On correct "grammars"

An interesting article in the Guardian slamming proscriptivists who make out that "grammar" is important to learn for some reason.

Rosen clearly has some understanding of linguistics but muddies the water a little bit. The sub didn't do him any favours because the head is plain wrong. It's not that there's no correct grammar; it's that there are as many correct grammars as there are fluent speakers of a language.

In the common parlance, "grammar" is just "correct English", which encompasses grammar, punctuation and spelling. It largely concerns itself with written English, where it does make some sense to talk about "correct English" because there is a written standard. Of course, it also makes sense to talk about correct punctuation because "eats, shoots and leaves" really does mean something different from "eats shoots and leaves" (add the Oxford comma, which does not matter but is correct in US English, if you are an American).

Rosen is implying that there are as many grammars as there are speakers, which is to some extent true, but rather unhelpful because clearly there are a group of rules that we all follow. Most utterances are well formed for all fluent speakers, and certainly in the case of English, most if not all native speakers share a more restricted and formalised grammar. That you don't possess your gerunds doesn't really mean much in speech (sounds the same either way), and even if I do say "I en't doing it", I do know that the "correct" way to say it is "I am not doing it".

A speaker's understanding of the shared underlying rules of English is called their competence. Generally, speakers cannot express, and do not consciously know, what this competence consists of. But you don't need to know what the word "pluperfect" means to use the tense correctly. All native speakers who do not have some pathology are about equally competent in their language, although those competences can differ. What I'm saying here is that no one walks around with a deficient set of rules unless they have a damaged brain.

You acquire competence when you learn a language, and you acquire it from the people closest to you first. So your competence in the language you speak is patterned on the competence implied in your carers' and then your peers' language. I say implied, because we do not express our competence directly. It is the underlying set of rules that shape our performance: the utterances that we deliver to others who then understand us or do not. Naturally, the closer our competences, the closer our understanding. We are hardwired to determine and internalise the competence of those nearest to us.

So people who have a lot of contact with each other have very similar "grammars". After all, we want others to understand what we say, so we're motivated to play by the same rules they do.

Complicating matters is that you can have more than one grammar that you've internalised. Obviously, if you speak French fluently, you have internalised French grammar, but less obviously, you may, and in most communities that are connected even relatively strongly to a broader community, people do have two grammars internalised for the same language: their dialect and the standard version of that language.

So when we say that Cockneys have "bad grammar", what we are saying is that they are using their common, local grammar and not the broader, standard grammar. They are clearly not incorrect to do so, and their grammar is not "bad".

However, people who are not well exposed to the standard may well have a faulty standard grammar, simply because their exposure to it has not been sufficient for them to infer its rules correctly. Also, there can be a mismatch between standards: standard English and standard Australian English are very close, but standard Indian English is in some ways quite different. The Indian speakers are not "wrong" in any real sense. They are simply not speaking the same language as we are.

This is one source of the problems we have with call-centre operators, although another is much more important. Alongside the rules used to construct sentences are other rules that define the sounds that are allowed in a language. Whereas standard English grammar is widely shared among us, it's hard to say there is a standard English phonology or prosody. (Prosody is the rhythm, stress and intonation of languages: in other words, how the sounds are deployed in varying utterances, rather than what they are, which is phonology.) The same principles do apply: we have accents like those of the people around us because we try to emulate the sounds they are using because we know they are meaningful. However, whereas using the "wrong" grammar can quickly make sentences poorly formed and unintelligible, using the "wrong" sounds does not.

For instance, in standard English, we aspirate "t", "p" and "k" before a vowel when they are word initial, but it doesn't change the meaning of a word if you do not. We do not aspirate them after an "s", but it would not make any difference if you did. These two sounds are allophones of the phoneme "t" and the difference between them is not "phonemic". In many languages, the difference is phonemic and using the wrong sound does change the meaning. Using the "wrong" allophone will sometimes make you sound "wrong": it's distinctive of the English accent in French that we wrongly aspirate word-initial stops -- the sound at the beginning of English "party" is different from the sound at the beginning of French "parti". The difference does not affect meaning: Frenchies will still know you mean to say the word for party (or gone, depending which of those homophones you are using).

In the foregoing, it's important to realise that English speakers are attempting to replicate the phonological competence of French speakers (those from Paris, because we are taught the Paris accent that is standard in French at school) and in fact we do, even though we use a "wrong" allophone. Our performance of "parti" is correctly interpreted by native listeners as representing underlying /p/.

However, our tolerance for allophones is stretched by incorrect prosody. Semi-fluent French speakers can misuse stress quite badly without affecting comprehension, simply because they are not speaking too quickly. Fluent speakers make fewer mistakes in prosody because the prosody competence they are attempting to reconstruct is the one we use. Part of becoming fluent in English for French people is learning the correct stress patterns in English, which are very different from those in French. Part of our learning French is the opposite: learning how to make our sentences have the "contours" of French, not English.

Here is the big problem with call-centre workers and other fluent Indian English speakers. They are not making a mistake. In their home environment, their English is entirely comprehensible. But it is not always to us. Why? The reason is that they have not in fact tried to internalise our prosody, but have internalised the prosody of a different standard: that of English speakers in their region. When I listen to J, an Indian in our office who has excellent English and understands everything said to him, I find him hard to understand, not because his English is not good but because his prosody mimics that of his home language, Malayalam, and not mine.

There's a premium in India on learning American English. Consequently, higher-class Indians who have had a high-quality education are perfectly understandable to us. They have been taught by people who have internalised American prosody (which is very similar to English prosody even if phonetics causes our accents to differ), either because they are Americans or because they are Indians who have been taught by Americans. (Or by English, Canadians or Australians, all of whom share a common prosody, but probably not by South Africans, who do not -- their prosody is strongly influenced by that of Dutch, which is different.)

So when you cannot understand the Indian guy in the office, it's not because his "grammar" is bad. It's because his prosody is! We could probably tolerate the different phonology (we do when Americans talk to us) but when it is coupled with wrong rhythm and stress, it's hard for us even to pick out words from the sounds (that's what prosody is for). That prosody is important in language use is beyond question: the reason that we struggle to learn languages like French, and that we complain that we can't pick words out of rapid speech is that French has a different prosody from English: if Frenchies spoke with English prosody we'd easily recognise the words.

Kindred

Stuck in a dreary office under artificial light, I am listening over
and over to Burial's Kindred and I am back home in London, transported
by his brilliant re-creation of the world I once walked in.

How did he know how much I yearn for my home, for the magical city I
once called home? How did he paint such an accurate picture not of how
it looks or even how it sounds, not how it feels, not even that, but
how it is to be there?

Music to sigh to, it is deeply romantic, nostalgic without
sentimentality but without the cynicism that blights modern music.

Were it a full album, it would be very hard to see another album
beating this for album of the year, and although this could not exist
without the music it mutates and builds on, I doubt I will hear
anything fresher or more innovative any time soon.

The other night, driving Zenella to her mum's, I was playing Kindred.
Suddenly, I said to her, in ten years, get out of this place, Zenella.
Don't be stuck here. She didn't say anything in return.

The road to hell

Sometimes I have a dream, we respect each other for the good we are and can do, for the love we bear, because it is our currency, and we work together so that none of us despairs, none of us loses, none of us has a life that does not fulfil us.

Then I wake up and get back on the treadmill that is all life is, where we are measured in money and instead of an angel of light, I find myself to be a worn-out middleaged man trapped in purgatory by a woman who was and is shamelessly selfcentred.

I wish that I could forgive her because forgiveness is golden, but every day is a reminder that my heart cannot find ease in this sweating trashpile, where I am condemned to pointless anger because I am small and cannot bloom.

Once a girlfriend said to me that one of the reasons she was dumping me was that I lacked ambition. I wanted to say, But I have the ambition to love you for the rest of my days. And foolishly I thought that was actually something valuable and real. But you can't put dollars on it, and I can't deny that dollars fuel the good life. You can't feel bad that a person wants the good life, and thinks you will be a stumbling block, rather than an enabler.

And it is true. I have never been much good for anyone and good intentions really do pave the road to nowhere, if not hell.

***

I wonder whether she would say to me now, But you are just lazy. Because don't you have the capability? Don't you have the power if only you could flick the switch?

But I am putting words in her mouth because I want to understand why people have stopped loving me. So I interpret their silences and omissions in ways that make sense, knowing what I do about myself.

It has to make sense. No wonder people believe in gods. A world without reason, so abstract and heartless, seems too hard to bear.

In the deep

Three months after we parted, for three days, I had each day a phone call from someone who didn't say a word. I couldn't even hear their breathing. At first, I wondered whether it was a robot, calling in the hope of being picked up by an answering machine, but they stayed connected for a while.

Who are you? What do you want? It seemed pointless to ask because somehow I knew that they wouldn't answer, and they didn't.

On the fourth day there was no call and I missed that silent communion.

Some days later, walking on the front street of my town, a woman -- a girl you'd call her in less liberated times -- approached me and asked for help.

She did not ask for money. She said, Can you help me? But I took it for begging and walked on. She did not ask twice. I had barely even seen her. All she was, a flash of blonde hair and a white scarf.

I like to think I am a generous person but I did not stop.

A couple of days later, I was walking along the same street and I saw a piece of white cloth across the road from me. Could it have been her scarf? I couldn't say and I wasn't curious enough to cross over to look.

It was just trash.

A few months later I became ill. I did not know what it was but I felt drained and feverish. I visited the doctor, but he was not very interested. He seemed tired and dispirited. I felt like I must be wasting his time. He sent me for tests.

I did not go for the tests. I went to bed instead and stayed there for a couple of days and felt better.

In the woods near my home, birds sang in the trees. As I walked, the sun was refracted by the leaves, bright where it felt its way through. The birdsong lifted me; I felt better than I had for a while. I realised I had been spending too long in the house. I resolved to change things.

But I didn't. It's easier to promise than deliver.

Some time in the next week I thought I saw the same girl from the window of a train but it was going so quickly that she disappeared from view without my being able to get a clear picture.

Or had she even been there? Sometimes ghosts wander in the space that you can only see from the corner of your eye.

I had been having dreams of riding on a horse. I had never done that so I didn't understand the dream but there I was, galloping in some fresh meadow. I could hear the beat of the hooves and the breath that steamed from the horse's wide nostrils. I could hear the birds echoing in the woods as I walked. I could hear my own heart beating, feverish, sweating in a dark night that seemed never to end.

Some days later, walking on the front street of my town, a woman -- a girl you'd call her in less liberated times -- approached me and asked for help.

I stopped to see what she wanted and before I knew it we were kissing among the leaves that fell from the trees in the woods where birds sang and the shards of light threatened to blind me.

I could feel the leaves against my back and drifting across my face. I could feel the leaves in my mouth, the smell of wet earth and the salt from a sea that I could hear but not see.

A couple of days later, I was talking to a friend who was telling me that he had seen you a week or so ago and you were fine and had lost a few pounds.

I did not remember that you even had a few pounds you could lose but when I tried to recall your body, all I could see was arched white skin, and in my ears was rushing water, rain on the roofs of the houses in my street.

There is lightning in the night when I return home but I'm not afraid, although the electric air is lifting the hair on my arms and the rain does not relent the whole way from the station to my front door.

I dry myself with a towel, the rough cotton feels like it may rasp all the skin from my body, and I am thinking about what you would find beneath it.

Some days later, walking on the front street of my town, a woman -- a girl you'd call her in less liberated times -- approaches me and asks for help and I want to say, Hey, I cannot help myself so what can I do for you? but the words echoing in my head sound so crass that instead I shake my head and keep it bowed as I walk away.

Wait, wait, she is saying, but I am wishing it would not be too strange just to run.

Wait, wait, I only wanted to ask...

I am breathing hard. I want to stop and still myself, bring my breath back into my body, enclose everything I have ever released, swallow my existence and cease to be.

All there is is the sound of my breath. Are you okay? All there is is the sound of my heart cascading symphonies of life. Are you okay are you okay are you okay.

I realise I do not know where I am. I have been walking without looking where I was going. I am deep in it, lost in a place I should know but there's no signpost, no clue, and finally I say

Yes, what can I do?

DR

Drug the boy not

Interesting
article in the NY Times about the ADD drugs that it has become
fashionable to poison our kids' heads with. Mrs Zen wants Naughtyman
to be drugged. I am totally and implacably opposed to it. I will never
allow it no matter how much the school lies about how it will help
him.

Of course when tested in the lab, drugs such as Ritalin have been
shown to improve concentration. We all know that stimulants can help
you focus. As a oneoff. (Who didn't scoff Pro Plus when cramming?) But
what has been less studied (why would a pharma company even care about
it?) is the long-term damage done to a child's neurons by being
constantly stimulated.

One of the key quotes in the article for me was this:

"One of the most profound findings in behavioral neuroscience in
recent years has been the clear evidence that the developing brain is
shaped by experience."

One of the areas in which I and Mrs Zen differed to the point of
screaming matches was her parenting of Naughtyman. I believed she
damaged him by not treating him like a "normal" little boy. Not that
she didn't also do good (he has real issues that have been helped by
some of the help she has acquired for him), but she often acted as
though she had a mild version of Munchausens by proxy. She decided
when he ws first born that Naughtyman was fragile, and then proceeded
to make him fragile. Then she diagnosis shopped so that she could
match what she felt about Naughtyman with whatever she found on the
web. (She did the same with me: apparently I have Asperger syndrome,
which would be news to anyone who knows me. In case you are not au
fait with Asperger's, think Sheldon in the Big Bang Theory and you'll
get the picture.)

In some ways he is fragile. Most kids are. They are sensitive and need
a lot of love and care. But he is also clever, cunning even,
manipulative. He pursues what he wants by any means he has available.

A big area of concern is food. He won't eat what the other kids eat.
It remains my view that the biggest error in parenting Mrs Zen made
was to give Naughtyman separate meals from the girls. We all have to
eat things we don't like much when we are kids. We all have to try new
things. Except Naughtyman does not. He is able to refuse because he
knows she will cave and give him what he wants.

Last night, I gave him mash. He used to eat mash but now he cries if
he's given it. Mrs Zen says he will eat "orange" mash made from
potato, sweet potato and whatever else, so long as it's just right. If
it isn't, he will refuse to eat it.

I make him eat it. It's a war because he is used to getting his own way.

So he starts gagging. Naughtyman, I say, that won't work with me. I
know you're faking.

He stops. I say to B, he does this gagging thing to the point of
spewing so that he doesn't have to eat things. B is sceptical. The
girls confirm that they know he's faking. They say he goes to the
toilet and spits his food out, pretending to be sick.

But his psychologist said he's ultra sensitive, and some foods may
give him a bad mouthfeel. I laugh, because it doesn't seem like
there's a biscuit, chocolate, cake or lolly made that he doesn't like
the feel of in his mouth.

I am not sure how to resolve Naughtyman's issues, although I'm sure
many, even if not all, are resolvable. I feel like anything I do is
bound to be undone week to week. If I try to make him try new foods,
she will undermine me by letting him eat baked bean sandwiches for a
week; if I try to get him to stay in his own bedroom, she will undo
the good by letting him sleep with her, as I'm told he does every
night.

I am concerned that she will have him prescribed ADD drugs behind my
back, because she "knows best". She does not. Although I do not think
for a moment she has anything but the best intentions toward any of
our children, I do think she hurt Naughtyman, and the girls, by
treating him as though he was disabled from the moment he was born.
(And it has hurt the girls. They hate that he's treated as though he's
more special than them. Now it's hard to feed Zenella too because she
has started to not like things she once ate. It's clear that she is
hoping to get the special treatment that Naughtyman has always had by
acting like him: she often complains that "Naughtyman is allowed to do
it but I'm not". Luckily, Zenita has reacted in the opposite way: she
becomes ever more obliging in the same hope. All they have ever needed
though was to be treated evenhandedly.)

My view remains too that Naughtyman should be shown how to get what he
wants in ways that aren't so dysfunctional. He should be shown strong
boundaries. Kids don't start thinking you don't love them if you're
firm with them: generally, they respond well, because you are, after
all, showing you care. Naughtyman possibly would respond to slightly
tougher love. But I often feel, what's the use? Any good I do will be
undone the next week. In this way I've become complicit in his
misparenting, but I don't really know how to fix it. Mrs Zen refused
to talk about the children in a serious way when we were together and
she still refuses to. Naturally, I understand that when you feel
bitter about someone, it's easy for conversations to degrade into "you
did, I did, you didn't, I didn't". But that doesn't necessarily mean
you shouldn't try.

Repost: Canaries

The bang and the clatter. The rattle and the wheeze.
Bang, clatter. Rattle, wheeze.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
He is a man. He is a man who is smacking that cheap, plastic keyboard.
He is a man of thirty-seven, thirty-eight years – I’ve never asked, never cared to ask – who shows the keyboard who is boss.
Fuck it. Fucker. Fuck it. Fucker. The bang and the clatter. He stops. Sucks his teeth. The rattle and the wheeze. Fuck it. Fucker.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
He is getting the minutes in there by some sort of two-fingered Morse code, I swear. He is a man among men. You'd think he could have learned to touch type. Bang. Bang. He is fierce.

I am fierce. I stalk the corridors a mighty warrior. I hunt the prey. I jerk my hips like a savage when I get the picture of the pool secretary. Then I remember the cameras and stop it. Stop it, stop it. Is she begging or teasing? Wanting it really. I catch sight of myself in the glass panels.

No natural light touches me nine to one, two to five. I breathe the breathings of those who have breathed before me, and when I am done with it, the system takes my air for them to breathe once more. The building hums gently. The air tastes strange. Everyone but me has bad breath.

Fuck it. Fucker. Fuck it. Fuck it. Everyone is breathing the air I have breathed and their breath is worse every day. They are talking under their breath and under that oppressive weight what they say never rises above a mutter. A murmur. Fucker. Bang. Fucker. Bang. Fucker. Bang.

*

This is how we compete. Someone is talking about targets. I am looking at a spot on the table. If I look harder, ever harder, the voice becomes a drone, the drone a hum, the hum indistinguishable from the aircon, the aircon a whisper of nothingness. I am glaring at the spot on the table. Glaring.
Someone asks me something. I haven't a clue. Yes, I say. I nod. Yes, and a nod. Nod, nod.
The drone begins again. They’ll send the minutes. He’ll send the minutes. Action. I find out what I agreed to when I see the minutes. I don't care. This is how we compete. Say yes, nod, move on. I can vanish into the spot on the table. I can vanish and they won't know I've gone. They will keep on putting the money into my account at the end of every month and they will not know I've vanished. Bang. Clatter. This is what you agreed. I don't know. I just nod, yes, nod, and read the minutes.

Someone is talking about targets and I am wondering if time began or whether the world has always been. But I'm thinking, in here time begins at nine. There is the world out there, beyond these four walls, and the world in here. The same rules do not apply. We are sealed off from the rest of it. We are breathing the air we’ve breathed.

Someone is talking about targets and I am watching the pulse in his neck. I wonder whether anyone could stop me if I dived across the desk and bit through his neck.

I need sharper teeth.

*

I am looking at my teeth in the mirror. My shirt feels uncomfortable. I pull it, I tug it, I move it around, but it bunches. I have to pull it out from my trousers. I glance up. I wonder whether they have cameras in here. You’d think it would be wrong. Wrong. But what is wrong? They have cameras in every corridor. If they want to watch you shit, they can.

The door opens. A guy walks in. He knows me. I know him. We are nodding. Nod, yes, nod. Hey. Hey hey.

He doesn't ask why I have my shirt pulled out. He doesn't even look curious. I tuck it back in. I look at his prick as I walk out the door. Not a long look, just a sneaky peek. It is small and the foreskin hangs over the glans.

If there is a camera in the washroom, they've seen my looking at another man's cock. I don't know what they will make of that. I don't know what the rule is for that.

*

Bang. Bang. Bang. BANG.

The end of his typing hangs in the air. He is breathing heavily. He has chased it down, hunted it, killed it, skinned it and fucking roasted it. The minutes. They are done.

If I could see through the walls of this room – do you still call it a room when it is so big? – I would not see the forest, I would not see the hills. But if I could stand up, on the roof, I could see far enough, far enough to see beyond the grey, to another, whole world. I could breathe.

What the fuck am I thinking about? He passes me a copy of the minutes. He has been talking to me. I have been nodding. Yes, I say. It's amazing how often yes is the right thing to say.

If I could only climb up the sheer face of the glass outside, reach the roof and breathe. If I could get high enough, just for a moment, I could see the forest, I could see the hills. They must be there. Even if in here there is no forest, out there…

Yes, I’m saying. Yes, yes. I nod. But what the fuck am I thinking about?

*

I am thinking it over. The figures are not right. Someone has changed the figures. I am thinking over the figures. Who would I tell? If I wanted to tell, who would I tell about the figures? I am trying to think who would care.

Someone has stolen a large amount of money, I’m almost sure. I am trying to think who would care. The same amount of money passes into my account at the end of every month. I'm trying to think who would care that someone has changed the figures.

I can see my reflection in the monitor. I am looking at my teeth. They are flat and blunt, not the teeth of something that lives in the jungle. I need sharper teeth before I start to care.

These figures don't look right, I say. But I am not sure anyone has heard me. I am not sure I said it aloud at all.

*

When we are born, we are the whole world and everything in it. Then our lives, one long process of finding out that others have made the world, and the space they have left for us in it grows smaller, ever smaller, until it is a speck of nothing, blowing in the wind.

I am looking at my teeth, reflected in my monitor. It is close to five o'clock. I should file my teeth like a savage. It is five o'clock. I should leave.

Repost: Fu Manchu and the Golden Phoenix

Some years ago, long before he became Fu Manchu, Fu learned the secret of extending life.

He stole it – although he claimed it was fair exchange – from a sect of monks whose commune he swept and cleaned for seven years. The monks, peculiarly for their sort, did not sweep and clean their own quarters. They had lost the discipline. Their order had once had a strong discipline, a rigid and some would say harsh regimen: gruel, manual labour and an obedience that would have appealed to the very soul of old Kong. But in those times of easy living, the scions of gentlemanly families, who as you would expect made up the most part of the monastery’s complement, would have no truck with anything that might dirty their hands – preferring to pass their days in meditating and playing cards – and it became necessary to hire a boy for the job. Fu was that boy.

He wanted to tell Harry Landers, as he fastened the handcuffs on to the steel bar above his head, that he only stole the secret because the monks, degenerates all, had replaced him with a woman, their order having fallen so far from its ideals as to permit the defilement of the monastery with a female. But he doubted not only that Landers could grasp the intricacies of Chinese society of that time, although Landers did claim to be Oxford’s foremost Sinologist (which Fu did not credit, Landers’ putonghua having shown itself more than once to be lacking, unless the importance of China as an area of study had very much declined since he had last visited), but also that Landers would welcome the distraction from the serious business of figuring out how to escape from the fiendish end Fu had prepared for him.

Sometimes, in a darker hour, Fu felt he might just as well shoot them, these blowhards who came to foil his cunning plots for world domination, but it was one of the few pleasures his dwindling years afforded him to spend long hours in imagining the most fiendish of end.

He left Landers strung up by the wrists, and walked out on to the verandah of the mountain hideaway. He had built it himself, twenty years before. He enjoyed the physical work of cutting the wood, shaping it. It kept him supple and focused the mind. He had learned the art of carpentry and joining from a man in Shanghai who had built houses for merchants who had made money in opium. The carpenter had struggled with his conscience. He knew the money he was paid was dirty, that it derived from others’ misery. He knew that the merchants sometimes had one another beaten, assassinated even. He knew they were not good men. He found it hard to bear.
Fu Manchu reflected that a man can always choose. The opium does not choose the smoker. Fu knew that well. For many years he had been a dope fiend, hanging around the slums of one of the numberless cities of the south, hoping to destroy himself, to eradicate himself in opiate oblivion. It didn’t work. Fu had a core, an inner light, which no matter how he tried he could not extinguish. He blamed his youth in the monastery.

On a dark night – unseasonally dark, you might say, for July in Shanghai, but the clouds covered the moon and made it a night for evildoing – Fu Manchu drowned the carpenter in a bucket. The carpenter had been washing his face. Fu knew a fork in life’s road when he saw one, and pushed down the carpenter’s head. With all his strength he pushed the carpenter down. When he was dead, he threw his body into the harbour from a shaded boardwalk. The carpenter barely made a splash.

Fu took the carpenter’s business and expanded it quickly and ruthlessly. His strategy was simple. Some of his competitors he killed. In those times a man could disappear and hardly be missed, if you had the will to make him gone and a dark night for the deed. Fu had the will and as the year drew on, the nights became dark enough for any desperate thing a man felt he had to do. Other competitors he frightened with sorcery, which is to say by using thinly veiled threats cloaked in the melange of smoke, mirrors, blood and thunder that impresses the less educated, or did back then, before schooling became more available to the lower classes. By the close of the year, Fu had a monopoly on traditional housebuilding on the waterfront. But clouds were gathering. Soon the Europeans – who had been only an occasional, pitiable presence, mostly in the form of crazed priests, whose own version of sorcery, with its own thinly veiled threats (which Fu somewhat admired for their ferocity but scorned for their lack of personality) gripped the peasant mind of many of Fu’s workers, to his great delight, because they ceased to agitate for better conditions, having come to believe that their reward was assured in another life – began to encroach into all areas of trade. The worst of them was that they despised the wooden houses that the merchants had always loved. They held to a peculiar belief that the solidity of stone was the right medium to express wealth rather than the organic beauty of wood.

Fu knew he had two choices. Kill every European who came or change track in his business. Fu did the research. It seemed clear that Europeans were tenacious where they were not subtle. Still, he felt it would be somehow noble to kill them on principle. The meddling fools seemed to believe they had a right to the wealth of the whole world, and would trample the locals underfoot, destroy their customs and traditions, to get their grasping hands on it. There were many unemployed coolies on the waterfront whom it proved easy to inspire to a grudge against Westerners. Soon Fu had a small army of thugs, who would assassinate the European businessmen who were becoming so prominent in Shanghai. The thugs grew ever more enthusiastic. They burned and looted godowns, churches and houses; they even swam through the choppy water of the harbour to climb like rats up the anchor chain of the Europeans’ boats, to rob them of the merchandise they brought as well as that they intended to take away. Chief among the imports was opium, and Fu quickly found he owned several hundred pounds of it. He did not wish to enter the drugs trade, having been ensnared by opium himself and recognising it for the evil it was, but neither did he wish to waste the goods that he had so the scruple proved surmountable.

Fu Manchu’s thugs were not often caught. When they were, they did not speak his name, because they feared him more than any torture the authorities offered them. Still his name came to be known, and the Europeans, who had been making great profits from the opium trade, began to think that he was the worst of things in their universe – bad for business.

So they began to send their agents, resourceful although not particularly intelligent men, to find and if possible eliminate Fu Manchu. Over many years they came and he amused himself with the game of setting them ingenious puzzles, watching them blunder through Shanghai and the surrounding countryside, bemused and lost children, his playthings. He had amassed a very large fortune and employed many thousands of men. It became obvious to him that he could, if he chose, become ruler of all China, which was becoming more and more complacent of its power and, in truth, was needing only the gentlest of pushes into instability. From there, how could he be stopped, were he to arm his nation with the latest weaponry, easily purchased from the Europeans, who would sell anything to anybody if the price was right, if he wished to conquer the entire world?

But something held Fu back. He began to doubt he could rule the world and remain the shadowy figure he liked to present. He did not seek the limelight. He had managed these many years not to be known, just to be a name – not even his real name. The people who could correctly identify him could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and each of them could be eliminated in an instant if he chose. Periodically he had them eliminated anyway, just to be sure. But if he had to inspire a nation of millions, he would need to be a figurehead. There would need to be rallies, conferences, meetings. Meetings! Fu did his business in smoky rooms, speaking from behind a curtain. He began to doubt you could conquer the world from a smoky room.

The view from the verandah was splendid. The low hills and wooded valleys around Fu’s hideout shone with late spring rain. The air, fresh, with hints of pine and jasmine, made a promise of new life that even Fu, bitter as he was, could not fail to respond to. He was glad that he had begun to make the puzzles that little easier, the traps slightly more escapable, so that the European agents would at least have a chance. Their ends could be, and often were, ghastly, usually involving sharp blades, for which Fu would confess a penchant. But they were not entirely doomed. Fu had come to feel he should share some of his own ability to escape fate, that they too should not necessarily have their lives curtailed. He did not know why. He had begun to have the idea that they were like children, and he was no more than their teacher, a guru of pain. Certainly they did not understand that wisdom must be earned, which explained why he found it so easy to entrap them in the first place – they never had the experience or plain dog sense to try to cover their tracks when they arrived in China. They blustered about Shanghai and Guangzhou, shouting the odds with the locals, many of whom owed something to Fu, and could repay their debt by sharing what they heard. The fools might just as well publish a circular, Fu thought, so brazen were they.

But it tired him. He bowed his head over the rail of the verandah. He could hear the cries of Landers, who had realised what was planned for him. Fu sighed. What use was life’s game of chess, if one’s opponents must each time be taught the rules, over and over? He walked down from the verandah, on to the path that led down from his hideaway, down through the forest, over the old bridge and into town. He would eat some rice and pass perhaps an hour in contemplation of the people passing by.

*

“The world shall hear from me again,” says Fu Manchu, wishing that this time he will not escape from the abyss and return to one of his hideaways to lick his wounds and once more work up a plan to make himself master of perhaps not the whole world but at least the corner of it he coveted. But he knows that Landers, who did not have the sense to look behind him when he entered a dark room, can inevitably only confront him by the cliffside.

Fu curses. He doesn’t even know whether he’s cursing himself, the Europeans or the world for existing for him to dream of owning. Or nothing at all.

He will turn end over end, his voice fading, until the watching agent can no longer hear it at all, and will not see, will not know that Fu Manchu has concealed a parachute, can fly, will live a thousand years and a thousand more, always striving, always thwarted, always alone.


DR 2004