Red is the Colour of Love
written by: Ginny Swart
When Ruby Norris turned seven, her father Fred gave her a ring. He pulled his paint-stained handkerchief out of his jeans pocket and presented it to her with a bow and a flourish, doffing his beret and giving her kiss. Her father had more style than anyone she knew.
“Here you are, chicken, a ruby ring for the prettiest Ruby of them all.”
The stone flashed brilliant red in the sunlight and Ruby was overcome that her father should have chosen such a perfect gift. It was too big for her bony little fingers but she slipped it on and turned it slowly, admiring the sparkle.
“Red’s the colour of luck and happiness, the Chinese say,” said Fred. “And love.”
“A ruby is very precious, isn’t it Dad?” she said in wonder, remembering that he’d given Alice a CD of Appalachian folk music which she’d sneered at, and to Ruby’s knowledge had never played.
“It certainly is, birthday girl. Glad you like it.” Her father ruffled her hair and hugged her. “That’s called a pigeon’s blood ruby on account of its deep red colour. I sold a painting, that one with the trees you liked. But that’s our secret, eh? Don’t let on to your Mum.”
“I won’t.” Ruby was thrilled that her father had spent this unexpected windfall on something for her, something rare and precious that even her mother didn’t have. A pigeon’s blood ruby ring.
She leant against him, prolonging the moment. She hadn’t seen much of her father since he’d moved out some months before. His jeans were torn and his tee- shirt smelled of turpentine but he felt wonderfully warm and familiar. Ruby wished he’d come home; if he’d told her he was coming back, that would have been the best birthday present he could have given her. But the way her mother referred to him, she knew there was no chance of that any time soon.
“I’ll keep it for special,” she said, and when he left she wrapped it in a small piece of Christmas paper and tucked it under her vests in the back of her drawer.
“What’s that you’re hiding away?” asked Alice, barging in at the wrong moment.
“Just something Dad gave me.”
“Show me!”
Struggling with pride in his gift and reluctance to share it, she carefully unwrapped it.
“It’s a ruby,” she said, studying her older sister’s face.
“Heyyy! A ring! Cool.” Alice examined it with the critical eye of a twelve-year-old. “Why would Dad give you a ring?”
“Because it a ruby.” She snatched it back and wrapped it again.
“That’s never a ruby! Dad’s got no money, he’s not going to buy you something precious like that!”
“It is one! He said!”
“Dad says lots of things. He probably found that in a cracker.”
Ruby hated the way Alice was always so sure of herself. So sure she was right. But she wasn’t this time.
“You’re just jealous ‘cos Dad loves me more than he loves you.”
She’d never said that out loud before, but the ring gave her a certain confidence.
Alice slapped her hard and pushed her violently onto the bed.
“He doesn’t! He doesn’t love any of us or he wouldn’t have gone off with that rotten little tart. He’s just a rubbish father and.. ..and he tells lies and never gives Mum any money!”
Alice punctuated this with a kick on Ruby’s shin and slammed the door as she left.
Ruby knew her father really loved her and he’d only gone off because Mum was so horrible to him. An artist like him couldn’t work properly with all that disapproval and nagging all the time, and he was a genius, so of course his art was more important to him than anything.
Ruby was the only one in her family who totally understood her father. One day when the rest of the world acknowledged his talent, he’d become rich and famous and he’d probably come home to them all. Mum and Alice would have to apologise for doubting and being so nasty about him all the time, and then he’d buy them a new house out at Woodlands with a proper garden, and he’d buy a car and they’d all go on holidays together.
And it didn’t matter too much about Savanna who had moved in with Dad. She had long blonde hair and dressed in Indian cotton skirts which hid her grubby bare feet and she played a guitar, rather tunelessly. Plinkety plonk, plinkety plonk. She sang throatily in between puffs on her thin brown cigarette which she shared with Fred. He smiled up at her fondly from the sofa and called her his happy hippy. And as he had explained, someone had to cook his food because he was hopeless in the kitchen and he needed to eat. Savanna was there to look after him until Ruby was old enough to do that herself. A housekeeper, like in the Amelia Bedelia books, although not as good at keeping her father’s apartment clean. Ruby had noticed the same dirty underpants lying on the floor of the bathroom for two weeks running and the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Her mother would never have allowed that state of affairs.
But she’d never know, because Dad wasn’t going to invite her over to admire his latest painting. He knew what she’d say. She’d carry on about spending all his money on expensive oil paints and turning out more rubbish without selling anything.
True, Fred sold almost nothing and sometimes he was forced to give his mate Darren a hand with his double-glazing business. Just to keep the wolf from the door.
There were a lot of canvases stacked against the wall in the flat but it was only a matter of time before he was discovered by people who truly understood art. And as he’d explained to Ruby, he didn’t want to sell to peasants who wouldn’t appreciate the meaning of his work.
“It’s a tough life, being an artist. Following my star.” He was sitting on the sagging sofa, sipping the tea Ruby had made him, his arm over her shoulders. “Passion, chicken. You have to passion about what you do. When you grow up you’ll find that nothing else matters as long as you’re doing what you really want to.”
“Like you,” agreed Ruby, snuggling closer. She pictured herself striding out across a windswept moor, like Catherine in Wuthering Heights, her hair blowing in the wind with a big golden star leading her on towards some glowing future just over the crest of the hill. “I’m going to be a writer, Dad. I’ll follow my star.”
She was wearing her ruby ring at the time, her fingers spread while she admired its blood-red depths, thinking her hand would look more sophisticated if she could stop biting her nails.
“This ring’ll take you places, chicken,” said her father, taking her hand in his. “Places I’ve never been. You follow your star wherever it might lead you and I’ll see the world through your big blue eyes. An exciting life’s out there just waiting for you, my Ruby girl.”
She loved these close moments her father shared with her.
“Pity he thinks things like food and clothes for you two don’t matter,” sniffed her mother when she reported this conversation. “Why d’you think you and Alice have to wear shoes from Oxfam and the cast-offs from your cousins? Because your lay-about father can’t be bothered to get off his backside and earn some honest money.”
Ruby hated it when her mother badmouthed her father, but she said nothing. Alice would only join in the chorus of recriminations and, besides telling them that Dad was a wonderful artist who would be successful one day, there wasn’t much else she could say in the face of their list of criticisms. She’d heard them often enough: lazy, in debt to everyone, a woman-chaser who lived off whichever girl was stupid enough to shack up with him …and as for that ridiculous beret- where did he think he lived – Paris?
Ruby loved the black beret and thought it gave him a jaunty air, but over the years that followed she was forced to admit that the girls who moved in and then left with increasing frequency were not quite what her father needed. Some of them were pretty, although her mother referred to them collectively as a bunch of floozies, but her father needed someone special. A helpmeet. This was a new word she’d learned and she imagined a helpmeet to be someone quiet and soothing in the kitchen, washing and sewing and making good nourishing meals for him. Someone who would encourage him and comfort him when he failed to sell anything.
His latest companion fell short of being a helpmeet. If anything, Mandy, who worked at McDonalds, was a hindrance to his creative spirit. She brought home cold, hard Big Macs for their tea, and on Fridays, she made Tequila Slammers. These were fizzy golden drinks which tasted horrible but her father seemed to like them. They were a change from his usual tipple, which was beer. Far too much of it, in Ruby’s opinion, but Mandy was a drinker, although she didn’t smoke home-grown weed like some of them had.
Mandy didn’t like Ruby, she’d made that clear.
“Haven’t you any work to do?” she snapped when Ruby called after school. “You get on back to your Ma. Your Dad doesn’t like you hanging around all the time.” Fred wasn’t home at the time.
“He doesn’t mind. He likes to see me,” said Ruby. She knew he did. If he was painting, which wasn’t very often these days, he’d happily stop and make them both a cup of hot sweet tea and they’d sit on the sofa and he’d tell her the latest chapter of the exciting life of Fred Norris.
He’d sold a painting to a rich American but there’d been a disaster and his enormous cheque had bounced. Or he’d been offered a solo exhibition in London but decided against it because he felt his work wasn’t ready. Or a well-known minor member of the royal family, whose name had to remain a secret, had visited his studio and praised his work and told him she’d be back to buy loads of his work as soon as her country home was refurbished. Ruby completely understood that these stories were fiction but she loved to hear them anyway.
They also discuss books he’d read, films he’d seen, folk concerts he’d been to, and in turn he was interested to hear about her schoolwork and her friends and her opinion on current events. Fred never mentioned her mother or asked after Alice. It was as though he’d forgotten the rest of his family existed.
They seemed to have forgotten him too. Her mother had long ago stopped moaning about the lack of financial support from Fred and had taken up with a tall military-minded man called Howard who moved in with a neatly packed leather suitcase and a harsh attitude to laziness, sloppiness or enjoyment of any kind. Or so it seemed to Ruby.
Within a week of installing himself in her mother’s bedroom, he decreed what time the girls should be home, what clothes were suitable to wear, and what books they should read. Magazines of any sort were out, because they were trash, and Idols and Glee and Desperate Housewives banned for the same reason. Howard favoured Animal Planet and National Geographic. Their mother went along with his diktats although Ruby knew she still watched the daytime soaps while Howard was out selling insurance.
“Why do you fancy him, Mum?” Asked Ruby during one of the rare moments when she was chatting to her mother alone, folding the dry laundry. There was a lot more to wash since Howard had moved in. He had seven pairs of white boxer underpants, seven white vests, and seven crisp white polycotton shirts which he embellished with a blue striped tie. “He’s so boring. I hate the way he’s arranged all the books by height. The bookshelf looks so silly.”
“Howard likes things to be tidy,” she said shortly. “He’s a good man. He’s made something of himself and he’s dependable. Unlike your drunken father who was a loser from the day I met him.”
“Dad’s not a loser. He just doesn’t think material things are important,” muttered Ruby who, at sixteen realized that her father had slowly changed since she was a kid. Or maybe she now filtered his bouts of drinking and his lack of ambition through older, more critical eyes. But she forgave him everything. He was her father.
Alice left home and moved in with her boyfriend as soon as she could but Ruby was forced to stay and endure Howard and his passion for watching crocodiles or termites. Could this single-minded interest could be called a passion? Sitting upright and staring at the screen every evening, shushing her if she or her mother spoke while the commentator talked about the reproductive cycle of dugongs hardly qualified as doing anything creative.
But passion wasn’t a word that her father had used much lately. She could see that things were slowly going wrong for Fred. He was no longer following any star. His oil paints were dry and crusted and Mandy started to hang damp washing on his easel. He hardly ever answered Darren’s call for help with the double-glazing either, and he sat around on the sofa reading old Hemingway soft covers he’d bought for ten pence at car boot sales…
When Mandy moved out a year later he hardly seemed to notice. Rudy thought this might be her chance to spur her father into a new start but she was wrong. He was always happy to see her but when she mentioned painting again he told her not to nag. He had never been a man for the pub but he started going around the King’s Head and staying until closing. He was probably lonely, she thought, and wished he could find another woman to look after him. She used to think she’d do that herself when she was old enough but she was going away to college the following year.
He was often asleep when Ruby called after school, and she’d wash the dirty dishes and clean the flat as best she could without him waking at all. He never thanked her for this and perhaps he didn’t notice the difference. In her final year, she was busier than she’d ever been and didn’t see as much of her father as she used to. He was often out when she called and she hoped he was gainfully employed somewhere although she doubted it.
The week before she left for college, Ruby went around to say goodbye to him. She arrived as he was walking towards his block of flats and watched, suddenly shocked. When had her dad turned into this shambling old man, with long unkempt hair and filthy clothes? He looked like one of those sad cases that sit on park benches and mumble at people.
But his smile was as welcoming as ever as he watched her make them tea, boiling the water in his rusty kettle and finding two cups that weren’t cracked, washing them before she used them.
“Going to college, hey, my Ruby girl,” he said, sounding sentimental. “A whole new life for you. You’re going to come back a writer, I know it. Following your star. Just like your old Dad.”
Ruby winced at this horrible cliché.
“What about having another go at painting, Dad,” she asked hopefully. “You were so good. You could still be a success, have an exhibition…”
He brightened. “You’re right, I could, chicken. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. But I don’t have the cash for oil paints and canvases. Don’t know what happened to all my brushes…no, it would cost a fortune to set up again.”
“Couldn’t you paint over your old paintings with undercoat? I remember you used to do that long ago when you needed a new canvas.”
He waved his hand to the wall where his old paintings used to stand.
“All gone, chicken. Mandy had a terrible temper and the day before she walked out on me she burnt the lot. She said I was no good and neither were my paintings. Reckon she was probably right.”
Ruby felt as though someone had punched her in the stomach. Why had he never told her that all his work had been burned? His whole life up in flames? And she didn’t even have one of her own, to keep. She couldn’t understand how he was so accepting of what that dreadful cow had done, but he just grimaced.
“She did me a favour really. I wasn’t any good, I knew I was just wasting my time.”
“Dad! You were fantastic! Your paintings were brilliant!”
He took her hand and said gently, “You were the only one who thought that, chicken. You always had faith in your old dad. Anyway, too late to start over now.”
No, it wasn’t. Ruby had a light-bulb moment and knew what she had to do.
She went home and found her treasured ruby ring, still squirreled away at the back of her drawer. Ever since she’d received it, she’d waited for some occasion worthy of showing it off and hardly put it on her finger.
Its time had come. She’d sell it, and buy her father everything he needed to start again. All the oil paints, fresh canvases, an easel – where had the old one gone? A selection of good quality paint brushes, bristle, and sable. Maybe one of those artist’s little stools for sitting outside to paint scenery. It would do her dad good to get out in the fresh air.
The crimson stone glinted at her, huge and expensive. She studied it for a long moment then put it in her pocket and took it to the pawn shop.
“How much for this?” she said, proffering it to the old man behind the counter. “It’s a pigeon’s blood ruby.”
He took it and turned it over. “No, it’s not. It’s glass, my girl.”
“It can’t be,” she whispered, “It can’t be.” But the sick feeling in her stomach told her the man was right. “My father bought this for me years ago. He said it was a ruby.”
“Then your old man was telling you porkies, wasn’t he? This is no ruby, love.”
“My dad never lied to me. He said it was valuable.”
“If you dad bought this as a ruby he was either stupid or he was ripped off. Sorry, my girlie, this is just glass. Well- cut mind you. Probably comes from China, they’re good with this sort of thing over there but the setting is so cheap, it’s a dead giveaway.”
Ruby walked blindly from the shop. She slipped the ring onto her finger and looked at it dispassionately. Of course, it was glass, how had she never seen this before?
She went home and lay on her bed, wondering. Had her gullible dad been ripped off? Had he genuinely thought he’d bought her a ruby? Or had he told her something exciting to make his cheap gift seem special- another one of his wild stories? He’d told her so many, he’d probably forgotten he’d ever said anything about a ruby. No.
She was certain that her father had thought it was a precious gem. He’d looked so pleased with himself, so happy for her. It no longer mattered, but she was sure he’d been cheated. She’d never mention her plans for the ring anyway.
Ruby sat up and sighed. So she wouldn’t be able to buy him any painting materials just yet. Maybe once she had finished college and was working, she could. If he still wanted them.
But in the meantime, she’d go round to his flat and give it once last good scrub before she left. Pick up all the clothes scattered on the floor and take them to the laundry. Buy some cleaning stuff and scrape the burnt gunk from the pots piled in the sink.
She hated the thought of him walking the streets while she was away, doing nothing with his life. She knew there was no point in suggesting the Jobcentre: her father had never been one for regular employment even when he was younger. But maybe his old mate Darren might be glad of some help with his window business, if it was still going? She could phone him and ask.
And wasn’t there some sort of outreach programme for a man like him? Perhaps a local church offering tea and biscuits with some company? She knew her Dad had never been a tea and biscuits sort but being with other people cracking jokes and making a friendly buzz around him, might be just the right thing for him.
Until she got back from college and she could fix things properly for him, somehow.
She’d keep in touch. But her father had never owned a phone of any sort, or a computer and had probably never tried email. So she’d send him a postcard every week, one of those funny, slightly rude ones to cheer him up and let him know she was thinking of him.
Ruby took off the ring, wrapped it up, and put it back in her drawer. Perhaps, when she was married one day, and a famous writer, she’d give it to her own daughter.
She’d tell her the ring had been a gift from her father and had no real value, but for a long time, it had been her most precious possession. And she was passing it on because red was the colour of luck and happiness. And love.
NOTE:
Based on the Prompt – The Color of Goodbye
- Red is the Colour of Love - May 6, 2025
- Father Christmas Comes Knocking - December 18, 2024
- Top Chef, Negotiable - October 3, 2024
