The Girl in the Red Dress

by Elaine Chong

  Richard

  Nurse Kelly is waiting for me at the reception desk when I leave my mother. She leads me into a small room containing a low table, a sofa and two hard chairs. Once glance at the posters on the walls confirms that this is the place where bad news is broken.

  She tells me to make myself comfortable while she fetches the tea. Though quite how comfortable a person can make himself is unclear, when he’s surrounded by posters of smiling-faced people offering sympathy and support in times of loss and despair. I’m worried about my mother, worried about her mental state, but I didn’t think she was dying.

  The reference my mother made to someone in a red dress rings a bell, but I can’t remember for whom the bell rings. Not Sarah – my ex-wife is one of those pale-skinned women who only ever wear muted shades of skin and bone. And certainly not Julia – in fact I can only ever remember seeing Julia in black, but maybe that was just at the funeral. Either way, it was unsettling to hear that ghostly apparitions are more regular visitors to my mother’s bedside than I am.

  I’m racking my brains trying to work out this conundrum when Nurse Kelly backs into the room with a loaded tray. She’s brought tea and two large slices of what looks like somebody’s birthday cake – lots of brightly coloured icing and holes where the candles have been removed for safekeeping.

  She puts the tray on the table then places a piece of cake in front of me. “Nurse Whitney’s twenty-fifth,” she informs me. “She’s following some mad diet so we’re helping her out.”

  For the next five minutes we make small talk and eat cake, but I’m impatient to find out what this ‘situation’ is with my mother. “You seemed to suggest, when I spoke to you earlier, that the UTI isn’t the only problem with my mother,” I begin.

  Nurse Kelly nods. “Obviously it isn’t possible to be completely certain, but there’s a chance that the trauma she’s recently suffered has triggered something.”

  “Triggered something?”

  “Well, it isn’t uncommon for trauma to bring on dementia in someone your mother’s age.” She must have registered the look of shock and horror on my face because she quickly goes on, “I’m not saying that she definitely has dementia, I’m just saying it can happen.”

  All the worries and concerns, which I have about my mother living independently, have suddenly multiplied by ten. The truth is that I actually have no idea if this is the case – if the trauma of the fall has somehow brought on a sudden deterioration of her mental capacities – because I’ve been too busy with my own life to do little more than speak to her over the phone since… I have to think back… since Christmas, and it’s now October.

  This is the reality: it’s more than possible that it isn’t a sudden deterioration at all. I only have to think about the weed-infested driveway and Julia’s bedroom obscured by a layer of dust to know that something has changed in recent months.

  A buzzer sounds outside the room and Nurse Kelly hastily excuses herself. I don’t know if this was an unexpected opportunity for her to leave me on my own to contemplate this piece of information, but she doesn’t return, so I decide to leave.

  As soon as I reach the car park, I know that I’ve already made up my mind to drive back to Hillcrest. I need to take another look at the house in daylight and satisfy myself that nothing else has changed, even though I have absolutely no idea what I’m looking for.

  When I call Silvio and explain the situation, he immediately agrees I should check the whole place out. “This is your mother’s home, Ricardo. How do you say...? The home is the heart. If she’s unhappy, o non si sente bene ... you will see. When my cousin, Lorenza, had the black mood, she stopped cleaning. Tutto. I see you tomorrow. E Ricardo. Non preoccuparti, mi amore.”

  I’m trying not to worry, but the prospect of dealing with the consequences of my mother’s fractured hip is already problem enough. The thought that she’s developed dementia fills me with not only a profound sense of sadness, but also a sense of dread.

  I stop in the high street on the way back and order a takeaway pizza. If Silvio knew he’d be furious with me – only Mamma Mazzi’s home-baked is allowed to pass our lips – but I don’t want to drive away from my mother’s house in the morning with the smell of curry or chicken chow mein lingering in the recently cleaned kitchen.

  The first thing that strikes me when I walk into the house is that it’s cold. The second thing is that the door to my father’s study is open. I don’t know if I’m being paranoid, but now I see that all of the doors are open – every room downstairs. I try to remember how I left them, and I think they were closed – it’s an old habit, something our father insisted on.

  “It’s one of the most effective ways to prevent a fire from spreading. It’s a simple precaution and one that even you, Richard, should be able to remember.”

  Even me.

  Well, the only explanation is that Maggie came back, I think to myself.

  Fortunately, the house soon warms up to a comfortable temperature after I’ve turned on the central heating, and although the pizza isn’t up to Silvio’s exacting standards, it still tastes good.

  The following morning, I’m woken early by the sound of someone entering the house. The front door slams shut, and footsteps echo eerily on the tiled floor of the hallway. The only other person who has a key is Maggie so at first, I’m not unduly alarmed. It’s when I hear the doors being closed that I sit up and take notice. I quickly get dressed and go downstairs.

  Maggie must realise I’m here because my car is parked on the drive, but there’s something furtive about the way she quickly moves into the kitchen ahead of me.

  “Would you like me to make you some coffee, Mr Oakley?” she calls over her shoulder.

  “That would be great,” I say.

  “I just thought I’d check...” She hesitates a fraction too long for this to sound anything other than contrived. “Well, make sure everything’s okay.”

  “I wasn’t expecting you to be here today, Maggie.”

  “No, I don’t usually work on a Saturday, but I was walking past, and I know the house is empty so... I just thought I’d look in, that’s all.”

  She manages to completely avoid eye contact with me throughout this exchange, busying herself with filling the kettle and putting instant coffee into a mug. I don’t know if she just feels uncomfortable in my presence because she doesn’t know me very well, but my gut instinct tells me that what brought her here wasn’t a spontaneous decision while she happened to be passing by. The surreptitious door closing puzzles me, so I decide to ask her.

  This time there’s no concealing her agitation. She blushes and her hands fly to her face. “Your dad was very strict about keeping doors closed,” she gushes. “I know a fire can spread quickly if they’re left open. I wasn’t sure if you’d remember to check. I’m not trying to interfere or anything.”

  I feel like the grand inquisitor and immediately apologise.

  “No, no, it’s fine,” she insists. “It’s not my home, but with Mrs Oakley in hospital...”

  “You really mustn’t worry,” I say. “I’ll probably be coming and going quite a lot now, and the responsibility for keeping the doors closed is mine, not yours.”

  We stand awkwardly looking at one another. Maggie is twisting the ring on her wedding finger round and round. I notice that it isn’t a wedding ring but a very expensive-looking diamond solitaire, which surprises me for some reason. Of course, I don’t really know anything about the woman other than that she cleans the house once a week, and Silvio would undoubtedly chide me for thinking such thoughts, but it doesn’t change the fact that the ring looks out of place on hands which have clearly spent more time scrubbing floors than having a manicure.

  I suddenly remember to ask her about the state of Julia’s bedroom. Apparently, this is something that she’s more than willing to discuss because the look of pained embarrassment vanishes.

  “I wondered when you were going to ask about that,” she says.r />
  “Well, it does seem a bit odd. Every other room in the house has been cleaned from top to bottom, but you can write your name in the dust in that room.”

  “I know,” she says. “But it isn’t my fault.” She pulls out a chair and sits down, so I follow her lead. She hesitates, looks to the corner of the room as though trying to gather her thoughts then begins to speak. “Did you know your mum’s friend, Agnes, lived here for a while?”

  I didn’t know because my mother didn’t mention it, but this is just par for the course in the life of the Oakley family.

  “When she was too ill to look after herself,” Maggie goes on, “she moved in here. Your mum nursed her. They were very close, almost like sisters, I always thought. Ovarian cancer, that’s what she had. Mrs Oakley told me Agnes hated going to see the doctor and by the time she went it was very advanced. They wanted to do an operation on her, but she wouldn’t have it.” Maggie suddenly smiles. “I always thought she was a bit…” She falters for a moment, searching for the right words, “…a bit prim and proper, but that was just the way she was brought up, your mum said. At the end, the Macmillan nurses were coming in every day because she needed a lot of painkillers. She was very brave, but I think your mum had had enough by that point, to be honest with you. It was very hard on her.”

  “My mother never told me,” I say. But then my mother is very good at keeping secrets, I think to myself.

  “The thing is,” Maggie goes on, “she had your sister’s room when she was here – because of the en suite.”

  “She didn’t...?”

  Maggie nods. “Your mum was with her when she died. Just slipped away in her sleep, but Mrs Oakley seemed to take it very badly.”

  Now I remember, not that Agnes died in Julia’s bedroom, but that two years ago my mother was treated for depression. She told me she was feeling ‘a bit under the weather’, that she was sometimes lonely, and Agnes’s death had underlined for her the fact that her own life was running its final course. At the time, I was involved in a large project in Manchester, so we only spoke over the phone. I can’t recall the exact words I said to her, but I probably told her she was going to live to a ripe old age and that I would visit as soon as the project was completed. Did I visit her? I’ve no idea, and the realisation fills me with shame and remorse.

  “I still don’t quite understand why the room hasn’t been cleaned,” I say.

  “It was cleaned regularly up until the beginning of this year.”

  “So, what happened to change it?”

  “Mrs Oakley told me she wanted the room kept locked and that I wasn’t to go in there anymore.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  This strikes me as odd, but as Maggie is technically an employee, I assume she didn’t think it was her place to question the decision. But then it occurs to me that the room wasn’t locked when I was here three days previously so I say, “Mum must have unlocked it before she had the fall.” Maggie stiffens. I can see her trying hard to keep a neutral expression as she meets my gaze, but her eyes betray her: it isn’t quite fear, perhaps just a nervous apprehension. “Do you know something about my mother that I don’t know?” I ask her.

  She quickly gets to her feet and moves to leave. “I’m only here to clean once a week, Mr Oakley,” she says and attempts a smile, which only reaches the corners of her mouth. “Your mum doesn’t confide in me. I’m not her friend. I do what she asks me to do, and that’s it.” She pauses in the doorway. “I’ll clean your sister’s room on Monday, if that’s okay?”

  She doesn’t wait for me to reply. She hurries out of the house, banging the front door behind her.

  Lenora

  When I woke this morning, the first thing I saw was Aggie standing at the end of the bed. As soon as she noticed that I was awake, she said, “How are you feeling this morning, Lenora?”

  I asked her why she was here.

  She said, “I’m just checking how you are.”

  She wasn’t wearing the red dress, which confused me a bit, so I asked her why she wasn’t wearing it.

  She said, “My dress? Oh, I am wearing it. Look.” And she opened up her coat and I could see that she was wearing a dress underneath the coat. I closed my eyes for just a moment and when I opened them, she’d gone.

  Breakfast this morning was porridge. I wanted toast, and they said I could have toast, but I think they forgot. The food they serve here is very bland, almost tasteless. They tell me I need to eat every time they see the tray untouched, but I have no appetite, so they just take it away. They leave a sheet of paper with the next day’s menu and I’m supposed to put a tick in a box next to the thing I want to eat, but I can’t read it without my glasses and my glasses are in the bottom drawer of the cupboard next to the bed. I can’t reach the drawer without getting out of bed, and I can’t get out of bed without help.

  I must have drifted off to sleep again because when I woke up, Aggie was back in the room. She was looking out of the window and she’d taken off her coat. I tried to call out to her, ask her what she wanted from me. My lips formed the words clearly, but my voice had been silenced.

  That scares me; it makes me think of George. He was always telling me to be quiet; to keep my opinions to myself; not to disturb him or bother him. “Keep your voice down, woman!” he used to say if I shouted back at him, or “It doesn’t matter what you think!” if I argued with him.

  In the end, I felt like I’d ceased to exist.

  Julia

  Colin had clearly assumed that I would be taking the night flight to London. I might even have suggested that was the case – I can’t remember – for when I rise earlier than usual and join him for breakfast, his expression is one of surprise.

  “What time’s your flight?” he asks.

  “Twelve-thirty-five.”

  “Twelve noon?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were leaving so soon.”

  “Does it matter?”

  He scowls into his cornflakes, and when Siti tries to top up his teacup, he pushes away her hand saying crossly, “I’ll tell you when I want more tea.” The amber liquid is spilled onto the white tablecloth leaving an ugly mark, which she’ll have to remove by first soaking then using a stain remover and finally washing by hand, because the fabric is delicate and she knows I don’t want it tossed and turned in the machine.

  She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look scared or offended, but I recognise the look in her dark eyes because I’ve seen it a thousand times before: it’s something these young girls do to camouflage their emotions. Her face freezes then she turns her head away and shuffles quietly back into the kitchen.

  “Did you have to do that?” I ask him.

  “Do what?”

  “Be so rude to Siti.” I offer him a look of stern rebuke – it’s the same one I use with Connie and has reduced her to tears on more than one occasion. Colin is made of sterner stuff and continues to scowl, so I say, “I know you’re cross with me, but you don’t have to take it out on the maid. It’s going to be just the two of you here and I don’t want to come home and find out the poor girl has run amok with a meat cleaver.”

  Colin huffs and puffs. “That isn’t actually very funny, Julia.”

  It is funny because Siti is less than five feet tall and has the physique of a prepubescent teenager, whereas Colin is six foot three and built like a sumo wrestler. But I chose my words with care: the word ‘amok’ is of Malay origin and describes someone in a homicidal frenzy.

  When we first came out here, it was spoken of in hushed tones at the LingLang Club by families who’d once owned rubber plantations on the peninsula – “Whatever you do, don’t upset the natives!” I’m certain it was nothing more than a kind of urban myth, but Colin has never forgotten the tales whispered by the old colonials into his young ears of workers carrying out frenzied attacks on their employers while they slept in their beds.

  Siti struggles
to cut up a chicken with a heavy knife so I can’t see her chasing Colin round the bedroom, but it amuses me to see the look of discomfort on his face when he seriously considers the possibility of being murdered in his own home by a maid wielding a meat cleaver.

  I finish eating my yoghurt and fruit and move to leave, but Colin stretches across the table and grabs my hand. “When are you coming back?” he asks.

  “I told you, I don’t know exactly.”

  “I still don’t understand why you have to go. You’ve never bothered about your mother before this. What’s really going on?”

  I pull my hand from his grasp. “For God’s sake Colin! What do you think is going on?”

  He gives me an odd look. He isn’t usually reticent in expressing his opinions, but I can see him wrestling with something. Suddenly his face becomes suffused with anger. “I know you’ve been seeing someone, Julia,” he blurts out.

  “Who told you that?” I shoot back and try to inject a note of indignation into my voice, but even to my own ears, it sounds unconvincing.

  “Are you telling me it’s not true?”

  I close my eyes and in the privacy of my own head I think, so this is it. It’s strange, this feeling. Am I standing on the edge of an abyss or is it the first taste of freedom? I don’t know what it is! For a few seconds, I’m lost to the sensation of space around me. I know I’m standing in the dining room of our apartment, but what I’m sensing is elemental. It’s my future.

  I don’t want to cry, but my eyes brim with tears. I want to tell Colin the truth, but I don’t know if I’m ready to face the consequences.

  He rescues me from my indecision by leaping to his feet and pulling me into his arms. “I’m sorry,” he says over and over again.

  I bury my face in his chest and we stand wrapped in each other’s arms until the tears have subsided.