The Colour of Memory (22 page)

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 is 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.’

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.

‘Do you worry a lot?’ I asked as she did a perfect back flip.

‘All the time.’

‘What about?’

‘Everything.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like whether my eczema’s going to reappear,’ she said, doing another flip. ‘What about you?’

‘It varies. In the summer I worry about the weather. For nine months of the year I pay no attention to it, I expect nothing from it. Then during the summer I shadow-watch and monitor
weather forecasts obsessively. D’you think it’s going to rain this afternoon?’

A hot desert wind was blowing across the roof. Monica was wearing shorts and a washed-out white vest that showed the sharp angle of her collar-bone and the hollow at the base of her throat. She
shook her head and did a handstand, her tanned legs wavering slightly.

‘I worry about my flat too,’ I said, holding her ankles to steady her and noticing the way her legs slid down into her shorts.

‘What about it?’

‘Things snap at me in it.’

Last week I’d been cleaning the flat and instead of sucking up dust from the floor the hoover had blown a full lung of dirt all over the carpet. I turned it off, poked around for a while
and thought I’d solved the problem (a sock caught in the mechanism). I turned it on again and gave the brush mechanism one last poke with the screwdriver which was tugged from my hand and
hurled across the room by the whirling brushes. It was only luck that I’d used the screwdriver rather than my hand. For the next ten minutes I lay on the sofa imagining myself searching for
my fingers in the hoover’s dusty stomach or trying to pry them loose from the twists and turns of its metallic digestive tract – with one hand while in considerable pain.

Even the telling made me flinch.

‘Surely you wouldn’t have put your fingers in the hoover like that,’ said Monica, back on her feet again.

‘I could have done, quite easily,’ I said, enjoying the sound of my own voice. ‘It didn’t occur to me that it was dangerous. Then, yesterday, my reading lamp went wrong.
I took the bulb out, saw what the problem was and started trying to twist the metal back into shape with a pair of pliers. Next thing I knew I’d been thrown across the room. The appliances in
my flat are on the brink of revolting.’

Monica cartwheeled along the length of the roof.

‘That’s fantastic. Such a beautiful thing to be able to do. Are you listening to me by the way?’

‘I catch the odd word here and there,’ said Monica walking back towards me.

‘That’s ample. Can you do a somersault?’

‘Not quite.’ Just then I heard someone calling my name. From the roof of my block Steranko and Foomie were waving to us. They were shouting and laughing, both wearing T-shirts and
shorts. Steranko was holding a tennis racket. The sun bounced off a ridiculous green sun visor that made him look like an American student in a fraternity house.

‘Tennis?’ he shouted, holding up a yellow ball for our inspection. He was about twenty yards away.

‘Rough or smooth?’ he shouted, twirling the racket fast in his hand.

‘Rough,’ I called back.

With his thumb he stopped the racket spinning and looked closely at the head. ‘Smooth it is,’ he said, smiling again. ‘My serve.’

He adopted a serving stance, bounced the ball a couple of times, sighted along his racket and then threw the ball high above his head and served hard from my block to Monica’s. High above
the street, the ball sped towards us, just cleared the low wall we were leaning against, hit the roof a couple of yards to our right and bounced against the wall behind us. I watched the ball
ricochet on to the door of the stairs and roll quickly along the roof. Before it came to rest I heard Steranko guffawing and Foomie laughing wildly on the opposite roof. I had to admit, it was a
good serve.

‘That guy’s a headcase,’ said Monica. ‘Either that or he’s a very good tennis player.’

‘Ace!’ Steranko shouted. ‘Fifteen love!’ Foomie was laughing. Steranko had one arm on her shoulder; with the other he waved the tennis racket triumphantly above his
head.

I picked up the ball and threw it back across the road. Steranko caught it in one hand. Jesus.

‘We’re going to Brockwell Park for some proper tennis,’ he shouted after a few minutes. ‘See you later. What’re you doing?’

‘Nothing,’ I shouted. ‘I’ll be around.’

Monica and I waved and watched Steranko and Foomie walk towards the roof door.

‘Who is that guy?’ Monica asked when they had disappeared from view.

‘That’s Steranko,’ I said. ‘A friend of mine.’

Monica actually met Steranko and Foomie a few days later when we all went to a party on Ladbroke Grove. It was an afternoon party and by five o’clock people in the
living-room were packed as tight as a deck of cards – there wasn’t room to dance but you could shuffle your feet. I moved out on the balcony with Freddie who was trembling so much that
he was having trouble lighting a joint.

‘Jesus Freddie, you’re shaking like mad.’

‘I know.’

‘Shit: you’re practically vibrating. This has got to be your greatest affectation to date. No doubt about it. It’s even better than that stutter you put on
sometimes.’

‘You like it do you?’

‘It’s terrific. You look like you might fall apart at any moment.’

‘I think it’s got something to do with last night. I was power-drinking over in Finsbury Park.’

‘Oh yeah, you went to that party? Did you have a good time?’

‘I got blind drunk. I definitely saw the midnight rat. No question about it.’

‘It’s a shame about the shaking though,’ I said. ‘I was hoping the shaking was pure affectation.’

Deep tan and shadow from the wavering match flickered over his face. I could see the interior of the kitchen reflected in his eyes like a tiny party in his head.

‘And what about the writing? How’s that going?’ Freddie liked to be asked questions like this when he was wearing his corduroy jacket.

‘Oh I don’t know. The time I most feel like a writer is at exactly the moment when I’m too out of it to even write my name.’

Monica joined us on the balcony.

‘That was good timing,’ I said. ‘Freddie was about to start on his Malcolm Lowry routine.’

‘Oh I’d like to have seen that,’ Monica said.

‘Me too,’ said Freddie, drinking white wine from the bottle. They’d met earlier that afternoon and Freddie had instantly reeled off a list of his favourite writers. Monica had
responded by asking if he worked in a bookshop. I could tell they liked each other.

I pushed past the people in the living-room and queued up for a piss. When I came out Foomie had joined the queue.