The colour of music

Short Story
THERE is this silk texture in the sound of the guitar and the piano that I am still trying to explain to myself. It’s like the fabric of the blue sky. So blue yet black when you get closer. Darkness brings the light of imagination. It can’t be explained in words or drawn. I don’t know; but I feel full when I hear symphonies in concordance.
The jingles of composure, the gestures of gratitude to the instrument, the gyrations of the listeners, the garrulity of the novice, the guffaws of the apprentice, the gullibility of the jay walker and the slow nods of the tipsy; feet stamping in synch; fingers drumming the wooden table.

Let them say music is the heartbeat of life; the euphoric injection to the downcast. This is just one of those days when I want to sing psalms or just bop to soft drumming and string chimes pushing the eardrum. Music plays along in my spirit without a choirmaster; when I flee to the solicitude of peace in this suburbia park. The green is raw. I like it here. There are many dreamers like ants who wish to carry a gentle giant to their queen for a feast. The owls gawking in the space like knitting grandmothers tired of chasing after the flakes and chaff in the windy lyrics of men with white beards. Many birds whistling with a coo like herd-boys from the east.

“Tell me, what’s the colour of music?” That’s why I don’t like bringing my niece along to the park. She’s imbecile. Childish. She likes asking what I know not. Questions that have made philosophers bald. I can’t tell her that. I don’t have a clue and an ego that claims to know everything. I am not like writers who go round the point to show their genius of weaving words. I am but an orator. Verbose. Eloquent but timid. I shook my head and hummed.

“That will need time,” the answer works at times; to kill the expectation in the child. She has not reached the age to know the metaphors that describe sweetness and success. She is still tender. How can I tell those enigmatic things to her in plain infantry language?

“Is it blue like the sky? Does it fade in the night to black? Does it have stars; the moon and spirits? Is music a spirit?” She talks like an adult. She recently learnt the colours of the spectrum. Her teacher is punishing me by teaching her about the world. She often hears me reciting my lines to the pieces that I have to utter before great man and steals the quotes that make me giddy and important. My niece is a thief of words she paints them in the tenderness of her age so that I don’t recognise them. Shrewd. I am proud of her yet baffled by her endeavour to challenge the gracious spectrum and explain it in music.

“Or is music yellow like the sun? Warm in winter, hot in autumn? Necessary to the green you lie on yet periodic. Is music like the sunflower that has a smile? Does it have seeds that can be planted to grow without being watered?” she is still a child. The sun is not yellow. She is looking at it through her primary school sunglasses that fool the young and weak-hearted. If she wasn’t my niece I would tell her to remove her shades so that she could see the true colour of the sun. It’s Blatant. Blazing with an unforgiving stare. Bright and blinding. What drove her to ask the question anyway? Is it the cooing birds? Holiday work? Even if I tell her what I know, she didn’t bring her notebook to jot down notes lifted from my manuscripts of Beethoven. She says her memory is photographic. She’s proud. Her mother showers her with compliments. I don’t believe that. Even when I was her age I could recite the times table without writing the figures in my hand. She thinks she’s one of those special kids that tell adults the way of life. Well I am not going to take that. Not today.

“Maybe it’s red like blood. Flowing out of the pulse stealing the sound of the heartbeat? What does red stand for? Danger?” she talks and laughs herself breathless. Child.

“My teacher says we should stop when the robot is red?” Childish tales. I like her though; she adds humour to my dull days. She has her own unique gift that I cherish. She is going to be a storyteller. She has this captivating way of speaking to people.

“Did you see that house where they were singing sad songs? Was the red cloth outside a sign of the music? Were they saying we are singing therefore stop don’t come in.” My niece talks too much. She talks herself to sleep at times. She talks herself slim, hoarse and pale.

“I think its maroon and grey. Do you know they force us to wear that ugly uniform at school during prize giving and I noticed when we wear it we sing so well or maybe the others who can’t sing hide behind my beautiful voice? Do you want me to sing for you?” How do you tell a seven-year-old that she has pride? I don’t want to hear the song.

“For free!!” I asked in shock. Her parents taught her that she should never sell her talent for free.
“Maybe it’s purple. Royal. It’s my favourite colour you know it matches with my . . .”

“No don’t show me” she thinks her breasts will grow overnight. She is wearing a toddler’s bra; what has happened to this generation.
“Close your eyes!!” She has this joy that I can’t understand and where she gets her ideas believe you me I don’t know. Let the children come to me.

“Just close them and listen can you hear that? Stand up hold my hand don’t let go. Walk” She is leading me to where the guitar and the piano are playing.

“Maybe music is black. I think it’s a prison,” she squeezed my hand. Who has been telling her all this?
“Camellia, who told you that,” I opened my eyes a bit. She noticed I was bruised by her last statement.

“Close your eyes please. Can you hear that?” I could. There were applause and shouts. Where had she taken me?
“What if I told you your eyes will never open again would you want to know the colour of music?” So this is why she wanted to know its colour.

“I would?” Children utter some of the craziest things.
“He plays and they told him the wrong colour about his music. He says he trusts me because I am a child and I will tell him the truth.” I don’t get it. She wandered off when I was sleeping and sang with they that are blind and then asked her the colour of her words.

“Do you think that they would open Jim’s eyes if he soothes them by singing what he sees in the world of imagination?” I opened my eyes. There were blind men playing flagged by men and women applauding.

“No; maybe,” I was stammering.
“Jim told me that I should be his eyes” she found a job that doesn’t pay.

“I refused and told him you can open blind eyes so that he can see for himself. I can’t work for him because I have to do my homework” by you she was referring to me. The music stopped and they gazed towards us. I noticed many who had come to this park had many disabilities but they could beg so well with music. I whispered in her ear.

“We have to go home?” I had forgotten sense and reason. If I answered I was going to lie. So I trotted back dejected hand in hand with Camellia. Maybe music is like water, colourless in its purity, falling like raindrops soothing and refreshing, music is the life that makes us jiggle and jive to the rhythm of the world.