Gray matters

An ordinary-seeming man walks home, unnoticed

It is drizzling. Gray, dressed in his mid-grey work suit and dark grey overcoat, walks steadily home along a drab street of terraced houses. His head is down, his body hunched in a vain attempt to minimise the dampening effect of the moisture on body, mind and spirit. He carries no umbrella or brief case, but only an orange plastic carrier bag containing his supper for the next few days. He has just purchased it from the mini supermarket by the Tube station.

The red brick facades are grimed with the soot of ancient coal fires and oiled by the exhausts of countless second-hand cars. In the ghostly grey-green light emanating from the sparsely-spaced street lamps, they appear colourless. Except for one halfway along which has been painted in bright red and white candy stripes by its owner, Gray’s next-door neighbour, who he has never met. It almost seems luminous; it has a street light in front of it.

Three girls, arm in arm, straddle the pavement as they clatter hurriedly on high heels towards him. They are heading, no doubt, for the same Tube station from which he has come, and are going to some club in Town. Gray has been working late. The girls all wear variations on the theme of little black numbers with high hems, so tight as to turn walking into tottering. Their voices are shrill and constant, the echoes bouncing off the houses on either side of the street.   

At a distance, their black dresses merge with the shadows while their pale faces, arms and legs reflect the dim light. They project an image of disembodied limbs and heads wobbling unsteadily like alien creatures unused to earthling gravity. Why, Gray wonders, when their intention is clearly to attract male attention, do they choose black when they could wear any (or even all) the colours of the rainbow? Black plus white equals grey. Melting into the crowd. No-one likes to be different.

It is clear that they do not intend to give way. Perhaps they can’t; they depend on each other’s physical support to remain upright on their heels. He steps into the gutter. The drain has blocked and water runs over and into his polished black shoes. A passing car hoots and showers him with spray. At least he shielded the girls’ unspotted legs from being splattered with a grimy solution of rubber and oil. They don’t thank him for his gallantry. They don’t even notice him. No one does. Gray by name, grey by nature.

Grey is not a colour but a shade. A shade can be a shadow, in the borderland between light and dark. Never the subject of interest. Gray is a number on the street, identified by his house but not his name.

Back on the pavement, a few steps later he crosses a side street. On the corner is the Fox and Trumpet. It is one of the few remaining traditional East End pubs. It has glossy green tiles between the ground and the window sills, an ancient remedy to keep the wall clean and unstained from the close attentions of dogs and drunks. The drizzle saves the landlord having to pay someone to wash it.

Gray has never been inside. He wonders if it still has sawdust on the floor. The wet concrete paving outside glistens as pools of pale light fall on it from the windows. Sounds of rabid arguments and raucous laughter, of chinking glasses and scraping chairs, seep into the chill night air. They cover the cracks in ephemeral relationships with an illusion of fraternity along a street of pale anonymity.

Maybe under cover of darkness foxes do prowl around the bins parked in tiny front yards, where weeds and self-seeded buddleias defy broken concrete. Nature abhors an urban desert. But the trumpets which heralded the hunt and drew the community together in open air festivities when the street was once a rural hamlet have long since been replaced by sports commentators blaring banalities from distant arenas through the Fox and Trumpet’s big screen.  

Tonight, there are no foxes. But a tortoiseshell cat slinks along the street on the opposite side. Gray knows it’s tortoiseshell because it’s often there, but at night it is camouflaged, a mere shadow on the monochrome wall. Another alien shape, invoking fear in the hearts of strangers who notice the movement but cannot discern its cause.

            Gray reaches his plain front door next to the candy striped house and dissolves like a wraith inside. He takes off his dark grey overcoat and shakes off the drops of water. He hangs it on a hook by the door, next to the grey-green waterproof coat he wears on his weekend bird-watching trips. He runs upstairs – he is not young but neither is he unfit; his daily walk to the Tube, and from it to the office, keeps him trim. He removes his mid-grey work suit, and hangs it carefully behind the bedroom door to air, ready for tomorrow. He finds light blue chinos and a purple and green patterned sweater to replace it as insulation against the cold of the evening.

            Downstairs, he closes the bright orange and blue patterned curtains. He lights the gas fire and watches as its artificial coals slowly begin to glow first red, then orange, and finally yellow going on white. Blue and yellow flames leap through the gaps. It sends as much heat up the chimney as into the room, but the flames create an illusion of warmth.

He switches on the wall lights that illuminate his modest collection of modern art. He likes the abstract designs and bright colours. He will often sit and contemplate them in the evening. It’s amazing what you can see in them, what thoughts they generate, if you invest time in them. Familiarity breeds contemplation. Shapes evoke images. Like shadows, only less fearsome and more enlightening.

            He unpacks his orange carrier bag and puts away its contents. He eats substantially in the office canteen at lunchtime so an evening snack is all he requires on weeknights. He puts a jazz CD into the player while he makes a sandwich and boils the kettle. The flames in the fireplace seem to dance to the improvised beat of the music. He eats leisurely. He looks and listens. Finally, he checks the news on the TV before preparing to sleep under a duvet printed with autumn leaves. He has spring, summer and autumn duvets with appropriate nature prints. In winter he has a bright red one. It reminds him of robins and redwings.

            The next morning, as usual, Gray walks to the Tube station. The rain has stopped. The potholed tarmac matches the non-colour of the slate roofs and leaden sky. He steps into a silver-grey train with red doors. It is full. People bury their heads in paperbacks or fiddle with their phones, oblivious to all around them. Some try to manipulate newspapers without starting a fight with the person squeezed against them. Others try to sway to the rhythm of the music in their earphones but the jerky carriage renders their movements robotic.

He looks around. There is a woman in red and another in blue. The rest are in grey. And so are you.

The train spits him out at Westminster and he ascends through the featureless concrete halls. The top escalator isn’t even graced with gaudy posters for theatres or warnings to ticketless passengers. He passes statuesque police in dark uniforms, weapons at the ready. He notices that their eyes move but their fingers poised on triggers do not. City twitchers, eyes attuned to detect unusual movement, scanning the horizon for rare bipedal predators.

Gray heads for the river. Why is water always blue in pictures? The Thames is always brown. Or grey. Today it is browny-grey. He enters an anonymous building clad in light grey stone, flashes his ID and goes to his work station.

For the next eight and a half hours, apart from regular breaks, Gray stares at a screen. He scrolls through reams of data. If you stare at an off-white screen with black type on it for long enough, it becomes a grey mass and you lose the will to live.

But Gray has a practised eye. Gray is an intelligence analyst. Gray looks for people who walk in the shadows, who wish to snuff out the light of the world and drain the colour from random faces and families.

He works so that the three girls in little black numbers can live to dance another night away. So that the patrons of the Fox and Trumpet may tune in to the commentator’s banalities undisturbed by unexpected, undeserved, and unwanted events. And so that he and his fellow twitchers can train their binoculars in peace on kingfishers flashing their orange breasts and blue wings on Sunday morning in the tranquillity of Tottenham Marshes.

For of such is the hue, and cry, of humanity.

© Derek Williams November 2017
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