#15 The Day The Colours Came Back

The year was 2145, and Jimmy had never seen anything that wasn't grey. Not silver-grey, not charcoal-grey — just grey. The houses on Pembrook Lane were grey. The sky was a pale, washed-out grey. The trees the council had carefully engineered stood in rows like quiet soldiers, their leaves a soft pewter, their bark a deep slate. Even the clouds seemed to have forgotten how to be anything else.

This did cause the occasional problem, of course. Just last week, old Mr. Fitch from number forty-two had walked directly into his own front door because someone had painted it the exact same shade of grey as the wall. He'd stood there for a full minute pressing what he thought was the doorbell before realising it was a beetle. Similarly, the postman had been delivering Mrs. Gable's mail to number eighteen for three years, because numbers sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen were genuinely indistinguishable from each other, and he'd stopped caring around the time they all looked like the same sad biscuit.

The stop signs were perhaps the biggest ongoing civic disaster. They were grey, naturally, because everything was grey, and the word STOP was printed on them in a slightly different grey, which the town council considered perfectly adequate. There had been fourteen intersection incidents that year alone. The official explanation was always "driver inattention." Everyone knew the real explanation.

It had always been this way, as far as anyone could remember. Jimmy had once spent twenty-five minutes looking for his own school bag in the school locker room  because every bag, hook, and peg was the same shade of mid-grey. He'd eventually found it by smell. He did not tell anyone this.

The Great Greying, they called it in history class, though nobody ever said it with much feeling. The Council had decided, long ago, that colour caused too much trouble. Too much excitement. Too many arguments about which was better — the red of a fire or the blue of the sea. Too many feelings that nobody knew what to do with. So they had taken it all away, quietly, while most people were sleeping, and told everyone it was for their own good.

And most people believed them too quickly, and far too easily.

Jimmy sat in Mr. Hadley's class on a Tuesday morning, his pencil moving slowly across the page. Around him, other students copied their notes in neat, orderly columns. Lennox, his best friend, sat beside him with his chin in his hand, looking exactly as unbothered as he always did. "Today," said Mr. Hadley, gesturing at the whiteboard with its careful diagram of shadows and light, "we are going to study contrast. Depth. The way light falls on an object to create dimension." Jimmy's pencil stopped. Dimension. The word settled somewhere behind his ribs. He looked down at the landscape he'd been sketching - a field, a fence, a sky.

He'd worked hard on the shading, carefully layering dark against light to give things shape. It was good, he knew it was good. Mr. Hadley had even pinned it to the board last week and said, "This is how you create the feeling of a world."

But Jimmy had started to wonder. If shading could create the feeling of depth - what could actually do it? What was missing? He looked out the window at the grey field behind the school. Something sat in his chest like an itch he couldn't reach. "I reckon something's not right," he whispered to Lennox. Lennox didn't look up. "Something's always not right," he said. "But what's the point of worrying about it? It's just how it is.”

As if to prove the point, Marcus Chen at the back of the class had just fallen off his chair, for the second time that week, because the step up to the raised reading platform was the exact same grey as the floor around it. He sat on the ground looking unsurprised. This also happened to him on Wednesdays. Nobody mentioned it anymore.

Jimmy frowned and went back to his sketch. There were just so many feelings buzzing inside that his body became tense and agitated. He screwed up his nose and let out a sigh.

That afternoon, walking home along the grey footpath past the grey letterboxes, Jimmy stopped dead. There, pushing up through a crack in the stone wall bordering their garden, was a small flower. A yellow flower. He didn't have a word for what he was seeing. He'd never needed one. His brain scrambled to make sense of it — this thing that was not grey, this impossible, vibrating, alive-looking thing. It was small, with four petals and a darker centre, trembling slightly in the breeze as if it knew it wasn't supposed to be there.

In fairness, standing very still in front of things was not unusual in this neighbourhood. People stopped and stared at walls, at footpaths, at fences, constantly - usually because they'd lost their footing on a kerb they hadn't seen coming, or walked into a letterbox they were certain hadn't been there a moment ago. Jimmy's dad had once shaken his fist at what he thought was a rude neighbour standing in a garden before realising it was a grey garden statue. He still didn't fully believe it hadn't been a person. But Jimmy wasn't confused about what he was seeing.

He was seeing something that had never existed in his world, and he could not look away.

Then he heard a small voice behind him. "I found it this morning." His sister Celia was standing at the gate, six years old, bare feet on the grey step, holding her school bag with both hands. She didn't look frightened. She looked delighted. "I've been hiding it," she whispered. "Don't tell.”

Jimmy didn't tell. That night, he crouched beside the flower in the fading light and did something he'd never done before. He touched one of the petals very gently and pressed it to his sketchbook page. It left a faint golden mark — faint, but there. He spent the next hour carefully, quietly, coaxing more marks from the flower. A smear of gold across a cloud. A line of brightness along the edge of a fence. His hands were shaking. When he looked at the page, something in his chest cracked open like a window. He felt happy. Actually, properly, loudly happy — the kind of happy that made you want to run and shout and throw your arms wide.

He sat with it quietly instead, because he knew somehow that this feeling was not safe to share yet.

Over the next few weeks, something extraordinary happened. More flowers appeared. A tiny patch of green behind the garden shed. A vine pushing through the fence with leaves so vivid Jimmy had to squint. And then, one Saturday morning, Celia came running to find him with her eyes enormous. "Jimmy. Come and look.”

Behind the shed was a small wild garden. Flowers in golds and pinks and deep, burning reds. Leaves in forty shades of green. A single tall flower with petals the colour of the sky Jimmy had never seen but somehow already knew — blue. Blue. They stood in it together, saying nothing. Jimmy began to paint.

He painted in secret, after dark, using the flowers as his palette. He painted the sky as it might look with feeling in it. He painted the field behind the school with the sun doing something extraordinary to the grass. He painted his mother's face, warm and golden and kind. People noticed he was different, and they didn't like it. "He's too cheerful," the neighbours said, watching him walk home with a smile. "That boy is a menace with that grin of his." Lennox pulled him aside one afternoon. "Mate," he said seriously, "you need to tone it down. People are starting to talk."

"Good," said Jimmy, surprising himself. "Let them.”

But one windy Wednesday, it all came undone. Walking home from school, a painting slipped from Jimmy's bag and skidded across the footpath. Before he could grab it, a woman walking past picked it up. She looked at it for a long, silent moment. In it was a garden — their garden — blazing with gold and red and green and the impossible, aching blue of a sky that hadn't existed in over a hundred years. She looked at Jimmy. Then she screamed.

By nightfall, a crowd had gathered outside their house. Voices and pointing fingers. Someone had called the Mayor's office. The word contamination drifted through the air. Jimmy's mother came to the door. She was a quiet woman who had always followed the rules, but something about the crowd's faces — the fear, the suspicion, the hungry need to punish something — made her stand up straighter than Jimmy had ever seen her. "What is the meaning of this?" she asked sternly.

"You're hoarding contamination!" shouted one man from the crowd, followed by, "It's not right by society, you're breaking the rules!" And with that, a woman at the front of the bustling group lifted the painting up to her face. Jimmy looked at his mum and she looked back in tears. But they weren't angry tears, they were tears of pure delight!

As she looked at the wonderful colours on the page she ran her fingers over the clumps of paint that formed intricate petals of roses and pansies and dahlias in full colour. For the first time in a while she smiled from ear to ear and then took to the crowd, wiping her cheeks with her jumper sleeve.

"The flowers grew by themselves, obviously," she said, loudly and clearly. "Nobody planted them. Nobody broke any laws. They came back on their own because they are alive and life does not follow instructions." She paused. "But I'll tell you what I've seen these past weeks. I've seen my son come home with light in his eyes. I've seen my daughter laugh till she falls over. I've had my family sit together at a table and feel something other than nothing." Her voice caught. "Can you honestly look at that painting and tell me it's dangerous? Because all I see is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. And I think you've forgotten that life is supposed to be beautiful."

The crowd was very quiet.

Slowly, one man pushed forward. He looked at the painting in the woman's hands. He looked at it for a long time. "I remember red," he said at last, in a voice so rough it almost broke. "When I was very small. I remember it." Others murmured, "A beautiful life...?" and "...life doesn't follow instructions, you don't say...". It was as if they had been waiting for a leader to take charge of the situation and now they pondered if they had been wrong the whole time. The words seemed to rest heavy in their minds.

The next morning, the whole street came to see the garden behind the shed. They stood in it in silence, these grey people in their grey clothes, and the colour fell across their faces and made them strange and new and entirely themselves. The Mayor's ban lasted another eleven days before the Council voted to lift it. It took six months for the first GMO fields to be replanted in colour. It took two years for music to start sounding different - richer, wider, more like it meant something. It took Jimmy's class almost a whole term to learn the names of all the colours, because there were so many and they kept finding new ones.

But it started with a small yellow flower in a crack in a grey wall. And a boy who felt too much for the world he'd been given, and decided, quietly and bravely, that feeling too much was not the problem. It was the whole point.