Amita Murray - The Trouble with Rose

There is silence. Not much changes in Federico’s face. There’s a slight shift, a clicking of his jaw, but not much else.

I want to claw my tongue out. I want to sit up and slap my face a few times. What is the matter with me? It’s like words spring out of my mouth and I have no control over them.

‘Sorry. Okay? Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’ I have the stupid impulse to ask, Do you still like me? Please say you still like me . But I never say things like that, and I don’t say it now. Even though I could do with some people liking me right about now.

Finally, after many suspended moments, Federico moves, he reaches out a hand. The four walls of Federico’s model house are standing up together. He takes one down and starts cutting out a square shape to make a window. He can’t quite get the four sides to be the same length, so the window is getting bigger and bigger. I watch him at this task for a while. He is no longer talking to me. In fact, he’s acting like I’m not here. I sigh and leave him to it.

Outside our house there is a lonely patio on which people rarely sit. Sitting there bears the risk of being sociable, so everyone avoids it, and this works perfectly for me. Sometimes I leave a pair of smelly socks there to drive the point home. I go down to it now and sit down heavily on the swing, hugging my knees to myself. I can’t tell if I never want to see Simon’s face again or if all I want is for him to come walking up to the house right now. A tinny twang-twang-twang is coming from the ground-floor flat. Our downstairs neighbour Phil (who is a teacher in training) wants to join a mariachi band and Federico is teaching him the vihuela. I clamp my hands over my ears. There are workmen digging outside the park across the road. They’ve been there for weeks, and the local residents are complaining to the council about how the noise is bad for their children. This has to be the noisiest street in the world. I stare into the distance.

My neighbour Earl rides past on his mobility scooter. Earl’s mobility scooter is the Cecil Turtle of vehicles. It is so slow that I can say hello, pop inside, put the kettle on, make my vanilla Rooibos chai , pop back out, drink the entire mugful and say goodbye to him as he rides out of sight. When he sees me this morning he does a double-take. Yup, I’m still here. I’m not on my way to my blissful new life with Simon.

‘To get somewhere, you have to leave the house, Rilla!’ Earl calls as he slo-mos past.

I curl my mouth. ‘I’ve always been better at staying put, Earl. That’s the problem.’

His snowy shock of hair blows gently in the breeze as he glides past.

That’s when I notice that I have a text message. 20 mins , it says.

For a moment, I’m paralysed. I stare at it like I can’t understand the words.

It is from my cousin Jharna. It was sent eighteen minutes ago. This means I have two minutes before the GIF arrives. I run inside and fling myself up the stairs and all the way up to my room in the attic. I barricade myself, I wedge the dresser inside the closed door, I place a dozen or so books on top of the dresser. I sit down on the stripy sofa-chair, cover myself with the duvet and squeeze my eyes shut. The GIF is on its way.

Two minutes after I disappear inside my room, my parents, an auntie and an uncle, and Jharna turn up. Federico lets them in. I can hear them downstairs in the living room. Well, that’s just fine. They can sit and chat with Federico for as long as they like. There’s absolutely no reason I need to leave my room. I will read a book. I pick one up from on top of my dresser and stare at the words. It is one of my books for my MA thesis: Roland Barthes saying something about love, something about how we meet millions of people in our life, but out of these we only truly love one. I snap the book shut. One out of millions! His arithmetic is clearly all wrong, that’s the problem with Barthes. How can anyone find love if faced with such odds? The man is a kook!

I look at the clock on the wall. I spring up off the chair, crouch on the floor and put my ear down to it. The odd thing is that the GIF has been there for a quarter of an hour but no one has bothered to even come up and knock at my door. Well, that suits me perfectly. What I need is exercise, I’m so restless I feel like I’m going to break things. I pace up and down, do some push-ups against the wall, and jog around the room. The buzzer rings. At once, I’m on the floor again, my ear pressed to it. I can’t hear anything for a few minutes. Someone, probably Federico, has walked all the way down to the front door, and then walked up again, slower this time. There are some exclamations, followed by silence. Then there it is. The sure waft of cheesy dough. The wily bastards have ordered pizza! I jump up and look out of my window. In the distance I see the delivery man. He’s from our local and they do really good pizzas. There’s the usual pepperoni and chicken sausage and farmhouse, but they also do goats cheese and caramelized onion, butternut squash and spicy bacon. My tummy moans, long and slowly. All of a sudden, I desperately want pizza. I’ve eaten nothing but Federico’s kale chips and tonic water since yesterday, my stomach turning at the thought of food after what I did to Simon, but now I can smell it. I can smell the pizza. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can hear them chewing. I pace around the room for another five minutes. Argh! I hate them so much!

I give in to the inevitable and walk slowly downstairs where a small army seems to be crammed into my living room.

‘Talk some sense into her, men don’t like it if you take them for granted,’ my Auntie Pinky says as soon as she sees me. She is munching pepperoni pizza.

I leap at a random pizza box and inhale half a slice in two bites. I close my eyes. It’s the tastiest thing I’ve ever eaten. Spicy sausage. I shudder it’s so good.

I turn around to look at the assembled company. ‘Hey Auntie Pinky, Uncle Jat,’ I give them a wave. I munch up the rest of my slice and grab another one.

Of course my Uncle Jatinder – my mother’s brother – and Auntie Pinky are here. They are always here. They are self-appointed custodians of everything. Everything that anyone in the GIF does or wants to do has to go through them. If you’re getting a job, a haircut, a mortgage, a pet, a manicure, a degree, a marriage license, a wax, it has to be discussed with Uncle Jat and Auntie Pinky so that they can tell you the best way to go about it.

Auntie Pinky is short and plump, her hair is uncoloured with two white wings (we call them the East Wing and the West Wing) that make her look like a zebra crossing. Uncle Jat has soft curves, he wears glasses with a gold chain attached and his hands gesture softly when he talks. He wears kohlapuri slippers even in the dead of winter and sneezes soundlessly by squeezing his nose. He doesn’t look it, but he is very good at all things finance. They own a catering business, an empire really, that supplies Indian restaurants with dessert.

‘Let’s not heckle the girl, Pinky,’ he says.

‘Thanks, Uncle Jat.’ I munch on the crust. Even the crust is good. Crunchy and skinny and cheesy, just the way I like it. ‘I ate frogs’ legs on pizza once,’ I say to no one in particular.

My parents, Uncle Jat and Auntie Pinky are all jammed into the one sofa in the room. It isn’t a large living room and the GIF is making it leak at the seams. Federico is sitting on the cane rocking chair. I have nowhere to sit, so I stand leaning against a wall.

Suddenly Auntie Pinky slaps her head with a hand. She gets up, walks to a large shopping bag that is sitting in the corner of the room, brings out an enormous plastic box and starts laying homemade cupcakes onto a tray, since apparently several boxes of pizza are not enough to feed our small GIF army.