March 2020 Winner

A Colourful Childhood

Written by Veronica Lando

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‘Prussian blue,’ was the answer my father had given me that night when everything changed.

He had a colour for everything. The crispness felt when diving into the Enoggera Reservoir at dawn was lapis. The sound of the campfire crackling at Wivenhoe Damn was burnt sienna. The smell of the scribbly gum trees at Mount Coot-tha was eucalypt. The heaving crowd at the Ekka, that swayed and pulsed over the showgrounds each August, was cadmium yellow. The dagwood dogs however, he assured me, were a delectable vermilion.

He was an artist, you see, and colour was his life: he lived and breathed it. He’d once even told me that colour coursed through his veins, the same way that xxxx gold coursed through the pipes of the old Milton brewery. I’d been young at the time and remember being disappointed when he’d cut his finger and his blood had ran the same crimson as my own.

I’d been six, and my brother eight, that unseasonably hot summer. We’d spent our days catching tadpoles in the creek and playing cricket with the other neighbourhood kids in the street; our noses smeared with coloured zinc and our bellies full of Mr Whippy’s soft serve. Afternoons were filled with swatting midges while chasing cane toads around the Hills Hoist, mum yelling from the back porch to come inside before we caught dengue fever. Evenings were family time. Corned beef for tea followed by a lamington, if we were lucky.

After dinner, dad would sit in his old brown—raw umber—chair; the one with the cracked leather on the arm rests that reminded me of Aunt Glady. He would slap his knee as an invite for me to sit on his lap.

‘What was the colour of your day today, Pip?’ he’d ask me.
I’d sit, feeling the tension crease my brow: I’d always consider my answer thoughtfully.

He’d never interrupt or hurry me along. Rather, he too would just sit and, resting his head on the tatty back rest of the chair, await my response.

I remember the day clearly when, near the end of summer holidays, mum and dad had called us to the lounge room.

A tumour they’d said.

I hadn’t known what a tumour was. Apparently, it was a growth on dad’s brain. I’d imagined it the same way the barnacles grew on the stumps of Shorncliffe pier: in tumultuous, expansive clusters.

Three months is all he’d been given. Three months to finish painting my world with his colour, before his disappearance would cast me into an eternity of black and white.

‘Prussian blue,’ was the answer my father had given me when I’d asked what the colour of sadness was.