Empty Chair

Empty Chair

Deborah Chatterjee

I was born on the last day of summer. 21st September to be precise. I’ll refrain from telling you the year, though at some point you’ll work out how old I am. My mother decided to call me Autumn – originality was never her forte – and like Autumn prepares us for Winter, my birth led the way into a vast, cold darkness.

I don’t remember much about my early childhood because it was about other people. Me as the passive spectator watching from the sidelines of a sheltered life; my early, (un) formative years and a blur of family crises. But then something happened that plays in my mind like a film on repeat. I know the nuance of how each line is delivered and all the intricacies of the unfolding plot. It was an incident so insignificant on many levels but one that changed the course of my life forever and made me who I am right at this very moment…

“Okoh Kemi?”

“Good morning, Sir”

“Tenman Claire?”

“Good morning, Sir.”

“Singer Robin?”

“Singer…Robin?”

And so arose the question that I’ve been asking myself most of my life – who is Robin Singer? Or dare I ask who was Robin Singer? I imagined quite vividly that the person behind the name was a girl and so Robin became Robyn. I’d be quite disappointed if after all this time Robyn did turn out to be a boy.

Why hadn’t Robyn Singer turned up for the first day and indeed any other day of her first year and then subsequent years at Secondary school? Could it have been an administrative error in the register? Perhaps her parents had had a last-minute stroke of luck and were able to pay for private schooling? I figured that it couldn’t have been too tragic a reason, otherwise it would have surely made the news headlines: “Girl Missing on First Day At Secondary School”; or “Girl Dies In Road Accident On First Day At Secondary School.” So one possibility was that she had been moved at the eleventh hour to another class. My sly detective work, with random questions such as “So…has Robyn Singer made the netball team?” …“Who?!”, confirmed my weirdness to one and all. Even when I resorted to asking the teachers directly, they looked at me blankly. And what’s more, my form teacher couldn’t recollect her name ever being in the register. It was as if I had completely imagined that morning, when those significant and omnipotent words had come bellowing out of his mouth. Had I imagined it? I take pride in the fact that as an Anatomical Pathology Technologist I spend hours in a public morgue piecing together people’s last days, hours and minutes. A baggy heart is the sign of unfit person. Cyanosis tells me I have the remnants of an alcoholic. But when it came to Robyn Singer I had no body dead or alive and no clues. Just questions. Endless questions.

Twenty years after the incident, when my cousin was pregnant with her first child, she asked me what names I liked. I declared with childish enthusiasm that Robin/Robyn was indeed the perfect unisex name. She laughed in mock disgust: “It makes me a think of a bird on a Christmas card and a diminutive man in red tights.” Six months later she called her newborn son Paris. He had been conceived while she and her partner had been holidaying in the capital. Like I said, originality doesn’t run in the family.

My inability to sympathise with family members and society at large was the main reason for entering a profession with a fancy title for dissecting other human beings. I liked the fact that I worked mainly on my own and that even if I did talk it was essentially to myself. But one day I was showing a trainee around the public mortuary where I worked and as I pulled out the storage drawers and enthused about our wonderful, new, body fluid drainage system, I couldn’t quite mask my excitement that this trainee was called Dave Singer. Could this slightly churlish-looking, young man be some relation to Robyn Singer? I didn’t want to beat around the bush and so I asked him outright whether he was related to her. This you’ll understand, put me in a somewhat vulnerable position – how often do we ridicule people who ask us whether we happen to know their friend, just because they live in the same city? I was overcome with joy when he nonchalantly replied, “Yes” as if I’d asked him whether he wanted a cup of tea. My elation and invisible tears of relief were prematurely cut short when he said in the same breath: “He’s just celebrated his 92nd Birthday.” This may have been a Robin Singer, but it wasn’t my Robyn, though I felt a shiver of thrill that it was the closest that I’d got, in what had now been a 25-year search.

Although not a bearer of good news, Dave’s presence did seem to bring about a change in circumstances (such a shame he’s no longer around) let me call them near misses with Robyn. The most exciting one was when I was showing Dave the basic routine of a top-to-toe check of the body – to make sure there are no cuts or bruising or outward signs of injury. It was a female in her 30s that we were looking at - sudden death with no obvious explanation. We turned her over on her front, and there, right in the small of her back, was the letter R in a fancy font. The body still needed to be identified. Could the R stand for Robyn? On first analysis of the corpse, the face looked like that of a woman in her 30s (as well as a woman in her 30s can possibly look when she’s suffering from rigor mortis) but on closer inspection, the rest of the body soon gave it away that when she had been alive and kicking, she had succumbed to the pressures of Botox to make up for the cruelty that gravity had imposed. The only fact I knew for sure was that Robyn had to be my age – give or take a few years. This woman was at least in her early 50s.

Now you may presume that all I thought about was Robyn. Of course not! On the contrary, I can assure you that most of my thinking was spent fretting about the usual things women fret about – whether I was going to spend the rest of my life on my own; whether I should get a dog as I obviously wasn’t going to have a child; whether I should become vegetarian or even a vegan. During these times I never really thought about Robyn until someone would mention school or ornithology and then of course Robyn would eventually come back to say “Hullo.” But after years of searching Missing Persons lists and asking people silly questions, there were only 3 possible conclusions: she had either been a figment of my imagination; was dead; or she, and let’s also say he (just in case), had changed their name by Deed Poll. I’d finally started coming to the realization that I probably would never find the real Robyn but the idea of her was most certainly lodged in my brain. Indeed, it felt like Robyn had become my alter ego. She had started off her existence looking like a young Jodie Foster, and then over the years, had slowly morphed and re-morphed into whoever captured my own personal Zeitgeist at the time. Now it felt she looked like…me.

Things might have turned out so differently had Robyn been a real person, who had actually turned up on the first day at school - and been my desk partner. You see, it meant that I spent the rest of my first year at secondary school, sitting on my own. The rationale was that our class had an odd number but the reality was that I was more like the class leper, which unfortunately became everybody’s rationale. If Robyn had turned up that day we might have been the Bonnie & Clyde of Year 7. I would have been one of the cool kids through association. I would have come to school and been greeted with high-fives and smiles, not eye-rolling and flared nostrils. I did have desk partners in subsequent years, but by then I had already solidified my reputation as someone to steer clear of.

I was relieved when I left school and went to college, where I could start afresh and be judged for who I really was. But somehow during my time at school, I too had come to think of myself as a leper, finding the task of making friends a bit like trying to impress at a job interview – hard work. Like I said, it was a no-brainer for me to work in a mortuary because who do you have to impress when you’re surrounded by dead people? Loved ones only think of their dead ones and the Coroners and Police only need to know the cause. They don’t care about you. They’d never suspect you.

People are oblivious to the actions of an invisible woman. Yes, I have become the invisible woman – doors slam in my face, I get bumped into all the time and whoever happens to be serving me in a cafe, looks straight beyond me, at something or someone obviously far more interesting. Even the cadavers I used to work with looked at me with more intrigue. Fed up, aware that I haven’t made the most of my small existence on this planet and with the words Carpe Diem ringing through my head, I decide to travel to the other side of the world – Australia. Apparently one of my ancestors had been amongst the 736 convicts on the first fleet of ships to this new world on 13th May 1787, and how funny that 220 years later to this day I too was making the journey – albeit in a much quicker fashion.

Excited and petrified at the same time – for how many women of my age go on adventures? – I settle into my seat number 36A. I watch as the seats around me get filled with hopeful travellers; people escaping from god-knows-what; adventurous families and weary, hard-nosed businessmen. Hand luggage is stuffed in the over-head lockers and entertainment is at the ready, as everyone resigns themselves to the long airborne hours that lie ahead. Only nobody is sitting next to me – on either side. Perhaps people are still boarding? Actually, they can’t be because the plane is slowly making its way to the runway. I ignore the butterflies in my stomach. I’ve never flown before. I hope the plane doesn’t crash. I start to feel sick with anxiety, scratching the ‘R’ in the small of my back. Scratching until I know that I have drawn blood.

And then just as the words “Here I am again” seep their way through my mind, a gentleman who has perhaps boarded the plane at the eleventh hour, or been unhappy with his original allocated seat, takes his place next to me. This disconcerts me just a little bit but pleases me even more. I feel a frisson of pleasure when he starts talking to me – you know, asks me questions and stuff like that. Had I been down-under before? Was it business or pleasure? It soon feels like an interrogation. Perhaps he’s a policeman hot on my heals? I would ordinarily panic, but I am so taken aback that someone is talking to me that I actually don’t care about his motives. And when I am proffered a handshake and “Amit Singh”, I can only say what has always come naturally to me: “Robyn. Robyn Singer.”

I’ve been thinking. History does repeat itself but as a famous author once said, it’s not just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong. As Amit Singh looks deep into my eyes and the plane finally takes off, I pray (and I’ve never prayed before) that things will not go wrong. Not this time. Please, never again. 73