#papersketch

To Yellow, the marks are the only indication of colours other than her namesake that she has. She looks at the pink blotch on her foot and compares it against the endless wheat coloured grass, flowers all the colours of sunflowers and dandelions, as if the whole world has been dripped and slathered in honey, oversaturated, bright, brilliant. She imagines whole skies the colour of the blue mark on her chest, sometimes a wobbly splotch with undefined edges, sometimes a child’s portrait of a cat, sometimes a messy handprint, like her soulmate has just stamped a hand in paint just underneath Yellow’s skinny neck.

She is five when she discovers that having three soul marks makes her different, because everyone else in her new nursery only has one. In fact, Yellow is only allowed to spend half an hour there before one of the nursery teachers notices the words peeking out above her T-shirt’s neck, marching obliviously up to the child’s innocent hairline.

“We do not tolerate profanity from pre-schoolers,” the nursery teacher scolds Yellow’s mother furiously.

Yellow stands nearby, head down, not looking at the other kids gathering round for the show, the back of her neck raw and abraded from when the nursery teacher had scrubbed relentlessly at skin. The words were still there, of course, harsh and black and angry, sunken into her skin like poisonous claws. No one apart from the nursery teacher knows French, but the words have the anger of a curse, and Yellow can feel the despair, like an ache, sinking into the bone.

‘Fucking kill me,’ one of her soulmates has written, across space and strangerhood, into her flesh.

“It’s her mark, it’s one of her marks,” Yellow’s mother tries her best to explain, “this one has always been the most developed – it didn’t say that when I brought her here this morning, look-“

“One of her marks?” The nursery teacher exclaims.

Like all good mothers, Yellow’s keeps a careful photo diary of her soulmarks’ progression. Unlike most mothers, she doesn’t share hers. She brings up the appropriate photo on her phone, only three days old. Clearly visible, the mark is in the shape of a snowy white hawk, lovingly drawn, deeply detailed, in all shades of monochrome.

Yellow is still removed from the nursery. She holds hands with her furiously embarrassed and humiliated mother, sweating under the heat of the scarf wrapped thickly around her neck, wishing she could go back to the cool nursery, with the sandpit she’d only just got the chance to investigate. She pulls towards the park as they pass, gazing longingly at sunny children playing behind gold bars.

“Please?” she asks, quietly, “park, mummy?”

Her mother looks down at her, probably wanting to get home and put the embarrassment behind her. But her usually rambunctious child is quiet, still somewhat shamefaced from a telling off that she doesn’t understand, and her mother cannot bring herself to say no. They go inside, and her mother pushes her on the swings, back and forth, soaring higher like she is untethered to the ground, like the hawk one of her soulmarks had been only that morning.

The thought makes her want to get off the swings, but there is a sandpit nearby to explore.

And, off-puttingly, a child, screaming. 

She has fallen off the climbing frame, facedown with hair in the darkest shade of yellow that she can see falling around her face, and the diagnosis hasn’t happened yet, but it is for the same reason that lands her in a wheelchair years later. Huffing, Yellow goes to see what the matter with her is. It’s rather difficult to play in the sandpit with somebody bawling for their mother right next to her.

She turns the little girl called Blue over and sits her up.

There’s a strange, funny feeling in her chest, and suddenly her eyes ache and her temples pound and now they’re both crying, drawing the attention of the adults.

Then they go silent, breathless, watching colours swirl around them. Blue sees buttercups shining bright gold and a yellow painted climbing frame, Yellow sees the deep turquoise of the sky, the chipped and flaking paint on the park bench. And together, they can see the verdant spread of the emerald green grass.

When their apologetic mothers collect them, their eyes have turned bright, hard green, and they are clutching onto one another and staring with the dazed, blissful expressions of those seeing something wholly new.

 “Oh, thank God,” says Yellow’s mother. “Does she have all three too?”

The mothers, nearly teary eyed with relief, adjourn to a nearby Americano café, small and neatly-kept with zinc-topped tables and a smiling blonde waitress. Blue and Yellow must be fussed, of course, and bought cakes and hot chocolate to celebrate the Finding. When the two children are adequately placated, staring alternately at each other over steamy mugs of hot chocolate with the innocent curiosity to the young, then at the wide, suddenly colourful world beyond the fogged glass of the cafe window, the mothers are free to talk, pouring out words in hushed whispers hoarsened by relief.

“I thought that Blue would never know-“ Blue’s mother stops, because Yellow’s mother has taken her hand, perfectly able to understand a mother’s fear that her child would never know something she considered a great joy.

They exchange contact details, and haggle over free weekdays for regular play dates. Each mother leaves satisfied, convinced that she has worn down the other into a better deal, half-yanking their child along when they stop too frequently to stare in intense and enrapt amazement at the light shining through a veined leaf, a yellow bumblebee’s iridescent wings, the deep murky blue of fountain water.

As Yellow grows, her childhood is spent split double, half in her own life, half in Blue’s. They have sleepovers that last over four days, their own mugs in each house, using clothes (Blue steals Yellow’s combat boots, Yellow borrowers with no intention of returning her sweltering hoodies) and toothbrushes interchangeably, living inside each other, like wearing in comfortable shoes that never break. Yellow comes to look on Blue’s mother like a stepmother, her second family.

It is Blue who approaches Yellow’s mother and tells her and Yellow both that Yellow is dyslexic. They work on strategies and techniques together, in between visiting Blue at hospital, finding ribbons and spray paint to decorate Blue’s new wheelchair’s rims.

They do everything for the first time together, learning to ride a bike, watching the sea coming in colours they can both see, watching films through special tinted glasses, swapping books with the text printed in Braille, shopping for clothes by texture rather than colour. Yellow comes to look at her life as an addendum to Blue, they are inseparable, parts of each other – she is convinced she can feel Blue’s patient amusement as she struggles through a timed essay, her pride when Yellow argues with her science teacher.

Blue kisses her for the first time when they are thirteen. They are sat on Blue’s bed, Saturday sunlight streaming through the window, highlighting the glossy darkness in Blue’s hair, the liquid shine of her eyes. She is leaning close, applying wobbly eyeliner to Yellow’s eyes. She leans back, to survey her work. Then, in that matter-of-fact way that Blue sometimes has when she is most nervous, Blue puts her small hand on Yellow’s cheek and her lips clumsily on Yellow’s. They both pause there, uncertain of what to do next, until they are interrupted from an untimely quarter.

Blue winces, Yellow grimaces. The grey soulmark is burning as it changes shape. United, they move apart, and Blue shifts her leg so that they can see the soulmark altering on the inside of her left thigh, bared by her shorts. Yellow’s legs tangle with hers, so it looks like the vivid pink mark on her ankle (in the shape of a wobbly child’s drawing of a ratty doll missing one leg) is the shadow of the grey mark on Blue’s thigh.

The soulmark shapes itself into words, and without needing to be asked, Yellow Googles a translation. She hesitates a bit before saying what it means.

“I’m nothing without you,” Yellow translates.

Blue looks at the soulmark on her thigh, then pokes the broken pink doll on Yellow’s ankle. “Do you think they’re okay? Do you think we will ever meet them one day?”

“I think if I have you, I don’t care,” Yellow told her honestly, slumping back on the bed to reply to a text.