This is the world drained of colour.
Grass is a withered, muddy yellow-brown, laced with spines of grey.
The brilliant crimson of a woman’s lips is an ochre smear on her blueish skin.
Oranges, yellows and limes, laid out in boxes at the local greengrocer, have waxy, stubborn skins and hues of slimy faded grey, like the wet mud of the river when the tide pulls back. She runs her fingers over them, suddenly no longer trusting to the familiar shapes of the fruit, and can’t smell their sweetness, and finds they taste only of acid in her mouth.
Tomato sauce is the colour of scrambled eggs.
Double-decker buses, painted shades of sludge, grunt by in streets of chemically drenched autumn. Sometimes she passes a child in brilliant-blue rubber boots, or a woman with a yellow scarf around her neck, and she has to stop herself from standing still and staring, dazzled by the brightness of it, a flash of astonishing life in the sullen wasteland she moves through.
Ibrahim keeps her on the books as long as he can, but in the end her performance isn’t enough, and head office has spotted it, and he has to put her on administrative leave.
“When you’re better, when this is . . . better,” he said, “you can come back. There’ll always be a place for you here.”
He’s not lying. Lying would imply an active intent to deceive. But it’s easier to make a promise of this sort – an impossible promise – when they both know she’ll never come back.
She sells what little she owns – laptop at the pawn shop, a couple of quid for the nicer of her clothes – and goes home, back to Bracknell.