The Hungry Ghosts - Anne Berry

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       PROLOGUE Ghost

      I am dead. No, strictly speaking that is not the truth. I am neither fully alive nor fully dead. I am ‘undead’. I am unable to relinquish my present and consign it to the past. I am unable to accept I have no future. Thus I am static, earthbound, my feet anchored in mud, while my essence, my Chi, is being pulled, tugged, drawn towards the ghosts of my ancestors, towards the dominion of death. Sometimes I feel like a bone being worried at by a dog. This is an appropriate image because that is exactly what happened to me. This ‘half-death’ does not make for a peaceful spirit. I am troubled and I am trouble. You see I just have to stir things up, play with the laws of physics to prove…to prove what? That I may still be the cause and have an effect. When the ancestors clamour I tell them to be patient. I am not prepared for death I say.

      My name was Lin Shui. I was the daughter of a fisherman. I lived on the island of Hong Kong and I was not ready to die. But nor were thousands of others, dying all around me every day.This is not what keeps me here. It is my gnawing hunger that fixes me to the earth.

      I was murdered on a perfect summer’s morning. It was early June, the year 1942. We had seen a black Christmas come and go. Our tiny island was infested with Japanese soldiers.They had invaded our shores. They held us in their vice-like grip. Father told me that the British could not withstand their venom, that, though they fought with courage, a time had come when they buckled and fell. He explained to me in his customary soft voice that our Governor, Sir Mark Young, had gone in person to the Japanese headquarters in the Peninsula Hotel, and surrendered on Christmas Day. I thought that was odd, to hand over our island home in a place where people had once come to dine and dance, and wear fine clothes and sparkling jewels, and talk of nothing in particular. But Father told me that everything in the time that was coming would be odd, and often not just odd but terrible as well. He told me the devils of war were unleashed, that we must bear their madness with fortitude. I listened like a child, and feared like the woman rising up within me. Father told me the worst that could happen had happened, that we were an occupied island now, that they could take no more from us. But in this he deceived me, for one day a Japanese soldier was occupying me, and what he took from me was my life.

      My death is like a tune that plays over and over in my thoughts. I cannot rid myself of the melody.

      I am alone. My father and our junk have been taken. My mother, who paved my way into this world with her own life, is no more than a shadow to me. For months now hunger has been my constant companion.With each passing day it consumes more of me. I know that soon there will be nothing left.When you are stripped of everything, I reason, it is good to climb a mountain, for then you will see the way ahead. So I slip through the busy streets of Aberdeen dodging the soldiers, ducking out of the way of jeeps, and diving into the maze of alleys. I find the narrow path that winds its way up to the Peak. I will climb this path, I resolve. When I am high up, I will look down on Aberdeen harbour and I will know what to do. Perhaps my spirit mother tries to warn me, but I am headstrong and do not listen. Perhaps the ancestors barrel into me, a wave of consciousness holding me back. But I am stubborn and plough on. Perhaps he has been watching me for days, my murderer, has seen that I am alone, vulnerable, an easy target? Like the hunter he stalks me as I ascend.

      It is already warm when I set out. A June day when the sky is clear as glass, and when the sun, as it swells to its zenith, exudes a smouldering heat that makes your skin prickle, and your head throb. The blood drums in my ears. I can feel the sweat pool in the dip between my shoulderblades, and trickle down my back. I can hear birdsong and the sounds of distant traffic. Sometimes a gunshot rings out, and then the birds, startled, fly up from their perches in the thick green canopy that surrounds me. From time to time I stand at the edge of the path and gaze down the slope, judging how far I have come, how high I am, how much further I have to go before I gain the summit. I look across a tangle of trees and vines and grasses. I am cocooned in confusion. But I am climbing the mountain that will spin lucid strands from all that is dense and opaque, I whisper.

      I hear him then, his boot on the dusty ground behind me, and a stone slipping away, falling into the untidy green expanse. I turn but see nothing.Three times I spin round and the third time he is there. Neither of us speaks. We both freeze for a moment, statues on the rutted path. Even then I realise I am on the cusp, on the brink of stepping out of time, of sinking in the bottomless well. He glances over his shoulder, and when he is certain we are alone he walks purposefully towards me.

      ‘Run,’ cries my mother, wrapping around me. ‘Run and together we will shun him.’

      There are only a few yards between us now. I can hear his short breaths, and smell his stale sweat. If I face him he will not harm me, I tell my ancestors. They mock softly, but my mother keens. He pauses feet from me, and there is a space between us where our breaths mingle. I can see wet patches on his khaki uniform, under his arms, across his chest, around his groin. He is wearing a cap and his face is partly shaded. He has a rifle slung over his shoulder. He mutters something in Japanese, his voice harsh and dissonant, specks of cloudy spit fires from his mouth. His eyes narrow to thin wet lines. His mouth splits in a yellow-toothed sneer.

      Someone will come by and by, and all will be well, I tell myself.

      This is in my head as he swings the rifle off his shoulder and rams me in the chest with the butt of it. I feel a shock of pain, a sickening thud, a splintering crack. I reel backwards, lose my footing, and fall against a hard bed of dirt and stones. He has knocked the air out of me. I am gagging, trying to bite in breath. The soldier does not wait for my lungs to fill. He throws the rifle aside along with his cap, leans over me, seizes the top of my blue cotton tunic, and rips it from my body. A slither of oxygen filters into me.Looking down I see my small breasts, the nipples raised, tight and hard against the cedar brown of my flesh. I am going to crawl away, but the pain in my chest blossoms now like a flower. Again the soldier lurches forwards.This time he grasps my trousers.As he wrenches them away my slippers tumble off. My bare feet scrabble in the dirt. I try to draw my knees up to hide my shame, but he lays hold of my legs and thrusts them apart. He thrusts them so wide I think I might split in two. Here, hunched between my open legs, with one hand he frees his penis, with the other he jams fingers inside me, tearing at my soft virgin centre. My scream dies in my throat, paralysed with terror.

      He waits a single interminable beat before he drives into me. In that beat his immutable eyes lock with mine, and he brings his fingers up to his mouth. I see they are coated with flecks of blood and matter.While I watch, he sucks at them ravenously. I have found my voice but he smites it with this same hand. My cry is suffocated and becomes no more than a gurgle. I taste myself in the blow, the sea-musk at the core of me, and my own blood, the metallic sweetness of it on the fingers that are clamped across my mouth. As he slams into me I feel rivers scorch and become runnels of ash.With his free hand roughly he kneads a breast, bruising and crushing it, pinching it so hard I am sure his fingers will meet, claw through my soft flesh.

      But when the moment comes and he shudders out his power, I cheat him of victory, for I have left my body and am looking down from a great height. My eyes, which have been stretched wide, aflame with fear, are smothered. They set in a dead fish stare. The stare enrages him. He lets go breast and mouth, and sits back heavily. He is gasping, his penis still ramrod straight between his sweat-slicked loins. He clenches a fist and then slams it into my face.The force of the blow breaks two teeth and cuts into my cheek. A trickle of blood courses down it like a single red tear. From above I snigger at him, and the face of that other girl below breaks into a toothless grin, as she joins me, coughing and hacking with laughter. His manhood shrivels then. It becomes a poor thing at the peal of our contempt, and we can see it is no better than a worm. In the same moment he glimpses it too, and his sallow skin is empurpled with fury as he grapples at his belt.

      ‘What have you got for me now?’ I taunt him, my voice as light as the breeze at his back.‘You have occupied me and I am still whole. How will you plant your filthy flag with its rising sun now?’

      It is then that I see the glint of the knife, the bayonet he has freed from its leather sheath, and I know how he will plant his flag. The red of his sun

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