The Colour of the Night
Robert Hollingworth is a successful and talented visual artist as well as a respected writer. As an award-winning artist he has held thirty solo shows since 1980 and has works in more than twelve public collections.
As a writer, Hollingworth is known for his essays and and short stories which have received critical acclaim. His more recent longer works include Nature Boy, self-published in 2004, and They Called Me the Wildman: The Prison Diary of Henricke Nelsen published in 2008 by Murdoch Books. This book was shortlisted for the South Australian Premier’s Literary Awards Fiction prize in 2010 as well as being selected for the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge List in 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Robert Hollingworth’s last work of fiction was Smythe’s Theory of Everything (Hybrid Publishers, 2011).
The Colour of the Night
Robert Hollingworth
Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
All rights reserved
© Robert Hollingworth 2014
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use
as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may
be reproduced by any process without prior written permission
from the publisher. Requests and enquiries concerning
reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher,
Hybrid Publishers
PO Box 52, Ormond 3204.
First published 2014
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Hollingworth, Robert, 1947-
The Colour of the Night / Robert Hollingworth.
978-1-925000-56-6 (pbk.)
978-1-742983-33-2 (e-bk)
Orphans – Fiction.
Interpersonal relations--Fiction.
A823.4
Cover design: Robert Hollingworth
This book
is dedicated to
Isak and Kirstie,
who died
while defending their home
on Black Saturday, 2009
The story
is also in remembrance
of a small boy
who came in from the bush
to embrace city life
1
THE NATIVE bushland was silent. At least it was to others: It is eerie, they would say, eerily quiet, like a vacuum. But it was no vacuum to Shaun Bellamy. Instead it was all animation; complex, manifold and systematic. Like language. Shaun knew the bush’s native tongue and could decipher it as easily as spoken English. Walking through bracken that grew taller than he, that ancient dialect came to him, steadily and uninterrupted.
Silent? Not to Shaun. If city folk acknowledged sound at all, they often mentioned the birds. Yet they rarely registered the cuckoo’s gentle trill, the scornful chatter of thornbills, the thrush scratching in the leaf litter, or the rattle of a kookaburra’s beak. Nor did they notice the spiderweb that wasn’t there yesterday or the teethmarks in the bark of a wattle, let alone why they were there. But Shaun did; he knew it all. He was born to it.
He rode a pushbike on bush roads, half an hour to school. There he blended with those around him, happy to comply, responding readily to all the nominated programs. He often attracted the attention of others, yet he was no talker – perhaps it was the few words he chose that caused heads to turn and conversations to pause. From his classmates he drew little more than an uncertain stare, but Shaun’s teachers took particular interest, regarding him as something of a curiosity. Perhaps, they imagined, his progressive parents had instilled in the boy an unusual soberness, or perhaps it was his comparative isolation that caused him to respond with a degree of composure more common in older folk.
One sports day afternoon Shaun stood on the edge of the field watching some older boys playing cricket. Henley at the crease knocked the bat on the hard earth, brought his knees together and turned his elbow to the sky. There never was a ganglier child. All at once Shaun realised that his Phys Ed teacher was staring down at him, leaning in like a big old tree. The man fixed Shaun with his squinty eyes and suddenly declared, ‘You think too much, Bellamy.’ The boy looked up at his teacher’s planet-like skull against the pale sky, and tried to unpick that trenchant claim. Perhaps it was meant as advice, but instead, the comment simply gave Shaun cause for further reflection; how might he curtail the practice?
The thinking affliction had dogged him from the age of six. It was around then that another of his teachers casually asked the class what their favourite colour was. Most said blue or pink or green. But for whatever reason, Shaun spontaneously responded, The colour of the night.
‘That would be black,’ his teacher replied.
‘No,’ Shaun said, ‘it is only black because people are afraid of it. You have to look harder. Then it is a special colour that no one can copy, not even in the movies.’
It was the expression on the man’s face that stayed with Shaun, a lesson in itself. Had he crossed some forbidden line, pierced some inner sanctum reserved only for adults, for the qualified? He was not to know it but he’d merely baffled the man: what is the appropriate response to a child who takes extemporaneous questions so seriously?
You think too much was the latest advice, which only encouraged the boy to think quite a great deal more.
Apart from that one serious anomaly, Shaun attended to his maths, science and social studies like all the others. He had a laptop, and with the improved satellite signal, he carried a smartphone, utilising apps and predictive text just as they all did. But it was the natural world that drew him. When home-time beckoned, he entered the bush as other children entered an interactive game – although Shaun’s console control was little more than a snapped stick, his keyboard the whole forest, his mouse a mouse.
Ask Shaun what a peppermint is and he’d explain that it’s
