I lowered myself into the low chair as gently as I could, the knuckles of my gnarled and twisted fingers white as I gripped the smooth wooden arm rests. If the cushion had been half a foot higher, the legs a little longer, it wouldn’t have posed so much of an issue. It would still have taken everything from me not to collapse suddenly into it, with my bones snapping like kindling, but it wouldn’t have been this damn hard.
A little lower.
The muscles in my arms were quaking; triceps and biceps. What little hadn’t atrophied, and most of it had.
There was perspiration on my brow, a rivulet running into the corner of my eye. I didn’t blink. I needed everything.
The bloody thing didn’t even look comfortable. I just couldn’t stay upright any longer.
I resisted the urge to look down or around. Nothing that would throw me off balance. It would take the slightest movement and I’d be down. Oh god did I take Coral for granted more than ever these days.
Teeth gritted now, jaw clenched. Focus for the love of god. How many times had I sat down? A million. A billion. I’d been doing it all my damn life. Yet this, much like everything else, was nearly insurmountable now.
I must be close. My elbows were bent to the point where if they were bent further my shaking limbs couldn’t sustain the support. My pipe cleaner legs that filled only a fraction of the baggy corduroys were damn near seventy degrees shin to thigh. My non-existent arse must surely nearly be kissing the
thank christ oh thank christ
cushion. I was there.
I relaxed my arms and allowed myself to fall the rest of the way into the welcoming softness. Yet I fell further than I thought. The cushion was deeper than I realised and it took the breath from me. Motes of dust caught the waxen light from the window and for a moment I thought they had come from inside me and not the cushion. Of course it had been the latter, but these days I felt as though it should be the former.
I allowed myself to settle against the back rest, bringing my still trembling arms to my lap and resting them there. I glanced down now, and could see my body vibrate with every thud of my heart as it slowed to a more sedentary pace.
There. I was down. I had sat down.
Big eggs for big boys.
Gary’s favourite saying popped into my head and resounded around the cathedral of my skull. I grinned in spite of it all. In spite of the fact that Gary wasn’t around to wind me up any more. In spite of the fact that Gary had been in the ground more than thirty (forty?) years. In spite of the fact I had seen Gary’s head crushed like (appropriately) an egg under the wheels of the articulated lorry that had drifted from it’s lane and scooped him up from where he stood beside his broken down piece of shit Vauxhall on the A84. I had been standing on the verge, as we all knew to do, yet Gary had decided to stay where he was until he’d got a light for his cigarette from the in-car lighter. It was the only thing that did work in that scrap piece of shit. He could have lit it from my side, but he chose to do what he chose to do. Light had been his downfall in more ways than one. The sun had been in the lorry driver’s eyes, so the inquest found. Just the right height and angle to cause momentary discomfort and have him lose clear sight of the road. Middle of summer, a right scorcher of a day. One of those where there never seemed to be enough air, and what there was would sear the inside of your lungs. Gary would have called it a boil in the bagger. I’m pretty sure he was saying something to that effect as he emerged from the driver’s side with his cigarette finally lit. I didn’t see him as the wheels went over him, but I was there after. I saw what had been left of him. The thing is, Gary had been a big boy himself. Too many late night drinking sessions - I was hardly svelte back then either but I was a supermodel compared to him. This was before my abstinence (or perhaps one of the precursors to it). The funeral had been closed casket and even as myself and the rest of the guys from the club carried the coffin down the aisle towards the front doors and the pouring rain, I kept thinking I could hear him. In there. Sloshing about. Like a big egg for another big boy. Only he was a loosely scrambled egg, and there was no big boy that would want that on his toast in the morning. No big boy at all. The coffin had been empty of course. They had to use a hose to slough most of him off the road.
I was still grinning. Like an idiot. Even though I now had the indelible image of my one-time friend’s head scudded across hot tarmac.
Egg on toast.
I guffawed out loud, completely involuntary. I don’t know what had come over me.
The pink room ate my laughter.
I closed my eyes for a moment. Just a fraction of a second. The exertion of sitting down. Jesus. Coral should be shaking her head in pity at the old fool she was still married to. At what this wretched husk was in front of her and what it had done to the once strong virile man who was her husband.
There. I could hear her.
tuttuttuttut
“I know what you’re going to say,” I murmured. “That I should have let you help me.”
tuttuttuttut
“But I can do these things myself sometimes you know.”
I waited for a response. I waited with my eyes closed. She had stopped tutting at last. The silence yawned on. It was so comfortable that I forgot what I was waiting for.
I think I slept but I don’t recall waking up afterwards. No dreams either.
Prising my eyelids apart I let my eyes become accustomed to the light. The waxen quality could have been a mistake earlier, for it no longer seemed like that. It was diffuse and clinical. White light. No, scratch that.
Grey light.
I know how that sounds, but the only way to describe it would be the fluorescence of a morgue.
Still tired. I could sleep again. Now.
I took in my surrounds needlessly. What need was there when I knew this place better than any other. Had I not been here time and again over the course of all my days? All my weeks? My years? Yet it had lost what it once was.
The pink room.
Those walls once so vibrant, almost a hot rouge, now anaemic and pallid, the colour of clinical skin cream. Not skin scream specifically, wound cream. Germo…something. I had it applied to me most when I was young. Cuts and grazes on hot summer evenings, as I rode my bicycle downhill too fast and into spiked bushes of various descriptions. Scrapes and grazes on my knee from over ambitious skating. Less after that as I cocooned myself in the banality of adulthood. I cannot remember the last time I bought it or if it was still sold anywhere. I’m not sure why it mattered.
Three walls that pale colour.
Skin scream.
That’s what I had thought earlier. Not cream. Scream. An addled brain perhaps hinting at an inner truth. What part of me didn’t scream.
Three walls with the last taken by large bay windows reaching from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Large bay windows that when I had first arrived here showed me nothing but azure skies and crystalline waters. The sun was directly overhead and out of sight yet it’s presence was undeniable. I remember I walked effortlessly towards the glass and rested my hand upon it. The heat was palpable. It radiated from the glass through my palm, up my arms and into my body, flooding me with warmth. I could still feel that warmth now, if I tried. It hurt to curl my fingers yet if I was able to, I knew I would feel it within the palm of my hand, as though I was holding the sun itself.
I conjure fireball!
Somewhere my nine year old self spoke. Standing above and behind where I now sat in repose.
That day, that moment, when I was first here standing at the bay window, I was captivated. The view, the heat, the feeling that absolutely and everything was utterly as it should be. My body felt strong as did my mind. I could hold that heat and
cast fireball and strike down all those servants of darkness and
I forget.
There was a short strip of white sand directly below, about a floor level down. I had the feeling that the pink room was a jetty and underneath lay the rest of the beach. The angle was too acute and I couldn’t see for certain, but I could hear the sand underneath, despite the impossibility. The windows were thick, double glazed, and the room was filled with a pillowed silence. Yet nevertheless, I could. A gentle swooshing sound. The faintest of whispers. Just a glimpse of a song on an unfelt breeze.
Those early days in the pink room were the apex of my life. In my memories they mingled with when I met her. Coral. I recall the day she walked out of the ocean and into my life. A holiday with friends, a campfire and drinks on the sand. She had appeared there, as though disgorged from the ocean itself, the sun giving way to something that managed to radiate even more warmth. Clive had approached her first, bolstered by the cider and no doubt a touch of sunstroke. He thought she would fall for his charm and wallet, yet even from where I sat I could see her looking through him towards the rest of our group, before
there
that moment. Her eyes locked with mine.
Clive walked accompanied her over we made our introductions and her in turn. Her voice was like the lightest touch of sea spray on warm skin. Felix and Gary were smitten and even Andi and Violet were more accommodating than they otherwise would have been to a potential female rival for Felix’s attentions. Yet it was I that ended up talking with her long into the night, long after the others had petered away to the rental cabin, leaving just Coral and I to the sunset. I had asked her where she was staying, where she had appeared from. She was wearing light pastel slacks and a bikini top over open toed thongs. She hadn’t been swimming yet had approached from the water as though she had.
“I came from the ocean, of course,” she had said, and I had laughed a little harder than I had perhaps meant to, the alcohol having had effect.
“Of course,” I had replied grinning. “The ocean.”
We were defined by the ocean and the beach. I lay with her and we watched the sunset. She asked everything of me and I told her, before asking of her questions which I never could recall the answers to. At one point I drifted away as the last vestiges of the day melted beyond the horizon. When I had awoken she had gone and I was gripped by panic. My stomach lurched at the thought of never seeing her again and I staggered to my feet, drunkenly looking into the darkness each way before falling back to the sand and passing out.
That was my first visit to the pink room. That night I awoke and placed my hand to the glass, feeling the warmth on my skin
scream
and feeling the most at peace I had ever felt.
I looked down at my twisted and gnarled hand, fancying I could still feel the sun, yet in the palm of that hand there was only ice, not
fireball
fire.
The sun now long gone in the pink room. I took it all in, now I had recovered from the exertion of sitting, but first, I unfurled my fingers, slowly, grimacing at the pain. Coral would have my medication. She had given it to me just the night before, yet I would be over due now.
I frowned. Unless it was still the night before. The pink room always left me unsure. It was always day here, despite the coldness of the room, the paleness of the walls. Even the carpet - once deep and luxuriously mauve - was ashen and thin. My feet were cold and -
I was in my bare feet. Where were my slippers?
I had them on when
tuttuttuttuttut
She would be so disappointed in me. She was still so young. So flexible, so mobile. She had no pain when she uncurled her fists.
“You do too much,” she would say. “I don’t need you to.”
I tried to help her. As though she was the infirm one. She would mock me lightly. That tutting again. She was more capable than I.
I allowed myself time to gaze out through the glass. Where there was once crystalline waters and endless horizon there was a pale grey expanse, and I could no longer see the horizon. There was no definition.
After some time I realised why. There was a blurriness there, and one that was increasing. The amount of smooth pale water that I could see, that yawned towards that ill-defined transition between water and sky, was diminishing. There was a great haar that was closing in, rolling across the ocean towards me. Ever so slowly so as to be almost imperceptible when I fixated upon it - something that I could only do for a short time as the pale light hurt my eyes if I lingered. The sight of this discomforted me although I could not say why. I felt perfectly at ease and warm, sitting in this most uncomfortable looking of chairs.
I turned my eye to the easel that sat in front of the chair, around three feet away. Sitting upon it was a large canvas that had been devoid of a single brush stroke a moment before. Yet now…I leaned forward as best I could, stifling the grunt of exertion that threatened to erupt from my lungs. Yes, there was something now upon it, a series of rough umber lines, the barest of preparatory work. It resembled a tree in winter from where I sat, but in truth could have been something else entirely. I had not painted it, of that I was certain. I never painted what was on the canvas. The first reason, and one that I found fairly important, was that there were no paints in the pink room. No paints, no brushes, no thinner or turps. No pencils or charcoal. No pastels. Nothing. There was an easel, and upon it was a canvas. And never once had I painted or sketched or even telekinetically projected what was to appear there. I was sure that if I concentrated hard enough, I could have done the latter. It was never anything that had been promised to me, but I was sure I had inherited that particular gift, even if I could not prove it. I had no control over it, not yet. Perhaps I ever would.
I tried it regardless. I sat and fixated upon those pale sketched lines, that skeletal tree on the blank canvas as though isolated against a background of snow. Something twinged at the nape of my neck then, a memory that lightly skittered it’s way up my spine and into my brain, a small fuse being lit.
Nothing happened of course. Perhaps I was too far away. I should get up off the chair, but damn it was it not too low and - dare I say it - too comfortable. How was it this comfortable when it looked as it did?
The canvas isn’t for me.
Apparently, yet the chair seemingly was, which didn’t make sense. I hated the chair (until now at least), yet the canvas had always beguiled me.
The chair, much like the canvas, had always been here, although I never had need of it before now. More than ever now however my life was a series of short journeys from sofa to chair, from chair to car, from car to stool, from stool to sofa. My thin brackish legs could only support me for so long and the sound of my own feet shuffling and scuffing the floor maddened me more than I could ever admit.
Just lift your damn feet off the ground John, I would admonish myself. Lift them up properly and walk with purpose.
Yet try as I could, after only a few steps, the shuffling would commence until I exhaled loudly as I sat down once more.
No big eggs for me.
I had always looked upon the chair in the pink room with contempt. That first night after meeting Coral and that first journey to the pink room, I had almost laughed. It was the chair straight out of a retirement home. Low back, large cushion, polished wooden arm-rests. I wasn’t a sitter, I told myself. There was time for sitting around, and therefore the sight of a chair in here of all places was an affront. Those first few visits I was almost irrationally angry at the sight of it. It insulted me. I would say as much to Coral every time after.
“Why does the chair need to be there?” I would ask her petulantly. She would laugh - a delicate melody - before replying.
“Because, one day you will want it there.”
I doubted it, and I said as much to her. I would refuse to talk to her after, I would hold out for an apology but none ever came, because ultimately we both knew that she was right.
I nearly sat in it after the accident. We had all gone skiing one winter and I had wished to show off, of course. I had instead on the black route despite none of us ever attempting it before. Everyone else had declined apart from Clive, who still had eyes for Coral despite him now being married with two children. Like two rutting stags we both set off to the summit as the others - Coral included - waited for our return at the chalet, sitting on the balcony with hot chocolates and Irish coffees. Clive had been a better skier than I by far. I was a recent convert to the sport, naturally thinking that a few instructed outings and investment in top tier equipment meant I was going to be indestructible on the slopes.
My initial descent was abruptly halted by a tree that resolutely refused to move out of my way, which I thought rude at the time. After all, who was I now if nature would not bend to my will? I was only a man of course, despite everything. Later on I would think differently, until more recently when I had to make peace with the fact of my mortality.
I had gone from the slopes straight into the pink room, never actually colliding with the tree. My speed of descent had carried me deep into the room which had been made so long as to allow my momentum to eventually slow before stopping. I stood there, in my ridiculously expensive attire, my goggles all misted with the sudden change in temperature and humidity. I was panting, my arms momentarily flailing uselessly in front of me (I had long let go of my sticks in panic) until I dropped them to my sides. I had thought then perhaps to slide my way over to the chair, if only to use it as an aide to taking off my skis.
Yet I was back in moments, at the base of the slope, stick-less and feeling a fool. Clive effortlessly brought himself to a graceful halt with a twist of his body and flickering of his arms. The expression on his face said it all. That smirk.
“Are you alright John?” He had asked. It was all I could do to nod dumbly. “Nearly decided to carve your own path down there eh? Although…”
I waited for him to continue.
“…I could swear you hit the damned thing.” He shook his head as he lifted his goggles, squinting in the sun towards me. “Still, glad to see you make it down here in one piece. Despite you loosing some of your things along the way.”
I wanted then to cuff him on the side of his smirking face, yet I could espy the balcony upon which his wife and children sat alongside Coral and the others. I would not make a scene here, yet I would perhaps wait for the opportune moment to tip the scales back into more equal territory. I remember then, looking to Coral, who later that year would become my wife. Her expression was hard to read, and I couldn’t quite fathom it. There was something knowing there, and I couldn’t work out how she knew (or suspected) what had occurred on the slope.
Of course she told me later, on our honeymoon at the coast, why she did know, and her part in it.
The fog was rolling in, the light losing what little vibrancy it contained. I allowed myself a soft contented sigh and leaned back in the chair once again. I could afford myself another little nap. After all, it was the perfect place. I never had done so much in the pink room before, yet I was never this weary and in need of one. Another short nap, around half an hour or so, to rejuvenate myself and wait until this visit to the pink room was at an end. I was never normally here too long. At least, it never felt as though I was. Time didn’t seem to work the same way as it normally did when I was in here, and so everything was done to my guesswork. My watch presumably had stopped. I looked at it, hanging limply off my wrist. The expensive dark leather strap not only on the highest hole it had originally, but one of the new ones that I had paid far too much money for someone only half competent to bore.. Yet still it hung off my wrist, as though I was a toddler wearing his father’s timepiece. To say the mechanism had stopped would be an inaccuracy (and in my life I was noting if not accurate). More specifically, time had stopped. It simply ceased to advance here. You could ask me how I knew this, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you. It made no sense to me either yet I knew it do be the case. Oh, time would have advanced elsewhere while I was in here, I had no doubt of that. The skiing example should be enough to have demonstrated that. At once I was on the slopes with my fatal destination the trunk of a large pine, then to the pink room and then to the base of the course. I can’t argue the toss of that and I’m aware that it weakens my argument, and yet argue I must. Time simply did not advance while I was in the pink room, despite of my continued existence within it (and I should dare add, the ever closing presence of the fog beyond the large windows).
I said that to her once, in so many words.
“What makes you say that?” She asked me as we sat once on the balcony of the coastal retreat I had purchased for us both a few years prior when one of my investments finally came good. We sat on the wooden decking upon a thin towel, enjoying the heat from the boards in the late morning sun, sipping freshly brewed coffee and intermittently picking at the freshly baked croissants I had delivered straight to our door every morning that we stayed there.
I said to her in as much as I can say now.
“I don’t know,” I replied, taking a sip too hastily of the hot dark liquid and wincing as it came in to contact with my tongue. “I just have that feeling.”
I then asked the question that I had been waiting to ask for ever. I looked her in her large grey eyes, once more marvelling - as I always did - at the smoothness of the surrounding skin. Whilst creases accumulated on my face like cracks in plaster, her skin never betrayed the ageing process that I was certain she must be at the mercy of, being no reason that she should be exempt. I always fancied I could see it there, deep within her. The ocean. I could dive in and join her.
“What is that place?”
At first I didn’t think she had heard me. She turned away and looked out to the water, the gentle surf on the pebbles. A family were standing at the waters edge, both parents and a boy of around six or seven. They were taking it in turns to look for large flat stones and cast them out, some more successfully skimming across the surface than the others. The sound of the excited sequels of the child were faint, nearly drowned by the surf, but audible, particularly if he managed to get the stone to bounce a couple of times before it plopped soundlessly beneath.
I was about to ask again when she turned back, her expression serious, skin impossibly pale. Her eyes threatening to drown me again, only this time the water wasn’t inviting. There was nothing but coldness and fog.
“Do you want that?” She asked.
“What?” I replied, until it became obvious. A family. A child. “No,” I said, more abruptly than I meant to. “I mean,” I hastily added, “you know I don’t. We discussed this before we got married. You know I don’t. I have you, and I don’t have time with work. It wouldn’t be fair.”
She nodded so slightly that I nearly missed it.
“Well then,” she replied, the colour once more rising to her cheeks, “does it matter? What it is?”
I smiled back and it was my turn to say nothing. I suppose not.
The fog was nearly at the window now. I should have been nervous. She had told me that things would soon be different, that my condition would force things to be such that they never had been before. She had said no more and I didn’t ask. We hadn’t talked about the pink room since that day on the balcony, an impossibly long time ago. I tried to think exactly how long, how many governments we had had. How many wars. I found that I couldn’t. They all rolled in to one.
Rolled into one and down the hill.
Eggs on Easter morning.
Big eggs for big boys.
Except that too had been along time ago.
I had rolled eggs down Vicar’s Hill on the day or the armistice. Me and all the others. I couldn’t see their faces any more. In my mind their faces were as the surface of the eggs I had rolled.
The canvas had changed. In my reminiscing I had missed it. The hidden hand of the artist had taken the skeletal frame of the tree and replaced it now. The entire thing primed the same grey as the floor and the fog beyond the glass. The fog that now pressed against the glass in abstract silence.
Something had been half formed on there and rendered in a pale pink. The left side was in shadow that it also cast across that side of the canvas. The right hand side, the side towards the window, had caught the light. It was a stone of some kind. Impossibly smooth. Looking at it exhausted me and I wondered again about having a little nap. I wondered something else. I wondered if there was dreaming here. Or - for perhaps not the first time - I wondered if I was already dreaming. Would it be possible to have. Dream within a dream? Where would it stop? What if in my dreams I awoke here?
I smiled at the thought of falling asleep and awakening in the pink room in all it’s pomp and vibrancy. In awakening with my limbs strong and supple.
For now, I thought I could look upon the canvas a little more. First however, first, I would see if I could see the ocean again, through the fog.
Something was coming with it.
A darker grey smudge, back deep within the undulating blanket of mist. My skin felt as though it suddenly contracted taut over my atrophied muscles and paper bones. It tingled and itched. It
screamed
felt uncomfortable yet I resisted the urge. Instead I looked at the canvas again. At the pink hued rock. Then back to the ship. That’s what it was. An old eighteenth century type with the masts and sails. It was closer now. I could start to see a little of it more defined. It made me feel more than uneasy. I felt my stomach begin to turn.
I would ask Coral of this when I was back. I finally had more questions.
My stomach churned again and I looked down at my belly, rubbing my liver spotted hands over it. My shirt was untucked and stained. Dark stains of I don’t know what. I hadn’t filled this shirt for years and yet now the buttons seemed to be straining, my belly distended. Gas was all it was. Too many
big eggs
pastries that morning no doubt. We had taken breakfast on the balcony again despite the colder temperature. Coral had helped guide me out, taking my arm and tutting and fretting over me as she did so. Not for the first time I wondered what she thought of me now. She was frozen in time, having the appearance of a woman in her twenties (and mid twenties at that, exactly when I had met her). There was no kidding myself any more. I know now that she didn’t just appear to be not ageing. She had in fact stopped. Although I didn’t know if she had ever. She had emerged from the ocean that day and I thought -
I shook my head. What nonsense was this? A senile mind. And yet
she was born that day, when she emerged from the ocean
there were things I just couldn’t ratify. All my life I had been involved in risk management. Large portfolios for well off clients that had very soon made me well off. Risk and ratification was very much my wheelhouse. My brain hadn’t dulled in that respect. Coral would say I was just as razor sharp as the day we had met. I knew I was slow in other respects but not my brain. Never my brain. Yet things just didn’t add, and I had never thought about them before.
I sighed, rubbing my distended belly gently. The canvas was empty again and I wondered if there would be anything else before I had to go. The light was fading now, the ship almost impossibly close. It looked like something from an old movie, some kind of pirate adventure. I had seen a few of those back in the early days. I had taken Coral, not resisting the urge to glance sideways at her agog expression at what she was seeing.
“How are all these people behind that clear screen? All those ships?” She would ask.
I presumed she was having one of her jokes and I would play along. She would give my hand a squeeze and laugh in that maddening melodic way that she did. It drove me crazy for her every time she did.
I can still hear it now. Although it seemed to be coming from beyond the glass. The ship that was too close. I still couldn’t see it with any definition yet it was right there. If I could walk to the window and put my arm through that glass I would touch it. I could see enough of the hull to see the wood slick with water and weeds. The name plate was almost in view as well, most of it rusted, yet I thought I recognised what little I saw.
My stomach lurched and pain shot through my guts. The pain made my vision swim. I thought again a short sleep would do me good. I thought again about dreams and if I would have any here. If I slept and dreamt and left the pink room then, would my dreams carry across with me? Would I awaken in my own bed?
The canvas had a dark crimson streak on it running down from the top to the base. The paint was wet and it ran from the easel on to the grey carpet. I followed the trail with my gaze to the far wall that was now shrouded in darkness. I couldn’t actually see the wall at all. Just that trail leading into he black. I thought then of eggs.
“Big eggs for big…” I began, before the last word was a strangled cry of pain. I needed to try and stand. Walk this pain off. Walk out the pink room. I had managed it once, I was sure of it. There was a wall there but with enough concentration I would make a door.
But first, stand.
I leaned forward and braced myself but something ripped. I thought it was my shirt and glanced down. I was right, but it wasn’t solely my shirt.
How did the paint get here from the canvas?
It was the same colour. The same deep crimson. She shirt was in tatters, white and ripped around the crimson mess on my lap.
tutttuttuttuttut
I heard her. She was admonishing me lightly for the mess I’d made. But damn it, it wasn’t my mess. It was the
articulated lorry smearing Gary’s skull and brains all over the
rock.
There was a rock in my lap.
or is it the
fireball
sun
I was so tired.
The white tatters weren’t my shirt. It was my skin. There were flecks of yellowed fatty tissue clinging on to the large pink stone that had erupted from my guts. It had heaved itself out and now I was cradling it like a baby.
The child I never wanted.
The room was so damn quiet. Why was the room always so damn quiet?
I wanted to sleep. To find out if there was dreaming in the pink room.
I closed my eyes. She was standing behind me. I thought she was tutting softly but it wasn’t that.
tuttuttuttuttuttut
It was inside my head, behind my eyes. It was the reel in the projection booth of the old movie theatre. It had run out of film and the last few frames were flapping round and round. The pirate ship.
The blood. Pale in the light now.
Pink.
tuttuttuttuttuttut
