When I was seven, I got my first pocket money. I pressed the golden pound coin to my bare chest like it would fill my puny muscles with power. Polish the metal with your school shirt and it gleams. Hand it over because mum forgot your lunch again. It physically hurt to give it to the dinner lady. And all that returned was a plate of mashed potato and grey peas.

It started slowly. A subtle loss of hues and tones, like my eyes were televisions that needed fiddling with. The only channel they ran was Money TV. The coins that came into my possession from kicking in vending machines and flogging single cigarettes burst into spectrum like light through a curved bottle. Reds and ochres for the small coins, indigo and violet for the heavy ones. The ones I hid.

In the disco, my mates pointed out the birds in bright dresses and short sequin skirts, but the only sparkle my brain knew were the crumpled fivers stuffed into my palm in exchange for a pill. 

One day, I discovered money isn’t cash. It’s a big lie they made up that we all go along with. I was twenty-six by that point and living an entirely monochrome life from Monday to Friday. Weekends weren’t much brighter. The days before the arrival of my copper tinted paychecks brought a gnarling kind of hunger. I’d tear the perforated edges with my teeth and marvel at the rich purple figures and wince at the red deductions as if they were written in my own blood.

Did you know, the eyes of a butterfly have fifteen spectrum detecting cones? We have three. Corporate write offs, offshore tax, and stock trading all exist outside the bounds of my limited perception. I’d be all over that shit if I had butterfly eyes. 

When I win fifty quid at the races, I collect a note as green as freshly watered track grass — good, good-to-soft in places. By the time I’m handing it over to the bookie to chase the others I’ve lost, it’s solid horse-shit brown.

At the bank, the clerk tells me what’s in my account. Instead of numbers, I hear colours: paper-cut crimson, whisky tears, warning-sign vermillion, and morning-after sunburn. The funds in the joint savings account are battleship grey.

In my dreams, the colours all blend together and chase me in the form of an amorphous blob. I never know what I’m running towards because it’s pitch dark. When I wake up, I look at myself in the bathroom and see a sagging face silvered with stubble. No amount of pound coins to the chest can save me now. I pick up the can of shaving foam and squirt a wide circle around the mirror. A zero. What’s inside the circle still has a hint of life. I wonder what adjustments it will take to bring the world outside the bathroom into sharper focus. Two steps back, take a breath, then hurl yourself towards the mirror.

If it works and you land inside the zero, you’ll see in bright technicolour.
Your eyes will be fixed.