Rita Vegas

You would expect noise. Shouting. People running. Police sirens. But there was nothing. Not so much as a single fretful decibel. After that initial alarming shriek, only silence.

I checked my watch. 5.30 am. I was on the second lap of my daily jog around the complex, taking advantage of dawn’s cooler temperatures, when I heard the scream. I cut away from the path and ran through a grove of mango trees towards the main gardening shed where I found Keren on her knees, rocking herself back and forth, and mumbling, or moaning, I wasn’t sure which. In front of her, a woman lay slumped against the base of a banyan tree.

She was obviously dead and it looked like she’d lain there all night. Her flesh was ashen, waxy, her mouth open, as if she’d been about to say something but was interrupted. Her lips were fixed in a gruesome rictus, her eyes wide open in a blank, dreadful stare. My own eyes filled instantly with tears. It was the shock.

‘Who is she?’ I meant to whisper but the words came out louder than I intended. My voice sounded harsh and strained. I reached into my pocket for a cigarette to calm my nerves only to remember I no longer smoked. I’d made the decision on my second day at the Serenity Centre to take advantage of its motivating mantra and quit.

Light was just beginning to finger its way across the sky. The rain had ended but water still dripped from the trees. The ground was saturated. Keren stopped her rocking. ‘It’s Arlene. Craig’s wife.’ Keren’s voice was low and muffled, as if she were speaking through a blanket. ‘She only just got here a couple of days ago. What can have happened?’

She reached out a hand to close Arlene’s eyes, but I stopped her. ‘Best not to touch anything, don’t you think?’

Keren murmured assent. ‘Of course.’ She stood up and wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I’ll go and get Marcus,’ she said, but made no move to go, instead gazing mournfully at Arlene’s body, biting her lower lip as if uncertain what to do or say next. ‘Yes. Marcus,’ she reiterated at last. ‘He should be the one to tell Craig. And Cameron. He came with Arlene. He’s their son.’ She gave me a helpless look. ‘I was on my way to the yoga hall, you know . . . set it up . . .’

She held out a small brown bottle, the sort that carries pills. It was almost empty. ‘I found it,’ she said, ‘just over there . . . by Arlene. I’m fairly sure they were hers.’

‘If they were prescription pills, the label will have her name on it.’

Keren turned the bottle around and we examined the label. Norp-something. We couldn’t decipher any more than that; whatever else it might have told us had been washed off in the rain.

‘Might be Norpramin,’ said Keren. ‘It’s an antidepressant.’ She put the bottle in her pocket and left. I watched her go. I wanted to follow, return immediately to my room, shut the door, pretend I hadn’t seen what I’d seen. And, this time, leave it to others. But my inquisitive mind got the better of me and I stayed put to contemplate Arlene. How forlorn she seemed. How lonesome. There was no reason for me to have known Craig had a family. Other than the fact he was Marcus’s right-hand man, I knew nothing about Craig, but I’d got the impression he was single.

The ground was soft and gummy and my foot sank a little into the mud when I stepped closer to the body. Arlene’s blonde hair and her green stripey dress were wet and streaked with mud. The laces on her blue sneakers were unfastened as if she’d left somewhere in a hurry. Her right foot was half out of its shoe. There was a leather sandal nearby but it was broken and looked as if it had been there for weeks. I was tempted to poke around in the mud but resisted the urge, less out of deference to police procedure and more because I didn’t want to inadvertently touch something that might bite or sting.

In the distance through the trees, I noticed a few people milling around the entrance to the yoga hall. There were never more than four or five at the six am yoga session. None of them looked in my direction and, as far as I could tell, no one had yet noticed anything amiss. Most of the Centre’s residents didn’t emerge from their rooms until breakfast at seven-thirty.

By the time Keren returned, just after six, the sun was high and the day already warm. ‘Told the yoga group to go ahead without me,’ she said. ‘Marcus is on his way. He’s asked us not to speak . . . you know, not to break Noble Silence.’

I glanced towards the administration building where Marcus spent his days. I’d met him, briefly, on my arrival at the Serenity Centre, and while I admired his altruism, I got the feeling he was a man who held himself apart. He’d seemed reserved, unapproachable even, a demeanour at odds with his objective in creating the Centre: to provide a refuge where people could get help to dry out or kick bad habits – mostly of the hard drug-taking kind – or find a way of living that’s less troubled than the one they’ve lived so far. A sanctuary in which to share and holler out their pain, to rant and rave, if that’s what their healing required.

Maybe Marcus needed sanctuary himself.

By now I was shivery and trembling, and I hurried back to my room, leaving Keren with the corpse. I stumbled through the door and dashed into the bathroom where I vomited. After that I lay down on the bed. It was a hard, narrow cot, but right then I wasn’t bothered by its austerity. My mind was reeling, as if I were in the throes of vertigo. Arlene’s grey inert face swam before me, then morphed into Rachel Quentin’s lurid image, the eyes gouged and the mouth tacked shut.

∞

After a short while I showered. I was anticipating some sort of warning, an alarm, or a gong perhaps, summoning everyone to the refectory, but this didn’t happen

Breakfast went ahead that day as if there was nothing untoward. It was strange, surreal, like something you’d see in a Jean Cocteau movie. By the time I arrived, just after seven-thirty, everyone else had already helped themselves from trays of fruit and cereals on the servery counter. As usual, no one was talking. The Centre’s twelve-hour stricture of Noble Silence remained inviolable and as everyone settled into their usual groups – residents on one side of the room, volunteers on the other – I registered that if anyone there was aware of the dead woman, they were keeping it to themselves.

At any moment I expected policemen to stride through the door, scope the room with jaundiced eyes, ask questions, demand to know who had seen what, but no one came, not a single cop. I noticed Keren wasn’t there. Nor was Craig, but that was to be expected. Marcus came in and for a couple of minutes stood just inside the door, gazing at his community. He appeared tense, as well he might. This was my first opportunity to observe him. He never ate with us in the refectory and apart from our first perfunctory introduction, I’d barely seen him. As a volunteer at the Centre, I was left to my own devices, more or less, while a fixed programme – group therapy, counselling, yoga, mindfulness sessions, stuff like that – occupied everyone else most of the time. When they weren’t engaged in these activities, the residents used the swimming pool or went for walks around the Centre, and each day they were assigned chores such as keeping the pool clean, helping in the kitchen, clearing up after meals and emptying rubbish bins.

Marcus had limpid grey eyes and light brown hair cut very short. It was hard to gauge his age. At first, he didn’t seem much older than me, but then I noticed threads of grey in his hair which suggested he might be closer to fifty than forty. He dipped his head at a couple of people to acknowledge them, placed his palms together in an attitude of prayer and left.

I abandoned my porridge and followed him out of the dining hall. Before I could say anything, he turned and lifted a hand to stop me, then tapped his watch meaningfully, reminding me no speaking was allowed until nine o’clock. It was exasperating.

‘That’s nearly an hour away,’ I said. ‘What’s being done about Arlene?’

No answer.

‘I’d just like to know. I . . . at least, Keren and me, we found her after all . . . and shouldn’t we tell people?’

Marcus took a couple of slow deep breaths and remained uncommunicative. Did he fear being struck down if he spoke during Noble Silence? It was dotty. Despite the injunction the rule was sacred, it wasn’t. No rules are. They are bendy, always subject to change or amendment, and, surely, given the circumstances, Marcus could break with his own directive. I watched him, not once looking away, and waited for him to say something. After a weary pause, he did at last speak, doubtless because he thought it the only way to get rid of me.

‘The residents don’t need to know. No one needs to know. It’s important for everyone’s welfare there is no disturbance to our daily routine.’ His eyes rested on me and he added: ‘We include your wellbeing in that, Rita.’

I was unconvinced, but impressed he knew my name.

‘Has anything like this ever happened here before?’

Marcus adopted that clerical pose again, fingertips to fingertips, and closed his eyes for a moment as if to remind me who he was and who I was, that I was a nobody or at least so peripheral, so inconsequential I wasn’t worth his making an effort. When he spoke again his voice was guarded, which suggested to me he wasn’t fully in control of the situation and had yet to figure out how he might best deal with it. ‘Why would you ask that?’ he asked.

I declined to state the obvious, such as plastic knives in the dining hall. ‘What about the police?’ I asked. ‘Won’t they want—’

He interrupted. ‘You talk as if there is some sort of case to be investigated. There isn’t. It’s terribly sad, and I wish with all my heart it hadn’t happened, but Arlene committed suicide.’ Marcus’s voice was strong now. He had a slight accent – German, possibly Dutch – and he measured his words carefully.

He walked away before I could say anything more, like tell him it hadn’t looked like suicide to me. There were questions to be answered, such as why Arlene was lying the way she was, as if she’d been struck down while trying to get away from something or someone. And if the pills in that bottle were an antidepressant, Norpramin, as Keren said, would an overdose of them be fatal? I had no idea.

I remained there, on the path between the refectory and the administration block, watching Marcus go. I had been firmly rebuffed and didn’t know whether to feel insulted or embarrassed.

∞

In hindsight, maybe I should have been grateful Marcus brushed me off. It’s possible he knew me better than I know myself, yet he couldn’t have known my seeing Arlene’s corpse earlier had been a disquieting trigger, a sharp reminder of Rachel Quentin’s brutal end and its impact on me. But he might have detected my air of malaise. For all I knew, Marcus had already pegged me for the rehabilitation programme and was waiting for me to come to my senses and sign up for counselling.

Maybe I would never be able to expunge from my memory what had taken place in that government agency. Perhaps it’s a paraesthesia I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.

Another pressure on my nerves at the time had to do with my feelings of guilt over Charlotte. We were orphans now and needed to stick together, but while her method of dealing with our mother’s death was to spend hours curled up on Mum’s bed, her arms wrapped around one of Mum’s cushions – the sort of impulse I also once yielded to – my approach this time was to get right away, lose myself in an unfamiliar landscape, eat foreign food, preoccupy and distract myself with some divergent activity. I’d considered a trip to Spain, exploring its central region, and there find in my bones, if this were possible, some connection with my paternal ancestors. In the end, I opted for somewhere equally exotic but closer to home and where I wouldn’t need to spend money I couldn’t really afford: Southeast Asia. I took some leave from my job as a copy writer in an advertising agency, and promised Charlotte I’d be back in a fortnight, to help clear out the house and settle Mum’s estate.

Sometimes a wave of despondency washed over me.

It didn’t help that I had been lonely. Until the day of Arlene’s death, when I’d been at the Serenity Centre for less than a week, the only person I’d exchanged more than a few words with was Jason, a tall skinny guy, about my age, in his early thirties, with long brown hair tied in a man-bun, and a beard trimmed very short. I didn’t warm to the man. He was responsible for managing the volunteers but was manifestly indifferent to us. Other than showing me my room, pointing out where the dining hall was, and cursorily assigning me to clean out the mushroom shack, Jason left me to fend for myself.

I don’t recall him ever saying thank you. Nor did he introduce me to anyone. Not a single person, although it didn’t take me long to sort out the various cliques. There were three: the management team; the residents, all of whom were recovering from substance abuse or abuse or depression and possibly all three; and, at the bottom of the heap, the volunteers like me who paid a nominal sum for board and keep in return for experiencing the joys of voluntourism.

∞

It was pointless even trying to pretend seeing Arlene’s body had no effect on me. I may not have encountered snakes or scorpions that morning, but I’d been stung. Stung by recollections I believed I’d succeeded in erasing from my mind but which even before I arrived in Siem Reap were beginning again to fester.

Chapter 2

During the week before leaving Wellington for Cambodia and the Serenity Centre, I’d found myself in a part of the city I’d spent years avoiding. There is a building there, halfway along Molesworth Street, in which I’d once endured a distressing couple of weeks. It’s an office block, four storeys high, and at the time I worked there it housed the government’s Agency for Homes.

It’s all changed now. About a year after I left, the Agency was relocated to Auckland, given a new name and, if what we read in the news is to be believed, cleaned up its act. I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced of that. Places change but people don’t.

I was employed by the organisation on a three-month contract. It was 2018, around five years before my trip to Cambodia, when I was twenty-six and when I met Rachel Quentin, if you can say you’ve met a dead person.

Even though more than half a decade has passed, I have no difficulty remembering what happened. Memories are malleable; you can rearrange them, reimagine or reinvent them. They are like remnants of cloth that fade and unravel over time, or even as you make them, commuting into something undependable, something wobbly. I’ve never relied on them. Instead, I have, sporadically, when I thought it mattered, kept a journal and can recall clearly that during my initial interview for the Agency job, the Administrative Affairs manager told me she’d once been convicted for assault, GBH she said and spelled it out for me – Grievous Bodily Harm – as if she needed to impress upon me, what? The seriousness of her crime, or that she wasn’t a woman to be messed with? Her name was Camilla, Camilla Blake, and I decided she was kidding, that she just wanted to test me in some way or see how I’d react. I’d kept my expression neutral, didn’t raise my eyebrows or anything, and my only response had been to say I trusted she was now reformed, at which she laughed. I didn’t fancy her as my manager. There was something a little abrasive about her – so maybe she was a crim – and I was relieved to learn after our preliminary meeting that I was unlikely to have anything more to do with her.

My immediate manager was Patrick Walsh, head of Public Affairs, who tasked me with trawling through Agency documents, searching for positive outcomes on its programmes which I would later write up as media statements. I cringe now when I think of some of the articles I wrote. It’s not that they weren’t true, they were, but I came to regard them as shellac on rotting wood.

Now, when I think about those vexatious days, everything returns, like an attack of asthma. A recurring injury. A nemesis.