The Colour of Memory (12 page)

‘Can’t get it up mate?’ Fran shouted.

‘Jesus Fran! Honestly you’re going to get us killed.’

Clutching it by the tail fin the man dragged the plane back to his car, shouting at the kids to hurry up and making barking noises at his dog. Understandably reluctant to get back in the car
– nobody had even thrown him a stick to chase – the dog was still eager to play. The kids were in their anoraks, arms by their side, walking obediently to the car.

We walked back across the Common towards some kind of park buildings – lavatories or storage buildings for the groundsmen. Two young black guys, both carrying smoke canisters of some kind,
hopped over the fence and started clambering over the building, every now and then releasing great clouds of red, green and blue smoke. It billowed up in thick palls and then blew away. As the sun
sank lower the light became richer and deeper, spreading out in long golden streaks. An angle of honking geese flapped towards these bright strips of light. It was slightly cooler now. I had no
idea where I was.

From behind us came the sound of car horns, yelling and bustling. We turned around and saw police scrambling out of a van – first two and then, in quick succession, five or six more
– and charging across the grass in the direction of the groundsmen’s building, shouting. Then we saw them jumping over the fence by the park buildings, running through coils and plumes
of blue and red smoke. More shouting. As the smoke faded we caught sight of the two kids, both still inside the fence and taken completely by surprise. One turned by the edge of the building but
ran straight into two cops who pulled him to the ground before he even had time to struggle. A cop lunged at the other one but he swerved just out of reach and started running hard for the fence.
The cop was yelling ‘Head him off, Ron!’ The fence was more than three feet high and the young guy cleared it without breaking stride. Another cop was running towards him as he ran
along by the fence, heading for the open park. Running at full tilt the young guy tripped over one of the stanchions and went flying. The cop was only a matter of yards away as he began to pick
himself up. By the time he got to his feet the cop was within a foot of him and stretching out an arm. For several seconds they seemed to stay exactly like that but then, unbelievably, the gap
between the cop’s hand and the kid’s back seemed slowly to widen as he got into his stride.

‘Go on!’ yelled Fran. ‘Run!’

The cop ran for all he was worth for a few more seconds but with every second the young guy was another couple of feet clear of him.

‘Go on, you’ll make it!’ called Fran at the top of her voice.

The cop was running out of steam, a few yards more and he was bent over, heaving for breath. The kid looked round, running more slowly now, heading across the field into the bright sun. He
looked around again. We waved and shouted to him. He saw us and waved back, then ran on again, silhouetted and getting smaller and smaller until he could hardly be seen against the last crimson
scarves of light.

I decided to buy the trumpet after all. When I called round at Steranko’s to pick it up I found only Foomie sitting on the floor of the Blue Room with a mug of tea
steaming beside her, reading. She was wearing one of Steranko’s sweaters.

‘Stay and have some tea,’ she said smiling.

‘I’m not disturbing you?’

‘It’s nice to see you. I don’t know where Steranko is.’

Foomie’s hair was tied up tight in a bun. She was wearing jeans and faded red socks. It was odd seeing her in one of Steranko’s favourite sweaters. While Foomie made more tea I
trotted up to Steranko’s room and brought down the trumpet.

The Blue Room was the main living-room of Steranko’s house, so-called because of the painted blue floorboards and the pale blue walls. There was nothing in it except a fire and a small
stereo. Foomie put on a record of Flamenco guitar. I poured the tea and opened a packet of biscuits. I took the trumpet from its case and fiddled around with the valves.

‘D’you think you’ll learn to play?’

‘I doubt it.’

We spoke in that relaxed and highly conventionalised way that the friend’s lover and the lover’s friend tend to when they find themselves alone. We were eager to like each other and
laughed too quickly at each other’s jokes. We talked about Freddie and about Belinda but the conversation was all the time revolving around Steranko. He both restricted our intimacy and made
it possible. There were all sorts of other things we could have said and we avoided all of them.

Instead, Foomie asked what I wanted to do, what kind of work I wanted. I said I didn’t know, that for as long as I could remember I had been living from one conversation to the next, going
nowhere slowly.

The room echoed with the sharp claps, heel stamps and ringing chords of the music. Foomie wiped away some crumbs that had fallen on her book.

The blue floorboards looked liquidy and wet in the orange glow of the electric fire. The panels in the middle of the door had been painted a dark grey and against the background of blue they
formed a cross which, for a moment, seemed like the mast of a sinking ship rising from a blue sea – the bars of the electric fire like the bright stripes of a sunset.

We sat and talked by the light of the fire.

Bonfire night: Steranko and I walked back to his house across the park. There was a halo of mist around the moon. A light fog draped the iron skeletons of trees. Fireworks
exploded green, red and yellow in the cool mist of the sky. The bandstand loomed stark and empty before us. Paths grew indistinct in the near distance. A rocket arced up into the sky and burst into
a bunch of bright petals falling. Some way off to the left there were the shrieking noises and colours of a fun fair. We walked towards it, past the huge pyre that would be at the centre of the
firework display later that night. We passed through a thicket of bare trees, indistinct and swampy in the fog. Another rocket asterisked the sky.

On the waste ground outside Steranko’s house some kids had built a big bonfire. His room reeled and heaved with the bright light of flames. The window panes were warm, the sky deep blue.
The whole room was rolling with orange light swirling around the various half-finished paintings. Writhing shadows. Heat. A portrait of Foomie – the first one I’d seen – was
stained red by the light of the flames. Her eyes were startlingly lifelike in the flickering light. Steranko put on a record and propped himself on the window-sill, hands round his knees, to watch the fire, silhouetted by the flames. Music flooded the room which was full of colours moving,
full of the light of burning.

It was a Sunday afternoon, cold and raining, the sort of afternoon when what you most want to do is spend four or five hours in the cinema, eating cake and taking in a double
bill of French films with nice photography and plenty of sunshine. On offer was a triple bill of black-and-white Bergmans so we ended up playing Ludo for money at Freddie’s place. Warmed by a
gas ring on the cooker Steranko, Freddie and I drank tea and waited for Carlton, picking up bits of the Sunday paper and throwing them down again unread.

‘What a lot of shit this paper is,’ Steranko said, tossing down the colour supplement in disgust. ‘I mean, look at this: part two of a pull-out history of ratatouille through
the ages.’

Freddie and I didn’t bother to reply. That’s the kind of afternoon it was. Steranko was wearing a thick and expensive cardigan that a friend of his had ripped off from a shop in
Chelsea where he worked. Steranko had the sleeves pulled down over his hands and cradled a steaming mug of tea between them.

There was a ring on the door-bell. Freddie went to answer it and came back followed by Carlton who was wearing a red baseball cap and some kind of thick American-style car-coat. Freddie poured
him some tea and Carlton struggled out of his coat, took off his cap and pulled a bright, turtle-neck sweater over his head. Underneath he was wearing another thick sweater.

‘You warm enough?’ Steranko asked.

‘I would be if I could afford a two hundred quid cardigan.’

‘I told you: this guy can get you one for fifty quid.’

‘I can’t even afford fifty quid.’

‘You’ll have to freeze then won’t you?’

‘Yes boss.’

‘C’mon, let’s play some Ludo,’ Freddie said.

Freddie’s living-room was icy cold so we set up the Ludo board on the kitchen table. After half an hour we’d all put about three quid in the kitty – ten pence every time you
threw a six or were unable to move – and no one showed any sign of winning. We were all much keener on sending each other back and forming hindering blocks – at one point Carlton had
all his four greens piled intransigently on one square – than we were on getting our own tokens home.

After about an hour, following a fluke throw of five sixes, Steranko – blue – was way ahead: he had three counters home and his last was three-quarters of the way round the board.
The only person anywhere near him was Freddie who had a red counter nine places behind. He threw a six (‘ten pee in, fuckhead,’ shouted Steranko) and a three, sending Steranko back to
base. After that Steranko sunk without trace. Unable to move or throw a six he had to put in ten pence every time he threw the dice. He chucked in two pounds in a matter of minutes while the rest
of us were skooting quickly round the board.

‘Oh for fuck sake,’ swore Steranko, rolling his fourth five in succession.

‘Ten pee in,’ said Freddie, ever watchful.

‘Shit, I’ll have to change this,’ he said, pulling out a large coin none of us had seen before.

‘What’s that man? A Krugerrand?’ Carlton asked, wide-eyed.

‘I’ve got a whole load of them at home. They’re quite tricky to get rid of these days. People are a bit sensitive about them,’ Steranko said, chucking the coin into the
kitty and pulling out some small change. ‘Jesus, haven’t you lot seen a two pound coin before?’

None of us had.

‘I’ll tell you something else as well,’ Steranko said. ‘The half crown is no longer legal tender: we’ve gone decimal.’

‘C’mon get on with the game,’ I said, throwing a three and thereby forming a pyrrhic block of two yellows.

The game ended up with Freddie and Carlton both needing to throw a one. While they threw a succession of fours, fives and threes Steranko finally succeeded in getting his last counter out and
staged a late dash around the board (‘Yes! Two sixes! Three sixes – that’s eighteen – and a one. Shit!’) Eventually Freddie rolled a one and won. The rest of us looked
on enviously as he counted his winnings.

‘Fifteen pounds twenty!’ he said with a big grin.

‘What a shit game,’ I said.

‘Superb game,’ Freddie said. ‘Tactical – a game of skill.’

‘Right Freddie,’ Steranko said. ‘Now you can go and look for a shop where you can buy some cake. Then you can have a nice little tea party for your friends.’

‘Nowhere’s open.’

We settled for more tea and digestive biscuits (‘probably the most boring biscuit in the world,’ Freddie conceded) and sat there slurping.

‘God, what an afternoon. The pubs are shut, there’s nothing on at the Ritzy, there’s not even any football on telly,’ said Steranko.

‘Isn’t there a film on TV?’

‘Yes there is,’ said Freddie, consulting the paper. ‘“Carry on up the Congo”: an adaptation of
Heart of Darkness
with Kenneth Williams as Marlow and Sid
James as Kurtz.’

‘Very funny Freddie,’ said Steranko, using his sleeve to wipe clean a patch of the wet, steamy window.

‘Is it still raining?’

‘Pouring. Why the fuck do we live here?’

‘Because we’re English.’

‘I tell you, this country is getting very close to being uninhabitable. The sheer delight people have in saying “no” to things. It’s unbelievable the quality of life you
have to put up with sometimes. For at least six months of the year it’s virtually impossible to have a good time. I don’t know how we put up with it.’

‘Nothing else to do,’ said Carlton. ‘When I was working at the bakery a couple of years ago – it was a terrible job but I needed the dough –’

‘I could see that one coming. I was sitting here waving it on.’

‘Anyway, I was pissed off all day long. Then one day I just said to myself “Ah fuck it”. And then I wondered what to do now that I’d said “Ah fuck it”.
Nothing. There was nothing to do. It was like having a paralysed leg. In the end you go on and on saying “Ah fuck it” day after day.’

‘Yeah, you’re right man,’ Steranko said, looking out of the window at the rain. ‘Shit. I can’t think of anything I want to do this afternoon.’

‘I just want to stroke my winnings,’ said Freddie. ‘How much did you say those cardigans were Steranko?’

I spent the next week working with Carlton, decorating a house near Camberwell. The job took longer than expected and it wasn’t until Friday afternoon as we walked home
up Cold Harbour Lane that we found the time to drop in at the dole office to sign on. What with the work and the dole office being open such limited hours we’d both missed our signing days.
The woman behind the reinforced plate glass asked me why I was two days late.

‘I had a job interview,’ I said.

‘What about you?’ she said to Carlton.

‘I had a job interview,’ he said. She gave us a warning each, smiling as she did so and not bothering to comment on our paint-splattered clothes. She wrote down our next signing date
which was in just under two weeks’ time and that was that.

With the exception of my brief period of above-board employment my dole had been running smoothly for years. Once your money is coming through regularly – housing benefit included –
the essential thing is to keep your life in a state of perpetual stasis as far as the DHSS is concerned. Avoid any change of circumstance since even declaring a few days’ work can lead to
massive complications. Dealing with that kind of thing makes life more difficult for the people working there so they much prefer you to keep any change in your prospects to yourself. Every now and
again I got a visit from someone concerned at the way my career seemed to have made no progress at all in the last two years but I told them I was keeping myself occupied (‘I use the library
a great deal’) and not contemplating suicide and they went off reassured. A couple of weeks previously, though, I’d had to attend some kind of interview down in Crystal Palace –
failure to attend, said the notice, would result in my benefit being stopped – where an understanding, polite but suspicious-looking woman grilled me about what I was up to, why I’d
been sacked from my last job, and what sort of work I wanted. To each question I gave precisely the answer I thought likely to preclude any further questions but she persisted for about twenty
minutes. I persisted in resisting her persistence, assuring her that my attitude towards finding a job had improved considerably.