3. COLOURS

The colours of life, of childhood ... and the one colour of death

“I bet you’ve got some good memories,” suggested the fat man’s alter-ego as he teetered half-way up the marble stairway, “I’ll bet you could tell a tale or two!”

“I might have!” snapped the teeterer, “I’ve done stuff, been to places, touched magic even! But that’s all in the past. I’ve left it all behind.”

“Like you’ve left life behind. But you had some fanciful tales, about zooming around on that sleigh of yours? With reindeer and their red and shiny noses, and the dark, cold nights of winter?”

“Why are you asking that kind of thing? You were there with me! You know the truth! And they might have been cold. We might have shivered. If that had been the actually cold stone sober truth.”

“Ah, but it wasn’t. What was the truth, then? That there was no sleigh involved? Yes, I suppose I know that, though I’ve lived for so long inside your head that I started to believe the colours of your dreams!”

“There might have been.” The fat man shrugged and might have breathed steam into the cold air of that half-way point But he didn’t. Breath wasn’t involved as he climbed the marble stairway.

“There was no sleigh and there were no reindeer because the whole idea of stuff like that flying through a starlit sky is a pretty fantasy! Yet you dreamed them. You did. I reckon you actually believed them! I nestled among your dreams, your fantastic reconstructions of reality and gave my support to your lies! It was the least I could do, and in truth it was all part of me too.”

“They weren’t lies. Just silly little fairy stories for children too young to learn the truth. They needed something to cling to, some hope that the world wasn’t the scary place it seemed to be, a softness to the coldest season. So I was part of a little fairy story.”

“Fairy stories? Another way of defining lies, and they were told by you. I heard you… Hey Maisie, what do you want me to bring you for Christmas when I land on your roof and climb down your chimney and warm myself by your fire, the one that didn’t burn me as I slipped past it from your lovely black chimney, and sipping the sherry left by your mummy and eating the mince pie left by you? Would you like a nice doll, a blonde-haired plastic girl with plastic thoughts and plastic fears come straight to you from a plastic wonderland? You would, wouldn’t you, for a plastic Christmas? And Benny, what might I have in my sack for a bright young man like you… how old did you say you were? You didn’t say? Well, never mind, tell me now and I’ll see what I’ve got in my sack for you, a soldier, a space rocket and a book about trees...”

“That’s not fair!”

“Of course it is! You sat in that grotto in the shopping arcade and lines of Maisies and Bennies queued up to see you. And you perpetuated the same myths The same old stories… I’ll be flying your way on Christmas Eve with my sack bulging with goodies, all the things you want and, guess what, even more that you’ve never dreamed of! But go to sleep, don’t look for me because if you see me I won’t be there. It’s part of the magic of Christmas … see the man in red and he vanishes in a twinkling ... and you’ll be unhappy with no presents on Christmas day. That happens, you know, children that go without because they were just too curious and pressed their noses too hard against the frosty window in the hope of catching a little glimpse of me … but you won’t do that, will you..?”

The Fat man looked uneasy. He could hear his own words in the voice of that wretched alter-ego. Now, teetering on the brink of disaster, or so it felt, with a bottomless chasm yawning below his fragile stairway, he could sense the colours of his memories and the words he’d said in order to give them substance.

There was colour in everything except his mind.

There was the cuddly pink of a pretty doll’s face with its curly nylon hair and constant pout. In a way he’d always liked pink. It was a soft but heroic colour. He smiled as he thought it.

“Long ago,” he said, “little baby boys were dressed in pink.”

“That’s rubbish,” said his alter-ego.

“No its isn’t! In the bad old, good old days when all a boy wanted out of life was to become a soldier and go to war for death or glory, wearing his bright red uniform, and the closest baby colour to red was pink, so baby boys were dressed in pink. Then it became the girls’ turn, not for war but for pink. That’s all I know.”

“It isn’t very much, is it?”

“Enough, at my age. When the only colour left to me is black.”

“Black isn’t a colour but the absence of colour. You should know that.”

“It’s black in here. Black as the blackest night ever.”

His alter-ego nudged him. “She at the top of the stairs, waiting for you, and there’s not much black about her … what colour is she wearing? And her eyes? What colour are they?”

He looked, and sighed. “I can’t tell,” he said, squinting, “It might be pink...”

“Or it might be blue. Or yellow. Or green. Or a whole rainbow of colours. Neither of us can tell what the colour is. Maybe it’s a none-colour, a shade undreamed of and unnamed, but we know one thing, and that is that she’s waiting there so patiently for you.”

“But I’ve got to get there, and the way is steep … and I’m too old for all this exercise.”

“You’re not old! Not any more!”

“Well, I feel it. I feel older than old.”

His alter-ego smirked. “You are,” he whispered, “I told you, didn’t I? You’re dead!”

© Peter Rogerson 07.11.18