The Colour of the Night

by Robert Hollingworth

  The Colour of the Night

  Robert Hollingworth is a successful and talented visual artist as well as a respected writer. As an award-winning artist he has held thirty solo shows since 1980 and has works in more than twelve public collections.

  As a writer, Hollingworth is known for his essays and and short stories which have received critical acclaim. His more recent longer works include Nature Boy, self-published in 2004, and They Called Me the Wildman: The Prison Diary of Henricke Nelsen published in 2008 by Murdoch Books. This book was shortlisted for the South Australian Premier’s Literary Awards Fiction prize in 2010 as well as being selected for the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge List in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

  Robert Hollingworth’s last work of fiction was Smythe’s Theory of Everything (Hybrid Publishers, 2011).

  The Colour of the Night

  Robert Hollingworth

  Published by Hybrid Publishers

  Melbourne Victoria Australia

  All rights reserved

  © Robert Hollingworth 2014

  This publication is copyright. Apart from any use

  as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may

  be reproduced by any process without prior written permission

  from the publisher. Requests and enquiries concerning

  reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher,

  Hybrid Publishers

  PO Box 52, Ormond 3204.

  www.hybridpublishers.com.au

  First published 2014

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Hollingworth, Robert, 1947-

  The Colour of the Night / Robert Hollingworth.

  978-1-925000-56-6 (pbk.)

  978-1-742983-33-2 (e-bk)

  Orphans – Fiction.

  Interpersonal relations--Fiction.

  A823.4

  Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 11.5/15.5

  Cover design: Robert Hollingworth

  This book

  is dedicated to

  Isak and Kirstie,

  who died

  while defending their home

  on Black Saturday, 2009

  The story

  is also in remembrance

  of a small boy

  who came in from the bush

  to embrace city life

  1

  THE NATIVE bushland was silent. At least it was to others: It is eerie, they would say, eerily quiet, like a vacuum. But it was no vacuum to Shaun Bellamy. Instead it was all animation; complex, manifold and systematic. Like language. Shaun knew the bush’s native tongue and could decipher it as easily as spoken English. Walking through bracken that grew taller than he, that ancient dialect came to him, steadily and uninterrupted.

  Silent? Not to Shaun. If city folk acknowledged sound at all, they often mentioned the birds. Yet they rarely registered the cuckoo’s gentle trill, the scornful chatter of thornbills, the thrush scratching in the leaf litter, or the rattle of a kookaburra’s beak. Nor did they notice the spiderweb that wasn’t there yesterday or the teethmarks in the bark of a wattle, let alone why they were there. But Shaun did; he knew it all. He was born to it.

  He rode a pushbike on bush roads, half an hour to school. There he blended with those around him, happy to comply, responding readily to all the nominated programs. He often attracted the attention of others, yet he was no talker – perhaps it was the few words he chose that caused heads to turn and conversations to pause. From his classmates he drew little more than an uncertain stare, but Shaun’s teachers took particular interest, regarding him as something of a curiosity. Perhaps, they imagined, his progressive parents had instilled in the boy an unusual soberness, or perhaps it was his comparative isolation that caused him to respond with a degree of composure more common in older folk.

  One sports day afternoon Shaun stood on the edge of the field watching some older boys playing cricket. Henley at the crease knocked the bat on the hard earth, brought his knees together and turned his elbow to the sky. There never was a ganglier child. All at once Shaun realised that his Phys Ed teacher was staring down at him, leaning in like a big old tree. The man fixed Shaun with his squinty eyes and suddenly declared, ‘You think too much, Bellamy.’ The boy looked up at his teacher’s planet-like skull against the pale sky, and tried to unpick that trenchant claim. Perhaps it was meant as advice, but instead, the comment simply gave Shaun cause for further reflection; how might he curtail the practice?

  The thinking affliction had dogged him from the age of six. It was around then that another of his teachers casually asked the class what their favourite colour was. Most said blue or pink or green. But for whatever reason, Shaun spontaneously responded, The colour of the night.

  ‘That would be black,’ his teacher replied.

  ‘No,’ Shaun said, ‘it is only black because people are afraid of it. You have to look harder. Then it is a special colour that no one can copy, not even in the movies.’

  It was the expression on the man’s face that stayed with Shaun, a lesson in itself. Had he crossed some forbidden line, pierced some inner sanctum reserved only for adults, for the qualified? He was not to know it but he’d merely baffled the man: what is the appropriate response to a child who takes extemporaneous questions so seriously?

  You think too much was the latest advice, which only encouraged the boy to think quite a great deal more.

  Apart from that one serious anomaly, Shaun attended to his maths, science and social studies like all the others. He had a laptop, and with the improved satellite signal, he carried a smartphone, utilising apps and predictive text just as they all did. But it was the natural world that drew him. When home-time beckoned, he entered the bush as other children entered an interactive game – although Shaun’s console control was little more than a snapped stick, his keyboard the whole forest, his mouse a mouse.

  Ask Shaun what a peppermint is and he’d explain that it’s a rough-barked native eucalypt growing on the drier slopes with distinctive-smelling leaves that curve inwards to deliver raindrops closer to the trunk. Ask him how leaf-curling spiders curl leaves and he would describe the process in detail; ask him why dragonflies dart, why White-eared Honeyeaters sit on kangaroos, why the seeds of certain grasses have spiralling tails, and he would deliver an answer more comprehensive than most textbooks. Hardly anyone in the world knew why night-flying moths were attracted to the light. But Shaun did.

  Much of his knowledge came from direct experience, but not everything. While other children read Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, Shaun absorbed his parents’ textbooks – history, biography and the natural sciences – with the assiduousness of a quiz-show celebrity. But Shaun’s prize lay in the sheer joy of knowing, in drawing a little closer to the birds, animals, wildflowers, grasses, insects, fungi and ferns. At twenty paces he could separate the dicots from the monocots – monocotyledons, to use the correct term.

  Yet Shaun could not distinguish a Honda from a Hyundai, a terrace from a tenement, a bagel from a baguette; these were objects beyond his terrain. The big city was far to the south, a humdrum of men and machinery, women and fashion, urgency and speed. In Shaun’s mind it all flashed brightly: glinting cars reflected in shop windows, trucks and traffic, ambulances, diesel buses, networks of wires – and people: striding, bumping, texting, preoccupied.

  With his mother, he’d once visited his Aunty Adele before she moved, before she was divorced. Her brick house seemed indistinguishable from many others, the front façade strapped back and forth by whizzing cars and bicycles; a kind of incessant monotony unseen in the green world. But it held a certain charm and, though now a distant memory, that blur of frenzy occupi
ed a special place in Shaun’s eleven-year-old mind.

  After his aunt’s divorce she moved into the city along with Elton – Shaun’s older cousin – but to which part the boy wasn’t sure. At night in his room, listening to the chuck-chuck of Marsh Frogs in a nearby pond, he conjured an image of that inner-city location and contemplated an excursion there as others might consider a trip to Moscow or Marrakesh. It was far away and exotic and some day he’d go, he was sure of it. Some day he’d navigate that foreign land; it would broaden his knowledge, allow an appreciation of things he knew only from films, books and the internet. Some day.

  ELTON BRIGHT – Shaun’s older cousin – would rather contract the self-replicating Storm Worm virus on his PC than be subjected to a half hour in the bush. He’d rather lose his warrior status on Guild Wars 2 than venture to a place where trees replaced power poles, where grass supplanted the grey exactitude of concrete.

  He didn’t need it. He had everything he could possibly want in his blacked-out bedroom: friends, information, games, videos, and the entire world to traverse, from the loftiest mountain, real or imagined, to the inner workings of another’s mind. Elton could tell you what a friend from Switzerland – that he’d never met – had for breakfast that morning, and what he’d dreamt about last night. It was all right there on the net; was there any reason to go outside?

  On this day, as he sat in his darkened man-cave, awaiting responses on Twitter, he spontaneously and unconsciously unzipped his trousers and released his penis. Well, why not?

  It was not at all uncommon for Elton Bright to be sitting at a screen conversing in one chat room or another, and not at all uncommon for his member to rise. Yet the two events – the conversing and the rising – were unconnected and an erection was no more irregular than a yawn or a cramp in the foot. Sometimes he’d shuck down his pants and stroke the thing like a family pet. And sometimes while he did it, he’d click on www.sweetly.com stored in his Favourites to observe some anonymous girl’s body, a young woman, purportedly a teenager, posing naked in a wheat field, astride a bicycle or sprawled in the sun next to a hotel swimming pool. But he rarely took interest in pornography – that other kind of imagery featuring the full gamut of sexual deviation – although he sometimes wondered who did. In Australia, it was a 1.5-billion-dollar industry with most viewing it for free, so how many Australians weren’t looking at it? For Elton, that question was more fascinating than the imagery itself. It wasn’t that he felt any sense of taboo; in fact it was the familiarity that rendered it dull, like looking at the back of one’s own hand – no surprise could be found there at all.

  He’d first discovered digital nudity at the age of five. On his father’s computer, an innocuous Search word had brought forth a naked woman who seemed to be drawing nutrition from her own breast, prompting instinctual recollections within him. Another woman appeared to be crawling – something he’d done himself only a few years earlier – and a naked man was pressing his body against her buttocks, causing her breasts to oscillate magically, like a ball on a string. He grunted, she groaned, and none of it made any sense at all. At seven, with his own laptop, he’d chanced upon all manner of male and female body parts not unlike some of the peculiar fruit and vegetables he’d observed in his mother’s shopping trolley. It all seemed rather homely and commonplace. So, these days, when he sat stroking himself, he often continued in an online conversation – or sometimes he brought up a picture of some trim girl just to share that brief, casual event.

  He preferred this to any thought of a real-life partner, knowing that, unlike three minutes of an MP4, actual encounters always incurred further complications. Even his mother’s profession – which he understood completely yet kept secret (not even she knew he knew) – involved transactions he was not prepared to accept. So a completely passive, naked girl on the screen who would leave the room at the click of a mouse worked fine. He’d catch the stuff in a Kleenex, crump it into a ball and while typing a message to a friend in Spain, toss it into the bin. The bin itself was occasionally emptied, particularly when his room took on the musty smell of a caged animal and threatened to disrupt his online concentration. It was his one concession to untidiness. In all other respects his body, his clothes and his bedroom were as neat and clean as an unoccupied hospital ward, and he had a large collection of selfie pics on his iPhone to prove it.

  Elton was the quintessential Gen Y modern male.

  But he did not see himself as such; he was just a normal person living in a time when technology had triumphed, when sanity had at last prevailed. He was overjoyed that society had permanently escaped the twentieth century, a bygone era when a totally different world existed. Back then, life was literal rather than conceptual, and people were impressed by things that today only excited the dull and naïve: garden blooms, sunsets, mammals in the sea, a kite in the sky, a ‘stolen’ kiss. Back then, even a wink was wonderful, while ecstasy could be found in a ripe apple.

  What an absurd, disturbed, witless world it must have been. And how isolated. Elton could not imagine having a mere handful of friends. He had several thousand, in fact he was more popular than all his forefathers put together. And without difficulty he could stay in contact with each one of those several thousand friends, conversing regularly, confirming the stupidity of other people’s lives, sharing anecdotes and playing games. Some of his friends he had even killed for.

  ELTON LIVED with his mother Adele at 42 Frederick Street, the centre terrace in a block of three. Her bedroom upstairs adjoined her son’s but was right at the front of the building. Her window faced the main thoroughfare, and from there she could look out across a sea of single-storey rooftops; a choppy vista of red tiles and tin running all the way to the horizon. In the distance, the irregular central-city monoliths stood clustered amid an amber monoxide glow.

  When Adele had first moved to that inner city suburb, the urban image from high up seemed exciting and epitomised everything important about making a fresh start. But now she rarely bothered to glance out; familiarity had sucked the novelty right out of it and the view had become as predictable as the boys who kicked over the council bins on Thursday evenings.

  Elton, whose bedroom was right behind hers, couldn’t care less about the view, now or ever. On the day they moved in, he pulled a single drape across his own small window and pinned it shut with a line of thumbtacks, denying the trifle of daylight that had previously limped through the smeary pane, any possibility of backlighting one of his monitors. He invested a little of his estranged father’s money on a long melamine benchtop which now ran the length of one wall with a return on each end. Atop it sat four monitors, two of them connected to the one hard drive, the others operated from laptops and all wirelessly connected to the internet. In front of this there were two ergonomic office chairs and it was from one or other of these that, all day and night, Elton met, talked and played games with his several thousand friends.

  To suggest that Elton was agoraphobic would not sit well with the young man. Hadn’t he undertaken a science degree? Hadn’t he managed a whole year of it even while his parents were going through the last ludicrous stages of divorce? You must complete your studies, his father had commanded. If you want to make me proud, please finish the course. And so he did, one year at least, not to make his father proud but to obligate him: he had two years to go. Now, with the intermittent conscience money from his corporate father’s canny dealings, Elton could afford to defer before deciding on the actual trajectory of his life. But he’d already decided that a professional career was objectionable – one in the family was enough. And surrounded as he was by his devoted circle of worldwide friends, it just didn’t seem necessary to go anywhere.

  Except to shop. Clothes were Elton’s only real interest in the tangible world. For apparel, he would go anywhere, traverse the length and breadth of the planet – New York, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Beijing – and he saved to Favourites a list of online stores. Stuff arrived in the mail, usually a softpa
ck of socks or shirts or a sports jacket which he donned with some solicitude before skyping a confidant in another corner of the globe.

  Elton was no slouch, no nerd; he would not be an overweight, bespectacled, pimply Übergeek, and he had a Wii EA Sports Active 2 Cooperative Multiplayer Fitness Game stationed to one side of his workbench with its own dedicated flatscreen monitor. His mother had bought it for him as a Christmas gift. She hunted it down, added it to the shopping cart and proceeded to the checkout. There she clicked Buy, entered her PayPal details and within three days the box turned up at their front door. She wrapped it in coloured paper and placed it one Christmas night beside the pointy plastic tree.

  ‘If you are to stay inside then I want you to exercise, Elton,’ she’d insisted. And so he did, every day in the first week; she even joined in – twice. But keeping the boy to the rigid program turned out to be more exhausting for her than for him, and in the end the twenty-minute circuits to target upper and lower body as well as cardio, deteriorated to a simple verbal exchange:

  ‘Are you exercising?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t forget.’

  ‘No.’

  Adele wanted to be fit herself; it was one of the first things she thought of as Randall drove away in the family car, his vintage number-plate, ICU, disappearing ironically into the distance. Good riddance.

  Now without a partner, it seemed logical to take special pains with her appearance. She had no intention of attracting yet another untrustworthy male, but with only the walls to appraise her, it was easy to let appearances slip. Her new career also dictated that she should stay fit, though she refused to take over Elton’s neglected trainer. Instead, she pumped her limbs briskly around the block each day, regarding her trim figure in the bathroom mirror as reward alone.

  But her son Elton never walked anywhere. He never advanced beyond the outer walls of their new dwelling – except to fetch the rubbish bins, which obliged him to venture at least as far as the rear yard. He hated it all, the green and brown and blue above, the uneven earth, the air weighted with dust, diseases and allergy-bearing pollens. Inevitably a breeze would bat him back inside to the comfort of a space that was square and clean and neatly defined. He could hardly imagine how he’d once caught the tram to uni and back, a concept that now seemed so pointless, so alien.