Red house

For the first ten years of his life, he saw things only in black and white. His mother passed on in childbirth, as was common among women in poor households. But she did leave in him a pair of eyes in which the world lived only in light or in darkness; anything in between was just a bit lighter or darker; and so when everyone talked about a green something or a yellow such stuff, he found it difficult to catch on to the meaning of it all and accepted that maybe he would never be able to. Nan said he was special, as Nan would, because of the way he saw the world, but he knew she was frustrated too as he came home one day with a bag of pink lady apples when she had asked him that morning very clearly, and quite absentmindedly, for some green ones.

He lived with Nan and his older sister in a cottage surrounded by dry, dead land that was never good to grow stuff in. But he enjoyed its quietude and the distance it put between him and other kids his age. Despite his attempt to fit in, he could never befriend them, for they laughed at him when he asked what does 'colours' mean?, and they gladly had him join them again in their little games because they wanted to laugh at him a second time. He was their freak.

He ran home that afternoon bawling out a torrent, asking Nan not to ever call him special again. He didn't yet know that something that had lain dormant inside him would soon break out and change him forever.

* * *

Nan redecorated the cottage for the first time the summer after his tenth birthday.

He woke up to the first ray of sunlight and to the muffled sound of chattering of people and clanking of tools. Curiosity brought him downstairs to see a pack of tradies dash in and out of the cottage's living room in their strange-looking getup. He soon found himself assessing the extent of the damage when one of them, with no hesitation, ripped the wallpaper from the wall where the windows sat. He learned then, for the first time, the rotten feeling of having to let go. That feeling urged him to tear off a small piece of wallpaper, one that had been discarded and carried the print of a myna bird on it, and put it in his shirt pocket. He was never that attached to the printed wall itself, but kids don't take changes easily. He paced slowly the room once more until a worker warned him of the unpleasantry he could face if he should topple over the paint bucket, which he had been too consumed by the savage demolition to notice.

He looked down at the bucket that lay at his feet. On the surface of the thick liquid he spotted the first pigment–a deep, cool kind of pigment that washed over him like the gentle embrace of a breeze. Like blue.

He knew that his time had come, that with time and with luck he had managed to break into the tower of knowledge he hadn't been privileged to for the ten years leading up to that moment. Now he sat mesmerised, educated by the dense substance that waved to and fro from the impact of his feet, until a roughened hand of a worker took it away. Playtime's over, boy, the hand said. But it was too late; he'd already fallen in love.

For the rest of the day he wandered in and out of the cottage and waited for the workers to sweep the entire room with the pigment and he would be the first admirer of it. But Nan soon ordered him to stay out, or else the fumes would get into his nostrils and grow in them a type of fungus that made breathing quite difficult. So he sat on the front deck and waited.

At noon, he watched as the tradies had lunch on the back of one of the utes. Every one of them had a sausage roll, which reminded him of his empty stomach. When one of the blokes took out from his lunch bag a can of Coca-Cola, the growling in him got louder, but it wasn't a hunger for food; he was caught in the vivid blue of the tin can, which radiated against the mediocre monochrome of a bright day.

Within half an hour, the tradies finished their lunch and banter. Some discarded their empty cans in a plastic bag in the back of the ute where they had sat. He waited until all of them had gone back inside the cottage and set out to retrieve the empty cans from the garbage. He counted five in total, two were crushed, but no matter; he loved their skin not their form. He hid the cans underneath the cushion of the deck chair and sat on the rattan table for he didn't want to squash them any more than they deserved.

The tradies finished their job just after dusk. They packed up and left as quickly as they came that morning. No one found out about his theft. Once the utes were out of sight, he scooped up the cans and took them inside and gave them a thorough wash and laid them out one by one on the window sill in his bedroom. A day or two after, the cans were dry. He took a pen from Nan's bookshelf and pierced the cans with it and threaded them together with a grey nylon string into a cluster of aluminium bunting flags he hung above his desk.

He found the small things around him now more worthy of his time; the blue window sills that ran throughout the lower level of the cottage, the painting of a sunset his sister added to the new wall—its arch of blue gradient emitting from a white semicircle, his sister's lipstick which he used to draw on his face and shoulders tribal markings then ran topless across the paddock playing warfare by himself. When Nan's cat was driven over and dumped—tied up in a sack—on the front deck, he collected its blood with a jar and used it in his drawings at school. He paid no mind to the festering inside the jar until his oblivious teacher remarked about the stench. He went home and sniffed at the substance to find that the teacher was quite right. He discarded the substance—which had turned into jelly by then—down the kitchen sink.

* * *

At the age of fifteen, he tagged along with Nan to the mall for the first time so he could pick out his own clothing. It took her a few trips around town until he found what he wanted, for blue shirts and trousers were incredibly hard to find. Nan was patient as she understood that a young man should take charge of his own way of dressing so he could be confident to face the lassies. But the confidence never did come. Instead, he endured relentless teasing from others, not least from his own sister. Suppose it's cool to have a little sister I can play dress up with, she said. Nan came to his defence, alluding once more to his quality of being special. He appreciated Nan's lie—or perhaps she really did believe it—but he had long since learned that he was different, and not in a good way.

The teasing started at home and continued at school. Girls called him Poppy and laughed behind their hands so as to hide their braces. Groups of boys slandered him, sometimes loudly enough so he could hear the rumours they spread, which were suggestive of him having a thing for other boys. School went on for too long.

When his tolerance of the school society ran dry, he skipped class and rode for hours to the outback and came to sit atop a dune among the ocean of blue dirt and the entire landscape would fill him with peace. He loved all things that never stirred under the sunlight; things that were put on earth only to tolerate its hostility. Maybe because he saw himself in them, or because they just let him be, let him sit, and be still and different, without judgement. He could be buried in this wilderness, which according to the townspeople was inhospitable, and still felt more welcomed by it than by the community he was born into.

Then school ended. Before he could drink to that fact, the festivity began. He had not a moment to revel in his farewell to the tormenting school years before hordes of graduates gathered round in the school yard for their graduation ceremony. He too had graduated, but the earth would implode before he ever set foot on that ground again. That was not to say he didn't envy them—the kids, the boys that came with their dates, who would probably conclude the night with a first kiss, or second or last. Yes, all the girls had ever done to him was point and laugh; but he'd rather have a chance he never did take, than to never have that chance at all.

* * *

On his twenty-fifth birthday, Nan died.

He organised a small, private service in the local church for Nan's mourners. A few people came and went within a half hour, for most were busy children of her friends who came to pay respect on behalf of their ailing parents; acquaintances who did come were themselves too old to stay out of doors for long.

By the timber coffin he stood, in black suit without a tie, dark wavy hair combed back. He greeted nobody unless they greeted him first, then he would respond with a slight nod, and that was all.

When the service was concluded, he came to sit in the parking lot. His was the only car there. He sat with a cigarette in his hand; the smoke spilled out the window. Soon his sister got in on the passenger side. She chucked a new black tie, still in its packaging, on the dashboard. Don't come to my funeral without this, she said. He offered no response. Got any more of those? she continued. He handed her the packet and a lighter and started the engine.

Nan left both her grandchildren the cottage and her decade-old Honda. One midnight a week after Nan's funeral, he woke up to the sound of a stifled engine, followed by the low rumble of a running car. He came to his window and looked down as the Honda slowly rolled down the dirt track, past the fence and out of sight.

Moments later, he stood at the doorway of his sister's bedroom; its door was ajar and everything shielded by darkness. He turned on the light and entered. The room was stripped bare to the bone, save for the mattress on the bed and a note on the dresser. Don't bother looking for me, have a good life, it read.

Within the following months, he packed up and sold off Nan's possessions—save for her blue wool, blue rug and her favourite cardigan, which wasn't blue, but he kept it for sentimental value. He spent the cash on a tub of blue paint; its label spelled Deep Garnet.

On his birthday he pulled out the tub, donned a pair of gloves, a mask and got to work. He began coating the exterior of the cottage just before dawn, when there was enough light but without the foul heat. When noon came, he had completed the lower level of the cottage, save for the door. So I can still see it, he would say to anyone who cared enough to ask him the reason. But no one ever did.

A day after he finished his painting, a woman showed up at his door. She demanded that he listen to her lecture on his selfishness that had resulted in such an eyesore of a cottage and what it meant for the value of her property next door. He listened without protest but missed the scorn entirely, for his attention was solely on the woman's companion—a young lady in blue, with a pair of aqua slippers and a smile warmer than the sea of blue dirt that had touched his heart long since. That heart was touched again that day, and he beheld as all things around him rallied in a world of gradients; of hues moving from tints to shades and back; of the cool, calm blue turning into fire.

When the swirling ceased, love had opened up his eyes—for the first time—to the beauty of red.