The Colour of Memory (21 page)

A flock of small birds, lunging quickly after one another, flew a few feet above our heads – agile specks that soon vanished.

‘Do you know what sort of birds those were?’

She shook her head.

‘Nor me. I don’t know the names of any birds anymore. It’s like trees. When I was a kid I could recognise all sorts of trees. Now I can only recognise two.’

‘Which ones are they?’

‘A weeping willow and a conker; three if you count Christmas trees. Apart from those when I see trees that’s all I see: trees.’

The vapour trail had broadened out further still and now looked like the print left by a thick tyre. A few minutes later it became still more diffuse, almost indistinguishable from the thin
spray of clouds. The sun was casting long strips of shadow on to the red-gold colour of the bricks of the low rampart. Our own shadows had climbed to within a few feet of Monica’s roof.

A wasp hovered on blurred wings a few inches from my face and then disappeared into a crack in some cement. Another plane cut its silhouette into the sky.

‘Are they from Gatwick or Heathrow, the planes?’ Monica said.

‘I’m not sure. They seem to come from all directions at once. On a clear day you can see five or six near-misses.’

Monica laughed: ‘I wonder where they’re going?’

‘Paris, Bucharest, Venice . . .’

‘It’s nice just saying the names of cities isn’t it?’ said Monica.

I nodded and smiled and watched the laughter in her eyes. Sipping beer, we looked up at the planes climbing through the sky and took it in turns to say the names of cities.

‘Stockholm.’

‘Aleppo.’

‘Detroit.’

‘Athens.’

‘Marrakesh.’

‘Jerusalem.’

The moorings of words were coming adrift, their sense floating free of meaning.

‘Octavia,’ said Monica finally.

A child’s balloon floated up from the street and was blown away by the breeze.

Next morning, for the first time since I’d moved in, I cleaned my windows, flooding the flat with blond light that bounced off the walls and skidded along the floors.
Suddenly the flat seemed twice as big. The magnolia walls looked a pale yellow in the sunlight. I was still admiring the effect when I heard someone calling up from the street. I leant out the
window and saw Steranko propped up against his bike. He was wearing a T-shirt, old rugby shorts and tennis shoes.

‘Let’s go out cycling,’ he shouted. Ever since he’d bought Freddie’s bike he was always wanting to go out cycling.

‘Come on,’ he shouted. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Two minutes,’ I said.

Outside the hot blue sky had seeped into every crack of the streets, fitting precisely into every angle of roof and building, even finding space between the agile leaves of trees. The sky
encased chimneys, washing lines, car aerials perfectly. Here and there it was swallowed by the open windows of bedrooms. The light slid from the red roofs of buses and the chrome bumpers of cars.
The road glittered with shards of glass. We cycled past a block of flats, almost completely obscured by scaffolding and flapping sheets of blue polythene.

‘Scaffolding: that’s the real architecture of the age,’ called Steranko.

When we turned into Railton Road it was as if we had accidentally strayed into a para-military coup. Suddenly we were surrounded by a renegade army of guerillas, all dressed in the same
para-military uniform of camouflage fatigues, DMs, green bomber-jackets and army caps. Some wore sunglasses, most carried truncheons. Steranko and I got off our bikes as two jeeps, crowded with
men, sped past and pulled over to where a group of five or six uniformed men were lounging against another vehicle.

There was a mixture of frantic activity and casualness about the scene. Some of the uniformed men were standing around talking, others scanned the street vigilantly, someone else was shouting
instructions. I expected to see them kicking down the door of a house or dragging a deposed dictator out into the streets. Steranko and I were the only other people around. No one paid any
attention to us.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ said Steranko.

‘It’s the Rats, that big security outfit,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ve heard of them but I’ve never seen them before.’

‘It’s like we’re in Angola or Guatemala or something.’

From behind us two more guys, dressed in the same gear, trotted past, their boots heavy on the pavement.

‘Let’s go.’

We crossed Railton Road and cycled past white-fronted houses with bars on the ground-floor windows and security gates on the doors. A few moments later we were in Brockwell Park where the
wind-flattened grass rippled in the heat. There were a few white clouds but they only emphasised the deep petrol-station blue of the sky.

People lay in the park in groups of two or three. A young white guy was doing martial arts training in the generous shade of a conker tree. A handsome black couple came past, their child
tottering along beside them, a big smear of ice-cream down one side of his face.

Where the paths were busy we cycled slowly and then I raced Steranko round part of the park, standing up on the pedals and throwing the bike from side to side. The black path rushed by beneath
us, the grass a blur of green on either side. By the time we got to the tennis courts and slowed down I was sweating. On one court a young couple rhythmically whacked forehands and backhands from
one baseline to the other without keeping track of the score. The ball spun yellow through the air; there was a deep loud pock whenever it was hit. On the other court a black guy and a white guy
were playing a proper game, hitting hard serves and rushing the net to volley or scrambling back to try to lob their way out of trouble.

Round the other side of the park, past the aviary and the pond, we got off our bikes and sat down on the soft grass. The park stretched away in easy slopes. In the distance there was a spire and
a gentle sound of church bells.

‘Now it’s like we’re in Suffolk or something,’ said Steranko.

I pulled my T-shirt off, draped it around my face to keep the sun out of my eyes and stretched out. Through the blue fabric the sun formed molecular cross-hatches and pearls of light. I could
feel the insect itch of the cool grass on my back.

‘Right. Keep your eyes shut and listen to this,’ Steranko said after a few minutes. ‘Ready?’

‘Yes.’ Next moment there was the unmistakable sound of a beer can being opened. I took the T-shirt off my face and Steranko handed me the can, laughing and opening another one for
himself. I took a big gulp of beer which crashed into my throat like sharp ice. Our bikes glistened metallic red and yellow in the grass. We basked in the sun like sharks. I could hardly even
remember what winter was like.

After a while we cycled back; Steranko set up his easel on the roof and we chatted while he worked. The painting was of a view from the roof but at this stage it was difficult to tell how it was
going to turn out. Even in his straightforward representational work, scenes that would have been clearly identifiable were so dramatically transformed by perspective and colour – distorted,
intensified or muted – that they became at once alien, strange and familiar, haunting. Almost always in these paintings some strong source of light cast long Chiricoesque shadows through the
heart of the scene.

His paintings resembled Chirico’s in one other respect (though their atmosphere and feel were totally different): each painting felt like a brief detail of a total imaginative world that
extended far beyond the three or four square feet that you were privileged to glimpse there.

The human figures in his paintings were anonymous and indistinct except for some detail of clothing (a pink T-shirt, the shape of a jacket, a hat) or something about a gesture (a way of smiling
or the tilt of someone’s head) that made them instantly recognisable. He had recently finished some nudes of Foomie: her face and body were shadowy and indistinct but from the way her limbs
arranged themselves on a sofa or on the floor, by the swelling hint of a bicep, the angle of a crooked knee – by the way gravity played uniquely on the figure – it was unmistakably her.
What struck me as remarkable about Steranko’s paintings was that I immediately recognised the figures by things like this which, until then, I hadn’t noticed in real life. It took the
pictures to make you notice the delicate, unremarked inflections of the actual. In much the same way, in his abstract paintings, you felt the insistent tug of the distinct and specific reality in
which they had their origin. Maybe all that remained of it was a colour – a particular shade of yellow, the texture of a red – but that was enough to bring back very precisely the
incident or moment that the painting addressed. Alternatively something about the way two colours sat next to each other, some felicitous relationship of blue and red – or the way a yellow
touched an adjacent brown – made you aware of the relation and angle of sky and brick – or grass and pavement – that he had in mind. In this way his paintings came close to
abolishing the distinction between the abstract and the physical. They worked on you in the same way as a
déjà vu
which instead of remaining tantalisingly beyond the reach of
memory and formulation was suddenly brought unmistakably back – as if the past were a perfect memory of the present.

Well, it finally happened. Walking back from Carlton’s one night I got mugged. I’d just got through the entry door to my block when I heard somebody come up behind
me. I held the door open for him. He said something I couldn’t understand – at first I thought he was asking for directions. Then several little details made it all clear. First, I
realised he had a scarf up round his face Jesse James style and it wasn’t even cold. Second I worked out what he was saying: ‘What you got cunt? What you got?’

Third (the clincher), two accomplices shouldered their way in, pushed me up against a wall and tickled my nose with a rusty stanley knife. Typically I’d gone out without that dummy wallet
I told you about – the one I always carry in case of a situation like this – but I did have some loose change and a screwed up five pound note. Finding it was the problem. My pockets
were full of junk they didn’t want – glasses case, empty crisp packets, a book – but after much ferreting around they grabbed the fiver and some coins from my pocket and scrambled
out of the door: three kids, all about sixteen and all looking like they were shitting themselves. Mugging is hardly even the word for it; it was more like begging by force. An intense exchange of
gestures between comparative strangers, it was closer to a charade than an assault. It didn’t seem worth calling the police.

I woke early with yellow sunlight blazing through the windows and then drifted back to sleep and dreamt of a red postbox noisily vomiting the as yet unfranked contents of its
stomach. Slowly realising that the dream had been set off by the sound of the mail cascading through the letterbox and crashing to the floor I lay in bed and let the sound settle after this welcome
intrusion of the outside world. It was amazing the amount of mail I received, especially considering that virtually none of it – with the exception of a few postcards each summer – was
from friends (I never wrote to anyone, nobody wrote to me: fair enough).

The room was full of hot light. I could hear the police helicopter overhead. Still unfocused from sleep I carried a pile of letters back to bed and began tearing them open without enthusiasm.
With the exception of a query from the TV licensing centre my letters were all disguised circulars. Addressed to me personally they were all about money, urging me to borrow some and get the things
I’d always wanted (pretty much the things I’d never wanted). AbbeyLoan, American Express, Daleyloan, Faustbank – they were all dying to lend me money. One just asked straight out
if I’d like ten thousand pounds.

Receiving this kind of mail was a fairly recent development in my life and there was no accounting for it. Perhaps I’d been chosen at random or maybe they just trawled through the phone
book and mailed everybody. Certainly it wasn’t as though my career had made any spectacular jump forwards. Maybe it was just that I was at the age when, according to some complex actuarial
logic, my career would normally have been expected to take shape. Either way they were beginning to work on me, these letters, starting to make me think of myself as a pretty well-heeled young man,
a good credit risk, a man with prospects, a man people were keen to invest in. Perhaps they’d heard that I was no longer signing on the dole, that I’d managed to carve out an even
cosier niche for myself in the poverty trap: I was on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. I’d set myself up as a self-employed market researcher but the bit of legitimate money I made from that
wasn’t anything like enough to disqualify me from housing benefit. Any other money I earned was strictly in cash. I didn’t even keep track of it.

Most of this money came from painting and decorating, a state of affairs which had its good points and its bad points. The worst things about it was that it was so fucking boring, The good
things were that it required virtually no skill and we got the run of people’s houses for however long the job took. Most people who wanted their house decorating had one facility or another
to make the work bearable: a good collection of records maybe, or a Compact Disc player.

Mainly I worked with Carlton but if the job was big enough Steranko, Foomie or Freddie would work on it too and at the end of the day we would all travel home together in high spirits. We earned
less money working together like that but since so many people were buying places in south London there was always plenty of work. Besides, none of us wanted to do it all the time. Ideally I worked
just enough to make me appreciate the days when I didn’t. I had vague plans to try to write film scripts but I didn’t really know how to go about it and didn’t have the
concentration to find out. In the meantime decorating suited me fine. It was summer and after that, in the winter, maybe I’d leave England and live abroad or something. For the moment
everything felt fine.