The Colour of Memory (17 page)

I got up to put a record on the turntable and listened to Coltrane swinging out in wider and wider arcs, aching on the frontier of the possible.

There was a photo of the four members of the string quartet practising together. They were all in their fifties or sixties, dressed in casual clothes with their jackets hung over the back of
their chairs. Two were wearing glasses; one was bald and the other had white or grey hair. They had the look of gentle, considerate men who probably enjoyed a joke together during rehearsals when
one of them played a wrong note or lost his way in the score. Probably they all had wives who may or may not have accompanied them when they made tours of England or the United States. What the
photograph made most plain, however, was that for four or five or however many hours a day they practised they all shared in an activity that probably constituted their main reason for being alive.
Gradually, I imagined, the intricacies of their relationships with each other became expressed and defined entirely by the music they were playing. It was hard to imagine them arguing.

It was equally hard to imagine how great must have been the sense of loss for the three surviving members of the quartet. Perhaps there was some trio for strings by Beethoven or Schubert which
they would continue to play from time to time, a piece which, whatever its mood – even in the lightest, fastest movements – would be saturated, in their interpretation, by their longing
for their dead friend.

There was something beautiful and poignant about the photograph of the middle-aged quartet: the raised bows, the sharp creases in the trousers, the music stands and the look of relaxed
concentration.

The tape was coming to an end, the saxophone choked by its own intensity and drowned by the weight of the drums. I thought of Coltrane who was forty when he died, of Eric Dolphy and Charlie
Parker and Lee Morgan – shot in a nightclub where he was playing; I thought of Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown who died in their mid-twenties, and of Booker Little who died when he was
twenty-three.

The record seemed to end and then, impossibly, the saxophone emerged again, surviving the tidal wave of drums that had broken over it: the resurrection.

Spring was in the air: low cloud and faint drizzle alternating with drenching showers and biting winds. Leaves. Here and there a few chinks of light in the dull armour of the
sky.

Travel Research and Information – the market research company that I worked for from time to time – was organising a huge survey over several rail routes in the south-west of
England. They needed forty additional staff and Steranko, Foomie, Carlton, Freddie and I were all taken on. We had to interview passengers on trains and since some of these trains started from
places like Truro, Exeter and Penzance at six in the morning the company put us up in an assortment of hotels in the region. Freddie and I stayed in a vast hotel in Taunton where the towels were
thick and white, the carpets silent, and the taps eager to fill clean baths with steaming water. Staying away from home was thought to be a great hardship so they paid eight pounds a day expenses.
Once that was used up we loaded as much as possible on to the hotel bill: drinks in the bar, room service, twenty quid dinners, newspapers; even things we didn’t want like salad sandwiches at
two in the morning.

None of us cared about the actual survey and for most of the week we simply ran riot in unspecified parts of southwest England. By careful manipulation of our rosters – suddenly the word
roster loomed huge in our lives – Freddie and I managed to meet up with Steranko and Foomie for a lavish meal in Plymouth where they had a double room in the Fitzwilliam hotel. Another day we
completed our quota of questionnaires quickly and hopped on a train to Exeter where we wolfed down a couple of cream teas for lunch and strolled round the Cathedral.

So far the weather had been dull and overcast but bright sun over the south-west had been forecast for the following day. As Freddie and I tucked into a five-course meal at the hotel that night,
he said that in the circumstances we were virtually obliged to take off to some coastal resort and spend the day lying on a beach, eating ice-cream and making up answers to the questionnaires. The
next day we did a few interviews and then caught a train to Teignmouth where we’d arranged to meet Carlton. By lunch-time the three of us were on the beach, jackets folded up in plastic
shopping bags, sipping cold beers and using questionnaires to keep the sun out of our eyes.

‘Paradise,’ said Carlton, speaking for all of us in a voice that was drowsy from the heat and the beer. ‘Three quid an hour for doing fuck-all.’

‘Not quite fuck-all,’ I said. ‘There’s still the questionnaires to make up.’ Inventing answers was not as simple as we thought; it was very easy to make some little
slip which had your imaginary respondent making an impossible journey or travelling on a non-existent ticket. In a way, as Freddie explained from his deckchair, it was a bit like writing a novel:
you had to invent a character – a retired school teacher, a business executive – and think yourself into his itinerary and probable opinions.

‘We’d better leave it to you in that case then Freddie,’ said Carlton, as we rolled up our trousers and paddled in the grey-green ocean.

We had only been back in London a few days when I got a call from Freddie. He sounded a little strange and said he wouldn’t be coming over that evening.

‘How come?’

‘I got my head beaten in last night.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Home.’

‘Have you been to hospital?’

‘I went this morning.’

‘Are you OK? I mean . . .’

‘I suppose so.’

‘How . . . ? Hey listen, I’ll come over late this afternoon.’

‘That would be nice.’

‘About four or five. Is there anything I can bring you?’

‘No.’

On the way to Freddie’s I stopped at the record stall in Brixton market and bought an Art Pepper album. Freddie took a while to come to the door – I heard him shuffling along the
corridor like an old man – and when he opened it he just nodded slowly. He was wearing dark glasses. His face looked puffed up and purple in places.

‘Freddie,’ I said, feeling tears pricking my eyes. I put my arm around his shoulder. I closed my eyes tight a couple of times and then stepped back.

Freddie took off his glasses and in the bright sunlight I could see the harm done to his face. One side was swollen out around the cheekbone and badly discoloured; the other was livid and
bright-looking. There were small cuts on his forehead and cheek. One eye was swollen shut and purple; the other was bloodshot but basically OK. His lips and nose were swollen. Both nostrils were
filled with hard black blood. His voice came out thick and bubbly because the inside of his mouth was smashed and swollen. He looked so bad it was difficult to imagine his face ever healing
again.

We walked to his room and Freddie lay on the bed, propped up on pillows.

‘I’m so sorry Freddie.’

‘Me too.’

‘Are you going to be OK?’

‘Yeah.’

It didn’t matter that this was all we said. It didn’t matter that we didn’t hold each other and sob, that words adequate to the situation were not there. Tenderness is a matter
of inflection, not vocabulary.

‘I’ve brought you a record,’ I said. ‘I thought getting something for nothing might cheer you up.’

‘That was kind of you . . .’

‘How d’you feel?’

‘I’ve felt better. My head aches, I get dizzy when I stand up, my nose hurts, my mouth is sore. My ribs hurt . . .’

‘What happened at the hospital?’

‘I spent the whole morning there. I was sitting next to a bloke with a big bloody bandage round his foot, tucking into a bag of McDonald’s burgers. Have you been to a hospital
recently?’

‘No . . .’

‘It was like a DHSS waiting-room. The same atmosphere: people driven there as a last resort. Everything old and worn out and not even clean-looking. All the doctors and nurses looking like
they were going to drop dead from exhaustion at any moment. I tell you, I’m going to join BUPA.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They took a whole load of X-rays. Basically I’m alright. My teeth are still all there, my nose and jaw aren’t broken. My eyes don’t seem to be damaged . . .’

There was a loud knock at the door.

‘That’ll be Carlton,’ said Freddie. I let Carlton in and made some tea while he went in to Freddie.

When I returned with the tray Carlton was very gently dabbing Freddie’s face with something.

‘It’s arnica,’ he said. ‘It brings the swelling down and soothes everything. How’s that feel Freddie?’

‘OK. Nice.’

Carlton continued very gently putting this thin cream on Freddie’s face. Again my eyes nettled with tears. I poured the tea while Freddie – he couldn’t drink, his mouth was too
bad – told us what happened. He’d just come out of a party when a young guy asked him the time. Freddie said he didn’t have a watch and next thing the guy was hitting him all over
the place. He didn’t even take any money.

‘I don’t remember much else,’ Freddie concluded. ‘Except that just after I’d fallen on the floor he kicked me in the chest but I had a book in my coat pocket and
that took the brunt of it.’

‘What was the book?’

‘Rilke poems funnily enough. It’s made me regard him in a whole new light.’

A few moments later Carlton said, ‘Did you get a look at the geezer?’

‘Not really. I hardly saw him. Just a young black guy, short hair, leather jacket. About twenty I suppose. Younger maybe.’

‘Would you recognise him again?’

‘No. You know, he was just some guy who was so pissed off he wanted to beat somebody’s shit in so he’d feel a bit better,’ said Freddie. ‘It could’ve been a
lot worse. I wasn’t stabbed. Nothing’s broken . . . Once in six years, you know? It happens.’

We stopped speaking and listened to Art Pepper. It was a recording of a gig he played a couple of years before he died, the music of someone who’d learnt to cherish what he did. Pepper was
an alcoholic and a junkie; he served time in San Quentin, but he didn’t squander his ability by getting as fucked up as he did. He had to waste his talent in order for it finally to flourish.
As an artist his weakness was essential to him; in his playing it became a source of strength.

The room filled up with hurt pity and the tenderness of scarred hands. The music cried out but there was no appeal in it; it had to find its own consolation.

I was still at that age when you do not form friendships but are formed by them, when there is no difference between having good friends and being a good friend. I’d known Freddie for a
long time, six or seven years, twice as long at least as I’d known any of my other friends. I hardly ever kept in touch with people for more than three years – Freddie was the only
exception I could think of. After about three years of knowing a group of people your identity becomes fixed by their expectations, you become trapped by your shared history; your range of
responses becomes more and more limited. After a certain point there’s no room for anything but the most gradual alteration in your identity. The past suffocates and restricts and the only
way you can breathe and move again is with completely new circumstances, new people. With Freddie it was different. My affection for him exerted no pressure. I mean the kind of pressure where
liking someone makes you want to be like them – this was exactly how I felt about Steranko – and then, after a while, that turns into its opposite: you begin to dislike them for not
being enough like you. I say ‘you’; I mean ‘I’.

Freddie once said that friends are the difference between being a spectator and a participant and I remembered how, together with another friend who I’d since lost touch with, the three of
us had got beaten up by one guy outside a party in Putney. ‘Go on: all three of you rush me,’ he’d said after hitting each of us once. ‘Right,’ he said when we all
just stood there, ‘now I’m really going to teach you a lesson,’ and he proceeded to instruct each of us in turn. Eventually we ran off with no real damage done – a fat lip,
a black eye, a bloody nose – and soon the whole episode was remembered only as anecdote fodder. This was about the time when – on the basis of having flicked through
The Dharma
Bums
and watched several episodes of ‘Kung Fu’ – Freddie claimed to be a Buddhist. That lasted about six weeks and soon after we dropped our first tabs of acid. I remembered
Freddie, notebook in hand, waiting for something to happen. ‘Am turning inside out’ was the only entry he made.

The record came to an end. Freddie had fallen asleep and was breathing heavily through his mouth. I looked at Carlton and we smiled. I made more tea and Carlton put on another record. When that
one finished we played another, letting the room grow dark around us, hearing the hiss of the gas fire between songs. Freddie woke about an hour later, unsure where he was or what had happened to
him.

‘Where am I?’ He looked at Carlton and me, glad we were still there.

We stayed until nine. We told Freddie we’d phone him tomorrow.

‘Thanks . . . for the record and the arnica,’ he said as we left. ‘Take care.’

‘You too.’

Carlton and I walked part of the way home together. Getting done over in some way was just a question of time really. You hoped that when your turn came it wouldn’t be anything too bad,
that it would just be young kids who were only after your money, that if you handed it over you’d be free to go, that if you got punched to the ground you wouldn’t get a kicking too,
that if they pulled a knife they’d slash and not stab; and you hoped that you would spot the moment when the only chance left was to run – and that if the worst came to the worst, if
all else failed, you would have the presence of mind to lash out with whatever came to hand.

Later that week Foomie’s flat got burgled. They came in through the bathroom window and took a cassette player and a portable TV. Foomie said it made her feel glad she
didn’t own anything.