The Alchemist

She sits at a table and stirs her pot slowly, watching its various contents – red, yellow, white, blue – slowly bind together. A crowd of figures, small in stature, peer over her shoulder. An unusual hush falls as each awaits the outcome, eyes fixed on the pot, on the four colours. Red slides into yellow into white and then the blue until finally, finally, the alchemy is complete. The carefully selected contents of the pot transmuted into the promised elixir. The alchemist leans back on her small plastic chair, paintbrush in hand, smile tugging at the corner of her lips. The figures lean in and then collectively fall back, stunned. “Skin colour,” they breathe in unison.

It isn’t just anyone who can make this mythical shade and the alchemist’s skills are in high demand. Everyone knows that mix it wrong and carefully drawn mums and dads, teachers, policemen, superheroes and orphaned adventurers could be mistaken for carved pumpkins, The Simpsons, or the queen’s head on a dirty 2p coin. And so the alchemist perfects her craft. Each time a classmate groans in frustration as their concoction ends up murky brown again, another mistake, she folds her lips tightly together, barely suppressing her smugness. Imagining that perfect pinky peach that she can make again and again. All of the people she paints, she thinks with glee, will have perfectly skin-colour coloured skin.

The dinner lady rings the bell and the children in the playground sigh, gather up their toys, have one last kick of the tattered ball and promise to continue their game tomorrow. The alchemist is first in the classroom. Tuesday afternoons mean Art and nowhere does she shine more. “Today,” the teacher says as the children settle back around their tables, “you’re going to be making self-portraits. Does anyone know what a self-portrait is?” The class shuffle their feet impatiently as mirrors are handed round but the alchemist is eyeing a set of brand new paints on the other side of the classroom, readying herself to bagsy them first. Almost before the order is given to get started, the alchemist is across the room with brand spanking new paints clasped tightly to her chest.

She grasps her yellow and black striped HB pencil and firmly draws the shapes of eyes, nose, mouth, ears. She pauses as she considers the hair, before deciding to ignore what she sees in the mirror and pencil in long curls that disappear behind her drawing’s shoulders. Close enough, she reasons. Outline done, she reaches for her paints, ready to start her alchemy. The paints are carefully measured and poured before she realises her mistake. A vital error. She checks the mirror again, but yes there it is – brown. Her skin is not the colour that creates hushed reverence, that gains her prestige among her peers, that has children saying with a hint of jealousy “but how do you get it to go like that?”. Hers is not skin colour. It is the colour that elicits the groans, the “yuck, not brown again”. She frowns, allowing herself a moment to mourn the fact that there will be no magic today. Then she adjusts the colour combination carelessly and daubs the nondescript brown across the face in front of her, no alchemy necessary. Nevermind, she thinks, I’ll impress them all next time.

A decade later and the alchemist is still painting: landscapes, still lifes, portraits. Portraits are still her favourite, real or imagined. She’s better than ever at skin colour now, though she doesn’t call it that anymore. She knows there’s not one skin colour, of course, and even white skin is rarely skin colour at all. She’s got good at it though, white skin. Spotting the colours that hide in the shadows that grace the temple and that sink into lines and creases. Sallow, rosy, porcelain, ruddy, sun-kissed, the alchemist can do it all. But she won’t paint herself. It’s too difficult, she argues, to paint a face you know so well. But the truth is, she doesn’t know it at all. Not in the way she knows white skin. She hasn’t learnt to infuse her skin with magic. How to make other people marvel at it. She’s been told her brown is somewhere between black and white, but even an alchemist would struggle to make skin from such a limited palette.

On her way back from college, she sits opposite a man with deep brown skin. She watches him as he leafs through a free newspaper, sees how his skin changes when light falls across his face, when his brow furrows at whatever news article he is reading. She imagines how she might paint him, a little purple here, a little red, and above all multitudes and multitudes of brown. At home, she takes a tube of acrylic and squeezes it onto her palette, she adds others, moving them back and forth with her brush. She applies the first stroke to her paper, then goes back to mixing, before putting paint to paper again and again. Not a make-up artist matching tones and shades but an alchemist capturing cloud-covered British summers, late nights at house parties, years fighting acne, sweaty evenings at the athletics club. Her painting is thick with energy. Her skin is layered with memories and experiences, things past and yet to come. The shadow that forms her nose is deep, rich, tasty even. The expanse of her forehead glistens with a love for autumn sun. Her neck like something sprung from the earth, blooming into rounded cheeks.

She works through the weekend until she has four new faces, her mother, her sisters and her brother. She puts them neatly in a folder and unpacks them in the art room at college on Monday. One, two, three, four, five, across her table. She waits for the comments, the praise from her peers and her tutor. For the crowd to gather round, to ooh and aah at this wonderful skin she has created, moulded from paint. She pretends not to watch her tutor making the rounds, coming ever closer to see her work, her triumph.

And yes, here he is now. She looks up and he’s nodding, he’s smiling. He congratulates the alchemist. “Wow,” he says. “And this is your family?” Mother, sisters, brother, she confirms, grinning. He slides her self-portrait towards himself. “It’s great to see you reclaiming representation of the black body,” he says enthusiastically. She… nods. “The way each sitter is really taking ownership of the space, asserting their blackness,” he continues. “You know, ‘what it means to be black and British in 2010’ – good work!” He slaps the table with his open palm, winks, pivots away. Her friend at the adjacent table groans and rolls her eyes in mock-jealousy: “Eurgh well done. Let me know when you do something crap, ok?” The alchemist laughs but she wants to hide, wants to put the paintings away. Cover those glorious swoops of paint, the skin that had taken her a decade to capture.

But still, later, when she returns home, her hands will itch once again for the paints, for the excitement, for the pure alchemy of it all.