The Colour of Memory by Geoff Dyer

Author:Geoff Dyer [Dyer, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857863362
Publisher: Canongate Books

036

In the post was a summons to the Magistrates’ Court for non-payment of rates I’d already been assured I didn’t owe. Four months ago they’d written to confirm that I wouldn’t have to pay any rates. Then they asked me for five hundred quid. I wrote back explaining that they’d already told me I didn’t owe any rates. Another demand arrived. I wrote again. They sent another demand. I wrote again. None of these letters of mine were acknowledged – as though the place sending the demands didn’t actually exist.

When the summons arrived I phoned the rates office but there was no answer. I went down to the office but as soon as I began speaking a man in uniform waved his hand to silence me and pointed to a notice explaining that no enquiries could be dealt with because of an industrial dispute. I sat down in the corridor, wrote another letter and dumped it in a rubbish bin marked ‘Post’.

Back home I ate a dismal plate of beans on toast and drank a mug of tea. Under the prison glare of the bare lightbulb, tiny bubbles of grease floated on the brown surface of the liquid.

On the news there was an item about anti-hunt demonstrators somewhere in the home counties. The huntsmen were all decked out sedately in their red riding gear, the hounds all yapping and panting while the demonstrators tried to get in the way and make a nuisance of themselves. In close-up one of the demonstrators was yelling ‘Scab! Scab!’

In recent years the word had become an all-purpose term of abuse for any situation in which one group of people wanted to move while another group wished them to remain stationary. So frequently had the word been used that it no longer carried any pejorative weight as far as the scabs were concerned. Its moral edge had been blunted and now it sounded like an aggressive greeting that was also an exclamation of pain, defeat and humiliation on the behalf of the person uttering it. It was something you shouted when the lorries or strike-breakers had already driven past under police escort. There was almost something elegiac about it, a nostalgic appeal to the word’s own lost moral and political authority, like a fading echo on a cold day, trying to call its way back to the lost warmth of the mouth.

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