Astonishing Splashes of Colour (2 page)

“Everybody’s gone,” she says. “What’s the child’s name?”

“Henry,” I say. “Henry Woodall.”

“Oh, yes.” She allows a brief smile to drift across her face. Henry must be a character. Just like my Henry. “I saw him leaving with Tony Perkins’ mother. Were they expecting you to pick him up?”

“Not exactly. I said I would try to be here in time if I could.”

“I see. Another time, it would be helpful for us to have a letter from his mother explaining the situation. I am sure you can appreciate that we have to be careful these days.”

I nod. “Of course,” I say.

“You know the way out?”

I nod again and turn towards the main entrance. Once I reach the double doors, I look back to check she’s gone. Then I race up another corridor in the opposite direction, hoping there’s no one else in the building. There must be a back way out. My heartbeat thuds in my ears, booms, thunders. I run past rows of empty pegs, infant toilets, unoccupied classrooms. There’ll be cleaners round every corner.

A fire door:
THIS DOOR BE KEPT CLOSE.

I would close it if I could. This is an emergency. The caretaker’s bound to see it later.

The playground has a gate on the far side. I make myself slow down and walk towards it. Holding my breath, tensed for the inevitable challenge. Nothing happens. I reach the gate and go through it.

Then I run again and I can’t stop. I run and run, along unknown streets. Pelican crossings without waiting for the green man. Groups of mothers with pushchairs. Clusters of small shops. I can’t go on. I slump against a lamp post, gasping, a stitch in my side, until I can breathe more easily. There’s a raw, scraped feeling in my chest. After a while, I set off again and walk, slowly and delicately, until I find a bus stop. I’ll catch a bus into town and then another out in the opposite direction. Back to my anonymity.

As I step on the bus, I remember Hélène waiting outside the school. I wonder if she’ll go in and look for me. Guilt bubbles up and fills my chest. She picked the wrong person.

So much for yellow.

I
DON’T ALWAYS GO HOME.
There are places in Birmingham where you don’t have to speak to people. You can stay all day in Rackhams, using their loos, riding the escalators, eating a sandwich, drinking a cup of coffee in their rooftop restaurant. I try on clothes I couldn’t possibly afford, and experiment with the perfume testers all down my arm until the smells run into each other. I’ve spent an entire day going up the escalators to the top floor and then down to the basement, turning in physical circles to try and calm the circular motion of my mind, where every revolution seems to overlap with the next.

The Central Library is open until eight o’clock in the evenings. I sit at a desk and put a book and paper and pencil in front of me. Then I pretend to work, turning a page occasionally, jotting down strange comments in case anyone is watching me:
Chapter 3
—where is she? Character development weak. Does James know Henry?

I stay out all night after the yellow collapses. I go to Rackhams until six p.m., the library till eight and then I walk up and down Broad Street until the lights come on, as if I’m going to Symphony Hall. I wander amongst the groups of people going to a concert or the theatre. I stand in front of the three-headed fountain, watching my feet get wet from the spray. I check my watch frequently, as if I’m meeting someone, look past people, searching the distance. I join the crowds having coffee in the intervals, then pretend to be part of the groups going home after the performance. I get on buses and go to Bearwood, King’s Norton, Hall Green. Halfway along the route, I get off and go back into the city centre.

I think only about me not thinking. There is a lightness inside me that makes me believe I could float if I tried hard enough. I like this non-thinking, this sensation of not being part of myself.

Music spills from the open doors of Brannigans and Ronnie Scott’s. Occasionally people speak to me, but I’m surrounded by a vast bubble of silence and they’re so far away that they hardly exist. Figments of someone else’s imagination.

Two boys who look about sixteen, who’ve been drinking too much: “Hello, darling.

“Want to come with us? We could show you a thing or two.”

They collapse against each other, hysterical with laughter. I walk on past as if they don’t exist.

Then the cold, dark time when everyone goes home and the nightclubs shut up. Couples pile into taxis. I wait in a bus queue with a group of young people who shriek and laugh. I don’t believe in their happiness; they are acting it out, trying to convince themselves. I get on the bus with them and watch them fall into an uneasy silence. I get off after a twenty-minute ride as we approach Weoley Castle Square, cross the road and wait for another bus to go back into town.

“You’re out late tonight,” says the bus driver as I put my fare into the machine. He’s the one with a jagged scar on his left cheek, who never smiles. It bothers me that we’re losing our anonymity.

I keep moving now. Only the homeless are left in their doorways. I am not homeless; just hopeless. I walk and walk and walk.

When the sun rises, I’m still walking. There is a greyness just before dawn. A paleness without colour. This is the reality. The daytime colour is a faÇade, a coat of paint splashed on to fool us into thinking the world is genuine.

Then the sun rises amongst the fragmented clouds. The buildings around me grow pink and splendid—concrete suddenly glows and I’m surrounded by beautiful blocks of offices, flats, hotels, which shimmer in sympathy with each other. Then pink turns to yellow and I remember that I can’t go and meet
Henry any more, so I go to a bus stop and wait for a bus to take me home.

After climbing the three flights of stairs, I pause for a moment in front of James’ door. But there’s no sign of life, so I get out my key and go into my flat. He won’t know that I’ve been out all night.

There is safety in my flat, where I am surrounded by colours and objects that mean something to me—my Cézanne poster collection, my GCSE artwork, my wall-hanging of multicoloured scarves. There is also a small number of my father’s unsuccessful paintings, which I especially like because they are rejects: a line is not straight, a blue is too vivid, or Dennis the agent just doesn’t like them. It pleases me to see what my father doesn’t wish to be seen, these poor abandoned creations, the part of him that isn’t perfect. Like his days in the RAF. I can see through him because I know about his medals and his secret flawed world.

James and I are married, not divorced, or even separated. We live next door to each other.

My brother, Martin, who is a long-distance lorry driver, has put several shelves on the walls, between the pictures. When he’s home, he does these things for me lovingly but imperfectly; the shelves slope slightly. Every three weeks, my china jugs edge their way down to the left and congregate in groups. Eventually I put them back in position, so they can start their journey all over again. I have collected jugs since I was eleven, brought from all over the world by Adrian, my oldest brother, who travels more stylishly than Martin when promoting his books. He never forgets me—he always finds something new, a vivid combination of colours, a satisfying curve. I like to take them down and hold them, smoothing my hands over their glaze, knowing each one through my fingers.

Underneath the china shelves are bookshelves, which are completely inadequate. My books fill every blank space, pouring out of the shelves, creeping along the narrow hall in piles, spilling into the bathroom, sitting on top of the television, tottering off the top of the fridge.

This is why I exist, to read books, children’s books. Not picture books, but stories for children who can read. I review them (I have impressive credentials: Adrian Wellington, the novelist, is my brother) in various newspapers and I read them for agents and the children’s library. I type out a two-page report or a one-page review, intended to be neat, but actually full of pencilled corrections and new, exciting thoughts which occur to me too late. I put it in an envelope, and then start on the next book.

So this is my life. I sit or lie and read and read and read. My head is full of bullies, wicked stepfathers, catastrophes on Betelgeuse, successful mothers who leave fathers in charge of the children. Children who run away from home, children who live at the top of a tower block, children with no friends.

But in the end—and I can’t help seeing this as failure—I am only a consumer. I eat up other people’s ideas and have no serious impact on anyone.

Perhaps my mother was a consumer. Perhaps I am like her.

M
Y FATHER BOUGHT
32 Tennyson Drive with money he had inherited after the war, when it was surrounded by similar houses. In the last thirty years, the others were first divided up into bedsits and then demolished. New houses have been built, neo-classical and detached, with double garages fronted by block-paving drives. Now number 32 doesn’t fit. It looks tired and dishevelled, the window frames rotting, the gutters rusting. A delinquent child, it exaggerates its failings in a bid for attention.

My father sometimes talks about modernizing the house, but I don’t want any changes. It’s exactly right as it is—the place where my memories always end up. Every time I step through the front door, I am filled again with the experience of my brothers when they were big and I was small. Their willingness to play with me.

We often played sardines, a version of hide and seek, where one person hides and everyone who finds him joins him, until there is one person searching alone. I remember hiding first, alone in a tin trunk where we kept dressing-up clothes. I could hear approaching footsteps, see a crack of light as Paul looked in. I crept into myself, stopped breathing, willed myself invisible.

“No,” he called cheerfully to someone and I heard the footsteps move away.

Then suddenly he was back, silent in his slippers, leaping in beside me and pulling the lid down carefully.

But Jake returned, not fooled by Paul’s trick.

We squeezed together in the darkness. I could hear Paul’s watch ticking—was he calculating even then, his mathematical brain analysing the odds of remaining hidden against the ticking away of the seconds? Jake was breathing through his mouth, his blocked-up nose whistling gently in time with a tune in his head. The dressing-up clothes smelled old and musty. They were all
men’s clothes: velvet dinner jackets, tartan waistcoats, a spotty bow tie. How did we all get into that tiny space? It doesn’t seem possible now.

Then there was dodgems, another version of hide and seek, where the one hiding keeps on the move, doubling back to occupy spaces already searched.

Brushing through the cobwebs, we crawled under beds, inside wardrobes, crouched motionless on a high mantelpiece, hidden by the dingy gloom of forty-watt lightbulbs.

There were so many hiding places, so many unused rooms. Furniture was piled redundantly into corners: wicker chairs, camp beds, chairs with holes instead of cushions to sit on. Cupboards were built into the walls, with crumbling plaster at the back, their doors hanging loose from broken hinges. There were huge cardboard boxes, trunks, piles of newspapers. We hid underneath tables, squeezed up against bare floorboards, mingled with the dust of generations.

We discussed tactics. Adrian, of course, giving instructions: “Paul, start in the old bathroom. Kitty, go to the other end in the green toilet. Martin can try the bedrooms. If I stand here, I’ll see him move. He’ll have to come this way eventually.”

The green toilet: dark with bottle-green lino curled at the edges. The walls were hidden by my father’s failed portraits. Eyes watched your every move, wherever you were in the room. Jake, small and slippery, moving rhythmically, sneaked out behind me. I heard the air move, the floorboards creak, and I missed him.

“Adrian!” I shrieked. “He’s out, he’s coming your way.”

He had us turning in circles, falling over each other, catching us out each time.

But we cornered him, cut off his escape routes, and suddenly there he was, between us, trapped in the middle of an upstairs corridor. A last-minute leap to a landing halfway down a flight of
stairs, but we jumped after him and caught him. We piled on top of each other, breathing heavily, the air full of sweat and dust, as we emerged from the half-lit secret places of the house.

Sardines again. I was the last one, unable to find them, stumbling through empty corridors, an edge of panic working its way up from my legs. I thought they had all gone, and started to whimper, believing I’d been left to wander for ever alone.

I tried to call them. “Jake. Where are you? Paul, I give up.”

I stopped to listen. A creak, a moved foot, a stifled cough. The sounds came from nowhere and everywhere, memories of previous occupants, their silent traces drawn in the dust.

And then I found them, my four brothers cramped up in the linen cupboard, standing on each other’s feet, cobwebs in their hair. I slid the door back and it jammed, but I had seen their shoes, the reflection of Martin’s eyes in the dark, the paleness of Adrian’s hand.