The Colour of Memory (8 page)

At the end of this little speech – I’d heard earlier drafts at other parties – Freddie looked as if he would have appreciated a round of applause. I handed him a can of lager
instead.

‘You ought to read the book he’s writing,’ said Steranko to the woman they were talking to. ‘It’s a work of Tolstoyan banality. One of the few truly dispensable
works of our time.’

‘What’s it about, your book?’ the woman asked.

‘It’s a memoir of life at the eastern end of the Central line. I’m calling it “Look Back in Ongar”.’ At the very least I had heard Freddie make this joke ten
times in the last two years. It was what he called one of his ‘Classic Standards’ and he showed no signs of ever getting fed up hearing himself say it.

‘And what do you do?’ the woman asked Steranko.

‘I’m an artist,’ he said.

‘The only thing he’s got in common with an artist,’ said Freddie, ‘is he gets cramp in the same wrist.’

Foomie came over, smiling, pouring wine and putting her arm around the woman Freddie and Steranko were speaking to.

‘So you’ve met the beer boys Caroline?’ she said, much less formal with us once she could mediate her comments through a friend. Steranko, Freddie and I stumbled over each
other trying to make jokes.

‘D’you three live together?’ Caroline asked during a pause in all this verbal jockeying for position.

‘We ride together,’ said Freddie before going off to get some food.

Foomie talked to Steranko and me but however hard she tried to share what she said evenly between us it was obvious that the conversation was taking place on a slope, tilting away from me
towards Steranko. If Steranko was talking to Caroline I could tell that Foomie was half listening to what they were saying. Her eyes lingered on Steranko when he spoke.

Someone tapped Caroline on the shoulder. I moved over to the drinks table where someone handed me another joint. The centipede rhythms of salsa snaked out from the room next door. Laughing
loudly Belinda came through the door, followed by Carlton who was wearing the same dark suit he’d had on earlier. Picking up another can of warm beer I went over and kissed Belinda. As I
shook hands with Carlton someone kicked me lightly on the back of the leg.

‘Go on: give him a big kiss,’ Mary said, winking and then walking off again.

Foomie came over and kissed Belinda and Carlton. Freddie came back, holding a plateful of chicken something.

‘Look at Steranko,’ Belinda said. ‘In a suit he always looks like he’s just got out of prison or the army.’

‘What bollocks,’ said Carlton. ‘He looks like he’s just got out of art school.’

‘I tell you, I’d hate to live in a time when men didn’t wear suits,’ said Freddie who wasn’t actually wearing one.

‘I’d hate to live in a time when women didn’t wear dresses,’ said Foomie.

‘Me too,’ said Belinda. ‘But I’d also hate to live in a time when you had to wear one.’

‘Suits and dresses,’ said Freddie. ‘When I’m wearing a suit I always wish I was wearing a shoulder-holster too.’

‘I even like the words connected with suits,’ I said. ‘Lapel, vent, turn-up . . .’

‘You feel good in a suit,’ Carlton said.

‘Not as good as you feel in a dress on a boiling hot day,’ said Foomie.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a suit that’s quite fitted properly,’ I said.

‘A suit shouldn’t fit properly,’ said Freddie, a sudden gleam of illumination in his eyes. ‘If it fits properly it doesn’t fit properly.’

‘What shit you talk Freddie.’

‘Let’s face it though,’ said Carlton, buttoning up his jacket for emphasis. ‘Suits always look better on black people.’

‘What about Lee Marvin in “Point Blank”? That’s a great suit.’

‘Not as good as Sidney Poitier’s in “In the Heat of the Night”.’

I went to the bathroom for a piss, leafing through a couple of pamphlets on cystitis and thrush while I was at it. When I came back Freddie was giving everyone a lecture about Hemingway and the
lost generation, leaning against a wall as though he needed to.

‘It’s meaningless. Every generation wants to think it’s lost. Take us. Who could have been more lost than us? We’re so lost we’re virtually extinct,’ he said
and everyone laughed. ‘As far as I can see there are only two things to be glad about. We were just old enough and just young enough to realise the full joy of short hair. And we were just
about on cue for the jazz revival. Obviously it would have been better to have been in on it first time round but that’s the way things happen these days. History is like the Cup Final: if
you miss it in the afternoon you can always catch the highlights later on in the evening when it’s shown again. As for politics, well, you might as well forget it. I mean I wasn’t even
able to vote in the last election . . .’

‘Nor me,’ said Foomie. ‘I wasn’t registered in time.’

‘Nor me,’ said Steranko.

‘Me neither,’ I said.

‘What about you Lin?’ She nodded and so did Carlton.

‘Look at that. It’s incredible. Four people out of six – two people out of three – don’t even have the vote! Our being on the left means nothing. It means we hang
around with certain kinds of people – people like us – but beyond that it means nothing. All it does is underwrite our friendships and provide a kind of shared language, a foundation of
broadly shared values. None of us really has anything to do with politics. We sneer at the way the news is presented on TV but nothing we feel has any effect on anyone else. It’s not our
fault. That’s just how things have turned out.’

I didn’t know whether I agreed with this or not and Freddie probably didn’t either.

‘People of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us in the sixties when we were still kids,’ said Steranko. ‘There are
plenty of good brave causes left but there’s nothing we can do about them.’

The afternoon passed quickly as we all got more drunk and stoned. People kept arriving. Juggernaut funk, agile, cumbersome and moving at high speed, thumped around the flat. Carlton and I were
in the kitchen with Belinda, scoffing French bread and hummus.

‘How’s your group going?’ I said, searching through the kitchen drawers for a corkscrew.

‘We split up,’ said Belinda as someone else came into the kitchen. Belinda introduced her to Carlton and me. Her name was Monica and she was wearing a green cardigan. Her ripped
Levis were three or four sizes too big, gathered in at the waist by a leather belt. She had light, wavy brown hair and wore earrings and no make-up. She talked to Belinda while I continued my hunt
for a corkscrew.

Eventually I turned to Monica and said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a Swiss army knife have you?’ She reached into her pocket and pulled one out. ‘You modern
women.’

We talked for a while but by this time I was well past my best, not far off my worst in fact. I sprayed breadcrumbs when I spoke.

After not very long she said, ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘OK. I’ll call you sometime maybe.’

‘OK.’

‘Have you got a pen?’

‘No.’

‘Nor have I,’ I said, feeling in my pockets. ‘I’ll memorise it.’

‘You memorise it, man,’ Carlton laughed. ‘You can’t even remember your own phone number.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong Carlton. My memory has never been in better shape. I answered one of those ads in the Sunday paper. Now I can even remember what I was doing on the
day George Best quit football.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Now Veronica, go ahead.’

‘Ready?’

‘Sure.’

‘Five . . .’

‘Five . . .’ I repeated.

‘Five . . .’

‘Five . . .’

‘Five . . . Five . . .’

‘Double five . . .’ I said, concentrating hard.

‘Five . . .’ she continued. ‘Five . . .’

‘That’s it,’ she said.

‘Hey, listen I know that’s not a real number,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘It’s only got six digits. London numbers have seven.’

‘I’ll see you around,’ she said, smiling and leaving.

I looked out of the kitchen and into the living-room which had thinned out now. There were more empty bottles than people. Foomie was sitting on the arm of the sofa, talking to Steranko who had
taken off his jacket and was propped up against a wall and drinking from a can like some swilled-out Valentino. She was laughing. Her hand rested on his for a moment as she said something I
couldn’t hear.

Something was happening. You could tell something was happening by the way everybody was asking everybody else what was happening. Railton Road was cordoned off. Police were
everywhere. I was back in the DIY shop, wishing I measured things more accurately. Unable to find a tape measure I’d spent the morning calculating distances in terms of LP covers and Penguin
books – quite a satisfying activity in an imprecise sort of way – and now, with the help of one of the assistants, I was busily converting everything back into feet and inches.

Ten minutes later all the stock from outside was bundled in and the shutters were yanked down.

‘There’s going to be a riot,’ claimed the manager with conviction, ushering customers out of the shop. Hardly a day goes by in the summer without a riot being predicted:
it’s done like farmers forecasting the weather (‘red sky in the evening, the ghetto is burning’) but with less accuracy. Outside everyone just milled around while the diverted
traffic congealed around them. I trudged back to my cave, eighteen foot (approximately) of shelving digging into my collar-bone.

From the roof of my block I looked out over the streets but everything was quiet, except for Concorde booming modernly overhead.

People were still talking about what had happened late that afternoon when I went over to Terry’s, the greengrocer on Tulse Hill.

‘The police raided a couple of houses on Railton Road,’ Terry explained to a shopful of customers.

‘They came down on the train,’ said a woman with pink streaks in her hair. ‘Like football hooligans.’

Terry was a big white guy whose thinning blond hair made him look older than he was. The shop was open till seven six days a week and until lunchtime on a Sunday. Terry was always there; even
when he was out at the market picking up new produce in his van he was somehow still in the shop. Not only was he always there, he was always in a good mood. Whatever time of the day you went in he
was joking or shouting hello to somebody. Such was the value everyone placed on Terry’s high opinion of them that no one even dreamed of ripping stuff off or getting impatient or swearing
because of the queue.

As well as all the usual fruit and veg he stocked a full range of West Indian vegetables and an array of wholewheat bread, natural yoghurt, free range eggs, tofu and vegan cheese. At the same
time he kept an eye on tradition with a few packs of bacon and pork sausages stashed away in the fridge. Although it wasn’t actually on a corner, Terry’s was the heir to the idea of the
corner shop but it also represented an unusual alliance of hard-working grocer shop economics with the anarcho-vegetarian culture of the inner city. One way and another he kept everyone happy.

I was just coming out of the shop when I bumped into Steranko and Carlton, both stoned and wanting something to eat. I offered to cook them an omelette and the three of us walked back to my
flat. It was the first time they’d been there since I moved in.

‘Shit, it smells like a skunk’s toilet,’ Carlton said as we made our way up the stairs, past marker-pen signatures and purple band-names in fluorescent Bronx script.

‘What d’you call that?’ said Steranko a few minutes later as the reinforced door clanged shut behind us. ‘Lubyanka chic?’

Carlton laughed: ‘Man, you might as well go the whole way – get yourself a drawbridge and portcullis while you’re at it. Look at this,’ he said, picking up the
entry-phone by the door. ‘When you get really paranoid you can just pick this up and
listen
to the outside world . . . Is there anybody there? Is there anybody there?’

With that they went through to the main room and lurched around there for a while. The day before I’d bought some flowers and put them in a jug on the window-sill: they had elegant green
stems and purple petals with yellow dots. Carlton looked at the jug of flowers and said, ‘Even
here
there is life.’

‘Nice isn’t it?’ I prompted.

‘Not exactly cosy is it?’

‘Course it isn’t cosy. It’s cosier than that place you live in. All you’ve got in that room is bare boards. Besides, comfort can never do as verb what it boasts as
noun.’

‘Who said that?’

‘Guess.’

‘Freddie?’

I nodded.

‘You know what sort of block this is?’ said Carlton, gazing out of the window.

‘Not really.’

‘It’s the kind of block where people draw their curtains early.’

‘Look at this,’ I said when we were back in the kitchen, turning on the hot-water tap and letting it run.

‘So? You’ve got hot water,’ said Steranko. ‘Very twentieth century.’

‘It’s free. You can waste as much as you want. You can leave it running all night if you want . . .’

Later that evening, weighed down by large slices of an unappetising Spanish omelette, we walked down to the Atlantic. A lot of police were still around, walking the streets in
twos and threes or waiting in buses parked some distance off in case anything happened. Groups of black and white youths were walking round too, falling silent as they passed the grim-faced police.
The Atlantic was right at the focus of all this activity. It used to be a dingy boozer; then it got to be very popular as people were drawn there by the slight uneasiness as well as the fact that
there was live jazz and the bar stayed open until midnight. After eleven it tended to fill up with people from the Albert, the pub across the road that was always packed with trendies complaining
about how trendy and packed it was. The Atlantic was also well known as the place you could buy grass – an arrangement that suited everyone, dealers and punters alike, since the beer was
awful. A lot of good musicians played there and even if they weren’t so hot the place always gave an edgy intensity to their playing.