“I don’t know much about people’s ages,” I admitted. “You could ask David Gilbert, who lives next door on that side.” I pointed to his house. “Dad says he’s the fount of all knowledge. Or the fountain. I can’t remember the right word.”
“Thanks for the tip, but I knew him as a kid. Like I said, I’d hoped the old git had moved away by now. I’m planning to avoid him like the plague. The prodigal son too.”
I kept quiet because git was a snot-colored word and the old didn’t improve its shade. Plus, I didn’t want to admit I didn’t know the identity of the prodigal son. I couldn’t tell for sure if she was worried about David Gilbert spreading a plague. I suspected she wasn’t.
She appeared to be smiling like she’d told a funny joke about pestilence and pandemics, but my knowledge of infectious disease outbreaks was limited to what I’ve learnt about the Black Death and the Great Fire of London at school.
“Who are you?” I blurted out.
“Sorry! My name’s Bee Larkham, the Bee spelt with an e, not an a like other people.”
“I’m glad,” I said, “because I love the color of bees.”
“Yes! Brilliant minds think alike. They’re such a lovely golden color. I have a feeling we’re going to be great friends.”
She was wrong on two counts: the word bee is a smoky blue with a splash of pale lemon while their buzzing sound is spotty blue with wavering, intermittent orange and yellow stripes.
Bee Larkham with an e not an a was right about us becoming Great Friends though.
“Can I come in?”
“Not today, if you don’t mind. I’m about to go out. Maybe tomorrow or something like that?”
She had a lovely colored voice, almost as beautiful as Mum’s, and a truly terrible memory. She was supposed to be going through things and making her sitting room look presentable for visitors.
I looked down, pondering her lapse in concentration, and noticed the doormat.
WHO INVITED YOU?
“Tomorrow,” I said, confirming our appointment.
I repeated the word twice, once out loud and a second time under my breath for good luck.
That’s what Mum taught me to do shortly before she died. She wanted to help me memorize the times of meetings with a teaching assistant at school when she’d no longer be there to remind me herself.
“Goodbye, Bee Larkham.”
“Thanks for coming round to say hi, John. Goodbye.”
John?
16
NAN’S STORY
After Mum’s funeral, I didn’t move or speak for two weeks. I didn’t realize it was that long, but Dad filled me in on the details later. I stayed in bed and had visits from doctors, who all tried to persuade me to talk.
I don’t know why they wanted me to open my mouth and form a sentence. I had nothing to say to anyone. I can’t remember a single shade from those dark days. Color deserted me the moment Mum stopped breathing. Or maybe I stopped looking and listening.
It was terrible, yet it felt right at the same time. Things had to be disjointed and wrong and out of place. They couldn’t carry on as they had before; the whole world had collapsed and there would never be cobalt blue again.
I stopped talking and Dad left the Royal Marines; we both gave up things. I remember the empty palette of silence.
Were there any colors as Mum’s coffin was lowered into the ground? The muffled brown tones of sobs? Green, wailing clouds? Slate gray muttered condolences from Dad’s soldier friends? I imagine their rifles firing petrol black shapes into the air, the way they do at military funerals in America.
I’ll never know what shades paid their last respects to Mum. I can never paint that final picture.
Weeks blurred into grayish white whispers. The first colors I remember again were so bright, so alive I thought my retinas were on fire. Nan managed to get me up and out of the house. I have no idea how. She took me to the park around the corner from our old house because Dad needed some “space.” The park had plenty of space if he’d bothered to look—a large adventure playground on the right-hand side of the field as you walked off the street.
I know it was a turquoise day—Saturday—because lots of kids and their parents were in the playground.
Whitish gray noise punctuated with sudden dots of bright red and yellow.
I caught my breath. It felt shocking to see color again, to realize it hadn’t disappeared completely from the world, along with Mum. Children laughed and shouted as if nothing had actually happened.
“Go on, Jasper,” Nan said, coughing puffs of flaky blancmange pinks and violets. “Have a play. It’ll do you good. Why don’t you run on over to those little boys with the ball?”
She pointed into the distance, but I didn’t follow the direction of her finger. I watched the light pink, almost translucent ribbons of high-speed trains speeding past. The railway line was behind a fence close to the playground, my favorite spot when I visited the park with Mum. She let me stand at the fence for hours and never tried to persuade me to get on the swing or seesaws, which always made me feel nauseous.
I caught flashes of people in the trains, a blur of fuzzy features. How could they be traveling on a day like this? It felt disrespectful to Mum that their journeys continued after her death. They hadn’t even noticed that only one person stood watching their train at the fence, not two as usual.
I looked around to tell Nan I wanted to go home, but I couldn’t find her. A group of five women huddled to my right and three to my left. Three stood separately, studying their phones. I didn’t recognize any of them.
“Nan!” I yelled. “Where are you?”
The aquamarine screams from my voice curled up like a dragon, rising above the playground, ready to strike at anyone. Everyone. Tears poured down my face as I spun around and around.
“Help! Help me! Where are you?”
The ground lurched up towards me and punched me hard in the face. I felt something warm and sticky on my cheek.
I heard a rasping lilac pinkish cough and bluish footsteps with black, wavering outlines. A woman wheezed raspberry mousse zigzags as she knelt down beside me.
“I’m here, Jasper. It’s Nan. Did you trip over?”
I grabbed her arm and clung on tight, afraid that if I didn’t, she would vanish in a puff of lilac smoke.
“Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Don’t ever leave me.”
“I’m not going to leave you,” she said. “I promise.”
She did leave me. That wasn’t her fault. She didn’t mean to break her promise. She died two weeks later. I didn’t go to that funeral either. Dad wouldn’t let me because I’d been rocking too much and flapping my arms, which was embarrassing.
I never saw coughs of light, delicate lilac and blancmange pink or raspberry mousse zigzags ever again. That made me sadder still. They were straightforward colors that always tried their best. I loved them and they loved me back, without ever wanting difficult favors in return.
17
WEDNESDAY (TOOTHPASTE WHITE)
Evening
Thanks for coming round to say hi, John. Goodbye.
John is a sharp rusty-nail-colored word. I’ve tried to shut out the tint of Bee Larkham’s hurtful mistake by hiding deep beneath my duvet, but it’s time to finally be honest with myself. Bee didn’t invite me inside her house the first time we met. She couldn’t even remember my name.
Now I’ve re-created all the correct colors, I can’t bear to look at the painting again. It’s embarrassing. My mistakes are too painful to view, even in private, when no one can laugh at me.
I climb out of bed and turn the picture around to face the wall. I check my notebooks and find my original diary entry from that day.
It’s as I feared.
I didn’t record Bee Larkham’s blunder in my notebook on January 18. It only contains the date and time of my visit, which lasted five minutes and eighteen seconds, and no other details.
I don’t recall when
it happened, but at some point I allowed myself to preserve only sky blue from our initial meeting. It bled into all the other colors and ruthlessly overpowered them. I didn’t attempt to stop it because the hue was so similar to Mum’s. I’d never have let another shade do that.
The color of Bee Larkham’s voice painted over the scene at the doorstep, covering up the uncomfortable truth—that this encounter was far more significant for me than it ever was for her.
I don’t have time to wallow in my wounded pride or whatever it is that’s left a horrid metallic taste in my mouth. I apologize to my paints for cursing them.
I must repaint more scenes while they’re bubbling away in my mind. Dad won’t check on me. It’s 10:03 P.M. He’s gone to bed early. I can’t see the colors of the TV; he might be looking at a book. It’s probably the same book he was pretending to read a month ago: a Jack Reacher thriller by Lee Child. Except he wasn’t reading a novel by his favorite author when I walked into his bedroom. He put his real book behind the cover of Lee Child’s.
Understanding Your Child’s Autism and Other Learning Difficulties.
I expect he’s studying it right now. Trying to get a grip on why I’m difficult. Why I’m different from other teenage boys.
Why I’m so hard to love.
I bet the book doesn’t mention anything about my colors. They’re not as difficult to love as me, except when they’re making constant demands for attention.
I dab my brush twice in the pot of water and breathe shallowly through my nose as my tummy mouth wakes up. I’m going to restrict myself to painting two more pictures from the day of my first conversation with Bee Larkham.
I’m being selective. I have to be.
I don’t want to repeat myself. Bee Larkham played loud Martian music again on the evening of January 18. I’ve already recorded the colors from the previous night and doubt I can improve upon the picture.
There are other more important details to recall, other stories to tell. It will take time to reveal their true colors.
Thirty to forty pictures—that’s how many I’d have to paint if I wanted to capture the dramatic colors featuring Bee Larkham’s Martian music from this date onwards. If I did force myself to paint all these canvases, I’d have to add dark brown, irregular rectangular shapes with bluish gray rings to the bottom left-hand corner of every single one.
That would be the knocking on her front door, usually from a man, late at night, when the music had reached its brightest peaks. Often, the man visited Bee Larkham’s house and went back inside David Gilbert’s house. Sometimes the man returned to Ollie Watkins’s house, other times the man walked from Bee Larkham’s to David Gilbert’s and then to Ollie Watkins’s house. That made it hard to keep track of their identities when they kept swapping houses.
Other times, more people on the street paid Bee Larkham visits late at night when she played loud music. They didn’t go back into David Gilbert’s or Ollie Watkins’s houses. I wrote their addresses in my notebooks in case I ever needed to show them to the police: mainly numbers 13, 17, and 25. Ted, who has been made redundant from his IT job, lives alone at number 13. He’s bald, wears black, rectangular glasses, and is easy to identify. Karen is a journalist and usually has a sparkly silver phone stuck to her ear. She’s next door at 17; and Magda, Izaak, and their baby son, Jakub, live at 25.
Izaak has a tattoo of a cross on his right hand, below his thumb, but it’s impossible to check for that from my window. The police shouldn’t rely on my records: different men could have come out of number 25 to complain about the music. Magda and Izaak had lots of visitors who wanted to see their baby back then.
I need delicate light blues and dark, sludgy browns to re-create the next scene. They cut through the darkness that night, sluicing color up my blank canvas.
I have to make this painting stand out, because it was different from the pattern that developed over the next few months. Bee Larkham argued with a stranger and it wasn’t to do with her Martian music. The row happened before she turned the music up to full blast on her iPod, not after like all the other times that followed.
This picture has to be a mottled lapis-lazuli-colored word.
It must be unique.
18
January 18, 9:02 P.M.
Out with the Old and in with the New on paper
I was painting voices in my bedroom—cobalt, cool and sky blue—to see how they’d look during an imaginary conversation.
The answer? They fitted perfectly together, speaking with one united voice.
They were friends. Great Friends.
Bang, bang, bang.
Murky clouds of dark chocolate.
I put down my brush and scooted to the window, almost ripping the curtains off the rail as I pulled them back. It was fifteen minutes before the next recital of Martian music began, according to my notebook.
A man stood at Bee Larkham’s front door. He was of average height, which to me meant he wasn’t any taller or smaller than other men I’d seen on the street before. His clothes weren’t grabby for attention either. He didn’t have a dog with him.
I’d written: Probably not David Gilbert, but he could have left Yellow French Fries at home.
The blond woman wore a long periwinkle blue dress. This had to be Bee Larkham because she was the only woman I’d seen at this address. She liked loud music and hated unpacking. She said I was unusual, in a good way.
I opened the window to listen. I caught snatches of vivid blue, but they trailed off before I could understand their meaning. The man turned and pointed at the skip, which made the woman’s shoulders rise up and down.
“I don’t care! I don’t care!”
Those were the only sky blue words I managed to catch, tossed up into the night. I wondered what Bee Larkham didn’t care about or who or why. My best guess? The skip color. She didn’t care about the nasty yellow because it was doing its job, getting rid of everything that upset her in the house.
Out with the Old and in with the New.
I felt sorry for Bee Larkham because I was sure she didn’t have any choice about skip colors. If she had, I was positive she’d have chosen a shade of blue, the same as me. I was certain of one thing: Bee Larkham was under attack for something that wasn’t her fault.
I wanted to alert the police, even though Dad had confiscated my Encyclopedia of Birds for two days after my 999 call about potential skip thieves. Before I could look for my mobile, the argument was over. It couldn’t have been serious because they’d already made up. As the man hurried back down the path and on to the street, the woman—Bee Larkham—shouted after him: “I’m glad! I’m so glad!”
Maybe the man had told a joke. I didn’t know how he felt because I couldn’t tell if he was happy or sad. He stopped and stared at the skip before stalking off. I was relieved he was gone, but disappointed too. I was unable to identify him by the house he entered on our street.
I jotted in my notebook he was probably a stranger, someone who didn’t belong on our street. He was another man who wanted to welcome her to the neighborhood.
Bee Larkham reappeared a few minutes later, while I made notes at the window. She walked down her path, carrying a box containing more things to throw out, which couldn’t wait until morning. When she reached the skip, she turned the box upside-down, smashing the contents—crockery, I think, judging by the colors.
Repetitive bursts of brilliant white and shiny, bright silver tubes.
Later that night, 3:03 A.M.
The Devil on paper
Hours later, long after the glittering, attractive shades of Bee Larkham’s Martian music had finally faded away, I was woken up by different, more guttural shades.
Rough, scratchy browns layered with raspy oranges.
At first, I thought it was foxes. They run wild around here at night, in the day too. They’re no longer afraid of humans. They’ve calculated their chances of survival as being high, based on the fact that most humans don’t have the
urge to kill or maim.
Skulk, a fried-egg-shaped and glossy red-tulip-colored word. That’s the collective noun for foxes.
I listened to the sounds for a few minutes before climbing out of bed. Without turning on the light I made my way to the window and grabbed hold of my binoculars. I didn’t need a torch or Dad’s night vision goggles (bought discounted on eBay because he couldn’t take supplies when he left the Royal Marines) to guide me. They were exactly where I’d left them on the windowsill.
The unpleasant brown and orange colors came from the skip. I couldn’t see properly because the lamppost outside Bee Larkham’s house had flickered for months before dying. The next working lamppost was fifteen meters away and not nearly strong enough.
Squinting through my binoculars, I couldn’t identify the creature at first. It wasn’t a skulk. It was too big to be a vixen or a male fox—a tod—or their cubs. Toad-like, the thing squatted over the cardboard boxes, ripping them open and searching inside.
A monster. I was too afraid to move as the creature shifted. Slowly, it turned around, still hunched over. It looked straight up at me, through me, inside me, ripping me apart with its gaze.
I fell backwards, dropping the binoculars on the carpet.
My body felt cold and clammy, my arms hung uselessly by my sides. Even if I could move them, I wouldn’t have tried to reach for my mobile. I knew dialing 999 was pointless.
I was certain I’d seen the devil in Bee Larkham’s skip; and it had seen me. The devil wanted to hurt me because I was the only person on the street who’d spotted it.
But I remember an important detail that was never in my original picture, the light lilac blue colors and textures I’d left out.
Even though I was terrified. Because I was terrified, I had to make sure the devil hadn’t climbed out of the skip and found its way to Bee Larkham’s front door or my own.
The Color of Bee Larkham's Murder Page 10
