I intended giving a full, frank, and unadorned account of how I came to be fired from my first proper job after leaving university, but that has proved more difficult than I imagined. It’s not just that I can’t remember things clearly enough; what really happened has been overlain by the recreated version of events in my novel The Colour of Memory (1989). The fiction has colored my memory to such an extent that it is nearly impossible for me to get at the literal truth of what occurred.
The facts, or what remains of them, are as follows: I came down from Oxford in 1980 with no real idea of what I intended to do. Having applied, without success, for various jobs in advertising and television, I moved to London, where I got a job teaching part-time at a tutorial college in Chelsea and at Lucie Clayton Secretarial College. Both of these jobs were for just one term. After that I worked in Harrods during the busy period of their January sale. I was not sacked from that job but a friend who worked in personnel and had access to my employee assessment form told me that I had been classified as someone never to be reemployed. For most of 1981 I lived on the dole before starting teaching again at another tutorial college in September. I also applied again for more jobs in journalism, television, and advertising. One of these jobs was at the Periodical Publishers Association (PPA). The company was run by a Tory MP whose name—Tom Something?—I have forgotten. My first interview took place at the House of Commons while my prospective employer was taking a quick break from a masochistic-sounding part of the democratic process called a Running Three Line Whip. My second interview was at the offices on Kingsway. To my amazement, I got the job.
I began work in September while living in Islington, renting a friend’s room while he was on holiday for a month. I know this because I can distinctly remember cycling to work down Rosebery Avenue, past Sadler’s Wells Theatre. I also remember being astonished at the amount of time a job soaked up. If you went for a drink after work—I mean “went for a drink” in the English sense of “got totally plastered”—the whole day was shot to hell.
London was exciting to me back then. There were many things I wanted to do—like going to Kensington Market to buy clothes—and having a job seriously interfered with my ability to do these things. I can’t remember what my job involved, but I assume it was boring and completely pointless.
One day the second-in-command took me out for lunch. It was the first free lunch I’d ever had, even though it wasn’t really a lunch, just some disgusting sandwiches on white bread smeared with too much butter. I thought I was going to be sick, partly because of all this rancid butter and pink ham, but mainly because this pink-faced deputy-boss was a rancid old bore. He told some stories he had reheated hundreds of times before. I was a vehement young lefty at the time and spent quite a bit of the afternoons debating politics with my colleagues. Gallingly, the other graduate who had been hired at the same time as me was a member of the Tory party and, even more gallingly, had actually published some short stories in glossy magazines. He shared a house with Ian Hislop, who would go on to become editor of Private Eye and a television celebrity. This other new employee and I had many arguments about politics and I greatly preferred arguing with him to doing the work for which I was being paid. Some days I didn’t do any work at all, I just larked around. It could be said that I had a bad attitude, in fact it probably has to be said that I had a bad attitude. All I’ve ever wanted from a job is to skive. Skiving is a whole way of approaching—in the sense of avoiding—work. It’s not the same as slacking because skiving can involve a far greater investment of energy and initiative than doing the work could have ever have necessitated. Get in late, knock off early, and do fuck-all in the interval except steal stationery: that’s my attitude to work. Get paid for something you haven’t done. Why? Because this stupid job required that I give up my valuable time, time that I would rather have used in some other way even if I did nothing with it.
I think I have this bad attitude to work because of my background. My parents worked hard and I didn’t like the look of it at all. University made me realize that you didn’t have to flog your guts out working at some piss-bin job. It also gave me a taste for leisure that has, if anything, increased over the years.
After about a month I was called into the deputy-boss’s office and sacked. I can’t remember exactly what happened, only that he gave me a month’s pay to sort myself out. For a more precise and extended—though not necessarily accurate—account of what took place, the curious reader is directed to the first chapter of The Colour of Memory.
After leaving the office I met my friends Robert and James at a cocktail bar where we got totally plastered. I felt pretty bad—not because the sacking was unjustified but because, effectively, I’d been caught, found out. I deserved to get sacked. (I am all for firing people. More people should be sacked from all sorts of jobs. The number of people doing jobs and doing them badly—thereby creating extra work for other people—is incredible. The world is an inefficient place and sacking people can only make it more efficient.) Although I felt pretty bad about being sacked, I realized that it was not for me, this world of work, that I was too selfish to do a job, that I actually valued my time—my life—so highly that I would rather waste it than work at a job.
My memories are a little vague from this point on. I know I moved into a house in Balham, full of apprentice lawyers. That was a grim phase because they all went out to work in the mornings and I was left in this grim house with nothing to do all day. Fortunately, I only stayed there for a short while. After six weeks I moved into a house in Brixton with a whole bunch of people who, like me, were on the dole. From there, to cut a longish story as short as possible, I ended up becoming a writer.
That’s all I can manage in terms of recalling the period of getting sacked from my job. The more I think about it the more confused events become. The chronology is uncertain. I just can’t untangle the sequence of events. I’ve had to give up. Perhaps there’s a connection here with getting sacked from that job. Getting fired turned out to be a good thing—even though it felt like a very bad thing—and I have tended to carry the lessons I learned from it into the rest of my life. That is to say, I’ve adopted a policy of quitting, of getting by without persevering. As soon as I get fed up, bored, tired, or weary of anything, I abandon it. Books, films, writing assignments, relationships—I just give up on them. (Is it possible to live entirely without perseverance? I think it is, as long as one perseveres with the idea of doing so.) So I should, by my own principles, have given up, without a second thought, on this attempt to write about being sacked. But something about this period of my life continues to gnaw at me. I’m curious about it, would like to learn more about it—and, fortunately, I’ve just had a breakthrough.
I’m writing this in New York, where I landed what I thought was going to be a cushy teaching gig for a semester but that actually involves a certain amount of work. My wife is in London, and a few days ago I asked her to have a rummage around in my filing cabinet to see if she could find my old diaries for the early 1980s.
“Eighty-one or eighty-two.” I said. “Hopefully in September or August there’ll be an entry saying ‘Started work at PPA’ or something.” This turned out not to be the case, but in my little 1982 diary she did find the following entry, dated September 24: “Sacked from PPA.” Significantly, I had noted the date I was fired but not the date I’d started work. My wife is coming to visit this weekend and she’s bringing the diary. All will be revealed.
I have the diary in front of me now. How funny, to end up being one’s own biographer, to have to resort to the kind of research required by writing someone else’s life. On the evidence of this diary, though, it’s not surprising, either that I have so little memory of what was going on or that I got sacked. If ever there was a case of un-unfair dismissal, this was it. The diary is two and a half inches by four, and not all the entries are legible; many are blurred as if by damp or by time itself. That’s what amazes me most about this diary—the simple passage of time between my writing it then and reading it now. To think that I am looking back at things that happened more than a quarter of a century ago…
At the beginning of the year I was living in Brixton, sharing a flat with my friend Robert, who was working as a solicitor at one of London’s most prominent left-wing legal firms. (I no longer know any lawyers but there was a time, I see now, when I was surrounded by them.) Robert had gone to the same school—Cheltenham Grammar—as me and had been a year ahead of me at Oxford, but I only got to know him afterward. I was teaching at a tutorial college over in west London. I see I was always going to gigs (a quick selection: Bow Wow Wow, the Au Pairs, Pig Bag, 23 Skidoo, Kid Creole and the Coconuts), nightclubs (the straight nights at Heaven, the Language Lab, the Kareba, the Beat Bop), and films ( Circle of Deceit, Reds, The Passenger, Badlands, The Battle for Chile, State of Siege, Barry Lyndon, Prince of the City, The Loveless, to mention a few). It seems that most weeks I went to the cinema and clubs twice and probably to one or two gigs as well. I was also reading a lot, far more than I do now. (I used to keep lists but the one for 1982 has gone missing.)
When my wife first looked through the diary she was surprised to discover that as well as going to the cinema a lot (which I still enjoy now) I had also gone to hear the London Symphony Orchestra a great deal (something I never do now). This, I see now, was a code. On Friday, February 12, Robert and I went to meet a client of his in the branch of McDonald’s near Warren Street tube. She was waiting with a copy of the Evening Standard newspaper folded up in front of her. We were there to buy LSD (some code, huh, changing the D to an O?), but when we walked back to her squat in Kings Cross she unfolded the newspaper to reveal a considerable quantity of heroin. Did we want some? I definitely didn’t. Just the acid was fine, thank you very much. But my friend Robert was adamant. This was something we had to do, an experience we had to have. So I did have some of this experience and most agreeable it was, too. We spent a couple of hours there, snorting this brown powder with Robert’s client and her moronic boyfriend. Robert was violently sick, both in his client’s flat and on the tube on the way home. I felt fine and went to meet friends (principally Caroline, Robert’s cousin, whom he was always trying to sleep with) at a party at the Royal College of Art. Robert felt better the next day so we took the acid that we had bought. We walked around Brockwell Park and sat in the blue room of our place in Brixton. It was winter in the park and the walls in the blue room rippled and breathed. The floorboards were painted a glistening blue, and sitting on the sofa watching the walls ripple and breathe was like being on a raft in the middle of a calm blue lake. The sun sank into the gas fire on the horizon.
There’s another coded entry for March 18: “A!!” This meant that I had anal sex, for the first time ever, with my girlfriend Kate. “I would love to fuck you in your arse,” I said. I used the porno words, but this was before I had ever seen any porno. Back then we were anti-porno. Porn was woman hatred. I said it in this relaxed way, but in reality I was as tense as Jeremy Irons in one of his uptight Englishman roles. Certainly I was a lot less relaxed than Kate, who coolly responded, “Then why don’t you?” I had never done this before, but Kate had (she had also slept with women). She was the first woman I had been out with who was really interested in sex.
The next day Robert and I took heroin again with his client and the day after that we did two microdots of acid each. Kate cooked a huge vegetarian meal for us. She didn’t take acid but she smoked a lot of pot (which I didn’t do back then because I hated the idea of smoking).
April 5: “Pink Flamingo club”: it’s all coming back to me now. It’s a reference to the Soft Cell song (“standing in the doorway of the Pink Flamingo, crying in the rain…”) and it meant I had split up with Kate. Immediately after this I fell ill with gastroenteritis. (Looking through my diary, I see that I got ill an awful lot more then than I do now.) My second interview at the PPA was at 10 a.m.
May 7: “Camden Palace—French girl.” Another New Romantic–type evening. The French girl was a hotel chambermaid. We came back to Brixton on the night bus (I never took taxis and do so now only rarely and reluctantly) and we had nothing-special sex. This was on the same day (I remember this, though I’ve not noted it) that I sprained my ankle playing five-a-side football: the first of a number of occasions when I have torn the ligaments in my ankle. What resilience, though: going to a nightclub after spraining an ankle!
I had become quite friendly with one of my students, James, a rich, charming guy who’d been expelled from Eton and who was now retaking his A-levels (though his only real ambition in life was to become a heroin addict). Another of my students was a promising tennis player. He was a member of the club—conveniently located round the back of my tutorial college—where, every June, there is a grass-court tournament that serves as a dress rehearsal for Wimbledon. When my tennis-playing pupil did not need his card (because he had either classes or some other obligation), he lent it to me so that I could go and watch the matches. Members were allowed to take a guest and so, one afternoon, after we had completed our tutorial, James and I dropped some acid and went to watch McEnroe and Connors in their respective quarterfinals. James was wearing fluffy blue slippers. I remember Connors or McEnroe complaining about these slippers because we were in the front row (it was a very intimate tournament back then, like watching top players in furious competition at the vicarage) and James had his feet resting on the net post. Well, that’s how it seems in retrospect. Certainly they were resting on the canvas barrier separating the small crowd from the court. According to my diary, I went to the club again on Friday the eleventh, took acid again on the twelfth, and went to see Connors beat McEnroe in the final on Sunday, the thirteenth.
June 30: I went round to Kate’s and we spent the day having sex. She was living in Sydenham Hill, a short bus ride from Brixton. I don’t recall the exact nature of our arrangement but over the course of several years after we had split up, if circumstances were propitious, we would have blissful sex together.
The next day I took a train to Italy en route to Corfu, where I was due to meet James. I stopped off in Venice, where I spent two nights sleeping outside the station so that I would not have to pay for a hotel. I also went to Florence. One night, in fact, I took trains back and forth between Venice and Florence just so I could sleep comfortably. It was a shitty way to see both cities because I was so tired all the time I could barely keep my eyes open, but I was obsessed with not spending any money.
Things got much better when I arrived in Corfu, via Brindisi. This, of course, was in the days before e-mail, and although I knew the name of the village I didn’t know exactly the pensione where James was staying. Miraculously, the first place I tried turned out to be his place. He was there with his girlfriend, Julia, who was gorgeous. I booked into a cheaper boardinghouse and then the three of us took acid and went down to the beach and got sunburned. It was the start of an amazing week. A football match was arranged between tourists and the local Greeks. We were one-nil down, I scored the equalizer, but then the game had to be abandoned because there was so much animosity between the two sides. We got to know all the other tourists in the village and went carousing every night. It was like Ibiza before raving and E and house music, which means we got plastered every night at the disco. Julia was becoming increasingly upset by James because he was so bent on seducing a woman from Norway. It was probably to get back at him that Julia ended up having drunken sex with me in my squalid room. James came in while we were still lying there. I remember him going out and saying to someone next door, “I need a cigarette quite badly.”
A few days later Julia suddenly took off. The note she left read: “James, I can endure your company no longer. Last time I left you my soul, this time I leave you money.” James was depressed by this because, contrary to what Julia had said in her note, there was no money to be found. Shortly after this he and I went on to Alexandria and Cairo. There are photos of us riding stallions in the Sahara, near the pyramids, on the edge of Cairo. James had said that one of the great things about Egypt was that you could go into a pharmacy and buy drugs over the counter but this turned out not to be true. We kept going into pharmacies and asking for amphetamines but they shook their heads and looked at us like we were junkies. Alexandria had nothing going for it. It wasn’t attractive and there was none of that Lawrence Durrell feel about it as far as I could tell (though I hadn’t read the Alexandria Quartet at that point and still haven’t).
Back in England for the late summer, I drove with Robert from Cheltenham to Hay-on-Wye, doing hits of amyl nitrite on the way. Why did we do that? Not only is amyl a horrible drug, it is a totally inappropriate drug for a trip to a place like Hay. In late August I must have started my job. I had only been there a few weeks when I went on holiday to Dublin with Robert and James. The reason for going to Dublin was to visit my old girlfriend Claire, who was now at art college there. She lived in a house with three other women and they all slept in the same room, on a row of adjacent mattresses. One morning, when everyone else had got up, Claire and I had sex quickly for no particular reason and without much pleasure.
Back in London I got sacked on Friday the twenty-fourth. The entry for Sunday the twenty-sixth is more representative of this period: “ The Conversation at NFT. LSO with R[obert]. Fucked C[laire], in love with C.” Claire was only in London for a few days and I can’t remember why she had come. After she went back to Dublin I moved into a room in a new flat in Notting Hill. I was now being paid by James’s parents to give him tutorials for the Oxbridge entrance exam, which meant that our relationship reverted to its semi-formal, semi-recreational basis. James had gone from wearing slippers to going barefoot. This behavior was sufficiently unusual to give a police constable cause to stop, question, and search him, whereupon he was busted for possession of grass.
The room I’d moved to in Notting Hill was only available for a month and I had to begin looking at a new place almost immediately. At a rental agency I got chatting to one of the women working there. Her name was Lucy and we went out, first to see Blade Runner, then to a club called the Bat Cave.
Some of the codes for this period don’t make sense, or at least I no longer understand them. October 28: “C + S!!! at Alison’s,” for example. I can’t remember who Alison was. Maybe she was a tall woman with back-combed blond hair whom I met when the Clash played at the Lyceum. One imagines the C stands for coke and the S for speed but I don’t think I ever came across coke at that stage. Its being October, though, I certainly came across a lot of magic mushrooms, partly because James and I spent so many of our tutorials looking for them. The weather must have been mild and wet because there was a bumper crop that year. On the evidence of my diary, it seems I did mushrooms twice a week for about six weeks. I even put together a little collection of writings about some of these escapades and made five photocopied booklets on blue paper. I called it Memories of Hallucinogenics and gave copies to Robert, Claire, and James. Lest we get too transcendental about the whole thing, though, a not untypical entry—for November 10—shows how casually tripping had been integrated into the normal rhythm of the day’s social life. “Some mushrooms—evening in pub with James.” That was at the tail end of a season that had come to a climax on Saturday, October 30, when Lucy and I had gone to Brighton for the day. She had a bag full of an unspecified number of dried mushrooms. We took half each and within ten minutes the world went completely berserk. The beach was as tidal as the sea. We were delirious. The walls of a bouncy red castle swayed over us. We spent the whole day clinging to each other, shrieking hysterically, trying to stay out of trouble. We both agreed that we had never been so out of it in our lives. When we got back to London—punch-drunk, bedraggled, relieved to not be permanently deranged—I assumed we would go home together but Lucy didn’t want to. We met again on Monday and went to a club called Sound and Vision, and she asked to come home with me because it had been a mistake not to on Saturday.
The next day I moved into a room in the house in Balham and, in the evening, went to see the Thompson Twins. James had started going out with a woman called Sammy who lived in Flood Street in Chelsea. There was a tremendous glut of mushrooms and everyone who passed through that apartment seemed to be off their heads on something. There didn’t seem anything unusual or untoward about this, but an unremarkable entry from November 3 suggests, I think, how routinely unacceptable our behavior had become: “Met James and Rob at Master’s [a bar, presumably]—got thrown out, then went to Lucy’s.”
On Sunday the fourteenth I saw Bob Dylan’s four-hour-long film Renaldo and Clara— for the second time. The stamina I had back then! Lucy phoned to say she didn’t want to see me anymore. I said I had the right to some kind of explanation or appeal. She told me to stop hassling her. It was around this time that I finally got the hang of smoking grass. I’d never smoked cigarettes and on the few occasions people had passed me joints—when, for example, we went to see Ciao! Manhattan at the Scala—I was violently sick. It was James who insisted that if grass was smoked without tobacco it would be fine—and he was right.
From this point on, I think it’s fair to say, things got really crazy. I started sleeping with Sammy—whom I fell in love with (and whom I was still in love with when she started fucking Robert), and James started sleeping with this very druggy, privileged girl called Bella (the kind of person, I used to think, Dylan might have had in mind when he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone”). At some point I must have torn out part of the page itemizing what took place on December 9, but later, in an attempt to at least partially restore the historical record, I added, on the opposite page, “The Flood St massacre!!!” God knows what happened.
Everything got messier and messier—and they didn’t get any less messy when, in January, I moved into the shared house on Brixton Water Lane with five other people (all of whom—like me—were living on the dole). I’m not sure how it happened, but after a while these five were joined by a sixth, James’s friend Bella, whom I hated. I tried, unsuccessfully, to have her evicted from the house on some kind of ideological grounds but the others decided she should stay on the same grounds—because it would be good for her political education. Having been infatuated by James’s poise, wealth, and decadence, I now found myself starting to loathe him for his poise, wealth, and decadence. In the course of an argument about something, I punched him in the face.
“I won’t take this lying down,” he said, from a prone position. One day a brick was thrown through the window of our front door; no one knew why. We were always having parties at our house, I was always getting NSU, and we were always in the local pub, the George Canning. I fell in love with Bella. We went out together for about three or four months, during which time we took a trip to Venice. Then, when I was out of London, visiting my parents, she called to say she had started sleeping with Karen, a woman who lived nearby. Shortly after this, Bella moved out of the house on Brixton Water Lane and deeper into the local anarcho-lesbian-squatting scene. She worked for many years at Brixton Cycles and was the first woman I knew to completely shave her head. A couple of other people moved out of our house and new people moved in. A new phase that was, in many ways, a continuation of the previous phase began. I gradually moved out of this very druggy phase into more of a stoner phase with occasional mushrooms thrown in. Later that year I published my first book review—of a new translation of Milan Kundera’s The Farewell Party—in the listings magazine City Limits.
I hope the foregoing provides some context to my getting sacked from the PPA. It had taken two years to find a proper job and less than a month to lose it. It is tempting to say that I decided to become a writer at that moment but this is not the way things work. Certainly, getting sacked was one of the things that contributed to my becoming a writer, but, more immediately, this job was another possibility—another possible direction—that came to nothing, led nowhere. This is part of the process of becoming a writer. As often as not, one ends up being a writer as attempts at doing other things fail to pan out. Writing is what you are left with. It remains a possibility, even when—especially when—nothing else is available. Having said that, my novel The Colour of Memory starts with me getting sacked from my job, so in this invented version of things (which is, in many ways, the most truthful version) my life as a published writer did literally begin on that day.
I am no longer in touch with any of the people in this account. James achieved his ambition and became a heroin addict. I think he lived in Thailand for a while, was disinherited by his parents, and ended up working as a banker. Robert’s client and her moronic boyfriend also became junkies. (Neither Robert nor I felt the faintest tug in that direction.) The last I heard of Claire she was living in France. I don’t know what she is doing now but I assume it is grand, international, and highly expensive. Kate was beginning to make a name for herself as an artist-photographer but then she got chronic fatigue syndrome and her career stalled somewhat. After meeting again at a wedding, Bella and I got back together when I was in my late thirties. Her parents had just bought her a house in Brighton, where she lived with her daughter. She had become a posh, languid mum and had lost neither her looks nor her capacity to make me unhappy (she chucked me again after about six months). Robert—Robert the communist, the Beat, the Buddhist, the friend who could always be relied on to fuck your girlfriend—is now a judge.
And me, I sit here at my desk, looking out of the window on Ninth Street as I’ve sat at various desks in the long years since the events jotted down in the pages of that little diary. As I look back through it I find myself thinking two things. First: Wow! That was a lot of fun! And second: What an exemplary way to spend your early twenties! But the thing that I’m most struck by, the thing I most love and of which I am really proud, is the way that the job hardly merited a mention, either in the original diary or in this annotated commentary. It meant nothing to me, that job. Compared to the books, the films, the parties, the drugs, the women, the sex, the laughing, the drinking, the clubs, and the friends, that job—and the career of which, had I been unlucky, it might have formed a part—was insignificant. It merited the amount of time I devoted to it in my diary: about two lines.
It takes a bit of getting used to, the idea that spending 365 days a year doing exactly as you please might be a viable proposition. Getting sacked from that job was what allowed this notion—that the three years I spent as a student could actually be extended indefinitely and rather profitably—to gain some kind of purchase on my adult consciousness. Since then I’ve done pretty much as I pleased, letting life find its own rhythm, working when I felt like it, not working when I didn’t. I’ve not always been happy—far from it—but I’ve always felt responsible for my happiness and liable for my unhappiness. I’ve been free to waste my time as I please—and I have wasted tons of it, but at least it’s been me doing the wasting; as such, it’s not been wasted at all, not a moment of it.
2004