The Colour of Memory (15 page)

Through the window I could see the yellow glow of the street lamp and above that a cold sickle of moon. The fire filled the room with warm light. Propped carelessly on the mantelpiece was a
postcard of Millais’ ‘Burning Leaves’: the pale light fading, the leaves burning, the trees receding, the girls’ faces touched by the light.

I looked across at my friends, their eyes made soft and dark by the candles and fire.

Freddie and I sat in his kitchen drinking tea. The radio was on. Someone knocked on the door and when Freddie opened it a cold wedge of air rushed in. Foomie stood in the hall,
stamping snow off her boots. She was wearing Steranko’s huge dark overcoat.

It was winter in the city.

Freddie filled up the kettle and I moved round the table to make room for Foomie. Her face was glowing from the cold. Snow was melting in her hair.

‘D’you want a mince pie Foomie?’ Freddie said.

‘I’d love one.’

‘Yeah, I’ll have two or three as well please,’ I said.

‘Honestly,’ said Foomie.

‘My mother made them at Christmas,’ said Freddie, prising the lid off the tupperware container. ‘I’ll put them in the oven so we can have them hot.’

‘What a nice guy eh?’ I said to Foomie.

‘So you and Steranko both got sacked,’ she said after a few moments.

‘I’m afraid so,’ I said, laughing.

After Christmas Steranko and I were skint and had both ended up applying for temporary jobs in a big department store in Knightsbridge. Each year they took on thousands of extra staff for the
January sale and after a very short interview Steranko and I were hired to work in the vast stock and storage area beneath the shop. A good part of each day was spent calling out
‘Mind-your-backs-please!’ as we charged through menswear with rails of cashmere coats.

During coffee breaks we played cards with two other guys who were only there for the sale. Quite often all four of us would get wrecked at lunchtime and spend the rest of the afternoon pushing
stock around deliriously, accidentally taking clothes up to the hi-fi dept, or men’s pyjamas into women’s lingerie, laughing crazily as we did so. We were sacked after a week.

‘All things considered,’ I said to Foomie. ‘I’m surprised we lasted that long.’

‘Me too,’ laughed Foomie.

We ate the mince pieces and slurped mugs of tea. The pastry was light and flaky, the mince so hot you had to keep it moving round your mouth so that it didn’t burn your tongue.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Freddie said. ‘Let’s have some port as well.’ He went over to the kitchen cabinet and took down a bottle and some glasses.

‘These are nice,’ Foomie said, picking up one of the glasses.

They were small, about the size of an egg cup. Each of them had two little corgi dogs on the side and just beneath the pattern on the rim was written: ‘Every Dog Has His Day’.

‘They’re great aren’t they?’ said Freddie as he began to pour the port. ‘It’s funny the way you get attached to certain things. In this flat apart from things
like the bed and some chairs I’ve got a stereo, some secondhand suits and other clothes. I don’t really care about any of those things. When they get ripped off it’s a drag but it
doesn’t really matter. Then I’ve got books, two favourite T-shirts, some records, one of Steranko’s paintings – those are the things I care about. And then there are these
glasses: I think I like these glasses more than anything. An old girlfriend gave them to me when I was about seventeen. I think she won them at a fair somewhere. I played a very big part in her
sexual awakening: it was while she was going out with me that she realised she was a lesbian.’

‘That’s very touching, Freddie,’ I said. We all clinked glasses and drank the port like elderly school teachers. Then we talked about what we were like when we were
younger.

‘I can’t even remember what I was like when I was seventeen,’ Freddie said. ‘What about you Foomie?’

‘At seventeen? The same as now. Except I was fatter.’

‘Were you?’

‘Much. Then I lost it all. And I used to listen to reggae a lot. What about you? What were you like?’

‘I didn’t have a personality at all until I was twenty-one,’ I said. ‘I was a late developer. Until I was about sixteen my main hobbies were Airfix models, football and
Subbuteo. From sixteen on my real interest was beer drinking. Pretty much like now really.’

Freddie poured some more hot water into the tea pot. He had bits of pastry round his mouth.

‘Have you ever been in love?’ Foomie asked.

‘I imagine so,’ I said.

‘What about you Freddie?’

‘I’m in love with the woman in the health food shop.’

‘You don’t even know her.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Freddie said, shrugging.

‘That’s not love,’ Foomie said. ‘It’s infatuation.’

‘Infatuation is the highest form of love.’

‘Good one Freddie,’ I said.

‘You two: you’re like children,’ Foomie said laughing.

‘And what about you Foomie?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t be so coy. Are you in love with Steranko?’

Foomie laughed: ‘What a question!’ she said, holding her mug with both hands and taking a big sip. ‘Anyway, what does it mean to love someone?’

After a pause I said, ‘It means you never tire of watching what someone says.’

Freddie turned up the radio for the news summary. A planned space-walk by American astronauts had been abandoned because of bad weather conditions.

‘It’s snowing in space,’ said Foomie.

The window was bathed in steam, like a perfect memory of home.

Winter in the city. More snow was forecast but none fell. Sometimes I got to the end of a day and wondered if it had actually taken place. Whole weeks disappeared without
trace. I bought disappointing loaves of bread and had conversations with the local shop-keepers. I caught a cold and passed it on to someone else. I went out; I stayed in.

I was on the tube, waiting for it to pull out of Brixton. Three young guys got on. They said something to an older man who was sitting in the other end of the carriage. He said
something back – I thought they’d asked him where the tube was going – and suddenly they were all kicking fuck out of him. He was half lying on the seat and half on the ground.
Punches and kicks thudded into him. Everyone from that end of the carriage charged up to my end where we all huddled, horrified, like cattle in a storm. Someone called the guard who walked towards
the carriage slowly. Two of the attackers walked off but the third was still piling into the older guy. Then he sauntered off too. The guard helped the man to his feet. There were big lumps taken
out of his face, bright blood spattered all over the tube floor and on the window behind him.

‘Why you all just standing there?’ a woman shouted at us all. ‘Why no one help him?’

Nobody said anything. No one wanted to sit near where it had happened. No one wanted to look at anybody else.

The court was already packed when I arrived: hundreds of people all getting hauled up for non-payment of rates, all protesting their innocence. I looked through a list pinned
up in the foyer of the Court but couldn’t see my name on it. I mentioned this to the clerk: ‘Maybe there’s been some mistake,’ I said.

‘Nobody’s name is on the list,’ said the clerk. ‘You can’t get out of it that easily.’

There were so many cases to be heard that we were called into the court ten at a time. I joined an S-bend queue of people waiting to see a weary official from the rates office – the man in
front of me was saying, ‘Who do you people at Lambeth think you are? Pol Pot persecuting the intelligentsia?’

I took a more moderate line and persuaded the official to adjourn my case. Then I played my trump card and said I wanted to complain to the Ombudsman. I didn’t know what the Ombudsman did
but Freddie – who knew nothing about these things – had told me I should complain to him. Those behind me in the queue, clearly impressed by this raunchy display of citizens’
rights, waited their turn. As I pushed my way through the crowds I heard the person after me in the queue insisting that he see the omnibus man immediately.

I walked home through the park, crossing an empty football pitch and passing through the thin H of rugby posts, noticing the trees and the way the pond endured. Back home there was a letter from
the rates office advising me that I didn’t need to attend the Court after all.

I caught boomerang flu, a new bug from Australia – a week after you’ve shaken it off it comes back more virulently than before. I went out, I stayed in and watched
‘The World at War’. During the autumn I’d taped most of the series on a secondhand VCR that I’d picked up in Brixton market and now I often watched two or three episodes
straight through: Stalingrad, the Pacific War, Arnhem, the Battle of Britain, the Afriker Korps, B29s, Lancasters, Spitfires, the Eighth Army, an egg frying on the scorched metal of a tank, Orde
Wingate, the leeches in Burma, the death railroad, Stukas, panzers, rubble, search-lights dissecting the night sky, the Russian winter, a French collaborator being hit on the legs with a hammer . .
.

At night I slept in a deep pit of dreams, familiar scenes tinted by the newsreel images of ‘The World at War’: Brixton consumed by the black and white fires of the blitz; Steranko,
Foomie, Fran – all of us – on a beach where the sand is white and the water Iwo Jima blue, planes bursting into flames in the clear skies overhead, a charred landscape behind us. I am
in the water up to my waist. Everyone else is talking on the beach. Steranko has fallen asleep. As the tide moves up the beach the sea laps over his legs and chest and covers the palette of
water-colours lying by his side. When the palette is completely submerged threads of colour – red, yellow, green, blue – drift like smoke in the water until it is dyed a colour that I
haven’t seen before. An American pilot bails out of a damaged fighter plane. The parachute fails to open; he disappears into the sea and then the parachute inflates, a white jelly fish with a
man tangled in thin tentacles beneath the waves.

As I walked to the bus-stop a woman I’d noticed off and on for a long time finally spoke to me. I’d first seen her a couple of years ago when she looked very bad,
as if she hadn’t seen any daylight for six months – thin, white, ill-looking with frightened glasses. Something bad must have happened to her. From time to time I saw her walking along
the street; if she had to cross a road she waited on the pavement a long time to make sure there were no cars coming. Once I saw her with a man I presumed to be her father walking beside her slowly
and protectively. That was the first time she said hello. A couple of times before that she’d glanced at me timidly but this was the first time she’d actually spoken. I suppose
she’d begun to recognise me at about the time that I’d started to recognise her. Since then I’d run into her about once a fortnight and on each occasion she’d said hello
more vigorously – more familiarly and confidently – than before. She had pale skin and stunted ginger hair. When I saw her another time she was wearing a little eye make-up. There was
something ghostly about her slow regeneration; although she looked much better you could see she was still in a bad way. There are people like that. You see them and your first reaction is
‘what happened?’ She was recovering from something bad that happened, that was for sure. To find out more would be to become involved. I didn’t want our nodding acquaintance to
increase.

The last few times we’d bumped into each other she’d taken me completely by surprise and on this occasion, walking to the bus-stop, I didn’t notice her at all until, suddenly,
there she was, standing a couple of feet away from me. I knew she was going to speak.

‘You’re very good-looking,’ she said, holding my eyes for several seconds before I could think what to do. I mumbled something and walked on, leaving her standing there. Then I
crossed the road quickly.

At the bus-stop I watched her walk away and wished I had smiled and said ‘So are you!’ I thought of calling out to her but it was too late. Instead I concentrated on small things:
two milk bottles lying in the gutter, each with a tiny pool of grey milk in the bottom; a car braking hard to avoid a dog padding across the road.

Two other people were waiting for a bus and we took it in turns to stamp our feet and moan. More people showed up. The wind howled as if it longed for the coarse grass of the moor.

Across the road a man in a greasy anorak nipped into the phone booth. He fumbled for change, pressed a few digits which served only to ignite the blue touch paper of his anger and then hurled
the phone back into its cradle. While we laughed, he strode off with his anger and rage, tremors of ill-feeling spreading out across the city. Perhaps he’d been trying to phone the
Samaritans. In six months’ time maybe he’d buy a shotgun and massacre four people in a sleepy town somewhere and no one would be able to say for sure why he did it, no one would know
the part played by the broken phone and the people at the bus-stop laughing.

By now there was a large herd of us huddled round the bus-stop, nourished by the thought that when the bus came we were really going to give the conductor a hard time because we were freezing
and late and wished we had the money for a fucking taxi even though you hardly saw any taxis round here.

Phones and buses: part of the war of attrition that the city wages on its inhabitants, part of its attempt to purge itself of citizens and become pure, empty possibility.

We waited another ten minutes and then saw a bus barging its way towards us through the wind.

‘Come on in,’ said the conductor, leaning out to help an old woman with her shopping trolley. ‘It’s nice and warm in here.’

As if he was welcoming her into his
home
.

The memory of that gesture warmed me for the rest of the day.

I had just got back from the paint shop when the phone started shrieking. It was a market research company wanting to ask about my opinions and habits. I asked them to hang on
a moment while I took my coat off. These calls started a couple of months ago when someone telephoned and asked about a dismal new product that I’d never heard of. A couple of weeks later
they called back and asked if I would be willing to have my name put on their list of regular interviewees. I said I would be only too pleased and after that the calls started coming fairly
regularly. Quite often the interview was closed down after a couple of questions because my habits or income cast me outside the research pool they were interested in. I soon learnt that when it
came to the second or third question – ‘Do you have a mortgage?’ or ‘Do you have a car?’ – I should give whichever answer was most likely to enable me to pass
through to the next stage of the questionnaire (‘yes’ was usually the best response when it came to mortgages and cars).