Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

Things were burnt and broken, people ran around in the dark. Two policemen appeared, one of them shaking his head, not quite sure whether it was worth anyone’s while to do anything about whatever it was that was happening here.

By now, like sand slipping through an hour-glass, the level of the gasometer had fallen and a vast cylindrical web of spars was silhouetted against the dim sulphurous sky. I saw Steranko sitting on an upturned crate close to a bonfire, his face bathed in the deep red light of the flames. The burning frame of a chair toppled down the slopes of the fire and rolled, still burning, to the ground. A momentary sense of déjà vu surged through me and vanished as I called Steranko’s name.

Some friends of Carlton’s came over. They were going to another party and asked if we wanted to come with them.

‘What do you think?’ Carlton said.

‘I’m tempted to abandon the evening,’ Steranko said.

‘Yeah, me too. What about you?’

‘I might go along for a while,’ Carlton said. ‘Sure you don’t want to come?’

‘Yeah.’

‘OK, I’ll catch you later.’

‘Yeah, see you next week.’

‘Take care yeah?’ We waved goodbye, another burst of fireworks exploding low overhead.

After clambering through the exit Steranko and I began walking silently to Trafalgar Square to catch a night bus. Halfway there, feeling drained and worn out by this shitty evening, we hailed a cab. We climbed in and shut the door before the driver had time to ask where we were going.

‘Brixton, please.’

The driver grunted and the cab began bumping its way reluctantly south. It was the first time I’d travelled by taxi in about six months. Trees slurred by as clouds slipped past the indifferent moon. The driver tugged back the glass partition. His neck was red through years of vigorous scrubbing.

‘What part of Brixton?’

‘If you go via Stockwell — then we can direct you,’ Steranko said.

‘What’s it like there then?’

‘Where?’

‘Brixton. .’

‘It’s OK.’

‘No trouble?’

‘Some. Not really.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You know, like everywhere. Most of the time it’s fine.’

‘You don’t mind living there?’

‘Not really. No, it’s fine.’

‘Rather you than me. I wouldn’t fancy it.’

‘No?’

‘Nah. Not me. All those. .’

‘I tell you what, man,’ Steranko said. ‘You just keep quiet and get us there in one piece and we won’t piss on your seats OK?’

The driver stopped the cab on the spot, brick-walled it then and there.

‘Right! Out!’

‘Forget it.’

‘Get out you filth.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Out!’ He turned round uncomfortably in the front seat as he said this and opened the door on Steranko’s side.

‘Let’s get out,’ I said.

‘Jesus.’ We got out. The guy wanted the money for the journey so far.

‘One ninety,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s on the clock.’

‘You must be fucking kidding,’ I said.

‘Yeah, fuck you scumbag,’ said Steranko. (We’d seen ‘Mean Streets’ a couple of days previously.) We walked off.

‘Oi!’

We stopped and looked round. He was standing there with a jemmy in one hand. He didn’t need anything in the other. We stood still as the trees shaking slightly in the breeze. In the cab his radio cleared its throat and crackled out into the night.

‘Now you slags give me my money.’

The money was the least of our worries now but handing it over involved getting near him. Steranko gave him two quid at arm’s length. The jemmy remained where it was, carving out a hook of sky over his shoulder.

‘You cunts,’ he said and walked back to the car, arms at his side.

‘Hey!’ said Steranko as the guy was getting back into the cab. . ‘Keep the change.’

I was already running.

Moving my stuff in to the new flat took less time than the paperwork: signing the lease, filling out a claim for housing benefit, applying for exemption from rates, registering the rent — all the fraying strands of state support had to be twisted, tugged and woven together in a secure financial safety net.

The flat was on the top floor of a five-storey block, protected from the outside world by a security door which was rarely closed — someone had ripped off the self-closing hinges. The area just outside reeked of drains, a damp, heavy smell that made you think of typhoid and cholera epidemics. On the stairways and landings the smell was a mixture of animal shit and piss. On hot days you made your way up and down the stairs through buzzing flags of flies. The flat itself was fine: spacious, light, and smelling like the previous tenant was decomposing beneath the floorboards. The living-room was covered in that slightly faded wallpaper associated with cases of suspected child abuse.

I spent my first morning there doing a bit of home improvement. I woke up early, full of anticipated achievement and in such good spirits that I gromphed down a breakfast at. Goya’s, the faded fry-up cafe on Acre Lane. On the way back I bumped into Freddie and asked if he wanted to help.

‘I’d love to but you know how I am with things like that. I get toolbox envy, the fear that your toolbox is much smaller than other men’s. It’s quite a common worry apparently — more men than you might think suffer from it — Fear of DIYing.’

‘I know what you mean. I’m not that well equipped myself,’ I said. A few petrified paintbrushes sculpted in a jar of turps, a roller you could make pastry with and an assortment of screwdrivers, bent nails, and inappropriate hammers were all I had in that department.

Steranko, on the other hand, had all sorts of tools and accessories scattered around his studio and I dropped in to borrow his drill and anything else that looked as if it might come in useful. Back home half an hour later I realised that the drill wouldn’t reach from the socket without an extension lead so I headed back to Steranko’s, slightly frustrated but still looking forward to the labour ahead.

Extension lead in hand, I stopped off at the DIY shop. I hovered around waiting for my turn and then realised that the guy behind the counter — a big white bloke with a triple chin — had been waiting for me to say what I wanted. He didn’t say ‘next please’ or ‘can I help’; he just leant forward, both hands on the counter, jutting out that gut of a chin a fraction of an inch and raising his eyebrows as if to say ‘yeah? Fancy your chances do you?’ His face was clean-shaven, red and sore-looking as if he used a sandpaper flannel and Ajax aftershave.

I made him even more sore by not knowing what I wanted. I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know what it was called in the hermetic argot of the building trade and as far as he was concerned that meant I was wasting his time. He assisted reluctantly, all the time making me feel like a piece of china in a bull ring. He threw screws from his hand into a bag, trudged around the shop heavily and yanked stuff out from dark recesses as if I was making him late for the heart attack that he’d planned on having for elevenses. When I’d got everything I wanted he did the eyebrows and chin bit again and stood his ground like a nightclub bouncer.

‘That’s the lot,’ I said.

He took the pencil from behind his ear and added everything up. It came to a small fortune. Then he slapped VAT on top and the total took another leap upwards. I handed over the money and the guy said ‘thankyou’, pronouncing it so that it sounded like rhyming slang for ‘wanker’.

Back home — Jesus, I seemed to have been in and out of the flat about ten times already — I set about reinforcing the door. At the old house we’d been burgled so many times that by the end of our stay we’d turned cut-price home security into a science. Other people knew about parquet floors, loft conversions and double glazing; what I knew about was low-budget impregnability. With a top-floor flat like this it was no problem: most of the kids who broke into places resorted to the simple expedient of kicking the door down and that was easily remedied. I fixed a long metal strip up the entire length of the door-frame with three inch screws every six inches so that the frame wouldn’t give way. Once that was done the problem was that the lock itself could get kicked through the door so I fixed two large metal plates around the lock. That left the other side of the door as the weak point and I screwed two heavy right-angled brackets into the wall so that they rested against the hinges. Finally there was the door itself which I reinforced with a thick metal strip down its entire length.