The Colour of Memory

by Geoff Dyer

  Carlton had to call for Belinda but Steranko, Freddie and I arrived together at Foomie’s place. The party was already in full swing. Foomie smiled warmly at both Steranko and me and said how glad she was that we could come. We introduced her to Freddie and they said hello and smiled at each other. Foomie was in a black sleeveless dress. Her hair was piled up and tied in a bright scarf and she wore big gold earrings. She asked if we wanted some punch but the three of us, at exactly the same moment, all said ‘BEER’. The single perfectly synchronised syllable belched loudly into the room, followed quickly by three separate mumbles of ‘please’. I could feel myself blushing.

  ‘Help yourself,’ Foomie said, pointing to the neat stack of cans on a sturdy table. The doorbell rang and she went to answer it, leaving the three of us standing in an awkward huddle.

  ‘I think we really made an impression there,’ Freddie said.

  ‘What a start,’ Steranko said and then we just stood there, drinking fast and looking round. There was a lot to drink but there were a lot of people to drink it as well. I opened a second can. Soul records were playing in another room.

  Steranko and Freddie drifted off. I stood in a corner, feigning intensity until Mary came over and handed me a joint. I remembered Mary from years ago when she would ask, wide-eyed, if Robert Mugabe was the fat one or the other one but in the last year she had suddenly got politics – it was like she’d received them in the post after a slight delay somewhere along the line. I liked Mary but her zest for arguing things through was sometimes a little wearying. After a film she always insisted that the sex scenes were pornographic, that the rape scene suggested that women liked being raped, that the husband’s slapping his wife endorsed violence against women and so on. She recounted arguments with people where they had said they weren’t interested in politics and she had responded by pointing out that everything is political. Her favourite expressions were ‘offensive’ and ‘ideologically unsound’. The latter she used so often that it was virtually a form of punctuation, occasionally reversing its meaning and using it as an indication of unqualified approval as in ‘ideologically sound’. Mostly, though, she preferred it in the negative mode when referring to buying Jaffa oranges, having service washes at the laundry or reading Martin Amis.

  Now she was explaining to me how we were all bisexual really.

  ‘But I don’t want to sleep with men,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know you don’t?’

  ‘That’s a daft question: you might just as well ask me how I know I don’t want to eat concrete. I just don’t want to.’

  ‘That depends on how deeply you may have repressed the homosexual side of your character.’

  ‘I think I’d know by now if I had any homosexual inclinations.’

  ‘Not when you’re brought up in a culture that makes you think of homosexuality as abnormal, wrong.’

  ‘I still think I’d know by now.’

  ‘How do you feel about gay men?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Are any of your friends gay?’

  ‘Not close friends really.’

  ‘Are you homophobic?’

  ‘No, I’ve just said: hardly any of my best friends are gay.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well all the time we’re told that every anti-Semite or racist starts by saying that some of his best friends are Jews or blacks or whatever . . .’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘True too, actually. Almost all of my best friends are heterosexual.’

  ‘D’you ever hug your friends?’ (Talking with Mary I quite often had the impression that I was being vetted for membership of some obscure new men’s group.)

  ‘No.’

  ‘What if one of them needed comforting?’

  ‘Comforting and hugging aren’t the same thing. Personally, I’ve never really taken much comfort from being hugged.’

  ‘And what about kissing? When you meet women you know you kiss them. Why don’t you kiss the men you know?’

  ‘I don’t always kiss the women I know. Generally I prefer to shake hands with people. The handshake is one of the great conventions of civilised living. Kissing is something else altogether.’

  ‘In different cultures men kiss each other.’

  ‘But we’re in this culture. Men kissing each other in this culture is just an affectation.’

  ‘What about crying? D’you feel embarrassed about it? D’you think men shouldn’t cry?’

  ‘I prefer it when they don’t.’

  ‘When did you last cry?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Ages ago.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Look, I mean crying is not that easy. It’s not something that comes naturally. You have to work at it like everything else. What’s so special about crying anyway?’

  ‘There’s nothing special about crying. It’s just that men are conditioned to repress their feelings. Do you ever touch your male friends?’

  ‘Well we touch each other for a drink now and again . . .’

  ‘Now you’re just being sarcastic.’

  ‘No I’m not and no I don’t touch my friends that much. But what’s so special about touching? I hate this facile equation of tactility with intimacy.’

  ‘Men are incapable of expressing affection for one another.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, dimly aware that I was using the bigot’s prefixes, ‘look’ and ‘listen’, as if I were issuing instructions on kerb drill. ‘Look, women are always accusing men of reducing affection to sex, yes?’

  ‘It’s true – they do.’

  ‘But in arguing that men can’t express affection for each other because they’re frightened of touching each other you duplicate exactly that reduction of the expression of affection to the physical.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘Look . . .’

  ‘There’s no need to shout . . .’ (A purely rhetorical ploy, this, designed to make me shout.)

  ‘I’m not shouting,’ I said, bait taken, voice raised.

  ‘All men – or most men – it seems to me, are constantly competing, just like you’ve turned this conversation into a competition.’

  ‘No I haven’t.’

  ‘Men are always bullying, either bullying women or trying to prove they’ve got a bigger dick than the next man . . .’

  ‘These are just clichés,’ I interrupted rudely. ‘You think in clichés – more recent ones than those you oppose but they’re clichés all the same.’

  ‘You’re the one that’s coming out with clichés. And you’re being rude . . .’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Anyway I’m bored with this conversation. Let’s talk about something else.’ For the next couple of minutes we weaned ourselves off rhetoric and back on to pleasantries. We talked about what we’d been doing and stuff like that and then Mary went off to get another drink.

  I crossed the room to where Freddie was talking energetically to someone about writing. You had to hand it to him: he really looked the part. He was wearing a corduroy jacket, suede shoes and a tie. Every now and then he took his glasses out of his jacket pocket, put them on and took them off again. (‘My new affectation,’ he’d once described it as, ‘one part Morrissey to one part George Steiner.’)

  ‘I always wanted to be a writer,’ he was saying. ‘Now that is the tense of great fiction. Only really great writers get a chance to come out with that kind of thing.’

  ‘Did you always want to be a writer?’ said the woman he was talking to.

  ‘I got forced into it. I mean I got fed up doing nothing. Now most days I still do nothing but at least I feel I’m meant to be doing something. As an incentive I pay myself psychological overtime: time-and-a-half after seven o’clock, double-time after midnight, triple-time at weekends. So if I put in a good four or five hours on a Sunday I can take the rest of the week off,’ said Freddie, pausing to swallow a mouthful of beer and then tossing away the empty can. ‘And that’s the really great thing about
writing: you can take a whole week off and nobody is going to give a shit: that’s the kind of powers writers wield. They can withdraw their labour at any moment – no need to ballot – and that’s fine by everybody. Nobody’s going to dock your wages, nobody’s going to get shit-face if you turn up at your desk hungover or late and knock off at four o’clock after a two-hour lunch-break. A toss is exactly what no one will give about anything you do.’

  At the end of this little speech – I’d heard earlier drafts at other parties – Freddie looked as if he would have appreciated a round of applause. I handed him a can of lager instead.

  ‘You ought to read the book he’s writing,’ said Steranko to the woman they were talking to. ‘It’s a work of Tolstoyan banality. One of the few truly dispensable works of our time.’

  ‘What’s it about, your book?’ the woman asked.

  ‘It’s a memoir of life at the eastern end of the Central line. I’m calling it “Look Back in Ongar”.’ At the very least I had heard Freddie make this joke ten times in the last two years. It was what he called one of his ‘Classic Standards’ and he showed no signs of ever getting fed up hearing himself say it.

  ‘And what do you do?’ the woman asked Steranko.

  ‘I’m an artist,’ he said.

  ‘The only thing he’s got in common with an artist,’ said Freddie, ‘is he gets cramp in the same wrist.’

  Foomie came over, smiling, pouring wine and putting her arm around the woman Freddie and Steranko were speaking to.

  ‘So you’ve met the beer boys Caroline?’ she said, much less formal with us once she could mediate her comments through a friend. Steranko, Freddie and I stumbled over each other trying to make jokes.

  ‘D’you three live together?’ Caroline asked during a pause in all this verbal jockeying for position.

  ‘We ride together,’ said Freddie before going off to get some food.

  Foomie talked to Steranko and me but however hard she tried to share what she said evenly between us it was obvious that the conversation was taking place on a slope, tilting away from me towards Steranko. If Steranko was talking to Caroline I could tell that Foomie was half listening to what they were saying. Her eyes lingered on Steranko when he spoke.

  Someone tapped Caroline on the shoulder. I moved over to the drinks table where someone handed me another joint. The centipede rhythms of salsa snaked out from the room next door. Laughing loudly Belinda came through the door, followed by Carlton who was wearing the same dark suit he’d had on earlier. Picking up another can of warm beer I went over and kissed Belinda. As I shook hands with Carlton someone kicked me lightly on the back of the leg.

  ‘Go on: give him a big kiss,’ Mary said, winking and then walking off again.

  Foomie came over and kissed Belinda and Carlton. Freddie came back, holding a plateful of chicken something.

  ‘Look at Steranko,’ Belinda said. ‘In a suit he always looks like he’s just got out of prison or the army.’

  ‘What bollocks,’ said Carlton. ‘He looks like he’s just got out of art school.’

  ‘I tell you, I’d hate to live in a time when men didn’t wear suits,’ said Freddie who wasn’t actually wearing one.

  ‘I’d hate to live in a time when women didn’t wear dresses,’ said Foomie.

  ‘Me too,’ said Belinda. ‘But I’d also hate to live in a time when you had to wear one.’

  ‘Suits and dresses,’ said Freddie. ‘When I’m wearing a suit I always wish I was wearing a shoulder-holster too.’

  ‘I even like the words connected with suits,’ I said. ‘Lapel, vent, turn-up . . .’

  ‘You feel good in a suit,’ Carlton said.

  ‘Not as good as you feel in a dress on a boiling hot day,’ said Foomie.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a suit that’s quite fitted properly,’ I said.

  ‘A suit shouldn’t fit properly,’ said Freddie, a sudden gleam of illumination in his eyes. ‘If it fits properly it doesn’t fit properly.’

  ‘What shit you talk Freddie.’

  ‘Let’s face it though,’ said Carlton, buttoning up his jacket for emphasis. ‘Suits always look better on black people.’

  ‘What about Lee Marvin in “Point Blank”? That’s a great suit.’

  ‘Not as good as Sidney Poitier’s in “In the Heat of the Night”.’

  I went to the bathroom for a piss, leafing through a couple of pamphlets on cystitis and thrush while I was at it. When I came back Freddie was giving everyone a lecture about Hemingway and the lost generation, leaning against a wall as though he needed to.

  ‘It’s meaningless. Every generation wants to think it’s lost. Take us. Who could have been more lost than us? We’re so lost we’re virtually extinct,’ he said and everyone laughed. ‘As far as I can see there are only two things to be glad about. We were just old enough and just young enough to realise the full joy of short hair. And we were just about on cue for the jazz revival. Obviously it would have been better to have been in on it first time round but that’s the way things happen these days. History is like the Cup Final: if you miss it in the afternoon you can always catch the highlights later on in the evening when it’s shown again. As for politics, well, you might as well forget it. I mean I wasn’t even able to vote in the last election . . .’

  ‘Nor me,’ said Foomie. ‘I wasn’t registered in time.’

  ‘Nor me,’ said Steranko.

  ‘Me neither,’ I said.

  ‘What about you Lin?’ She nodded and so did Carlton.

  ‘Look at that. It’s incredible. Four people out of six – two people out of three – don’t even have the vote! Our being on the left means nothing. It means we hang around with certain kinds of people – people like us – but beyond that it means nothing. All it does is underwrite our friendships and provide a kind of shared language, a foundation of broadly shared values. None of us really has anything to do with politics. We sneer at the way the news is presented on TV but nothing we feel has any effect on anyone else. It’s not our fault. That’s just how things have turned out.’

  I didn’t know whether I agreed with this or not and Freddie probably didn’t either.

  ‘People of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us in the sixties when we were still kids,’ said Steranko. ‘There are plenty of good brave causes left but there’s nothing we can do about them.’

  The afternoon passed quickly as we all got more drunk and stoned. People kept arriving. Juggernaut funk, agile, cumbersome and moving at high speed, thumped around the flat. Carlton and I were in the kitchen with Belinda, scoffing French bread and hummus.

  ‘How’s your group going?’ I said, searching through the kitchen drawers for a corkscrew.

  ‘We split up,’ said Belinda as someone else came into the kitchen. Belinda introduced her to Carlton and me. Her name was Monica and she was wearing a green cardigan. Her ripped Levis were three or four sizes too big, gathered in at the waist by a leather belt. She had light, wavy brown hair and wore earrings and no make-up. She talked to Belinda while I continued my hunt for a corkscrew.

  Eventually I turned to Monica and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a Swiss army knife have you?’ She reached into her pocket and pulled one out. ‘You modern women.’

  We talked for a while but by this time I was well past my best, not far off my worst in fact. I sprayed breadcrumbs when I spoke.

  After not very long she said, ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘OK. I’ll call you sometime maybe.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Have you got a pen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor have I,’ I said, feeling in my pockets. ‘I’ll memorise it.’

  ‘You memorise it, man,’ Carlton laughed. ‘You can’t even remember your own phone number.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong Carlton. My memory has never been in better shape. I answered one of those ads in the Sunday paper. Now I can even rem
ember what I was doing on the day George Best quit football.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Now Veronica, go ahead.’

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Five . . .’

  ‘Five . . .’ I repeated.

  ‘Five . . .’

  ‘Five . . .’

  ‘Five . . . Five . . .’

  ‘Double five . . .’ I said, concentrating hard.

  ‘Five . . .’ she continued. ‘Five . . .’

  ‘That’s it,’ she said.

  ‘Hey, listen I know that’s not a real number,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s only got six digits. London numbers have seven.’

  ‘I’ll see you around,’ she said, smiling and leaving.

  I looked out of the kitchen and into the living-room which had thinned out now. There were more empty bottles than people. Foomie was sitting on the arm of the sofa, talking to Steranko who had taken off his jacket and was propped up against a wall and drinking from a can like some swilled-out Valentino. She was laughing. Her hand rested on his for a moment as she said something I couldn’t hear.

  053

  Something was happening. You could tell something was happening by the way everybody was asking everybody else what was happening. Railton Road was cordoned off. Police were everywhere. I was back in the DIY shop, wishing I measured things more accurately. Unable to find a tape measure I’d spent the morning calculating distances in terms of LP covers and Penguin books – quite a satisfying activity in an imprecise sort of way – and now, with the help of one of the assistants, I was busily converting everything back into feet and inches.

  Ten minutes later all the stock from outside was bundled in and the shutters were yanked down.

  ‘There’s going to be a riot,’ claimed the manager with conviction, ushering customers out of the shop. Hardly a day goes by in the summer without a riot being predicted: it’s done like farmers forecasting the weather (‘red sky in the evening, the ghetto is burning’) but with less accuracy. Outside everyone just milled around while the diverted traffic congealed around them. I trudged back to my cave, eighteen foot (approximately) of shelving digging into my collar-bone.