White Ghost Girls by ALICE GREENWAY

Author:ALICE GREENWAY
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Groove Press
Published: 2006-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

eighteen

The smell of drying fish is strong and sharp. It reaches you as you come up from the beach, before you walk into the village. Rows and rows of small fish, laid out on rattan mats in the hot sun.

An old woman peers at us from inside a darkened doorway, sitting behind a raised portal built to keep out bad spirits. Half-naked children run before us like heralds, shouting, ‘Gwailo. Gwailo.’ White ghosts. White ghosts. Scrawny chickens peck underfoot, unbothered. A mangy chow rushes at us from the shade of a banyan, teeth bared. Whiny Cantonese love songs trickle from a transistor radio. ‘Gwailo. Gwailo,’ the children cry. The dog snarls.

The village consists of two rows of whitewashed houses made of mud brick. Inside, the houses are cool and dark with no windows. They have curving green-tiled roofs. Beyond the hot courtyards spread with fish are fields of vegetables, neatly tended, reeking of human night soil. There is a central man-made pond, an ancient pump for watering. Plastic bags tied on sticks keep the birds off.

Frankie and I walk through, stepping warily as we pass the dog. Just off the path beyond the village, we dip through the broken door of a ruined church, its glass windows shattered, walls streaked green with mould. An iron cross rusts over a crumbling door. Inside it’s quiet. The roof‘s fallen in, the aisles are filled with rubble. Jasmine and honeysuckle clamber over the once ornate blue-and-white plaster altar, smelling wanton, seductive.

The children don’t follow us here. They skip off, back to the village. Perhaps they’re afraid of our gwailo God, of the stories their parents tell of a tall, gaunt priest striding forth in funereal white robes, cursing their earth gods and kitchen gods, scowling at their joss sticks. Father Simeon Volunteri, my father tells us, was a nineteenth-century Italian missionary from Milan. He built the church, his heart set on taming the Sai Kung pirates.

Abandoned places are our territory, ours for entering, taking. We’re archaeologists, hermit crabs, Viet Cong scouts, Volunteri’s followers. Saying nothing, we shuffle along the aisle, searching for some relic, some Italian talisman. An olive-wood cross. A piece of wild boarskin. The church exudes a silence, a reverence for Volunteri, his passion, as if breathing a final sigh before submitting to the more ancient rhythms of the village, the tangled vines of jungle.

How he raged when he saw the pirates, returning home with crates of opium, silver, tea, taken from European ships. When he refused to cook rice, free meals, a tactic his mission in China had used, his converts stopped coming. He stormed around their small Tin Hau Temple. I imagine he went mad. Disappeared into the jungle. How could he survive, a lone white man with his mission, his desire? Even if he learned Chinese, he would never know all its secrets.

Frankie motions for me to crouch quickly under the arched window. We’ve run ahead. We’ll hide here while the others go by, wait for my father, who’s home.

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