Over the years my mother developed lots of ways to avoid
using colour to describe things to me - she would try to use other means to
single things out. She counts – ‘the second one along’ sort of thing. She
compares sizes – ‘the third smallest’. She does both at the same time - ‘the
fourth smallest in the fifth row’. She even uses the alphabet to describe
different shades of a colour (A is the very lightest and, theoretically, Z
would be the darkest. However she only ever really gets up to a D or an E as
her feel for shades is a little too crude for an entire twenty-six letters).
When I was really young, she drew symbols to help me understand the colours of
certain things. For green she would draw an apple. For blue she would draw two
wavy lines. She would scribble them on stickers and go around putting the
stickers on everything so that I got to understand which things were which
colour. I don’t think she did it for my benefit though. I mean, it didn’t
actually bother me to know if a particular jumper was red or yellow. But I
think she did it so that I wouldn’t struggle around other people and stand out
too much from the crowd. She did it so that I wouldn’t look too much of a
freak.
However… having said all that… even
though my mother had come up with some inventive ways of avoiding making
reference to colour, sometimes – just sometimes – it would slip her busy mind.
Like it did the day she bought the
Bot Job.
‘I’ve bought a car,’ she said
pulling her coat off and slamming the front door behind her.
‘You’ve bought a car?’ I replied.
‘Why?’
She hooked the coat over the hanger
on the back of the door and ignored my question.
‘Don’t you want to know what sort of
car it is?’
I put the pencil and my magnifying
glass down on the pad of paper. I’d barely started the sketch of Sandwich
curled up and purring on her cushion, her eyes squashed shut, contentedly
dreaming of baby birds and tiny mice. All I’d drawn so far were her ears.
‘Okay then. What sort of a car is
it?’
‘Not sure. I don’t know much about
cars. All I know is it’s a big one.’
I sighed. ‘A big one?’
Mum nodded. ‘Have a look for yourself. I’ve parked it out
front.’
‘How much did you pay for it?’ I
pulled the curtains aside and peered down to the road, ten flights down. A
number of cars – all of them old -– were lined up on the sides of the road,
each of them waiting for their owners to return to spark them back to life.
‘How much? Only a quarter of a
million pounds.’
‘A quarter of a million?’ I couldn’t
believe it. You couldn’t get any car for a quarter of million nowadays. It
must’ve been a real bot job. Perhaps it only had three wheels or
something. Perhaps the passengers had to
hold their legs up because of the holes in the floor. ‘That’s cheap.’ I turned
back to look at my mother who was now kneeling in front of the chest of drawers
and pulling out lots of pieces of paper. ‘I bet it doesn’t even go,’ I added,
hardly able to hide my suspicions. ‘If that’s all it cost.’
Mum did her scowl face at me. ‘Of
course it goes. Drives very well. It got me back here all the way from Romford,
didn’t it?’ She took the large pile of paper and shoved it roughly into a
plastic bag, before opening up another drawer and doing exactly the same.
‘Honestly, Auden. You should have more faith.’
I looked back down at the segmented
snake of cars below. ‘Which one is it?’
And that was when she did it.
‘The green one. The long green one.’
Green!
‘Mum!’
‘Oh,’ she shoved the large bag
aside, stood up and came over to the window. ‘Sorry, Auden. I didn’t mean to do
it.’ She snapped the elastic band she kept around her wrist for such occasions
against her thin skin. A tiny punishment for a tiny crime. ‘You know what I’m like. Too much on my
mind.’ She looked out of the window and stabbed her finger downwards. ‘That one
there. This side. One, two, three along.’
I could see it. It had a long bonnet
and a long roof and looked as if some giant creature had picked it up at both
ends and stretched it.
‘It is big.’
We stood
there in silence for a while, watching the people down below coming and going
like dust on the breeze. Behind us on the sofa, Sandwich gave a short squeak,
and clawed the corner of her little, fluff-covered cushion. She scratched it
hard, pulling out threads.
‘I don’t understand why you’ve
bought a car,’ I said. ‘We don’t need one.’
‘You know why,’ she answered, not
even bothering to turn to look at me. ‘We talked about this last week.’
It was true. We had talked about it
last week. Or should I say she talked
about it while I tried my best not to
listen.
‘Yeah, but what about Dad?’
‘What about him?’
‘Well, when he comes back home, he’s
not going to know where we are.’
She reached along the windowsill and
tried her best to give my hand a gentle squeeze. ‘It’ll be alright. I’ll write
him a letter.’
A letter? What good was writing a
letter?
‘But he’s fighting. You can’t just send him a letter. He
won’t get it. It’ll just get lost or something. It’ll get trampled into the mud
in Paris or Rome or wherever he is. Then, when the war’s over and he comes back
here, he won’t find us.’
She leaned in close, trying to hug
me and kiss me on the head. But I wasn’t having any of it. I am eleven years old, after all.
‘Silly,’ she said. ‘He’ll know where
we are. Don’t worry.’
Out of the window a Scoot drone – one
of the ones with reflectors for eyes and extended antennae - hovered its way
along the street, its tiny camera head swinging left to right to left to right
to left as it went. The sound of the buzzing wings dropped a semitone as it
passed by, watching out for trouble on the streets below. Eventually it
disappeared from view.
‘So…’ It was no good fighting it. It
was all going to go ahead anyway, regardless of what I said or thought. She
obviously thought it was for the best. ‘When do we go?’
‘I’ve given two days notice on this
place. I’ve notified the Water Allocation Board and the War Authority, so we’ll
have to pack up and be gone by Thursday.’
It wasn’t like there was a great
deal to pack up anyway. We didn’t own much stuff. A load of clothes; a stick or
two of furniture; a handful of books; some documents and papers; Sandwich. That
was about it. Two days was more than enough in which to pack all that away. We
could probably do it three times over in that amount of time.
‘When we get there,’ Mum added
quickly, keen to stop me from changing my mind again, ‘we’ll find a nice school
for you. A good school this time. Somewhere you can make friends. Yes?’
I wandered over to where Sandwich
was yawning and stroked her until she began to dribble.
***
It may well have been a bot job (the way the doors rattled
every time you opened them seemed to suggest that it had never been exposed to
a single human being during its construction, only robots) but the car was
massive. Absolutely massive. It had more than enough room to fit all of our
belongings, and by the time we had finished filling it, there was still space
for a few more suitcases and crates. I propped Sandwich - who was in her wicker
basket - on top of a box of books just behind my seat and, after we had said
our goodbyes to the empty flat and the neighbours who couldn’t have cared less
about us anyway, we strapped ourselves into the car and headed off.
At the garage, Mum filled the Bot
Job full of the cheap petrol – price at an all time low apparently - and then,
reluctantly, added some of the much much
more expensive water to the water reservoir.
‘It’s a long trip, I’m afraid,’ she
said climbing back into the driver’s seat. ‘Might take us a few hours. Make
yourself comfortable.’
The car rumbled unconvincingly along
beneath us as my mother steered and braked and crunched gears in spectacular
fashion, speeding up through the narrow, twisting streets of east London. There
seemed to be very little traffic on the road. A couple of other cars. A few food
lorries. Some war effort supply vans. A heavily protected water tanker. One or
two refugees with heavy packs on their backs or pushing handcarts full of
possessions. That was about it.
As we drove on – the Bot Job giving
out the occasional backfiring bang - the buildings became smaller and fewer,
and the roads longer and straighter. Eventually, the city faded into the
countryside and the trees began to cluster together in dry looking patches.
There weren’t many trees, not since the rains slowed and water got scarce.
Field after field of ornamental cactuses lined the roads while small towns and
villages swept by.
‘Let’s play I-Spy,’ Mum suddenly
sounded weirdly enthusiastic. If only Dad was here, I thought, so they could
jabber on together while I sat in the back listening to music.
‘I’m not
four years old!’
‘Go on. You go first.’
I sighed. ‘Erm… I-Spy with my little
eye something beginning with…er… R.’
‘Road!’ she shouted triumphantly.
‘You got it.’
‘That was easy. Do another one.’
‘Okay then. I-Spy with my little eye
something beginning with… T.’
‘Tree?’
‘No.’
‘Truck?’
‘No. No trucks here anyway.’
‘Er…’ Her eyes scanned around trying
to find something. ‘Telegraph pole?’
‘Nope.’
‘I give up. What is it?’
‘Tarmac.’
‘Tarmac?’
‘Yep.’
‘So you’ve had ‘Road’ and you’ve had
‘ Tarmac’. Hmm. I think I see a pattern emerging.’
‘It’s pretty much all I’ve seen for
the last two hours.’
‘Well, not to worry,’ Mum smiled.
‘We’re nearly there.’
Having consulted my QWERTY ten
minutes earlier, I knew this already. Cambridge was five miles away and at the
speed we were travelling (fifty miles an hour which, for my mother, is speedy
let me tell you) we would be there in six minutes. I also knew that the chance
of precipitation was nil (as always) though breeze was fair to moderate, that
Cambridge was the epicentre of good taste and vending machines and that the
vintage cinema on Collier Road was screening a black and white movie for the
Old & Mouldies, even distributing free popcorn to those who still possessed
a set of their own teeth.
I eyed my mother sideways wondering
whether to try the joke out on her but decided against it. She looked tired and
strained and her hands were gripping the steering wheel like she was going a
heck of a lot faster than fifty miles an hour.
‘Yippedee do dey!’ I said, trying to
reach behind my seat to stroke Sandwich through the bars of her basket.
