The Uninvited Read Online Free PDF Page A

did someone at Jenwai commit a sin slash transgress ?’
    He didn’t answer directly. ‘You please one and then you offend another. It’s like being torn into small pieces, you understand?’ I didn’t. Professor Whybray always advised: when in doubt, say nothing. So for a while we ate in silence. Sunny Chen continued to add more salt to every mouthful he took. In between he sipped green tea. ‘I think we make a big mistake about ghosts,’ he said suddenly. ‘We think they are from the past. We think they are all dead. But they are alive. And some of them are not even born yet. They are travellers.’
    ‘Travellers?’
    ‘Yes! They move about.’ His voice caught in a strange choke. ‘They go wherever they like. They enter your body and make you do things.’
    I’m not proud of my reaction, which was to register his welling tears and look away.
    Through the window, forked lightning cleaved a blinding white slash across the sky’s deep grey, chased by the cymbal-crash of thunder. A tourist coach drove past, headed for the National Museum: I recognised the ideograms on its destination plate. Chen’s raw emotion was very desperate. And for me, awkward to contemplate. A behavioural psychologist such as Stephanie Mulligan would have known what to do or say. I did not. So I reached in my briefcase for the lime-green praying mantis I’d pre-creased on Arran and started constructing at Manchester airport. While Sunny Chen recovered himself and paid the bill, I did the last twenty-eight folds and presented the paper insect to him with both hands and a small bow of the head.
    ‘A gift.’
    It seemed to cheer him. ‘I want to take you somewhere,’ he said. ‘I will show you what I mean about the spirits.’
    Outside, we caught another taxi: he had a brief conversation with the driver and we drove through dense Taipei traffic. The rain stopped and the sky cleared. Chen seemed absorbed in his own thoughts. He didn’t say where we were going. The hotels and department stores of downtown gave way to suburbs, then a netherland of factories, silos, warehouses and repair workshops. Finally, after twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds, we took a fork to the right and began to climb upwards into the mountains that ringed the city, heading west towards the district of Yang Ming Shan. Six and a half minutes later the taxi driver asked Sunny Chen a question about the precise location of our destination and he answered distractedly, pointing. The storm had cleared completely, replaced by piercing sunshine. Rocky outcrops and feathered trees and small rubbish dumps exhaling coils of smoke dotted the roadside. Eventually, the taxi took a left turn down a narrow side road flanked with high bamboo. After three minutes and five seconds we slowed and entered a gateway into a concrete car park with weeds pushing through the cracks. The rainwater was evaporating in the sunshine: you could see the rising vapour. The driver parked under a tree with coarsely corrugated fan-shaped leaves and Sunny Chen told him to wait for us. I was pleased by how much Chinese I could understand.
     
    The shrines hugged the earth, so it took me a while to register what we had entered. There must have been a hundred or so monuments in marble, granite and cement, scattered across the hillside overlooking the city. Up here, we were right on the edge of the fairy ring. Distant enough from the sprawl of humanity to see the scale and enterprise of it. Around us, the sunlight danced on the puddles left by the storm.
    ‘Good feng shui,’ said Sunny Chen, spreading his arm wide to indicate the view. It was spectacular. Beneath a blue sky streaked with wisps of cloud squatted the great urban crater: a centrifuge of money, metal, glass and cement, of malls and sports centres and arterial roads dotted with the pinpricks of cars, emanating a faint hum. A heat-haze scrolled over the glittering ceramic rooftops of the outer suburbs. You couldn’t see any human life