Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

A lot of the people working in the Arcade were quite old. They’d seen a lot of things change and they’d seen nothing change.

‘I’m starving,’ said Monica as we walked past Franco’s.

‘Me too.’

‘Come on, I’ll buy you lunch.’

We got a table quickly. Monica was wearing a ripped tracksuit, her hair was tied back with a blue scarf. She tilted her head slightly to adjust an earring. For a moment her gaze became abstracted as fingers performed the work of eyes. The sound of opera was all around us.

‘D’you know who this is?’ I said, angling my fork vaguely in the direction of the music.

‘No. All opera’s the same though,’ said Monica. ‘Man, woman, stab, stab. I’m hot.’

She pulled her tracksuit top over her head, one hand holding down the T-shirt that had begun to ride up over her slender stomach. I drummed on the table with my knife and fork.

As we ate our pizza Monica asked if I did anything for a living.

‘Odds and ends. Nothing specific,’ I said. ‘I missed my vocation in life.’

‘What was that?’

‘What I’d really like to have been is a third division footballer, a fairly solid player for a team that tended to end up in the middle of the table each season without ever being close to getting promoted or relegated. That would have suited me nicely. Maybe one lucky cup run that climaxed with a goalless draw at home to Everton before getting hammered 6–0 in the replay at Goodison Park, just something to tell the kids about. When I was at school I spent all my time longing for lessons to end and football to begin. At that age I knew what I wanted. I wish I’d stuck at it.’

‘Were you a good footballer? You don’t look like a footballer.’

‘Not really, but I’m sure it’s not that difficult, not as difficult as some things anyway.’

‘A girl at school wanted to be an astronaut; she said you only needed two O levels. I bet it’s much easier to be a footballer. You probably don’t need any O levels at all.’

Laughing, I said, ‘And what about you?’

‘No, I wouldn’t like to be a footballer.’

‘I meant do you have any way of earning money?’

‘Three nights a week I do some waitressing.’

‘What’s that like?’

‘Awful. Let’s not talk about work. That’s all people ever seem to talk about in this city: jobs and house prices. I read somewhere that by the year 2000 two out of three people will own their own estate agent’s,’ said Monica. ‘God, you eat fast.’

‘Got to. There’s not much of the century left,’ I said and thought back to an afternoon in Paris when Freddie and I were there a couple of years ago. Outside the Pompidou Centre there was a huge electronic row of numbers. When we started watching the number was about three hundred and seventy million. Then with every second that went by the last digit went down one. Neither of us could work out what the point of it was. Then somebody explained that it was counting down the number of seconds to the year 2000. Freddie thought it was terrific and made a note of the exact number of seconds left: 376,345,060. It didn’t seem that long at all — in fact it seemed quite possible that you could just sit there and watch the digits click their way back to a long line of noughts. I liked the idea of time getting denuded like that instead of simply piling up — a countdown to nothing, to an apocalypse that would last only for a second. A new kind of time. It was both awe-inspiring and, at the same time, absolutely pointless: pure anticipation.

‘And what would happen after it worked its way down to zero zero nothing?’ asked Monica. ‘What would happen then?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Or maybe the whole process would begin all over again. The funny thing about it though was that it actually seemed like a reasonably rewarding way of spending your time, standing there watching the seconds clicking away and waiting to see what happened.’

Monica chewed and digested this information. ‘Frightening too.’

‘Yes.’

‘It reminds me of something I saw on TV the other night,’ she said after a while. ‘A programme about a prisoner on death row. Half an hour before he was due to go to the electric chair he was picking out a new tune on his guitar. One of the guards asked him what good it was going to do him, learning that tune?’

I was coming to the end of my pizza. After a pause Monica said, ‘Do you think about dying?’

‘No. Do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So do I.’

All that remained on my plate were a few olive stones. I could think of nothing to say and had run out of things to eat. The table was splattered with cheese and tomato. Monica still had over half her pizza left.

‘Your table manners are appalling,’ she said without malice.

‘I know. It’s something I’ve never quite got the hang of.’

When Monica had finished eating we ordered two coffees — Franco is a master of the disappointing cappuccino — and asked for the bill. Monica insisted on paying for the meal and leaving a huge tip.

Carlton and Belinda arrived just as we were leaving. Belinda and Monica kissed and talked enthusiastically while Carlton, unseen by them, raised his eyebrows, grinned and gave me a blokeish nudge in the ribs.

After Carlton and Belinda had got a table Monica took my arm and guided me across to the fishmonger’s.

‘I love the man who works here,’ she whispered as we waited to be served. ‘He’s so amphibious.’

He had glistening grey hair greased back from his forehead and ears stuck flat against his head. His hands were icy from handling cold fish and there was no hint of sun anywhere on his smoothly shaven face as he darted and glided round the slippery floor of his stall. The expression in his black, unmoving eyes was impossible to fathom.

‘It’s a great place that,’ said Monica as we walked away, two pieces of newspaper-wrapped cod nestling in the bottom of her red string shopping bag. ‘I once bought a fish there that had been extinct for two hundred years.’

Monica and I were up on her roof talking about our eczema. I sat on an arm of the red chair while she practised her acrobatics. We talked about hydrocortisone and Betnovate and compared ways of keeping it at bay. Monica had had it very badly as a child but since puberty her eczema tended to do little more than threaten. I admitted that as a child, in addition to eczema, my fingers were covered in about fifty warts — I had to go to a hospital to have them burnt off. Monica said her occasional bouts were set off by stress and worry.

‘Do you worry a lot?’ I asked as she did a perfect back flip.

‘All the time.’

‘What about?’

‘Everything.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like whether my eczema’s going to reappear,’ she said, doing another flip. ‘What about you?’

‘It varies. In the summer I worry about the weather. For nine months of the year I pay no attention to it, I expect nothing from it. Then during the summer I shadow-watch and monitor weather forecasts obsessively. D’you think it’s going to rain this afternoon?’

A hot desert wind was blowing across the roof. Monica was wearing shorts and a washed-out white vest that showed the sharp angle of her collar-bone and the hollow at the base of her throat. She shook her head and did a handstand, her tanned legs wavering slightly.

‘I worry about my flat too,’ I said, holding her ankles to steady her and noticing the way her legs slid down into her shorts.

‘What about it?’

‘Things snap at me in it.’

Last week I’d been cleaning the flat and instead of sucking up dust from the floor the hoover had blown a full lung of dirt all over the carpet. I turned it off, poked around for a while and thought I’d solved the problem (a sock caught in the mechanism). I turned it on again and gave the brush mechanism one last poke with the screwdriver which was tugged from my hand and hurled across the room by the whirling brushes. It was only luck that I’d used the screwdriver rather than my hand. For the next ten minutes I lay on the sofa imagining myself searching for my fingers in the hoover’s dusty stomach or trying to pry them loose from the twists and turns of its metallic digestive tract — with one hand while in considerable pain.