The Way We Were

By Peter H. Burgess and Petra Leong

The stories are original and mostly set in Asia. They often involve a supernatural theme.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Feb 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543756890

Peter H. Burgess

About the Author Peter Burgess was born in England in 1945. He was educated at schools and university there. He studied English at university and earned an Honours degree in English and Philosophy. He went into teaching in English government schools shortly after graduating from university. He came to Singapore in 1979 to work on a three-year contract for the Ministry of education, teaching in various Junior Colleges. In Junior Colleges he taught General Paper and English Literature to students ranging in age from 17 to 19. He married in Singapore and ended up staying almost forty years, retiring from government service in 2000. Since then he has been in the private education sector. He has a wide experience of teaching English in Singapore. He has also taught in China and Vietnam. He is the author of several books on English grammar, English Literature and Shakespeare. His second language is French. He is married with two grown sons. His hobbies are watching movies, fishing and reading and writing. About the Artist Petra Leong is a Singaporean artist. She paints the world a more colourful and vibrant place. Her paintings inspire love, happiness and smiles. Her paintings are collected by many across the globe. She can be contacted at https://www.facebook.com/PetraLeongArt

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Copyright © 2020 by Peter H. Burgess.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

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Contents

The Man Who Could See Beyond…

Herbert’s Kite

The Black Stone

Rose of Rose Garden

The Ninth Hole

The Gate of Hope

Millie

Shingo’s War

Windy City

Teresa Harlequin

The Promises

The Haunted Kelong

The Face at the Window

Walking on Water

The Way We Were

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The Man Who Could

See Beyond…

Chew Mun Hon nearly died on the operating table at Singapore General Hospital on the afternoon of Friday 13th August, 2002. He was 54 at that time. In fact, you might say he really did die. It really depends on what you or I, or anyone else for that matter, mean by die. There again, life and death are strangely linked, as we will see by what happened to him later.

Mun Hon worked as an office assistant for a car rental company on the second floor of Guthrie House in Fifth Avenue, just off Bukit Timah Road. He was a rather dull, unambitious, unimaginative man who liked routine and had never married. At a few minutes to one o’clock on that fateful Friday, he stepped out of Guthrie House on his way to lunch. He usually ate at the stalls across the road at Sixth Avenue. Other office workers were standing at the kerbside, ready to dash across the road, risking their lives in the constant flow of traffic that zooms up and down Sixth Avenue at almost all times of the day. Mun Hon walked soberly down to the crossing where Sixth Avenue joins Bukit Timah Road. Glancing to his left, he watched an approaching car slow down before stepping onto the zebra crossing. The car did slow but it did not stop. At least it did not stop before it had struck Mun Hon with full force, throwing him high into the air and over the top of the car, from whence he landed on the road, his head landing on his arm as he smashed into the tarmac.

Somebody called an ambulance and some thirty minutes later, Mun Hon was being rushed through the Accident and Emergency Department of SGH to the operating table.

A team of surgeons worked on him, trying to put the broken bits of his body back into the shell that had once been the whole man. The cardio meter in the operating room bleeped rapidly, the needle on the graph rushing up and down as Mun Hon’s heart beat raced to retain its hold on life. Then it slowed to a mere bleep. And at 1.44 p.m. precisely (for the doctor’s glanced at the clock on the wall), the cardio meter was heard to register a loud persistent monotone and the needle stopped moving as his heart stopped beating. Chew Mun Hon was dead. Or so it seemed.

While the doctors moved away from his body, ready to strip off their rubber surgical gloves and call it a day, a last attempt to resuscitate him was made with huge hand-held electrodes applied to his chest. The lifeless body lurched into the air as the current surged through him. Once. Twice. The body threw itself up from the table as the electrodes were applied. On the third attempt, the body arched itself on the operating table, as though Mun Hon was awaking from a deep sleep by stretching himself. The Cardio meter bleeped singly, the needle jumping high on the monitor’s screen. Then, a few moments later, four or five seconds perhaps, it registered a steady, rhythmic beating. Chew Mun Hon had returned from the dead.

They kept him in intensive care for three weeks, then, when he was able to get up and move around on his own, moved him to a general ward for observation for another two weeks. After that, he returned home to his three-room flat in Bukit Panjang. He had sustained several broken ribs, a broken left arm that was now in plaster and yet, miraculously, though he had hit his head hard when he landed after the accident, his skull was left intact, possibly because his left arm had shielded his head from the full impact with the road’s surface.

That he could see beyond was not obvious to him until a fortnight after he returned home from the hospital. It did, however, come to him one Monday morning during a walk he was taking in Lorong Sesuai. He had not returned to work. The doctors had ordered him to take a month’s rest, with weekly visits to the hospital for check-ups and NTUC had sent him a letter announcing that he would receive a handsome $50,000 from the accident driver’s insurance, which left Mun Hon wondering whether he need ever return to work again. And so that Monday morning, he had taken the bus from Bukit Panjang to the fire station beside Southaven condominium and begun his slow trudge up the hill of Lorong Sesuai, that leads through thick forest to the clearing at the top.

He heard voices behind him half-way up the hill. A strange cacophony of sound, boots trudging, shrill screams as of men screaming angry orders in a language he barely recognized and the groans and mutters of exhausted men, occasionally broken by false laughter and deep-throated utterings in English. Mun Hon turned and saw them coming towards him. At first, he thought he was witnessing some scene from a movie that was being shot. Yet it was real enough. But only to his left eye. His right eye saw what was actually there that Monday morning, bright sunlight, an empty road, thick forest on all sides. His left eye was witnessing a group of perhaps thirty emaciated men, bare-chested and wearing filthy khaki shorts, a few wearing Australian army-style slouch hats being herded up the hill by Japanese soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets.

One of the men fell. Three other men tried to drag him to his feet but they were prodded with bayonets by screaming soldiers and had to follow the rest of the work party. The fallen man lay spread-eagle on the road. After the party had moved about ten yards up the road from him, a single Japanese soldier detached himself from the group, walked leisurely back to the fallen man, stood over him grinning down at him, then raising his rifle with both arms above his head, plunged his bayonet through the man’s chest. The Japanese soldier tilted his head back and laughed; then pulled the blade from the man’s lifeless body. He lit a cigarette, kicked the dead man with his muddy boot, and hurried back up the hill to join the others. A huge pool of blood was spreading across the road where the dead man lay.

Mun Hon raced up the hill as fast as he could, driven by fear, loathing and horror. But it never crossed his mind that he needed to alert anyone to what he had just seen. Some instinct in him told him that it had come from beyond the time in which he now lived and breathed.

He rested at the top of the hill. Some cars and taxis came by, some stopping, some parking, a few joggers puffed past him to carry on up the paths that led in to the forest above. He felt a strange throbbing in his left eye, as though the muscles within it were pulling strongly against themselves. Then a blinding headache, more like a migraine, came upon him. He walked over to one of the parked taxis and told the driver to take him home. Half-way down the hill, as the taxi crawled slowly along in low gear to brake against the steep descent, the forest was inscrutable on either side of the road. There was no sign of the dead man, or of the blood from his murdered corpse.

Back at his flat, Mun Hon lay on the bed and closed his eyes. A huge weariness had overtaken him. He fell into a deep sleep and woke at around five in the evening. But he did not feel fresh. True, his headache had gone but he felt exhausted, as though he had returned from some long journey taken on foot across rugged and uneven terrain. He bathed, for his body was unaccountably sweaty, despite the fan being switched to full over his bed while he slept. At around 7p.m., he went downstairs to the food centre at the foot of the HDB block adjacent to his. After his supper, Mun Hon ordered several bottles of beer and sat drinking alone until the place began to close at around 11p.m. He felt light-headed and quite cheerful when he returned to his flat. From his refrigerator, he took another can of Tiger beer from a six-pack, parked himself on the rattan sofa in front of the television and watched Liverpool playing Arsenal. He went to bed shortly after midnight.

He woke up with a start at around 3a.m. His mother was standing at the foot of his bed, smiling down at him. His right eye could see nothing but darkness; yet his left eye could make her out clearly. She was wearing the blue and white floral frock that had been her favourite outfit when he was a young boy in primary school. She was holding something in her hands in front of her. It was his school lunch box with the green base and plain Tupperware top that he knew so well. His left eye was throbbing. Mun Hon did not feel afraid. He knew it must be time to get up and go to school. He must be late. Swinging himself out of bed, he called out to her, I’m late, Mum. Just leave it on the table. He dashed into the bathroom and began to sluice his face with cold water. The effect was only to revive him slightly. He stared at his image in the mirror. And saw her once again. She was standing at the bathroom door. Her image was reflected in the bathroom mirror. She was leaning slightly against the side of the bathroom’s entrance, one arm hanging at her side, the other arm raised so that her forefinger touched her cheek, as though she was watching him fondly. Mun Hon turned around. She was still there. A broad smile crossed her face. She straightened herself and tipped her head sideways slightly in a gesture of fondness.

What are you doing here, Mum? Mun Hon asked. I’ve kept the place nice since you left, haven’t I? She nodded her assent. They sat on the bed together and chatted, all Mun Hon’s sense of urgency about having to get to school having dissipated. She said she was happy where she was now. Dad was there, too. He was a better man now, she said. She left him at dawn saying she had to get back and Mun Hon fell into a restful sleep.

He awoke at around 10 a.m. and later that morning took a taxi to Mount Vernon, where he left a single red tulip that he bought from a vendor outside the columbarium on her grave. He rubbed the back of his left hand fondly over the tombstone of his father and said, I’m sorry, Dad. He heard a sigh behind him. His father was sitting on a bench facing him. But he had changed. Though wearing the white singlet and dark blue shorts that he had always sported in his idle years after he had lost his