“That’s … eloquent.”
He drops his cigarette and grinds it beneath his boot, turning to me. “Yeah, well. Ever had twenty grown-ups put you on sympathy blast?”
“Sympathy blast?”
Felix does a pity pout. “Like that. My mum’s friends falling all over themselves to say, ‘Poor you. How awful. You must be so sad?’ Like they wanted to be the first to make me cry. And they all rub your arm in the same place, like this.” He demonstrates. It reminds me a little of Ms. Goldenblatt’s shoulder squeeze and Ritika’s shoulder punch, but it’s different, because this hand on my arm belongs to Felix Waters. I can’t believe I’m noticing the weight of his fingers, even as we’re talking about the worst thing ever. “And all the sympathy cards are pink: ‘There’s nothing worse than losing a mum.’ Eurgh. Fucking awful.”
I nod, thinking of the teddy bears at the walled-garden memorial, the Hallmark card sentimentality.
Felix folds his arms. Sun streams down behind his head, shooting out glittering rays that prevent me from seeing his expression. “Minnie, I know you want to feel better, but that’s the thing. You can’t. I can’t, unless she magically gets not dead. The trick is … You work out how to live with feeling terrible for the rest of your life.”
This is so unbelievably depressing. But it’s reassuring, too. Like a safety net. Felix’s intensity makes me feel less insane. Ash keeps asking me if I’m all right, trying to tell me things will be okay. But it’s nice, for once, to admit that maybe they won’t be. That this hurt is permanent.
We walk on, into the sun. The light is blinding-bright, blending the street and the sidewalk and the trees into one white canvas. Up ahead of us, near the entrance to the studio, there’s a blur of movement. A thin figure with long glowing hair, turning to look at us—
“Oh my God.” I stop walking abruptly.
“What?” asks Felix.
I shield my eyes, wishing I had my sunglasses—wishing I had those EnChroma sunglasses I ordered already, but they won’t arrive for weeks.
It’s Mum. I’m sure of it. For real.
In the days after the letter, I saw Mum everywhere. On street corners, on the Tube and the bus; walking through Poets Corner or browsing in the bookshop on Full Moon Lane. I heard her, too—a crash from the kitchen or her key in the lock in the middle of the night, the Beatles floating faintly up the stairs. And, of course, now I see her all the effing time.
But this is different. This isn’t my imagination. This is finding evidence of her in the studio yesterday: the damp paintbrush and the full ashtray. Lipstick marks and coffee dregs that haven’t dried out the way they should have if they were from weeks ago; her perfume hanging in the air.
She’s two hundred yards away, fading into the sun.
She’s dead, I think.
She’s here and she’s dead in the same moment.
I believe in both. I like it that way.
I know the way I’m thinking isn’t right. But I don’t want to give it up, either. What a crappy choice to have to make: Mend my brain and never see her again. Or tumble forward into this burgeoning madness and get to be with her all the time.
Now I see what a great metaphor a sinkhole is. A cavernous space is opening up at my feet; I’m teetering on the brink.
“Minnie, what?” Felix’s voice rumbles through me as Mum flees round the corner. He places his hand on my arm, gently shaking me from my walking coma. “Minnie. What’s up?”
Felix moves in front of me, blocking the light.
I blink away the sunspots in my eyes, taking in the streaks of white porcelain on Felix’s navy sweater; lavender clouds against a buttercream sky.
I blink again.
The sun is glazing everything apricot.
Color.
Paler than pale.
But there.
This is what it looked like in August, right before it all faded. Somehow I’ve hit a button, pressed REWIND, gone back through these aching days and found the world again. Almost. The colors aren’t absolute: Imagine the world’s smallest, itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny dab of rose-violet paint diluted by a gallon of white. Or a photo on your phone with the saturation turned almost down to nothing. The faintest wash of watercolor across the paper.
But there’s no mistaking the blue-lavender-rose-violet-yellow sky.
Or Felix squinting down at me with charcoal eyes, brown hair.
A haze of color.
Lavender
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
The plant that woos hundreds of bees to the garden each summer. Tired shadows under Felix’s eyes. A late-September afternoon haze.
CHAPTER 21
Tombstones Are Gray
I’m standing in the back garden, trying to decide between scaling the wall or going in through the kitchen like a normal person—where I’ll end up in trouble. It’s obvious I haven’t been on a school trip: there’s clay dust billowing from every pore, porcelain streaked across my dress.
As I’m staring up at her window, Emmy-Kate’s flamingo legs emerge, followed by the rest of her. She starts clambering down, wreathed in long strawberry-blond hair. Halfway to the ground she spots me and stops, then goes scrambling back up the wall like a spider. Her window slams.
It shakes half the climbing roses from their stems, depositing a carpet of petals at my feet. Dusk creeps across the garden as I lift one from the grass to examine it.
The petal in my palm is bruised. And it’s the wrong color. I look up at the trellis. These roses should be apricot, and they’re not. They’re … some other color. Only, I can’t name it. I can’t even describe it, because it doesn’t exist. It would be like trying to explain birthday cake to a Martian—there’s no common reference.
I run through the mnemonic: ROY G BIV. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. A rainbow. The full spectrum.
Except now I’m seeing an extra color.
Ummm.
There’s no blue in the Bible. Mum whispers in my ear: There are more colors in the world than you’ll ever know about.
Worry clenches a fist around my heart. I look at the grass, then the sky, reconsidering their pale pastel hues. I’ve been so happy to have color, I’ve convinced myself they’re green and blue. But they’re not. They’re vast great canvases of weirdo nonexistent new Minnie-vision.
This is not how normal brains work.
I crush the petal in my fist and bang open the back door.
The first thing I notice is how quiet the kitchen is, like a breezeless day. After Niko’s marathon cleaning session it’s sterile and bare, too. It feels entombed.
The next thing I see is Niko herself. She’s sitting bolt upright behind the table, her face stony and flat. In front of her is a sheet of paper, unfolded, with three creases in it. The fold pattern immediately makes me think of the goodbye letter—but the police have that. Then I think it’s a note from school about my absence. My sister is quivering with rage, but she can’t be this annoyed that I’ve skipped school … can she?
Finally, I see that the Professor is here—a-freaking-gain—perched on his usual chair in his jogging outfit, drinking chai and working at a laptop. He stands up when I come in. Niko flicks her eyes toward the movement, then back to me.
“What the fuck, Minnie?” Her hands snap-snap-snap. “You used her credit card.”
Oh no. My eyes drop to the paper in front of her. She pushes it toward me. It’s a statement for Mum’s Visa, showing one item only. Enchroma.com. The stupid magic sunglasses.
Niko’s fist hammers on the table for my attention. I’m expecting her to stand up and condemn me, but she stays seated, shoulders flopping in defeat. She starts signing lethargically, speaking at the same time for the Professor’s benefit in the deep voice she rarely uses:
“Do you even know what you did, Minnie? I called the police this morning. I had to stay home from SCAD all day and clear up your mess.” Niko’s hands move like broken birds, but all I can think is,
phew. She was nowhere near the studio today, nowhere near me and Felix. She hasn’t witnessed my epic boyfriend betrayal.
“This letter arrives,” Niko continues, “and I thought it was her, and I called the police. Then the Missing People hotline. And I had to knock on the Professor’s door and ask him to come round because the police always take it more seriously if there’s a grown-up. And it wasn’t an emergency, so I had to wait in the house all day thinking: Is this it? Is she actually out there somewhere? The whole day, I had this stupid hope.”
She’s tearing up behind her glasses, hunching over her hands: “Do you know what that was like?”
I’m so horrified—I didn’t even consider this as an outcome—and so overwhelmed by this weirdo day I say exactly the wrong thing. Which is: “How did you know it was me?”
Niko’s face crumples. She looks crazy vulnerable for a second—almost like Felix at his most despairing. “The police finally came round a couple of hours ago with that interpreter woman I can’t stand. They explained that they spoke to the credit card company, and then they spoke to”—she glances down at the bill and spells out—“E-N-C-H-R-O-M-A, and finally they found out this transaction wasn’t her. It was you.”
The two of us stare-off. Me coated in porcelain and panic; Niko in a headscarf and charity-shop cardigan and Battersea Cats & Dogs Home T-shirt she’s amended with a Sharpie to read & Rabbits.
“I’m sorry, okay?” I sign, but my words don’t breach the wall between us. By this point it’s impenetrable, like Sleeping Beauty’s thorns-and-all barricade.
Two rosy spots of annoyance appear high on Niko’s cheekbones. Her vulnerability vanishes and she’s tense again. “That’s it?” she signs. “You’re sorry. God! How could you, Minnie?” She takes in my soaked-in-art appearance, and her nostrils flare. Then she shakes her head—in disgust or disappointment, I can’t tell—and goes rushing from the room.
I slump into her chair, staring at the Visa bill. Okay, but so what?
I open my eyes every day to monochrome. I go to school. (Albeit not today.) I chew my way through every microwave meal. I wash my hair, brush my teeth, do my homework; I plod on and on and on through these endless empty days and I don’t tell on Emmy-Kate and the boys in her room, and I don’t confess to my sisters the exact words I read in the goodbye letter, because no one needs to carry that weight on their shoulders, and I see Mum everywhere and now I’m seeing colors THAT DON’T EFFING EXIST, so tell me this:
Where’s my Get Out of Jail Free card to do one tiny thing wrong?
I’ve forgotten the Professor is here too until he sits down opposite me and clears his throat repeatedly. He spins the bill toward him between finger and thumb, the same way he twirls his bow tie, then clasps his fingers together under his chin. It’s instantly clear: He and Niko have discussed this ambush. They’re in cahoots. I don’t get her at all, why she keeps inviting him over.
“Er—Minnie, er, perhaps you could … explain,” he waffles. “Why you’ve used Rachael’s credit card to, ah”—he squints, peering down at the page—“spend, uh, three hundred and fifty pounds?” The Professor starts squinting around the kitchen, as if looking for a Cadillac or a diamond ring or a yacht, some evidence of my spoils.
Holy Botticelli, to steal a phrase from Emmy-Kate. But who cares? In the grand stupid scheme of things, does any of this even really matter?
“Three hundred and fifty pounds?” I repeat.
“Mmm.”
Silence reigns. It strikes me that it’s not only one tiny thing I’ve done wrong, not only one person I betrayed today. By kissing Felix, I’ll have upset or disappointed or pissed off Ash and Emmy-Kate and Niko and even the Professor—weirdly, even this last one bothers me.
“Look, I’ll pay the money back or return the glasses,” I mutter, humiliated.
The Professor nods. “I don’t think that’s your sister’s issue,” he says gently. “I think perhaps she wants an explanation.”
The way he says it, I can tell he doesn’t mean about the credit card. Niko wants an explanation for Mum’s disappearance.
“Don’t we all?” I say, and he smiles in a shipwrecked fashion.
After an hour of sitting in silence and the Professor’s disappointed sighs, I apologize again and high-tail it upstairs, where Mum’s bedroom door is ajar. I hesitate outside, listening to the banshee wail of music seeping from Emmy-Kate’s room, then peek through the gap.
Niko is stripping the bedsheets.
Quick and methodical, she shakes the duvet from its cover, yanks off the fitted sheet, pulls pillows from pillowcases, and in doing so, deletes our mother’s last dreams. She piles the sheets on the floor and tips out the contents of the laundry basket on top. Then she grabs the dress from the chair and adds that to the pile on the floor, places the sandals inside the wardrobe. I bite the inside of my cheek so hard I taste blood.
The ashtray gets tipped into the bin and both relocated near the door—I shrink back—to be taken downstairs, along with the lipsticked wineglass. Books are reshelved. Niko unwinds her headscarf and uses it as a duster, swiping over my words on the mirror without noticing them, cleaning the dressing table of its history. She screws lids onto jars and tucks them into drawers.
Pretty soon the room looks hotel-neat, void of any personality. But Niko keeps moving around: straightening and restraightening any remaining knickknacks, pushing at the books on the shelves until they’re in perfect alignment, twitching the curtains into neat pleats.
When she finally runs out of things to organize, she stands in the center of the room, biting her lip. I know what she’s going to do before she does it, as if I’m watching my life on replay. She sits on the edge of the unmade bed and reaches underneath, pulling out the shoebox and lifting it onto her lap. There’s an inch of dust on top. Niko blows it off, then runs her hands back and forth across the lid.
My whole body begins shaking. This is a pact I can’t watch her break. I slip away from the door and dart up the stairs to the Chaos Cave, heart exploding because the last living traces of Mum are being deleted from the world.
And as I sit in my room, the pastels begin to drain away.
I watch them for hours, each new and strange color fading from view, like paint down a drain. Until all that is left is a black-and-white that’s much, much darker than before.
Lime
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
Niko’s sketch pad cover—an Aquarelle watercolor block. Tic Tacs. Tulip stems and the garden in early spring. Some of Ash’s more outré sneakers. The parakeets that flock through London’s parks.
Violet
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
Stocks and wallflowers and sweet peas, spring flowers she will never see again. The winter pansies and violets that are about to bloom and she will miss. Purple shampoo for super-blond hair, which used to sit in our shower caddy and has now been relocated by Niko to the bathroom cabinet.
CHAPTER 22
The Color of Shadows
The sunset beams light through the skylight and all over my bed. I’ve propped the window wide open to listen to the trains, and every now and then I catch a waft of traffic fumes mingling with the sweet scent of the roses. The combination reminds me of this afternoon’s illicit cedarwood-and-cigarettes kisses with Felix.
I’m still wearing my porcelain-covered dress—I can’t bring myself to take it off—and every time I move, I want to be back at the studio with him. Or underneath a bubble in Meadow Park. Or at school. Basically, anywhere but trapped here in the house of heartbreak, where any minute Niko will summon me downstairs for seitan fingers and Bird’s Eye potato waffles and a lecture.
I close my eyes, hoping to escape my life and relive a moment from this afternoon: when Felix Waters put his arms around me in the lee of the Full Moon Inn and kissed me goodbye. But with my eyes closed, all I see is Ash’s face, contorted with shock.
How could you, Minnie? Niko’s words reverbe
rate through my skull.
Ugh. Disgrace chases me from the bed. I go to my desk, where I idly pick at a blob of porcelain on my sleeve and revisit the floral drawings from the other day. Each one is unfinished, a cautious pencil rendering to be painted or inked or crayoned. Without color, there’s no way to decide which. They’ll remain incomplete, like everything else in my portfolio.
That’s it. I’m incomplete. Monochromacy will stop me from applying to SCAD or being an artist. Mum made The White Album, and quit. I’m not even going to get started, not going to have a chance.
The clay blob comes off in my hand, flat and round like a pebble—or one of the rose petals from earlier. I fiddle with it, the porcelain thin and delicate. It’s dry, ready for the kiln—my cardigan has soaked up the water and created accidental greenware. And when I spin my chair around and hold the piece up to the window, it glows.
I feel on the brink of some huge discovery, the way Rodin found the light in the stone. Maybe these porcelain scraps and splashes on my dress are what I’m supposed to make?
I start agitatedly peeling and picking at my dress, jabbing my nails in the fabric and prizing off the clay shards, piling them carefully on my desk. I’m thinking that this is the closest I’ll ever come to being Mum—wearing my art on my sleeve—when of course she strides into the room.
“Fleas?” she jokes, waving her cigarette at my disassembly.
I stop yanking at my cardigan. Mum is wearing a chartreuse frock like mine, and scarlet stilettos. As always, she’s the brightest thing in the room. She’s also soaking wet, and there’s seaweed hanging from her hair. Her skin is waxy and blue. Cold sweat springs up on my skin.
Every time I imagine her, she looks more and more dead. The trouble is, I don’t know if I’m doing it on purpose or not. Am I holding on to her, or letting her go?
“What’s going on, Min?” she asks.
“I had a slight porcelain accident at the studio,” I say. “Sorry.”
“Pah! Who hasn’t?” She dismisses this with another wave of her cigarette, and I giggle. For all her morbid appearance, she’s still acting like Mum.
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