The Girl in the Red Dress

by Elaine Chong

  “For God’s sake, Julia, keep your voice down,” I scold her. “This really isn’t the time or the place to conduct a post-mortem of Mum and Dad’s marriage.” I turn my head so that only she can read my lips and say in an undertone, “You’re not exactly in a position yourself to criticise.”

  Julia’s response is to fold her arms over her chest and clamp her mouth shut.

  Mum’s response is to utter a hollow-sounding laugh. “I don’t think a post-mortem’s going to tell you anything you don’t already know.” Her expression darkens suddenly. “Your father never made a secret of the fact that he had little time for me, and his behaviour towards Richard was shameful. I think that’s what hurt the most, actually. But you, Julia, you never lacked for anything; you always had his love and his affection, and you certainly had more than your fair share of his money while you were growing up.” She hesitates and I see a look of pained disappointment in her eyes. “Is this the real reason you’ve come back? Because you think you’re entitled to an inheritance?”

  “I am entitled!” Julia snaps.

  A look of sad resignation passes over my mother’s face. “Well, clearly your father thought differently.”

  I know I have to end this torturous exchange quickly. I tell Julia, “I think it’s time to leave.” I lean across the bed and draw my mother into a gentle embrace. She’s lost weight, I think to myself. I can feel the bones beneath her withered skin: fragile, brittle as ancient brickwork. I picture them crumbling to dust, and the thought of it fills my heart with sadness. I kiss her cheek. “We can talk about the house another time. I just wanted to bring Julia to say hallo.”

  Julia stretches out her hand across the starched bed linen, which separates her from our mother, and briefly touches her fingers to the age-spotted skin. Immediately she withdraws her hand, as though this physical contact with infirmity is somehow contagious. Her lack of humanity sickens me.

  She says, “I’ll come back when you’re feeling better, Mummy.” For a brief moment, she looks like she might apologise for her behaviour. “I didn’t mean to upset you, but...”

  “That’s enough now,” I tell her, and insist that we leave.

  We slowly make our way back to the car, Julia wisely keeping her ungracious thoughts to herself until we find ourselves in a queue to get out of the crowded car park. She looks up at me and says, “Are you sure she has dementia? She didn’t sound to me like someone whose memory’s fading. I know she looks as frail as a bird, but that brain is still firing on all cylinders.”

  Lenora

  The morning after Julia’s surprise visit, I’m woken by the tea trolley. It’s now a familiar, jarring concerto of crockery and cutlery reverberating on a metal tray as it’s wheeled from bed to bed.

  At home, I wake up to Radio 4. The newsreaders have mildly annoying voices but at least they can be switched off; the sound of the tea trolley and its driver – today a lady called Brenda with a Birmingham accent – can be heard long before they’ve arrived at bed eight and can’t be dismissed in quite the same way.

  Brenda checks the board behind my bed for instructions and prohibitions before she asks, “Cup of tea, Lenora?”

  I push myself up into a sitting position then together we pull the table from the bottom of the bed and station it so that I can reach it without straining my stitches.

  Brenda carefully places the cup and saucer in front of me. “Enjoy,” she says.

  “I will enjoy it. I won’t get this kind of service at home.”

  I know she’s in a hurry, but she stops for a moment, smiles. “Haven’t you got a nice husband to wait on you when you get back then?”

  I want to say that I had a husband, but he wasn’t very nice, and I don’t think he ever, even once, brought me tea in bed. Instead I explain that I live on my own – although I’m no longer quite certain if that’s true.

  “Well, make the most of it then,” she says. “See you later.”

  The tea tastes surprisingly good and it perks me up, so that when I’m reminded that it’s Monday morning and the physiotherapist will be round later to get me out of bed, I don’t immediately plead an excuse to stay where I am.

  The problem is that I don’t want to go home.

  The first time I became aware that Aggie had come back, I was in bed. The alarm clock had sounded and someone on Radio Four was announcing the weather forecast for the weekend, but my attention was focused on the unmistakeable smell of a sweet, floral fragrance. I say ‘come back’ but now I don’t know if she ever actually left. The irony of it, however, wasn’t lost on me: it was Aggie’s perfume I could smell. Je Reviens – ‘I will return’.

  Of course, I did that thing that every up-to-date person does these days: I googled it. I soon discovered that smelling something, which isn’t there – otherwise known as a phantom smell – is potentially a sign of something seriously wrong with the brain. The more I read about olfactory hallucinations, the more worried I became, because it was associated with all sorts of unpleasant conditions like epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease.

  In the end I asked Maggie if she could smell it. When she said she thought she might have noticed it on a few occasions, I was momentarily relieved – it meant I wasn’t on course for a temporal lobe seizure. But that then begged the question: where was the smell coming from?

  The answer presented itself one evening when I went to bed. The small, blue glass bottle of perfume was sitting on my dressing-table, and then I nearly did have a seizure because it definitely hadn’t been there when I’d got dressed in the morning.

  I thought I’d cleared Julia’s bedroom of everything, which had belonged to Aggie. I thought I’d boxed it up and given it away. Of course, I checked the room and it was empty apart from a few bits and pieces Julia had left behind, though the absence or otherwise of Aggie’s belongings still didn’t explain how the bottle came to be sitting on my dressing-table.

  When I showed it to Maggie she said, “Well, that explains everything, doesn’t it?”

  “Does it?”

  “It explains what you’ve been smelling.”

  “I rather think you’ve missed the point,” I told her. “I know what I’ve been smelling is Aggie’s perfume. What I don’t understand is where the bottle came from.” At first, she looked back at me with blank incomprehension, and then the colour drained from her face. “Now do you see what I mean?” I said.

  She nodded then she took the bottle from me and threw it in the bin.

  Three weeks later it was back on the dressing-table.

  I didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that Aggie had somehow come back. I understood that I’d become forgetful over recent years and so the first time I found the bottle of perfume on my dressing-table, I realised that if I’d found it in the house then I could have put it there myself in a moment of distraction. It was when it reappeared that I began to doubt what I thought to be true. Of course, I knew that Aggie had died – I’d been with her when the last gasping breath left her body, and I watched as it was taken away.

  I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that I saw the corporeal manifestation of Aggie being loaded into the back of a vehicle and I think I can rely on the fact that this earthly body was put into a coffin and cremated – I watched the curtains close around it at her funeral. But what happened to her afterwards? That was the question, which began to bother me.

  I’ve been a churchgoer all my life even though my relationship with God and his only son has fluctuated between faithful devotion and disappointed scepticism. What I have never seriously doubted, however, is that there’s a place for all of us in the afterlife, so I just assumed that Aggie had left this world for the next one, never to return.

  The appearance of the blue glass bottle marked Je Reviens consequently made a gaping hole in my long-held belief system. Was it possible that Aggie had somehow come back or indeed had never really left? I wrestled with these thoughts and confided some of them to Maggie.

  She to
ld me she’d recently read an article about something called ‘unresolved grief’. She said the symptoms sometimes included disbelief in the death of a loved one, an inability to accept the death, and overwhelming feelings of emotional pain and sorrow. Well, I knew it wasn’t that. I’d spent a lot of time with Aggie while she was dying; became her true confidante; the recipient of her final confessions. When she died, I knew things about my friend, which should have gone with her to her grave. I was actually unreservedly relieved when Aggie finally passed away.

  Julia

  Last night I dreamed of Jian. He was standing on the balcony of his apartment, so he didn’t hear me when I entered. It was almost dark outside; that time of the day when the warmth of the sun has heated every leaf, every flower, and the fragrance is suddenly released into the air. I could still hear the busy hum of the traffic on Orchard Road, but Jian radiated peace and contentment.

  I wanted to draw my finger down the length of his spine; feel his naked flesh shiver under my touch. As I slowly walked towards him across the cool, marble-tiled floor, I saw that he was holding something in his arms. A surge of joyous recognition ran through me. I knew what it was. He’d bought me a puppy, a French bulldog, and it wasn’t even my birthday. As I approached the balcony, he turned. His face shone with happiness...

  Needless to say, it wasn’t a puppy he cradled lovingly in his arms: it was a baby. His baby.

  The shock drove me from restful slumber into gasping, wide-eyed, wakefulness, like someone who has filled their lungs with air, dived to the bottom of the ocean and is propelled back to the surface. Whoosh.

  I scrambled out of bed and ran to the bathroom. I could taste the vomit before it spewed between my clenched lips into the toilet bowl.

  This nightmare scenario of Jian sharing a beautiful moment with the offspring of his loins was only partly responsible for the violent eruption of the contents of my stomach: the main reason was drinking too much red wine the evening before.

  Richard had driven me back to Bocca Felice after visiting our mother in hospital and then Silvio insisted that I spend the rest of the evening with them in the empty flat upstairs because he didn’t want me to be left on my own in a ‘horrible hotel room’. I was desperate to be left on my own in a hotel room, but he can be very persuasive, and I couldn’t be bothered to argue.

  “Drink. Be happy, Julia,” he told me.

  “I want to be happy,” I said. “But finding happiness, lasting happiness, is a bit like searching for the Holy Grail. You’ve read that it exists, and you want to believe you can find it, but every time you think you’re getting close, you’re disappointed.”

  Silvio pushed a ridiculously large glass of wine into my hand and said, “Roma non fu fatta in un giorno.”

  “What?”

  Richard took the bottle from him and poured himself a somewhat smaller measure of wine. “He said Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  “True, or not true?” Silvio demanded of me.

  “Well, of course it’s true, but how is that relevant to my situation?”

  “It’s not,” Richard said.

  “It is,” Silvio insisted. “You must keep trying to be happy. You’re not happy with Colin? What’s wrong with you? You have a good man.”

  “She doesn’t love him anymore.”

  “Oh ... I see now.” He cocked his head to one side and peered at me with mistrustful eyes. “You fell in love with someone else. Yes?”

  “She’s been having an affair.”

  “Mamma mia! Julia! What were you thinking? This is not good. Who is he?”

  Richard dragged out a chair from under the table and sank into it. “Yeah, who is he, Julia?”

  “You’re both so mean!” I cried. “You don’t understand what it’s been like for me.”

  I spent the rest of the evening trying to explain and then justify my behaviour. I think Silvio was only pretending to be appalled, but Richard looked genuinely dismayed.

  At the end of the evening, they put me in a taxi and sent me back to my hotel, but not before Richard had extracted a promise from me to go and take a look at my old family home.

  “Just take a look over the place,” he said. “See if you can find any more evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Anything else, which might indicate that Mum’s not looking after the place or looking after herself properly.”

  “Why didn’t you do it when you were there?”

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

  “Don’t know what you’re looking for? Oh right, and I am supposed to know because I’m a woman. Is that it? Are you stupid? I don’t know anything about ... domestic stuff. I have a maid at home.”

  “Well, you have to have a better idea than I do, if she’s not looking after herself,” Richard replied, slurring his words slightly.

  “Why exactly do I need to do this?” I asked. “What purpose does it serve?”

  “We have to know if she’s going to be safe, Julia.”

  “And if she’s not? What then?” I retorted.

  He put his finger to the side of his nose and tapped it.

  “Is that supposed to mean you know something I don’t know?”

  He then had the temerity to laugh. “There may be a way out. That’s all I’m saying.” And he refused to say any more.

  With yesterday evening’s overindulgence voided, I feel quite a lot better, although the picture of Jian with his baby lingers unhappily in my mind. That is how it will be, I keep thinking to myself. It doesn’t matter how much he tries to reassure me that nothing will change, I know that everything will change, and the dream only proves it.

  I decide to order room service then I shower and dress.

  It’s another short walk to the tube station, but this morning it’s a much less pleasant experience compared to yesterday’s trip to Bocca Felice because the streets are busy, and the sun isn’t shining. I’ve waited until rush hour has passed so that I don’t have to (quite literally) rub shoulders with the hoi polloi, but the trains are still crowded and claustrophobic, and the habit of walking and looking at the screen of a phone has become an international phenomenon. How some people don’t fall over the edge of the platform and in front of a train is beyond me.

  I checked the route to Shenfield station before I left the hotel, though I ought to know it well enough. I commuted from there into Liverpool Street station for several years, specifically until I married Colin, but only until then because my father had this outdated idea that married women shouldn’t work. As he was the one who was giving me away – another completely outdated notion – Colin had no choice but to accept his terms if he wanted to have me. We moved to Singapore two years later, and I suppose I could have found gainful employment in another office after that, but Colin never asked, and I never offered.

  Liverpool Street station has been transformed since I last boarded a train there, but it’s still a dark, grimy, cavern compared to the shiny, glass and steel, shopping mall-like Dhoby Ghaut station where I occasionally hop on the MRT if I’m meeting Nancy. If cleanliness really were next to godliness, then the Singapore Mass Rapid Transport system would be a holy shrine.

  I search out a seat, which doesn’t look like someone has recently rested his filthy shoes on it, then check my phone for messages. Singapore is seven hours ahead of London so Colin will be leaving the office for the LingLang Club at about this time – I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to contact me already. In fact, nobody has tried to contact me.

  It’s strange finding out that everyone I know in Singapore can get on with their lives without reference to me. I never seriously thought that I was indispensable; I didn’t actually imagine that I was instantly forgettable, but it is a sobering discovery that nobody needs or wants to speak to me.

  I did think – and probably hoped – that Jian might message or mail me, but there’s nothing on either of my phones to indicate that he’s even tried to get in touch, so I turn my attention t
o the landscape outside the window of the train.

  I’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a vast, urban environment like London and frankly I’m horrified at what I see. Of course, Singapore is a tropical island but it’s actually just as much a concrete jungle as any other city on the planet. There, however, the resemblance ends. In Singapore, emphasis is placed on creating an eye-pleasing backdrop. Trees and flowering plants are used to soften the hard lines of steel bridges and towering, hi tech office blocks as well as utilitarian housing developments and futuristic shopping malls. It would be true to say that there’s an element of theatre about the place – things aren’t always quite as lovely as they seem at first glance – but I know I could never live anywhere else and I certainly couldn’t come back to this. London may have the edge as far as culture and history is concerned, but a city is judged by its streets and its architecture, and everything I can see is litter-strewn and grimy.

  Thankfully, with each passing mile, the dismal buildings gradually give way to green fields – a much more pleasant vista to gaze upon – and then I remember that my father made this journey every working day of his life. It can’t have been very enjoyable, but I don’t remember him ever complaining, though he probably had his nose in a newspaper for much of the time.

  It’s difficult to reconcile my memories of him with the picture that Richard has painted. My mother was right: he rarely denied me anything. I was the apple of his eye and it was a wonderful place to be. I felt loved by him; appreciated for my wit and my intelligence.

  When he took my arm and walked me down the aisle, he whispered to me, “You’ll always be Daddy’s girl, Julia.” He placed my hand in Colin’s and withdrew to my mother’s side in the pew at the front of the church, but I could feel his eyes on me, and I knew they were filled with tears. This is what I can’t understand: why would you turn your back on someone you love? Why would you deny them what’s rightfully theirs? I don’t care what Richard says: I have to find out why Daddy did this. Before I return to Singapore, I have to know.