Free The Colour of Death by Michael Cordy Page B

and more bizarre.  He ticked the third entry off his list:  ‘grapheme color’.  He probed further.  “What’s the letter O like as a personality?”
    “O’s are female,” she said without hesitation.  “And they’re generally generous, open and kind.  Although they can be a bit fussy.”
    “What about the number seven?”
    “Seven is tall and dark.  And male.”  She giggled, enjoying the game.  “He’s elegant but dangerous.”
    He ticked the next entry off his list:  ‘ordinal linguistic personification’.  He took out his cell phone and played two of its ringtones.  “What do you see ?”
    “Blues and greens but the last note is yellow.”
    He took out his bunch of keys and shook them, making a discordant jangling noise.  “Do you see anything now?”
    “A blur of yellows, reds and oranges.”  He ticked two more entries off his list:  ‘sound-color (narrowband)’ and ‘sound-color (broadband)’.  Then he selected the calculator mode on his cell phone.  “What are you like at mental arithmetic, Jane?”
    “Try me.”
    “OK.”  He began entering numbers into the phone.  “Multiply eighty-seven by twenty-two, add sixty-one, divide by eleven…”  As he pressed the buttons he noticed her finger stabbing the space in front of her, as though manipulating a virtual abacus.  “…multiply by fourteen, subtract twenty-three, add six and divide by five point five.”
    As the phone revealed the solution he heard her say it, exactly as it appeared on his display:  “Four hundred and fifty-three point nine three three eight eight seven.”
    “Impressive.  When you do your calculations, can you see the numbers in front of you?”
    “Of course.  They’re laid out in color-coded rows and columns, which I move around to do my calculations.”  Like a spreadsheet , he thought, ticking the final entry off his list:  ‘number-form’.  His head buzzed with possibilities.  She frowned.  “Can’t everyone do this?”
    “No, they can’t.”  He looked back over his list.  “Ever heard of something called synaesthesia?”
    She shook her head.  Like most synaesthetes she didn’t appear to think her crossed senses were unusual but, incredibly, no one else had picked up on her condition.  No mention of it appeared in her file.  “What’s synaesthesia?” she asked, anxiously.
    “Don’t worry, it’s not an illness.  It’s not classified as a neurological medical condition and rarely causes problems or disability.  Some even regard it as a gift.  If you want to get technical, synaesthesia is defined as a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a secondary sensory or cognitive pathway.  Put more simply, it involves two or more sense becoming cross-wired.  For example:  sight and touch, sound and taste, sound and color, symbols and color.”
    “Is it unusual?”
    “Pretty unusual.  About one person in every twenty-one has some form of the condition.  One of the rarer forms is mirror-touch synaesthesia, in which a subject sees someone else experience touch or pain and then feels it himself.  I happen to know a bit about this because I’ve got it.”  He smiled at her.  “I’m pretty sure you’ve got it, too.  I noticed the way you rubbed your wrist when I fell.”  She nodded.  “But you don’t just have my type, you also seem to have lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, in which individual words and sounds of spoken language evoke the sensations of taste in the mouth.  This tasting of words is also very rare.  What makes it rarer still is that synaesthetes — as we’re known — usually have only one form of the phenomenon, one pairing of cross-wired senses, but you appear—”
    “To have two,” she said.  She was sitting forward now, forehead creased in concentration, hungry for answers.
    “Not just two,” he said.  “Even your ability to see