Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

‘Yeah, you’re right man,’ Steranko said, looking out of the window at the rain. ‘Shit. I can’t think of anything I want to do this afternoon.’

‘I just want to stroke my winnings,’ said Freddie. ‘How much did you say those cardigans were Steranko?’

I spent the next week working with Carlton, decorating a house near Camberwell. The job took longer than expected and it wasn’t until Friday afternoon as we walked home up Cold Harbour Lane that we found the time to drop in at the dole office to sign on. What with the work and the dole office being open such limited hours we’d both missed our signing days. The woman behind the reinforced plate glass asked me why I was two days late.

‘I had a job interview,’ I said.

‘What about you?’ she said to Carlton.

‘I had a job interview,’ he said. She gave us a warning each, smiling as she did so and not bothering to comment on our paint-splattered clothes. She wrote down our next signing date which was in just under two weeks’ time and that was that.

With the exception of my brief period of above-board employment my dole had been running smoothly for years. Once your money is coming through regularly — housing benefit included — the essential thing is to keep your life in a state of perpetual stasis as far as the DHSS is concerned. Avoid any change of circumstance since even declaring a few days’ work can lead to massive complications. Dealing with that kind of thing makes life more difficult for the people working there so they much prefer you to keep any change in your prospects to yourself. Every now and again I got a visit from someone concerned at the way my career seemed to have made no progress at all in the last two years but I told them I was keeping myself occupied (‘I use the library a great deal’) and not contemplating suicide and they went off reassured. A couple of weeks previously, though, I’d had to attend some kind of interview down in Crystal Palace — failure to attend, said the notice, would result in my benefit being stopped — where an understanding, polite but suspicious-looking woman grilled me about what I was up to, why I’d been sacked from my last job, and what sort of work I wanted. To each question I gave precisely the answer I thought likely to preclude any further questions but she persisted for about twenty minutes. I persisted in resisting her persistence, assuring her that my attitude towards finding a job had improved considerably.

‘I’ve got my mind straight,’ I said. ‘I’ve had some interviews and some very encouraging rejection letters. I really think things have started to move.’ That seemed to satisfy her or at least satisfied the criteria she had to satisfy in order to bring the interview to an end. She gave me some leaflets and wished me luck. I thanked her warmly and left, less pissed off than I might have been in the circumstances.

Carlton was meeting Belinda in Franco’s, the pizza place in the covered market. I was worn out from the decorating and said I’d see him later.

Effra Road felt like a flight of stairs and the closer I got to home the wearier I became. My legs were heavy as rucksacks, my eyes full of hot grit. I envied my shadow for the way it was able to just slide and crawl along the ground.

My neighbour, George, was coming out of his flat just as I was unlocking the door of mine. He was about sixty and lugubrious would be an over-energetic way of describing him. For the last twenty years or so, as far as I could gather, his main ambition in life had been to get out of the rain. Everything else — such as what he did once he was out of the rain — was secondary.

‘How’s it going then George?’ I said fiddling with the lock.

‘Oh mustn’t grumble,’ he said and went on to grumble about anything that came to mind.

‘Looking forward to Christmas though?’

‘Not really son, not really.’

I opened my door and said to George that I’d see him later.

‘Oh well, plod on, son.’

Back in the flat I stumbled into a scene from a low-budget horror film. The mess was too much for the cockroaches: one, the size of a half crown, was in the sink doing the dishes, another was hoovering the floor; a few anonymous amoebatype things were taking it easy in the bath; dead wasps and flies which I’d swatted over the course of the preceding two weeks but neglected to clear up were petrifying on window sills or glueing themselves to the panes. The airing cupboard smelled like I’d been frying hamburgers in it; the cooker was covered in a solidified yellow ooze which I judged to have come from some mackerel I’d tried to lightly baste in butter a few days previously. Near the black sack that I used as a bin, looking as if it had failed in a last ditch bid to escape from the rubbish and find a more hygenic resting place, lay the partially eaten carcass of a chicken. In tin foil containers the remains of a vegetable curry looked like transparent earth in which could be seen potatoes, carrots and cauliflower, the whole scene garnished with a light confetti of pilau rice. Old peaches in a bowl wore thick fur cardigans of mould.

Stripped down to my boxers, I threw out all the rubbish, piled all dirty clothes into a bin liner and cleaned up everything I could see. I de-greased some kitchen utensils and prised loose some of the cups that had got glued to the kitchen table. In the pantry I found a squelching bag of potatoes which were the source, I now realised, of the odd earthy smell that pervaded the whole kitchen. Close to the potatoes, a bottle of olive oil had sprung a leak and a couple of lumps of meteorite cheese lay basting in a pool of it. Wearing rubber gloves I disposed of a piece of radioactive cauliflower and then threw the rubber gloves out too.

It was not a perfect job but it was certainly an improvement. Even so, it was difficult to see how things had got to quite this state. With each week I seemed to descend another few rungs on the evolutionary ladder. To reverse the process I filled the bath brimful with hot, clear water and plunged in. I dunked my head under and held my breath, feeling my hair float up like cropped seaweed, and then rose a couple of inches until I could breathe through my nose, hippopotamus-style. I writhed around for a while, then pulled the plug and let the water drain away around me, becoming amphibious, mammalian and then, finally, when there was no water left and only a circle of pond-scum to reveal where it had been, human.

Seconds later the phone rang and there I was, right back in the late twentieth century again.

I dropped in at the Effra and found the lounge bar packed. The only people in the public bar were half a dozen police and a guy lying on the floor, bar towels soaking up his blood. A woman crying. It had happened five minutes before I got there. The barmaid was seeing to him, wringing out the towels with red hands. That left only one other person serving. It was quarter to eleven. Nobody grumbled about having to wait.

I asked what had happened but there was nothing to know. These things are always the same: an argument over who’s next on the pool table, someone talking to someone else’s girlfriend, a spilt drink, somebody looking at somebody else. A scuffle, tables going over, glasses smashing — and suddenly someone’s getting their guts cut out.

The ambulance arrived ten minutes after the police. I remembered something Freddie had said one evening when we were both drunk: ‘There are two kinds of tragedy: the ones that don’t happen and the ones that needn’t have happened.’

I thought of the guy being loaded into the ambulance and hooked up to a plasma bag, of the nurses and doctors who would be waiting for him in their masks and gloves, and of all the other people queuing half the night in casualty departments with all their blood and pain and helplessness. I thought of dawn breaking over the broken glass, the indifferent streets and curtained windows.