The Colour of Memory (13 page)

‘I’ve got my mind straight,’ I said. ‘I’ve had some interviews and some very encouraging rejection letters. I really think things have started to move.’ That
seemed to satisfy her or at least satisfied the criteria she had to satisfy in order to bring the interview to an end. She gave me some leaflets and wished me luck. I thanked her warmly and left,
less pissed off than I might have been in the circumstances.

Carlton was meeting Belinda in Franco’s, the pizza place in the covered market. I was worn out from the decorating and said I’d see him later.

Effra Road felt like a flight of stairs and the closer I got to home the wearier I became. My legs were heavy as rucksacks, my eyes full of hot grit. I envied my shadow for the way it was able
to just slide and crawl along the ground.

My neighbour, George, was coming out of his flat just as I was unlocking the door of mine. He was about sixty and lugubrious would be an over-energetic way of describing him. For the last twenty
years or so, as far as I could gather, his main ambition in life had been to get out of the rain. Everything else – such as what he did once he was out of the rain – was secondary.

‘How’s it going then George?’ I said fiddling with the lock.

‘Oh mustn’t grumble,’ he said and went on to grumble about anything that came to mind.

‘Looking forward to Christmas though?’

‘Not really son, not really.’

I opened my door and said to George that I’d see him later.

‘Oh well, plod on, son.’

Back in the flat I stumbled into a scene from a low-budget horror film. The mess was too much for the cockroaches: one, the size of a half crown, was in the sink doing the dishes, another was
hoovering the floor; a few anonymous amoebatype things were taking it easy in the bath; dead wasps and flies which I’d swatted over the course of the preceding two weeks but neglected to
clear up were petrifying on window sills or glueing themselves to the panes. The airing cupboard smelled like I’d been frying hamburgers in it; the cooker was covered in a solidified yellow
ooze which I judged to have come from some mackerel I’d tried to lightly baste in butter a few days previously. Near the black sack that I used as a bin, looking as if it had failed in a last
ditch bid to escape from the rubbish and find a more hygenic resting place, lay the partially eaten carcass of a chicken. In tin foil containers the remains of a vegetable curry looked like
transparent earth in which could be seen potatoes, carrots and cauliflower, the whole scene garnished with a light confetti of pilau rice. Old peaches in a bowl wore thick fur cardigans of
mould.

Stripped down to my boxers, I threw out all the rubbish, piled all dirty clothes into a bin liner and cleaned up everything I could see. I de-greased some kitchen utensils and prised loose some
of the cups that had got glued to the kitchen table. In the pantry I found a squelching bag of potatoes which were the source, I now realised, of the odd earthy smell that pervaded the whole
kitchen. Close to the potatoes, a bottle of olive oil had sprung a leak and a couple of lumps of meteorite cheese lay basting in a pool of it. Wearing rubber gloves I disposed of a piece of
radioactive cauliflower and then threw the rubber gloves out too.

It was not a perfect job but it was certainly an improvement. Even so, it was difficult to see how things had got to quite this state. With each week I seemed to descend another few rungs on the
evolutionary ladder. To reverse the process I filled the bath brimful with hot, clear water and plunged in. I dunked my head under and held my breath, feeling my hair float up like cropped seaweed,
and then rose a couple of inches until I could breathe through my nose, hippopotamus-style. I writhed around for a while, then pulled the plug and let the water drain away around me, becoming
amphibious, mammalian and then, finally, when there was no water left and only a circle of pond-scum to reveal where it had been, human.

Seconds later the phone rang and there I was, right back in the late twentieth century again.

I dropped in at the Effra and found the lounge bar packed. The only people in the public bar were half a dozen police and a guy lying on the floor, bar towels soaking up his
blood. A woman crying. It had happened five minutes before I got there. The barmaid was seeing to him, wringing out the towels with red hands. That left only one other person serving. It was
quarter to eleven. Nobody grumbled about having to wait.

I asked what had happened but there was nothing to know. These things are always the same: an argument over who’s next on the pool table, someone talking to someone else’s
girlfriend, a spilt drink, somebody looking at somebody else. A scuffle, tables going over, glasses smashing – and suddenly someone’s getting their guts cut out.

The ambulance arrived ten minutes after the police. I remembered something Freddie had said one evening when we were both drunk: ‘There are two kinds of tragedy: the ones that don’t
happen and the ones that needn’t have happened.’

I thought of the guy being loaded into the ambulance and hooked up to a plasma bag, of the nurses and doctors who would be waiting for him in their masks and gloves, and of all the other people
queuing half the night in casualty departments with all their blood and pain and helplessness. I thought of dawn breaking over the broken glass, the indifferent streets and curtained windows.

The regular drinkers talked stoically about what happened. Spend enough time in pubs and you get used to most things. After a while you’re unlikely to see anything that you haven’t
seen before. Someone said: ‘Get into a fight round here and you’d better be prepared to die of it.’

I drank my beer and didn’t speak to anybody. I was thinking about my liver and kidneys doing whatever it is they do invisibly and without complaint. I hoped I would never get stabbed. Or
get my nose broken, or my jaw, or my teeth knocked out or my face slashed with a stanley knife. But most of all I hoped I would never get stabbed.

At home I watched Mike Tyson smashing the shit out of someone and then listened to Callas singing
Lucia
. As I listened I knew that nothing could be as perfect as the memory of her
voice, not even love or betrayal – especially not love or betrayal. Maybe, to her, that was the meaning of tragedy; maybe that was the meaning of all tragedy.

We were travelling by taxi from a party in north London: Steranko, Foomie, Freddie, Belinda and I. After about ten minutes the driver pulled over and said the engine was
fucked. We bailed out over Westminster.

It was one thirty in the morning. The sky was almost purple. A slight mist. We cut through St James’s Park, passing a flotilla of ducks. Nothing moving, not even the dappled lights on the
surface of the pond. We walked along an avenue of trees and caught dark glimpses of statues. Foomie and Steranko were walking slightly ahead of the rest of us; her arm was through his, her head
angled slightly towards him. We passed a bulbous, black statue of Churchill.

A few minutes later Foomie called out: ‘Look, Christmas!’ and pointed to a Christmas tree decorated with red, yellow and blue bulbs.

We walked through Whitehall, through all the empty architecture of power with its austere ornamentation and inscrutable attractiveness. Wide streets, discreet trees. A sign said
‘Churchill’s War Cabinet’ and an arrow pointed down some steps. The whole area had the feel of a museum. Suddenly we were tourists. There was no one else around.

The windows in the buildings did not look like windows. They shared the same texture as the walls and were not there to be looked in to or out of. What impressed most about the walls was the
suggestion of discreet thickness. There was only one impulse behind these buildings: they were built to last – and to last it was necessary not only to be impregnable but also to impress.
Vandalism was not even an issue. These buildings created their own time. They did not defy time, they consolidated it. Their foundations were deep in an unshakeable past; their walls were the
habitation of a perpetual present. The buildings had turned the symbolic power invested in them into an active, brooding patience that rendered surveillance superfluous. The archaicism of the
buildings was the chief source of their potency. The buildings had the same weight – the same
feel
– as the war memorials we passed: solid, carefully angled blocks of rock on
whose sides the names of men had been scratched. Even the pavement felt more permanent here.

The streets commanded respect. Most things were out of the question here. All sound except that of the ministerial clack of steel-tipped Oxfords and brogues briskly mounting steps was
inappropriate. Steps. All the time our tread was led persuasively upward. We felt that we were being drawn towards the heart of something without ever arriving there. A sense of conviction grew.
Each street or arrangement of steps led to a statue: a rearing horse, a hussar waving a sword, an august statesman surveying the streets and stamping them with unbending authority.

The sound of Foomie’s laughter floated back to us on scarves of breath. We walked towards Big Ben. Looking up we saw first the vertical, black railings; then the chaotic branches of bare
trees; behind the branches was the intricate decoration of Parliament; above that the sky which, oddly, still seemed purple.

We walked past a square manhole cover. Sharp green light glinted through two small access holes. Curling our fingers through these holes Steranko and I pulled back the cover. Immediately, like
the glare from a treasure chest of jewels, our faces were bathed in electric lime-coloured light. A metal ladder ran down from the pavement to the green-bathed room below. A single red dial winked
silently in the green room, as obvious as a drop of blood on grass. Extending from this room a small tunnel ran beneath our feet, at right angles to the kerb.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know.’ We lowered the cover, careful not to trap our fingers.

‘What do you think that was?’

‘I don’t know.’ It was impossible to say. My eyes were still recovering from the green glare.

We walked across Westminster Bridge. The river was oily, dark and full of harm.

‘Crossing a bridge is always romantic,’ said Belinda. ‘I wonder why?’

‘Whistler,’ said Freddie.

‘Sometimes when I walk over a bridge I have this fear that I’m going to throw all my money over the edge,’ I said. ‘I get it on boats too when I’m standing at the
back, watching the seagulls and all the litter bobbing around in the wake.’ I felt a certain pride in formulating this statement. Big Ben struck two. We were all standing close together and
looked back at the huge silvery-white clockface.

‘You always know where you are when you can see Big Ben,’ said Foomie.

‘That’s right. Where are we again?’

The Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey were slightly hazy in the mist. Except for the river nothing was moving. A jagged crack of lightning flashed over Westminster. The sky flinched and
then was still again.

The weeks went by quickly. I did some decorating with Carlton and even got a week’s work doing visual research for a film. At first it seemed a nice job – sitting
in libraries and browsing through catalogues – but the novelty soon wore off. Even when the novelty had worn off it was still quite nice. If I wasn’t working I spent the afternoons
playing squash and in the evenings I got drunk at parties. It was a good time of the year. Pubs and buses were full.

One night I came out of the Recreation Centre at about five o’clock. Beneath the cool night sky a train rushed over the railway bridge. Through each window I could see the imploring faces
of commuters heading south. The market traders were packing up their stalls, loading unsold items and produce into their vans.

Christmas lights hung across Brixton High Street: stars, lanterns, candles, holly shapes, the smiling outline of a yellow moon. The tree outside the Ritzy was swathed in blue and red bulbs. A
group of smartly-dressed men, women and children were singing gospel in front of the library.

A single star was hanging in the sky. I mention it only because it was there.

Just outside my block was a van selling hamburgers; it looked like a belch in 3D and inside it was a guy toiling away in a tropical drizzle of grease and onions. Walking away
from it a lard-faced man threw his empty carton on to the grass in front of the flats.

‘Oi! Don’t you live on this fucking planet?’ I shouted. He turned round, mouth working like the back of a garbage truck, ketchup smeared down his chin.

‘No,’ he said through a mouthful of half-chewed animal.

Leaving him to it, I walked to the centre of Brixton and spent an hour trawling for Christmas presents before settling down to the sedate and steadily unrewarding activity of reading jazz sleeve
notes at the record stall. Holding his styrofoam cup at an angle reminiscent of Lester Young the guy running the stall sucked hot soup through a straw. People were walking quickly along, rolls of
wrapping paper protruding from their carrier bags. Some of the market stalls were also draped with coloured bulbs and tinsel. I saw Luther shuffling around with his coffee jar, a piece of tinsel
draped festively around it. A police van parked by the entrance to the market played screechy recordings of Christmas carols and reminded shoppers that pickpockets were operating in the area.

Someone called my name. Steranko and Foomie, arm-in-arm, both wearing overcoats and smiling, made their way through the crowd. We stopped and talked about Christmas shopping while people bustled
past, our breath forming momentary tangles of sculpture. A hand came down hard on my shoulder.

‘Drug squad,’ said a voice near my ear. I jumped and looked around.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that Carlton,’ I said.

‘You spook easy, man,’ he said, laughing. He too was carrying a big bag of shopping. We were all pleased to see each other.

‘What time is it?’ Steranko asked.

‘One fifty seven,’ said Foomie.

‘How d’you know that?’