On the other hand, I did come up with a lot of pinks, for neutral but necessary. Stuff that I didn’t have strong feelings about, but which would have been a pain to be without. Teaspoons, toaster, cooking oil, pepper, flour, detergent, the buttons on the microwave, light switches, windows, gravity, air. It was surprising how many of them there were.

I nibbled a Tim Tam. It didn’t make me feel a whole lot better—not that I deserved to. I took out a pizza to thaw for dinner and realized I’d managed to overlook the freezer. Four more pizzas. I only used one orange, though. I couldn’t afford to squander them.

Before I knew it, the biscuits were all gone. I studied the packet. It was the contents that were desirable, not the container. I removed the tag and put it on the back of my hand. The wrapper itself was just a harmless piece of cellophane, neutral but hardly essential. It could self-destruct in a puff of smoke and my life wouldn’t change one iota, apart from fleeting amazement at the miracle of spontaneous combustion. Indifferent, that was the word. I was indifferent. I chose beige, the blandest colour of them all. Then I threw it in the rubbish.

I moved through to the lounge. A two-bar electric heater, a worn sofa, a leopard-skin beanbag. But the elephant in the room, the fly in the ointment, the snake in the grass, was the telephone, crouched like a gargoyle on the table in the alcove. Even when I turned my back, I could feel its red eye glaring at me. You have one new message. Not that it was new—I must have listened to it a dozen times already.

“You know, ever since we were kids, I always thought you were different from other guys. I thought you were a friend, someone I could trust. Just goes to show how stupid I am, right? And by the way, fuck—”

The tape cut her off in mid-rant and beeped at me. I stared at the phone, placed a pink note on the receiver. The message was chartreuse, of course, but that didn’t do it justice. She was still the closest thing I had to a sister. I needed another category. Ambivalent. Wildly ambivalent. I added a royal blue sticker below the first. Then I pondered some more. It was only natural that she was livid. But at the same time, if I was honest with myself, I couldn’t have acted otherwise. Being who I am. I put another Post-it on the side of the machine. Lemon yellow, the colour of fatalism.

The orange label on my hand went on the maidenhair fern, twisted loosely round a stem. The TV, that was orange, pink and chartreuse in three business-like columns. The stereo was vomit too, because it hadn’t been working for months. The skirting board, beige. I wondered what kind of man could get excited about skirting boards. Anyway, I was making progress. I experimented with a faint smile, but it was too early for that.

Then I came to the dolphin. When I saw it lying on the speaker, I recoiled and forgot to breathe—I’d grown so used to it that it had become invisible. A gift from her, back when we were young and life still held promise. A stone no bigger than my fist, with gentle curves and a couple of odd protrusions. She carved it, sanded it, polished it, whatever it is you do with rocks, and gave it to me for my twenty-first. Happy Birthday, here’s a memento mori for your self-esteem.

I sank to my haunches, seeking inspiration in my Convenient and Perky Labels. I fixed a lilac paper on one amorphous bulge, to represent something which I felt I should like but couldn’t. Not through any defect in the statue, nor in the sculptor who made it. The problem was me. The dolphin set standards that I was unable to meet, no matter how much I wanted to. It wasn’t disappointment, exactly. More like unworthiness.

I shut my eyes and tugged at my earlobe. Every cloud has a silver lining. The night is darkest just before the dawn. Empty vessels make the most noise. Then I went through to the cupboard in the hall, a goldmine of junk. A beginner’s guide to quantum physics. WTF turquoise. A pair of batting gloves from my brief flirtation with indoor cricket. Purple, a brand-new subsection of things I used to like and didn’t anymore.

But I’d known all along that I was going to have to mend some fences with her. If I was serious. That required discipline, and sometimes discipline is hard. I walked to her place yesterday afternoon in the blazing sun. Outside her gate I did a few deep breathing exercises to calm my nerves, and then strode contritely up the path.

I knocked on the door until my hand grew tired. I guess it was one of those days. I’ve been having one of those days since October. Standing dumbly on the veranda, I raised my arms, palms upwards, and let them fall in a show of vulnerability and remorse. It would have been quite effective if she’d been there to see it. Even so, it perfectly summed up my state of mind, so I did it again. And again.

I shook my head free of the memory and entered the bathroom. Then my brain froze. Just after the indispensable but disgusting toilet brush, burnt sienna, an unhealthy diarrhoea shade. I found myself clutching a tub of hair wax, purchased years ago and never opened. I knew I was indifferent, but couldn’t for the life of me remember if that was beige or pink. For a second I panicked. If I lost my bearings now, all my efforts would have been in vain.

I retraced my steps. Orange, like, check. Chartreuse, dislike, check. Indifferent was beige. I knew that. I wandered from room to room, taking stock. It was a riot of colour, like an exploded kaleidoscope. My Post-it notes had earned an orange sticker of their own for getting me back on the straight and narrow. Obviously life could never be the same as before, but at least I’d achieved a semblance of order.

Yesterday, once I’d accepted that she was either out or hiding behind the couch, I sat in a canvas chair in her back porch, drumming my fingers on the lid of an old paint tin—Vivid Vermillion. Slowly, an idea took shape. I levered the top off the can with a handy screwdriver. Only an inch or so remained at the bottom, so I poured in some water from the tap jutting out from the stucco and stirred it to a thin sludge.

Returning to the front of her house, I scrunched up my hanky and dipped it in paint. Then I reached up to the window and wrote my apology, a single letter in each pane. The liquid ran down my wrist, soaking my shirt and splashing Rorschach blots onto the decking. Halfway through I realized I’d miscalculated, but by then it was too late.

There was only one room left. I started with my bed. I like that a lot. Orange. The space underneath was full of dust, especially near the back where I never vacuumed. I began to remove a chartreuse sticker, but then it hit me that I simply didn’t care. I changed it to beige.

Curtains. I was down to my last pink, so I pretended I hadn’t seen them. Alarm clock, chartreuse. A royal blue marker for my reading lamp. When I added a purple tag to the Tibetan mandala pinned on the wall, it disappeared in the swirl of colour.

From her gate, I had surveyed my handiwork. The paint was already bleeding down the glass like the credits on a B-grade horror, but it was legible enough. It occurred to me that she was going to have to clean it all off again, so it might not have been the best way of getting back in her good books. And I wished I’d spelt SORY with more than one R.

I opened the wardrobe to sort through my clothes. Instead I was confronted by my reflection, gawking wide-eyed from the mirror behind the door. Now there was an unexpected pleasure. I gazed at it for a long time, both heads aslant, flicking my teeth with my fingernail as I considered my options. Definitely not orange, nor pink. Ambivalent blue? Revolting shit? Lemon or lilac or purple?

Finally I made my choice. I peeled off the Post-it note and placed it precisely in the middle of my forehead. Then I smiled at myself, and my reflection snarled back. It was over. I was done.