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There is a rule, that every child knows. It’s pressed and layered, echoed in the background of everything. Absolute.
Sophie hears her mother laugh some days about how lovely the sky looks, how on sunset there is a pallet of pinks and yellows and purples and they soften the world, bathe it in a kinder light. She doesn’t know what her mother means. She sees the muted greys, the soft whites, the slightly more grey than whites and the blacks. She watches them with her mother and marvels at the thousands of shades and the smear of them across the sky.
You get the colours when you fall in love.
Some day’s Sophie wonders if her mother has stopped seeing the colours. If the day her father didn’t return home, “He’s fine, he’s alive, he just needs some time.” the colours died away. It’s taboo to ask but she desperately wants to know. She doesn't ask the teacher, but asks the other kids, and they giggle behind chubby hands as if they know the answer, but they don’t, and she see’s her question sparks doubts in them as well.
She plays with her pencils at night drawing things she can’t see properly yet. She presses hard into the paper and smooths the greys, and edges the blacks, and highlights the whites and wonders what it will look like when she is in love.
Her sister comes home sick one day. Clara won’t open her eyes, the colours are too much. Her mother cries. Her father shouts down the phone line in rage, “My little princess is too young to be in love.” Clara’s fourteen and she can’t open her eyes for a week without being nauseous.
Sophie brings her sister drinks when she refuses food, and Clara stares at one and calls it orange, and Sophie knows that because it’s orange juice so it must be orange. She knows the name of colours and where to expect them, they covered that in school the year before.
“Is it nice?” She can ask her sister, Clara is not so much older than her after all.
“No. I want to be sick.”
“What about lemonade?” She asks, “It’s clear.”
“Okay.” Her sister subdues and accepts that drink. Unchanged it’s safe.
Her sister goes back to school on the Wednesday and brings home George on the Friday. He’s bright and joyful and he say’s he’s seeing colour too. Sophie wonders if it's a lie because there is something calculating in Georges eyes but she’s too young to know what it means.
Mother makes rules for them: Enjoy the colours, take it slow, you’re still young, you don’t have to do everything now, don’t rush. They ignore every one and her sister doesn’t get pregnant, but there are scares, and there are doctors visits, and then George gets sent to university in America.
Her sister cries that week too, hides in her room. When Sophie asks Clara chokes and tells her the colours are fading away. Sophie gets her sister the brightest drinks, knows Fanta burns an unnatural orange though it looks sandstone grey to her. She brings them to Clara and offers them up and her sister hurtles one glass against the wall and screams that she’ll die if she loses the colour. “Without colour you’re nothing.”
On the phone their mother begs their father to buy the plane ticket. To give his daughter this one thing and he just sighs and tells her it’s for the best. “She should let him go if he doesn't want her.”
Their mother tells her that night, halfway through a bottle of translucent black wine, that Clara’s wrong, “They never go away, even if you want them to. Muted and dull, they never go.” Sophie’s old enough to see the scars for what they are, has been watching them weather with age in the corners of her mothers eyes.
She puts her mother to bed and spends the night lost to the hard lines of charcoal etched board. The tips of her fingers marked a dusty black as the pieces crumble between her fingers.
When she’s fifteen the girls around her start dressing in different shades. They don’t take long to start to snicker at her clothes, they don’t even hide it. So she rummages through her sisters old clothes and wears the outfits Clara no longer wears. They slide off her shoulder and don’t quite fit, but the snickers ease away.
She teaches herself how to lie and compliment around the colours she can’t see. How to twist her words around to blend in. Learns all the games she has to play to fit in.
At home she keeps drawing. Her mother knows, buys her a pallet of pastels anyway “in case.” and she uses them because they blend and smudge against each other in a new way. Her hands get smeared and stained with the greys and blacks of a thousand shades. Some nights she stares at them in the moonlight, watching the shimmer of new life they bring with them.
“Wash your hands.” Her mother will say the next morning, and “That skirt doesn’t match, wear the blue one.” and she’ll go upstairs and find the blue skirt. She’s labelled them all so she can't get it wrong. The process makes her feel ill when she thinks about it, but it’s easier not to fight.
At university she meets a boy, he’s bight and vibrant and without colour to confuse her she can see the scars on his wrists. He says most people don’t even look. She wonders how that feels.
One night they’re laying on her bed and he admits he’s never seen a single colour. “But I want to.” So when he pushes her down, spreads out over her, and kisses her, she knows he doesn’t mean it personally. She doesn’t even mind when he starts to get angry because she doesn’t kiss back. “You have to-“
“No, I don’t.” But she means she’s sorry, because she can’t make it work for him either.
They don’t talk again, but she worries later that his scars have only gotten worse.
Her sister is married with a child in America, a second on the way. Her mother still watches the sky in muted colours.
Alone at night she sits, covered in flecks of grey as she paints her world out on canvases no-one else will see. The colours are still wrong, but she doesn’t care because she can’t see them, and she doesn’t even want to.