Astonishing Splashes of Colour Read online

  We didn’t leave breakfast things out for Paul. Nobody knew when he was going to get out of bed, or even if he was in. Sometimes he disappeared for weeks at a time, and then just turned up for lunch when we’d almost forgotten about him.

  My father finished his toast, put his plate and knife in the dishwasher and went off with his cup of tea to start painting. He wasn’t angry any more. This was quite normal. He never seems to hold to any important viewpoint for long. The heat of his fury grows stronger throughout the day—we’ve learned to keep out of his way, so he can direct it at inanimate objects: he likes to throw plates and hurl furniture around—then the fury goes out overnight.

  “No,” he’ll say, as if he’s really perplexed. “I wasn’t angry. Not at all. I’m never angry.”

  Sometimes I think that he hasn’t grown up. He paints all his emotions on the surface, like a customized jacket, and when he gets bored with them he throws the jacket away and finds another. But are they real emotions, or just what he thinks we expect? How can you tell?

  I sat watching Martin eat, spreading butter on his toast so that it was the same thickness all over, including the corners. Then he lifted it up and demolished half of the slice with one enormous bite. It hardly seemed worth all that trouble.

  He saw me watching him and smiled slowly. “Rough crossing this morning,” he said at last.

  I leaned across the table. “Martin, I’ve bought a flat.” I couldn’t help it, the excitement was still with me. I had to tell him.

  He chewed thoughtfully. “So you’re going to leave us?”

  I loved his calm acceptance. “Can you take my stuff to the flat—in your lorry?”

  “Of course. When?”

  “Saturday. I want to move on Saturday.” The excitement was spilling out of me. “It’s not far—only one bedroom—wonderful view. It’s just right for me—”

  “Fine,” he said and lifted his cup for a large gulp of tea. “Good for you.”

  Paul was home by Friday evening, looking tired and unshaven. Dad had phoned him—how did he know where he was?—and he wanted to help, he said. Things hadn’t worked out with Jody. He needed an excuse to come home.

  I couldn’t remember which one Jody was.

  “Was she the one who shaved her eyebrows?” said my father. “Purple fingernails?”

  Paul thought for a minute and seemed unsure. “No,” he said eventually. “That was Jenny. You’ve muddled Jenny and Jody.”

  “Well, as long as you know which is which,” said Dad.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Paul. “I’m not likely to see either of them again.”

  He’s a researcher, working from home, spending hours at a desk, thinking, calculating, inventing. I’ve lost track of his girlfriends. Immaculately dressed women under thirty-five, in linen suits and straw hats, their bobbed hair ending in razor-sharp edges. They must be impressed by his brain. I can’t see what else they see in him. I suppose he’s exciting at the beginning, when he buys them flowers and meets them from work, openly adoring them. They end up feeling neglected when his latest project takes him over and his mind can only focus on numbers and equations. When each affair ends, he goes through a denial stage, then he falls desperately in love with the next woman and all his old girlfriends become intimate friends with each other. They are happy to talk to him for hours on the phone, letting him pour out his feelings about someone else. Perhaps they feel safe once they know his love has moved on, and his romantic demands are falling on someone else’s shoulders.

  There wasn’t really much to take, I realized on Saturday morning. Paul and Martin carried my bed downstairs, my MFI wardrobes, my stereo, my boxes of books. I watched them load up all my possessions and they looked small and insignificant in the enormous darkness of the lorry. My father stood with me.

  “You need more furniture, Kitty. Come with me. We can do better than this,” he said, leading me back to the house. We went into the kitchen and he emptied piles of cutlery out of the rickety drawers. “We don’t need all this. Take them, take them.”

  He opened more drawers and cupboards, producing saucepans, frying pans, plates, dishes, bowls. There were so many they filled the table.

  “Boxes,” he shouted out of the front door to Paul and Martin. “Go down to Tesco’s and fetch some boxes.”

  He was enjoying himself, rooting through cupboards that hadn’t been opened for years. “Come on,” he said. “Help yourself. You need chairs, a table, sofa, cushions, curtains.”

  I picked up the knives he’d put out—old knives that had lived for many years, cooked in the dishwasher, old, warped, used. I loved them all.

  He stopped suddenly. “But you need a cooker, a fridge.” He ran his hand through his hair and looked appalled. “What are we going to do? We should have thought of this ages ago.”

  Did he really think I was so incapable? “I’m going to buy them, Dad. I’m earning money.”

  He looked amazed, then relieved. “That’s all right then. You can come and eat with us to start with—until you get your own cooker.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  Paul and Martin came back with the boxes and we started piling in everything we had found. Paul picked up each item reluctantly and with distaste. “You can’t take these, Kitty,” he said. “They’re disgusting, a load of junk.”

  “No,” I said with surprise. “They’re lovely. When you use them, you think of all the hands that have held them, all the mouths that have eaten off them. Years of memory, decades of history that most people have forgotten.”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been reading too many books.”

  “You shouldn’t criticize what you use,” I said and scowled at him. Yes, everything needed to be cleaned—I would do that when I was settled—but I thought he was being unkind. He’d lived with these things all his life. He could have moved into a home of his own somewhere, but he chose to stay here amongst our broken rubbish.

  He looked back at me, cool and impersonal, unmoved by my irritation. I’ve never been able to penetrate his thoughts.

  “Stop arguing and carry these out to the lorry,” said my father. “Then get Martin and you can take out the sofa—the blue and yellow and red one.”

  “Dad,” I said, “you don’t want to give me that. It’s been there for years. It’s part of the house.”

  He laughed uproariously. I could see that he was beginning to get overexcited. “So what? It was your mother’s. Take it. She would want you to have it.”

  “Oh, Dad,” I said and could feel tears forming. That was the first time he had ever mentioned my mother in the context of our home. Never mind that the sofa was decades old, losing stuffing through a hole in the back, one corner resting on a Chambers Concise Dictionary.

  So we left 32 Tennyson Drive in a convoy. Martin and I went in the lorry, Dad followed in the Volvo and Paul drove behind in his metallic-blue sports car. We were high up in the lorry, and when I looked back I could still see the house behind the wall. The mulberry trees looked wet and miserable in the autumn dampness and our house seemed to be sinking into the mud, settling into its history and our history, refusing to acknowledge the forward movement of time.

  We unloaded the furniture into my new flat, carrying everything up three flights of stairs. No one came out of the other flats to greet us or welcome me. We arranged the rooms, hung the curtains and put the china into cupboards.

  Then we all went back to 32 Tennyson Drive for lunch. Dad stirred the sweet and sour sauce into the frying pan and muttered lists to himself. He was going through all the things that were needed to set up a home, happy to keep talking even if no one was listening. The subject matter was unimportant.

  “Potato peeler,” he said dramatically, turning round to face me. “I bet you haven’t got one.”

  NOW I HAVE A POTATO PEELER and a cooker and a fridge. Am I richer for the accumulation of objects? Have they changed me? I don’t go home very often. I have James instead.

/>   I don’t feel grown-up any more. Somehow since my move, my marriage, my loss, I seem to have gone backwards. I feel as if I’m the pet again, little, without forward drive, dependent on others. I find myself wanting to ask permission before I do anything:

  Can I go to bed now?

  Am I allowed to use the cooker?

  Is it all right if I finish the book tomorrow?

  Shall I turn the light off?

  I make myself some toast, look for orange juice in the fridge and find there isn’t any. I fill a glass with water from the tap and gulp everything down, not because I am hungry or thirsty, but because I think I should.

  The telephone rings and makes me jump, but I don’t answer it. Perhaps the school has discovered who I am, perhaps it’s Hélène.

  When it stops ringing, I set the answer machine. Then I lie down on my sofa and go to sleep.

  My dreams don’t refresh me. I wake up exhausted. If I try to remember the dreams, it’s like stepping into an alien existence, a world that is parallel to reality, but sinister and twisted, with shapes that expand and distort like a Salvador Dali painting.

  I dream in colours, astonishing, shimmering, clashing colours. So many shades. Not just red, but crimson, vermilion, scarlet, rose. There are not enough names for the colours in my dreams. I wake up longing for visual silence, looking for a small dark place where there is no light.

  “Kitty, it’s James. Are you there?”

  Why does he have to tell me who it is? I know his voice. I’ve been married to him for five years.

  “I know you’re there, because the answer machine wasn’t on when I rang last night—”

  Very clever. Why didn’t I think of that? I stay on the sofa. I don’t want to talk.

  “Pick up the phone, Kitty.”

  He sounds so sad, but I’m not sure if I believe him. He likes his space as much as I like mine. Perhaps he phones because he feels he ought to. Perhaps he secretly hopes I won’t answer, but needs to convince himself that he doesn’t.

  I nearly leap up to answer the phone, to go next door, but I don’t. I know he will be happy playing on the computer on his own.

  I know he won’t come round unless I ask him.

  “I’ll try later, Kitty. I’m at home if you want me.”

  The phone rings every hour. He doesn’t say anything. He just waits. I wish he would do something positive. I wish he would use his key, rush in and find me on the sofa, sweep me up in his arms.

  But he won’t, because if he did, he wouldn’t be James.

  James moved into the building six months after me. His presence announced itself with a great deal of banging that started at eight in the morning and ended at six o’clock. I thought he might be paying workmen, but there was never any evidence of this. No vans outside, no men in overalls on the stairs. At first I was irritated by the noise, and several times found myself on the landing, poised to knock on his door. But my anger always subsided as I raised my fist and I would shrink hurriedly back into my flat, hoping he wouldn’t come out and catch me. And, gradually, the hammering became part of my background, so when he wasn’t doing anything, the building felt empty, too silent.

  We started with a smile on the stairs. He was very polite, and always waited at the top or bottom of a flight of steps when he saw me coming. If he got caught in the middle, he would flatten himself against the wall to let me past. I found his appearance unsettling. I seemed to tower above him. I thought that I should be standing aside as he limped up the stairs, a traditional dwarf in a modern setting.

  James is five years older than me, and he is not handsome. He’s not exactly ugly either, at least not in a traditional, Rumpelstiltskin sense, but his shape is out of proportion. He is not ergonomic. His body is a normal size, but he has unusually short legs and a large head, made even bigger by his bouncing, curly black hair. He walks with a limp, because one leg is slightly shorter than the other. His parents tried to do something about it when he was younger, but he refused to submit to painful operations, preferring to assert himself mentally if not physically. School was difficult, he says, where status depends on sporting ability. He describes it as a formative experience. Now he marches around lopsidedly and faces the world aggressively. Demanding, confronting, refusing to be treated as an outcast. He prefers to make himself an outcast voluntarily—not to be pushed into it by people who take exception to his appearance.

  One day I came into the block just behind him. I followed him up the first flight and he was waiting for me at the top.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m James. And you are?”

  “Kitty,” I said nervously.

  “Hello, Kitty,” he said. He looked less alarming once we were on the same level, and his face was more comfortable, more lived in than I expected.

  We went up the next flight of stairs with me in front, trying to turn round occasionally and smile, in case he thought I was ignoring him. We went up the third flight side by side; it was a bit of a squash, but not impossible.

  “I’ve just moved in opposite you,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.”

  “I haven’t seen any other tenants,” he said. “Do they exist?”

  “They’re all elderly. They hardly ever go out.”

  “That explains it then. We’re the only ones still in the living world.”

  I thought he was being unfair. “They’re quite sweet,” I said. “Miss Newman on the second floor invites me for morning coffee sometimes. It’s very polite, with doilies and slices of fruit cake.” It sounded as if I were mocking. I didn’t know how to explain to him that I liked old people. I like the wrinkles, the trembling hands, the unsequenced memories. I often take the conversations home with me and fit them with previous bits of information, linking them like a jigsaw

  “That’s a good idea,” he said.

  I seemed to have missed an essential part of the conversation. This happens sometimes, a loss of concentration, my mind wandering elsewhere. I blinked at him, and tried to work out how much taller I was than him. Maybe only two inches. I kept thinking of Snow White. But I don’t have ruby lips, I thought, although my hair is almost black as ebony.

  “Coffee,” he said.

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure if he was inviting me to his flat, my flat, or a café somewhere. “All right.” I followed nervously as he led the way to his front door.

  James opened the door and we stepped on to a wooden floor in his narrow hall. The wood gave off a feeling of light and space which I liked then, when I first saw it.

  “Did you do this yourself?” I asked, although I knew the answer already.

  “Yes. You can buy it from Ikea. It’s very easy to fit.”

  But noisy, I thought as I tried to walk on the soles of my feet. James just seemed to glide across it, lurching on his uneven legs, but somehow making no sound. He led the way into his lounge and I stood in the doorway, blinking with surprise.

  “Is anything wrong?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “It’s just—” How could I explain my reaction? There was nothing to react to. More wooden floor, bare white walls with no pictures. Two white leather chairs with metal arms, and a hi-fi in one corner on a cupboard with pine louvred doors—presumably where he kept the CDs. Under the window was a computer desk; disks were stored neatly in a series of labelled boxes on two wooden shelves beside it. The ceiling lights had been changed to groups of spotlights and there were two angular lamps, one on the computer desk and one tall standard lamp between the chairs. That was all. Nothing else in the entire room. It was alarmingly colourless. I thought I would lose myself with all this space round me.

  “Where are the books?” I said.

  He looked confused and I liked the way his eyes creased uncertainly. “I have some books in my bedroom,” he said eventually.

  I didn’t think I would ask to see the bedroom, books or no books. “Is this room the same size as mine?” I said, and my voice seemed to get lost in the emptiness. I tried
to compare the length of his walls with mine, the position of the window, but it was like comparing an elephant to a piece of rhubarb. Where do you start? How can you compare two things that have no point of contact, where their whole structure is different? His room didn’t feel alive to me. My flat is small and cluttered, but living, throbbing with colour and evidence of me. His is huge and empty, like a barren plain, its boundaries far beyond my sight.

  “Would you like to sit down while I make the coffee?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll come into the kitchen with you.”

  But his kitchen was no better. The cupboard doors were stainless steel mirrors and the tops gleaming white, so every surface shone. It gave me a slightly dizzy feeling. There was nothing out of place, not a crumb fallen carelessly to the floor, not a half-eaten apple left on the side, not a stray tea leaf in the sink. This was not a kitchen where you would make scones, or sit and chatter with friends.

  I sat on one of the tubular metal stools and watched his meticulous coffee-making. It was as if he counted every granule as he put it into the filter.

  “You’re very tidy,” I said.

  He stopped measuring and looked up at me. A faint flush was creeping up his face. He smiled in a lopsided way. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m too tidy, aren’t I?”

  Something about that crooked smile and gentle flush caught me in my throat. “Well,” I said, desperate to cancel my last comment, “it’s a good thing someone is. If the world was inhabited by people like me, everyone would be buried in mountains of their past. I lose my shoes, my door key and my diary, which tells me where I have forgotten to go.”

  He laughed. “I was brought up in a tidy house,” he said, “and taught to fold everything neatly and put it away. I think it’s more genetic than anything.”

  “A family obsession?”

  He nodded. “They’re both doctors—surgeons. They can tie knots with one hand, sew things together meticulously. They’ve declared war on germs. I think they sometimes got muddled when I was a child and thought I was a germ too.”