The Color of the Sun

by David Almond

  She sighs and stands before him with the gate between them.

  “We have to kiss before we can go through,” she says.

  “What?”

  “It’s a kissing gate.”

  His heart thumps.

  “So what?” he says.

  She sighs again. She laughs.

  “It’s stupid,” she says. “But they say that at every kissing gate there’s pixies watching. If they see folk going through the gate without kissing, they’ll bring bad luck.”

  “What kind of bad luck?”

  “Simple things like bad weather or lost money but sometimes terrible things like broken bones. Or like death . . .”

  Davie says nothing. His heart thumps faster.

  “It’s stupid,” she says. “And it might be nonsense and it might be childish. But we’re all still kids, aren’t we?”

  She leans toward him.

  “And we’ve had quite enough bad luck today. Kiss me, Davie. Please.”

  So he leans toward her and their lips touch for an instant, and he steps out again and lets her through and she thanks him and off she runs and he watches her and his soul is reeling.

  He passes through the gate. He pauses and listens for Dad’s voice again, but it’s not there. The dog walks on in front of him, leads him forward. Perhaps the dog too knows where the water is.

  Up here, the town is nearly gone. There are some ancient knocked-down terraced houses, ancient broken garden walls. The ground is all disturbed from ancient mine workings. There are holes and gouges and cracks in the earth. There are boarded-over and fenced-off pit shafts. There are turfed pit heaps and ripped-up rail lines. Soon everything will be gone, grown over, sunken down, disappeared. Just uneven stony earth made beautiful with bright green grass, moss and lichen, speedwell, hawthorn and forget-me-nots.

  So many places where Zorro could be hiding, so many places where he could be lost.

  Far below are the ancient mining tunnels. Davie might have worked in them had he been born a hundred years ago. Down there are the bodies of boys like him, killed in collapsed tunnels and seams or by explosions. He could have been lost in the earth like them, lost in time like them.

  Sometimes he dreams of the pit children. Sometimes he sees them rise from his sleeping mind. They stand and crouch in his bedroom, silent. Sometimes he dreams that he sees them here, sitting at ease on the turf in the sunlight, scrawny children with blackened bodies and glittering eyes allowed out from the dark into the modern peaceful day.

  He looks around himself now. He imagines those children here, now. They seem so close. If he could relax in the right way, or slip closer to a state of dreams, or simply open his eyes and see more clearly, he knows that they would be with him, come back from death into this bright Tyneside day. Ghosts and phantoms would become as real as he is for a few short, vivid moments, as real as dogs and skylarks here in this strange, miraculous world.

  He smiles. He looks for pixies and for pit children, and he listens for his father and he looks for Zorro Craig.

  Rabbits race for cover as he passes. He sees a mouse flick down into its hole. There are foxes here, badgers. Sometimes deer can be seen to pass this way. There are slow worms, grass snakes. Now the buzzards are much closer: a pair of them, wings outstretched, jagged wingtips silhouetted against the blue.

  The dog walks on, leading the way to Cooper’s Hole.

  So strange. Not many people seem to know about this place. It’s nothing huge or special and maybe that explains it. It’s tucked away behind some tumbledown shacks. There’s a little spring trickling out of a few rocks into a little pond of dark water with wet moss and a few reeds around it and some old stones you can sit on and stare into it. There are a few scraggy hawthorn trees. There’s a low stone arch that looks very old, and below that there’s a low entrance straight into the dark earth.

  It was Dad who first led Davie through the kissing gate and further to this place.

  “There’s always secret places waiting to be found,” Dad said. “Even in a little town like this, where you can think you’ve seen everything there is to see.”

  Davie crouches by the spring, cups his hands and lets the icy water make a pool in them. He sips and drinks. So icy, so delicious. He sits on a rock and takes out the colored pencils and the sketchbook again. He inspects the ancient stuff on the pages: stick figures, scribbly drawings of the family, a green drawing of a teddy bear called Spook, a picture of a rocket heading to the moon. The pages are faded and crisp at the edges. He looks at the pages that he has begun to fill today.

  What would lads like Zorro Craig think, seeing him coloring like a child? What would the lasses think? It doesn’t matter. Nobody can see. And he thinks of Fernando Craig, the vicious, hard lad with the tender voice and the ability to create such beauty with a few swift marks. Fernando Craig, he understands.

  He looks at the trickling water. He catches his breath. What he sees is commonplace and wonderful. As the white light of the sun falls through the splashes and the spray, the light is broken up, the colors separate. A rainbow appears and disappears, appears and disappears. The truth within the white light of the sun is shown to him and shown to him.

  He laughs out loud, seeing this truth in his childhood tin of colored pencils. He colors, scribbles and draws. He creates nothing that is recognizable. He allows the colors to roam and spread across the paper. Then he begins to make the marks that try to draw this strange place, Cooper’s Hole. He draws grass and water and stone arch and trees. He draws wildflowers and waterweed. He draws the bees. He tries to match the colors in the real world with the colors in his book. Impossible, but he goes on doing it. And, entranced by all this, he is cast back to his primary school, to the day Mrs. Fagan put a vase of daisies and buttercups in front of the children.

  “Take up your pencils,” she said. “Take up your paints and brushes.”

  “But, miss,” someone groaned. “We’ve done buttercups before.”

  “Not these buttercups,” she said. “And not on this day and not at the age you are now.”

  She moved gently through the class.

  “Some artists,” she said, “spend their whole lives painting the very same thing time and time again.”

  “It must get boring, miss,” someone said.

  “Oh, no,” she answered. “Every time you look, every time you draw, you see something very new.”

  She laughed her kindly laugh.

  “And some artists,” she said, “even spend year after year painting pictures of themselves.”

  “Is that ’cos they’re bigheaded, miss?”

  “Oh, no,” she said again. “They’re trying to find out who they are. And they’re seeing how they change and grow, day by day, year by year.”

  She reached down and touched the petals of a daisy.

  “Magical things,” she said. “Did you know that when the sun is out, the daisy opens wide, and when the sun is gone, the daisy folds in upon itself? That is why they are often called ‘day’s eyes.’”

  The children painted and drew. They paid attention to their work. Mrs. Fagan praised them. She gently helped guide uncertain hands to move brushes and pencils across paper.

  “One day,” she said, “I will find some sunflowers to bring to you. They too are magical. Brilliant yellow things from the far south that follow the sun with their faces as it passes overhead.”

  “I’ve seen them, miss,” said Davie. “They’re in a painting that my dad loves.”

  “Ah, yes. Perhaps it’s one of the paintings that I love too.”

  She tenderly touched his head.

  “Color the world, children,” she said, “just as that artist colored the world. Make it beautiful.”

  “I can’t get it right, miss,” someone muttered. “It doesn’t look how it’s supposed to look.”

  “Don’t worry. It needn’t look like any particular thing at all. How could we imagine that we could make a world as perfect and as lovely as the world
that God has made? All we can do is to do our best. Paint and draw. Create your own beautiful, imperfect world.”

  Her voice drifts through the years as Davie cups his hands under the little spring again and sips the icy water again. He squishes it around his mouth. He feels it flowing into him and through him. At his side, the dog drinks too, lowering its mouth into the waters of the pool.

  Davie goes on drawing and coloring in the sunlight and the heat, sitting on this rock by Cooper’s Hole. He draws Cooper’s Hole itself, a gulf of blackness, an entrance to the endless blackness beneath the surface of the earth, black as sleep, black as death. He imagines the blackness of Cooper’s Hole deepening and spreading. He is entranced, absorbed. He starts to lose himself again.

  He was maybe five years old when he first came here with Dad. They found frogs beneath stones and saw minnows flicker in the water. The minnows flash and flicker still. He creates them on the page with little dashes of white against the water’s dark blue. And he tries to catch the impossibly bright sunbeams falling through the hawthorn leaves to sparkle on the water.

  Back then, he brought a net and jam jar sometimes, to catch the minnows and carry them home. He’d watch them swimming through their colorless, shadowless world on the kitchen windowsill. They never lasted long and he’d feel cruel then. They needed space and freedom, poor things. Who was he to limit their lives like this? But he kept on doing it. Poor innocent long-lost minnows. Poor little dead things.

  And now he looks up from his page and his enchantment, and he sees that Dad is here.

  He shimmers in that light that slants down through the hawthorn trees.

  He sits on one of the ancient stones right by Cooper’s Hole itself.

  He watches Davie, maybe wondering how his son is going to react.

  Davie does nothing. Doesn’t speak. Keeps very still. Just watches the man who watches him. Sees the colors come and go.

  The dog too sits very still, eyes toward the pool.

  A frog leaps into the pool and swims across the water in a dead straight line from Davie to his dad. It kicks its legs and leaves a perfect little wake behind.

  Davie quickly draws this blue wake on an empty piece of page.

  He considers trying to draw Dad, but it seems impossible.

  Dad shrugs and smiles.

  “So,” he says, just as he used to do to open a conversation.

  “So,” answers Davie, just as he used to do.

  “So you just out wandering, son?” says Dad.

  “Aye.”

  “That’s good. You always liked that, didn’t you?”

  “Aye.”

  “A grand thing for a lad to do.”

  He looks down at the frog that’s now poised right at the water’s edge, looking up at him.

  “You should never drink the water here. I told you that, didn’t I?”

  “Aye,” whispers Davie.

  “They used to say it turns you daft. They used to say it starts you seeing visions.”

  He grins.

  “But mebbe that’s all bollix. What do you think, son?”

  Davie grins back. Bollix. The word the priest used, and the word he used to share with Dad when Mam wasn’t listening.

  “Aye,” he says. “It’s all a load of bollix, Dad.”

  “You going far?”

  “Dunno. I might do. I think I might be following Zorro Craig.”

  “Zorro Craig? Him from Collingwood Terrace?”

  “Aye. You’ve not seen him, have you?”

  “No, son. Mind you, I’m not sure I’m really seeing anything at all.”

  He’s dressed in brown jeans and a green sweater. His blue eyes are bright and kind as ever. He’s like he was before he became all shrunken and thin. He turns his eyes to the larks singing high above, then looks back, and he smiles again.

  “Beautiful,” he whispers, just like he used to do.

  “This is what it’s all about,” he says, just like he used to do.

  He laughs at himself saying that. Then he asks, “So why the interest in Zorro Craig?”

  “There’s talk he might have killed somebody.”

  “Killed? Killed who?”

  “Jimmy Killen.”

  “Jimmy bliddy Killen?”

  “Aye. It’s true. I’ve seen the body. I’ve seen the knife.”

  “What the hell’s he doing killing him?”

  “I dunno, Dad. It’s all a mystery, Dad.”

  He laughs at that as well. It’s what they always said when they got to something that seemed beyond them. It’s all a mystery. It’s all beyond our comprehension.

  “Killing!” says Dad. “What’s anybody doing killing anybody? There’s enough death in the world without the Zorro Craigs adding to it all. Isn’t that right, son?”

  “Yes.”

  Then a thought comes into Davie’s mind.

  “You’ve not seen Jimmy, have you?” he says.

  “Can’t say I have.” Dad grins. “Mind you, that could depend on how long the lad’s been dead.”

  Then he just looks at Davie and Davie just looks back at him, and the time they spend in doing that seems to last an hour, a day, a life, an eternity.

  “You’ll be all right,” says Dad at last. “Keep on wandering out here in these lovely places on this lovely day. You’re a good lad. No harm’ll come to you up here.”

  The dog licks the pool, its long tongue dangling down into the water. Dad smiles.

  “What’s with the dog?” he says.

  Davie rolls his eyes.

  “I can’t stand the thing,” he mutters. “I can’t get rid of it.”

  Dad grins.

  “Mebbe it’s looking after you,” he says.

  “It’s not. Go away,” Davie whispers to the dog. “Go on. Get lost.”

  The dog just stares back at him, stupid. It licks water from the pool.

  “You’ll be all right,” says Dad again. “Don’t worry, son.”

  When Davie looks back to where Dad was, he’s gone. There’s just the pond, the spring, the colors, the archway and the dark entrance to the earth. Davie isn’t disturbed. It seems to be the way that things should be. He sighs. Cooper’s Hole. They used to wonder if it led down to the ancient coal mines below, whether it was the start of a tunnel that would take you right through to the other side of the hill, or whether it was the entrance to Hell itself.

  “No way of knowing,” Dad once said, “without crawling in and finding it all out for yourself. And I don’t intend to do that. Do you?”

  “Not likely,” said Davie.

  He stares at the dark entrance. Maybe that’s where Dad came out from. Maybe that’s where he’s gone back into.

  With a black pencil, Davie makes the hole seem even darker, deeper, more dangerous. Then he wonders if Zorro Craig is finding out for himself and using the place as a hideout. He could hole up in there by day and come out raiding shops and people’s kitchens at night. Davie peers harder, strains his eyes, like he might see the shape of Zorro Craig, or see his eyes staring out of the dark. But no, it’s all too wet in there, all too confined. Zorro will have traveled much further on if he’s got any sense. He’ll be putting miles between himself and the murder scene.

  Davie puts two white dots on the black for Zorro’s staring eyes.

  He thinks about writing a horror story called “The Monster of Cooper’s Hole.”

  He thinks about writing a story about a father coming back from death, but knows it would be impossible without it seeming barmy, scary, far too full with weeping, far too sentimental.

  He simply writes, in green pencil: Dad came back today at Cooper’s Hole, just for a little while.

  He draws the frog. It’s now right where Dad was. The skin under its mouth is lifting and falling. It sits there above the water on the rock, and it’s shiny and green and really beautiful.

  Davie sits there for a long time. Images from his infancy move through him as the earth turns and the sun above him follows i
ts arching route across the sky. The images flow through his mind and body and down into his arm and hand and make their marks and fill the lovely empty sketchbook pages.

  The slobbering of the dog brings him out of it. He curses it, but he closes his book and puts the pencils and the book back into the sack.

  He takes another sip of cool, clear water from the spring.

  The frog suddenly leaps into the pool and disappears.

  Shimmering damselflies dance there.

  “Shove off,” he tells the dog.

  But it takes no notice. It stands waiting for him to follow, and it pads along ahead of him as he leaves Cooper’s Hole and wanders on.

  The hill steepens toward the crest. There’s a point where it’s possible to stand on a high bare rock and look back to see what’s gone before. Davie stands there. Below him are the paths and the playing fields, the disturbed earth, the zigzag path, the poppies, the town. He seems to have come so far, but it’s all there, all still visible, all just a short walk away. He sees the steeple of the church, and he sees again dead Jimmy Killen and the bloody knife lying together in the rubble. It already seems a hundred miles away, a hundred years ago, but the place is small and the time’s been short. The smallness and the shortness are so strange in their immensity.

  He sees the swarming footballers, like a distant flock of earthbound birds. And apart from them he sees someone tiny, dressed in bright red, coming up through the green fields. It must be Shona Doonan. She waves her arms in wide circles just like Gosh did. Davie shuts his eyes and listens, and he swears he can hear her voice, calling his name as if it’s a song.

  “Davie! Davie! Come back, Davie!”

  And he wants to call to her, wants to see her coming up the zigzag path to him. But she’s so, so distant and he might be wrong. She might be simply singing. She might be calling someone else’s name. She shimmers in the light and heat, a bright red dot in all that great green land.

  Still the breeze blows upward, into Davie’s face. It plays across his skin. He sees how far the sun has moved. He sees the buzzards drifting in the blue above. He hears the larks and sees the tiny dark dots of them. Are they scared of buzzards? he wonders. Does it trouble them that they share the same sky?