My First Colouring Book (5 page)

When I walked around in public I thought of the Jews, forced to wear the Star of David in Nazi Germany. Suddenly I felt a strong sense of empathy with them; I felt as though I were wearing my own personal yellow star – my skin. I'm not trying to make a connection, god forbid, my condition was trivial in comparison. But that is what I thought of then. My sanity changed colour about that time too. I'm told that madness has been linked with the colour yellow. And I remember an advertising man telling me during one of those mystifying workplace conventions that yellow is the best colour to use if a black and white advert needs bringing out – the human eye is drawn to it quicker than any other tint.

So I went to see a doctor – who saw at a glance that I was a living advertisement for my ailment. No prizes for guessing what created this new yellow me. Two bottles of vodka a day chased down with gut-rot cider – the fabled White Lightning – on top of hardly any food at all had battered my liver into submission. Within hours I was in hospital, watching real living people as they really really died.

There's a phrase,
frightened to death
. But during that episode I was frightened to life. Frankly, the shock of that yellow malfunction made me realise how awfully mortal I was, and I ran for my dear little life. Sheer cowardice. As I'd suspected all along I was a yellowbelly, literally and metaphorically. I've not had a drink since December 28, 2001 – and I'm an average white man again nowadays. Incidentally, vodka birthdays are much more meaningful than real birthdays. December 28 shimmers in my cranial calendar as no other date ever has: it's the birthday of my twin brother who came out of my side, into the world, about fifty years after my own birth. We talk together often about December 28: he has a morbid interest in the lifetime I led before that date.

The years passed and my yellow period faded almost out of memory. One doesn't meet many yellow people in public, not the lurid yellow of the jaundiced, anyway. Then, one day, I came across a yellow person in a very public place. I was standing on a platform at Crewe railway station, waiting for my connection, when she walked in front of me. My emotional response was immediate and strong: I wanted to go to her. The instinct was very powerful – magnetic. I wanted to tell her that I too had been yellow once upon a time. But of course I didn't. I say
of course
, but we don't trot up to absolute strangers, normally, do we? For a start, there might be reasons other than alcohol for her hue. Hepatitis caught on holiday perhaps, or kidney stones. So I stood and watched her, fascinated, as if I were a rare bird watching another of my kind coming in to land on an otherwise lifeless island strewn with the hot dry guano of thirst. I reasoned that she wouldn't want to be bracketed with an ageing alcoholic. She might be ashamed of her colour, wouldn't want anyone to draw attention to it. And decorum, bloody decorum. Christ, the decorum of humans in public places, passing each other without a word or a nod. Urbanites in particular treat every passing male as if he were Hannibal Lecter in the last frothing throes of avian flu and rabies combined.

So I stood there, ogling her, studying her yellowness, controlling the impulse to step out, walk towards her and say
Hey! That happened to me once!

She was about half my age – in her mid-twenties – and distinctly underweight. Hardly any shape to her, just a plank in pencil jeans and slip-ons over white socks. She was about five foot seven and wore a faded parka with a fur-trimmed hood which was a bit too big for her, flapping and tenting around her elfin face. What I could view of her flesh was bright yellow. She had eyebrow rings and a stud in her nose, typical urban memorabilia, over a thin, purplish mouth. And like the rest of them she was obsessing into her mobile phone – as if it were an occult altar, a pentangle in her palm. She was chain-smoking cigarettes and trembling, from the cold weather or the cold turkey – or both. Fresh out of hospital, I thought. Two young males buzzed around her, also in parkas, Mod relics or sub-stream chavs. But she wasn't jaded – she seemed quite animated and lively. Of course, she could have been on the bounce back up after a couple of cans.

It's at times like this that a good old-fashioned imaginary conversation comes in handy.

Soon I was standing next to her (in Never-Never land), chatting amiably. I don't know about your imaginary chats (don't fib – of course you have them), but mine are incredibly wise and the whole wide world would be an earthly paradise within days or maybe even hours if only people listened to what I have to say.

Our conversation starts on a banal note, both of us breaking the ice. Rule Number One is – treat a drunk carefully at first. Don't rush the person.

But people who have been through a yellow period – and the accompanying spell in a hospital or psychiatric unit – usually identify fellow travellers quite quickly. No doubt about it, there seems to be a recognition system, as if we all had zebra stripes or spoke with a conspicuous accent. So I'm enjoying a close-up chat with this girl almost immediately. In my mind's eye, of course.

You're a flattie girl, aren't you? I inquire.

Flatties are the half-sized bottles used by distillers – quite distinctive and comfortable in the hand, less likely to slip. Lots of sensual curves. Comforting groove down the back of the bottle, like the cool furrow running along a woman's spine. The flattie is user-friendly and easier to hide, though prone to slide away in a hedge or a rabbit hole.

Me, I'm a full throttle man with a liking for the cylindrical litre bottle, triple distilled for ultimate purity. I don't normally respond to ceramics or glassware, passing those piles of Portmeirion or Nantgarw or Lalique in museums without a second glance. But the vodka bottle could stroke me like a cat again if I let it. The feel of it in the hand, the crack of the seal as the top is released. The hot perfume of the first kiss.

Of course certain races simply can't take alcohol. Take the
Eskimo, or the native American Indian – genetically indisposed to it.

Like the Japanese and milk, I hear her say. Doesn't suit them, makes them sick.

Having warmed up – ah! the sublime plunge into heat with that first sip – we move onto familiar territory.

Sick in the mornings? I inquire.

Every bloody day, she replies.

I sympathise with her. It's very unpleasant, the end game. You desperately need more firewater inside you so that you can feel human again, but the body can't process the alcohol and throws it straight back out again. I can still remember the taste of the vodka coming back up, warm and phlegmy, passing through my fingers. The hollow, empty retching.

Did you itch when you came off the booze? she asks.

Christ yes, I reply. Worse than wearing a hair shirt – like being wrapped up in that stuff they lag roofs with, makes me scratch just thinking about it.

On and on we went, worrying the same old subject, two little puppies with an old slipper. But it's not the same, talking to yourself, it's never as good.
You can't beat the real thing – a good head-to-head with a total stranger on a railway platform: pigeons flickering to and fro, the Tannoy sending disembodied messages to the otherworld. Detached Christian-looking people trundling their trolley-cases devoutly from the newspaper kiosk to Calvary and beyond.

You can't beat a meeting of like minds in unexpected places. Birds of a feather. Fellow travellers. I've picked them up all over: I call it cottaging because it's just the same but without the sex. I love the stakeout, the silent patient watch, the thrill of the encounter, the quick exchange, the retreat into anonymity. Much more sophisticated than pestering or moidering or ear-bashing – it's the cerebral equivalent of two spies exchanging microfilms on a ferry crossing the Bosporus. Instead of a one-night stand with a ten-second orgasm, it's a ten-minute encounter with a clunking psychological orgasm guaranteed to last all day.

So I'm standing at Crewe station, a spaghetti nexus for travellers, a focal point for hordes of people on the move, and in this inpouring and outpouring of humanity I've been deposited next to a yellow girl. Destiny? Don't be ludicrous. Chance, nothing more. Statistics allow for this sort of thing, in the way they predicate against my winning the lottery. The laws of chance were drafted by a despot with a quirky sense of humour, probably a retired tax inspector with a huge store of Ken Dodd jokes.

Still feeling the need to swim out to this girl and grab her, drag her in from the human tide around her, I turn again to converse with her on my brain-platform.

Her flattie's almost empty and she's beginning to sweat on the next one; her mind's already clouded with logistics. She exerts her brain day and night, there's a noise like the railway station's arrivals and destinations board going cha-cha-cha-cha-cha metallically as she counts the bottles in, counts them out, worries about being late, worries about never getting there on time.

What would I say to her anyway, if I spoke to her for real?

I hope you don't mind me telling you this, but I was yellow too, once. Looked like a bloody banana, actually. Poisoned by a Russian agent, Miss Smirnoff by name. The bitch ruined me. Met her in a bar and fell for the oldest trick in the book – went back to her place and they filmed us having a fabulous time. Best lover I ever had
.
When I woke they'd filmed my soul, sold my body to the national health. Dreary business. How about you?

Or would I saunter towards her, theatrically, and say:
I've been there too kid
.

Our eyes would meet and we'd both know the truth about each other, immediately, without saying a word.
Not bloody likely
. And if she listened to me, wouldn't I sound like a born-again Christian trying to sell her a miracle cure?

But I wanted to go to her, yes, and I wanted her to recognise me for what I was, quickly – someone who was trying to share an experience, to show some compassion. But was there one single thing I could tell her that would change things?

No, said a little voice in my head. Nothing you could say would change the course of this girl's life. Except two words maybe.
I survived
. And that would sound a mite triumphalist, wouldn't it now?

I conceded the game. She knew and I knew that the yellow people already know which train they're going to catch – up or down the line, heaven or hell, freedom or slavery. Usually they don't have much time to decide which one to board, and some say the ticket was bought long ago, way back in childhood.

I ended my ‘conversation' and returned to my studies on the platform at Crewe station.

She was still there in front of me. I could still step up to her. It could be done.

Perhaps she would want to talk – it's often easier with strangers. A quick exchange. Perhaps I could tell her, as un-evangelically as possible, that it wasn't as difficult as she might imagine, staying above ground. And worth it, dammit – life could be very sweet when compared to the war zone of addiction. If only for a year or two.

Be kind to yourself
, I'd say.
Don't punish yourself any more
.

The pigeons cooed some more and the Tannoy gabbled some more too – in fact I made a connection between its announcements and the message I'd intended to give this girl – equally garbled, more likely to induce panic than composure.

When I lifted my eyes from the pigeons she was moving towards the lip of the platform and a train was chuntering towards her. It wasn't my connection, so I watched her do the standard black and white feature film exit, the
Brief Encounter
wave through the window to her mates, without all the steam and romance.

I almost walked to her even then – had it been an old-fashioned train, with pull-down windows, I think I might have. But I didn't. Then I lost her, and in the ensuing vacuum my brain instigated two wayward meditations on the colour yellow.

First, I went back to my childhood, and it was a morning in summer, soon after dawn, with the early sun flooding onto my bed and songbirds singing outside. I was a little boy who wondered why each window attracted the sun, my fingers trying to catch it – without a thought of what would become of me later in life, when the sun and I were older and weaker.

Next I thought of an incident which happened when I was a gardener, briefly, at a stately home – it was a summer holiday job and I hated it. Plagued by mice in the walled vegetable garden, we set traps – or rather the head gardener did, because I managed to avoid the task. Traps were never really my thing, though I managed to end up in one myself eventually. Don't we all. But despite the fact that I wouldn't set the traps it was me who examined them first each morning, fascinated, driven to discover…

And in one of them I found a mouse, still warm but limp, the eyes glazed over. I turned it over in my hands, this newly dead and still lovely thing. It was a yellow-necked field mouse, with a bib of cadmium yellow. Dead and most beautiful.

That day on the platform at Crewe I caught my connection and returned to Pembrokeshire. For the greater part of a long and tiring journey I was followed by the reflection of the sun in the carriage window, hot and buttery. I had met the only yellow girl I was ever likely to meet at a railway station, and I'd missed my opportunity. I still think of her, often. I wonder to myself idly – is she alive or dead? Happy? Lost? Waiting at another railway station?