Chapter 4: Martin

It’s getting harder and harder to get out of bed. Martin was staring at the ceiling, listening to his aching body. Gravity was a cruel mistress, waking him at night and nagging throughout the day. His once has an athletic figure. One he had been admired and envied for. Ha! It was behind him now and he could ponder the ever-growing tiredness, an existential luxury he could afford with retirement. He pondered which excuse he would use that day to pull the sheets away from his embarrassing legs and, as an old man, face the wooden staircase.

As his thoughts lazily unravelled, he stared at the ceiling, trying to remember how he had been manipulated (because there could have been no other explanation) into painting his room “canary yellow”. Was it the pale wedding dinning-set, communally purchased by his erratic circle of friends? Or was it one of her erratic desires she knew how to twist his heart with? He sighed, it didn’t matter now; he was used to the shade; they were fading together.

He had married his wife five months after their first night together- he grinned. Those were the days when you did such a thing. He twitched at the fleshly memory. He knew then as he knew now that his love resided in her big wide eyes. They were blue yet he always felt that simple, monosyllabic word failed them. The colour escaped definition really. At the beginning, he had tried to write a letter about them to his mother. “They aren’t from the blue of a clear sky –azure- nor the blueberry blue from the painting you gave me on my wall. You know the one that Suzi calls purple... They aren’t blue-grey that we find in the horizon or dark deep blue encountered in the sea”. How embarrassed he still was thinking of his efforts. It was so bad it almost made him laugh. Dismal. He had folded his shame and tucked it, and any further attempts at poetry, safely in his desk.

Her face gently unveiled in his mind. It was a simple colour really, which in its simplicity - dare he think honesty? - you could get lost in, not knowing what it resembled, having no reference to guide you. That was the basis for his marriage. A colour, which had no other significance but itself and no other reason to exist than to drown him entirely. It was the type of blue he wanted to pour in his coffee to keep him alive throughout the day. He knew Isabelle had been, despite their early romance, a catastrophic wife and mother but the blue of her eyes had entrapped him even as it failed to redeem her disappearance.

The phone disrupted the rapidly distorting mood of his recollection, tittering violently towards Isabelle’s unforgiven death. He rolled over, with a grunt, and picked up the receiver. Damn son-in-law. What could have pushed Helen to marry that idiot? Seconds later, his hands were shaking more violently.