The Colour of Memory

by Geoff Dyer

  From the roof of my block I looked out over the streets but everything was quiet, except for Concorde booming modernly overhead.

  People were still talking about what had happened late that afternoon when I went over to Terry’s, the greengrocer on Tulse Hill.

  ‘The police raided a couple of houses on Railton Road,’ Terry explained to a shopful of customers.

  ‘They came down on the train,’ said a woman with pink streaks in her hair. ‘Like football hooligans.’

  Terry was a big white guy whose thinning blond hair made him look older than he was. The shop was open till seven six days a week and until lunchtime on a Sunday. Terry was always there; even when he was out at the market picking up new produce in his van he was somehow still in the shop. Not only was he always there, he was always in a good mood. Whatever time of the day you went in he was joking or shouting hello to somebody. Such was the value everyone placed on Terry’s high opinion of them that no one even dreamed of ripping stuff off or getting impatient or swearing because of the queue.

  As well as all the usual fruit and veg he stocked a full range of West Indian vegetables and an array of wholewheat bread, natural yoghurt, free range eggs, tofu and vegan cheese. At the same time he kept an eye on tradition with a few packs of bacon and pork sausages stashed away in the fridge. Although it wasn’t actually on a corner, Terry’s was the heir to the idea of the corner shop but it also represented an unusual alliance of hard-working grocer shop economics with the anarcho-vegetarian culture of the inner city. One way and another he kept everyone happy.

  I was just coming out of the shop when I bumped into Steranko and Carlton, both stoned and wanting something to eat. I offered to cook them an omelette and the three of us walked back to my flat. It was the first time they’d been there since I moved in.

  ‘Shit, it smells like a skunk’s toilet,’ Carlton said as we made our way up the stairs, past marker-pen signatures and purple band-names in fluorescent Bronx script.

  ‘What d’you call that?’ said Steranko a few minutes later as the reinforced door clanged shut behind us. ‘Lubyanka chic?’

  Carlton laughed: ‘Man, you might as well go the whole way – get yourself a drawbridge and portcullis while you’re at it. Look at this,’ he said, picking up the entry-phone by the door. ‘When you get really paranoid you can just pick this up and listen to the outside world . . . Is there anybody there? Is there anybody there?’

  With that they went through to the main room and lurched around there for a while. The day before I’d bought some flowers and put them in a jug on the window-sill: they had elegant green stems and purple petals with yellow dots. Carlton looked at the jug of flowers and said, ‘Even here there is life.’

  ‘Nice isn’t it?’ I prompted.

  ‘Not exactly cosy is it?’

  ‘Course it isn’t cosy. It’s cosier than that place you live in. All you’ve got in that room is bare boards. Besides, comfort can never do as verb what it boasts as noun.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Freddie?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You know what sort of block this is?’ said Carlton, gazing out of the window.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It’s the kind of block where people draw their curtains early.’

  ‘Look at this,’ I said when we were back in the kitchen, turning on the hot-water tap and letting it run.

  ‘So? You’ve got hot water,’ said Steranko. ‘Very twentieth century.’

  ‘It’s free. You can waste as much as you want. You can leave it running all night if you want . . .’

  Later that evening, weighed down by large slices of an unappetising Spanish omelette, we walked down to the Atlantic. A lot of police were still around, walking the streets in twos and threes or waiting in buses parked some distance off in case anything happened. Groups of black and white youths were walking round too, falling silent as they passed the grim-faced police. The Atlantic was right at the focus of all this activity. It used to be a dingy boozer; then it got to be very popular as people were drawn there by the slight uneasiness as well as the fact that there was live jazz and the bar stayed open until midnight. After eleven it tended to fill up with people from the Albert, the pub across the road that was always packed with trendies complaining about how trendy and packed it was. The Atlantic was also well known as the place you could buy grass – an arrangement that suited everyone, dealers and punters alike, since the beer was awful. A lot of good musicians played there and even if they weren’t so hot the place always gave an edgy intensity to their playing.

  It was a warm evening and people had spilled out on to the pavement, the sheer sound of trumpet and saxophone slashing brightly into the dark street. The trumpet held notes that were long and high as a tightrope stretched out across the night.

  When the band had played a quick encore more people came outside and stood around talking and drinking. Police vans cruised slowly past. No bottles smashed against their windscreens.

  People began leaving the pub and we started walking home. Steranko turned right at the top of Cold Harbour Lane and Carlton dashed for a bus, waving to me as it pulled away. There was hardly anyone around. A few cars went past. It occurred to me that the whole idea of street life in this country came into existence at exactly the moment when, it was claimed, the streets became unsafe to walk in, when crime began destroying a way of life that had never actually existed.

  A couple of young guys, one of whom I vaguely recognised, walked towards me. He nodded, ‘Ah right.’

  ‘OK.’

  I walked slowly, enjoying the feel of the warm night and the clouds drifting like whales across the sky.

  052

  For the rest of that week I had some work with a market research company. On the way home one evening I dropped in at the Effra. Freddie was there, pissed off and standing by the bar on his own. That morning he’d been burgled.

  ‘What did they take?’

  ‘Stereo, records, camera.’

  ‘You insured?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s just the hassle. They got in through the window and found a spare set of keys which they took so I had to spend the whole day getting new locks fitted. A hundred quid. Guess how many burglaries there were in Brixton last night?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Twenty-five. That’s what the cop who came round told me. He said he’d never known a night like it. I think there was even an element of pride in his voice as he said it.’

  I laughed and bought Freddie another beer.

  ‘This weather is so weird too,’ he said, draining his old glass. ‘Is it hot? Is it cold? It’s not even that easy to tell whether or not it’s raining. The seasons are all dissolving into each other. Look at it: it’s supposed to be September and it looks like snow. I’m beginning to think the weather reports are government controlled, censored. They probably change the records to make out that thirty inches of rain is normal for August. I’m sure it never used to rain that much. People wouldn’t have stood for it. There’d have been a revolution. They can’t let the truth out because they know there’d be panic. The forecasts are just government propaganda. They say it’s going to brighten up by the late afternoon and it’s still pissing down at seven. The wonder is that people still go on believing them.’

  Freddie was clearly in the mood to complain. I nodded my head in agreement.

  ‘Mary says the weather is determined by the economic structure of society; it’s all related to that economic base. We get the weather we deserve,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, we can’t afford good weather anymore. We probably sold it all to America. That’s why we get all this drizzle. It’s the perfect weather for a declining industrial power,’ said Freddie, groaning as he saw Ed making his way towards us. Ed was a manic depressive and like all manic depressives you never saw him manic, only depressed. You had to take his word for the mania and that was difficult because he communicated mainly in
grunts and lumps of sentences that were swallowed as soon as spoken. Not only that but he never looked you in the eyes when he spoke; he looked at the rings and squiggles of beer that he traced on the bar with his fingers. He never bought anybody a drink and he always accepted one from somebody else grudgingly, as if he was doing so at considerable personal inconvenience. He never made jokes or laughed at other people’s – as far as he was concerned, there was nothing much to laugh at, the state of the class struggle being what it was. The nearest he got to a smile was a sneer and for entertainment he rolled his own cigarettes.

  Freddie slurped gloomily at his beer while I exchanged a few words with Ed. After a couple of minutes he trudged over to someone else.

  ‘Thank God we didn’t have to put up with him. He’s like human drizzle,’ said Freddie, putting down his glass. ‘So, this job you’re doing, what d’you have to do?’

  ‘Code and check questionnaires before the results are put through the computer. I’m working with this other bloke, a friend of Carlton’s. There’s no room for us in the main office so we have to work in the basement. The only time anyone comes down is when they want boxes of computer paper shifted so it’s quite nice. It’s so boring though. This afternoon we ended up playing Battleships. After that we just sat there and worked out how much money we were earning per minute.’

  ‘Sounds a great job,’ Freddie said. I went for a piss. When I got back Freddie’s glass was empty and I asked if he wanted another. I had just ordered two more beers when Freddie touched my arm and gestured towards the door. Steranko was coming through the door – with Foomie. She was looking gorgeous and happy. I felt a jolt of shock and then a steady, draining sensation in my stomach. I was still looking at them when Steranko and then Foomie caught my eye. They made their way towards us; Freddie was already saying something to Steranko. It was one of those situations where you have either to conceal your reactions or conceal yourself behind your reactions. Smiling broadly, I leant towards them and asked what they wanted to drink.

  051

  The groan of thunder. Grey light. The cold smell of rain coming through the open window. There was the sound of a plane, soggy through the rain; the long swish and wince of cars, the sob of a police siren. I leant on the sill and watched the rain fall past the window, the trees below glistening and black. Suddenly I caught a blur of movement on the opposite roof, a shape indistinct in the drizzle. At that moment the rain began falling heavily again. I crossed the room and turned out the small reading light and went back to the window. I looked out again. For a long time I saw nothing and then, for a few seconds, I saw the shape of someone on the roof, smudged by the falling rain. The phone rang. I glanced towards it and when I looked up at the roof again there was only the rain.

  I picked up the phone. It was Fran calling from a kiosk because her phone was broken. She was just calling to see how I was. Hearing the crackle of rain in the background I pictured her in the call box, hair dripping into the receiver, her hand idly wiping condensation from the fee-display.

  I looked out again, my breath fogging the window. I wiped the cold glass clear, held my breath and stared out. The thump of my heart grew steadily louder. I turned my head, exhaled and breathed in deeply once again. The rain was as it sounded.

  050

  I did not see Steranko or any of the others for several days. The market research company was conducting a survey for British Rail – What sort of tickets were people using? Where were they going? What did they think of prices? The buffet? – and I spent the next week shuttling up to Manchester and back four times a day, handing out questionnaires. On most trips it only took an hour to dish them out and then I sat back in the wide First Class seats and enjoyed the ride, reading and drinking, eating hot and cold snacks from the buffet bar, not thinking about Steranko or Foomie, just watching the damp landscape slide past the big windows.

  On the last day of the survey I got back to the flat and found a note from Steranko pinned to my door: ‘ON ROOF – S.’ I chucked my bags in the flat and made my way up the stairs. The roof was the single best thing about the block. At the top of the stairs a door opened on to a flat concrete rectangle about the size of a tennis court, a low wall and railing running along the edge. At the other end the same arrangement was duplicated with an identical door leading to another flight of stairs and another lift. The roof of the lift-housing was also flat and since it was eight or nine feet higher it got another half an hour of sun at the end of each day – if there was any sun to have.

  Steranko was reading by the light of a hurricane lamp that covered him in a warm tent of light.

  ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ he said, looking up.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Come over . . .’ I sat on the rug next to him. Gnats clung to the side of the lamp. Our shadows crawled the floor.

  ‘Nice light, isn’t it?’

  ‘Beautiful. Where’d you get it?’

  ‘This friend of Foomie’s found it. She didn’t want it so I cleaned it up and fixed it.’ I wondered whether I should say something about Foomie and then decided against it.

  ‘What are you reading?’ I asked after a while. Steranko held up a battered paperback selection of Nietzsche.

  ‘You read him?’

  ‘Only odd bits.’

  I flicked through some pages without reading them. The light from the hurricane lamp made the sky look dark as ink. A few feet in front of us there was an unfinished sculpture of a woman, with rough-hewn head, arms and waist protruding from a block of white stone.

  ‘Is someone who lives here sculpting that?’ Steranko asked.

  ‘Yeah, I don’t know his name though.’ On the afternoons that I’d been up on the roof I’d watched him work on it, enjoying the gentle tap of the chisel and the way the form of the woman slowly emerged from the hard block and the cloud of white dust.

  Today had been the first time in several weeks that it had been hot and sunny; little progress had been made since I’d last seen the sculpture. The bricks of the low wall behind our backs were still faintly warm, breathing the last of their accumulated heat into the cool night air. On the roof of the opposite block I saw the dark shapes of a man and a woman, his arm around her shoulders. I waved at them and they waved back, the red glow of a cigarette tracing the movement of a hand.

  ‘Shall we have a joint?’ I said after neither of us had spoken for a while.

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Can you sort that out?’ I pulled a bag of grass and some papers out of the pocket of my trousers. ‘I’ll bring some coffee up.’

  ‘Hey, can you bring up your cassette player? I made this tape today – it’s unbelievable.’

  ‘Sure. What’s the tape?’

  ‘It’s a Mahler symphony. The third.’

  Making coffee in the kitchen I thought about Foomie. There was an inevitability about her being attracted to Steranko that destroyed even the possibility of jealousy. Instead of wishing that Foomie was attracted to me I found myself wishing that I was more like Steranko. Just as there are individuals who are always on the periphery of a given group so there are those like Steranko who, you know, will always be at the defining centre of other people’s lives.

  By the time I came back up with everything Steranko had rolled a clumsy joint with the home-grown grass. Steam floated off the dark surface of the coffee.

  We took turns pulling deeply on the joint and exhaling grey smoke that hung sweetly in the air for a moment and then disappeared. To the west the sky was tinted orange. I read odd pages of Nietzsche. My mind wandered. We watched clouds moving fast across the moon; the lights of a plane overhead. Neither of us said anything for a while. Steranko rewound and fast-forwarded the cassette player until he found the place on the tape he wanted.

  ‘Right, this is the fourth movement: Vas meer die Nacht erzalt,’ he added in Colditz German.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I dunno. Something, something, night, something.’ Our laughter floated awa
y and quietness gathered round us. The noise of the traffic was still there but quieter, further off, like the sea at low tide. Sheets hung out to dry on the opposite block, visible only as grey squares in the darkness, shrugged in the breeze. There was no sign of the couple we’d seen earlier. A few lights were on. The steady flame of the hurricane lamp, the tape running noiselessly. Then, hardly audible, barely distinguishable from the silence that preceded it, came the sound of a woman’s voice.

  Each syllable was like a breath, insubstantial as the night air. The voice was so frail a gust of wind could have blown it away. The singer’s lone voice gathered the night’s silence into itself and slowly overcame it, pulling itself out of the silence like the sculptured form of the woman, pulling herself clear of the rock. The voice continued its long, slow ascension, angular syllables stretched out and hanging for long seconds in the darkness.

  O Mensch! O Mensch!

  Tief! Tief! Tief ist ihr Weh!

  Tief ist ihr Weh!

  The voice came from the throat of the darkness. The light from the hurricane lamp wavered.

  Steranko leafed through the grimy pages of the book, folded it back on itself and passed it to me without speaking. Half his face was in shadow. In the vacancy left by the music, in the silence that craved the lone voice of the woman, I read:

  What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’