by Geoff Dyer
I settled for silence – for the noise of the traffic – and levered open a can of emulsion. Magnolia: not a colour to get excited about, hardly a colour at all, not even not a colour. It hugged the pot neatly, the very image of soon to be disrupted serenity.
Slapping the paint on the wide expanse of walls was very pleasant – you got extremely good mileage out of those rollers. Unfortunately you also got a thin film of magnolia sprayed over carpet, chairs and stereo, none of which I’d properly covered with rags and newspapers. I only noticed this when someone rapped on the door and I made my way through the wreckage to see who it was.
‘Foomie!’ She was eating a pale yellow banana.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked. I kissed her carefully to avoid getting paint over her clothes.
‘This is not your lucky day. I’m decorating,’ I said, reboiling the kettle. ‘Actually maybe it is your lucky day . . .’
She was shaking her head.
‘It’s creative, stimulating and great fun. Good practice for when you want to do your flat. I’ll give you a few tips.’
‘I bet. You’re covered in paint – look you must have stepped in some: you’re treading white footprints everywhere.’
‘Oh fuck. It’s not white, it’s magnolia actually. See, you’re picking up useful knowledge already and you learn even quicker on the job.’
‘Not me Michelangelo.’
‘Go on.’
‘Out of the question.’
In the end she agreed to help on condition that she was able to drink as much lager and smoke as much grass as was ‘reasonably possible’.
‘What does that mean?’
‘As much as I want.’
‘It’s a deal,’ I said, handing over money for her to pick up beer from the off-licence. While she was out I sorted out a sweatshirt and some old trousers for her to wear. From then on we were really flying. We drank beer almost continually and stopped for a joint every hour. I slapped on dripping coats of emulsion and she touched up neatly around the edges. In what seemed hardly any time at all the flat was transformed into a bright haze of not-quite white. The thick, fresh smell of paint felt heavy in our nostrils. By the time we finished I was so thickly covered in paint that I cracked as I walked; standing against one of the walls I was invisible except for two dark eyes. Foomie had only a couple of smears of paint on her hands and a small white dot the size of a mole on her face.
When I’d had a bath and peeled off my emulsion skin I cooked some sort of vegetable mush which Foomie ate without complaint. I tipped the dishes into the sink and we sat in the bright-smelling living-room, playing music quietly and drinking tequila. I turned on the main light, dyeing the night outside a deeper blue. The patter of rain.
‘Is this the trumpet you bought from Steranko?’ Foomie said, opening the case.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you learned to play it yet?’
‘No. I couldn’t get the hang of it at all. I was really determined to learn. For a while I practised for about twenty minutes a day. Then it dropped to ten. Then I just practised whenever I felt like it which was about once a week. After that I just left it lying around because it looked nice. Now I keep it in the case to stop it getting dusty. It’s principal function now is to serve as a symbol of non-achievement.’
‘I’m like that with my self-defence classes. I go for a couple of weeks. Then for some reason I can’t go and after that I stop going for about six months. Then I go again and wish I’d kept at it.’
We listened to the music which was only slightly louder than the rain.
‘What shall we do this evening?’ I said after a while. ‘What’s Steranko doing?’
‘He’s having dinner at his brother’s. He won’t be back till late.’
‘So shall we do something?’
‘Yes.’
‘What would you like to do?’
‘Let’s go out dancing.’
‘I knew you were going to say that.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘I hate discos.’
‘We wouldn’t go to a disco,’ Foomie said. ‘We’d go to a club.’
‘All clubs are really discos.’
‘Have you ever been to one?’
‘Several. Hundreds. Years ago I went to loads and I never had a moment’s pleasure in any of them. All I did was watch people having what I thought was a good time but which I now realise was simply a highly ritualised form of boredom. Besides I’m allergic to clubs.’
‘I love dancing,’ Foomie said. ‘Don’t you like dancing?’
‘Hate it. Can’t stand it. It’s one of those things I’m really glad I don’t do. Every time I don’t do it I get a small thrill of pleasure. It’s like playing chess or doing crossword puzzles. Chess, I don’t like to even think about; I can rest easy knowing that it’s something I’m never going to be interested in and will never regret not having taken up. As for crosswords . . .’
‘We’re supposed to be talking about dancing.’
‘Right, actually I sometimes have an urge to dance but I’m always too embarrassed to actually do it.’
‘It doesn’t matter how you dance. It’s just whether you do it.’ As she finished speaking Foomie started dancing a little, moving slightly to an imagined beat. She held her hands up like fists and moved them slowly and rhythmically, her eyes half-shut.
‘See?’ she said, rocking her head to the beat. ‘Come on: groove that body.’
‘Can’t I just watch you and imagine you’ve got no clothes on?’ I said.
There was a sharp intake of breath as Foomie prepared to shout.
‘I’m joking, I’m joking!’ I said. ‘Look, I’m dancing, see? My heads nodding, my foot’s tapping.’
I went out to the kitchen to fetch the bottle of tequila. When I came back Foomie was standing at the window, looking out.
‘Hmmn, chilly,’ she said, putting on her cardigan.
The block opposite was invisible except for the angular pattern of windows which appeared as squares of coloured light – warm yellow, mauve blue – hanging in emptiness, capillaried by the scribbled silhouettes of twigs. The room was filled with the cool breath of the rain. The sound of dripping trees, the faint moan of traffic. I poured Foomie another drink.
‘We could go to the cinema. What’s on at the Ritzy?’ I said.
‘Oh, it’s that stupid Japanese film about a man getting his willy cut off. What’s it called? “I’m not a Corridor” or something like that.’
‘I’ll tell you what we could do,’ I said, laughing and reaching for the bag of grass. ‘There’s a dog fight tonight in Stockwell. We could go to that.’
Foomie shook her head.
‘What about badger-baiting over in Essex?’
‘Badger-baiting is the pits,’ said Foomie. ‘What time is it? How much longer before I can go home?’
‘It’s early yet and we’re having a great time . . .’
‘Like a house smouldering.’
We ended up going to the Atlantic. Foomie walked straight in; I got delayed at the door.
‘You want sinsee?’
‘No I’m fine.’
‘Black ash?’
‘No man I’m skint.’
‘How much money you got?’
‘I’ve just got enough for a couple of drinks . . .’
‘You want a five pound draw?’
‘I told you, I’m skint . . .’
The guy got fed up with me and waved me into the pub. Foomie bought two glasses of beer and we waited for the band to come on.
It was the first time I’d been in the Atlantic for a while. Since the night of the raids on Railton Road the pub had got into that cycle of dealing, arguments, fights and police. Despite this, it had been getting more and more crowded and Foomie and I devoted a lot of our energy to making sure we didn’t nudge somebody or spill their drink. Previously it had always been nice to get stoned and listen to music here; now I found myself overcome by wave
s of gulping paranoia.
Ray, an American who had been living in Brixton for a year, came over to where we were standing. I introduced him to Foomie and he told us how a gang was out to get him. He’d got into a fight after someone had spat in his hair while he was on a bus. When the bus stopped he dragged the guy on to the pavement and cracked him in the mouth a couple of times. By this time the guy’s friends had got off the bus too and Ray had had to run for it. Now the whole gang were out to get him.
The purpose of this story was to impress Foomie; he looked at her almost continually while he spoke. He even looked at her when he asked me what I would have done in his shoes.
‘On the bus?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? I can’t believe it.’
‘I’d rather get spat on than beaten-up.’
‘Man, you can’t live like that. You’ve got to have some self-respect.’
‘That kind of thing is a question of self-preservation, not self-respect.’
‘So you’ll let people do anything to you? I can’t believe it.’
‘Look,’ I said, wondering what Foomie was making of all this. ‘I don’t like the idea of being spat on but apart from the unpleasantness – having to wash it off or whatever – it doesn’t really bother me. Obviously I think the guy who does it is a right fucking bastard but I’m not going to do anything about it. It’s like a code, that idea of self-respect. Either you buy into it or you don’t. That’s the one good thing about fighting; it usually takes place between people who share the same values. But I don’t share those values. That’s not where my self-respect lies.’
‘Where does it lie then?’
‘That’s a good question. Maybe I haven’t got any at all – which makes life a lot easier . . .’
I thought of the guy who’d been beaten up on the tube. Nobody had done anything to help him; we were all paralysed by our fear. But there was a logic to our fear as well, a logic that we all shared: better he gets a pasting than I get stabbed trying to help.
Ray, meanwhile, was talking to Foomie who responded to his questions with the same formal politeness that I’d noticed when I first met her. As Ray spoke she slipped her arm through mine. Suddenly, off to the right, three young guys with knives were slashing at a big guy who batted them away with a bar stool. As they caught the bright lights of the stage their knives left gleaming hoops and arcs hanging in the darkness. The four of them gradually carved a path across the floor of the pub and disappeared around the corner of the bar.
‘Let’s go,’ said Foomie.
As we walked up Cold Harbour Lane I asked her what she thought of Ray. Laughing, she formed a circle with her thumb and index finger and shook her left hand slowly.
028
In the newspaper I read about the death of a violinist in a famous quartet. Like the other members of the quartet he was highly respected as an individual musician but it was the quartet itself rather than the individual members of it that was well known. Anyone who enjoyed chamber music would have heard of them but only a small percentage of these would have been able to name any of the members. Together they recorded complete cycles of Beethoven and Schubert quartets. When the violinist died – he was in his sixties – the quartet decided to disband rather than try to continue with a replacement. They had been playing together for about thirty years.
I got up to put a record on the turntable and listened to Coltrane swinging out in wider and wider arcs, aching on the frontier of the possible.
There was a photo of the four members of the string quartet practising together. They were all in their fifties or sixties, dressed in casual clothes with their jackets hung over the back of their chairs. Two were wearing glasses; one was bald and the other had white or grey hair. They had the look of gentle, considerate men who probably enjoyed a joke together during rehearsals when one of them played a wrong note or lost his way in the score. Probably they all had wives who may or may not have accompanied them when they made tours of England or the United States. What the photograph made most plain, however, was that for four or five or however many hours a day they practised they all shared in an activity that probably constituted their main reason for being alive. Gradually, I imagined, the intricacies of their relationships with each other became expressed and defined entirely by the music they were playing. It was hard to imagine them arguing.
It was equally hard to imagine how great must have been the sense of loss for the three surviving members of the quartet. Perhaps there was some trio for strings by Beethoven or Schubert which they would continue to play from time to time, a piece which, whatever its mood – even in the lightest, fastest movements – would be saturated, in their interpretation, by their longing for their dead friend.
There was something beautiful and poignant about the photograph of the middle-aged quartet: the raised bows, the sharp creases in the trousers, the music stands and the look of relaxed concentration.
The tape was coming to an end, the saxophone choked by its own intensity and drowned by the weight of the drums. I thought of Coltrane who was forty when he died, of Eric Dolphy and Charlie Parker and Lee Morgan – shot in a nightclub where he was playing; I thought of Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown who died in their mid-twenties, and of Booker Little who died when he was twenty-three.
The record seemed to end and then, impossibly, the saxophone emerged again, surviving the tidal wave of drums that had broken over it: the resurrection.
027
Spring was in the air: low cloud and faint drizzle alternating with drenching showers and biting winds. Leaves. Here and there a few chinks of light in the dull armour of the sky.
Travel Research and Information – the market research company that I worked for from time to time – was organising a huge survey over several rail routes in the south-west of England. They needed forty additional staff and Steranko, Foomie, Carlton, Freddie and I were all taken on. We had to interview passengers on trains and since some of these trains started from places like Truro, Exeter and Penzance at six in the morning the company put us up in an assortment of hotels in the region. Freddie and I stayed in a vast hotel in Taunton where the towels were thick and white, the carpets silent, and the taps eager to fill clean baths with steaming water. Staying away from home was thought to be a great hardship so they paid eight pounds a day expenses. Once that was used up we loaded as much as possible on to the hotel bill: drinks in the bar, room service, twenty quid dinners, newspapers; even things we didn’t want like salad sandwiches at two in the morning.
None of us cared about the actual survey and for most of the week we simply ran riot in unspecified parts of southwest England. By careful manipulation of our rosters – suddenly the word roster loomed huge in our lives – Freddie and I managed to meet up with Steranko and Foomie for a lavish meal in Plymouth where they had a double room in the Fitzwilliam hotel. Another day we completed our quota of questionnaires quickly and hopped on a train to Exeter where we wolfed down a couple of cream teas for lunch and strolled round the Cathedral.
So far the weather had been dull and overcast but bright sun over the south-west had been forecast for the following day. As Freddie and I tucked into a five-course meal at the hotel that night, he said that in the circumstances we were virtually obliged to take off to some coastal resort and spend the day lying on a beach, eating ice-cream and making up answers to the questionnaires. The next day we did a few interviews and then caught a train to Teignmouth where we’d arranged to meet Carlton. By lunch-time the three of us were on the beach, jackets folded up in plastic shopping bags, sipping cold beers and using questionnaires to keep the sun out of our eyes.
‘Paradise,’ said Carlton, speaking for all of us in a voice that was drowsy from the heat and the beer. ‘Three quid an hour for doing fuck-all.’
‘Not quite fuck-all,’ I said. ‘There’s still the questionnaires to make up.’ Inventing answers was not as simple as we thought; it was very eas
y to make some little slip which had your imaginary respondent making an impossible journey or travelling on a non-existent ticket. In a way, as Freddie explained from his deckchair, it was a bit like writing a novel: you had to invent a character – a retired school teacher, a business executive – and think yourself into his itinerary and probable opinions.
‘We’d better leave it to you in that case then Freddie,’ said Carlton, as we rolled up our trousers and paddled in the grey-green ocean.
026
We had only been back in London a few days when I got a call from Freddie. He sounded a little strange and said he wouldn’t be coming over that evening.
‘How come?’
‘I got my head beaten in last night.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Home.’
‘Have you been to hospital?’
‘I went this morning.’
‘Are you OK? I mean . . .’
‘I suppose so.’
‘How . . . ? Hey listen, I’ll come over late this afternoon.’
‘That would be nice.’
‘About four or five. Is there anything I can bring you?’
‘No.’
On the way to Freddie’s I stopped at the record stall in Brixton market and bought an Art Pepper album. Freddie took a while to come to the door – I heard him shuffling along the corridor like an old man – and when he opened it he just nodded slowly. He was wearing dark glasses. His face looked puffed up and purple in places.
‘Freddie,’ I said, feeling tears pricking my eyes. I put my arm around his shoulder. I closed my eyes tight a couple of times and then stepped back.