I knew the colour I wanted. It was the same as a T-shirt I wore two summers ago when I was three stones lighter. After a bit of rummaging in the cupboard under the stairs, I found it in a half filled charity bin bag; one of those that come through the front door with leaflets for stretch sofa covers and takeaway pizza.
The T-shirt was a little ‘weathered’, jumble sale smelly and a bit dog hairy even, but when I turned it inside out the colour was perfect.
‘Orange,’ said Phil, ‘you’re going to paint the front room orange.’
‘No. Tangerine. Orange would be horrible.’
Although ‘Millers Home Decorating’ had the full spectrum of colour cards, the man behind the counter was definitely a magnolia person. There was a sign, the size of a business card, in the corner of the shop window saying they would ‘match any hue’. I’d noticed it on my way home from work on Friday. ‘Clive’, according to the ‘happy to help’ badge on his brown overall, didn’t look that happy about my T-shirt and took it at arm’s length between his thumb and biroed forefinger.
‘Yes, we may be able to match that if you’re absolutely sure about the colour?’ He said, through his nose and led me past pyramids of brilliant white gloss, sandpaper fans and rolls of woodchip, to some dull grey chunks of technology at the back of the shop.
‘We haven’t had this machine that long. Head office installed it.’ He said as if to emphasise it was nothing to do with him. He bent down and switched it on. Lights flashed and a digital display on the front eagerly welcomed us to the ‘Fantasia Rainbow Centre’.
At the request of the digital display, Mr Clive (I felt Clive on its own was too familiar) positioned my T-shirt on the glass plate and wiped his hands down his overall. He lowered the hood and the upside-down rainbow indicator light smiled as it lit up. I thought of a tangerine heaven and smiled back. Mr Clive, not smiling, huffed and puffed the dust off the control panel and pressed the virtual button on the touch sensitive screen.
The edges of the glass plate turned diode blue and a thin red laser line swept up and down the T-shirt sandwich. Happy beeps announced that the scanning was over and the machine was ready to mix. Mr Clive pointed to my T-shirt, which I obediently picked up and stuffed in my pocket.
Then he disappeared through a grey and black strip blind into the stock room and a moment later emerged with a ten litre tin of the base colour. He opened a glass door on the front of the mixing chamber, heaved the tin in, levered off the lid with a handy screwdriver from his top pocket and closed the door. A spectrum of lights raced round the carousel of coloured inks, connected by tubes to the chamber below and the whole thing started to vibrate with a self-satisfied hum.
Through the glass door, I could see a large dollop of sunshine yellow, a teaspoon of brown and the tiniest speck of blood red being squirted into the tin. The vibration increased to an excited shiver, which soon became a rock and roll shimmy. Mr Clive retreated to the control panel and pressed the touch screen display. The rocking and rolling increased and the lights flashed and danced. The blue diode plate shone and the thin red laser line swooped backwards and forwards over the glowing glass while the rainbow smile on the front of the hood beamed brighter and brighter.
‘Is the machine ok? Does it normally do this?’
Mr Clive, wiping his forehead with an ironed white hankie was on his knees flicking some switches on the side, ‘not normally, no,’ he said.
He tried to pull the plug but it was too far to reach. The whole thing was now shaking and rattling and rolling. It hummed higher and higher until it was singing in exultation. The tin of paint inside had turned the tangerine of my dreams and as the ecstatic Fantasia Rainbow Centre reached its crescendo, the door burst open. I toppled back into some rolls of heavy duty lining paper sending them careering down the shop, followed by a tide of tangerine paint.
Later, at home, I was sitting on the front room sofa with a cup of tea, when Phil poked his head round the door ‘Didn’t you get any paint?’
‘A bit,’ I pointed to my tangerine toes, ‘but I think I can probably live with the lime a little longer.’
(c) Jan Carr 2008