Free My First Colouring Book by Lloyd Jones

Suzuki, wearing that black bomber jacket. You’ve forgotten her name, the girl sitting behind you, grinning into the camera. But you haven’t forgotten the jacket, emblem of your youth. After doing some crude mental arithmetic you realise that the girl on the bike behind you came after the girl at the party, the one who ran away because you didn’t trust her. So the jacket survived the accident. You must have lifted it off the road as the ambulance jangled off into the distance.
    But wait – there’s something else. In that photo of your precious little red bike (fastest 250 on the road, you told everyone you met), the young superman (you) sitting astride its black plastic seat is wearing light brown boots. You can see one of them clearly, resting on the gear-change. Lace-ups, with a horseshoe ridge around the uppers. Mud and sand used to collect in a little man-made dustbowl above your toes. Crap and gunge met there daily. Why should those shoes be so important to an old man in his dying moments, as the cardiogram tires of playing its childish monotone, the same old beat? Those cheap Polish shoes will be the last image in your head. And why? Why will you remember a cut-price pair of light tan boots, whose eyes began to disintegrate as soon as you bought them? Aha, you’ve remembered something. Their soles were made of crepe, a spongy material. Never bought a pair like that before or since. Odd bouncy soles as if you were walking on a rubber mat. People looked at them when you passed, their eyes drawn to the unusual lightness of the crepe sole. Creamy and porous.
    And what did they absorb on the tarmac that winter’s night, what exactly did they suck up as you squatted by a young man’s deathbed? What was the stain you took through the house, leaving livid red footprints all along the green hallway carpet?
    Was it water, was it mud?
    No, old man (who may be me in the future) it was blood, which had been watered down on the road’s rainskin. The soles of those boots looked like the lower half of a sandwich, peeled away, with runny red jam sucked in by the bread.
    Those footprints you spread through a large Victorian house, which has also been eradicated since, demolished and reduced to memories, those cartoon footprints stamped on the stairs were red, the colour of blackberry juice on your fingers after an hour’s picking.
    So, we come to the last few moments – yours, not his, since he died almost thirty years ago, a few minutes after reaching casualty. He would be a middle-aged man, now, fretting daily, probably, about the safety of his own children. You can’t remember much about him, but if you tried very hard (and if you had enough time to spare) you might remember the fresh, slightly acne-pocked face which passed you on the stairs of the Labour Club, some four hours before he lost control of his motorbike and slid uncontrollably into the back of a black van containing four musicians, one of whom would die years later in very similar circumstances.
    But you won’t remember any of that, nothing at all.
    The drums are throbbing again, but the beat is faltering, weakening. The deal is done.
    They’ve traded your earthly remains (worth little, if anything at all) and you’re off to the atomic shredder. Personal pin number rendered unreadable, proteins sundered in helixes of smoke, your code destroyed for ever.
    In an act of metallic irony your own son frolics every night with his own little killing machine, a souped-up Ford, around the wasteland by the sea, where the factories once stood, and to mark your own passing he will be given a morning off work – though he will take a whole day and get a written warning, which he’ll crumple and throw over his shoulder onto the back seat of his dangerous little car. In addition, he will receive the condolences of a small group of people and a death certificate. No inheritance, no fine pictures, no heirlooms. Finally,