Anjali's Red Scarf Ch. 04

Chapter Four: Red Tulips

Apologies for the long delay since my last update. It's been a tough year, and I got stalled for quite a while, but after a couple of false starts here I am again. As I post this, Chapter 5 is with my beta readers and I'm starting on Chapter 6.

"Hey Anjali!"

"Hello Sarah, how are you?"

"Oh, not too bad... look, my boss has asked me to go to Holland at short notice. I fly out early Saturday morning. So I'm going to need to postpone our date on Friday week."

"Oh gosh. That is short notice. For you, I mean. I'm all right to postpone. Why the rush?"

"We're helping build the business systems for a new container facility at Schiphol. Martin was going to go, he usually does these trips, but he fell down some stairs last week and broke his leg in two places. There's nobody else, and he thinks it'd look bad if there's nobody there to represent us."

"Oh... that makes sense, I suppose. When were you thinking of rescheduling?"

"I get back on Saturday week, so maybe the Friday after that, the 27th?"

"Yes... I suppose that works." But she sounded hesitant, and a thought occurred to me.

"Anjali, is this going to inconvenience you, if I don't pay you until the 27th?"

She didn't reply.

"I can pay in advance if that would help."

"It might, yes. Thank you, Sarah, I would appreciate that. I'm all right for bills, but I'm still trying to find a flat, and I might need to come up with deposit money in a hurry."

"Sure, it's no problem. How is that going, anyway?"

"I'm still looking." She sighed. "I will be very glad when I can move. We have two new housemates and they are simply terrible."

We met up for afternoon tea on the day before I was due to fly out. I paid for our orders, and as I returned to the table I gave Anjali an envelope. She looked at it with a perplexed expression. "What is this?"

"Money," I said softly.

"Oh!" She blinked, then tucked the envelope into her purse. "Silly me, of course it is. Thank you."

"Everything okay? You seem a bit distracted today."

She held up her hands. "I'm sorry. I'm just exasperated today. My housemates are maddening."

Over our coffees she told me the details. Her housemate's cousin had come to stay, with his girlfriend, "just for a few days", after they had been kicked out by both his parents and hers. Three weeks later, they showed no signs of moving on, and they had worn through Anjali's patience.

They left messes on the bench and in the sink. They finished toilet rolls and didn't replace them. Anjali had searched for an hour for her favourite frying pan, before discovering it in their bedroom full of day-old food. And although nobody had admitted to anything, she was almost certain that they were to blame for the burnt-plastic smell that appeared in the kitchen on the same night her favourite plastic spatula vanished.

"They play their terrible music so loud, and she leaves hair in the shower... ugh! I hate it. I just want my own space and my own things and nobody messing with them." She was staring at her hands, twirling her spoon, dropping it and fetching it and dropping it again, and I touched her arm and spoke.

"Anjali. Look, I'll be away for a week. If you want some quiet you could stay at my place while I'm gone."

"No, I..." She paused. "Really? Do you mean that?"

"Really. Just as a friend thing, not as a... business arrangement. I have to warn you the place isn't the tidiest just now, I've been packing and I won't have a chance to clean up before I go, but if you can live with that it's yours for the week."

"Hmm. I think that might be... helpful." She squeezed my hand. "Thanks, Sarah, I appreciate this."

"Well, I don't want you going to jail for killing your housemates." I sipped my coffee. "Even if they thoroughly deserve it."

She wished me well for my trip, and I made arrangements to get her a spare key, and then put her out of my mind so I could concentrate on my last-minute travel panic.

I'm not afraid of plane crashes; I've seen the numbers and the risks are very low. For me it's the petty things that play to my anxieties. Missing the plane, losing my luggage, arriving in a foreign country to find I don't have a hotel booking, that sort of thing. I check and re-check everything, and it's only when I feel the plane's engines kick in that I start to relax, because the next few hours are out of my hands.

They'd booked me in business class, and it's certainly better than economy—good food, seats that lie flat, a healthy separation from my fellow passengers—but the cabin crew always make me uncomfortable.

It's not their fault. They're paid to be charming and attentive, and that's exactly the problem. Every few minutes some immaculately made-up hostess would stop by to ask if I needed anything, a meal or a drink or a newspaper or anything at all. I couldn't find a polite way to tell them that all I wanted was to be left alone with my thoughts.

In the end it was easiest just to invent a few whims so they'd feel they'd done their job. So I finished an extra dessert that I didn't really need, and let them set up the bedding that I could have handled myself, and then lay back feigning sleep.

I was supposed to be thinking about client meetings, working on my contingency plans for our meetings. Instead, I thought about Anjali, sweet bookish Anjali, who I had been paying to wait on me in rather more personal ways.

I still had my qualms about the arrangement. But if my scruples hadn't stopped me from taking her to bed twice, they weren't likely to prevent it from happening again. Besides, I told myself, I'd already made a financial commitment and Anjali would be relying on that, so it would be immoral not to go on sleeping with her.

Did I mention I'm pretty good at rationalising things?

I wondered what exactly I felt for Anjali. Was I attracted to her? Or to the situation? I'd known her for seven years without thinking of her as a bed-mate, until we stumbled into the possibility together. If the question of money hadn't come into it, if Miss Anjali Kapadia had simply told me one day that she wanted to kiss me and maybe more, would I have said yes?

Perhaps I would have—oh, let's be honest, of course I would have. I'm a sucker for women who have the good taste to find me attractive, and she was very much my type in some of the ways that mattered most. Smart, passionate, and pure in a way that has nothing to do with virginity.

Maybe, in some other world, she'd have just asked—or, slightly less improbable, I'd have asked her—and we'd have had something more conventional. But, I thought, it would have been a very different relationship to the one in which we now found ourselves.

It was complicated, and I was in that annoying state of being tired but not sleepy, so I didn't make any progress in figuring it out. After wrestling with it all for an hour or two I gave up and pulled out my laptop to read the pre-meeting notes and soothe myself with some programming problems.

It's a twenty-four hour haul from Melbourne to Schiphol, including the stop at Dubai, and even a lie-flat plane seat is no substitute for a proper bed. By the time I wheeled my suitcase out of Customs I was half woman, half shambling zombie. Thankfully my hotel was just a five-minute taxi ride away—after all, our project was at the airport—and it wasn't long before I crawled into a bed that felt much too big for one person.

The four days that followed were productive, but stressful. I spent most of them in an office building that echoed incessantly with the rumble of jets, talking the finer points of container management with my clients and colleagues.

I wasn't always sure who was which. We were subcontracting to a German-American management consulting firm who had a partnership with the Belgian-Dutch-Swiss consortium who ran the container facility, and every time I tried to understand how it all fitted together, my eyes started to glaze over. It doesn't help that I'm a little face-blind. From the agenda I knew there was a Roy and a Jonathan and a Holger in the room, but I had trouble remembering which was which.

Mostly I just kept my mouth shut and did my best to look like I was listening. That is to say, I concentrated on nodding and modelling Normal Person Body Language and making eye contact, which didn't leave me with much processing power to follow what people were actually saying. I would have been in trouble if anybody called on me for comment, but thankfully nobody did. On Monday and Tuesday we went out for dinner and I made superficial conversation for a couple of hours, then pleaded jetlag and retreated to my room to decompress with my computer.

But on Wednesday I got my moment in the spotlight, thanks to Miep. She was from the Dutch contingent, the only other woman in the room, which made it easier for me to remember who she was.

"I would like to ask about a technical issue," said Miep. I shut down my game of solitaire and pricked up my ears. "We have customers who would pay a premium for retrieval and dispatch on short notice. Perhaps somebody is willing to pay ten per cent extra for guaranteed three-hour despatch, or twenty per cent for one-hour. Can we support that?"

Before I go on with that conversation, let me explain a few things.

A container facility is basically your hoarder grandpa's garage on a grand scale: boxes crammed in as dense as can be, piled in stacks ten high. Except that the boxes are steel shipping containers, twenty or forty feet long, and instead of piling up and staying there forever, most of them have somewhere to go. A truck drives in, a crane picks up the container and stacks it somewhere convenient, a few hours later a ship docks and another crane loads it onto the ship. Meanwhile, we've loaded something else on the truck so it's not wasting petrol without a cargo.

Part of the magic that I get paid to perform is ensuring that when that ship comes in, the container is on the top of its stack and not buried under nine other boxes -- because unstacking all those boxes to get to it wastes time, and time is money. It's a complex bit of mathematical choreography, planning which containers get stacked where and which cranes service them, so that when we pick up the containers for an eight a.m. despatch the containers for nine a.m. are waiting underneath them.

Oh, and by the way, some of these containers are extra-heavy, so we can't put them too high up in the stack. Some of them have hazardous materials and can't be stored close together. And so on, and so on. It's an intricate dance with hundreds of rules, and fortune favours the flexible.

Let's pretend you're in the tulip business, growing acres of flowers in the fields of Holland and exporting them to the USA. Refrigeration technology is better than it used to be, but tulips still don't like long sea voyages; if you want to deliver the freshest possible, your flowers have to travel by air, and airfreight is expensive.

But sometimes it isn't. Airfreight companies aim to fill their planes every time they fly, but it doesn't always work out; maybe they don't manage to sell all their capacity, or maybe somebody cancels a shipment with twelve hours' notice. Either way, they have space to sell and they need to sell it in a hurry.

If you're smart enough and nimble enough, you can make that work for you. Park your container full of tulips in a container facility near the airport, keep an eye out for last-minute bargains, and hey presto, massively discounted shipping.

Of course, this only works if you can get your tulips out in a hurry, as soon as that opportunity opens up. The faster you can react, the more you can save.

So that's what Miep wanted to know: can we arrange operations so we can get those tulips out of storage in a hurry whenever the owner calls for them, without getting in the way of everything else that needs to move through the container facility?

"Well," said Roy (or was it Jonathan?), "that's not part of our—"

I leaned in, waving my hand, and people looked at me as if one of the chairs had just grown a face. "We haven't done it before," I said, "but I've been thinking about this, and I'm pretty sure we can. If I can just borrow the projector a moment, I can show you a demo of how it might work..."

And I did. It was just a quick-and-dirty prototype, but it was still enough to wow them and put a smile on Miep's face.

"Did you really write that on the spot?" she asked.

I shook my head. "I read your slides, and it seemed like an interesting problem, so I did a little work on it last night." And the night before, and in the daytime when everybody else was talking. But I didn't say that bit, and after that everybody took a bit more interest in me.

By the time we wrapped up on Thursday afternoon we had tentatively agreed to develop software to support what Miep had asked for, and I even got an enthusiastic email from Martin: "Jonathan says you made quite an impression. Nice work!" All the same, I was very relieved when I was able to farewell my colleagues and head back to my hotel for my last night before returning to familiar surroundings.

I had several hours to kill in the airport on Friday morning, and so I browsed the duty-free shops. I was about to congratulate myself on having run the gauntlet without buying anything more than an ornamental box of chocolates, when I foolishly wandered into an art-gallery gift shop.

They had all the Dutch standards: Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Mondrian, even Escher, in T-shirts and posters and coffee mugs. But what caught my eye was a display of scarves from a recent Art Nouveau exhibition. They were beautiful, elegant patterns in rich colours; I wanted to buy all of them, even though I knew very well that I never wore scarves and anything I bought would end up forgotten at the back of a cupboard.

"One hundred per cent silk," said the shop assistant approvingly, and the metaphorical angel on my shoulder whimpered. I have a thing for silk.

"How much are they?"

She named the price, almost eighty euros, and I sighed to myself. That was just far too much money for something I wasn't going to use. I was about to make my excuses when she caught me.

"Are you shopping for yourself, or for a friend?"

If I buy it for somebody who'll use it, it's not really a waste, is it? Then it's an act of generosity, not greed. And there are half a dozen beautiful scarves here that I want to buy, so if I only get one... really, that's quite frugal.

"A friend," I said, and the angel on my shoulder threw up her hands in disgust.

"What colours does your friend like?"

I reached out and touched one of the scarves, felt its softness, ran my fingers down to the hem, so neatly sewn I could barely feel it. That reminded me of somebody.

"All kinds of colours." I ran my hands through folds of cream, apple-green, apricot, sea-blue, charcoal. "But she looks very good in red." And I examined a tessellated pattern of crimson-blushing tulips so vibrant I felt they might bruise if I touched them roughly.

"That one is my favourite."

Reader, I bought it. I battled with my conscience a little longer, but in the end the desire to buy and to have won out, and a few minutes later the shop assistant was ringing up a sale and folding it into a little box for me. "I hope your friend likes it!"

Perhaps because I didn't have a meeting to worry about at the other end, I actually managed to sleep for a few hours on the return flight. We had another stopover for a few stifling hours in Dubai—the air conditioning was struggling to keep up with the heat—and by the time I boarded my connection to Melbourne I was unpleasantly sweaty.

We landed in Melbourne at ten p.m. on Saturday night, and after getting through the formalities it was close to midnight by the time I got to my apartment. I was just glad to be home, ready to unwind in the first real solitude I'd had for almost two days. But when I walked in the door, there was Anjali sitting in my lounge room, looking embarrassed.

"Hi Sarah, I'm sorry, I know I said I'd be gone before you got back. Is it okay if I stay on the sofa just tonight? I promise I'll go in the morning."

I wasn't thrilled about this. I don't like surprises, and my social batteries were well and truly trained. Dealing with anybody, even someone who I liked as much as Anjali, felt like an imposition. But I didn't think she'd be asking without reason.

"What's up?"

"I'm sorry, it's stupid. I got a cold and I was trying to prepare for a review but Professor Cheng's away at a conference and he's not answering his emails and I found a nice flat but I didn't have my ID with me and by the time I got it somebody else had already -"

I held up my hand. "Hang on, hang on. Stop a moment. I know I asked, but I didn't realise there'd be so much. Anjali, I've been travelling and I'm sweaty and gross... look, you can stay the night, but I'm going to need a wash before we have this discussion, okay?"

"Okay. Sorry."

"I'm not mad at you, I just need a moment. And a loo break."

As I did what I needed to do, I heard Anjali's footsteps coming up the stairs. Then some noises from the bathroom next to me, and the sound of water running. I flushed, and emerged from the toilet to find Anjali waiting for me, and the bathtub beginning to fill.

"I thought you might want a bath?"

I was about to say no, I was planning to have a shower, because I didn't want to marinate in my own grime. But I had a feeling I knew what she was doing, because I've been there myself: you feel like you've fucked up, and you don't really know what to do about it, so you're trying to make amends in any way you can.

"Thanks, that's a lovely thought. I might rinse off in the shower first, and then a bath sounds really nice."

"Do you put anything in the water?"

"I don't usually, but hang on..." I rummaged in a cupboard. There, at the back: a bath bomb my aunt had given me two Christmases ago. As with most of her presents, it was violently pink. "I have no idea what this will be like, but let's find out."

I dropped it in the tub, and then took off my glasses. I turned my back to Anjali as I undressed; I'm not especially shy about nudity around female friends, but it was the first time I'd been naked in her presence outside the terms of our arrangement, and it felt a little weird. It didn't take long before steam fogged the shower screen, and then I no longer had to worry about modesty.

From the colour of the bath bomb, I'd expected it to smell of fake strawberries. But the scent that began to creep into the shower was subtler than that, more like cloves and cinnamon. Not a pink smell at all; really quite pleasant.

After a couple of minutes in the shower I emerged, clean enough to enter the tub, but the tub wasn't ready for me. "Sorry," said Anjali, looking away from me, "it's taking a while to fill."

"Anjali, you don't need to apologise for the laws of fluid dynamics."

"Sorry. I mean..." She sighed. "Never mind. It hasn't been a good week."

I wrapped a towel around myself. It seemed pointless to dry myself just to hop into the bath, but it was easier than trying to untangle my thoughts about the whole nudity thing just at that moment.

"Well, just let me get in the bath and then you can tell me about it."

The water was rising, covered in a thick foam of pink-tinged bubbles. When it seemed high enough to give some degree of coverage I climbed in, leaving the towel behind. I sat upright at the back of the tub with my knees drawn up against my chest, perhaps for modesty's sake, perhaps just to keep my toes away from the hot water that was still running in.

Anjali sat on the floor beside the tub, and talked, and I wanted to invite her in to share it with me. Perhaps it would have been just two friends sharing a tub—it was large enough to do so in comfort—and nothing more than a way to help her relax. I wasn't really sure, and so I held back, and listened, interrupting only to turn off the water when the tub was in danger of overflowing.