The Colour of Memory (7 page)

Pursued by the tolling of the town-hall clock I left Steranko’s at midnight and walked home through drizzle so fine it was hardly more than a damp breeze. Behind me I heard the sound of
running. I turned round, feeling the first warning shock of adrenalin, my arm half raised to protect myself, as someone charged past. A few seconds later he disappeared round a corner, still
running, feet slapping hard on the wet pavement. My heart was beating fast. People tended not to run like that after dark round here. It was like a false alarm that set others on edge and made them
nervous – it looked too much like you were running away from something.

That was on Wednesday. On Saturday morning Carlton and Freddie called for me and the three of us called for Steranko.

We trooped up the stairs to his room, opened the door and found that everything in it had been moved round. Steranko did this from time to time, turning his room from a place of relaxation into
an obstacle course for living in. There were coloured scaffolding poles everywhere, the bed was perched up on a platform of planks about six feet in the air and most of the other things he used
regularly – record-player, books – were stored well above eye-level. If you went to bed drunk and got up for a piss in the night it seemed unlikely that you’d be able to find your
way back to the bed. Steranko was nowhere to be seen. Freddie called his name and Steranko’s head appeared over the side of the bed.

‘What time is it?’ he said, still half-asleep.

‘Twelve thirty.’

Carlton dumped a pile of clothes on the floor and sat on the seat they’d been occupying. I looked out of the window which was thick with grime that the sun arranged in patterns. To the
left of the window there was an easel with the beginnings of a painting. Propped up against one wall was a battered-looking cello. Steranko had lain back on the bed and disappeared from view. He
reappeared a few moments later, yawning and rubbing his head.

‘How come you’re here so early?’

‘You said come round for breakfast before Foomie’s party.’

‘Did I?’

‘No but we came anyway,’ said Freddie. There was some rustling up on the bed. Steranko pulled on a dressing-gown and swung himself down to ground level.

‘So what’s this supposed to be?’ Carlton asked, gesturing towards the bed. ‘Urban Tarzan or what?’

‘It’s my experiment in negative ergonomics. An attempt to turn the fabric of the everyday inside out. It’s pretty exhausting.’

‘I bet. So that’s why the bed’s up there . . .’

‘A man’s bed should be like an eagle’s nest – Nietzsche said that,’ explained Steranko.

‘Did he fuck,’ said Carlton.

‘What he really said was only a fool goes to bed while he could still be working,’ said Freddie. ‘He used to sleep about half an hour a day in his bed and spend the rest of the
time nodding off at his desk because he couldn’t bear the idea of being proved stupid by his own logic. That’s what I call will power.’

Steranko grunted and headed towards the bathroom.

‘Have you still got that trumpet Steranko?’ Carlton asked.

‘It’s over there in that case. You want to buy it?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I thought I was buying that,’ I said. Hearing Carlton say he was interested in the trumpet made me suddenly certain that I wanted to buy it. Up until then I hadn’t been
bothered one way or the other.

‘First come first served. Maybe you’d be better off with the cello,’ he said, glancing towards it and then going out the door. A great variety of musical instruments passed
through Steranko’s hands. He picked them up cheaply, learned to play them a little, and then sold them.

Carlton took the trumpet from its case, inserted the mouthpiece and made a few screeching blasts. There was no hint of a note let alone a tune but he was wearing a suit and looked good (‘a
little like the young Miles Davis even,’ said Freddie).

When he had finished I picked up the trumpet and blew loud and tunelessly. Freddie meanwhile was sawing away at the cello and by the time Steranko got back from the bathroom Carlton was banging
out random notes on the out-of-tune piano in the corner.

‘What a racket,’ Steranko said, rubbing his face with a towel.

‘It’s free-form, man,’ Carlton said. ‘Collective improvisation.’ Freddie and I sniggered; Steranko looked pissed off.

‘I’ve only been awake five minutes,’ he said.

‘How much do you want for the trumpet then,’ Carlton asked.

‘Twenty-five quid.’

‘Thirty,’ I said, gazumping Carlton.

‘Do I hear thirty-five?’ Steranko said, buttoning up his trousers.

‘You’ll never learn to play it,’ Carlton said.

‘Probably not but at least I’ll stop you getting it,’ I said.

‘You can have it,’ said Carlton, ‘and I bet in six months you still can’t play anything remotely resembling “My Funny Valentine”.’

‘I only want to play “The Last Post” anyway,’ I said. ‘Something to bring tears to my eyes.’

‘I bet a fiver you’ve given it up completely in a month,’ Carlton said.

‘You’re on,’ I said, extending my hand. ‘Shake.’

‘Two months,’ said Carlton extending his.

‘Actually now that you don’t want it I’m not sure I’ll even buy it,’ I said, withdrawing mine.

‘Jesus,’ said Steranko, putting a record on the turntable. ‘What a kid.’ A few moments later the clean, intelligent emotion of Jan Garbarek’s tenor filled the room.
Audible landscapes formed and re-formed themselves around us. Morning music, mist melting in the sun.

‘It’s going to be a nice day,’ Carlton said.

We went down into the kitchen where Steranko stirred a saucepan of porridge. He made porridge perfectly and patiently and ate it every day regardless of the weather.

When it was ready he filled four bowls. Carlton dumped in a lot of brown sugar and then some more after he’d taken one mouthful. It was still too hot to eat. We blew on it. Carlton poured
more sugar in.

We were all blowing on our porridge and taking gasped spoonfuls from round the edge. It felt like it was burning my stomach.

‘Beautiful,’ said Carlton when it had cooled down enough to eat.

‘You sure it’s sweet enough?’

When we’d finished Steranko chucked the bowls in the sink and we went back up to his room. While Steranko finished getting ready Carlton fiddled around with the cello.

‘Can you play this?’ he asked, leaning it back against the chair.

‘Not really,’ Steranko said. He reached for the cello, settled himself behind it, ran the bow across the strings a couple of times and then played what was recognisably the beginning
of Bach’s first cello suite. Freddie, Carlton and I clapped.

‘That’s all I know,’ Steranko said, smiling.

Carlton had to call for Belinda but Steranko, Freddie and I arrived together at Foomie’s place. The party was already in full swing. Foomie smiled warmly at both Steranko
and me and said how glad she was that we could come. We introduced her to Freddie and they said hello and smiled at each other. Foomie was in a black sleeveless dress. Her hair was piled up and
tied in a bright scarf and she wore big gold earrings. She asked if we wanted some punch but the three of us, at exactly the same moment, all said ‘BEER’. The single perfectly
synchronised syllable belched loudly into the room, followed quickly by three separate mumbles of ‘please’. I could feel myself blushing.

‘Help yourself,’ Foomie said, pointing to the neat stack of cans on a sturdy table. The doorbell rang and she went to answer it, leaving the three of us standing in an awkward
huddle.

‘I think we really made an impression there,’ Freddie said.

‘What a start,’ Steranko said and then we just stood there, drinking fast and looking round. There was a lot to drink but there were a lot of people to drink it as well. I opened a
second can. Soul records were playing in another room.

Steranko and Freddie drifted off. I stood in a corner, feigning intensity until Mary came over and handed me a joint. I remembered Mary from years ago when she would ask, wide-eyed, if Robert
Mugabe was the fat one or the other one but in the last year she had suddenly got politics – it was like she’d received them in the post after a slight delay somewhere along the line. I
liked Mary but her zest for arguing things through was sometimes a little wearying. After a film she always insisted that the sex scenes were pornographic, that the rape scene suggested that women
liked being raped, that the husband’s slapping his wife endorsed violence against women and so on. She recounted arguments with people where they had said they weren’t interested in
politics and she had responded by pointing out that everything is political. Her favourite expressions were ‘offensive’ and ‘ideologically unsound’. The latter she used so
often that it was virtually a form of punctuation, occasionally reversing its meaning and using it as an indication of unqualified approval as in ‘ideologically sound’. Mostly, though,
she preferred it in the negative mode when referring to buying Jaffa oranges, having service washes at the laundry or reading Martin Amis.

Now she was explaining to me how we were all bisexual really.

‘But I don’t want to sleep with men,’ I said.

‘How do you know you don’t?’

‘That’s a daft question: you might just as well ask me how I know I don’t want to eat concrete. I just don’t want to.’

‘That depends on how deeply you may have repressed the homosexual side of your character.’

‘I think I’d know by now if I had any homosexual inclinations.’

‘Not when you’re brought up in a culture that makes you think of homosexuality as abnormal, wrong.’

‘I still think I’d know by now.’

‘How do you feel about gay men?’

‘Fine.’

‘Are any of your friends gay?’

‘Not close friends really.’

‘Are you homophobic?’

‘No, I’ve just said: hardly any of my best friends are gay.’

‘What?’

‘Well all the time we’re told that every anti-Semite or racist starts by saying that some of his best friends are Jews or blacks or whatever . . .’

‘Very funny.’

‘True too, actually. Almost all of my best friends are heterosexual.’

‘D’you ever hug your friends?’ (Talking with Mary I quite often had the impression that I was being vetted for membership of some obscure new men’s group.)

‘No.’

‘What if one of them needed comforting?’

‘Comforting and hugging aren’t the same thing. Personally, I’ve never really taken much comfort from being hugged.’

‘And what about kissing? When you meet women you know you kiss them. Why don’t you kiss the men you know?’

‘I don’t always kiss the women I know. Generally I prefer to shake hands with people. The handshake is one of the great conventions of civilised living. Kissing is something else
altogether.’

‘In different cultures men kiss each other.’

‘But we’re in this culture. Men kissing each other in this culture is just an affectation.’

‘What about crying? D’you feel embarrassed about it? D’you think men shouldn’t cry?’

‘I prefer it when they don’t.’

‘When did you last cry?’

‘I can’t remember. Ages ago.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘Look, I mean crying is not that easy. It’s not something that comes naturally. You have to work at it like everything else. What’s so special about crying anyway?’

‘There’s nothing special about crying. It’s just that men are conditioned to repress their feelings. Do you ever touch your male friends?’

‘Well we touch each other for a drink now and again . . .’

‘Now you’re just being sarcastic.’

‘No I’m not and no I don’t touch my friends that much. But what’s so special about touching? I hate this facile equation of tactility with intimacy.’

‘Men are incapable of expressing affection for one another.’

‘Listen,’ I said, dimly aware that I was using the bigot’s prefixes, ‘look’ and ‘listen’, as if I were issuing instructions on kerb drill. ‘Look,
women are always accusing men of reducing affection to sex, yes?’

‘It’s true – they do.’

‘But in arguing that men can’t express affection for each other because they’re frightened of touching each other you duplicate exactly that reduction of the expression of
affection to the physical.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘Look . . .’

‘There’s no need to shout . . .’ (A purely rhetorical ploy, this, designed to make me shout.)

‘I’m not shouting,’ I said, bait taken, voice raised.

‘All men – or most men – it seems to me, are constantly competing, just like you’ve turned this conversation into a competition.’

‘No I haven’t.’

‘Men are always bullying, either bullying women or trying to prove they’ve got a bigger dick than the next man . . .’

‘These are just clichés,’ I interrupted rudely. ‘You think in clichés – more recent ones than those you oppose but they’re clichés all the
same.’

‘You’re the one that’s coming out with clichés. And you’re being rude . . .’

‘No I’m not.’

‘Anyway I’m bored with this conversation. Let’s talk about something else.’ For the next couple of minutes we weaned ourselves off rhetoric and back on to pleasantries.
We talked about what we’d been doing and stuff like that and then Mary went off to get another drink.

I crossed the room to where Freddie was talking energetically to someone about writing. You had to hand it to him: he really looked the part. He was wearing a corduroy jacket, suede shoes and a
tie. Every now and then he took his glasses out of his jacket pocket, put them on and took them off again. (‘My new affectation,’ he’d once described it as, ‘one part
Morrissey to one part George Steiner.’)

‘
I always wanted to be a writer
,’ he was saying. ‘Now that is the tense of great fiction. Only really great writers get a chance to come out with that kind of
thing.’

‘Did you always want to be a writer?’ said the woman he was talking to.

‘I got forced into it. I mean I got fed up doing nothing. Now most days I still do nothing but at least I feel I’m meant to be doing something. As an incentive I pay myself
psychological overtime: time-and-a-half after seven o’clock, double-time after midnight, triple-time at weekends. So if I put in a good four or five hours on a Sunday I can take the rest of
the week off,’ said Freddie, pausing to swallow a mouthful of beer and then tossing away the empty can. ‘And that’s the really great thing about writing: you can take a whole week
off and nobody is going to give a shit: that’s the kind of powers writers wield. They can withdraw their labour at any moment – no need to ballot – and that’s fine by
everybody. Nobody’s going to dock your wages, nobody’s going to get shit-face if you turn up at your desk hungover or late and knock off at four o’clock after a two-hour
lunch-break. A toss is exactly what no one will give about anything you do.’