The Color of the Sun

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Tenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  It’s an ordinary summer day, the day that Jimmy Killen dies and comes to life again. It’s the middle of the summer, when it sometimes seems like time stands still, when it seems there’s nothing at all to do. Davie’s in his bed, in the shadows behind his bedroom curtains when it all begins. The whole day lies before him, but he wants to stay there. He wants to be older so he could be with a lass or go drinking with the lads. He wants to be younger so he could run about yelling like a daft thing.

  His mam calls up from down below.

  “Davie! Get yourself out into the sun, lad!”

  He peeps through the curtains. He’s dazzled by the light. He can see nothing when he turns back to his room. He rubs his eyes till his sight returns and he sees it all anew.

  “Davie!”

  “Yes, Mam!”

  He starts digging through some ancient toys. Animal masks have been hanging inside his wardrobe door for so long he’s nearly forgotten that they’re there at all. They’ve been gathering dust since he was four or five. A gorilla, a tiger, a horse, a fox. The fox was best. He’d pull it on and leap and screech to make his parents terrified. He does it again now, alone in his shady bedroom. He looks out through the fox eyes and raises his claws, and he snarls and imagines he’s slaughtering a coop full of chickens.

  “Davie! What the heck you doing up there?”

  He laughs and rips the mask off. He laughs again to see the plastic antlers dangling on the door as well. How could he have forgotten them? He sticks them on his head. He steps quietly through the room, looking out for predators. He rocks his head and shakes the antlers. He leaps and dances silently, and soon the antlers start to feel like proper antlers. The room feels like a forest. He starts to lose himself in the old game of being a boy who’s also a beast.

  He pauses. Why am I doing all this? he wonders.

  Maybe it’s time to get rid of things, time to chuck this childish stuff out.

  Mam calls from down below again.

  “Davie!”

  “Aye!” he calls. “Coming, Mam!”

  But he keeps on digging. He finds some ancient coloring pencils, from when he was maybe five or six. There’s an old sketchbook as well, with a faded green cover and brittle pages. He opens it and comes upon things he hasn’t seen for years: scrawled pictures of dark monsters and slithery snakes. Stick figures of his mam and dad, pictures of the house, a scribbly sketch of a lovely black-and-brown dog they used to have called Stew. A page full of pictures of himself. A picture of a baby with messy writing beside it: Davie as a bayby. A picture of an ancient man with a beard: Davie wen he is old. And here’s the beginning of an ancient tale that starts and then gets nowhere past the first two sentences: Wons ther was a boy calld Davie and he wonted an advencha. So he got sum sanwichs and he got his nife and set owt into the darknes. The ends of the pencils are chewed and he chews them again, and he thinks how weird it is that he’s probably tasting himself as he was all those years ago.

  “Davie!”

  There’s an old gray haversack. His dad gave it to him a few years ago. Davie used to stride around the house with it on his back, marching and saluting and carrying an imaginary rifle on his shoulder. He puts the fox mask, the antlers, the pencils and the book into it. He slings it across his shoulders and goes down.

  Mam’s in the red-hot kitchen. She’s been baking, making bara brith and lemon meringue pie, such lovely things. There’s a smell of lemon, raisins, warm yeasty dough. Davie salivates as he imagines the delicious food on his tongue.

  She stands there with her arms folded. There’s drifts of white flour on her red-and-white apron. Dad’s favorite painting, of sunflowers, is shining bright on the wall behind her. Sunlight pours into the room.

  “About time!” she says. “Now eat that breakfast and shift those bones.”

  She guides him to a chair at the table. There’s a bowl of cornflakes and some toast and some orange juice. She hums a tune and spreads her arms and shifts her feet in a gentle dance. She smiles and sighs as he eats and drinks.

  “Now get yourself out into the world,” she says.

  “What world?”

  “The lovely world outside that door.”

  He grins.

  “I’ve been there before, Mam. I’ve seen it all before.”

  She grins back at him.

  “Aye,” she says. “But you haven’t been in it on this day, and you haven’t seen it in this light.”

  “And what if there’s a mad axman on the loose out there?”

  She taps her cheek and ponders for a moment.

  “That’s a good point,” she says. Then she shrugs. “It’s just a risk you’ll have to take!”

  She laughs at the haversack. She asks what’s inside and he tells her.

  “Those old things!” she says. “Didn’t you use to love them!”

  She smiles as she gazes back into the past for a moment.

  Then she puts a little package into his hand. It’s a piece of warm bara brith, wrapped in waxed paper.

  “There’s butter on it,” she says. “And there’s a slice of Cheshire cheese with it. Won’t it be delicious? Put it in the bottom of your sack so you won’t be tempted to eat it too soon.”

  He does that.

  She puts her hands around his head and plants a kiss at the top of his skull. She blows away the floury dust that she leaves there. She spreads her hand across his back and gently guides him to the door.

  “Go on,” she says. “There’ll be time enough for sitting about when you get to be as old as me.”

  “I’ll never get as old as that!”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she whispers.

  She kisses him again.

  “Now, my Davie, out you go. Don’t hurry back. The day is long, the world is wide, you’re young and free.”

  And out he goes, to start his wandering.

  Should I go up, he wonders, or should I go down? He tosses a coin. Down. He doesn’t walk far, just to the heart of this little town, the place he’s lived since he was born, the place where everything is so familiar.

  He sits on the gray pavement opposite the houses on Ethel Terrace, with his back against the wall of the Columba Club. It’s clean enough. No dog muck, no cigarette butts, just some dust and slivers of slate that must’ve come down from cracks in the roof. Nothing seems to move. His mood declines. He gets that feeling that he sometimes gets these days, that he hates this dead-end place, where nothing seems to happen, nothing seems to change. Sometimes he just wants to walk out of it and keep on walking and leave it all behind. But he knows he’s too young to do that yet, and anyway today it’s like he’s got no energy. Like there’s nothing in the world he wants to do.

  So he just sits there, in the dust.

  For a moment he thinks about Elizabeth McErlane. He met her in the square yesterday evening. She wanted him to go down to Holly Hill Park with her, but he held back. She asked if he was daft. She said most lads would be with her like a shot if she asked them to Holly Hill Park.

  “You’re like a wet weekend,” she sa
id. “It’s like you’re on the point of tears even when a lass is making eyes at you.”

  He knows she’s got a point, but you’d think she’d try to sympathize. She’s not the one who lost her dad just a few weeks back. How would she feel about that?

  He moves his thoughts away from her. If he’s honest, he’s not too bothered. He’s still more interested in playing football than in being with lasses. He does try, like lots of the lads do, and sometimes he loves it, like lots of the lads do, but kissing’s never as sweet as making a perfect diving header or curving the ball into an imaginary net. He has to admit that Elizabeth’s very bonny, though, and she does bring about some pretty amazing dreams.

  He’s in full sunlight. The wall at his back is already warming up. There’s hardly a soul in sight. Not a breath of wind. There’s somebody singing somewhere far away, and somebody playing a fiddle. As Davie listens, he takes out the sketchbook and pencils. He starts to draw what he can see: the dark roadway, the gray pavements, the steel fences and stone walls of Ethel Terrace. It’s all so colorless, all so static, all so empty, all so drab. A crow flaps over him and lands on the roof of Ethel Terrace. He draws it, that beautiful streamlined jet-black shape. It stays a few short moments, then it caws and up it goes, black silhouette flying over him, rising into the endless blue. He draws its flight as a black line fading as it stretches to the page’s edge. Then closes his eyes and lifts his arms and stretches them out wide at his side. He laughs at himself. Sees himself as Jesus hanging on the cross in agony in church. Then changes what he sees and feels, and has the better feeling, the old feeling he’s had since he was small, that his arms are wings. He stretches them wide, becomes a bird, rising from this dry and dusty place, soaring away into the sunlit distance.

  “Flying far?” says someone.

  Davie comes back to earth and opens his eyes. It’s Wilf Pew from Wellington Street, standing just a few feet away.

  “Flying far, I said,” says Wilf.

  Wilf’s got his long gray coat on even in this heat. He always wears the thing. Maybe he thinks it’ll hide the fact that he’s got a false leg. Doesn’t work. Everybody knows and nobody’s bothered. Why should they be?

  “Cat got your tongue?” says Wilf.

  “No,” says Davie.

  “Good.”

  Wilf takes a tube of fruit gummies out of his pocket and holds it out. There’s gray fluff on the orange one that’s at the top of the tube.

  “No, thanks,” says Davie.

  Wilf shakes his head in disappointment.

  “You young’ns,” he says. “You should never turn down a gift, you know. What the hell’s become of you all?”

  He holds the orange gummy up to the sun, then puts it into his mouth, chews and grins.

  “Blimmin’ lovely!” he says. “Absolutely blimmin’ lovely!”

  He wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

  “Anyway,” he says. “Enough of that. So what’s the plan?”

  “The plan?”

  “Aye, the plan. What you up to? Where you going? How you gonna make yer mark?”

  Davie sighs, sits there, says nothing.

  “Look at ye,” says Wilf. “Sitting there with yer face trippin’ ye.”

  He leans over toward the boy and widens his eyes.

  “It might never happen, ye knaa,” says Wilf.

  Davie groans. Why do blokes say things like that? What are you supposed to say to things as daft as that?

  Then Wilf frowns and bends down and bangs himself hard on the thigh of what must be his false leg.

  “Damn thing!” he says. “Be better off without the silly thing. Wouldn’t I?”

  Davie says nothing.

  “The answer is I would!” Wilf snaps. “One day I’ll rip it off and fling it aside and I’ll be free!”

  Then he starts to limp away and he kind of shimmers in the heat, but he pauses and turns back for a moment.

  “I knaa you’ve had some bother,” he says. “But there’s many a body worse off than you!”

  He opens his coat wide and shows his legs.

  “This is a world of wonder!” he yells. “And some folk stroll through it with their eyes down to the dirt like it’s all nowt but a great big bore!”

  He heads off, but he turns back yet again.

  “Look around you!” he says. “You should be running around dancing and singing your head off at the glory of it all!”

  He digs in his pocket and takes out the gummies and flings one of the sweets toward Davie. It bounces on the pavement and comes to rest against Davie’s leg.

  “Eat it up!” says Wilf. “It’ll diy ye good!”

  Then he twirls on his false leg and the long gray coat swirls around him. He flinches and groans in what must be pain, then giggles at himself and turns his face to the sky and sings a weird, wordless, joyful song.

  He yells back one final thing.

  “There’ll come a time when you have to leave this wondrous place, you know!”

  Then at last he’s gone.

  Davie picks the gummy up. It’s yellow. He rubs the dust and fluff off it. Wilf Pew. When Davie was a boy he was scared of the bloke, who was always limping back and forward through the town. But Davie’s mam told him that Wilf was harmless. She said that one summer he walked all the way to Edinburgh and back just to prove that he could do it. He’s a bold, brave man, she used to say. And he’d had his dose of tragedy. Tragedy? Davie asked. Aye, the story is he had a lovely lass once and he was about to marry her, and she went and died, too young.

  Davie licks the gummy. He eats it. As it dissolves deliciously on his tongue, he shuts his eyes and lets the sun shine down on him. What a summer it’s turning out to be. He hears some kids laughing in the park. He sees bonny Elizabeth wandering inside him. He sees his dad sitting on the sofa at home all shrunken and knackered and gasping for breath. He sees other things he doesn’t want to see. Why do they keep on appearing like this? Why can’t he turn his mind away from them? What is it about the mind that keeps moving from picture to picture, even to ones that are horrible to see?

  Then there’s something hot and slobbery on his hands. The tongue of a big dog, licking him. Davie gasps. For a moment he thinks it’s the black-and-brown dog called Stew, but of course it’s not. Yes, it’s black and brown, but the pattern’s really different, and this dog’s far bigger, and it’s gasping and grunting, and its tongue is horrible and hot and wet. He tries to shove it off, but it won’t budge, so he stands up and shoves it with his foot. It snarls and bares its teeth and looks like it’s going to go for him, but in the end it packs in and slopes off.

  Davie doesn’t know whether to sit down again or to wander a bit more. He thinks about tossing a coin, but he doesn’t. He looks about and tries to find something colorful to draw, then suddenly somebody else appears right beside him. It’s his mate, Gosh Todd. He stands sideways in front of Davie and looks up and down the street like somebody might be watching or listening. Then he leans in close and whispers, “I seen a body, Davie.”

  “Eh?”

  “A body.”

  “What kind of body?”

  “A dead one, Davie. Do you want to see?”

  “It’s in the rubble,” says Gosh. “Where they’re pulling down the old church hall.”

  He looks Davie in the eye like he’s waiting for him to say something, but Davie doesn’t know what to say.

  “Are you sure it was dead?” he says at last.

  “Aye. I seen the knife.”

  “The knife?”

  “Aye. The one that killed him. There was blood and everything, Davie.”

  Davie tries cursing and swearing to see if that feels like the right kind of thing to say.

  “Whose body was it?” says Davie.

  “I can’t be sure,” says Gosh. “I seen it and I nearly jumped out me skin and didn’t dare get too close. But I think it was Jimmy Killen.”

  “Eh? Why would it be Jimmy Killen?”

  “He
had them tight jeans on that he wears. And that green checky Levi’s shirt.”

  Davie tries cursing and swearing again.

  “Jimmy Killen,” he whispers.

  “Aye. And if it was Jimmy Killen then I reckon the killer was Zorro Craig.”

  Gosh nods and grins and widens his eyes.

  “Aye,” he goes on. “Zorro Craig. It’s obvious when you think about it, isn’t it? Who else could it be? It’s how it was all bound to turn out.”

  “Was it?”

  “Aye. You know how they went on. You know how they hated each other, like all the Craigs hate all the Killens and all the Killens hate all the Craigs.”

  “I thought that was over and done with.”

  “Mebbe it’s not that easy. And them two, they were the worst of the lot of them, weren’t they? They were like bliddy beasts.”

  Gosh is right about the Killens and the Craigs. It’s been going on for years, ever since Davie’s dad was a kid. His dad never understood it. Davie never understands it. How could two families get into such a state about each other? Why did they not get fed up with hating each other? But could it really come to this? Murder? Could Zorro Craig really be a murderer? Aye, he was mental. But this?

  “Anyway,” says Gosh, “I run down to the police station and I tell the sergeant there. He says am I sure I’m not just seeing things. Like he thinks that nowt like that could happen in a place like this, or like he thinks somebody like Gosh Todd would say anything to get folk stirred up on a sleepy sunny morning. But in the end he knows he has to take a look, ’specially when he realizes the Craigs and Killens might be involved, so he goes with me and that’s that. He gets the doctor and the priest. They telt me to tell nobody but now I’ve telt you. Do you wanna come and see?”

  Davie hesitates.

  “Howay,” says Gosh. “It was just half an hour ago. Mebbe it’ll still be there.”

  Davie hesitates. What would it be like to see a body? And to see a body that had been murdered? And Zorro Craig? Everybody knew he was a monster. But would he kill?

  “Howay,” says Gosh. “It’s not every day you get a chance like this.”

  Gosh looks at the pencils and the book.

  “And you’ve got to admit it’s a bit more interesting than coloring in.”