19/100, A Story about Red

now I am no longer blue.

For a time, there is a red table in the sitting room. It has, by turn, housed the TV, the record player, many books; it was, five years ago, the desk I sat at when I wrote The Last Days; before that, in a tenement in Edinburgh, it was the desk I struggled to work at as two very small boys giggled underneath, the older encouraging his brother to draw on the underside with sharpies they’d illicitly procured, the date of this misdemeanour still written next to their inchoate drawings.

I’d carried this table home years before. It was just me and my eldest daughter then, she was four and the kind of days were passed were the sort that only in retrospect can you realise were some of the best of your life. I’d spent the year before tentatively learning how to fill days up. For much of that year, in the morning I told myself I just needed to make it to lunchtime, from lunchtime to mid-afternoon, mid-afternoon to dinner. Slowly, time began to stretch, becoming easier to make it from breakfast to lunch, lunch to dinner, somewhere around the midpoint of the year, I could make it from breakfast to bedtime and suddenly what had felt like too much time became not enough time. We would stay out late, enjoying every moment of the sun, we’d plant seeds and forget to water them, we ate when we wanted, our faces dirty by the end of days spent by the Water of Leith or walking miles around the botanical gardens, she’d find sand between her toes in the bath, from the park or the beach, and I’d watch as it swirled down the vortex of the plughole. I’d work in the evenings with the windows thrown open to the sound of a city not ready for sleep as she lay on her back, abandoned to sleep in the way only the guiltless can. I began to like the feel of my muscles, the way my thighs tensed when I stretched, the limber feeling of being in a body; I body put to uses I chose, other than being the possession of someone else.

They were good days. I had no money and was young enough not to mind. We had enough, and enough seemed like everything after a lifetime of living in a cult She was at nursery the day I first saw the table there on the street outside the antique shop. I have a thing about old things, used up things, attics, lofts, old books, forgotten dresses crammed in wardrobes at the top of houses. Every artefact is a ghost story.

Certain I could not afford the table, I crossed the street to look at it. Around it’s barley twist legs, there were chips. Many chips, so many chips I hoped it was cheap. It was missing a drawer. The red paintwork was good but not so good. I was in love. A hopeless one. Red, then, was my favourite colour.

The man came out. Smiled at me. £15 quid, he said, with a shrug, unable maybe to believe his luck. I said yes, fiver, he said, to drop it off. I shook my head, it wasn’t far home. I picked it up, found it lighter than I expected although half way down the hill, it became heavier. The antique shop’s as cafe now. I saw it last week, haunting my old haunts. It’s clean and white and I’ll never go inside.

I loved the table until I didn’t.

I stopped loving it the spring I turned blue.

It was my birthday when I became Vishnu. Breathing had been uncertain for weeks and then I looked at my nails that day and they were blue. But it was cold. Cold for April, I say this every year, not realising I maybe expect too much of the month. Barely recovered from the plague that had befallen us, I’d gone out in a thin dress. It was pretty, but thin, but it was my birthday and I wanted to be pretty and thin but all that happened was my nails turned blue and the blue crept up my skin and I felt my lips tighten and tingle as the sirens I’d watched spool their way across the ceiling nightly for the last two months, finally came for me.

After, when my heart rate when back to normal and my blood had the oxygen it needed and I waited to get well but it didn’t happen, I became attached to blue. So attached, I came to believe it was my favourite colour. I think I wanted to reach the sublime again.

The table by then sat at the end of the sofa I struggled most days to move from. The red of it becoming a taunt. It seemed to vibrate so viciously I could not stand to look at it. I began at the same time, to entertain myself with fantasies of white.

I wanted white walls. White curtains. White kitchens. White bathrooms. I wanted a white washed house with a white picket fence surrounded by white houses all the same, they would be so white they’d glow on the landscape, becoming a blot, a cloud, an absence. I wanted a white fitted kitchen of the type where every cupboard, every drawer shut silently. I wanted a muffled house. I wanted silence. I wanted tedium of the sort that would used to have had me gnawing through my own arm to escape it. I wanted nothingness. I did not want black though, but its opposite. Black is not the colour of nothing. Black is the presence of all light, it has just been trapped there but white, oh give me white, I’d pray those long nights when I didn’t know who I was praying to, or why, just that I was doing it again. I did not think to worry.

Possessed by the idea of white, I ordered paint, brushes, varnish. I dragged the table out into the garden although I could hardly stand. I painted it without a mask although I could hardly breathe with the fumes. But there I was feeling again, the burn in my lungs and the same in my legs. I painted and painted until the red was obscured, the table appearing white. I had washed it clean.

I packed my red dresses away, stockpiled white dresses of linen, lace, cotton, gossamer things for the light to hit.

I could not stand to look at red, visiting instead IKB 79 as regularly as I could, moving to the sea, blue and blue and blue and never enough of it, and here the sky is white most days, the light too, the kind of white I dreamt of, so much white, I no longer dream of it and it was this way until, I walked into the Turbine Hall at the Tate sometime in late November.

I cannot recall the date, the time, or the day. Just the feeling. I walked in and there it was. Red. Was it a sail? Was it a flag? It just was. El Anatsui’s huge sculpture, The Red Moon, billowing there at the entrance to Turbine Hall, stopping me, I looked up, red as far as I could see. Red glinting, shimmering, teasing, turning. Someone was sitting on my chest, someone was punching me in the face, someone was crying, and I put my hands up to my face and it was me. I couldn’t move. For minutes, I stood there; so much red.

I went back and back and back to visit it. It was still there the last time I went, I know it’s gone now, and I’m scared to visit, knowing it will create an absence so visceral I’ll be able to taste it. It will always still be there in the way Bourgeois’s I Do, I Undo, I Redo has never left the same space.

After, I begin to collect images of red on my phone. I tell the waitress in my local cafe ketchup red is the colour of the season. She eyes me strangely. Parcels start to arrive. Next to my white dresses I hang a red bat-winged silk dress, a skin tight red one, nearly an exact dupe of Calvin Klein’s 96 collection, I unpack a tiny red cord dress, become amazed it still fits, I hang red body suits, a red blazer, red flares, I buy red shoes, two pairs of red tights, send pictures to a friend who laughs and says I will become a red barbie, buy too many bottles of red nail varnish.

I will drip red.

And what is it, this redness, other than becoming mortal again, after so much blue, after such oxygen deprivation, it is coming to life, it is staking my territory; cut me, and see what colour I bleed.