Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

All that first day and for most of the ones that followed I longed for time to pass and dreamed of doing fuck-all. Typically I spent a good part of any morning trying to tunnel my way out of a hangover before getting down to the serious business of skiving and flat-hunting. I was in no shape to work: being homeless, I slept at the flat of whichever friend I happened to be seeing on a particular night, went into work, changed into a suit and slowly assumed the identity of a diligent employee as the morning wore on. Sometimes I didn’t make the transition until the afternoon; sometimes I didn’t make it at all. If I was out very late I let myself into the office at two or three in the morning, slept on the couch in reception and then shaved in the washroom and clambered into my suit before anybody else arrived. The good thing about this arrangement was that by the time anybody else turned up I was already beavering away like a going-places company man. The bad thing was that it was difficult to sleep properly on the couch and by eleven in the morning I felt like Lazarus.

I was in even worse shape than usual on the Wednesday morning when Mr Caravanette said he wanted to have a word with me in his office. The night before I’d had a brief glimpse of what the ten-to-six lifestyle entails. Having got to work dutifully enough at ten fifteen I left at five thirty and met people for a drink in Soho. Swilled out by eight o’clock, I stayed on for another hour’s dousing and then travelled up to Highbury to crash at a friend’s place. On our way we called in at the local pub, stayed till eleven and then dropped in at the chippie. I woke up on the sofa the next morning with my suit for pyjamas and a half-eaten bag of cod and chips for a pillow. I got into work smelling like I’d washed my hair in salt and vinegar shampoo and dried it in the deep frier.

As I tidied myself up before going to Mr Caravanette’s office I thought it was highly unlikely — all things considered — that he would offer me a seat on the board. I knew I was going to get a dressing down and a strip torn off but that was fine by me. Getting told off had quite a lot going for it: it didn’t hurt and it didn’t cost money. Getting told off I could handle.

Mr Caravanette was a self-made man with a face like a toupee, a silver-haired slug stuffed into a fat pink shirt with his initials embroidered over the left tit. The shirt fitted him like a bun fits a burger and ketchup: he was squeezing out of it any way he could.

Mr Caravanette was a busy man. His time was so valuable that he didn’t want to waste any of it walking to the kitchen (where I had been known to take up to twenty minutes to make a trayful of coffee). He had a kettle in his room and he switched it on as I sat down. His desk was crammed with stacks of correspondence, memos, intercoms and telephones, all this clutter indicating my comparative unimportance in the face of the many and varied responsibilities that converged here.

The problem, he said, was my attitude. Now attitude, I knew, was shorthand for ‘bad attitude’; a good attitude was like a bad guard dog — invisible and inaudible. Mr Caravanette then outlined exactly what he meant: I was slovenly round the office, I took a long time to do things, my letters needed correcting. .

‘No they don’t,’ I said.

‘. . And your office is a mess.’ (Dead right — it didn’t even look like an office; it looked like the bedroom of a rebellious adolescent. Being homeless I’d ended up keeping most of the things I needed on a day-to-day basis — clothes, tapes, books, squash racket and so on — in a filing cabinet but gradually they had spilled on to the floor. My filing wasn’t all it could have been either.) As he continued with his list of grievances I got the first inkling that maybe I was on the brink of a sending off or a disqualification, not the booking or public warning that I’d first imagined. Meanwhile the catalogue of breached office protocol continued:

‘You don’t even wear shoes in the office.’

‘They were pinching my feet,’ I whined.

‘That’s not my problem.’

‘I know it’s not. That’s why I took off my shoes not yours. Besides, what difference does it make? The only people who see my socks are the people who work here. Has somebody complained about my socks?’

‘Look I’m not here to argue about your socks. .’

I think he was about to call me ‘sonny’ but changed his mind, possibly because the kettle, after a lot of huffing and puffing, had managed to work itself up to a steamy climax.

‘As I say, I’m not here to argue with you,’ he said, absentmindedly taking a book from his shelf and weighing it in his hand as if he might, at any moment, throw it at me. ‘Things aren’t working out as we hoped and I think it’s best for all parties concerned. .’

And that was that. He was giving me a month’s money. I could leave in the afternoon. Maybe with a month’s money I could sort myself out. .

‘Sort myself out?’

‘Get a grip on things.’

‘Get a grip on things?’

‘Pull your socks up?’

‘Pull my socks up?’

As the kettle subsided into sighs and rattles I looked at Mr Caravanette, at the boardroom glaze of his glasses, at the hands sitting heavily on the desk in front of him. Eventually I said, ‘Is that all?’

He said it was.

I left his office shaking slightly. It was a piss-bin job but you always feel demoralised and foolish when you’ve been sacked. It’s like getting punched: by the time you see it coming it’s too late to do anything about it.

My workmates all wanted to know what Caravanette had said. I told them about it through a half-hearted grin. They all said how unfair it was but there’s something about losing your job that makes people take a step back in case it might be catching. The swish of the guillotine generates excitement, fear and, at the same time, a sense of relief — that it’s you not them — which also serves as a warning.

I didn’t want to stick around. I went into the office of the old toad in accounts to get my month’s money. I’d heard from someone that I ought to watch out for her, that she’d said a couple of things to Caravanette. Now she uttered a few sympathetic murmurs.

‘Just give me the fucking money will you?’

What with all my stuff in the filing cabinet and desk and everywhere it was less like getting sacked from a job than being evicted from a flat. I packed a small hold-all and arranged to pick up everything else some other time.

I left before lunch. Everybody said stay in touch.

From a payphone I called Fran’s house but nobody had seen her for a couple of days.

‘D’you want to leave a message?’

‘If you could just say her brother called. I’ll try her again.’

I wandered round Soho in the rain for a while, unsure what to do next. Getting fired was bad news. It wasn’t something I’d counted on or planned but at least I had a month’s money in my pocket. I’d have some spare time again as well. During the time I’d been working I’d badly missed the life I’d been leading for the two or three years before: signing on, doing casual jobs when they came up. Getting sacked meant a return to normal life.

I walked up Charing Cross Road, past Leisure Hell or whatever it’s called where the noise of electronic whooping and cascading money rushed out on to the wet street from the flashing, purple interior. The kids in there looked like ghosts, their pale faces tattooed by agile shrieks of light.

When I woke up the next morning I had no idea where or who I was. Gradually I realised ‘I was at Freddie’s — he’d gone away for a few days and had lent me his keys — and that I was someone whose circumstances were enviable only from the perspective of total dereliction. No job and nowhere to live. The slippery slope. I lay in bed and wondered at what point somebody actually becomes derelict? You can see how it starts (a run of bad luck; losing your job, having nowhere to live, slipping through the social security net) and how it ends, but the long interim tends to take place invisibly. That is probably the most painful part: when you are still tormented by the thought that one last effort of will might improve things. From then on time means nothing; there is only weather, benches and booze.