The Colour of Memory (2 page)

I was in even worse shape than usual on the Wednesday morning when Mr Caravanette said he wanted to have a word with me in his office. The night before I’d had a brief glimpse of what the
ten-to-six lifestyle entails. Having got to work dutifully enough at ten fifteen I left at five thirty and met people for a drink in Soho. Swilled out by eight o’clock, I stayed on for
another hour’s dousing and then travelled up to Highbury to crash at a friend’s place. On our way we called in at the local pub, stayed till eleven and then dropped in at the chippie. I
woke up on the sofa the next morning with my suit for pyjamas and a half-eaten bag of cod and chips for a pillow. I got into work smelling like I’d washed my hair in salt and vinegar shampoo
and dried it in the deep frier.

As I tidied myself up before going to Mr Caravanette’s office I thought it was highly unlikely – all things considered – that he would offer me a seat on the board. I knew I
was going to get a dressing down and a strip torn off but that was fine by me. Getting told off had quite a lot going for it: it didn’t hurt and it didn’t cost money. Getting told off I
could handle.

Mr Caravanette was a self-made man with a face like a toupee, a silver-haired slug stuffed into a fat pink shirt with his initials embroidered over the left tit. The shirt fitted him like a bun
fits a burger and ketchup: he was squeezing out of it any way he could.

Mr Caravanette was a busy man. His time was so valuable that he didn’t want to waste any of it walking to the kitchen (where I had been known to take up to twenty minutes to make a trayful
of coffee). He had a kettle in his room and he switched it on as I sat down. His desk was crammed with stacks of correspondence, memos, intercoms and telephones, all this clutter indicating my
comparative unimportance in the face of the many and varied responsibilities that converged here.

The problem, he said, was my attitude. Now attitude, I knew, was shorthand for ‘bad attitude’; a good attitude was like a bad guard dog – invisible and inaudible. Mr
Caravanette then outlined exactly what he meant: I was slovenly round the office, I took a long time to do things, my letters needed correcting . . .

‘No they don’t,’ I said.

‘. . . And your office is a mess.’ (Dead right – it didn’t even look like an office; it looked like the bedroom of a rebellious adolescent. Being homeless I’d ended
up keeping most of the things I needed on a day-to-day basis – clothes, tapes, books, squash racket and so on – in a filing cabinet but gradually they had spilled on to the floor. My
filing wasn’t all it could have been either.) As he continued with his list of grievances I got the first inkling that maybe I was on the brink of a sending off or a disqualification, not the
booking or public warning that I’d first imagined. Meanwhile the catalogue of breached office protocol continued:

‘You don’t even wear shoes in the office.’

‘They were pinching my feet,’ I whined.

‘That’s not my problem.’

‘I know it’s not. That’s why I took off my shoes not yours. Besides, what difference does it make? The only people who see my socks are the people who work here. Has somebody
complained about my socks?’

‘Look I’m not here to argue about your socks . . .’

I think he was about to call me ‘sonny’ but changed his mind, possibly because the kettle, after a lot of huffing and puffing, had managed to work itself up to a steamy climax.

‘As I say, I’m not here to argue with you,’ he said, absentmindedly taking a book from his shelf and weighing it in his hand as if he might, at any moment, throw it at me.
‘Things aren’t working out as we hoped and I think it’s best for all parties concerned . . .’

And that was that. He was giving me a month’s money. I could leave in the afternoon. Maybe with a month’s money I could sort myself out . . .

‘Sort myself out?’

‘Get a grip on things.’

‘Get a grip on things?’

‘Pull your socks up?’

‘Pull my socks up?’

As the kettle subsided into sighs and rattles I looked at Mr Caravanette, at the boardroom glaze of his glasses, at the hands sitting heavily on the desk in front of him. Eventually I said,
‘Is that all?’

He said it was.

I left his office shaking slightly. It was a piss-bin job but you always feel demoralised and foolish when you’ve been sacked. It’s like getting punched: by the time you see it
coming it’s too late to do anything about it.

My workmates all wanted to know what Caravanette had said. I told them about it through a half-hearted grin. They all said how unfair it was but there’s something about losing your job
that makes people take a step back in case it might be catching. The swish of the guillotine generates excitement, fear and, at the same time, a sense of relief – that it’s you not them
– which also serves as a warning.

I didn’t want to stick around. I went into the office of the old toad in accounts to get my month’s money. I’d heard from someone that I ought to watch out for her, that
she’d said a couple of things to Caravanette. Now she uttered a few sympathetic murmurs.

‘Just give me the fucking money will you?’

What with all my stuff in the filing cabinet and desk and everywhere it was less like getting sacked from a job than being evicted from a flat. I packed a small hold-all and arranged to pick up
everything else some other time.

I left before lunch. Everybody said stay in touch.

From a payphone I called Fran’s house but nobody had seen her for a couple of days.

‘D’you want to leave a message?’

‘If you could just say her brother called. I’ll try her again.’

I wandered round Soho in the rain for a while, unsure what to do next. Getting fired was bad news. It wasn’t something I’d counted on or planned but at least I had a month’s
money in my pocket. I’d have some spare time again as well. During the time I’d been working I’d badly missed the life I’d been leading for the two or three years before:
signing on, doing casual jobs when they came up. Getting sacked meant a return to normal life.

I walked up Charing Cross Road, past Leisure Hell or whatever it’s called where the noise of electronic whooping and cascading money rushed out on to the wet street from the flashing,
purple interior. The kids in there looked like ghosts, their pale faces tattooed by agile shrieks of light.

When I woke up the next morning I had no idea where or who I was. Gradually I realised ‘I was at Freddie’s – he’d gone away for a few days and had lent
me his keys – and that I was someone whose circumstances were enviable only from the perspective of total dereliction. No job and nowhere to live. The slippery slope. I lay in bed and
wondered at what point somebody actually becomes derelict? You can see how it starts (a run of bad luck; losing your job, having nowhere to live, slipping through the social security net) and how
it ends, but the long interim tends to take place invisibly. That is probably the most painful part: when you are still tormented by the thought that one last effort of will might improve things.
From then on time means nothing; there is only weather, benches and booze.

With this in mind, I spent the rest of the day re-activating my social security claim. Since I’d last been to the DHSS offices a month before, they’d spruced the place up a bit. In
particular they’d put in a thicker plate-glass partition and lowered the claimant’s side of the counter so that you actually ended up on your knees and yelling, as if praying to a deaf
and bureaucratic God.

I left the dole office and shook my head at the pavement-faced guy selling a revolutionary tabloid. Across the road the pale sun brightened the colours in the huge Nuclear Dawn mural showing a
spectral figure of death clad in stars and stripes, striding over the dwarfed, fish-eyed landmarks of London. Bricks, their colours slowly warming in the weak sun, would have looked nicer but that
was probably not a relevant consideration any more.

Immediately behind the mural was the railway bridge. After the uprisings the local traders paid for huge ‘Welcome to Brixton’ hoardings to be hung from the bridge. Now only a few
tatters were left to cover the blank boards. A train clanked overhead, pulling a long freight of dangerous-looking, toxic-coloured containers towards some unspecified zone where no one was sure
what happened. An innocent possibility of horror, the train clunked and screeched past. Further off, visible over the moving freight, were the large letters ATLANTIC forming a balcony on the roof
of the pub.

Outside the pub Luther shook his coffee jar and asked for money. Years ago I used to see him in the George Canning, wearing a combat jacket and selling his paintings which were bright and
colourful. People who hadn’t seen him before were fascinated and he always managed to shift a few. Then, after seeing him in the boozer selling the same paintings night after night people
stopped taking any notice. The more trouble he had selling paintings the harder he hustled. The landlord barred him and things began going badly. I saw him in various places, wearing the same green
combat jacket but looking less like an artist and more like somebody with time not paint on his hands. By the time of Band Aid he was reduced to roaming around Brixton with a coffee jar, an
optimistically wide slot cut into its green lid and a label saying
BAND AID
:
PLEASE GIVE GENEROSLY
.
ETHIPIA FAMINE
. The jar
was never quite empty; there were always a few bronze coins in the bottom like half-an-inch of beer in a glass. After Band Aid he rationalised his enterprise still further by taking off the label
and throwing away the lid.

Until today I hadn’t seen him for a couple of months and in that time he’d slid a few inches nearer to destitution. His combat jacket had big rips in it; one sleeve was in shreds as
though he’d been mauled by a spiteful dog. He shook the tin at me, still trying to maintain that he was not begging but collecting.

‘Who’s it for?’ I asked.

He paused for a moment, looked me up and down and mumbled, ‘Nicaragua.’

I dropped some coins into his jar. Back at Freddie’s I circled the phone and played the start of some records, looked out of the window at the nothing-happening grey of the sky, turned a
tap on and off, read one and a half lines of the paper and then put it down again. I turned on the TV and found horse-racing on both sides. I watched for about twenty minutes, ignoring the horses
and concentrating instead on the suburban hinterland in the background: a place where it always drizzled, a place that didn’t look like anywhere. I turned the TV off, picked up one of
Freddie’s books and studied the Olympic coffee rings on the cover. I rehearsed things I might say if someone turned up. I rang Fran and left another message. I called Freddie, heard the
engaged sound, tried again and then remembered that I was actually at Freddie’s and had dialled my own number. I called Steranko and a voice said he was out. I called Carlton but there was no
answer. Where was everybody?

The doorbell rang just as I turned on the TV to watch the news. I trudged along the hallway and opened the door.

‘Fran!’

‘Hi!’

We kissed and held each other.

‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I was in Brixton anyway. I called home and they gave me your message.’

‘I’m so glad to see you. I’m so miserable.’

‘Why?’ We were walking back along the corridor to Freddie’s kitchen.

‘I got sacked from my job.’

‘Again?’ Fran laughed. I nodded. ‘You’re going to end up in the Guinness Book of Records.’

‘It’s not funny.’

‘No, I know. I thought you said it was an awful job though.’

‘It was. Now I’ll have to get an even worse one. What will I say when a prospective employer asks what I’ve been doing for the last two years? That I’ve been in prison,
studying for a sociology degree with the Open University?’ I put my arms around Fran: it couldn’t be described as a hug – I just put my arms around her and leaned.

‘You feel thin,’ she said.

‘So do you.’

‘We’re a thin family.’

‘Built for speed,’ we said together, quoting our mother.

Fran was wearing a beat-up suede jacket, very baggy light trousers rolled up above her ankles, old suede shoes and faded yellow socks. Her hair looked like it had just been cut. I filled the
kettle through the spout and sat down, resting my head on my hands.

Fran and I didn’t meet up regularly. Often I wasn’t even sure where she was living and would go a couple of months without seeing her. Then, just as I was beginning to wonder what
had happened to her, when I was wanting quite badly to see her, she’d turn up or we’d run into each other.

‘Why are you holding your head?’ she said suddenly.

‘Not because I’ve got a headache.’

‘That’s a weird answer. OK. Why
aren’t
you holding your head?’

‘I
am
,’ I said and stood up to make the tea.

‘What were you doing?’ Fran said. ‘When I arrived, I mean.’

‘Lamenting my lot – my little. And thinking about the slippery slope.’

‘What about it?’

‘I was wondering where you slipped to.’

‘A blind alley probably – through there to a park bench and meths. What else were you thinking about?’ She was leaning against the door frame, one foot resting on the thigh of
her other leg.

‘Nothing really. I was just waiting for time to pass.’

‘Time is money,’ said Fran. ‘I saw that sprayed on a wall near my house a couple of days ago. Then today I saw that somebody had changed the ‘is’ to an
‘isn’t’. People spray weird things these days. You see something like that sprayed on a wall and suddenly it looks like some kind of prophecy. You wonder if you know what it
means.’

‘Well, if time was money I’d have paid this afternoon into my account. I bet there are people who’d give their right arm for an extra couple of hours. I’d have been happy
to loan them a couple of mine – I’d have
given
them away. Anything to have got them off my hands.’

‘You should have been with me yesterday,’ Fran said. ‘I was sitting on a park bench and this man asked me where some road was. I didn’t know exactly where it was but I
pointed in the general direction. Then about ten minutes later the same man came charging up in an absolute fury. “You sent me the wrong way you silly bitch,” he was saying. Absolutely
furious. “You owe me ten minutes. Ten minutes, and I want them now!” I thought he was going to kill me.’