The Colour of Memory (23 page)

‘Have you seen Steranko?’ she said.

‘He went out to score some grass about half an hour ago,’ I said. ‘He’s probably been arrested.’

Someone touched me on the shoulder. I heard a familiar jangle of bracelets and turned round.

‘Fran! I don’t believe it,’ I said, hugging her.

‘I was sure you’d be here,’ she said, laughing. ‘Look I only dropped in for a moment to see if you were here. I’ve really got to rush.’

‘How come?’

‘Oh I’ve had such a weird day. I was waiting for a tube and the sign said “Next train ten minutes”. When I looked again it said fourteen minutes. About five minutes later
it said sixteen. I thought time was going backwards. I was already late so I thought “fuck it” and went to get a bus. Then the bus broke down in the Wandsworth triangle where all public
transport mysteriously disappears. Luckily some friend drove past in a car – on their way to the same place I was going – and winched me to safety. And then since we were driving past
here I persuaded them to stop for a moment.’

There were dark smudges round Fran’s eyes. She looked beautiful and worn out – that was another thing about Fran: looking tired actually suited her.

‘Hey this is Foomie,’ I said, seeing her come out of the bathroom. ‘This is Fran, my sister.’ They smiled and laughed. ‘And this is Carlton,’ I added as he
joined the queue. ‘Freddie’s over there somewhere too. You remember him?’

Fran ended up staying about twenty minutes. She talked at high speed with Foomie and Carlton, smoked a joint and met Freddie and Monica out on the balcony. She was still there when a stationary
car began hooting.

‘I’ve really got to go,’ she said, laughing. ‘I told them I’d only be a minute and we’re about two hours late already.’ With that she said goodbye to
everyone, promised she’d come down to Brixton soon and left.

Steranko arrived back just after Fran had left and for some reason I felt vaguely relieved that he hadn’t got back a few minutes earlier.

More people were crowding out on to the narrow balcony, pushing Monica and me up into the far corner. There was still some brightness in the sky but beneath us the street was shaded and dark. On
the pavements families, couples, young women with kids, middle-aged West Indian men, awkward punks and some teenagers on skateboards passed by. Most cars had their lights on. To the left, heading
north, the traffic thinned out; to the right it congealed as it passed under the Westway and disappeared from view. The car lights formed a shifting red and yellow stream that flowed in both
directions at once. As the volume of traffic increased to our right it became a thick river of volcanic colour that hardly moved. On the Westway, spanning this red and gold medal ribbon of colour,
the grey shapes of cars, vans and lorries whizzed past, blurs of rapid motion against the deepening grey of the sky. Every five minutes or so the traffic on the flyover would be blotted out by a
train moving slowly across the railway bridge from Ladbroke Grove station.

Over all this, over the pedestrians and cars in the street, over the traffic on the flyover and the train on the railway bridge, luminescent storm clouds were moving slowly towards us, moving
even more slowly than the heavy passenger plane climbing through the thick grey air in the distance.

We waited for it to rain. Someone’s beer can toppled from the balcony. It took a long time to fall and then slopped noisily on to the damp concrete yard below. From inside came the thump
of music and the heat of bodies dancing. I felt the cooling evening on my face.

Looking down at the steady flow of people, traffic and trains I became aware of an odd quality of calm in the hurtling kinesis of the city. By repeating itself over and over, day after day, this
same configuration of traffic – the precise pattern of lights varying according to the season – had acquired the constancy of sky and clouds, day and night.

We waited for the rain. The sky was like a tarpaulin sagging beneath the weight of water. The air was full of the damp crackle of electricity. Thunder prowled the sky.

Monica and I said goodbye to everyone and made our way through the trashed kitchen and the beer cans, bottles and glasses. Down in the street we waved to the people on the
balcony and they waved back. After we’d walked for a couple of minutes I looked back and waved again.

We could hear the traffic rumbling overhead as we passed under the Westway. Cars swarmed past. There were a lot of people around. Cyclists in bright shirts and shorts pedalled past. It felt
warmer in the street than it had up on the balcony. The pavements were warm. The street-lights, the neon lights of shop signs and the harsh glare of their interiors, the red stream of brake-lights
– all of these intensified the blue night of the sky. A group of teenagers, one of them with a big ghetto blaster on his shoulder, moved apart to let us walk between them. My arm was around
Monica’s shoulders; her hand was around my waist resting on my hip. She sipped from a last can of lager, warm now. Some strands of hair had come loose from under her scarf. Our hips bumped
accidentally from time to time. When I turned to speak to her I could smell her neck and her hair.

‘That shirt!’ she said.

‘I know. It’s terrific isn’t it?’ I’d bought a shirt from Freddie, pale yellow and very big with splashes of a black print.

‘Don’t you like it?’ I said.

‘Well I don’t think I’ve ever seen one quite like it before.’

‘Yeah I was thinking maybe it wasn’t such a good buy after all. I overheard Freddie at the party saying to Foomie: “No, I
sold
it to him” and
laughing.’

Monica shook her head and smiled, ‘That’s some shirt.’

We turned left and crossed over All Saints Road. My skin felt warm and dirty from the sun, my feet sweaty in old sneakers. Monica sipped her beer again and I noticed how small her fingers were,
hardly big enough to get round the can.

Some trees still had blossom on them. Two women jogged past in shorts and running vests. A sports car was caught up in the traffic. An Asian family with several smartly-dressed kids walked past.
A black couple, the man carrying a sleepy child wearing a big red baseball cap walked slowly by.

‘As soon as we’ve put Marcus to bed you get in the bath and I’ll bring you your tea in,’ she said to the man. He said something and she laughed and hit him lightly on the
arm. I think they were almost home.

It was an evening when no one wanted to do anyone else any harm. No one wanted to fight or hassle anybody. When people bumped into each other they said sorry and smiled because it didn’t
matter. It was an evening when people wanted to notice the trees and the stars that shone through them, they wanted to smell the blossom in the night air and feel the heat coming off the earth.
People were in no hurry to be home but when they got back they’d take a bath and go to bed with the warm night air blowing through the windows and touching the curtains, remembering other
times like this.

After the tube ride we walked to the door of Monica’s block. I kissed her cheek and touched the back of her neck with my hand. She touched the buttons on my shirt and smiled.

The four of us – Carlton, Steranko, Freddie and I – walked over to Brockwell Park for the second day of the Country Fair. Trees fanned the wind under a blue and
white Battle of Britain sky. When the sun passed behind a cloud it was disappointing and slightly chilly; when it emerged the grass flared up brightly again from under the dull carpet of
shadow.

On the edge of the park we saw a young family: the man and woman were our age, maybe slightly older; the kid was about three or four or however old they are at that age. The couple hid from the
child in the long grass and then – when he was wondering where they were and was probably on the brink of tears – they sprung up from behind the long grass and shouted
‘Boo!’ so that instead of bursting into tears the child let out a delighted shriek of happiness.

‘Jesus,’ said Steranko. ‘How can any intelligent adult enjoy the company of children?’

‘There’s a baby boom going on right beneath our eyes,’ said Freddie as we continued on our way.

As the fair had expanded over the years so its rustic element had been getting smaller and smaller. There were pigs, donkey rides, horses and other farm animals but in a few years’ time it
seemed likely that a couple of piles of plastic dung and a hologram of a tractor would be all that remained of the fair’s rural impulse.

We walked round stalls for local associations and societies, political organisations like the Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign, the Anti-Apartheid group, El Salvador support group, all selling
T-shirts and pamphlets, badges and books. Various bits of Lambeth Services had lots of stalls and displays: a group of young black and white guys in blue overalls sipped beer from cans and knocked
together the wooden frame of a house. Two rastafarians sold prints of Bob Marley and Burning Spear and red, yellow and green patterned T-shirts and wristbands.

Inside a long, bright marquee the more sedate societies had their stalls: the Lambeth Chess Club (Carlton played a game and lost in about eight moves), the Painting Group, Photographic Society
and Bridge Club (Carlton claimed he was a good bridge player too). At the end of the tent was the Lambeth Literacy Society.

‘Here you go Freddie,’ Carlton said. ‘The Lambeth Literary Group – just your scene.’

‘If you weren’t illiterate you’d see it says Literacy not Literary.’

‘Even better I’d’ve thought.’

We made our way over to the main stage where a high-life band were playing, accompanied by twenty women in kangas who danced to the music. It was gentle, catchy music. A few people in the crowd
were dancing and swaying. The brightness of the sun and the blackness of the stage made it difficult to see the band clearly except for a guitarist and a couple of men playing elaborate banks of
percussion instruments. By the side of the stage a giant video screen the size of a terraced house showed close-ups of the musicians and dancers. The camera zoomed in on their faces or their hands
and then panned back a little to show three or four dancers at once. I found myself spending more time watching the video screen than the stage. The video looked more real, more authentic than the
people on stage. The dancers and musicians looked as if they were playing at the Country Fair in Brockwell Park; the pictures on the video screen looked as if they were being broadcast live by
satellite from Harare or Lagos.

When the band finished their set we walked to the beer tent which had an atmosphere all of its own. Impatient to get to the bar people waved fluted fivers at the bar staff; the smell of beer
sank slowly to the ground. Steranko bought four pints of real ale in imitation glasses and we sat outside where people were crashed out on the grass or arguing about whose round it was. When
we’d finished these I bought four more and then we lay on the grass and argued about whose round it was.

‘It’s so nice acting like yobs isn’t it?’ said Freddie. Hungry after the beer, we wrapped our faces round large portions of falafal and walked on. Feeling sluggish and
drunk we took turns on stalls like Soak the Bloke and Test Your Strength. Carlton and Steranko bought balls for the coconut shy. Steranko’s second ball flew over the back of the stall.

We waited for a scream. Then we waited for someone to come round the corner with a bloody grimace where his teeth used to be. Steranko gave the balls back to the guy in charge of the stall and
we sloped shyly off, making our way through the throb and hum of shaking generators to the fairground rides where the grass had turned to downtrodden mud. Everything here was a blur of yellow and
red and kids’ screams whooping in and out of the loud music. Most of the rides were fairly gentle, the sort that make kids laugh and screech but not cry: merry-go-rounds and unfrightening
ghost trains as opposed to the psycho-death trips or Vietnam gunships that some fairgrounds offered. It was nice standing there watching the black and white kids on the rides, the brothers and the
sisters with their curls and pigtails, the happy-looking parents talking to each other and reaching willingly into their pockets for more coins. Some of the men sipped from cans and kept an eye on
things. A few thin white goths were slumped over unicorns on the largest merry-go-rounds but no one took any notice of them.

Leaving the others at the rifle range I went into the flower tent where the light was thick and still, saturated with the fragrance of flowers. The sun beat heavily through the white canvas and
made the air humid and tropical. It was bright in the tent but the flowers and plants seemed to absorb light from the air, making it both luminescent and dusky. The plants also soaked up the noise
of the fair, creating their own quietness. The flowers were perfect with sleek stems, broad leaves and heads dangling heavy as fruit, their petals shiny purple, dust yellow, poppy red and labile
pink. At the far end of the tent the flowers blurred into a haze of rippled green with soft splashes of dull orange, frail white and pale blue, flame-bursts of yellow and red. By one batch of
flowers the air was syrupy, sweet and cloying, by another, musky and dense. It was like breathing through a sponge whose pores were clogged with pollen. After a couple of minutes I felt
intoxicated, bewildered by the tendril leaves and the quiet blooms. The tent was filled with fragrant air but beneath it was the dark, heavy smell of damp earth.

Someone touched my arm, so softly I hardly noticed. I turned round and saw Foomie. Her hair was tied up in a brightly coloured scarf. I kissed her on the cheek.

‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Foom. I thought you were selling deckchairs.’

‘Oh there were all sorts of problems. The van wouldn’t start and then – let’s not even talk about it.’

‘OK,’ I said and touched her shoulder, feeling the light film of sweat on her skin. There were small pearls of sweat above her lip. The hair beneath her arms was tangled and damp.
‘It’s nice to see you here anyway.’

‘You too,’ she said, smiling and slipping her arm through mine. ‘Is Steranko around?’