Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

‘It’s so nice acting like yobs isn’t it?’ said Freddie. Hungry after the beer, we wrapped our faces round large portions of falafal and walked on. Feeling sluggish and drunk we took turns on stalls like Soak the Bloke and Test Your Strength. Carlton and Steranko bought balls for the coconut shy. Steranko’s second ball flew over the back of the stall.

We waited for a scream. Then we waited for someone to come round the corner with a bloody grimace where his teeth used to be. Steranko gave the balls back to the guy in charge of the stall and we sloped shyly off, making our way through the throb and hum of shaking generators to the fairground rides where the grass had turned to downtrodden mud. Everything here was a blur of yellow and red and kids’ screams whooping in and out of the loud music. Most of the rides were fairly gentle, the sort that make kids laugh and screech but not cry: merry-go-rounds and unfrightening ghost trains as opposed to the psycho-death trips or Vietnam gunships that some fairgrounds offered. It was nice standing there watching the black and white kids on the rides, the brothers and the sisters with their curls and pigtails, the happy-looking parents talking to each other and reaching willingly into their pockets for more coins. Some of the men sipped from cans and kept an eye on things. A few thin white goths were slumped over unicorns on the largest merry-go-rounds but no one took any notice of them.

Leaving the others at the rifle range I went into the flower tent where the light was thick and still, saturated with the fragrance of flowers. The sun beat heavily through the white canvas and made the air humid and tropical. It was bright in the tent but the flowers and plants seemed to absorb light from the air, making it both luminescent and dusky. The plants also soaked up the noise of the fair, creating their own quietness. The flowers were perfect with sleek stems, broad leaves and heads dangling heavy as fruit, their petals shiny purple, dust yellow, poppy red and labile pink. At the far end of the tent the flowers blurred into a haze of rippled green with soft splashes of dull orange, frail white and pale blue, flame-bursts of yellow and red. By one batch of flowers the air was syrupy, sweet and cloying, by another, musky and dense. It was like breathing through a sponge whose pores were clogged with pollen. After a couple of minutes I felt intoxicated, bewildered by the tendril leaves and the quiet blooms. The tent was filled with fragrant air but beneath it was the dark, heavy smell of damp earth.

Someone touched my arm, so softly I hardly noticed. I turned round and saw Foomie. Her hair was tied up in a brightly coloured scarf. I kissed her on the cheek.

‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Foom. I thought you were selling deckchairs.’

‘Oh there were all sorts of problems. The van wouldn’t start and then — let’s not even talk about it.’

‘OK,’ I said and touched her shoulder, feeling the light film of sweat on her skin. There were small pearls of sweat above her lip. The hair beneath her arms was tangled and damp. ‘It’s nice to see you here anyway.’

‘You too,’ she said, smiling and slipping her arm through mine. ‘Is Steranko around?’

‘He’s over by the rifle range,’ I said as we walked towards the bright square of daylight at the end of the tent.

Outside, the air felt cool, the sunlight raw on the grass — the flower tent like a dream that was already fading.

‘What’s this drink called again?’ I said. ‘A daktari?’

‘A daiquiri. Strawberry daiquiri,’ said Monica rolling the icy glass across her forehead.

Earlier in the day I’d bought a blender from a stall in the market for three quid — the guy let me have it cheap because he couldn’t guarantee it would work. I picked up a bottle of rum and an assortment of fruit and when Monica came over we mixed up a jugful of cocktails with crushed ice and lots of strawberries. Monica did the mixing and I cleared up the mess — there was a lot of mess.

The drinks gleamed pinkly in the bright sun. The sky was as blue and still as paint in a pot. Monica was wearing her favourite T-shirt. We were sitting against the low wall of the roof and listening to ‘Sketches of Spain’.

‘Nice?’ asked Monica.

‘It’s giving me a throbbing pain behind my left eye like ice-cream used to when I was a kid. I love it.’ I upended my glass, poured another for myself and topped up Monica’s. We were both wearing the same cheap sunglasses. Monica took off her plimsolls.

‘Sorry, I bet my feet stink.’ She bent forward, grasped a foot with both hands, pulled it easily towards her nose and sniffed. ‘Oh, that’s not so bad,’ she said, rocking backwards slightly. I saw the muscles in her legs straining faintly until she released her foot. It was a supple gesture.

I read a few lines of my book but even with sunglasses the glare of the pages was too bright. The trumpet dissolved in the air.

‘Given a completely free choice,’ I said after we had smoked a small grass joint. ‘What event would you most like to see enacted in the sky in the next half hour?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Think.’

‘You suggest things to me and I’ll pick one,’ Monica said.

‘OK. Wait a second. OK: An airliner, a 747, exploding in mid-air and sending a shower of wreckage and people all over Stockwell while leaving Brixton completely untouched.’

‘No.’

‘No problem. What about a Spitfire and a Messerschmitt 109 from a nearby air display staging a mock dogfight directly overhead, climaxing with the German pilot bailing out of his damaged plane and eventually landing here on this roof where we torment him with pitchforks until the arrival of the home guard?’

Monica shook her head.

‘I can see you’re after something really spectacular. A fleet of Flying Fortresses flying overhead in dense formation to execute a daring daylight raid on industrial targets in the Rühr Valley.’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Oh come on. . What’s wrong with you? That would bring a shiver to anyone’s spine. OK. See that air balloon over there advertising Goodyear tyres? What about that exploding in a ball of flame and then slowly floating in tatters to earth while a dense cloud of black. .’

‘Nope.’

‘How about me making a spectacular escape from this roof by a rope-ladder dangled from a helicopter which hovered dangerously close to the TV aerials?’

Monica yawned.

‘Come on then. Think of one of your own.’

‘OK.’ Monica thought for a moment. She had a slight smile on her face like someone doing a jigsaw who sees the puzzle is complete but still holds one more piece, uncertainly, in her hand. After a while her smile broadened.

‘I know what I’d like to see,’ she said. ‘A rare and beautiful bird — a heron, a flamingo or a golden eagle — gliding overhead on warm thermals, dawdling, circling the roof on its long and lonely flight south.’

We had just finished a lavish breakfast. Carlton was sitting in one of Foomie’s deckchairs with a newspaper folded over his face; Foomie was stretched out on a rug. The sun flashed off dishes and glasses of orange juice and melted ice. Someone’s sheets were hung out to dry and flapped in the wind, making a noise like the sail of a yacht. With the sky all around us the block felt like the opposite of a swimming-pool where a blue cube of water was enclosed by concrete; here a solid block of bricks was surrounded by the liquid blue of the sky.

I glanced over at Freddie who was sitting on a small cushion, writing in a notebook.

‘What you writing Freddie?’ called Carlton, taking the newspaper from his face and heaving himself out of the deckchair.