Marie's Room

"Bleu en été"  [E]

Marie's room was painted her favourite colour: a pale blue, the colour of the sky on a hot summer's day. The door and window frames were painted white and they still gleamed with cleanliness, as if they'd been painted the day before.

The carpet, which was a light lilac, was likewise very clean and fluffy. The centre of the floor was graced by a round white rug with a large blue flower in the middle: Marie had found it on a second hand stall and washed it three times to get it clean. When the lamp hanging from the ceiling was switched on, the pink silk globe shade gave the whole room a soft feminine glow.

Directly opposite the door was Marie's desk, beneath a window. It was scattered with books, school books and novels, and a purple pen-pot stood in the corner. There were three drawers, all closed, to the left of the blue swivel chair.

Her bed was along the left-hand wall, a pale wooden frame with a huge squishy patchwork quilt covering the pale blue mattress and just touching the pink pillow at the head of the bed. A lone teddy sat on the edge of the bed, against the corner of the wall. There had once been dozens of toy animals strewn across the quilt: they had been cleared away to a shelf above the bed where they sat in a neat row.

On the left hand side of the room, against the wall with the door, stood a chest of drawers which contained her clothes. They were neatly sorted into different sections: underwear, school uniform, tops, trousers and skirts. On the top of the chest was her mobile phone, fairly old with a pale pink cover.

Across the room, between the end of the desk and the bed, was a small table. It was the most cluttered part of the room, covered with make-up, hair stuff, tweezers and perfume vials. Above it hung an oval mirror, which Marie used to apply make-up, brush her hair and pluck her eyebrows.

On the right hand wall, not visible from the doorway, was a large poster of a Greek island. It was one of Marie's dreams to visit, and perhaps even live there.

The whole room was pretty and clean, and somehow looked at the same time childlike and very adult. Marie couldn't remember a time when it had looked any different: the make-up had once been face paints for dressing up, the mobile phone a toy, but the furniture and the colours had been the same throughout her life. It was very familiar and very comforting.


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