The Extraordinary Colors of Auden Dare Read online

  “Nice,” I groaned. “Cheery.”

  Jonah ignored me. “In fact, who knows, the whole canal may one day be filled with water again. You see, things evolve—they turn themselves completely around and upside down—and all you can really say about anything is that that is how it is right now. In a year or two’s time … in a minute or two’s time, even … who knows?”

  I watched the man on the opposite bank hobbling up the steps and hoped for his sake it was just that his boots didn’t fit him properly, or that one of his socks had a big hole in it.

  “What about color?” I asked after the man had stumbled away completely. “Color is fixed. Red is always red and blue is always blue and I can never see either of them. What about color?”

  “But color, itself, is unimportant.” Uncle Jonah seemed to wrinkle up his forehead to squeeze some extra thoughts out of his brain. “Color is just a label. A way of comparing things.” I quickly thought back to the way my mother always tried to skirt around the concept of color. “Admittedly it is true that color does occur in nature … but the color itself is often unimportant. It is what the color represents that is important.”

  I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

  We stood there in silence for a while, listening to the buzz of the city above us.

  “Uncle Jonah?” I eventually asked. “You’re a scientist. Do you think you might be able to invent something that could help me to see color?”

  He stared into the distance like the other side of the canal was about a mile away. Then he smiled. “Maybe, Auden. One day. When my current work is complete, I shall give it some thought.”

  *   *   *

  When the solicitor brought the keys over to our flat in Forest Gate, he brought a few other things, too. Most of them were boring legal things—the deeds to Unicorn Cottage; Uncle Jonah’s bank details; his Water Allocation Board usage record. Stuff like that.

  But there was also a little cardboard box.

  With my name on it.

  “Your uncle left this. For you,” the small, sweating solicitor had whined as he handed it over to me. I gave him fifteen years, tops. If you’re a sweater, you’re a goner—on the way to being extinct. Losing all that fluid puts too much of a strain on the kidneys, you see.

  Inside the box was a rock. Well, half a rock. It was egg-shaped—or had been egg-shaped once upon a time, before whatever had caused it to break in half had occurred—and was smooth along its curved surface, but all jaggedy and rough in the middle. I picked it out and held it up to the light. It wasn’t particularly beautiful or exciting and I twisted it around to see if there were any secret diamonds hiding inside it.

  “There’s a letter, too.” The solicitor held the envelope out to me before wiping his brow with his handkerchief.

  I took it off him and ripped it open. Unfolding the paper I could see line after line of Uncle Jonah’s spidery handwriting, slightly curling down as it made its way across the page from left to right.

  I read what it said to myself.

  Auden, it said. If you are reading this then I suppose I am no longer alive. Which is a bit of a shame as I rather enjoyed our friendly chats and walks whenever you came to visit me in Cambridge, or I you in London. Hopefully you got a degree of enjoyment out of them, too. Perhaps a little knowledge, even?

  Anyway, I have left all of my possessions to your mother—I’m sure you know this by now—but there is a small something that I have deliberately kept aside for you.

  In the box that accompanies this letter is what appears to be half a small rock. A funny thing to be left by your uncle, you may think. Only, this rock is a rather special rock. In fact, it is not a rock at all. It is a meteorite. Its official name is Snowflake 843A, after having fallen just outside of the small town of Snowflake (yes, there is such a place) in Arizona in 1957. An appropriate name, I’m sure you will agree.

  Imagine. For millions of years this ball of chrondrite was hurtling around the deepest parts of space, minding its own business, before eventually straying into our tiny, insignificant little universe and finding itself pulled into the Earth’s atmosphere where it finally slammed into the soft sands of Arizona, coming to rest, and splitting in two.

  Now, given the practically immeasurable, infinite nature of space, the chances of any meteor getting close enough to crash into this speck of a planet is undoubtedly somewhere in the region of a trillion to the power of a trillion to one, I am certain. The probability of it coming into contact with us is—essentially—negligible.

  So do not be put off by the fact that it looks like any other lump of stone or rock that you can find on any hillside or in any quarry or even in the garden at the rear of Unicorn Cottage.

  What it appears to be is irrelevant.

  What it is is something of a miracle.

  I picked up the chunk of meteorite and turned it around in my hand.

  By the way, I continued reading, its sister—Snowflake 843B—I have left to someone I know at Trinity College—my dear friend Six Six. Six Six is one of the brightest, cleverest, kindest people I’ve ever met in my life and, if you should ever find yourself needing to … I don’t know, say, find out about space, stars, constellations, etc., then do pay a visit to Six Six.

  Six Six? I thought. What sort of a name is Six Six?

  Anyway, Auden … look after your mother and remember that your condition may sometimes actually be a strength and not a weakness.

  Dig deep, my boy. Dig deep.

  Always remember to dig deep.

  Yours,

  Jonah

  Nowadays Snowflake 843A resides in the right-hand pocket of my jacket, so that whenever I am outside and I find my condition getting me down, I can reach inside and run my fingers over it, scratching the tips across the sharp, jagged ridges in the middle, or even give it a little squeeze to try to remind myself of Uncle Jonah’s words.

  Sometimes it helps, I find.

  But sometimes, I’m afraid, it doesn’t.

  *   *   *

  A few weeks after moving in, I found myself standing in the tiny attic at Unicorn Cottage. Uncle Jonah had put a sort of retractable ladder thing into the hatch and, after lowering it, you could easily climb up into the damp-smelling loft.

  It was dark up there, but my eyes could cope easily with such dinginess. Nevertheless I used the torch function on my QWERTY so that I could see as far as I could into the farthest corners and crannies.

  Spiderwebs filled the spaces between the buckled rafters, and tiny specks of dust floated aimlessly in the beam of the torch. I waved them away with my hand and looked around.

  A number of packing boxes—big wooden crates without lids—were dumped randomly across the uneven floor. I peered into one only to find a ton of old clothes neatly folded into ten or twelve seagrass bags. I pulled something out of one bag and held it up. It was probably the busiest and most horrible waistcoat I’d ever seen in my life. I dropped it back into the crate before fishing out a long tie with a zigzaggy pattern that seemed even more nasty and headache-inducing than the waistcoat, and for once I was actually quite glad that I couldn’t see color. Uncle Jonah might well have been a genius, but he had no taste in clothing.

  I looked into another of the packing cases. It was filled with books. Dull, pictureless scientific books, mostly. The damp had somehow managed to ease its way inside, and the pages of most of them looked curled and soggy and almost unreadable.

  The other crates were just as dull. Just piles and piles of junk that Uncle Jonah probably intended to get rid of at some point, but in the end never got around to. It was like a sort-of waiting room for garbage.

  I turned to go back down the ladder but, as I did so, something caught my eye and I stopped. In a small stony alcove—probably nothing more than an imperfection in the brickwork—sat a long manila envelope. I came around one of the packing cases and picked it up, blowing thick lumps of dust from its glossy surface. It had not been sealed up, so
I lifted its end and let the contents slide out into my other hand.

  Photographs.

  Lots of photographs.

  Mostly pictures of a young family. A mother, a father, a son, and a younger sister. There were photos taken in a wide, tree-filled garden. There were photos of the family washing an old-fashioned-looking car—yes, actually using water to wash a car! A dog … no, a number of different dogs jumping up and licking the faces of the boy and the girl. A picture of the boy standing proudly next to what looked to me like a homemade rocket. A picture of the girl standing on a chair in a kitchen, making cookies with the mother. A picture of both children leaping around in the pouring rain.

  Photographs. Dozens and dozens of them.

  I recognized them all straightaway, of course. The girl was my mother. The boy, Uncle Jonah. The mother and the father, my long-dead grandparents.

  I leveled the photos in my hand and was about to just throw the envelope down onto the floor when I realized there was something else inside. Something a bit heavier than some photos. I gave the envelope a quick shake and a short, fat lump of metal landed on top of the pictures.

  It was a key.

  Looped around it with short lengths of string were two labels. The first—a newish-looking label—had the words OFFICE SPARE scrawled in the unmistakably bulbous capitals that Uncle Jonah liked to use when he thought something was important. The second—smaller and much older than the other—had neat, tiny handwriting that certainly didn’t belong to Jonah Bloom. PROPERTY OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, it said, like it was ever so slightly ashamed of the fact.

  I slipped the key into my pocket and took the photographs downstairs, where Mum proceeded to spend the next two hours laughing and crying over the images in about equal amounts.

  *   *   *

  I didn’t tell my mum about the key. You see, I don’t think I really wanted her to know. The fact that it was me who found it hidden away in the attic made it—sort of—my property in a way. I gave her the photos—they belonged to her. But the key was mine.

  Anyway, I wanted to do some investigating of my own. You see, I was starting to have my own doubts about Uncle Jonah’s death.

  He was very young to just die. Heart attack or no heart attack. And I started to think the worst. What if there was something more to his death than just a bad heart? What if there was something that triggered his previously undiscovered heart condition? I might just be scrabbling up the wrong tree but I wasn’t completely sure.

  I wanted to check.

  Thinking back, it was weird the way Unicorn Cottage had been all messed up when we arrived. I mean, I know Uncle Jonah was not the tidiest of men, but there was something about it that made me worry. It was too … all over the place. Mum didn’t question it at first, so I went along with her. After all, she knew him better than anyone.

  But, after a while, I found myself wondering, what if the mess wasn’t made by him? What if the mess was made by someone else?

  It didn’t make sense to me at all. It was just an idea. A nagging, if you like.

  But I was determined to find out.

  *   *   *

  Late one afternoon, I hopped on the bus into town. I’d told Mum that I was going for a walk to get some fresh air—after all, the stink of cleaning products in the cottage was getting a bit overwhelming. She smiled and nodded before going back to polishing Uncle Jonah’s framed degree certificates on the wall.

  I got off the bus as near to Trinity College as I could and walked the rest of the way. Perhaps it was just my suspicious mind, but there seemed to be a surprising number of Water Allocation Board men patrolling the city center that afternoon. Armed with their machine guns and equipped with bulletproof vests and helmets—every single one of them with ice for eyes—they cast a fear across your chest that made you feel automatically guilty. In a way, I suppose they were there to protect us all, but you couldn’t help feeling that it was you they were watching. Of course, the people who had most to fear were the black marketers—the men and women who tried to sell contaminated or corrupted water. “Cat’s Pee,” as everyone referred to it. Thirst and dirt and desperation drove many people to extremes and for a couple thousand pounds they could buy a liter of water that wasn’t fit for consumption. I’d heard stories of entire families going mad after drinking just a cupful of the stuff. Old and Moldies would curl up and die in their beds just hours after sipping it. And the teeth of toddlers would just drop out if they were washed in the terrible radioactive liquid. That’s what people said, anyway, and even if some of the stories weren’t true or badly exaggerated, Cat’s Pee was definitely best avoided.

  I kept my head down and hurried past a pair of particularly vicious-looking WAB men.

  A couple of corners later and I found myself standing outside the entrance to Trinity College once again. I stopped to look up and admire the wide-open arch and the turrets on each side. It really did look like it had come from another planet, or at least another time. There was nothing in East London that I could compare it to.

  Suddenly feeling nervous, I tugged up the collar on my coat and walked in.

  In the dark alcove, the rows of pigeonholes clung to the wall, some of them stuffed full with envelopes and packages. Making sure there was nobody around, I reached up and pushed my hand into the slot marked Dr. Jonah Bloom. I swept it around, left and right, and pushed to the very back of the pigeonhole, but there was still nothing inside.

  I stood back a little and looked at all the names. Was there a Six Six? My eyes read along to the S level … but, no. There was no Six Six. Not that I was expecting one. Six Six was not exactly your average common-or-garden surname, after all. No. Six Six must be a nickname for somebody. Or a code name, even!

  I carried on through the second arch and stepped out into the large open space surrounded on all four sides by the old, crumbly walls of the college. The windows all stared down like a ring of ancient professors closely observing the comings and goings, and that strange, domed fountain thingy was still sitting in what seemed to me like quite the wrong place.

  A couple of students with their daft-looking cloaks were lounging on the dull lawn to the right of me, so I quickly turned left and headed toward another wide arch, my feet scrunching over the gravel. I went inside and made my way up some stony stairs, not knowing where I was going.

  As the stairs turned and curled back on themselves, I came out onto a corridor. Along the corridor were doors, each of them with a name displayed in ornate carvings. The doors were all heavy and wooden and even though I put my ear to some of them and tried to quiet my breathing, I couldn’t hear a single noise coming from inside. Were these people even there, or were they so clever and obsessed with their work that they all sat silently at their desks, scribbling their genius little ideas into notebooks? Perhaps some of them were even away fighting. After all, I suppose not all professors are old and crumpled-looking. Some might be quite young.

  I pushed on around the corner and up another smaller flight of stairs. More doors lined the long, cold corridor. Suddenly the corridor opened up into a wide room where a number of fat, comfy-looking armchairs and coffee tables sat in front of a growling fire burning away in a huge granite hearth. As I wandered through the room toward the doorway opposite, I realized that two wispy-haired old men reading newspapers were snuggled down into a pair of the chairs. They were so engrossed with the news stories that they appeared to be ignoring each other and hadn’t even spotted me coming into the room. I moved slightly lighter and quicker and passed through into the next corridor.

  The place was enormous, and after about twenty minutes of getting myself lost in the maze that was Trinity College, I was about to give up.

  It was then that I found it.

  Tucked down a tiny dead end with an almost microscopic window looking out over the rooftops was the door I’d been looking for.

  Dr. Jonah Bloom (Dept. of Physics)

  My hand dug about in my jacke
t pocket. Nudging Snowflake 843A aside, my fingers picked out the short, stumpy metal key that I’d found in the attic. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, I slipped it into the keyhole and tried turning.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  I grabbed it with both hands and twisted hard, but still the lock wouldn’t turn.

  Frustrated, I gave the door a kick. The loud thud reverberated down the long, echoey corridor and I swore at myself for being so stupid.

  Desperate, I pulled the large ring handle with all my strength and tried the key once more. It was hard to move it but …

  Click.

  It unlocked. Just.

  I smiled.

  The door was slightly buckled. That had been the problem. The door curved ever so slightly inward and the mechanism had been grinding against the other part of the lock inside the door frame.

  I looked closer at the part of the door near the lock. Was that damage? Chunks of the wood were missing and a couple of small splinters were sticking right out. I brushed them away so they fell onto the floor, before pushing open the heavy oak door.

  Inside sat a huge wooden desk in front of an ornately designed fireplace. A shiny leather chair—one of those ones you could lie down on if you wanted to—was against the wall under the window, and on the opposite wall were row upon row of shelves.

  They were all empty.

  Because all the files and books that had once been stored on them were now tossed and crumpled all over the floor. My heart bounced in my chest and my mind jumped back to the first time Mum and I went into the cottage and saw the mess that it was in.

  I was right. This wasn’t normal, not even for untidy, easily distracted Uncle Jonah.