by Isabelle Li
He waited in his car until she reappeared. They drove through the winding streets of the eastern suburbs. At one intersection, he thought he had lost her, but then he caught up.
She slowed down and stopped in front of a small yellow building next to a fire station. He was not sure if she had noticed his silver sedan, pulling up not far behind. She unlocked the gate and went inside, her movements swift and determined. It was a quiet street of modest houses. Trees rustled in the breeze and two night birds flew away. Ben pressed on the gate. It opened silently. He walked through and stood before an old door with dusty windowpanes.
Olivia was lighting candles in a hall with mirrored walls. As more candles lit up and the flares grew bigger, the brightness increased like the slow beginning of a symphony. She walked to the middle of the room and lay down. Her long body formed an S shape, and her dark hair, black dress and black scarf spread on the timber floor. In the mirrors, her reflections all started sobbing.
Ben withdrew his face from the windowpane and walked away.
He thought he should leave. Or maybe wait for five minutes. After twelve slots of five minutes, Olivia emerged. She drove, with Ben following, further towards the east end of the city on the hilly roads along the coastline. Through the open windows, he felt the occasional drop of rainwater from the trees, the residual dampness clinging to his skin.
The seaside was quiet on a winter’s night. Olivia parked her car on the high side of a split-level road. A tramp was sitting on a bench nearby, smoking, all his gear in a linen bag. She walked onto a cobblestone pavement, passed by a sandstone cottage with a gate lamp. She continued on the footpath in the open grassland, then further up the cliff exposed to the ocean, not slowing down even when the track became indiscernible among the large rocks. Her hair and scarf floated in the wind.
On top of the cliff, facing the ocean, was a cemetery, its quietness accentuated by the thundering of the waves breaking against the rocks. She ran to the tombstone of a new grave and knelt down.
The southerly wind cleared the moisture from the air. The temperature dropped. The full moon was so bright that Ben could make out the plateaus and valleys on its surface. In the distance, a man in a heavy coat was sitting at the edge of a rock, operating a camera on a tripod.
Ben felt cold, even colder when he saw Olivia putting her face on the stone skirting of the tomb. He pulled up the collar of his leather jacket. He was no longer hiding, but waiting conspicuously on the path. He hoped she would realise she had been watched and get up, or he could just walk up and ask if she was all right. She seemed asleep now. He could not wait any longer.
His footsteps on the gravel path seemed to have startled her. She propped herself up with one hand, looking right at Ben, and smiled, her white teeth gleaming in the moonlight. She stood up, walked towards him and politely passed by as if they were two strangers on a bushwalk.
Ben followed her discreetly on their way back and saw her disappear behind the ivy-covered walls of the sandstone cottage.
It had been more than a month but Ben felt simultaneously that he was seeing her for the first time and had just seen her the day before. Olivia was sitting upright, in a maroon leather jacket and matching boots.
‘Have you been riding?’ he asked jokingly, trying not to betray his eagerness.
‘I took the bus today.’ She paused, as if to slow down the ripples in her memory. ‘Once I saw a child with an oversized schoolbag getting on the bus. He peeled himself away from his young and obese mother, embarrassed by her affection and clumsiness. He paid his fare using coins in a plastic cling bag. They waved at each other. There was sadness in that moment. I knew they were saying goodbye for the last time.’ Her voice toned down. ‘The road was trembling like a heaving chest. Layers of sound were almost palpable: the floor vibrating, the windows shuddering, the ticket machine printing, coins clinking, someone talking on the two-way radio about an accident and finishing with a bubbly gurgle, shoes scraping the floor, voices chattering on mobile phones, cars zooming past, the bus indicator clicking. Soon after we took off, I heard the squeal of tyres skidding on the bitumen, followed by a rubbery odour, and then a bang. A car and a truck had collided. The truck, with its full load, fell to one side onto the boy’s mother. The boy ran to the back of the bus to look, kneeling on the back seat, elbows on the windowsill. He must have been thinking it was all a bad dream, and soon his mother would wake him up with her suffocating kisses.’
Ben listened. The room was quiet, without the ticking of the grandfather clock. ‘When did that happen?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe years ago, when the air was transparent, without the metallic smell of barbed wire.’
‘Does the memory bother you?’
‘It appeared suddenly and was playing repeatedly on my way here. I wondered if I had remembered it or I had imagined it, even before it happened.’
‘We do assign meanings to experiences, particularly when we revisit our memories. For example, you said it was a sad moment when they said goodbye. There’s the possibility that you assigned the mood after you knew what had happened. Or it could be a mere coincidence: the mother could have been feeling a little empty, seeing her son leaving for school.’
Olivia listened half-heartedly, playing with her maroon leather gloves.
‘Today we’ll do some free association exercises. You can pick a card from this box.’
Olivia’s hand hovered over the cards, as though fearful of words and their hidden meanings. She picked one, tentatively, and turned it over. ‘Tree’. She placed it on the desk, facing Ben.
Ben turned the card around to face her. He had asked Denise to schedule Olivia as the last appointment of the day. There was plenty of time. ‘What comes to your mind when you see this word? Can you give me three words?’
‘Green. Rustle. Shade.’
‘Can you give me another three words connected with “Green”, please?’
‘Sky. Insects. Moss.’ Olivia leaned back slowly. Her eyes seemed to look through Ben and travel slowly back in time. ‘I was young, looking into a green sky, thick branches over my head, lichen and moss forming different patterns on the rocks in various shades of green. The summer insects buzzed in my ears. Hot. My white skirt was stained with green blood. My hair shrivelled from thirst. I sank and grew into the soil, my hands the roots, digging, gripping, searching for water.’ Her face turned old at that moment, an ancient look emerging, lines forming on her forehead, her lips quivering.
Ben gave her a bottle of water, and watched as she tried to open it with her trembling hands, to uncover the secrets of her past. What is the point of remembering? He loosened the lid for her.
‘Your test results have come back.’ Ben handed a stack of paper to Olivia.
She looked at the statistics, her face puzzled like an unprepared child before an arithmetic exam.
‘The results suggest that you’re highly synaesthetic, which means some of your senses are coupled. You seem to associate numbers, alphabets, sounds, tastes, odours, dates and moods with colours, shapes, textures and even temperature. You also feel the tactile sensation when others are touched, making you particularly sensitive.’ The word ‘touch’ lingered on his tongue.
‘Touch.’ She repeated the word. ‘Blue velvet, muscat grapes, early summer evenings.’ Her tone was mesmerising. ‘My memories were lost on a blue day. They escaped at dusk and hid in the sky where stars no longer show me the direction.’
Ben looked out the window and realised it was getting late. ‘Excuse me.’ He picked up the telephone and dialled zero. ‘Hi Denise, I’ll be a little while. You can go first.’ His eyes followed while Olivia stood up and walked to the window. ‘Sure, I’ll fix it.’ He put down the receiver.
He walked to the window and stood behind her, intoxicated by the subtle fragrance of her hair and overwhelmed by the urge to hold her.
She looked back at him and smiled. ‘You have a blue aura, like a nebulous star, calming and comforting. I want to sa
il towards you in the black sea.’
Ben felt vertigo, as if he had fallen off a cliff.
They stood in front of the window for a long time, looking down at the harbour, while the sky turned from pink to purple to black, and the stars were swamped by the city skylight.
Ben spent Saturday preparing for his ‘A Thousand and One Arabian Nights’ party, making sure there was plenty of food and drinks, and enough candles. He did not know how many people were coming, because he had asked his friends to bring anyone they liked. At seven, he thought nobody would turn up. By eight, there must have been a hundred people, filling up every room, drinking, nibbling and chatting in candlelight.
He was bored by every conversation, from the latest films to the election, from the stock market to celebrity gossip. He did not need to talk to anyone, because they had all been able to entertain themselves. Instead, he spent most of his time fixing the tinsel that kept falling off the ceilings. For the rest of the time, he was the DJ, trying to satisfy the nagging requests from all the girls. He envied people who could drink alcohol, because he was intolerant to it.
James tried to set him up with a music teacher, a blonde with blue eyes and a charming smile. She was put off by two Chinese girls who were fighting for his attention. When Ben danced with the music teacher, the two rivals danced together. Then he danced with the Chinese girl in red, his hand caressing her naked back, enduring the smell of cigarettes that could not be disguised by even the finest perfume or the strongest mint.
James asked to see his paintings, and they climbed the fire stairs to the terrace.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ James asked once they were inside the studio.
‘What do you mean? I’m throwing a party, am I not?’
‘You seem desperate. I’ve never seen you like this.’
‘Why? Have I done something silly or inappropriate?’
James sighed and started to look at Ben’s paintings.
They had studied together in medical school. James had gone into general practice, while Ben undertook further study and specialist training. James’s clinic now focused on skin cancer and plastic surgery. He had done every examination in dermatology; the walls in his consultation room were covered with framed certificates. He freely shared his investment tips with Ben—how his wife owned the property that was rented to his clinic, so they received a tax deduction for the interest, although the money was changing hands within the family. Ben never understood it. He could not apply himself to such matters, just as he could not be satisfied with the eligible ladies James had introduced to him.
‘Who is she?’ James asked.
On the table was a Chinese painting of cliffs and a winding road, roaring ocean, rising moon, and a lonely figure before a tombstone. On the easel was a pastel drawing of the silhouette of a woman standing between darkness and light, ambiguous as to whether she was coming forward or moving back, as though she was trapped at a threshold in a liminal space.
‘Her name’s Olivia. She’s a patient.’
‘You’ve got to stop seeing her.’
‘We need to talk, since this is a consultation session,’ Ben said.
Olivia shook her head. She was wearing a silver trench coat, with a royal blue scarf wrapped around her neck. She looked anxious and lonely. ‘My grandmother died at the beginning of the winter, when the liquidambars just started losing their leaves.’
‘Do you have any other family?’
‘No. Or maybe I do, from the days that I’ve forgotten. Grandma taught me how to forget.’ Her voice changed, as if it was her grandmother talking, in a cultivated, dry, slow voice. ‘Erase the colours, so all images become black and white. Forget the sound, so all characters are mute. Let the images dissolve into bits, like shards of glass, then you sweep them into a bin. Draw a labyrinth and hide the memories in the middle. Change the colours of the roads, build confusing dead ends, and burn the map. Fill the vacuum, where the memories used to be, with colours and scent and sound from here, this moment. Grandma said the only way to heal a wound was to grow a scar.’
Ben thought he would do anything, anything at all, to protect her, even from her own memories.
‘When Grandma was sick, I cared for her, and I still feel her pain every day. Sometimes it is so strong that I feel the whole world’s concrete has been poured on me. I listen to my heart pumping and my blood flowing. It calms me down. Grief has the colour of purple and pain is navy blue. But I don’t want to lose my memory of her. She was the castle where I lived. Now I’ve lost my bearings.’
I care for you, Ben thought.
‘I know,’ Olivia said softly.
Ben was very sure he had not uttered the words. He hesitated for a moment, then changed the topic. ‘Do you sleep well?’
‘I sleep often. The black sleep is warm and sweet and childish, like chocolate. Sometimes I drift into the grey sleep, where I travel at the speed of light in a silver mist, forward, backward and downward. I gravitate towards a window with swirling colours and patterns like the centre of a migraine. I can wake up with a different set of clothes at the bedside.’
And you would be naked. Ben shook off the thought. ‘Have you always had the grey dreams?’
‘More often since Grandma died.’ Olivia looked down again, her thick lashes the curtains to her enigmatic heart.
‘I notice that you often cast your eyes down.’
‘At times, it’s safer to look inward. My heart is as peaceful as a sapphire lake. But if I stare at an object for too long, it comes to life. There are small movements, and things start to breathe. I become part of that world and I can’t contain myself.’ She looked up, straight at Ben.
He saw the sapphire lake through her eyes and started to become aware of his own breathing, synchronised with hers. He could feel his bones, his internal organs, his hair and his nails. The uncontrollable and autonomic parts of his body had all come to life. Olivia, Olivia, Olivia, her name rolling on the tip of his tongue. He leaned forward, reaching out his hands. But they touched the envelope on the desk between them. He leaned back again.
‘The scan and the rest of your results have come back. They show no abnormalities with your nervous system and no deficiency in your memory capacity. It seems you have an extraordinary memory due to the high level of synaesthesia. Because of the intensity of the recollection, you can relive the experiences. Your amnesia may be psychological rather than neurological. It is possible that you have obliterated some memories out of self-preservation.’ Ben swallowed the acrid taste in his mouth. ‘I’ve written a referral for you to see a very good psychologist.’
Olivia opened her mouth but no words came out.
It was Ben’s turn to look down. Then he looked up again, trying to remember every detail of her face. ‘For the cherished memories, maybe you can hide them at a safe place in the garden of your heart. You can go there whenever you miss them.’
Ben did not move after Olivia left. He sat there, watching the fruit bats flying over the evening sky, so many of them, departing the Botanic Gardens, heading south for a night’s feed. The intercom light turned green.
‘Sorry, Denise. You can go first. I’m finishing some paperwork.’
‘Sure.’ Her voice was warm and considerate. ‘Shall I bring you the mail?’
‘I’ll get them on my way out.’
‘Would you like a cup of tea? The cafes are all closed by now.’
‘I’m fine. See you tomorrow.’
The light was still green. ‘By the way, Miss Lindsey forgot to stop by my desk. I’ll send her the bill by post.’ Denise hung up.
Ben remembered the look on Olivia’s face before she left, and he remembered her words when they had stood in front of the window. ‘I want to sail towards you in the black sea.’ He jumped up and grasped his keys.
He regretted not leaving earlier. His heart was filled with so much anticipation that he feared it would explode. But he was caught in the traffic congestion. Roadwork was in progress eve
rywhere, to narrow the main roads to single lanes and force the cars into the underground tunnel. In his haste, he had forgotten about the new tunnel!
Finally he turned off the arterial road and was on his way to the seaside. It was the time when the cafes and restaurants were filling up. He often had to stop and wait for cars to reverse park. At the split-level road, he could not find her black vintage car. The tramp was there again, eating a hamburger from a paper wrap.
Ben walked up the pavement towards the sandstone cottage. The lamp was on, although there was no light from the front of the house. On close inspection, he suspected the building was originally a small church, evidenced by the cathedral roof and the stained opaque windows. The garden was a mixture of overgrowth and plants that had been neglected or were unsuitable for the coastal climate. The cast-iron gates were locked and did not seem to be in use. Ben remembered that Olivia had disappeared behind the ivied wall, and there was indeed a side entrance. But there was no light from what must be the kitchen window.
He wondered what the inside of the house would look like. Would the floor be carpeted and covered with dust? Had everything been kept as though her grandmother were still alive? He could still leave. Ben looked out to the distant sea, bright blue from the evening light. A crescent moon was hanging at the horizon like the upper part of a question mark.
The waves sounded distant. It must be low tide. There were not many stars in the sky. Ben recognised the Southern Cross, pointing forward. He tightened his jacket, and walked briskly towards the cemetery.
Further South
On the morning of my twenty-eighth birthday, I woke up from a long dream. My body still carried the bittersweet sensation of an epiphany, but the memory was like the last wisp of incense, blown out of shape by the first movement of the air.
I opened the curtain. Shafts of sunlight shone on my shoulders. Beyond the next block, the glazed terracotta roofs of the Buddhist temple were glistening, and bells chimed amid the traffic noise from the expressway. On the table was the birthday oracle written vertically on rice paper: ‘One step back, the sea is broad and the sky wide.’ I had shaken the bamboo tube at the temple until one stick fell to the floor. The nun handed me the oracle but did not explain; she remained silent while receiving my red packet.
