Canvas asked four New Zealand authors to write about love, what it means, where they see it, how does it look right now; does it surprise or has it the same old face despite the circumstances ... how better is it to feel love now, than to clench in fear. So they each wrote a short story. Part one: Fiona Kidman and Bronwyn Sell.
The Blue Room
by Fiona Kidman
The blue room looked as if it hadn't been slept in for months. In the dull light hanging from the blue ceiling, the blue painted walls, the blue bed cover, the blue carpet, the windowless room seemed shrouded in gloom. It was one o'clock in the morning in Paris. We had travelled, my husband and I, by train from Rome. The man at the desk at the little hotel in Montmartre had no record of our booking. But I did and so we found ourselves in the emergency room below stairs.
What will we do for a fortnight in Paris, my husband had asked. I had been to Paris before but he had not. Now I had no answer. We would move in the morning, somewhere, anywhere but here, I promised. In the morning we woke to bells chiming. We staggered to the breakfast room. A manager appeared, offering apologies. We would immediately be transferred to the red room upstairs. The red room was as red as the blue room had been blue. We looked now directly into the source of the chiming bells, the exquisite art nouveau church of Saint-Jean de Montmartre.
My husband's spirits were lifting. We went outside. On a wall next door to the little hotel the words "I love you" were painted in 132different languages. "I love you," my husband said. "Je t'aime," I said. "Te amo," he said, going all Spanish on me. The words, they were there in te reo, too. Like home. By the metro station at the end of rue des Abbesses, a man was playing an accordion. My husband went and sat beside him. They smiled at one another.