Astonishing Splashes of Colour (21 page)

But it won’t be all right in the morning. I’ll be as silent then as I am now. I have no past. No mother, no significance in my brothers’ lives and no baby memories, because they have all been destroyed by my father. No future. No children to depend on me, take a little bit of me, to remember me.

I go out when the sun begins to rise. I don’t want anyone to come and find me, because I’m afraid they might not see me. I’m afraid that I don’t really exist at all.

I walk a long way, right into the centre of the city and out again on the other side into an area where I’ve never been before. There are a few people around, even at this hour, but I look
at the ground and pretend not to see them. I have too much silence in me to smile or say “Good morning.” They are people going to work. Postmen, milkmen, shift workers waiting for the bus to take them to Longbridge, Cadbury’s, all-night Sainsburys. They seem so purposeful. They know they exist, they know where they are going.

I walk fast. I want to look as if I know where I’m going, as if I have a purpose like everyone else.

Then I stop. I look around me, and I have no idea where I am. What am I doing here? I’ve never seen this road before: this pavement, these houses. I stop so abruptly that a woman with a pushchair bumps into me.

“Sorry,” she mutters breathlessly. She has a toddler in the pushchair, and two other children, one on each side, holding on to the handles. I can feel her irritation. The child in the pushchair is wailing constantly, not very loudly, on a jarring pitch that sets my teeth on edge. The two older children have red noses and puffy eyes. She’s allowed to have three children but she doesn’t even look after them properly.

“It was my fault,” I say, pretending to smile, but not meeting her eye.

The boy sneezes and sniffs very loudly.

I move aside and let them pass. I walk behind them, but slowly at first, so that I can disappear into the background if they notice me. They must be going to school, I think, and with a jolt, I realize that I’ve lost hours of time. Why am I here? The pavements are crowded with people, the roads full of cars and lorries and bicycles. Everyone seems to be going somewhere except me.

The mother and the pushchair are moving rapidly out of sight, and I walk faster so that I can watch them going to school. I would like to see the mothers outside the school, watching the
children go in, waving at them while they stand and talk. A sharp stab of nostalgia for my yellow time pierces me and I start to run in my anxiety to reach the school gates.

The children on each side of the pushchair are carrying lunchboxes. The girl’s is pink with a cartoon image of
Pocahontas,
while the boy has the
Lion King.
They don’t want to walk as fast as their mother. The boy has thick ginger hair that sweeps disobediently over his head and ends in soft curls just above his ears, which stick out rather more than most children’s. I worry about him being bullied because of those ears. He walks with his head down, holding on to the pushchair, expecting his mother to guide him round obstacles.

The girl is older and her hair is fairer, tied up in a ponytail with a big fluorescent green clip. You can buy enough hair clips nowadays to have a different one every day for a year. Sometimes, I go and buy them, collecting them for the daughter I will never have. It seems that if you have children and a bit of money, the world opens up like a huge Aladdin’s cave, beckoning in the children, offering them wonders, excitement, food, clothes, videos, toys. The world is made for children, and without them you’re no one.

The girl’s fair-yellow-ponytail is swinging, and she’s arguing with her mother. I walk faster, because I want to hear what she’s saying.

“Mum—why can’t I?”

The mother seems breathless, whining like the girl. “No, Emma. I’ve told you once and I’m not telling you again. It’s too late.”

“I won’t come home on my own. Sarah will walk back with me.”

“And who’ll walk back home with Sarah?”

Emma pauses to catch her breath. “You could.”

“If I could take Sarah back, I could come and fetch you in the first place.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

“Who’s going to look after Darren?”

“It’s not fair—everyone else is going.”

“Mum,” says the boy suddenly.

The mother ignores him.

“Mum—” his voice holds the word for longer, letting it drift, setting up a painful discord with the wail from the child in the pushchair.

“What?”

“My foot hurts.”

“So?”

I don’t like the mother. She doesn’t seem to care at all about the children. I fall back, feeling Emma’s distress at not being allowed to go with her friends, feeling the boy’s pain in his foot.

The mother stops unexpectedly, leans over and smacks the child in the pushchair. A shriek of fury rises up in the air. The mother starts to walk again, dragging the boy along. “How many times have I told you?” she shouts at the pushchair. “Don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve.”

But has he got a handkerchief? I think. Does he have an alternative?

I stop trying to keep up with them. I can’t bear to watch.

We’re approaching the school gates and I can see the mothers and children outside, a haze of yellow above them—the morning, the sun, the blond heads of hair …

They are moving so fast that the boy trips and falls over. “Mum!” he screams.

The mother keeps moving. “Stop messing around, Henry,” she yells.

I run forward and pick him up, putting him back on his feet.
“Oh dear,” I say and smile at him. He’s only little, and as he turns round I see that his face is covered with a mass of freckles that are running out of control, spreading and joining up so that they are almost one giant freckle. He looks up at me, but doesn’t stop crying. His eyes are round and bewildered and he backs away nervously.

“It’s all right,” I say. “You must be careful to watch where you walk, otherwise you’ll end up on the pavement again.”

He looks at me and makes no response. “Mum!” he suddenly shrieks.

She stops, turns round and sees us. Immediately, she leaves the pushchair with Emma and races up to me. “Keep your hands off him,” she yells.

“I was only—” I begin.

“Don’t you go near him,” she shouts. “What do you want?”

“Nothing,” I say. “He just—” I realize belatedly that she’s much bigger than me in all directions, and expects aggressive confrontation, not reasonable explanations.

The boy continues to wail noisily. People are watching us. I can smell the change of atmosphere, the burning, as another yellow flame dies into a charred ruin.

I turn away. Rush back the way I’ve come. Listen for her footsteps behind me, her hand on my shoulder. Nothing. Just screams somewhere in the distance. Her voice fades away.

When I finally stop walking, there’s no sign of the school. No children rushing because they are late, no mothers with pushchairs coming away from school. Somehow, I’ve separated myself physically and mentally, crossed a line dividing the life of school and the life of the rest of the world.

I stand still for some time and try to look for something that will tell me where I am: a signpost, a shop, a road sign. I don’t even know what direction to take to get back to the city centre.

Then I see the 11C bus stop and almost cry with relief. I know the number 11. It goes round Birmingham in a giant outer circle, so if you set off at one stop and stay on the bus for two hours or so, you arrive back where you first started. Clockwise or anti-clockwise. 11C or 11A. A bit like the young lady called Bright.

There was a young lady called Bright,
Who could travel faster than light.
She set off one day
In the usual way,
And arrived there the previous night.

Could you get back to the same bus stop earlier than when you left? It depends on your perception of time, which seems to move in straight lines or circles, a rotating spiral that goes up or down, forwards or backwards, fast or slow. I struggle to hold on to it, but lose the thread every now and again. Sometimes, whole days disappear. At other times, a few seconds feel like several hours.

At the 11C bus stop, I wait and try to calm down. Breathing in and out, I pretend to watch the passing traffic, wanting to be invisible. It feels awkward, having to think about breathing. Shouldn’t it be automatic?

The bus comes. I climb on and show my bus pass to the driver, who grunts briefly and drives off before I sit down. I nearly fall over, but save myself by grabbing the shoulder of a white-haired lady. For a second I think she is Miss Newman.

“Sorry,” I say.

She doesn’t answer or react in any way. I wonder if she is dead.

I find a seat at the back, in a corner, and watch the changing passengers. They are mostly elderly. A younger man gets on with identical twins who look about three. They each have a packet of
tomato-ketchup-flavoured crisps and sit staring at me, mechanically taking out crisps and eating them with their mouths open. They have a dull, jaded look about them with their green eyes and orange-stained mouths. They get off with their father at the job centre.

I watch them until they are out of sight and wish I could take them and wake them up, shake them, tickle them, show them how to laugh …

I sleep on the bus, because I’ve missed two whole nights—one reading Adrian’s novel, the other feeling myself disappear. As soon as I’m comfortable, I close my eyes.

Voices drift in and out of my dreams.

“Only six months to live—”

“Mum! I want the green lolly. You know I don’t like yellow—”

“Well. I told him he could get out, now—”

“20p each in the market.”

I make one complete circuit in a clockwise direction. Selly Oak, Harborne, Bearwood, Winson Green Prison, Handsworth, Aston … Sometimes the bus moves very slowly, as if it doesn’t have the energy to go on. Sometimes it stops altogether for ten minutes, waiting for a change of drivers. One driver stops in the middle of the traffic and gets out. He crosses the road and goes into a newsagent’s. Nobody on the bus speaks. I watch from my sleeping corner at the back and wonder how long they will all wait before they decide he’s not coming back.

After five minutes, he returns, clutching a
Mirror,
two bags of crisps, three Mars bars and a can of Coke. He gets back into his cab and we can hear him opening a bag of crisps. Then the engine starts and we move off again very slowly. Perhaps he’s reading the paper.

I sleep again and dream of the pink van that took Dinah away, with the slithering question marks.

Sometimes it’s empty and sometimes—like today—it’s on the road, the people inside singing. “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Bob Dylan. Martin has all his records. He tapes them and plays them on his long journeys. He says the music does something to his in-sides. I spent many days of my childhood in his cab, listening to Bob Dylan. I know all the words.

The mingling voices croon like a lullaby, but the sound of the singing wakes me up. I sit, half awake, half asleep, trying to focus on the singers. Is one of them my sister Dinah, whom I never knew? Or my mother? The question marks slide round me teasingly, leading me on, escaping when I reach out to grasp them.

Why do I remember Dinah’s van?

Looking out of the window, I recognize where we are: King’s Norton, near Jake and Suzy’s house. I think of Suzy when I last spoke to her, and I know in that instant that I should speak to her again. She will almost certainly be at home, because she’ll still have morning sickness. It lasts at least three months. I decide to wait and do one more circuit. I don’t want to see Jake. I need to see Suzy.

I’m wider awake on the second circuit, waiting now for my return to Jake’s house. I look out of the window, noticing landmarks, and begin to check the time on my watch every now and again. I feel better.

After about an hour, I start to feel hungry, so I rummage in my bag. I find a stick of chewing gum, a packet of mints and half a KitKat stuck to my comb. I separate them and start to lick the chocolate off the silver paper.