Yellow Room

by Shelan Rodger

  She nestled slightly further into the space between them, acutely conscious in the semi-darkness of the tiny gap between her foot and his thigh, and tried in vain to sleep.

  After a few minutes, he shifted in his seat and she felt a flood of static as he touched her accidentally with his thigh.

  ‘Sorry,’ she muttered, feeling immediately stupid.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ he countered sleepily, sinking further against the window.

  Chala battled through the night against the unsought intimacy of their proximity and her own restlessness, which only highlighted the electricity of each accidental brush against each other. Once she woke up to the feel of him pushing gently past her to visit the loo. Her body moved to let him through.

  When breakfast came at last it was a relief to be able to start talking again, but Chala was annoyed with herself. Why in so much conversation had they steered so clear of personal circumstances and, specifically, why had she failed to mention Paul? Yet if she did so now it would sound out of place and much more important than it was, like an acknowledgment of something that needed to be held in check, and if that something were all in her imagination, she would just look silly. What would Paul have done in her place, she wondered. He would have spilled his personal situation in black and white right from the start, she was sure.

  In a rush of guilt, she suddenly gabbled out a CV to Bruce, which included the fact that she had met Paul five years ago and they had been married for three. He looked up from his congealed omelette with a smirk on his face that made her want to either hit him or ruffle his hair. Paul hardly ever let her ruffle his hair.

  ‘No worries, Sheila,’ countered Bruce with a mock Australian accent, and then, apparently serious, ‘I knew there had to be a good reason.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For not having sex with me on the first night.’

  ‘You arrogant—’ And she did hit him, with a mock slap across the cheek.

  ‘OK, look,’ he said, serious this time. ‘I am running away from boxes and locked doors, and I have no desire to get myself – or you – into trouble before I even get off the plane, so relax. No pressure, OK? I’ll give you my mobile and if you feel like a drink on land, then call me.’

  Chala’s immediate impulse was distrust. This was real cool-speak – much too cool for her. And there was something about the unsought chemistry of the night that flashed on and off inside her. But she took the number.

  CHAPTER 4

  By the age of six, Chala has burnt off some of the toddler fat of her early years, but her rosy-cheeked, full-moon face retains a chubbiness that keeps her puppy-like. Her red hair is always too long, even days after it has just been cut, and stray curls across her face are in almost every photo ever taken of her. She has grown into a rather shy, nervous little girl, capable of spending hours playing on her own, but when she smiles, and two puckered dimples pierce her roly-poly cheeks, she looks like an angel straight from a da Vinci painting. In morbid, introspective moments, the Chala of later years will look back at photos of herself and strain to see some sign of what lies beyond the sham of innocence.

  Today, she sits expectantly on the chequered rug that has been laid out in their little walled garden on a spring Sunday afternoon. Ever since Denise left, Philip makes a point of doing something special on a Sunday. They go for excursions to the beach, play hide-and-seek in the woods on the edge of the moor, pick blackberries or bake bread together – and they discover an effortless companionability with none of the edge that so often accompanied the attempt at family outings with Denise. Chala doesn’t know where Denise has gone and Philip doesn’t talk about it. Today he is making her favourite picnic lunch: marmite sandwiches with banana.

  At last Philip appears at the glass door that opens straight from his study into the garden. He is carrying the expected tray, piled high with sandwiches, juice, beer, raspberries and cream. There is something of the absent-minded professor stereotype about Philip. With his soft beard, longish, prematurely greying hair and glasses he is forever losing, he is perfectly in context in his primary school classroom full of eager or unruly young faces. Elsewhere there is a gentle clumsiness about him; an awkwardness that Denise used to find endearing when she first met him, but struggled with over time. In the kitchen he looks quite out of place, and most women if they see him there cannot contain an impulse to wave him aside and take over. The mess behind him now belies the outcome – he must surely have cooked a three-course meal, not a few rounds of sandwiches!

  They tuck into their picnic with shared relish and then lie back on the rug and look for shapes in the clouds. Philip sees trees and rivers and mountains. Chala sees mostly dogs and horses, and Philip makes a private resolution to buy her a dog. A dog will be a distraction and good company for both of them.

  ‘Phiwip?’ Chala says, still looking up at the sky above them, and he tunes into the sudden childish earnestness in her voice. ‘Why did Neece leave us?’

  Philip thinks hard about how to present reality to a six-year-old but, impatient, she fills the pause with another question. ‘Was it my fault?’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t, my sweet. Why would you think that?’ Philip is glad that they are staring at the sky and that she doesn’t see the tears in his eyes. He launches into a simple, adult explanation. ‘Sometimes things go wrong between a man and a woman. It’s nobody’s fault, but sometimes it just happens and they can no longer live together, and then one of them has to leave.’

  ‘Has she gone to look for Emma?’ Chala is still woken up by occasional nightmares about Rosie, although Emma hasn’t been to check on Rosie for a while now. Once Chala ripped Rosie’s arm off and hid it in the rubbish, another time she buried her alive in the garden, but these things happen less often and during the day she finds that she can even let Rosie sit on her bed sometimes.

  Philip swallows hard. ‘In a way, yes, I think she has sort of gone to look for Emma. You know, my sweet, she doesn’t blame us, it’s just that, well, I suppose in a way, we both remind her too much of Emma not being there.’ Chala says nothing and Philip decides to give her more adult information. ‘You know, Chala, before Denise and me, you had another mother and father. Your real mother was my sister—’

  This is too much for six-year-old Chala. ‘Don’t be silly, Phiwip, you don’t have a sister.’

  ‘Not now, no, but I used to have one and she was your mother. Her name was Sarah Bryan – you see, she had the same surname as you and me – and your father’s name was Robert Walsh. When you were two years old, they had an accident a… and they died, so you came to live with us.’

  ‘Look at that cloud there, what can you see?’

  Philip wonders if he was wrong to tell her, but when is it the right time to tell a child that you aren’t her real parent? ‘Um, I can s… I can s… a giant fish,’ he offers with a proud jolt of his imagination.

  ‘Don’t be silly, it’s not a fish, Phiwip,’ she chastises him.

  ‘Well, what is it then?’ he says, almost put out.

  ‘It’s your sister!’ And Chala starts to giggle at her own joke.

  Philip laughs too and comforts himself with the hope that he has done the right thing. Over the months that follow, his sister and brother-in-law become figures in a story for Chala, good ghosts to crowd out the bad ones. Philip is always reticent, but gradually, over the years, Chala will coax out the story of what happened and what they were like. She will look at old photos and play imaginary games with them. When she becomes a teenager she will love the tragedy of the way they died, in a climbing accident on Mount Kenya during their honeymoon. She will love the knowledge that her own birth parents were unconventional enough to wait until she was two to get married, at a time when this was hardly the norm, and the fact that they were adventurous and young, and that this will never, ever change. Mount Kenya will become a legend in her imaginati… honeymoon mountain.

  But when she talks about her birth mother to Philip, she never says �
�my mother’, it’s always ‘your sister’. ‘Tell me more about your sister, Phiwip.’

  At school, some of the kids laugh at her and ask why she calls her daddy by his first name, but she shies away from a direct answer. Her stories are private and she doesn’t want to share them with her classmates.

  The day of her eighth birthday is one that she will never forget. Philip drives her to her school on the way to his own, just like any other day. Having himself suffered the stigma of being a student in his father’s class, he was determined not to let that happen to Chala and applied for a teaching job outside their primary school catchment area. By now, they have developed a comfortable routine around their day. Chala goes home with her best friend, Amanda, who lives down the road. Philip picks her up an hour or so later, with Rusty, their gorgeous springer spaniel puppy, and they walk him home together. On long summer evenings, they walk past their converted cottage into the woods and watch Rusty chase butterflies through the ferns, but on cold, dark winter nights, they march straight back to the house and warm their cold noses by an open fire. Like a retired couple who have slowly grown to resemble each other in old age, sharing and acquiring each other’s habits, Philip and Chala have both discovered something safe in the act of walking and talking. It’s a time they both savour, when the distractions of Rusty and the weather and the view around them make intimacy less intense.

  On her eighth birthday, which falls in July, they are to have an after-school picnic in the woods with Amanda and her family. Chala is excited, but she makes Amanda promise not to tell the other children that it’s her birthday. She hates being the centre of attention and yet, in the playground during break, a tiny incident will launch her centre stage with a force that will ensure she needs to take beta blockers before any form of public speaking for the rest of her life.

  She and Amanda are part of a group of girls who have formed a circle. In the middle, two girls are rotating a skipping rope. A girl called Louise, with rolls of fat and lots of freckles, is the leader. Chala is a little bit afraid of Louise, but all her friends are Louise’s friends and everyone does what she says. ‘One, two, three,’ chants Louise, ‘tell us about your brother’ – or your mother or your favourite game or the boy you’d like to kiss. And the girl whose turn it is to skip has to shout out things on cue to the rhythm of her skipping.

  ‘Tell us about your father’ is the cue when it is Chala’s turn.

  ‘Philip is a teach… Philip’s got a bea… Philip…’

  And then she trips with the concentration of thinking of more things to say and everyone laughs and suddenly someone is saying, ‘Why do you call your daddy Philip?’ And others chime in, ‘Yes, Chala, why do you do that?’ And Louise says, ‘I know why,’ and everyone crowds round her expectantly and the skipping rope lies forgotten underfoot.

  ‘He’s not her daddy, he’s her uncle. It was on TV. My mummy told me about it, but said I mustn’t tell.’

  ‘Tell, tell, tell,’ chant the little girls.

  ‘She killed her baby sister with a pillow when she was four.’

  There is a moment of complete silence as the girls absorb this shockingly delicious revelation about their classmate.

  Chala’s face is stone-still. What does Louise mean? She can’t really remember what happened, but she knows that baby Emma disappeared one day and never came back. It was an accident – that’s what everyone had always said.

  But then she feels the eyes around her, bursts into tears and runs indoors, followed only by Amanda. And the rest close ranks to invent more detail in the story of Chala’s crime.

  From this moment on Chala will find herself the twin butt of their revulsion and their fascination. No one except Amanda will want to be on the same side as her when they are asked to form teams for PE. Only Amanda will sit next to her in class. And yet they will not be able to stop looking at her. Her entry into a room will never go unnoticed again.

  * * *

  Chala rubbed her eyes and wondered how many years it would take to undo the damage of who she was. Despite her resolve to master jetlag and stay awake through the day, she had drifted to sleep and woken up in the grip of some kind of half memory to do with being taunted at school. It was probably all just a matter of nerves, because she had to give a presentation the next day. Pathetic, she added to the list of taunts for herself. Get over it.

  She went into the bathroom and took one of the Valium she reserved for moments like this. She thought about calling Paul, but it would be too early in the morning there and, anyway, what was the point? Why burden him with something so ridiculous, so far away? She tried to look away from Paul’s presence in her mind, to look inside herself for strength, as if conscious of a need to break the habit that had formed so seductively between them, the black and white cushions of his arms around her. She climbed back onto the hotel bed, dragged her laptop out of its case and opened the unfinished presentation with a slow and deliberate deep breath.

  By eight o’clock in the evening the pill had done its work. She had finished the presentation and felt a soft white wave of calm wash through her. Now she found she no longer felt tired and realised she would probably pay for the failure to stay awake through the day. Still, there was nowhere she needed to be until the following afternoon when she would visit the Sydney campus. She flicked through the room service menu and then thought, with an uncharacteristic flash of spontaneity, sod it, I’m in the gourmet capital of Australia. I’m going to a restaurant.

  She spent the next fifteen minutes consulting the hotel guide and reception staff about where to go and how to get there, which meant that it took her longer to think about where to eat than it took her to do something utterly uncharacteristic that would change her life. She phoned Bruce.

  * * *

  ‘So how was your day?’ The question was deliberately ironic.

  ‘Fine. How was yours?’

  ‘Not bad. … what’s new?’

  They were sitting in the top-floor restaurant of a building that appeared to be made only of glass, with an intoxicating view of lights all around them, sipping very cold and very dry white wine. This wasn’t fair, thought Chala. Why were they imitating a married couple? But Bruce was smiling warmly at her and she smiled back.

  ‘Right. Time to introduce me to your husband. Come on. Let’s get him out into the open!’

  ‘Does your arrogance really work that well with women?’ Chala countered, genuinely shocked by his absolute air of self-assurance.

  ‘Bad call,’ Bruce fired. ‘Not arrogance. Just fed up of hiding shit beneath the surface. Did too much of that with the job – and with Janie.’ The subjects had dropped from his sentences. This made him sound like a character from a very bad western and it made Chala giggle, despite herself.

  ‘Sorry,’ she explained to the momentary look of hurt on his face. ‘It’s the way you’re talking. You sound like a poor imitation of Clint Eastwood, that’s all!’

  ‘Well, you can be pretty direct when you want to be, can’t you?’ Bruce raised his glass to hers.

  ‘… not normally, no.’ Chala chinked her glass against his and looked away from his eyes. ‘You never told me if you’ve actually been to Australia before.’

  This was the way Chala worked. She needed to put spaces between intimacies. And neither of them realised that the subject of husbands and ex-girlfriends had been sidelined. They shared impressions of their travels and talked about safe dreams; dreams for him of living somewhere different, somewhere a million miles away from the City; dreams for her of doing something worthwhile, perhaps some kind of voluntary work in Africa, something that might ‘help’, if only she could define what that mea…

  ‘But what you do now is all to do with educating international students. Isn’t that worthwhile?’ Bruce asked her.

  She sipped more wine and plunged into a subject she was not used to talking about. ‘That’s how I justify it to myself, but if I’m honest it’s not really about helping people, it’s about maki
ng money.’

  ‘Tell me about it – you want to do a job swap?’

  ‘I just wish I had something valuable to offer. I mean can you imagine how it must feel to be a surgeon … or a lifeguard?’

  They both laughed and she took another sip of wine. Chala knew that she was drinking more than she should. She knew two other things. One was almost subliminal: a gentle lapping of guilt beneath the surface. Surely she was crossing a line. Or was this just space in their togetherness? But the second was more powerful, more present: she was enjoying herself, enjoying the freedom of anonymity, enjoying this man who knew nothing about her. With him she had no past. She did not need to be anything or anyone – she was free to imagine being a lifeguard, for goodness’ sake, free from the fear of failure to live up to expectations – and this made her feel as though she were finding a new part of herself that she hadn’t known existed.

  They talked on over coffee and brandy, moving onto the open terrace, and then their conversation slowed. With the bill already paid, the empty glasses drew attention to the dilemma gathering momentum in the sudden silence between them. Chala felt dizzy and was not at all sure that it had anything to do with the wine and the brandy.

  ‘Time to go,’ she said, and was at once relieved and disappointed when he raised no objection.

  ‘You’re the boss,’ he said, and followed her out into the lift that would take them back to normality.

  What happened next took Chala by surprise and showed her another part of herself that she hadn’t known existed. They were alone in the lift when, in one simple movement, Bruce put his hands against the wall on either side of her and kissed her deeply. Her mouth responded. There no longer seemed to be any connection with her brain. Her body ached for his to come close to hers, but he stayed where he was with arms outstretched either side of her, hands against the wall, and only their faces touching. His tongue searched inside her for an answer to the unspoken question and he got it.