Easy Peasy

by Lesley Glaister

  I should go to bed, snuggle in with Foxy. The fat envelope is on the table. I could wake Foxy, she might not mind. She might get up and we could open the envelope together and know whatever there is to know.

  This is a special night. This is the night following the day on which my father died. This night will never come again. I will not sleep. I will keep vigil on this night. Keep watch. But for what? It was yesterday he died. And since he died how many others – in this country, in this continent, in this world – how many others have died after him? And how many have been born? How many conceived? All the stopping and starting of souls.

  The telephone. It makes me jump. It cannot ring at this time of night. Swiftly I cross the room and pick it up with a hand that is slippery with sweat.

  ‘Grizzle?’ It is Hazel, her voice thick with tears. ‘I can’t sleep, thinking. I knew you would be awake.’ She sobs into the phone. Answering tears come to my eyes. I don’t know what to say. ‘I keep thinking of him … doing it …’ she sniffs and gulps out the words, ‘Whatever was in his head?’

  ‘I haven’t even thought of that,’ I say. The telephone is wet as if her tears are running from it, welling out of the regular pepper-pot pattern of holes. ‘I’ve been thinking more about the past.’

  ‘Why do you have to say commit suicide? It’s always commit isn’t it? Commit suicide, you can’t say suicide without saying commit. I said it to Colin, Daddy’s committed suicide …’, she wails as she hears herself say it. I can feel her grief in the room with me summoning mine. ‘He did love us, didn’t he?’ she pleads.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Haze, I don’t know.’

  ‘I thought he was here,’ she says.

  ‘What? Me too.’

  ‘He was in the room … I sort of sensed him, of course Colin says I’m projecting but I know. Do you know what I said, Grizzle? I said, “I love you.”’

  ‘I couldn’t say that.’

  ‘And then he was gone.’

  ‘I couldn’t say it.’

  ‘Of course Colin doesn’t believe me.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the tree-house.’

  ‘But then he didn’t see.’

  ‘And Puddle-duck.’

  ‘Poor Mummy.’

  ‘And how he used to scream at night.’

  ‘Poor Mummy. She found him. Imagine that Grizzle, finding him like that.’

  ‘How I could never sleep.’

  ‘And poor us.’ Her voice chokes up again. I hear her blow her nose. ‘What are we going to do without him?’

  We cry on the phone for a minute or two. No words, just sobs and gulps travelling the wires between York and Durham. I hear Colin in the background urging Hazel back to bed. I sniff hard. This can’t go on all night. ‘I’m glad you rang,’ I say.

  ‘I feel so alone.’

  ‘You’ve got Colin.’

  ‘Yes but …’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Is Sybil …?’

  ‘She’s being wonderful. But … I feel alone too.’

  ‘See you tomorrow old bean.’

  ‘Try and get some sleep.’

  ‘Night-night Grizzle.’

  I cry for a bit standing and then sitting. I wipe my nose on my pyjama sleeve. I am glad she rang. Even though our childhood was one long competition, one long fight, Hazel is still my sister. We share something no one else can share, something that cannot be said, that we cannot say, an understanding of what was in and what was not in our lives … of what was underlying but … Oh it is not explicable. It is frustrating. You cannot know what you never had. Oh shut-up! I had a happy childhood. What the hell am I whining on about?

  And there is another feeling in me that I can hardly believe and will not credit. A little wormy feeling of jealousy that he visited her too, that I wasn’t singled out. How can I be so … ghastly? I will not feel it. But if I am feeling that it must mean I believe he really did visit us, after his death. That there is something, some sort of existence after death. Must it? No, no, no … hang on a minute … Or?

  Hazel knows about Puddle-duck too, what we did. I. What I did.

  I pour another glass of wine. It tastes delicious: red velvet against the salt taste of my tears. On the envelope is a smear of blood from my cut thumb. The cut has sealed itself down now like the envelope flap: a narrow red V. I open the inner envelope at last, and, my fingers only trembling the slightest bit, pull out a wad of thin papers and with them a smell of age and grime. The small rectangles are covered in writing, unbelievably minute writing, fuzzy graphite, too smudged and small to read. It must be possible. Not all rectangles, many of the papers are lacy at the edges with holes as if something has been eating them. They make my hands feel soiled. I spread them out on the carpet in front of the fire, grubby, soft, yellowish, like pieces of old skin all mottled with the bruisy indistinct writing. But it is Daddy’s writing. At the edge of one piece I make out a few words until the night falls. The writing slopes like his, the ‘g’ has his characteristic loop that I used to try and copy when I first did joined-up writing. I lean forward, squinting at the impossibly tiny marks. Daddy wrote this, prisoner Daddy, stranger, young man – younger than I am now – unmarried Daddy. I get up and switch on the big light.

  I run my finger-tips over the pages, straining my eyes until I find a page where I can make out a few sentences:

  under a couple of foot wading from bed to latrine, little point, waste sloshing about under beds … alive … mosquitoes breeding even in our hut.

  In the kitchen drawer is a magnifying-glass, I don’t know where from – not something I’ve had a use for before. I go and fetch it, pausing for a moment outside the bedroom door. I can hear Foxy’s sleep; not that she’s snoring, there’s just the thick sound of silent contentment.

  three small bowls of rice today with something green, sea-weed Mac suggested, tasteless. 14 hours bamboo cutting. Hands in shreds. A stomach cramp, stopped, hands on knees waiting for cramp to pass, kicked in back of knee by guard just above worst ulcer … pain like nothing I … so fell beat with stick till I … Wince gave me a smoke. His obstinate cheerfulness an ins (piration?)

  I lift my head. Through the round smeary glass the pencilled words are furry round the edges. I breathe on the glass and polish it with the hem of my pyjama top. I flinch at the first word:

  suicide today, Dutch … poor bugger need hardly have troubled. Elephant to shift bamboo clumps … incredible force and kindness and yet starved and beaten … cholera again … moved … will not be fed … in gut and reeling … came round in hospital hut … amoebic dysentery … by door. At least still

  Each word is an effort to read because of its indistinctness and because of the odd sensation of reading this diary, these words of my father, words he never said I could read; that he might object to me reading: words that he may have forgotten – of reading myself into his nightmare. I take another gulp of wine that is thick in my throat. I will be ill if I don’t stop drinking. I should sleep. Even an hour’s sleep…

  Rain like … inches flooding down … the river bed filling a rage of yellow … Vince … a living skeleton but still smiling … just a kid … losing teeth … bringing me a smoke and half a lime … ulcer to the bone … look of my own bone which is yellowish, to touch it, warm … dressed with a kind of leaf recommended by Chinese women … five funerals today … elephant … the look of … in its eyes…

  My eyes ache. Several pages are completely indecipherable, full of holes and darkly stained, spindly lines and traces of squashed ant or mosquito. Fragments of the paper coming away on my fingers like the soft scales of a moth. The egg-shaped hollows in Daddy’s legs where I put my childish finger. Daddy’s finger touching his own bone. I hold the papers up to the light but for pages it is too far gone to read. Then pages from another time. Earlier? Because the margins of the paper have gone, there are no dates, there is no order to it.

  Read ‘The Happy Highwayman’ by Leslie Charteris. Excellent vocal concert
outside canteen. Jap idea, camp commandant recently said … those who want to be fit are fit whatever the food, those who want to … and so forth. Something in it. Tin with remaining Black Horse cigarettes stolen. What rage. To find I could kill…

  Chosen for party up river tomorrow, beyond Tarsao … rumoured to be more primitive conditions but can hardly believe … walk of twelve hours lost two … ulcer spots starting in four … to blast rock for siding … just at point of despair when dragonfly like green mercury in a thick shaft of sun

  Tomorrow will be a long day. A funny expression, it will be a day of average length but much will be in it: travel and grief and … what is Mummy doing now? Is she sleeping? The doctor will have prescribed her something to help her sleep for a night or two. She will be all right. Soft in a grey blankety sleep, just now she will know nothing.

  could be in hell … but discipline … Vince … if a fly has landed on it throw it away be you starving … if a man is fit enough to dodge a blow he’s fit enough for work … mist wreaths amongst the feathery bamboo … calls of frogs … the damp in my broken … all the time it rains the ground mud with inches of water on top … railway extends beyond Kinsayok they say … rumoured that allied bombers … Bartlett’s funeral … fizz of flies … game with Aussie, Vince, word associations … 11 more cholera deaths men falling like

  I have tried sleeping pills, of course I have tried. At university and again with Guy. ‘You have to sleep, baby,’ he said. Sometimes he would stroke my forehead, the hair back from my eyes to soothe me. He did take care of me. He will be married now to someone else, taking care of someone else. They will have babies. The children will have an architect-designed Wendy house in the garden – or perhaps a tree-house. Once, on holiday in Norfolk, we drove within ten miles of Little Dealing and I persuaded him to take a detour to look at ‘The Nook’. I wanted to show him the tree-house. We rang on the bell but there was no one at home. Feeling like burglars, we let ourselves in through the side gate. squeezed past the dustbins and into the back garden. While I reeled in a blast of nostalgia he studied the construction of the tree-house. ‘Amazing thing,’ he said, ‘exploiting the potential of the tree’s structural qualities … can you see how incredible … the walls built to incorporate the movement of the tree even in a gale.’

  Sometimes I do miss him. Not him but the life I could have had with him. Wife and mother. Mother. Where are the babies I could have had?

  all day long the thin men file past … there is a walk a stiff stumble … I find my own limbs falling into it … to latrine … Vince with incredible kindness … decent and … headache pulse of just under…

  Only these snatches picked out from the papers, nothing much else legible. Only snatches from his experience, from his head, writing it then as if to me now here although there was no me then: the process of communication so strange. Him sitting as he wrote – on a bunk? on the ground? writing by daylight or firelight or what? Writing with a blunt stub of pencil, the paper resting on his knee or a book? And writing to an unknown woman, to his daughter, Zelda. And Zelda reading, in the small hours of the morning following his death. His suicide.

  little difference between those dying of dysentery and avitaminosis in here and those dying of starvation and over-work out there … the songs of birds, plangent

  Plangent is not a word I ever heard him use. It is not his sort of word, it is a poet’s word and his use of it plucks at me inside like fingers on a harp. I could still have them. Babies. I could have three or four. Me? A mother? Ha!

  Sleeping pills did make me sleep but it was dirty sleep, not clean. It did not do the job of real sleep which is like a tide that cleans the shore, smooths down the footprints, the scuffles in the sand, leaves it fresh with maybe a frill of flotsam, seaweed, beached dreams. Drugged sleep is only stagnant. You wake the same with a dry mouth, you mutter and stumble through the day. I would not take sleeping drugs again. Brandy helps sometimes. Sex does, straight after, almost unaware, soft and languid I can slip down – before I catch myself – into the sweet net of it and sometimes, just occasionally, I am cradled all night.

  a roaring rush uprooting the bushes, rolling boulders with deep intermittent rumbles … all manner of … from latrines … rice ration cut … burning oil on water … and quinine … no mail for three months … Mother and home

  Daddy’s mother died when I was ten. We used to visit her in Colchester and I was always car-sick. She loved my mother more than her own son I think. They used to drink sherry and get red-faced in the kitchen, sending out blasts of laughter while everyone was waiting for lunch. When Huw was born she came to stay at ‘The Nook’. I brushed her stiff laquered hair for her and did it in a fancy style. I liked her tiny shoes and her powder-compact with a crinolined lady on the lid and a powdery circle of mirror inside. The powder puff was flesh coloured and grubby at the edges. Its lady-like smell made me sneeze. Her funeral was my first. She died of a stroke. No suffering, my parents said, it’s what she would have wanted, I thought that was a lie. She didn’t want to die. She was in the middle of knitting a cardigan for me.

  I felt sorry for Huw, squirming in his shawl at the funeral in a cold church because she was his only granny and he was too small ever to know her. Mummy’s parents had both died before I was born. She was a late bloom, she said, a surprise, born when her mother was forty-six and her father fifty-eight, their only child. I thought of the photograph of her with her long white plaits. ‘They didn’t know what to do with me,’ she said sometimes and I would think of her on the lawn meeting my father, think of him untangling her kite strings. Before. Before the war. Before he wrote the diary. Only fragments now. Holes right through the last few pages, eaten right through so that there are only the odd words edging the holes.

  Could not walk … skeleton carried up 45 degree … blastings … never a complain … every sinew…

  Belly and … blown … on top of dysen …… carried back on stretch … still no complaint but he is fin … an see it in his ey … at night the cry of a wild cr … the dark like a knife and then he begged … my last … my last streng … Bleak Mid Win … food … cannot … my own hands … heart … black

  I feel sick from the wine and from crouching forward to read. The gas-fire is scorching my side.

  Vince … wooden cross … en by ants, … imm … ately, such greed seething … m the jungle … to sa …… im from agony … the wrong thin …… he right thing … three amputations … do not care now if I d … benign tertian mala … and lost track … cannot hear, quinine … bubble it is … htening … tapioca but

  And on the last page only one word legible: Vince.

  I walk about the flat, past Foxy’s study, up the stairs, past the bedroom door behind which Foxy sleeps, into the bathroom. There I am in the mirror but I am almost surprised to see myself reflected back. It is as if I am not really here. My mind is struggling in a jungle with my young father, struggling to digest him and the fragments of his words. He was between about twenty and twenty-three when he wrote the diary, years my junior. I touch the skin under my eyes where the years are starting to show.

  I cannot match what is written with what I know of him. How can it be true? All the death, the filth, the disease, the pain, my Daddy’s bone open to the air, somebody kicking him when he was down and in agony? And whatever else he suffered. How can that be true of the man behind the newspaper, the man with the golf-clubs? I wash the gritty sensation of the old papers from my hands and brush my teeth, fiercely, to get rid of the bluish wine stain. I scrub until the froth I spit is flecked with blood but in the mirror my lips are still blue. I reach for a lipstick – Foxy’s – and fill them in cherry red. Bright lips in the small hours. Last time I put lipstick on I didn’t know that he was dead.

  Sitting on the edge of the bath I clip my toe-nails. I rarely remember to cut them and Foxy complains when I scratch her in bed. They are painted maroon, but sluttishly chipped, and there’s a pink crescent at the base of each where the nail
has grown. The dark slivers lie on the bathroom tiles like some sort of bugs. Daddy detested insects, it comes back to me suddenly how much he loathed them. We abandoned a camping trip in Scotland once because of the mosquitoes that whined around the tents, the swarm of flying ants that settled on the canvas so that we could see the dark moving clusters of them as the sun shone hotly through the orange walls. We went to a guest-house instead which suited Hazel, Huw and me because there was a big colour television – but annoyed my mother who loved camping. She had bought a new Calor-gas stove especially for the trip.

  In that respect, Daddy was a coward. If there was a wasp in the room, or a spider in the bath, he would ask Mummy to remove it, or if she was out, one of us. I asked Mummy why he was so scared. ‘It’s not rational,’ she’d say, a touch of disdain in her voice.

  I don’t like flies, ordinary black house-flies. I don’t like the querulous noise they make, or what they do. They inject saliva into the surface of food to predigest it and then suck it up through their proboscis. I cannot eat anything that a fly has been on. If a pair of flies reproduced and all their grubs survived to adulthood and bred, it would only take a year for there to be a ball of maggots bigger than the earth itself. But I don’t mind spiders. I quite like snails. When I was a child, ants and beetles were my favourite things.

  When I was very young, before we lived at ‘The Nook’, I started a beetle collection – dead beetles. Only sometimes it was hard to tell whether they were dead or alive. There are hundreds of species of beetle. I liked ladybirds, but my favourites were stag beetles with their bright black armour and antlers; smart insects, special and shiny as party shoes. I found a dead one and put it in a match-box with a picture of edelweiss on the top. I found another one floating in the water-butt and because I had no more match-boxes, put it in with the first one. They were identical, just like a pair of new patent-leather shoes, snug in their box. I covered them in a piece of white tissue, slid the box shut – and forgot them. Some time later, it could have been weeks, I opened the box to find that one of the shoes had come alive and eaten most of the other. There were frail bits of antler and leg and empty wings gone dull like scabs. The other one looked dead too. I tipped it out in a bush in case it still wasn’t dead and threw the match-box in the dustbin. My feet were cold like a dead person’s and my tongue was too heavy in my mouth to tell anyone the terrible thing I had done. But in the night sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I couldn’t help thinking of what had been happening in the match-box on the window-sill while I slept or read or played. The terrible thing that had happened, the beetle waking up to find itself imprisoned with a corpse and the hunger that had turned it cannibal before it died.