The Colour of Memory (24 page)

‘He’s over by the rifle range,’ I said as we walked towards the bright square of daylight at the end of the tent.

Outside, the air felt cool, the sunlight raw on the grass – the flower tent like a dream that was already fading.

‘What’s this drink called again?’ I said. ‘A daktari?’

‘A daiquiri. Strawberry daiquiri,’ said Monica rolling the icy glass across her forehead.

Earlier in the day I’d bought a blender from a stall in the market for three quid – the guy let me have it cheap because he couldn’t guarantee it would work. I picked up a
bottle of rum and an assortment of fruit and when Monica came over we mixed up a jugful of cocktails with crushed ice and lots of strawberries. Monica did the mixing and I cleared up the mess
– there was a lot of mess.

The drinks gleamed pinkly in the bright sun. The sky was as blue and still as paint in a pot. Monica was wearing her favourite T-shirt. We were sitting against the low wall of the roof and
listening to ‘Sketches of Spain’.

‘Nice?’ asked Monica.

‘It’s giving me a throbbing pain behind my left eye like ice-cream used to when I was a kid. I love it.’ I upended my glass, poured another for myself and topped up
Monica’s. We were both wearing the same cheap sunglasses. Monica took off her plimsolls.

‘Sorry, I bet my feet stink.’ She bent forward, grasped a foot with both hands, pulled it easily towards her nose and sniffed. ‘Oh, that’s not so bad,’ she said,
rocking backwards slightly. I saw the muscles in her legs straining faintly until she released her foot. It was a supple gesture.

I read a few lines of my book but even with sunglasses the glare of the pages was too bright. The trumpet dissolved in the air.

‘Given a completely free choice,’ I said after we had smoked a small grass joint. ‘What event would you most like to see enacted in the sky in the next half hour?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Think.’

‘You suggest things to me and I’ll pick one,’ Monica said.

‘OK. Wait a second. OK: An airliner, a 747, exploding in mid-air and sending a shower of wreckage and people all over Stockwell while leaving Brixton completely untouched.’

‘No.’

‘No problem. What about a Spitfire and a Messerschmitt 109 from a nearby air display staging a mock dogfight directly overhead, climaxing with the German pilot bailing out of his damaged
plane and eventually landing here on this roof where we torment him with pitchforks until the arrival of the home guard?’

Monica shook her head.

‘I can see you’re after something really spectacular. A fleet of Flying Fortresses flying overhead in dense formation to execute a daring daylight raid on industrial targets in the
Rühr Valley.’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Oh come on . . . What’s wrong with you? That would bring a shiver to anyone’s spine. OK. See that air balloon over there advertising Goodyear tyres? What about that exploding
in a ball of flame and then slowly floating in tatters to earth while a dense cloud of black . . .’

‘Nope.’

‘How about me making a spectacular escape from this roof by a rope-ladder dangled from a helicopter which hovered dangerously close to the TV aerials?’

Monica yawned.

‘Come on then. Think of one of your own.’

‘OK.’ Monica thought for a moment. She had a slight smile on her face like someone doing a jigsaw who sees the puzzle is complete but still holds one more piece, uncertainly, in her
hand. After a while her smile broadened.

‘I know what I’d like to see,’ she said. ‘A rare and beautiful bird – a heron, a flamingo or a golden eagle – gliding overhead on warm thermals, dawdling,
circling the roof on its long and lonely flight south.’

We had just finished a lavish breakfast. Carlton was sitting in one of Foomie’s deckchairs with a newspaper folded over his face; Foomie was stretched out on a rug. The
sun flashed off dishes and glasses of orange juice and melted ice. Someone’s sheets were hung out to dry and flapped in the wind, making a noise like the sail of a yacht. With the sky all
around us the block felt like the opposite of a swimming-pool where a blue cube of water was enclosed by concrete; here a solid block of bricks was surrounded by the liquid blue of the sky.

I glanced over at Freddie who was sitting on a small cushion, writing in a notebook.

‘What you writing Freddie?’ called Carlton, taking the newspaper from his face and heaving himself out of the deckchair.

‘Nothing really,’ said Freddie without looking up.

‘I bet,’ Carlton said. ‘“Pound of tomatoes, loaf of bread, tin of corned beef, bag of potatoes . . .” Have a look Steranko: I bet it’s his shopping list
he’s working on. Just shout if you need any help with the spelling Freddie. Only one M in tomatoes . . .’

‘You just concentrate on reading your comic,’ Freddie said.

Steranko was fiddling with the cassette player, unable to find the track he particularly wanted to hear. He spent the next five minutes rewinding and fast-forwarding, ejecting tapes and putting
in new ones but whatever he played he became dissatisfied with quickly. Eventually he went charging down the stairs in search of another tape. Ten minutes later he resurfaced empty-handed and tried
to find the track we’d been listening to originally.

This kind of behaviour was not unusual. Steranko at this time had developed the exhausting habit of constantly trying to improve the happiness of any given situation. In his efforts he
frequently managed to disrupt and even destroy exactly the situation he was trying to improve. He would suddenly decide that we had to have some booze and at two minutes to two on a Sunday
afternoon would run off in pursuit of an off-licence where he could beg and plead with them to sell him a couple of six-packs of lager. Freddie termed this constant attempt to nudge the moment a
little closer to perfection the dilemma of the late urban romantic.

‘Let’s go swimming,’ Steranko exclaimed enthusiastically after a while.

‘Hey relax, man,’ Carlton said. ‘Take it easy. All this fucking around is really interfering with my quietness.’

‘Mine too,’ I said. I was barely awake. Carlton’s voice had floated thick into my ears; I had a book over my face and breathed in the sharp wet smell of the ink.

‘Steranko, what’s the matter with you?’ Foomie asked, laughing. ‘Why don’t you calm down, just for a few seconds?’ She said it with that tone of endless
patience she had when she felt most affectionately towards him.

‘Why don’t you do something useful like roll a joint?’ suggested Carlton.

‘OK.’

‘Am I going brown?’ I said from beneath my book.

‘No.’

Later in the afternoon Belinda and Monica came over, giggly and stoned and wearing pale dresses.

Steranko suggested we get some beer and he and I walked over to the off-licence. Trudging back, clutching an American-style brown bag full of booze, I saw Fran walking up the road towards us,
waving and smiling. I shifted the weight of the cans so that I could wave back.

‘Who’s that?’ Steranko asked.

‘My sister, Fran,’ I said when she reached us. Fran held my face between her hands and kissed me. She was wearing sandals, shorts held up by braces and a large blue T-shirt.

‘This is Steranko,’ I said. ‘And this is Fran.’ They shook hands and smiled. ‘You’ve come just at the right time. There’s a lot of people here. It looks
like turning into a party.’

‘Shall I buy some drink?’

‘No there’s plenty here. It’s great to see you Fran.’

We were standing at the edge of Effra Road, waiting for a break in the traffic. Seeing a slight pause Steranko and Fran dashed to a bollard in the middle of the road. A car sounded its horn in
an angry warning and then they walked to the opposite pavement. For the next thirty seconds the traffic was even heavier. I saw Steranko and Fran talking and laughing on the opposite side of the
road but then a steady stream of lorries and buses blocked them from view completely. I crossed the road a few moments later. Fran put her arm through mine. We smiled at each other. Steranko walked
slightly ahead. On the road behind us a police car roared past at high speed, siren wailing.

Back on the roof Fran kissed Monica and Foomie and said hello to Freddie and Carlton and soon she and Belinda were laughing together like they were old friends. Planes glinted in the sun as they
passed through the perfect sky. A short time later, when we were all stoned and not wanting to do anything, Steranko declared that since everybody was here and the light was so spectacular we ought
to take a photograph. He and I went down to the flat to look for my camera. It took us five minutes to find it and another five to discover that there was no film in it. Undeterred, Steranko
borrowed my bike and set off looking for a shop that sold film.

He got back about a quarter of an hour later, a yellow cycling cap tilted back on his head. He was sweating, breathing heavily and snapping pictures without remembering to adjust the focus or
the light setting.

‘Let’s take one with us all in,’ he said after wasting half the film. ‘It’s got a self-timer hasn’t it?’

Setting up the picture took a long time. To get us all in the frame the camera had to be placed on the low wall at the other side of the roof. To see through the viewfinder and check that we
were all arranged properly Steranko had to hang from the railing over the side of the building while Freddie moved the camera fractionally in accordance with Steranko’s grunted instructions
of ‘left a bit, right a bit’.

‘I feel like Bernie the Bolt from “The Golden Shot”,’ Freddie said.

‘Hurry up Steranko,’ Foomie said anxiously. All we could see of Steranko were his white knuckles gripping the railing and his cycling cap above the camera. We began to wonder how
much longer he could hang there.

‘Are you alright Steranko?’ Freddie said, looking down anxiously.

‘No, I’m. I can’t . . .’ Suddenly the hands slipped from the rail. There was a long scream and then a dull thud from the other side of the wall.

Freddie’s face mirrored the shock on all our faces.

‘Oh Jesus fucking Christ,’ he said quietly as we rushed over towards him. I was the first to get there. I looked over the wall and saw Steranko, grinning and standing on the narrow
ledge that ran just above the top windows of the block. The others crowded round. There was a collective sigh of relief which turned immediately to a groan. Freddie and Steranko were laughing
crazily.

‘What a wrister,’ said Carlton and then we all took up our positions again on the other side of the roof. Once he had hauled himself back over the rail Steranko shouted
‘Ready?’, depressed the timer and scampered over to rejoin the rest of us. Foomie was peeling an orange. Freddie and Carlton were trying to push each other out of the picture. Monica
and Belinda posed with their arms around each other. I was standing between Fran and Foomie; Steranko was crouched down in front of everyone. We waited, smiling.

‘It’s not working,’ Freddie said.

‘Yes it is, you can hear the whirr of the thing going round.’ I took a sip of beer – and at that moment there was a sharp click from the camera.

‘Maybe now we can get some peace,’ Carlton said as Steranko walked over to pick up the camera and wind on the film.

I heard the drone of a propellor plane making its way nostalgically across the sky. Squinting into the bright sky I saw a plane circling slowly overhead.

‘Look!’ said Steranko suddenly.

Gradually, red, yellow and then green and dark blue smoke trails appeared in the sky like Christmas streamers. A few moments later there were two sudden twists of even brighter colour,
ballooning out into perfect parachutes, one striped red and yellow, the other quartered into segments of black and gold. There was a third brief flicker and then another full canopy blossomed, a
sudden poppy of colour in the blue sky. Up until this point the smoke trails had been stretched fine by the speed of the free-falling parachutists; now, with the parachutes stalled in mid-air, the
smoke curled out thickly and lazily. Then the bottom of the fourth and last smoke trail ignited in a sudden flame of colour, twitching and falling through the sky – but this time it failed to
burst into a perfect canopy. The sheet of colour was just hanging there, a faint speck tumbling away from it and dragging a stream of smoke like a scream. A huge second passed. There was another
brief pinch of colour turning instantly to a bright parachute, clinging tight to the sky.

The four parachutes rocked and pendulumed slowly downwards, smoke trails aerosoling elaborate and curly signatures on the wall of the sky. As they descended it was possible to see the
parachutists themselves, hanging beneath their canopies on invisible strings. One drifted out wide from the rest and for a moment it seemed possible that he might land here on the roof. Gradually
the radius of descent narrowed and he drifted away from us, heading with the others towards Brockwell Park. Two disappeared behind trees, their smoke trails exhausted; then the third and fourth
until there was nothing left except fading loops and wisps of smoke: pink, faint lemon, pale green and blue. Soon there was just a mist; and then only the haze of memory.

Late that night we all made a drunken arrangement to meet up at Brockwell Lido at eleven o’clock the next morning but it was gone twelve by the time Fran and I set off.
We walked the long way round, past the old garage on Effra Road that looked like a painting by Edward Hopper with its faded red and blue petrol pumps and the people and cars no longer there. A
little further on there was a white building with a sign for ‘Cool Tan’. Fran thought it was advertising some technique for getting brown without getting hot but it was for a fizzy
drink in the fifties or sixties that never really caught on. All that remained was the sign.

Brockwell Lido was built in the 1930s. The pool itself was an unheated rectangle of blue water surrounded by wooden changing huts and two high chairs for lifeguards. With the barbed wire on the
surrounding walls the whole place looked like a camp, converted for leisure now that the refugees or prisoners had gone. It was a nice pool but I could never quite rid myself of the feeling that it
was the kind of place where you got issued with verrucas when you exchanged your wire basket of clothes for a faded rubber ankle-band with ink-smudged number. Toes curled up reflexively, I splashed
quickly through the disinfectant footbath. Fran emerged from the women’s changing-room, thin, tanned and wearing a blue one-piece bathing suit borrowed from Monica. Wrapped around her
shoulders, a brightly striped towel soaked up the sun. The pool was already fairly crowded but there was no sign of any of the others. A group of dripping adolescents stood about five yards from
the edge of the deep end, watching attentively until someone walked by fully clothed. Suddenly they rushed towards the pool and plunged into the water, sending drenching waves over the unsuspecting
passer-by. The lifeguard whistled and shouted.