Читать книгу The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder - Sarah J. Harris - Страница 17

THIS IS MUM’S STRAIGHT story, not mine. I was only three or four. I sat with her in the back garden of our house in Plymouth on a late summer evening. Dad wasn’t there. He was with the Royal Marines in Afghanistan or Iraq. I’m not sure which country. No matter. We didn’t need him in the picture when we had each other.

The grass felt warm beneath our bare feet. I don’t remember wriggling my toes in the sunburnt yellow grass, but that’s what Mum said we both did while we played with my red pick-up truck. It had come to rescue the battered yellow car that crashed into Mum’s foot and overturned.

She told me this story over and over again because I was too young to remember it actually happening. She remembered it for me and it became our favourite bedtime story.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Do you mean the starlings? Look, they’re the noisy birds in the tree over there.’

‘No. I don’t mean those birds. They’re reddish pink. I mean the other sound. Short blue lines.’

A robin hopped out of the hedge, chirping. ‘That one,’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s the colour. A short blue line with moving lemon bits.’

‘You see colours?’ Mum asked. ‘When you hear sounds?’

I said yes, of course I did. Didn’t everyone?

Mum kissed the top of my head over and over again.

‘Not everyone,’ she said, when we finally stopped laughing. ‘Not everyone understands the wonderful way we both see the colour of sounds, Jasper. Which is a shame. A shame for them, not for us, because we share an amazing gift.’

We ran through a list of things, starting with noises we could hear in the back garden like a lawnmower, a car revving, an aeroplane passing overhead and radio music blasting out of a neighbour’s window. I told Mum the colours I saw for every sound.

Lawnmower: shiny silver

Car revving: orange

Aeroplane: light, almost see-through green

Radio: pink

We moved on to other things. The sound of the fan Mum had put in my bedroom to help keep me cool at night (grey and white with flashes of dark ink blue).

Dogs barking: yellow or red

Cats meowing: soft violet blue

Dad laughing: a muddy, yellowish brown

Kettle boiling: silver and yellow bubbles

We talked and talked about my colours and I’d never looked happier, Mum said. My smile stretched from ear to ear.

We could have chatted and played forever, but Mum said it was late and time to have a bath and get changed into my dinosaur pyjamas.

‘Roar!’ I shouted. ‘What colour are dinosaurs’ roars?’

We both decided they were probably shades of purple because that’s the coloured sound my T-Rex made whenever you squeezed his tummy.

Mum swung me up and I settled into my favourite position on her hip.

‘Thank you for letting me into your secret, Jasper,’ she said. ‘Now can I tell you something?’

‘Yes!’ I shouted. ‘T-Rex wants to hear too!’

‘For me, the starlings are bluish green, the robin is bright yellow and the kettle boiling is dark grey with orange bubbles.’ She kissed me quickly on my cheek. ‘Daddy doesn’t like me talking about the colours, so when he gets home you don’t need to tell him about yours either. He’ll be sad he can’t see the world like us, Jasper. Not everyone’s built the same. We’re the lucky ones.’

She was right, but my luck eventually ran out. When Mum died, I lost the one person in my life who could see the world like me.

She loved hearing about my different hues and discovering how they compared to hers.

My colours miss her. They long to be shared with someone who appreciates them as much as I do. But I still have to talk about the shades I see – even to Dad – because a part of Mum lives on through them.

That’s my straight story.

I hate the ending but I can’t change it.