Delia sat for a moment, just staring, but soon it fell through- the facade of someone who didn't care was gone and underneath was the real Delia. She wrapped an arm around me, an arm that quickly developed into a full on hug with her little hand rubbing up and down my back to soothe me as I sobbed into her thick hair.
The ice was broken in that moment. I told her something awful and she replied with something no one else had given since my mother passed- undeniably and undying love.
In the hours that followed we talked. We chatted about simple things- shared that we were both bilingual (well, my Mandarin was never half as good as her Welsh but I had tried hard as a young girl) We discussed the differences in running in free in stubble fields to rolling in the dust.
It was midnight before we knew it and we were lying on my single bed, me propped against the headrest and her head leaning softly in the no man's land between my neck and chest. The topic which always brought horror to me - the one usually followed by lies - was soon brought to the top of the pile. The War.
This time I felt my chest tighten and my throat dry and I dared myself to cry but something was different. There was always something different when I was in the company of Delia, something I had noticed in all the time I had been around her - she made me so secure, made me feel safe once again in a way I could only compare to my Mother and that is why the words spilt, tripping and tumbling over each other from my heart.
I told her it all, about the ship being torpedoed as we left Singapore, about being delighted at the sight of a boat as my mother tried desperately to keep herself and my younger sister afloat all the while paddling desperately at her side myself. I told her about arriving at the camp, having a tantrum at the simple boiled rice meal we were given and crying over the rats in the latrines.
I fast forward,telling her that within three months we had got used to so much. At six months in the camp I became a 'nursing apprentice' to the few nurses we had amongst our troups of british and australian women. I assisted in a caesarian - a woman expecting twins. I remembered scrubbing beyond the elbow, remembered waiting with a scabby, but clean, blanket waiting to receive the baby. I remembered him dying minutes later in my arms. He was too small and too soon.
I explained a year, then two and then my mother was gone. The Nips had found out my Father was a shipbroker - his brother a general. The Kampai took me for interrogation. They removed my fingernails, one by one. I wore boxing glove bandages for weeks and still it was painful. My sister had to feed me. I never told the Kempai we were related. She was eight when typhoid took her on its second race through the camp. She would have been the same age as Delia.
I cried once more in her arms, she cried for me, cried for my mother and sister and all the others who could never have made it out alive.
She was the first person to know about the camp, to know what had happened and what had made me a nurse. She was the first person to make me feel it was ok to have survived, help me look past my view of 'it should have been them' and to let me see that I was alive because I had a job to do. I was saving so many lives in the memories of all that had gone.
We laughed then, laughed about Delia's mother still living in the thirties, laughed about my 'posh kid' education and the hilarity of my days fencing in a convent. We talked about coming of age, growing up and knowing after a while we weren't like the other girls, knowing we would look at someone's bosom too long, or wonder what the skin at their waist felt like.
It soon went beyond one evening to become every evening, to Delia being the thing I knew I would always have at the end of a hard day. She was my opium. When a perfume was released with the same name, I bought it for her without a second thought only to find she had never owned a proper perfume before. She was both delighted to have it, and embarrassed to admit she wasn't exactly mouneyed. I was equally embarrassed to admit I was.
It was the perfect bliss I had grown up to expect. I knew there was no doubt that I had feelings for this woman, and there was equally a lack of doubt those feelings were anything other than the real thing.
It wasn't bliss, however, due to one small problem which was ever growing larger.