had finally congealed into sentences of ghostly green letters on a screen. He didn’t love his ex-wife and now knew he never really had, though the ungentlemanliness of admitting so still bothered him. It had been one of those media marriages where glamour, loot and career advancement are the dark smear on Cupid’s arrow, the curare which partially paralyses judgement and taste.

Jessie had gone, but it now seemed that Ruth had never entirely left. About his love for her Prideaux had no doubts whatever. On almost any day, listening to the news or looking around him, his eyes could fill with tears at the sight of someone of Ruth’s age, her life or body or spirit shattered by cruelty or mischance. ‘That could be her,’ he’d think. Or, seeing a picture of a hollowed-out, anonymous refugee wandering a pitiless badland (it might be Zagreb railway station) carrying a sheet of the cardboard she or he slept on, ‘That’s somebody’s Ruth.’ Late, late, late – disgustingly, shamefully late – the discovery that no-one was anonymous: that stick figures panned in a bald African landscape had uncles and aunts and playmates, people who might say of them ‘Remember the time he –?’ or ‘She used to make us laugh.’ This secret action of bestowing a name on the nameless always brought pity in an uprush so that wherever he was he wanted to phone Ruth at once and hear her voice. This he could never tell anyone, her least of all. So to that extent, yes, a failure as a father, her fellow-mortal.

A marriage on the rocks had led to this: a survivor standing, letter from another survivor in hand, by an open window in a distant city. A survivor with a new sense of urgency, at least. He must finish up here, somehow bring to conclusion a project whose inconclusiveness he now understood as intimately bound up with everything he had ever done or been. A vague project in a vague course undertaken for motives which might, after all, have been no more than a roundabout way of discovering that he most deeply loved his own daughter. How could it ever have been unclear? Because in the night when things founder all is spray and flying rope-ends and the doomed, shouting to make themselves heard. Later, when offshore a shattered mast and
davits jut peaceably from a glassy sea, objects may be found wearing their intactness like surprise, a precious chest unscratched and wedged between tufts of marram grass.

‘Finishing up’, though, was easily said. He was not working to an obvious clock. He was no youngster on a grant. An open return air ticket, extensible visa and a bank balance that wouldn’t miss the odd thousand pounds: these were not necessarily an advantage to the middleaged student-by-default. Recently, however, as Prideaux began to organise his notes (and with them his thoughts) certain strands of interest were starting to emerge. He hesitated to dignify them as themes, still less as theories. There was, for instance, a strand which was interested in hysteria, another in the relationship between internal and external varieties of stress. Somewhere in his sleep these elements felt as though they jelled into an updated theory of
amok.
They certainly didn’t on paper. Hysteria happened to be top of the list that particular morning because when Ruth’s letter had arrived he’d been in the middle of laboriously translating the popular press’s versions of an outbreak at a school in – of all unlikely places – the Armed Forces’ HQ at Camp Crame. The reports differed somewhat, according to which of the twenty victims was being interviewed, but generally agreed that a huge red man with horns and tail had suddenly appeared. ‘He tried to take us,’ said one 12-year-old girl. ‘His eyes were all red and glaring.’ Or, in another’s testimony, he said in a terrible loud voice: ‘I’m going to pay you back for what you did to me. I’m going to eat up the whole of Grade 6 in this school! One by one I shall possess you all!’ Most of the pupils affected were girls who fell into faints or had screaming fits when presented with a crucifix. The Camp Crame priest was called. He said Mass and burned incense, accompanied by a policeman who now and then performed exorcisms to order with a rosary given him by Pope John Paul II during his papal visit in 1981. The exact nature of the crime for which the children were to be ‘paid back’ was a puzzle until they remembered having set fire to some rubbish against the trunk of an ancient tamarind tree which ‘old-timers’ at the camp said was ‘home to supernatural creatures known to have lived there since the Spanish regime’. Still another pupil claimed to be possessed by an evil spirit, having seen a woman dressed in black standing by the tamarind. A police chaplain held her head and said a prayer to drive away the demon. It was all in a day’s work. Meanwhile,
religious groups such as El Shaddai and the Charismatic Foundation insisted that the tamarind tree be exorcised.

A lone voice of reason suddenly spoke up in its defence, a Grade 3 teacher. ‘There’s nothing whatever the matter with that tree,’ she said briskly. ‘My classroom’s right next to it and in all my years of teaching I’ve never seen anything strange about it. On the contrary, as a source of medicine, food and shelter it’s God-given.’ She then went on to observe that the first girl to become ‘possessed’ had recently been caught shoplifting in one of the camp’s mini-groceries. She was ‘an imaginative child, psychologically restless. She keeps on drawing things on the blackboard in front of her classmates. Once she started her hysterical fit the others simply took their cue from her.’ This redoubtable lady added that in her view it was silly to blame evil spirits for the children’s behaviour when there were far more obvious factors like drugs, emotional or family problems. ‘You must now excuse me, my pupils are waiting,’ she said and stumped off to teach.

‘That’s the sort of person for me,’ thought Prideaux. ‘That’s who I should have married. Quezon City’s Miss Jean Brodie.’ The story itself was ordinary enough, but it had been given an interesting gloss by another just reported from Egypt. This was of a full-blown epidemic of schoolgirl fainting which was spreading rapidly through entire provinces. A hundred and fifty girls had succumbed at a single railway station, leading to a local medical crisis since the hospital was far too small to deal with them all. Egypt, too, had its Miss Jean Brodie, a psychiatrist who said that the first thing to do was stop all media coverage of the story at once since hysteria fed on itself. He went on to comment that this was a condition which typically affected the developing world. In wealthier countries there were many ways open to adolescents to express themselves, to be diverted and to discharge their stress. In the developing world, though, and especially in the provinces, there was very little opportunity for self-expression in the face of stultifying social conventions and official indifference. Thus worries were bottled up. Many of these worries were entirely reasonable and concerned things reported in the news such as endemic unemployment and environmental pollution. In these circumstances hysterical outbreaks were hardly to be wondered at.

Prideaux found this interesting because it was the first time he had seen mass hysteria accounted for as a by-product of socioeconomic
conditions. The vast majority of documented cases (excluding things like Orson Welles’s Martian invasion scare) took place in more or less enclosed communities – typically schools, nunneries, prisons, reformatories and sects living in isolation. If whole nations could fall prey to it as a response to anxiety partly generated by a constant stream of ominous news, would this make a predisposition to breakdown, to full-blown
amok,
less or more likely? Less, presumably, since a hysterical attack was a way of discharging intolerable tension. But maybe it was more open to women to seek this refuge, leaving the men to go doggedly on until they broke and went ape in a McDonald’s with an Uzi?

This tied in with another of his strands: that of the way a general external threat could exacerbate purely private stress. The hollow left in him by the decamping of his own wife and daughter had been filled by a dread which had rushed in from all sides. He remembered the sensation clearly. It was as if the rituals of domesticity, no matter how time-serving, had held at bay the general alp of disaster which nowadays towered on everybody’s doorstep. It was an unstable mountain, the upright equivalent of the San Andreas Fault. Everyone agreed that disaster was inevitable sooner or later but nobody, not even the insurance companies’ actuaries, could put a date on it. The alp was added to daily, its details meticulously and even lovingly described by an army of newscasters and journalists. Beneath a cancer-inducing hole in the ozone layer its crags were variously labelled nuclear holocaust and overpopulation. Its vast screes were environmental collapse. Violence and extremism rumbled around its shoulders while close-up shots of its bare and forbidding faces showed the steady erosion of what little forest remained and the remorseless extinction of beautiful plants and creatures. The alp was in all weathers and from all angles so menacing that even the most optimistic measures which human ingenuity could propose were merely holding operations, remedial forays undertaken by men armed with shovels. Indeed it was so overwhelming that certain people were driven to a kind of desperate revelry. They positively cavorted on its lower slopes in a strange world where advanced technology mediated primitive behaviour. Theirs was a wilderness of futuristic atavism, of neo-Nazi rock groups and parties where parents watched violent videos before buggering each other’s children and leaving the victims
with a lifetime’s guilt for not having been more lovable. There was a steady stream of refugees back from these regions, hollow-eyed, many with puncture marks in their arms and in the throes of terminal disease.

Thus the alp which had shouldered in after Jessie had taken Ruth away with her. It was still there, just as it was everywhere, ever more threatening and lurid and apocalyptic but none the less effectual for that, heaping up anxiety which contaminated even the most private forms of worry. There was no getting away from it, no ignoring it; and in deference to it the art of modern living had largely shrunk to concentrating on how to get away from it or ignore it. That
was
wisdom, and only that. Respectable ways had to be found to deal with the global alp so that the one and only life could be lived out in whatever light its bulk didn’t block off. This was not easy. Prideaux increasingly wondered whether it was better to say To hell with respectability and simply stop reading newspapers and watching television. Something terrible was going to happen; we felt it in our bones. Desperate times required desperate measures. And mixed into it all was pity. He had had rather a nice life, all things considered, starting with the inestimable and wholly unearned advantage of having been born among the liberal and well-heeled. But what would it be to grow up in a shanty town, to be a twelve-year-old Egyptian schoolgirl all too conscious of the alp being added to everything she already didn’t have, when what there was to tell of grief and dread could be expressed only by epidemic bouts of unconsciousness? And how naturally this pity led to a fear for Ruth’s own future, a fear which entailed its own gloomy mathematics.
I might make it through to my threescore years and ten before the alp goes critical, but will she?

Prideaux shuffled his notes, came upon Ruth’s letter again, smelled it tenderly. Even thinking about stress made him anxious. Time to be a bit brisk; time to be worthy of the woman he hadn’t married who had withstood the cultural deadweight of policemen brandishing rosaries. If he had chosen this fatuous topic in order to appease an unconscious John Prideaux who was trying to warn him he was headed for breakdown, then that was just the sort of vulgar banality one might expect of one’s unconscious. In the meantime it was possible to identify an immediate source of anxiety, if less easy to face it. This was The Rotting Man, whose figure in the intervening few days had
haunted him in sleeping as well as waking hours. At first he thought the power came from disgusting physical detail, the distorted head and leprous skin. He kept seeing the head like a battered sponge nodding significantly beneath wild tatters of camouflage and it filled him with its own particular dread. But beyond that lay something else, an entire landscape of unease summoned into being by that right hand’s emblematic gesture. Converge On Me. Follow Me. The arm’s peculiar sweep was seared forever against blue sky, calling up ghost platoons of elsewhere and elsewhen. Prideaux ran from him in his sleep, or else stood bolted to the ground, but The Rotting Man came no closer. He simply kept turning on the skyline, over and over again throwing up his right arm, locking gazes with the same electric jolt.