Yellow Room

by Shelan Rodger

  ‘Well, it’s not really—’

  ‘Your thing?’ She laughed. ‘No, I don’t like it either. I don’t really get it. I mean I wish it would just be a photo without the attempt to, I don’t know, art it up.’

  Chala wished for confidence like that. She knew that her own looks were often a hurdle. Even if she wasn’t conventionally beautiful, the fact that she was striking meant people assumed she was self-assured, too.

  ‘Come on, you look like you could do with a drink. I’m Nicola.’

  Chala followed Nicola to the bar, hoping no one else could see through her, but they had only just got into a conversation about something unrelated to art when Paul sauntered into the middle of it with a corduroy-clad stranger at his side.

  ‘Che, I want you to meet a friend of mine – Daniel.’ Mmm, thought Chala, such a good friend that I’ve never heard of you before. And then, ‘Daniel, this is my wife.’

  ‘Chala Hutchings,’ she said. She hated it when Paul called her ‘Che’ in public. As for ‘my wife’, she had loved the sound of that when they first got married, but now it smacked of a sense of possession that had nothing to do with the content of their wedding vows. It made her feel like an accessory, and she didn’t know how an accessory was supposed to behave.

  ‘This is Nicola,’ she added, ‘a friend of mine.’ Nicola caught the irony – though Paul didn’t – and laughed.

  On the way home Paul was driving and they both seemed content to let silence wash through them after the twitter of endless sound bites. Chala’s thoughts drifted back to the phone call with Philip, trying to put her finger on what had bothered her about him. The resolve to rake through those boxes in the attic must be weighing on him much more heavily than he was prepared to admit, but it was no use talking on the phone. She knew he hated talking on the phone. When she went to visit him on her return from Australia, they would go walking on the moor – their safety net for conversation. Then she would be able to make sure that he was really OK.

  Paul cut into her thoughts. ‘So what the fuck’s wrong with you tonight?’

  Chala jolted back to the evening they’d just left behind, aware that she had lapsed into a half-presence after Nicola had left them, unable for the life of her to think of anything to say to Daniel or any of the others who had joined them. How she wished for Nicola’s easy confidence. How she wished she could be the person Paul so obviously wanted on his arm.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. It’s ju… I don’t kn… I’m sorry if I let you down.’ She didn’t know how to talk to him when he was like this.

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I am. I am sorry.’

  ‘No you’re not. It’s always the same. “Oh, how fantastic, you’ve got an exhibition, I’ll be there for you.”’ His high-pitched imitation of her voice made her feel as if she had been winded. ‘And then when it happens, you’re never fucking there.’

  She slumped into silence, defenceless.

  She knew she wasn’t good at these events, not good at parties or social functions. And yet there were other – less public – ways of being there for him. Had Paul forgotten the slow exorcism of insecurities that had made it possible for him to leave a safe career in pursuit of a dream? The days when Chala had slowly inched into the raw place inside him that had been carved out by his parents? She had seen through the comfortable skin he offered to the world, stunned by and yet sensitive to the lack of self-belief that had kept him in a job he hated. She had believed in him. She still believed in him.

  When they got home, he walked in ahead of her and went straight upstairs to bed. She climbed in beside him a few minutes later, careful not to touch him, and lay spooned away, staring in the dark. Nobody prepares you for this, she thought, nobody tells you that loving someone is not enough.

  She scrolled back through the years to the first time they had met. It was at a mutual friend’s wedding in Andalucía. Guests had poured in and occupied the entire village, with seasonal bars opening in June just for them. She had noticed Paul the day he arrived, the day before the wedding, and felt bashful. At the reception their shared status as members of the unattached minority had thrown them together at the same table. What she only realised in retrospect was that they had talked about things they wanted to do in life rather than the things they actually did. Paul had talked to her about painting. She had only learnt from someone else that he was a lawyer and it had instantly struck her as a misfit. She had talked to him about Africa and travel and an undefined yearning to ‘do something worthwhile’. They had danced together and he had touched her hair and she had calmed the tremble in her hands behind his neck, but then they had drifted to different parts of the room and nothing more had happened.

  Back in the UK, six months later, they had still not slept together and yet they were spending more and more time with each other, and had already begun the process of sifting back through the incubation period of their relationship, turning it into a story. One day, sitting on the crimson sofa in her bedsit after an evening at a comedy club and remembering the Spanish wedding, she told him that she had longed for him to dance with her again.

  ‘What!’ he had said with a stage slap of his palm against his forehead. ‘Why didn’t you give me any clues? Why didn’t you ask me to dance?’

  ‘Too shy,’ she had said, feeling even now the rush of blood to her face.

  ‘With your looks? You shouldn’t be.’ And he had stopped more words with his mouth on hers, and then she had seen his eyes glance towards the bed in the corner of the room, and suddenly he was leading her to it, saying ‘May I? I want to see more of you. I want to look at you. I want to paint you. I want to fuck you senseless.’

  And she had felt the blood not just in her face but all through her body.

  Afterwards, she had picked up the story again, teasing him. ‘So, why didn’t you ask me to dance again? Why didn’t you come near me again?’

  ‘You were too scary, too beautiful.’

  ‘I’m neither of those things. Go on, what was it?’ She had rolled over to face him and was looking for answers in his eyes.

  ‘No, really, you seemed distant and I wasn’t sure that you were interested. A…’

  ‘And?’ She was like every other woman in the world at this moment, poised for the next delicious detail in the story they were making about their discovery of each other. But what he said next had shocked her.

  ‘I didn’t want to frighten you away. Claire warned me about you—’

  ‘Warned you?’ She was stiff then. ‘About what?’

  ‘Bad choice of words – I didn’t mean it like that. I mean she told me what happened when you were a kid and that you were wary of relationships, and for the first time in my life I didn’t want to blow it by rushing in and spoiling everything.’

  She had drawn the sheets up around her in an involuntary movement to cover herself and then started to pull towards the edge of the bed, to move away, but he had grabbed her by the wrist and forced her to look at him.

  ‘Chala, I realise this is a big deal for you, but it isn’t for me. Just remember that. Don’t ever forget that.’ Something about the way he said ‘ever’ made her feel safe. She had melted back into the bed beside him and tried to convince herself that it wasn’t important.

  CHAPTER 3

  Somewhere in the blur of the weeks that follow, Chala is standing behind Denise in a check-out queue at their local supermarket. Denise has a slightly wild, unkempt look about her. Her hair, chestnut brown and usually pulled back neatly into a ponytail at the back of her head, hangs loose and wiry over her shoulders. Her face has the grey stamp of insomnia and even the tiniest act seems to require enormous reserves of concentration. At this moment, she pours intense effort into the simple business of piling the items from her shopping trolley onto the counter, unaware that she has duplicated certain things and forgotten others. She registers with a pang the approach of a mother and pushc
hair at the end of the short queue, and then concentrates even more fiercely on her shopping.

  She doesn’t notice Chala’s involuntary wince as the baby in the pushchair joins their queue. Chala steps closer to Denise and concentrates on the pattern on her jeans pocket as she bends over to take out the last tins from the trolley. It’s just a baby, silly. You don’t even have to look at it. And anyway, it’s not even looking at you.

  But then something awful happens. The lady immediately behind them suddenly remembers something she has forgotten and disappears, muttering, to fetch it, and the mother pushes her baby forward so that it is now right next to Chala. Delighted by the sight of a little girl almost at eye level, the baby starts to gurgle, gazing at Chala as if it has known her all its life. A proud smile is already breaking out on the mother’s face – the smile of a million mothers worldwide, so besotted with their own child they assume others feel the same. But what happens next converts the smile into an expression of horror.

  Chala loses concentration, looks up from the pattern on Denise’s jeans pocket, accidentally makes eye contact with the baby and screams. Denise jumps and drops a jar of marmalade, which shatters on the floor and Chala, still screaming, clings to her leg, trying to hide from the baby ghost that is looking and looking at her. The mother with the baby pulls the pushchair backwards, away from the queue, and, with a parting glare at Denise, crouches to comfort her own baby, who has now started to cry. Everyone is staring at Denise, but she barely registers this as she tries to separate Chala from her leg. Sorry, she mutters to the cashier, who looks if anything a little frightened, and Denise bends down to try and calm Chala. But Chala is clinging and sobbing into her leg and she is forced to pull her away quite roughly, at which point Chala screams again. For an awful second it looks as though Denise might hit her, but then she too starts to cry, picks Chala up and holds her tight, and everyone looks away, embarrassed, as a kind of normality slowly returns.

  When they get home, Philip is already back and Chala rushes straight into his open arms. Philip doesn’t notice that his wife says nothing. He doesn’t notice the weariness on her face or in her step as she brings in the shopping. After all, the limpness in her movements has become normal over the last few weeks. She has almost finished unpacking when it occurs to him to leave Chala for a minute and go to greet her. He walks around the bar into the kitchen area of their recently fitted open-plan living area and approaches her from behind to peck her on the cheek. He doesn’t feel her stiffen.

  Later, Chala wakes up to the sound of Philip and Denise arguing. She can’t really hear or understand what is being said, but Denise’s voice gets louder and louder. Chala tries to shrink under the covers, but every time she closes her eyes it is as if Denise is standing there beside the bed, screaming at her.

  And sometimes, very late at night, Emma’s ghost comes back to visit, but it isn’t Chala she comes to see, it is Rosie. She comes to make sure that Chala hasn’t hurt her. Chala woke up screaming the other night, because they were making such a noise playing together in the drawer where she had packed Rosie away, out of view. Philip came running in and hugged her, and listened to her explain that Emma and Rosie were making too much noise.

  ‘Where are they, my sweet? Where did you hear them?’ And he had followed her frightened little finger and opened the drawer, and told her that it was OK, Emma had gone now. ‘Do you want me to take Rosie away somewhere?’ He had sensed her revulsion at the sight of the cloth doll. I don’t know why we don’t just throw it out, Denise had said once in a moment of irritation after another nightmare had broken their sleep, but Philip had caught the look of alarm on Chala’s face and understood it.

  ‘Shall I take her away?’ he had gently offered again.

  ‘No, no, no, she mustn’t go away. She will be angry, Phiwip.’

  ‘OK, I tell you what, how about we put her in a new place, somewhere nice and comfy, where she can rest without being disturbed?’

  ‘But where, Phiwip?’

  ‘What about on the top of the cupboard, with your spare blanket?’

  ‘OK. And then you kiss me goodnight?’

  ‘And then I’ll kiss you goodnight, my sweet.’

  But it never worked, Emma always found her sooner or later and then Chala would wake up screaming again.

  * * *

  The battery was running low on Chala’s laptop, so she shut it down with a double edge of reluctance and relief. She could finish the presentation later and anyway she had drifted off again. She packed away the laptop and settled back into her seat to contemplate the hours left. The first leg had been quite painless – a meal, a film and sleep of sorts. A brisk walk and a foot massage at Bangkok airport, and now the time-travelling had really begun. When the flight landed in Sydney she would have lost a day over the ocean.

  Chala toyed with the concept of time and wondered whether it is ever really possible to recapture the past. All memories are reconstructions. How much could she honestly claim to remember of her early childhood? So many early memories had a textbook quality about them, details learnt from photos or the repetition of anecdotes. Even she and Paul had been together long enough to dispute the detail of shared memories. Did she really, truly, actually remember what had happened that day in the yellow room? She had worked out a kind of explanation that made it possible to live with herself, but how much of it was true? Every now and then some detail would force itself onto centre stage of a memory, so irrelevant or intimate that she felt it couldn’t have come from someone else’s story, something that just felt irrefutable. But how could so much of the past that defined her exist beyond her grasp? She blinked, hauling herself back into the present.

  ‘What are you planning to do in Australia, then?’

  Shit. She had been remotely aware that her unchosen companion on the flight from Bangkok had been itching patiently for an opportunity to start a conversation, despite the empty seat between them. She hated talking about herself.

  ‘The company I work for has just bought an Australian company and I’m going over to visit their schools.’

  ‘Oh, what sort of company is that then?’

  She looked at him for a moment. Did it really matter what sort of company it was? Then he would ask her exactly what her job was. He was English. He would need this information to open the gates to further conversation. Then she would have to ask him what he did. Something to do with the City she thought, but not too senior, otherwise he would be travelling business class. And then – God forbid – they could get on to more personal questions about each other’s partners and marital status.

  ‘We have a number of schools for international students in the UK, the US and now Australia. We offer language and academic preparation programmes for universities and I’m working on product development across the group, so I need to see how the schools work in Australia.’ This would surely bore him into silence. ‘I also have a husband, I don’t want children and I don’t want an affair,’ was what she felt like adding. Just in case.

  ‘Oh, interesting.’

  Result, she thought. He’s bored. Now all I need to do is not ask him what he does and then there will be a few moments’ uncomfortable silence before we can both retreat back into the space of our own privacy.

  ‘So, what do you do then?’ She kicked herself mentally under the seat in front of her, convention winning the battle.

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  Whoops. And suddenly – now – she did.

  ‘I didn’t, but I do now!’ The words took her by surprise. She laughed and the ice was broken.

  His name was Bruce, which had nothing to do with going to Australia. He had walked out of a City job and a relationship, which were both strangling him – that explained why he was in cattle class – and he was off to spend the paid leave he had negotiated travelling round the world, first stop Sydney. Despite the conversation opener, he was interesting, didn’t waffle, and laughed easily. Actually, she thought, with an obscu
re sense of guilt that seemed unrelated to the situation, those words could describe Paul, and yet she was sure these two men were very different.

  ‘Have you ever slept with an Aussie?’ Her neighbour was looking at her slightly quizzically.

  ‘No,’ she laughed nervously. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just wanted to make sure you were still here. You seem to spend a lot of time in a daze, that’s all. Like when you were working on the laptop, I don’t think you would have noticed if a bomb had gone off.’

  ‘So you were spying on me, then?’

  ‘Just looki… I like the way you look.’

  Chala switched away from his eyes and noticed his hands. They looked like the hands of a guitar player, almost feminine, and the thought of them touching her shot through her. She blushed and opened her mouth to say something quickly.

  ‘Do you play the guitar?’ she asked, and looked back at his face. He hadn’t struck her as good-looking in the peremptory glance she had given him as she sat down, but the intensity in his eyes as he regarded her now did nothing to relieve the blush she could feel spreading across her neck. She noticed that his hair was thick and straight and slightly spiky and made you want to stroke it.

  ‘No. Why? Do you?’

  And so went the ping-pong of conversation between them. She answered his questions quickly, unthinkingly, as if silence were some kind of threat. Despite the empty seat, he felt too close.

  They had dinner and then more wine, watched the same film and then agreed to meet at the same place for breakfast.

  ‘Why don’t you raise the arm? You can have those two seats to sleep on. I can rest my head against the window,’ he offered gallantly.

  ‘Sure, thank you,’ she replied immediately, grateful that the lights were dimmed. But what if her feet poked into his legs? She felt foolishly self-conscious. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t done this before! You simply shrink and create a protective layer around you that tucks you into your own tiny space. So she drew up her legs, tucking them in tightly at the knees, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to move into the seat in the middle and keep her legs on the side of the aisle. God no, her head might flop over onto his shoulder!