Runaway

I

In the days that followed Rachel’s abortion it was clear to all of us, except for Jeff, that we were falling apart. Not just as a group, but as friends. Although it was the music that had brought us all together in the first place, friendship was the glue that had seen us through the last weeks. And now we were simply coming unstuck. We hadn’t practised for more than a week. Maurie barely acknowledged my existence, and I hadn’t set eyes on Rachel since she told me through the locked door of her room that we were finished.

But the end itself was precipitated by an entirely unforeseen event.

It was one of those late-spring mornings when the air was at blood temperature, the sun rising over the park, early-morning mist floating above the chimney tops to vaporize in a painfully clear blue sky. The kind of day that lifts your spirits. But in Onslow Gardens, depression hung about Dr Robert’s house like a fog.

I didn’t know where the others were, and didn’t really care. I had descended into a torpor from which I was finding it almost impossible to raise myself. I knew that something had to be done. The status quo was no longer acceptable, but I had no idea how to change it — nor did I have the energy to make it happen even if I did. I was sitting smoking in the breakfast room, watching my cigarette smoke twist in the sunlight that streamed in from the back garden, and nursing a coffee that I had poured and then let go cold.

I turned at the sound of someone in the hall and Dr Robert leaned in the door. He was wearing low-slung jeans with a white belt, and a pale pink shirt with fastidiously rolled-up sleeves.

He smiled. ‘You got a minute, Jack?’

‘Sure.’

‘Some stuff I’d like you to see.’

He went back into the house and it was clear I was supposed to follow. I eased myself reluctantly out of my chair and went into the hall. He was already halfway up the stairs.

He called down, ‘I’ve got a date for that demo recording at the Marquee. And a photoshoot afterwards. So we’ve got to get the group a visual identity. Haircuts, clothes. I’ve had some outfits sent over from a friend in Carnaby Street. Big friend of Twiggy’s. You know, the model?’

I didn’t. But I followed him up the stairs anyway. I should have got suspicious when we went down the hall on the first floor and into his private bedroom.

I had never been in here before, and if I hadn’t known better I’d have thought it was a woman’s room. It was filled with the heavy, musky scent of eau de cologne, and through the open door of the en-suite bathroom I could see pink towels abandoned on the floor. The whole room was tastefully decorated in pale pastel blues and pinks — drapes and sheets, walls and ceiling. The carpet was a white shagpile.

A fussy, frilly throw covered a very large bed, pillows piled up at one end, and I noticed a mirror fixed to the ceiling above it. When I think back on it now, I am amazed at how naive I was in not realizing why it was there. An array of coloured shirts and trousers was laid out on top of the bed.

Dr Robert closed the door softly behind him and said, ‘Try these on, Jack. For size and for colour. I mean, I think you should all wear the same gear — same colours, but different — like your shirt should match Jeff’s trousers, Maurie’s trousers matching Luke’s shirt. You get the idea.’

I nodded and waited for him to leave so I could try something on. But he just stood watching me, with the strangest look in his eyes.

‘On you go,’ he said.

And I started to get uncomfortable. ‘Not with you watching.’

He laughed. ‘Don’t be silly. Won’t be seeing anything I haven’t seen before.’

I suppose I should just have walked out there and then. But I was embarrassed, and still uncertain about my reading of the situation. I stripped off my T-shirt and quickly pulled on one of the shirts. It was peach, with long sleeves, and ruffles down the side with the buttonholes. I hated it immediately.

‘Looks good,’ Dr Robert said. ‘Button it up.’

I did up the buttons and caught a glimpse of myself in a full-length tilting mirror. More than the shirt, or its awful peach colour, I saw how red my face was, coloured by my embarrassment.

‘Try it with the blue trousers. They’re the latest fashion. Hipsters they’re calling them, because they sit on the hips, two or three inches below the waist. Very sexy.’

I didn’t know what else to do, so I kicked off my shoes and dropped my jeans, aware all the time of his eyes on me. I avoided looking at him, and pulled on the pair of blue hipsters as fast as I could. But they were tight. So tight I could barely get them up over my thighs.

‘They don’t fit,’ I said. ‘They’re too tight.’

‘Nonsense. That’s the fashion, Jack. You need them to be tight. Show the girls what you’ve got when you’re up there onstage. Just like P. J. Proby.’ He grinned. ‘Without splitting them, of course. Here, let me give you a hand.’

He came round behind me, and grabbed the waistband to pull them half over my hips, until I was squeezed so tightly into the crotch that it was almost painful. He was very close, his aftershave nearly overpowering. His body pressed itself into the back of me, and I felt his hand come across to pull up the zip and then close around the bulge it contained.

I reacted instinctively and without thought, pulling away hard. ‘Get off!’

As I turned to face him he took a step towards me, and I swung a bunched fist at his face, connecting with the side of it, feeling his teeth through his cheek. He staggered back, half falling on to the bed, his hand at his mouth, blood on his fingers.

‘You little bastard!’

I wriggled out of the hipsters as fast as I could and pulled on my jeans, hopping on one leg, then the other, before falling backwards and dragging them all the way on as I lay on the carpet. I zipped up, grabbed my shoes and scrambled to my feet.

He was on his feet, too, by now. Breathing hard and glaring at me. He snatched a tissue from a box on the bedside cabinet and dabbed his mouth.

‘Unsophisticated little shit!’ he shouted at me. ‘This is the sixties. Time to experiment, little boy. Do things differently.’

My heart was hammering so hard I thought I might be in danger of breaking a rib or two. I ripped off the peach shirt and grabbed my T-shirt. And even through his anger and humiliation I could see him eyeing my body.

‘I’m sorry I hit you,’ I said. ‘But you’re going to have to find someone else to experiment with.’ And I hurried out of the room.

Even as I ran down the hall, pulling on my T-shirt, I heard him shouting after me from the bedroom.

‘You owe me, Jack. Remember? You all owe me.’

I started down the stairs and he raised his voice to a bellow, like an elephant trumpeting its anger.

‘Or maybe you’d rather be back on the street where I found you, with nothing more than the clothes you stand up in!’

In the downstairs hall I passed Simon Flet on his way in. He threw me his usual cursory glance of disdain.

And then something in my face must have sounded an alarm, because he stopped and called after me as I ran down the stairs to the basement. ‘What’s wrong?’

I didn’t reply until I got to the foot of the stairs and looked back to see his head turned up towards the first-floor landing. I raised my voice so that he would hear me. ‘Nothing.’

He glanced down at me very briefly before turning and taking the stairs to the first floor, two at a time.

I was startled to find Rachel in the basement sitting room, and stopped in my tracks. I am not sure what she was doing there, but she was just as startled to see me. We stood looking at each other during several long moments of uncomfortable silence. Then I saw a slightly quizzical look in those dark, dark eyes and her head canted a little to one side.

‘What’s wrong?’ An echo of Simon Flet.

I didn’t tell her. ‘Where is everyone?’

She shrugged. ‘I have no idea. At the hall probably.’

I lifted my jacket from the back of a chair and pulled it on. And we stood in more awkward silence.

I said, ‘See you around, then.’

But I didn’t move until she had nodded and turned away, and I ran back up the stairs to the ground floor. Then out into the glorious May morning, breathing hard and ready to weep, if I could have been sure that no one would see me.

II

I took the tube across town to Bethnal Green. In the weeks since our arrival in London, I had begun to get some kind of sense of the place. But only vaguely. I had spent so much time underground that I had only become familiar with those parts of the capital around the tube stations that I travelled to and from. Like some subterranean creature that pops its head up for a few minutes to get its bearings before plunging back down into the dark.

Like everyone else, I sat on the train lost in private thought, cocooned from the people around me by my very indifference to them.

They were the same thoughts I took with me as I walked through the leafy, littered streets of Bethnal Green in the spring sunshine. Dark, desperate thoughts.

I knew now that it had all been a big mistake. That the streets of London were not paved with gold, but with illusion. That no matter how far you run, the things you are trying to flee are there waiting for you when you arrive. Because you always take them with you.

In my desperation to escape I had done a dreadful thing. I had made a girl pregnant and taken a life. And the verse from Omar Khayyám that I had learned at school came back to me as my feet beat down on the warm asphalt. I am sure my English teacher, Mr Tolmie, would have been pleased to know that I not only remembered it but fully understood it now, perhaps for the very first time.

But, oh, how I wished it was possible.

There was no sign of the others when I got to the hall. One of the residents was up a ladder outside, nailing a board across a broken window. There was shattered glass all over the pavement, and the main door appeared to have been damaged somehow, split open in places, with jagged shards of wood lying around the entry. I recognized the resident as a man called Joseph.

‘What’s happened here, Joe?’

He interrupted his hammering and looked down at me. ‘Bunch of locals got drunk last night and attacked the hall when they came out of the pub. Threw stones at the windows and tried to break down the door with an axe. We were all locked inside. It was quite terrifying.’

There was no one around in the hall itself. Except for Alice. Thankfully, for once, she was covering her nakedness with a flimsy white gown and dancing around a long strip-painting that hung on the far wall. The paint, still wet where it had been freshly daubed on the paper, glistened in the sunlight that fell through arched windows on the south side. Music boomed out from the Dansette in the common room. The Kinks version of the Martha and the Vandellas hit ‘Dancing in the Street’.

‘Where are the boys?’ I asked her.

‘Haven’t a clue, darling.’ She pirouetted around me, dabbing the air with a long paint brush. ‘Dance with me.’

‘No thanks, Alice. Is Dr Walker around?’

I needed someone to talk to. Someone to give me a perspective, and I’d always felt a connection with JP, ever since discovering that we had both attended the Ommer School of Music.

‘Ahhhh, Johnny, poor Johnny. Chief of the sanity police, punishing me with his cures. Physician, heal thyself.’

‘Is he here?’

‘Try his office, darling.’

There didn’t appear to be anyone around as I made my way through the building, up the dark back stairway, through slashes of light from windows high up in the stairwell, and I wondered where all the residents had gone.

J. P. Walker’s office was on the first floor. It was simply furnished with a scarred desk, an office chair, and two worn old leather armchairs with the horsehair bursting through the arms. As I approached its open door I could hear someone softly sobbing. A contained sob, held back and smothered in the chest. Without thinking, I slowed my walk to push up on tiptoes so that I wouldn’t be heard.

Daylight flooding in from the office window spilled out through the open door into the darkness of the corridor, and I edged cautiously into the light, craning round the door jamb so that I could see who was crying in JP’s office.

I was stung immediately by a sense of shock. JP was sprawled in his office chair, legs stretched out in front of him, face tipped forward so that his forehead was resting in his open palm. The doctor’s face was shiny with tears, and deep, dark lines were etched into the grey skin below his eyes.

He was crying like a baby. I had no idea why, and I forgot myself for a moment, standing there and looking at him with unabashed curiosity. He lifted his head suddenly and saw me. For a moment I thought he was going to speak, then he leaned forward to push the door shut in my face.

I walked back along the corridor feeling both guilty and chastised. Guilty because of the prurient pleasure I had taken for a moment in witnessing his misery. Chastised because the door closed in my face had told me more eloquently than words that, whatever the reason for his tears, it was none of my business.

I heard voices in the common room as I came back down the stairs, and went in to find Dave and Luke and Maurie making tea. They seemed surprised, and a little embarrassed to see me.

‘You want some tea?’ Dave said.

‘Sure.’

Luke put a tea bag in a fourth mug, and Maurie said, ‘What are you doing here?’

I sat down at the end of the table, in JP’s seat, and stared at my hands in front of me. The Kinks had progressed to the final track on Side One and were so tired of waiting. Alice was still dancing and painting out in the hall.

I looked up and said, ‘I’m leaving.’

All three looked at me. Clearly surprised.

Maurie said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, I’m leaving. Going. Quitting. Departing. Fucking off out of here. I don’t know how else to say it.’

Luke passed me a mug of steaming tea, and the others pulled up chairs.

‘Is this because of Rachel?’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘Yes. And no. Well, I mean, she’s part of it.’ I drew a deep breath. ‘Dr Robert tried to... I don’t know how to say this... seduce me this morning.’

There was a dead stillness around the table. I was embarrassed to talk about it, as if somehow it reflected on me. But I’d started. And the rest just came pouring out of me. The whole sordid incident, ending with the punch.

‘Jeeeees,’ Dave said. ‘You actually gubbed him?’

I nodded, and could sense their collective shock. For the longest time nobody spoke. The Kinks were no longer tired of waiting, but the arm had failed to lift at the end of the album and the needle went click, click at every endless revolution of the record.

Then Dave broke the silence, his voice unusually small. ‘Happened to me, too.’

We all looked at him.

I said, ‘What do you mean?’

He flushed deeply. ‘Same thing. Wanting me to try on clothes.’ He had difficulty concealing his shame. ‘Wish I’d gubbed him, ’n all.’

Suddenly no one was looking at anyone else. Eyes were fixed on hands or cups.

Then Luke said, ‘And me.’

He became the focus of our attention, and he blushed, too. It took a moment before we all turned our eyes towards Maurie. He looked grim, but his lips remained firmly pressed together and all he did was nod.

‘Fuck’s sake!’ Dave said. And he turned blazing eyes in my direction. ‘You’re no’ going without me.’

‘Or me,’ Luke said.

And we all looked at Maurie again.

‘Is there a plan?’

But I shook my head. ‘No plan. We fucked up. Whatever it was we thought we were going to find here, we haven’t. My fault.’ I raised my hands. ‘Mea culpa.’

And I caught sight of myself in a cracked mirror on the far wall, with my bruised face, the white Elastoplast still stuck across my nose. The picture of failure.

‘But I really never meant for any of it to happen. I really didn’t.’ I glanced at Maurie. ‘And I never, ever thought I would lose my friends.’ I had to swallow my emotion.

‘You haven’t.’ Luke’s voice was stiffened by a kind of steely resolve, and he looked pointedly towards Maurie.

Maurie spoke much more quietly, and still avoided my eye. ‘You haven’t.’

‘Has to be a plan, then,’ Dave said.

‘I’m going home,’ I told them.

Maurie shrugged. ‘Then that’s the plan.’ He paused. ‘But I’m not going anywhere without Rachel. Or Jeff.’

‘Damn right.’ Dave thumped his fist on the table. ‘We came thegether, we go thegether.’

I smiled ruefully. ‘Runaway home.’

I

It was Luke’s idea to wait until the evening before going back to the house to get our things. Dr Robert was throwing a party. We only knew about it because there had been some discussion of whether we would play at it or not. But in the end it was decided that the logistics were too complex. And the rift among us was an added complication.

So we whiled away the rest of the day in town, in cafés and pubs, talking about what we would do when we got back home, how we were going to explain everything to our folks, and what kind of reception we were likely to get. None of us was looking forward to that.

We counted up our cash and ended up at the information desk at Euston Station to calculate the cost of six single fares back to Glasgow, to see if we could afford it. We could, but only just. Maurie was dubious about whether Rachel would come with us. But at the very least, he said, he wanted to get her away from Onslow Gardens. And I harboured the secret hope that if we could persuade her to come back to Glasgow, there might just be some chance of patching up the damage between us.

We got back to the house around nine, when we knew the party would just be starting to get into full swing, and no one would notice us arriving. The place was already jumping. You could hear the music halfway down the street, and we could see partygoers dancing beyond the balustrade up on the roof terrace. Silhouettes against the evening sky. The front door was open, the hall and stairs leading up to the next floor jammed with the young and beautiful people of these Swinging Sixties. The rich and the famous from the world of music and movies, drinks in hand, spilling out from the kitchen and into the breakfast room and downstairs lounge. The Stones version of ‘Under the Boardwalk’ from their second album was blasting out of the lounge, and I could hear the single ‘Zoot Suit’ pounding down from the first floor, raw and filled with energy.

We pushed through the bodies in the hall, to the stairs leading down to the basement flat. No one wanted to party down there. It was too gloomy and cold and smelled of damp. Maurie shouted above the noise that he was going to find Rachel, and he headed off into the house.

As I turned to go down the stairs a girl caught my arm. She was beautiful, with long, tangled blonde hair and a skirt so short it barely covered her arse. Her eyes were glazed, pupils dark and dilated, her pale pink lipstick blurred around slightly too-full lips.

She pouted at me. ‘Who bust your nose, baby?’

‘Long story,’ I said, and pulled my arm free.

‘Don’t you want to fuck me?’ she called after me as I hurried down the stairs.

‘No!’ I shouted above the melee, without looking back.

And I heard her scream, ‘Well, fuck you, then!’

The sound of the party was muffled in the basement, but it vibrated through the ceiling. We went off to our separate rooms to gather our things and pack them into the bags we had brought with us. It didn’t take us long, and in five minutes we were gathered in the sitting room waiting for Maurie and wondering if Jeff was even in the house. No one had seen him all day.

It was nearly fifteen minutes of anxious waiting before Maurie appeared with a sullen-looking Rachel clutching a holdall. Black eyeliner was smeared and smudged around her eyes.

‘She’s coming with us,’ he said. ‘All the way.’

But she didn’t look happy, and it was clear she didn’t want to go. Somehow Maurie had persuaded her, and I wondered what it was he’d said.

‘What aboot Jeff?’ Dave asked.

Maurie sighed. ‘Rachel says he’s dancing up on the roof. We’re going to have to go and get him.’

Rachel shrugged. ‘I think you’ll find he doesn’t want to go with you, either. I saw him about half an hour ago. He was high as a kite. He might have dropped a tab.’

‘Not going without him.’ Maurie’s voice was low and determined.

And we all knew that the only chance of saving Jeff from himself was by getting him home.

‘Come on, then,’ I said. ‘Let’s go bring him down.’

We left our stuff in the flat and hurried up the stairs to the hall. Dave was ahead of the group, but even before he reached the top of the stairs he stopped suddenly and turned back, colliding with the rest of us.

‘Jesus,’ he hissed. ‘It’s fucking Andy!’

‘What? Rachel’s Andy?’ Maurie looked at him in disbelief.

Rachel paled to a sickly green-tinged pallor.

I peered up through the bodies beyond the bannister and saw Andy and two others that I recognized from the stairwell at Quarry Hill. Andy wore a black leather jacket with the collar turned up. His face was carved from concrete. Hard and rough-edged, cancerous and unforgiving. He was pushing through Dr Robert’s party guests as if they weren’t there. Ignoring their protests, shoving them aside. His henchmen followed in his wake, kicking or punching anyone who got in their way. Drinks were spilled, glasses broken, but beyond the path they scythed through the crowd, revellers in the kitchen or the lounge were oblivious, ears deafened by the music, senses dulled by drink and drugs.

I ducked back out of sight. ‘It bloody is!’

‘How the hell did he find us?’ Dave growled.

And everyone looked at Rachel.

‘I never gave him this address.’

Maurie’s eyes bulged with disbelief. ‘You mean you spoke to him? After everything we went through to get you away from there?’

Defensiveness made her angry. ‘It was after I got pregnant... and before the abortion—’ She broke off, and for the first time met my eye. But only for the most fleeting of moments. ‘I was so low. I wanted... I needed... I don’t know what I needed.’ Then, more determinedly, ‘I wanted a fix, that’s what I wanted. And Andy was the only one I knew who could give me that.’

‘So you told him where we were?’ Maurie slapped his hands on either side of his head. ‘I can’t believe you, Rachel.’

‘I didn’t!’

Luke ushered us all out of sight, back down the stairs.

Rachel’s voice dropped to a hissed whisper. ‘I told him I had this job working with loonies at an experimental residence in the East End. I didn’t think for a minute he could track us down to the Victoria Hall.’

‘Well, obviously he did!’ Dave’s face had lost all colour and he was glaring at Rachel. ‘Someone there must have given him oor address here.’

‘I’m sorry!’ But Rachel’s apology was aggressive and lacking sincerity. ‘I was depressed. Okay? I couldn’t see any other way out of it.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Anyway, I changed my mind the next day. Never, ever thought he would come looking for me.’

‘Fuck!’ Maurie’s exasperation made me think he was not going to forgive her easily.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘We just need to get Jeff and get out of here. And stay out of Andy’s way in the process.’

And so we set off again up the stairs, very carefully. Threading a path through the fabric of the party, and making our way in ones and twos up to the first floor.

There were fewer people here, where Dr Robert had his study and bedroom. The door to the living room was shut. I tried the handle but it was locked.

With all the doors closed in the hall that led to the back of the house, it was dark there. But at the far end of the passage, electric light lay across the floor and angled up the wall opposite the open door of Dr Robert’s study. Shadows moved through the light, and we heard raised voices.

‘Oh my God, that’s Andy!’ Rachel’s hand flew to her mouth.

I heard Dr Robert shouting, ‘Get out! Just get out!’

We crept along the hall until we could see into the room. Andy was on his own, and I glanced over my shoulder, suddenly afraid that his sidekicks might be sneaking up behind us. But there was no one there.

Andy was leaning forward, his hands bunched into fists and planted on Dr Robert’s desk. ‘Not until you tell me where I can find them. Or I’ll kick the shit out of you. And that’s no idle threat, friend.’

Dr Robert stood on the other side of his desk, emboldened by its presence between him and the gatecrasher. ‘I’m warning you. I’ll call the police.’

He lifted the phone and Andy snatched the receiver from his hand, banging it back into its cradle.

‘I told you. Do. Not. Fuck. With. Me!’

I hissed at Luke, ‘Jesus, just let’s get Jeff and go!’

And we turned and ran back along the hall, to push our way up the stairs to the second floor. It wasn’t until we reached the upper landing that I realized that Maurie and Rachel weren’t with us. But there was no point in turning back. And no time, anyway. None of us had the least idea where Andy’s unsavoury friends might be, and the last thing we wanted to do was bump into them.

Dave and I followed Luke into the lounge. The French windows leading to the roof terrace stood open. Rachel had said that the last time she’d seen him, Jeff had been dancing out there.

The roof was thick with dancers, music from loudspeakers fed by a gramophone in the lounge booming out into the fading light of the evening and echoing across the rooftops. The air was heady with the perfume of marijuana, and simmering with unfettered sexuality. The dancers seemed transported, frenzied, bodies rubbing one against the other. Male, female. Male, male. Female, female. It didn’t seem to matter. The dance and the music were primitive, tribal, a release of the most basic of human instincts.

For the briefest moment I saw JP dancing like a maniac among all these beautiful people, wild-eyed, transported as far from reality as the patients he treated at the Victoria Hall. And I recalled seeing him just a few hours earlier, crying like a child in his office.

‘There he is.’

I turned at the sound of Luke’s voice, and my heart very nearly stopped. Jeff was balanced on the low stone balustrade on the street side of the roof. His feet were drawn together and he held himself very erect, arms straight out on either side, for all the world like a competitor preparing himself for a medal dive in an Olympic competition. No one was paying him any attention, and he seemed oblivious to the presence of the dancers crowding the roof.

‘Jeff!’ I positively screamed at him.

His head came around. He smiled when he saw us, and we began shoving our way through the bodies to get to him.

‘I can fly,’ he called over their heads.

‘Jesus!’ Dave’s voice exploded from his lips.

‘No, you can’t!’ Luke shouted.

But Jeff just grinned that big stupid grin of his. ‘Yes, I can.’

Before we could get to him, he had flexed his knees and swung his arms straight out in front, as if he thought he was Superman. And he launched himself into space.

I heard the echo of my own voice yelling back at me from the rooftops. And then others. Those nearest the balustrade who saw him go. And the shockwave swept back through the dancers like a tsunami. Those who got to the balustrade first began screaming.

I was still numbed by an overwhelming sense of disbelief. That what I had just seen could not possibly have happened. I wanted to get to the balustrade and look down to find Jeff smiling in the street below and waving back up at us.

But all such illusions were dispelled in a millisecond when we reached the spot where Jeff had jumped, to be replaced by the most gut-wrenching feeling I have ever experienced in my life, before or since.

Jeff was spreadeagled on the wrought-iron railings below, face up, skewered by half a dozen spikes which had punctured his back and exited through his torso and neck. I could see his eyes wide and staring back at us, and I knew that he was dead. But his body was still twitching, lost in the convulsions of some awful death throes.

I turned away, blinded by tears, and threw up on the bitumen, gasping for air and thinking that my insides were about to drop out of me. I felt Luke’s hand on my arm, strong, reassuring.

‘We’ve got to go.’

And I looked up at him to see the shock on his face.

It was chaos all around. Girls screaming, people running inside. I straightened up and Luke pushed me towards the door, Dave at my side, and we somehow managed to force our way through the lounge and into the hall.

People inside still had no idea what had happened, and music blasted up the stairs from below. We had reached the top of the staircase when I saw Andy’s friends running up towards us, faces upturned and contorted by the scent of revenge. And all the shock and loss that I felt in the wake of what I had just witnessed converted itself somehow into pure, distilled fury.

I swung round and saw a fire extinguisher fixed to the wall. I cannot even begin to describe the thought processes that led me to rip it from its bracket and slam the release valve into the wall. I was simply incandescent. Foam exploded from the short length of rubber hose that I turned on the thugs as they reached the top of the stairs. Into the face of one, then the other, before I swung the canister full into the chest of the nearer of the two. The force of it sent him cannoning into his friend, and they fell backwards down the staircase.

The screaming and yelling all around me was deafening, drowning out even the pounding of the music that came from the living room and up the stairwell. Those people must have thought I was a madman, and in truth I felt possessed as I ran down the stairs, Luke and Dave right behind me, jumping over the sprawling bodies of the thugs from Leeds who lay in a tangle halfway down.

I heard someone shouting, ‘Call the police. For God’s sake, someone call the police.’

We got to the first landing and turned into the hallway, very nearly colliding with Simon Flet. I felt his open hand thump into my chest as he pushed me out of the way, and I saw the blood on his face and hands, and the terror in his eyes as he ran past, turning to sprint down the stairs to the ground floor, bellowing at partygoers to get out of his way.

Somehow, control of anything seemed to have slipped from my grasp. Everything was happening quickly and slowly at the same time. As if we were all starring in our own movie spooling in slow motion. I saw Maurie standing at the end of the hall, half in silhouette, half lit in outline by the lamp in Dr Robert’s study. He seemed transfixed, and turned towards us, his face a veil of confusion. Luke ran down the hall towards him, and Dave and I followed.

The door to Dr Robert’s study stood wide. Dr Robert himself was on the near side of his desk now, and standing over Andy’s body. Rachel’s one-time boyfriend lay in a twisted heap on the floor, blood pooling around his head. One side of it was split open, and I could see the grey-white of his brain marbled by the red that oozed through it. A large brass paperweight in the shape of an Oscar stood incongruously upright on the floor beside him, like a witness to murder, and yet clearly the murder weapon itself, blood trickling down the contours of the body from its bloody head.

Dr Robert stared down at the dead man at his feet, before looking up to see us standing in the hall.

His voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Simon... killed him.’ His voice rising in pitch now. ‘He’s killed him!’ He gazed down on Andy again. ‘I don’t even know who this man is.’ Then his head snapped up, accusation in his voice. ‘What did he want with you?’

And in his moment of helpless confusion, I very nearly felt sorry for him.

It took Luke’s cool head to wrest control of the situation. He grabbed Maurie by the arm, and Maurie turned, stupefied, to look at him.

‘We have to go!’ Luke said. And when Maurie didn’t respond, he yelled in his face. ‘Now, Maurie, now!’

And he virtually dragged him along the hall as we ran back towards the stairs.

It took hardly any time for us to get out of the house. People were escaping it like rats from a sewer, and we were simply carried along by the flow. Through the hall, out of the door, down the steps and into the street. All the time to the incongruous accompaniment of the Rolling Stones song ‘Pain in My Heart’.

It was almost fully dark now, street lamps casting pools of illumination broken by the flitting shadows of demented moths. Partygoers from the house spilled from the pavement into the road, forming a semicircle around the railing on which Jeff had fallen. We couldn’t see beyond them to where his body was skewered on the spikes. But I could hear sobbing, someone screaming, a girl staggering free of the crowd to double over on her knees in the warm night and empty the contents of her stomach all over the tarmac. And I realized it was the girl who had propositioned me in the hall just half an hour before.

Maurie seemed dazed, as though he were concussed.

I took him by the shoulders and shoved my face in his. ‘Where’s Rachel?’

He looked at me blankly.

‘Rachel. Maurie, where is she?’

He simply shook his head. ‘Gone.’

‘Gone? What do you mean? Gone where?’

‘Gone,’ he said. Then, almost as if realizing where he was for the first time, he found focus and glared back at me. ‘Where’s Jeff?’ And when I couldn’t meet his eye, it was he who grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘Jack, where’s Jeff?’ Sudden fear in his voice. ‘Jack?’

He let me go, then, looking around with wild eyes, as if only now aware of the mayhem in the street. I heard the distant sound of a police siren.

Luke said, ‘Maurie, we need to go.’

But Maurie wasn’t listening. He pushed past us and cleaved his way through the crowd on the pavement with such violence that he knocked one man over, and pushed a girl to her knees. The not so beautiful people parted in the face of his fury to let him through. And we saw, at the same moment he did, the prone form of poor Jeff impaled on the railings, blood dripping to form pools on the wall beneath him. His mouth was gaping and filled by the curl of his tongue, his eyes wide and staring as if in shock.

The most feral and frightening human sound I have ever heard issued from between Maurie’s lips, and raised goosebumps all over my arms and shoulders. It was followed by the strangest hush as the anguish in his voice communicated itself to everyone on the street. I shoved my way through to him, turning him by the shoulders to lead him away. He offered no resistance, his face a mask of misery and disbelief.

‘He thought he could fly,’ I said.

And Maurie’s head turned slowly. He looked at me with such incomprehension.

The police siren was very close now. And the Stones were singing something about being afraid of what they’d find.

Luke said, ‘Nothing we can do for him, Maurie. We should go. We really should go.’

‘What about our stuff?’ Dave said.

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Luke’s eyes were open so wide with stress, I could see the whites of them all around his irises. ‘If we don’t want to get caught up in all this, we have to go.’

I nodded, and we almost dragged Maurie away along the street out of the light of the street lamps. Dave tried the gate to the gardens and it opened into darkness. A darkness that swallowed us as we ran off across cut grass that felt soft beneath our feet, through the shadows of trees towards the distant light and the sounds of traffic in Old Brompton Road.

Behind us I heard the wail of the siren as the first police car arrived, its blue light strobing in the night.

II

At this time of night the waiting room at Euston was all but deserted. Out on the concourse passengers stood in desultory groups of twos and threes, smoking, watching the arrivals and departures boards, times and platforms, names of places only ever seen on railway timetables, destinations known only to those who lived there.

Maurie sat between Luke and me in the far corner, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, face buried in his hands. He had wept inconsolably on the tube, and now seemed overtaken by inertia. Almost catatonic, like JP’s naked lady in Ohio. Luke had his arm around Maurie’s shoulder. He leaned forward and spoke so softly that I could barely hear what he said.

‘What happened, Maurie? In Dr Robert’s study.’

Whatever he had seen, he was a witness to murder. But he wasn’t saying anything. Neither then, nor in all the years since. He gave the slightest shake of his head, before straightening up, to stare straight ahead into the smoky gloom of the waiting room. His face was still shiny wet with tears, but his eyes were dry now. Red and puffy.

‘Poor Jeff,’ he said. ‘Poor Jobby Jeff.’

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Maurie, you have to tell me what happened to Rachel.’

His head swung slowly round and the pain in his eyes was almost too great for me to bear. I struggled to maintain eye contact.

‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’

But I wasn’t going to give up that easily. ‘Where is she?’

‘I told you, she’s gone.’

I sighed my exasperation. ‘Gone where?’

‘Just gone, Jack. Away from you. Away from all of us. Just gone. Forget her.’

The door swung open, and Dave came in, breathing smoke from his final cigarette. ‘We’ve missed the last train tae Glasgow. Next one’s no’ till the morning. We’re gonnae have tae spend the night here.’

‘Shit.’ I banged my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.

Dave sat down opposite and sucked on his cigarette. And I heard Luke’s voice, quiet but filled with determination.

‘I’m not going back.’

I opened my eyes wide and turned to look at him. ‘How do you mean?’

‘I’m staying here.’

‘In London?’

He nodded. ‘We left nothing behind at Onslow Gardens to identify us. Some dirty linen, a couple of guitars and a melodica. Those goons in the Lake District ripped up Jeff’s driver’s licence, so they won’t even know who he is. You can go back home and just pick up your lives where you left off.’ He paused. ‘Not me. I’m not going back to them. To my parents. To the Kingdom Hall and tramping the streets in all weathers. For better or worse, this is where I’m going to make my life.’

‘You’ve no’ got any dosh,’ Dave said.

Luke shrugged. ‘I’ve got a few quid. As much as I’ll save on my train fare, anyway. I’ll survive.’

I looked at him with his wide green, innocent eyes and remembered all the good times we’d had. The laughs. The madness. And I thought about Jeff, and his Veronica. Five of us had run away that fateful night more than a month ago. Only three of us would be going back. And nothing, nothing would ever be the same again.

III

And so we spent that night in the waiting room at Euston Station, knowing that we wouldn’t sleep, and yet drifting off in moments of overwhelming fatigue to dreams of Jeff, and his poor broken body impaled on the railings in Onslow Gardens. I don’t know how often I replayed the moment when he launched himself into space, believing he could fly, and searched for something I might have done to stop it. But it always ended in the same, tragic conclusion.

Again, and again, and again.

In moments of waking misery, I saw Rachel’s black, black eyes gazing at me out of the darkness, the light in them conveying, in turn, love, hurt and betrayal. And I cursed my cowardice.

Morning brought no relief from the torment. Luke went and bought our tickets for us, and we gathered on the concourse as the station came to life around us. A new day. The first without Jeff. Or Rachel. The sounds of trains revving on their platforms. The hiss of brakes. The monotonous announcement of arrivals and departures reverberating around the rafters.

Luke handed over our tickets and each of us in turn solemnly shook his hand. Because boys, especially boys from big macho Rain Town, didn’t hug. At the last, I took his right hand in my left, and pressed a bunch of folded notes into his palm.

‘What the hell’s this?’ He withdrew his hand as if I had burned him, and he looked in confusion at the notes he was holding.

‘That’s everything we’ve got among the three of us,’ I said.

‘I can’t take this!’

‘Of course you can. What bloody use do we have for it? Can’t spend it on the train, and won’t need it at the other end.’

He was touched and embarrassed. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered. Then, very quickly, as if he didn’t trust himself to say more, ‘See you sometime, then.’

And I saw his eyes filling up just before he turned away to walk briskly across the concourse, shoving his hands deep in his pockets.