Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

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.