Aw, but they're cool people (2)

Where to begin with Hayes? As she approaches our table - actually "approaches" doesn't really cover it. It's maybe twenty-five yards from the door to our table, and for the few seconds it takes her to walk this distance she's making an entrance. She's rocking the monochrome, but daringly, has branched out with a white chemise. She regards us with a cool eye, from beneath a natty, chestnut fringe. It's almost a relief when she sits down and once amongst us proves herself to be as droll and amicable as her comment board persona. A fellow can only handle that much charisma for so long.

We're lucky with the waitress. She's a patient, soft-featured girl, who handles us attentively and unobtrusively. Her colleagues seem like a difficult bunch, stomping around impatiently, sporting brief shorts and brief, unconvincing smiles. She deals with the afternoon's setbacks - a CO2 shortage and a smashed glass (not one of ours) - with good humour and minimal fuss.

The only individual who's not enjoying the day so far, perhaps, is the toy ferret, whom we have dubbed "Steve". He's been liberally doused with duty-free cologne, and tossed through the air in a display of astonishing legerdemain by the author. Retrieved, he sits on the table as a marker to latecomers.

We order food, and as we do Nancy arrives, with her husband Bob in tow. This is something of a conundrum for me, as Nancy and I have fallen into a pattern of bickering and mutual denigration that has its foundation, at least as far as I'm concerned, in a deep affection. I like most of the people who contribute to the Surviving Grady board, but she and I know each other as well as two people can, who have never met, nor shared more than the scantest details of their lives with each other. Which is to say not well at all, but it doesn't feel like that. The geography of the table, as well as a natural instinct for what is seemly, prevents me from monopolising her company. Anyway the scouting report on Nancy is that in person she is somewhat reserved, in spite of her garrulousness at the keyboard. Evidently, anyone is going to seem a little quiet, relatively speaking, when a noisy, shameless Englishman with a couple of lunchtime beers under his belt is showing off in the corner. But she's not the mime I feared. She's funny, and charming, and a part of me is irritated that I didn't get a chance to talk to her at any length. Bob maintains an air of bemusement. He's a solidly compact fellow, with a warm smile.

JD and Rob are here now. Later, along with Cyn, they will shepherd me around Fenway. They're the kind of couple who were put on this earth to remind the rest of us of our shortcomings. They're handsome, athletic, generous and entirely impossible to dislike. JD is a willowy blonde, with an infectiously gossipy way about her. Rob strikes me as the kind of guy who would always go out of his way to make a stranger welcome. I'm greatly indebted to them both for helping make the day special.

I enjoy a club sandwich. Kelly has chosen an unusual side dish, a kind of fondue, in a cottage loaf. The hollowed-out crust is filled with a warm Florentine sauce into which you dip your chips and crudités. I'm not sold on it, but I dip in anyway, reasoning that if I don't fuel up now I'll be asleep by the sixth inning. I'm falling in love with the waitress. She has these enormous brown eyes which seem to regard me with what I take for indulgent affection, but which could just as easily be pity. Confusingly, JET looks just like her. Seriously, they could be sisters. And just to add to the effect JET seems incredibly pleased to see me. Obviously I've come a long way to meet these people, but at the same time I must smell of beer, bacon, and cheese, and I'm pretty sure I have spinach in my teeth. By now, I'm romanticising everything about the day, the beer will do that to someone like me, and I detect (spuriously, in all likelihood, and without any real evidence) a certain melancholy in JET. I want to give her a big hug and smuggle her back to England with me. Fortunately I stop short of voicing this sentiment, and realising the depth of my folly, I slow down on the drinking. There is a general, post-prandial lull.

Aw, but they're cool people (1)

History may well adjudge Tim Berners-Lee as the most influential Englishman ever to have lived. Children of the future will yawn at Shakespeare, struggle with Newton, and wonder what all the fuss was about with regard to Churchill. None of them will be able to ignore the World Wide Web. As he scribbled down his grand idea on the back of an envelope is it possible that he conceived how swift and total its conquest of the globe would be? Academics, terrorists, enthusiasts of every shape and colour have found each other via this extraordinary medium. And now, on a sticky morning in late May, I was about to gravely disappoint a motley bunch of Americans, unfortunate enough to have bumped into me on a website, a blog, strictly speaking, called "Surviving Grady".

It's a curious thing to meet people you already know for the first time. You assess them differently, and experience a subtly different shade of self-consciousness as they assess you. It must be something akin to what happens when two public figures first meet.

Il Papa: I thought you'd be taller.

Bono: I thought you'd be... holier.

Cyn is warm and chatty, easy company. Her online persona can tend towards the belligerent so I'm pleasantly surprised. I tone down the Englishness, too, so perhaps we're both muting our cyber-selves somewhat. We're acknowledged by a guy in a filthy pair of chinos, a shift manager perhaps. Cyn, with typical directness outlines our demands to him. We need a table big enough to accommodate a dozen or so souls, if everyone shows up. He slopes off to sort something out for us.

Next to arrive is Bridget, who I imagined, based on her rather impish sense of humour and a blog photo taken from a steep angle, to be tiny. She's tall, however (it can't be her!) and wearing a vivid green Red Sox tee-shirt. She's pretty and obviously very smart but shy in spite of this, I sense. I've forgotten that the rest of us are half a generation older than her, of course, and upon realising this I resolve to curb my behaviour in deference to her. I keep this up for about twenty minutes or so. At least into my third beer.

Kelly's next. Again she's taller than I'd thought. She's also in black, with fair, celtic skin, and impossibly curly red hair cropped short to make it manageable. She's lugging a backpack jammed with camera equipment and a toy ferret. It becomes clear, very quickly that she's one of those people whom I hold in the highest regard, because they exhibit all the qualities I lack. She's thoughtful, reasonable, funny without being a clown, self-aware without being inhibited. That slim sliver of the afternoon that I don't spend making lame jokes I spend listening to her, and agreeing with everything she says.

It's eleven thirty, so the four of us go inside, loitering sheepishly by the entrance. There are large LCD screens everywhere and a robust sound system blaring although there's only us and the waiting staff to hear it. Before we're seated Cindy turns up. She's a voluble, pneumatic blonde who is obliged to suffer the worst of my more animated misbehaviour. She sits next to me, a decision, I imagine, that she is still regretting.

As the day wears on, my recollection of events becomes a little impressionistic.

North of Columbus

I was looking for something else when I came across this, an article ignored for publication by The Spectator. It's quite long, fictionalised in parts - who remembers drunken conversations with any degree of accuracy? - and, in fact, rather overwritten. But it's not bad enough to delete altogether, and it fits the travelogue theme (Every Day Is A Holiday At Borrowed Philosophy!) rather well. More on Boston to follow.

The apartment overlooks a small square close to the Museum. Locals call this part of the city el Xino; its squalor recalling other Chinatowns familiar to sailors, sex tourists and professional travellers back in the 1920’s. There is some evidence of post-Olympic gentrification even here. Beneath the cloistered edges of the square a café and a skate shop seem to thrive, and in the north-east corner a basic, sandy playground has been laid out. Reassuringly, the rest of the plaza is given over to dogshit and vagrancy.

The winos hold the junkies in suitably low regard, I’ve noticed, and from time to time exhibit their contempt with their fists. The drunks wear dark clothing - to disguise their incontinence, presumably, and contributing somewhat to their random, baggy menace - the drug-addled tend to be more brightly turned out, although one sometimes gets the impression that they are wearing each other’s clothes. A waiter assured me, early in my stay, that none of these undesirable souls were Catalan. “They come from elsewhere in Spain, from Africa, from Yugoslavia, just to stink up the streets.”

Yugoslavia? Of course no-one comes from there anymore. But by early afternoon, once they have drunk off the previous evening’s sleep and begun their daily carousing in earnest, you might suppose that the reeking crows gathered around the square’s benches might be singing about Tito, or Franz Ferdinand, or Philip of Macedon. Their vocal facility declines each day with the sun and their noise turns into something feral, a desperate fling at self-expression.

Today, as I shave, the voices from the afternoon window seem a shade more coherent, momentarily, passing as a faint signal on a short wave radio. I can almost grasp the melody - for a second it’s there, like the gist of a half-remembered nursery rhyme - but then it’s gone. I finish shaving and rescue some clean clothes from the suitcase already half-packed in the hall (I will be flying home for good on Wednesday). In the two months I’ve been here my skin has darkened and my mode of dress has shifted somehow, until the distracted figure looking back at me from the wardrobe mirror could be a local boulevardier, albeit one in need of a haircut and a woman substantially younger than himself with whom to window-shop on the smarter streets of the Eixample. As a result confused day-trippers from Zaragoza will ask me the way to the aquarium or the Imax, and become increasingly confused as I offer tortured instructions, or apologies “Desafortunadamente…” and sometimes tortured apologies for my instructions all rendered in unaccented schoolboy Castilian.

My route to Bar Julia is the same most days. Past the museum, where idling skateboarders try to sell me marijuana, shuffling through the lime groves of Santa Creu. Students sunbathe on the east side of the courtyards, between lectures, it is beautiful amongst the lime trees, and unexpectedly quiet. From here I emerge onto the Carrer de Hospital and head east towards the market, a hot sandwich and, occasionally a beer. But not today. I have promised a copy of “Highway 61 Revisited” to a Swedish waitress I met on Sunday evening. She works at a restaurant which offers vast salads served by waiters and waitresses who dress informally and come from all over the world. The restaurant is a little out of the way. She’s not there but I leave the CD anyway. Heading east again I realise that although I’m not lost I am on unfamiliar streets. There are areas here, west of the Ramblas, which have escaped Mayor Maragall’s reinvention entirely. Bedsheets hang drying like grubby flags from windows above boarded-up shops. I keep walking, and happen, quite suddenly, upon a obstacle course of magnificent black prostitutes. I don’t realise that they are prostitutes at first, of course. They are not any more provocatively dressed than the girls in the supermarket aisle or the cinema queue, but they are young and fleshy and African, talking amongst themselves until I’m almost amongst them. “Oi guapo!” one girl shouts to me. It’s impossible not to smile when a handsome young woman chooses not to ignore you, regardless of her agenda. This involuntarily reaction encourages the others who begin to catcall, offering themselves. There must be twenty-five or thirty women shouting at me. Beneath my suntan I can feel my face burning. The source of my shame is obscure. I have merely walked down the wrong street. It is daylight, my intentions are unambiguous, but it occurs to me that if I were at home, trying to catch a cab from Kings Cross, and these girls were skinny and white rather than hearty and black my reaction would be one of disgust, not shame. This thought puzzles me sufficiently that I walk past the half-dozen pimps - lurking at the end of their avenue of employees, engaged in some kind of small-stakes, playground gambling game - without fear. I call my wife from the Placa Reial, where a stamp fair is taking place. Leaning on a fountain, with the scent of flaking gum and the sound of aggressive haggling around me I describe my recent encounter, seeking absolution perhaps. She laughs at me instead. “See you very soon,” she says, “and no more whoring.”

* * *

“In 1937,” my companion explains, “with the greater part of the country already under the control of the Nationalists, and in spite of the subversive efforts of both Franco and Stalin the first true anarchist state in the history of mankind was created here, in Aragon-Catalonia. Industrial and agrarian concerns fell under popular control. Productivity in the collectivised factories and farms actually increased, as people began to work not for themselves but for each other. People believed, all at once in a complementary idea of selfhood. It must have been an extraordinary thing to be part of. Eventually, the loss of men to the war, and sabotage by Fascist and Communist fifth columnists took their toll, and the idyll, whose preservation had always had to be fought for, dissolved. There are men here,” he gestures towards a table of gnarled philatelists, “who remember that time, and to the whole region it is still real. For libertarians and revolutionaries everywhere else in the world the commonwealth is a vindication of anarcho-syndicalist thought.” He hasn’t touched upon the subject of my initial enquiry yet, but I have the feeling he’s just getting started. I’m happy enough to listen though, he speaks English beautifully, clearly, but with the low, slightly cynical intonation that you hear from bus drivers, barmen and museum curators throughout the city. My wife calls this ‘The Catalan Grumble’. He unfolds his sentences carefully and without hesitation. His is the kind of voice that is used to being listened to.

“The people of Catalonia are like the countrymen of Sleeping Beauty; unconscious through years of oppression, then awaking with the same revolutionary zeal but finding that there are fewer things to protest about. This, to answer your question, is the source of Catalan militancy. The lesson of the commonwealth, for most Catalans, certainly for those who remember it, is that political action can produce concrete, positive change.”

We are sitting at a small square table. The walls are covered with giant black and white images of late jazz pioneers. I recognise Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk. The music playing slightly too loudly in the bar is not Bebop however, but something less cerebral and more percussion-heavy, Township music, I think. It’s a little urgent and primal for late afternoon, though even the aged stamp fanciers are tapping their feet. My new acquaintance has the wild-eyed look of a shaman as he talks about the revolution. “Ben”, short for Buenaventura, is named for Buenaventura Durruti, hero and martyr of the anarchist movement. Smoking furiously, as if he has just rediscovered nicotine, he tells me a little about himself. He studied at Bologna, I learn, then at the LSE. Now he now teaches here at the Universitat de Barcelona. He looks like David Baddiel will, ten years from now, but has a very different kind of charisma.

“What does the commonwealth mean to you?” I ask him. He sips his Estrella ruminatively before answering.

“For me this history is just that, a story, a fairy tale like Sleeping Beauty or the Gospels. You can interpret it as outsiders do, as a justification for revolution, a blueprint for violence against the powers that be. Or it can spur you on, as it does our local activists, to further protest and vigilance against encroachment by big business and the state. Me, I’m a dreamer. I believe that the story of the commonwealth is a story about the perfectibility of humanity. About the idea that if we come together, educated but without prejudice, we can achieve an earthly paradise. I recognise that this is an unrealistic ideal, a cliché, in fact, but if we do not aspire to achieve great things we will never achieve anything at all. Experience has instructed me towards a less naïve view of life, but perhaps naivety is something worth holding on to.”

“I love my family,” I tell him. “I’m not sure that I could not put them first.”
“The idea is that you invest a little faith in the collective, that it can provide for you and yours more effectively than a plutocracy, or whatever your current government passes off as a democracy.”
“It’s just an idea, though, isn’t it. If people are comfortable with their lives then they’ll never make that leap of faith, will they? Which is why revolutions only occur when people are desperate.” It’s early in the evening, and a little late in our lives to be having this conversation, it occurs to me. Ben withdraws, sensing my self-consciousness, perhaps. He nods to me and gets up to go to the bar. As he replaces his chair he says, gently “People can be desperate for an idea, you know.”

* * *

The clientele of the bar becomes increasingly youthful and cosmopolitan as afternoon turns into evening. The stamp sellers break up their stalls and leave the square to tourists and street performers. I have nowhere particular to be, and I’ve taken an early supper of almonds and stuffed olives, so for the time being I occupy a quiet corner, with a crossword and a collection of Harold Brodkey’s stories. A group of locals, youngish people, between twenty-five and forty years old, have congregated at one end of the long L-shaped bar. They are drinking quickly, heavily, I notice. And they are scruffy, artfully so in some cases, which is unusual for this city, where men and women seem to resign themselves to a kind of smart conformity of dress much sooner in life than in London, say, or Berlin. My favourite waiter is working tonight and while he conscientiously ignores me as he has done for the past eight weeks I have an opportunity to observe the group more closely. Something is very wrong. They can barely speak to each other. As if to confirm this observation the youngest of them, a tall, slim woman with unkempt red-brown hair halfway down her back stands, suddenly tearful, and strides outside to the square, pressing a number hard into her mobile phone as if trying to push a drawing pin into a concrete wall. I feel the draught from her overcoat as she passes. Away from her friends she begins to sob harder, in between hoarse stage-whispers to whoever is on the other end of the line. More people arrive and join the group, among them Ben, to whom I had been speaking earlier. He has changed his clothes so must live close by, I conclude, with a note of self-congratulation. He acknowledges me with a wave and a brief smile, but the manic look has gone, he now just looks like a pale, middle-aged man with an ill-judged afro.

My waiter decides that I have waited long enough with an empty glass and makes his way over. He winces at my Spanish as I order, and leaves without a word. I think that I may be falling in love with him - he’s certainly playing hard to get. My drink sits warming upon his tray while he chats to an American couple at the bar. The mood amongst Ben and his friends has darkened, meanwhile. One of the men, a tall sandy-haired head boy type is addressing the rest of the group. His voice is raised but he is speaking in rapid Catalan and I can’t make out a word of what he’s saying. It must be powerful stuff though. Two more of the women begin to weep, now the shoulders of one of the men begin to heave. The head boy raises his glass, finally, and the friends drink together. It’s a wake, I realise. Pretty soon everyone is in tears. There is an honesty in the grief, it is uncomplicated, proportionate, unexaggerated. The friends hug each other or stare at nothing. An older guy is holding on in the clinch a beat too long, like a shattered heavyweight. The girls push him away, indulgently. I meet Ben again at the urinal.

“Sorry for your loss,” I tell him.
“You’re kind,” he replies. “He looked like you, actually.”

This spooks me a little, as perhaps it was meant to. I leave him behind and return downstairs to collect my book and paper. An Australian woman is complaining to my waiter that there are men and women cuddling in the Ladies. The waiter looks the other way. I can see a shrug forming, from his fingertips upwards - What can you do? The square is at its busiest now, but I feel queasy and decide to return to my apartment. London is now just under 72 hours distant. Strangely, Glasgow is closer still. From the Irish pubs on the Carrer de Ferran I can hear Celtic fans, in town for a Champions League match with FC Barcelona on Wednesday. They are singing a hymn, a favourite of my childhood, Give Me Joy In My Heart, but with the chorus revised to reflect their worship of their erstwhile striker, Henrik Larsson, who now plays for Barca.

Hehn-rik Larrsun!
Hehn-rik Larrsun!
Hehn-rik Larssun is the King of Kings!

From my bedroom window I see the drunks slumped together in the square below like an unlit bonfire, and realise that their rendition of this same hymn was the tune I half-recognised earlier today, as I washed shaving foam from my face.

I can’t sleep. I have been away too long. I tell myself, out loud, and with drunken conviction, that anyone who puts their faith in anything other than home is a fool. There is no Utopia, that’s the point of it. Anarchy can’t save you, neither can brotherhood or Bebop, Bob Dylan or Henrik Larsson. Just find a place that fits and stay there. By now of course I’m crying; for the life I miss, for the dead motorcyclist who looked like me, even for the prostitutes who made me smile. I get up and finish packing.

It’s time to go.

The pilgrimage has gained momentum

Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox (around whom the whiff of the occult lingers like no other sporting organisation) sits in a pentagle, bordered by five thoroughfares. Van Ness Street runs along the south side of the stadium, diverging slightly from the First Base line within. Banners show the team's retired numbers, alongside Jackie Robinson's 42, in blue relief, on an otherwise featureless facade. A little way along is a bronze statue of Number 9, Ted Williams, caught in a moment of rare condescension with a young fan. Williams has a pained look about him, as if dimly aware of the craziness that awaits him post-mortem.



Any account of a visit to Fenway measures itself against John Updike's classic essay "Hub fans bid Kid Adieu". Updike is one of the great prose artists of the post-war period so you'll get no change out of him. His subject's splendour has been dulled somewhat by the shenanigans of his family and also by the Red Sox' cathartic victory in 2004. Until 2004 Williams was a totem of the team's frustration. A World Series win eluded the team armed with this great weapon; in an era of Free Agents migrating in search of glory and lucre the story of Number 9 playing out his days surrounded by lesser mortals serves as an exemplar of lost loyalty, lost innocence, even. Fittingly, the statue is larger than life.

I walk down Van Ness Street, killing time. A Brasilian kid, five years old, is swinging off his father's arm. He kicks a tennis ball towards me along the pavement. I flick it up with unwonted deftness and hand it to him. His dad, gawping up at the grandstand, lowers his gaze and smiles.

Yawkey Way runs behind home plate. The game doesn't start for another eight hours but here, already, there is a crackle of excitement. The food stands are parked in the shadow of the stadium but gameday papers, programs and every conceivable type of merchandise are being sold by a shaggy flock of vendors. Ambling fans of both teams form a haphazard tricolour of red, white and blue. The Cleveland fans are just barely outnumbered, I notice. There's no reason for the locals to get here quite this early. I manouver my way through the bustle, wearing black, feeling like an impostor.

Things are quieter on Brookline. Aside from overpriced parking and ticket offices some non-Sox related businesses operate here. It's still a little overcast, and if I hadn't seen a forecast I'd expect a thunderstorm later. Ahead and to the right, looking rather like a bus shelter or a Normandy fortification, is the rendezvous: The Cask 'n Flagon. Loitering outside, with the faintly distracted air of a tour guide, is a small, yet Rubenesque woman in dark sunglasses. Cyn. I gather myself for a moment, removing my headphones, then I stroll over and introduce myself.

Fun on Route 9

The clock thermometer on the second floor balcony tells me it's seventy degrees out at 5.30 in the morning. The peninsula of Nahant, really two islands connected to the mainland by a causeway, fills a quarter of the horizon out to the east. Spring haze obscures the city southwards. We're all still on London time, my wife, my daughter and I, and we shuffle around the house barefoot, talking in whispers. Broad low waves exhaust themselves on the beach a few yards away, you don't really hear them after a while, and an occasional gull shrieks, waiting for the tide to recede, waiting for breakfast in the exposed sand. We're hungry too. I eat a three day old doughnut - surprisingly good - my daughter eats her imported cereal straws, my wife swigs from a bottle of water.

The top floor of the house is full of light. Tall windows extend almost the whole way around. Without moving you can see back toward semi-industrial Lynn, right around to the airport, where the taillights of landing Boeings become visible through the morning mist, as we wait for the rest of the house to wake.

The girls are off shopping today, and I'm headed to Fenway, for some conspicuous consumption of my own. There's some hassle with the surround sound, meaning that my daughter has to watch Playhouse Disney in dumbshow. Her tiny niece attacks her lovingly, biting, pulling hair, leading with her head and shoulders.

We get on the road just after ten. My brother's driving a Navigator. It's black, and, as he puts it, loaded. TV, DVD, GPS, refrigerator, jacuzzi. The interior of this great tank of a vehicle is about the same size as our hotel room. We head south, past the dog track at Wonderland, past the horse track at Suffolk Downs. He hands the toll booth guy some crumpled notes and we disappear below ground, emerging close to the hotel.

The Plaza must once have been quite grand. It occupies a triangular block of the city, close to the Common. Nowadays it's cheap enough for us to stay there, along with flight crews from various airlines, and other British middle-income types (all sporting long shorts, polo shirts and sunburn).

I kiss the girls goodbye and manage an awkward handshake-cum-hug with my brother. I dump our bags and change out of my long shorts and polo shirt.

Boston calls itself, amongst other things, "America's Walking City". Compared with, Venice, say, ("Europe's Floating City") this title seems a little, well, pedestrian. It's meant to indicate that because of the relatively compact layout of the city centre it's a great place to walk around. And so it is. But it also captures the pleasant, if unspectacular character of the place. Boston is nice. The people are nice. Even the tramps are nice. I stop in Starbucks on my way up Boylston Street. I'm walking to the park, obviously. On my way out a softly-spoken vagrant who thinks my name is Buddy asks me for change. "There you go, Buddy, " I say, emptying the foreign coins from my pocket. "Thanks Buddy," he says. He looks pretty well-groomed for a homeless guy and has no detectable street odour, despite the swelling mid-morning temperature.

I shift onto Newbury Street which runs east to west, parallel to Boylston. Pavement patios are being swept or hosed down. Dogs urinate against trees. Childless couples stroll along slowly with their heads on each other's shoulders. It's all vaguely Parisian. Until I come across a U-Haul truck double-parked further up the street, obstructing the traffic and attracting vehement insults and instructions in Massachusetts English and Arabic. An unabashed college-aged guy is waving off the barrage while struggling with a mattress.



Back on Boylston I slip into Saint Clement's, a modest but satisfyingly murky Catholic church, and light some candles. The candles are colour-coded in some way which I can't decipher. The three other patrons are all deep in prayer so it seems inappropriate to ask. I leave a tip, being in America and all.

It's very clammy now. A few yards further west and I can see Fenway Park, squatting unassumingly on the other side of the street. And here are the Fens, soft-looking ground with marsh grasses. There are public allotments here, staked for tomatoes and runner beans and sunflowers.

I'm early, so I slip on my iPod. Nirvana is playing, which seems apt.

Heading West

We bought a car, a silver blue Peugeot 206 with just 18,000 miles on the clock. It smells faintly of dogs and doesn't seem terribly robustly made. But it will get us to Heathrow on Saturday, barring some incredible misfortune. I'm ambivalent about flying, as any sensible person should be. You hear that it's the safest form of transport, but you have to remember that if anything does go wrong fatality rates are exceptionally high.

It should be a super trip. My wife and I went to Boston back in1999. It rained. I went to a strip club with my father, played barefoot football on the beach, sang karaoke at a roadside hostelry after my brother's wedding and exaggerated my Englishness to a barely credible degree wherever and whenever the situation saw fit. Last time we stayed in a borrowed winnebago with a bed about three and a half feet square. This time we're staying at the Boston Park Plaza, which is either a Grand Hotel or a fleapit, depending on which review you read.

This time I get to see my beloved Red Sox play, weather permitting ("...sometimes it rains.") And while I'm looking forward to seeing family, and meeting unmet friends, this is the point of the trip. It's St Peter's, Lourdes and Santiago de Compostela all in one, for a fellow like me (and I love those gaudy Roman churches). Let's hope Fenway doesn't disappoint. A Sox win wouldn't hurt either.

Something to hold when I lose my grip

The anniversaries come thick and fast. My wife and I have been married for seven years now. I think we've established our compatibility beyond reasonable argument. Either that or we're trapped in a bubble of apathy that neither of us are energetic enough to burst. I like the former idea, and I'm convinced that we're in it for the long haul. In fact the only thing that might persuade me into divorce would be the promise of another wedding day because our wedding day was a riot. We'd have to remarry each other, Burton/Taylor style, because it wouldn't be the same with anyone else. I'm not particularly prone to uxoriousness, but a conversation I had last night, with a friend who is also warmly ensconced in a loving relationship, reminded me of how fortunate I am to be where I am.

She said something along the lines of: -

"Partners should bring out the best in each other."

Which is a wonderful idea. I'm afraid that I've failed my wife in this regard; she was inexplicably gentle, tolerant and rounded to begin with.

"I think I would have turned okay eventually," I told my friend. "But my wife has certainly helped me along the road to decency."

"Two Become One" sang the Spice Girls. Reductive nonsense. If you enter into a relationship with a view to giving up half of yourself what you need is a therapist, not a lover.

The easiest way for a couple to become more than the sum of their parts is to reproduce and in this area we've done very well. Or at least our genes have combined to brilliant effect. I see in our daughter many of the good qualities that my wife possesses. And our not so little one is occasionally rather mouthy, and always very beautiful. Gets that from me. Her proud grandmother would have been 67 today, she is greatly missed, absent for the first time on her birthday. Much love.

Busy Making Other Plans

I have nothing but admiration for people who manage to knock out 250 words on this, that or anything every single day. Of course many of them have a specific subject matter to work with, or a project to relate the progress of, or a round-the-world-adventure to irritate their less intrepid friends with the details of.

I am not haggling with a Nepalese craftsman in the foothills of the Himalayas this week. Nor am I getting married, nor converting a Vauxhall Chevette into a tank.

I don't have a muse. Maybe that's the problem. I have a lawn I'm trying to regrow, but the progress of this undertaking wouldn't make for ripping reading, I suspect.

Reseeded (again). Noticed lady blackbird consuming seed.

Reseeded (again). Scattered fine layer of compost over seeds.

Green shoots appearing! Green shoots! Walt Whitman can kiss my plump English arse - green shoots are visible!

I'll be thirty-six next week, meaning that adulthood has caught up with childhood in terms of temporal extent. And you'd have thought that in the second half of my life thus far, having got all that growing out of the way, the sloshing of hormones having calmed to a mere ripple, I'd be well-set to consider what to do next. To have a plan of action. Goals, dreams, realistic or unachievable. To regard the future with a clear eye. But always, instead, when the question pops up, unasked-for, yet fully-formed - "What next?" - I find that I still have no answer.

Good Friday

It's my father's sixty-eighth birthday. He was a beautiful, generous man, who believed in relativity and the fundamental decency of humankind. He's been dead a while now, and I try not to think about him too often, so great is the gap that he left. I am still the luckiest boy alive to have been loved and raised by such an ordinary, warm-hearted fellow. Snot and tears prevent me writing more, but there's not much more to say. Imagine your ideal best friend and then recast him as your father. That's how privileged I was.

Summoner's Tale

Lauren Laverne came in to the shop today, with her mum and dad. She's surprisingly tall. The last time I saw her in the flesh she was still fronting Kenickie who were supporting Ash at the Astoria and I don't remember her being particularly Amazonian. That was ten years ago, I'd guess, and she doesn't look any older. My daughter likes her because Auntie LaLa bought her a Christmas present - an electronic toy which my wife won on her radio show - and because she's a familiar voice, every morning. I mention all of this only because she is "the lady on the radio" mentioned in the previous post on this blog.

I'm starting to believe that the shop is built on a paranormal hot-spot, an intersection of lay lines perhaps, because this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened.

One morning my colleague Paul and I were reflecting on the inevitably of a son turning into his father. That afternoon a TV producer, scouting locations, came in and asked if he could film in the shop. The programme was called "Oh My God, I'm My Dad".

Then there was the Nick Bradshaw incident. I really should get in touch with him, incidentally.

I'm not by nature superstitious, but if I were I'd be blogging furiously about Scarlett Johansson.

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

Dear Diary,

You will doubtless be pleased to learn that I am fully recovered from my recent affliction. Spring has arrived in London. The young lady on the radio described the weather this morning using the phrase "barley water sunshine" which I thought most poetic. The haze she describes is more pleasing than midsummer haze, as it is a result of the natural earthly cycle of condensation and evaporation, unlike the smog that engulfs us in the hotter months. As I strolled out for my mid-morning constitutional the sky had brightened further lending some legitimacy to my wearing of those rather expensive sunglasses I told you about. As I sat on a bench in the small park in the shadow of the market a blackbird hopped right up to me, and eyed me curiously before absconding with a discarded cake wrapper. All in all it seems like a good day. It occurred to me, as I sat in the sun, that for some fortunate souls every day must be like this. They must glide effortlessly through life cushioned by their own brilliance and success. But then I thought, where's the fun in that? It is through struggle that we learn and grow. Therefore I have resolved never again to feel sorry for myself, regardless of how dark things become. Things could always be worse. I could be French, for example.

Much love. Will write again soon.


Tom

Minor Illness

Continental fellows, like Proust and Nietzche, put their ailments to good use. Restricted to daybeds in murky living rooms they scribbled away at great length. My productivity during illness more closely follows the Anglo-American model of old Tom Eliot.

On Margate Sands
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.

The idea of the body punch is to wind an opponent, causing his hands to drop, and exposing his chin. That's what it feels like, this curious thing I've picked up. Like I've been pummelled beneath the ribcage, by the heavy gloves of a prize fighter. There's been some puking, and some general disturbance of normal lower alimentary function, but it's this ache around the gut that's most difficult to abide. It's hanging around like the weird guy at a house party, you don't know where it came from, it's strange and unwelcome, and definitely not leaving of its own accord. Meanwhile my chin is exposed to the bitter blows of fate.

The Karamazov Brothers Reimagined As Circus Stereotypes - Part Four

‘I got into music because of a girl. She dumped me and I moped around. They’re all impossible really, and they all say they want one thing when they want something completely opposite, or maybe they’re just testing you. Fuck knows. I sat around with some mates, smoking, and they gave me a hard time because I didn’t see much of them when I was going out with her, so it was “Now you’ve got time for us you prick” which was fair I suppose. But it gets you down spending your days indoors with the curtains drawn just spliffing, and money was low, so I got a job in a record shop and the pay was fucking awful, like two quid an hour but it was good to get away from my stoner mates for a few hours every day and have that music all the time. The guy who ran the shop, he didn’t own it and to be honest I think he had his fingers in the till, nothing stupid, just the odd tenner here and there, he was into all that old school shit, which I thought was embarrassing at first, but then of course you’ve got to factor in the drugs. A lot of those fat soul boys were taking a lot of speed because it was cheap, principally, and because they were fat, I dunno (laughs).
We drove up to Caister after we closed the shop on a Friday, and I’d got some E. My mate Chris, he was also fat and a junglist, but he used to get his stuff down in Plymouth and he reckoned it came straight off the boats from Russia. Or submarines, as if they’d surface in the English Channel and there’d be these mad Plymouth blokes, like frogmen, who’d do the deal on the hull, swap ‘em E’s for Levis or something. It was quite mad. My girlfriend, Chris would always say to her “You’re mine, you are. When you dump him, you’re mine” in this ridiculous yokel accent. He always had spit on his chin but he did take a shitload of drugs. He’s clean now, I heard, he works as a children’s counsellor or something ridiculous. Anyway, she did dump me, he was right about that. “Told yer Pav,” he said. “She’s mine now.” So we dropped the first lot in the car on the way up there driving up the A12. It was all over. We were fucked. Of course with the E it’s impossible to resist the big beat. When you’re near the speakers it feels like someone’s squeezing your heart, but it feels good. Anyway I’m dancing and sweating and it’s fucking packed and I look at the DJ and he’s just surveying the scene, laughing, and I think, “I could do that. How hard can it be?” I had no decks, no records, but right then I thought, “I’m gonna be a DJ. I’m gonna make these fat fuckers dance.” So I started dealing, smalltime really, just fulfilling a need, supplying a demand. And this is where I was smart I think, I didn’t consume the profits, or spend it on birds in tight jeans with long necks and bangles and all that. The temptation was there because the money was there. I was never interested in promotion. I’d get the E and sell it to the bouncers. Much less hassle. Then I’d go and do a three hour set for free. And I was good. I don’t know if it’s something you can learn, but I was good from the start. I was spending more on old records than new ones. There is so much music and everyone else was playing tiny percentages of it. I never saw it as a niche market, I wanted to include everyone, now you run the risk of turning some people off, but, you know, fuck them, basically. If their minds are so small that they can’t listen to new ideas, well, old ideas really, then fuck them. That was the attitude I brought. I wasn’t sucking up to the crowd, I was challenging them, seeking to educate them.’

‘I don’t know who my Dad was and I never really gave a thought to it. People back home remember my Mum. They all knew what she did for a living, but no-one tried to help her. It wasn’t as if the priest or the council were knocking on the door saying “Lizzie, we’re here to save your soul and get you off the game.” She wouldn’t have listened anyway. She never listened to me. She was kind though. She looked after me when she could. She’d put me to bed then go out to work, what else was she going to do? I got through school alright because of her, got my GCSEs. I was going off to college maybe, after that. There was a hitch in the road. I got dumped. Life does that to you, though, to keep you sharp and alert. Well, it does that to some people. Life just ground my Mum down. She loved me, I know that. Everything she did was for me, so I can’t blame her, I can’t think badly of her. I think that her death made me more determined to succeed and to come through, if you like. I didn’t want to be someone who people talked about for the wrong reason. It’s funny kind of example to set, I suppose, but that’s what it was. Whenever I’ve felt myself sliding into bad behaviour, I’ve stopped myself, shaken things up, followed a different path. I feel fortunate that I was able to make her comfortable at the end. It’s a horrible way to die, your body just kind of packs up. I knew she was dying but I was in Rio. It’s crazy over there. You’d could play Mantovani and they’d go mad for it. I flew back as soon as I could but she’d died the night before. It was easier than I thought. A relief, really. The funeral was pretty quiet. She had no family left, it was just me and some ageing Toms she knew, a couple of old guys I didn’t recognise. Punters maybe. There was some stuff about it in the papers, but I didn’t read it. I’d lived it, and it wasn’t a lot of fun. You try and remember the happy times, like they tell you to, but to be honest it was a stretch. We had no money, never went on holiday, ate shit food. But I know she loved me. Can I nick a fag?’

‘I never did it for the fame. Just as well, really, it’s a pretty anonymous life. It’s not like I can’t walk down the street. Ninety-eight percent of the population don’t know who I am. Of the two percent that buy the records or come to the clubs most of them couldn’t pick me out of a line-up. That’s as it should be. Most of the time I’m just playing other people’s music. It’s different when you’re in the studio, obviously. There’s a creative element to that. But it’s still a bit like a kid playing with poster paints, trying to see which colours go together best. I read a review of the last EP I put out which said I had an unusual talent for juxtaposition. It’s not a word I’d use. Because I don’t know what it means. (Laughs). Joking. But that’s a pretty slender talent. It’s not going to help me in many other areas of life is it? Unless I take up, what’s it called? With the broken tiles. Crazy paving. Those geezers are just like DJs aren’t they. Making it up as they go along. Fucking charlatans, that’s what they are. I’m not a missionary or anything, but the most satisfying thing is after a set when a punter comes up to you and asks, “What the fuck was that?” And they start singing a tune you’ve played back to you. You see it in their eyes, that they’ve understood. That’s pretty rewarding. A lot of guys try to make it into something it isn’t. They paint themselves like they’re some weird puppet-master directing the whole thing, controlling the energy of the room. That’s all bollocks. Music can be transcendent, especially if you’re fucked (laughs) but at the end of the day you’re just playing records. It’s not that taxing. You hear these wankers moaning about their schedules and all the travelling when most people are daydreaming about a life like theirs. They say they want more recognition. For what? They’re not saving lives or helping the poor are they? There’s no Nobel Prize for Hard House. (Laughs). I think that the bloke doing a mobile disco at a wedding has a tougher time than we do, trying to get the grown-ups to dance without playing Madness or something from “Grease”. That’s a fucking riot, I’d love to do that. Play for five hours and get fifty quid and a couple of chicken drumsticks. Mental, but real, y’know. No foam, no girls in cages, maybe a couple of tearaways in cheap suits doing some spliff in the pub car park but that’s it. Play some proper tunes. “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero”, all that. Mad. Maybe that’s what I’ll do. Go into semi-retirement. Get the Transit out at weekends and tour the South-East. Lights, PA, everything. There’s no way I’m playing fucking Spandau Ballet though, fuck that. Does that make me a snob? So be it.’

The Karamazov Brothers Reimagined As Circus Stereotypes - Part Three

He was a boarder at a choir school when he ran away. He had given no indication to his fellow pupils that he was unhappy. He wasn’t subject to any bullying from the boys or staff, as far as anyone would admit. I didn’t think they were lying. The choristers seemed confused, the teachers panicky. The housemaster had gone into the dorm on the morning of March 3rd, drawn the heavy curtains, and found his bed empty. “Where’s Alex?” he had asked, prompting yawns that were also shrugs from the seven other lads. Perhaps he’d gone out for a run, they suggested. He liked to jog around the Great Pond before breakfast, sometimes, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the great carp, eight feet long some of them, which swam there. His trainers and athletics strip were still in the locker at the end of his bed. By ten o’ clock the whole school was looking for him. In uniform, they swept in a line across the Commons and out into the woods calling his name. “Alexei!”

They were returning when I arrived. They had not found him. I eased the car up the drive past blazered boys, many of them now armed with sticks. The spire of the cathedral projected above and behind the school and seemed to get taller the closer I got. The Headmaster was waiting on the steps. “Is there just one of you?” he asked. “We’re very worried. Will you have to drag the pond?”

I told him I didn’t think that was necessary yet. “Have his parents been informed?” The Headmaster shook his head. “We can’t get hold of them,” he explained. “It appears they may be out of the country.”

I interviewed the boys from his dorm. These eleven-year-olds were still at that precious, prelapsarian age where all they cared about was food and football. They were astonished at the suggestion that young Alex might have been anything other than ecstatic to live and sleep among them.

“Can you think of any reason why Alex might have run away?”
“No. Uh, none. We have a great laugh.”

I alerted the station that we had a possible Missing Person. The school secretary found his file and scanned his photo for me. “It’s from last year,” she said. “His hair’s longer now, but he doesn’t look anymore grown-up.” I sent the photo back to the station and went to interview his masters. It was two o’ clock by then, academic lessons had been abandoned for the day, and the boys had gone off to choir practice.

His housemaster, Turner, was a hare-eyed fellow who worked in this closed-off world, I assumed, because he had failed to make it outside. He was astonishingly nervous. Had he noticed anything unusual about Alexei recently?

“No. Yes. I mean no, he was very much himself. He’s a quiet, polite boy. Rather shy. Always keen to help. Charming, really.”
“You’re close to the boys, are you? A confidante?”
“Not exactly,” Turner said. “You can’t be their friend and their master, it doesn’t work. But I think if any of them had a problem I’ve made it, um, clear enough that they can come to me.”

The rest of them were as unhelpful as they were co-operative. How strange, I thought, to live amongst these young men and to form no deeper impression of them than would serve to fill out a school report. I thought of the men and women I worked with. I could tell a story about most of them that would illustrate some personally unique pattern of behaviour. The teachers seemed to regard a classroom of boys rather as a postman might consider a sack of letters. Their job was simply to make the boys someone else’s responsibility. I left the school just after five. Some lads were out on the Commons, punting a rugby ball around. They paused their game to watch me pass. I was angry, disproportionately so. As I reached the station my phone rang.

They found him in the Lady Chapel, shivering, still in his pyjamas. He didn’t know how he had got there and remembered nothing about what had happened during the day. They rushed him back to the school, fed him, and put him to bed in the matron’s room. He ran a fever for two days and never moved. The housemaster wanted to take him to the local hospital but was persuaded by the matron and headmaster that this was unnecessary.

I visited him a week after his disappearance. He was as described; quiet, courteous, shy. But no-one had mentioned his eyes to me, which was strange, as they were remarkable. He had the darkest eyes, as if his pupils and irises were a single shade. Black almost.

The Karamazov Brothers Reimagined As Circus Stereotypes - Part Two

“Five minutes,” says a guy in a headset. “You’re on in five.” Ivan looks out from the wings. The stage is black. The ceiling of the club is black. The whole place smells of piss and dust and beer. About a third of the seats are occupied; everyone else is at the bar. He goes over his routine in his head, pausing for laughs. This laughter, he realises, is entirely hypothetical. But he knows what it sounds like.

Try to think of the first joke you ever heard. The first joke that really made you laugh. (This is how they did it at the workshop). Let’s explore why it works. Why it’s funny.

“What’s yellow and highly dangerous?” This was Ivan’s joke. The facilitator explained that because it’s difficult to think of anything that is, in fact, yellow and highly dangerous the question creates confusion, or what he called intellectual discomfort, in the listener.

“Shark-infested custard.” This absurd answer, it was further explained, creates a strong mental image, as well as relieving the listener’s intellectual discomfort in an unexpected way. A guaranteed laugh. Conviction is the most important thing, he said. Weak material, nerves, an indifferent audience, can all be conquered by conviction. If you believe in the joke, if you believe that the audience will laugh, then generally they will.

Ivan drums his fingers against a partition. The booker really liked his stuff, his nervous energy, his rapid synaptic leaps from subject to subject. He can do it, he knows. He is well prepared. His delivery is assured, his timing honed. It’s a short set he’s doing so even if he bombs he can be off stage almost as soon as he walks on.

He listens as the MC finishes his set. The empty seats have been filled. A band of smoke stretches impressionistically across the front of the stage. There is a big laugh, and Ivan hears his name. Then the MC rushes off the stage, pausing to pat Ivan on the back and say “Don’t shit your pants”.

He’s on, squinting hard into the lights, owning the stage. As the applause dies, as he’s about the thank the audience for their kind welcome, a fat guy in the front row shouts, very loudly, “QUEER!”.

“Why do you assume I’m queer? Because I like to fuck your girlfriend in the arse, is that it?” And then he’s rolling.

The Karamazov Brothers Reimagined As Circus Stereotypes - Part One

Dmitri, a giant, hungry bear of a man, emerges from the delicatessen with his mouth full of spit. He unsheathes a dry sausage and eats it as he walks across the square towards the beach. “The drains are bad this morning,” he thinks. Finishing the sausage he discards the paper wrapper which the wind drags like a cat’s toy, stopping, starting, before coming to rest at the foot of a slide in the small playground next to the market. He buys six beers from a kid on the boardwalk and sits at the edge of the sand watching the surfers crash amongst the waves. Every so often a girl will trot up the beach to use the showers. The sand makes everyone knock-kneed. Dmitri watches the girls wash off the sand. He keeps his jacket on – it’s denim, too hot for this weather – because he is ashamed of the hair poking down past the sleeves of his t-shirt. A dog comes and sniffs at him. He cuffs it away with his giant hand. The dog can smell the other sausage wrapped in the inside pocket of his jacket. He knows without looking that people are staring and laughing at him.

He's So Frothy

Mr Coffee takes me to one side this morning and says: -

"Hey, I'm famous. You know youtube, the website?"

I nod.

"I'm on there. Search for Mr Coffee."

I search and find this video. I have no idea what's being said but the blurb translates roughly as

This Sicilian genius has converted a scooter-van into a mobile coffee shop!

It's not exactly Citizen Kane. But it's fun to watch him playing up to the camera. And then I notice, at the right of the screen, between 0:41 and 0:37, a great bumbling oaf in a corduroy jacket. Me. I think of myself as a wiry seventeen-year-old, of course. Most men do, in spite of glaring evidence to the contrary. Somewhere along the line I've transformed into wall of flesh. It's most discouraging. I yearn for the aerodynamism of my youth.

More About Money

Today I took a brief sojourn amongst the mega-rich. Business took me to Kensington Palace Gardens, home of some the World's Wealthiest People. This guy lives there, as does this guy, oh, and this guy. The houses look like the picture above. The fellow I went to meet wasn't there, he's got a dodgy knee, apparently. It rained heavily, and there was a fire on the Tube. It was a waste of time, but I got to smell the money.

Fabulous wealth does not ensure happiness, self-evidently. In fact, I concluded, strolling along a pavement completely free of litter and gum, there is a kind of poverty in superfluity. The miniature daffodils growing sparsely in my front garden afford me greater pleasure, I imagine, than those sprouting in the Sultan's crescent beds do him. Alien to the plutocrat is the sensation of relief when your car starts first time and you weren't entirely sure it would. Will these people ever know the joy associated with finding a fiver in the pocket of a coat unworn since spring? No.

I hope that these precious lozenges of pleasure are never denied me, because I am richer for them.

Instead of Drowning

I am the son and grandson of sailors; men with squinting faces, lined with salt, their eyes reflecting an endless blue-grey horizon. Like Ulysses I feel the pull of the sea. The shrieking of gulls is enough to shorten my breath and narrow my veins.

I have this money, my share of my mother's disposed estate.

I could go to Vegas and put it all on black. But what happens if I win? Twice the problem.

I could buy a boat. I've found a 60 foot gaff yawl which I could easily afford:-



But I'd have to man her, moor her, and, presumably, learn how to sail. I like that boats are girls. Maybe I'll just get a beach hut.

Fixed as Fate

For a few yards either side of the fence a path of flattened grass is visible. People still come here it seems, for a sensation that we discovered half a lifetime ago. The fence itself is new, rising from a shallow ditch ten feet straight up, then returning outwards at forty-five degrees for a further two feet. Someone younger, fitter than us could still climb over, I’d guess, but it wouldn’t be easy. Anyway, that’s not our plan.

The first plane tears overhead while we’re still in the car, a Swiss A330, big enough to shift the suspension. We rock gently to rest, smiling at each other as the plane’s engine noise diminishes.

I get out first. It’s early and the grass is still wet although the day is warm. I catch myself crouching as I approach the fence, like a kid playing a solitary war game. I pull at the mesh where it meets an upright. The bottom wire has been cut already, and the stretcher bar unscrewed. The corner pulls up easily. I turn to summon Mary from the car but she’s already out and without looking around she hurries across the grass, ducks under my arm, under the fence and through. I twist and drop to my knees and I’m after her, pulling the fence back down behind me.

***

I’d expected the call ten years ago, when I heard about her parents, who by that time had more or less withdrawn from life, from Mary, and from each other. It’s difficult to imagine how anyone carries on after losing a child, and in this case they hadn’t. Instead they drifted blankly from day to day, a suburban marriage in dumb show. There are no photographs of their firstborn, suddenly and immutably gone, anywhere in the house, Mary tells me. They never talk about her. They rarely talk about anything else.

Mary’s elder sister, Catherine, was my first girlfriend. The family went on a skiing holiday, Catherine caught a cold which turned into something else, and she died, aged eighteen. The whole thing happened in less than two months. I got to see her once, after she fell ill. Her skin was curiously grey, but otherwise she seemed herself. I dream about her occasionally, but I stopped crying for her years ago. There didn’t seem any point. You can’t measure how loss affects you. There’s no control, no parallel life you can lead where your loved one doesn’t die, and instead your lives diverge in the normal way: - different colleges, different interests, different partners. Some part of you remains stuck back when you heard the news, however, like the cropped branch of a tree, with all of its potential outcomes and flowerings flatly aborted.

She rings me at work. I don’t recognise her voice. She no longer sounds fifteen and spoiled.

“Dickie? It’s Mary”
“Mary?”

And then we fall (oddly, considering the matter which connects us) into an old, dimly remembered pattern of teasing. She suggests I’m pompous. I wonder if she’s still not brushing her hair. It is innocent and reassuring. Then she says: -

“Listen, I want to go back to the runway. I can’t get the idea out of my head.”

I experience a sudden spell of dizziness, as if I’ve stood up too quickly. I am at once surprised that I’ve never thought to do it, and panicked by the prospect of doing it now. It’s stupid, possibly dangerous and certainly illegal. And for all of those reasons it’s exciting.

“Why don’t you go?” I ask her.
“I want to go with you,” she says. “Like we used to.”
“I’ll think about it.”

We meet a week later. We had last seen each other some time after the funeral. Her hair is darker now. I’m a little grey around the temples. She goes to kiss me on the cheek and I’m not expecting it so my lips end up brushing her nose.

“Oh my God, you’re old!” she says.
“We’re practically the same age now,” I tell her.

She is gawky, and she smokes heavily. Her knees and elbows and cigarettes project outwards at unexpected angles. Her hair seems undecided. She has a dreadful laugh. There is, thankfully, nothing about her which calls to mind her dead sister about whom, it turns out, she too is reluctant to talk. On the whole, though, she seems undamaged. And while there remains something unrefined, something adolescent about her, who’s to say she wouldn’t have turned out that way without her family marooning her on the brink of adulthood? We choose a date. It’s important to Mary, obviously, and I don’t feel that it could injure me.

“It’ll have to be a perfect day,” she says, “or we’ll postpone.”
“Okay.”

A week before the agreed date I call her to suggest a reconnaissance. She’s against it. “Back then we just used to go, if the weather was right.” I wish that there was someone I could lie to, someone that I could make excuses to, about it. Someone who would wonder where I’d gone, but there is no one. On the chosen Sunday the sky is layered with storm clouds, and hail showers are forecast. Mary calls me at six in the morning. “I don’t think we can do it today,” she says. I’m relieved. A nasty little part of me hopes that the absurd idea will fade now, that she’ll forget about it and that the feeling will go away. Later, when the hail starts I walk out into the garden and lift my face upwards. I stand there with my eyes closed, feeling the hail spring off my face. The experience is more painful than cleansing. I go back inside where the pellets of ice melt in my hair.

***

There’s a further fence between us and the end of the runway strip, which may also be new. It’s not as high as the chain link but it’s solid and topped with razor wire. We’re close enough. We crawl to where the grass is deepest. Mary is five yards ahead of me. “Is this okay?” she asks, sitting suddenly upright. “It’s fine,” I tell her. She lies down in the grass. I crawl alongside her. We hear the engines approaching, but it’s something small, a 737 perhaps. My skin starts to prickle, nonetheless, as the engine noise increases. The plane is a long way up as it passes over us.

***

In the short summer between exams we came here, Catherine and I. Someone told her about it. It wasn’t my idea. You lie in the grass, and when a big plane goes over you get a brief feeling of weightlessness. It doesn’t happen every time. Some afternoons we lay there without being lifted once, just staring upwards into nothing. It was an excuse to be together, without having to take action. We just lay there, like an emblem of our future, joined, waiting for whatever hurtled in our direction. Mary followed us one day, and after an exchange of sororal threat and counter-threat she was allowed to stay. The first Jumbo that went over low shifted her a foot off the ground. She was lighter than us, and being younger, was not so attached to the earth.

***

The four Pratt & Whitney engines on a 747 make an unearthly noise, a noise you’d expect to hear only in a nightmare. The tone shifts sharply as they approach. I look across at Mary. She is crying, but calmly. She notices me looking at her and wipes her face then takes my hand. Her skin is dry, rough almost. She says something I can’t hear over the scream of the jet engines. I wince and she shouts: - “I’m glad you’re here!” The 747 snaps into view, huge and low, its belly almost with reach, seemingly. And then I get it, the pull, moving instantaneously from my shoulders down to my toes. I stay in contact with the grass, but for half a second it feels like I’m cushioned by something else. “Yes,” I hear myself say.

We lie there watching the plane climb and bank out of view. There is only sky then, free from cloud or haze, rinsed clean by a week of heavy rain. There is nothing to focus on, no depth. I feel the dampness of the grass on the back of my neck. Otherwise there is nothing. “Did you get it?” I ask. Mary nods. She is shaking now, and swallowing hard. “Are you cold?” “No,” she says. She looks straight upwards. Tears stutter down her cheek and into her ear. I watch her, propped up one elbow, for several minutes. Another Airbus takes off. “I’m hungry,” I tell her. “Let’s go.” “Okay.” I pull her to her feet and we walk back towards the car.