Geoff Dyer: The Colour of Memory

I poured the tea. Fran took off her jacket and threw it on the floor (something else she used to get told off about). She was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and men’s braces.

‘What’s this?’ she said suddenly, turning up the volume on the TV. ‘Oh it’s that Van Gogh painting they’re auctioning at Sotheby’s.’

The bidding got up to eight million fairly easily, stalled for a few moments and then soared upwards again.

‘He ought to make a special offer: for fifty million you can have the whole of England too — industry, agriculture, health service, the lot,’ I said.

The bidding continued for a few more millions and when it was over no one knew who had actually bought the painting. It was as if the escalating logic of the auction had generated this final bid independently of human intervention so that the painting was now the property of the auction.

‘A bid without a bidder,’ said Fran. She was sitting on the chair with her legs tucked up under her, sawing away at a loaf of bread. I watched the muscles move in her arms, heard her bracelets jangling together.

‘Have you got any butter?’

As I reached inside it the fridge shuddered and rumbled quietly.

‘Have you heard of this new kind of butter that you don’t even have to spread?’

‘No.’

‘It’s part of an exciting new range of products.’ I watched her scrape the cold butter on to the bread.

‘D’you want some jam?’

‘Hmmn. What sort have you got?’

‘Apricot.’ There was something unusual about the word as I said it, as if there were more sounds in it than could be logically accounted for.

Splodges of jam dropped on to the kitchen table as she hooked it from the jar and on to the bread. In a moment of sudden clarity I said, ‘I hate stickiness.’

‘Me too,’ said Fran, sucking jam from her fingers. ‘What about this evening? Have you got any plans?’

‘None at all.’

‘Let’s have dinner then. I’ll pay. That bread’s made me hungry. We can drive somewhere in your car. Is it working?’

‘After a fashion. You know what it’s like. It won’t get out of second gear but the bloke at the garage reckons there’s no mechanical fault — I’m thinking of having it psychoanalysed.’

I’d bought the car for seventy pounds — while the balance of my mind was temporarily disturbed — from an unscrupulous drug dealer in Tulse Hill who felt it was time to expand and diversify. Most of the time people like Freddie and Steranko used it as a wastebin for tins of beer or a mobile observation lab in which they could get stoned and see the capital rush past in a blur of colours and near-misses. As far as I was concerned it was a millstone round my neck. Actually that’s not true. A millstone around my neck would have felt like a loose-fitting polo-neck by comparison. I couldn’t go out in it without getting lost and I couldn’t get lost without losing my temper in sympathy. I often lost my temper almost as soon as I’d folded myself into the driving seat — only a few seconds after it had broken down, in other words. The only time it didn’t break down was when it wouldn’t start.

As luck would have it, on the night of Fran’s visit it was working perfectly — so perfectly that the kids who stole it made barely a sound as they drove off. I must have only missed them by five minutes which is a shame because I would like to have thanked them personally.

While I got changed Fran went down to get the A-Z to work out where we were heading. When we left the house a few minutes later the car was gone. It’s odd, that elusive sense of non-presence when something just disappears. It takes time to establish that something’s not there and for a couple of minutes we paced up and down the street as if the car had just been mislaid — Fran even peered beneath another parked car as though it had rolled under there like a lost coin. Maybe the car was around somewhere and we couldn’t see it. Maybe it had never been there. Maybe it was somewhere else.

‘It’s been stolen,’ said Fran eventually and we set off for Brixton police station to report it. Only a few minutes from the house we ran into a policeman who put out an A.P.B. on the missing vehicle. I started to explain that it was extremely unlikely that the culprits could travel more than a couple of miles in it, that it was a fucking useless car and I wished I’d never bought it but the cop held up his hand in a halt sign and said there was no time for that because I still had to go to the nick and report the theft officially. We hopped on a bus to save time.

‘It’s like a Hitchcock film,’ said Fran. ‘Always a bus when you need one.’

I jumped off at the traffic lights opposite the police station. A few seconds later, as the bus accelerated away, Fran jumped off too, crashing into the arms of a moody-looking guy with long locks.

‘Man, you ought to keep her on reins,’ he said.

They were doing a lot of business at the police station that night — so much that you wondered if somebody was selling grass under the counter as part of the community policing project. The queue was pub-sized, hardly a queue at all, just a scrum of bodies, three or four deep, pushing to the counter. It took me fifteen minutes to get to the bar — the counter, I mean — and as I began telling my story the message crackled over on short-wave that a squad car was pursuing my vehicle down Streatham Hill.

‘You can listen to it happen,’ said the lager-complexioned copper behind the counter. ‘Just like on the telly — metaphorically speaking anyway.’

On the wall to my right was a noticeboard covered with MURDER posters. In Westerns, posters like these always showed the murderers; here it was the victims, all but one of whom were black. Men and women; one aged nineteen, another in his forties, the rest in their twenties. Stabbings, an axe murder, someone beaten to death, a shooting in the early hours of the morning. The faces of the victims had something of the random, anonymous quality of their deaths. None of the photographs had reproduced properly; they looked like photocopies of photo-fit assemblies. The format made the victims look guilty, as if they were being sought in connection with their own deaths.

The airwaves sang with the crossed wires of distress and crime, the coughs of static giving way to the delta-tango zero-niner dialect of break-ins, pub fights and muggings. Then in a rare burst of clarity it came over the radio that my car had been brought to a standstill by a brick wall. A few minutes later we heard that the two kids who had ripped off the car were unhurt but the car had taken it full in the face.

The loss of his first car is a big moment in a man’s life and as such he is entitled to a lavish display of grief. Since I appeared totally unmoved by this mechanical castration it was assumed that the trauma had already plunged me into deep shock. A policewoman offered me a cup of tea with lots of sugar. As we left she whispered to Fran that it might be a good idea to keep an eye on me for a few days.

‘Well that’s a load off my mind,’ I said as we stepped through the door.

Outside I caught a quick glimpse of a twitching grey squirrel, high up in the dusk of a tree.

‘Look,’ I said, touching Fran’s elbow and pointing. At school they had taught us that the red squirrel was cuddly and lovable but that it was being forced out of business by vicious greys. I couldn’t remember ever having seen a red squirrel but as we watched I was struck by how cute this grey one looked with its munching jaws and bushy tail.

‘Soon it’ll probably turn out that even the greys are endangered, that their survival is threatened by a new, savage mutant of the species, perfectly adapted to life in the inner city,’ I said.