The Colour of Skin

THESE DAYS I have plenty of time to think. I swim every morning in the sea and pull myself through the ebb of the wave, because the sea is hungry and wants me back. The sea is heavy. I feel the suck of the wave in the morning and water seduces me all day, because it is something to lie on. Water that makes you spread just to look at it, that wants you, small as you are. I cannot find the edge of myself, which is why I have to be inside things now, so that the walls will hold me in, so that I can lap into corners and seep into carpets and carry like a bowl the noise of the sea.

I have plenty of time to tease it apart and fit it together again, what happened on the show and where Stephen went. I have spoken to everyone concerned. I tie it all together and then I cut the string.

Last night I dreamed that Stephen was dead, and that he came into my dream to tell me that he was dead and to tell me something else, which I can’t remember. I should not have been surprised. These are things that I already know, in a way.

The Stephen in my dream was the same, though his eyes were larger. His eyes were larger but still the same colour, or so the dream told me.

When I woke it was with the grief of everyone who has ever seen a dead friend in their dreams; the same want; the same ache to sleep again; the same need to hear what they were saying, or about to say, the memory of which is spread through all of you, but gently, like water, like something you cannot pick up.

And the joy that he was there and that he was real. All the dead, they smile or sit or lean forward in just that way. They sit in a way that you had forgotten and lean forward in a real way, just to remind you they are not a dream. ‘Yes. It’s me.’

They lean forward to tell you what they have come to say and they let you look in to their eyes, which are larger than they used to be, but still the same colour.

You want to see them again but you don’t want to die. You just want to sleep again, to be in that place again, where the dead and the living can talk to each other and look into each other’s eyes.

I woke up grateful and sick with grief, as if I could not carry my heart anymore; it had burst and spread, like an old yolk.

So I pick up the clues again, as if they mattered. I remember the blur when we arrived in the office, the residue of the night before, or the excitement of going live. Whatever I focused on was simple enough; Frank being calm, Jo being calm, but the LoveWagon was hovering on the edges and every time I looked away from him, Marcus seemed to smile.

I remember Stephen coming to sit with us; with my colleagues, none of whom slept with him the night before, and with me, who did.

He talked to Jo. He talked to Jo as if I wasn’t there. He took her stopwatch and handled it, clicked it on—let it run—reset—let it run. His hands looked like a builder’s hands. I remember the awful dryness of his palm last night, the lines deepening in the creases, even as I looked at them.

He wraps the stopwatch in its thong and gives it back, still ticking, to Jo, who switches it off casually, as if she didn’t know. The year they added an extra second to the clock Jo was the woman up in the studio gallery, counting down for the nation.

‘So where did you put the extra second?’ Stephen asks. Did she have the old midnight and then a new one a second later? Or did she scrub the old one and just go for the new? Did she say zero twice, and if so which was the right zero? If both were right, what would you call the time in between the two?

Jo smiles and seems to know what he means. He smiles back, as if to thank her for giving us all a little extra time.

Michelle in make-up had never seen such beautiful skin. She looks at him for a while, then looks at him again.

‘I’d leave you as you are,’ she says, ‘except you wouldn’t be able to go on without’, and Stephen smiles like a cat.

‘Slap it on,’ he says. ‘You need a thick skin for this show.’

So she picks up some foundation with regret, then puts it back down again, picks up a different one, mixes a little in her hand and as he closes his eyes, sponges slowly under his chin and in thick even strokes down his neck. He opens one eye as she works on his face. It worries her, this perfect skin.

‘I’ll be in to you later to see how you look under the lights.’

She says it firmly, as if the camera would never intervene, as if the guys in Master Control didn’t tweak the colour after the man at the lighting desk tweaked the colour after the guys in Maintenance set the colour on the cameras, and all of them with graphs that go up and down to tell them what colour skin is, somewhere between this wavelength and that wavelength of blue or green or red. So they stand back and fix it there—where skin is just honest to God skin, and red is the red they like, the red on the inside of their heads; Manchester United red, blood red or the red they see when they kiss in the dark. Then everyone at home starts fiddling with their own set as if to say, to each man his own kiss. She says it with conviction, as if the sum of all those tweaks and shifts made it true, a kind of skin by consent.

How do you make a decision about colour in that kind of environment? How do you make a decision about red if you have forty shades there set out in a row in front of you, from Burnt Rose to Burgundy to Flame and every single one of them not quite right?

‘It’s a question of tones, isn’t it?’ said Stephen and she seems relieved. ‘Did you ever work in black and white?’

That is how I remember him, the air blurring around him as his body settled on his bones; as pores opened and age crept in. I should not blame myself. I don’t even know what happened when the cameras switched on and he walked into the propellors; when his flesh hit the airwaves. I think he put up a fight anyway. Because, it would seem, we all saw our own show. And here is the best that I can do.