Colorblind

by Peter Robertson

  Inexplicably I found myself thinking about Brief Encounter again. Trevor Howard and an actress, whose name escaped me, in a drab café in at least one sensually tense scene. Had it been Deborah Kerr? I thought not. But I really couldn’t remember. They had drunk a lot of tea. I was sure of that part at least. Did Deborah Kerr have a famous actress sister? I had a feeling that she did. But who was it? That I wasn’t sure of.

  After a while I stood up and walked to Catriona’s table. This would be awkward.

  “Pardon me,” I said to her. “I think these belong to you.”

  I placed the items quickly on the table. Then I spoke quickly, breathlessly, before my nerves capitulated. As she listened she picked up the bracelet and held it in her hand. She didn’t try it on, as I imagined she would. For a while she said nothing.

  I finished. “I believe that your father would’ve wanted you to have them.”

  Then she began to speak. She still retained her Northern England accent. Her voice was slight and gentle.

  “However did you find me?” It was a natural enough question.

  I placed my finger on the inscription.

  “It wasn’t hard. It was your first name on the paper. That helped me. Catriona. It’s an unusual name. And I guessed your age. And I guessed which part of England you were born in. There are websites about your father. They mention a child. They didn’t mention your first name. They mention your adopted parents’ last name so you see it wasn’t hard.”

  She stared at the paper.

  “But I don’t understand why he wrote this for me. Such a long time ago. They gave me up. I was very small. I knew about him. My parents told me. So I did know who he was. Everything like that. Did you know that he named me? Catriona was always my name. My parents had intended to call me something else. But they didn’t, in the end. They liked it too much to change.”

  I told her I liked it too.

  After she smiled she began to talk some more.

  “You followed me here.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I did.” I told her I was sorry.

  “Why are you doing this?” She wanted to know.

  “A misplaced sense of order.” I had nothing else to offer her.

  “I like it here,” she said.

  I told her I did too.

  “I come to this place a lot. Late in the day is the best time. It fills up dreadfully at night. I don’t care for crowds. I used to be more comfortable with them.”

  “Why?” I asked her.

  “Because I was a part of them.” Her tone hinted that she might consider me dim.

  “The vinegary smell of this place. When I first walk through the door. Doesn’t it remind you?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of our home.” I was clearly getting no brighter.

  So she had noticed my accent. She was right of course. It did remind me of home.

  “How long have you lived here?” I wanted to know.

  “Four years this summer.”

  I asked where her home was and she mentioned the name of a seaside town in the Northeast of England. I knew roughly where it was. I confessed I had never been there and she didn’t seem surprised.

  As she talked Catriona played with her hair. She pulled it out from behind her ears then slid it back. Up close her hair was more dark red than brown and she wore it short, higher than her shoulders, lower than her ears. The constant pulling and sliding revealed a scattering of light freckles on her neck that resembled a constellation of stars that I couldn’t identify.

  I’ve noticed before that when the British first encounter other British people they tend to talk mostly about the brilliance of British things and the greatness of being British; it’s a dreary form of conversational refuge that has sheltered me on more than one occasion.

  Catriona and I were certainly no different in that regard.

  So we plunged right in.

  “There was a fish and chip shop at the end of the pier where we lived. Mum and Dad used to take me there. When I was very small. It was a special treat. Dad and I would each get fish and share the chips and Mum would sit and look out the window at the sea and keep us company. She hated the food. Said it made her stomach all queasy. If it was a warm night she had a small ice cream cone with a flake.”

  I told her I remembered flakes.

  She told me when she was a teenager, she and her girlfriends would go to the shop after the Friday night disco dance in the church hall.

  I told her I remembered Friday night disco dances.

  “The dances were in the winter. It was something to do in the long hours of dark and cold. The haar used to come slating off the water and chill the town.”

  I nodded. Sea haars were also very familiar to me.

  “We sat outside shivering in our coats all buttoned up. There were white plastic chairs and round tin tables left there from the summer, signs advertising Wall’s ice cream that always got blown over. The wooden pier was green and wet. There were rusted metal bars at the far end to stop people from falling into the sea below.”

  “How old were you?”

  “We were fourteen.”

  “Is the pier still there?”

  “It’s been a long time since I was there.”

  Was that an answer?

  She pulled her hair free.

  “The pier was boring in the middle of winter. The promenade lights were left on all day and night. The beach gates were locked but older children and town alkies climbed over and drank on the sand under the pier, between the seaweed and the rock pools and the wooden pillars and the support beams.”

  She pushed her hair behind her ears.

  “In the winter the waves were stronger. They used to come up and over the bars at high tide. When I was little, I remember being too frightened to stand close.”

  Catriona suddenly smiled.

  “Do you remember the seaside deck chairs? The wooden ones that folded up and down and had a sheet of colored cloth to sit on?”

  I told her that I did.

  She laughed. “My dad could never get the damn things to open or close. You could rent them at the chip shop. I don’t remember how much they were. There were windbreakers too. You had to push the wooden poles into the sand. The big striped patterns matched the chairs. I remember them being such old things that belonged to the past. The sun and the wind and the rain and the salt in the air stripped most of the colors away. It’s strange what you remember.”

  “Did you like the beach when you were little?’ I asked her.

  Then she changed the subject.

  “What else did you find that belonged to my father?”

  “I found his guitar.” I hadn’t intended to tell her. There was also the small matter of his capo, but that would stay secret.

  “Where is it?” She sounded suddenly interested.

  “It might need to be fixed.”

  “Don’t we all?” she replied.

  At an early point in the drive between New Orleans and Seattle my nervousness over his guitar had overcome me. In a suburb north of Dallas, I had found a UPS store, and there I sheepishly handed it over. The cost of packing and shipping was exorbitant, but the toothy young man in khakis and a brown polo shirt assured me that the instrument would make it to the repair shop in Boulder in its precisely current condition. This was both reassuring and opaque, because I had no idea how much damage the years of humidity and abandonment had done. I emailed the store and told them it was on its way. I texted Jesse and asked him to wander over to the shop in a few days and get a verbatim assessment of the patient’s condition. He texted me back and told me to go fuck myself, which probably meant that he’d do it.

  This would buy me a few days to decide what to do. At this point I wasn’t sure where the guitar belonged. I also wondered if leaving the instrument in
its original condition was preferable to fixing it. If it were mine, I’d want to play it at its best. But I could play. And it wasn’t ever going to be mine.

  “Am I getting it?” Did she sound eager?

  “I really don’t think so.”

  “Is it valuable?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  That wasn’t strictly true. For a very select person it was likely worth a fortune. Even I would have been willing to pay a lot for it, and a sneaky alternative scenario flashed rapidly before my eyes. But I could let that thought go. It wasn’t mine.

  “What will you do with it?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Is it broken?” I was being interrogated.

  “I don’t know. You sound like you want it.”

  “I don’t want anything that belonged to him.”

  I was confused. “You took the song and the bracelet.”

  “You came a long way to give them to me. It seemed appropriate.” Her smile wasn’t especially warm.

  The waitress chose that moment to approach us. We both ordered fish and chips.

  “You were asking me about the beach,” she reminded me.

  “I was.”

  “I remember the bother of having to get there more than anything else. We got the chairs first and then we had to walk all the way back along the pier. We had to carry all the stuff, the chairs and the spades and pails and a basket with our lunch inside and the beach towels for after our cold dash into the water, which my dad insisted on. We had to climb down the wooden steps. They were steep and always sandy and wet and slippery. I wore plastic sandals. I hated them. They were red and they blistered my feet. We would try and find a nice spot to sit; in the shade, sheltered from the wind, and higher than the tide when it came in.”

  “Were there old Victorian bath houses?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “There were once. Knocked down before my time. My dad said they were still standing when he was a boy. They belonged to the posh families from the South who came north to our town on the coast train at the start of the summer, for the season. My father grew up there. My mother’s family came later, when she was a teenager. She was about my age when she moved there.”

  I suddenly wanted to leave. I didn’t dislike Catriona. I had driven a long way to give her something. Now I had done so. She wasn’t especially grateful. But there was no good reason why she should be.

  At this point in the conversation I calculated that his guitar would beat me back to Boulder.

  And suddenly there was the mental picture of my house there–my little house and the big porch in the front. There was me with a guitar in my lap and a cup of coffee on a cold morning with a dusting of leaves that needed to be swept up and the Flatirons, warm fire red in the first sun. It was more than a little trite. It was dangerously close to approximating an ad for a John Denver retrospective, but I didn’t care.

  I wanted to go home then and there.

  Catriona was in the process of talking. I struggled to concentrate.

  “After the disco the shop was steamy and warm. We always bought the smallest bags. I forget how much they cost. None of us had much money. They were wrapped up in brown paper with a layer of real newspaper on the outside. The owners’ son usually served. We used to smile for him. We thought he’d give us extra if we were nice to him. We were young and we thought we were so brilliant.”

  I asked her what the town was like.

  “Like everywhere else. Provincial. It certainly wasn’t a rich place, the town we lived in. My mum worked mornings in the post office. My dad was a salesman in a sports shop on the high street.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant by a sports shop. I asked.

  “Sinclair Sports was on the church end of the main road between a kebab carryout and a dentist’s. They sold football boots and football strips and football scarves and football hats and footballs and rosettes and posters and trophies and pennants and what-not. The sign outside said “Sinclair Sports” but it was all really just football stuff that they sold. My dad was the only full-time employee. He played for the town team. They were just amateurs. Dad was the goalie. He was actually good and he played into his forties but he wasn’t ever good enough to play for a professional team. When he was a schoolboy he had trials for one of the big Yorkshire teams. They were just a second-division team. He said he was nervous and wasn’t good enough. He let an easy shot slide through his hands and he didn’t get signed. The first time I remember seeing him play he got nervous again and let in another sitter. Direct from a corner. The ball caught in the wind. The supporters booed. They were such little shits. It was awful. He pulled the ball from the net. His head was hanging so low. I just started to cry.”

  “So tell me all about the boys.”

  She laughed and took a deep breath. “We were a right bunch of mercenary little tarts. It was always the same. We eyed the boys at the dance. We looked and smiled then we looked away and tossed our hair and danced close and held them tight—but not too tight—when the slow songs played at the end of the night but we didn’t let them kiss us. Not on the lips. Not then. When we left the church hall we talked loudly, about where we were going for chips. We were shameless. They followed us. They probably imagined that they were doing all the work, chatting us up outside the shop, talking their way inside our knickers with their stupid jokes. What a bunch of trendy wankers. Lambs to the slaughter in their silly cop show outfits. Perishing cold on the English Riviera in their baggy Florida pastels. The stupid show was no longer even on the telly.”

  I was growing to like Catriona less and less.

  “It did get complicated. There were always the four of us. We went together. The very best of mates we were.” She was joking. Then she paused and looked hard at me. Her hand held a strand of hair caught midway between her face and her ear.

  “How do we choose our friends when we’re that young?” She asked me.

  “I’m not sure we do,” I replied.

  She shook her head in mock vexation. “There was me and Angie and Penny and Karen. I was the talkative one, Penny was quite plain, Angie was self-proclaimed gorgeous.”

  “What about Karen?”

  “She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t chatty and she wasn’t ordinary.”

  “So what was she?” I was curious.

  She sighed. “Karen Chisolm was irresistible to all men and boys. God knows why. She just was. A walking wet dream.”

  “You must have loved her.”

  She sighed dramatically. “Karen made it very difficult without trying to. We had these elaborate rules for the boys. There had to be four. One each. One we each liked. They had to like us. One each. They had to want to chat us up. And once we had lured them into thinking they were doing all the hard work, we had to want to get off with them.”

  I smiled at an expression I hadn’t heard in a long while.

  “How well did all this work out?” I wondered out loud.

  She almost snorted at that. “Naturally the little pricks all fancied Karen even though Angie considered herself to be the prettiest. Angie was quite particular about the boys. If she didn’t fancy any of them then the whole thing was off. This happened a lot. She would sometimes try to pinch another boy—mine or maybe Penny’s. She had no luck poaching Karen’s. She was very rude to boys she thought beneath her. She was mean to Penny.”

  “Why was that?” I asked, even if I knew the answer already.

  “Because Angie thought that Penny was ugly and boring and Angie used to get annoyed because, in her queen bitch opinion, no boys ever wanted to chat Penny up. Penny used to get upset.”

  “Angie sounds charming,” I remarked.

  “Oh she was.”

  I hesitated to ask my next question. But I was curious. “What did you do with the boys?” I finally asked.

  “We at
e our chips and stood by the boys with their backs up against the wet metal bars and we necked with them until our mouths were sore. If the waves broke over the top of the pier we would get drenched. If the weather was great and the sea was calm, we would keep on kissing. If the boy was cute and kissed well, we both got soaked. If he was sloppy and smelled too much of cheap Boots aftershave we broke and ran for cover. I remember that Karen usually ran first. She and Angie didn’t like getting wet all that much. Penny was usually the next to go.”

  “What about you?” I smiled at her.

  “A right little trollop. Always the wettest and the last,” she said mock ruefully. “I really liked kissing the boys.”

  I was forced to laugh.

  “What about you?” She asked me suddenly.

  I grinned at her. “A trollop. Just like you. I really liked kissing the girls.”

  * * *

  Shona Nesbit had red hair and ran fast enough to be allowed to compete in both the girls and boys relay teams in the school that I attended. She had long thin legs and wore navy blue knickers to gym class and had matching dimples behind her knees. She had an older sister with long dark hair who was even prettier than she was.

  For almost two months we had been forced to learn the Dashing White Sergeant and other energetic Scottish reels in a compulsory class that met for half an hour after school and cut deeply into our afternoon football time.

  There was going to be a dance at the end of the school year and we were required to be ready.

  In between fits of nervous giggling we formed into circles of eight, frantically maneuvering so that all four girls and all four boys got to dance with their chosen partners. I recall the process being complicated and not always successful.

  I had passed a note to Shona in class before the first practice. She already knew I fancied her, as did everyone else in Mrs. Harper’s chemistry class. We called out the rhymes about the children who fancied each other; Andy and Christine, Kenny and Doreen, Tommy and Shona.