The Way We Were: Volume 2

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: Apr 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543757491

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 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.

Toll Free 800 101 2657 (Singapore)

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Contents

The Dripping Tap

The Woman at the Station

The Lost Girl

Jungle Birth

Walk Towards the Light

Albert

The Aboriginal Boy

Ghost Soldiers

False Hopes

The Doll

The Gift

Amber Beacon Tower

The Statue

Timothy

The Witch in the Tree

Terence

The Beautiful Princess

Lucy Snowe

Love Is Blind

Division

Qianhu Miaow

The Beast in the Jungle

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The Dripping Tap

Mrs. Alice Tan, 49, was a good worker. It was her proud and often repeated claim that she never left the office until all the work for the day had been cleared from her desk. Oddly enough perhaps, she admired her boss, who held nothing like the same attitude to his work. He usually came to the office late, frequently with a hangover, and left as soon as he had shoved as much of his workload as he could onto Alice’s desk. Alice had a strong, though somewhat traditional view of proper behaviour in the workplace. It was a secretary’s job to get things done; to make the office run efficiently; it was the boss’s job to entertain clients and bring in business. That was how she thought it should be. If he came to the office late with a sore head, that was because he had been out entertaining clients and drumming up business the night before. If he left early, he was meeting clients. With this thinking, the two got along very well. Neither sought to check on the other in any way and Alice never discovered that her boss, Johnny Tan, 38, spent most of his evenings and a considerable amount of the company’s money in karaoke lounges in Jalan Besar.

Alice was a widow and lived alone in a three-room flat in Commonwealth. Her husband had died of cancer five years earlier and their only son Mark, now 25, had married and moved away to a condominium in Upper Bukit Timah. Alice did not approve of Mark’s wife, for she had no sense of order or priority and kept a very messy and untidy home. A sense of order, priority and tidiness were very close to Alice’s heart. Living alone, Alice was never in any hurry to leave the office in the evening. If the truth were told, she felt more at home in the office than in her flat. At least in the office, she felt needed. Her meals were normally taken at the hawker centre across the road from her office, which was on the third floor of a somewhat shabby building off Serangoon Road. The date 1913 was embossed in the cement on the top floor of the four-storey building.

One evening in January, 2001, Alice was working late as usual. The company was a Marine Supply business and her boss had earlier that day told her to prepare several lengthy invoices and get them into the post as soon as possible. As she worked on her computer, she heard the brass ship’s clock on the wall strike 10 p.m. Then she heard something else. At first she thought it was a mouse and a shudder of fear ran down her spine. But it was only a tap dripping. Across from her desk, in a small adjacent room, was a pantry. In there was a fridge, a microwave oven and a sink. Alice considered the pantry her own domain. She kept it spotlessly clean and stocked with coffee, tea, sugar, bread and biscuits. Her boss rarely went in there. However, her boss’s wife, of whom Alice totally disapproved, because as a mother of three young children she still wore mini-skirts and cleavage-revealing tops, often went in there to make herself snacks on her frequent visits to the office to check on her husband. Alice resented the way she left her dirty cup and plate in the sink for her to wash.

Alice went into the pantry and twisted the handle of the tap more tightly. But after a few seconds, the dripping began again. After a while, Alice noticed that if she ran the tap fully then turned it off, the dripping stopped for a few minutes. That was better than nothing. As she switched off her computer, she left a note for herself the next morning to call a plumber.

Taking her umbrella out of her bag for it was raining hard, she locked up and went down the lift to the main lobby. The Indian security guard wished her goodnight. Moments later, the same guard saw Alice re-enter the building and get into the lift again. It did not come as a surprise to him. Alice was a creature of habit with a somewhat obsessive frame of mind. She frequently thought she had forgotten something on the way to the bus-stop and returned to the office. Very rarely had she actually forgotten the thing she thought she had forgotten. It was just Alice’s way.

What did surprise the security guard was that Alice did not make her usual and expected reappearance moments later. In fact, she did not reappear at all and the guard went to the office to see if she was still in there. But it was locked and there was no sign of the lady.

There was no sign of Alice the next day either. When her boss arrived at work at 10 a.m., the office was still locked. He let himself in with his own keys; sat with his feet up on his desk in his part of the office that was partitioned from Alice’s section by a huge glass window and read the newspaper. It did not in the least trouble him that Alice was not there. Of course, he knew that she was never late but it was not of sufficient importance for him to wonder what might have become of his elderly secretary. He was far more interested in his newspaper. However, as the day progressed and the work began to build up – phones ringing with orders, emails flying in and faxes demanding attention – he became slightly irritated at her absence, if only because it meant him having to do some work himself. So he called her home. But there was no reply. He called several times in the afternoon but still no reply. He piled the faxes onto Alice’s desk and left around 5 p.m.

The next day, Alice did not reappear. Again Johnny Tan called her home several times. Now his annoyance with her was building up. She could at least have called me if she was ill or taking leave, he thought to himself. For several days after that Alice failed to report for work at the office in the morning. After ten days, Johnny’s annoyance was almost volcanic. He was having to stay late in the evening to get the office work done and thus had to forgo a few hours of pleasure with the girls and the booze in the karaoke lounges. Out of sheer desperation, Johnny did something that he had never done in the five years Alice had worked for him. He drove to her house and knocked on her door. There was no reply. A neighbour poked her head around a corner and Johnny asked about Alice. The neighbour replied that she hadn’t come home for about two weeks and that she may have gone to stay with her son or to visit her mother in Malacca.

The next evening, Johnny was sitting in the office alone, trying to make some sense of the Excel files on Alice’s computer. Suddenly there was a loud sound of water running. It was coming from the pantry. Johnny got up and walked over to the pantry door and looked in. The tap was running full blast. But then he saw something that he could not believe. The tap handle turned on its own, as though some invisible hand had been there. There was an almost imperceptible movement of the air and he had a feeling as though something light, lighter than the lightest feather, had brushed against him. He went back to the computer at Alice’s desk and continued to ponder the files. What he had seen and felt did not at first trouble him or excite his curiosity much. There was some rational explanation, he thought to himself, such as the water pressure in the system causing the tap to turn. Ghostly thoughts were far from his mind that night. He was far more interested in getting the money rolling in again so that he could get back to his nightly pleasures.

On his way out of the building that evening, Johnny thought to ask the security guard if he knew anything about the whereabouts of Alice. Only two guards worked the place, one on the day shift, the other at night. So Johnny was told by the Indian guard how Alice had returned to the office several evenings ago and had not reappeared. He described how he had gone to the office to check if she were there but had found the office locked. He concluded that, for some reason, Alice had taken the stairs to the back entrance of the building on her way out that night.

Johnny headed for the karaoke lounge, after calling his wife and telling her he was working late, as usual.

Johnny did have to work late the next evening – very late. The faxes and emails (not to mention the phone calls) were making constant demands for deliveries and customers were getting angry. He was still in the office at midnight. He heard the brass ship’s clock strike the hour and then there was the sound of rushing water again. Standing at the door of the pantry, he saw the tap again turn