Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Once upon a time there was a woman who became a mother. It didn’t happen overnight. Obviously. It started over night but then took 9 months to come to fruition. After nine months she had a round wrinkly little thing that could do nothing but required everything. And the mother wrung the best bits out of the grey world that surrounded her to try and grow and stretch and toughen up this little beast. The sky where they lived was never visible. It was always cloaked in a dirty grimy blanket of grey, but she would leave the kid to roll around in the tiny outdoor space they had, to soak up whatever withered traces of sunshine it could.
Every day, she would strap the child to her front and hug it to her chest like a hot water bottle. They would walk through narrow industrial streets, with gritty gutters and wrappers collecting in the corners and alleys. They would walk to the baby girl’s childcare centre, which was full of bright light and primary colours. Then the mother would go and spend hours cutting carrots into items of intricate garnish for high end catering events.
One day, stepping across the threshold from the coarse and grinding city, into the smooth and shiny reflections and colour of the child care centre, the mother was hit by the contrast in a way she had never experienced before. She couldn’t leave the girl there, where there was no chance of skinned knees from angry gravel or scratches from misjudging a rough corner.
Because of that, she decided to take her child with her, back out into the grey, and try to find the real colour and softness and grit and texture that she knew was out there somewhere in the world. They started small. One bean, sitting in some rubbishy dirt in a mug on their kitchen counter, sent up two small leaves at the top of a tender stalk.
And, because of that, a little colour started to leach into their life. And the child soaked it up. They collected snippets of coloured wool and painted patches of garish wall. They grew tall sunflowers with awkwardly heavy heads and mixed colours that were against the rules. The child began to speak, and began to point out the snatches of colour that might otherwise have disappeared into the overwhelming grey of the sky and heavy cogs of the growling industrial city where they lived.
Until finally, the child had absorbed all that there was to provide light and life in that city. She had grown from a round, wobbly small thing, into an almost adult. What colour they could collect from they streets around their little flat, she had harvested, accumulated, carried in and arranged on the shelves and on the walls. And it was time for her to go. There was nothing left for her to feed and grow from. When she left her mother, and left the city, the colour and the variety and the possibilities of the rest of the world swallowed her up. Occasionally notes and pictures find their way back to her mother, little snippets of the countries she had worked her way through or the people she had met. Biology students in Guatemala, theatre directors in New York, orangutan rehabilitators in Borneo.
Her mother tried to be glad for the colour and life her daughter was moving through, but all she thought was “Oh my god I miss you”.