The Colour Black

by Maia Walczak

  ‘No. But I used to know an Isabelle. She was great,’ he said smiling.

  My blood suddenly boiled. I think my face went red. It’s okay Silvia, ex-girlfriends don’t mean a thing, I told myself. He turned around to me and let out a soft sigh before facing the road and pulling out of the lot.

  ‘I’ll tell you all about that at the next stop,’ he said.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said.

  As we drove it dawned on me just how little I still knew about Jack.

  Sproat Lake

  We were heading to Vancouver Island, another place I knew nothing about, but that Jack seemed to know a lot about already. After purchasing tickets we drove onto the ferry and in less than two hours we reached the island. Another one and a half hour drive and we reached a big lake, where Jack stopped the van.

  During that whole journey, since Jack had thanked Isabelle in the store over four hours ago, we’d barely spoken to each other. Now at the lake with its forested shores, Jack switched off the engine, and we took some food and a rug out of the van. We walked over to a wooden picnic table where we set all our stuff down. We sat down, opposite each other, each a bench to ourselves. Oak curled herself up at my feet. Jack perched himself at the end of his bench, hanging his legs off the side, so he was side on to me and facing the lake.

  ‘Sproat Lake,’ he said without looking at me, ‘beautiful, isn’t it? Even prettier than the pictures.’

  I hadn’t seen any pictures, I knew nothing, but I nodded. So was this the next stop he’d been talking about? The place he was going to tell me about this mysterious Isabelle? My heart sunk. I didn’t really want to know anymore.

  *

  Jack’s little sister had been twenty-two years old when she was diagnosed with malignant melanoma. Terminal. Six weeks later she died. Now I understood why, despite the fact he said he loved it, Jack avoided the sun the way he did.

  Jack had never been particularly close to either of his parents – least of all his father. Jack’s dad had always wanted him to study corporate law, and many tensions and confrontations had arisen between the two due to the differences in their ideological beliefs. But Jack had always been close to his sister, Isabelle. Though there were only five years between the two, she would always be the little baby sister, and he the overly protective big brother. Isabelle was small and slender, and had a long mane of golden red locks, huge blue eyes, pale skin and freckled nose: a good giveaway of the family’s Irish roots. But she loved the sun. Since as far back as Jack could remember, Isabelle would always be outside as soon as the sun was out. Everybody loves the sunshine, but Isabelle was addicted.

  And she was beautiful, sun-kissed and glowing. According to Jack, she was that rare mix – attractive, intelligent and kind.

  ‘You know,’ said Jack half laughing, ‘one of those girls who gets stopped, interviewed and photographed by a style magazine, and they ask her where she got her “cute little sweater” from and she’s all like, “oh my goodness, thank you! Oh, this thing? I got it from a thrift store…” and all this whilst she’s in a bit of a hurry because she’s on her way to volunteer at the women’s refuge on a weekday evening, or the animal shelter on the weekend.’ Jack rolled his eyes and smiled sadly. ‘Isabelle was that girl,’ he continued. ‘And man, she was a heartbreaker. It sure made it hard to be her brother; I had to deal with loads of jerks. She always looked immaculate. I guess that was the main difference between me and her. I just didn’t care!’

  ‘Oh, but guys that don’t give a shit… they have their charm.’ I smirked at him.

  ‘Ha! Yes, the same goes for girls…’

  I wondered if I was the kind of girl that generally gave a shit or didn’t give a shit. I wondered which one Jack thought I was.

  The day I bumped into Jack in Balboa Park he had been thinking about Isabelle a lot. Perhaps that’s the reason he felt like opening up to a stranger about his thoughts on life and death. Isabelle’s death was a reminder of what he’d glimpsed on that beach. A reminder of the utterly beautiful ridiculousness of existence.

  The day Jack found out about Isabelle’s cancer it didn’t even cross his mind that his sister was going to die. He was sure she was going to be okay as soon as the doctors sorted her out. Isabelle thought the same. She talked a lot about visiting him in San Diego again at some point soon, after graduating. They wanted to do a road trip, all the way from San Diego to Alaska.

  Jack went on to tell me about how Isabelle had affected his relationship with Adam. Back during their university days, when Adam and Jack had only recently met, they were involved in a range of protests, a few of which had turned violent. On one occasion Jack had been arrested for throwing a brick in the direction of a group of police officers – except Jack hadn’t done it, they must have confused him with someone else. But the officers refused to listen and he was taken to jail. Adam bailed him out and from that day the friendship was sealed, they were inseparable.

  It just so happened that over the years, in an attempt to battle his anxiety and depression, Adam had developed a strong interest in Eastern philosophy. In his spare time, when he wasn’t working himself up talking or thinking about the state of the world, and the greed-driven economic and political structures that ran it, Adam was very much a spiritual seeker. He had a whole library of books to prove it. Books on Zen, Taoism, Advaita, transcendental meditation, self-realisation, and the like. And Adam could sit for hours attempting to meditate his way to enlightenment. But when Adam found out about Jack’s epiphany, instead of feeling happy for his friend, Adam was jealous. He was jealous that Jack, who’d never even dabbled in spirituality, never meditated, never even come across the term enlightenment in its spiritual context, was graced with the random luck of such a powerful awakening, whilst Adam was still getting his panic attacks.

  Their friendship started to crumble. Jack told me that it was strange to suddenly realise that the friendship had turned out to be mainly based on shared radical political views. Jack was finding himself increasingly ready to phase Adam’s growing negativity out of his life.

  But things changed in the last weeks of Isabelle’s life, when she was fighting to live. Adam had known Isabelle fairly well, and the news of her cancer had devastated him. He’d liked her from the start, but had never acted on it. The distance was too great to try to start something, let alone the difficulties of being in a relationship with your best friend’s little sister. With Isabelle’s death, Adam remembered how much he actually cared for Jack. Her death rekindled their friendship in a completely new way.

  There were just too many ties between the two to keep them separated. Too much history – shared experiences that only they knew about. And it was Isabelle, beautiful wonderful Isabelle, who somehow managed to reconfigure everything. The tragedy of her death deepened Jack and Adam’s friendship. It was thanks to her that the friendship endured.

  ‘Isn’t it strange how things happen like that sometimes? Life is a continual chain of loss and gain. The only constant is change.’

  I smiled, but the waxing and waning of friendships was not something I knew much about.

  ‘Meditation is a funny thing,’ Jack said after a pause. ‘People think that if they meditate they’ll reach nirvana. They think nirvana is something you can attain if you put in the hours and the dedication. Being a seeker is like a whole identity, you know. It’s like a full time job. You become more interested in seeking than in finding. I’m not saying meditation is bad. In terms of psychological health benefits, it must be great.’

  ‘So what, you can’t attain nirvana?’

  ‘Everything already is nirvana. We can’t see it because we’re looking for it.’

  I laughed. ‘Like the fish swimming in the sea looking for water?’

  ‘Yes,’ he smiled, ‘just like that goddamned fish.’

  ‘But then, not everyone’s looking for nirvana.’

  ‘Aren’t they? New car, new lover, new house, sex,
drugs, rock ’n’ roll… isn’t it all just our attempt at reaching fulfilment?’

  I shrugged. ‘So this is nirvana?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said.

  I laughed and so did he.

  And after a pause he added, ‘but it can also be hell, for those who can’t see it.’

  I could still sense how much he’d loved his sister. It was good to hear someone else’s story for a change, instead of just being trapped in my own one. I thought about how, as an adult, I’d never really had to show sympathy to anyone. I wondered if that showed. Maybe I wasn’t good in these sorts of situations. I wanted to reach out to him, but I wasn’t sure exactly how, I wanted to tell him I was glad he’d told me all this. I felt an urge to somehow reach out in the same way he’d reached out to me. I suddenly saw Jack as a fragile human being, and I had never thought he was.

  *

  The water in the lake was so clean and clear that you could see down to the bottom even when you swam into the depths. It smelled so intensely fresh it was like breathing for the first time. It was so much warmer than my last swim, and I must have stayed in there for almost half an hour, taking in the views of the beaches and Douglas Fir forests that lined it. Shades and contrast appeared stronger than usual in the light of this crisp summer day. Oak, though she occasionally barked after us, waited patiently at the shore, showing no interest whatsoever in joining us in the water. As I floated on the lake’s surface, lying still, looking up at the sky with my ears submerged in the lake’s silence, I contemplated the vastness of the universe. Here I was looking up at an infinite sky. I was but a tiny speck floating on a miniscule puddle, floating on a spherical object floating in space. With perspective like that what was there to ever worry about?

  Light at Cox Bay

  Jack pointed up the beach to the silhouette of the Lennard Island lighthouse in the distance.

  ‘There’s something about lighthouses,’ he said. ‘As a kid it was my dream to one day live in one.’

  I nodded. We were sitting on a beach at Cox Bay, still on Vancouver Island. Seagulls screeched and waves crashed as we breathed in the smell of ocean. Oak was curled up in the sand, dozing. Jack had just finished drying off, clothing himself and gulping down some tea after a cold swim. I had watched him as he bodysurfed on the waves. It looked incredible when he did that. How did he do it? He made it look so easy. We were eating our evening meal of peanut butter sandwiches, and soaking up the last warming rays of sun.

  ‘I guess there’s something very romantic about the idea, isn’t there?’ I said.

  ‘Totally. It’s so easy to imagine a secluded life, surrounded by the force of the ocean, far away from the rush, turmoil and monotony of city living. You know, a poetic life,’ he laughed.

  He was right. I found myself fantasising about living a secret life with him, tucked away in a lighthouse, far away from civilisation – a place where no one would ever find us… and we’d live happily ever after… I was completely in the throes of a childish fantasy.

  ‘What are you smiling about?’ he asked.

  If only he knew. ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I’m just imagining how nice our lighthouse would be. Like in Moominland or something,’ I laughed.

  He laughed with me and nodded.

  ‘Yeah, I guess most of those childhood ideas I had in my head pretty much did belong to fantasy. I don’t know how things are now, they’ve probably changed, but back in the day being a lighthouse keeper meant a low wage, constant work, and yeah the isolation might be nice at first but after a while it might drive you mad, and you’d have had little freedom or money to go on holiday…’ he paused for a while, ‘but maybe that wouldn’t be so bad,’ he said, ‘I don’t know, I guess different people react differently to different situations. Some people like being alone.’

  ‘Do you?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. We lay there on the sand for a while, both staring up at the open sky above us, both in our own worlds. I thought about Jack and what he’d told me about Isabelle. I felt closer to him after that conversation. And with that closeness I’d begun to feel a growing calmness.

  When the air began to cool we gathered up our things and walked aimlessly along the shore. And as we walked he told me that the seas of British Columbia had once teemed with salmon, as though there was a never ending supply, and how in the early nineties the accumulation of human greed and the waste encouraged by commercial fishing had finally taken its toll, bringing the fish close to extinction. He told me all this, with dates and figures, names and places, like my mother would have done had she been here. I felt like I was in a strange and wonderful place, flittering between nostalgia and intense presence. Memories of the sweet parts of my childhood, combined with something – Jack, the road, the landscapes – that didn’t belong at all to the past nor the future, but only to a now I suddenly cherished so much.

  I was overwhelmed with the feeling that this was an incredible interlude in my life. I could have never imagined any of it. Here I was with a man and a dog that a couple of months ago did not exist to me, in a place that I never knew existed either.

  When I forgot my fears, about the idea that we were running away, that danger existed, all I was left with was the magic of the world that surrounded me – the landscapes, the light, the sky – and this incredible connection I felt with my two travelling companions. It seemed there were two worlds, the world of fear, and this world of magic. And I wondered which was truer of the two.

  As the sun sunk towards Lennard Island, the silhouette of the lighthouse looked like a huge sea creature with a long protruding neck, on top of which was a head with two bright eyes. It was as though he had slowly risen from the sea to watch me. A distant watchful presence. And with this lighthouse-turned-sea-creature, everything else seemed to glow with some strange fantastical quality too. Like Moominland, I thought. I let out a short laugh under my breath. But I really did feel like I was in some kind of wonderland.

  With my feet pressed into the sand I watched the foaming edge of the surf. It was joyfully playing a game with itself, seeing how far it could reach before it decided to retreat once again. And as the water pulled back, the froth that was left bubbled and fizzed with an intensity I hadn’t noticed before. I looked back at my shadow. I waved at it and it waved back. Between the sun and the earth stood a me. A me that was solid enough to cast a shadow. And I looked back at the sun and, in an instant, all there was was light. For a brief moment it felt as though there was not a me looking at light, but just light. Light seeing light.

  I was floating in a sea of warm glowing light.

  ‘Look, Silvia, look!’

  I snapped back to my senses and quickly turned towards where Jack was pointing. At first I didn’t see a thing, and then, out there on the horizon two whales jumped out from beneath the ocean. They danced out there for a few minutes, for our eyes only. They were grey whales, Jack told me. Finally the ocean swallowed them up, and they disappeared back into the vast depths from which they had come.

  I will never forget that evening on the beach. It changed me. Fear no longer had such a firm grip. I wondered what the future held, and then I stopped wondering, for it wasn’t long before the immediacy and intimacy of my present reality bewildered me once again. The light, the play of contrast on land, sea and sky, the sound of waves, the water breathing in… out… in… out, the taste and smell of salty ocean air, Jack’s skin on mine as the weight of our bodies pressed against each other, a soft breeze. This was my world.

  *

  For the next couple of days we explored more of the island. As we walked through forests of Red Cedar and Douglas Fir and along windswept beaches, and drove slowly along misty roads, I felt strangely unlike myself. The beauty of this island was making me forget myself, lose myself – still on a high from the evening at Cox Bay. If I die, I thought, looking around and breathing the world in, at least I will have seen and experienced all this.

  We were walking through the old-growth forest like tw
o kids without a care in the world, marvelling at the ancient moss-covered trees that towered above us. It was a very hot day, but under the canopy of the trees the temperature felt perfect. We were both beaming. Even Oak seemed happier than usual. I couldn’t remember a time I’d ever smiled so much. Jack tried to describe some of the colours to me. He told me now that apart from the shots of yellow, red or brown, we were most definitely in the very heart of the Kingdom of Green. God, how I longed to see what he could see!

  ‘Some of these will be almost a thousand years old,’ he said as he walked up to a tall Western Red Cedar and patted the trunk with his hand.

  I walked up to the tree and looked up.

  ‘I feel tiny,’ I said.

  Once, long ago, this strong, wide and tall tower had been just a small seed. As if by magic, energy had erupted out of the seed in slow motion. Shooting straight up out of the earth, for no apparent reason other than to simply live and to be. How strange these things we called trees were. And weren’t we the same? Once just a tiny cell, we grew and grew, a magic explosion of energy and potential. Except that we didn’t have a thousand years to keep growing. But perhaps that didn’t matter. Perhaps no amount of time would ever seem enough for us anyway. As I looked up I wondered how the tree experienced this thing called time. Surely, without a self-conscious human mind, for the tree life was timeless, an eternal present. And surely that was enough. I put my hand on its soft stringy bark. I looked at Jack.

  ‘Fucking hippies,’ I said.

  We both laughed and he grabbed my waist and kissed me. His kisses ran to my neck as we sunk down and sat under the tree. He passed a hand beneath my t-shirt and with the tips of his fingers he stroked the bare skin on my stomach… then my back… until I felt my whole body tingling and I was covered in goose bumps. We undressed each other and sat naked under that tree. He traced the contours of my body with his hands. Slowly. Slowly. Oh Jack… They ran down from my neck, circled over my breasts, down over my stomach… closer… closer…