The building was completely overgrown now. People used to say that it would be redeveloped in the summer, then next year, then the year after, but nothing ever happened. Mum and I had found it completely by accident, when we went searching for lost tennis balls. It was hidden behind a tall hedge, old scaffolding still surrounding the dirty brick. I think it used to have Danger signs on it, but even those had fallen off or rotted away.
I was almost too big for the hole in the hedge now. Either it had closed up or I was bigger. I squeezed through, burrowing my hands in the earth. Swarms of ants scurried away. Twigs scratched the exposed skin on the back of my neck. I felt a sudden mad panic that I wouldn’t get through – that I would be stuck somewhere nobody would look for me. I propelled myself forwards but my legs stuck in the hedge, my shoelaces caught. I kicked fiercely till the laces snapped, and pulled with all my strength. On the other side, I stood, dirty and out of breath in front of the derelict building, which seemed not to have changed since the last time that I’d been here – long, long before the Blackest Day.
Mum and I used to sit in this very spot, pretending to be rich ladies from Victorian times, sipping tea from dainty teacups and being served neatly cut sandwiches by our butler. Sometimes, when it was sunny, we would bring a picnic, paper and paints. I would mess around, drawing whatever came into my head, but Mum would draw detailed pictures of the old house, taking the utmost care over every brick.
I stared at the exact view that she’d painted. I wanted to remember – what she’d said, the smell of the tubes of acrylic scattered on the grass, the sharp tang of the cheese and ketchup sandwiches. I sat for what could have been minutes or could have been hours, but nothing came back to me. Nothing, except that flicker of an image of the two of us there.
I gave up when I noticed it was getting dark. When I checked my watch I couldn’t believe it was almost six o’clock. I pulled myself back through the hole in the hedge, and ran through the empty park to the gate.
When I reached Gulliver Avenue, the street lamps were shining.
‘Izzy! Wait a sec, love!’
I ground to a halt and spun around. Lou’s mum waved to me from the door of Mr Joshi’s shop. Just my luck. I wished I hadn’t stopped. I wished I’d pretended not to have heard her. She was beckoning me. It seemed she was alone. I waited patiently for her to finish paying for her shopping, praying that Dad hadn’t freaked out and sent a search party for me.
‘Thanks for waiting,’ said Shelley. ‘Did your dad get my voicemail?’ She sounded worried.
‘Voicemail?’
‘Yes. I tried to ring a couple of times since… since what happened between you and Lou the other day.’ In the glow cast by the street lamp, I couldn’t quite make out her expression. This was it. I felt my face instantly heating up. Of course she would tell Dad and Aunty Lyn. I wouldn’t be able to keep it from them any longer.
‘I’m sorry…’ I began, but she stopped me by putting a hand on my shoulder.
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ she said. ‘Louise shouldn’t have said what she said. She can be thoughtless and downright awful at times. I was ashamed of how she behaved. I’ve spoken to her, Izzy, and told her that she must apologise to you.’
I stared at Shelley, unblinking. Her hand felt heavy on my shoulder, but she didn’t move it away, as if frightened that the minute she let go, I would be off.
‘Thank you,’ I managed, breaking the horrible silence.
‘Don’t thank me, Izzy. I couldn’t do anything… I saw and I couldn’t do anything…’ she whispered. I knew then that she wasn’t talking about what Lou had done, but about something very different, and I couldn’t listen any more. I wrenched myself free and ran down the road, faster than I’ve ever run before.
Fourteen
The door swung open before I’d managed to turn the key.
‘Izzy! She’s here! Oh, thank goodness.’
Dad’s stubbly face collapsed with relief. He hugged me so tight that he almost knocked us both over.
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ he repeated over and over into my hair.
‘Izzy!’ cried Aunt Lyn, emerging from the kitchen. She was clutching her notebook with her phone balanced between her ear and shoulder.
‘She’s here, Anna… No, don’t worry. We’ll ring you back…’ she said into the phone.
Her voice shook – I wasn’t sure whether it was from anger or relief.
‘Izzy, where were you? We got a call from the school and we’ve been driving the streets looking for you for hours. Anna and Toby went out separately to see if you were by the river… We all thought something awful must have happened. I was honestly about to ring the police.’
I could see that she was on the verge of tears. I almost wished that they would both start shouting, but they just stood there, waiting patiently for an explanation.
‘Where did you go, Izzy? Where were you?’ Dad sat me down at the kitchen table and paced the room, rubbing both hands across his face.
‘I… Stuff at school’s been terrible recently. And today something… something happened and I couldn’t stand it any longer. So I left the lesson… I just walked out and I went to the park.’
Dad stared at me, as if trying to read my expression.
‘Izzy, what’s going on?’ he asked finally. ‘I got an odd voicemail from Lou’s mum the other day. I didn’t call back, because I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I think you do. You know you can…’ Dad began, but Aunty Lyn interrupted him.
‘Why didn’t you tell anyone where you were going? Surely you knew that we would be worried sick? Don’t you think that your poor dad has enough to be worrying about?’
Their barrage of questions hit me from all sides. A pulse was beating faster and faster in my head. And then the words came spilling out of my mouth before my brain had a chance to catch up.
‘I don’t care!’ I yelled. ‘I DON’T CARE!’
‘Izzy!’ Dad shouted after me, but I legged it upstairs, slamming my bedroom door shut.
I sat down shaking. My face in its different forms stared back at me from above my bed: newborn-Izzy, toddler-Izzy, skiing-Izzy, Juliet-Izzy, Izzy-on-the-day-Milo-joined-our-family… The bubbles of anger continued to burst in my head. Not only was it all colourless and empty now, but in this careful documentation of my life, there was one horrid moment that was missing.
I scrabbled desperately in my desk drawers and grabbed a thick black marker pen that I’d last used to label boxes of stuff I wanted to put in the attic. I took off the lid. Then I walked up to the most recent picture of myself and put the marker down hard to the right of it, where the next scene should have gone. My hand moved wildly, frantically covering every centimetre of wall I could reach. Black scribbles erupted, spilling into millions of tiny cobwebs, and still I carried on.
The finished product was a thick, spreading cloud of darkness. I’d used up all the ink in the pen and I was exhausted, but satisfied. That day was finally documented on the wall. The mural was up to date.
I crumpled to the floor and saw the warm, dark space under the bed beside me. I rolled into it, tucking my knees into my chest, among the clouds of dust.
I don’t know how long I lay there before a voice reached me through the haze of my anger.
‘Izzy! Izzy? Can I come in?’
It was Toby. I stayed quiet. I didn’t want to be disturbed. Not now.
‘Izzy, I know you’re in there,’ he persisted. ‘Can you come down?’
I heard the clank of his wheels moving across the kitchen lino, a sudden bark and a rustling noise. I visualised Milo jumping into his lap.
I heard Aunty Lyn say, ‘I think we should leave her for a bit,’
‘Izzy!’ Toby called again. He wasn’t one to give in.
I willed him to go away. But instead of the noise of the front door shutting, I heard a peculiar sound, somewhere between a thud and a drag.
‘It’s OK, I can do it,’ he said, amid Aunty Lyn’s protests
.
I curled myself up even tighter, attempting the trick that Mum had taught me when I was very small, which would help me to calm down. I shut my eyes, and counted down from a hundred. My hiding place was suddenly boiling hot and I felt sticky beads of sweat on my forehead.
When I got to seventy-four, I heard the door being pushed open.
‘You’re horrendously stubborn, aren’t you?’
‘Toby.’
‘Who else would it be? Didn’t you hear me yelling at you from downstairs?’
‘I did, but I… I didn’t think you’d come up here.’
‘I had to, because you wouldn’t come down,’ he said accusingly. ‘The things I do for you.’
We lay in silence for a while. From my position, I could see his legs just to the side of the bed, and his long fingers tapping out a rhythm on the carpet.
‘Coming out?’ he asked casually.
‘I can’t.’
‘OK, I suppose I’ll have to come to you,’ he said, pulling himself under the bed. I had to shuffle against the wall to make room for him.
‘Eurgh, it’s disgusting in here. It’s like this place has never seen a vacuum.’
‘You don’t have to be here. Nobody asked you to come.’ I rolled on to my side, away from him.
‘Let’s say I want to, even though you’re being ridiculous.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? I don’t know why you’re being ridiculous. But if you’re asking why I’m here – I just thought you might have something interesting to tell me.’
‘I don’t,’ I snapped and then felt guilty for being so horrid. ‘Do you have anything?’
‘Anything…?’
‘Anything interesting to tell me?’
He was silent for a minute, thinking.
‘Biology OK?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Do you know how many bones there are in the human body?’
‘Umm… I don’t know. I would guess about one hundred and fifty?’
‘Nope – two hundred and six in adults, but babies have more than two hundred and seventy when they’re born.’
‘How’s that possible?’ I asked, turning to face him.
‘Some of them merge as you grow so you become stronger. D’you know how many bones in the spine?’
‘Isn’t it one big bone?’
‘No, don’t be stupid, otherwise how would you be able to bend? You’d be completely stiff. There are thirty-three small bones in the spine, but I only have thirty-two and a half.’
‘How come?’
‘Because of the accident.’
‘Oh.’ I could sense that we were coming to what Dad would call ‘the crux of the matter’, but I couldn’t tell whether Toby was ready to say any more about it yet. It turned out that he was.
‘I know that you’re curious and I don’t mind telling you. It was awful. My own stupid fault. I was really into skateboarding at the time. I loved it almost as much as football. We were fed up of going to the local half-pipe.’
‘Half-pipe?’
‘Ramp. It’s a semicircle. You know, you stand on the platforms on either side and then skate from one side to the other?’
‘Oh, yeah, I know what you mean.’
‘I was with my friend, Chai – we got bored because there were lots of little kids trying to butt in, so we decided to build our own. We found some old boards and bricks left over in Chai’s garage from when his uncle was building an attic extension. First we tried to make a ramp in my back garden, but there wasn’t enough room. Then I suggested that it would be great to create it on the garage roofs…’
He tailed off but I wanted to hear the rest.
‘And then what?’
‘Well, it was a long row of garages so we managed to build an awesome sort of wave. We lined the bricks up in three mountains and put the boards on top. They were quite flexible so they created a great sensation, almost as if you were surfing, on wheels. It was incredible – flying up and down through the air, seeing the rooftops of the houses around us.
‘Anyway, first we linked the three peaks and it all worked really well and then Chai thought he would test it with four. It was still OK, but he landed pretty close to the edge of the roof at the other end. We should have noticed at that point that we’d made the ramp too long, but we didn’t. So I gave it a go, just the way that he had, but maybe with a little bit more force.’
‘You fell, didn’t you?’ I wanted to get to the moment before he did, and then I realised what I’d said and clamped my hand over my mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered through my fingers.
‘Yeah,’ Toby said in his normal voice as if he was telling me a random piece of news.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I repeated, forcing my fists into my eyes. It made black floating dots appear before me, even in the dark.
‘I flew through the air and I landed hard – incredibly hard – on my back. I felt the most insane pain, and then nothing, absolutely nothing, except the thump of my blood in my head.’
‘Did you faint?’
‘No, I was still conscious, and maybe my arms burned a bit because I’d grazed them, but the intense feeling in my back was gone. Chai came running over. I can still see the look on his face. He thought I’d died. He rang for the ambulance.’
‘And what did they do? At the hospital?’
‘So many different tests. I was there for days. Then the doctor told me that I’d shattered an intervertebral disc, which is basically a joint that allows movement between different bones in your spine. It caused a puncture in my spinal cord, which is part of my nervous system.’
The medical phrases swam through my brain.
‘That’s basically why I can’t feel my legs,’ he summarised, and for the first time ever his voice shook.
‘When did it happen?’
‘Just over a year ago. Last July. I didn’t really want to go anywhere after that. I just stayed at home in bed. When I was half-asleep, I could sometimes pretend that it was just like before and that somehow I would open my eyes and be able to jump out of bed and run downstairs. I didn’t want to see anyone and I definitely didn’t want to go back to school…’
‘And did you… go back?’
‘I missed a bit of the start of term, but I went back. I soon found out that getting around wouldn’t be easy because only some of the buildings in my old school had wheelchair access. And it took me a while to get used to always seeing people at their stomach level, rather than face-to-face.’
‘What were your friends like about it?’
‘Generally good, but, you know… it wasn’t the same as before. And then the restaurant Mum worked in opened another sister restaurant here and she wanted to give it a go, you know – a fresh start.’
We lay together for a while in the thick, comfortable darkness.
‘Do you want to tell me anything?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s about a day. That day,’ I corrected myself. ‘The Blackest Day. But I can’t… I can’t tell you just yet.’
Fifteen
‘Can you hear me? Can you hear me?’ The voice was calm and measured. I recognised it. It belonged to the shadow man. It belonged to the colour thief. He was calm because he had me in his complete control now. I tried to fight back with all the energy that I had left, with all the redness that still coursed through my body. I thrust my arms and legs out, and for a moment my hand connected with something and I half-managed to push myself up. But no… it was no use.
‘Let go!’ said the colour thief, and he loomed large, long fingers ready to snatch the last of my colour. He pressed the glass mask hard on my face and I felt my body grow weak. The world flickered like a faulty lightbulb and then everything went dark.
6.03 a.m.
A whimper. I shot upright in bed. For a second, I thought the sound had come from me, but then Milo leaped from under my elbow and settled himself on the floor. I sensed that it had happened, even before I saw the mural. On it, a painted M
ilo stared back at his real life counterpart. His little black body was still leaping up at the younger version of me, but the red collar that I’d got him especially, with his name and our address on it, was no longer visible.
It was just a nightmare – a nightmare that kept coming back, but still just a nightmare. And I remained the only person who could see what the colour thief had stolen, which simply meant that it wasn’t real.
A vague salty smell reached me from downstairs and I forced myself to get up, relieved it was staff training day and there was no school.
‘Good morning,’ said Aunty Lyn. When she smiled at me, her mouth looked like it was being held up on either side by tiny, invisible strings, and the lines around her eyes were deeper than normal.
‘Good morning. I’m sorry about yesterday. I didn’t mean what I said.’
‘It’s OK, Izzy. It’s OK.’ Her fingers combed through my hair, reminding me of Mum. She pointed to the table and pushed a bacon sandwich in my direction.
As I ate, she sat opposite me with a cup of coffee.
‘Your dad’s gone to see Dr Liz again,’ she said, as if guessing the next question I was going to ask. ‘She’s got “doctor” in her title, but she’s not a doctor of the sort that you would imagine. She’s a counsellor and she helps people with the way that they’re feeling. If it all goes well, he’ll go and see her every week. I’m feeling confident that she’ll help get him back on track. We won’t worry as much then, will we?’
I wasn’t sure what to say, but she looked positive, so I nodded.
‘You know, Izzy, if you felt you ever wanted to talk to someone, I hope you’d let me or Dad know…?’
I nodded again. She was trying to understand and to help, but she didn’t know… she hadn’t been there.
‘Can I go to Toby’s?’
‘Yes, of course. He seems like a lovely boy. He helped a lot in searching for you. He clearly cares a lot about you. Lots of people care about you being all right. Mona called for you last night – I almost forgot to tell you. She apologised for what she said in the science lab. I didn’t ask her for details, but whatever it was, she said that she didn’t mean it. Sometimes… sometimes people react badly to things that they don’t understand.’
The Mystery of the Colour Thief Page 8