Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

‘What’s it for?’ Belinda asked. Luther looked up, saw a white man and a black woman, and said, ‘Mandela.’

Inside the cafe a woman was trying to serve food and hold on to a baby at the same time. It seemed certain that either the baby or the contents of its stomach were going to end up in the stew before the day was out. Service was understandably slow. Belinda tapped her feet. The sun blared through the large plate glass roasting bag of the window. Belinda’s friends hadn’t showed up yet. We ordered a pot of tea and went outside and shared a table with a white rasta. He had a wispy beard and sunken, kidney-problem eyes. There was only one person in the world who didn’t think he looked like a jerk and we were sitting next to him. After a couple of minutes he unlocked his bike and left. A damp waitress brought out tea and we drank it, sweating, in hot gulps.

‘Nice shirt,’ Belinda shouted to a young punk who slouched past with ‘Sceptic Death’ printed on the back of his black shirt. He took it as a compliment. Carmel and Manda showed up together and Belinda introduced me. They were both wearing sunglasses.

‘No sign of Foomie?’ Manda said, taking her glasses off.

‘You know what she’s like.’

They ordered some cold drinks and sucked at them through straws.

‘Here she is,’ Belinda said, laughing and waving. Foomie walked slowly towards us, smiling. She had on a T-shirt, large black shorts, red ankle-socks.

‘Where’ve you been Foomie?’ Carmel called out.

‘An hour late,’ said Belinda, smiling.

Foomie came over and kissed all three of them. Her arms were thin and muscular. Her hair was pulled tight to one side of her head and tumbled down like black weeping willow over the side of her face. She looked sleepy but her eyes were unhurried and calm as water in a glass.

‘I’m never drinking again,’ she said, holding Belinda’s hand. ‘My head. It feels like it’s made of tupperware.’ Carmel shifted over so that Foomie could share her seat. She ordered mineral water and siphoned off an inch of Carmel’s orange.

Belinda introduced Foomie and me and we shook hands for a moment. She smiled but there was something instantly different in her manner. She was friendly but formal, not at all like she was with her three friends and not at all like Belinda who was abrasive and funny from the moment you met her. I’d heard of Foomie but this was the first time I’d actually met her. Previously, she’d either just left before I arrived somewhere or she was meant to have turned up at a party but had got side-tracked and ended up somewhere completely different.

Foomie’s water arrived. She drank it in one gulp, gasped and ordered another. The four of them talked about what they’d been doing, laughing loudly and sipping drinks. I laughed and smiled but didn’t say anything. I was sitting there but I was like a guy at another table hidden by his newspaper. I looked at Foomie, at her arms and hair, and had a sense of gravity rippling around her limbs.

‘Steranko!’ I shouted suddenly, seeing him cycling home from Brixton Recreation Centre in training shoes and an old tracksuit. He came over and leant against the crossbar of his bike. We joked for a few moments until Belinda introduced him to everybody. He noticed Foomie and she noticed him, his gestures, the way he moved. I watched how they shook hands and smiled at each other. His sleeves were pushed up above the elbows; the veins stood out on his forearms. He was unshaven, his body had that easy assurance that comes after intense physical exertion. There was a clarity about his movements. He ran a paint-splashed hand through his hair, dripping with sweat or water from a shower.

‘What have you been doing?’ Belinda asked.

‘Squash,’ he said.

‘You’re so fucking sporty Steranko.’ At this point I wanted, quite badly, to point out that I’d absolutely hammered him the last time we’d played squash. And tennis.

‘We’ve got to go,’ Carmel said. ‘It’s practice time.’

‘Where shall we go?’

‘Let’s go to my house.’

‘Why don’t we go to my house. It’s nearer.’

‘My place is near too.’

‘We never go to my house.’

‘It’s too far away.’

‘No it’s not and I’ve got a double-tape cassette player.’

‘I’ve got a double cassette player too and it’s much better than yours. I only bought it six weeks ago. Yours hardly works.’

‘It works perfectly.’

‘I don’t care where we go.’

‘Nor do I.’

‘Let’s just go.’

Steranko and I listened and grinned at each other. There was an elaborate chorus of goodbyes and then we watched them walk away. When they had gone it was as if their ghosts were still there in the chairs, as if the air was still used to shaping itself around them. I could hear their voices all over again like a perfect echo.

‘Well. .’ said Steranko a few minutes later, holding the handlebars of his bike with one hand as we walked up the road together.

‘Exactly,’ I said.

‘God, you take one look at her and all you want to do is cry.’

‘She’s got those kind of looks that make you feel really sorry for yourself,’ I said as we manoeuvred our way through tired women clinging to their prams. ‘Still, you seem to be taking it pretty well.’

‘Taking what well?’

‘Foomie. It’s obvious it’s me she fancies but you don’t seem to be sulking about it or anything.’

‘You took the words out of my mouth,’ said Steranko and we both laughed like college boys.

Steranko was leant up against the bar, studying the original gravity information on the beer pumps. He was wearing his working clothes — paint-splattered jeans, an old sweatshirt — and his fingers and nails were black with paint and grease. He bought me a drink and we sat next to two women who were quite often in the pub.

‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you,’ I said.

‘Go on.’

‘The good news is that Foomie — remember her, that gorgeous woman at the Jacaranda?’

‘Of course.’

‘She’s having a party this Saturday. In the afternoon.’

‘In the afternoon?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s the bad news?’

‘You’re not invited.’

‘You’re kidding.’

I shook my head: ‘Fraid not.’

‘Are you invited?’

‘Very definitely.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It’s alright, I’ll tell you what it was like, what she was wearing, what she said to me — all that kind of thing.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. I bet you’re really pissed off. I know I would be.’

We drank beer.

‘And I’m really not invited?’

‘Course you are. Carlton just phoned. She asked him very specifically to invite both of us.’

‘Brilliant,’ Steranko said, smiling.

‘We can ask Freddie to come too,’ I said.

Steranko nodded: ‘She’s so beautiful.’

‘Yeah, isn’t she.’

‘What about Carmel? D’you fancy her?’

‘No. Do you?’ One of the women opposite us glanced across disapprovingly but didn’t say anything.

‘Not really. What about Manda?’

‘Not really.’

‘No, me neither.’

This was one of the irritating aspects of my friendship with Steranko. We both tended to fancy the same women — and they tended to fancy him. We looked similar but it was always Steranko they went for.

‘I’ve got some good news for you too,’ Steranko said after a while.

‘What’s that?’

‘I’ve got that money I owe you.’

‘Great.’

I swallowed the rest of my beer in a big gulp just as time was called. The two women next to us started putting on extra layers of clothing and then picked up two crash-helmets. We left soon after them, just in time to see them roaring off down the road, hunched over a powerful motorbike.