I remember him clothed in the blue of the winter sky and the sea below, in the small flowers of May and in the colour of my eyes. He is framed, now, in the white border of an instant camera photograph, leaning over the back of the orange intercity train seat, to see beyond the boundary of the image. His small smile restrains a surge of delight about his eyes as the train leaves the station.
That same thin blue was in the nurses’ dresses, in the curtains around his bed and in the blanket stretched over his feet. It was the colour of his duvet cover at home, on which two children, one dark, one fair, like he and me, floated upwards in a hot air balloon, into the wide blue sky, a repeating pattern of he’s and me’s.
After he died, thousands of tiny blue forget-me-knots found their way into the light, through cracks in the pavement, around the base of brick walls and between the flowers that were meant-to-be. I recognised them for the first time, like so many things that had always been there, these tiny blue flowers the colour of his coat exhorting a promise of me.
Later, when I wanted to disremember, I removed his duvet cover from my bed, folded, wrapped and laid it at the bottom of a box at the back of a dim cupboard. I ripped the forget-me-knots from the fractures in the paving and buried them in darkness. And then I filled my mind with black and with white, with everything and nothing.
Blue is the colour of the winter’s sea and of our eyes, of uniforms and blankets and a chiding little flower. It is the colour of the train leaving the station.
Cameron wrote, initially, about the internal world and then, through the lens of a camera, felt the wonder of the natural world. She writes from the seclusion of her south facing room, under the influence of the literary canon, the morning light, and a little caffeine to spark the mind into life.
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