Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

‘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.’

At the end of this little speech — I’d heard earlier drafts at other parties — Freddie looked as if he would have appreciated a round of applause. I handed him a can of lager instead.