Asylum – Part Two

To catch the beginning of this story go to Asylum – a novel in weekly parts

…in which Yvette confronts the squallor of her friend Thomas’ flat…

PART TWO
2.1

Yvette stood in the aisle beside her back-row seat. Behind her the other passengers jostled for a place in the tightly-packed queue. After a ten-hour bus ride, another hour in transit to Tullamarine airport, and a tedious three hour wait for a smooth four-hour flight across the desert guts of Australia, her skin felt dirty and sticky and she hankered for somewhere, anywhere, quiet, cool and still.

Instead, the steward opened the plane’s rear door and Perth greeted Yvette with a gust of hot, dry air. November, and it must have been a hundred degrees.

The heat was at once exotic and familiar, the heat Yvette grew up with in Perth, the sort of heat she craved all those years in London, the heat that drew her to Malta. Heading for the shelter of the concrete and glass building across the tarmac, she felt exhilarated, until memory stabbed its black through her head and, for a few seconds, she was light-headed. She breathed deeply and stared down at the tarmac. She was back at primary school. How she loathed that school. More than anything she loathed morning assembly.

 

The morning sun was hot. Young as she was, to her English eyes the Headmaster looked absurdly casual in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts and carefully-measured socks. But Yvette took him seriously as he lectured the rows of kids with stern authority. Only she couldn’t listen. She stood at the back of her class queue, eyes fixed on the flag pole, willing the Australian flag to billow. It hung, limply, and she went limp inside and staggered across the playground to the toilets.

She was six, a timid, scrawny Pom, an easy target for those rowdy Australian kids. She avoided them. At recess and lunchtimes she sat on a bench in the shade of the peppermint gum furthest from the tuck shop. She fed the hard lump in her belly with marmalade sandwiches. Her mother couldn’t understand why she insisted on marmalade. She couldn’t understand it either at the time. Now she knew. Marmalade was bitter. Even then she had a sense of the symbolic.

Weeks passed and she adjusted, to the heat, the buildings and the smell of gum leaves, but not to the Aussie kids. She made two friends, Melissa Kovac, a pretty, wide-eyed girl from Bosnia, and Heather McAllister, who immediately became Yvette’s best friend. Heather was a plump girl with curly black hair and blue-green eyes, whose family arrived in Australia from Scotland about the same time as Yvette’s. Heather was in the same class and they sat together in the shade of the peppermint gum to eat their lunch. Yvette’s sandwich progressed from marmalade to lemon butter, still tart yet smooth and creamy.

Melissa’s family moved to Melbourne about a year later and Yvette hadn’t heard from her since. And when Yvette was twelve and her family left for England she lost touch with Heather.

Yvette might have made an effort to keep in touch. Yet she’d preferred to keep Heather locked in her past. For a reason strange to her, she suffered an absurd resistance to maintaining old friendships. Friends frozen like photographs, with the same values, interests and beliefs they’d had when she’d known them, moss-gatherers while only she rolled through life like a bare pebble seeking new experiences. Even Thomas. Last time they had met he was recovering after being punched in the face by an angry young woman on the London Underground. His pride bruised more than his eye. And he was furious with Yvette for laughing so hard rivulets of mascara ran down her cheeks. Now she was apprehensive. She had to force herself to embrace the possibility that Thomas was a little less paranoid and a little more trusting, and in the six months he’d lived in Perth, absorbed some of the laid-back Australian way of life.

The big acoustic chamber of the arrival’s lounge housed a muted cacophony of bustling and chatter, thumps and squeaking trolley wheels, and a clear high voice piercing above the rest with announcements. Yvette squeezed by a clutch of women with small children and noticed Thomas hovering beside a row of seats. He greeted her with a light kiss on her cheek. His round face, full lips and sharp blue eyes were exactly as she recalled. Short and sturdy, dressed in a tight-fitting white T-shirt and jeans, shaven head framing his unshaven face, he’d taken on a sort of George Michael style, without the pizzazz.

‘Good to see you,’ he said.

She wasn’t convinced he meant it. His eyes darted from her face to her feet and scanned nervously about the lounge. She was sporting a baggy purple T-shirt hanging over a pair of punky drain-pipes, streaks of black and lurid-pink on a white background. When she’d found them in the Cobargo Op shop she’d been ecstatic, the village instantly more appealing. Surrounded now by suntanned folk in shorts and thongs and others dressed uniformly in Kmart Chic, she suddenly felt ridiculous. She felt an overwhelming desire to merge, to belong to the ordinary. And an equally powerful urge to stand apart.

‘Let’s go.’ She handed Thomas the canvass holdall her mother had given her before grabbing a stray copy of The West Australian folded on a nearby seat. Then she adjusted the handles of her travelling bag that were pinching her shoulder and they headed for the exit doors.

It took Thomas five minutes to remove the heavy metal contraption he’d locked to the steering wheel of his Honda Civic. A vintage model painted a lurid pea-green, the car had the appearance of a jelly bean. At last he started the engine and crunched the gear stick into reverse.

Yvette sat back in her seat in bemused silence as he manoeuvred the car out of the car park, his face riven with tense concentration. Heading towards the city, he drove slowly in the inside lane of a stretch of dual carriageway, cars sweeping past on the right. She didn’t mind his caution. It afforded a leisurely chance to take in the streetscape. And she was shocked by the expansion of the American occupation that had occurred in her absence – a visual famine she hadn’t taken in at the blinkered age of twelve – the sprawl of car showrooms and petrol stations, discount warehouses and furniture display rooms, McDonalds and KFC and Hungry Jacks, and drive-through bottle shops to wash down the cultural bilge, all manner of businesses advertising themselves with blatant disregard for any aesthetic. O’Keeffe would have packed up her easel in disgust.

‘I can’t believe what’s happened to this place,’ she said. ‘And there’s no cohesion, just a ribbon of businesses each with its own car park. Not even a connecting footpath. What were the town planners thinking?’

Without moving his head, Thomas sniggered in that distinctly Thomas way of his, at once familiar and comforting. ‘American-style self-promotion,’ he said.

‘Gaudy and loud.’

‘A poverty of style.’

‘A mishmash lacking civic pride.’

They both laughed, but another part of her sank flat as the landscape, hoping with every passing set of traffic lights that the appearance of this metropolis would improve the closer they inched towards its centre.

An hour later, Thomas turned down a tree-lined street in Maylands, pulling up in the car park outside a block of high-rise flats. Yvette looked with dismay at the plain brick building fringed with rows of concrete balconies, the whole edifice totally devoid of charm.

There was no lift. She gave Thomas the holdall and, following behind him,  heaved her travelling bag up six flights of concrete stairs, entering a carpeted corridor that smelt faintly acrid, stopping about half-way down on the left. She braced herself for what was to come.

Sure enough, the flat was vile. A rectangular room painted institutional cream, partitioned at the end by a kitchen bench. Beyond the kitchen was a sliding door leading to a balcony. Opposite the kitchen bench, a door led to a bedroom and through it, a windowless bathroom. She took in at a glance the plain grey sofa, small Formica dining table and three padded vinyl chairs, and in the bedroom, a battered melamine wardrobe and a double-bed mattress on the floor. The lack of bars on the windows and a key to open the front door were all that prevented her from screaming, ‘let me out of here!’

Hiding her displeasure, she turned to Thomas. ‘Thanks so much for letting me stay.’

‘I left the fridge on.’

As she went to open the fridge door he said, ‘but it’s empty.’ He hesitated. ‘There’s a shop round the corner.’ He glanced at his watch then caught her eye with an apologetic smile. ‘Anthony’s due at my place soon.’

She fought an urge to cry.

‘I’ll call you later.’ And he left.

 

2.2

 

She slid open the door to the balcony and stepped outside. The view was impressive in a modern kind of way; the jacarandas and the gum trees, the suburban rooftops and the Perth city skyline to the west. There was a satisfying depth of field, pleasing variations of height, but the light was too brash, the detail too bland to warrant the sharpening of a pencil.

She was about to lean over the concrete wall to survey the ground below when she noticed a black bin liner in the far corner of the balcony. Loosely knotted, the blow fly buzzing around was sure to find a point of entry. She picked up the bag by its knot and recoiled, the distinct smells of rancid food and rotten meat so strong she caught her breath. She propped open the front door, grabbed the bag and dashed downstairs. Rows of green wheelie bins were lined up along a fence. She hurled the bag into one and followed a trail of fetid drips back to the flat.

Deciding to make the best of things, she used the skerrick of washing up liquid and the old rag Thomas had left beside the sink and cleaned the cupboards, inside and out, and the benches, cooker, fridge and floor. Then, she walked to the shops. She didn’t buy much. Partly because she was broke, and partly because whatever she did buy she had to lug up those stairs. She returned with two carrier bags of groceries.

Entering the flat again she recoiled. Was this a conspiracy of town planners and architects to depress the senses of the populace, render them dim-witted, numb and complacent, passive acceptors of the institutionalisation of everywhere? She had to summon all her resolve to endure it.

She divested the shopping bags of their contents, putting the milk, butter and eggs in the fridge along with a small selection of vegetables, and the tea, sugar, a tin of tomatoes and a packet of pasta in one of the cupboards. Then she unpacked, setting free of her clothes a handful of cutlery, a bowl, two plates, two glasses and two mugs, and an old kettle and a toaster her mother had been keeping for a daughter-leaving-home eventuality. When done she filled the kettle and made a mug of tea, taking up one of the vinyl chairs and opening the newspaper, curious to see what passed for news in this state.

She waded through the usual bashings, drug hauls, rich and glitz scandals and political storms, stopping to read with mild interest a piece on a stand-off between Australia and Indonesia over a boat of asylum seekers, neither country prepared to take the people to shore. What a ludicrous scenario. Someone has to show some humanity. Otherwise, what are those folk to do? – Bob about in the ocean forever?

She closed the paper in disgust and took a cool shower. Then she made the bed with the sheets her mother had given her and lay down, staring at the light globe hanging in the centre of the ceiling. What now? She thought of reading a book but she didn’t have one. She couldn’t listen to music. She’d left her CDs, along with her jewellery, lap top, photos, sketches, paints and brushes in Carlos’ house. She didn’t even have a radio. And the silence was claustrophobic. She reached for her shoulder bag leaning against the skirting board and rummaged about for a pencil and her sketch book.

She leafed through ten sketches of dead trees, none of them worthy of her pencil’s attention. Arriving at a blank page, she was unexpectedly crowded by memories, prisoners straining the highwire fence she’d long ago erected in her mind.

Perhaps returning to Perth wasn’t such a good idea.

She drew a large oval and marked out where in the face the nose and eyes would go. His portrait. The one she painted in that first year here. She was so proud. She’d given him a shock of black hair, large ears, round eyes set close together, a long nose with flaring nostrils and a wide mouth full of dagger-like teeth. Looking back she viewed the work her one expressionist masterpiece. Her mother thought she’d captured him delightfully well. She supposed she had. Her father wasn’t stupid, although her mother liked to call him gormless. He wasn’t mad either, but when he smiled he had an air of mad stupidity, the sort of stupid, senseless madness that transfigured, along with his countenance, into something terrifying when his anger was triggered. Which was as often as sunrise. He wasn’t a powerful man, lanky and barrel-chested, with sloping shoulders and a nervous blink. Her mother had other names for him. Sometimes she called him a silly old sod or face-ache. She must have hated him. Yvette loved him. Which was why, when he saw her portrait of him and ripped it to pieces, she cried.

Yvette closed her sketch book then her eyes.

 

Thomas phoned late that evening.

‘How are you settling in?’ he said.

‘I’ve been cleaning up a bit,’ she said, brightly. ‘I removed the bin liner you left out on the balcony.’

‘Oh, that? It wasn’t mine. It was there when I moved in.’

Yvette’s upper lip curled of its own accord. Thomas wasn’t the most hygienic of men, the sheets on his bed in his functional London flat looked and smelt so grimy when he offered her the choice between his bed and the couch she always took the couch.

She accepted his invitation to dinner at his place the following evening, curious to see what sort of home he now had, and hung up her phone.

Deciding she’d had enough of the day, she turned to switch off the kitchen light. Something small and black scuttled across the floor. She thought best to ignore it. She brushed her teeth and changed into a T-shirt for bed. Back in the kitchen she opened a cupboard for a glass. Inside, scurrying to the back of the cupboard were three shiny, black insects. She opened the other cupboard doors. And there they were in all of them, crawling, scurrying, feeling their way about with long antennae.

Cockroaches.

She keeled with revulsion. Worse than ants, worse than flies, ranking joint-first with rats in her hierarchy of vile and dirty pests. And they were everywhere. One had even found its way into the fridge.

She slammed shut the cupboard doors and rinsed then filled her glass in the bathroom. Hoping the roaches had not found their way into the bedroom she rolled a towel and rammed it into the crack under the living-room door. She switched off the light and closed her eyes. She dared not open them for fear of glimpsing in the gloom a roach crawling up the wall beside the bed.

 

2.3

 

Thomas’s unit was four streets closer to the city in the adjacent suburb of Mount Lawley. It was a warm evening. Yvette walked along the flat, suburban streets dodging the spray from garden sprinklers watering the carefully mown lawns. She admired the canopy the Jacarandas made, their floral display of purple trumpets, fallen blooms dusting the pavement like fat confetti. Had she been more like Séraphine Louis and less Georgia O’Keeffe in her artistic approach, more inclined to chaos than control, she would have been in creative paradise right here on these pavements.

Instead, she kept walking, determined to make the most of her new life in Perth, determined, therefore, to enjoy whatever social delights Thomas had to offer.

Accessed by an external walkway, Thomas’s unit was on the second floor of a brick building fashioned in the style of government housing. The door to the unit was ajar so she pushed it open and entered straight into a steam-filled kitchen. Thomas was frantically snatching handfuls of spaghetti out of the sink and tossing them into a colander. On the cooker, on hard boil, a saucepan brimming with bolognaise sauce spluttered madly.

‘Can I help?’ she said.

Thomas emitted a small yelp before plonking a lid over the colander. Regaining his composure, he said. ‘Are you early?’

‘No. Bang on time. Smells terrific.’

She kissed his cheek before sitting down at a small wooden table. Beyond the kitchen, the living room was the same in size and appeal as her flat. A jumbled mess of books, papers, clothing and towels occupied every seat and the whole of the floor, except for a small area over by a music stand and Thomas’s violin.

Thomas handed her a glass of red wine.

‘Where’s Anthony?’ she said.

‘He didn’t turn up.’ A look of dejection appeared in his face. He seemed close to tears. ‘It isn’t working.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He turned to fetch the colander. She sipped the wine. It had a sharp, metallic twang.

‘What’s the problem?’ she asked.

‘He won’t commit. He says he wants an open relationship.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. Really, what could she say?

‘Me too,’ he said with his back to her.

He piled spaghetti onto plates, placed the saucepan on a board in the centre of the table and offered her a ladle.

‘Help yourself to sauce.’

‘Thanks.’ Keen to reinforce her solidarity, she said, ‘You didn’t move half-way round the world to share him with other men.’

‘He’s always been a butterfly. But I thought he wanted me.’ Thomas poured two ladles of sauce onto his spaghetti, thrust in his fork and twisted furiously then shovelled the dribbling bulk into his mouth. She twirled a few spaghetti strands on her fork without looking up at him. Poor guy.

‘I don’t know how you can stay with him,’ she said, realising as she spoke she had been doing just that with Carlos until she fell pregnant.

‘We might be splitting up.’

‘What will you do? Go back to England?’ She had to repress an unwarranted feeling of abandonment.

‘I thought about it. But I’ve bought this place now.’

She couldn’t see how anyone could bond with a unit like this. But she felt relieved.

‘And then there’s my job,’ he continued, reaching behind him for the stained tea towel on the draining board to wipe his mouth.

‘Computer programming? I thought you hated it.’

He avoided her gaze. ‘It pays well and my colleagues are friendly. I seem to fit in.’

She let his justifications slip by without challenge.

They spent the rest of the evening lying diagonally on his unmade bed, discussing art, poetry and music, an elixir of conversation. They finished one bottle of wine and opened another. Yvette felt drawn to him, not physically, but there was an intimacy between them, born of affection and shared history. They reminisced. Long walks on Hampstead Heath. Sunday mornings at Camden Market. The cinemas, pubs and cheap restaurants they’d frequented. Of the two weeks he’d spent with her in Malta. How they’d visited the old temples and strolled along the rocky beaches where the limestone cliffs met the ocean, their voices raised against the wind, dissecting the ravaged body of the island’s culture with their scalpel-sharp minds. An island settled by stone-age farmers thousands of years before first the Greeks, the Phoenicians then the Romans came along. Embroiled in the Byzantine Wars, colonised by Arab rulers from Sicily, then back to the West in the hands of the Normans, eventually ending up part of the British Empire. Poor beleaguered Malta, in sixty-four its people finally gained independence after many thousands of years, only now to be colonised by tourists, who at least, they had to agree, went home after their generally less harmful pillaging.

‘I identified with the island so much,’ she said, ‘I refused to mix with the foreigners. Even the market traders. But the locals were a closed group.’

‘So you fell in with Carlos.’

‘That’s an interesting way of putting it.’

‘Well, you’re here now. Malta is the past.’

She buried her face in her hands. He had no idea how much his words stung. He couldn’t fathom the depths of her attachment to that island. And she hadn’t told him she’d fallen pregnant. She didn’t want him to know Carlos had coerced her into having a termination. Now, with a hollow heart and a resistant mind, she faced the bland suburban landscape of Perth, with its suburban values, suburban aspirations, inane, urbane and nauseatingly bourgeois. She had no idea how she’d find her way. One part of her craved security. Another craved adventure. Both were drawn by the allure of the fortune-teller’s prophecy. It was all she had to hold on to.

She left shortly after eleven. She could have stayed up all night but Thomas had to work tomorrow. And she had to find work. Casual work. Cash in hand. But she wouldn’t clean motel rooms again.

 

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