A Good Read

The Saxophone

by George Thomas

Two saxophone cases sat on the table. I rushed over and ran my fingers over the case that was clearly the more expensive. When I lifted the cover, I gasped and my mouth went dry. I'd never seen anything so beautiful. The gold-lacquered saxophone, nested in a plush velvet lining, shimmered like a rare jewel. I ached to own it and to run my fingers over the mother-of-pearl finger pads whenever I wanted to. It was a dream. Would it come true?

Earlier that summer, I realized that, because I was entering high school in the fall, I could no longer use Pa's hand-me-down C-Melody saxophone, the instrument I'd learned on and had played for four years. I knew all its quirks and foibles. I didn't want to part with my battered old friend, but marching band music is not written for that instrument.

In my junior high band, I had transposed all the alto sax music up one-and-a-half tones and changed the key signature in order to play it on Pa's sax. I'd wanted to do the same thing in the high school band, but the bandmaster only allowed regulation instruments. The time had come to trade it in on a standard alto or tenor sax. An alto is smaller and cheaper, so it would be an alto. My parents had called Mr. Gershman, and he had brought over two alto saxophones for us to inspect.

The four of us sat around in a circle in the family living room--Ma and Pa, me and Mr. Gershman, who was my music teacher and also owned the music store. Pa had just come in from hoeing corn and hadn't changed from his overalls. They were covered with corn chaff; garden dirt clumped on his boots. I was mortified. He could've at least changed into something clean. I knew he worked hard at the mill and then came home and had to work the farm. But I worked hard that day doing chores, too, and I took the trouble to change. What would Mr. Gershman think?

Ma had changed from her working clothes--the uniform she wore as a short-order cook at the diner. But I could smell the rancid odor of deep-fry grease on her hair and worried that my teacher could, too.

I tested each of the two saxophones the man had brought--the reconditioned silver-plated Pan American and the glowing new golden Buffet. The plain Pan American one was much better than Pa's. I could play all the way up to high F above the staff and down to low B-flat just like any of the other notes. But when my fingers flew through scales and arpeggios on the Buffet, the sound was so much more glorious that Ma and Pa stared at me in astonishment.

As the adults talked about the two instruments, I sensed that they were reaching a frontier and when they crossed it, there would be no turning back. I sat deathly still with my heart in my mouth.

Pa turned to Ma. "What do you think, Grace?"

I could see her glare at him and purse her lips. He always forced Ma to make all the decisions. Why couldn't he speak up for once?

She sighed and smiled brightly at the rotund little man in the thick glasses who had driven from town all the way out to our farm. "I think the Pan American will be just fine. I can't really see any difference in the sound. If he stays with his music, we'll think about trading up to the other one later."

My heart sank. With her, "think about it later" always meant never. And anyone could tell the difference in the sound--Ma wasn't being fair.

My teacher looked at me sympathetically. He must have seen how desperately I wanted the better instrument. He leaned forward in his chair, his forehead perspiring. "I have no doubt, Mrs. Thomas, that he'll continue to play and to make progress. He has a rare gift, and we all know how hard he works to improve. Why, he practices all summer, even harder than the rest of the year, and takes lessons when the other kids take time off." He removed his glasses and mopped his forehead. "You might not think of it this way, but the Buffet is a better investment. He'll move ahead faster on that sax so he can start earning money playing in dance bands, starting in high school." Finished, he sat back.

Looking away from me, Pa shifted uncomfortably in his rocking chair. "Grace is right, Mr. Gershman. We'd better stick with the Pan American for now. It's a good instrument and all we can afford."

So that was that--they'd crossed the frontier.

I bit my lip and blinked back tears; thirteen year old boys don't cry.

If only I could have gotten a real job the last two summers, I'd have earned enough to pay for the difference between the two saxophones. But job pickings were slim with all the World War II vets coming home and needing work. Nobody would hire a twelve or thirteen-year-old to do anything except mow lawns, which barely paid for my music lessons.

Or if only Mr. Gershman had brought just the Pan American for me to try out, I would have been satisfied with the plainer instrument, not knowing any better.

If only, if only . . .

Mr. Gershman rose from his chair. "Well, if that's your final decision . . ." He shut the velvet-lined lid on my dream sax. And something closed inside me.

The little man continued. "He can have the Pan American now, to get used to before school starts. I won't make you wait until you've paid all the installments. I'm sure he'll do well with it. He's my best student, and I expect him to win all the high school music contests."

Pa went to the roll-top desk, got his wallet, and counted out Mr. Gershman's money. There was none left when he finished.

My music teacher turned at the door and looked at me. "I'll see you next Tuesday for your first lesson on your new sax."

* * *

Mr. Gershman had been right; throughout high school, I did win blue ribbons in all the competitions, from the county level right up to the state finals.

By the time I had finished high school and was evaluating college scholarships, I'd earned enough playing in the municipal concert band and in local dance bands to buy that Buffet saxophone.

I brought my dream sax home from Mr. Gershman's music store, placed it on the living room table, and opened the case. Staring at the instrument, I longed to recapture that magic time-- the excitement and enchantment when I'd first seen it, right on that same table. I tugged hard at my memory, knowing that it had been a very special feeling, a very special age. But I couldn't go back. I was no longer a child. I'd crossed a border, into a new place and a new time, never to return.

_______________

The ride along Route 301 takes us past tobacco fields, firework stands and diners that smell of fried eggs and defeat. The rear windows on the ‘62 thrust engine Le Sabre roll all the way down. A third of my father's arm has roasted. My mother's hair is held hostage by a turquoise scarf. "Dame eso," Give me that, he says to her. She's exceeded his time limit for refolding the map. He steers with his knee.

In the back, I am in charge of the cooler. Bottles float and clang. The ice came from a station near a ramp that emptied onto the smoke stacks and refineries of the New Jersey Turnpike. At four in the morning, my father stabbed the block with a pick and then reached for a cigarette. The orange embers glowed in pitch-black. Tonight I will make five trips with the plastic bucket. I've learned not to ask about the air conditioning, "It's a waste of gas," he says Gas that costs thirty- five cents a gallon.

My parents patiently grimace as I dazzle them with my eloquence and read aloud about Pedro's shenanigans all the way to South of the Border. Tires crunch over gravel when my father pulls in the driveway that promises clean, modern comfortably furnished guestrooms with a private bath. The diamond plastic ring has been fearlessly stamped with the room number. No card to swipe. Inside, forest green drapes, mildew on stucco walls and beds dressed in mint chenille. A quarter buys a massage. The door will groan with abandonment when we leave.

I dread brushing my teeth at bedtime. The sulfur makes the tap water stink like rotten eggs. I wade into a rectangular pool after fourteen hours with my thighs stuck to plastic seats. My eyes sting and turn pink.

Later my father orders a T-bone. He's completed a day's driving between Fayetteville and Florence. We are halfway between New York and Miami. Time has an entirely new meaning here. It passes languorously. At the Formica table, I arrange pegs on a triangle and eavesdrop on my parents' conversation.

Tomorrow at this time, we'll be in Miami Beach, the American Riviera for all Cuban families like mine. First, we'll pick up my aunt at the factory. Auburn with soulful coffee eyes, she is damp and dewy in the scent of Tabu. We head to her overgrown house where fallen mangos ripen on a windowsill and then to a hotel across from coconut palms that at night turn incandescent in lime, aqua and cherry. When I pull the lobby door, the cold air shoves me out. The precise molecules that comprise the ocean and sand and salt are propelled into my lungs where they will dwell for the rest of my life. The next day I make deals with a merciless sun and overstay on the beach eating pastelitos and croquetas and persuading my parents of my invincibility. The shower pellets me like hail. The solarcaine stains the unforgiving sheets.

The steak arrives an hour later: overdone and leathery. I use my fork like a plow to push the grits to the edge of my plate. On the walk back to the room, I cry out "Daddy" and clutch his hand. I'm afraid of frogs that will leap out of the bushes and land on my pale northern legs.

To collect a card of the Dixie Dreams Motel, a menu from Rod's grill, a frayed photo of the Sombrero Tower at dusk is to reconstruct a life, card by card. To wage a stake in the struggle between a stony future and a past that has been razed, burnt down, and painted over. By the time he retired, the skyscraper where my father worked had turned silver like him. I remember it shiny and black as his hair.

When I was a teenager and too mature to hold his hand but oh so curious about his job, he let me tag along on snow days. An overnight blizzard had shut down the city but not the banks. Currency transfers in another realm. My father's polished florsheims were protected by totes. My maxi coat skimmed the sidewalk. No pictures of us exist, only the stillness of how we tread beholden to a transformative snow. A ten-minute train ride brought us across the river. In the World Trade Center, he stepped on the escalator first. Their steepness made me dizzy. "Cuidado." Be careful, my father said. He was my protector. Now, both are gone.

Postcards, menus, tickets, ephemera as they are known in the trade are the proof, the evidence, the numbered exhibits in the case against evanescence. Otherwise, who would believe you? How can you convince anyone that something you cannot see can kill you? Or that a pile of rubble can make you cry?

How else to bear the disillusion of a detour off the interstate. "This is it?" my children said as we drove on 301 past boarded buildings and billboards that proclaimed, "When God is not enough call Dr. Womack." Or how to explain that my aunt in the nursing home rolls her fingers forward in little waves because she's still at that phantom sewing machine, attaching zippers, sleeves, and collars?

The quest for place and time is an alchemist's mission. It is the creation of a force more devastating than loss, more enduring than love, more magical than turning metal to gold. It is an equation that can prove places are immortal, a power that can return him to me, and a grace so divine it can restore what we have lost.

I first met Neil not long after my father died. I was living in a big old red-brick Victorian semi in north London with my mother and her vicious cat Sparky, trying and failing to finish a long, learned novel packed tight with the obscure literary allusions and authentic multicultural credentials that the publishers loved in those days, when out of nowhere Neil rode into town, all bravado and muscles and shaved head and mad, staring eyes. He was just a boy, really, but a boy with an ASBO at fourteen, a caution at fifteen, a spell in junior detention centre at sixteen and a boy of his own by seventeen. He was a boy who was wild and dangerous and soft-hearted, a boy who wanted to live more badly than anyone else I knew at that time. Compared to my own sad, shambling existence in the shadows of life, his was a kaleidoscope. I peeped from behind my mother's curtains at the world outside and wrote about people like Neil. I never believed that he really existed until I met him.

Here's how it happened. It was one of those long, cold winter evenings in London, when the streets are slick with a rain you don't recall having fallen and the lights are an orange ball above you in the damp, black chill, fighting feebly against the night. Water hangs in the air with nowhere to go. You brush against these tiny cold needles and they stab your face, making you draw your hood closer about you. Long, dark alleyways harbour thieves and villains, furtive drug-dealers and nervous knife-wielders and young drunk couples rutting. Through it all runs the Holloway Road, a long straight road with dismal shuttered shops on either side, the gloom punctuated at infrequent intervals by the bright lights of a pub, a kebab shop, a curry house, a burger joint. One or two of the old fish and chip shops remain, but they are relics of a time fast being forgotten. A younger crowd roams the streets on these nights, ravenous for real red meat, big slabs of it slathered in ketchup and hot chili sauce. Fish seems strangely genteel for such a crowd. Even an inch of grease and a side order of thick, stodgy chips cannot hide the slight effeminacy of the tender white fish that melts away at the first bite. The crowd on the Holloway Road these days wants meat that you can bite into, gristle that you can chew on, blood that you can wipe off your lower lip. It wants its beer cold, its curry hot, its lights bright and its music loud. Nothing luke-warm, nothing ambiguous for this crowd.

If you follow the long, straight Holloway Road far beyond the neon horizon, you'll end up in Scotland. It's hard to believe, but this drab parade of tawdriness is the Great North Road by another name. Before too long, the Holloway Road becomes Archway Road, then Aylmer Road, Lyttelton Road, Falloden Way, then the Barnet Bypass, and then you're out of the suburbs and into open countryside, speeding up the A1, sometimes calling itself the Great North Road, other times the London Road, depending on the perspective of the locals, and the green fields and hedgerows flash past as you tick off the towns - Stevenage, Letchworth, Peterborough, Newark, Doncaster, Pontefract, Darlington, Durham. Fight your way through the huge smoky grey sprawl of Newcastle and you find yourself speeding up along quiet open roads now, close enough to the sea to smell the salt in the air and hear the seagulls cawing but never quite close enough to see that big grey frigid North Sea until suddenly you're past Berwick-upon Tweed and hopping over the border into Scotland without even realising it, and there is the sea in front of you all craggy crumbling cliffs and white-topped waves, freezing and forbidding, so that after just a few minutes the road turns away in disappointment and heads inland, cutting across open countryside to grand, regal old Edinburgh, with its magical castle suspended in the clouds above the city. You skirt over the top of ancient Holyrood Park, and for the last few hundred yards of its existence the A1 takes on the name of Waterloo Place, as if trying to reassert its Englishness one last time, reminding the burghers of this proud town that this road, the A1, begins on Newgate Street in London, where Rob Roy himself was held in chains.

I was dreaming all these unconnected vague drunken dreams as I sat in a plastic box of light and sound and blood, Donna's Kebabs I think it was called, taking refuge from the oppressive damp mist outside which had, after some time spent walking up and down the Holloway Road looking for some friends I'd misplaced earlier in the evening, pierced the protective film of alcohol and got to my joints, making my elbows and knees ache arthritically. So I sat huddled over a white foam box filled with grey-brown, glistening slices of meat encased in pita bread and doused in hot sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, red onion, white onion, cucumber, gherkins and olives. By the time Neil walked in I had left magical castles and folk heroes far behind and was pondering on the olives, a nice touch but not right. I admired the originality, but originality is not what you expect from a kebab house at midnight on the Holloway Road in the middle of November. You want something to fill your stomach with the expected greasy-sweet flavours. The sourness of the olives was unexpected, and left me feeling somewhat dissatisfied. Donna did not have any other customers that night, either: perhaps others felt the same about olives in a kebab. So I was surprised when this big, shaven-headed hulk of a man ignored all the empty tables and eased himself creaking into the little red plastic chair opposite me, his gruff "dja mind?" uttered far too late to admit any response but an impotent shrug.

For long minutes he said nothing, just attacking his extra large kebab as if he hadn't eaten for a month. I sat saying nothing, eating nothing. I couldn't. I got the sensation that was strange to me at the time but would soon become familiar: that Neil was doing enough living for the two of us, and there was nothing left for me to do but watch. Soon he had ketchup and chili sauce all over his stubbly chin, and bits of lettuce had flown all over the table, the floor, his jeans, his T-shirt. Whereas I had been eating my kebab using a small folded piece of pita bread as an ersatz fork, Neil just shoved the whole bundle of meat, salad and sauce into his face and began chomping with his huge strong jaws, slashing the food to pieces and somehow ending up with most of it in his mouth, where he chewed only perfunctorily before gulping it loudly down and setting those chomping blades immediately to work on a new mouthful. The noise was astonishing. The dull beat of the radio, the squealing roar of the traffic on the Holloway Road and the underlying buzz of the slowly rotating lump of grizzly meat in the window were all drowned out by the sound of Neil's bones crashing against each other, his saliva washing around among the sauce and ketchup and meat, his muscles working so hard that his temples pulsed furiously with each pincer-like motion of those powerful jaws. His face, already blood-red, became redder with each mouthful, and just as I was beginning to fear that he would choke, he put the remains of the kebab down, took a big slurp of Coke and belched softly.

"So whatcha doing tonight?" he asked. He looked like a child suddenly, all eager energy and bright eyes, waiting for the next amazing thing to come his way.

"I was looking for my friends," I replied. "I lost them somewhere back there." I gestured vaguely over my shoulder into the misty wet darkness, and Neil's eyes followed my arm faithfully, searching the night for people he'd never seen before.

"Can't you call them?" he asked. "Text them? Page them? Email them? IM them? Photograph yourself holding up a sign saying ‘Where the f--- are you?' and send it to them? I mean, who loses people these days?"

I looked down at my kebab, and picked up a small mouthful with my piece of pita bread. "I don't have a mobile," I said awkwardly. Usually it was a sentence I pronounced with pride, as it comprised one of my few truly distinguishing features. People would draw in their breaths and regard me with awe, as one who had asserted his individuality and resisted the siren call of technology. But suddenly tonight my lack of a mobile phone felt like what it really was, a phoney affectation. To my relief and astonishment, Neil did not pass judgement one way or the other, just accepting it baldly as one more simple fact to add to his growing store of knowledge about the world around him.

"Well, if you can't find them, they've either gone home or gone to a club in the West End or they just don't want to be found," he said after a moment of intense concentration. "So here is what I propose. We'll finish our food here and then go around the corner to the Nag's Head and talk to as many people as we can until we find someone who's going to a party afterwards, and then we tag along and have the time of our lives. How's that sound? By the way, I'm Neil Blake."

"Jack Maertens," I replied, and Neil took that for assent to his plan of action, for he then began attacking the rest of his kebab and motioned for me to do the same, which I did, feeling a little sick as I lurched back out into the dark wet Holloway night and followed Neil to the Nag's Head, a dive of the worst kind, so bad that I didn't want to go in until he told me patiently and seriously, as if talking to a slow child, that he had chosen it precisely for the very reason of its awfulness, which would make anyone in it naturally keen to get out and on to somewhere better. He was soon proved right, too, as after just a half hour or so of working that tight-packed smelly old crowd, he hit upon a group of students who were heading on to a party up in Highgate, and all he had to do was tell them a few jokes and buy a couple of rounds of drinks, which he left me to pay for, and suddenly we were on the night bus chugging up Highgate Hill, where a few hundred years ago Dick Whittington had heard the Bow Bells calling him back to fame and fortune in London, and where today middle-class families drove their huge snorting Landrovers up to huddle together in expensive refuge from the pulsating violent ugliness below. For Neil and me that night, Highgate Hill was a place of cheap wine in plastic cups, vodka in jelly, cheap cigarettes, expensive hashish from a reputable dealer on the Edgware Road, tequila slammers, half-grabbed kisses with a girl on a sofa, loud music and shouting and some attempts to dance.

By the time we left it was already morning and people in suits and raincoats were climbing sourly onto buses. The sun was still not up, though, and neither was my mother when I sneaked in quietly through the sleeping house to my room. Where Neil went after that I don't know, but I know that he must have followed me home because the next day when I woke up, although I hadn't given him my address or phone number and was caught between relief and regret over it, I went downstairs and found him back again, sitting in my mother's living room sipping a cup of tea and chatting amiably with her about the beautiful bright yellow winter jasmine climbing across the walls of her garden. Soon we were out again onto the Holloway Road, dodging cars and buses and mingling with the crazy throngs of shoppers as we hopped from pub to pub, our talk becoming crazier at each place until the orange glow of evening took hold and the shoppers on the street became drunks like us, and after we had hopped from pub to pub for a while Neil was able to finagle us into another party, this time in Hackney.

Almost every night and every day passed this way in the new period of my life in which the morose brooding behind my mother's curtains suddenly gave way to a riotous drunken haze of colour and noise. If I felt any regret it was only because my novel was sitting unwritten on my laptop and by the time I woke up each afternoon it was time to go out again. As well, there was a slight lingering feeling of being a hanger-on. At the parties we went to I knew nobody, and usually Neil didn't either. Yet soon he was virtually playing host, while I felt myself merely being suffered as a necessary side effect of Neil's irrepressible presence. I tried to introduce him to some of my friends, but he quickly tired of them, while they thought he was mad, and we left early from whatever soiree we had ruined. As for his friends, he said he had none. Since leaving Feltham Young Offenders Institution he had drifted from town to town, making deep and intimate connections but not lasting ones. He had more phone numbers than his mobile phone's memory could handle, but each of them was accompanied by a long and extravagant story about why he couldn't call it because he owed the person money or a favour or had slept with his wife or stolen his car. So we sloped around north London from pub to pub and invited ourselves to parties with strangers.

Then, one day, Neil was gone. For several weeks I heard nothing until, just before Christmas, a battered postcard smudged with rain informed me that Cornwall in December was a truly beautiful place, full of crags and rocks and monuments to people and gods nobody can remember any more. He was staying in a friend's old cottage working his way quickly through a dusty old Cornish dictionary, he told me, seeming to remember the ancient words rather than having to learn them anew. He had got as far as "gwreg" (wife), but couldn't find anyone to teach him the correct pronunciations. So he was fumbling through, making up his own sounds as he went on and planning to get all the way through to z by New Year. He signed off "Dha weles" without even putting his name, although who else could it be? The friends with whom I now spent my time, the collection of failed writers and "mature students" who only a few weeks ago had been in my naïve young eyes the height of wit and erudition and wisdom, seemed like shades. None of them could have composed something so spontaneous and true as that smudged, creased old postcard with its spidery black script streaking across the page, winding its way between the lines of the address and spilling over onto the bright yellow sands and blue sea on the other side. I was gripped, and wanted to jump into my old blue-green Nissan Figaro and burn down the M4 to spend Christmas with Neil learning Cornish and drinking whisky in the rickety old fisherman's cottage with the fire crackling and the treacherous winds lashing the windowpanes. But I lacked the heart for it, and instead toasted Christmas with sherry in my mother's living room with some relatives who always made me feel dead.

New Year's Eve came around and I was feeling as lonely as the grave. I had been invited to a couple of parties but knew exactly what they would be like and had no interest in going. I fully intended to see the New Year in with my mother, using my desire for solitude as a pretext to be a good son for once and help her through what my vapid relatives had sententiously predicted would be a ‘difficult time' for her. By ten o'clock, however, the canned laughter from the television was making me perfectly suicidal and I knew that my mother could see it because she offered to turn it off and I hastily declined and she looked relieved as I sped out of the door and into the cold dark night full of animal yelps and whoops. I pulled the top down on my Figaro so that I could hear it all and perhaps let some of it rub off on my lonely soul. I drove down the Hornsey Road into the dark madness of Holloway and all was as I expected but it did nothing for me. After driving up and down for some time looking for something, I parked in a side street and did something truly absurd. I went to Donna's Kebabs, ordered an extra large kebab with hot sauce and chomped down on it, watching the clock tick down to midnight and all the time fully expecting Neil to come crashing in full of ideas and enthusiasm and dragging me out of my solitude into some pulsating pit of desperate young drinkers trying to live just a little more before the end of the year. Of course, nothing happened. Neil was buried in his Cornish dictionary, probably halfway through ‘y' and feverishly fighting his way to the end, and I was left with myself. It was another slow night for Donna's Kebabs: everyone with anywhere to go was somewhere else. Around midnight the spotty young man who had been left in charge shuffled out from behind the counter with two cans of beer and set one before me, saying, "Don't tell anyone, yeah?"

Midnight came and went. We clinked cans. For the kebab boy, the fear of getting caught seemed to outweigh the pleasure of rebelling against Donna, and he looked constantly out of the window for the police, hardly talking to me all the time, and about ten minutes later, with his can still half-full, he went back behind the counter. I was bad company anyway, and to avoid getting Donna's Kebabs closed down over the worst, smallest and most dismal and depressing New Year's party in history, I took my beer out into the street. People were cheering as they swayed past in flush-cheeked groups, arms around each other, and several tried to gather me up and carry me along in their tide of celebration, but I resisted and broke free. Everything felt wrong, and all I could think about was that one more year had passed with my great literary novel still unwritten. I had wasted too many nights on the Holloway Road and too many mornings lying in bed too sick and confused to do anything. My laptop brimmed with half-finished thoughts. Abandoned chapters littered the dark corners of its hard drive. It was taking longer and longer to start up in the mornings, evidence, the shop said, of a virus, but to me it was a symptom of the weight of hackneyed, cliché-ridden prose clogging its arteries. The more I wrote, the slower it ran, as if in protest at the poverty of my writing. A few days later, in a grand New Year experiment, I tried taking a notebook to a café and writing there, as I had on long dreamy university days, but the process now felt foreign. My hand ached quickly, the dull characters in the café distracted me too easily, and writing even the simplest sentence seemed to require far too much effort. I realised that I could never have churned out so many megabytes of dross had I been forced to write longhand, or even to feed paper through an old-fashioned typewriter. At some point my body would have rebelled against the wasted effort, as it rebelled now in those cafés at every trite sentence that my tired brain formed. I went back to my room and let my fingers glide swiftly over the keys. Better to produce garbage than to produce nothing at all, the writing books always said. So for two months I cluttered my hard drive with more megabytes of ponderous, inelegant, pretentiously sententious prose, all the while feeling like more of a fool.

When Neil came racing into my mother's house one bright March morning, then, I embraced him as my saviour. He did look curiously messianic, standing there in the hallway with the bright orange sun flooding in through the open door at his back and making him almost glow around the edges, as his bright brown eyes shone childlike and his thick face smiled broadly but serenely at me. He looked at once like a man who had discovered some important secret and like a child eager to discover a new one. Probably all this was in my head, a product of the months of despair and their sudden end in a blaze of glorious spring light. We hugged like old brothers, and my mother stood watching us in bemusement. She liked Neil for his polite talk of winter jasmine and for the simplicity and kindness that lay beneath all that loud masculine youth and laughter and energy, but she could sense that he was dangerous too. She knew I would leave with him soon and that she couldn't stop me, but she warned me before I left not to follow him everywhere he went.

"Keep your own mind, Jack," she said. "Don't let yourself be led anywhere you don't want to go."

I kissed her and said I'd be fine, and indeed at that time I felt stronger and more independent than at any time in my life, and the idea of going anywhere I didn't want to was ridiculous and slightly hurtful. By that time Neil and I had spent a week or two exploring every pub and bar and club and kebab shop and curry house and chicken shack and burger joint on the Holloway Road, and were thoroughly sick of London and all its grey grimy misery. We'd even taken to trying the pubs around my mother's house in sedate little Crouch End, disturbing the faithful old dogs at the feet of the old men with their crossword in one hand and pipe in the other and their pint of bitter half-drunk on the table in front of them. We decided to cause some havoc in those places just to shake them out of their dead filmy-eyed smiling expressions and get them to put down their pipes and papers and express something, if only anger. But the first place we tried it, a tiny little place with net curtains on the window and a crackling fire and a leafy beer garden out back, nobody rose to the bait. We cursed loudly and danced and shouted and even took a swig of one old man's beer. But nobody said a word. The barman stared at us with an ambiguous expression on his face, and the customers just buried themselves in their crosswords and waited for us to go away and leave them alone, which we soon did, feeling so ashamed of the whole thing that we bought a round of beers for everyone. After that we got a bottle of whisky from an off-licence on the Hornsey Road and went down the hill to dark dirty old Elthorne Park to sit among the sad old winos and drink and smoke. Neither of us said very much, not even Neil, who usually only seemed to stop speaking to eat, sleep or kiss someone. I don't know what he was thinking about, but I was thinking of my father, who had worked all his life in a government office up in the city and travelled home on the same train every night, always stopping on his way back from the station for a quick pint and a chat with his friends before coming home to dinner. I imagined how he would have looked at Neil and me if we'd interrupted his quiet pint one tired evening with foolish attempts to goad him, how he would have told the story later over dinner with a sad shake of his head.

"We must leave tomorrow," Neil said into the night. A couple of winos looked over: we'd been silent so long that they must have forgotten we were there.

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