Geoff Dyer - The Colour of Memory

It was too good a chance to pass up. The lack of a digital file meant that the text of The Colour of Memory would have to be entirely reset for this Canongate reissue. And so, twenty-three years after it was published, I had the opportunity to make some changes to my first novel. These changes, I felt, could only be deletions, not additions — I would intervene as the sharper editor I should have been, not as the more mature writer I had become — and they were mainly small. I took out some dialogue which seemed superfluous and deleted as many expletives as possible from the dialogue that remained. I removed a line which I’d stolen from a friend, unaware that he in turn had stolen it from Woody Allen. The only big change was to get rid of what used to be chapter 030 — an interminable and quite pointless account of a card game. The remaining chapters are now numbered differently: in this edition the last chapter is number 001, rather than number 000.

The book did not start out as a novel (and, for anyone expecting a plot, never adequately became one). It was commissioned as something loosely termed ‘The Brixton Diaries’ in the hope that the life my friends and I were leading in a particular area of south London at a particular time (the mid-to late-1980s) might have an interest that was more than local and personal. Gradually I saw a way of using and shaping the material in a slightly different way, in a form that would deploy it to better, more personal ends (I invented a sister for myself, or for my narrator, rather) and, hopefully, more lasting effect. A couple of years ago I said somewhere that ‘I like to write stuff that is only an inch from life — but all the art is in that inch.’ The importance of that inch — and the fun to be had within it — first made itself apparent in these pages.

Maybe the period in which the novel is set feels closer now, in the midst of a catastrophic recession, than it did a decade ago, before the wheels came off the economy. The difference, of course, is that back in the 1980s, in spite of the ravages of Thatcherism, the safety net of welfare support was still more or less intact. That word Thatcherism never comes up in the text itself, and neither does AIDS — not because they are unimportant to the story but, on the contrary, because they are ever-present. Nevertheless it — the book — has an idyllic quality, a rough lyricism, of which I have fond memories.

G. D.

April 2012

The pages were bathed in the yellow light of the reading lamp. I read a few phrases at random, flicked through some more pages and then turned back to the beginning and read the first sentence:

In August it rained all the time — heavy, corrosive rain from which only nettles and rusty metal derived refreshment. The sky was a grey sea with no tide. Gutters burst their kerbs. When it didn’t rain it drizzled and when it didn’t drizzle the city sweltered under a thick vest of cloud. Even the clouds looked as if they could do with some sun. The weather was getting people down. I wasn’t keen on the rain either but what really put a damper on things was being thrown out of my house and sacked from my job.

Being evicted from a house was a new experience for me but getting sacked was something I’d always had a talent for. I started early, when I was still at school. On Saturdays I worked in a sports shop and was laid off because there was a question mark against my honesty. Called in to the manager’s office at four o’clock, I left for good at quarter past, helping myself to a generous silver handshake from the till as I went. A few years later I was fired from an insurance company for lack of attention to detail. My work involved checking someone else’s figures for errors and I tended not to bother. There was no point; my checking was checked by somebody else and before anything went through the computer it was double checked, cross checked and double-cross checked by two or three other people. Would you have bothered? Of course not; you’d have been down in the basement playing in the ping-pong tournament like the rest of us.

Next I was sacked from a place before I’d even started working there. Now that takes some doing. Apparently there was a little problem with one of the references — I’d drawn up some headed notepaper and written it myself — and my future employer felt that under the circumstances they would have to withdraw their conditional offer of employment. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. A week later I was taken on at a civil engineer’s. Before they had a chance to sack me I trashed my leg in an industrial accident and picked up a thousand pounds in compensation. Easy money.

Cursed with a track record like that and tainted by several years of unemployment it seemed unlikely that I would ever get a job. Experience is all important as far as employers are concerned and since my only experience was of un-unfair dismissal it came as quite a surprise to find myself in a proper job with a regular wage, luncheon vouchers and everything. I thought I’d finally got a foot on the ladder. The job turned out to be a real ladder on the foot number but at least it took my mind off having nowhere to live. A week before starting work myself and the five other people who also lived there were thrown out of the crumbling cesspit on Brixton Water Lane where we had lived quite happily since the riots. Discourteous visitors assumed it was a squat but no self-respecting squatters would have lived there; in fact we were legitimate, rent-paying tenants. We had a rent-book to prove it. We didn’t have a rent-book to prove it but Len said we could have one any time we wanted. In the meantime we handed Len’s dad a total of five hundred pounds a month cash (it made no difference to us: we were all claiming housing benefit anyway). Len didn’t own the house — he owned the motor repair shop next door — and neither did his dad. It was Len’s brother Stass who actually owned the house. There were three other brothers as well but at any one time at least two of them were in gaol. Stass himself wasn’t in prison; he was in the nut-hutch. Unlike his brothers Stass wasn’t a bit violent; he was very violent — that’s what his father, Anastassi, told us the day before Stass got his discharge. The first thing Stass did when he got out was tell us to get out. There was no reasoning with him. I started to explain how we, as tenants, had certain rights. Stass looked at me with eyes like dead planets and asked if I’d seen his brain anywhere.

‘Whose brain?’ I said.

‘Mine.’

‘No. Why?’

‘See I took a big shit and realised I’d shit my brain down the bog,’ said Stass and then just stood there.

Bewildered but unable to counter this belligerent interpretation of the Rent Act we all moved out at the end of the week. A week later I started my job.

The night before my first day at work I crashed at a friend’s house and went to bed early to make sure I got up in time. I set the alarm for seven-thirty. Jesus! How did people ever get used to getting up at that kind of time? Slightly drunk, I got into bed and thrashed around for a couple of hours without feeling sleepy, got up to go for a piss, crawled back into bed and lay awake until four o’clock. In the morning the alarm split my sleep like an axe. More than anything in the world I wanted to go back to sleep, to call in sick and say I’d start tomorrow. All around was the wireless crackle of rain. The room was full of early morning light that seemed both brighter and darker than the sort I was used to. In the bathroom I slapped my face with cold water and took a joyless crap before running out of the house to catch the bus. The sky was pigeon-coloured and sick-looking. The pavements were already swarming with people splashing through the drizzle to work. And this, I remembered with a jolt, was going on every morning: the busy hum and honk of the metropolis.