by Geoff Dyer
In cinema or books the climax of the action, however calamitous, simplifies and resolves – brings things to an end. In real life calamity and confrontation always bring chores in their wake. There are keys to return, bills to pay, the milk to cancel, people to tell and arrangements to make. It’s like Othello. Two minutes after murdering Desdemona he’s expecting earthquakes and eclipses and all he gets is the neighbours banging on the door wanting to know what all the noise is about. Or like a friend of mine who was stabbed and got his dole money stopped because he missed his signing-on day and hadn’t filled out a sickness form while he was on a life-support machine.
046
At the underground station a group of policemen and women stopped everyone as they passed through the barriers. I joined the long queues at the ticket machines but the police had no interest in fare-dodgers: they were asking everyone if they had been using the tube at this time a week ago when a woman had been killed between Brixton and Stockwell. I shook my head and was handed a sheet of paper with MURDER and APPEAL FOR ASSISTANCE printed in large letters at the top. Underneath was a photograph of a woman. She was smiling; the photo was blurred as if it had been taken at a party where she was laughing and drunk. She was twenty-one, an African, and no one knew anything about her except that she’d been found bleeding to death in an empty carriage when the train pulled in at Stockwell.
And now, exactly a week later, I sat waiting for the train to pull out. Hunched forward and holding it in both hands like a tiny newspaper, I stared at the photo of the dead girl. On either side of me a dozen people were doing exactly the same.
045
Fran came round the next day in an expensive-looking car. I didn’t know what model it was and she wasn’t sure either.
‘I think it’s called a Vauxhall Courgette or something like that,’ she said, kicking one of the front tyres as if to suggest casual familiarity with the world of pistons, cross-plys and sump oil.
‘Whose car is it?’ I asked as we hummed noiselessly past the new riot-proof Tesco’s on Acre Lane – it had the look of a place which could be air-lifted out to neutral Vauxhall in under fifteen minutes in the event of trouble.
‘It belongs to the guy who goes out with Sal in my house. He lent it to her and she lent it to me on the strict condition that I don’t have a prang in it. Apparently that’s what motorists call an accident: a prang.’
Fran wore her glasses to drive. They had big plastic frames that made her look almost comically scholarly. She clutched the wheel like she was steering a ship in heavy weather. We moved very slowly in dense traffic; I groaned, complained and swore but Fran, showing no sign of irritation, tapped the steering wheel to the rhythm of a pop song that played on the radio. Over the years my own impatience had become so extreme that I was in danger of becoming incapable of enjoying anything: every activity was an obstacle to the next. This accelerating impatience had nothing to do with being late or in a hurry; it was a condition not a response. I was even in a hurry when I had nothing to do. On buses I watched traffic lights compulsively, dreading a red, loving a green, happiest of all when the bus hurtled past a stop without stopping. On holiday I longed for the train journey to end and the holiday proper to begin, and then for the holiday to end and the normal routine to resume. Fran had always been different. As kids we used to go out for a drive with our parents in their sky-blue Vauxhall Victor. Our father was a very cautious driver and every time someone overtook us he would say: ‘he’s in a hurry’ and our mother would nod wisely. It used to drive me crazy but Fran would continue looking out of the window and sucking her boiled sweet. (I’d already chewed and swallowed mine.)
‘What happened to your car in the end?’ she asked after a while.
‘The car-breakers offered me forty quid for scrap so I traded it in for a second-hand tube pass. I miss it sometimes. The other day I was walking past a motor spares shop and I suddenly had an urge to buy some jump leads.’
‘What are jump leads?’
‘Don’t you know what jump leads are?’
‘No.’
‘They’re those things you lend to people when their car won’t start.’ Eventually we reached the Common and Fran began manoeuvring into a parking space. You’d have thought we were trying to reverse into a telephone kiosk the way she hauled the wheel first one way and then the other, crawling forwards a few inches and then lurching back after a strangled screech of protest from the gear-box.
‘Shall I have a go?’
Fran got out and I slithered over into the driving seat. I twisted and shuffled through the various stages of a three-point turn until the car was parked perfectly between two other vehicles – except that it had its back to the kerb instead of its side.
‘It does sort of extend itself unnecessarily at the front and back doesn’t it?’ Fran called to me through the open window. I extricated the car and got it parallel with the one in front, vaguely remembering that this was what you were meant to do. This time I must have got the lock just right; it started gliding into the space behind without a murmur of complaint. Fran was directing me back with that circling motion of the hands that I always associated with the adult world of our father. I reversed another foot or so and Fran continued waving me back until I crunched into the car behind. I looked again into the mirror and saw Fran absentmindedly urging me back.
‘Dear God! I do not believe it!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Can’t you see what’s happened?’ I said through my clamped, my traffic-wardened teeth. Fran looked down at the cars, surprised for a moment, then put one hand over her mouth and gave a wide-eyed chuckle.
‘Ooh!’
‘Fran!’
‘What a driver!’
‘Fran!’
‘You might have been a bit more careful,’ she said between laughs. I didn’t begin to see the funny side of it until seconds before it stopped being funny, when the man whose car we’d hit came bulging out of the cake shop like meat from a pasty. The first thing he saw was the cars; the second was the smile coaxing its way out of my mouth. He looked like the kind of guy who could get violently angry over something like this: a self-made man who had got where he was through hard graft and wasn’t short of a tattoo or two. There was no point saying anything. It was just a question of standing there and hoping that whatever he did wouldn’t hurt too much or cause any major structural damage.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ said Fran. ‘I’m afraid we’ve had a bit of a prang.’
The man still didn’t say anything. The bag of whatever it was he was clutching was starting to turn transparently greasy: sausage rolls perhaps. He was breathing thickly through his nose.
‘Only a little prang really,’ said Fran but as she was saying it the last syllable was already bubbling into a laugh. She tried to stop herself but her eyes were shining with wet laughter.
‘Just the teeniest little prang,’ she said, holding her thumb and index finger a fraction apart. ‘And we’d be very happy to lend you our jump leads. Unfortunately we haven’t got any.’
With that she doubled-up laughing. It was OK for Fran. Despite what women claim, in situations like this men are much more at risk than women. The bloke would never hit Fran – he’d hit me twice as hard and twice as often instead.
‘Something wrong with her?’ the man asked.
‘She’s my sister,’ I said trying not to laugh. Laughing would have revealed my teeth and that might have tempted him to knock them out. I hadn’t been hit for years. I could hardly remember what it was like but that only made the prospect more frightening – like getting stung by a wasp: I couldn’t remember what that felt like either but the idea of it was terrifying.
The bloke slid into his car and moved it back a foot or two, then got out again, the engine still running. Fortunately the damage was all self-inflicted. As soon as our car had got within six inches of his it had bumpered out our rear light and punched in part of the boot.
‘It’s peopl
e like you,’ he said looking at me and not Fran who had stopped laughing by now. ‘It’s people like you . . .’ He left it at that. We never found out what it was that people like us did for him. He just gave me a look that said he could buy me, my sister, the car and everything in it and scrap the lot if he didn’t have about a hundred other more important things to ruin first. He had some trouble squeezing the car out of the space we’d boxed him into. Fran was drying her eyes, still chuckling.
‘Silly prick,’ she said as he drove off.
‘Shit, Fran,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to be careful with people like that.’
It was a clear but cool day. Fran was wearing a red woollen hat and a grey raincoat which she always called her ‘famous blue raincoat’ – she had gone through a Leonard Cohen phase a few years back – because it was torn at the shoulder.
‘Anyway, it’s a good job we hadn’t eaten these,’ she said, pulling a polythene bag out of her coat pocket. ‘Things might have got really out of hand.’
‘Are they what I think they are?’
‘Yes,’ she said pouring out half the contents of the bag and handing them to me. The rest she tipped into her mouth. Wrinkling up her face she pulled a can of coke from another pocket – I was beginning to wonder how many pockets that coat had – opened it and took a big, frothing gulp.
The sky was pale blue as if showing through a gauze of cloud so thin as to hardly be there at all. It was neither summer nor autumn. The sun had none of the intenstity of summer but the trees were still thick with green leaves. A strong wind came and went. As we walked by the edge of the Common there was barely a breeze. Then we came up on a large tree hissing and writhing. At our level there was still only the very faintest of breezes, as if the wind existed only in the twisting leaves and rocking branches. Green with time, a large statue of a woman offering a drink to a lame man had been erected in front of the tree. The man was seated; with one hand the woman helped him drink, the other rested lightly on his shoulder.
We walked on. The Common stretched out vast and flat before us. Up ahead a line of thin trees cast long poles of shadow across the grass. In the distance there was a clump of fertile trees – slightly hazy as in a landscape by Claude Lorrain. The sun flung clouds across the sky. Every few seconds the light changed: now the clouds were flecked with lemon or pink; within a few moments they were turning bruise purple. The ground felt hard under our feet. Fran’s face and clothes were bathed in the brightness of the light; the light of the sun burned in her eyes.
We watched a man with two young children and a dog take a large model of a Sopwith Camel out of the boot of a car. The plane was radio-controlled; twiddling with his hand-set the man taxied the bi-plane along the ground. We watched for about five minutes during which time he sent his children back to the car for spare parts or oil of some sort. Then he tinkered around with the wings and stepped back, pointing the aerial of the hand-set at the plane. It taxied along the ground for a few more yards but didn’t gain any speed. His kids lost interest and were throwing a balsa-wood plane at each other; it caught the wind and looped the loop for a few seconds or just floated before falling quietly back to earth. The man had one more go with his radio-controlled bi-plane but this time it wouldn’t even crawl along the ground.
‘Can’t get it up mate?’ Fran shouted.
‘Jesus Fran! Honestly you’re going to get us killed.’
Clutching it by the tail fin the man dragged the plane back to his car, shouting at the kids to hurry up and making barking noises at his dog. Understandably reluctant to get back in the car – nobody had even thrown him a stick to chase – the dog was still eager to play. The kids were in their anoraks, arms by their side, walking obediently to the car.
We walked back across the Common towards some kind of park buildings – lavatories or storage buildings for the groundsmen. Two young black guys, both carrying smoke canisters of some kind, hopped over the fence and started clambering over the building, every now and then releasing great clouds of red, green and blue smoke. It billowed up in thick palls and then blew away. As the sun sank lower the light became richer and deeper, spreading out in long golden streaks. An angle of honking geese flapped towards these bright strips of light. It was slightly cooler now. I had no idea where I was.
From behind us came the sound of car horns, yelling and bustling. We turned around and saw police scrambling out of a van – first two and then, in quick succession, five or six more – and charging across the grass in the direction of the groundsmen’s building, shouting. Then we saw them jumping over the fence by the park buildings, running through coils and plumes of blue and red smoke. More shouting. As the smoke faded we caught sight of the two kids, both still inside the fence and taken completely by surprise. One turned by the edge of the building but ran straight into two cops who pulled him to the ground before he even had time to struggle. A cop lunged at the other one but he swerved just out of reach and started running hard for the fence. The cop was yelling ‘Head him off, Ron!’ The fence was more than three feet high and the young guy cleared it without breaking stride. Another cop was running towards him as he ran along by the fence, heading for the open park. Running at full tilt the young guy tripped over one of the stanchions and went flying. The cop was only a matter of yards away as he began to pick himself up. By the time he got to his feet the cop was within a foot of him and stretching out an arm. For several seconds they seemed to stay exactly like that but then, unbelievably, the gap between the cop’s hand and the kid’s back seemed slowly to widen as he got into his stride.
‘Go on!’ yelled Fran. ‘Run!’
The cop ran for all he was worth for a few more seconds but with every second the young guy was another couple of feet clear of him.
‘Go on, you’ll make it!’ called Fran at the top of her voice.
The cop was running out of steam, a few yards more and he was bent over, heaving for breath. The kid looked round, running more slowly now, heading across the field into the bright sun. He looked around again. We waved and shouted to him. He saw us and waved back, then ran on again, silhouetted and getting smaller and smaller until he could hardly be seen against the last crimson scarves of light.
044
I decided to buy the trumpet after all. When I called round at Steranko’s to pick it up I found only Foomie sitting on the floor of the Blue Room with a mug of tea steaming beside her, reading. She was wearing one of Steranko’s sweaters.
‘Stay and have some tea,’ she said smiling.
‘I’m not disturbing you?’
‘It’s nice to see you. I don’t know where Steranko is.’
Foomie’s hair was tied up tight in a bun. She was wearing jeans and faded red socks. It was odd seeing her in one of Steranko’s favourite sweaters. While Foomie made more tea I trotted up to Steranko’s room and brought down the trumpet.
The Blue Room was the main living-room of Steranko’s house, so-called because of the painted blue floorboards and the pale blue walls. There was nothing in it except a fire and a small stereo. Foomie put on a record of Flamenco guitar. I poured the tea and opened a packet of biscuits. I took the trumpet from its case and fiddled around with the valves.
‘D’you think you’ll learn to play?’
‘I doubt it.’
We spoke in that relaxed and highly conventionalised way that the friend’s lover and the lover’s friend tend to when they find themselves alone. We were eager to like each other and laughed too quickly at each other’s jokes. We talked about Freddie and about Belinda but the conversation was all the time revolving around Steranko. He both restricted our intimacy and made it possible. There were all sorts of other things we could have said and we avoided all of them.
Instead, Foomie asked what I wanted to do, what kind of work I wanted. I said I didn’t know, that for as long as I could remember I had been living from one conversation to the next, going nowhere slowly.
The room echoed with the sharp claps, heel stamps and
ringing chords of the music. Foomie wiped away some crumbs that had fallen on her book.
The blue floorboards looked liquidy and wet in the orange glow of the electric fire. The panels in the middle of the door had been painted a dark grey and against the background of blue they formed a cross which, for a moment, seemed like the mast of a sinking ship rising from a blue sea – the bars of the electric fire like the bright stripes of a sunset.
We sat and talked by the light of the fire.
043
Bonfire night: Steranko and I walked back to his house across the park. There was a halo of mist around the moon. A light fog draped the iron skeletons of trees. Fireworks exploded green, red and yellow in the cool mist of the sky. The bandstand loomed stark and empty before us. Paths grew indistinct in the near distance. A rocket arced up into the sky and burst into a bunch of bright petals falling. Some way off to the left there were the shrieking noises and colours of a fun fair. We walked towards it, past the huge pyre that would be at the centre of the firework display later that night. We passed through a thicket of bare trees, indistinct and swampy in the fog. Another rocket asterisked the sky.
On the waste ground outside Steranko’s house some kids had built a big bonfire. His room reeled and heaved with the bright light of flames. The window panes were warm, the sky deep blue. The whole room was rolling with orange light swirling around the various half-finished paintings. Writhing shadows. Heat. A portrait of Foomie – the first one I’d seen – was stained red by the light of the flames. Her eyes were startlingly lifelike in the flickering light. Steranko put on a record and propped himself on the window-sill, hands round his knees, to watch the fire, silhouetted by the flames. Music flooded the room which was full of colours moving, full of the light of burning.