Free My First Colouring Book by Lloyd Jones Page A

he will receive a jarful of dull grey ashes and a small collection of memories which on certain occasions he will replay swiftly on the miniature screens of his mind.
    That’s it then. The last few seconds are here. Wait for it – the countdown begins.
    10, 9, 8… and your very last memory, what will it be? A face perhaps, looming out of the fog of your departure: the face of a young man-boy bounding past you on the stairs of the Labour Club one winter’s night long ago, his dark hair pushed down flat by his helmet and his red woollen face mask pulled down below his chin, making him look gypsyish, slightly dangerous, interesting to girls.
    7, 6, 5… will it be a last welling of compassion and pity for his poor mother, about to outlive you both, who lost her own real life that night, who still lives in a limbo of waiting?
    4, 3, 2… will it be a pang of wonder that you yourself cheated death so many times?
    No, old man, who may be me in the future, it’s none of these. As your jellyfish eyes cloud over and the monitor emits its final beep, your senses will be attracted to a loud squeal, a tortured rubbery screech coming from the shoe of a nurse as she turns towards your bed and starts to run.
    The scrape of her shoe on the plastic floor-tile will remind you of a pair of boots which you once owned. And as your inward eye rests on those light brown boots, made in Poland, as the defibrillator drops down towards your chest, you will remember one last thing: a man in a café asking you about the blood on your shoes, and it was days, months, years after the night of the accident. You kept them, you still used them. What sort of person were you? Poor? Heartless? And since you won’t remember throwing them away, and since you won’t remember giving them to anyone, as your breathing rattles to an end and your eyes puddle into two small plastic jellyfish, you’ll ask yourself a final question: whatever happened to the boots with the red crepe soles?

violet
    LET ME take you back to that hot summer in France, more than thirty years ago: I can still smell the coffee and the drains, even now. Dry little dust bowls in the cherry orchard and soil trampled into fine talcum, blown onto our feet in cool puffball clouds. Blue ceramic skies, fired in a vast kiln, vultured with black dots now and again, and all around us a drug-crazed landscape warping and shimmering in a constant mirage, pale and unreliable. Four of us living in a barn with no windows, sleeping on the republic’s last remaining iron bedsteads, queer and crooked; feathers wafting in our sleeping quarters, floating on the stale air: blown in downy raspberries from a hole in my lumpy mattress, drifting also from a troupe of dowager hens in the entrance – hens which studied us, trying to learn our language, guarding us (contemptuously, I thought) from their sentry box in a fan of hot yellow sun in the doorway. When we clapped and flapped they treated us to a Gallic shrug, or the closest a hen can get to one. Mistrals and dog day afternoons: a huge, violent Alsatian darted from a lonely house on the road into town and bit my bum; for weeks I worried about rabies, waiting stoically for hydrophobia to drain me. I pictured myself in a hospital, tended by the nuns of Loudun, making desperate gurgling noises – sucking the last few drops of water in all of France into my arid intestines.
    Chris went to Marseilles to buy a knife. We were all of us fateful about that knife.
    I remember the shape of its blade, and the face of the old dog which loped around the yard. He’s been dead for years now; buried under a tree probably, but I can’t imagine old Bruyes, the farmer, crying over anything, least of all a dog. I have a picture in my mind’s eye of its skeleton, white and curved in its last sleeping position under the dun soil, with young rootlets threading their way through its bones, fanning bronchially in its rib cage. We