All the Colours of Paradise Read online

  For Stephen Michael King …

  because there are no words in Paradise,

  only pictures. — G.M.

  For Tani and Luka — S.M.K.

  Epigraph

  To everything there is a season

  And a time for every purpose under heaven.

  A time to be born and a time to die,

  A time to plant and a time to harvest,

  A time to kill and a time to heal,

  A time to cry and a time to laugh,

  A time to be sad and a time to dance,

  A time to hug and a time not to hug,

  A time to find and a time to lose,

  A time to be quiet and a time to speak up

  A time for loving and a time for hating

  A time for war and a time for peace.

  The original poem from the Bible was written a long time ago. This version is painted on the door at the Kingdom of Silk.

  Contents

  Cover

  Epigraph

  1. Superman, Blue and the Deep Mystery

  2. Dancing the Spanish Fandango

  3. Indigo’s Shadow

  4. Lavender, Scarlet and Fangled

  5. Words and Pictures and Melted Chocolate

  6. A Little Bit of Sweetness

  7. Christmas Hams and Pearls of Hope

  8. Windows of Opportunity

  9. Seven Hundred Paper Cranes

  10. The Door to Paradise

  11. Tales of a Teapot

  12. Five Days and Finishing Touches

  13. Bolts, Bicycle Wheels and Inspiration

  14. Sunday Lee

  The A-Z of things Glenda likes

  The A-Z of things Stephen likes

  Also by Glenda Millard

  Copyright

  1. Superman, Blue and the Deep Mystery

  Griffin came into the Silk family after the Rainbow Girls; Scarlet, Indigo, Violet, Amber and Saffron, and before Tishkin. And then came Layla, who was not born a Silk, but was sent to comfort them after Tishkin went away.

  Perry Angel came last of all. He arrived on the ten-thirty express with a small and shabby suitcase embossed with five golden letters. It had taken him almost seven years to find the Kingdom of Silk.

  Melody, the welfare lady with the ponytail and jeans and the small silver ring through her nose, had suggested Perry come to stay in the rickety, rambling old house on the hill that everyone at Cameron’s Creek called the Kingdom of Silk. Until then, Perry had been looking for his mother who had left him on the steps of the Maxwell Street welfare office when he was small enough to fit inside the golden-lettered suitcase. But no-one seemed to know where she was, not even Melody.

  The golden letters on Perry’s suitcase were getting worn out because he’d been looking for so long, so it was nice to belong in a place where he could put his suitcase underneath the bed. Even though he liked being part of the Silk family, sometimes Perry still wondered about his mother.

  And now it was Sunday, almost a year after Perry had arrived at the Kingdom of Silk. Nell, who was the grandmother of the Silks and of anyone else who needed one, was in the vegetable garden. Griffin’s best friend, Layla, was helping Nell pick caterpillars off the baby cabbages. Layla’s chicken-feather wings fluttered in the breeze. She was disguised as a cabbage moth so as not to frighten the caterpillars away. Over near the Cox’s Orange Pippin tree, Superman was emptying Christmas beetles out of his gumboots.

  It wasn’t really Superman, it was Perry Angel, dressed in the costume Nell had made him for Christmas. Being Superman was one of Perry’s favourite things about Sundays. The costume had a big red S stitched on the front and a swirling red cape attached at the shoulders. It looked so much like the one the real Superman wears that Perry wondered if Nell had made his costume, too. Perry also got his gumboots for Christmas. He wasn’t allowed to wear them inside. He had to leave them at the back door. When he came out again he was supposed to turn them upside-down before putting them on, in case there was anything in them that shouldn’t be; like spiders or Christmas beetles or a bone that Blue, the dog, had hidden there because he wasn’t allowed to dig holes near Nell’s roses. Perry didn’t mind sharing his boots with the beetles, but he was afraid he might squash them, even though they had hard, shiny shells to protect them.

  As well as the costume and the boots, Perry had a mask that Ben, whose other name was Mr Silk, had made from bicycle-tube rubber. Layla said Perry should wear the mask at all times he had the costume on, so no-one could guess his true identity. If anyone did they might get some Kryptonite and take away his super-powers, she said. Layla knew all about Superman because she had seen him in movies. Perry Angel hadn’t, so he didn’t know what a true identity was or Kryptonite either, but he still liked wearing the mask.

  Perry looked through its narrow slits at the open sketch pad on his knees. Its clean white pages had perforations so the pictures could be torn out and hung on the wall. Beside him was the tin of seventy-two coloured pencils with five shades of green and seven shades of blue that his teacher, Miss Cherry, had given him on the Day of Cake and Thankfulness. That was the name Layla had thought up for the welcome party the Silks had held for Perry last spring. Close to Perry’s other side, Blue lay dozing in the grass.

  Perry turned each of the pencils gently with his finger, so the shiny golden writing was facing up and he could see the names of all the colours. He couldn’t read them, but Indigo had told him what they were called. Indigo was the second oldest of the Rainbow Girls. One day when Griffin had been showing Perry through his bird book called The Comprehensive Illustrated Ornithologist’s Bible, they came across a picture of a tropical parrot. From then on, every time Perry thought about Indigo, he was reminded of that parrot; a beautiful, bright, flying creature, loud and fast and never still.

  As well as being loud and fast and never still, Indigo painted mysterious pictures. She was also kind. She shared her paints and paper and showed Perry how to mix the colours, hold a brush properly and wash it out when he’d finished using it. And once, she had painted a picture especially for him. She told him the names of the colours she’d used. It was mostly deep purple, she said, with a heart of crimson lake, overlaid with washes of emerald and jade. Giving someone a picture you have made is a kind thing to do, even if the picture is a deep mystery. So Perry Angel hung Indigo’s picture on the wall near his bed and every night before he went to sleep he tried to figure out the mystery.

  The rainbow of pencils in his tin reminded Perry of the first time he heard Ben, the father of Griffin and his sisters, talking about the Rainbow Girls. Perry had imagined they must be people with coloured stripes on them. Nell told him this was called a misunderstanding. Now Perry knew it was just Ben’s way of talking about Griffin’s five sisters all at once. Indigo had shown him the coloured pencils that matched their names and he pointed to each of them and softly said the names out loud. When he finished he gave himself a small, quiet clap and right at that moment Blue woke up. If Layla had noticed this, she would have said it was a small miracle, because Blue couldn’t hear small, quiet claps or anything at all. Perry didn’t know what miracles were. He just knew that Blue understood things that other people didn’t. He put his arms around Blue’s neck and gave him a hug and then Blue gave Perry a big, wet lick on the cheek.

  Perry Angel loved Blue with all his heart. Sometimes he thought he might love the old dog more than anyone else in the whole universe. Blue didn’t hear and he didn’t talk. He just licked and wagged or lay down on his back, waiting to be scratched, with his legs sticking up in the never-ending sky that was always there above the Kingdom of Silk. Perry and Blue never, ever misunderstood anything about one another.

&n
bsp; 2. Dancing the Spanish Fandango

  Superman was not the only one who loved Sundays at the Kingdom of Silk. Layla did too, for many reasons including caterpillar catching. Caterpillars are masters of disguise because they are exactly the same green as the leaves they eat. But Layla and Nell were experts at finding them. Layla had tried to convince her mother to telephone the people at The Guinness Book of Records and ask them to come to the Kingdom of Silk to see for themselves exactly how many caterpillars she and Nell could catch. But Mrs Elliott said it was too expensive to make international telephone calls and anyway she wasn’t sure if there was a category for that sort of activity. Collecting caterpillars is an occupation that gives you plenty of thinking space for other things and Layla was thinking about Perry Angel.

  She could see him in the distance, sitting under the tree, drawing. It was clear he was much happier now than when he had arrived at the Kingdom of Silk. When she’d asked him if he liked living there, he nodded his head at least ten times. Everyone knows a nod means yes, so Layla decided that ten nods must mean Perry liked living at the Kingdom of Silk very, very much. It wasn’t only yes or no that Perry didn’t bother to say, there were other words too. Layla spent as much time at the Kingdom of Silk as a person possibly could without living there and she and Perry and Griffin all went to the same school. So she knew Perry could talk and wondered why he often used his hands to say things.

  When she got to the fifth cabbage in the row, Layla asked Nell, ‘Why does Perry Angel do his hand signals?’ Nell straightened her back and leaned on the garden fork. She looked across at Perry and didn’t answer right away and Layla knew that whatever she was going to say would be important.

  ‘Some people would say that Perry has a learning disability,’ said Nell, ‘but I say he just has a different way of learning. Using signs is sometimes easier for him than finding the right words. And his drawings are another way of expressing himself.’

  Layla collected three more caterpillars while she thought about what Nell had said. Then she put the caterpillars in her pocket. ‘Is that why he draws pictures of feelings instead of pictures of things?’

  Nell nodded. ‘Most likely.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Layla. ‘So it’s a bit like when my whole body feels like it wants to smile and it can’t, so I skip instead.’

  Nell laughed and passed Layla two more caterpillars to put with the others. Then she lifted up her skirt and skipped along the sawdust path between the rows of cabbages. That’s the kind of grandmother Nell was; the sort who didn’t mind if you saw the elastic garters that held her hand-knitted socks up, or the dimples in her knees, when she skipped.

  Layla skipped along behind her and a cloud of quiet, white moths flew up in the air like an upside-down snow storm.

  ‘Is there anything about skipping on the door?’ Layla asked. Annie had painted the poem on the door because it was Nell’s favourite. Nell knew it by heart. She said it helped her to keep an even keel through the storms of life. Griffin and Layla looked up the word keel in the dictionary and discovered it was something fixed under a boat to keep it balanced so it didn’t topple over.

  ‘No, not skipping,’ said Nell puffing, ‘but there’s the one about dancing!’

  Just then, Griffin appeared from behind the shed. He’d been helping his mother, Annie, who wrote poetry and painted pictures and was also good at many other things, including reading hearts, milking goats and singing. For a long time after her baby girl, Tishkin, died, Annie didn’t sing at all, not even when Ben had played lilting love songs on his mouth organ. But this morning, while she and Griffin milked Jezebel and Delilah, Annie’s voice rang out as sweet as a silver bell. She said singing made the goats give more milk. Griffin and Annie were carrying the buckets of milk towards the house when Griffin saw what was going on in the vegetable patch.

  ‘Off you go,’ said Annie. ‘I’ll take your bucket.’

  Griffin ran and grabbed Perry’s hand and together they joined in with Nell and Layla and danced the Spanish Fandango up and down the sawdust paths until they were out of breath.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ said Nell. ‘Sometimes you don’t need to say a word to make people understand!’

  It was a shame all the caterpillars bounced out of Layla’s pocket when she was dancing. But it was fortunate that caterpillars don’t like walking over sawdust because it prickles their underneaths. That made them easy to catch again. Zeus, Nell’s pet crow, helped. Although he was blind in one eye, he saw the caterpillars and flew down from his perch on the scarecrow’s hat and ate some for his lunch.

  Everyone else was having pizza for lunch. Ben had made the dough and was rolling it into circles. Annie and Nell sliced the toppings. The plan was for everyone to take a circle of dough and add the toppings they liked best.

  Perry was sprinkling cheese on his pizza when Ben said to him, ‘Looks as though I’ve counted wrong, Perry. I’ve made one too many. I wonder if Blue’s hungry.’

  Perry knew Ben was pretending. This was his one-too-many joke he always said when he made pizza. Perry nodded. ‘Blue’s hungry. Blue likes pizza.’ Blue’s favourite toppings were cheese and bacon.

  Ben cooked the pizzas in the wood-fired oven near the dam. The table was set in the shade of the Cox’s Orange Pippin. There were jugs of orange juice, a platter of juicy, pink watermelon chunks and one of Amber’s famous Armenian Love Cakes, drizzled with syrup made from lemon-juice, cinnamon and honey from Nell’s beehive.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ said Ben as he brought the first of the sizzling hot pizzas to the table, ‘right after lunch Griffin and I are going to demonstrate our new invention: the Magnificent, Multifunction Levitator!’

  Annie had drawn a curly moustache on Ben and he was borrowing Nell’s crushed purple cloak that she wore when she was being Mistress of Ceremonies. He and Griffin were also wearing shiny green helmets made from the empty halves of the watermelon they had eaten for lunch. Some of the juice and a few pips were dripping down their faces but they didn’t seem to notice because they were so excited about the magnificent invention.

  Superman, Blue and the cabbage moth got front row seats at the launch of the Magnificent Multifunction Levitator. They watched carefully as Ben and Griffin came back from the shed and spread an old canvas blind on the ground under the tree. It had a piece of rope threaded through brass eyelets around the edges but it didn’t look at all magnificent. Griffin climbed the wooden steps up to the tree house and began winding a handle that looked something like the one on Nell’s rotary clothes line, only much bigger. A sound came from above, the leaves quivered and quaked and a huge metal hook appeared at the end of a cable. Ben gathered a loop of rope from each of the four sides of the canvas and fastened them over the hook with a flourish. Then he beckoned to Blue, who trotted across and sat in the middle of the canvas as though he understood perfectly what was expected of him.

  Perry’s feet felt hot inside his gumboots. Ben swished Nell’s cloak so it rippled like water in the sunlight, then he did a secret signal in the air and Griffin began to wind again. Perry’s heart beat fast and loud inside his Superman suit. What if Ben’s invention hurt his friend? The rope gathered the canvas in and around Blue, like cloth around a plum pudding.

  ‘No, no, no!’ Perry yelled, rushing towards the magnificent thing as it began to rise slowly from the ground.

  Suddenly Annie was there holding his hand and talking quietly.

  ‘It’s all right, Perry. Blue will be fine. He can’t fall out.’

  But Griffin stopped turning the handle and brave Layla said, ‘I’ll go first, Ben. Let me go first.’

  When the canvas touched down again and Ben loosened the ropes, Blue waved his tail like a flag and smiled at everyone as though he had been on a wonderful adventure, like a monkey who’d been to the moon. And Layla took her wings off and curled up on the canvas like a caterpillar.

  The Multifunction Levitator proved to be a truly magnificent invention. Everyone had a turn, even S
carlet, who was usually too busy painting her fingernails to match her name or trying out new hair styles and being as fifteen as a person can possibly be, when they are really only fourteen years, ten months and eleven days old. Perry and Blue went together, last of all.

  3. Indigo’s Shadow

  Violet wound them up through the leaves to the tree house. Perry liked Violet. She wrote stories in books made from scraps of wrapping paper, used envelopes and shopping catalogues. When she had saved enough waste paper, she tore it into tiny pieces and mixed them with water. Before she strained the pulp she added small treasures, like used dragonfly wings, found buttons or shiny beads from broken bracelets. When the water drained away, it left behind a new sheet of paper which Violet trimmed into smaller pieces and stitched together with embroidery thread or ribbon. Sometimes the paper was a bit lumpy, and the words had to go up hills, but Violet’s stories were good. When she grew up she wanted to write the kind of books sold in shops.

  Most Sundays Violet spent time in the tree house practising to be a writer. Indigo had made an AUTHOR IN RESIDENCE sign for her. Indigo said the tree house was strictly off limits when the sign was up. But Violet nearly always forgot to use it, and anyway, she didn’t mind if other people came up while she was there. She didn’t even seem to notice, especially if she was reading. Reading was part of practising to become a good writer, Violet said. Sometimes she even invited Perry to come up with her, especially when she’d written something and wanted to try it out. She called it getting feedback.

  Violet made up all kinds of different stories to write in her books, but Perry’s favourite wasn’t a made-up one at all. It was fact. Violet said it was a well-known phenomenon that fact was stranger than fiction. The story was called In Indigo’s Shadow. Indigo said Violet was a sophisticated writer. There were many words Perry had yet to learn; like sophisticated, phenomenon, fact and fiction. But although he didn’t understand all of Violet’s story, he liked the sound of words she used and the way she read them. The story sounded like a song to him; the song of being born. He often asked Violet to read it, not because he’d forgotten what she said, but because he didn’t know the story of his own beginning. When Violet told her story, he imagined it was his.