The Colour of Memory (27 page)

‘Hot eh?’ one of them said, wiping his smoke-blackened face with a piece of rag.

‘Throw them chairs on when you’ve finished will you?’ he said a few minutes later. We said we would and they walked off into the night. We continued sitting, watching the
worsening flames subside into molten red embers. Alone in the waste ground, in our armchairs, we were reluctant to break the elemental pull of the fire.

Eventually we got up to leave. Together we swung first Steranko’s and then my chair on to the fire. For a few minutes they sat there as if untouched by the heat and then suddenly erupted
in a rush of flame that flung back the cold of the night once more. We walked back through the waste ground, fires dying all around us.

The room smelt of stale time.

Back in the kitchen I noticed a cup and a plate in the sink. On the table was half a loaf of bread, solid as stone, surrounded by scattered crumbs. There were some greyish milk bottles, a
towel, a small glass with silhouettes of dogs and ‘Every Dog Has His Day’ printed just beneath the rim. I turned on the hot tap and immediately the water heater humphed into life. By
now my eyes were used to the dim light. There were some spots of mould at the end of the tap. Cracked tiles.

Lying by the door were a couple of Airmail letters, covered by the smudged postmark of a shoe – I must have trodden on them as I came in. I picked them up and saw immediately that the
address of one was in my own handwriting. Post-marked six days ago, it had arrived too late; as I posted it his own last letter was already making its way towards me.

I went back into the main room. On the wall, attached by yellow sellotape, was a familiar, faded poster for an exhibition of an artist’s paintings. An identical poster hung in my own
flat back in England.

Time had settled on everything like dust. I picked up a sweater with a shirt inside, taken off at the same time – how long ago? – and thrown carelessly on a chair. By the
skirtingboard was a pair of shoes, the outside of each heel worn down almost to the sole. How much meaning was contained in the accidental arrangement of these things? How far back would you have
to go to decipher the simple creases of that shirt, to establish how it came to be lying there, like that?

I walked over to the window and looked down at the wet street. Through the threads of rain I saw someone hunched up in a raincoat beneath a street-lamp. There was a brief flash of lightning
and in the sudden bleaching of the rain I saw the figure in the raincoat look up at my window and then walk on. A shiver passed through me. A moment later he disappeared from sight, the echo of
footsteps hanging in the damp air.

Be near me when my light is low.

Near the desk was a small electric fire with a frayed flex. I plugged it in carefully and immediately both bars began to glow orange. Arranging my coat on the back of the chair I sat down
and looked at the mess of papers and odds and ends that covered the desk. There were a few cassettes, pens, an empty glass. On the back of an envelope was written FRIDAY and a neatly printed list
of things to be done. All of the other papers were in his usual chaotic scrawl. I picked up odd sheets but most were incomplete. Many paragraphs had been crossed out; there seemed no discernible
continuity.

One by one, I pulled open the drawers of the desk. The first was empty except for pencils, an old diary and a small dictionary. In the next there was a stack of unused paper and some more
sheets covered in writing, much of it crossed out. In the last drawer there were more sheets of unused paper and, underneath them, a large notebook. I opened it in the middle and flicked through a
few pages. Though much neater than any of the other pages – as if he had been copying from an earlier draft – the handwriting was still unmistakably Freddie’s. The pages were
bathed in the yellow light of the reading lamp. I read a few phrases at random, flicked through some more pages and then turned back to the beginning and read the first sentence:

‘In August it rained all the time . . .’

Skipping here and there, impatient to get to the end, I read all the way through, remembering incidents that I had totally forgotten, recognising many episodes despite the distortions and
dislocations. By the time I came to the end the first grey light of day was coming through the window.

The text stopped about twenty pages from the end of the notebook. I flicked through these last pages in case there were some more paragraphs but all were blank.

Reluctant to break the spell of the past, I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes and sat back in the chair. As I did so I noticed a couple of postcards taped to the wall above the desk. To
one side of these cards, propped up against the right-angle of the wall was a photograph that I recognised immediately in spite of its age. I reached for it and saw that a few words had been
written on the back: ‘. . . that terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.’ Then I stared at the image on the other side.

We are all there on the roof, crowded together to get into the picture frame. Spreading across the ground are the thin shadows of TV aerials. Surprised by the self-timer some of us are
caught at unexpected angles as we jostle for a good position in the photograph but because the light is so bright everyone is in sharp focus and is clearly recognisable. Most of us are laughing or
smiling as we squint into the glare. Freddie is drinking from a red can of beer. The colours are striking: there are the reds, blues and whites of T-shirts, shorts, dresses; a half-peeled orange; a
halo-yellow cycling cap; the wide stripes of a deckchair. And over all of this is the deep blue of the empty sky – the colour of memory.