David and I met on the tail end of the ecstasy revolution. Dancing up to me in the Spacehopper (the underground club in Birmingham back then, in the mid-nineties), he offered me a drink from his bottle of Evian.
     "Love the dress. It's such a great texture, all fluffy and soft. What's it made of?"
     In reality it was neither fluffy nor soft; just spongy nylon that scratched my skin, but to David's e'd up eyes it could have been mohair. The dress was brand new, UV yellow, and I knew I looked Hot. I was sweltering in it though, despite the water I poured down my throat and the regular breaks I took, sitting on the stairs by one of the few open windows.
     That first night we shared a taxi home; David lived five minutes from me. It seemed natural to invite him in and drink tea, listening to ambient tunes while outside the sun came up and the birds started singing. We soon began to look out for each other on a Saturday night; from there it was a small step into friendship.
     E's a funny drug. It makes you love everyone, but while you're on it you don't want to make love. A drug laced with irony. I was always at my most attractive when I was on the stuff, but never interested.
     I loved the scene, not just for the music; though once it got inside your blood it made your heart beat to its rhythm, and you couldn't stop dancing. It was a revisited adolescence for me, without the angst and acne. I was pushing thirty, but there it didn't matter. There were people far older than me. And everyone was friendly. In the toilets, women would chat as they touched up their make-up. For once we weren't in competition, we were just out to have a good time.
     "I love your piercing," a girl of twenty with neon plaits and a Day-Glo sari told me. It was a pink UV cone almost an inch long, jutting out from my navel. "Had my tongue done last month. It swelled up so much I couldn't eat properly, let alone give a blow job."
     I lived for the weekends, but midweek each day was a matter of survival. I'd just about hold it together at the shop where I worked, but the evenings would find me hunched on the floor, without the energy even to cry. Then David started turning up at my door. At last there was someone who understood my life, with its Saturday night highs and midweek blues.
     "How do you feel today?"
     "Grey."
     "A warm browny grey?"
     "No. A kind of washed up grey. The kind of grey that makes you think of nothing."
     "You don't look like nothing – you look great."
     I laughed. I was in my dressing gown, just out of the bath, my hair wet. I looked a mess. But it made me wonder about David. What did he want, exactly?
     "David thinks you're a babe," my friend Amber told me.
     "I don't think so. We're friends."
     "Oh yeah. He told Rob last week in the pub. I heard him." We were in the greasy spoon over the road from her flat; she was watching me but I wasn't inclined to answer. I'd had a run of failed relationships. There were no good men left when you got to my age. For Amber, at twenty-four, life was full of promise. I so wanted to be loved, but I was scared of losing a friend.
     "Honestly, Rachel. Haven't you noticed the way he looks at you? Take a chance, for once."
     The next time I saw David didn't count because the e kicked in before I had time to feel embarrassed. "You're looking beautiful," was more statement of fact, than flirtation. I felt beautiful – we all did on Saturday nights. It was when he made his Tuesday night visit that I remembered Amber's advice. He thinks I'm a babe, I told myself as I made us a cup of tea, while in the other room David rolled a joint. Before long we were cuddled up together on the sofa, with David unplaiting my hair. He loved my hair; he was always untying it so he could run his fingers through it.
     "What colour do you feel?"
     "I feel light blue," he said.
     "Like the sky at dawn, when you know it's going to be a good day, but it isn't yet?"
     "That's the one. How about you?"
     "I feel brown, like shit." Even the thought of David thinking I was a babe wasn't enough to scupper this mid-week low.
     "Brown's just a mixture of red and orange and green. All you've got to do is separate them out."
     "But how?"
     "Like this."
     And he began to kiss me.
     The sex was another thing. He used to talk to me; the kind of talk your mother wouldn't approve of. No one had ever talked to me before, except for "I love you" and "Did you come?" His talk was fierce, shocking, and it made me laugh. He wanted me to talk back, but I was shy. Since that first time I've learned to talk so well in bed that sometimes I even shock myself.
    A month later we'd planned a trip away to Dublin. Not telling our friends just added to the excitement. It was our secret.
     "How do you feel?" I asked him the night before we left.
     "Purple."
     "A kind of dark angry purple, like when you're stressed out, worrying you might miss the ferry? Or mellow mauve, where you're just looking forward to having a great time?"
     "Neither."
     "What then?" I wanted him to ask how I felt so I could tell him, I felt pink with the first flush of falling in love.
     He pulled me onto the floor, and lay on top of me, whispering in my ear.
     "The kind of purple when you feel so horny you just can't wait another second."
     We checked into the hotel as Mr Smith and Ms Jones, letting the laughter at our feeble joke explode as the lift doors closed behind us.
     "Don't leave any valuables in your room," the manager warned us on our way out.
    "Sometimes the kids from the estate get in through an open window."
    Dublin was a strange city, full of contrasts and opposites. We stayed in the city centre, in a row of high-fronted Victorian houses. Just around the corner it was completely different. Run down tenements, where the children playing on the street had dirty faces and the sad smiles of empty futures. We hit the city centre, turning our backs on the poverty and grime. We walked down Grafton Street, where there were buskers who could actually hit the notes. We stopped and listened for a while, dropping a few coins into the hat.
     Later, upstairs by the open windows of a café‚ drinking Earl Grey tea above the hustle of the street, David sat back and fleshed out one of his ecstasy theories. "We could start our own festival. We'd have to charge entrance, to put on some Class A bands, but everything else would be free."
     "I'd bring a few tins of baked beans, a festival goer's must have," I said.
     "As long as someone else remembers the tin opener. … There'd only be one rule."
     "No, there'd be two. The first one is that everyone has to bring something to share."
     "Like your beans. The second one is that all tents would have tassels, or velvet tusks sewn on."
     "We could relax that rule for Day-Glo tents."
     "Or ones with piercings." Our chairs scraped across the pitted wooden floor as we laughed. Around us, people turned and stared, but we didn't care. We were happy.
     Our second day was nearly over and we'd spent it most of it drinking. We'd been on a pub-crawl, ending up at one of those old-fashioned Dublin pubs, painted red inside and full of dark wood. I loved the way the bar was partitioned off with glass panels. And there were people wanting to collar you for a conversation. It was our idea of heaven.
     "How long have you two lovebirds been married?" a man in a brown overcoat asked. We laughed for five minutes, but only when the old boy had left. We got chatting to the landlord, in the lull between lunchtime and the evening crush. "So, where are you from?"
     We told him the story of our lives, laced with our favourite colours.
     "Norwich just made me blue, so I came to Birmingham about five years ago. The traffic's awful though, all those people going through red lights."
     "And what do you do for a living?" I told him I was a chef, making pale pink birthday cakes, and David said he was photographer, specialising in black and whites. It wasn't that working in a shop or on a building site was embarrassing, more that we enjoyed inventing other lives and personalities for each other. The barman found it as amusing as we did. "Thanks a million for the chat. You've cheered up a quiet half hour," he told us as we left.
     Back at the hotel we lay on the bed, stupefied from sunshine and the Guinness. David was trying to read the guidebook to find us somewhere to eat that night, and sorting out his money. I was cleaning my nails with a camping knife that I'd found in my rucksack, left over from a weekend in the country. I stretched out on the pink nylon bedspread, enjoying doing nothing in particular, with David by my side.
     "What colour do you feel?"
     "I feel ochre."
     I had no idea how ochre felt. "Tired?"
     "Yes. Tired of this. I think we should go back to being friends. We made a big mistake when we slept together."
     I was dizzy from the alcohol. At first I didn't understand; it had come out of nowhere. I remember everything spinning round, as I tried to grab onto something that would stop me feeling I'd been dropped from a great height.
     "But why?"
     "It makes me feel grey. And I never used to feel grey when I was with you. How does it make you feel?"
     I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Pink, like falling in love. It was ridiculous. "I don't know. It's not a colour – it makes me feel good. That's all."
     "But I'm not happy with it. You should never have…" David glanced at the knife I was still holding, then up at my face. I put the knife down and our eyes met.
     "I thought you were going to stab me, just for a moment." He gave a nervous laugh. "It made me feel quite yellow for a while."
     "I thought about it." I watched, as his face tensed. I couldn't help him out. I didn't even want to.
     I thought it was pink, but all along it was grey.
     I walked out without a word, leaving him lying on the bed on that silly nylon bedspread, still shocked and open-mouthed.
     Dublin's a good place for a break up. It's hard to be sad and lonely when there's a whole city full of people ready to be your friend. I wandered along by the Liffey, past the Guinness factory with its musty barley smell.
     "It's a grand day for a walk," a man, not much older than me, carrying his baby girl on his shoulders, called out as he strolled past.
     I must have walked for hours, ending up back in Grafton Street. I sat drinking coffee, drowning in sunlight that filtered in, though I was as far from those wide-open windows as I could get. Listening to the laughter in the street below. Wondering what would happen next. I already missed our weekend highs, even the mid week lows – at least they were our lows. When we faced them together the world had seemed less grey. For me at least. There was no going back. Nothing to go back for. I took the next boat home.
     "How's things with David?" Amber asked. I'd told no one about David and me, but you couldn't keep a thing like that from Amber.
     "It didn't work out."
     It took a while for the news to filter through. We were in the pub, just before closing, though we always stayed back for the lock-in on a Friday night.
     "Did you hear about David?" I didn't say a word. I felt my face change slowly. I let myself crumple onto the floor. My expression was grey; the sort of grey when you can't believe what's being said to you is true. The sort of grey David made me feel that day.
     "The police think it must have been a robbery gone wrong. They told his mum there'd been a few break-ins at the hotel."
     They'd never catch those thieves. At least I hoped they wouldn't hold those poor children responsible. While Amber told me what little she knew I let myself remember.
     "I thought you were going to stab me," he'd said that day.
     "I thought about it."
     I put the knife down. And we laughed, though I didn't much feel like laughing. It still wasn't too late to save something of our friendship, and I so wanted to try. But that moment, when I was green with hope, didn't last long.
     "I don't want to do this again," he said. "We made a mistake when we slept together. I don't normally do casual sex, and I don't want to do it any more."
     I thought it was pink, but all along it was grey. The kind of grey that makes you think it's silver, but when you take a closer look there's nothing more than a thick layer of dust.
     I stabbed and stabbed but I just couldn't find his heart. Perhaps it too, had turned to dust.



About the author:
Debra Broughton is British and lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where she runs the website of a global environmental organisation. Her short stories have been published on-line and in print at Buzzwords and QWF, among others. She is a recipient of a 2004 Momaya Award and has recently completed a novel based on her travels in India.

More information about Debra can be found on her website: www.debrabroughton.com

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