Yellow

[Trigger warning: mental health, suicide/self-harm]

The brief at the night school class is clear: Paint a self-portrait in monochrome. I choose yellow.

It sits there between green and orange on the art teacher’s colour wheel. He spins the paper circle and all the colours briefly blur to white.

I choose yellow because it is the colour of happiness and sunshine. The colour of the sunflowers in the Van Gogh painting the teacher showed us. Yellow flowers in a yellow vase on a yellow table against a yellow wall. The colour of butter and comfort. The colour of my favourite dress.

But when I open the draw of yellow oil paints, harsh metallic names glare out at me – cadmium, sulphur, titanium – as if from the tiny squinting black letters of the poster in the chemistry lab. Hazardous, poison-tasting names.

‘He used to eat the paints’, the teacher had said. ‘Lead-based paint, you know – it sent him mad…’

*

The first week, I sketch the outline of my face – the too-sharp nose, the too-thin lips. Studying myself in the rust-blotted hand-mirror, I take each detail down, mercilessly.

The other women gossip and share advice. Most had chosen to work in blues or greens, after the colour of their eyes. I chose yellow.

By the time the teacher is closing the blinds, I had a workable outline of my face. Casting one look back at my sketch, I see the blank pupils, white unfilled holes where a soul should be.

*

The second week comes and we enter the classroom from the blunt cold of a November night, trailing long knitted scarves and the mulch of autumn leaves on our shoes. The others were greeting each other by name now.

Setting eyes on my sketch again, its lines seem to have shifted – the face narrower, the forehead more lined, the expression more pinched than I had remembered. I had aimed for a neutral smile, like the Mona Lisa the teacher showed us – but what I see now before me is a thin grimace outlined in hard HB and not a smile at all.

But the colour will cheer up the lines of my face, I am sure. I select a sunshine yellow for the background and wash the canvas quickly with broad confident brushstrokes.

Yellow, the colour of the roses I received on my first ever date. The colour of cartoon smiley faces and the notebook my mother gave me that says Positive vibes only on the cover. Also, the colour of the laburnum tree in the garden of my childhood home. One seed pod, my mother said, could kill you. Yellow yellow yellow for danger.

*

The third week is noticeably colder and our breath clouds in pale halos around the art studio. The other women talk about their families and the latest episode of a series I’ve never seen.

Revisiting my canvas, the yellow of the background is not the warm hue I remembered but the pale and washed-out shade of sickly winter sunbeams – an anaemic, bloodless colour.

No matter - I will pick richer yellows to shade the portrait itself and the muted background will only serve to highlight the brightness of the face. I pick out a bright lemon to highlight the cheekbones and forehead and nose and a deep mustard to work in contrasting shadows under the brow and lip. It will be an exercise in delicate chiaroscuro (I remember taking down the new term in my small, cramped hand, which did not seem to do justice to those smooth Italian syllables).

‘Chiaroscuro,’ the teacher had said, ‘The art of balance, the perfect harmony of light and dark.’

But stepping back to appraise my shading, I find there is no balance in the lighting – the highlighted cheekbones and forehead and nose are too bright, a lurid, luminous yellow, and the mustard shading has dried too dark, carving deep pits of shadow under the eyes and hollowing out the cheekbones to ragged caverns. The face that stares back from the canvass looks wild and sleepless. Recently, the nights have become an endless string of minutes. In the darkness, the luminous yellow numbers on the alarm clock haunt my vision. I screw my eyes shut but the numbers dance behind my eyes.

‘They used to eat the paint, you know,’ my mother had said. ‘The factory girls painting the clock faces would lick their brushes to get a fine point. Later, their jawbones rotted and fell from their faces. The paint was radioactive of course.’

*

The fourth week finds my portrait even more altered. The highlights and the scoops of shadow have only widened in disparity as the oil paints dried, throwing the jagged mountain-range of features into ghastly contrast. My brush-strokes had been too bold, too careless, and now I see that the paint had dried textured and uneven, creating the impression of a leprous disease, yellow flakes of oil paint hanging from the cheek bones like sloughed skin.

I try to cover the strangely bright and poisonous-looking shade of the highlights, but that lurid yellow won’t budge. It seeps through the new layers of paint I apply (hand moving quickly now, barely shaking) like the stubborn sunshine that creeps around my bedroom blinds each morning after a restless night, chasing sleep away.

The others don’t even try to engage me in conversation now. They sit and chat Christmas plans and exchange compliments on their progressing portraits – how the seascape of blues in one woman’s monochrome really evokes the colour of her sea-deep eyes, how another’s choice of lilac perfectly reflects the wistful serenity of her manner.

I chose yellow. Or did yellow choose me? Thinking back to the first week, I cannot quite remember my rationale – something about sunflowers and sunshine. Something about a yellow tree that grew in my childhood garden. The thoughts whirl and blur like the snow-flurries that now rattle the windows of the studio.

As I paint, the yellow burns itself onto my retinas, that sickly, bilious, jaundiced colour. It flickers now always at the corners of my vision – half-glimpsed yellow shadows that dance away laughing when I turn to look.

That night, I purge my room: I turn the alarm clock with its yellow numbers to the wall, I stuff my favourite yellow dress to the back of the wardrobe, I bin the yellow roses my mother sent.

*

Week five and it’s everywhere now. It was the yellow carrier bag the cashier handed me this morning (my weekly shop: five packets of fags and headache pills). It was the yellow billboard that promised to sell me a happiness I cannot find. It was the yellow curtains in the therapist’s office (the silence stretches between us, I cannot explain the yellow fever in my mind).

My hand flies across the canvass now, knuckles white around the brush, trying to capture the smiley sunshiney colour I’d imagined. But the paint vomits onto the canvas like so many brushfuls of bile. The girl in the picture looks sick, her sallow skin pinched in uneasy discomfort, the unnatural yellow eyes staring back at me with a look of contempt.

That night I lock myself in the bathroom and scrub my hands raw but the thick oil paint clings to my fingers and the yellow contamination has infected the grain of my skin and seeped deep under each nail like yellow blood that marks me guilty guilty guilty of a terrible crime.

*

Week six. She is talking to me now. She whispers very quietly and the others cannot hear.

She recites the curse-words with a twist of her lip: Ugly! Sinner! Bad! I take the paintbrush to her mouth but it doesn’t stop her talking. I heap brushfuls of paint between the thin lips but the voice sputters out still, spitting flecks of yellow in my face. I abandon the brush and squeeze paint from the tube into her mouth with shaking fingers. Still the bilious yellow voice comes and now she’s vomiting yellow paint and it’s running down the too-sharp chin and the too-thin neck. Between thick mouthfuls of yellow, she spews the familiar words: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

‘What do you want from me?’ I ask.

And she tells me.

And suddenly I’m running and now I’m outside and the wind rips a ragged scream from my lips as I duck out of the yellow search-lights of the street lamps and disappear into the night.

*

‘It was an odd case indeed,’ the fresh-faced psychiatrist said, wrinkling his brow and taking another sip of the scalding coffee that he wouldn’t have time to finish before the end of his break. ‘A young woman, admitted with D&V, diaphoresis and heavy salivation. Later became delirious and fell into a coma. We suspected a deliberate self-poisoning of course but the tox screens came back clear. We had to get the big guns involved from the poison centre but they nailed it eventually – cytisine, main alkaloid toxin in the laburnum plant. Beautiful tree actually, the laburnum. Very pretty – really brightens up any garden. I should get the Mrs to plant one. Anyway, she must have chowed down on a whole heap of it. She survived. She’s in Pleasant View now of course, suspected emerging schizo-affective. Apparently she still won’t talk. Not one word. Only that damn tune that she hums over and over again. You know – I finally placed it! It’s an old Donovan song, right?’

And with that, straightening his tie and abandoning the half-drunk coffee, the brisk-gestured psychiatrist left the staff-room. The others on their break couldn’t help but laugh at the eccentric doctor, striding down the corridor to the beat of his voice raised in song: And they call it mellow yellow! Mellow yellow! They call it mellow yellow!