The Colour of Memory (11 page)

A few minutes later somebody offered me a lift back to Brixton. Impulsively and happily I said yes and for the next half an hour I quivered in the back seat of a car with two other passengers
while the driver, roaring drunk and sipping Sapporo, squealed around corners and kamikazied his way through the red lights of east and south London. Every couple of seconds I had a precise and
frightening vision of a head-on collision, of getting oxy-acetylened out of the wreckage and coming round in hospital a week later while a doctor patiently explained that I was going to have to
spend the rest of my life in a brain-damaged wheelchair. I got out of the car about a mile from home and walked the rest of the way, relieved to feel the blood pumping through the muscles of my
still intact legs.

Waking up the next morning with the odd sensation of being surprised to be alive I threw recklessness to the wind and abandoned my spontaneity programme then and there. I was fed up with the
rigours of impulsive living anyway: I didn’t have the application for it. I couldn’t cope with being stoned at eleven thirty in the morning and that kind of thing. Spontaneity seemed
constantly to tow regret in its wake. Living for the moment was all very well, I decided, but you had to pick your moments carefully. Quite often there was another moment just around the corner
which was much more worth living for than the one you were engaged in.

The phone rang. I picked it up semi-spontaneously. It was Fran.

‘Hi! How’s things?’

‘Good. How are you?’

‘Fine. Listen,’ I said. ‘Dad phoned the other day. He said he’d been trying your number for a week and no one knew where you were.’

‘I’ve been all over the place. OK, I’ll phone him. How are you though? I haven’t seen you for ages.’

We talked for a few more moments like that (neither of us really knew how to chat on the phone) and then arranged to meet.

Fran, I reflected when we’d hung up, was much better suited to the spontaneous lifestyle than me. She had a knack for avoiding the consequences of things. Or rather, like Steranko, she was
at ease
with the consequences of things. When we were on holiday with our parents we would go swimming together and afterwards I would always want to get dry fast and change out of my wet
trunks; Fran, on the other hand, would be happy to build sandcastles or go for a walk along the cliffs in her wet costume, letting the sun and the wind dry her off. And still, as an adult, she
managed to inhabit a world of action and gesture rarely seen outside the cinema, where people walk through streams without taking their boots off, or rush out into the pouring rain wearing only a
shirt, or throw plates at their lover across the room in a fit of passionate rage. I’d love to do all those things – but in real life you always have to get your boots dry, or wake up
with a cold, or sweep up the broken pieces and fork out for new crockery. It’s the same with fighting: afterwards you have to hang around the hospital for three hours waiting to get your nose
X-rayed and straightened, or you’ve got to take your best suit to the dry cleaners to get the blood out and the lapel stitched back on. In the cinema there are only the large consequences of
plot; the mess is cleared up off-screen by stage hands; even a real trouncing leaves only a few cosmetic scars.

In cinema or books the climax of the action, however calamitous, simplifies and resolves – brings things to an end. In real life calamity and confrontation always bring chores in their
wake. There are keys to return, bills to pay, the milk to cancel, people to tell and arrangements to make. It’s like Othello. Two minutes after murdering Desdemona he’s expecting
earthquakes and eclipses and all he gets is the neighbours banging on the door wanting to know what all the noise is about. Or like a friend of mine who was stabbed and got his dole money stopped
because he missed his signing-on day and hadn’t filled out a sickness form while he was on a life-support machine.

At the underground station a group of policemen and women stopped everyone as they passed through the barriers. I joined the long queues at the ticket machines but the police
had no interest in fare-dodgers: they were asking everyone if they had been using the tube at this time a week ago when a woman had been killed between Brixton and Stockwell. I shook my head and
was handed a sheet of paper with MURDER and APPEAL FOR ASSISTANCE printed in large letters at the top. Underneath was a photograph of a woman. She was smiling; the photo was blurred as if it had
been taken at a party where she was laughing and drunk. She was twenty-one, an African, and no one knew anything about her except that she’d been found bleeding to death in an empty carriage
when the train pulled in at Stockwell.

And now, exactly a week later, I sat waiting for the train to pull out. Hunched forward and holding it in both hands like a tiny newspaper, I stared at the photo of the dead girl. On either side
of me a dozen people were doing exactly the same.

Fran came round the next day in an expensive-looking car. I didn’t know what model it was and she wasn’t sure either.

‘I think it’s called a Vauxhall Courgette or something like that,’ she said, kicking one of the front tyres as if to suggest casual familiarity with the world of pistons,
cross-plys and sump oil.

‘Whose car is it?’ I asked as we hummed noiselessly past the new riot-proof Tesco’s on Acre Lane – it had the look of a place which could be air-lifted out to neutral
Vauxhall in under fifteen minutes in the event of trouble.

‘It belongs to the guy who goes out with Sal in my house. He lent it to her and she lent it to me on the strict condition that I don’t have a prang in it. Apparently that’s
what motorists call an accident: a prang.’

Fran wore her glasses to drive. They had big plastic frames that made her look almost comically scholarly. She clutched the wheel like she was steering a ship in heavy weather. We moved very
slowly in dense traffic; I groaned, complained and swore but Fran, showing no sign of irritation, tapped the steering wheel to the rhythm of a pop song that played on the radio. Over the years my
own impatience had become so extreme that I was in danger of becoming incapable of enjoying anything: every activity was an obstacle to the next. This accelerating impatience had nothing to do with
being late or in a hurry; it was a condition not a response. I was even in a hurry when I had nothing to do. On buses I watched traffic lights compulsively, dreading a red, loving a green, happiest
of all when the bus hurtled past a stop without stopping. On holiday I longed for the train journey to end and the holiday proper to begin, and then for the holiday to end and the normal routine to
resume. Fran had always been different. As kids we used to go out for a drive with our parents in their sky-blue Vauxhall Victor. Our father was a very cautious driver and every time someone
overtook us he would say: ‘he’s in a hurry’ and our mother would nod wisely. It used to drive me crazy but Fran would continue looking out of the window and sucking her boiled
sweet. (I’d already chewed and swallowed mine.)

‘What happened to your car in the end?’ she asked after a while.

‘The car-breakers offered me forty quid for scrap so I traded it in for a second-hand tube pass. I miss it sometimes. The other day I was walking past a motor spares shop and I suddenly
had an urge to buy some jump leads.’

‘What are jump leads?’

‘Don’t you know what jump leads are?’

‘No.’

‘They’re those things you lend to people when their car won’t start.’ Eventually we reached the Common and Fran began manoeuvring into a parking space. You’d have
thought we were trying to reverse into a telephone kiosk the way she hauled the wheel first one way and then the other, crawling forwards a few inches and then lurching back after a strangled
screech of protest from the gear-box.

‘Shall I have a go?’

Fran got out and I slithered over into the driving seat. I twisted and shuffled through the various stages of a three-point turn until the car was parked perfectly between two other vehicles
– except that it had its back to the kerb instead of its side.

‘It does sort of extend itself unnecessarily at the front and back doesn’t it?’ Fran called to me through the open window. I extricated the car and got it parallel with the one
in front, vaguely remembering that this was what you were meant to do. This time I must have got the lock just right; it started gliding into the space behind without a murmur of complaint. Fran
was directing me back with that circling motion of the hands that I always associated with the adult world of our father. I reversed another foot or so and Fran continued waving me back until I
crunched into the car behind. I looked again into the mirror and saw Fran absentmindedly urging me back.

‘Dear God! I do not believe it!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Can’t you see what’s happened?’ I said through my clamped, my traffic-wardened teeth. Fran looked down at the cars, surprised for a moment, then put one hand over her
mouth and gave a wide-eyed chuckle.

‘Ooh!’

‘Fran!’

‘What a driver!’

‘Fran!’

‘You might have been a bit more careful,’ she said between laughs. I didn’t begin to see the funny side of it until seconds before it stopped being funny, when the man whose
car we’d hit came bulging out of the cake shop like meat from a pasty. The first thing he saw was the cars; the second was the smile coaxing its way out of my mouth. He looked like the kind
of guy who could get violently angry over something like this: a self-made man who had got where he was through hard graft and wasn’t short of a tattoo or two. There was no point saying
anything. It was just a question of standing there and hoping that whatever he did wouldn’t hurt too much or cause any major structural damage.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ said Fran. ‘I’m afraid we’ve had a bit of a prang.’

The man still didn’t say anything. The bag of whatever it was he was clutching was starting to turn transparently greasy: sausage rolls perhaps. He was breathing thickly through his
nose.

‘Only a little prang really,’ said Fran but as she was saying it the last syllable was already bubbling into a laugh. She tried to stop herself but her eyes were shining with wet
laughter.

‘Just the teeniest little prang,’ she said, holding her thumb and index finger a fraction apart. ‘And we’d be very happy to lend you our jump leads. Unfortunately we
haven’t got any.’

With that she doubled-up laughing. It was OK for Fran. Despite what women claim, in situations like this men are much more at risk than women. The bloke would never hit Fran – he’d
hit me twice as hard and twice as often instead.

‘Something wrong with her?’ the man asked.

‘She’s my sister,’ I said trying not to laugh. Laughing would have revealed my teeth and that might have tempted him to knock them out. I hadn’t been hit for years. I
could hardly remember what it was like but that only made the prospect more frightening – like getting stung by a wasp: I couldn’t remember what that felt like either but the idea of it
was terrifying.

The bloke slid into his car and moved it back a foot or two, then got out again, the engine still running. Fortunately the damage was all self-inflicted. As soon as our car had got within six
inches of his it had bumpered out our rear light and punched in part of the boot.

‘It’s people like you,’ he said looking at me and not Fran who had stopped laughing by now. ‘It’s people like you . . .’ He left it at that. We never found
out what it was that people like us did for him. He just gave me a look that said he could buy me, my sister, the car and everything in it and scrap the lot if he didn’t have about a hundred
other more important things to ruin first. He had some trouble squeezing the car out of the space we’d boxed him into. Fran was drying her eyes, still chuckling.

‘Silly prick,’ she said as he drove off.

‘Shit, Fran,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to be careful with people like that.’

It was a clear but cool day. Fran was wearing a red woollen hat and a grey raincoat which she always called her ‘famous blue raincoat’ – she had gone through a Leonard Cohen
phase a few years back – because it was torn at the shoulder.

‘Anyway, it’s a good job we hadn’t eaten these,’ she said, pulling a polythene bag out of her coat pocket. ‘Things might have got really out of hand.’

‘Are they what I think they are?’

‘Yes,’ she said pouring out half the contents of the bag and handing them to me. The rest she tipped into her mouth. Wrinkling up her face she pulled a can of coke from another
pocket – I was beginning to wonder how many pockets that coat had – opened it and took a big, frothing gulp.

The sky was pale blue as if showing through a gauze of cloud so thin as to hardly be there at all. It was neither summer nor autumn. The sun had none of the intenstity of
summer but the trees were still thick with green leaves. A strong wind came and went. As we walked by the edge of the Common there was barely a breeze. Then we came up on a large tree hissing and
writhing. At our level there was still only the very faintest of breezes, as if the wind existed only in the twisting leaves and rocking branches. Green with time, a large statue of a woman
offering a drink to a lame man had been erected in front of the tree. The man was seated; with one hand the woman helped him drink, the other rested lightly on his shoulder.

We walked on. The Common stretched out vast and flat before us. Up ahead a line of thin trees cast long poles of shadow across the grass. In the distance there was a clump of fertile trees
– slightly hazy as in a landscape by Claude Lorrain. The sun flung clouds across the sky. Every few seconds the light changed: now the clouds were flecked with lemon or pink; within a few
moments they were turning bruise purple. The ground felt hard under our feet. Fran’s face and clothes were bathed in the brightness of the light; the light of the sun burned in her eyes.

We watched a man with two young children and a dog take a large model of a Sopwith Camel out of the boot of a car. The plane was radio-controlled; twiddling with his hand-set the man taxied the
bi-plane along the ground. We watched for about five minutes during which time he sent his children back to the car for spare parts or oil of some sort. Then he tinkered around with the wings and
stepped back, pointing the aerial of the hand-set at the plane. It taxied along the ground for a few more yards but didn’t gain any speed. His kids lost interest and were throwing a
balsa-wood plane at each other; it caught the wind and looped the loop for a few seconds or just floated before falling quietly back to earth. The man had one more go with his radio-controlled
bi-plane but this time it wouldn’t even crawl along the ground.