Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

His paintings resembled Chirico’s in one other respect (though their atmosphere and feel were totally different): each painting felt like a brief detail of a total imaginative world that extended far beyond the three or four square feet that you were privileged to glimpse there.

The human figures in his paintings were anonymous and indistinct except for some detail of clothing (a pink T-shirt, the shape of a jacket, a hat) or something about a gesture (a way of smiling or the tilt of someone’s head) that made them instantly recognisable. He had recently finished some nudes of Foomie: her face and body were shadowy and indistinct but from the way her limbs arranged themselves on a sofa or on the floor, by the swelling hint of a bicep, the angle of a crooked knee — by the way gravity played uniquely on the figure — it was unmistakably her. What struck me as remarkable about Steranko’s paintings was that I immediately recognised the figures by things like this which, until then, I hadn’t noticed in real life. It took the pictures to make you notice the delicate, unremarked inflections of the actual. In much the same way, in his abstract paintings, you felt the insistent tug of the distinct and specific reality in which they had their origin. Maybe all that remained of it was a colour — a particular shade of yellow, the texture of a red — but that was enough to bring back very precisely the incident or moment that the painting addressed. Alternatively something about the way two colours sat next to each other, some felicitous relationship of blue and red — or the way a yellow touched an adjacent brown — made you aware of the relation and angle of sky and brick — or grass and pavement — that he had in mind. In this way his paintings came close to abolishing the distinction between the abstract and the physical. They worked on you in the same way as a déjà vu which instead of remaining tantalisingly beyond the reach of memory and formulation was suddenly brought unmistakably back — as if the past were a perfect memory of the present.

Well, it finally happened. Walking back from Carlton’s one night I got mugged. I’d just got through the entry door to my block when I heard somebody come up behind me. I held the door open for him. He said something I couldn’t understand — at first I thought he was asking for directions. Then several little details made it all clear. First, I realised he had a scarf up round his face Jesse James style and it wasn’t even cold. Second I worked out what he was saying: ‘What you got cunt? What you got?’

Third (the clincher), two accomplices shouldered their way in, pushed me up against a wall and tickled my nose with a rusty stanley knife. Typically I’d gone out without that dummy wallet I told you about — the one I always carry in case of a situation like this — but I did have some loose change and a screwed up five pound note. Finding it was the problem. My pockets were full of junk they didn’t want — glasses case, empty crisp packets, a book — but after much ferreting around they grabbed the fiver and some coins from my pocket and scrambled out of the door: three kids, all about sixteen and all looking like they were shitting themselves. Mugging is hardly even the word for it; it was more like begging by force. An intense exchange of gestures between comparative strangers, it was closer to a charade than an assault. It didn’t seem worth calling the police.

I woke early with yellow sunlight blazing through the windows and then drifted back to sleep and dreamt of a red postbox noisily vomiting the as yet unfranked contents of its stomach. Slowly realising that the dream had been set off by the sound of the mail cascading through the letterbox and crashing to the floor I lay in bed and let the sound settle after this welcome intrusion of the outside world. It was amazing the amount of mail I received, especially considering that virtually none of it — with the exception of a few postcards each summer — was from friends (I never wrote to anyone, nobody wrote to me: fair enough).

The room was full of hot light. I could hear the police helicopter overhead. Still unfocused from sleep I carried a pile of letters back to bed and began tearing them open without enthusiasm. With the exception of a query from the TV licensing centre my letters were all disguised circulars. Addressed to me personally they were all about money, urging me to borrow some and get the things I’d always wanted (pretty much the things I’d never wanted). AbbeyLoan, American Express, Daleyloan, Faustbank — they were all dying to lend me money. One just asked straight out if I’d like ten thousand pounds.

Receiving this kind of mail was a fairly recent development in my life and there was no accounting for it. Perhaps I’d been chosen at random or maybe they just trawled through the phone book and mailed everybody. Certainly it wasn’t as though my career had made any spectacular jump forwards. Maybe it was just that I was at the age when, according to some complex actuarial logic, my career would normally have been expected to take shape. Either way they were beginning to work on me, these letters, starting to make me think of myself as a pretty well-heeled young man, a good credit risk, a man with prospects, a man people were keen to invest in. Perhaps they’d heard that I was no longer signing on the dole, that I’d managed to carve out an even cosier niche for myself in the poverty trap: I was on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. I’d set myself up as a self-employed market researcher but the bit of legitimate money I made from that wasn’t anything like enough to disqualify me from housing benefit. Any other money I earned was strictly in cash. I didn’t even keep track of it.

Most of this money came from painting and decorating, a state of affairs which had its good points and its bad points. The worst things about it was that it was so fucking boring, The good things were that it required virtually no skill and we got the run of people’s houses for however long the job took. Most people who wanted their house decorating had one facility or another to make the work bearable: a good collection of records maybe, or a Compact Disc player.

Mainly I worked with Carlton but if the job was big enough Steranko, Foomie or Freddie would work on it too and at the end of the day we would all travel home together in high spirits. We earned less money working together like that but since so many people were buying places in south London there was always plenty of work. Besides, none of us wanted to do it all the time. Ideally I worked just enough to make me appreciate the days when I didn’t. I had vague plans to try to write film scripts but I didn’t really know how to go about it and didn’t have the concentration to find out. In the meantime decorating suited me fine. It was summer and after that, in the winter, maybe I’d leave England and live abroad or something. For the moment everything felt fine.

Later that morning I bumped into Monica outside the Pie and Mash shop on Cold Harbour Lane. She had just come from her acrobatics class and was on her way to sign on. I walked down to the dole office with her and after that we wandered round Granville Arcade. Painted red and yellow, it was bright with the light that showered through the glass roof. We walked past a shop where huge silver trunks were stacked on top of each other like the speakers of a powerful sound system. At the wig bazaar Monica tried on a hairpiece that made her look like Charles II. We watched bloody-smocked butchers chopping pink meat and walked past pet shops and stalls selling kiddies’ clothes — cardies and tiny shoes — or toys wrapped in Cellophane, the sort that get featured on the local news around Christmas because a toddler could easily swallow bits of them and choke; either that or they’re highly inflammable and give off noxious fumes when burnt. Round a corner from there the Back Home Foods stall gave off the roots and earth smell of yams, sweet potatoes and plantains.