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“I’m immensely flattered.” I tried not to let my lips twitch. “I can’t remember the last time anyone did that for me.” Or maybe someone had, but I’d been too wrapped up in work to notice.
“Yes, well, I did. And now I’ve made you feel awkward. But you don’t need to because I won’t make a pass at you or anything.”
The rosé must be hitting hard on an empty stomach because, in a flash of chocolate brown, a tinge of disappointment washed over me. Although God knew how I’d react if he did come on to me. “I don’t feel awkward at all, but would you like it if we changed the conversation now?”
“Yes, putain, anything. Please.”
I searched for a suitable subject. Probably not the moment to mention imaginary amorphic demons and how they’d convinced me they were real. The daily ins and outs of my subsequent breakdown weren’t light topics for drinks chit-chat either. Nor was informing him tiny silver flames licked across his shoulders every time he took a swallow of rosé. I cast around, brown and orange vying for prominence. The thing was, absolutely nothing else defined me.
“Tell me what you do for a living,” said Florian, back to his normal self. “You already know all about my job.”
And it couldn’t be more different. Florian worked the land creating magic, whereas I used my money to help myself to the fruits of other people’s labours, raped them for profit, then destroyed them.
“I live and work in London,” I hedged.
Ah, what the hell. There was no point sugarcoating it. He must have met plenty of wealthy Parisians similar to me. “I’m a venture capitalist. We acquire struggling businesses, or undervalued businesses, and, if we can, we increase their worth by streamlining their assets. If we can’t, we sell the assets on.”
Florian laughed. “I have no idea what any of that really means, except that it sounds like it makes you a pile of money.”
“Most people don’t understand it,” I agreed. “It’s smoke and mirrors. And yes, it makes my business partner and I an awful amount of money.”
“Good for you.”
I sensed his attraction to me lessen a fraction. Maybe I should have lied that I was a postman or something and conjured up a witty anecdote about a snappy dog and a letterbox.
“And has having all that money made you happy?”
Seemed we were launching straight into a serious conversation after all. Two guileless sea-green eyes studied mine, set above cheekbones that could slice a baguette. I had an insane urge to stroke my thumb across one of them; I’d have to settle for trying to sketch them later.
“That’s a difficult question to answer, Florian.” I took a sip of wine, framing my thoughts. “I used to think it did, and then…” I took a shaky breath. “You know I mentioned I’d been ill, after my mother died?” He gave a cautious nod. “It’s a bit more complicated than that. I’ve, well, I’ve spent the best part of this year as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital.”
Florian’s jaw dropped to the floor. Not only was his companion a capitalist thug, but a bona fide headcase too. Right now, he must be wondering how to extricate himself out of his dinner invite without appearing rude.
“It’s… um… as I said, it’s complicated,” I added. “To compound my mother’s death, I suffer from a slightly unusual condition.”
I’d honed a technique of telling this tale on autopilot, of divorcing myself from it. Having related it so many times over the years, to friends as well as fascinated psychologists, my green no longer wavered. Orange didn’t get a look in.
“I have synaesthesia. I imagine you don’t know what that it. Most people don’t.”
Predictably, he shook his head, his expression one of polite curiosity more than wariness. That would come later.
“It sounds a little strange, but it is a recognised phenomenon, although there aren’t many of us. In its simplest form, synaesthetes, like me, see certain numbers or words as being associated with a specific colour. And in itself, synaesthesia is not an illness, so to say we suffer isn’t the right phrase. It’s simply some people’s version of normal.”
Until it wasn’t.
“The commonest phenomena reported are assigning particular colours to months of the year or days of the week,” I continued, because I’d read that somewhere. And if that was all that most synaesthetes had to deal with? Good luck to them.
Florian frowned a little. “What, like January and February have, I don’t know, a gloomy brown feeling when you think about them?”
I smiled at him. “Something like that. A lot of synaesthetes don’t even know they do it, or maybe don’t realise everyone else isn’t doing it too. Recently, I read about a guy who experiences a vile odour and actually gags whenever he sees magician’s equipment, like on the television, for example.”
“That’s weird. Although it doesn’t sound like something that would be too…” He searched for the right way of alluding to my breakdown, “Upsetting. Especially the colours and seasons thing. Doesn’t everyone associate spring days with bright yellow sunshine, and winter with greys and browns?”
I agreed with him. “Possibly, to some degree. My own experience can be a little more… intense. My colour associations tend to be more with… um… moods and feelings. And based on people and the emotions they generate, rather than numbers and seasons. Although I do that too, but in comparison, it hardly registers.”
Florian’s lips quirked a little and he took another sip of rosé. “So, like, if you’re happy, your head is filled with a certain colour? That sounds cool.”
Over the last few minutes, his silver had darkened and now settled around him like a comfortable shawl. My flat green butted against it in a tranquil fashion. If I told him that, he’d fall off his chair.
