The boarding house
Down in the south where the wind blows from Antarctica and the clouds seem to bloom from the Southern Alps; it is Dunedin, a student town with romantic stories about castles, a medieval style train station and the Octagon in the centre of the city. I loved going to the Octagon to visit the art gallery, watch movies every week at the cinema and explore the books and magazines at the city library.
When I was 22 I stayed in the woman’s boarding house near High St in Dunedin. The house was a 1920s two story white weatherboard building with 28 rooms. Most of the residents were overseas students, travelers and local misfits and lonely hearts. The rooms seemed to be dressed up from the 1960s with smooth edged mirrors, single beds draped with large colourful duvets, a tall wardrobe and a wood desk. The hallway had a faint smell of cigarettes and the walls were sparsely decorated with velvet paintings of dark ladies with bare breasts sitting on branches or in frilly dresses and hats. The flower wallpaper tongues revealed moisture stain dribbles and at night the floorboards squeaked under the spongy carpet. The boarding house sat on a street with other similar homes, some modest and others elegant, all of them were stitched together with metal power lines and the invisible chaotic heart beat steps of people.
The dark grey haired lady in room 14 kept to herself, but she was very kind to me. Everyday on the hour she drank her hot sugar tea and smoked a yellow ended cigarette outside by the door. She sipped the tea gently and always smiled and giggled when she saw me come home at the end of everyday. She knocked on my door on a Tuesday night, she was wearing a wedding dress. She asked me to come to her room, where a pink paper flower was pinned to her wood door. Her skin was luminous brown and her cheeks dimpled when she smiled. She had propped her veil in her hair, with black pins. Her large thick lips brimmed towards the edges and she pressed at her stomach and pulled the skirting at the back of the wedding gown. The silk rippled down to her sneakers, moving her shadow in the brown flower carpet. “I’m getting married”, she said blissfully, toward the mirror. The mirror sat low on a dressing table covered in hair brushes entangled with hair, creams and make up, spilled and blotched on the edge of their containers. Cob webs adorn the corners of her little room, with tiny glistening flies platted in the spider’s silk. Quietly she pushed the door closed and swayed to her Beetles music, tilting her head up and closing her eyes, she pressed the silk with her brown hands, it wavered with the sounds, like thick pouring honey. Her eyes glinted with stars, and wrinkled with a smile. She waited under the sun of the bulb, chanting small melodies.
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On a Thursday night I gave the lady in room 18 some coins. “I need them to catch the bus” she said politely. I remember her bright sweet eyes, framed with tidy glasses and her short brown hair, peppered with a little bit of grey. She seemed frail back then, but she walked proudly down the hallway. Some nights I heard her cry over the sound of the radio and other nights her boy friend visited her and I would hear them laugh.
One Wednesday a few weeks later, the landlord found her unresponsive on the bed in her room. When I got home that day, 3 police cars were parked outside the boarding house. A dark haired policeman with a beard, and blue plastic gloves on his hands, was outside and he looked at me, “A lady on your floor has passed away…have you got somewhere to go for a while”, he said gently.
I walked around the corner, my eyes no longer saw the beautiful flowers blooming, the old villas, grand and monumentus. I forgot the bird song and froze on the lime stone wall, under green leaves, which slid against my skin, like cold snakes.
I ended up walking down the hill to the Warehouse. I looked aimlessly at the furnishings and clothes, trying to figure out what to feel. Room 18 was right next door to me and I hadn’t realised that a poor lady lay there dead for three whole nights. I felt sad for the lady in Room 18. I went back up High St to the boarding house. I walked past the ladies room…her door was still open, it was tidy and the certain were opened making it seem fresh, but there was a slight stale smell. The lady across from me stood in her door, she had a wide cheerful smile and I knew she wanted to talk about the lady who had died. The lady at her door said that it was a heart condition that caused the woman in room 18 to die. Another person said that the ladies boy friend had been visiting that last night she was seen.
About a month later room 18 had a new tenant. She was a happy woman with faded blue tattoos and wiry red hair and freckles around her eyes, I use to hear her laugh echo through the hall where the velvet paintings hung and her boy friend would stay over night sometimes. She would talk to me, her eyes wrinkled when she spoke and she smiled, she moved from Christchurch and was trying to get her life sorted she said. She wore black singlet tops with spaghetti shoulder straps and black coal around her eyes.
