The Colour of Magic

I was born in the 1980’s and I mean right on the edge of the 1980’s. My mother had decided to keep me in so I would be the first child to arrive in the new decade. She hung on there, waiting and panting and hoping that I would be first, some new breed of human. She did her job too well and I was born, January 1st 1980. From what I can gather I was all ready to go and make my break for freedom December the 31st 1979, but that was about ten to midnight. By the time she had successfully held back my little black head I had decided to stay where I was, to spite everyone, doctors, nurses, mother, father, Guinness book of records people…and emerged, russet stained, crying and squealing at eight minuets past midnight.
Being a child in the eighties could only be described as grey. Grey walls, grey paving stones, grey concrete and grey pigeons that flew past grey tower blocks and up into a perpetually pregnant grey sky. Grey people dotted around our block, with skin-tight grey jeans, grey skinheads and grey faces. They cursed grey Maggie Thatcher (who seemed to be a witch of wicked proportions) with her grey suit and grey handbag for the unemployed millions. Television delivered us grey programs like Grange Hill; even Roland Rat, the saviour of ITV, was military grey. All I wanted were cartoons, but seeing as we only had a warped television set that only delivered black and white moving pictures with the sound perversely catching up five seconds later, I had to find my colour in other ways. I had decided that black and white was crap (“its just different variations of grey”) and found the most colourful things that populated the eighties, things from the seventies.
Fabrics discarded from the old seat covers (orange and brown flowered, but Mum decided that she wanted something more practical, more hardwearing, more modern - .
more grey) and old photographs became oracles to the past, a past where things were allowed to be painted. Salvaged teenage magazines, Jackie and Blue Jeans became my oracle into a world of perpetual summer, where the Bay City Rollers were kings and big fringes were cool. Huge coloured two dimensional flares on pages contested the grey drainpipes of outside. In the seventies it was ok for everyone to wear lip-gloss. Everything was tinged with pink and photographs had been taken through bubblegum bubbles. It was like discovering that pink lemonade existed after you had got so used to the normal, boring clear kind. These colours were infectious and stained both walls and tank tops alike. Obviously, when the children of the eighties grew up, rebelling and screaming and shouting against the world of enforced grey, all hell broke loose.
It was 1996 and I was sixteen and a half. I had just sat my exams and knew I had done badly. The perpetual summer of the seventies seemed to have returned with a vengeance and it was hot. I made a note in my diary of how I never remembered any extremes of weather in my childhood, how it never snowed and washed the world with a clean polyester white. I heard whistling from outside and without looking up from my desk I knew Doogie Buchannon was swaggering down my garden path, smoking a cigarette and expecting the back door to be open.
“Hey Doogie”, I called from my open window and he waved up at me. Moments later he was in my room, looking over my shoulder, trying to read my diary.
“So, did you consider what we discussed last night?” he asked, with real concern.
I laughed. Doogie had debated, (not “discussed”) what I was to do about the extensive problem of my virginity (I had not seen as such a problem before) when we were in the pub. He insisted that at sixteen and a half, I was too old to be a virgin. Most girls he knew had ominously “done it” between the ages of thirteen and fifteen and I was seriously lagging behind in the experience field.
“People will think it’s weird. If they find out they’ll think you’re weird”, he had said as if it was a profound statement. We played pool and the game took over an hour due to conversation and the sticky heat.
“People think I’m weird already”, I mused, looking down at the pool queue. Doogie bent over to take a shot at a yellow and missed it.
“Damn. Maybe so, but I mean people from the city. People who you’ll meet out at parties and clubbing.”
“How will they know? Its not as if I’m gonna introduce myself and then tag on that I’m a virgin”,
“True. But these things have a way of getting out”, he suggestively wiggled his dark, caterpillar eyebrows.
“Well, it’s none of their business; in fact it’s none of your business”,
“Whoa! Easy tiger! I’m just thinking of you”, he raised his hands in a gesture of peace that felt mildly threatening. As Doogie got more and more drunk and his game got worse and worse. He suggested that I loose my virginity to him. He made some fairly persuasive arguments and I was beginning to see what he meant, he was only a year older and sitting his A levels at college. I suppose it wasn’t such a bad match. He wasn’t terrible looking, a “seventies lovechild” (as he often described himself) with a penchant for cringe some sixties inspired Britpop. He wore flares and loud shirts; he had even
managed to grow some furiously bushy sideburns for his age and played guitar (badly). Girls did like him, until he spoke, and I wondered why we hung about together so often. I had been friends with him for years and we were more like siblings. I just couldn’t help but remember Doogie when I was five massacring insects with a magnifying glass, Doogie when I was eight puking at Drayton Manor, Doogie when I was seven and three quarters stealing cigarettes and coughing all the way through his punishment…the list went on and it made me ill to think of him in a sexual sense.
“Yes, I thought about it and the answers no”, I said standing up and slamming my diary shut. I stood up and took him by the elbow. I stirred him out of the room and down the stairs.
“Let’s go for a walk”, I said and we wandered out of the house and up the garden path, over the parks and through the labyrinth of semidetached suburbia. Doogie didn’t hide his disappointment and he criticized my taste in music and my choice of clothing.
“I don’t know why you like all those American bands. It all Nirvana, Nirvana, Nirvana…or at least a diet Nirvana”,
“You heard that on telly last night. It sounds too original for you”,
“Stop being so sarcastic. It doesn’t suit you. What’s wrong with British music, what’s wrong with what’s right here and now?”
“That Oasis and Blur nonsense?” I scoffed “the only thing wrong with all of that stuff is that it’s the same shit that’s been going round for the past thirty-odd years.” He didn’t attempt a retort and stormed off a few paces ahead. I followed him and eventually we
spoke again, but only when we had broken out of suburbia, with tinges of its grey hangover and into the first of the daisy and buttercup drenched fields. Large grey pylons loomed out of the middle of the countryside like post-modern oak trees and they webbed together to create an unholy hum.
Doogie stopped and turned round. “I knew you’d say no, so I got you some other experience”, he reached into his pocket and produced the coloured plastic yoke of a kinder egg. He broke the middle open. Inside, baggie wrapped, were two pristine tabs of acid. On closer inspection they were daubed with a little purple tellytubby face, complete with upside down coat hanger headpiece.
“If we take them now, we’ll be ok by tonight and we can go back to the pub to drink off our comedowns.”
Doogie had taken it upon himself to teach me the ways of the world. It wasn’t too bad to have someone guide you through your experimental youth, someone who (seemed) to have a better understanding of what was going on. I had gone to house parties with Doogie; smoked my first joint with Doogie; had my first, excruciating, speed comedown with Doogie; watched my first horror movie with Doogie, so it only seemed right to experiment with LSD with Doogie. My virginity however was another matter.
“Ok, I’ll take one, if you promise to look after me”, I said cautiously perching the acid on my fingertip.
“Of course, I always do, don’t I?” he said not looking at me.
“True. You haven’t let me down yet.” I said almost as a finalised statement with one simple taste.
Nothing happened for ages. We walked up and down the beaten tracks that we knew well and I was beginning to think perhaps Doogie wasn’t as street wise as I had first thought and had been ripped off.
“Doogie. Nothings happening”, I complained and he ignored me.
“Doogie, nothings happening”, I repeated and he continued to ignore me.
“DOOGIE!!!” I yelled, as if he was disregarding me on purpose. he turned around to look straight at me and said “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Nothings happening, you’ve been ripped off”,
“Did you let it dissolve in your mouth for as long as possible?”
“Of course I did. You saw me”,
“And you still think nothings happening”,
“Absolutely fuck all.”
“Then why is that tree bent in such an abnormal way?” true enough I looked at the tree and it did seem to bend in an odd way. Not blatantly, but subtly. It had probably bent in that way for many years and I had probably walked past it for a lifetime but never noticed. Today it looked peculiar, obscene almost and I began to laugh. I laughed so much I couldn’t stop and after a while I forgot what I was laughing at. I looked around and the world had changed delicately, not obviously, but enough for me to feel a slight unease. The summer sun had scorched the landscape badly and none of the trees had leaves left. It was to the far left of grey, but it still lingered in its dank vicinity.
“It looks post-apocalyptic!” I gasped taking in the scrublands that we had played on so often as children
“Don’t be daft, its fine. It’s like bright picnic wartime summers day”,
“All I know is that they were grey”,
“You had that crap TV set. Everything was grey on that. Plus they hadn’t invented colour film then”,
“No. I mean it was really grey. I always imagined people who lived in times without colour T.V. to have been grey”,
“That’s the most stupid thing I have ever heard you say”, Scoffed Doogie and he began to laugh uncontrollably. I could not stop surveying the landscape and sighing at how barren it felt.
“Come on.” I said to Doogie and tightly held his hand. “Let’s go somewhere else. This place is depressing me.”
The thing about acid is it can make you walk and walk and walk for hours and you don’t know until the next day when your calf muscles ache and your feet feel like they’ve been repossessed by some burly, grey faced bailiffs. Doogie and I walked straight through the suburbs and out the other side, all the semi’s blurring into one giant semi detached house where the people who lived inside were the embodiment of every semi dwelling family. It was 1950’s America, but with a British twinge, a twinge of grey. We ended up over the other side of the city where the old houses were. Where the
terraces survived and were owned by the council. They had not been knocked down since people eventually realised how depressing the grey, oppressing tower blocks were. This area was famous for its prostitution and drug problems, and one would think that two teenagers who came from the posher end of the burbs, completely off their faces on LSD would get harassed, surprisingly we didn’t. We laughed at discarded sofas in front gardens, trees that were superimposed onto the cityscape, graffiti that reminded us of things from our childhood. Doogie and I were young and unusually impressionable, Stood into the middle of the vast city park, looking upwards and out onto the rapidly gathering night sky. It felt like balancing, unnoticed on some giant eyeball, scraggly trees which adorned the edge of the park became witches eyelashes. All we could see after a while was the purplish-bruised night sky, with its clusters of stars twinkling and mimicking me. Looking at me from way, way over there. I felt Doogie's arm snake around mine.
“Your cold”, He whispered. “You’ve been looking up for so long now. Don’t you need to move your head?” I jutted my chin to one side and felt a little crack through my body. I just couldn’t stop gazing at the sky and wondered what I was doing here.
“Here, put this on”, He said removing his greyish-green cardigan. It was one that he had proudly salvaged from the Salvation Army shop in the village. It would have been at home on an elderly gentleman; however it still looked perfectly at home on Doogie’s thin shoulders.
“Thanks”, I said, looking around me, looking up and down and side to side to struggle the cardigan on and he snaked his arm around mine again.
“We should get going if we wanted to be back at the village by a reasonable time, its three miles away” He said pulling me closer to him and tightening his grip. For a moment I felt pure abject terror and I looked in his face. He was quite a handsome guy, but for some reason he had become quite dark. His eyebrows furrowed and his sideburns gave him the faintly menacing look of a Mills and Boon villain. His skin had become mottled and pale. He needed to be wearing black, better still; he needed to be grey and captured in the confines of the television, pursuing poor pale beauties round mazes and castle walls. I could see the maze behind his grey stare, it began with elegant shrubs and grew into flat packed suburban houses. I shrugged his hand off my arm and the shoulder of the cardigan crumbled away a little.
“What’s wrong with you now?” he asked, slightly hurt, slightly fed up.
“You go back, I’m staying here”, I said defiantly.
“You know that’s not going to happen, I said I’d look after you.”
“I’m not going home, I want to be here.”
“Ok, we can stay for a bit, if you like, but it’s getting cold”, and he grabbed my wrist tightly.
“I meant I wanted to be here on my own.” Doogie looked injured and wronged. His face blacked over again and he became most rebelliously grey.
“Fine”, he spat as he threw my wrist down. “Fuck you.” He added to show his distaste
“You wish” I childishly called after him. I could see his back retreating across the park like a beaten shadow. I sat down on the rapidly dampening grass and lay back with my head up at the stars and my arms outstretched. I observed the only sight I had ever seen that had never been tampered or tainted by the tinge of grey, a view so on the edge of the world it was truly coloured and holy.