The Colour of Memory (3 page)

‘What did you do?’

‘I jumped on a passing bus.’

As I washed out some cups Fran walked by the kitchen table and banged her hip on the fridge.

‘Ow! That hurt,’ she said, absently rubbing her hip and sitting down. She was always banging into things or knocking them over. When we were kids our father used to tell her not to
be so careless and to look after things but you could tell that really he was worried about Fran hurting herself. As Fran got older this concern subsided into a bemused and tender attention to the
way she navigated her way through the world. I had more or less inherited this tendency of his and often found myself fascinated by her movements, wondering what would happen next. There was
something graceful about her awkwardness. Several times I’d seen her knock a bottle off the edge of a table and then catch it before it hit the ground. For her part Fran paid little attention
to these bruises and knocks – as if even when things hurt her there was some level at which she didn’t feel them.

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.

‘The scag squirrel,’ said Fran in the hushed tones of a TV naturalist. ‘Capable of living off dustbins and the dried blood from old syringes, its graffiti-patterned coat
enabling it to blend in perfectly with its natural habitat of windswept tower-blocks and crumbling window sills.’

As we walked on it occurred to me that in the last month I’d lost my home, job and car. Each loss bothered me a little less than the previous one. I mentioned this to Fran as we sweated
over plates of chicken madras in the local Indian.

‘I’m becoming immune to catastrophe,’ I said.

‘There’s a good side to all of this as well.’

‘How?’

‘The house was terrible, the job was boring and the car hardly worked,’ she said, reaching out and touching my hand.

‘Thanks Fran, I appreciate that. Hey, I thought you were a vegetarian.’

‘I am – a meat-eating vegetarian,’ said Fran. Then she told me about her latest scrapes.

Fran had a knack of getting into scrapes and then slipping out of them, bewildered but no worse for wear. A couple of months ago she had popped out from her house to buy some milk and had ended
up on the outskirts of Barcelona. Most of the time Fran emerged from her encounters completely unscathed but I was always worried that one day something was going to happen that she couldn’t
handle, that she was going to find herself completely out of her depth. Whispering over our curry she told me how she’d stolen a hundred pound necklace on impulse from a jewellers (‘the
next thing I knew I was out of the door’) and sold it to someone she happened to meet in a nightclub. I made a point of never going shopping with Fran; it was too nerve wracking. She
regularly lifted clothes, shoes and books from shops and had always told me stories of scams, deals and stealing but this was on a different scale altogether. It was when she told me things like
that that I wondered what was going to happen to her.

I looked at her face, at her brown eyes and the tiny scar just above one eye. When she was nine and I was eleven she banged her head on the corner of a table and I wrapped a clumsy bandage
around her. Later she had four stitches above her eye in hospital. We sort of looked alike. I looked at her and saw myself reflected in her eyes. In her face I saw our history, our parents.

‘What now?’ said Fran, hands on her stomach and tilted back in her chair. ‘God I’m full.’

‘Up to you.’

‘I’d like to go back to the place you’re staying and get really wasted,’ she said. ‘How about you?’

‘That’s great. There’s an offie just round the corner.’

Fran insisted on paying for the meal and for the expensive Japanese lager we picked up from the off-licence. Even as a kid she was generous with money. Our father used to call her a
windfaller.

Lugging our booze back to Freddie’s we saw a guy up ahead smashing a four-foot plank into the corrugated iron that fences off the old synagogue on Effra Road. We crossed to the other side,
keeping an eye on him as we drew level. As he hurled the plank round his shoulder and crashed it into the metal he screamed and shouted: Nyaargh! Nnnnagg! His head must have been like a shaken can
of beer, ready to explode all over the place. We walked fast, not wanting to attract his attention, the bash and clatter of bent metal ringing in our ears as the distance between us increased.

Back at Freddie’s we drank beer and smoked Fran’s sinsemilla until we were almost legless. Just as there was an odd combination of elegance and gawkiness in Fran’s movements so
her fine-boned features concealed a considerable physical resilience. She looked like a dancer and had the constitution of a pit pony.

We listened to early Coltrane, moving fast and easily through the contours of bop. We played one record after another, concentrating hard until we were existing only in the music and pursuing
whatever train of thought came into our heads. We danced to whichever song came next and bottles got kicked over. When I say we danced I mean we hung on to each other, slugging back beer and
crashing over the sofa or on to the floor. Neither of us cared. Then we sat down again for a few songs. Fran’s eyes were shiny and wet from laughing.

‘You OK Fran?’

‘I can feel a lot worse than this and still feel fine. How about you?’

‘I can feel a lot better than this and still feel bad,’ I said as I got up and lurched to the toilet.

‘I hardly know where I am,’ said Fran when I got back. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this point.’

Eventually the beer ran out. Neither of us threw up. I drifted off to sleep and woke up in bed, unable to remember how I got there. It was six a.m. and my bladder felt like a hot-water bottle
that had been filled to bursting. In the bathroom I pissed and gulped down mouthfuls of water. I looked in the main room and saw that Fran was asleep under a sleeping bag.

Fran had already gone by the time I got up the next morning – sleep was something she snatched at odd intervals like coffee from a vending machine. Propped up against an
empty packet of Rice Krispies was a note scrawled in her appalling handwriting:

I felt pretty bad too and if my current form was anything to go by I’d be lucky not to finish the day feeling a good deal worse. Extrapolating from the events of the last few weeks it
seemed likely that I would end up either in prison or hospital within a month. The only good thing about the way things had worked out was that in my current circumstances it was logically
impossible to get burgled.