The Hungry Ghosts
A novel for those who loved Behind the Scenes at the Museum, The Poisonwood Bible and The Lovely Bones.Raped then murdered in Japanese occupied Hong Kong, 1942, Lin Shui’s ‘Hungry Ghost’ clings tenaciously to life. Holing up in a hospital morgue, destined to become a school, just in time she finds a host off whom to feed. It is 12-year-old Alice Safford, the deeply-troubled daughter of a leading figure in government. The parasitic ghost follows her to her home on the Peak. There, the lethal mix of the two, embroiled in the family’s web of dark secrets and desperate lies, unleashes chaos. All this unfolds against a background of colonial unrest, riots, extremes of weather and the countdown to the return of the colony to China. As successive tragedies engulf Alice, her ghostly entourage swells alarmingly. She flees to England, then France, in a bid to escape the past, only to find her portable ‘Hungry Ghosts’ have accompanied her. It seems the peace she longs for is to prove far more elusive that she could ever have imagined.The Hungy Ghosts is a remarkable tour-de-force of the imagination, full of instantly memorable characters whose lives intermesh and boil over in a cauldron of domestic mayhem, unleashing unworldly spirits into the troubled air.
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The Hungry Ghosts
Anne Berry
For my matchless husband Anthony, and my amazing children, Andrea, Antonia, Ivan and Ruth.
The value of their unflagging support continues to be of inestimable worth to me.
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, Act 1, scene 4
Table of Contents
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.
