Free The Colour of Memory by Geoff Dyer Page B

that afternoon when I went over to Terry’s, the greengrocer on Tulse Hill.
    ‘The police raided a couple of houses on Railton Road,’ Terry explained to a shopful of customers.
    ‘They came down on the train,’ said a woman with pink streaks in her hair. ‘Like football hooligans.’
    Terry was a big white guy whose thinning blond hair made him look older than he was. The shop was open till seven six days a week and until lunchtime on a Sunday. Terry was always there; even
when he was out at the market picking up new produce in his van he was somehow still in the shop. Not only was he always there, he was always in a good mood. Whatever time of the day you went in he
was joking or shouting hello to somebody. Such was the value everyone placed on Terry’s high opinion of them that no one even dreamed of ripping stuff off or getting impatient or swearing
because of the queue.
    As well as all the usual fruit and veg he stocked a full range of West Indian vegetables and an array of wholewheat bread, natural yoghurt, free range eggs, tofu and vegan cheese. At the same
time he kept an eye on tradition with a few packs of bacon and pork sausages stashed away in the fridge. Although it wasn’t actually on a corner, Terry’s was the heir to the idea of the
corner shop but it also represented an unusual alliance of hard-working grocer shop economics with the anarcho-vegetarian culture of the inner city. One way and another he kept everyone happy.
    I was just coming out of the shop when I bumped into Steranko and Carlton, both stoned and wanting something to eat. I offered to cook them an omelette and the three of us walked back to my
flat. It was the first time they’d been there since I moved in.
    ‘Shit, it smells like a skunk’s toilet,’ Carlton said as we made our way up the stairs, past marker-pen signatures and purple band-names in fluorescent Bronx script.
    ‘What d’you call that?’ said Steranko a few minutes later as the reinforced door clanged shut behind us. ‘Lubyanka chic?’
    Carlton laughed: ‘Man, you might as well go the whole way – get yourself a drawbridge and portcullis while you’re at it. Look at this,’ he said, picking up the
entry-phone by the door. ‘When you get really paranoid you can just pick this up and
listen
to the outside world . . . Is there anybody there? Is there anybody there?’
    With that they went through to the main room and lurched around there for a while. The day before I’d bought some flowers and put them in a jug on the window-sill: they had elegant green
stems and purple petals with yellow dots. Carlton looked at the jug of flowers and said, ‘Even
here
there is life.’
    ‘Nice isn’t it?’ I prompted.
    ‘Not exactly cosy is it?’
    ‘Course it isn’t cosy. It’s cosier than that place you live in. All you’ve got in that room is bare boards. Besides, comfort can never do as verb what it boasts as
noun.’
    ‘Who said that?’
    ‘Guess.’
    ‘Freddie?’
    I nodded.
    ‘You know what sort of block this is?’ said Carlton, gazing out of the window.
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘It’s the kind of block where people draw their curtains early.’
    ‘Look at this,’ I said when we were back in the kitchen, turning on the hot-water tap and letting it run.
    ‘So? You’ve got hot water,’ said Steranko. ‘Very twentieth century.’
    ‘It’s free. You can waste as much as you want. You can leave it running all night if you want . . .’
    Later that evening, weighed down by large slices of an unappetising Spanish omelette, we walked down to the Atlantic. A lot of police were still around, walking the streets in
twos and threes or waiting in buses parked some distance off in case anything happened. Groups of black and white youths were walking round too, falling silent as they passed the grim-faced police.
The Atlantic was right at the focus of all this activity. It used to be a dingy boozer; then it got to be very popular as people were drawn