Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

‘Would you recognise him again?’

‘No. You know, he was just some guy who was so pissed off he wanted to beat somebody’s shit in so he’d feel a bit better,’ said Freddie. ‘It could’ve been a lot worse. I wasn’t stabbed. Nothing’s broken. . Once in six years, you know? It happens.’

We stopped speaking and listened to Art Pepper. It was a recording of a gig he played a couple of years before he died, the music of someone who’d learnt to cherish what he did. Pepper was an alcoholic and a junkie; he served time in San Quentin, but he didn’t squander his ability by getting as fucked up as he did. He had to waste his talent in order for it finally to flourish. As an artist his weakness was essential to him; in his playing it became a source of strength.

The room filled up with hurt pity and the tenderness of scarred hands. The music cried out but there was no appeal in it; it had to find its own consolation.

I was still at that age when you do not form friendships but are formed by them, when there is no difference between having good friends and being a good friend. I’d known Freddie for a long time, six or seven years, twice as long at least as I’d known any of my other friends. I hardly ever kept in touch with people for more than three years — Freddie was the only exception I could think of. After about three years of knowing a group of people your identity becomes fixed by their expectations, you become trapped by your shared history; your range of responses becomes more and more limited. After a certain point there’s no room for anything but the most gradual alteration in your identity. The past suffocates and restricts and the only way you can breathe and move again is with completely new circumstances, new people. With Freddie it was different. My affection for him exerted no pressure. I mean the kind of pressure where liking someone makes you want to be like them — this was exactly how I felt about Steranko — and then, after a while, that turns into its opposite: you begin to dislike them for not being enough like you. I say ‘you’; I mean ‘I’.

Freddie once said that friends are the difference between being a spectator and a participant and I remembered how, together with another friend who I’d since lost touch with, the three of us had got beaten up by one guy outside a party in Putney. ‘Go on: all three of you rush me,’ he’d said after hitting each of us once. ‘Right,’ he said when we all just stood there, ‘now I’m really going to teach you a lesson,’ and he proceeded to instruct each of us in turn. Eventually we ran off with no real damage done — a fat lip, a black eye, a bloody nose — and soon the whole episode was remembered only as anecdote fodder. This was about the time when — on the basis of having flicked through The Dharma Bums and watched several episodes of ‘Kung Fu’ — Freddie claimed to be a Buddhist. That lasted about six weeks and soon after we dropped our first tabs of acid. I remembered Freddie, notebook in hand, waiting for something to happen. ‘Am turning inside out’ was the only entry he made.

The record came to an end. Freddie had fallen asleep and was breathing heavily through his mouth. I looked at Carlton and we smiled. I made more tea and Carlton put on another record. When that one finished we played another, letting the room grow dark around us, hearing the hiss of the gas fire between songs. Freddie woke about an hour later, unsure where he was or what had happened to him.

‘Where am I?’ He looked at Carlton and me, glad we were still there.

We stayed until nine. We told Freddie we’d phone him tomorrow.

‘Thanks. . for the record and the arnica,’ he said as we left. ‘Take care.’

‘You too.’

Carlton and I walked part of the way home together. Getting done over in some way was just a question of time really. You hoped that when your turn came it wouldn’t be anything too bad, that it would just be young kids who were only after your money, that if you handed it over you’d be free to go, that if you got punched to the ground you wouldn’t get a kicking too, that if they pulled a knife they’d slash and not stab; and you hoped that you would spot the moment when the only chance left was to run — and that if the worst came to the worst, if all else failed, you would have the presence of mind to lash out with whatever came to hand.

Later that week Foomie’s flat got burgled. They came in through the bathroom window and took a cassette player and a portable TV. Foomie said it made her feel glad she didn’t own anything.

I was edgy and alert as I walked around. The whole area seemed tense but it was difficult to know whether this was a result of my own contingent experience or of my gauging an aggregate feeling that made itself subtly but palpably felt.

I told people about Freddie and the guy getting done over on the tube. They told me about things that had happened to them, that they had seen or that other people had told them. Ripples of panic and suspicion and worry spread out and intersected.

I went to dinner with some people in Kennington whom I vaguely knew and quite liked. I took beer; everyone else brought wine but wanted to drink beer. When someone asked what I did I said ‘odds and ends, bits and pieces, nothing really’ and felt pointless as a broken bulb.

The food was nice and there was plenty of it. When we’d finished eating and had drunk all of the beer and most of the wine somebody started telling a story about how he’d recently been involved in a car accident. Someone else told of an injury they’d suffered a few years ago. I told the story of how my leg got smashed at the factory. We talked about a programme that had been on TV about self-defence. Someone told of how they’d recently been burgled and after everyone had told their burglary stories we talked about mugging, rape, trouble at parties, stabbings and broken bottle fights in pubs.

These subjects were our currency, the common denominator of our experience; they were subjects of interest to us all, topics on which everyone had something to say.

The dinner came to an end — it was a Monday night and people had to get up for work the next day — and I caught a late bus home. A storm was building up and by the time I got off the bus at Brixton a steady rain was falling. Walking past Freddie’s house I saw a light in his window on the second floor. I stood beneath a street lamp, threads of yellow rain falling around me. I saw a face framed by the window in the warm light of the anglepoise above Freddie’s desk, looking out into the night. Suddenly there was a flash of lightning like a jagged crack in time. A shudder of bleached rain.

I glanced up at the window once more and walked on, the sound of my footsteps lost in a low roll of thunder.

I spent the rest of the week in Court. A friend of mine who knew a solicitor asked if I wanted to do some court clerking. All you had to do, he said, was sit with the client and take a few notes to remind the barrister of what was going on. It paid twenty-five quid a day, cash.

‘Oh and don’t forget to wear a suit,’ he said before putting the phone down.

The case was being heard at the Crown Court in Croydon and I was quite looking forward to it as I travelled down there on the train: meeting the defendant, piecing together a story from the unfolding catechism of the court, weighing up the truth and falsehood of witnesses, seeing the judge and lawyers in action. .

I met up easily with the barrister — a puppy-fat Oxbridge graduate — and he introduced me to the client. He was a sad mixed-race kid, an eighteen-year-old no-hoper who wasn’t much good at anything, not even looking sympathetic in Court. He was accused of breaking and entering some offices in Lewes. His story was that he’d gone to look for his friend Trotsky who was living down there. He called in at various bars and asked where Trotsky was but nobody had seen him. In the end he got pissed, missed the last train back and was picked up while trying to find somewhere to crash for the night.