My Life as a Fake (23 page)

You have seen it coming. I was treating the wrong disease, and he died not of Graves’ disease but of a rare leukemia, myeloproliferative disorder. The leucocytes had accumulated near the eyes, which is what turned them into jellyfish. He died of cancer.

The coroner was an Indian chap. Furious with me. I had
impersonated a doctor. Smuggled drugs. I should be hanged, he said, except he could not see how that would benefit the family.

Leukemia was recorded on his death certificate but this had no meaning to the woman and the girl, who were soon telling the neighbours that the
hantu
had sucked the blood from Mr Bob.

It is hard to believe the monster had been so loved, Mem, but they wept for him on Jalan Campbell. They had seen the way he cooed and fawned around the little girl. They would never understand how he had fed off her, stolen her very life to fertilise his ego. It was not only Tina he devoured. Every child in that street was fuel for his forge. He was a user and a thief, yet tears were shed for him. My role was to be his cause of death.

But I had won as well, so I thought. I had my daughter. She did not love me then but I did not doubt that she would learn. And while she spurned me, my life was not a desert. I was sustained by his strange and fearsome book.
My Life as a Fake
. What an accusation! It was to me it spoke, and had been willed to me directly, but I knew the women would not like me touching it. So I read it in secret, taking little trips up the stairs when I was at home alone. I was at it like a hidden arak bottle, going back for more of the harsh, bitter taste.
Satu lagi
. Just one more sip.

Certainly, Mem, I was as cunning as a drunk and it was several months before they caught me at my studies.
Wah!
You never saw such rage. They scratched my hands with their fingernails but that was nothing. I must put the volume down at once. The little scarface threatened what would happen if I erred again: sharp knife in the night.

My daughter smirked.

After this time, my heart hardened against her.

She had been used and abused and it had made her cruel
and ignorant. I should have felt great pity but suddenly I loathed her. As you loathe someone who has betrayed you, cheated, lied, used you like a toy, made profit from everything that is good in you. This was not her fault, but that did not stop me hating her.

In spite of this, you have seen, I continued to serve the creature’s interests, for even if I could have abandoned the family I would never leave that work of art alone and unprotected.

I was patient, Mem, and I waited, because I knew one day you would come, or someone like you. Such a bet to place-
lah!
What chance you would find me reading Rilke? My life was almost a waste, but now, Mem, I will fetch you the book.

He stood. He was quite shaky, I thought. I’ll come with you, I said.

No, no, you must not. At seven o’clock they will go together to the railway station. There are bicycle parts coming from Singapore. I must be there to mind the shop.

Very well, I said. So you will be back here by seven?

By seven-fifteen—he smiled—you will have the book.

I was distracted, I think, at that moment. Signing the bill. I did not pay particular attention to his departure.

Chubb left me with the dreadful problem of how to endure the three hours between now and his return. I packed and repacked my case—toothbrush, unwashed clothes, the free postcard of the ghastly Merlin. I ate the horrible hotel biscuit
whose charms I had so far resisted and drank a glass of musty water. Then what? I was stuck ages away from the moment when I would finally hold that rough and slippery volume in my hands. From there it was another eternity until Charlotte Street, where I might feast contentedly on my treasure, its foreign stippled skin bathed in watery London light. In that far-off happy time I would copy every line by hand, not merely for safety—though that too was much on my agitated mind—but to learn it inside out. This is how I’d first read Milton, aged fifteen, and perceived what my dull lesbian headmistress would never see: that it was Satan for whom the poet felt sympathy. Back in London I would use my pencil as an instrument of worship, using it to plumb the logic of McCorkle’s ripped and rumpled map.

But how the time did drag in that dreary hotel room. And when night fell a full seventy-five minutes remained and I was irrationally frightened that the wet octopus of Kuala Lumpur would manage to suck my book into its fishy maw.

Downstairs, I sought the bar. No members present, as they say. I was reduced to ordering a curried-egg sandwich and a Tiger beer, and as the first wash of bubbles touched my throat Slater sat down opposite me. His brow was stern, shadowed, like deeply eroded rock.

Don’t, he ordered.

I thought he was forbidding me the beer, which would have been out of character, to say the least.

Keep away from those women, he said, whatever you do.

You know, John, that’s exactly what I was going to say to you. The young one particularly.

Micks, please. Get off it.

Oh, you weren’t seducing her?

He ignored that. What are you hatching? he said. I have been sitting over there watching you. You are in a complete
bloody state, so please do tell me what you’re up to because I don’t think you understand exactly where you are.

Don’t be ridiculous.

Have you sent mad old Chubby off to steal that book again? Yes? I’m right?

I would have denied it but had no defence against his angry eyes.

You must call him off, he said. Those women are the dogs of hell.

Yes, but as it happens the dogs are at the railway station.

They’re on to you, Micks, believe me. You’ll never see that manuscript.

You know that?

I said
they’re
on to you.

How could he know? It was impossible. Yet he succeeded in making me believe that my treasure was about to be snatched away and I simply could not bear it. I stood and rushed out into the hot night. The bill, I imagined, would detain him for a moment, but as my cab pulled out of the congested drive I saw him entering the one behind, and now I supposed we would be like creatures in a bad movie. In order to confuse my pursuer I directed the driver to the Coliseum, which I recalled was a short walk from the shophouse, and there I jumped out and dashed into the throng. Assuming Slater was behind me in the traffic, I crossed the street and soon was in a very questionable lane. In the adjacent alleyways, illuminated by their own flashlights, were women in short dresses whom I knew to be men. Someone called out to me and I splashed off through the puddles. I emerged onto Batu Road disorientated, and although I pushed rather violently through the crowd I was not confident of my direction.

How relieved I was to see the familiar police station and then, diagonally across Jalan Campbell, the bicycle shop, its
roller door wide open, the clear white light spilling out into the smoky night. There was no-one inside! That surely meant that the women were at the station, just as Chubb had said. I threaded my way through the tangled bicycles, calling out hello as I ascended the stairs. I heard a thump. Chubb, I thought.

Upstairs there was sufficient light to reveal Mrs Lim lying on the floor with Tina kneeling at her side. The girl turned towards me and in the glow from the window I could see that her luscious top lip was split open like a burst sausage, blood washing her teeth, black as betel.

I don’t know what I said but I certainly believed, even before understanding what had happened, that I was to blame.

Mrs Lim tried to sit up, then groaned and fell back to the floor. She too had been cut and her blouse was dark with blood. The floor around them was shining, black and wet.

What had Chubb done? What horror was I responsible for? I got no answer. They stared up at me as if at the enemy eyes narrowed.

I asked again and cannot remember how I put it, but the girl’s answer was in the rough Australian accent she had inherited from McCorkle: The mongrel-
lah
. He ran away.

It was Mr Chubb who did this to you?

Mrs Lim gasped and pointed towards the window.

But the window was barred. No-one could have escaped through it.

She continued pointing and then I saw, beneath the sill, what I took to be a pile of abandoned boots and clothes.

They kill him, Mrs Lim said. We could not stop them. They try to kill us too.

I cannot describe the confusion of my mind as it attempted to explain what my eyes were seeing. The last thing my brain would tell me was the truth. From the lane outside
came an old man’s voice—
‘paper lama, paper lama’
—and I walked to the window. On the floor below was the pile of clothes. The light was slightly blue, making Chubb’s shoes appear almost purple. There was something else: I imagined it was a dog. I don’t know what I thought exactly, but I know I reached down and felt meat, as raw as in a Chow Kit butcher’s shop. Then I saw the soft burr of that beautifully shaped monk’s head, and I knew at last what it must be.
Sparagmos
. This was the horror at the poem’s end. The man I had spent the afternoon with was now dismembered, his warm blood on my hands and spreading like honey across the floor.

Suddenly I was kneeling and then Slater was there, his big hands underneath my arms, pulling me to my feet.

Come, he said, we must go.

I decided he was afraid that the attacker would return. As he pulled me towards the stairs I insisted that the women come with us. When they would not budge I thought they wished to bravely guard the book.

Come, I said, bring the book with you.

Book gone, said Mrs Lim. Stole the book.

On her hard, square face was a sheen of satisfaction I could not understand.

Come, said Slater. Micks, darling, you must not stay.

The Chinese woman’s face was so strange. By now it was clear, even to me, that she did not wish me well.

Micks, do as I say. Come now.

Confused as a drunk who dimly understands she has given offence, I permitted him to escort me down the stairs and out into Jalan Campbell and across to the police station, so conveniently close.

We were treated with the utmost seriousness and taken immediately to a kind of conference room. Then I was shown to a separate, smaller office. I was given a towel and bowl and only then did I fully appreciate that my hands and arms were
bright with blood. As I washed I brooded that the women were alone and unprotected. I recall very little, only that I was extremely cold and they gave me a blanket and took my statement. No-one removed the bowl. Whenever the door opened or closed, the surface of the red liquid shook. It was Chubb, his substance, the blood that had coursed through his beating heart.

When they told me I could go, John Slater was waiting by the door. He gave the policemen back their blanket and wrapped his jacket round my shoulders. Everything I had hoped for was lost, gone, dead.

Back at the Merlin, a wedding party was spilling into the foyer. I badly wanted a drink but Slater bundled me into the lift. There were three men in the car with us—Japanese, I think.

Slater got me inside his room which, unlike mine, turned out to be very well provisioned. He poured me a large single-malt but not even its distinctive peaty flavour could mask the taste of blood.

Slater sat on the bed opposite me. Micks, darling, he said quietly, do you understand what has happened?

Poor Christopher is dead. The book is stolen.

You understand the women are lying?

No, I saw him. He’s dead.

Yes, but didn’t you see the mad triumph on their faces?

They were in shock, I said. They’d been attacked.

They’re lying, darling. About bloody everything. Didn’t you see the book? It was sitting on the shelf where it always is.

He fetched a big tub of cold cream and a box of tissues and, without asking permission, began to clean my face. I had no idea of my condition, blood all across my cheeks and ears. God knows what I had done.

You have cold cream, John?

Shush.

He cleaned my neck and arms, and then took a cotton bud to my blood-lined nails. It had taken me years to realise that, for all his faults, John Slater was truly very kind.

I was sure you were going to notice the book, he said. You’re a lucky girl not to have.

How am I possibly lucky?

Darling, don’t you understand yet? They killed him.

Then who attacked them?

They did it to themselves.

I did howl then, most horribly, and the dear man held me and did everything he could to give me comfort.

Though I thought I now understood exactly what had happened, it would take me an awfully long time to accept the full extent of the horror that had occurred in the shrine on Jalan Campbell, and even back in London I could not grasp it firmly, not least because I had no sensible explanation of McCorkle himself.

The result, of course, was that I was left with a wound that would not heal no matter how I tended it, and tend it I did, obsessively, until even Annabelle was forced to tell me I had become a bore. I expelled her for her honesty. I did not care. I was now above such scrapes and hurts for I had turned into one of those ’sad friends of Truth Milton describes in his
Areopagitica:
‘such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangl’d body of Osiris.’ The body of truth, he meant, dismembered and scattered—in Greek,
sparagmos
.

I now commenced to travel compulsively ‘up and down gathering up limb by limb’ of that horrid puzzle. It was this quest that sent me journeying out to Australia at a time when I could scarcely afford the bus fare to Old Church Street, and at the end of all this ridiculous expense and anguish the only ‘fact’ I could be certain of was that McCorkle had a physical existence and it was separate from Chubb’s.

This I would not accept and so I laboured madly on, stubborn as a goat, writing pestering letters, borrowing money, imperilling
The Modern Review
, getting sucked deeper and deeper into the morass until, one dark winter’s afternoon on Oxford Street, I suffered what is politely called a nervous breakdown.

It was certainly not John Slater’s idea that I should return to K.L., but when this was deemed important for my convalescence he behaved like the dear friend he had become, and this time he did not slip away to Kuala Kangsar. No-one, certainly not the genius doctors at the Tavistock Clinic, had ever considered the possibility that the two murderers might be exactly where I had seen them last and that the sight of them would not be therapeutic in the least. By 1985 Jalan Campbell’s name had been changed to Jalan Dang Wangi, but the bicycle business was just as it had looked thirteen years before and the old black vise still sat where Chubb had left it, on the floor inside the door. Seeing that ugly device did rather wrench my heart and I would have paid any price to have the dear old puritan alive, with his wry sweet smile and his sniffy snobbery, his desperation to tell the story of his sad, unlikely life.

One can assume that McCorkle’s manuscript remained in the shrine upstairs, although by then it seemed as foul to me as the disgusting giant orchid with which Mrs Lim had first attracted the poet’s attention.

Tina was by now in her thirties, and if she did not appear to recognise the tourists at the door, the scars made her perfectly identifiable to us. We remained there only a moment, until the Chinese woman looked up from her abacus. John doffed his hat and she, for her part, raised her upper lip to display the lethal edges of her small white crooked teeth.