The Perfect Palette

The Patent Clerk glanced at the clock, its hands struggling against the weight of time. He considered that perhaps it needed winding.

‘Colour, colour, colour… No, can’t find anything under colour. Generally, colour can’t be protected. You can have ‘textures, ‘patterns’ and ‘coatings’ but not ‘colour’. Let me see.’ He searched in the Patent Submissions ledger.

‘There are ‘colour combinations’, but that’s ‘Logos and Trademarks’ upstairs. Is there anything else I can help you with?’ The clerk closed the book, laying both hands on the leather binding. He stared, no light shining through this closed door.

‘It has to be colour,’ insisted Sally. ‘After all, that’s what it is.’ She seemed pleased that it was colour. The clerk pulled the ledgers across the desk, varnished by generations of sleeves in public service, to signify withdrawal of cooperation and his patience.

‘Really?’ sighed the clerk, willing himself on. ‘Can you describe this colour?’

‘Not really. That’s what makes it unique.’

‘Then how do you expect to patent something that can’t be described?’

‘That’s the thing. Colours are described against other colours people have seen: green, brown, yellow. This is so unlike anything that has been before that there are no descriptions.’

‘May I see a sample?’ The clerk leant on the ledgers with his full weight, the step beyond closure.

‘Will that help with the protection?’

‘No, it may help with the description. What’s it like? Please.’ He glanced again at the clock.

‘It’s like no colour that has ever been seen before,’ smiled Sally, her eyes sparkling, boasting about her invention as yet unseen and, by her own admission, indescribable.

‘But surely all colours have been seen before, aren’t they just combinations of other colours? Primary colours, secondary colours… eh… and other colours. People may say ‘that’s an unusual colour’, but not ‘that’s a colour that no one has seen before and I can’t describe it.’

‘They will now!’

The ledgers were moved under the desk, irretrievable except under armed siege, not an event logged in the annals of the Patents Office. Sally continued to smile, not as a mask to flatter or deceive; she was a product of the studio not the boardroom.

‘This is completely different from everything. It’s not just a combination of colours, it’s ALL colours. It hacks into the visual cortex and straight to the hypothalamus. It links the hemispheres of the brain and BOOM!’ She clapped her hands too close to the clerk’s face. ‘It’s like a texture, a sound, a flavour. Once you see it you will know it’s different.’

Her febrile enthusiasm was uncrushed by the barren landscape of old books and dusty procedures, by a place where no sunlight bothered to shadow, no laughter could reverberate. But the clerks were gatekeepers skilled in defence against the ill-informed and the hopelessly optimistic.

‘Is it a colour or a drug?’ The clerk smiled, but to mock, realising that this was one of those nutters who rock up every month and insist that they have found a flaw in physics or can prove perpetual motion. Alchemists? Arseholes, he admitted. He braced himself for a final attack, five minutes to home time (‘is that clock even working?’) and this needed the concerted action of twenty years manning the frontline.

‘Have you made anything like this before?’ he asked.

‘No one has.’

‘How is this ‘colour’ made?’

‘That’s the secret.’

‘What can it be used for?’

‘Everything.’

‘What will you do with it?’

‘Why, change the world, of course!’

#

Sally had been working on colour all her life, even as she lay in glowing clouds of the amniotic sac. As a child she had a fascination for everything bright in an era when everything was brown. She collected coloured paper, swatches, fabrics from the haberdashers and sari shops, post cards and glitter. She stared at holiday Ektachrome slides and the early colour televisions with their twenty-four inches of backlit perils, disregarding the content. She was hypnotised by the possibilities of colours, and when a teacher had said that colours were limitless she set about exploring infinity. But no matter how many colours she found they just looked like other colours.

She wanted more, beyond the rules of light spectra and the physical restrictions of her eyes. She wanted to exit this universe of coordinated surfaces and patterns to explore the next galaxy. Why didn’t they understand she was building a space rocket? She would talk excitedly to her mother about buying more fabrics and pencils and tubes of paint, or her father about painting the walls in ten different shades, each reflecting the evolving daylight. They laughed, but not her school friends; they started to avoid her crazed talk about travelling to colours deep inside her brain. Sally saw herself as an adventurer to places unchartered, an explorer of the metaphysical who had lost faith in the confines of conventions which conspired to lock her in darkness.

Her art teachers told her to forget colour and just draw, which she did with a smile as rigid as the reluctant pencil in her hand, a smile that followed her beyond school to fend off the unbelievers while behind it she exploded with possibilities: light fizzing and popping in her head or in dark corners that nobody else could see, at the myriad of shades that were even in a shadow, at the aura of reflections bouncing from surface to surface again and again. A leaf was intoxicating and the folds on silk a deep narcotic that hinted of a paradise that she would one day visit. Sally knew that she, and only she, would find the beauty beyond space and light.

So, she developed her new colour, or colours, working like she was running out of time. After all, how much time would it take to find a new colour, perhaps several lifetimes. She would return from her job and work until she dropped onto a bunk under her desk, eating while mixing paints, layering fabrics on fabrics, backlighting photographs, scanning and printing, over and over again. She noticed that colours started to have sounds, musical notes, then smells, and others would take her to places she had been and some never visited; a split second of hallucination, then back to reality with an essence of the trip. Each day, dressed in more and more outlandish colour combinations that transcended fashion and good taste, her eyes became more aware and tuned to new horizons. Her vision lost her job, and her single mindedness prevented her finding another.

And then, sleep starved, staring across her studio, she found it! A billion colours, splashed over palates and mixing bowls, the carpet and floor, her dungarees, in photos hanging from cords, fabrics pinned to the wall and ceiling, dangling in her face, gouging her eyes with a red-hot laser and piercing her brain with the most wonderful sonic incision. The more she looked the more she felt, heard, sensed, until she could see, finally, with her eyes closed, redundant in the quest, no more use than a monocle at the Big Bang.

#

It was years until Sally finally got to grips with what she had discovered and showed her new ‘colour’ to friends. One reacted in wonder. One cried. One left the room and was never seen again. Sally took several paint colour charts and applied her colour to a horizontal line of small squares. She placed the colour charts in a paint shop and watched. Two decorators in white overalls turned to the doctored page, one looked to the ceiling and smiled.

‘Can you hear that? I can smell it!’

Then an art student picked up a chart, stopped at the doctored page and laughed. He laughed until he became hysterical, until tears flowed down his cheeks and he slid to the floor. Others joined him and they laughed and cried together. Perfect, thought Sally, just perfect.

#

Centre stage in the Patents Office was the Enquiry Desk, the type once common in government departments. Few visitors came to this place that assumed heresy in every applicant; like Silicone Valley being held to account by the Spanish Inquisition. Sally’s hurried footsteps followed the path ingrained by the foolish or successful, alerting the creaking floor to opening time.

‘What if its more than a colour?’ her first remarks, as she pushed her 5’1” frame to the enquiry desk. ‘Oh no,’ thought the clerk, ‘here we go; The Return of the Nutter.’

‘What if it’s about finding a colour?’ She smiled as though proffering the final piece of a long-lost jigsaw.

‘Madam, nice to see you again.’ Decades in public service had instilled standard platitudes. Without looking at Sally, the clerk pulled the registration tome from its place of rest.

‘If it is as you say, it’s a process,’ he offered a nano-glimmer of hope, ‘like a search tool, a type of index? That we can help with. How do you find this ‘colour’?’

‘I don’t. You do. In your head.’

That’s the way it is with nutters, he thought.

#

Sitting on long distance trains are trapped audiences. Sally looked for the right pairing for the five-hour journey from London to Edinburgh. No to the young woman of fashion with a rodent sized dog. No to the retired couple with an expedition’s worth of food containers. No to the corporates with spread sheets. She found a bohemian woman, capes and scarves and a multitude of jewellery cascading to her lap, busy with appointment cards, laptop and phone, all wired together like homemade Christmas lights. Creative and business, thought Sally, someone who will see the opportunities, someone who must think to survive. Perfect. Sally sat beside her with a few ice breakers.

The woman talked eloquently about her food company, purveyors of sea greens. She spoke enthusiastically about how all we need is sea greens, how healthy, how sustainable and how the Mediterranean diet is finished. ‘Doesn’t work in our climate.’ Something about osmosis or market appeal that Sally didn’t understand. The woman was versed with facts and figures from her recent research which she was enroute to present at a conference. Perfect, a scientist and a sociologist! Sally invested in the partnership and cross-examined at length.

Returning with coffee and refusing payment was the start of Sally’s allotted time slot. ‘Perhaps you can give me the benefit of your advice. What if I said I was an inventor or a discoverer? What if I had something that can’t be described, can’t be categorised and is unlike anything anyone has ever seen before? Let’s say, a new colour.’

‘Then I would say sell it to the big chemical companies. Then they can apply it to cars, fabrics, clothes. The market must be infinite. The big question is will people like it?’

‘It depends on the people,’ Sally confirmed, unaware of how simplistic this sounded to a woman who had justified travelling five-hundred miles to talk about sludge.

‘Obviously it’s subjective.’

‘No, it’s not about taste, it’s about dreams, memories, fear, even love!’

‘But it’s a colour; it’s not that deep, honey. Some will like it, others won’t. Ultimately, they will all get fed up with it and before you know it, they will be painting the bedroom magnolia again.’

‘Not with this colour they won’t,’ Sally assured. ‘They can’t. How can you get fed up with your own memory, a colour that digs deep into all your experiences and brings them rushing back, like retrieving files that are forgotten and projecting them in high definition?’

‘No, it’s fashion. Comes and goes. Like my sea greens; I’m selling it because I can. I can’t sell a Mediterranean diet; you just pick that off a shelf. What good is that to me? All you are doing is trying to find an angle for a fashion.’

‘Is love fashion? Are memories of sitting on your mother’s knee fashion, or of your first day at school, of lying in a pool in the sunshine, of your favourite music, favourite food?’

‘But colours can’t evoke that…’

‘This one can! And a lot more. You have a purple scarf and bag. I would guess it is a colour that reminds you of someone. You see purple more than other colours because when there is an emotional connection, we search out that colour. That colour helps you retrieve memories; it makes you feel safe; it comforts you. You see, colour is a superhighway into the cognitive system. Colour stimulates memory and makes adrenalin and hormones flow, so we don’t just remember, we have a physical and emotional response! It can arouse you; it can even change your heart rate. Why does the eye see nature’s colours more than any other colours? Because we needed them to survive, to find food. That’s why green makes us happy and blue makes us calm. My colour triggers everything in your brain; understanding, memory and physical response. It’s not just a simple colour; its every colour you have ever seen, in every shade, compressed, like they have been through a liquidiser. You will find all the colours that mean most to you and they will burrow into your brain, erupting all that data. It’s sounds, numbers, letters, faces, smells, textures, the warm crust of bread, light on the waves, the sunset. It triggers every receptor and is so intense you will smell the flowers, feel the waves, the sun on your face. You will hear voices, your mother’s voice. It will make you laugh, make you sing, it will drive you on… or make you not want to go on.’

The passenger was leaning forward in her seat, her phone flashing, her laptop running low. She looked anxious. She exhaled loudly, trying to find the words, trying to convince herself that this was just some silly notion.

‘Have you shown anyone this thing? You want my advice?’

‘Yes please,’ said Sally, her smile barely contained by the train.

‘Don’t show it to anyone! Don’t show it to me. Destroy it or take it with you to the grave.’

She hurriedly packed her laptop, cables trailing, gathered her many layers of clothes and scarves now a barrier to flight, jewellery clanging, her considered appearance starting to unravel, and headed for the door two hours before her destination.

‘I am sorry for your loss,’ offered Sally, the same smile on her lips that now spoke of sympathy and concern.

‘How did you know my mother died?’

‘I guess that purple was her colour, and you are crying.’

#

The clerk wondered if Sally would ever come back again. She had been in ten times with the crazy colour. He had recommended a copyright lawyer he knew and assumed that they had dissuaded her. Regardless, they went out of business so perhaps her case was stuck in a file. When she appeared he was glad, he was surprised to be glad, as he was that she had been on his mind. There was something about her he liked: her eyes, one blue one green, her neat hair and small sculpted hands. She was homely and attractive, he admitted, which had eluded him at first. And he liked her voice, which cut through the stale echoes of the room, and that she always smelled nice, though it wasn’t perfume it was earthier, more like wool. Grass? Log fires? Surely not.

‘Hi, how are things? Any luck with the whole ‘colour’ business?’ he said.

‘No. Too many risks and the lawyers are expensive.’

‘Really? Yet they still went out of business. Though I suppose they had to after the partner died. He washed up in the Thames, you know.’

She stared at the floor, her smile ambivalent, her bright attire like a raging hibiscus in a concrete car park. ‘You didn’t see the colour, did you?’

‘No, you never showed it to me.’

Yet as she had packed up her paperwork after a visit, he had seen a small coloured square for a fraction of a second. Nothing to explain or describe, like she said. More of a shimmer than a colour. He felt content that he had tried to help her. He was generally content these days, he admitted, again surprised.

‘Will you be in again? I was hoping to see an application. Gets my numbers up,’ he joked, his ledgers open.

She smiled, distracted; ‘I was a bit of a time waster. You must have thought I was crazy.’

‘No! Never crossed my mind. Crazy? No. Perhaps we should talk about it,’ he said, impulsively.

‘There is nothing to talk about. The whole thing is gone. I just came to apologise. I’m moving away, to the coast, to Scotland.’

That’s what the smell was, the north, he realised. The damp green grass, big brown cows in pasture, blue-green salty mist from the sea, the rusty sand; the Scotland of his childhood holidays.

The clock’s bronze hands moved rapidly to one o’clock as Sally turned to leave. As she reached the door she looked back at him behind the huge desk, the guardian of volumes, protector of patents, vanquisher of the unprepared. Perhaps? She considered. Maybe? Perfect! She smiled, tying a diaphanous coloured scarf round her neck.

‘Can I buy you lunch to make up for the time wasting,’ she asked.

He smiled in this place not intended for smiles, a convention he had rarely troubled. He had definitely over-wound the clock, because now the hands moved slowly, shy of the commitment of striking for lunch hour. It was the longest two minutes in the history of the Patents Office; Scottish sand pouring grain by grain through a gigantic egg timer.Lunch with Sally! The clerk looked at Sally. Sally smiled at the clerk, and they stood there for what seemed an eternity, happy, feeling the wind on their faces and listening to the sea.