The Lear Library

This was originally created to be a child’s story, part of an anthology to be illustrated by a friend. The project was never finished, unfortunately, but the story felt very solid and so I re-structured and editted it a little. It still works as a piece of fiction for a young reader, but I would hope that it’s enjoyable by any age.

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It was dark in the room.

Actually, that is not quite correct. It had been dark in the room, but the cheerily-patterned curtains were beginning to let in a dim, just-before-dawn light. Paulina sighed and rolled over in bed again, facing away from the lightening window and tugging the covers close up to her chin.
She hadn’t slept all night.
Her eyes felt itchy and dry, and she was in a bad mood. For the past two nights, she’d had so little sleep she’d been constantly tired, yawning widely whenever she was talking to people. It made her look like she was bored or rude, and Paulina tried very hard to appear to be neither.
She finally gave up as the grey light continued to filter into her room, rolling around to untangle herself from her bed. She glanced at her alarm clock and gave a groan of despair when she saw it was already five o’clock in the morning. Standing, she pulled on a dark t-shirt and some trousers, then crept downstairs so as not to wake her parents. She took her brilliant-blue coat from it’s hook in the coat-room and pulled it on, then unlocked the back door to her parents’ house and snuck out into the early morning.

It was a little cold outside, so she pulled her coat closer around herself as she followed the town down towards the sea. It was quite a pleasant little area, like any small tourist town. In the summer there were stalls set up along the beaches, selling inflatable crocodiles and ice-creams. There was an old man who would often walk down onto the sand with a knotted handkerchief draped over his bald head and leading an old, frail-looking donkey to the beachfront. He’d set up a sign reading “Donkey Rides – 1s 6d.” Which, when anyone asked, assured them that it roughly translated into a fiver.
Paulina walked down the length of the beach, idly kicking her green shoes through the sand, when it started to rain. She only noticed because the sand abruptly began to dapple with tiny round patches of darker moisture under her feet. She hunched her shoulders up a little and continued to walk. She turned and walked backwards for a while, to look back along the curve of the beach and watch her footsteps stretching out and away.

There was also something else on the beach; a bright, unnatural line of blue left in the sand. A long line of little plastic-looking droplets. She frowned and crouched to get a closer look at the odd, molten-plastic-seeming markings. They were exactly the same colour as her coat. Looking at her garment, she was alarmed to see that the colour was running out of it, washing down her in the rain and dripping off the hem of the coat in thick, syrupy droplets.
She stood in alarm and looked at the sleeves of her coat as the colour ran away down her elbows, followed by rolling lines of what looked like the colour of her own skin. She was shocked and, she’d admit, a little horrified to see her hands were now left a dull, featureless grey that matched her jacket. The colour had all run down her legs, leaving her a rather deshevilled and drab-looking little girl with a grey face and darker grey hair, all bundled up in colourless clothes.

While a lot of people may have screamed or panicked at this rather frightening turn of events, Paulina was quiet and considered her situation. The odd occurance hadn’t hurt, which was certainly fotunate. It was just very unsettling. She stepped out of the strange pile of mixed pigments, her once-green shoes leaving perfect footprints that set in the plasticky colour rivulets, and she momentarily thought of an impression being left that was somehow unique to her. Like the medieval kings gone by pressing their coat of arms into the wax seal on a letter.
Thinking rationally, or as rationally as she was able given her disturbing predicament, she looked up and down the beach to see if she could spot someone of authority. After all it had been drummed into her many times that, were she ever in trouble, she should always look for a policeman or something of the sort if her parents weren’t there. But there was no blue uniform in sight on the beach. She was considering walking to the fire station in town to see if they could help, though heavens alone knew how, when she caught sight of the old donkey-rides man walking towards the shoreline. He was carrying what looked like a painting-easel with a canvas, and a folding stool made for camping. The knotted handkerchief was gone, and a bright yellow scarf was tied tightly around his neck instead, as the autumnal morning was a far cry from the balmy summer afternoons Paulina usually saw him on. He planted down his folding stool, altered the way it was facing slightly, then set up his easel. He sat, and began digging around in his pockets, his bald pate gleaming ever so slightly in the dim light of the drained-grey sky.

While her parents had told Paulina not to talk to strangers they’d talked to the old man very often on days spent at the beach, and they seemed to like him quite a lot, so Paulina suspected he might be something other than a stranger. Or, even if he was a stranger, he couldn’t be that strange. She approached and coughed politely, trying to remember what her parents had called the old man when they’d talked. The old man turned on his stool, still rummaging in his pockets.
“Oh, it’s little ‘Lina, an’t it?” he smiled a wide, toothy smile that made his wrinkles turn into deep creases, his rubbery lips stretching hugely. “What’re you doin’ out so early, m’gel? Should be warm in bed, not walkin’ through the rain. It be a shade too early for pony rides right now too. Besides, my old Claude is tucked up in bed hissel’. And, oh my, you appear to be all blank-like.” He said the sentence in one great big runaway breath, as if the thoughts trickled from him in a continuous stream, lining up at the mouth for debarkation like passengers from a train.
Paulina was about to answer with her own marked concern about suddenly being “all blank-like,” but the man turned away and pulled out the hands he’d been moving around in his coat. He produced a small tin, which he opened to reveal a set of paints, and removed a thin brush from within. The rain slowly eased off as he went about his business, trickling to a stop as he stuck his finger and thumb into his mouth and tweaked the bristles of the paintbrush into a fine point. He began to collect a dull orange pigment from the tin, the paints already made wet and prepared for use by the light rain.

Ignoring the easel completely, he raised his hand above the line of the horizon and began to move his brush back and forth in small, horizontal passes. The dull grey of the sky slowly gave way to a sliver of light as the sun began to crest the curvature of the world. The old man continued to sweep his hand in tiny, careful movements until there was a great crescent of brilliant dawnlight over the horizon. The man dipped his hand below the line between the sun and sea, and Paulina’s eyes watered and became unfocussed as she tried to watch.
It was as if the paintbrush was somehow in the man’s hand but also very far away, like a trick of foreshortened perspective. The tiny, thin paintbrush was actually incredibly long, and reached out across the sea – it was just the angle that the man held it at that made it look small. She had to concentrate on the very tip of the brush and screw her eyes up slightly to watch properly as the orange pigment began to wash from the brush’s bristles and gently evaporate into the air. Or perhaps it was washed off and mingled with the sea-water, as at that moment the reflection of the sun over the ocean glistened on the crests of waves, the light spreading down to match the rising dawn as Paulina watched.
The man smiled to himself as he worked and dropped his brush back down to the paints to collect another colour – a hazy purpley blue this time, and began to spread it slowly over the air in front of him. Paulina breathed out in wonder as the pre-dawn grey of the sky deepened and changed. It began to mingle with the orange of the sunlight as the man worked, the brilliant light mixing with the new addition to slowly create the rich azure of the sky. The cloud-grey had all but evaporated, leaving only a few unpainted areas that, with colour around them to define them, became clouds rather than featureless nothing. And with each time the man dipped his brush below the level of the horizon, the colours gently evaporated from his brush and the sea became a deeper, more brilliant blue to match the sky.

For a long moment, staring at the new day, the only sounds in the world were the pair’s breathing, and the slow cresting of waves against the sands of the shore.

Satisfied, the man put the paintbrush carefully back in the tin and snapped the lid shut. As if the tiny clicking sound was a signal a bird began to sing and trill, somewhere near the trees lining the road just apart from the beach. The world was suddenly, imperceptably somehow turning again. Paulina felt as if she’d somehow woken up.
The old man stood, folding away his stool and tucking it under his arm. He gave Paulina a broad, conspiratorial wink and a smile and said,
“Odd, an’t it? I always think the rain leaves things looking washed out, like. Just a trick of the mind, I suppose.” He patted the young girl’s head, then picked up his easel. The canvas was no longer blank, a watercolour replica of the dawn gracing it. Paying it little mind, the old man began shuffling up the beach and left Paulina to stare with wonder at her sky blue coat and green shoes, her brown hair and tanned skin.

Now, in later years when she was older, Paulina was a very different person from herself-as-a-young-girl. She spoke confidently in complete sentences, and had paper work that wouldn’t do itself. She was a woman who did lunch, as opposed to just eating it.
Sometimes, however, when she sat on part benches and looked up through the shadows of trees into the endless, unweighable blue, she could see the brush-strokes in the sky.