The Hungry Ghosts - Anne Berry

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when it flutters in the wind. He thrusts forwards with all his might, up beneath my broken ribs where he hits his mark. My heart gives a mighty shudder, unreels in a final leap and freezes, the blood curdling within it. I watch him come back to himself, caging his demon deep within, hefting out the knife, and springing back before the rush of red that fountains up to meet him. He drags my body to the edge of the path and rolls it roughly into the deep green cavern. But the ragged tear in my chest snags on a branch and my body hangs there. My blood spills onto the bark, cloaking it thickly, dripping darkly, and even now drying to a crisp beneath the unforgiving sun.The soldier cleans his bayonet blade in the earth, slicing the wetness off it, slipping it back in its sheath. He adjusts his uniform, stoops to retrieve his cap, slips it on, takes up his rifle and slings it back over his shoulder. He gathers up my garments and slippers, wipes his hands on them, balls them in his fists and hurls them after my body. They do not snag on the branch but unfold as they spin, performing mid-air acrobatics as they shake off their creases, before landing, hidden in the undergrowth below. He scuffs the pool of blood over with earth, kicking at it, as if the merest sight of his sin is now abhorrent to him. Then he is gone, the beat of his boots ebbing away on the dusty tide.

      I watch from my perch in the tree where I rest now, beside Lin Shui’s body. Soon all is still once more, but for the ‘drip, drip’ of my blood against a waxy leaf, scalding red, striking cool virgin green. How easy is it then, this business of dying, the ancestors trumpet, preparing to welcome me into their starry fold. That is when the fury unfurls inside me. I shrink from them.

      ‘I am not ready to go with you,’ I say, clinging to my body, smelling the black hair with just a trace of the mineral sea, and the skin, cotton fresh, and blood that oozes still, salt and copper and cloying with sweetness. And when their rhapsody swells and they pluck at me in their impatience, I hiss and lash the air up into a wind.Then they are frightened and disperse.

      The flies come first, bent on blood, crazed with the rancid whiff of decay. And while they swarm over Lin Shui, I consider the shame I might bring on my family if I am found like this. If my father returns and discovers me with the blood bubbling between my thighs, it might prove too great a disgrace for him. I reflect over the buzzing of the flies that it would be better if I was never found. I summon all my strength, pushing the flesh that had once been mine, trying to dislodge it, but it is heavy as lead. When the chorus of cicadas start, I implode, gathering up all the spidery range of me. I slip into the branch, where the limb that bears Lin Shui’s body angles from the tree. I seep into the taut, woody fibres there, already stretched with the weight of their load. I saw at them, fuelled with anguish, and at last there is a great crack. The branch breaks, and Lin Shui’s bloody corpse, my corpse, pitches downwards, the green opening up to her like water, and closing over her when she is gone. Now you can no longer see her from the path. She is hidden, a covert child. I slither down to her. She has landed with a twist. She lies on her belly, her head corkscrewing round, her face still wreathed in its broken-toothed smile, crowning her back.

      That night the dogs come. At first there is only one, a sad creature, all ribcage and weeping sores, that skulks nervously around my body, snarling and baring his dripping fangs for several minutes before tucking in. He laps and licks the blood thirstily. He tears at sinew and muscle and flesh. He crushes and crunches bones. His teeth grind and grate. The cacophony of his feeding frenzy appals me. He is joined by another. First they scrap, hackles up, wearing what fur they have on their mangy carcasses like ruffs, gnashing their teeth, growling and snapping over their prize. In the end they realise there is enough for both of them, and they settle down together to feast on Lin Shui. I cannot stay here, I think. If I stay here I shall be reminded that I am dead. So I rise up and shiver on the thermals, and see days come and days go. I soar with the birds. But even here there is buzzing, silver planes somersaulting and diving and chattering, and far below me a seething sea, carved up with sail-less pewter ships, all hard lines against the scrolls of the sea. I want somewhere I can repose and gather my wits, some refuge that I can lose myself in.

      I know it is ironic for someone cheating death, but I settle at last on a morgue, the morgue of a British army hospital. Perhaps I have more in common with the dead than I realise. It is a gigantic red-brick building, three storeys high, with tiled floors and wide staircases.The patients’ wards, the operating theatres, the laboratories and the offices, which nestle within it, are bordered by long corridors, open to the elements but for the arched colonnades that line them. There are smaller barrack blocks standing on the terraced slopes above it. The edifice is reassuringly solid, rooted comfortingly, as I still am, to the earth. It rises grandly from its site in Bowen Road. My morgue lies in a roomy basement at one far end of the hospital. It is quenched of light.

      This then is how I come to stave off death, with nothing but my will for weaponry. And it is how, paradoxically, I find myself housed in a sepulchre of death. Above me a battle rages, but I choose to reside below with the defeated.They lie stiffly in the tenebrous ward that all mankind must come to, with their shattered bones and gory stumps. Some have empty red sockets where the jelly of an eye once swivelled, some ragged flesh where once an ear thrilled to the music of life, some scorched bloody caves, where tongues wagged and lips were bellows, pumping the body’s elixir of oxygen. Beneath their shrouds I trace the puncture patterns of bullets, reliving the impact of each one, the flesh yielding with a judder to their sting.

      These then are my playmates, my companions, these cold rigid cadavers. Sometimes I concentrate very hard and jerk their waxy limbs.I make their petrified,pale eyelids twitch.As I move over their ruined bodies like a lover, my presence soft as gentle rain on their ugly wounds, they tell me their sad tales of death. They speak of lovers left behind, of mothers longed for, and of filth and gore and carnage.They tell me how they grew fluent in the language of horror, of shrieks torn from bodies racked with pain, of groans dredged up from a Hades of everlasting torture, of grief that had not the luxury to linger.Theirs was a lottery of limbs yielded up to blade and bomb and bullet, their drama, the inestimable tragedy of war. And in turn I croon them to sleep with memories of breath, and the urgency of it, and the beat of blood, and the flood of sensation, and the tick of life. I tell them stories of our junk, Heavenly Sea, bucking and pitching across a bowl of liquid gold. I recount how my father, a simple fisherman, was taken by the Japanese, a suspected informer for the Gangjiu Dadui, one of the Chinese resistance forces. I confide my yearning for the inconstant ocean, the salt smack of her rough embrace. I impart that it was the South China Sea that bore me up, when my child’s body grew weary with its chores.

      So we share our burden of loss, the dead and I, robbed of our lives and of our loves. Once, one of my soldier playmates is brought to the morgue, like me hovering in the half-light between life and death. Before he slips away, he makes a gift to me of his ethereal British army jacket.

      ‘To shield your modesty,’ he says, insisting as he departs that he no longer has a need for it.

      Then a dawn breaks, that is marked by a ringing silence. Gone is the clattering, booming, jarring disharmony of war.The staccato guns have stopped firing. The crescendo of marching feet is stilled. The medley of horses’ hooves is muffled.The dreadful ululation is spent. My dead companions no longer come to see me, and the building above my head grows thick with quietude. I am thinning with loneliness, for dust motes and dried blood make for poor company. Curious, I creep out of obscurity. It is dusk. I alight on a curve of railing. I am aware that time has rolled by and all is changed. I stare down the skirt of the mountain at the harbour,Victoria harbour. I see it transformed, the dimpled sea freckled with crafts of every imaginable shape and size. Ribbons of road packed with cars and lorries and buses wind about the slopes. There are more buildings beaded with lights than I could ever have dreamt of—buildings so tall they seem to brush the clouds. I am blinded too by the shimmering pictures facing some of the tall towers, pictures that bounce out across the water, luminous sea snakes, electric colours that crackle and spit into the night. Lin Shui’s life is faded now, like an old book left in the sun and rain too long. Some days I allow myself to drift towards death.When I do, I think I see a small boy crouching in the shadows, an urchin with hair of spun gold, and skin that shines like varnished teak. He is barefoot and clad in black rags. I start to sink into the soporific infinite blackness at the centre of his eyes. And he stands and smiles, and opens his arms to me in greeting. Like a moth drawn to a flame, I am drawn to him. But

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