Free Easy Peasy by Lesley Glaister

indicating. If he really was here. The idea makes me go cold again. I don’t believe in ghosts. But there was something and it did not come from me. I did not summon Daddy up. I wasn’t even thinking about him. I never would have thought to summon up that smell, his spicy, pipe smoke smell. Not a ghost because I do not believe in ghosts. But maybe a good-bye visit.
    I could have said I love you .
    It was my chance.
    I could ring my mother and tell her I’m going to open the envelope. But it’s half-past two. I cannot ring her now. What if she is sleeping? And she’d only say, ‘Whatever you like.’ Or pretend not to know what I mean, what envelope? She doesn’t want anything to do with waking the sleeping dogs. If I took the envelope, unopened, with me tomorrow and suggested that we look inside together, she would not want to. What’s inside might upset her and then she would blame me. It might make her angry, it might cause a rift between us just when we should be drawing close.
    I open the Atlas again. South-East Asia. Burma. On the map it looks quite innocuous. Area: 261,789 square miles; Population: 20,500,000; Capital: Rangoon. Geographical facts. The shape of it, a frill at the bottom that is the Mouths of the Irrawaddy. I strain my eyes to find the River Kwai, I cannot find it in Burma or in Thailand. It is not there, or if it is, it’s too insignificant to mark. Scale: 1 inch to 158 miles. Think what life is taking place within each flat square inch – the loving and the fighting; the birthing and the dying; the screams of birds. All those beating hearts. Staring at the grid of fine black squares that mesh the page I feel quite dizzy at the concentration of life they represent.
    The tape on the flap of the envelope has gone brittle with age. It is hardly stuck down, easy to remove. But the flap is stuck fast, old glue, old spit, it will not come up. I slit it with the cheese knife, stupidly, in a rush now, and cut my thumb.
    He does not want me to open it. Funny if it was nothing but bills or … old love letters … or money? I stop. Money? Some sort of crime, hence the secrecy?
    Blood is running down my thumb, not a bad cut, a little flap beside my nail. My imagination is running away with me. What do I think he is, was? A great train robber? The sort of cut that stings and catches. I lick away the blood and suck my thumb. The memory of comfort conjured up by the sensation is acute, the ball of my thumb, nestling in the ridged hollow behind my upper teeth. The rhythmic suck comes automatically back though I haven’t done it for – twenty years? My mother never minded me sucking my thumb. My father wouldn’t have noticed, but my Swedish grandfather would scold, tell my mother to smother it in mustard, warn that I’d ruin my teeth. But my teeth are perfectly fine. Nice teeth. Straight. Nicer than Hazel’s actually. Oh get to the point, Zelda. The taste of blood. Get on with it.
    I slip my hand into the manila envelope and pull out a letter and a further envelope, foolscap but folded round its smaller wad of contents. I put this aside and with my thumb back in my mouth, I read the letter:
    Dear Ralph ,
    You will no doubt have me down as an abject coward when you have read this. You have my absolute permission to think ill of me, to think what you like .
    I have done wrong by you 3 times. You entrusted me with a parcel of papers when I was moved from Kanburi to Tarsao thinking they would be safer with me since the Japs were turning the camp over. When we met in London that once in 1948 you expected me to hand over the diaries. I told you that they’d been found and confiscated by guards at Tarsao. I lied. It turns out, Ralph, to be as hard to confess this by letter, and, I hope, from beyond the grave as it were, as it would have been to do so to your face .
    Bear in mind I was utterly demoralized and degraded. Literally demoralized. Suffering from