By Patrick Sagaram

Last year I found a box of things from my university days. Inside was a painting given to me by Kayla who I lived with during my year as a graduate student in Perth. The painting was of the Crawley Edge Boathouse at sunset after a storm, the dots of colour giving a dreamy reflection of the Swan River. At the time when Kayla gave me this painting, she almost stopped making art altogether. 

We were living in a two-bedroom house on Clifton Street, a quiet suburb in Nedlands, a 10-minute walk to campus. The house was owned by a retired soldier who purchased the property in the eighties and rented it out to students after his wife passed away and he went off to live with his daughter.

Kayla told me this when we went to see the house. It was old, you could feel the floorboards giving and wood creaking followed by a tinkle of glass. Except I could tell how much she liked the place. She was pacing back and forth in the empty living room, saying where the sofa, coffee table would go, the bean bag, that kind of thing. But the most important thing about the house was a small room at the backyard that Kayla planned to use as a studio.  

That previous semester, Kayla and I had attended a seminar on art history and the speaker, Alan Sigley a professor at the Fine Arts Faculty at our university began by talking about the importance of any artist—writer, painter or musician—to produce some work each day. "Whether you like it or not," he said.

Kayla was living with her family in Rockingham and the drive to school to use the studio was making it tough for her to achieve the level of consistency in her work and she often found herself giving excuses not to paint. She understood that if she wanted to pursue art as a profession than her work habits must change.   

I was living in student housing at the time. A room with a single bed, study table and my only furnishing were books. It was good enough except for the agonising noise down the corridor now and then when somebody would turn up their music and it would bleed through the walls.

We had been going out for only a year but it got serious quickly. Except for a few friends back home, I didn't mention anything to anyone especially my parents because I had no idea how they would react if I told them about my Australian girlfriend. Besides, I'd just turned 28 and I was in a hurry to complete my studies. Because of the SARS outbreak in Singapore, I was looking for opportunities in Perth and on the recommendation of my professor I was about to pursue my doctorate. Kayla was also trying to make it as a painter, even giving up her part-time job as a barista, which paid more to work for less at the Wilson Art Gallery on campus.

So this house was perfect and available but the only problem was the rent. We were driving to Exmouth one weekend to attend a music festival, when she brought it up because if she was going to live there, she had to get a roommate.

"Don't get me wrong," she said. "I'm not trying to rush things."

"I know."

"Why don't you take a couple of days to think about it?"

 I didn't have to. It was a nice arrangement. 

Every morning, I'd wake up before the sun came up and sit at my desk with a cup of coffee and work on my thesis. I was studying physics having always been interested in the ideas of Heisenberg and Bohr—the Copenhagen group—the group of scientists who changed the way we understood our universe.             

After I'd finished writing, I'd attend lectures or collect data at the laboratory. To relax I'd go for a run in the evenings, along the Swan River, a good seven to 10km just to clear my head. Kayla was the opposite, sleeping late most of the time unless she had an early lecture. Her classes were mostly in the afternoons and she'd only return from school in the evenings where we'd cook a simple meal, watch TV or listen to records before she would disappear into the studio to paint.

Kayla was working on a series of painting that were based on her travels across Southeast Asia. She had taken a year off after high school to backpack with her friends from Thailand to Indonesia and those experiences left a mark on her. I've only seen a few pieces of her work, a throwback to the Impressionists. In one painting Kayla swaps the Parisian cafes for the glut of neon-lit, lady bars in Ko Samui capturing lonely men surrounded by a harem of beautiful Thai girls, giggling and whispering. In another, street vendors squat barefoot over their cutting boards in Ho Chi Minh City. Her work was often defined by a specific colour field that was used to frame the scene but it also spilled beyond the frame suggesting a continuation of the narrative beyond the immediate visual field.

Kayla seldom talked about her work and I never asked to see her paintings unless she asked for my thoughts on a particular piece. From time to time we'd talk about having a future together in a vague way but as the months passed, I could easily picture making Perth my home. I had friends from JC who were based overseas—London, Helsinki and Shanghai, their lives looking much brighter. Many times, I was tempted to pick up the phone and call my parents to say, what if I never came back home? What if I decide to build my life here?

One Friday evening Kayla came back from class and earlier that day we had made arrangements to have dinner at this Vietnamese café along Broadway our friends kept telling us about, but the moment she walked into the house, I could tell from her expression that she was upset. She looked distracted, lost in thought. 

Later at the café once the waiter had taken our order, I asked her what was on her mind.

"What do you mean?" she said, at first.

"Clearly," I said, "something is bothering you."

She looked outside and across the table at me.

"It's probably nothing," she said, "but do you remember the lecture we attended a few months ago—"

"Gagi Beri Bimba," I said, rolling my eyes.

"Self idiocy is a key theme of Dadaism," Kayla said, "But never mind that. It's the speaker Alan Sigley, he lives a few streets away from us."

"Yes, so?"

"I saw him the other day. With a girl in my class at his house," Kayla said. "They were sitting outside on the porch, smoking and having a drink together."

"I don't see anything wrong," I said.

"At first, I felt the same way," she said. "Except it's not the first time I've seen them together."

At that moment the waiter arrived with our food and drinks and Kayla waited for him to go before leaning forward to say what she had observed so far.

"I think we're jumping to conclusions," I said. "He's old."

"Even so," she said, "he's still youthful."

"You think he's youthful?"

"Sure," she said, and then paused as if trying to find the right words. "Like Robert Redford in Spy Games."

I gave a look. "You're starting to worry me."

She laughed and reached across the table and took my hand. "But seriously," she said. "Why would I want to get involved with someone like him? I don't need any favours from him."

The first time I met Alan Sigley was at his house. It was identical to ours except for a garden and out back, a pool. He had given another talk at campus to a group of graduate students and invited everyone over to his place for drinks that night. Kayla felt obliged to go and convinced me to come along even if she knew how much out of place I'd be stuck in a roomful of artsy types.

When we got there, she was quick to point out the girl she saw with Sigley—a lanky redhead with a striking face, probably not much older than Kayla—who was talking to a guy with a patchy beard holding a plastic cup of foamy beer. A girl from Kayla's class came over and began chatting with her while I stared at a porcelain unicorn that stood on a little table, its spiralled horn pointing at me.  

Through the backdoor I could see a group of people out by the pool huddled around Sigley who was talking and waving his hands above his head and the longer he stood there, more people came over making the circle around him grow.

At that point there were only 10 to 15 people around outside standing in small groups talking. There was music playing faintly on the stereo and light tingling of wind chime made by a steady breeze. I walked over to one of the empty chairs by the pool and sat down.

The sky was flat, cloudless blue and I could picture myself one day relaxing with a glass of wine after a day at the office without carrying the kind of anxiety that I saw in my parents early in their careers. I remember them coming home from work—but work was never over and seeing my dad slumped on the sofa, clawing loose his tie and going over a file he had pulled from his briefcase and my Mum hunched over the dinner table grading papers way past midnight, reminded me of Sisyphus, pushing the boulder over the last incline only to see it roll back and away to the very bottom of the slope.  

When I arrived in Perth, I was surprised how very different the pace of life was compared to Singapore. You miss the bus to town and you had to wait close to an hour for the next one. Shops closed by late evening on most days. But four years later, I began to appreciate its charms, the city feeling more like a coastal town, relaxed and unhurried. Also, I've grown more patient, I suppose.       

A while later, Sigley came around from behind, tapped my shoulder and pulled up a chair next to me. Previously, Kayla had mentioned how youthful Sigley looked for his age and now I could tell that she was right—salt and pepper hair swept back and his skin was smooth, his eyes had this curious gaze.

Earlier on Sigley had assumed that I was another student from the Arts & Humanities Faculty and was surprised to learn that I was completing my postgraduate degree in Physics. 

"So," he said. "What's next for you?"

"I can't quite decide," I said. "A logical step would be a doctorate."

"How old are you?" he said.

"Twenty-seven."

He nodded, took a long pull from his glass of wine and for a moment it looked as if to say something but a group of students came over to our table, clinked glasses with Sigley and began chatting with him. I excused myself and got up to leave and turned to see one of the girls put her arm around Sigley's shoulder and watched as he did the same and soon the entire group had draped their arms around their shoulders and they began to sway gently back and forth.   

That night when we got back from the party Kayla asked what I'd been chatting about with Sigley because she was observing me from across the pool. I replied it was just small talk and nothing else.

"His paintings are so good," Kayla asked.

"So are yours," I said.

"Not in that kind of way," she said. "His paintings are really something special."

Kayla was doing really good work since we moved in together. Even now I think of her early paintings and the way she applied loose brushstrokes and drawing emphasis to changes in light, I knew she was finding her style.

I told her all this on that night but she was not listening. Instead, she ran through a list of names that she felt were less deserving but were chosen to showcase their work as part of a student led exhibition at the Art Gallery. Everyone was talking about it earlier at the party.

"Even her," Kayla said, after a pause.

"Who?"

"The girl I saw with Sigley," she said. "Can you believe it?"

I was thinking that she might have been picked on the merit of her work but at this point I knew nothing I said would have mattered because Kayla was convinced of other forces at play. She was feeling discouraged, feeling as if something was lacking in her paintings. Then she took off all her clothes leaving them on the bedroom floor, lying in a crumpled heap and went to take a shower. A few minutes later, she got out wrapped in a towel and picked up her things and put them into the laundry basket. She came over to the bed and laid down, eyes fixed at the ceiling. A while later she rolled over to my side and pulled her towel off, slowly so I could see her body.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"Do you think I'm as pretty as that girl?" she said.

"C'mon Kayla," I said.

"Just tell me."

"What's going on with you?"

"Never mind," she said. Then she got up and changed into her baggy overalls and turned to look at me, briefly before she went into the studio.

A crisis of confidence, doubt in oneself or something else—I would never know for sure. She lost some of that creative impulse which kept her going on those summer nights, when she'd work in the dim light of the studio for hours while I'd sit in bed, reading as the wind blew in the leaves, the branches scratching against the windowpane. Now when I passed by the hallway and went out back, I'd see Kayla through the inch wide gap of the door of the studio just staring into the blank canvas.

Late one evening on my way back from my evening run—a loop around Swan River—I was walking off the burn in my legs when I heard someone call my name. I turned and looked over my shoulder to see Sigley waving me over and I recall being surprised by the sound of his voice, it was deeper and got me thinking about my father.

"Why don't you come inside and cool down," he said, opening the gate.

"Look at me," I said as sweat lined my face. I kept walking around in circles with my hands at my hips.

"No worries," Sigley said. "I'll get you a glass of water."

As I stood outside the porch waiting for him, I saw a painting he had left out to dry—a watercolour drawing of a pair of interlocking hands that looked strange, almost erotic.

"I just completed this today," he said, handing me a glass of water. He brought out a bottle of wine and poured himself a solid half a glass. He explained that the idea for the painting surfaced, after reading the chapter in Moby Dick where the crew of the Pequod are squeezing oil off the head of a whale.

"How long did you take to complete it?" I asked.

"A couple of weeks," he said. "I get a vague idea and then I make some preliminary sketches before the painting takes shape."

"Do you paint every day?" I asked.

"I do, actually yes," he said.

On that evening, we sat talking about art and physics and my background growing up in Singapore, my family and my plans for my future. I told him of my interest in quantum entanglements and Sigley drew this fascinating parallel—in 1922 while Tristan Tzara was going around Europe giving talks on Dada, a young Heisenberg was just starting his studies in physics and would go on to produce the uncertainty principle—that we cannot simultaneously know the exact location and speed of a subatomic particle and these entanglements, these bizarre yet very real contradictions going on at sub-atomic is what Dada is encouraging to think at the artistic level, to go beyond simple binaries.

Before I left, Sigley invited me over again.

"When's a good time?" I asked.

"I can always use the company," he said.

At the end of summer, Kayla drew that painting of the Crawley Edge Boathouse as part of a series that included Freemantle Harbour and Cottesloe Beach after I gave her a book on George Seurat as a present on her birthday and after reading it, Kayla got back to work again after weeks of feeling discouraged. Sigley has explained how Seurat, a post-Impressionist adopted a more scientific approach to his paintings, influenced by chemists such as Michel-Eugene Chevreul's work on colour theory whereby the artist would place complementary colours next to each other to build up the image thereby having more control over the artwork compared to the spontaneous ways of traditional impressionists.

We saw less and less of each other during that time. I was busy writing my thesis while Kayla spent most of her time working in the studio when she was not in school. It was clear that she was in that rare creative space. In my free time I'd read the books Sigley recommended on art and philosophy each time I'd drop by his house. I never mentioned anything about my visits to his place because I knew that Kayla did not like him so I did not want to do anything to upset her. I felt a little guilty but to be honest I enjoyed his company because talking to him got me thinking about things that I would otherwise not have given much thought.   

Each week, I'd pay Sigley a visit after my run or did not have any deadlines. He always opened a bottle of wine, and if I felt up to it he'd pour me a glass. He chain-smoked as we talked, burning one stick after another, wreaths of smoke rising around his face. On some nights he'd have too much to drink and tell me about his wife who died a few years back or his son who was based overseas but cut off all contact with him. I'd only realize how drunk he was when he tried to get up. I'd put my arm around his waist and feel the sweat dampen my shirt as I dragged him into his bedroom.

"Kayla's doing some incredible work," he said to me one night while the both of us were sitting out at his porch.

"You've seen it?"

He nodded.

"It's always good when that happens," he said.  

Sigley sipped his wine and tapped out another cigarette from his pack. After he lit the cigarette, he looked at me and smiled.  

"So are you planning to settle down in Perth," he said.

It was supposed to be the plan all along except Kayla and I never got around to talking about that subject after we began living together and now both of us were avoiding having that conversation. I was positioned for a career in academia but every now and then, I'd get a feeling if this was really what I wanted to pursue and if there was something else out there more satisfying. I'd talk to my parents on the phone about my decision and each time I'd get the same response, which was to do what made me happy. I must have held that thought for too long because Sigley leaned forward as if reaching for his glass but instead took both my hands and squeezed them briefly. His hands were cold. Our eyes met briefly. It was a strange moment. He had this look on his face and said, "You can talk to me anytime. I'm just down the road."

"Okay," I said

"Another?" he said, holding up the bottle.

"No," I said. "It's getting late." And then I stood up. "I'd should be going home."

It was Sigley who offered to make a call to a gallery in Melbourne after Kayla showed him and some other members of the Fine Arts Faculty the series of paintings she had been working on the past few months. The owner of the gallery got in touch with her to offer her a ten day show. She told me this one evening when she got home, shaking with excitement about the news. "Let's celebrate," I said, but she was already off to a bar at Northbridge with some of her classmates.

"You should join us," Kayla said, but the ambivalence in her voice was clear.

"It's okay," I said. "I'm too tired and I have a long day tomorrow."

"Did you believe this would actually happen?" Kayla said to me before she left.

"I did," I said

"Really?"

"I never had any doubt," I said, meaning I also understood what was also happening, a gradual pulling away, which was going on all summer.

It was odd for Kayla to accept Sigley's offer because I thought she did not want anybody to do her any favours. I brought it up a few days later when she was planning her trip to Melbourne.

"Did I actually say that?" she said.

"A few times."

"I don't remember," Kayla said. "Maybe I did and now I've changed my mind."

Kayla would travel to Melbourne a few times to meet the gallery owner who was helping her with the logistics of moving her paintings. Each time she returned she told me how much more exciting it was over there after meeting up with other artists in the city. It was during one of her trips when I dropped by Sigley's place on a day when I had time on my hands and for some reason, I just wanted company because with Kayla gone, the house seemed so empty and I didn't want to be alone.

We shared a bottle of wine and talked late into the night and he asked me questions about wormholes, collapsing stars and the event horizon. I could only answer to the best of my knowledge—at that time, most of the phenomena he was describing were based on theory and scientists had very little empirical evidence so I explained to him that what we understand was provisional.

At some point I excused myself to the bathroom to splash water on my face having drunk too much of wine on an empty stomach. I wandered down the hallway turning on the light to find my way and passed by his studio. Some of the paintings were covered in tarp but there were others Sigley had left out. One in particular caught my eye, a nude painting of a girl reclining in bed gazing into a mirror except the reflection is blurred and the viewer is unable to distinguish the identity of the girl, and perhaps this was a way for the artist to engage with the audience's imagination. The redhead, I thought at first but upon closer observation, I noticed the girl in the painting had dark shoulder length hair, identical to Kayla even though it could have been anyone.

As a first-year student, I recall a professor telling us that our observations is much more than a record of data acquired by using our senses as we bring our assumptions and values to the process. As a consequence, a scientist can unknowingly conduct experiments to confirm a theory based on their existing beliefs—in 1904, physicist Rene Blondlot was about to make scientific history because a year ago he claimed to have discovered n-rays, a previously unknown part of the electromagnetic spectrum. These rays are supposedly emitted by most objects and have unusual properties such as changing the brightness of sparks and improving the resolution of faraway bodies.  Even as news spread in the scientific community about his findings, there was also scepticism because other physicists were unable to replicate Blondlot's experiments. An optical physicist, Robert Wood was sent to investigate and Blondlot, reproduced his experiment for him showing how electrical sparks glow more brightly when exposed to n-rays but Wood could not see anything. In the end, as Blondlot set up the apparatus for one last demonstration, Wood quietly removed a crucial aluminium prism, without which the rays could not be detected but as the test began, Blondlot and even his assistant insisted that they could see the rays. Robert Wood was now convinced that Blondlot had imagined everything, which can occur when a researcher's anticipation of a specific outcome can distort their physical perception and data interpretation. Science may be susceptible to human fallibility but safeguards are in place, my professor explained, as the discipline relies on corrective mechanisms such as falsification to mitigate the flaws in human observations. Unfortunately, he added, no such safeguards exist in moments of everyday life.           

I kept looking at the painting for a long time trying to determine the identity of the girl but there was no way to be certain. Except the longer I stood there staring at the painting, what kept passing through my eyes was Kayla in the studio, taking off her clothes and turning her face up to the light, just before it comes into full view, giving the painter a glimpse of hair and a small ear.

I switched off the light and head down the hallway and looked out through the sliding windows at Sigley leaning back on the chair, a lit cigarette between his fingers. Under the yellow porch lights, he somehow looked so old and barely recognisable. And I decided at that moment I wasn't going back and without saying a word to him, I walked to the kitchen and out the back door. 

A week later when Kayla got back, we had that talk, the one we'd been avoiding for so long. We took a long walk down by the river and it was over just like that without any angry, hurtful words or much tears. On the way home we stopped by the boathouse to watch the sun go down on the far edge of the river, the sea and sky welded together. Later that evening, Kayla would give me the painting without saying why she was giving it away except that it was her favourite and she wanted me to have it. Even now, so many years later, the painting reminds me of a life I could have had except I'll never know for sure.  

I found another graduate student couple to take over the lease and got a little room back at student housing. Kayla went back to live with her family in Rockingham but she would relocate to Melbourne by the end of that year where she still works as a full-time artist.   

I dropped out of my doctoral studies after six months—a combination of exhaustion and the doubt over the direction of my thesis forced me to give up my studies and move back to Singapore. I was almost 30, and my friends settling nicely into their careers and starting families and here I was working as a relief teacher in a secondary school near my housing estate and living with my parents, back upstairs in my old room, with the same posters stuck on the wall, edges peeling off. I can't tell you how many nights I lay in bed as a slow breeze caused the curtains to rise and fall, making small waves in the cloth and I realised that part of my life, probably the best part was over.  

A year or so passed before I got a letter from Kayla. She wrote about thinking about our time together when we lived in that house and how that experience had informed some of the paintings she was producing at the moment. At the end of the letter, she mentioned about Sigley and his retirement from academic life and in recognition of his service the university had commissioned her to do an interview with him for a special edition of The Dispatch Review. He spends his days working, Kayla wrote, working as if caught in a continuous cycle of creative inspiration. Up to that point, I'd pushed him out my memory but the letter was a pull from the past and got me thinking about that night after I left his house without saying goodbye and the drunken slur of his voice on the phone when he called me later up asking, "What happened to you, mate? Where did you go?"

_____