Read Online The Colour of Memory by Geoff Dyer - Free Book Online

extending his.
    ‘Actually now that you don’t want it I’m not sure I’ll even buy it,’ I said, withdrawing mine.
    ‘Jesus,’ said Steranko, putting a record on the turntable. ‘What a kid.’ A few moments later the clean, intelligent emotion of Jan Garbarek’s tenor filled the room.
Audible landscapes formed and re-formed themselves around us. Morning music, mist melting in the sun.
    ‘It’s going to be a nice day,’ Carlton said.
    We went down into the kitchen where Steranko stirred a saucepan of porridge. He made porridge perfectly and patiently and ate it every day regardless of the weather.
    When it was ready he filled four bowls. Carlton dumped in a lot of brown sugar and then some more after he’d taken one mouthful. It was still too hot to eat. We blew on it. Carlton poured
more sugar in.
    We were all blowing on our porridge and taking gasped spoonfuls from round the edge. It felt like it was burning my stomach.
    ‘Beautiful,’ said Carlton when it had cooled down enough to eat.
    ‘You sure it’s sweet enough?’
    When we’d finished Steranko chucked the bowls in the sink and we went back up to his room. While Steranko finished getting ready Carlton fiddled around with the cello.
    ‘Can you play this?’ he asked, leaning it back against the chair.
    ‘Not really,’ Steranko said. He reached for the cello, settled himself behind it, ran the bow across the strings a couple of times and then played what was recognisably the beginning
of Bach’s first cello suite. Freddie, Carlton and I clapped.
    ‘That’s all I know,’ Steranko said, smiling.
    Carlton had to call for Belinda but Steranko, Freddie and I arrived together at Foomie’s place. The party was already in full swing. Foomie smiled warmly at both Steranko
and me and said how glad she was that we could come. We introduced her to Freddie and they said hello and smiled at each other. Foomie was in a black sleeveless dress. Her hair was piled up and
tied in a bright scarf and she wore big gold earrings. She asked if we wanted some punch but the three of us, at exactly the same moment, all said ‘BEER’. The single perfectly
synchronised syllable belched loudly into the room, followed quickly by three separate mumbles of ‘please’. I could feel myself blushing.
    ‘Help yourself,’ Foomie said, pointing to the neat stack of cans on a sturdy table. The doorbell rang and she went to answer it, leaving the three of us standing in an awkward
huddle.
    ‘I think we really made an impression there,’ Freddie said.
    ‘What a start,’ Steranko said and then we just stood there, drinking fast and looking round. There was a lot to drink but there were a lot of people to drink it as well. I opened a
second can. Soul records were playing in another room.
    Steranko and Freddie drifted off. I stood in a corner, feigning intensity until Mary came over and handed me a joint. I remembered Mary from years ago when she would ask, wide-eyed, if Robert
Mugabe was the fat one or the other one but in the last year she had suddenly got politics – it was like she’d received them in the post after a slight delay somewhere along the line. I
liked Mary but her zest for arguing things through was sometimes a little wearying. After a film she always insisted that the sex scenes were pornographic, that the rape scene suggested that women
liked being raped, that the husband’s slapping his wife endorsed violence against women and so on. She recounted arguments with people where they had said they weren’t interested in
politics and she had responded by pointing out that everything is political. Her favourite expressions were ‘offensive’ and ‘ideologically unsound’. The latter she used so
often that it was virtually a form of punctuation, occasionally reversing its meaning and using it as an indication of unqualified approval as in ‘ideologically sound’. Mostly, though,
she preferred it in the negative mode when referring to buying