Smoke of Spirits

By Claire Frances Raciborska

...rows of sunlit tombs lining green hillsides littered with cosmos...the laughs of children different and the same...dragon's whiskers reaching into a soft wet sky...a singsong language of buried meanings...smoky incense wafting in a neon-lit temple...

Bruised and battered, Lucy arrives in the city of Taipei, seeking only escape, a world away from That Night and what she did. She finds herself mired in a land of strangeness - of alien sounds, faces, smells, shapes. She meets Carlos, a hostile Spaniard, Anand, a septuagenarian Buddhist, and Rashnid, an Indian biker. But it is the island of her refuge that reaches deepest into her heart. As the curtain draws back, magic unfurls. Does she dare to love again?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Claire Frances Raciborska
• Release date: Feb 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310382130

Claire Frances Raciborska

Claire Frances Raciborska grew up in South Africa, where she completed an arts degree majoring in Mathematics. She spent four years living and working in Taiwan, which is the setting for her first novel, Smoke of Spirits. She currently lives on a farm in South Africa with her husband Seth, her daughter Emma, two dogs, a cat, some chickens and a lot of cows. She enjoys dreaming about travelling and pretending to garden.

Book preview

Smoke of Spirits

by Claire Frances Raciborska

For S

without whom there would be no story

Copyright Claire Frances Raciborska 2009

Smashwords edition

First edition published in Taiwan in 2010 by Falconers Press

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used

fictitiously.

Cover photographs by Allison Megan Orr and Wilhelm Springhorn

Cover design by Wilhelm Springhorn

Prologue

I’m sorry I killed you. I wish I could go back and undo what I did. Undo the end of you, the end of me.

The end of all of us.

He has found a way to go on. You know how he is. Stalwart. Surviving. No matter what.

And she…

Well, you know her. She has always clung to things until she squeezed the life from them, the joy. Although in this case it is not life she clutches, but death. Your death. Every moment, every breath, it is the only thing that matters to her.

But it matters in a void. Some things cannot be spoken about. Especially not this. Her hole of loneliness is so deep and so dark I do not know if she will ever escape.

But I have. I have escaped…her at least.

And what of the great shadowy beasts that mark me? Teeth-snarling eyes-glinting beasts they are. More fearsome than anything we ever dreamt up. For so long they have circled me, baying for my blood. Guilt and Loneliness.

Can I escape them? Can I escape you?

Chapter 1

THE PENALTY FOR DRUG-SMUGGLING IN THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA IS DEATH.

This was the welcome I received when I first set foot on the Beautiful Island. Formosa, or the ROC, or, as a handful of obscure countries dared to recognise, Taiwan, greeted me with a dingy airport of unimaginable drabness, harsh fluorescent lighting that forgave nothing, and the threat of death. Did it ever leave me?

It was a slow process of parturition into the Republic of China. In a cavernous pink hall, I waited in line with my fellow passengers, suspended between two worlds, the Coming From and Going To. Passport Control squinted and sighed over our papers, and then squeezed our mass through a heatsensitive canal. I pushed on determinedly through Customs where, my body already scanned for the undesirable, my bag was left mercifully alone. There was a final dilation of sliding glass doors, and then I emerged, independent, into a vacant, ticking lounge.

A camera in my face. On the other side of the room, a giant screen mirroring my dismay. In this country, I would be watched.

I shuffled past the camera’s scrutiny, and towards a desk marked i.

‘Hello,’ I said to a woman whose every piece, hair lips eyelashes, looked painstakingly applied and assembled. She raised her perfect eyebrows, and I hurriedly continued, not wanting to mar such a careful masterpiece for long.

‘I’m looking for a place to stay?’ I said. ‘In Taipei?’

‘This pamphlet will help you.’ Enunciated consonants emitted sharply from her dark red mouth. Cerise fingernails tapped at a flyer on the counter. ‘And you must take the bus to get there.’ Pink talons indicated the other side of the long room.

BUS 公車flashed in neon.

Anonymous faces of cities everywhere rolled past my window. Tar road tresses, apartment windoweyes, the bends and angles of a disfigured industrial nose. The hangover of the long-haul flight, and that of a more personal, metaphoric kind, blurred my brain, but I had enough sobriety to note an uncommon feature. Roving swarms of scooters erupted like acne at traffic lights, and clustered along the side of the roads in hundreds, thousands. They snatched greedily at any brief openings of space on street or pavement and defied any rules of behaviour or decorum.

I put my head back against the faux-velvet of the seat. My eyes stung with fatigue. Soon after leaving Johannesburg I had been overwhelmed by nausea,but it had, for the time being, mercifully receded. The fear in my stomach had kept my thoughts dancing. Their vigorous choreography had kept me awake for the entirety of the fourteen hour flight, three hour stop-over in Hong Kong and two hour hop to the parturient Taipei airport.

The bus stopped. I had no idea where we were, but my well-groomed informant had circled the first red dot of the bus map. I shouldered my bag, staggered down the steps and into the smog-aired traffic-roar of Taipei.

With the map miniature of the physicality in front of me, I followed the ballpoint line emanating from the red dot down the busy street. A set of traffic lights loomed within a few minutes, but I paused on the pavement. A hasty arrow directed me left into nowhere, a blank blue between green snakes. A swanky hotel reflected my lost soul in its glass doors. Its neighbour was an office block. In between the two was a slice of darkness, signposted with a small plaque announcing a series of numbers that corresponded with the hasty arrow.

Forsaking the brittle order of the arterial road, I let myself be drawn into the dark recesses of the crack. The one side of the alley was bordered by the mouldy backside of the hotel. Bathroom pipes dripped thin rivers down the black fungus-ridden wall. High up above me, closed curtained windows reflected mottled opaque views. On the other side lined up a stack of cubbyhole shops from which noxious smells, steam and shouts arose. A pushcart growing limp bundles of spinach was manned by a sour eyes-narrowed face. I pulled back in fright at the sound of a hungry dog’s bark, right at my heels. I looked down to see an animal caged in dirty wire mesh. He would have thrown himself against the walls of his prison to get at me, only there was not enough space. Somewhere in the distance, the tinkling of an ice-cream truck sang a merry song. Once, in a long-ago world, my brother’s cellphone had sung the same melody. That was before I had broken the Whole of us. And made of myself a useless fragment.

At the end of the alley, next to a door so narrow I almost missed it, was a dirty A4 page. Happy Times Hostel, it said. Beneath, Call Anton 0953657604. The door was open.

Up a smudged flight of steps, decorated with a fly-covered dog turd, I found the office-receptionlounge-internet area of Happy Times. A man sat behind the one desk, on one of the three chairs, tapping away at a computer.

‘Anton?’ I guessed.

‘Yep,’ he said, swinging around in his chair. ‘What can I do you for?’

‘I’d like to stay a few nights.’

‘Sure thing. Dorm or single?’

‘Single.’

‘That’ll be one thousand NT a night. There’s the bathroom, here’s the lounge, washing machine round the back, your room’ll be through there. No kitchen at the moment. Everything got stolen. You can use the computer if no-one’s on it. No curfew.’ He directed me around the hostel from the comfort of his chair, pointing at the various doors that led off the room. He tossed me some keys. ‘First time in Taiwan?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I hope you like it. Any questions about the hostel?’

‘No.’

‘Good.’ He turned back to the blinking screen and resumed his rain-patter on the keyboard.

My single room was a cubicle big enough for a double bunk and a sliver of floorspace beside it. The chipboard walls did not reach the ceiling or floor. Laughter voices arguments wafted through the narrow openings. I dumped my backpack on the floor, unlaced my boots, and lay down on the yellow-stained sheet.

I awoke in a fog. My eyeballs had been rolled in sand and my throat was clogged with sawdust. I moved my swollen tongue thickly against my palate.

How long had I been sleeping? It was dark in my cubicle, but since it had no windows, that gave me no clues. I pulled myself upright on the slats of the bed above me, and that was when a knife cleaved my brain in two. The pain was excruciating and so pervasive that I struggled to see through my gritcrusted eyes. I fumbled in my bag for the red tube of headache tablets I always carried. I shook out a pair, and then paused. Depending on what the time was now, I had not eaten for almost twentyfour hours, and if I swallowed the relief of the little white pills on my palm, I had no doubt the nausea from the plane would return.

I shoved my feet into my boots, stumbled out of the chipboard booth and down the dust-coated stairs. Outside, it had become dark, but the smellssteam-shouts of the next door café remained unchanged.

In a place that looked more like a storeroom than a restaurant, a screen stood across the back left corner, only partially obscuring the frying pans, chopping boards and sweaty cooks of the establishment’s kitchen. A fridge, branded with TAIWAN BEER, was in the corner, and sported several colourful rows of cans and bottles. The rest of the floor was covered in Formica-topped fold-up tables flanked by small stools. Two patrons, each at their own table, shovelled down a plateful of noodles, their eyes glued to the TV suspended on a metal arm above the fridge.

I threaded past them, my urge for hydration propelling me past all the sticky patches of grime on the tables and floor. After grabbing myself a bottle of water, I sat down at one of the tables and waited. Amidst the steam-shout-TV noise, someone must have noticed me, because it was not a long while later that a man in a white apron appeared from behind the screen and approached my table. A long red stain (sauce? blood?) spread down the front of his uniform.

He stood before me, hands clasped, eyebrows raised. ‘Whatyouwant?’ he fired. ‘Rice? Noodle?’

‘Um…noodle?’ I said. I glanced around at the black-marked floor, the sticky tables, and thought of the dog in the cage outside. Making an instant decision that I would keep to for the rest of my journey in this place, I said, ‘Do you do vegetarian?’

The man shrugged and disappeared. On the table in front of me there was a small cage of chopsticks in thin plastic covers, a bottle of a red oily substance and some plastic disposable spoons. He soon returned with a plate of fried noodles. I took a pair of chopsticks and slipped off its packet. It was my first encounter with the spindly utensils, but I still shovelled in a few mouthfuls, and then knocked back the pills I held clenched in my fist.

When I returned to Happy Times, I made it all the way to the door at the top of the stairs before I realised I had forgotten my keys. I banged on the door and shouted until I was hoarse. Was it early evening, late? Nobody came. My headache receding but my stomach now churning with the oil of the noodles, I sat down on the step outside the door and cried.

My head in my hands, elbows on knees, it started as a smooth sliding of tears down my cheeks. But when the first drop hit the floor, splashing through the dust, my chest heaved. Silent racking sobs consumed me for so long that the drops of my tears gathered into a pool and hovered at the edge of the step. Soon their weight overcame their natural viscosity, and all together they tumbled over the ledge. A thin stream unfolded down the stairs.

When had I last cried? Weeks, months… but it had been years since… And then I had…

I heard somebody come onto the stairs. ‘What’s all this mess then? Don’t tell me it’s been fucking leaking again?’ said Anton.

I spent nearly all of the next morning on one of the three chairs in the office-reception-loungeinternet area of Happy Times waiting for a turn at the computer. While Anton tap-tapped away, seemingly unaware of my presence, I observed the passing life of the alley through a dark-filmed window that did not open.

When Anton eventually rose, (‘Ah, just about time for lunch,’) I scurried for his seat, narrowly beating a Finnish resident who slept in the cubicle next to mine, and who, at Anton’s words, had suddenly appeared in the doorway.

I trawled the internet for every job-post on the island. I made duplicate copies of a letter, (‘Hi, I’m a young South African with a university degree urgently seeking a post as an English teacher,’ convincing, no?), and sent them to every suitable address I could locate. Soon my stomach, having long ago completed digestion of the oily, but surprisingly palatable, noodles, was grumbling audibly.

‘Time for lunch?’ said the Finnish girl, who was hovering behind me hopefully.

I conceded my position, and checking first to see I had my keys in my pocket, I descended to join the alley’s netherworld. A few minutes down its length and I emerged once again into the light and muffled seething of the city life. From what I knew it was a young city, waking each morning to find itself bigger and taller, struggling to forge a unique identity, while domineering parents bore down from just across the strait. The pavements were wide and the cars shiny. There was nothing to provoke memory or remembering. The faces that passed me, their owners’ feet encased in pointed high heels and smart black loafers, were tilted downwards, focussed on the shoe-parade of people. They were engrossed, isolated in the tight crowd. I became invisible, anonymous, just like them. My chest cracked open and I breathed a cleansing intake of the grey polluted air. Oh, the blessed forgiveness of anonymity. My heart sang a silent hymn to it as I walked.

Not far from the alley, I came across a yellowbranded supermarket. Its red-lettered name was of the same font as the sign in the airport, although its semantic content was more gregariously oriented. Welcome, it said.

A sponge for the slightest hint of friendliness, I was sucked into its doors. I bought a packet of bread, which was located, rather than at a bakery section, alongside the pasta and dried grains, and seemed to have an interminable shelf life. I also found a jar of peanut butter.

Back at the hostel, the computer was, miraculously, unattended. Scooping lumps of peanut butter out the jar with pieces of the soft strangely-sweet bread, I logged into my email account. Four new messages.

Two auto-generated. ‘Thank you for your application. We regret to inform you…’ Delete.

One from a place called Tainan, ‘Our recruitment officer is currently on leave. If you could re-apply in the following month…’ Delete.

One from my mother. Delete.

I screwed the lid back on the peanut butter, and pushed myself away from the desk. Then the screen bleeped. One new message.

‘Dear Miss Lucy, We are happy for you to send us this letter. Our school is very much needing a teacher. If you call me on the number I give you below, we can make interview for you…’

I had moved from one underworld into another. In the neon-lit chamber of the train’s waiting area, I sat with a dark sticky-looking slab on a Popsicle stick in my hand. Its smell was slightly stale but strangely familiar. I nibbled on the corner while I contemplated the young man sitting across from me. The wires from a buried Ipod snaked up to his ears. Hair hung around his face in long black spikes, alternate pieces straightened and curled. His eyes were down-turned on the pages of a book, the print of which looked to me like some ancient holy text, but whose cover showed a man in the process of being stabbed by a vampire. While I wondered why indeed a vampire would need to stab anyone, it dawned on me that the day before yesterday, I had only seen one Asian person in my life. Yuki, a Japanese student in my history class at the college. Although I had seen her every day for almost three years, we had never spoken.

The board above the man started to flash 14:07 next to the symbols時間. I looked down at my ticket. Amongst the many unintelligible markings were the numbers 14:07. I dropped my halfeaten Popsicle in the one of the bins beside me (recyclable or not? Is black goo malleable to other forms?) and hurried down the steps to the platform. Following once again the Arabic numerals cushioned in the fog of Mandarin on my ticket, I found my seat on my allotted carriage. I used the seat next to me for my twin personage, my backpack. I slipped my ticket into the nylon pocket on its front, and eased out another scrap of paper, discreetly torn from one of the magazines on Anton’s desk. It spoke a single word, Jhunan. I practised saying it but any way I tried I could not make it sound the way the lady on the phone had said it. I folded it in my hand and watched the passing buildings outside the window. Already the train seemed to be making its first stop.

Banciao 板橋

As well as the signs posted on the platform outside the window, red digital letters moved across a bar at the end of the carriage. It would be necessary to keep a feverish watch of the scrolling destinations. If I missed my station, I would be none the wiser. I would travel on on, down down the island.

Despite being submerged in a sea of alien faces and words, despite the flutter of the paper in my hand as I drenched it with my concentrated study, I felt a small sense of triumph blossoming above my sternum. I was here, on a train in Taiwan, heading to a place called Jhunan. With nobody’s help. Nobody else’s knowledge even. Nobody in the whole world knew where I was at that moment. An intoxicating swoon caused me to close my eyes for a brief second. I detected the heady scent of freedom creeping into the train, mingling in a friendly manner with the swirl of boiled noodles, limp cabbage and salty fried snacks of the passengers around me.

Taoyuan. Jhongli. Hsinchu. A parade of pictures. 桃園 中壢 新竹 Then, 竹南.

Jhunan.

The parochial train station, devoid of a single sign in English, spat me onto the pavement along with a bustling shoving crowd.

Within a few minutes the throng had dispersed. Only I was left, and in front of me, a short middleaged woman with the black bob of a school girl was standing next to a large black car. Her stature had prevented her from noticing me amongst the general disgorgement of the station, but as soon as she saw my blonde hair and blue eyes, she rushed forward, a chattering bob-haired midget.

In a babble of Chinese, she wrest my bag from me and shepherded me into the car. I mentioned the name of Catherine, the woman I