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  There’s no such thing as true black.

  This is one of the very first art lessons. Squeezing black ready-made from a tube makes a painting look artificial, so instead, you mix the three primary hues: red, yellow, and blue. Because even the darkest shadow or deepest sorrow has a glimmer of color at its heart.

  But I know there’s another kind of black.

  I see it when I close my eyes, and become a paint palette. This black is a bottomless ocean of dark. I dip my fingers in it, smear it across a canvas. Use a paintbrush and flick my finger over the bristles, splattering tiny constellations onto the paper. Each small, lonely speck the color of sadness.

  PART ONE

  The Dictionary of Color

  CHAPTER 1

  Life in Monochrome

  The last color vanishes with an audible pop, as if it’s been sucked through a straw.

  And now everything I see is in black and white. Including this pillow fort. At seventeen, I’m too old to be hiding in one, but I can’t bring myself to move. I’m a frozen tableau of WTF?, staring out through the duvet at my colorless bedroom.

  In front of me, my window frames our back garden like an old photograph. It’s the last day of August, and white sunshine is cascading over the monochrome flower beds. Roses and clematis and honeysuckle, all rewritten in gray.

  There are more than ten million colors in the world, and I can no longer see a single one.

  Literally.

  The colors began fading ten weeks ago, the day after my mother disappeared.

  The last time I saw her was the final day of school before the summer holidays. I was eating breakfast; she was leaving for work. Wearing her usual glaze-spattered smock, cigarette clamped in fuchsia-lipsticked mouth, she waved me madly goodbye. It reminded me of a tulip in a tornado.

  After school, I went to her ceramics studio, expecting to find her absorbed in her latest piece. Instead, she had left the kind of note that inspires the police to search the rocks beneath Beachy Head—a cliff with incredible views of the sea, and England’s most notorious suicide spot.

  But as no body was found—and her long, rambling letter wasn’t enough proof—she’s not considered dead. She’s missing. Vanished into thin air.

  Ever since then, the world without her has looked a little chalkier. Like a drop of bleach has been added to the sky. When this first started, it made total sense to me: My disco ball of a mother was gone, of course I was seeing things a little askew.

  But then the colors kept fading. With each minute, hour, and day that she didn’t come bursting back through the front door … or send one of her habitually exuberant ALL-CAPITALS texts … or kick off her shoes and dance through the garden … the saturation drained from my sight. Until all that was left was the palest gossamer pastels. A last whisper of hope.

  And now today. All morning, even these barely there colors have been disappearing. It’s the last day of summer; my baby sister’s fifteenth birthday. By not coming home for Emmy-Kate, Mum is really, truly gone.

  As I peep from my duvet through the window, the birthday girl herself comes cartwheeling across the lawn. Emmy-Kate is in black and white too. But I bet the dress she’s wearing is pink. (The underwear she’s flashing as she turns head over heels is definitely days-of-the-week.)

  My sister concludes her acrobatics and springs upright, her gaze landing on my open window. She narrows her eyes, squinting up.

  I turtle beneath the duvet, disturbing the world’s stupidest house rabbit: Salvador Dalí.

  “Shhh,” I warn, putting a finger to my lips. Too late. His ears fly backward, listening as the back door slams, then two sets of footsteps come clattering up the stairs to my attic bedroom. Emmy-Kate’s pony-princess prance, followed by Niko’s steady clomp-clomp-clomp. No pillow fort in the world is safe from my sisters.

  Emmy-Kate arrives first, spinning in her new froufrou frock.

  “Minnie! Isn’t this dress a Degas? It’s Dancers in Pink,” she says in her bubblegum voice.

  With a famous artist mother, we’re all walking art encyclopedias—Emmy-Kate, though, actually thinks and talks in paintings, using artwork as an indication of mood. Dancers in Pink is an impressionist piece, a blur of lighter-than-air ballet dancers. It might seem strange, given the circumstances, that she chooses a happy painting. But she’s turning fifteen: too young to be told about a letter, a possible suicide, a cliff. As far as Emmy-Kate knows, Mum is merely AWOL, and innocent optimism is the order of the day.

  I emerge from the duvet and croak, “Happy birthday.”

  Emmy-Kate tilts her head, setting off a cascade of what should be strawberry-blond hair. It’s gray. Gray eyes. Shiny gray pout. My stomach lurches. Black-and-white vision would be a problem for anyone, but for an artist—even me, a total wannabe—it’s an effing catastrophe. Before I can throw up from all this weird, Niko comes stomping into the room.

  She snorts at the mess. Then at me, still in my duvet nest. Despite her glam-grunge appearance—think dungarees and flip-flops worn with pinup girl hairdos and perfect eyeliner—the oldest Sloe sister acts more like ninety than nineteen.

  “Minnie—you’re not still in bed?” she signs, rhetorically. Niko is Deaf, and the movement of her hands as she signs is exacerbated by the bandages on her fingertips. She’s a bona fide art student, specializing in cutouts: Think paper snowflakes, only ten times as complicated. Injury is an occupational hazard.

  I examine my pajamas, my location on the mattress, and sign back, “No, I’m on the moon.”

  “Humor. You must be feeling okay.” Niko rolls her eyes. “Good. You can help me make the pancakes.”

  Note: the pancakes. It’s our birthday ritual: a breakfast feast of pancakes and Nutella. Usually made by Mum—from a box. This is the house that convenience foods built. But she has the fairy-dust ability to turn even the ordinary, even ready-mixed pancakes, into magic.

  The three of us freeze as we consider this: the first tradition without her.

  A newly subdued Emmy-Kate trudges to the door. “Minnie?” she prompts, with a single fingerspelled M. When it’s only the three of us, we don’t speak: we sign.

  I clamber from my fort, as does Salvador Dalí. Niko leads us in a parade down the stairs: sister after sister after rabbit after sister. As we leave the sanctity of my bedroom, I glance out of the landing window. This view stretches across south London’s skyline.

  Despite distant tower blocks and terraced streets, I’ve never considered this city to be gray. It has too many trees and parks, lampposts and graffiti and fried-chicken shops; the concrete has too many variations. Smoky hues and soot and shadows and bricks and sidewalks.

  But now it looks flat. As if it wasn’t enough for my mother to walk out of the world. She had to take all the colors with her too.

  Pale Pink

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Fairy roses scattering pe
tals across the grass. Strawberry slices atop heart-shaped pancakes. When I was little, my unpainted nail beds beneath Mum’s shiny red ones as she held my hands, teaching me how to sign to Niko. And blood, if it’s diluted with enough water. Like if you’re in the bath when you die, or a river, or the sea.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Color of Limestone

  In early September, the morning before school starts, I wake predawn to find my heart attempting a jailbreak through my ribs. I sneak from the house, racing myself down leaf-lined streets, trying to outrun the black and white. Can’t. Her disappearance follows me, an unshakable shadow. Double-decker buses blast by in pale gray instead of red, near-invisible against the asphalt.

  Since I’m not exactly sporty, the fear and I run out of steam at the same time. I slow down and look around. Somehow I’ve ended up on the far side of Meadow Park. A huge, hilly wilderness that borders my neighborhood, Poets Corner, it contains everything from an outdoor pool to community greenhouses and a wildflower meadow. It’s like a piece of countryside got spliced into the city by mistake. In summer, it throngs with people, but since it’s early, only birds and joggers and grieving girls are awake. I step through the gates for the first time since the disappearance.

  There’s a library hush as I climb to the top of the hill, my destination the walled garden. Home to my mother’s first-ever art installation: the Rainbow Series I. The work that made her famous—superstarrily so, like Rembrandt or Frida Kahlo.

  I hold my breath as I walk inside, hoping for a siren, strobe lights, Mum’s sudden reappearance in full color. Nothing happens. The Rainbow Series I is minus one rainbow—but it still takes my breath away.

  Huge clay spheres as big as racehorses rest on transparent Plexiglas stands. They appear to float among the garden’s flamboyant rosebushes. Tinier rounds, the size of marbles or peaches or beach balls, are embedded in the paths and suspended from pagodas. All are glazed in shiny nail polish colors—Mum’s signature style. Ordinarily, they make the flowers look muted. Ordinarily, it’s like God himself leaned down from heaven and began blowing bubbles.

  If anything could restore my vision to a full spectrum, it would be this.

  I take another step toward the spheres, then stop, noticing the visitors’ plaque. This tells tourists and art pilgrims alike that Rachael Sloe won the UK’s biggest art award, the Turner Prize, with this—her debut.

  Underneath the sign, an impromptu memorial has sprung up. A gargantuan pile of cellophane-wrapped flowers, sympathy cards, half-burnt candles, and cutesy teddy bears. It’s tatty from weeks of summer rain; the flowers at the bottom of the heap rotten and mushy. The whole thing is gross. Makes me think of morgues, reminds me that my mum’s disappearance is headline news.

  I give the memorial a wide berth, shuddering as I catch a whiff of the flowers. My skin prickles. I’m being watched … Actually, I wouldn’t put it past my exhibitionist mother to teleport into existence right here in the middle of this garden. I spin round, certain she’s here—

  Emmy-Kate is watching me, peeking out from behind the biggest bubble like a mischievous Glinda the Good Witch of the North. Automatically, I stiffen. All I can think about is this enormous secret I’m keeping from her. Suicide. An ugly word, and one I worry will spill from my lips whenever we talk. It’s been almost three months since we’ve had a real conversation.

  Guilt manifests as annoyance, and I snap, “Stalk much?”

  Emmy-Kate lifts her chin, defiant, and struts over to me. She’s fresh from her Sunday morning swim; a damp towel drapes over her shoulder, and her long hair falls in wet curtains, dripping between our feet.

  “Hardly,” she says, wringing out a rope of hair. “I saw you from the pool and followed you here.”

  I shake my head, try to be nice. “Em, that’s the dictionary definition of stalking.”

  Emmy-Kate smiles a tiny bit at this, as a breeze sweeps through the empty garden. She shivers, wrapping her arms around herself, eyes landing on the memorial. For a second, her face empties, like a squeezed-out tube of paint. I wonder how much she actually suspects about Mum being missing, but all she says, in a syrup-soaked voice, is: “Wow, that’s grim. Seriously, Whistler’s Mother depressing. Let’s get out of here.”

  We walk side by side. Emmy-Kate’s hands flit as she starts painting the air—she’s a girl who treats the sky as her own personal canvas—and compensating for my silence with a lilting monologue on boys, breakfast, school tomorrow …

  She’s about to start sophomore year; I’m about to graduate. There’s two years between us, and another two between me and Niko. Next year, I’ll leave Emmy-Kate behind and join Niko at the Silver College of Art and Design. SCAD. The local art-school mecca and Mum’s alma mater.

  From this vantage point on the hill, the villagey neighborhoods of south London are laid out like a patchwork below. The streets of Poets Corner, the wide avenue of Full Moon Lane cutting through them like Broadway in New York City or the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and as vast. And a few miles in the distance sit the squat toads of SCAD’s brutalist modern buildings.

  Even though SCAD is close to my mother’s studio, I’ve never actually set foot on the campus. Visiting before I’m actually accepted seems like I would jinx it. But years ago I did look up the website, copying the ethos onto a piece of paper that I pinned to my wall:

  We believe art and design can change minds and move worlds. Immersive, imaginative, and hands-on—because theory without practice is like learning to swim without water. Let’s get messy.

  Back then, I totally bought into this concept. Now, I think: It doesn’t get messier than a missing mother.

  The thought guts me. It’s instant wipeout. Mum abandons me on a daily basis. A hollow flies from the hole in my chest, expanding to empty the park and everything in it, me a tiny speck in the middle of all this nothing.

  Because even if she comes back, there will never be a moment where she didn’t leave me.

  I stumble to a halt at the bottom of the hill, near the pool where my fearless little sister swims even in winter. Emmy-Kate takes a couple of steps without me, still babbling, before seeing I’ve stopped. She turns around, reading the hurt on my face.

  Instantly, her eyes mimic mine. What Sloe sisters have in common—despite three different fathers, temperaments, and shades of red hair—is tissue paper–white skin, and eyes that play our thoughts like cinema screens.

  “What?” she asks, worry crisping the edges of her voice.

  I force myself to swallow away the emotional hurricane, since beyond Emmy-Kate, bumbling along in a tracksuit, is the Professor.

  Aka Professor Rajesh Gupta. Bachelor, next-door neighbor, and, by some bizarre twist of fate, Mum’s best friend. Think oil and water, chalk and cheese. My madcap mother and this buttoned-up theology professor, who looks and acts as though he was blown from the dust on a leather-bound book, have been thick as thieves my entire life. He was the first to show up at our door after the disappearance, bearing a casserole dish full of biryani. Unfortunately, his cooking is desert-dry, nothing like the fragrant, jeweled curries you can get in east London.

  “Run away,” whispers Emmy-Kate, only half joking.

  “Shhhh,” I tell her as he spots us and changes course, ambling over.

  “Ah! Girls,” he says, his forehead crinkling in sympathy. “Good, er, hmm.” He jogs on the spot, coughs into his fist, then bends over and straightens up again. This is the entire sentence. The Professor brings his own personal tumbleweed to every conversation.

  After he clears his throat for the ten thousandth time, Emmy-Kate bursts and says, “Okay, we were going home.” She grabs my elbow, starts dragging me away. “Bye!”

  “Good, good.” The Professor checks his watch, bending and stretching again. “Well. Perhaps I’ll accompany you, see how your, er—sister is. Lead, ahem, the way.”

  He jogs on the spot, leaving Emmy-Kate and me no choice but to walk on. When I glance back, I can’t see the walled ga
rden, or the Rainbow Series I, or the sky. I can’t see anything.

  Sky Blue

  (An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)

  Sky, obviously. But not the stormy June afternoon my mother chose not to come home. The dress she’s wearing in her SCAD graduation photo. Forget-me-nots. Her pastel eyes.

  CHAPTER 3

  Everything’s White

  As soon as the Professor follows Emmy-Kate through the front door, I duck away and go through the side gate, into the back garden. I can breathe more easily out here, among the overflowing foxgloves and roses. Our miniature Midsummer Night’s Dream garden is tucked away like a secret between the house and the railway. And I’m a flower freak.

  Something Mum and I have in common. The blooms flourish through her sheer force of will. She shapes all her surroundings to fit her particular aesthetic, from our chartreuse front door to this overgrown bouquet—and three redheaded daughters, despite being a natural blonde.

  I close my eyes, bury my face in a humongous rose. Inhaling the myrrh scent almost makes up for not being able to see the color. I can imagine it, though. Apricot. A vivid pink-gold shade that’s inherently Mum and brings her back to the garden like a hologram—striding past me with that shocking-pink-lipsticked smile, mermaid hair knotted atop her head, bone-thin beneath her artist’s smock. She’s holding a cigarette in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other: charisma fuel. Mum captivated everyone: us, the Professor, journalists, SCAD students.

  She worked there for a while, after Emmy-Kate was born. She’d made the Rainbow Series I while still a student, and pregnant with Niko, and stepped straight into the professional art world after graduation. But then in quick succession I arrived, then Emmy-Kate, and she ended up having to return to SCAD as a lecturer. What her biographies call “the wilderness years” and we call “our lives.”