The Colour of Memory (9 page)

It was a warm evening and people had spilled out on to the pavement, the sheer sound of trumpet and saxophone slashing brightly into the dark street. The trumpet held notes that were long and
high as a tightrope stretched out across the night.

When the band had played a quick encore more people came outside and stood around talking and drinking. Police vans cruised slowly past. No bottles smashed against their windscreens.

People began leaving the pub and we started walking home. Steranko turned right at the top of Cold Harbour Lane and Carlton dashed for a bus, waving to me as it pulled away. There was hardly
anyone around. A few cars went past. It occurred to me that the whole idea of street life in this country came into existence at exactly the moment when, it was claimed, the streets became unsafe
to walk in, when crime began destroying a way of life that had never actually existed.

A couple of young guys, one of whom I vaguely recognised, walked towards me. He nodded, ‘Ah right.’

‘OK.’

I walked slowly, enjoying the feel of the warm night and the clouds drifting like whales across the sky.

For the rest of that week I had some work with a market research company. On the way home one evening I dropped in at the Effra. Freddie was there, pissed off and standing by
the bar on his own. That morning he’d been burgled.

‘What did they take?’

‘Stereo, records, camera.’

‘You insured?’

‘Yeah. It’s just the hassle. They got in through the window and found a spare set of keys which they took so I had to spend the whole day getting new locks fitted. A hundred quid.
Guess how many burglaries there were in Brixton last night?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Twenty-five. That’s what the cop who came round told me. He said he’d never known a night like it. I think there was even an element of pride in his voice as he said
it.’

I laughed and bought Freddie another beer.

‘This weather is so weird too,’ he said, draining his old glass. ‘Is it hot? Is it cold? It’s not even that easy to tell whether or not it’s raining. The seasons
are all dissolving into each other. Look at it: it’s supposed to be September and it looks like snow. I’m beginning to think the weather reports are government controlled, censored.
They probably change the records to make out that thirty inches of rain is normal for August. I’m sure it never used to rain that much. People wouldn’t have stood for it. There’d
have been a revolution. They can’t let the truth out because they know there’d be panic. The forecasts are just government propaganda. They say it’s going to brighten up by the
late afternoon and it’s still pissing down at seven. The wonder is that people still go on believing them.’

Freddie was clearly in the mood to complain. I nodded my head in agreement.

‘Mary says the weather is determined by the economic structure of society; it’s all related to that economic base. We get the weather we deserve,’ I said.

‘Yes, we can’t afford good weather anymore. We probably sold it all to America. That’s why we get all this drizzle. It’s the perfect weather for a declining industrial
power,’ said Freddie, groaning as he saw Ed making his way towards us. Ed was a manic depressive and like all manic depressives you never saw him manic, only depressed. You had to take his
word for the mania and that was difficult because he communicated mainly in grunts and lumps of sentences that were swallowed as soon as spoken. Not only that but he never looked you in the eyes
when he spoke; he looked at the rings and squiggles of beer that he traced on the bar with his fingers. He never bought anybody a drink and he always accepted one from somebody else grudgingly, as
if he was doing so at considerable personal inconvenience. He never made jokes or laughed at other people’s – as far as he was concerned, there was nothing much to laugh at, the state
of the class struggle being what it was. The nearest he got to a smile was a sneer and for entertainment he rolled his own cigarettes.

Freddie slurped gloomily at his beer while I exchanged a few words with Ed. After a couple of minutes he trudged over to someone else.

‘Thank God we didn’t have to put up with him. He’s like human drizzle,’ said Freddie, putting down his glass. ‘So, this job you’re doing, what d’you
have to do?’

‘Code and check questionnaires before the results are put through the computer. I’m working with this other bloke, a friend of Carlton’s. There’s no room for us in the
main office so we have to work in the basement. The only time anyone comes down is when they want boxes of computer paper shifted so it’s quite nice. It’s so boring though. This
afternoon we ended up playing Battleships. After that we just sat there and worked out how much money we were earning per minute.’

‘Sounds a great job,’ Freddie said. I went for a piss. When I got back Freddie’s glass was empty and I asked if he wanted another. I had just ordered two more beers when
Freddie touched my arm and gestured towards the door. Steranko was coming through the door – with Foomie. She was looking gorgeous and happy. I felt a jolt of shock and then a steady,
draining sensation in my stomach. I was still looking at them when Steranko and then Foomie caught my eye. They made their way towards us; Freddie was already saying something to Steranko. It was
one of those situations where you have either to conceal your reactions or conceal yourself behind your reactions. Smiling broadly, I leant towards them and asked what they wanted to drink.

The groan of thunder. Grey light. The cold smell of rain coming through the open window. There was the sound of a plane, soggy through the rain; the long swish and wince of
cars, the sob of a police siren. I leant on the sill and watched the rain fall past the window, the trees below glistening and black. Suddenly I caught a blur of movement on the opposite roof, a
shape indistinct in the drizzle. At that moment the rain began falling heavily again. I crossed the room and turned out the small reading light and went back to the window. I looked out again. For
a long time I saw nothing and then, for a few seconds, I saw the shape of someone on the roof, smudged by the falling rain. The phone rang. I glanced towards it and when I looked up at the roof
again there was only the rain.

I picked up the phone. It was Fran calling from a kiosk because her phone was broken. She was just calling to see how I was. Hearing the crackle of rain in the background I pictured her in the
call box, hair dripping into the receiver, her hand idly wiping condensation from the fee-display.

I looked out again, my breath fogging the window. I wiped the cold glass clear, held my breath and stared out. The thump of my heart grew steadily louder. I turned my head, exhaled and breathed
in deeply once again. The rain was as it sounded.

I did not see Steranko or any of the others for several days. The market research company was conducting a survey for British Rail – What sort of tickets were people
using? Where were they going? What did they think of prices? The buffet? – and I spent the next week shuttling up to Manchester and back four times a day, handing out questionnaires. On most
trips it only took an hour to dish them out and then I sat back in the wide First Class seats and enjoyed the ride, reading and drinking, eating hot and cold snacks from the buffet bar, not
thinking about Steranko or Foomie, just watching the damp landscape slide past the big windows.

On the last day of the survey I got back to the flat and found a note from Steranko pinned to my door: ‘ON ROOF – S.’ I chucked my bags in the flat and made my way up the
stairs. The roof was the single best thing about the block. At the top of the stairs a door opened on to a flat concrete rectangle about the size of a tennis court, a low wall and railing running
along the edge. At the other end the same arrangement was duplicated with an identical door leading to another flight of stairs and another lift. The roof of the lift-housing was also flat and
since it was eight or nine feet higher it got another half an hour of sun at the end of each day – if there was any sun to have.

Steranko was reading by the light of a hurricane lamp that covered him in a warm tent of light.

‘Hey, how’s it going?’ he said, looking up.

‘OK.’

‘Come over . . .’ I sat on the rug next to him. Gnats clung to the side of the lamp. Our shadows crawled the floor.

‘Nice light, isn’t it?’

‘Beautiful. Where’d you get it?’

‘This friend of Foomie’s found it. She didn’t want it so I cleaned it up and fixed it.’ I wondered whether I should say something about Foomie and then decided against
it.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked after a while. Steranko held up a battered paperback selection of Nietzsche.

‘You read him?’

‘Only odd bits.’

I flicked through some pages without reading them. The light from the hurricane lamp made the sky look dark as ink. A few feet in front of us there was an unfinished sculpture of a woman, with
rough-hewn head, arms and waist protruding from a block of white stone.

‘Is someone who lives here sculpting that?’ Steranko asked.

‘Yeah, I don’t know his name though.’ On the afternoons that I’d been up on the roof I’d watched him work on it, enjoying the gentle tap of the chisel and the way
the form of the woman slowly emerged from the hard block and the cloud of white dust.

Today had been the first time in several weeks that it had been hot and sunny; little progress had been made since I’d last seen the sculpture. The bricks of the low wall behind our backs
were still faintly warm, breathing the last of their accumulated heat into the cool night air. On the roof of the opposite block I saw the dark shapes of a man and a woman, his arm around her
shoulders. I waved at them and they waved back, the red glow of a cigarette tracing the movement of a hand.

‘Shall we have a joint?’ I said after neither of us had spoken for a while.

‘Good idea.’

‘Can you sort that out?’ I pulled a bag of grass and some papers out of the pocket of my trousers. ‘I’ll bring some coffee up.’

‘Hey, can you bring up your cassette player? I made this tape today – it’s unbelievable.’

‘Sure. What’s the tape?’

‘It’s a Mahler symphony. The third.’

Making coffee in the kitchen I thought about Foomie. There was an inevitability about her being attracted to Steranko that destroyed even the possibility of jealousy. Instead of wishing that
Foomie was attracted to me I found myself wishing that I was more like Steranko. Just as there are individuals who are always on the periphery of a given group so there are those like Steranko who,
you know, will always be at the defining centre of other people’s lives.

By the time I came back up with everything Steranko had rolled a clumsy joint with the home-grown grass. Steam floated off the dark surface of the coffee.

We took turns pulling deeply on the joint and exhaling grey smoke that hung sweetly in the air for a moment and then disappeared. To the west the sky was tinted orange. I read odd pages of
Nietzsche. My mind wandered. We watched clouds moving fast across the moon; the lights of a plane overhead. Neither of us said anything for a while. Steranko rewound and fast-forwarded the cassette
player until he found the place on the tape he wanted.

‘Right, this is the fourth movement: Vas meer die Nacht erzalt,’ he added in Colditz German.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I dunno. Something, something, night, something.’ Our laughter floated away and quietness gathered round us. The noise of the traffic was still there but quieter, further off, like
the sea at low tide. Sheets hung out to dry on the opposite block, visible only as grey squares in the darkness, shrugged in the breeze. There was no sign of the couple we’d seen earlier. A
few lights were on. The steady flame of the hurricane lamp, the tape running noiselessly. Then, hardly audible, barely distinguishable from the silence that preceded it, came the sound of a
woman’s voice.

Each syllable was like a breath, insubstantial as the night air. The voice was so frail a gust of wind could have blown it away. The singer’s lone voice gathered the night’s silence
into itself and slowly overcame it, pulling itself out of the silence like the sculptured form of the woman, pulling herself clear of the rock. The voice continued its long, slow ascension, angular
syllables stretched out and hanging for long seconds in the darkness.

The voice came from the throat of the darkness. The light from the hurricane lamp wavered.

Steranko leafed through the grimy pages of the book, folded it back on itself and passed it to me without speaking. Half his face was in shadow. In the vacancy left by the music, in the silence
that craved the lone voice of the woman, I read:

The words broke over me. I stared into the dark sky above and around us. The night remembered the voice. The night remembered how the voice had needed the night. There were no
stars, only the red and white blink of a plane, the steady flicker of the hurricane lamp.