When I was five and he was six, I first met Peter the pastel boy. He would sit beside me in school and we would talk in the quit fits, punctuated with giggles, that teachers were content to let us think we’d managed to slip under the radar. His hair had been a CAPUT MORTUUM scribble, his eyebrows a squiggle of consternation as he focussed his attention on the problems put to a six year-old. Below his brow, his eyes were flecks of COBALT BLUE.
His stubby fingers, MEDIUM FLESH, gripped a pencil in a tight fist, two-dimensional hands grasping at a three-dimensional world only by wrapping entirely around it. In the summertime, he’d start to sweat – just a little, but enough to leave minute traces of pink across the pages as he wrote. From time to time, I’d see him using nib of pen or tip of pencil trying to scratch through the waxy layer, but I’d pretend not to notice.
When school was out, we were on the same football team, his cheeks touched with a flush of ALIZARIN CRIMSON, the grass on his little pastel boots all PERMANENT GREEN OLIVE, with hints of JUNIPER GREEN. We’d play until the sky was soft and pink, eventually walking home tired and happy, our shirts stained with grass and sweat, his streaked with the transparent, waxy stuff he’d secrete when the weather was hot and humidity high.
We’d return to his house, it being closer to the pitch on which we’d train. His mother would make us dinner, and at the time I’d never realised why she seemed so happy to feed me, but I suppose it was because I would eat as she and her husband did. Peter would sit at the opposite side of the table and skewer the cartoonish chicken his mother had drawn him; his squat, sketched fork resting well in his hand despite its scratchy outline.
From time to time, we’d plead until I were allowed stay the night, parents agreeing with the sort of half-hearted reluctance that children can sense. His father would check our heartbeats with an old stethoscope, he being a doctor. He would press the cold of it against my skin and take a note while he listened to my heartbeat, listing off the various ups-and-downs of blood pressure, diet and healthy lifestyle. All the while, Pete would look on, marvelling.
It’s only in retrospect that I recognise the uncomfortable air about the place, the feeling of satisfaction. I imagine Pete didn’t quite put it together himself until later. His father might just have felt powerless in the face of anything wrong with his son, with no heartbeat to check and no SCARLET RED blood to pressure – the idea of a flesh-and-blood boy must have seemed straightforward.
The one time I saw his father forced to minister to him was one rainy afternoon, when the two of us had taken it upon ourselves to dig around in their overcrowded garage. There were areas so tightly cramped that I couldn’t follow Pete into them; from these he would emerge, smeared with engine oil and dust, to show off the treasure’s he’d unearthed.
He fell from between an old lawnmower and a disused chest of drawers, his arms wrapped around two bulky plastic cartons. As he turned to face me, for a moment almost vanishing as he turned sideways to me, the cartons hovering oddly at about chest height.
As he turned, one food caught in the mower’s length of cable, he fell to a one knee in an awkward genuflection, spilling a glass or so worth of petrol-smelling fluid from the cartons across his chest. I moved to help him up from his fall, but where I gripped his hand it slipped and melted from my own, I looked down at it, sickened by the feeling, and found it smeared and spattered with his MEDIUM FLESH and the HELIO TURQUOISE of his dissolving sleeve.
I kicked the cartons away from him, spilling more of the stuff, but at least away from him, and ran to get his father. When we returned, he had already extricated himself, but had left a trail of molten pastels across the floor to the wall against which he sat slumped. His father fell to his knees, his jeans quickly soaking up the outermost droplets of the puddle of turpentine, and swept his practically weightless son up in his arms.
Pete’s head listed as his father dragged him to the kitchen and laid him out along the table, the white of his shirt already stained by both sweat and the colours his son was haemorrhaging. He wrapped a towel around his left hand and plucked up the edge of the tablecloth with his right, without saying a word, he was dabbing and staunching, MEDIUM FLESH and the CAPUT MORTUUM of his son’s hair staining his fingers and, where he’d scratched at his cheeks as he worked.
“Get me the blue first aid kit from below the sink?”
I reached the sink at a sprint and plucked from it a child’s lunchbox with a square of lined paper on top, broad and scribbled RED-VIOLET cross filled emblazoned on it, laminated by the yellowing tape. When I handed it to him, he slammed it down on the table top with such force that it sprung open, spilling out a raft of worn and stubby wax crayons.
His father, having dabbed and rubbed and smeared his way to staunching up the turps, then proceeded to lovingly colour in the missing details of the now ragged and unconscious Peter the pastel boy.
He filled out his face with the MEDIUM FLESH, and renewed his eyes their rims of COBALT BLUE. He smudged a little BLACK into the roots of his hair with the flat of one broad thumb and sighed to himself in relief and satisfaction.
As I gathered up the few broken crayons that had rolled along the table, he planted a hand on my shoulder and smiled, this man whose son was a drawing.
