Thyla - Kate Gordon [16]
‘Rhiannah didn’t mind being disrupted?’ I asked. ‘She didn’t mind her other roommate moving out?’
‘Her other roommate had … already gone,’ said Ms Hindmarsh, and a curious darkness settled on her face. I remembered what you said, Connolly, about Ms Hindmarsh’s husband being ‘gone’. You hadn’t said ‘dead’. Just ‘gone’. There seemed to be so much uncertainty in that word – so much emptiness, as though the word was made of air. Rhiannah’s roommate was ‘gone’. Ms Hindmarsh’s husband was ‘gone’. My parents were ‘gone’. Cat was ‘gone’. They were like leaves, blown quietly away by a summer breeze. I didn’t know what to say to Ms Hindmarsh. I wanted to tell her I would help to find her husband too, but I knew my first priority was to find Cat. Maybe one would lead to the other.
As quickly as the darkness appeared, brightness came again and Ms Hindmarsh smiled. ‘Anyway, Tessa, make yourself at home,’ she said, as she opened the door to room 36. ‘I know you don’t have many things with you but I’m sure you’ll settle in soon and find some way to make it yours.’
I looked around the room. ‘Does Rhiannah not have many “things” either?’ I asked.
The room looked very comfortable, but its furniture and decorations were decidedly minimal. The furniture consisted of two beds with thick charcoal-coloured quilts and dark pillows, two armchairs, a black box which I took to be some sort of electronic equipment (the operation of which I would have to sneakily ascertain at a later time), a deep-red rug on the floor, two small wooden bedside tables, two charcoal reading lamps, a wood-framed mirror on the wall, two tall wooden wardrobes and a strange, misshapen black splodge in the corner.
‘A beanbag,’ Ms Hindmarsh said, as if reading my mind. ‘For your guests to sit on. I’m afraid we couldn’t quite spring for three armchairs per room, and a beanbag is more comfortable than a plastic chair, I suppose. I don’t know; it was the interior decorator’s idea.’
A ‘beanbag’?
The word squeezed into my mind with the other words, but it looked uncomfortable there. As if it wasn’t sure of its place or purpose. As if it knew it looked a bit funny and silly.
I wondered whose idea it was that chairs were a less than ideal apparatus for sitting on, and that a wonky, bean-filled splodge might be a more sensible idea. The thought made me smile. I wondered if the gentleman who had created it was now very rich and famous, like the man who invented the refrigerator, or mechanical sheep clippers!
My eyes moved away from the funny beanbag to other features of the room. There was one picture on the wall – a painting of a Tasmanian devil. The image looked as though the creature might be slightly fearsome, but I didn’t feel scared by it. In fact, I thought it was strangely beautiful.
‘Yes, she does love her devils,’ said Ms Hindmarsh when she saw me looking at the picture. ‘But she calls them purinina, which is the Aboriginal name for them.’
Purinina.
That was the word that had been trying to squeeze into my head before, when I was talking to Rhiannah.
Strange that the word I had been trying to think of would turn out to be the name of Rhiannah’s favourite thing.
‘She’s always drawing them in art class,’ Ms Hindmarsh went on. ‘And she helps out at the market, selling scarves and badges and things to raise money for them. It’s very important to her. Maybe you can talk to her about it? I’m sure she’d love to tell you. I hope you’ll be happy here with her, Tessa.’
Later, staring through the darkness at Rhiannah’s empty bed, I hoped so too.
And niggling in the back of my mind was another hope.
If Rhiannah liked bushwalking, maybe she knew Cat. Maybe she was there on the bushwalk when Cat went missing. Maybe she knew something about what happened.