by Geoff Dyer
There was a mixture of frantic activity and casualness about the scene. Some of the uniformed men were standing around talking, others scanned the street vigilantly, someone else was shouting instructions. I expected to see them kicking down the door of a house or dragging a deposed dictator out into the streets. Steranko and I were the only other people around. No one paid any attention to us.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ said Steranko.
‘It’s the Rats, that big security outfit,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ve heard of them but I’ve never seen them before.’
‘It’s like we’re in Angola or Guatemala or something.’
From behind us two more guys, dressed in the same gear, trotted past, their boots heavy on the pavement.
‘Let’s go.’
We crossed Railton Road and cycled past white-fronted houses with bars on the ground-floor windows and security gates on the doors. A few moments later we were in Brockwell Park where the wind-flattened grass rippled in the heat. There were a few white clouds but they only emphasised the deep petrol-station blue of the sky.
People lay in the park in groups of two or three. A young white guy was doing martial arts training in the generous shade of a conker tree. A handsome black couple came past, their child tottering along beside them, a big smear of ice-cream down one side of his face.
Where the paths were busy we cycled slowly and then I raced Steranko round part of the park, standing up on the pedals and throwing the bike from side to side. The black path rushed by beneath us, the grass a blur of green on either side. By the time we got to the tennis courts and slowed down I was sweating. On one court a young couple rhythmically whacked forehands and backhands from one baseline to the other without keeping track of the score. The ball spun yellow through the air; there was a deep loud pock whenever it was hit. On the other court a black guy and a white guy were playing a proper game, hitting hard serves and rushing the net to volley or scrambling back to try to lob their way out of trouble.
Round the other side of the park, past the aviary and the pond, we got off our bikes and sat down on the soft grass. The park stretched away in easy slopes. In the distance there was a spire and a gentle sound of church bells.
‘Now it’s like we’re in Suffolk or something,’ said Steranko.
I pulled my T-shirt off, draped it around my face to keep the sun out of my eyes and stretched out. Through the blue fabric the sun formed molecular cross-hatches and pearls of light. I could feel the insect itch of the cool grass on my back.
‘Right. Keep your eyes shut and listen to this,’ Steranko said after a few minutes. ‘Ready?’
‘Yes.’ Next moment there was the unmistakable sound of a beer can being opened. I took the T-shirt off my face and Steranko handed me the can, laughing and opening another one for himself. I took a big gulp of beer which crashed into my throat like sharp ice. Our bikes glistened metallic red and yellow in the grass. We basked in the sun like sharks. I could hardly even remember what winter was like.
After a while we cycled back; Steranko set up his easel on the roof and we chatted while he worked. The painting was of a view from the roof but at this stage it was difficult to tell how it was going to turn out. Even in his straightforward representational work, scenes that would have been clearly identifiable were so dramatically transformed by perspective and colour – distorted, intensified or muted – that they became at once alien, strange and familiar, haunting. Almost always in these paintings some strong source of light cast long Chiricoesque shadows through the heart of the scene.
His paintings resembled Chirico’s in one other respect (though their atmosphere and feel were totally different): each painting felt like a brief detail of a total imaginative world that extended far beyond the three or four square feet that you were privileged to glimpse there.
The human figures in his paintings were anonymous and indistinct except for some detail of clothing (a pink T-shirt, the shape of a jacket, a hat) or something about a gesture (a way of smiling or the tilt of someone’s head) that made them instantly recognisable. He had recently finished some nudes of Foomie: her face and body were shadowy and indistinct but from the way her limbs arranged themselves on a sofa or on the floor, by the swelling hint of a bicep, the angle of a crooked knee – by the way gravity played uniquely on the figure – it was unmistakably her. What struck me as remarkable about Steranko’s paintings was that I immediately recognised the figures by things like this which, until then, I hadn’t noticed in real life. It took the pictures to make you notice the delicate, unremarked inflections of the actual. In much the same way, in his abstract paintings, you felt the insistent tug of the distinct and specific reality in which they had their origin. Maybe all that remained of it was a colour – a particular shade of yellow, the texture of a red – but that was enough to bring back very precisely the incident or moment that the painting addressed. Alternatively something about the way two colours sat next to each other, some felicitous relationship of blue and red – or the way a yellow touched an adjacent brown – made you aware of the relation and angle of sky and brick – or grass and pavement – that he had in mind. In this way his paintings came close to abolishing the distinction between the abstract and the physical. They worked on you in the same way as a déjà vu which instead of remaining tantalisingly beyond the reach of memory and formulation was suddenly brought unmistakably back – as if the past were a perfect memory of the present.
015
Well, it finally happened. Walking back from Carlton’s one night I got mugged. I’d just got through the entry door to my block when I heard somebody come up behind me. I held the door open for him. He said something I couldn’t understand – at first I thought he was asking for directions. Then several little details made it all clear. First, I realised he had a scarf up round his face Jesse James style and it wasn’t even cold. Second I worked out what he was saying: ‘What you got cunt? What you got?’
Third (the clincher), two accomplices shouldered their way in, pushed me up against a wall and tickled my nose with a rusty stanley knife. Typically I’d gone out without that dummy wallet I told you about – the one I always carry in case of a situation like this – but I did have some loose change and a screwed up five pound note. Finding it was the problem. My pockets were full of junk they didn’t want – glasses case, empty crisp packets, a book – but after much ferreting around they grabbed the fiver and some coins from my pocket and scrambled out of the door: three kids, all about sixteen and all looking like they were shitting themselves. Mugging is hardly even the word for it; it was more like begging by force. An intense exchange of gestures between comparative strangers, it was closer to a charade than an assault. It didn’t seem worth calling the police.
014
I woke early with yellow sunlight blazing through the windows and then drifted back to sleep and dreamt of a red postbox noisily vomiting the as yet unfranked contents of its stomach. Slowly realising that the dream had been set off by the sound of the mail cascading through the letterbox and crashing to the floor I lay in bed and let the sound settle after this welcome intrusion of the outside world. It was amazing the amount of mail I received, especially considering that virtually none of it – with the exception of a few postcards each summer – was from friends (I never wrote to anyone, nobody wrote to me: fair enough).
The room was full of hot light. I could hear the police helicopter overhead. Still unfocused from sleep I carried a pile of letters back to bed and began tearing them open without enthusiasm. With the exception of a query from the TV licensing centre my letters were all disguised circulars. Addressed to me personally they were all about money, urging me to borrow some and get the things I’d always wanted (pretty much the things I’d never wanted). AbbeyLoan, American Express, Daleyloan, Faustbank – they were all dying to lend me money. One just asked straight out if I’d like ten thousand pounds.
Receiving this kind of mail was a fairly recent development in my li
fe and there was no accounting for it. Perhaps I’d been chosen at random or maybe they just trawled through the phone book and mailed everybody. Certainly it wasn’t as though my career had made any spectacular jump forwards. Maybe it was just that I was at the age when, according to some complex actuarial logic, my career would normally have been expected to take shape. Either way they were beginning to work on me, these letters, starting to make me think of myself as a pretty well-heeled young man, a good credit risk, a man with prospects, a man people were keen to invest in. Perhaps they’d heard that I was no longer signing on the dole, that I’d managed to carve out an even cosier niche for myself in the poverty trap: I was on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. I’d set myself up as a self-employed market researcher but the bit of legitimate money I made from that wasn’t anything like enough to disqualify me from housing benefit. Any other money I earned was strictly in cash. I didn’t even keep track of it.
Most of this money came from painting and decorating, a state of affairs which had its good points and its bad points. The worst things about it was that it was so fucking boring, The good things were that it required virtually no skill and we got the run of people’s houses for however long the job took. Most people who wanted their house decorating had one facility or another to make the work bearable: a good collection of records maybe, or a Compact Disc player.
Mainly I worked with Carlton but if the job was big enough Steranko, Foomie or Freddie would work on it too and at the end of the day we would all travel home together in high spirits. We earned less money working together like that but since so many people were buying places in south London there was always plenty of work. Besides, none of us wanted to do it all the time. Ideally I worked just enough to make me appreciate the days when I didn’t. I had vague plans to try to write film scripts but I didn’t really know how to go about it and didn’t have the concentration to find out. In the meantime decorating suited me fine. It was summer and after that, in the winter, maybe I’d leave England and live abroad or something. For the moment everything felt fine.
013
Later that morning I bumped into Monica outside the Pie and Mash shop on Cold Harbour Lane. She had just come from her acrobatics class and was on her way to sign on. I walked down to the dole office with her and after that we wandered round Granville Arcade. Painted red and yellow, it was bright with the light that showered through the glass roof. We walked past a shop where huge silver trunks were stacked on top of each other like the speakers of a powerful sound system. At the wig bazaar Monica tried on a hairpiece that made her look like Charles II. We watched bloody-smocked butchers chopping pink meat and walked past pet shops and stalls selling kiddies’ clothes – cardies and tiny shoes – or toys wrapped in Cellophane, the sort that get featured on the local news around Christmas because a toddler could easily swallow bits of them and choke; either that or they’re highly inflammable and give off noxious fumes when burnt. Round a corner from there the Back Home Foods stall gave off the roots and earth smell of yams, sweet potatoes and plantains.
A lot of the people working in the Arcade were quite old. They’d seen a lot of things change and they’d seen nothing change.
‘I’m starving,’ said Monica as we walked past Franco’s.
‘Me too.’
‘Come on, I’ll buy you lunch.’
We got a table quickly. Monica was wearing a ripped tracksuit, her hair was tied back with a blue scarf. She tilted her head slightly to adjust an earring. For a moment her gaze became abstracted as fingers performed the work of eyes. The sound of opera was all around us.
‘D’you know who this is?’ I said, angling my fork vaguely in the direction of the music.
‘No. All opera’s the same though,’ said Monica. ‘Man, woman, stab, stab. I’m hot.’
She pulled her tracksuit top over her head, one hand holding down the T-shirt that had begun to ride up over her slender stomach. I drummed on the table with my knife and fork.
As we ate our pizza Monica asked if I did anything for a living.
‘Odds and ends. Nothing specific,’ I said. ‘I missed my vocation in life.’
‘What was that?’
‘What I’d really like to have been is a third division footballer, a fairly solid player for a team that tended to end up in the middle of the table each season without ever being close to getting promoted or relegated. That would have suited me nicely. Maybe one lucky cup run that climaxed with a goalless draw at home to Everton before getting hammered 6–0 in the replay at Goodison Park, just something to tell the kids about. When I was at school I spent all my time longing for lessons to end and football to begin. At that age I knew what I wanted. I wish I’d stuck at it.’
‘Were you a good footballer? You don’t look like a footballer.’
‘Not really, but I’m sure it’s not that difficult, not as difficult as some things anyway.’
‘A girl at school wanted to be an astronaut; she said you only needed two O levels. I bet it’s much easier to be a footballer. You probably don’t need any O levels at all.’
Laughing, I said, ‘And what about you?’
‘No, I wouldn’t like to be a footballer.’
‘I meant do you have any way of earning money?’
‘Three nights a week I do some waitressing.’
‘What’s that like?’
‘Awful. Let’s not talk about work. That’s all people ever seem to talk about in this city: jobs and house prices. I read somewhere that by the year 2000 two out of three people will own their own estate agent’s,’ said Monica. ‘God, you eat fast.’
‘Got to. There’s not much of the century left,’ I said and thought back to an afternoon in Paris when Freddie and I were there a couple of years ago. Outside the Pompidou Centre there was a huge electronic row of numbers. When we started watching the number was about three hundred and seventy million. Then with every second that went by the last digit went down one. Neither of us could work out what the point of it was. Then somebody explained that it was counting down the number of seconds to the year 2000. Freddie thought it was terrific and made a note of the exact number of seconds left: 376,345,060. It didn’t seem that long at all – in fact it seemed quite possible that you could just sit there and watch the digits click their way back to a long line of noughts. I liked the idea of time getting denuded like that instead of simply piling up – a countdown to nothing, to an apocalypse that would last only for a second. A new kind of time. It was both awe-inspiring and, at the same time, absolutely pointless: pure anticipation.
‘And what would happen after it worked its way down to zero zero nothing?’ asked Monica. ‘What would happen then?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Or maybe the whole process would begin all over again. The funny thing about it though was that it actually seemed like a reasonably rewarding way of spending your time, standing there watching the seconds clicking away and waiting to see what happened.’
Monica chewed and digested this information. ‘Frightening too.’
‘Yes.’
‘It reminds me of something I saw on TV the other night,’ she said after a while. ‘A programme about a prisoner on death row. Half an hour before he was due to go to the electric chair he was picking out a new tune on his guitar. One of the guards asked him what good it was going to do him, learning that tune?’
I was coming to the end of my pizza. After a pause Monica said, ‘Do you think about dying?’
‘No. Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So do I.’
All that remained on my plate were a few olive stones. I could think of nothing to say and had run out of things to eat. The table was splattered with cheese and tomato. Monica still had over half her pizza left.
‘Your table manners are appalling,’ she said without malice.
‘I know. It’s something I’ve never quite got the hang of.’
When Monica had finished eating we ordered two coffees – Franco i
s a master of the disappointing cappuccino – and asked for the bill. Monica insisted on paying for the meal and leaving a huge tip.
Carlton and Belinda arrived just as we were leaving. Belinda and Monica kissed and talked enthusiastically while Carlton, unseen by them, raised his eyebrows, grinned and gave me a blokeish nudge in the ribs.
After Carlton and Belinda had got a table Monica took my arm and guided me across to the fishmonger’s.
‘I love the man who works here,’ she whispered as we waited to be served. ‘He’s so amphibious.’
He had glistening grey hair greased back from his forehead and ears stuck flat against his head. His hands were icy from handling cold fish and there was no hint of sun anywhere on his smoothly shaven face as he darted and glided round the slippery floor of his stall. The expression in his black, unmoving eyes was impossible to fathom.
‘It’s a great place that,’ said Monica as we walked away, two pieces of newspaper-wrapped cod nestling in the bottom of her red string shopping bag. ‘I once bought a fish there that had been extinct for two hundred years.’
012
Monica and I were up on her roof talking about our eczema. I sat on an arm of the red chair while she practised her acrobatics. We talked about hydrocortisone and Betnovate and compared ways of keeping it at bay. Monica had had it very badly as a child but since puberty her eczema tended to do little more than threaten. I admitted that as a child, in addition to eczema, my fingers were covered in about fifty warts – I had to go to a hospital to have them burnt off. Monica said her occasional bouts were set off by stress and worry.