The Art of Painting A Memory

My uncle George’s voice is my favourite colour: a smooth velvet purple.

Unfortunately, my voice was a grungy green for George, which he was always at pains to remind me if I talked too much.

“If I wanted to see this much green, I’d go to a rainforest,” he was very fond of saying.

We both have synaesthesia, which is where our senses get cross-wired and one sense triggers another. When I hear a sound, there’s always a specific colour attached to it. George is the same, but our colours are never associated with the same sound. A duck’s quack is a greeny shade of blue for me, but George hears a browny-purple. Keys jangling are a sharp red for me, bright orange for George. Of course, there’s only ever one right answer. I’m right, and George gets sympathy points for being an old fart, but he’s wrong.

We were sitting on a hill on George’s farm, watching the stars on a lovely summer night. There weren’t many, as dark storm clouds were building up. But there were a few, which was about the only bright thing I could focus on. George would be heading into the city tomorrow and going under surgery the day after to remove the tumour in his brain. He’s cheerfully encouraged his doctors to also cut out memories of his ex-wife and to fill the space with musical prowess. I’ve added that if they can stop him eating raw garlic, that would also be greatly appreciated. But George has gone to great lengths to make sure the doctors leave in his ‘superpowers’: his hilarious wit and colourful music. I didn’t think his synaesthesia would ever be at risk, but I know why he’s anxious. If I lost it myself, I wouldn’t know how to cope.

We had brought some snacks out, and were relaxing in the night air, painting memories with the sound of our voices. We had lapsed into silence for the moment, just absorbing the atmosphere. It was a nice night. Even though a storm was coming, it seemed a while away. As I scanned the horizon, I noticed a barn owl on a fence post, silhouetted against the field. I pointed to it.

“Did you know barn owls don’t hoot?” I said, staring at the owl whilst I chewed absent-mindedly on beef jerky. “They screech neon yellow. It’s quite a pretty colour in the night.”

As if on cue, the barn owl took off with a screech. George turned to face me.

“Yellow? That’s pink.”

I feigned concern.

“Pink? George mate, that brain tumour is getting worse, do you think your surgeon would sneak you in tonight?”

I smiled as George laughed a deep flowing purple. We settled back into a comfortable silence, watching the stars, interspersed with the reddish chirps of crickets.

“I wonder why they don’t hoot…” George murmured after a while. “They deserve a nice blue hoot.”

I looked at my uncle, sitting there, a slight grimace on his face as he contemplated the vocal cords of a barn owl. He had a tempered expression now, his eyes focused far into the distance. Blue was his favourite colour, and the farm was his favourite canvas. It was a soundscape filled with squawks and rustles and chirps that he always enjoyed. Though wouldn’t dare mention it, I suspected that this was the last time George would be on the farm. The combination of medical bills, moving to the city for treatment, and his age…the farm would be sold soon, and barring a spontaneous remission, it would be sold before George had finished treatment or survived the tumour.

And it seemed a waste to sit on a hill and whinge about barn owls. As lovely as it was, there weren’t enough sounds to make it memorable.

“Do you wanna go for a walk?” I asked George. My uncle turned to me.

“It’s gonna be dark soon!” he said in an all-too-familiar sarcasm. We could barely see out each other’s faces in the dark night.

“Come on, let’s go to the creek,” I persisted. “We’ll listen to the frogs and the water.”

I was starting to wish I’d paid more attention to George’s sound-colours, and not simply bantered with him about them. A memory of a zoo trip on a rainy day and a trip to the frog-house, and George’s joke about a lovely blue day, made me suspect a frog croak was blue for him. Or maybe it was just an owl’s hoot…

“Oh wow!” George exclaimed.

“What?” I straightened in my chair and saw George inspecting his leg. “What is it?”

“Oh, I think my cancer has just flooded my legs, I don’t think I’d be able to walk anymore,” George said, and then looked at me with a grin.

I feel back into my chair. “You cheeky bastard,” I muttered.

I was a little at loss as to why he was so reluctant. It seemed to me a nice way to spend the night before months of uncertainty and hospital air. A good final memory of the farm. But George was having none of it, and I was surprised at how much that annoyed me. I was beginning to realise that tonight wasn’t just for George. This wasn’t going to be fun or easy for me. If the surgery wasn’t successful, or the cancer didn’t go into remission, I was going to spend months in garish hospital wards watching my uncle slowly die, the beeping of equipment adding sickly pinks and yellows to an already ugly place. I didn’t want any of it. This was going to fucking suck and I couldn’t even have the last decent night in the foreseeable future to be a memorable one.

I took a breath. I was being selfish. This wasn’t about me.

Except it was. It wasn’t just about me, I knew that, but it was part of my story. And I wanted it to start on a bright note. This was the farm I grew up on, the farm I spent weeks of my summer holidays on, the farm I learned to drive and shoot and catch fish and weave flower-crowns for my sisters. I wanted to explore it at night one last time.

“Well I’m going to go for a walk anyway,” I said curtly. I stood up. “I’ll head down to the creek.”

“Alright mate, don’t be out too late. You got your phone?”

“Yep.”

It was an efficient and emotionless conversation that gave no pretences that either of us were very pleased with the other.

I made my way down the hill, not even bothering to turn on my phone torchlight. Stomping downhill seemed to only incense me, and by the time I reached the edge of the forest, I wanted to break something. So I did. I threw a stick at a tree. And then I threw another one. I marched through the forest, picking up another stick and using it like a blunt machete to hack through branches and the vines. Fuck cancer, fuck loving someone with cancer. Fuck it all.

I knew the creek would settle me. Water sounded of limey-green, which was an eternal annoyance of mine. It should be blue, not stupid green. It didn’t feel fair. But the sounds were calming, and I often went there as a kid. It would have good memories.

I kept going. The creek wasn’t far, but I was stubbornly avoiding the path and that meant I wasn’t very efficient in my journey. Which turned out to be a good thing, as it kept me in the moment which slowed my heartrate down and soon my blood pressure returned to something a bit more reasonable. The heat of the day had almost entirely gone, and the cool breeze of a brewing storm fluttered across my skin. I looked up at the sky through the trees – almost all the stars were gone now, hidden behind dark clouds. The birds would be seeking shelter now. I thought back to the barn owl, and its screech. It made me think of a pterodactyl, flying high above Jurassic forests.

I stopped, leaning against a tree to catch my breath. Somehow, I’d ended back to the path, so I didn’t need my stick anymore. I tossed it aside and took a deep breath. I didn’t blame George, of course. The future was undoubtably scarier for him than it was for me. And he had much more on his mind than making it a perfect experience for me. It was just… a frustrating situation.

I dwelled on this for thought for a while, leaning against the tree and zoning out in the night air. I’m sure the creek was close, but the appeal of going to it alone wasn’t very strong now I had calmed down a bit.

I was about to turn back when I heard a reddish rustle behind me and for a second, I forgot I was in the real world. My heart thumped in my chest and I suddenly had a very real fear I would be pounced upon by a dinosaur.

I twisted, expecting an animal to tear me to shreds. Instead, I saw a very George-looking shape.

“Roar!” He growled, although he looked more like a stoned panda than anything remotely scary. That made me feel a bit foolish.

“Hey there,” I said with a smile.

“Sorry about before…all this upcoming stuff is making me a bit grumpy,” he said. I nodded. He knew I understood. I opened my mouth to apologise myself, but George was already pulling out a piece of paper.

“I found this at the house this morning. I was gonna swing by here tomorrow before I left, but I thought since you’re already out here, now might be a better time to finally dig it up. Before the storm hits.”

I stepped forward to have a look at the paper George was holding. It was tricky to see in the dark, but it looked like a map.

“I buried some treasure here the first day I bought the property to dig up on my last day here.”

Ah.

George sensed my surprise.

“We sold the farm last week. With Val’s hips and a lump of Satan in my brain, and our ripening…maturity, it is time to move to the city. And there’s better pizza too I hear.”

I’m not sure what the next feeling that washed over me was. It felt a bit like sad relief, mixed with nostalgia and anxiety and hope. The combination of adrenaline and peace was very difficult to make sense of. It just felt so messy. I knew the farm was going to be sold, and wanted George to make this decision, and yet it was still a bit too soon.

“What’s the treasure?” I asked, still trying to process.

“Photos,” George said. “Maybe someone dug it up and added some gold in there too, but to be strictly accurate it’s more time capsule than treasure.”

“Alright, so where is it?”

George held up his phone torch over the map, and I was able to see his scrabbly drawn map properly. It had a few landmarks on it, but it was difficult to know where we were in relation to it, or where the treasure was. It seemed to be somewhere near the creek.

“I think you were heading near it anyway,” George said quietly. He looked at me with a soft, compassionate smile. It was a rare admission of vulnerability from my uncle, and it was everything I needed right now.

“Let’s go then,” I said. “It’s not too far.”

It wasn’t. Only a few minutes of us navigating through the trees and the lime-green trickle of water began penetrating my senses.

Once we could hear the water, it wasn’t long before we were standing on the edge of the creek. Rocks dominated the creek – big boulders shaped the terrain, with smaller rocks guiding the water over the creek bed’s smooth pebbles. The result was a trickle of water, punctuated by deeper tones as the creek deepened. Crickets and frogs were chirping all different shades of reds, and the gentle pre-storm breeze rustled turquoise through the trees. It was a wonderful canvas of vibrant colours, and both George and I stood there, absorbing it all. I hadn’t even noticed we had turned our phone lights off. The air was cool and fresh, and the hospital felt like a million miles away.

We could have spent all night there. And for a moment, it felt like we would, but George’s gentle voice eventually broke the spell, splashing a purple over the greens and maroons.

“I think it’s over there, under the tree.”

I opened my eyes to see him pointing to an old, twisted tree on the opposite bank. The clouds were pretty thick now, but the creek was in a bit of clearing and our eyes were now adjusted to what little moonlight was remaining. The tree in question was a small but hardy tree, with thick, craggly bark. It reminded me of the wood that a witch might use for her broomstick. I had seen it maybe a thousand times, playing in the creek over the years. It had never occurred to me that something might be buried underneath it.

As a kid, I loved crossing of the creek. It had felt like climbing Mt Everest and might have taken half an hour or more, especially when I was very young. Now, in the dismal world of my early twenties, it was a lot less exciting. The boulders were large, dry and grippy, and most of them were reasonably flat and it was not trouble getting across. Oddly, it felt like closure.

We reached the tree and George made a beeline for a particularly convoluted root, hidden behind the trunk that wrapped behind a rock. He dug around for a moment before calling out to me:

“Can I get some light here?”

I scurried over to where George was crouched and shone my phone torch on his hands. There was a dull glimmer of a square metal tin, that was immediately punctuated by the sharp glimmer of drop of water.

“Eugh, no need to dribble!” George exclaimed, turning around to look up at me. But my mouth was nowhere near him, and I think he knew that. He grinned, and I grinned back.

“Looks like the rain’s coming,” he said. He adjusted his feet to get better leverage and yanked the tin free. He handed it back to me and I clutched the tin under my arm as George stood up.

“Let’s get back to the house,” he said. “There’s some stories in there, and I think you’ll enjoy them.”

Another raindrop plopped onto the lid, as I brushed the dirt off the tin. I smiled to myself. It was an old biscuit container, because why wouldn’t it be?

We scrambled back over the rocks as the rain got heavier. I passed the tin to George and we both stood in front of the creek for a moment, as raindrops added a new colour to the existing canvas. This would be the last time here, and we wanted to soak it in as much as possible. The moonlight, the colours and sounds, and the air, with gentle raindrops piercing it all… this moment would be etched in my memory for a long, long time.

Eventually the rain got a little too heavy, and I took the lead, phone-torch in hand, as we made our way back to the house. We might have made it three-quarters of the way before the storm broke, and the rain began bucketing down. All semblance of being adults grieving the end of an era was out the window as we ran through the rain, laughing like little children. We broke free of the forest and into the grassy field behind the house, and George stopped and stared up to the rainy sky, eyes closed, tightly grasping his tin of photos.

Maroon thunder rumbled in the distance as I slowed down, panting.

“WOOOHOOOOOOO!” George shouted; arms outstretched now. I grinned, and couldn’t help hooting with him. Maybe a tear or two joined the raindrops running down my face as well. George deserved this. I did as well.

The moments sort of slid together after that. We were out in the rain until it was too cold, and then we were undercover, drying ourselves with towels. Then we were grabbing a beer and settling down on the balcony. George was opening the tin and unwrapping the plastic protecting the photos. And then I was listening to George as he told me the story behind each photo – photos of the house, of the old barn, of the attempts at a swimming pool, of the treehouse that got blown down in a storm. He gently weaved anecdotes together from his time on the farm as I sat and listened. Listened to the velvet purple of George’s voice. Listened to the rustling of the photos and George’s excited tapping of the wood to punctuate his stories. Listened to the rain sounded of ruby pink on the tin roof, interspersed with the maroon of thunder. In any other circumstance, it would have been a random assortment of dull colours, but these deep, rich hues felt warm and comfortable.

I closed my eyes and let them envelop me like a blanket.