Ghosts of Manila by James Hamilton-Paterson

Author:James Hamilton-Paterson [James Hamilton-Paterson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571320158
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

17

YSABELLA HAD UNDERTAKEN her dawn bus journey at her own insistence and not for lack of proffered limousines. The senator had nodded with affected admiration, remarking that she was obviously her father’s daughter. In due course she found herself rattling in pre-dawn darkness south past the back of Ninoy Aquino International Airport. The highway was lined with factories bearing the neon names of domestic appliances and the sort of food that came in packets. In Alabang they stopped and vendors forced their way aboard with heavy trays of freshly cooked hopia, newspapers and peanuts. She bought newspapers. She was unique: as far as anyone could tell, an unescorted American girl. Even more unique than you know, she thought as she returned or deflected the smiles of surprise. Assuredly she was the only person on this bus who was off to spend the weekend with a senator.

The boy beside her, who looked as though he were heading for a provincial college with a concrete statue of its founder outside it, interpreted the captions for her. She had deliberately chosen tabloids for what looked like sensational pictures on their front pages, something with which to complement the half light and glimpses of pavement life outside. The concrete underpass pillar by which they were waiting bore tattered fragments of names in red, the torn faces of hopeful politicians. Also the stencilled injunction COUPLE FOR CHRIST. Anything was possible here, where a religious sect called Good Wisdom for All Nations was on the rampage, slashing the tyres of cars caught in traffic jams and still further immobilising the congealing city. At the pillar’s foot, she now noticed, a man lay with his head on a deep cushion of carbon which had collected like a drift of snow.

The picture in one tabloid showed a barrel being winched from the mud of an estero somewhere in Manila, its open end jammed with suggestive contours like meat and rags mixed. ‘They identified him from his watch,’ her neighbour translated. The bus started again, the lights went off and they drove out of their concrete nest into early morning light which came as a surprise. Had she known to look, she could have glimpsed in the distance the arched entrance to the famously porous State Penitentiary in Muntinlupa as they passed. Instead, the boy had angled a second tabloid to the window. This photo was of the interior of a burned-out car. Half-melted strips of trim and a steering wheel reduced to a wire ring confused things until she understood what she was looking at. The driver’s seat tilt mechanism had collapsed until the metalwork of its headrest lay back on the frame of the rear seat. On bars and springs, in a posture of extreme reclining comfort, was a calcined skeleton. ‘Dedbol na.” Of the dead ball in question, the student explained, nothing was left but his bones and a Rolex watch. This was one up on all those dreary golfers and opera singers and mountaineers, Ysabella

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