Colouring In

Sometimes when I'm bored, I doodle in my head. I take up an imaginary pencil and draw leaves and flowers on the trees, birds in the sky, butterflies which land on my arms. I fill the sad world with colour. I draw smiles on people's faces.

My brother was a soldier, but they sent him back when he couldn't shoot anymore. I draw him back his missing arm and a medal on his chest and make his mouth touch his ears at each end. He doesn't smile much, now, and he says they don't award medals for bad luck.

I colour in the square, grey buildings of the city which fills my canvas as far as I can see. The library is green, like the plants I've seen pictures of there; the hospital is red for blood; the prisons are blue for sad; I fill in the government building with black; and the adjoining military headquarters is bright orange and yellow for the bomb which started all this.

I draw Mummy next to Daddy. She holds his hand and her smile reaches up towards her pencil-dot eyes. Sometimes I draw in her angel wings, but mostly she just wears trainers and her favourite jumper and holds Daddy's hand and fiddles with her cuff, like she used to. I'm not sure I believe in angels, anyway. They told us Mummy was in heaven, now, and I thought that must be nice for her, but Daddy cried and didn't seem to think so. At school, they told us that heaven was a wonderful place, but that wouldn't make Daddy sad. I think there must not be a heaven. The teachers lied about it because it's so terrible down here they think people need to look forward to a better place.

Once a man who lived in a box on the road outside our house told me he'd had enough of life down here, and he was going to heaven instead. My brother used to tell me not to talk to the man, but he was still a soldier and so I asked the man how he knew heaven would be better. He told me it had to be because it couldn't be any worse, and being better is what heaven is for.

The next day, he wasn't in his box, and I never saw him again.
In my head, I took out my brush and painted his box clean, then I drew some flowers outside and a radio for him to listen to. With a thick pen, I drew a big set of steps up to the clouds, over the square, grey city where all the people with no smiles live, full of pictures of flowers and butterflies and striped with all the colours in my imaginary paint set. I hoped that now that his box was nice, he might see the stairs and come back.

When he didn't, I thought heaven must be so lovely that he didn't want to leave, even to talk to me. Now I think he never got there, and my staircase just led to the clouds.

At least it was beautiful.