Month: August 2014

Colourcaste: Chapter 2 – Shadow Watching

If I hadn’t been looking for them I might have missed them. Missed him. The dark shadows who began to slip around the edges of my vision, following my movements, waiting for me to slip up.

So I became more cautious. My trips to the library were put on hold, my raids on the communal gardens were too. With the staring frontage of the white-walled jail watching me every time I left my home I hardly needed to be reminded of the perilousness of my existence. With my food supply limited to what I could grow myself I became thinner, wracking my brain for a way I could stretch out my few winter vegetables to last me until spring.

But it didn’t matter how I did the maths, there wasn’t enough, I wasn’t going to make it. Now when I ventured out I realised that not all of the shadows I saw were the Order of Black watching me, some were the holes in my vision where hunger was beginning to take it’s toll on my senses.

With perhaps a week to go until starvation I realised my only option. I’d hidden at first to establish myself away from the word which hated me and then because I didn’t need it or its judgement. Now there was nothing stopping me from once again entering their space. The Black Order knew I was alive so why shouldn’t everyone else.

The next day I walked boldly into the center of town, purposely avoiding the paths which I’d always used before and refusing to shrink away from the busy streets. With the winter festival in town there were families everywhere and I watched as brightly coloured parents pulled their children behind them, turning their eyes away from the freakish outsider in their midst.

I pretended not to see or care and went straight to the middle of town, knowing that the bins would be overflowing with the leftovers of these happy little outings. Not caring who saw me I stuck my head in the closest dustbin and was rewarded with a half eaten hotdog. As a horrified circle opened up around me I devoured it, concentrating only on the sensation of the cheap meat settling in my stomach.

I stayed there all afternoon, filling my stomach with lukewarm tidbits and my pockets with more for the next day. I occasionally caught glimpses of my shadow on the edges of the crowd, it looked today like the same guy who had been sent to tidy me up but I couldn’t tell at this distance, they just looked like silhouettes.

I passed the rest of the winter in a similar way, the townspeople soon becoming accustomed to the vagrant in their midst and ignoring me, much as they did the greys who I sometimes found eying the same half drunk hot chocolate as me. Once I was brave enough to approach a young grey woman who I’d seen a few times, I’d let her take the pie, there was a lot left and I’d seen her before with a small child. But as I began to speak she looked nervously over her shoulder before fixing her expression to one of disdain and hurrying away.

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I supposed maybe she had caught sight of my shadow or perhaps the green police officers who sometimes tailed my movements around town in case I suddenly decided to break the law in plain sight.

The day I first saw a rabbit and realised the snow was meting and winter coming to an end was a happy one. I looked forward to being able to support myself again without scavenging, to expanding my garden and trying out the makeshift fishing rod I had made from scrap wood and an old line found in a bin.

Most of all though I couldn’t wait to not have to be among the studied obliviousness of everyone in town, to be alone rather than just feel alone. Spring filled me with a new hope and I turned my back on the cold desperation of winter and swore next year would be better.

A hammering at my door awoke me at the crack of dawn one morning and I stared blearily through the door at Tayberry Brooks’ finest, the green officers of the police station.

‘Winter Bleach?’ they demanded.

I nodded.

‘We have a warrant to search your home for items of illegal colour. Open this door or we’ll break it down.’

Glancing around to check that I was safe I hurried to open the door, I didn’t want to have to work out how to rehang it and replace the hinges and there was nothing for them to find except the books under the floor.

After shoving their way in and tearing the place apart, the floor being pretty much the only thing they didn’t pull apart the officers left, their stares promising they would be back and left me standing outside the wreckage of my home.

Most of my makeshift furniture was beyond repair, scuffed and cracked beyond use. The only mercy was that they’d left my garden unscathed, their green education probably not informing them that the scrubby little bushes were of any value. I’d once seen a brown girl at school punished for mocking an orange who thought potatoes just appeared in sacks, seems he wasn’t the only one to think that.

As I made my way back into my home to see what bedding I could pull together for the chilly spring night to follow I became aware of the unwelcome shadow of the Black Order behind me.

Emboldened by my anger at what had just happened I abandoned my usual policy of ignoring them, spinning to confront the man and shocked to find him much closer than he had ever been before.

‘What the fuck do you want? Haven’t you all done enough harm for one morning?’

The young man who I could now tell was the same one who had been sent to check on me seemed shocked by my vehemence.

‘Um…. I’m so- sorry about your house.’ He stuttered. His soft voice and stutter were completely at odds with the usually commanding voice of the Order of the Black. Reaching in to his jacket he pulled out a slim volume with a creased brown cover which he tentatively extended towards me. It looked like some sort of gardening manual.

‘I…. I saw your garden and I th-thought this might help you.’

At first I was stunned into silence and then almost without realising I began to reach for the book, the kindness was so alien to me that I just reflexively did as he asked. At the last moment I realised the danger and snatched my hand back…. I wasn’t allowed that book. No doubt the green policemen were just round the bend, waiting to pounce upon my illicit reading material.

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Backing up as fast as I could I shook my head.

‘No. Just leave me alone! Can’t you all just leave me alone?!’

The black man looked almost disappointed at my reaction, I could have sworn I saw regret in his eyes but I’m sure I imagined it; it’s almost impossible to decipher any emotion in the dark chasm of the Black Order’s gaze. Turning my back I rushed indoors and shakily banged the door shut, glancing back only once to see the shadow man still standing holding the book, looking somehow lost.

The next morning I stirred from a broken night’s sleep to find the book lying on the steps. Now I was closer I could see it was a guide to over-wintering vegetables, it even had a diagram of a thing called a greenhouse, a special room to keep plants warm, I itched to read it but I left it there, not even daring to touch it to throw it away.

My shadow was noticeably absent the next few days and there was no sign of the greens either. If I didn’t know better I’d think they had just given up and left me to my own devices. But I did know better, I knew well enough that my presence here on the edge of town was like having an insect bite on your back. You couldn’t see it, couldn’t touch it but you knew it was there and that you hated it.

Knowing this I found the silence sinister, the lull before the storm where the anticipation is as electric as the lightening to follow.

Read Chapter 3 – Black and Blaze

Colourcaste: Chapter 1 – Despair vs. Determination

There are two things that can happen to a person when they realised they have been left for dead. The first is despair. The natural response perhaps. Hopelessness and weeping followed by a slow descent in to oblivion. I did despair for exactly a week.

It took a week for me to eat my way throughout the food I’d taken from Miss Chalice’s larder, the grey bread that was all we’d been able to afford, despite there being no law to dictate what a grey could eat. It took a week for the ancient toilet to gurgle to a stop, a week for the rotten front step to give way beneath me.

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As I fell the lurch of hitting the ground went through me, jolting my growling stomach and clearing out the last vestiges of despair.

It was then that I learned the second way a doomed person can respond to their fate. That defiant little switch in my head flipped, that same spark that stopped me from running all through school and I swapped desperation for determination.

If they wanted me dead they were going to have to try a hell of a lot harder.

That evening I snuck into town, my first time there alone, and found it strangely deserted. As I hugged the white wall of the library, hoping it would camouflage me should anyone be around I heard shouts and laughter from the direction of the square. Counting back days I realised that it was midsummer and the festival must be in full-swing. Perfect.

Checking every step of the way I crept into the library finding it empty, just as I’d hoped. The coloured shelves stood out against the white walls, the knowledge allowed to each caste clearly marked out and separate. Emboldened by the quiet I strode forward, heading straight for orange, wondering at the incredible contrast between my pale hand and the shelf it rested on. My eyes were drawn as always to the strange moon-shaped scar on my hand, I had no idea where it was from and it was the darkest spot on my body, the shelf’s colour seemed to make it more vivid. But soon the allure of the books pushed the question back into the recesses of my mind.

I’d only been to the library once before, a school trip where I had been saddened by the pitifully few books that had survived the burning of the old world, thinking I’d never be allowed to read even these few, none of them were “white appropriate” the pink librarian had told me smugly.

But now it was different, I had been forgotten which rendered me temporarily invisible and therefore free. I had nothing to lose. I found a book on basic building, ‘Barn-Raising and Joinery for Dummies’, and glancing around the empty room slipped it in my bag. The gap it left on the shelf seemed impossibly big and my heart started pounding. But I was determined.

Brown was my next stop, two books here. One on repairing household problems and another on growing food crops. Not wanting to stay any longer and risk my discovery I left the library and headed to the outskirts of town, dodging the main roads and pausing only to pluck an apple overhanging the white fence of the community garden.

As I walked home the dark truly set in making me self conscious as it always did. While most bad things disappeared in the night, dirt, decay and ugliness, I remained visible. Even the most diluted moonlight, faint starlight or a glow from the lit streets of town would find my pale skin and light me up for all to see. I hurried across the marsh, turning my face away from the white prison and finally reaching my white box.

I laid my stolen books on the dirty white floor, their colours alien in the blankness of my existence and for the first time the white box didn’t feel empty and hopeless. Somehow the knowledge that I was fighting back filled it with a new air, an air of rebellious hope.

Those next few months were a daily battle, find food, read, find materials to improve my shelter and give me a chance once the snows began to fall. It was exhausting but for the first time in my life I had a purpose and I finally started to believe I had a place and a value in this strange universe, whatever the Credo of Colours said about white.

White didn’t belong in their world perhaps, but by excluding me so utterly from their structure, by isolating me they had removed any need I had ever felt to play by their rules or accept what they said. I had nothing to lose and nobody they could harm and so I lived outside of their regulations, I lived in technicolor and the careful boundaries that school had placed around my understanding of the world fell away.

At first my reading was to help me survive. I learned to tend a garden, stealing lettuce plants and fully grown tomato plants from a park to keep me alive until my seeds grew to maturity. I found a guide to trapping small animals in the grey section, one of only thirteen books on that shelf, the thick dust telling me that it hadn’t been disturbed in some time.

I grew bolder in my excursions, learning the paths in town that nobody used and the rhythm of the population’s movement. I wanted to preserve my invisibility until I was sure I was strong enough to handle whatever followed, when they realised I wasn’t just going to give up.

There was an hour at sunset when everyone had just gone home from school and work, before the bars got busy, before the night began and a matching one at sunrise. It was in these pauses that I went to the library which increasingly was my favourite place in the world. I devoured books of every colour, loathing to return them to their shelves but knowing that If I didn’t the diminishing volumes in the library might give me away.

And so it was that when winter came I was ready, my home insulated with layers of bracken, hay and plywood scavenged from dumpsters around town. I’d rescued abandoned furniture and built other bits, rickety and primitive but fit for the jobs they did. I painted it all white, the leftover tins from the erection of my shack abandoned by the builders. I whitewashed not from any desire to do so but so that should anyone come to check on me I had not broken the law. I also hid the books I borrowed, finding a cavity under a floorboard to keep them safe and secret

To the unknowing eye my home looked as it ought to, the pitiful abode of an outcast, full of cast-offs and outfitted by dumb luck and survival instinct. But to me it was a triumph, each thing stained in my imagination by the colours of the knowledge which had brought it to me.

I was painting my world in technicolour and it was beautiful.

The red strategist in me felt a surge of triumph the day I heard the alien noise of tyres on the track leading to my home. Quickly tucking away the horticulture book I was reading I went to my single window. After five months on my own they’d finally sent someone to see if the job was done. The Order of the Black to be precise, the young man not one I recognised but vividly visible against the thick blanket of snow which had settled a week ago.

Who better than to attend what was likely to be a place of death than the crypt keepers. His nose wrinkled at the state of my home and in his focus he missed my flourishing and carefully protected vegetables. The young black man approached my door cautiously, muttering to himself and looking almost…. Nervous?

I wonder what kind of state he expected to find me in.

A devious smile played at the corner of my mouth and waiting until the man was only feet from the door I threw it open and stepped into his path.

‘Hello’ I said, as the man clutched his chest and breathed hard, looking as if he’d seen a ghost which I suppose, in a sense he had!

‘Hello?’ I repeated. ‘Can I help you?’

The man gathered himself and tired to brush off his shock.

‘Um no. I mean yes…. Are you Winter Pearl Bleach?’ He managed.

I nodded.

‘Oh. I was sent…. Sent to check on you.’

I narrowed my eyes. I knew why he was there.

‘I’m fine.’ My answer was short and left no room for discussion. ‘Anything else?’

He shook his head mutely and returned to the car as I stood watching, glancing back once as if to check that he hadn’t imagined the whole exchange. I stood motionless, stony in my refusal to offer him or anyone else any sign of need or weakness.

Eventually the car pulled away, leaving me alone again, back to normal. But I knew that the visit had changed everything. I hadn’t done as I was supposed to. I was still alive and I wasn’t supposed to be.

And now they knew. Now I was a concern again and I was sure I’d be receiving many more visitors than I had in last few months. They would be watching me.

Read Chapter 2 – Shadow Watching

Colourcaste: Prologue Part Two – A Chink in the Armour

Now you have seen how the world works. It is perfectly organised to maximise our chances of survival, to maximise our obedience. Every person has their colour and every colour has their role. As generations have passed we have adopted our colours not only on our skin but in our names, our clothing and our homes.

Even our places of work wear the colours of the caste who run them, the fire station is jade green, City Hall is red. Within public spaces there are sections for different colours, outfitted with equipment or entertainment suitable for its users. Everywhere you look there is colour, a reminder of your place in the world and that the order of things is absolute. Or should I say was absolute.

Never since the time of the emerging had there been any question about somebody’s colour. It was impossible. Even cross-caste marriages were almost unheard of despite being legal; occasionally a brown would marry a grey or a pink and a purple would end up together but their colours were similar and the difference would barely notice in their offspring.

People liked the system, they liked the certainty, it made us safe, made us strong. That was what all the teachings told us.

Those who didn’t like it were few, if they existed at all, and when they became anything other than invisible the town senate would take quick and decisive action. Colour objectors along with serious criminals of other kinds were stripped of their colours and locked away, separated forever from the society that they had rebelled against. The prison for the Berriverse is on the edge of Tayberry Brooks and it’s enough to strike fear into the heart of every coloured berry, a place austere and impregnable.

This was the domain of the whites, the irredeemable, rediscovered technology used to bleach the pigment from their skin and forever mark them as outsiders. Elsewhere in town white was used to mark out a municipal building, a library or a park perhaps, but on this hillside, exposed to the elements, white was the cold, unforgiving hand of the law.

Which brings the story to me. The impossible girl.

Sixteen years ago to the day, I was found on the steps of the town hall at sunrise. A white baby.

There was no note, no witness to give an explanation for my presence there and definitely nobody to explain how I had come into being. Whites were infertile, the bleaching process made sure of that, and yet here I was, pigmentless and pale. They ran tests. A lot of tests. But nothing could explain where I had come from or how I came to be the colour I was.

In a land where the rules were everything and were thought to be completely unbreakable, I had accidentally become the ultimate danger, a chink in the armour of their world.

In the town senate arguments raged over what should be done with me, some called me an angel but more called me an abomination. The abomination side argued for my imprisonment, if not my “termination” while the liberals and the bleeding hearts argued for my innocence. What could a newborn possibly do to endanger society. Perhaps those arguing for my destruction might have triumphed had not the order of Black stepped in to my defense.

In the deep commanding voice which matched his night black skin and clothes Elder Charcoal Dark pointed out that the murder of a child would only perpetuate the danger of the situation, muddying the waters as respected town members committed crimes worthy of whitening and then got to keep their colours.

In our new world life was fragile and sacred, every birth mattered and to kill me would set a precedent more dangerous than keeping me alive. Dead I was a weakness, alive I could be an example.

It was decided instead that I would be fostered by a grey woman on the outskirts of town, a woman who had broken the rules and was offered a choice of punishments, to raise me or become a white herself.

I’ve lived on that little plot of land my whole life, kept separate from the world of colour across the old bridge by fear and a watchful population, determined to separate me as much as possible from the ordered world my existence called in to question.

I spent my childhood hiding, ashamed of what I was. Within the walls of the little gray hut I felt safe, nobody could see me and in the dim light from the dirty windows I could almost imagine the grey light staining my skin until I became like the other children.

Miss Chalice was kind to me, she didn’t exactly love me but she never taunted me or seemed physically repulsed by my presence. I loved her for that, following her about and sitting as close as she would let me. I suppose that she was an outsider too, I never found out what she did that gave the senate the power to punish her with my upbringing, but it must have been bad.

Whatever the truth was, it gave me a shelter from a world which was as unkind as it was colourful. I’ve never been sure why I was allowed to go to school. Perhaps for the same reason that they let me live, that breaking the rules was not an option and all children had to go to school, or maybe because it is easier to discipline and impress a rowdy room of children when the thing they fear the most is in the room with them. Whatever it was, school was a rainbow coloured version of hell.

The desks were segregated, each section colour appropriate and as we grew up the timetable varied by caste. The reds took politics, the blues learned to cook, green did extra physical exercise and so on. Me? I sat in the corner by the teacher, on show in a whitewashed seat that clearly used to be grey. They didn’t timetable me any colour specific classes but I couldn’t leave so instead I became adept at hiding, loitering in the hallways was not an option unless I wanted to be avoided by 95% of the students and tormented by the remainder, kids of every colour caste who seemed to believe that their cruelty would make me vanish.

Sometimes I wondered if it would, if perhaps I should just walk until the reclaimed lands of our town disappeared behind me, walk until I fell and then slowly rot into the putrid soil which still covered most of the land.

But something has always stopped me, some spark of defiance which held me back from doing what I’m sure half the town would like me to do. As I grew I realised that the best thing I could do to fight back was continue to be. They could taunt me, they could ignore me but they could not hurt me, not without risking sharing my fate.

And so it was that the system which should prevent my existing became what kept me alive. My destruction by any hand other than my own would destroy the person responsible, as a child protected by the laws of our state I was untouchable.

That all changed last week, the week of my sixteenth birthday and the week that Miss Chalice finally succumbed to her illness.

Legally I am now an adult. I am no longer the responsibility of the state and with Miss Chalice’s death and the repossession of her house by the senate I am also homeless. Suddenly there is a way that perhaps the problem of my existence may be solved by a means other than violence or my own actions.

Who would be to blame if a penniless, orphaned, unemployable young woman were simply to slip through the cracks of society. Dying by starvation or exposure was not uncommon among the lesser colours, the dangers of hard labour in the winter and cheap housing was a part of the natural order. What a convenience it would be if I fell amongst that number.

Which is how I found myself here. The plot of land assigned to me by the senate.

It’s a burned wreck with a tiny plywood box erected on top of it. The roof is metal sheeting, the insulation non-existent and it contains a sleeping bag, a barbeque and some plumbing that looks like it predates the emergence.

To live here in winter would be the kiss of death, an outcome I’m sure the senate has considered. That’s a few months off but there’s plenty of things which could take me before then. Starvation, exhaustion, being crushed when this shoddy structure falls on me, all of these are distinct possibilities.

Perhaps I should just accept it, an adult life unable to work or marry stretches ahead of me, but as we’ve already established, I rather like to defy people’s expectations.

This is not the story of how I die.

This is the story of how I survive.

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Read Chapter 1 – Despair vs. Determination

Colourcaste: Prologue – Forged in Darkness

I learned the history of our world the same way as every child does, sitting in a too warm classroom and struggling to understand how things could have been so different all that time ago. The world we lived in, belonged in, seemed so real, vibrant and permanent that it was hard to imagine it any other way. What was different for me was that I didn’t really belong in the new world either, I was something else entirely, something in between past and present. Something impossible.

My name is Winter Pearl Bleach and this is my story.

To make you understand I have to take you back, back to the old times, the bad times before there was colour.

Back then everything was shades of beige. It was a divided world where people fought and killed for power and land, they claimed they were doing it for religion, freedom or race, but the lines were blurred. Everyone looked similar, but not similar enough that people didn’t hate other people just because their colour was different. Without each colour having a place, there was no order, dark beige could overtake light beige and light beige could kill them for it. Every person could be whatever they wanted and to do that, they would do whatever it took.

In the west of the world, across the ocean from our country there was a huge power. A country called America where people of every shade lived under the banner of liberty. But it wasn’t true freedom, every day of peace came at a price, there were hidden divisions within the land and across the seas America was quietly involved in wars which were tearing at the fabric of the world. Threats were made and held for decades, nobody daring to test the weapons that they pointed at one another.

Time passed and things got worse, people forgot why they were fighting and began just killing people who were different to them. Planes were brought down, schools bombed and families ripped apart by conflict and desperation. Chaos reigned.

Chaos and desperation breed madness and once the madness takes hold it is almost impossible to stop.

In the thrall of madness a man at the heart of it all decided that it would be better to start again than to continue in the vain hope of fixing what seemed so irrevocably broken. He pressed the button, making real those long idle threats and four two weeks the old world burned and its people with it.

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What was left once the flames died down was contained in an underground complex in the south-west corner of an island nation formerly known as Great Britain. It’s position on the edge of the biggest blast zones had left it marginally less damaged, though it was still burned beyond recognition. Under what had once been a great monument to the flora and fauna of the dead world in a warren of tunnels and bunkers, a few hundred people, shared a stockpile of food and equipment which might one day enable them to return to the surface.

In virtual darkness, their energy limited a new society developed. A society built for survival where everyone had a part and a value. To identify people in the shadow, bright colours were worn, colours which signified a person’s place in this new world and which in time began to represent more than a job description.

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Colours began to define the person who wore them, to give them an identity in the endless blackness. Even as the inhabitants of the bunker struggled to survive, they surrounded themselves with their colours whenever they could, taking comfort from the stability of this system. Colours sought out mates of their own colour, friendships were forged tying together these groups and the system prospered.

After almost a hundred years, the air quality sensors turned from red to green and a party went to the surface, knowing that their complex would not survive much longer. They found the world outside changed almost beyond recognition. The scorched earth had begun to grow again, but it had grown differently, brighter and hardier, the poisoned air and water changing the plants and the landscape in to something new just as the catastrophe had changed its people.

The surface was pronounced safe and blinking and blind the cave-dwellers emerged, only the oldest among them having been on the surface as small children, most had been born beneath the earth and their subterranean home had somehow altered them. The colours they wore and lived by had become part of them, something about the depths or perhaps the radiation had caused their skin to begin to take on the colours they so proudly wore. As generations continued the colours became more pronounced, colour marrying colour and so what began as a necessity became a fundamental part of the new humanity.

As the new colony rose from the ashes of the old world, new rules were written. Rules for a new society, immune from the hatred and the discontent which had destroyed the old ways. Rules which survive to this day. Humanity now numbers in the thousands, spread between five towns in what our first leader’s daughter christened “The Berriverse” – berry being used to describe the rich colours of our lives.

The berry idea stuck. The founding town Sloe Valley was followed by the reclamation of a city now known as Barberry Port. Strawberry Shores sprang up when the sea was no longer too acidic for sailing (swimming is still dangerous) and two new outposts have recently begun. The first, Acaiberry Plains, is dedicated to farming whilst the second, Tayberry Brooks is my home and is distinguishable only by the prison, the only one of our new world, which sits at its furthest extremity.

Although we are beginning to reclaim the land we still live by the rules which began so long ago, The Credo of Colours, the founding agreement of our lands signed by all 124 people who emerged from that bunker generations ago.

THE CREDO OF COLOURS

We, who have been so fortunate to be granted another chance at life, do hereby swear to observe and uphold these laws until our dying day. The foundation of a new order upon these laws will serve to remind generations to come of the importance of social structure and harmony, even when the dark days of our past have passed beyond living memory. We, the undersigned, ancestors to all who will follow, have founded a world upon these unshakeable principals and pledge to teach them to our descendants, so binding them to a path which separates us from devastation and death.

Let no man doubt his place in the world order. He shall be born with his colour written in his very skin and so shall never be without place or purpose.

With colour comes responsibility. No colour is less valuable than another, though their callings will lead them to different places each path is essential to our survival and should be undertaken with pride and honour.

No colour is to fight for what is not rightfully theirs. Dissatisfaction breeds conflict and conflict breeds death. Those who resent their colour or employ trickery or violence to attain things beyond their station in life are to be punished. Where rehabilitation is impossible or inadvisable, they shall be stripped of all colours and imprisoned, lest their treason disrupt the peace we have striven for.

Colours must work to preserve the boundaries which bring us peace. Therefore colours may only marry freely within their own colour, so maintaining the purity of their line. Marriages may be made one colour on either side of your birth colour, but only with the town senate’s permission, the dominant colour will be decided and any children from such couplings will continue as if their heritage were from that colour alone. Couplings beyond this are forbidden and will be punished as any other treason.

The town senate holds the power of judge and jury and will work to ensure the stability and peaceable continuation of our rainbow society.

So it has been written and so shall it be.

The Colours

RED – The colour of the senate and civil leaders. As the last man to enter the bunker, having waited to help others, the leader of our colony was burned red. To honour him red shall forever more be the colour of those who put aside their own agendas to lead and to serve. Those who wear red shall be politicians, business leaders and public figures.

ORANGE – The colour of determination and dedication, closest to red but very different. Lawyers, sportsmen, architects and philanthropists shall wear orange as a symbol of their contributions to our society and our enjoyment of it.

YELLOW – is the colour of reason and satisfaction and shall be worn by those who use their minds to improve the world we are building. Teachers, doctors and scientists shall wear yellow as they strive to guide and inspire our people.

GREEN – Green is the colour of hope and life and shall be worn by those who work to maintain that which we have reclaimed through service and bravery. The military, police and fire service shall wear green as they work to protect us from the forces of nature and from ourselves.

BLUE – Is the colour of harmony and understanding shall be worn by those whose skills help us reclaim the high quality of life humanity once enjoyed, experimenting with old ideas I a new world. Blue shall be worn by chefs, inventors and journalists as they strive for progress and chronicle our return to greatness.

PURPLE – is one of the oldest colours and shall be worn by those who dedicate their lives to the improvement of our world through the ancient arts. Painters, sculptors and musicians shall wear purple as they enhance our lives with the beauty and harmony of their skills.

PINK – is the colour of innocence and sensitivity. Pink shall be worn by those tasked with the rearing and care of the next generation and those who help people understand and represent their colour. Day care professionals, stylists, and shopkeepers shall wear pink as they pass on our ways to the children and adults in their care.

BROWN – is the colour of the earth and shall be worn by those who work the lands to maintain our civilisation. Farmers, gardeners, handymen and fishermen shall wear brown as a sign of their understanding of the needs of our earth and its people.

GREY – the colour of modesty. Grey denotes individuals who remain unattached to any path, the transient workers. Those who wear grey fill the gaps left by society, fulfilling those needs which we cannot plan ahead for as they occur.

BLACK – last but by no means least – those who wear black are those who remind us of where we have been, the spiritual leaders of our community. They will administer last rights and watch over our souls and our dead.

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These colours are our world. From the day you are born until the day you die your colour means everything, it dictates your friends, your lovers, your job and your home. You are your colour.

And me?

I’m white. I have no colour.

I am an impossibility.

White in a coloured world

Read Prologue Part Two – A Chink in the Armour

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