Runaway

I

We watched in wonder, and not a little disappointment, as the train made its final approach to King’s Cross Station in London. The last few miles gave on to the backs of dilapidated terraces, mean and blackened by smoke, ugly high-rise flats, and factories pumping their poison into a cold grey sky. London had not earned its moniker of the Big Smoke for no reason.

The end of the platform was lost in smoke and light. Great metal arches with glass panels in the roof letting drab afternoon light fall in daubs all along its length, and we shuffled with the other passengers past rows of half-lit wooden luggage trolleys, to pass through the gate and on to a crowded concourse.

London! We were finally there.

The clock tower between the arches in the station’s grand facade dominated King’s Cross and displayed a time of five twenty. Traffic choked the artery that was Euston Road, belching fumes into the late afternoon.

A mini-skirted girl wearing knee-high white boots and a black and white striped top walked by with such confidence that she must have known that every eye was on her. Mine certainly were!

Everything, it seemed, was ‘mini’ that year. Even the cars. Jeff got excited when he spotted a Mini Cooper S.

People dressed differently, especially the young. Clothes-conscious teenagers parading all the latest Carnaby Street couture, Mary Quant and Beatle haircuts, fashions of the Swinging Sixties that wouldn’t reach the provinces for a year or more. I felt like some poor country cousin arriving in the big city for a day out, grey and dated, a refugee from the sepia world of the fifties. Conspicuously old-fashioned.

The thing that struck me most that first day, an impression that only increased with time, was the sense of arriving in a foreign country, a land of wealth and privilege. I would learn, of course, that there was dreadful poverty and deprivation in some of the housing estates and run-down boroughs around the capital, but in the city itself affluence moved in pools and eddies all around you. In such stark contrast to the industrial deprivation of the places we had come from. Glasgow. Leeds. The streets of London were not, as in legend, paved with gold, but money walked the pavements and motored the roads.

Rachel grabbed my hand. ‘Come on, let’s explore.’

‘Wait!’ I held her back. ‘We should take the Underground somewhere. I’ve never even been on the subway in Glasgow.’

‘Why would you?’ Dave said. ‘It just goes round in a silly wee circle.’

So we all piled into King’s Cross tube station and spent several minutes consulting the big Underground map, before deciding to take the blue line to Piccadilly Circus. For no other reason than that it was a name which we had all heard.

We went down into the bowels of the city, where incoming trains dispelled hot air to rush up stairwells and corridors. A couple of boys stood busking, music echoing all the way along tiled passageways. Acoustic guitars strumming, and voices bent to mangled imitation of the Everly Brothers. I clocked the coins that passers-by threw into an open guitar case on the floor at their feet.

I don’t know if I really expected there to be a circus at Piccadilly, but I was almost disappointed to find that there wasn’t. Just a glorified roundabout with a winged statue of Eros set in its centre, red London buses and black hackney cabs circling before heading noisily off to other parts of the city. The roar of the traffic was wearing and relentless, and we had to shout to make ourselves heard above it.

There was nothing for us here, and we headed off along Shaftesbury Avenue. Robert and Elizabeth, a musical with June Bronhill and Keith Michell, was playing at the Lyric Theatre. The farce Boeing-Boeing at the Apollo. I recognized the name David Tomlinson as an actor I had seen in Mary Poppins the previous year, and suddenly felt very close to celebrity and the heart of all things. This, after all, was London. The very centre of the universe.

At the top of the avenue we turned into Charing Cross Road and walked up the hill past Foyles to stop beneath three gold-painted balls hanging outside the door of a pawnbroker’s shop.

I saw our reflections in the window. A motley crew of dishevelled teenagers who had slept rough for two nights, and hadn’t changed clothes or had a proper wash in nearly forty-eight hours.

‘Is this a music shop?’ Jeff said.

I jumped focus and saw that the window was full of musical instruments.

Luke said, ‘It’s a pawn shop. Lends people money in exchange for goods. If they don’t come back to claim them, the shop sells them.’ He turned to gaze thoughtfully at the array of musical instruments on display. ‘I guess musicians must get pretty hard up.’

‘That’s encouraging,’ Maurie said dryly.

But I had an idea. ‘What if we exchanged our electric guitars for a couple of acoustics. Then we could busk in the Underground and make some money.’

This was greeted with a few moments of silent contemplation before Jeff said, ‘And what would I do?’

‘Hold the hat,’ Rachel said, and we all laughed.

‘I wouldn’t have anything to play either,’ Luke said.

But I pointed in the window at a tiny two-octave keyboard about fifteen inches long, with a mouthpiece at the top end. ‘What about that?’

‘A melodica,’ Luke said. ‘I’ve read about those. You blow into it, and when you press a key it opens a hole to let the air pass across a reed. Polyphonic, too.’

‘Let’s see what we can get,’ I said, and we all trooped in, with Jeff bringing up the rear.

‘Jobbies!’ I heard him mutter.

In the event, by adding ten of our precious pounds to the trade, we were able to exchange my electric guitar and Dave’s bass for two acoustics, the melodica and a couple of bongo drums to satisfy Jeff.

We were distracted by a crowd gathering around the door of a little record shop twenty yards or so further on. Its window was jammed full of classic album covers. The Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys, the Kinks, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Elvis.

I heard someone saying, ‘What’s going on?’

And someone replying, ‘They’re playing the new Beatles single. It’s out today.’

We joined the crowd, pushing our way towards the door in time to catch ‘Ticket to Ride’ for the very first time. Hearing the first play of a new Beatles record was like sharing in a part of history. Our history. A seismic shift from the past and our parents’ generation.

‘Listen to those drums!’ Jeff was in awe.

Ringo’s staggered, staccato half-beats drove the song, building around the repeating guitar riff and leading to the punctuated harmony at the end of the line. It was exciting, and I loved it immediately.

But Rachel was listening to the words. ‘God, Lennon sounds just like Andy,’ she said. ‘Like it was all my fault, or hers in the song. Because, of course, he was bringing her down, and that’s why she had to leave. Couldn’t possibly have been because he was such a shit.’

I looked at her in astonishment and realized for the first time that perhaps the sexes interpreted lyrics differently. I had empathized with his sadness. His girl had left him and made up an excuse for it, blaming him.

‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘It’s a great song.’

She shrugged, indifferent. ‘I’m hungry.’

In Wardour Street we stumbled on the entrance to the Marquee Club, aware that this was probably the most important venue in the pop music of our generation. The Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds with Eric Clapton, and the Animals had all played here, and we could do no more than dream that someday we might do the same.

But it was Rachel who spotted the newly opened Pizza Express just along the road. The first time any of us had encountered British fast food. Ironic since the cuisine was Italian. It wasn’t particularly cheap, but we were inclined to celebrate. We had got to London, we had musical instruments, a little money in our pockets, and a bucketload of self-belief.

We shared three pizzas among us. Hot, soft, bready pizzas with delicious tomato and cheese toppings, all washed down with ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola, and by the end of the meal there were more than a dozen cigarette ends in the ashtray.

When we had eaten we sauntered off through the falling evening, and I was aware for the first time that it was warmer here. There was a softness in the air that remained in spite of the gathering dusk. The city was alive. People and lights. Diners crowding tables in the windows of expensive restaurants, drinkers spilling out of pubs to head for West End shows.

At the end of Park Lane we arrived at Marble Arch without passing Go or collecting £200, and crossed into Hyde Park, where we set up to busk for the crowds at Speakers’ Corner. Jeff squatted on the grass beside an open guitar case and the rest of us gathered around to start playing through our repertoire.

It’s not really for me to judge, but I think we were pretty good, in spite of our acoustic constraints. At least, I could see from Rachel’s face that she thought so. It was clear that we exceeded any of her expectations, and she stood watching us with a kind of wide-eyed astonishment. She saw me looking at her, and we locked eyes for a moment. I felt as if something were kicking in my stomach trying to get out. Butterflies with hooves.

Pennies and threepenny bits, sixpenny pieces and the occasional shilling showered into our guitar case, and I almost started to believe we could make a living just doing this. We played for half an hour and made almost three quid before two London bobbies wearing tall helmets with silver Brunswick stars moved us on. Jeff gave up some cheek and they told us to scarper, and we went running off across the grass, jumping and whooping and shouting obscenities at the coming night. Until we settled ourselves on the bank of the Serpentine, lying on our backs in the grass and watching the sky overhead clear itself as darkness drew a veil over the park.

With the arrival of night, and the first chill breath of damp air rising from the water, the euphoria of just being there began to fade, and a more sombre reality settled itself on us like down after a pillow fight.

‘Where are we going to sleep tonight?’ Luke said.

Nobody knew.

‘There’s bound to be cheap hotels somewhere, or a youth hostel or something,’ Jeff suggested.

But I was the one who quickly dispelled dreams of a soft bed for the night. ‘We can’t afford it. Even somewhere cheap would go through our cash in no time.’

‘So what do you suggest, smart arse?’ Maurie cocked an eyebrow in my direction.

‘We passed an eatery earlier. The Serpentine Restaurant, I think. Overlooking the lake. Weird thing with glass pyramids on the roof. It’ll be closed by now.’

Jeff’s voice was derisive in the dark. ‘Well, if it’s closed, what use is that to us?’

‘It had kind of open terraces under concrete eaves. It would give us shelter for the night.’

‘Mmmmh, concrete pillows,’ Rachel said. ‘Just what I’ve always dreamed of. You boys really know how to show a girl a good time.’

I said, ‘Just for one night. Maybe we can get ourselves sorted out with something better tomorrow.’

II

It must have been after midnight by the time we got ourselves settled among the shadows on the terrace of the Serpentine Restaurant. Coats laid on concrete, underwear balled up inside shirts for pillows. Rachel and I shared my coat but sat awake for a long time, smoking in the dark and listening to the heavy breathing of the others as one by one they drifted off. It was an extraordinary journey that had brought us here, and I had never for one minute expected to meet someone like Rachel on the way.

Moonlight dappled the water, and its silvery reflection shimmered under the eaves of the restaurant. I stole a glance at her as she gazed out across the lake.

‘How are you feeling?’

She shrugged. ‘Okay.’ But she didn’t really look it.

I took her hand. It was ice cold, and I could feel her trembling. ‘Is it still bad?’

She pressed her lips together as if trying to stop herself from speaking. ‘I’m alright. Last night was worse. Give me another fag.’

I lit one and passed it to her. She sucked on it savagely and drew the smoke deep into her lungs.

‘What did you dream of?’ I said.

She gave me an odd look. ‘What? Last night?’

I smiled. ‘When you were young. What was your dream? What did you want to do with your life? Who did you want to be?’

Her smile was wry as she lifted her eyes towards the stars. ‘To be famous. A star of the silver screen. To be someone people looked at and envied. To be rich. To be in love with a beautiful man who loved me back.’

‘Didn’t want much, then.’

She laughed. ‘I was just a kid. You know what it’s like when you’re just a wee lassie.’

‘No!’ It was my turn to laugh. ‘I was always a wee laddie. No matter how much my mother would have liked to dress me up in a skirt and tie my hair in pigtails.’

‘You don’t have any brothers or sisters, then?’

‘No. Just after I was born my dad got TB and spent two years in the sanatorium at Peesweep. I suppose he was lucky to survive it in those days, but I don’t think he could have any more kids afterwards. And I’m sure my mum wanted a wee girl.’

Rachel said, ‘We should have swapped parents.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said doubtfully. ‘Not sure I would have been very happy about the circumcision.’

She laughed. ‘Don’t be such a baby. Actually, I’ve never seen one without a foreskin.’

‘And, of course, you’re such an expert.’

She smiled.

And I said, ‘Andy wasn’t Jewish, then?’

‘No.’

‘And you and he...’

She turned to look at me, amusement twinkling in her big dark eyes. ‘He and me what?’

‘You know...’

Now she laughed. ‘Of course we did.’

I nodded and didn’t like to think about it, or the irrational jealousy it stirred inside me.

‘What about you?’

I looked at her. ‘What about me?

‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Well, either you do or you don’t.’

I shrugged my shoulders in the dark. ‘Well, I did before we ran away.’

‘And were you and she...?’

‘She and me what?’

‘You know.’

I grinned, in spite of my embarrassment. ‘No, we weren’t.’

Suddenly I felt her whole body turn towards me. ‘You’re a virgin!’

‘I’m not!’ My denial was too hot and too fast.

‘Ohhh, Jack.’ She stroked my cheek with the back of her hand, and it felt cold on my hot face. ‘My very own little virgin.’

‘I’m not,’ I said again. With less force this time, but no more conviction.

‘We’ll see.’

And I turned to meet her eyes. They almost glowed in the dark. Darker than the night itself. Gathering, as they always seemed to, every bit of light to reflect somewhere in their hidden depths. And I wondered what she had meant by that. While I am sure I knew really, such was my insecurity when it came to girls that I was always riddled with uncertainty.

But in that moment I was emboldened by her words, and kissed her for the second time. A very different kiss from the one the previous night. A soft kiss full of tenderness, and I felt her tongue in my mouth, sending little electric messages to my loins where an erection quickly burgeoned to push hard against my trousers.

Stupidly, Luke’s words from two days before came into my head. Penile tumescence. I almost laughed.

She pulled back and looked at me quizzically. ‘What?’

I grinned, feeling sheepish, and told her. About Maurie and Dave and the nocturnal erection, and Luke’s description of it as ‘penile tumescence’. We stifled our giggles like children in the dark. And suddenly she reached her hand over to slip it between my legs, taking me completely by surprise.

‘I think the colloquial “hard-on” is more appropriate in your case.’

I gazed at her, my stomach flipping over, enjoying the way her hand stayed there, squeezing me. And I said, ‘Only, in my case, it’s down to the Rachel effect, rather than REM sleep.’

She laughed. ‘You damn well better not go to sleep on me!’

So I kissed her again, and we got kind of lost in it for what seemed like a very long time. When, finally, we came up for air, she looked at me for even longer.

‘I like you, Jack Mackay,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to say. I like you, too, seemed like such a lame response that I didn’t say anything.

Then she said, ‘What about your dream?’

I thought for a moment. ‘I suppose I’m living it. Well, the fantasy version of it, anyway. To play in a group. Make music. It’s all I really want to do with my life now.’

How could I have known then that failure of ambition is like a long, lingering death, and that disappointment with your life never goes away? It only grows stronger with the passage of time, as the clock ticks off the remaining days of your life, and any residual hope slips like sand through arthritic fingers.

She touched my lips with the tip of a finger. ‘You’re talented,’ she said softly. ‘I could tell that straight away tonight.’ She kissed me. ‘It’s arousing. Talent. You know that?’ Then she smiled and said, ‘We should sleep.’

So we lay down together, covering ourselves as far as possible with my coat. The concrete beneath us was unyieldingly hard, and I spooned in behind her, pressing myself against the softness of her bottom, allowing my hand to slip over and cup one of her breasts. I was half expecting her to move it away, but she didn’t. And I was both aroused and comforted, and asleep within minutes.

I

We were awake early, with first light and the dawn chorus. All of us stiff and cold and bruised by the concrete, deathly pale, with dark, penumbrous smudges beneath bloodshot eyes. Our third day living rough, and we were starting, I thought, to look like down-and-outs.

We found underground public toilets in Knightsbridge at Hyde Park Corner and were at least able to wash and brush our teeth. I changed into precious pairs of fresh socks and underpants and wondered what we were going to do for laundry when the time came.

We took the Underground from Hyde Park Corner to Leicester Square. Rachel and I got separated among the rush-hour crowds in the carriage and I became aware of Maurie pushing up behind me. His mouth was very close to my ear and I felt his breath hot on my neck.

‘I’m watching you, Jack.’

There was something dangerous in his voice. Threatening. I turned my head to look at him, and his face was very close.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘She’s my cousin. She’s not for you.’

I felt anger prickle across my shoulders, and pushed my face at him so that our foreheads were almost touching, like young stags locking horns. My voice was low and just as threatening.

‘None of your fucking business, Maurie!’

We glared at each other until the doors opened at Green Park. People got off, and more got on, and Rachel found me again and took my hand. But those big eyes of hers missed nothing.

She looked at me. ‘What’s wrong?’

I just shook my head. ‘Not a thing.’

It was a grey, overcast morning, cooler than the day before, and our spirits had dipped along with the weather as reality began to set in. Just off the square, in Bear Street, we found a greasy-spoon café and refuelled ourselves on egg, bacon and sausage, washed down with hot, milky tea. Almost immediately the world looked a more promising place. Grudgingly, the woman behind the counter loaned us her Yellow Pages, and we began surfing it for music agencies and recording studios. Luke wrote out a tidy list and we headed back to the tube station to consult the big map and work out an itinerary.

There was a brief debate about whether we should split up to save time and money, but we decided that we should stick together in case anyone asked us to play for them. How naive were we?

We made the long trek out to Fulham Broadway and a tiny recording studio, tucked away in an industrial unit off the King’s Road, behind Warr’s Harley-Davidson franchise and an old art bronze foundry. Motorbikes were stacked side by side all the way along the street.

A lean, unsympathetic young man with long, greasy hair and a thinning pate told us his hourly rate for two-track demos. He eyed us sceptically through smoke that rose from the cigarette clamped permanently between wet lips, and told us that we would need to bring our own gear, and that setting-up time would be included in the hourly rate. But we had already lost interest. We had no gear, and couldn’t afford to hire any. Besides which, the hourly rate itself was beyond our means.

Outside, in the King’s Road, Luke stabbed a nicotine-stained finger at his notes and suggested that we try some of the agencies closer to town.

So we set off on a fruitless search for an agency that would sign us. A search that took us out to Belsize Park in the north, Shoreditch in the east, and the Roger Morris Agency in Oxford Street. Everywhere it was the same story. We would need demo tapes. No one wanted to hear us play. We said we would gig anywhere. Pubs, hotels, dances... funerals — which didn’t even raise a smile. When we were asked for a contact address and phone number, of course we didn’t have one.

By the end of the morning we were tired and disheartened and sitting in the waiting room of an agency in the Strand.

A secretary popped her head round the door of her office and said, ‘Sorry, boys. The boss won’t entertain you without a demo tape.’ She gave us her sweetest smile and almost closed the door on a young man on his way out. ‘Oh, sorry, John,’ she said.

He had collar-length brown hair, and wore jeans and a leather jacket. He grinned and winked as he passed. ‘It’s tough lads, eh? You write your own stuff?’

I shook my head. ‘No, just covers.’

‘Then you’re wasting your time, boys. No one’s interested. My advice is go away and write. And, you know, if you can’t write, forget it.’ He cocked an eyebrow and pulled a face. ‘See you around.’

He skipped off through swing doors and down the stairs.

Rachel’s voice was hushed in disbelief. ‘You know who that was?’

‘He looked a bit familiar,’ Jeff said.

‘That was John Lennon.’

‘Nah.’

It wasn’t possible that I had just spoken to John Lennon, and hadn’t even realized it.

But Luke was nodding slowly. ‘I think it was, you know. People look different in the flesh. And that was definitely a Liverpool accent.’

‘It was John Lennon, I’m telling you,’ Rachel insisted.

Many years later, when such things were possible, I tried to find out on the internet where Lennon might have been that day. It turned out the Beatles were in London filming Help!, out at Twickenham Film Studios, in the spring of 1965. So it was possible that it might have been him, and I like to think that it was. And that I’d had my own little brush with history.

Sadly, none of his stardust rubbed off on me, but I outlived him by decades.

II

The Savoy Hotel was just along the road, on the south side, opposite the Strand Palace Hotel and Manfield House. I must have heard the name Savoy somewhere, because it was associated in my mind with class and money, and when we stood on the corner by the ornately leaded windows of the Savoy Taylors Guild, I saw just why.

The entrance to the hotel was set back from the road, beneath a shiny triangular frontage resembling the nose of a giant Rolls Royce, but engraved with the name SAVOY and crowned by a golden figure bearing a shield and lance. Porters with top hats and tails saw clients on and off the premises, a constant stream of taxis and private cars revolving around the faux fountain at the centre of its turning circle, stopping only briefly to drop off or pick up. Large palm trees flanked the marble-pillared portals, through which elegant ladies and sleek, perfumed gentlemen in Savile Row suits sauntered with such casual ease you might have thought they owned the place.

This was wealth on a scale none of us had ever encountered, and we immediately set up on the corner to start playing, in the hope of attracting some lucrative contributions. Of course, you learn from your mistakes.

The first thing we learned was that rich people treat you as if you are invisible. You simply don’t exist as anything other than a minor irritation. Had we been a string quartet playing a Bach prelude, we might have had a different reception. But Elvis and the Beatles went down like a bucket of cold sick — at least, judging from the crinkled faces and noses upturned in our direction.

The second thing we learned was that working-class porters are punctilious in sparing their wealthy clients exposure to riff-raff like us. They knew their place and were quick to tell us that we should know ours. Two top-hatted porters detached themselves from their duties at the door within a matter of minutes and told us in no uncertain terms to move on.

Rachel suggested that they might like to go forth and multiply.

And the older of the two lowered his voice, ‘If you’re not out of here in two bloody minutes, I’m calling the rozzers.’

I could see that Luke was about to embark on one of his diatribes about the freedom of the individual when our fractious gathering was interrupted by a young man wearing a tailored suit that hung on his lean frame as though he were a male model. Hair longer than conservative was, nevertheless, beautifully cut. His skin was lightly tanned, as if he had recently been abroad, and I noticed immediately his long fingers with their pale, manicured nails. He wore a light blue shirt, open at the neck, with no tie. His aftershave smelled expensive, and he had a smile to match. It was the first time that we set eyes on Dr Cliff Robert, and it is a moment I will never forget.

‘I’ll sort this out,’ he said confidently to the porters. ‘No need to cause a scene.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

The two of them retreated reluctantly towards the door, and the young man turned to us.

‘Who’s the head man here?’

There were several moments of confusion. Nothing had ever been discussed or acknowledged in regard to who should speak for the group, but all heads turned towards me and the man drew his own conclusion. He held out a hand to shake mine, and I took it uncertainly.

‘Cliff Robert,’ he said. ‘And you are...?’

‘Jack Mackay.’

‘Ah. Scottish, I’d say from the accent.’

It was an accent that seemed gauche and broad compared to his creamy public-school drawl.

‘Does the group have a name?’

‘The Shuffle,’ I said.

But he didn’t appear impressed. ‘Interesting sound. I like your vocals. But that’s for another time, maybe. Right now, how would you boys,’ he inclined his head towards Rachel, ‘and girl, like to make a few pounds?’

I glanced around the faces of my friends and saw the same trepidation in them as I felt myself. ‘Doing what?’

‘Oh, nothing very much, and it won’t take more than half an hour or so of your time. We have a documentary crew round the back of the hotel here setting up to do a bit of filming. We just need a few strategically placed bodies to prevent vehicles or pedestrians from interrupting once we’re turning over.’ He looked at us expectantly, showing beautifully white teeth behind pale lips, and a winning smile that crinkled around his blue eyes. ‘What do you say?’

III

A narrow, cobbled lane called Savoy Steps climbed the slope off Savoy Hill, squeezed in between the small white-stone Queen’s Chapel and a brick wall at the back of the hotel that was covered in builder’s scaffolding. A group of young men was clustered around a thickset man with a cumbersome-looking cine camera strapped to his chest. He was young, too, with an unruly mop of wavy brown hair. Various pieces of equipment lay around, and the group seemed to be involved in a debate over the words scrawled on a pile of large white cards, about eighteen inches by twelve, which were stacked up against the wall. Random words, it seemed, without any meaning. The top one read BASEMENT. The cameraman was talking to a small skinny guy who looked about sixteen. He had long, curly hair that might have been permed, and wore a dark waistcoat unbuttoned over a long-sleeved shirt. He seemed to me to be in need of a square meal.

‘Jees, Bob, I know they’re heavy, but they’ll get lighter as you drop them.’

You could tell straight away from his accent that the cameraman was American, and I felt an immediate thrill. I had never met an American before.

‘That’s alright for you, Donn,’ the kid said. ‘You don’t have to hold ’em up there.’

‘Maybe you’d like to try the camera on for size, Bob. You can bet your life it’s a damned sight heavier.’

The kid with the perm sucked in smoke from his cigarette and threw it away. ‘Just kidding, man. Let’s do this thing.’

‘Okay,’ Donn said. He turned to the others. ‘Hey, Allen, you and Neuwirth get over there by the sacks and try to look like workmen, willya?’

A large bald man with a beard and glasses, dressed up like he might have been a workie, and a thin guy with a flat cap and a stick detached themselves from the group and stood by a wooden crate on the other side of the lane, lighting cigarettes.

‘What’s going on exactly?’ I asked Cliff Robert.

‘They’re making a documentary of the UK tour,’ he said. ‘This is the opening sequence they’re shooting here. All those cards have got bits of lyrics from the new single scrawled on them. Bob’ll hold them up and drop them one by one as the words come up in the song.’

Jeff said, ‘Whose single?’

‘Bob’s, of course. It’s called ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’

‘Daft name for a song,’ Rachel said.

‘Bob who?’ Maurie asked.

Cliff Robert looked at us as if we all had two heads. ‘Dylan. He’s just arrived for his first tour of Britain.’

I looked again at the skinny guy with the curly hair and the haunted face as he hefted the cards up into the crook of his right arm. And was both amazed and thrilled at the same time. Bob Dylan! We were in the presence of rock royalty.

My jaw went slack. ‘Dylan and Lennon both on the same day!’

Cliff Robert frowned. ‘Lennon?’

And I told him about our encounter at the agency.

He smiled. ‘I doubt very much if that was John Lennon.’

But I didn’t have time to be disappointed. Because this really was Bob Dylan.

There were four possible approaches to the corner of Savoy Steps, and we were given our instructions to stand guard at all of them, and politely stop any people or vehicles from coming through while they were filming.

I have seen that video many times in the years since. Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth hovering in the background pretending to be workers, a bored-looking Dylan standing in the foreground, right of frame, dropping the cards to match the lyrics. Well, almost. He got a little out of sync here and there.

It was a chilly, grey London morning. The video captures that, and Dylan’s sullen mood, perfectly. And all these years later I can almost believe that the world itself was black and white that day, and that it wasn’t just the film in the camera. They say it has been acknowledged as the very first modern pop video. And me and Rachel stood together at the entrance to the access tunnel under the Savoy Hotel and watched them shoot it.

Afterwards, Dylan and his entourage headed back into the hotel and one of the men paid us a tenner for our trouble.

‘Jesus’ jobbies,’ Jeff said. ‘That’s more than I earned in a week at Anderson’s.’

We made our way back up the hill to the Strand and stood debating what we should do now. A frustrating morning had ended well, but the future did not look promising.

‘So what brings you to London, boys?’

We all turned at the sound of Cliff Robert’s voice. He had come up the hill after us.

I was embarrassed to tell him, and shrugged hesitantly. ‘We sort of ran away.’

‘The whole group,’ Jeff added quickly. ‘We’re looking to be signed up by an agency and get a recording contract.’

Cliff Robert smiled. ‘Just like that.’

‘We’re good.’ Luke was defensive.

The older man shrugged. ‘I don’t doubt it. But the world’s full of great groups nobody’s ever heard of. You’re just another in a long list.’

One of the cabal of men from the Savoy Steps passed us and slapped Cliff Robert on the shoulder. ‘Thanks, Doc.’

‘My pleasure.’

‘Doc?’ Maurie said.

Robert smiled. ‘I’m a qualified doctor. But medicine’s not my passion. Music is.’

‘You got a practice?’ Rachel asked.

And he smiled again. ‘Let’s just say I’m freelance.’ His smile faded. ‘Look, if you boys are any good, and you’re serious about making it in this business, I might be able to help.’ He looked at our two acoustic guitars. ‘Is this all the stuff you have?’

Jeff said quickly, ‘Our van got stolen. With all our gear.’ And he shifted uncomfortably as the rest of us looked at him.

Dr Robert nodded. ‘Well, I know where you can borrow some gear, and find a place to rehearse. But I’d like to hear you before I make any promises. And if you want to make a bit of cash in the meantime, I know someone who’s looking for performers.’

‘You mean you can get us a gig?’ Jeff said.

The good doctor seemed reluctant to elaborate. ‘Well, not a gig exactly. And not the kind of performing that you’re probably used to. But it’s money, and I can offer you a roof over your heads. At least temporarily. If you want to come back to my place I’ll explain it to you.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I just have a little business to conclude with Donn Pennebaker and I’ll be right back. Think it over.’

He headed off along the Strand to the entrance of the hotel. We stood on the corner, with the traffic rushing past us on the street, and the first drops of rain spitting from a frowning sky. For quite a while no one knew what to say.

It was Jeff who sliced through our hesitation. ‘I think we should go for it.’

Rachel’s scepticism was evident in her voice. ‘You really trust that guy?’

‘Not as far as I could throw him,’ Luke said. ‘He says he’s a doctor, so what possible connection could he have with the music business?’

I said, ‘Well, he was with the Dylan entourage, wasn’t he? That’s pretty connected, if you ask me.’

Maurie weighed in. ‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I wouldn’t mind somewhere reasonably civilized to lay my head tonight. And it seems to me that’s what’s on offer here.’

‘Yeah, but what else is on offer?’ Rachel looked at me. ‘Come on, Jack. The guy’s a creep.’

‘A connected creep,’ I said. ‘It’s the only offer we’ve had all day, and probably the only one we’re likely to get. There’s six of us. If we stick together, what harm can there be in it? We should at least find out exactly what it is that’s on offer.’

‘I agree,’ Maurie said.

‘Me, too.’ Jeff looked around the faces of the others like a dog hoping someone will throw the ball.

Luke sighed. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Aye, well, that’ll make it five.’ It was the first time that we’d heard from Dave all morning.

Rachel just shook her head. ‘You boys need your heads examined, you know that?’

And I have often wondered since how different all our lives might have been had we followed her instincts and chosen not to go with Dr Robert that afternoon.

I

Dr Robert lived in Onslow Gardens in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in a fabulous four-storey townhouse with a basement, attic rooms and a huge roof terrace. It looked out over tree-shaded gardens behind wrought-iron railings, a stone’s throw from Old Brompton Road and its rumble of distant traffic.

It was a grand property in yellow brick and white-painted stone, with porticos and balustrades. The streets around it reeked of wealth, lined by expensive cars and flanked by beautifully manicured gardens. There was a sort of reverential hush in those streets, as though it might be considered vulgar to raise your voice. Our silence, though, was induced by open-mouthed awe.

We arrived, all seven of us, in two taxis that Dr Robert paid for, and he led us up steps and through glazed doors into a wide hallway with carpeted stairs sweeping up through a half-landing to the next floor. Everything looked freshly painted. White, glossy woodwork, pale pastel walls, blue and yellow and cream. The hall and stairs were carpeted in a rich, subtly patterned grey. Through open doors I could see into a large kitchen in the back, and a dining room that overlooked a garden where the trees were heavy and fragrant with blossom.

Dr Robert took us up to the next floor. ‘I mostly live on this level,’ he said. And pointing down a long hallway with doors opening off on both sides, he told us, ‘My study’s down at the end there. But I spend most of my leisure time in here.’

We passed through a door into a high-ceilinged room that ran from the front of the house to the back. Perhaps two rooms at one time, but opening now one into the other through an arch. The front half was dominated by a vast, ornately carved wood and marble fireplace, around which settees and soft armchairs were gathered on a polished wooden floor as if huddled there for warmth. Bay windows gave on to a view over the park. Shelves on the wall opposite the fireplace groaned, floor to ceiling, with books. The back room was used for dining. A long, polished oval table reflected light from every window, and a gleaming silver tea service stood on an elegant, low mahogany sideboard.

In stark contrast with the old-fashioned gentility of these rooms, the walls were covered by the most extraordinary modern artwork. Large and small canvases, mostly black and white. Squares and circles, cubes and whorls, painted in such a way as to create the illusion of depth. Almost 3D. An image folding in on itself. Another buckling within its frame. Distorted geometry. Trompe l’oeil, an expression I had learned during my history of art classes at school. Fooling the eye. They were startling works, really, and quite out of keeping with the rest of the house.

‘Do you like them?’ Dr Robert was clearly proud of his collection.

No one knew quite what to say.

‘All works of a friend of mine. Bridget Riley. She’s exhibiting soon in New York. Going to be huge.’ He smiled his self-satisfaction. ‘And these, my friends, are going to be worth a small fortune one day.’ As an afterthought, he added, ‘Although I have no intention of selling them.’

He took us up through the rest of the house, waving expansively along corridors to his left and right, following the curve of the polished wooden bannisters from floor to floor. It seemed that most of the other rooms in the house were bedrooms, including several in the attic, which he said had once provided accommodation for the staff.

‘Of course, I have no staff,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t afford it, even if I wanted to. I was fortunate to inherit the house from my parents, but it’s as much as I can do just to pay for the upkeep of the place.’

On the top floor we went out through French windows on to a wide, square terrace with a low, white-painted stone balustrade around three sides. And from here we had a view across the rooftops of Kensington. A forest of chimneys sprouting from steeply angled slate roofs, in turn broken by countless attic dormers.

‘It’s wonderful up here of a summer’s evening,’ the doctor said. ‘With the air soft in your face, the perfume of a thousand blooms in your nostrils, and a glass of fine Scotch in your hand.’ He turned to smile at us. ‘The basement, on the other hand, smells a little damp. But I’m sure you won’t mind that.’

The basement was much darker than the rest of the house, limited light slanting in at acute angles through high windows that opened into a sub-pavement alleyway where stone steps climbed up to locked wrought-iron gates. There were three small bedrooms, a toilet and a sitting room down here, and the all-pervasive miasma of damp that seemed to have contaminated curtains, carpet and furniture in equal measure. But the doctor was right. We didn’t mind at all. It was a vast improvement on the concrete terrace of the Serpentine Restaurant, or the back of the van.

‘Make yourselves at home,’ he said. ‘There’s a girl comes in once a week to change the sheets and do the laundry.’ He pulled a face. ‘Speaking of which, can I suggest that you get yourselves a change of clothes. Or underwear at the very least. And a bath wouldn’t be out of order. There’s plenty of hot water.’

He took out his wallet and, to our amazement, counted out a sheaf of notes that he dropped on to the coffee table in the sitting room.

‘Consider this an advance on that little performance job I told you about. There are plenty of shops down the Old Brompton Road. When you’ve got yourselves freshened up, I’ll order some carry-out for this evening and tell you all about it.’

II

We were in the hall, on the way out to do an underwear shopping, when we heard the rattle of a key in the latch, and the front door opened before we got to it. A painfully good-looking young man with a shock of Scandinavian blond hair, tumbling like straw across his forehead, looked startled to see us. He wasn’t terribly tall, but you saw at a glance how beautifully proportioned he was. He wore an open-necked shirt with sleeves carefully rolled up, revealing a tattoo of a bluebird on his left forearm. A pair of neatly pressed slacks folded themselves over spotlessly Blanco-ed tennis shoes. He looked like he might have acquired his tan at the same time and place as Dr Robert, but his pale green eyes lacked warmth and he glared at us as if we were aliens.

‘Who’s this?’ His voice cut sharply through our chatter, the question posed directly to our benefactor at the foot of the stairs. It carried more than a hint of hostility.

The doctor said, ‘They’re a young group from Glasgow, Sy. Going to help out at the Victoria Hall. They’ll be staying in the basement in the meantime.’

Sy looked far from pleased. ‘I need peace, Cliff, you know that.’ His voice was modulated by petulance. ‘I’m due on set at six tomorrow, and I’ve got five pages of dialogue to learn.’

‘No one’s going to disturb you, Sy.’ Dr Robert’s voice was calmly soothing, like a psychologist reassuring an agitated patient. ‘The boys will be out for the rest of the afternoon, won’t you, boys?’ He barely looked at us and didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You’ll have the place to yourself. And you can run your lines later with me, if you want.’

But Sy appeared less than mollified by the promise of peace and the offer of help. He flicked a dismissive hand theatrically in the air and pushed past us, fastidiously avoiding contact as if we might somehow be contaminated.

‘I just don’t need this right now, Cliff. I don’t.’ And he took the steps two at a time, disappearing round the curve of the staircase beyond the first landing.

Apparently unruffled, Dr Robert said to us, ‘I’ll see you later, then.’

And we all tumbled out into the street. The door shut behind us and Rachel turned excitedly on the pavement.

‘You know who that was?’

‘Well, it definitely wasn’t John Lennon,’ I said.

She made a face. ‘It was Simon Flet.’

When we all looked at her blankly, she raised her eyes to the heavens.

‘The actor. He was in that movie last year. You know, the one that’s been tipped for an Oscar. Shit, what’s it called?’

There wasn’t one of us could help her. Jenny and I had been to the flicks together a few times, but we hadn’t paid much attention to the films. And anyway, I was interested in music, not movies.

‘The Killing Breath,’ she said suddenly. ‘It was a psychological thriller. Simon Flet got rave reviews, and every girl in the country fell in love with him. He’s totally gorgeous.’

‘Well, they’ll all be disappointed then, won’t they?’ Dave said.

Rachel gave him a quizzical look. ‘Why?’

Dave grunted. ‘Obvious, isn’t it?’ When no one responded he looked around our curious faces in surprise. ‘Well, he’s queer, isn’t he? And I’ll bet that Dr Robert is, tae.’

III

Bridget Riley’s op art paintings took on an almost sinister air by candlelight. The flickering flames of a dozen or more candles set around the dining room danced across the geometry of black and white patterns, causing them to shift shape and distort if you let your eyes rest on them for more than a few seconds. Along with the effects of the wine, it was quite unsettling.

I don’t think any of us had ever drunk wine before. A warm, rich, heady red with which Dr Robert filled our glasses each time they were in danger of emptying. We all sat around his table, changed and washed, eating Greek food that he’d had delivered from a restaurant in the high street. Another first — at least, for me. I had never tasted anything like it before. Lamb flavoured with mint and cinnamon. Rice wrapped in vine leaves. Slow-cooked beef in a rich gravy that simply fell apart when you poked it with your fork. Tuna like steak, broken into pieces and served in a salad with little cubes of white cheese.

It was the first decent meal we’d had in three days, and we devoured it.

Dr Robert sat languidly in his chair at the head of the table. He wore jeans and an open-necked white shirt, and his tan seemed deeper by candlelight. There had been no sign of Simon Flet when we returned to the house.

We hadn’t spoken much, our focus on the food, but the wine had dissipated much of the tension that lingered among us and we began to relax.

The good doctor wiped his lips with a cloth napkin and lit a cigarette before leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table as if about to impart some solemn secret. ‘Ever heard of J. P. Walker?’ he said, only to be met by blank looks. ‘He’s from your neck of the woods.’

Then Luke said, ‘The psychiatrist?’

Dr Robert nodded. ‘Author of The Two of Us, international bestseller and direct challenge to all the fundamental precepts of twentieth-century psychiatry.’

None of us had any idea where this was going, and so no one said a word. The doctor smiled.

‘JP disputes the very existence of madness, at least as we have come to accept it. He argues that “normal” is just an averaging out of human behaviour, and that no such thing truly exists. And so what we define as insanity is just another form of behaviour that should, by rights, come within the very broad spectrum of normality.’

‘I’ve read something about this,’ Luke said. ‘J. P. Walker believes that the treatment of mental illness with drugs, or worse, is wrong because the “illness” as defined by psychiatrists doesn’t actually exist.’

Dr Robert nodded a smiling acknowledgement in Luke’s direction. ‘You have a bit of a savant among you, boys.’ He interlocked his fingers on the table in front of him. ‘That’s broadly correct. Dr Walker believes that what the profession defines as schizophrenia is a form of behaviour conditioned by conflict in the family and can be treated by a kind of regression during which the patient is taken back to infancy, or even earlier, and rebuilt to be what society would accept as “normal”. A sort of second chance at growing up.’

I was wondering why on earth he was telling us this, when he looked at me and smiled, almost as if he had heard the thought spoken aloud.

‘You’re probably wondering what this has to do with anything.’

I was glad of the smoke and the flickering light that hid my blushes. And I had the oddest sense of having been violated, the fingers of his mind reaching in to grasp my innermost thoughts.

‘Dr Walker is the one who will be employing you. And you should feel honoured. The man is famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He has set up a project in the East End of London to put his theories to the test. Along with colleagues, he has taken possession of a former community complex known as the Victoria Hall, in Bethnal Green. He lives there with a number of patients who would otherwise be confined in mental institutions. Under his tutelage, they are free and equal members of the hall’s twenty-five or so residents, which include psychiatrists and psychologists. And, trust me, you’d be hard pushed to tell the difference.’

I could hear music now, but had no recollection of Dr Robert putting any on, and no idea where it was coming from. The strange thing was that, although I knew it was music, I couldn’t have told you what kind of music. Classical, pop, rock ’n’ roll, jazz. It was just music, and it seemed amazing to me.

‘The Victoria Hall experiment has already gained quite a reputation. There’s a lot of media interest, and a number of what you might call celebrities drop by to consult with JP or just hang out.’ He grinned. ‘Names and faces you probably wouldn’t believe.’

He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. It gave me the urge to have one myself, and although I managed to get a cigarette out of the packet, I somehow couldn’t seem to hold it between my fingers. It kept moving as if it were alive. I looked up and saw Rachel turning her head towards the window. It left a kind of coloured trail that traced the movement of her head, and I felt a tiny seed of anxiety start to burgeon deep inside me.

‘Anyway, our friend JP is looking for performance artists who will improvise dramas for the residents at his direction. Nothing too structured, but designed to provoke discussion.’ He blew smoke towards the ceiling and it seemed to me to take shape in the form of a dragon breathing fire. ‘There’s a local pop group in Bethnal Green who use the hall for practising. They leave their stuff set up there. I’m sure JP can persuade them to let you use their gear to practise for yourselves. And then we can get an idea of just how good you are. Or not.’

Finally, I managed to get the cigarette to my mouth. But when I turned the sparking wheel on the lighter, the flame that leapt out of it reached the ceiling. I looked up as it flattened itself against the plaster, and spread out like water to cover the entire surface.

I heard Dave say, ‘What the fuck?’ And when I turned he was staring, wild-eyed, at one of Bridget Riley’s paintings on the wall.

I felt Rachel’s hand slip into mine, and for a moment all my anxiety slipped away. She was smiling. Serene and beautiful. Her hair was glowing, silver and gold, red and green, and as she reached out to touch my face I saw each movement of her arm as a sequence of images, each fading as the next formed, a slow-motion trail of fingers and flesh, and then the touch of her fingertips on my skin like needles.

And still Dr Robert’s voice penetrated my consciousness.

‘Johnny... that’s what they call him. Johnny Walker. Get it? Johnny uses LSD in some of his treatments. He takes the trip with them, so that he can share what can often be a psychotic experience, and guide them through it. Of course, some people like to use it for purely recreational purposes. Some big names are into that these days, boys. Bet you didn’t know the Beatles are dropping acid. I’ve heard some of the stuff they’re writing. Man, it’s just taking them to the next level. And they’re not the only ones.’ He sat back and smiled. ‘Just about everyone comes to me when they want to go tripping. You know what LSD is, boys?’

I heard Luke’s voice come from somewhere. ‘Lysergic acid diethylamide. Commonly known as acid.’

‘Ah, our savant again. Our know-it-all. But absolutely right. A semi-synthetic psychedelic drug that can alter thinking processes, visual and aural awareness, leading to sometimes intense spiritual experiences.’ He grinned. ‘So how is it for you, boys?’

And I realized, with a sudden and very intense clarity, that Dr Robert had somehow slipped acid into our meal. All my anxiety returned in a rush, and Rachel’s hand in mine felt like it was crushing me. I turned to see her wolf’s head snarling in my face.

But Luke’s voice somehow cut through all of it. Clear, controlled and reassuring.

‘You shouldn’t have done that, Dr Robert. Not without their permission. I have read that LSD is the only thing, apart from cancer, that can actually split your genes and change your personality.’

I glanced across the table and saw that Luke’s wine glass was untouched. He had not drunk a drop. So it had been in the wine, and he was quite unaffected.

Dr Robert said, ‘There is some debate about that. But, anyway, no need to worry. It was the tiniest dose, and it will wear off very quickly.’ He looked around the table, eyes shining. ‘This is the sixties, boys. You need to experience it all. You can’t do it second-hand. Not if you want to compete with the rest.’

By the time we went down to the basement for the night, we were also coming down from the trip. Angry and excited at the same time. I was quite shaken. I had not enjoyed the strange visual distortions produced by the acid, and still felt a residual sense of anxiety.

Luke, of all of us, was the most furious and wanted us to pack up our stuff and leave immediately. ‘He had no right. No right at all!’

But we weren’t going to go down that road. Both Maurie and Dave were unsure of the experience and hesitant about trying it again. But their hesitation, I knew, meant that they would.

I knew I wouldn’t. The heightened sense of awareness that came from smoking dope was different. You felt in control of that. But an acid trip seemed random, and utterly dependent on your mood to determine whether it would be a good or bad journey on the road to paradise or psychosis.

I caught Rachel eyeing me with strangely dilated pupils, a faintly knowing smile curling the corners of her mouth, and I wondered what kind of experience it had been for her.

For Jeff, however, there was no doubt. ‘Man, that was AMAZING,’ he said. ‘Did you see them? Did you?’

‘See what?’ Maurie said.

‘The rainbows. Coming right out of the wall. I swear to God, I’ve never seen colours like it. It was just beautiful.’ He looked around all our vacant faces. ‘Didn’t you see them?’

‘It was all in your head, Jeff,’ Luke told him. ‘Everyone experienced something different.’

And Jeff seemed disappointed by that.

Luke picked up his bag. ‘I think we should all get a decent night’s sleep and talk about this in the morning.’

I had thought there was going to be some argument about who was going to get which room. There were only three: a single and two doubles. But it seemed the others had already discussed it and made a decision to which neither Rachel nor I had been privy. Rachel, Maurie said, was to get the single at the end of the hall. He would share with Jeff, and Luke and Dave would share the other. I was to get the settee.

‘That’s not fair!’ I said.

‘No one cares what you think,’ Maurie said. ‘It’s been decided.’

I glanced at Rachel and she just shrugged, lifted her bag and headed off along the hall.

Luke hung back when the others had gone. He kept his voice down. ‘I don’t like this, Jack.’

But I wasn’t in the mood to hear it. ‘Well, let’s take a nice democratic vote on it in the morning. I might even tell you we’re having it. Unlike some people.’

‘Jack—’

‘Fuck off, Luke.’ I kicked off my shoes and dropped on to the settee, pulling my coat over me and burying my head among the cushions. ‘And switch off the light.’

He stood for a while without moving, then I heard him cross the room to the hall, and the light went out.

IV

I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when I felt her fingers on my neck, cool and trembling. I awoke with a start and sat up suddenly, almost cracking my head on the underside of her chin.

She giggled in the dark. ‘What are you trying to do? Knock me out?’

I caught hold of her arms and pulled her down on to the settee. And somehow, without being able to see her, I found her lips. It was a hungry kiss, full of lust and impatience, and I don’t think I have ever been so awake so fast in my life. ‘Do you want me to come through?’ I whispered.

‘No. The bed’s far too small.’

I was disappointed. ‘The settee’s even worse.’

She giggled again in the dark, and I would have given anything to see the light in those big, full-moon eyes. ‘It’s our first time, Jack. We deserve something a little better.’

My mouth was so dry I had difficulty swallowing. ‘First time?’

I heard her smile. ‘Well, not for me. For you. For us.’ And then a deep sigh. ‘We’re in a house full of bedrooms that nobody’s using.’

‘The doc’ll kick us out, if he catches us.’

‘Maybe. And maybe it’ll be worth it.’

I discarded my coat and stood up, feeling for and finding her hand. ‘Come on, then.’

And we both had trouble stifling our giggles as we snuck out of the basement flat and started up the stairs. Maybe it was a residue of our acid trip, but I think more likely it was nerves.

Light from street lamps outside laid down long, elongated rectangles through the glazing in the door, and our shadows danced along the hall like cartoon silhouettes as we ran barefoot along it, the deep-pile carpet soft under our feet. The curving sweep of the stairs took us up to the first floor. A night light burned dully somewhere at the end of the hall. This was the floor where Dr Robert said he spent his time. One of these rooms would surely be his bedroom. The living room stood in darkness, but I saw a pencil line of light beneath the door of his study and heard the hushed sound of distant voices.

Rachel pulled my hand and we moved quickly to the next flight of stairs. In a whispered exchange, we decided to go all the way to the attic. After all, as far as ‘class’ was concerned, our parents were far more likely to have been employed by Cliff Robert’s folks than be their peers. So it seemed appropriate that we should make love where the maid might once have slept. But before we climbed that final, narrow flight to the servants’ quarters, she pulled me back.

‘Stop!’ There was an imperative in her whisper. ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun to do it in the master’s bed?’

‘What? In Robert’s own bed?’ I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice.

‘No, silly! Not his. Not exactly. But one of the pukka guest rooms. One with a nice big, soft bed and feather pillows and a quilt to wrap ourselves up in.’

We checked out three rooms on the top floor before finding a large bedroom at the front of the house with a four-poster bed. Neither of us could believe it. A real four-poster! I had never seen one in the flesh before. It was the sort of thing you saw in period dramas on TV, or at the flicks. It was covered with a canopy and had drapes at the four corners. And judging by the way it creaked when we threw ourselves on it, it could have been a genuine antique. It almost sucked us down into its bosom, with the soft-sprung mattress positively enveloping us.

The curtains were open, and light from the street flooded in. Somewhere above the rooftops I could see an almost full moon rising into a diamond-studded sky. But we were driven now. Pulling clothes off each other, discarding them carelessly on the floor. And then I felt her skin on mine, smooth and cool, like a thousand tiny electric shocks. I am not sure I have ever felt quite so hopelessly aroused — so lost in lust and the moment — that my brain seemed to have given up on all rational thought.

Over the years I have read many accounts of young men and women losing their virginity. For the most part they seem to have been fumbling, frustrating encounters that ended prematurely, often in pain and blood. Perhaps it was Rachel’s experience that saved us from that.

Because of the complete disconnect between me and my brain, she was in total control. In as much as our passion would allow. And she almost forced me to wait, and savour. To linger over our kisses, holding my head to her breasts, urging me to bite, then pulling my head away when there was too much pain, before drawing me to her again to salve teeth marks with my lips and tongue.

All my primitive sexual instincts wanted me simply to be inside her. But she made me wait for that, teaching me instead that we could give and receive as much pleasure with our mouths. Things I would never have known, or thought to do. But which, ultimately, led to the most heightened moment of release when finally I was inside her, feeling her grip me with her muscles as my hips rose and fell to the most ancient rhythm known to mankind.

I can’t imagine what kind of noise we must have made, but we were unrestrained in giving voice to our passion, and neither of us cared.

When it was over, we lay breathless and sweating, wrapped in each other’s arms, a tangle of legs. Kissing and whispering words that came without thought.

‘I love you.’ Had I really said that? It sounded like me, but I had no idea where it came from. After all, what could I possibly know about love? I was barely seventeen and had just lost my virginity to a girl I’d known for two days.

She said, ‘Shhhh,’ and held my head and kissed me. ‘Time enough for that.’

But we had no time even to register the opening of the door before the room was flooded with hard, cold electric light. I turned over quickly on the bed, naked, exposed and feeling horribly vulnerable. Dr Robert stood in the doorway looking at us. We were on top of the bed and so had no way of covering our nakedness. Rachel didn’t seem to care. She just lay there, brazenly returning his stare. I wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of any words.

There was the slightest lascivious smile about his mouth as he ran his eyes over us and appeared to consider the situation. In the end, all he said was, ‘Enjoy,’ and pulled the door shut.

I

We were picked up the next morning in a Volkswagen minibus driven by a young man with incredibly long hair. Dr Robert sat up front and we all piled into the rear. As we headed down to the Old Brompton Road he leaned back over his seat. ‘Just popping up to Abbey Road to collect some demo tapes, then we’ll head out to Bethnal Green and you can meet Johnny.’

Abbey Road, it turned out, was a tree-lined suburban avenue north-west of Regent’s Park. Just beyond a zebra crossing our driver pulled off, inching through a sizeable crowd of teenagers standing outside black wrought-iron gates. The gates opened, allowing him into a small parking area outside a white-painted villa. Steps led up to the front door. Above it, a white-glazed panel bore the legend Abbey Road Studios.

Dr Robert jumped down on to the tarmac and leaned back in, grinning at us. ‘This is where the Beatles record, you know.’ And then he laughed at the expressions on our faces. ‘It’s a bit of a Tardis inside.’

He ran up the steps and into what looked just like a large suburban villa. Anything less like a recording studio would be hard to imagine, at least from the outside. But when I think back on it now, that zebra crossing we passed must have been the one that appeared in 1969 on the cover of the second-to-last Beatles’ album, Abbey Road, the four Beatles crossing in single file, Paul’s barefoot appearance giving rise to all kinds of rumours, including one that he was dead.

Dr Robert re-emerged clutching several tape boxes, and we headed south to Circus Road, then east towards Wellington Road.

As we crossed Cavendish Avenue, Dr Robert said, ‘McCartney’s in the process of buying a house here at number seven. Less than ten minutes’ walk from the studio. Forty grand, he told me it’s going to set him back, and probably as much again for the renovations.’

Rachel said, with a kind of hushed awe, ‘You know Paul McCartney?’

His smile was a smug affirmation of our naivety. ‘I know lots of people.’

It took us another half-hour to get out to Bethnal Green. The Victoria Hall was to be found, appropriately enough, in Albert Square, and stood in a small patch of neglected gardens surrounded by high-rise council flats. It was a curiously impressive building of black and red brick, built on four levels, with tall arched windows on the first floor and a roof terrace with commanding views of the surrounding area south of the gardens towards the railway. The first leaves were appearing on winter-dead creeper that was gradually spreading its tendrils across the walls, and a green sheen shimmered around towering trees in early bud in the neighbouring gardens. Large, white-lettered graffiti on the wall urged NUTTERS OUT! While another scrawl proclaimed SHIT RULES.

Dr Robert said, ‘The Victoria Hall experiment is not very popular with the locals.’

He led us through the main doors and upstairs to the hall itself. Early-spring sunlight lay in patches across its wooden floor. A drum kit and amplifiers were set up on a low stage at one end, electric guitar and bass leaning against a single manual Vox Continental organ with its distinctive red top, and white sharps on black keys.

At the other end, a door led into what the doctor described as the common room. ‘Everyone eats here,’ he said.

I noticed a small kitchen opening off one side. There was no one around, but I could hear voices drifting through the building. Someone was singing. Two, or maybe three, voices were involved in some kind of animated conversation. The air was heavy with the sour perfume of body odour, and something else. Something distinctly unpleasant. I noticed huge coloured candles sitting in pools of molten wax all around the floor and on almost every laying surface.

Dr Robert went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. ‘Make yourself at home,’ he said. ‘Or take a wander around. JP should be down shortly, once he’s finished his morning consultations.’

Maurie and Jeff went off to examine the group equipment at the far end of the hall, and Luke sat himself down at the table to light a cigarette. He looked distinctly unhappy.

‘Want to take a look around?’ I asked Rachel.

‘Sure,’ she said.

And we headed off hand in hand to explore the building.

I had found it almost impossible to keep the smile from my face, or my eyes from hers, all morning. From time to time she had caught me looking at her, and laughed, shaking her head.

‘You’re like a love-struck puppy dog,’ she whispered in my ear in the VW.

And I suppose that’s exactly what I was. No doubt, either, who the pack leader was. In contrast to Luke, I couldn’t have been happier. The crap of the last few days had receded into obscure corners of my memory, and my whole being was filled and consumed by the presence of Rachel in my life.

We wandered along dark corridors, doors opening off into offices or bedrooms. On one landing, the walls were covered with crudely painted figures, and the place was stinking.

I screwed up my nose. ‘What is that smell?’

Rachel sniffed the wall and recoiled as if she’d been struck in the face. ‘Jesus! That’s not paint, it’s shit!’

We hurried away in search of fresh air, up narrow stairways, through burned-out pools of light from unexpected windows on dusty landings, until we emerged, blinking, into full sunlight on the roof. A low wall surrounded its black bitumen surface. There were some tattered deckchairs set out around a half-rotten slatted wooden table, and the roof was littered with plastic cups, discarded food wrappings and a thousand cigarette ends.

A figure in a cream robe sat cross-legged on the wall looking out over the garden, upturned hands resting open in his lap, thumbs and middle fingers lightly touching. We couldn’t see who it was until he turned at the sound of our voices. Simon Flet. I felt Rachel’s hand tightening around mine at the excitement of seeing him. Her reaction stirred feelings of jealousy deep inside me, in spite of Dave’s assertions that he was ‘queer’.

He was less than pleased to see us. ‘What do you want?’ His voice was terse, verging on hostile. ‘I came up here for some peace and quiet, if you don’t mind.’

Rachel said, ‘Sorry to interrupt.’

He glared at us. ‘You’re those kids that Cliff brought to the house. I hope you’re not staying long. You’re not wanted.’

And he turned away again to resume his meditation. Although what kind of inner peace could ever be attained by such a troubled personality I could not imagine. Rachel pulled a face at me, and it was clear that her infatuation with celebrity had been short-lived. We went back downstairs to the common room and the mugs of hot tea that sat awaiting us on the table.

We arrived almost at the same moment as J. P. Walker. He shuffled in after us, hands sunk deep in his pockets, apparently unaware that there was even anyone there.

‘Johnny, these are the kids I told you about on the phone last night,’ Dr Robert said.

JP emerged from his private reverie as if someone had just turned on a light in a dark room. His face became immediately animated and his smile was oddly seductive. He stepped forward to shake all our hands.

‘Pleased to meet you, boys.’ Then, as he spotted Rachel, ‘Oh, and girl.’

He wore only a pair of jeans ripped at the knee, and an open-necked, collarless white shirt hanging out at the waist. He was barefoot, a slight man in his middle thirties, with long, thinning brown hair, and the most hypnotic hazel eyes I think I have ever seen. If he looked directly at you, you felt trapped and held by their gaze. It was quite disconcerting. His personality completely overshadowed his modest stature. But there was something about the familiarity of his soft-spoken Glasgow accent that was strangely comforting and removed any sense of intimidation.

Dr Robert said, ‘Look, I’ve got to go. You can get the tube back, boys, whenever you’re done here. Central Line to Holborn, Piccadilly to South Ken.’ He grinned. ‘Have fun.’ And he was gone.

JP beamed at us. ‘Cliff’s probably told you all about us, and what it is I’m looking for.’

‘Some kind of improvised theatre,’ I said.

He turned smiling eyes of surprise on me. ‘Scottish?’

I nodded. ‘From Glasgow.’

‘Never! I grew up in Shawlands.’

‘That’s where my dad was born.’

He shook his head. ‘What a small bloody world it is. You know, I might have taken up a musical career myself if things had been a little different. Got to Grade Eight on piano at the Ommer School of Music.’

It was my turn to be astonished. ‘You’re kidding! I went to the Ommer School. In Dixon Avenue.’

‘You’re not serious!’ Those hypnotic eyes opened wide to completely encompass me. He shook my hand again, grasping it in both of his. ‘The Ommer School. Man, those sisters were some girls! And it’s good to hear the sound of home. I’ve been away far too long. We’ll have to chew the cud sometime, you and me.’ He stood back then to survey us all, and his smile faded a little. ‘Cliff says you’ve run away from home.’

We all nodded, and exchanged sheepish glances.

‘Do your folks know where you are?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, the least you need to do is call them and let them know you’re safe. Promise me you’ll do that.’

I glanced at Rachel. ‘We will.’

‘Why did you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Run away.’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Listening is what I do for a living.’ He grinned.

And we all sat around the table then and told him the whole sordid tale. My being expelled from school, deciding to run away as a group, being robbed on the first night, and rescuing Rachel from her boyfriend the next.

He listened in grave silence. When we had finished, he said, ‘Well, you’re getting your education, anyway. Ambition is all very well, but you know, boys, you get nothing for nothing in this world, and people are not always what they seem. You’re lucky you landed here, and if things work out I’ll be happy to have you help at the hall for as long as you like.’

His eyes raked around the table like searchlights on a dark night, casting a piercing light into hidden places. But then he brought his own darkness to the conversation.

‘Word to the wise, though. Your benefactor... Dr Robert. He has his virtues, and his uses. But if you take my advice, you’ll keep your distance.’ Then he smiled again, just as suddenly. ‘You can put on a wee show for us tonight. I’ll brief you on that later. Meantime, you’d better stay for lunch.’

II

Lunch was weird. One by one the patients and doctors began assembling in the common room. And Dr Robert was right, it was almost impossible to tell which was which. They were universally dishevelled, most of the men with long hair or beards, or both, shabbily dressed and often unwashed. I noticed fingernails bitten to the quick, and others that were long, broken and dirty.

According to a rota pinned on the wall, they took it in turns to prepare the food, but a glance into the kitchen revealed that the rules of hygiene were not necessarily being observed. We were hungry, but we didn’t eat much that day.

There was almost an equal number of men and women, ranging in age, I’d say, from early twenties to somewhere in their fifties. Some introduced themselves, some didn’t. Some gawped at us with naked curiosity, others ignored us.

Much of the conversation around the table seemed to me to be gibberish, and I was afraid to catch the eye of Rachel or any of the others in case I would start laughing. Which is shocking, when I think back on it now. These were poor souls, most of them, and we should have been counting our blessings.

One middle-aged man held an animated conversation with no one that we could see, gesticulating wildly, voice rising and falling as if in argument. ‘Now mathematicians have been debating this for centuries,’ he argued. ‘Temperance, that’s the symbol. Temperance, whether reading in the house or not. And I don’t care what you say, but it’s the way of the world. It is. Yes, it is. It is. It is.’

Like the needle stuck in a record, he repeated this assertion until it became almost unbearable. And yet nobody else even seemed to hear him. A large man with a full black beard caught my eye, and smiled and winked, and I wondered if he was one of the doctors.

JP himself sat at the end of the table, locked away in some distant inner thoughts, and paid no attention whatsoever to what was going on around him. We might all have been invisible to him, or he to us.

After lunch the residents began clearing the table and washing the dishes and we went into the hall to examine the equipment on the stage. It was good gear. Whoever was financing this group from Bethnal Green had spared no expense.

The hum and crackle of valve-driven amplifiers filled the hall as we powered up, tuning the guitars and shouting at Jeff to shut up as he tried out the kit. In all my years of playing music, drummers were always the noisiest, most annoying and inattentive members of any band. And when they had no kit in front of them, their fingers would tap on any surface to hand, incessantly, as if some inner urge to communicate drove them to beat out a constant, demented tattoo. I can remember being at Jeff’s house for dinner with his family when the meal was repeatedly punctuated by Jeff’s father, whose almost unconscious admonition to ‘Stop tapping, Jeff’ was nearly as irritating as the tapping itself.

When we were finally set up and ready, we launched into the set that we would normally perform for the first half of a dance gig. Just to get ourselves back in the groove. The acoustics in the Victoria Hall were good, and we were fresh and full of energy, just because we hadn’t played in a while.

In groups of twos and threes the residents of J. P. Walker’s experiment in the democracy of madness trooped into the hall and stood listening to us. There is something universal about the communicative power of music. It cuts through all barriers of language and culture, of sanity and lunacy. And we connected that first day with almost everyone at the hall. Someone began dancing, and very soon all of them were. Crazy, wild dancing that transcended the music. And it was exciting to watch. To know that you were doing this to people and that, whatever their mood or depression, whatever their physical or mental problems, they had left them at the door along with their inhibitions. Music made them, and us, free. And one.

JP himself stood watching with interest, a tiny smile playing about pale lips, and I caught the admiration in Rachel’s eyes. They were fixed on me and filled with an intensity that released something deeply primal inside me. And I remembered her telling me that she found nothing more arousing than talent.

We had just finished ‘Roll over Beethoven’, and were counting in to ‘She was Just Seventeen’, when the most bloodcurdling scream cut us off mid-count. The door into the hall burst open and a middle-aged woman stood there, stark naked and yelling at the top of her voice. Yells interspersed with lung-bursting sobs, then fresh screams.

She was a woman in her forties, breasts like empty sacks, her flesh carried on a small frame like a baby’s jumpsuit that was two sizes too big. Her body was smeared with some thick, dark substance, and it didn’t take long for the smell of it to tell us what it was. She was covered in her own shit.

‘Where’s my bottle?’ she screamed. ‘I want my bottle! Johnny says I’ve got to have my bottle.’

And she started running around the hall, scattering everyone in her path. No one wanted to go near her. The run turned into a skip, and she began singing some toneless, unrecognizable tune.

I glanced at JP but he made no attempt to intervene. He watched disinterestedly for a moment, then turned to disappear into the common room.

The smell was beginning to fill the hall, and Rachel took refuge on the stage beside us. But the woman stopped right below us, staring at us with wild eyes.

‘Why did you stop? Why did you fucking stop?’ Her voice was like tearing paper. ‘I want to dance. Play! Play!’

I glanced at Jeff and nodded. Anything to get her away from us. He struck his sticks together four times, and we launched into ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, wishing in fact that she wasn’t standing there at all. But she didn’t move away. She began writhing and twisting on the spot in the most grotesque and violently malodorous dance I have ever seen. It was all I could do to stop from throwing up.

Then suddenly one of the men who had been at the table during lunch came running out of the common room. A big man, completely bald, all his head hair concentrated in a mass of black beard, and matted curls covering his chest and neck. His arms were spread wide, holding out a large grey blanket which he wrapped around the dancing woman as he reached her, completely engulfing her. I could see in his face his repulsion at the smell. And yet still he held her — against all her kicking, thrashing, screaming protests — until gradually she began to lose impetus, surrendering finally to the hold of his arms, whimpering and sobbing.

A woman emerged from the common room with a baby’s bottle filled with milk and handed it to the bearded man, who immediately thrust the teat between the shit-smeared lips of the woman in his grasp. She began sucking on it with a passion, and allowed herself to be led away, distracted and consumed by the feeding process. The remaining residents moved aside, like a parting of the Red Sea, to let them past, then several went running around the hall opening all the windows.

A small, bald man walked up to the front of the stage and grinned at us, revealing two missing front teeth, one top, one bottom. ‘That’s Alice,’ he said. ‘The star of the show.’ He took a pull on his cigarette, then pushed the tip of it into the cavity in his lower teeth so that it stuck there and moved with his mouth when he spoke. ‘She’s about six months now.’

‘What show?’ I said, confused.

‘The Victoria Hall show. Johnny’s prize patient. Stripped back to the womb, and growing again to childhood.’ He closed his lips around the cigarette and sucked in smoke. ‘Gets all the fucking attention!’ He turned and stomped across the hall back to the common room.

Not for the first time, I had been unable to discern whether this was a doctor or a patient. A distinction, I was to learn, as fine as that between madness and sanity.

I turned to look at the others, and saw in their faces the trepidation that I felt. None of us was sure that this was a gig we really wanted.

III

The hall was so big and dark that the few candles carried by shadowy figures barely made an impression. Joss sticks burned in unseen corners, filling the air with a sweet, pungent scent. I was aware of bodies all around us, forming a large, loose circle. Four of us moved slowly around its interior circumference. Me and Maurie and Luke and Dave. And Rachel. She had insisted on being a part of it.

She’d had a bad afternoon, slowly succumbing to the shakes and an insidious itching that had her scratching her arms and scalp. There was nothing I could do to comfort her, and in the end JP led her away mid-briefing, an arm around her shoulder, his voice soft and filled with reassurance. When he brought her back half an hour later, she had been calm, almost serene, and I was torn between jealousy and relief, wondering if he had given her medication, or whether it was the power of his personality that had triumphed over her craving.

Now she was back to normal, if any of this could have been described as normal.

Suddenly, a rectangle of yellow light fell from the door of the common room, cutting through the crowd and extending to the back of the hall. A man stumbled through it. A silhouette. And although we couldn’t see his face, we could feel his confusion.

It was our cue to surround him, the wider circle closing around us as we did so. We were close enough in the dark now to touch and smell him, and I pushed him as instructed into Luke’s arms. Luke immediately spun him round, passing him on to Maurie, Dave, Rachel and then me. Round and round our tight little circle. His body relaxing into trust, growing heavier as it did, his momentum preventing him from falling. Faster and faster, as we ourselves moved round the bodies that encircled us. Until a crack like a gunshot was our signal to stand back.

Both inner and outer circles moved out from the centre, like rings of water from a pebble tossed in a pond. And the man dropped to the floor, crouching on his knees. The bearers of the candles moved in to create a circle of light around him, and he got unsteadily to his feet, dizzy and confused after all his spinning.

Another figure stepped into the circle, a sweep of white robe swirling around him as he turned to reveal himself in the flickering light. A young man, face powdered white, his lipsticked mouth a slash of red. He wore a felt hat with a toy parrot affixed to the top of it. Although I knew it was Jeff, I would never have recognized him. He cut a dramatic, half-comic, half-scary figure.

I could see the light of fear in the eyes of the man in the centre of the circle as Jeff drew a pistol from beneath his robes and pointed it straight at his head. The man raised his hands, as if somehow he believed they could stop the bullets.

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No! No!’

But Jeff held his arm straight and steady, a slow smile spreading itself across his face. He was enjoying this. Then, very slowly, he began to lower the gun, still at the end of a ramrod-straight arm, until the barrel of it was pointing directly at the man’s crotch.

He was very nearly hysterical now. Screaming at Jeff. Urging him not to shoot. Hands grasping his crotch as he bent himself almost double.

Then, Bang! Bang! Bang! Jeff fired three times, and the man’s scream ripped through the darkness like a knife through flesh. He collapsed, whimpering, to the floor, clutching his private parts, rolling back and forth, moaning and weeping.

Almost immediately, several figures detached themselves from the crowd and stepped forward to lift him to his feet, hurrying him away through the yellow glow of the common room as the lights in the hall itself snapped on to leave us blinking in their sudden glare, pale startled faces all around, like floating Chinese lanterns.

JP stood by the door, a solitary figure whose lone clap resounded around the rafters. ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ he shouted. Then, ‘Time to eat.’

As at lunch, we ate very little. But there was wine on the table, a seemingly unending supply of it, and we drank to lose ourselves. It had been the strangest of days.

The coloured candles in their pools of melted wax burned all around the common room, sending the shadows of the diners dancing across the walls. A pile of albums played on a Dansette record player on the sideboard, and the sounds of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, the Kinks and the King thickened the smoke-filled air. The man at the centre of the evening’s little drama seemed perfectly recovered from the shots to his crotch, and he ate and drank hungrily. Jeff had washed and changed, but a residue of lipstick left his mouth unnaturally red, and he looked strangely feminine.

Rachel and I flanked JP, but it was Rachel who had the courage to ask what I had only wondered.

She was blunt and to the point. ‘What was all that about tonight?’

JP’s smile, it seemed, always reached his eyes, and he appeared genuinely amused. He kept his voice low, beneath the hubbub around the table, and said, ‘Richard suffers from what I can only describe as castration anxiety. Several months of psychotherapy have made very little progress. So tonight was an experiment of last resort. A kind of shock therapy to make him confront the illusory nature of his anxiety. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jeff blew his balls off. Or so he thought, or feared. Now he’ll have to deal with the fact that his testicles are still intact, and that his fears are groundless.’ He nodded acknowledgement to the possibility of failure. ‘Only time will tell if it has worked or not.’ He looked at each of us in turn. ‘That’s what the Victoria Hall experiment is all about. Taking an unconventional, non-pharmaceutical approach to problems that conventionally would be treated with drugs.’

His eyes sparkled, and I felt his excitement.

When the food was finished more wine was opened, joints were rolled and passed around the table. The residual excitement of the earlier drama was gradually dispelled, and the mood became more mellow. I noticed for the first time that there was no sign of Alice, or the big, bald, bearded man who had pulled her away.

‘Tell us a story, Johnny,’ one of the women implored. ‘Tell us a story.’

‘I’ve told enough stories to last a lifetime,’ JP said. ‘Someone else’s turn.’

An expectant silence settled itself around the table, and for a time it seemed as if no one was going to step up to the mark.

Then a dapper man in a white shirt and slacks pushed round tortoiseshell glasses back up the bridge of his nose and leaned into the table. ‘I’ll tell you a story.’

He had a lazy, North American drawl, and the streaks of steely silver through Brillo-pad hair made me think that he could be in his forties or fifties, which seemed very old to me then.

He pulled on one side of his short, wiry moustache. ‘This was when Johnnie and I were on that speaking tour of the States last year.’

All eyes turned towards him, and he seemed momentarily discomfited by the spotlight. But he quickly regained his composure.

‘Everyone knows what a hard time they gave us. The Institute of American Psychiatrists weren’t just sceptical. They were abusive. They were rude. They took every opportunity to criticize us in the press, to debunk our research and our papers. They sent hecklers to all our speaking engagements. It was like trying to bring enlightenment to the Dark Ages. After all, these people still believed in electric shock therapy and lobotomies. They were like witch doctors.’

His passion was clear, and I glanced at JP to see how he was reacting. But he was giving little away, lounging back in his chair, one bare foot up on the table, and a tiny enigmatic smile playing about his lips as he pulled on his joint.

‘Anyway, we were somewhere in the Midwest. Ohio or someplace, I don’t really remember. And they laid this ambush for us. A kind of challenge they knew that Johnny would have to accept but could never win.

‘They were waiting for us after the event that night. A group of psychiatrists from a local mental institution. Throwing themselves on our mercy, they said. But it was no coincidence that the press was waiting for us when we got there. The problem they claimed they were seeking Johnny’s help with was a young woman in a deeply psychotic state. She was locked up in a padded cell for her own safety. Refused to wear any clothes, and hadn’t spoken, quite literally, to anyone for more than six months. They had tried all sorts of shit with her and nothing worked. She was catatonic.

‘So we looked at her through the glass in the door. And she’s sitting there, cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall. Someone says she hasn’t moved from that position since she performed her last toilet. And Johnny says, “Let me in.” So they do. When the door closes behind him, he starts taking off his clothes. “What the fuck!” they say, and I have to stop them going in to pull him out again.

‘Johnny puts all his clothes in a neat pile in one corner and goes and sits cross-legged on the floor beside her. He doesn’t say a thing. Doesn’t even look at her. Just sits there. Half an hour goes past. Forty minutes. Then after about three-quarters of an hour, I see her half turn her head to look at him. He continues to ignore her. By the time we’re an hour in she’s staring at him. Then suddenly she reaches out and touches his face and says, “What’s wrong?” Within fifteen minutes they are telling each other their life stories.’

The storyteller grinned in the candlelight.

‘Totally backfired on them. Press the next day was full of how Johnny had brought this woman out of catatonia in an hour, when the local psychiatrists had failed to get through to her in six months.’

There was a ripple of delighted applause around the table.

JP tipped himself even further back in his chair and said, ‘I was only after her body.’

Which provoked a roar of laughter. As it died away, so did his smile.

‘Trouble is, most psychiatrists like the sound of their own voices too much. It’s what the patient has to say that’s important. Listening is the virtue.’

And I thought how true that was. Not just of psychiatrists and their patients. But of everyone, in any relationship. And it wasn’t too long before I wished it was a lesson I had put into practice sooner myself.

We never got back to South Kensington that night. We were drunk on wine and high on dope. And by the time we realized the hour, the last tube train had already gone. So everyone went off to find himself a spot to curl up and sleep for the night. Rachel and I were about to make our way up to the roof when Maurie insinuated himself between us.

‘I want a word with Jack,’ he said.

I hesitated, sensing the danger in his voice, then nodded to Rachel. She sighed theatrically and went to wait for me in the common room. Maurie’s voice was low and tight, and his fingers held me by the fleshy part of my upper arm, bruising me, I was sure.

‘I told you, Jack. She’s not for you.’

I looked into his eyes for a long time, trying to find some reason in them for this obsessive protection of his cousin. But all I saw was hostility. ‘Yeah, you did.’

We stared each other out for a very long moment before I pulled my arm free and went off into the common room to find Rachel and take her up to the roof.

The weather had changed during the course of this spring day, a shift of season, and the night air was positively balmy up there. Like a summer’s evening. You could smell the blossom and the scent of leaves bursting out of their buds, and from somewhere the perfume of lilac, sweet and cloying. It was a fragrance I had always associated with the arrival of summer, burgeoning invisibly from the lilac tree that grew outside my bedroom window at home.

We lay back in the deckchairs, gazing up at the sky, and I forced myself to stop thinking about Maurie.

‘What did he give you?’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘JP. This afternoon when you got the shakes.’

I sensed her hesitation in the dark, her reluctance to tell me.

‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘But whatever it was I felt better after it.’ More hesitation. Then, ‘I think he might be an addict.’

I sat up, startled. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘The needle marks on his left arm.’ Maybe she felt my disappointment, because after a moment she added, ‘But who knows? Maybe he’s just diabetic.’

I lay back again in the deckchair and gazed at the cosmos, lost in its vastness, my mind drawn to all those pinpoints of light like a moth to a million flames. ‘You ever wonder what’s out there?’

I turned to see her shake her head.

‘I never do. What’s out there... well, we’ll probably never know. And chances are we wouldn’t understand it even if we did. I only ever worry about what’s in here.’ She put a hand on her breast, and turned her head to meet my eye.

‘And what’s in there?’

‘A day or two ago I couldn’t have told you.’

‘And now?’

Her smile was pale and washed with moonlight. ‘You,’ she said. ‘You’re in there. Filling the big empty void that used to be me. Filling it up with something better. Something good.’

While I might have whispered ‘I love you’ in the throes of passion the night before, I knew now in my heart that I meant it. Whatever it was, whatever it did to me, however long it would last, I knew it was what I felt. I eased myself out of the deckchair and took her hand. She stood up, then, and we kissed. And the big furry coat my old headmaster had thrown at me that day in his office got laid out on the bitumen. Our bed for the night, and the cushioning beneath us as we made love again, this time under the stars, as if all of eternity had existed to create only this moment.

I

It’s funny how the bizarre nature of that first experience at the Victoria Hall became not only familiar, but routine. In the next month or so we fell into a pattern of time spent between Dr Robert’s house in Kensington and the dafties at Bethnal Green. I use the word ‘daftie’ in that fond, Scottish way that is not meant to offend. Because, in fact, all of us very quickly ceased to think of the residents of the hall as dafties at all. The norm became extended to include what had, at first, seemed outrageously abnormal.

However, smearing yourself and the walls with shit was never going to be acceptable, and everyone at the hall was hugely relieved when JP gave Alice the gift of paint. Using her shit to draw on the walls was, he said, her way of giving expression to her inner self. Literally. But paint very quickly became an acceptable substitute, and across the course of those weeks we saw a marked change in her. Paint became her new medium of communication. JP had acquired from somewhere a huge roll of newsprint, and Alice would tear off great lengths of it to hang from the walls all around the hall and paint. Fantastical, colourful creations with their own narratives. Figures in distress, making love, fighting. Jesus. God. The Virgin Mary.

The hall received frequent visitors — actors, pop stars, writers, artists — and Dr Robert seemed to know them all. He was everybody’s friend. And we were treated as equals by residents and visitors alike. More than once I found myself sitting in conversation with people I had only previously seen on television, or the big screen. As if I were one of them. I saw Richard Burton one time. And Audrey Hepburn another. And had a very stoned conversation with Brian Jones. Gradually I came to see that, for all their fame and celebrity, they were just like us, with all the same fears and insecurities. Knowing that, oddly, had the effect of decreasing mine, and I found myself growing in confidence and maturity.

A BBC documentary crew came and filmed at the hall for several days. I never saw the film they made, but I suppose that somewhere in the vaults of the corporation there still remain some dusty old reels of film, recording for posterity a little of the flavour of that time we spent at Bethnal Green.

The group played often for both residents and visitors, always drawing applause and getting people on their feet to dance. JP himself never danced, but would often stand by the door, watching the dancers with a curious smile on his face.

He asked me once if I didn’t perceive dancing as being a little strange.

I said I didn’t.

And he said, ‘What if you couldn’t hear the music?’

I didn’t see how that was possible. My head was always filled with the stuff.

He smiled that enigmatic smile of his and said, ‘Nietzsche once observed that those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. It’s a fun thought, don’t you think?’

And I don’t believe I have ever seen dancers in quite the same way since.

Dr Robert promised he would set up a recording session so that we could make demo tapes. Not at Abbey Road, but at a tiny four-track studio above the Marquee Club in Soho where, he said, he knew one of the engineers. But he also said we had to start writing our own songs, just as the young man who might have been John Lennon advised us on our first day in London.

So Luke and I spent hours in the basement flat at Onslow Gardens with an acoustic guitar and the melodica trying to write songs. I suppose that was probably the first time in my life that I really bumped up against my own limitations. We both did. Luke had an extraordinary talent, and I was reasonably accomplished on the guitar, but it was one thing to copy others, another to be original. Writing songs was the hardest thing either of us had ever attempted. It required something else. Something more. Something deeper. And the more we tried, the more aware we became that we simply didn’t have it.

Strangely, it was Dave who came up with the best song during those frustrating, sometimes fiery sessions, when we took our lack of talent out on each other, as if the fault might lie outside rather than inside of us. He turned up one afternoon with lyrics scribbled on a sheet of paper. It was the story of our running away. Unsurprisingly, he’d called it ‘Runaway’. They were simple, narrative lyrics, quite unlike the derivative love-and-loss stories that Luke and I had been playing with.

The whole song was built around three chords. G, C and D, with a repeating chorus of Run, Run, Runaway, Run-Runaway.

I can just about remember now how the melody went. But the song itself was never finished, and never recorded, so I have nothing to bring it back, except for the haziest recollection of sun slanting down from high windows in a smoke-filled room, and the all-pervasive smell of damp.

I took JP’s advice and contacted my parents. I didn’t have the courage to telephone, so I wrote them a short letter to say that I was okay. That we were all okay, and that I would be in touch when things had settled down. It was hard to find the right words, and so it was the briefest of notes. Cruel, when they must have been so hungry for news. I had no real sense then of what I was putting them through. Only with the passage of time, and graduating to parenthood myself, was I able to imagine their pain, and realize how selfish and thoughtless I had been.

I just lost myself in Rachel during those weeks. Immersing myself in my obsession for her, burying my head in the sands of our relationship and ignoring the real world that one day I knew I was going to have to face. We made love often, sometimes several times a day. The bedroom with the four-poster bed became ours by default. Dr Robert never mentioned the night that he found us there, but each week when the girl came to clean we would find that our sheets had been changed.

We often lay for hours at night just talking, learning everything there was to know about each other. Childhood adventures, teachers at school, first kisses. Rows with parents. Best friends, worst enemies. Hopes, dreams, jealousies, fantasies. For the first time I felt that I was actually absorbing another person into the very fabric of myself. I got to know every physical and mental contour of this girl who had so bewitched me. We each began to anticipate what the other would say before we said it, and then laughed when we did, both knowing that the other already understood. For perhaps the only time in my life I didn’t feel alone in the universe.

Conversely, my relationship with Maurie was deteriorating almost daily. He could scarcely bring himself to speak to me. Rachel and I made no secret of our relationship, or the fact that we were sleeping together in that upstairs room, and it all came to a head one evening when I interrupted an argument between Maurie and Rachel in Dr Robert’s sitting room. I don’t know where the others were, but I had gone upstairs looking for Rachel. And when I found that she wasn’t in our room, I came back down to hear raised voices. Rachel’s was shrill and distressed, Maurie’s little more than a low growl.

As I walked into the room Maurie was snapping at her, ‘Don’t you dare tell him!’

‘Tell who what?’

They were both startled by my unexpected arrival, perhaps wondering just how much I’d heard. Which was almost nothing.

Rachel stared for a long hard moment at her cousin. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said, and she turned and ran out of the room, brushing past me as she hurried into the hall.

I heard her footsteps on the stairs. ‘What the hell’s going on, Maurie?’

He turned on me, almost puce with anger. ‘I told you to stay away from her.’

His anger fired mine. ‘And I told you, it’s none of your fucking business.’

‘She’s my cousin!’

‘So bloody what? That doesn’t give you the right to tell her who she can and can’t be with. She’s her own person. Entitled to make her own decisions without reference to you.’

He took a step towards me, his whole body conveying barely restrained violence. ‘Stay away from her.’

‘Why the hell should I?’

‘Because you’re not Jewish!’ He almost shouted it.

I could hardly have been more startled if he had physically hit me.

‘What?’ I could hardly believe it. Religion had never been an issue — at least, not one that I had been aware of. ‘Oh, don’t be such a Yid,’ I said, knowing that would hurt him.

His simmering anger burst into full-blown fury. He came at me. Grabbing me by the collar and pushing me back towards the doorway. Almost full into Simon Flet, who was just emerging from the darkness of the hall.

His anger stopped us in our tracks. ‘What the hell do you think you boys are playing at?’ It was extraordinary how bad temper could turn such a handsome face ugly. ‘This is not some pub where you can go about brawling and swearing. And who told you that you could come into Cliff’s private apartments when he’s not here?’

Neither of us knew what to say and we stood, chastened, like naughty schoolboys.

‘Really! If you’re going to be here at all — and I hope that won’t be for very much longer — then stay down in the basement, unless otherwise invited.’ He turned and glared at me. ‘And you might like to rethink your sleeping arrangements. This is not a brothel.’

I am sure I blushed. And I glanced nervously at Maurie, whose face was like stone.

‘Now get out!’

I didn’t dare go upstairs immediately, so I went back down to the basement with Maurie. He went straight to his room, and I sat nursing my resentment on the settee. I waited half an hour before creeping back up to our second-floor room to find Rachel standing by the window, staring out over the rooftops, arms folded across her chest.

She neither turned nor waited for me to speak, pre-empting my question with a curt, ‘Don’t even ask.’

And we never spoke about it again.

II

Sometimes, when Simon wasn’t there, all six of us would sit in the evenings with Dr Robert in that first-floor living room watching TV and smoking dope. One time we saw J. P. Walker on a late-night current affairs programme talking about the Victoria Hall experiment, and it felt odd to be watching someone we knew up there on the television screen. It probably increased our illusion of being at the centre of things. And an illusion it was. For we were going nowhere fast. Treading water in a deep, dark pond that would eventually suck us down and drown us.

That was also the night, I’m sure, when Dr Robert told us that JP’s personal life was a mess. How he’d sacrificed his marriage on the altar of his career, losing his wife and family to separation and then divorce.

‘He’s a wreck of a man, really,’ he said. ‘How he manages to work through other people’s problems when he can’t even deal with his own, I’ll never know.’ He was half sitting, half lying in a leather armchair, legs extended, sucking on a joint. ‘He’s on medication for depression.’ He grinned. ‘I should know. I write his prescriptions.’

Which seemed to me a breach of medical ethics and his Hippocratic oath. I think that was when I finally decided that I really didn’t like Dr Robert.

But the most worrying thing during those weeks was the sense that we were losing Jeff. From that first night, when Jeff had seen rainbows coming out of the walls, he was lost to LSD. I think maybe Maurie and Dave took it again a few times, but Jeff couldn’t get enough of it. And Dr Robert, it seemed, made sure he had all he wanted. It released something in Jeff, some inner sense of himself that he’d never been aware of before. He had always been the poor performer at school, the runt of the intellectual litter. I suppose that nowadays the therapists would say he had low self-esteem, and that his extrovert, often brash, behaviour was a compensation for that. Well, with acid, he didn’t require compensation. He’d found something beautiful, he said. A part of himself that he never knew existed.

But it changed him. And not in a good way. He no longer felt a part of the group, either to us or himself. He frequently failed to turn up for practice at the hall and spent more and more time with Dr Robert. They would often go out together in taxis, or on the tube. It wasn’t that he was secretive about where they went, he just believed it was none of our business. And increasingly Dr Robert appeared to be exerting an almost Svengali-like influence on him.

We had a council of war one day. Me and Luke, and Dave and Maurie. We were losing Jeff, and we knew it couldn’t go on like this. Maurie was taking it the hardest. They had been so close all through their childhood years, sharing everything. Hopes, dreams, ambitions, thoughts. For Maurie it was almost as if Jeff had died. And although Maurie and I were still barely speaking, Rachel told me that he was becoming increasingly depressed. While he and Jeff shared a room, it seemed that the two of them hardly ever talked any more.

But as far as the group was concerned, we were losing our drummer, and so it was agreed that Maurie should speak to Jeff that night, raise our concerns with him, and try to bring him back into the fold.

The four of us, and Rachel, sat about in the basement flat smoking nervously, waiting for Jeff to get home. We had returned from Bethnal Green late in the afternoon and there was no sign of him. He had left no word of where he was, and Dr Robert was not around to ask.

It was almost nine before he finally appeared, and I guess he must have sensed the atmosphere the moment he came in. He hesitated, almost imperceptibly, by the door when he came down to the flat, glancing around the room with a kind of dead-eyed disinterest. Even from where I was sitting I could see how dilated his pupils were.

‘Hey, guys,’ he said, and went straight through to the bedroom.

We sat in silence for several moments, none of us wanting to look at Maurie. Finally he eased himself out of his chair and I saw how pale he was. Apprehension filled his eyes. He followed with heavy steps in Jeff’s wake.

I suppose we had always known it would not turn out well, but the moment had come when we couldn’t let it go any longer. There was an elephant in the room and the time had arrived to acknowledge it. Though none of us had anticipated just how badly it would go.

At first we heard only a murmur of conversation. Then Maurie’s voice raised in anger, though we couldn’t hear what it was he said.

Then silence. Followed almost immediately by more raised voices.

And finally, clear as a bell, Jeff shouting, ‘You’re just jealous!’

‘Jealous?’ Maurie sounded both hurt and angry. ‘What have I got to be jealous of?’

A loud crash brought us all to our feet. We exchanged glances, but nobody moved.

The door to the bedroom flew open and we heard Jeff screaming, ‘You’re just a stupid little bunch of fucking wankers. No talent, no future. Grow up, go home!’ And he stalked from the hall into the sitting room. He stood and glared at us in turn, the strangest look in his eyes, before turning and slamming out on to the stairs and running up to the first floor.

It was a long time before Maurie came out into the smoke-laden silence of that basement living room. He didn’t say anything. Just dropped himself into his seat and lit another cigarette. But I would swear to this day that there were tears in his eyes.

The other thing that became only too apparent during those weeks was that Dr Robert and Simon Flet were lovers.

When he wasn’t on set, Flet spent all his time at the house, often prowling the stairs and hallways, reciting mumbled lines of dialogue and growling at any of us that he came across. He was a thoroughly objectionable individual, and I never met anyone who had a good word to say about him. But that he and Dr Robert were obsessed by each other was obvious to everyone.

They shared a bedroom and breakfasted together in the kitchen, spending evenings, when Flet was free, smoking and drinking up on the roof terrace. They went to film premiers and West End shows together, and often dined out, returning in the small hours, tipsy and giggling and barely able to contain themselves until they got to the bedroom.

Flet never made any pretence of the fact that he hated our presence in the house. He was openly rude to us, individually and collectively, and it was apparent that he was deeply jealous of his lover’s relationship with Jeff. A relationship that was not clear to anyone, least of all us.

I knew that there was a showdown looming when I heard them arguing one day. I was coming down the stairs from the top floor, and as I approached the first-floor landing I could hear their voices coming from the doctor’s study.

‘I won’t put up with it any longer, Cliff. I won’t. They’re horrible. Unwashed. Rude. Scottish! I don’t know why you insist on keeping them here.’

Dr Robert laughed. ‘Scottish? Is that a pejorative term, these days?’

‘They’re uncouth. Common as dirt. They contaminate this house with their language and their music, and that boy and girl fucking every night up on the top floor. Honest to God, why do you put up with it?’

Dr Robert’s voice was soothing, persuasive. ‘They have their uses, Sy. And when their usefulness runs its course, they’ll be gone. I promise you.’ A pause. ‘Come here...’

Flet’s petulant voice came back at him. ‘You can’t win me over like that.’

I could hear the amusement in Dr Robert’s voice. ‘Oh yes I can.’

I didn’t like to imagine what they were doing, and tiptoed across the landing to hurry silently down the stairs, wondering just what our ‘usefulness’ was, and how long it might be before it ran its course.

But everything else was pre-empted by the bomb that Rachel dropped suddenly and unexpectedly into the mix. Its detonation destroyed us, ruining the rest of my life, and was probably the single most influential factor in precipitating the tragedy to come.

I

We hadn’t made love that night, and I had not questioned it. She had been moody and distant for some days, and I had assumed it was just her time of the month. But as we lay in bed, in the dark, side by side, not even touching, I sensed something more. Something much bigger. And because I couldn’t see it, the presence it created was almost frightening.

It grew in my mind until it took over my entire consciousness. I became aware of her slow, impatient breathing. I knew she was not asleep, but neither did I feel her to be there in our bed. Not really. She was somewhere a long way away, and I had never felt so separated from her in all our weeks together.

For the longest time I lay looking at the light from outside lying across the ceiling, divided and subdivided by the frames of the windows. Until I could stand it no longer. I rolled my head to one side on the pillow. She was staring straight up with her eyes wide open, gathering as they always did all the light that there was in the room. I could see it reflected somewhere deep in their inaccessible darkness.

‘What’s wrong?’

There was neither a flicker of her eyelids, nor any indication in her face that she had heard me. And she made no reply for so long that I began to believe that she hadn’t. I was about to ask again when she said, ‘I’m pregnant.’

And I felt the bottom fall out of my world.

I sat up immediately. ‘You can’t be!’

‘I am.’ Her voice was flat and emotionless.

‘But we take precautions.’

‘No. I take precautions. You take it for granted.’

We had never used condoms. She told me that first night that she had a diaphragm. I had no idea what that was, but she said I didn’t have to worry about it. And I never had.

‘Then, how...?’

‘I have no idea. Nothing is a hundred per cent safe.’

I had heard of women trapping their men by deliberately getting themselves pregnant. But I didn’t believe that of Rachel for one second. She had no need to trap me. I was unequivocally hers. And we were just seventeen. Having babies wasn’t even a distant shadow of desire on our horizon. Neither of us would have wanted that. We were little more than children ourselves.

At first I simply couldn’t believe it. There had to be some mistake.

‘Are you sure?’ Then clutching at straws, ‘Are you sure it’s mine?’ I withered under the gaze she turned on me.

‘Yes, and yes.’ That flat, toneless voice again.

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘Dr Robert arranged it privately.’

I was stabbed by a spike of jealousy. ‘You mean you told him before you told me?’

‘There was nothing to tell. I didn’t know until I had the test.’

I reached over to switch on the bedside lamp. And by its harsh yellow light, I saw that her face was bloodless. She lay like a ghost beside me on the bed and wouldn’t meet my eye.

‘Jesus!’ I dropped my face into my hands. ‘Jesus! What are we going to do?’

I saw my whole life vanishing like smoke in the wind. Everything I had dreamed of doing, of being. And fatherhood had never figured on that list, nor any of the responsibilities that went with it. A job, a flat, a weekly rental. A mortgage if I was lucky. Nights spent stuck at home, building my life around TV schedules. I had watched it happen to my parents. Two weeks on a cold beach somewhere in the summer, a lumpy bed in a cheap guesthouse, and a baby that kept you up half the night. It was my worst nightmare.

‘What do you want to do?’ she said.

‘I don’t know.’ My voice rose involuntarily, out of my control. Panic, I suppose. ‘How the hell should I know? Jesus Christ, why weren’t you more careful?’

‘Why weren’t you?’ I heard the hurt in her voice.

‘Because you said you were taking care of it.’ I turned to look at her. ‘You don’t really want to have a baby, do you?’

‘I didn’t want to get pregnant, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Fuck!’ My voice resounded around the room, and the silence that followed it was deafening.

I fell back, staring up at the ceiling again, and felt the movement of her head as she turned to look at me for the first time. I let my head fall to the side to meet her gaze, and what I saw there was so painful I almost cried out. I suppose, when I think about it now, it must simply have been a reflection of what she saw in me. My fear, my selfishness, my total lack of concern for her or the baby she had conceived. Our baby. And I think I saw her disappointment, too. The realization that I was not, and never would be, the man she had hoped for. All the illusions we had constructed around each other, falling away like so much scaffolding to reveal the ugly reality of the buildings beneath. Just two kids hooked on each other, on having sex and a good time. And one of us, at least, neither ready nor willing to give up his dreams.

I was a mess of emotions, unable to think clearly. And so I clutched at what she said next like a drowning man grabbing for a piece of driftwood.

‘I could get rid of it.’

I was so naive, I hadn’t the least idea what she was talking about. But they were words that brought the first crack of light to the darkness of my nightmare.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There are ways to abort a baby, if you catch it early enough.’

‘Abortion?’ I had heard of it, of course, although I wasn’t at all clear what it involved. But one thing I did know. ‘It’s illegal, isn’t it?’

She sucked in her lower lip, biting down on it, and nodded.

I was confused. ‘Well, how’s that possible, then?’

‘There are women who will do it. For money.’

All the light in her eyes was reflected in the tears that gathered in them. I know now that what she wanted with all of her heart was for me to say no. That I couldn’t possibly put her through some backstreet abortion, that the idea of killing our baby was reprehensible to me and not even a consideration. Every hope, or dream, or illusion she’d ever had about me hung right there, in that room, in that moment. And all I could see was a way out for me. A way to get my life back. Blind and selfish.

I can find all sorts of excuses now for how I was then. Young. Ignorant. Naive. Insensitive. Incapable of seeing the big picture. Lacking the maturity and empathy to understand how it must have been for Rachel. But that’s all they are. Excuses. She saw me in that moment for what I was, and I guess in that moment, too, she stopped loving me. And how I wish with every ounce of my being that I could reel back time and change it. Change me. Change the words that next came out of my mouth.

‘How much would it cost?’

II

We never discussed it again, and the only person I confided in was Luke. He was more shocked by the idea of an abortion than he was by the news that Rachel was pregnant.

We were in the basement flat, just the two of us, and he immediately closed the door to the stairs. He lowered his voice, and I have rarely seen such intensity in his eyes.

‘You can’t do it, Jack. You can’t let her have an abortion.’

‘It wasn’t my idea.’

Already my guilt was leading me to blame her. I was in denial, and Luke knew it. He took me by the shoulders, and for a moment I thought he was going to physically shake me.

‘You can’t do it.’ He pronounced each word like a separate sentence. ‘Jack, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’

I pulled away from him. ‘I don’t need your judgement. I need your support.’

‘I’m not judging you, Jack. I’m telling you. It’s not too late, you can stop this.’

I didn’t know it then, but things were already in train. The first I learned about it was when Dr Robert took me aside after breakfast one morning. Rachel had been avoiding me for days. Maurie had leapt to the conclusion that we had split up, and was happier than I had seen him in weeks. Almost gloating, glibly unaware of what had created the rift between us.

But it wasn’t just me that Rachel was avoiding. It was everyone. She had gone back to sleeping in the single bedroom in the basement flat, while I had stayed upstairs in the big room, sprawling sleeplessly in the big empty four-poster, hoping against hope that one night the door would open and she would slip in beside me to tell me she still loved me, and that everything was going to be alright.

The others had already trooped out to the waiting VW minibus when Dr Robert called me into a downstairs lounge. It was a room I had never been in before. A room overcrowded with antique furniture, every shelf and surface playing host to framed photographs of what must have been the doctor’s family. His parents. Brothers and sisters, or perhaps cousins, since he was the only one who seemed to have inherited. Aunts and uncles. Grandparents. Black and white images of dead people, locked away in this forgotten room that was never used.

He closed the door carefully behind us. Through the window behind him I could see the VW waiting for me in the street.

‘Rachel tells me you want her to get an abortion.’

My hackles rose immediately. ‘I never said that.’

He sighed impatiently. ‘Well, do you or don’t you?’

It was decision time, and still I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Perhaps I was figuring that if I just went with the flow I wouldn’t have to blame myself. I shrugged, paralysed by indecision.

Irritation crept into his voice. ‘Look, I can fix it, or we can drop it. Up to you. I know someone who knows a woman in Stepney. A former nurse. She’ll do a good professional job. But it’ll cost.’

‘How much?’

‘A lot.’

‘I don’t have any money.’

He shook his head. ‘No, you don’t.’ He sighed again. ‘I’ll lend you it. But you’re going to have to pay me back.’

‘How?’

‘There are always ways you can earn it. We can talk about that later.’

I felt like I was standing on the edge of a precipice. One step forward and I would fall, irretrievably, into the big black hole of regret. And yet stepping back just didn’t seem like an option. I reached out, clutching at straws, desperately searching for some way to avoid the decision.

‘How safe is it?’

‘Safe?’ Dr Robert very nearly laughed. ‘There’s no such thing as safe. Women die in childbirth. Everything in life has risk, Jack. Everything we do. Abortion is no different. Are there risks? Yes. Is it riskier than going full term? Yes. But these are the choices we make.’

The driver of the minibus peeped his horn, and I felt something like panic rising in my chest.

‘Well?’

I drew a deep breath and nodded. The die was cast.

III

The morning that we took the taxi to that crumbling red-brick terraced house at 23A Ruskin Avenue will probably rate as the worst and most shameful of my life. Several days of fine, warm weather had seen the trees of West London spring into full leaf. The air was balmy, warm and laden with the scent of early summer. The fact that the sun rose into the clearest of blue skies seemed only to mock our misery. A bruised and weeping sky on a bleak, cold day would have provided a much more appropriate backdrop for what I can only see now as an act of murder and betrayal. I was the perpetrator, and Rachel and our baby the victims.

Dr Robert had given me the money in a brown envelope that I had stuffed into an inside pocket. Everyone else had gone to Bethnal Green, and I had made a point of avoiding them before they went, so that I wouldn’t have to find an excuse for not going with them.

Rachel was waiting for me in the hall when I came downstairs, caught in the sunlight from the door, diminished somehow, and vulnerable. All I wanted to do was take her in my arms, and waken with her in the four-poster bed to the realization that it had all just been some awful dream.

She was carrying a small holdall and wouldn’t meet my eye.

I said, ‘Do you have the address?’

She nodded, and the taxi sounded its horn out in the street.

And that’s how we left, without a word, on that fine, sunny morning to take a taxi across town and kill our child.

Ruskin Avenue was one street back from a small square around a fenced-off area of gardens. These terraced homes must once have been quite grand but were now divided, and sometimes sub-divided, into flats and studios. Number 23A had a nicely kept lozenge of garden at the front and steps up to a door with only two names on it. Griffin was the one we wanted, and I pressed the bell-push with a slightly trembling finger.

A voice barked out of a loudspeaker. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Richard. We’ve come about the cat.’

It sounded so ridiculous that in almost any other circumstance we might have laughed.

‘Upstairs.’

A buzzer sounded and the door unlocked. I pushed it open and we entered a dark, dusty hall that smelled of stale cooking and body odour. An old people’s smell. It reminded me of visits to my grandmother as a child. I followed Rachel up to the next landing. We had not uttered a single word during the thirty-five-minute drive from west to east, sharing the bench seat in the back of the taxi, but with a gulf between us wider than could ever be measured in feet and inches.

Miss Griffin was a lady in her fifties. I was surprised when she opened her door to us on the first landing. I’m not sure what I had been expecting. Someone witchlike, I think. Thin, with bony, clawlike hands and sunken cheeks and the reek of death about her. Instead, she had a round face and a pleasant smile and there was the smell of baking coming from her kitchen.

‘Come in, come in, my dears,’ she said. She took off her pinny and draped it over the back of an armchair in a small comfortable lounge with a window looking out over a garden at the back. Sunlight came dappled through the leaves of a large chestnut tree, like daubs of yellow paint. A large TV sat on a cabinet in the corner. A radio on the sideboard was tuned to the BBC Light Programme, playing Housewives’ Choice. A woman’s bright, Home Counties voice read out requests and chattered like one of the birds in the tree outside the window, introducing records that were as anodyne as the paper pasted on the walls of this incongruously cheerful little room.

Miss Griffin took Rachel by the hand. ‘Now, you don’t need to worry about a thing, my love. I’ve done this many times, and I have medical training. Nothing invasive here. No needles or coat hangers poked up the uterus.’

She smiled, as if somehow this was reassuring. But all she did was conjure in my mind a picture of some dark dungeon filled with implements of torture. God knows what it did to Rachel.

‘The drugs I use are perfectly safe. You’ll spontaneously miscarry within the next twenty-four hours. You might experience some discomfort, and it’ll be a little messy.’ She laughed. ‘But we women are used to that, aren’t we, my dear?’

For the first time that day my eyes met Rachel’s, and all I could see in them was abject terror. I wanted to be sick. I wanted to scream, ‘Stop!’ But still I said nothing.

In truth, what I really wanted was for it to be over. I find it hard to believe now that it was me. That I was that person. That selfish, cowardly bastard who let the girl he loved go through with this. But it was me, and I did. And I will carry the shame of it with me to my grave.

Miss Griffin opened the door to the hall and said to Rachel, ‘The room on the right at the end, my love. Just make yourself comfortable. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

I saw her disappear into the gloom. The sun from the window at the back didn’t extend into the hall, and so I barely saw her face as she glanced back, black eyes like saucers in the palest of faces. Miss Griffin shut the door carefully and turned to me. Smiling still, no judgement in her eyes. How often had she dealt with couples just like us?

‘You have the money?’

I handed her the envelope that Dr Robert had given me and she opened it up to count diligently the notes inside it. There was something about the care that she took over it, and the mercenary look in her eyes, that must have found a reflection in mine. For when she looked up, satisfied that it was all there, her smile faded on seeing my face.

‘Don’t judge me!’ she said, in an ugly little whisper.

And she turned and left the room.

I stood for a long time, my face stinging with the shock of her words, before I turned and walked slowly to the window, hands in pockets, to stare out into a world filled with sunlight, in total contrast to the darkness in my heart. I paid a terrible price that day for what I thought of as my freedom. But the true cost was in allowing Rachel to pay it for me.

Miss Griffin, her smile restored but strained now, finally ushered Rachel out of the darkness and back into the living room. That brave little girl whom we had wrested from the clutches of her drug dealer in Leeds looked crushed. Her face was stained with tears, her eyes red with the spilling of them, and she absolutely could not bring herself to meet my gaze.

‘When you get her home, leave her be for a day.’

The coldness with which Miss Griffin looked at me almost froze my soul. But there was something else in her gaze, something that I have never been able to identify, which left me unsettled then, and still to this day. A look that has haunted my worst nightmares and darkest hours. Almost as if God himself had peered through a crack in the brittle shell of my mortality to pass his judgement upon me ahead of the grave.

The taxi ride home was painful. Rachel gazed from her window with unseeing eyes, her silent misery filling the cab until I could bear it no longer.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said finally. My voice barely a whisper.

But she couldn’t hear me above the rattle and roar of the taxi and turned cold eyes in my direction. ‘What?’

‘Rachel, I’m so sorry.’ And when she didn’t respond, ‘I wish—’

‘What do you wish, Jack?’

‘I wish... I wish I hadn’t let you do it.’

The oddest little smile soured her face, and cynicism stretched her voice thin. ‘A bit late now.’

IV

Dr Robert was waiting for us when we got back. He was sitting in the breakfast room with a pot of coffee, smoking and reading the newspaper. I could see him through the open door as soon as we came into the hall. He folded his newspaper, stood up and came through to greet us. He ignored me, all his attention and concern focused on Rachel.

‘How did it go?’

She just gave the tiniest of shrugs.

‘I’ve had a room prepared for you up in the attic. It’s your room, Rachel.’ He glanced at me with cold eyes, then turned them back to Rachel. ‘I’ll stay home for the next twenty-four hours. If you need me at any time...’ He looked at me again. ‘I’ve moved your stuff down to the basement. Rachel’s old room. The four-poster’s out of bounds.’

Like a punishment. Although, in truth, I would not have wanted now to sleep in the room where Rachel and I had conducted most of our relationship. The bed in which we had conceived the child we had just destroyed.

But neither did I relish the little single room in the damp, dark basement where I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to face the disapproval of the others.

Dr Robert led Rachel up the stairs, and she disappeared round the curve of the landing without a backward glance, leaving me to stand in the sunlit hall, with my guilt and regret, feeling lonelier than I had ever felt in my life.

I was in my room in the basement when I heard the others return late that afternoon. But I couldn’t face them, and sat miserable and depressed on the edge of my bed. Their voices came to me from along the hall, sounds of laughter and wise-cracking. After a while they subsided, and I heard someone going back up the stairs.

Ten, perhaps fifteen minutes passed before there were steps on the stairs again, and I heard raised voices in the living room. It sounded like an argument, though I couldn’t make out what it was they were saying.

Then Maurie’s voice raised above the others, shrill and filled with rage. ‘Where the fuck is he?’

I heard his footsteps in the hall and stood up as the door burst open. His face was livid, dark eyes burning. He looked at me for the briefest moment. ‘You bastard!’ The words exploded from his lips in a breath, and he flew at me across the room.

The whole weight of his body knocked me over and we both landed on the bed before falling to the floor, Maurie on top, forcing all the breath from my lungs.

‘You fucking bastard!’ Spittle gathered around his lips, and his fist smashed into my face.

I felt teeth cut into my cheek and blood bursting into my mouth. A second blow broke my nose, and tears and blood blinded me. I made no attempt to defend myself. If this was the worst punishment I would receive for my sins, then I was getting off lightly. Of course, I know now that the punishment didn’t stop there. The punishment has never stopped.

I think that Maurie might very well have killed me if Luke and Dave hadn’t pulled him off. I don’t know where Jeff was, but the two of them dragged Maurie away, still kicking and shouting, and somehow I managed to get to my knees. The blood was streaming from my nose and mouth, dripping from my chin on to the carpet.

I spat out a tooth, and looked at Maurie through my tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

An echo of the words I had uttered in the taxi. Too few and too late. My voice was hoarse and barely audible. Maurie was breathing hard, and shook himself free of Luke and Dave’s hands, and stood staring at me with hate in his eyes.

‘I’m so, so sorry.’ And I sat back on the floor then, dropping my face into my hands, and cried like a baby.

I didn’t see Rachel all the next day. I stayed at the house while the others went to Bethnal Green, harbouring perhaps the faint hope that she might come looking for me, and that I would be there for her if she did.

Dr Robert insisted on treating my mouth and facial injuries. He reset my broken nose and held it in place with some kind of strong white Elastoplast that he stretched across the bridge of it. I didn’t see him for the rest of the day, although I knew that he was somewhere in the house, probably in his study.

He had given me paracetamol, but I didn’t take it. Somehow I wanted to feel the pain, to punish myself. My face and mouth hurt like hell, and my head was bursting. I couldn’t bring myself to eat, and sat alone in the basement flat smoking for most of the day.

When Rachel finally appeared the next morning, she seemed frail, a washed-out shadow of herself. The life, and the light, had gone from those dark eyes, and it was so painful to look at her that I could barely bring myself to do it.

She came down to the basement, searching for some of her stuff, and I half expected her to pack her bags and leave. She didn’t once glance in my direction, although she said hi to the rest of the guys.

When she had collected her things, she looked at Maurie. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.

Maurie nodded, and the two of them disappeared back up into the house. Just in that moment before she left the room, her eyes flickered almost involuntarily in my direction and I saw the shock in them.

Then she was gone.

Dave lay back on the settee, his acoustic in his lap, idly picking at some riff he was working on, a cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth. Luke sat on the edge of one of the armchairs, leaning forward on his knees, staring off into space. I have no idea where he was or what he was thinking, but we all knew by now that the dream was over. None of us felt inclined to speak.

Except for Jeff, who sat at the table rolling himself a joint. He looked at me and shook his head. ‘Ya stupid big jobby,’ he said.

When Maurie returned about twenty minutes later it was with the news that Dr Robert had offered Rachel a job cleaning and tidying the house in exchange for her room. ‘I don’t know how long she’ll stay,’ he said. Then he looked at me. ‘But apparently you guys owe Cliff some money.’

I lowered my head and felt the disapproval in the room. ‘She doesn’t have to do that,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay him back.’

‘Oh yeah, how you going to do that?’

When I glanced up again I saw the oddest look in Maurie’s eyes. Anger, yes. Contempt, yes. But something else. Something it took me a moment to identify. Pity. Which is not what I had been expecting. And I have always thought that no matter how angry he had been at me, in the cold light of day he regretted what he had done to his friend.

‘I don’t know. I’ll work something out.’

‘And you’re so good at that, Jack, aren’t you? Working things out so that someone else has to pay.’ The moment of regret seemed to have gone.

‘It wasn’t my idea. The abortion. I’d never even have thought of it.’ I don’t know why I was trying to defend myself.

‘No,’ Maurie said, anger brimming in his eyes again. ‘And she wouldn’t either. Except that you were too selfish to see her through the pregnancy. And she knew it.’

And there was nothing I could say. Because that was the truth, and everyone else knew it, too.

I couldn’t sleep again that night, lying sweating, covered with just a sheet, light from the street outside shining through the barred fanlight high up in the wall, and falling in a zigzag pattern across my troubled bed.

Sometime around 3 a.m., I got up and slipped on my jeans and a T-shirt, and tiptoed silently through the basement flat. I could hear the sound of heavy breathing coming from the other bedrooms, and eased open the door to the landing and the stairs up to the house.

The whole house simmered in darkness, except where light fell through windows in unexpected angles and shapes. I followed my own shadow, ascending two flights of stairs, and then climbed the narrow staircase to the attic.

Rachel’s was the only door that was closed. When it wouldn’t open I knocked softly. I waited, but there was no response. I knocked again, a little harder.

‘Who is it?’ Her voice sounded small and frightened.

‘It’s Jack. Rachel, I’ve got to talk to you.’

A long pause.

‘Rachel?’

‘There’s nothing to say, Jack.’

‘There’s everything to say.’

‘No.’

Another pause.

‘It’s over, Jack. And nothing you can say is ever going to change that.’