‘Toby, let’s come back another time,’ I whispered, ‘I can’t do it now. I don’t want to…’
But he had already wheeled himself all the way to the back of the van and motioned for me to give him a hand getting out of his wheelchair.
We made it just at the moment when the clouds opened and the rain began to pelt down in solid sheets. We sat leaning against opposite sides of the van, our feet touching.
‘Don’t you love the night?’ he whispered. ‘Things look different somehow, more real than by day. You get the sense that some of the most important things happen when the rest of the world is sleeping.’
It was true. There was something magical about the night. Time swung suspended at night; it didn’t leak away at its normal speed. The van was filled with a restful peace.
But the knowledge of what I was about to do made the spiders wild. They had woken up and were now crawling through my insides, higher and higher towards the tiny compartment in my mind; the storage box of memory which housed that day.
‘It will be the most awful thing, but you have to do it,’ Toby said, guessing my thoughts. ‘I did it, Izzy, and I think I’m far more of a chicken than you.’
‘Stop it,’ I began. I knew what I wanted to say to him. It was there inside my head, ready to come out. I wanted to say that he was the bravest person I knew – that he was incredible at coping in a world that wasn’t designed for people like him, that he was the first person who had understood what I felt… But I surprised myself by beginning a very different sentence.
‘It was the last day of school before the summer holidays. We were doing up the bedrooms and the whole house smelled of paint. I wanted my room to be a bright yellow, because it would remind me of summer all year round, and I came home from school that day to find Mum with yellow paint splattered everywhere. She insisted on doing all of the decorating herself and she did more than just paint the walls. She was a real artist, and before I was even born she’d had the great idea of making a mural in my room, showing important events in my life.
‘“We can add to it as you grow up,” she’d said, when I was old enough to understand. The first picture was of all of us in hospital on the day I was born. I was a huge baby, the biggest on the ward, and I was born with lots of hair. Mum had painted the three of us, taking lots of care with every brush stroke so it ended up looking so realistic. You can even see the nurses in the background and some of the other bawling babies on the ward.
‘The next picture was of me as a three-year-old, when I’d decided to cut off my own hair. I’m sitting on the grass with these funny tufts sticking up all over my head.’
‘Like Spike?’ Toby asked.
‘I suppose so, yes. Then there was me with a giant backpack on my first day of school and so on, until… that day.
‘She wanted me to pose, but I was in a rush. She was supposed to be taking me to a concert, picking Lou up on the way, and I had to get changed quickly and take all my stuff. And I was angry with Mum because she didn’t have dinner ready and she hadn’t ironed my only good blue dress. And then she was talking for ages on the phone to Mr Leah – they share an art studio. I wanted…’
‘You wanted?’
‘I wanted for her to be more like Lou’s mum. She always spent lots of money on Lou and took us both to great places – films, theme parks, shopping. And my mum… was scatty and disorganised. She worked as a teaching assistant to kids with special needs and she wore baggy jumpers and jeans. And that day, she hadn’t made dinner and decided that we would just have egg and chips.
‘And she went to the kitchen and whipped out this silly mould for making fried eggs in the shape of an elephant, thinking it would make me laugh. One of the kids from school had given it to her. But I had no time for it because I had nothing to wear and I was annoyed at her. By the time I’d got ready and we’d eaten, we were running really late.’
I could barely recognise my own shaking voice in the silence of the van.
‘What happened?’
‘We got into her car. It used to belong to my grandpa and I loved it. It had brown seats which still smelled of leather and were deep and bouncy. Dad used to always say proudly that the car was a proper classic. It made me feel like a lady being driven back to her manor house in the country. But that day I was just scared that I was going to miss the concert.
‘I kept asking Mum to take shortcuts and go faster, and she took a quicker route, past the petrol station. We were really nearly on Lou’s road. I was putting on my lipgloss in the mirror and out of the corner of my eye, I could see a purple car racing down the road that crossed with ours. I was certain that Mum had seen it too, but she hadn’t. The lights were flashing orange – they hadn’t changed to green. Mum saw the car in the lane next to hers starting up so she hit the accelerator.’
I breathed out – I realised suddenly how much speed I’d gathered as I spoke. My mouth was parched but I couldn’t stop now that I’d got this far.
‘Next thing I saw a flash of purple to my right and felt a massive thump. It all happened in seconds. I turned and I saw Mum’s face, filled with hopeless, horrible panic. Then everything was black.’
Seventeen
‘But that day didn’t end with everything turning black?’ asked Toby.
‘No, no, it didn’t… although I really, really wished that it had done. I only fainted for a minute at most, and when I came round, I was still sitting in the same position. For a moment everything was scarily quiet and then suddenly the sounds came flooding in – police and ambulance sirens, people shouting, cars slowing down. There was smoke everywhere and flashing lights and this horrible smell of petrol and rubber that made me want to gag.
‘I knew that something was very wrong, but I hesitated and then I turned my head to the right. And she was there, her head resting on the steering wheel, her hair spread out all over. Her left arm was pale and freckly with little smudges of yellow paint.
‘But to her right, there was no longer a door and everything that was left was red. There was so much red and it seemed to expand at such an awful rate that I couldn’t look any more.
‘I sat and stared at a tiny smudge of yellow on the soft inside of her left elbow. I think I was semi-conscious, but that’s when the shadow man came and tried to get me, but I didn’t want to leave Mum. My limbs felt like lead. I couldn’t stop him shouting, couldn’t stop the red, and I just couldn’t help her – I couldn’t help my mum.’
‘You went to hospital?’ asked Toby.
‘Yes, although there was nothing wrong with me apart from the back of my neck, which felt really sore. They said I was on the “good side”. I suppose they meant the side that the purple car didn’t hit.
‘Mum was on the bad side. They said that it was such a huge force and over so quickly that she wouldn’t have felt any pain.
‘Next time I saw her, she wasn’t covered in red any more and the look of panic was gone. She was there, lying white and peaceful. She had an awful head injury and the doctors had put her into a coma, but her heart was still beating.
‘They said they needed to wait for the swelling in her brain to go down and that they didn’t know when… that they didn’t know if she would be OK again. And it’s my fault. It’s all my fault. I just sat there stupidly and held her hand… but I couldn’t cry. It felt worse than the worst feeling in the world and I couldn’t cry.’
‘Until now…’ said Toby.
He was right. For the very first time since it happened, oceans of tears were spilling from my eyes, sliding down the side of my nose. They were coming so fast that I could barely brush them away with my hand. My vision went hazy, my nose was running and my body heaved. I sobbed and sobbed, for Mum lying there so helplessly, for Dad and his tired eyes, for Aunty Lyn, for Toby and his box of treasures, for the world as it was before, for every single one of the colours that had disappeared. And then I allowed myself, just a little, to cry for me.
‘Why now?’ Toby asked.
‘I… I don’t know.’
‘Because you’ve let go. Nobody knew the whole of it until now and you didn’t dare tell anyone.’
‘Because it was my fault.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘It was. If I hadn’t made her drive me to that stupid, awful concert, it wouldn’t have happened. I was the one who made her rush… who told her off on that last day for not ironing my dress! For not making dinner on time!’
‘You didn’t make her crash, Izzy. You didn’t tell her to go when it was dangerous.’
‘But she wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for me!’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Everything is linked to everything else. You wouldn’t be sitting here with me now if it wasn’t for your mum. But it doesn’t mean it was your fault, Izzy. I might not have been on the roof of that garage if it wasn’t for Chai, but I didn’t ever think that the accident was his fault.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No. And you thinking you’re to blame is just that – you thinking. It’s not what happened. You have your own version of the Blackest Day… Anyway, when was it that the colour thief first arrived in your nightmare? What happened on that day?’
I thought about it hard.
‘My best friend from school, Lou, was acting weird towards me,’ I began, and then I realised that wasn’t true. That had been the day after the nightmare. The day before, I had been to the hospital to see Mum for the first time since the accident. I didn’t even get as far as the room – I only looked through the glass. Now that I thought back, I remembered that it was the first time that I properly allowed myself to understand that she might never come home and I’d known that it was because of what I had done. By not visiting her earlier, I hadn’t had to face that thought.
‘You weren’t there, Toby… I could have done something! I could have reacted quicker!’
‘I know I wasn’t there. Nobody was, apart from you and your mum. That doesn’t mean…’
But I didn’t hear the end of that sentence, because something suddenly dawned on me. Toby was wrong – there had been another person, another person who’d witnessed it, who’d seen exactly what had happened. Shelley.
As the morning light began to spread through the sky, I knew what I had to do.
‘Come on,’ I said to Toby. ‘I’d like you to come with me to visit someone.’
It was Lou’s dad who opened the door in his pyjamas, looking anxious.
‘What’s going on? Oh, it’s you, Izzy. Has something happened? Are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said impatiently. ‘Is Shelley in?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ll get her. Is everything OK with Lou?’
‘What? Isn’t she at home?’ In the swift march to their house, I hadn’t even considered what would happen if I came face to face with Lou.
‘She’s gone to some sleepover.’
Luckily, at that point, Shelley appeared behind him.
‘Izzy, what are you doing here? What’s the time?’ she asked bewildered.
‘Just coming up to six-thirty a.m.,’ Toby informed her, looking at his watch. I’d had no idea how early it was. I felt embarrassed for having come at such a ridiculous hour. But now that I was here, it would be worse to suddenly leave.
‘I… I wanted to ask you something,’ I told her. ‘Would it be all right if I came in? And… this is my friend Toby. Could he come in too?’
The three of us sat around the kitchen table, our hands wrapped around mugs of steaming tea. Lou’s dad had disappeared upstairs after he’d been assured that his daughter was perfectly safe and had nothing to do with my early morning arrival. It was strange being back here. Nothing had changed. Even the stain on the blind from the chocolate sauce bottle that had exploded in Lou’s hands was still there. That was from when we’d made chocolate cakes for New Year’s Eve. It seemed a lifetime ago.
‘Nice to meet you,’ Shelley said to Toby. ‘Are you in Lou and Izzy’s class?’
‘Not yet, but I hope maybe I will be next year.’
‘Right… so why is it that you’re here?’
‘It’s about the accident,’ I said to her, staring at the gingham tablecloth. ‘I want to know what happened.’
Shelley was quiet for a moment.
‘Which part, Izzy? Surely you know…’
‘Could you tell me what you saw?’
‘Of course I can, but I don’t see how that would help…’ she started. ‘It will be a horrible thing for you to hear, Izzy, and I don’t…’
‘It would help,’ Toby told her. ‘It really would.’
‘Why?’
‘Because—’
‘No, don’t say anything,’ I said to him pleadingly. ‘Let Shelley tell it.’
She closed her eyes and I assumed that it was in protest against reliving those awful moments. Minutes passed in silence, each one making me wonder whether this had been a terrible idea. My chair scraped on the kitchen floor and Shelley’s eyelids flickered open.
‘I’ll tell you,’ she said and motioned for me to sit back down.
‘Your mum rang to say that you were running late, but she said that she could drive you all the way to the venue to save me the journey. I had to check in on Lou’s grandma that day, as she’d been taken to hospital. So Lou stayed in the house to wait for you and I set off into town. I’d reached the end of the road when I saw it happen. You’d just left the junction with the traffic lights and a purple car came speeding from the right. It all happened in an instant.’
‘Had the lights changed?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Had Mum jumped the lights?’
‘What? No, of course she hadn’t.’
I stared at her, desperately trying to see whether she was lying, trying to protect me from the truth.
‘I don’t remember seeing them turn green,’ I told her.
‘Oh, Izzy, how would you be expected to remember such a thing?’
‘But you don’t have any proof that I didn’t make Mum jump the lights?’
‘Proof? How do you mean? You weren’t the first car at the lights, Izzy. There was another in front of you. I remember that distinctly because the one directly in front was a red Mini that narrowly avoided the hit. So that’s proof that you couldn’t have jumped the lights. The Mini driver was in shock, but not in as much shock as I was. He was the one who rang the ambulance and the fire brigade. I couldn’t do it.’
It was only when I noticed the tiny splashes on the edge of the table that I realised that I was crying again. Tears of relief came flooding from somewhere deep inside me, somewhere deeper than I had ever explored. Shelley leaned over and hugged me close.
‘Carry on. Please carry on,’ I begged her.
‘There isn’t much else to say, Izzy,’ she told me. ‘The car was smoking by then and it was so hot that I didn’t dare come any closer. The paramedics arrived quickly. They had some trouble getting you out. One of them had to cut through the seatbelt and lift you…’
‘Green – he was wearing green.’
‘Was he? Yes, they have dark green uniforms, don’t they? He was a nice young chap. He got you on to a stretcher and put an oxygen mask…’
‘The colour thief!’ I interrupted her. ‘He’s the colour thief!’
‘Sorry?’
And that was when all of the scattered images from my nightmares rearranged themselves into a train of events I could finally understand. This man had arrived to pull me out of the smoking car and tried his best to stop me from seeing what had happened to Mum, who, of course, was on my right-hand side. ‘Don’t look right!’ he’d repeated over and over. He must have struggled to free me, and by the time he’d succeeded, I would’ve breathed in a lot of smoke. That was where the oxygen mask had come in and then he would have strapped me to a stretcher and lifted me into an ambulance.
‘It was a paramedic all along,’ Toby whispered in disbelief. ‘He was trying to help you, to get you to safety.
’
‘I know… and I thought that he was doing the opposite – that he was trying to hurt me, and that he was stealing the colours…’
‘Are you all right, Izzy?’ asked Shelley, not following a word we were saying.
‘I’m good,’ I whispered to her. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
Eighteen
‘You look different,’ said Frank.
‘Do I? How?’ I’d enjoyed the walk to school that day for the first time in weeks. I’d walked slowly, taking in the clear blue sky, the yellow, red and orange of the last fallen leaves. They mirrored the colours on the mural, which had returned, of course. When we came home from seeing Shelley, I ran up to my bedroom to check and there they were – looking exactly as they had done before the arrival of the colour thief, who I now knew had never really been a colour thief at all.
‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘Just different. In a good way.’ He blushed a deep shade of crimson and ducked his head under the desk, pretending that he was picking something up off the floor. Cormack Griffiths and his mates would’ve had a field day if they’d seen Frank now.
When he re-emerged he said, ‘It’s up, you know. It’s official.’
‘What is?’
‘The cast list on the staffroom door. The big news, of course, is that I’m chief lighting technician. I’ll sit in the box at the back of the hall – you know the one with the flashing buttons. I get to move the big spotlights around, maybe even drop them on the heads of people that I don’t like. If you have any requests, send them my way.’
I rolled my eyes.
‘I was joking. I mean I am chief technician, but that’s not the big news. The big news is that you’re Lady Macbeth.’
‘What? Seriously?’ I felt like giving him a hug.
‘Yep.’
I couldn’t believe that Mr Winch had decided to give it to me after everything that had happened.
The Mystery of the Colour Thief Page 10