The Uninvited (5 page)
‘Ordinary people can have views.’
He blew out a stream of smoke. When smoke mixes with air it obeys mathematical rules. ‘So as an ordinary person I don’t especially care about the environment.’
‘So why did you do it?’
‘Pressure.’
‘What kind of pressure? Who from?’
‘I told you! The spirits! Them!’
He shook his head, stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. We sat there for a while. Two metres away, a tabby cat with a kinked tail was nursing a litter of black, white and tortoiseshell kittens.
‘Do you fear that there will be a reprisal of some kind?’ I asked after a moment. ‘That the Jenwai staff who were exposed might attack you in revenge?’
He made a noise with his mouth, as if he were stifling more choking. ‘It’s not their business. It is nothing to do with them. You see, it was not me that did this thing. They come in. I don’t know how. Maybe you eat the wrong thing and they get in your blood. Like a parasite. And they make the body disobey the mind. Do you understand?’
‘Not yet. But I’m here to try. That’s my job. So I can write my report.’
He reached for my recorder and turned it off. ‘No. Sorry Hesketh. We finish this now.’ He blew out a thin stream of smoke. ‘I can’t. I don’t understand it myself. I’m not in charge of anything, you see. I am just a . . .’ he trailed off.
‘Just a what?’
He flicked some ash off his sleeve. ‘Just a little man made of paper.’
Then he stood up. I did too, and made to follow him, but he signalled for me to stay where I was. So I sat down again and watched as he walked stiffly back to the family shrine where he took a wad of red Hell notes from his pocket, knelt to place it on the stone, fanned it out and set fire to it with the plastic lighter. Then he fished in his briefcase for some incense sticks, bowed three times, then placed the incense in a small jar and lit it. His shoulders were shaking.
The smoke drifted towards me: I smelled sandalwood. I recognised it instantly. Last Christmas when Kaitlin and I rented a cottage in Devon, Freddy insisted on lighting sandalwood joss sticks in every room. Kaitlin’s moods tended to be capricious, but on this occasion the atmosphere was positive. She had drunk four glasses of wine and there was a sheen to her skin that made me want her urgently. My body has a mind of its own and I have learned that when it comes to sex one need not fight this because sex has its own rules. That night she was very receptive and for once she shut her eyes too. But I misunderstood why. I thought she was giving me something, finding a way to join me in what she called the Fortress. But it wasn’t that. The truth was, she’d already begun her affair.
I was actually present when they met. It was a Phipps & Wexman reception. They talked all evening. I saw that they stimulated each other. One minute they’d be serious. The next they’d be laughing. Ideas were bouncing around. It was the kind of exchange I struggle to participate in. It was classic courtship behaviour, but I failed to identify it as such. Later Kaitlin told me this was because I’d been ‘complacent’. I had ‘made assumptions’, and ‘failed to appreciate’ her sexual appetites. I had taken her for granted. I should have been jealous and I wasn’t.
I asked her: ‘Are you saying I’m to blame for your having an affair?’
‘Don’t twist what I’m saying.’
‘My intention is to understand the logic. Not just of what you did, but why you hid it from me. I need to know why.’
‘Look. Not everything can be explained by some damned behavioural flow chart, OK? And not everyone shares your rule book.’
‘It’s not a rule book. It’s just morality.’
‘People change, OK? They evolve over time, they want to explore who they might be, as well as who they are!’
‘They should just be who and what they say they are.’
‘Well one of us failed to do that, OK? One of us committed the apparently unforgivable crime of
changing
.’
Her body language and facial configuration told me to leave it there.
A flock of green birds flew overhead, squawking, then disappeared into the smog coiling around the mountainside. Parakeets. I went and joined Sunny and we watched the glowing tips of the incense sticks.
He said, ‘Thank you for making me the man. And the insect. What is its name?’
‘A praying mantis. It’s called that because it rocks to and fro like someone praying.’
I like to rock too. It soothes me.
‘Ha. A holy insect.’
‘Not really. The females devour the males after they’ve mated.’
He shifts a little, and glances at me sideways. ‘Not my business, Hesketh. But your wife—’
‘Girlfriend. Ex. Met someone else.’ I might as well learn to say it aloud.
He studied his hands. ‘Very sorry. I should not ask.’
‘Later she regretted it and wanted us to carry on like before.’
He looked up and smiled. ‘So the best man won!’ he exclaimed, play-punching me on the arm, American-buddy style. But he might as well have shot me. He meant well of course. He wasn’t to know the appalling nature of what happened. ‘You’re the best man,’ he continued. ‘She saw that, so she wanted you back.’
‘But I couldn’t trust her any more. That’s why I live alone.’
‘Man of principle. Good.’ I knew he was looking at me. ‘But you miss your son.’
‘Stepson. Freddy’s hers. From before we met. He doesn’t know his real father.’
‘He still needs you. You know, Hesketh, families are with us all the time.’ He gestured at the shrines. ‘Dead and alive. The ones from the past and the present and the future too. They’re living in us. We can’t escape them even if we want to. They send us signals. This is what holds us together. Blood. DNA, Hesketh. It’s very strong.’
‘Freddy and I don’t share DNA.’
‘Then you are lucky. DNA is cruel. It makes demands.’ He leaned down and stubbed out his cigarette in a dried pomegranate shell. ‘Hesketh, I am glad it was you they sent.’
His eyes were glittering again. I looked across and met them for a second. I couldn’t manage any longer. But perhaps there was an exchange of sorts.
I said, ‘Yes.’ Then in Chinese: ‘Me too.’ I meant it.
‘We will say goodbye now. I have told you all I can. Go and do your job. I will stay here. Take the taxi back to the hotel.’ I started to object, but he stopped me. He had his mobile, he said. He would order another car when he was ready to leave. ‘I want to be here for a little longer. To work out what I must do now. But be careful, Hesketh. The spirits are becoming very active.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They are angry and starving. They live in bad conditions. You like the truth. So I will be honest with you. This is not something Phipps & Wexman or any other organisation can resolve. The spirits will do what they came to do. They won’t give up. They are fighting for their survival.’ He sighed, then held out his hand. We shook, then exchanged a small head-bow. ‘It was good to meet you Hesketh. Have a safe journey. Please go now.’
He called out to the taxi driver, who snapped awake and started the engine. We shook hands and I got in the car and Sunny waved me off. I looked back at him, but he’d already turned away to face the city. Hands in his pockets, shoulders high. On the way back to the hotel, I used my BlackBerry to let Phipps & Wexman know I had identified the whistle-blower. Ashok’s instant reply:
You’re the man.
The best man
, according to Sunny Chen.
The man who won.
He wasn’t to know.
As the taxi drove off, I looked back and saw the small figure of Sunny Chen standing like a hunched sentinel at the shrine of his forefathers, near the blown ashes of his little origami self.
Hurricane Veronica struck during the night, devastating towns on Ireland’s western shore before strafing its way up the Scottish coast. I woke to its dying howls. When dawn broke I saw that one of the hawthorns had been blown down, its branches scattered across the moor. My roof had lost a few tiles, and a dead sheep lay on the beach. Otherwise, there was little sign of the weather’s passing, save for the sparkle of salt borne by the wind: coarse crystals winking on the slate roof of my cottage and on the granite boulder.
My living-room smells of damp wool and wood smoke. I’ve put logs on the fire, and from time to time air pockets in the bark detonate like gunshot. It’s already autumn up here: spider season. Because of this year’s wet spring they are numerous and huge, with long legs and bloated abdomens. The structure of each cobweb is the same, but every spider has its own style, like handwriting. Sometimes I sit and watch them at work, single-minded and fanatical. I have to tear myself away.
The lunchtime news was full of the hurricane damage and the scientific row over whether the freshly replicated CERN results ‘disprove’ Einstein’s theory of relativity. At the end, there’s a small update on yesterday’s ‘pyjama killer’: the girl’s father is still in hospital, while the remaining family is undergoing counselling.
I’ve been trying to summarise the results of my Taiwan investigation, but my notes amount to little more than a list of Chen’s agitated remarks about the spirit world. I can’t quote this kind of thing in my report. Clients don’t want superstition and uncertainty: they want closure and a three-point plan. I do too. I throw more wood on the fire and watch the sparks. I enjoy starting these miniature contained blazes. I use crumpled newspaper and failed origami figures. I am harsh on my own craftsmanship: a bad fold, the wrong kind of kink, or a small paper tear, and it’s sacrificed. I think of Sunny Chen, burning himself in effigy. The body can disobey the mind, he said. How can that happen? Is it like my nocturnal bouts of Restless Leg Syndrome, where the brain craves shut-down, but the lower limbs enforce their own meaningless, agitated agenda?
They are in your blood
, he said.
Like parasites
. But what do they eat, the hungry inner creatures he conjured as his tormentors? I look it up. Rice, says one source. Fruit. Soup. Sweets. Meat. Anything they can lay their spirit hands on, and stuff into their spirit mouths and absorb into their spirit bloodstreams.
Sometimes a feeling of physical constriction overwhelms me: to use an analogy, it’s as if I’m trapped inside an egg and must burst free. At three o’clock I give in to it and close the Chen file. Shucking on my anorak, I grab my umbrella and push out into open air. I have my routines. Five and a half minutes to the gate. Nine minutes along the sheep-path. A thirty-second pause at the sheer-sided black boulder, then down past the bluff where a row of trees cringe from the wind, and down to the shore. Most of the island is rocky and dry, but in this particular region the bog-land absorbs the liquid with the capacity of a sponge. It exhales methane. The fossil gas streams to the surface in tiny bubbles like champagne, then ignites and dances with flickering blue tendrils of light. You can see it now, through the massing late-afternoon dark. In the old days they called it will-o’-the-wisp and conjured goblins to explain it. Other native beliefs: wild fairy children once roamed here. Sometimes they swapped places with humans and lived as changelings.
According to Japanese lore, if you fold a thousand
ozuru
, you’ll achieve your heart’s desire. Like most origami aficionados, I’ve folded many more than that, but I’m no closer to knowing what my heart’s desire might be.
Once, it was simply peace: to be left to myself, as I am now, walking on a moor, with a case to puzzle over.
The boy changed all that.
When we lived as a family, Kaitlin would wake him and then leave for work. By the time he was dressed, I’d have Freddy’s breakfast ready on the table. Every schoolday for two years I prepared him a bowl of yoghurt with eleven raisins on top and a four-minute boiled egg. While he ate the yoghurt I put the egg in boiling water and pressed the button on the timer and we’d play ‘the Egg Game’: I’d throw a tea cloth over the timer and we’d each make a ping when we guessed the four minutes was up. If you missed the real ping, you lost completely. The skill lay in being an accurate judge of time. By the time I decided to leave, we had both become extremely good at the Egg Game.
‘I know your mum has already talked to you about this,’ I said, after he’d won again, three seconds short of the real ping. But he must have been anticipating the conversation because he slapped his hands over his ears. I continued anyway. ‘We’ve decided not to live together any more.’ It had to be stated. By me as well as Kaitlin. ‘But we’ll still see each other I hope.’ I put the egg in his eggcup and set it in front of him. ‘Mum will pick you up from school today. I won’t see you tonight. But I’ll come by whenever I can. Freddy K?’
He didn’t answer.
We had our rituals. One of them was that when I gave him his egg he’d say ‘
Foonk-you-fonk-you-fank-you
,’ in the deep distorted voice he uses for the archaeopteryx, and then – here was the educational part – I’d say ‘You’re welcome’ or its equivalent in a foreign language, some basic phrases of which I’d looked up earlier. We’d covered over a hundred countries. Then we’d talk about the culture and traditions of the day’s country, and I’d tell him one of its folk tales while he ate. When Kaitlin came home he’d try out that morning’s language on her, or a story. He especially loved Russian, and the story of Baba Yaga Bony-legs, the witch who lived in a house that stood on chickens’ legs. Often he said
nyet
for no, and
da
for yes.