The Colour of Memory

by Geoff Dyer

  ‘Bring ’er up,’ I said.

  Steranko gently pulled at the string, careful to ensure that the magnet didn’t bang against the sides of the pipe. He kept pulling. The string was tense. Eventually it became wet and dirty. Foomie and I looked on expectantly as Steranko stood up and pulled the magnet clear of the hole. And there, clinging precariously to it, was a small bunch of keys.

  ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’ Steranko exclaimed, hugging Foomie and kissing her loudly. ‘The ingenuity of the human mind!’

  ‘You couldn’t have done it without my string,’ I whined and we all laughed.

  ‘Superb string,’ Steranko said, beaming and putting his arm around my shoulder.

  The sound of the evening rush-hour rose up from the streets. From overhead came the deep clatter and thump of a police helicopter tracking the convoy of prisoners on its way back from the courts to Brixton prison. The three of us stood with our arms around each other, laughing loudly at the sun.

  018

  I turned on the TV to watch Wimbledon for a few minutes and ended up watching for two days. Since I’d last watched tennis a couple of years previously the players seemed to have attained new, almost superhuman standards. Not that this made it more interesting – on the contrary it was the sheer tedium of the game that made it so compelling. If you tuned in for five minutes you wouldn’t see much at all, especially in the men’s game where a thunder-flash serve had become so essential that the players had to put themselves in a state of deep trance before they could even think about hitting the ball. One guy took ten bounces of the ball, two finger sniffs, a couple of forehead wipes and a dozen racket twists before smacking the ball into the net. After pausing for two minutes he repeated exactly the same ritual and sent the ball flying into his opponent’s service court. Unfortunately the ball was judged to have touched the net en route and so, to complete what was perhaps the most elaborately time-consuming double-fault ever attempted, he went through the whole routine again before thumping the ball down the opposite tramline. No wonder he was angry.

  No wonder, either, that some of the line judges found it difficult to stay awake and had to take pot luck on close calls. It actually seemed that the conflict between players and officials had reached such a pitch of animosity as to constitute the chief interest of the match. As far as the line judges were concerned their job was to goad a given player with unjust decisions until he was forced to concede sufficient penalty points for bad behaviour to leave the match hopelessly beyond reach. Once that had been achieved the officials switched their attention to the other player. As for the players, their behaviour had degenerated to the point where the commentator found himself looking back fondly on John McEnroe as quite a gent. Even unseeded players were now quite capable of the kind of sustained F-ing and Are-you-fucking-blind-ing that used to be the preserve of only the most talented players. I imagined some young player plumbing new depths of unpopularity by threatening the umpire with his racket or taking a swipe at a docile ballboy who’d had the misfortune to hand him an unlucky ball. The stage-managed nastiness of one or two players was almost as ritualised as wrestling. I half expected to see someone whipping up the crowd with a chant of Ea-sy! Ea-sy! after a particularly vicious forearm smash.

  Inspired by all this tennis I called Steranko to see if he fancied a game but he was out. So was Carlton. As a last resort I tried Freddie.

  ‘There’s no point. I can hardly even hit the ball. The only bit of the game I’m any good at is the drinking afterwards – as long as the barman keeps serving I can keep knocking them back,’ he said, laughing enthusiastically at his own joke. ‘Let’s just go out for a drink instead. We can take our rackets if that makes you feel better.’

  017

  It was another perfect blue day but I didn’t have a chance to get on the roof until the early evening. The sky was turning lemon where the sun would later set. Overhead it was pale blue with a few air-brush splashes of light cloud. I was sitting at the end of the low wall at the edge of the roof, one arm hanging over the railing, dangling into the blue air like it was a lake. I’d adopted this posture of exaggerated relaxation because of the book I had propped open on my knees: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Freddie had lent it to me on the strict understanding that I didn’t squander it by reading it on the tube, that I read it only in ideal conditions, when I could savour each sentence ‘like a hammock slung between full stops’. (Freddie tended to wax lyrical about Calvino; he once said that he knew exactly how he was going to meet the woman of his dreams – they’d be sitting opposite each other on the tube, both reading If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and that would be that.) Sticking more or less to Freddie’s strictures I’d been reading it off and on for about six months and was still only halfway through.

  Perched up there on the low wall, I’d only read a couple of pages when I caught a glimpse of someone moving on the opposite block, a blur in the corner of my eye. I looked over and saw a woman leaning on the rail, looking across my roof at the pale yellow of the evening light. I knew I’d seen her somewhere before but had no idea who she was. She was wearing dark glasses and a T-shirt that had been washed so many times it was hardly red at all. Her skin looked tanned and calm in the evening light. Her brown hair was tied back loosely. She glanced towards me as I looked at her.

  I shouted ‘Hi’ and smiled. She waved, smiling.

  ‘Nice isn’t it?’

  ‘Wonderful . . .’

  ‘I’m surprised there’s not more people up here,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  All around us was the faint rumble of the evening traffic. We threw words across the street and sometimes they were difficult to catch and fell unheard into the space between us.

  ‘I said I’m surprised there’s no one else around.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I nodded. Behind her I could see a red armchair that someone had recently dragged on to the roof.

  ‘You live here?’ I called. She nodded.

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve seen you around, I think.’

  I smiled. She bent over the railing and looked down into the street then pulled her head back so that the sun touched her throat. She looked back, a sparkle of light bouncing off her dark glasses.

  ‘What are you reading?’ she said.

  I held up the book. She leaned forward a little, raised her glasses and squinted into the sun.

  ‘I can’t see,’ she said, leaving the glasses perched up on her forehead.

  ‘You’re too far away. Maybe you should come over, then you could see it better,’ I said, grinning widely. She was smiling too, but not as much as I was.

  ‘Couldn’t you just tell me?’

  ‘It’s one of those books you really need to look at closely.’ Again I had a smile the size of a slice of melon.

  ‘Is it?’ she said, laughing.

  ‘Yeah, ideally while drinking a cold beer . . .’

  ‘Cold beer?’

  ‘Like ice.’

  She paused for a moment, smiling and looking around the sky.

  ‘It’s a great book,’ I said. She looked back, smiling and nodding.

  ‘Well . . .’ She tapped her fingers along the railing and then added: ‘I’ll be about five minutes.’

  ‘Fine.’ She paused for a few seconds then turned and headed towards the stairs.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted as she was about to open the door to the stairs. ‘Don’t forget the beers!’

  Her laugh floated across the street invisibly.

  ‘Don’t push your luck.’

  A little while later I saw her walk out from her block into the street.

  I heard her feet on the steps and then she appeared from behind the door. She held her hand up against the glare, trapping a blue triangle of sky in the crook of her arm. She was wearing pale trousers rolled up above her ankles which were thin and tanned. A red sweater was draped around her shoulders. Draped around that was the sky.

  Her name was Monic
a and I was sure I recognised her from somewhere. For a few moments we stood awkwardly and tried to work out where we might have met before. I handed her the Calvino, open at the passage I’d been reading, and went down to get some beer.

  If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell how Octavia, the spiderweb city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed.

  This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope-ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes-hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumbwaiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.

  Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.

  ‘Would you like to live there?’ asked Monica when I came back with the beer.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Octavia: the spiderweb city.’

  ‘It would depend on what the licensing laws were like. What about you?’

  ‘It would depend on the weather.’

  ‘I don’t know where I’d like to live,’ I said. ‘I prefer to think of all the places I wouldn’t like to live and then work my way upwards.’

  Evening sounds were all around us: birds, church bells, dogs barking, not much traffic. A vapour trail thin as cotton chalked itself across the sky, the plane so high that it was hardly visible. I could smell dinners being cooked and kept thinking I could hear a Bruce Springsteen song being played on a transistor radio. Confirming this suspicion, Monica said, ‘This country is turning into America.’

  ‘I’d like to live in America.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know where you wanted to live.’

  ‘I don’t. That’s why I said I’d like to live in America. America has always been a synonym for anywhere that might be better than where you are now. If you know where you want to live you say Australia.’

  ‘I hate America.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what we think or say about America anyway. Whatever we say about America we keep buying American products and that’s all that counts,’ she said, sipping a can of Budweiser.

  ‘I’d like to live in a place where you could walk everywhere,’ I said. ‘A city where it was warm all night and you could walk down narrow streets, past people of all ages and all races, where there were lots of jazz clubs and cheap beer.’ This sounded less impressive than I had hoped. I was tempted to suggest we got stoned. Instead I asked how long she’d lived in Brixton.

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘In the same block?’

  ‘No I’ve only just moved in there. Before that I was travelling.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘India, Thailand. I went to lots of islands.’

  ‘Did you go scuba diving?’

  ‘Snorkeling.’

  ‘I’d like to go scuba diving more than anything else in the world.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t even been skiing.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘I’d love to go hang-gliding and I’ve never done that either. What was the snorkeling like? Tell me a snorkeling anecdote.’

  ‘As it happens I’ve got a very good snorkeling anecdote.’

  ‘Has it got sharks in it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘OK,’ said Monica after swallowing some beer. ‘One of the places I went to was a small island near Bali. On the first day there I went snorkeling. Then I found out that none of the natives ever went in the sea. Imagine that – an island people and they never go in the sea. There’s some odd convergence of currents so that sharks, octopuses, rays and stingy star-shaped things end up there. So the sea is quite dangerous but they also throw the ashes of their dead into the sea so it’s a place of evil spirits.’

  ‘Incredible. And this fear of the sea is a centuries-old myth, right?’

  ‘That’s the great thing about it. This age-old myth has only been around for twenty years,’ said Monica. ‘It’s their way of coming to an understanding of nuclear waste.’

  I laughed: ‘Ah, travel . . .’

  ‘I love it. Don’t you?’

  ‘It bores me rigid,’ I said.

  ‘Me too actually,’ said Monica. ‘Something funny always happens when I’m travelling. I go to a place to see certain things and then when I get there I suddenly don’t really care whether I actually see them or not. Just the proximity is enough. When I first went to Paris I didn’t quite see the Eiffel tower; in the Louvre I suddenly got fed up of looking for the Mona Lisa. When I was in Cairo I almost didn’t see the Pyramids.’

  ‘I know that feeling. When I was young my parents took my sister and me to London. We queued up for about six hours to see the treasures of Tutankhamen. We actually saw all the Tutankhamen stuff in about twenty minutes. In retrospect I think we went for the experience of queuing. In many ways it gave me my first sense of allegory.’

  High up a bird – some kind of hawk – was swooning and gliding through the empty air.

  We talked for a while about people we knew in Brixton. I mentioned Foomie, and Monica clapped her hand over her mouth and laughed.

  ‘That’s where I know you from.’

  ‘You know Foomie?’

  ‘Not really. I went to a party of hers last summer.’

  ‘You were the woman with the phone number.’

  ‘You never called,’ she said, laughing.

  I fetched two more cans of beer and we leant against the rail, not speaking. Our shadows appeared as two climbers flattened out against the wall of Monica’s block. As the sun sank they inched their way a little higher.

  A plane climbed overhead, the sun glinting off its wings. Without our noticing it the vapour trail that had slashed the sky had spread out, thickened into a scar. Monica put on her sweater.

  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.

  016

  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.