Rose Tattoo I’ve got the jitters. I’m pacing up and down the departure lounge, past all the bleary-eyed business people on their phones and laptops. There’s an announcement that I can’t make out, but I think they said ‘Auckland’ and people get up and go over to the gate. I follow them, hoping it’s right. As I’m about to go through, I notice a man running towards us, jacket flapping, arms flailing. My stomach lurches. I’m about to run, although I don’t know where I’d run to, when I realise it isn’t him, just someone late for a flight. You’re supposed to press your boarding pass against the scanner, but my hands are shaking too much. e Air New Zealand woman takes it from me. She’s realised there’s something wrong. ey’re going to stop me from boarding. But she just scans it for me and hands it back. And I’m through, following the other passengers out the doors and across the tarmac, towards the plane. A seagull glides above us in the clear morning sky, its feathers brilliant white in the sunlight. As I climb the steps to the plane, the wind tugs gently at my hair, ﬁlling my nostrils with the smell of the sea. e roads and houses grow steadily smaller as the plane climbs. I think of him down below, shrinking into nothing. And there’s Peacehaven on the hill, with its red roof and the patio where Rose used to sit. Tears suddenly start rolling down my face. ere are some tissues in my handbag and I reach for it under the seat in front of me. Before I put it back, my ﬁngers feel for the envelope in the lining pocket. I unzip it a little, so I can see it, dog-eared at the corners now, my name written on the front in unsteady letters. I WASN’T SURE what to make of Rose at ﬁrst. Not that I had much to do with her. Her room was in the West Wing and I usually worked in the East. But Rose was the kind of person that you noticed. She looked diﬀerent for a start. She didn’t wear the usual old lady type of clothes – you’d never see Rose in a shapeless ﬂoral dress and slippers. Her clothes were stylish, but old and faded, as if they were le over from another part of her life. ere was something about her manner, too, the way she would pause when she entered a room, looking around as if she expected everyone to be looking at her and her gestures, which seemed more extravagant than they needed to be. She didn’t mix much with the other residents. Sometimes she played cards with a little group in the lounge, but I never saw her in the TV room. On ﬁne days, she would shuﬄe out to the garden, gripping her walking frame with her veined hands. She would sit alone, puﬃng away at a cigarette in a polished holder, looking out to sea. She always wore sunglasses outside and if it was at all breezy, she would wear a silk scarf tied over her bob of white hair. I thought she was a bit stand-oﬃsh. I knew she was English and we had another English lady once who thought she was better than everyone else. But Rose wasn’t like that at all, once you got to know her. She was a bit of a mystery at the home, as far as I could tell, not that I was one for gossiping with the other staﬀ. No one seemed to know much about her. She never had visitors. Peacehaven was one of the more expensive rest homes in the area so she must have had money. I felt sorry for her. It 48 Takahē 73 Louise Slocombe “For me, writing opens a door into a world of my own imagining. As a writer, my challenge is to take the reader with me on this journey through the looking glass and on into territory unknown.” Louise Slocombe has had short stories published in New Zealand and the UK. Originally from the UK, she now lives in Wellington, where she loves the views and is learning to love the wind. was sad to end up like that, I thought, alone in the world and dependent on strangers to look aer you. But then they moved me over to work in the West Wing. e ﬁrst day I went to help her shower, she was waiting in her armchair wearing a bathrobe printed all over with huge crimson butterﬂies. She looked tiny, marooned among the cushions and the overstuﬀed wings of the chair. “You’re not Barbara,” she said. “I was expecting Barbara.” Her voice was strong with a hoarse edge, no doubt from the cigarettes. “Sorry, I’m Janet,” I told her. “Barbara’s doing aernoons now.” “No need to apologise for who you are,” she said. “Sorry,” I said again, without thinking. “I mean…” And then I noticed her room. It was practically empty. Where were the knick-knacks crammed onto every surface, the photos of the grandkids, the ﬂowering pot plants? She seemed to have nothing, just a few bits of makeup and a fancy hairbrush on the dressing table and what looked like a seaman’s chest tucked at the end of the bed. “Can’t be doing with clutter,” she said. “I’ve got my own way of remembering.” She laughed and then wheezed. She waited as I ran the shower. “I can manage on my own now,” she said, once I’d checked the water. “No, you can’t,” I said. “Oh, well,” she said. “Here goes.” I went to help her with her bathrobe, but she shrugged it oﬀ herself. It slithered down her tiny body and she kicked it away with surprising grace. I gasped and clutched at the handrail. She was covered in huge bruises. But then I looked again and saw they were tattoos, all over her wizened body. Big blue ones, blurred with age and distorted with the sagging of her skin. ey weren’t the kind of tattoos you see nowadays. ese were sailor tattoos - mermaids and anchors, and hearts with daggers. “So are you going to help me or not?” she asked. Aerwards when I was drying her, I asked her about the tattoos. Funny that I’d thought they were bruises. “I used to collect them,” she said. “I’d get one whenever I went somewhere new.” She held out her arm from under the ﬂuﬀy white towel to show me a faded merman. “I got this chap in Marseilles.” “Marseilles? Where’s that?” “South of France. I used to sing for a living and I had this job on a millionaire’s yacht for a while. We cruised round the Med for months, parties, champagne, the lot.” “Sounds very glamorous.” I helped her put her bathrobe back on. “It was,” she said. “But then we got boarded by the police at Marseilles. We all knew Gianni, the millionaire, was involved in something dodgy, but we took care not to ﬁnd out too much about it. So Gianni gets arrested and we’re all without a job, no way of getting home. I was pretty good at fending for myself in those days though.” She winked at me. As I took her back to her room, her mood seemed to change. “I hate Sundays,” she complained as I helped her dress. “Visitors coming and going all day long. Can’t get any peace and quiet. And it’s too wet to sit outside today.” She asked me to open the window for her and I knew she was going to smoke out of it, but I didn’t say anything. BUT THAT’S WHAT SHE was like. She could change moods instantly and she was never the same from one day to the next. Sometimes she would be morose and silent, and other days it was hard to get away from her. She would tell me about her tattoos. Each one had a story and she seemed to have a tattoo for everything she’d done, as if her whole eventful life had been charted out on her body. She’d get me to tell her which tattoos were on her back because she couldn’t remember anymore and couldn’t twist round to look in the mirror. ere were stories about men, about love and ﬁghts, about singing in ports and on ships all over the world. I wasn’t sure I believed them all, but they were always interesting. She asked about my life once, and I told her how my two were grown up now, both living in Sydney, no sign of grandkids yet, just me and him at home these days. “Is he good to you?” Rose asked. She was putting on her makeup at her dressing table. “Who?” “Who? Your husband, of course.” I laughed and then stopped. “Not really.” Rose put her lipstick down and turned around. “You shouldn’t stay with a man who isn’t good to you,” she said. “I never did.” “I used to think I’d marry a sailor,” I told her to change the subject. “And sail away to sea.” Rose snorted. “Good job you didn’t. Sailors are the worst husbands and I should know, I married four of them. My Jack was the only one who was any good.” Jack was immortalized with a heart on her lower back. He was her last husband, a New Takahē 73 49 Zealander she’d met on Brighton pier one summer. at was how she’d washed up here at the ends of the earth, as she put it, following Jack back home. He’d died ﬁve years ago. “at was my last tattoo, that love-heart,” she said. “He didn’t much like tattoos, didn’t Jack.” Not all the tattoos were things you’d think she’d want to remember. She told me once that a homemade dagger above her le elbow was done when she was ‘inside’ by a lifer named Carla. Another time I reminded her about two names on her right shoulder. “My babies,” she said, but she wouldn’t say anymore. She got weepy aer that. “I haven’t got anyone,” she snivelled, as I was doing up a pleated crêpe de Chine blouse for her, slightly faded along the lines of the pleats. “Don’t you have any family here?” I asked. She shook her head and blew her nose. “Only Jack’s lot. And they don’t give a stuﬀ about me.” Later that aernoon, I saw her playing whist with a group of old boys in the lounge, passing around a hip ﬂask and laughing as she slapped her cards down on the table. WE HAD A PIANIST in one aernoon who played the usual sing-along tunes they all like, the wartime songs, sentimental stuﬀ. Towards the end, one of her card-playing friends stood up and announced that Rose was going to sing. At ﬁrst, Rose shook her head and ﬂapped him away. But she didn’t take much persuading. She stood up and made her way slowly to the piano. I’d noticed that recently she’d started moving more hesitantly and she was coughing a lot, although it didn’t seem to put her oﬀ smoking. She said something to the pianist and turned to face her audience. “is is a French song called ‘No Regrets’,” she announced. e pianist played a chord and she nodded. She took a breath and seemed to straighten, even though she was still holding her walking frame. She started singing, quietly at ﬁrst then steadily building up. Her voice was amazing. It was ragged and hoarse and wobbled on the long notes, but it seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her, resounding round the room. I could imagine her in her younger days, singing late into the night in smoky bars. When she’d ﬁnished, she basked in the applause, bowing to the room and thanking the pianist, before shuﬄing back to her chair, a little old lady once more. It stayed in my head for a long time, that song. I don’t know a word of French, but it still made perfect sense. I envied her. No regrets. I wished I could say that about my life. 50 “YOU SHOULD HAVE a regular spot, entertaining the residents,” I said to her the next day. She was sitting on her usual bench in the garden. Rose shook her head. “Takes it out of me too much.” I followed her gaze out to sea. It was a beautiful spring day and it glittered in the sun like a net of diamonds. She took a puﬀ on her cigarette. “I could never live where I couldn’t see the sea,” she said. “I’d feel trapped.” “I’ve only ever lived here, so I don’t know if I’d miss it or not. I’m not a traveller like you.” “I was never one for staying put. Except for now when I’ve got no choice.” I looked away from the sea. It was starting to hurt my eyes. “If you don’t stay put, how do you decide where to go?” I asked. “Follow a whim. Or things turn up that set you oﬀ on a particular path. You get the hang of spotting them. And if all else fails, you leave it to chance.” She opened her handbag and brought out a small leather pouch. She shook a couple of worn yellowed dice into my hand. “Roll the dice and see where they take you.” I closed my hand, shook the dice and let them roll oﬀ my palm onto the bench. One of them kept rolling and clattered down onto the path. “Doesn’t count,” she said. “You’ll have to roll them again.” I reached out to pick it up. “What’s that?” she said. e sleeve of my uniform had ridden up as I stretched towards the dice. I pulled it down but she grabbed hold of it with a quick movement and pulled it up again. e triangular shape of the burn was livid against my pale freckled skin where he’d held the iron against it. “Caught my arm on the oven,” I said. “at’s a funny shaped oven you’ve got,” she said and let my sleeve go. I handed her the dice and stood up. “You shouldn’t ever stand for that,” Rose said. “No man is worth that much.” It made me laugh, the thought that he was worth anything at all. THAT NIGHT when he was asleep, I locked myself in the bathroom. I took oﬀ my nightie and looked at myself in the mirror under the cold striplight glare. It’s not just tattoos that can tell your life story, I thought. My body had stories to tell. But mine were nowhere near as interesting as Takahē 73 Rose’s. I put my nightie back on. It was all very well for Rose to tell me what to do, but what did she know? I couldn’t up and leave just like that. As I went back down the dark hallway to the bedroom, it was my mother’s voice that I heard. She would probably be the same age as Rose, if she was still alive. You’ve made your bed, you’ve got to lie in it, she used to say. I GET THE JITTERS again when we land in Auckland. I’ve made a mistake and now I can’t go back. I think about what the kids will say. Everyone seems to be looking at me as if they know. I walk out through the glass doors and the air feels warm on my skin. I can see pohutukawa trees, heavy with crimson ﬂowers. ere’s a queue of people with suitcases waiting at a bus stop. I take a deep breath and join them, trying to look as if I know what I’m doing. Sitting on the bus, I check the envelope yet again. e manager gave it to me the day they cleared out her room. I knew she’d been getting frailer, but I hadn’t expected it to be so sudden. Stupid to get attached to people when you work in a rest home. I’d no idea what was in the envelope. When I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom to open it. It was stuﬀed full of dollars. At the bottom was the leather pouch with the dice in it. When I step oﬀ the bus, I know it’s going to be all right. He won’t come here. I can’t imagine him among these tall glass buildings and the busy streets. He’d be lost. He’ll be lost without me anyway. He never was any good at fending for himself, but he should have thought of that. I’ve got an address of a place I can go to, but I decide to stay in a hotel instead. I want to have a room where I can close the door and sit in bed watching TV on my own and where someone else will clean up aer me. Just to see what it’s like. I ﬁnd one by the harbour. From my balcony I can see boats bobbing on the water and it makes me think of her. I could sit here all day, watching people coming and going, but there’s something I need to do. I take a few notes out of the envelope and go back out. For a long time, I walk around, trying to build up my courage. In the end, I pick the one that looks cleanest from the outside. ere’s a sound of buzzing as I walk in. A girl comes in from the back as I’m looking at the designs on the walls. She’s got piercings all over her face and her arms are covered in green and red swirls up to the sleeves of her tshirt. “Can I help you?” she asks. “I’d like a rose,” I say. Takahē 73 51