The Colour of Memory (18 page)

I was edgy and alert as I walked around. The whole area seemed tense but it was difficult to know whether this was a result of my own contingent experience or of my gauging an aggregate feeling
that made itself subtly but palpably felt.

I told people about Freddie and the guy getting done over on the tube. They told me about things that had happened to them, that they had seen or that other people had told them. Ripples of
panic and suspicion and worry spread out and intersected.

I went to dinner with some people in Kennington whom I vaguely knew and quite liked. I took beer; everyone else brought wine but wanted to drink beer. When someone asked what I did I said
‘odds and ends, bits and pieces, nothing really’ and felt pointless as a broken bulb.

The food was nice and there was plenty of it. When we’d finished eating and had drunk all of the beer and most of the wine somebody started telling a story about how he’d recently
been involved in a car accident. Someone else told of an injury they’d suffered a few years ago. I told the story of how my leg got smashed at the factory. We talked about a programme that
had been on TV about self-defence. Someone told of how they’d recently been burgled and after everyone had told their burglary stories we talked about mugging, rape, trouble at parties,
stabbings and broken bottle fights in pubs.

These subjects were our currency, the common denominator of our experience; they were subjects of interest to us all, topics on which everyone had something to say.

The dinner came to an end – it was a Monday night and people had to get up for work the next day – and I caught a late bus home. A storm was building up and by the time I got off the
bus at Brixton a steady rain was falling. Walking past Freddie’s house I saw a light in his window on the second floor. I stood beneath a street lamp, threads of yellow rain falling around
me. I saw a face framed by the window in the warm light of the anglepoise above Freddie’s desk, looking out into the night. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning like a jagged crack in
time. A shudder of bleached rain.

I glanced up at the window once more and walked on, the sound of my footsteps lost in a low roll of thunder.

I spent the rest of the week in Court. A friend of mine who knew a solicitor asked if I wanted to do some court clerking. All you had to do, he said, was sit with the client
and take a few notes to remind the barrister of what was going on. It paid twenty-five quid a day, cash.

‘Oh and don’t forget to wear a suit,’ he said before putting the phone down.

The case was being heard at the Crown Court in Croydon and I was quite looking forward to it as I travelled down there on the train: meeting the defendant, piecing together a story from the
unfolding catechism of the court, weighing up the truth and falsehood of witnesses, seeing the judge and lawyers in action . . .

I met up easily with the barrister – a puppy-fat Oxbridge graduate – and he introduced me to the client. He was a sad mixed-race kid, an eighteen-year-old no-hoper who wasn’t
much good at anything, not even looking sympathetic in Court. He was accused of breaking and entering some offices in Lewes. His story was that he’d gone to look for his friend Trotsky who
was living down there. He called in at various bars and asked where Trotsky was but nobody had seen him. In the end he got pissed, missed the last train back and was picked up while trying to find
somewhere to crash for the night.

The judge didn’t look at him sternly or savagely; he hardly looked at him at all. The whole thing was conducted like a bored ceremony that had considerable power but which no longer had
any meaning. Clarifying points of legal procedure for the benefit of the jury, with a bored impatience he made no attempt to conceal, the judge made it plain that he had no interest in either the
judicial or human aspects of the case – the only time he showed any alacrity was in arranging adjournments for lunch. The members of the jury were bored too; they wished they were involved in
something more interesting like armed robbery or rape. There was nothing about the kid being tried to threaten the indifference or rouse the interest of anyone in the Court. The proceedings left
him with only two options: insolence or submissiveness – and since there was nothing to be gained by either of these he looked bored. The nominal object of the court’s attention, he
played a part in its proceedings only to the extent that someone getting stitched up by doctors participates in surgery.

If he got convicted, he told me during one of several adjournments, he’d probably end up back inside. He could handle that if he had to. Maybe he’d get off with a suspended sentence
in which case he’d have the summer to look forward to.

The case dragged on. Each day I commuted down to Croydon in my suit. The longer the case went on the more money I earned (I’d already begun to think like a lawyer). Somehow the elaborate
indifference of the court proceedings coloured – or rather, they did exactly the opposite, drained all colour from – my feelings for the boy. He became simply ‘the accused’,
an abstraction, a legal term. Both his case and the circumstances in which he was being tried were dwarfed by the lofty ethics of justice in whose name they were being carried out. In the praxis of
the Court all that remained of the ideal it embodied was the shabby paraphernalia of robes and wigs, the elaborate hierarchical etiquette with which only the officers of the court were
familiar.

After a brief adjournment the jury proudly delivered their verdict of guilty. It was as if by announcing his guilt they had negatively affirmed their own freedom from civic wrongdoing,
demonstrated to the Court their own harmlessness. The judge looked gravely over his glasses and handed out a suspended sentence, pointing out to this sad eighteen-year-old (the accused, the
defendant, the client – or did he have some new title now that his guilt had been established and proved beyond reasonable doubt?) that the suspended prison term would be there, hanging over
his head like the sword of Damocles. Unimpressed by the classical reference the defendant didn’t even blink. I walked with him back to the station. He borrowed a pound for the train fare to
London and bought a pack of cigarettes. That was the last I saw of him. I called in at the solicitor’s office, claimed half a day more than I’d actually worked and multiplied my claim
for travelling expenses by improbable complications of route. They didn’t seem bothered one way or the other.

Suddenly, like a submarine breaking the surface of the ocean after long months beneath the waves, it was summer. From open windows, radio chat tinkled to the street. Carlton
and I walked round the market, ostensibly to buy vegetables but really just for the pleasure of seeing bare arms and legs, women in dresses, sunglasses, the sun on people’s faces. The market
was clogged up with smiling people. Coins glinted in the sun as they were handed over. The stallholders had something to say to everybody. No one wanted potatoes or turnips. It was oranges that
compelled attention, piled on top of each other, two halves cut open and glistening freshly at the bottom of each stack. Apples, lemons, grapefruits, tomatoes swelling redly in the heat. Next to
the fruit-seller the man who ran the china stall pinned up a notice – ‘Please don’t stand in front of my stall. It’s not a waiting-room for the fruit-stall’ –
and was happy to let the sun polish his wares. Winding through the noise was the sound of an ice-cream van; today was the first day of the year he was selling more ice-creams than hotdogs. I bought
a can of coke that tasted like being hit in the teeth gradually. A group of young guys, heads almost shaved and wearing Raybans, trainers and black leather jackets moved fast through the crowd.
Heavy women were clinging to their shopping and laughing with their friends. There was the smell of coconut oil in hair, glistening. Music from shop doorways mingled and remixed in the open air.
Splotches of ice-cream on the pavement. A car went by, trailing a loud exhaust of hip-hop.

‘Greenpeace,’ said Luther shaking his coffee jar suggestively in front of an American tourist with a camera and wide-angle check trousers. A mad guy with locks and a walking-stick
was shouting ‘let me out! let me out’ as if he was locked up inside himself. A tall rasta in a blue tracksuit strode past taking no notice of anything except where he was going. At the
Recreation Centre a BBC news team were stopping representative-looking people and asking how Brixton had changed since the riots. Other representative-looking people shrugged through the heavy
doors, struggling under a bulk of muscle which, until they got to the weights room, looked awkward and inessential as a diver’s tanks.

‘I’d give my right arm for biceps like that,’ I said to Carlton.

We made our way along the crowded pavement, the elderly moved cautiously along in jackets and ties, in cardigans and coats. I saw Freddie’s bike, locked up to a lamp-post by the tube
station. A young punk with grey arms and eyes so pinned you wondered how any light got in asked Carlton for money.

‘I’m always giving you money, man.’

‘I’m always skint.’

Carlton handed him some coins. We crossed the High Street where the traffic was hardly moving. Bus drivers, shirt sleeves rolled up to their elbows, sat it out; conductors hung from the back
platforms of their buses. From somewhere in the congealing traffic a police car wailed pointlessly.

We stopped off at the Trinity and sat outside, our beer warming quickly in the sun. It was like a little bit of Islington, estate agents said of this square, with its pub and restaurant. The
small forecourt of the pub was packed with people who looked like they worked for the council, arguing departmental politics, getting a few down them and loosening their ties. I felt sleepy drunk
after one pint but still only just resisted the temptation to have a couple more.

‘It’s riot weather this, perfect riot weather,’ said a shiny-faced white guy, holding his beer up to the sun as if reading the future in the dregs.

Slowly, dragging our bags of produce, we walked along the High Street past the smearily opaqued front of a large shop that was being refitted. This often happened: a shop selling mass-produced
beds and furniture started up with an opening sale that lasted for a couple of months. Then there was a closing-down sale and as soon as that finished the windows were whited over and signs saying
‘New Shop Opening Soon’ appeared. Then a new shop – called Price Slasher, or Cost Buster – opened on the old premises, selling exactly the same thing.

‘That must be the worst shop in London,’ said Carlton. ‘The only decent thing you can buy in there is a black bin-liner.’

A few yards further on was the new, refurbished Woolworths where they used to stock nothing except security guards and empty shelves. We walked past the Ritzy and the library where
round-the-year alcoholics stuck with the Tennants Extra that served as anti-freeze through the long months of winter. A few steps further on we passed a place called Brixton Fashion. For a long
time no one knew what it was supposed to be: there was only this elaborate designer façade with nothing going on behind it. Then Freddie pointed out that our confusion was due to wondering
what was happening
behind
the façade when what was going on here was, precisely, the façade. The whole thing existed solely in the realm of display. The front wasn’t
the outward display of a concealed function: the façade
was
the function.

A little further on someone had sprayed DON’T CATCH IT on a clean white wall.

With the good weather everything changed for the better. Boredom turned to leisure. People with no work were glad once again that they didn’t have jobs to go to. What to
do was no longer a problem. Everyone felt bouncy and fresh as new tennis balls.

Freddie was getting better too. The bruising had come out and the dizziness had passed. Apart from some discolouring around one eye you could hardly tell that anything had happened to him. I ran
into him late one morning as he bought a paper from the stall outside the Prince of Wales on the corner of Cold Harbour Lane. A couple of years ago the man who ran this stall had handed Freddie his
paper with the words: ‘Now you look like what I’d call a radical intellectual sir.’ It made Freddie’s day – it made his year – and since then he’d always
bought his paper from the same bloke.

‘You’re looking great Freddie,’ I said as we strolled around the market, enjoying the smell of the new season. He was wearing a crumpled linen jacket and had the look of
someone who might go on to write novels set in south-east Asia.

‘You bet. I’m thriving both physically and financially.’

‘You’ve sold a story?’

‘Not exactly. But I did sell Steranko my bike.’

‘How much for?’

‘Sixty quid.’

‘This calls for a celebration,’ I said, offering him a wine-gum.

‘What about you?’ Freddie said. ‘What have you been doing?’

‘I’ve started the long slow fade to retirement and senility. I take each day a little easier than the previous one.’

‘You were saying that three years ago.’

‘I was joking then. Now it’s really happening. I didn’t realise it at the time but those jokes were just a premonition of what was to come.’

‘What is the past though,’ said Freddie, ‘if not an intense premonition of the inevitable?’

We walked past the side of Woolworths, past one of those badly painted murals depicting a multi-racial society where women are the equal of men, where no one is discriminated against because of
their age or race or sex, where work looks like play and play looks like work because it’s all painted with a childlike simplicity and the sun never stops shining. Across the road, like
nothing in the mural, guys hung outside the Granada Car Hire or sat chewing in the Acapulco. An old man came out of the door, dragging a leg that was heavy and useless as a sledgehammer.

We ate a pizza in Franco’s in the covered market. It was a tiny place with room for only a dozen people inside, either on stools or at tables. Outside in the Arcade there were more tables
but these were always full too. It was the sort of place where it was nice to hang out but because it was so crowded and there were always so many people waiting to get served you had to do your
hanging out quickly. With people eating or queuing for tables or waiting for takeaways there was hardly room for the waiters to move. There was hardly even room for the opera which tumbled to the
floor from two speakers high up on the wall. After ten minutes we got a table outside which was fine because the sunlight and warmth fell through the high glass roof of the Arcade.