The 100 metres was about to start. Eight world class sprinters were limbering up and stretching behind their blocks. There was Mack ‘The Knife’ Johnson, the Olympic champion, a towering 6-foot 5 ebony figure. He was grinning and waving at the crowd—confidence personified. And he wanted that world record off his countryman and deadly rival. World record holder, Charlie ‘Shades’ White, was a shorter, stockier man known for his blistering starts and the sunglasses he always wore; he called them his ‘re-entry peepers’ because ‘I run so damn fast,’ he said. He was unbeatable over 60 metres, but this was the 100. He was smarting over his Olympic silver medal and being pipped at the post by Johnson. He was out for revenge today. There was no love lost between the pair. The other six men were top class and included the Olympic bronze medallist, the aptly named Jesse Swift from Trinidad and Tobago. The European Champion, Otto Ludwig, was conspicuous as the only white man there.

Sky stood parallel to the finish line. He wanted to see the battle between the Olympic Champion and the World Record Holder. His own race, the Mile, wasn’t due to start for another four hours, so he had plenty of time. He looked over at the starter in his red coat and white hat.

On your marks!

The starter raised his right arm, pistol pointed skyward. The runners settled into their blocks and a hush descended over the stadium.

Get set!

As one, the sprinters rose out of the crouch into the set position. The starter was holding them a tad too long, thought Sky. Sure enough, one broke too early. It was the burly Jamaican, Ray Stark (fourth place at the Games), in lane eight. Another false start and he’d be out. Disqualified!

Sky looked up. There were no clouds and a dark blue blimp advertising ‘Good Year’ hovered high above. The stadium commentator reeled off some stats about the blue-ribbon event about to start. He was an enthusiast, an encyclopaedia of track and field facts. The crowd murmured. It was like the buzzing of a gigantic insect.

The hush descended again. The sprinters were now back in the crouch position. Get set! The starter’s pistol cracked and a puff of smoke hung like a miniature white cloud above the upturned barrel. It was a clean start this time. Charlie White was as usual the fastest into his stride after the pick-up. Mack Johnson’s long legs took a while to get going; at 40 metres he was dead last. White had a clear lead with the other runners tearing down the track more or less in a line.

White was still leading at 50 metres. He charged along like a raging bull, sunlight glinting off his shades. Johnson was still last, but then he turned it on and went into turbo mode. His long raking stride ate up the track, and knifed through the field. White felt Johnson coming like an unstoppable train. At 75 metres, White was still ahead but tying up, desperately trying to hold his form for the last twenty-five. But he was powerless to resist: Mack ‘The Knife’ Thompson blew past him and was well over a metre clear at the line. As was his habit, Johnson decelerated round the top bend, slowing to a jog down the back straight. He was enjoying himself, taking the plaudits of the crowd. Someone handed him an American flag which he draped round his shoulders. As he jogged into the home straight, a huge roar burst like a clap of thunder from the crowd. Sky looked at the trackside clock. It showed: 9.76 WR. Johnson had shaved White’s record of 9.81. It had been an incredible race with the first six all under 10 seconds.

The weather was perfect for sprinting but hellish for the white distance runners; the Kenyans wouldn’t be bothered; in reality the Africans were unbeatable in any conditions. Those lean tall men from high altitude were lungs on legs. Sky didn’t relish running in the heat. Ruefully, he watched the thermometer click up to 29. ‘What a bitch!’ he thought. He drank some water from a plastic bottle. ‘Keep drinking and stay in the shade!’

The Olympics had come and gone. This was one of the last big meets of the season and Sky wanted to atone for his poor showing at the Games. He had made the final of the 1500 metres but had placed a lacklustre ninth. He’d been hoping for a medal. He’d shown spectacular form before the Games. The 3.30.7 he clocked in Oslo ranked him second in the world. It was an American record and just 1.8 seconds shy of the world record. He had smashed Jim Ryun’s long-standing US 1500 record and taken a major scalp; the moment had been captured for posterity in colour on the cover of Track & Field News.

But Sky had disintegrated in the Olympic final. At the gun no one wanted to take it on and they shuffled through the first lap in a pedestrian 62 seconds. The knowledgeable crowd booed; this was third-rate mile pace. Sky languished at the back of the pack. He was feeling ropey. Then the Kenyan world record holder, Paul Kipchoge, lost patience, stepped on the gas and the field was suddenly strung out. No wonder: the Kenyan put in a vicious 55-second lap to reach 800 in a reasonable 1.57. Sky staggered passed in 1.59, labouring in leg-heavy hell. He was more or less a spectator for the rest of the race.

The British ex-world record holder, Steve Lowe, and the in-form Tunisian, Gammoudi, held on to Kipchoge’s searing pace. Sky was some 20 metres behind them at the bell and he had nothing in the tank. The leaders flew down the back straight for the last time. The stretch drive for the tape in the home straight was titanic, edge-of-the-seat stuff. The crowd went wild and the television commentators went hoarse, screaming out of television sets from Sydney to Los Angeles. Lowe finally pipped Kipchoge on the line, with Gammoudi having to settle for bronze. Just half a second separated the three medallists.

The three of them were here for the Dream Mile, along with nine other top milers. Sky was confident that he could get in amongst them if he had a good race. The Olympics had been a disaster. Nnth place. He had only just recovered from a heavy cold and it was a miracle that he made the final, after struggling through the heats and semis. On a good day he could stay with the best of them, and beat them, but at the Games illness had reduced him to a relative carthorse.

Today’s was his last race of the season and he was determined to exonerate himself with a fast time. And maybe the world record? He could do it. He watched the ladies’ 800 metres. The Czech Locomotive, Sveta Novak, destroyed the field as usual. The Olympic champion had the biceps and thighs of a man. Chemically assisted? Sky knew that many of the athletes were juiced, particularly in the power events. He didn’t need any juice himself—just the Great Spirit and space to run free down his shining path.

Sky had a slender physique, standing just 5-foot 9 and weighing 120 pounds. Most top-class middle-distance men were taller and more powerfully built. However, Sky’s power to weight ratio and speed endurance were phenomenal. He had been tested in sports laboratories and scientists had marvelled at his oxygen uptake capacity. Sky was a thoroughbred: his legs were long and chiselled with tireless muscles. His chest contained a massive heart capable of pumping huge volumes of blood. Indicative of this miraculous organ was a resting pulse rate of 38. In full flight, he seemed to float above the track, like a gazelle; but he was also as vulnerable as one. His slight body meant he had to watch out and not get bumped and bored by the bigger guys. For that reason, he often ran on the outside of the pack. Or, he simply destroyed them from the front.

Middle distance runners are a breed apart. They don’t have the naked fast-twitch speed of the sprinters, or the slow-twitch endurance of the long-distance runners. The middle-distance athlete combines fast and slow twitch muscle fibres, allowing him or her to run at breakneck speed (not a lot below all-out sprinting pace) for half or a full mile.

The Mile: the only non-metric distance recognised for record purposes by the IAAF. The Mile is legendary and has many storied heroes and a history that goes back to 19^th-century characters such as Walter George. The distance holds a special mystique in track and field, and for some 60 years it presented an unsurmountable barrier every bit as daunting as Everest: to complete four quarters in 60 seconds each to run the fabled, and some claimed impossible, four-minute mile. The barrier defied great milers for decades until Roger Bannister broke it in 1954, in Oxford, England. Funnily enough, just the year before Hilary and Tenzing had conquered Mount Everest. Then came the likes of Herb Elliott, Peter Snell and Jim Ryun who took the record well under four minutes; today the record was down to an alarming 3.46.

Sky thought about the pace needed to break the record. Was he tough enough? A superhuman effort would be required. He visualised each lap and felt it. He had to feel it mentally in order to conquer it physically. The first lap is fast, but you’re easy, just striding along. After the second lap you know you are operating at your limit. The pace is super quick: a half mile clicked off in 1.51. But the third lap is where it’s won or lost. You must be remorseless and drive the pace along. You must break through the pain and dominate it. If your body and mind are right, the bell gives you wings, and with half a lap to go, you put the hammer down and kick, screaming round the final bend, leaving your opponents destroyed, defeated in your wake. You drive on through the pain, never letting up until you’re through the tape. Maybe then, after all that, you will have run a world record.

‘I can do it,’ thought Sky, gazing out across the track, inwardly focused on the Race.

Sky came out of his mental preparations and strolled around the stadium, signing the odd autograph for a track fan, and chatting with a few fellow athletes he knew. He spoke to his coach for a few minutes. Ernie Smith, as usual, said he had every confidence in Sky. They watched a couple of rounds of the Long Jump, the ladies’ 200 metres, and then Sky headed off to the warm-up track behind the stadium.

The first thing in the warm-up routine was to jog a slow mile to get the engine ticking over. Steve Lowe suddenly appeared at Sky’s shoulder. They jogged along together.

‘How’s it going Sky? You got your legs today?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘We’re set up for the world record,’ said Steve. ‘The rabbits are good.’

‘I know,’ said Sky.

‘3.46 is fast.’

‘We are fast enough!’

Sky liked and got on well with Steve Lowe, who was only aggressive on the track. The Englishman was friendly, outgoing, ready for a laugh, and then, always ready to run you into the ground on the track. He had a philosophical attitude to the sport that Sky had learned something from. What they were doing was just that—sport! And you needed to keep it in perspective in terms of its significance to the world.

However, on the track Steve Lowe was serious and formiddable opposition. A destroyer of dreams. He had a trademark finish which all the other milers knew: ‘I’m going with 200 to go!’ It was as if he wore a sign. Once off a slow pace in Koblenz, he ran a destructive last 200 in under 24 seconds. No one could stay with the Olympic Champion that day, including Sky, who watched Lowe’s back disappear down the home straight. But Sky had beaten him when he ran the American Record at Bislett. And today, he felt he could beat him again, if his path shone brightly enough, and the eagles took him under their wings.

After jogging four laps, the two milers shook hands, wished each other luck, and went their separate ways. Sky did some stretching and then opened up his powerful miler’s legs in a few accelerating sprints down the back straight. He felt great and on good days like this his legs were light, as if filled with helium, yet immensely strong—a combination of feather and steel. As he made his way back to the stadium, he said to himself, ‘You’ve got a great race in you today.’ The temperature had dropped in the early evening. A big bonus. Sky felt he was ready to fly like an eagle.

There were 14 men on the line—two rabbits and 12 contenders. On your marks! They were under starter’s orders: Sky felt the usual churning in his stomach, the nerves screaming for the gun to get them going. The milers stood on the curved start line, torsos bent slightly forward, waiting for the gun to galvanize their pent-up energy into a flurry of pumping legs powered by superhuman hearts and lungs. The gun cracked and they burst from the line. The first rabbit, a second-string miler, took the lead. The pace was brisk and Sky felt nice and fluid. He was just floating along, running free with his long black hair flying out behind him. As they swept down the back straight for the first time, the packed stadium was already roaring—roaring them on to the world record.

The rabbit went through the first quarter in decent 55 seconds. Sky was on the outside, halfway down the pack. He wasn’t going to allow anyone to box him in. Up ahead, Kipchoge was lopping along behind the pace-maker. Lowe was on his shoulder with Gammoudi tucked in behind, followed by the Spanish record-holder, Gonzales, who’d placed fourth in the Olympic 1500.

The second rabbit moved up, ready to lead them round the third lap. Sky glanced to his right at the stands as they turned into the home straight for the second time. He wondered where his coach was. Ernie was in there somewhere. The crowd was a blur of faces. There were some 30,000 spectators and the din they made was impressive. There was something primeval about it.

The first rabbit did his job well, taking them through the half-mile in a shade under 1.52. He stepped off on to the infield and the second rabbit took over. It was the German, Manfred Gotz, a pretty good miler although he’d been dumped in the semis at the Olympics. He’d been charged to take them to the three-quarter mark. On the back straight, for the penultimate time, Sky moved up the field and sat in behind the three danger men and the rabbit. At the bell, he felt good. They were on world-record pace. He saw the track before him; he had only to fly down this shining red path to glory and immortality. He was a running brave, after all, but the opponents were fierce, and not to be underestimated.

The rabbit peeled off, leaving Kipchoge at the front, followed by Lowe, Gammoudi and Sky. Gonzales was snapping at his heels. Into the back straight for the last time, Sky was feeling strong, and his confidence was rising. He felt the invisible cord tying him to Gonzales break. Now there were only four. A supreme quartet of milers locked in a mortal battle for the world record. The stadium commentator was going nuts but his voice was drowned in the baying of the crowd, who were witnessing the final dramatic unfolding of what must surely be a world-record.

The four milers were nearing the crown of the bend: Kipchoge had a slight lead; Lowe was on his shoulder, with Gammoudi just behind on the inside. Sky was on the Tunisian’s shoulder, ideally placed to strike. ‘I’ve got this!’ he thought. Gammoudi was boxed in, desperately looking for a way through. And then, it happened. Sky felt Gammoudi’s spikes gash the side of his left leg near the ankle. And before he could kick, the burly Tunisian shoulder-barged him. Sky tumbled to the track. Dazed, he lay on his back gazing up through the hole in the stadium’s roof at the blue sky. Everything was a blur of noise and light. Some medics rushed up but he fended them off, telling them he was okay. He heard the crowd roar: Lowe had broken the world record with a sensational 3.45.7; Kipchoge was second (3.46.3); Gammoudi recorded 3.47.1 in third place, but was later disqualified for the blatant shoulder barge.

Sky stood up. Blood was streaming from his leg. He tore his spikes off and held them like weapons in his hands. Then he walked off into the darkness of the tunnel, to find Ernie before going back to the hotel, and then on to the airport. He felt happy for his friend Steve Lowe: Olympic champion and now World Record Holder! He had met a great match in the jolly Englishman, an athlete who could only be beaten on rare occasions. It was a pity about his own race, of course. But Sky was a warrior, a running brave, and he would tell his crestfallen coach Ernie Smith not to worry: his shining path still lay ahead.

…………………………

Previous Sky Cobb stories
Running Brave - click here
The Time Trial - Click here

‘How are you doing, Sky?’

Sky looked up into the man’s weather-beaten face and said nothing. He wondered how he had come by that long scar that ran from the corner of his left eye halfway down his cheek. Ernie was 37 years old and looked in good shape. In fact, he exercised and watched his diet. He felt it was his duty as a police officer to be fit and strong, and not go round with a fat gut hanging over his belt.

‘I’ll soon be appointed your guardian,’ he said.

Sky studied his feet for a moment and then looked defiantly into Ernie’s face. ‘I don’t need no guardian,’ he said, coldly.

‘That may be, but that’s the way it is.’

Silence. Sky stood like a cornered animal. Ernie saw mistrust and apprehension in the boy’s face, and also latent hostility.

‘I gotta run,’ Sky said, launching off across the campus lawn.

‘Hey, wait!’

Sky heard footsteps behind him and he increased his pace. He felt sure he could outrun Officer Smith. However, Ernie was no slouch. He figured he might not catch up with Sky over a distance if he let him get away, so he sprinted up fast and whirled Sky around.

‘Hold up, Sky, I want to talk to you.’ Ernie had his hands on Sky’s shoulders. The boy twisted away, shouting, ‘What do you want, Officer Ernie Smith? I told you, I gotta run.’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘What?’

‘About running!’

‘Why talk about it? You just do it.’

‘And you’re doing it every chance you get, I hear.’

‘Yeah…’

‘Every day?’

‘Mostly.’

Sky looked at Ernie as if he were some kind of retard that he was obliged to tolerate. He kept silent. Of course, he ran every day. He was born to run. So when would this guardian guy leave him in peace and let him run? Sky was agitated and hopped around from one foot to the other.

‘Listen, Sky, I want to be your friend.’

‘I don’t need no friend.’

‘Oh, come on! Everybody needs a friend.’

Sky thought, ‘If you were really my friend, you’d quit jabbering and let me run.’ He uttered a monosyllabic grunt.

Ernie smiled. ‘I can help you with your running.’

‘What help do I need? You just put one foot in front of the other.’

‘Well, I know something about it. I used to be a runner myself.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Half-miler.’

‘A what?’ Sky had no concept of set distances, let alone times for them. He just ran free – fast, slow, faster, slower, fast, as he felt.

‘Look,’ Ernie said. ‘I think you’re a talented runner and so do some other folks round this place. I hear some of the boys have tried to race you.’

‘I blew them away. Dust off my heels.’

‘Yes, I heard. Do you want to be a racer? I think you could be a good one.’

‘A racer?’

‘Yes, a competitive athlete… win glory and gold.’

Sky had stopped hopping about. He was curious to know what running medicine his soon-to-be guardian had, this man who had authority over him and could curtail his freedom. Yet, Sky also knew Ernie had never raised his voice in anger against him. He had always acted kindly, and it was a big plus that he wanted to encourage Sky’s running. What’s more, he warmed to him more in civvies. The uniform was authority which raised some atavistic resistance in him. Sky was for Crazy Horse, not General Custer! ‘So, how can you help me?’

‘Well, there are some technical aspects.’

‘Uh-huh!’

‘Runners run against the clock.’

‘What for?’

‘To see how fast they are. For example, the middle distance and distance guys are obsessed with what are known as split-times, and, of course, their final time is important to them.’

Sky had no idea what a split-time was. Ernie went on to explain: ‘Those are the times the runners record for each lap and section of the race. For example, to run a four-minute mile, each lap, or quarter, needs to be run in 60 seconds. They also give split times for the half, and then the three-quarter-mile mark.’

‘Oh!’ Sky said. ‘Is four minutes for a mile fast?’

‘It’s fast enough.’

There was another silence. Some kids went by on bikes. A car started and drove out of the school gates. Sky was thinking that ‘glory and gold’ sounded cool. And he wondered about racing good runners. So far, no one could stay with him. One kid had managed to last a mile, before exhaustion had sent the boy tumbling and retching in the dust. Sky avoided running duels because they were pointless—no competition. Besides, he preferred to run free by himself with only the trail, the wind, and the sky for company. But, nevertheless, it might be fun to race against real and worthy opponents.

‘So,’ Sky said, slowly, ‘you’d be my… coach?’

‘Yeah, coach,’ Ernie said.‘Or trainer, if you like. I mean, no pressure, but I think you’ve got it in you.’

Ernie knew that to be a great runner it wasn’t good enough simply to run fast; you had to have spirit and mental strength. It seemed to Ernie that Sky might possess those qualities. In the top flight you were up against the best and beating the guy who level-pegs with you transcends the physical struggle and becomes a mental one. You needed legs as tough as nails but brains even tougher. And you had to embrace suffering, the pain of pushing your body beyond its apparent limits. You also had to have the dogged determination to go out and train every day, whatever the weather was doing. Ernie had a feeling about Sky and he wanted to see just how good he was. He was about to speak but Sky broke the silence.

‘So, what’ll we do?’

‘Well, you run and I’ll time you. Come on!’

Ernie started to walk towards the car park. Sky stood indecisively for a moment and then he trotted up and fell in with Ernie’s stride. ‘What, right now?’ he said.

Ernie smiled broadly. ‘Now is always a good time,’ he said.

Sky was hesitant but also excited. He felt the spirit begin to roar inside him, the one that drove him out of the door; the one that compelled him to run and run until his legs burned, and then he would recover, and feel a warm glow of satisfaction and a sense of achievement. He would sit on a boulder, or in the shade of an alder tree and contemplate the old hunting grounds, the big Dakota sky, and feel an elemental attachment to the Black Hills and the rolling prairies. And he would take a piece of paper and a pencil from his knapsack and begin sketching. These were his happiest moments. When he was alone, drawing, with the Great Spirit connecting him to the land of his ancestors.

Sky felt nervous; the idea of someone watching him, timing him, judging him… But at the same time his warrior spirit had accepted the challenge. He was a running brave, after all. Ernie broke the silence: ‘You feeling good, Sky?’

‘I guess.’

‘Then let’s go, champ!’

They parked in front of some buildings that were part of a high school. There was a running track at the back, with bleachers down the home straight. It wasn’t a modern rubberized tartan track, but its cinders were in reasonable condition. The track was deserted except for an old black guy going about with a rake. He was halfway round the bottom bend near the water-jump. He wore blue overalls and had on a red baseball cap at a jaunty angle. He lifted his cap and waved at them. Ernie waved back. Ernie and Sky were standing at the start line.

‘Who’s that?’ Sky asked.

‘That’s Luke,’ Ernie replied. ‘The janitor. He’s a track fan and keeps this old dirt track in order.’

‘He looks old.’

‘He’s in his seventies. They say he could sprint and jump some in his young days. A regular Jesse Owens! He rakes this old track, waters it, rolls it and even puts the white lines down for the lanes…’

Sky wasn’t listening. He was drawing his toe along the surface of the track, whose perfect geometric oval fascinated him. He was itching to get going, like a greyhound on a leash.

‘You ever been on a track before, Sky?’

‘Nope…’

‘This is a dirt track. We have modern rubberized tracks these days. Let’s see how you go today and maybe we’ll run on one soon.’

Sky had no concept of what the difference between an old cinder (dirt) track and a modern rubberized one was, but the idea of running on rubber appealed to him. It sounded fast. Kind of springy! For now, this track seemed okay. ‘So, what do I do, Officer Smith?’

‘To start with, cut that “Officer Smith” stuff out. Just call me “Ernie” please!’ Ernie had spoken firmly, but his eyes were smiling and he repeated the ‘please’.

‘Ernie…’ Sky tried the syllables. What taste did they leave in his mouth? Never mind! The name was fine. ‘Let’s run, Ernie!’

‘Okay, let’s run,’ said Ernie, breaking into a slow jog. ‘We start with a warm-up… Jog four laps real slow.’

Sky was unfamiliar with the terms. ‘Warm-up? Jog?’ he asked.

‘Jogging is the slow running we do in what is called the warm-up, to get the blood going and your muscles ready…’

‘To run fast?’

‘Exactly. If you start running hard off the bat you might pull a muscle.’

‘Yeah, I get it. I do that, anyway. I always start slow and then, when the spirit catches me, I fly up and down the trails.’

Ernie and Sky were jogging side by side down the back straight. Ernie explained that after warming up, which would also include some stretching exercises, Sky would run two laps of the track (800 metres) as a time trial.

‘How fast?’ Sky asked.

Ernie grinned: ‘Hell, as fast as you can!’

He went on to explain the two middle-distance races: the 800m and the 1500/Mile; the 1500 metres was also known as the metric mile. The 800 was really a sustained hard and fast run (the averge reasonably fit person probably couldn’t even sprint 100 metres at a world-class pace). The runner who decelerated the least usually won. A tactical 800 was of course also possible, with a slow first lap and a storming last 400. Olympic races had been won that way. But to break records, the sustained hard run for the line was the way in the 800. The Mile and the 1500, being longer, had more tactical options. However, to break world records, a hard sustained run from gun to tape was necessary in both events.

Sky thought about the hard sustained run. He could do that. Mentally, he unravelled the track into a straight line and doubled it. He thought about similar distances he ran hard along the trails and a favourite dash came to mind: a flat 900-yard run along the river to a clump of alder trees. Sky figured that was about the same as twice round this old dirt track. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

‘Hold your horses!’ Ernie said. ‘You gotta do some stretching first.’

He showed Sky how to stretch his calf muscles and the all-important Achilles tendon. You did that by going to a wall and trying to push it down! Foot flat on the floor and your leg (do both legs of course) stretched out behind you. ‘Feel the pull in your calf, Sky.’ Then, he showed him how to stretch his hamstrings. ‘Use a steeplechase barrier, or a low wall, and lay a straight leg on it, like this, and bend your head towards your knee.’ Ernie demonstrated some other stretches for the back, thighs and hips.

‘Last thing,’ Ernie said. ‘Put these on!’ He produced a pair of spikes from his hold-all.

Sky took them and gazed in awe at their sleekness. ‘They got nails in them!’ he said at last.

Ernie laughed. ‘Those are spikes,’ he explained. ‘This is a pair of spiked running shoes.’

‘Why spikes?’

‘They give you better grip and traction. All track runners wear them.’

‘Oh…’

‘Basically, they help you run faster on the track.’

Sky was excited.

‘Go on. Put them on!’

‘How’d you know they’re my size?’

Ernie grinned. ‘I’m a cop!’

To Sky’s delight they were a perfect fit. They felt great—nice and snug on his feet. ‘Okay, we’re nearly good to go,’ said Ernie, getting out his old stopwatch. ‘But first, try out those spikes and do a couple of accelerating runs round the top bend. Hit a good speed and then ease off.’

Ernie watched Sky. The boy was a natural. He floated effortlessly round the crown of the bend and then broke into a fast and fluid stride for a few metres before slowing to a canter. Despite Sky’s slight, elfin physique, Ernie felt sure there was a middle-distance runner there in the making.

‘So, ready? 800! Two laps, okay?’ Ernie said, thumb poised over the silver-rimmed stopwatch.

Sky looked determined. ‘I’m ready,’ he said.

‘Put your right foot on this line.’ Ernie showed him the staggered line of the start. Sky put his foot on it and leaned over, waiting for the command. The idea that competitive running against opponents and the clock was a shining path came into Sky’s head. He was ready to fly down it. This was surely his destiny.

‘Get SET!’ Ernie held him for a second. ‘GO!’

Ernie’s thumb snapped down and the clock began ticking off its unforgiving seconds. Sky accelerated into the bend and settled into a comfortable rhythm. He was enjoying the spikes; the feather-light orange Asics Tigers were snug, like a second skin round his feet, and they helped him get great traction. Old Luke, the janitor, was walking up the home straight, looking at the boy’s form as the young Indian raced down the back straight. The old man was impressed. He walked up to Ernie. ‘What’s he doing?’ he asked.

‘Time trial—800!’ Ernie said, glancing at the stopwatch. ‘Just under 44 seconds at 300. Not bad.’

They were watching Sky come up the home straight. ‘He’s a natural, for sure,’ Old Luke said.

‘I think so,’ Ernie agreed.

‘How old is he?’

‘Just turned15.’

As Sky neared the finish line for the first time, Ernie began to call out the 400-split: ‘58…59… 60…’ Sky was passed. Around the top bend he appeared to lose steam. Ernie looked at the clock, nervously. Sky’s attention had drifted. He was thinking about how he’d draw a picture of the track and him on it, and he lost concentration. But just before the back straight opened up, the spirit roared in him, and he went into overdrive. He felt like an eagle swooping on wings of speed. The young running brave flew to the finish line, down his shining path.

‘Hell, that boy’s moving some now,’ old Luke said.

They were watching Sky power round the final bend. Ernie glanced from time to time at the clock. There was excitement in his eyes. He crouched down, concentrating on the finish line and stopped the clock the moment Sky flashed through the imaginary tape.

Old Luke peered at the stopwatch. ‘What time did he get?’ he asked, eagerly.

Ernie showed him the clock. The old man’s eyes widened. ‘1.56! Hot damn!’ he said. ‘Helluva last 300! You sure he never done this before?’ The old man took his red baseball cap off and scratched his bald head.

‘Nope!’ Ernie said, and he whistled through his teeth.

………………….

To read the first Sky Cobb story click here

How to describe Siberia?
You can say it’s big,
and there are a lot of trees!
Snow in winter, devilish cold,
brief hot flaring summers.
Berry-picking days

and idling in the forest.
Long evenings of solitude.
Time enough to write sagas!
And to read and mark
all the works of man.
Time for contemplation.

How is Nevsky Prospekt,
the boats, canals, and White Nights?
Oh, the gaiety of St. Petersburg,
with its scheming underbelly.
A regime’s reckless critic,
I burned all my bridges.

Painful is the memory of Papa
turning his face to the wall,
mute and dreadful as a bust.
And the old clock in the hall
striking my time for leaving,
warders and manacles waiting.

Well, you’ll escape the city soon
for the dacha near Gatshina.
Give my love to each and all.
I am thinking of Papa now.
Sad he was never reconciled
to his son’s happy exile:

felicitously gathering berries,
(dew-drenched rubies in the grass)
under canopies of Siberian fir.
I labour on most gladly,
repairing the steel rails
that never take me anywhere.

The express carries my letters
to cities distant as dreams now;
I accept it like an exegesis.
Thawed by my 15th spring here,
it’s hard to feel banishment
in a land as pure as this.

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You can get Exiles at Amazon

‘Get down there and shoot the son of a bitch,’ the owner’s wife said. She was sitting up in bed, curlers in her hair, a terrified expression on her face.

‘I think I’ll just call the cops,’ the owner retorted, an equally frightened look on his face. He was a timid man.

Eerie blue and red lights revolved in the gloom of the shop. Sky hid behind the counter, crouching in the semi-darkness, trying to control his breathing. He was scared out of his wits. A coyote howled in the distance. A cop got out of his car and approached the glass door of the entrance. He shone his flashlight in and started banging on the door. After a while, the timid owner came down in his pyjamas and dressing-gown and opened the door.

‘You reported an intruder?’ the cop said.

The owner, a thin pale man, had ferrety eyes that were too close together. They were darting around now, nervously. ‘Yes, officer. He must be hiding in here someplace.’

‘Maybe it’s a racoon,’ the cop said. His name was Ernie Smith.

‘I don’t reckon so,’ the owner replied.

The cop and the owner were standing at the back of the store. Sky took his chance. He vaulted the counter, bolted through the door and sprinted off down the street. STOP KID! The cop’s deep bass voice boomed in the silence of the night. Sky didn’t stop and kept on running fast down the road.

Officer Smith was impressed by Sky’s turn of speed. The policeman had been a decent half-miler in his youth and knew good running when he saw it. He stared after the receding figure. Sky’s long jet-black hair was blown back in the draught as he flew along. Ernie Smith pushed his cap back and whistled in admiration. ‘That kid can run,’ he said to himself, as he hurried to his car.

Sky was slight, almost elfin. It was a warm evening and the boy was only wearing a white singlet, red running shorts and pumps. A slight, fleeting figure dashing through the night.

Officer Ernie Smith admired Sky’s form; the kid was built to run. The young Indian boy glided effortlessly along with the carriage of a true middle-distance runner. There was no wasted movement: his trunk was perpendicular to the ground, not pitched too far forwards or vice versa. His head and neck were poised in the perfect position to maximise oxygen intake, not thrown back in lung-compromising desperation. His shoulders and arms were relaxed, perfect parts of a well-oiled engine driven by the long slender shafts of his powerful legs.

Ernie Smith got in his car and followed Sky for about a half a mile, down a side-street and right along another, wondering when the kid would run out of steam. Sky was reaching the end of his rope. His elegant stride faltered. He was exhausted. Scientifically speaking, he was in a state of anaerobia and he couldn’t carry on like that for too long before his muscles turned to concrete, flooded with lactic acid, the by-product of glycolysis, a metabolic pathway now in overdrive delivering power to the mitochondria, the little cells in his muscles that cranked the shafts. Stay with aerobic and you can go the long haul but cross the red line into anaerobia and the fuel needed to keep your legs turning burns down fast. It was burning in his thighs now, but Sky kept right on running, displaying another quality of a middle-distance runner that goes beyond speed and endurance: the mental ability to embrace pain and endure it. But you can only do that for so long, and then you grind to a standstill.

Sky was leaning over with his hands on his hips, panting hard. Officer Smith strolled up. Naturally, the boy couldn’t outrun a police car. The policeman steered him gently to the patrol car and stowed him in the back. Sky sat there with a magnificently sullen and defiant look on his handsome face.

‘You can run some,’ Officer Smith said.

‘Yeah. I like to run.’

‘I see. But you shouldn’t run from the police.’

Sky said nothing. ‘I have to inform your parents. What’s their number?’

‘No phone.’

‘OK, what’s your address?’

Sky gave the policeman his address, adding that it was pointless talking to his parents.

‘How old are you kid?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘You’re a minor, so I have to inform your folks.’

Sky shrugged. He’ll get the picture, he thought. They drove up to the house. He and Officer Smith went through the rough unpainted front door into a room with peeling walls and bare floorboards. A low wattage bulb in the ceiling cast a sickly yellow light. There was an old formica-topped table by a window around which stood three rickety chairs. A dilapidated old couch in the corner had springs bursting in places through its drab brown covering. Sky’s father was sprawled on it—passed out. He reeked of whisky. Spittle had encrusted at the corners of his mouth. He was unshaven and his long lank hair was matted. He wore a green singlet. It was covered in stains and had a number of cigarette-burn holes in it. Spindly, filthy legs sprouted like broken twigs from his red trunks. Sky looked away. His father was a nauseating site. Officer Smith shook him a few times but was unable to rouse him.

The policeman whistled through his teeth. It was a habit of his. ‘Is he always like this?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘I mean, is he always drunk?’

‘Yeah. OK till noon. Then, forget it!’

‘I see. Where’s your ma?’

Sky pointed to a room in the back. Officer Smith discovered Sky’s mother lying on a mattress. There was no bed. The mattress looked like a dejected island surrounded by a sea of trash—clothes strewn about, old newspapers, dirty cups and plates, the detritus of drug addiction and desolation. The only light in the room came from a cheap white candle stuffed in an old wine bottle. Its light flickered and played over the woman’s ravaged face; her complexion was like wrinkled-up brown paper. She looked about 70 but in reality she was 44 years old. Her dead eyes stared listlessly at the ceiling. Officer Smith couldn’t get any sense out of her either. He looked around the room and noticed a drawing nailed crudely to the far wall.

He took the candle and approached the drawing to have a closer look. It was just a few strokes, lines sketched with a heavy 2B pencil. The image was of a butte and Officer Smith recognised it immediately: Mato Paha in the Black Hills, known in English as Bear Mountain, a place of spiritual significance for several Plains tribes. On the floor there were some more drawings; they had been on the wall at one time. There were tear-marks in them where they had come loose from the nails dotted haphazardly around the wall. Had someone snatched them away, or had they worked themselves loose over time?

One of the pictures on the floor caught Officer Smith’s eye. It was a landscape with a bear in it. You only saw the bear’s back in the picture. He was sitting on a rocky outcrop with a view of distant hills. The bear appeared to be meditating on the stunning landscape before him, transfixed by the view of Bear Mountain. Officer Smith picked up another picture: a tree in the middle of the prairie. Next to the tree, a coyote, head thrown back, was howling up at a shining path to a moon that was full and bright.

Suddenly, the woman spoke: ‘Little Running Bear,’ she croaked, in a voice that seemed old beyond her years. She mumbled it a couple of times. Officer Smith went back to the filthy mattress and crouched down to hear her better. She grinned at him, showing a mouth with half the teeth missing and the remainder rotten. He tried to explain the situation with Sky to her, but she just leered and repeated, ‘Little Running Bear’ in her ghastly, broken old voice. He figured she must be referring to her son. He stood up and left the room.

He found Sky on the porch. It was a summer night and a big yellow moon hung against the backdrop of the constellations and their hard bright stars. Coyotes were howling somewhere out on the prairie. Sky liked to hear them. He thought of them as his brothers, braves, wild spirits like himself. While Sky was thinking this, Officer Smith had come to a decision—he wanted to help Sky.

‘Let’s go, Sky!’ Ernie Smith said.

They walked to the patrol car.

‘No use talking to them. Told you so!’ Sky said. A coyote howled somewhere in the distance, as if in agreement.

‘Yes, you told me so. Here, sit up front!’ Ernie Smith opened the passenger door and Sky got in. ‘Put your seat belt on!’ Sky did as he was told and the policeman walked round the car and got in the driver’s side. They drove in silence for a while. Sky was not the talkative type. He answered questions with a monosyllable, or a short, sharp phrase.

‘Did you draw those pictures in your ma’s room?’

Sky glanced at the cop suspiciously. ‘Yeah, and so what if I did?’ he said.

‘So what nothing! But I think they’re pretty good.’

Sky wondered if this was some kind of forked-tongue chicanery on the cop’s part, to get him into more trouble. He shrugged and said nothing. Ernie Smith was not your average cop. Maybe he should have been a social worker. He always tried to find something good in a person, to give them a break. In his spare time, he read poetry. Robert Frost was his favourite. Of course, he didn’t tell his colleagues about the poetry in case they figured him for some kind of pussy.

Ernie felt bad for the boy and decided to get him out of there. The kid deserved a break. Of course, Sky would have to answer for his crime. People couldn’t just go breaking and entering grocery stores when they felt like it. But he saw something in Sky: a strong spirit burned in the kid’s dark brown eyes. He was a warrior. A running brave! And Ernie Smith knew a thing or two about running. Back in the day, in college, he had run a creditable 1.52 for the 880.

Ernie went through the system and Sky wound up in a reformatory. Although, they didn’t talk about ‘reform schools’ any longer. In the old days those places were like prisons. When inmates were released, more often than not, they pursued a life of crime. So, reform schools had done the opposite of reforming bad boys and girls. The system was now more supportive and constructive. The State also considered it a better refuge for a child whose parents were substance abusers.

Not long after he went to the reformatory, both Sky’s parents passed away. It helped to speed up the process that Ernie Smith had started. First, Sky’s mother overdosed on a twisted cocktail of powders. A few hours later, his father, presumably grief-stricken, ploughed his old Ford pick-up into a tree. His blood alcohol level had been nearly 0.40%, which was potentially lethal in itself.

On his first few nights in the dorm, the orphan sobbed quietly into his pillow. He was philosophical about his parents’ deaths. He was sorry, of course, but they had chosen their path. Sky wanted to be strong and proud like his grandfather and his ancestors. That would be his path and he would make it shine. His tears were really for what he perceived as being deprived of his freedom. He wanted to be out on the prairie, running under the big South Dakota sky. Finally, in the small hours, he fell asleep. He dreamed he was with his brothers, the coyotes, and he howled in his sleep.

Two of the women are sisters. They are drinking beer and talking nineteen to the dozen. The older sister is called Makiko. She is 39 and works as a hostess in a bar. This is a Japanese thing: it would seem Japanese men need the company of professional hostesses (not their wives or girlfriends) while they get steaming drunk. Part of the job involves cajoling the men to spend more on booze. Another part is to listen, apparently sympathetically, to the inanities of men in their cups.

Makiko’s 30-year-old sister is Natsuko. She aspires to be a writer and is writing a bunch of stories about dead people. The third female is Midoriko. She is Makiko’s 12-year-old daughter. Makiko and Midoriko are visiting for a couple of days from Osaka.

At the moment Makiko is holding forth about breast augmentation. She is so thin she makes a stick of celery look fat. She is concomitantly flat-chested. She desperately wants to have a decent bust. She imagines that a nice pair of breasts will make her happy and fulfilled as a woman. There are a whole bunch of brochures spread out on the table from clinics who specialise in making breasts bigger. They contain before and after photos and ecstatic testimonials; in other words, the usual advertising claptrap.

Makiko enthuses while Natsuko says, ‘Uh-huh’ a lot. She claims she’s not doing it for any man; she wants to do it for herself. Makiko describes the various techniques for enlarging breasts. For instance, fat can be removed from some part of the body and squirted into the mammary glands. Sounds pretty ghastly to me. Makiko isn’t keen on the fat route either. Besides, because she’s as thin as a rake, she has no fat to spare. She says the best and most preferred method is silicone implants.

Her daughter is not speaking to her. She thinks her mother’s obsession with breast enlargement is totally ‘gross’, a word she often uses. Midoriko has a small notebook in which she jots down perfunctory answers to anything her mum asks. This not talking to her mother has been going on for a while. But she talks to other people: shop assistants, teachers, classmates at school and so on. The silent treatment is reserved solely for her breast-fixated single parent.

Midoriko has her own obsession. She is worried about her menstrual cycle. Chiefly because it hasn’t begun yet. It is a horror that hangs over her. Apparently, most of the girls in her class have started their periods and avidly compare notes. She knows it has to do with her eggs and is frankly appalled that every month for years, until menopause, a woman must bleed. A cycle only broken by pregnancy. What a curse! She is not looking forward to it.

Midoriko has another larger notebook in which she jots down her thoughts, mainly about how gross and awful the world of adults is. She hasn’t confided in her mum or anyone else about her worries regarding periods. She is squeamish, I guess.

Natsuko is doing her best to sympathise with her sister about this breast business. She asks how much the procedure costs.

1.5 million yen, Makiko says. I do a quick calculation and discover this is nearly ten thousand bucks. Five thousand apiece.

Natsuko breathes in sharply and points out that her sister barely scrapes by as it is, and where the hell is she going to find 1.5 million yen? Makiko says she will get a loan. Natsuko says she is crazy and that Makiko should resign herself to having small tits. They get into an argument.

Midoriko rolls her eyes and switches on the TV so as not to have to listen to her mother and her aunt talking about breasts. Pretty soon Midoriko goes to bed and leaves the sisters yapping amid a detritus of beer cans and empty bento boxes.

It’s amazing how I can really see these women in this tiny flat, drinking beer and scoffing snacks on a hot night in Tokyo. They are real and palpable to me. The scene is so vivid, so real, as real as my hand writing this. I guess that’s what great writers do. I really can’t stop turning the pages of this fabulous novel.

Endless wheat ripples in the wind.
Rapeseed spills sumptuous yellows,
shimmering in the unfenced distance.
In the cerulean lagoons of the sky,
clouds drift like white schooners.
Behind the Azov’s diminutive waves,
boundless steppes stretch far away.

Rickety fences along a rutted road;
an old house shuttered and worn;
riot of growth in a prolific garden:
a babushka wields a prodigious rake
and the black soil yields to her will —
an abundance, a cornucopia
of flowers, fruit and corn.

The crone glances up, squint-eyed.
Three geese fly by in V-formation,
beating quiet synchronised wings,
receding into the far blue reaches.
A fighter shatters the peaceful sky—
death travelling faster than sound
to the other side’s haunted beaches.

The sea bleeds into the horizon,
where the waters kiss the sky.
But this serene horizontal is a lie;
beyond it lies another front—
long lines of entrenched mud
where the loam is rich in bone
and watered with men’s blood.

After the Great Patriotic War, the young combat-hardened officers who enrolled at the Literature Institute started the phenomenon of ‘lieutenant prose’, which was nothing like the style war correspondents had used during the war. Today, the tradition is carried on. Many soldiers write poetry in the trenches. But not all of these poems have literary merit. Natasha made it her mission to seek out the poets and poems that mattered.

*

She first met Pyotr Bakunin in 2015 during the Mayakovsky poetry festival. They nearly came to blows because Pyotr at the time was, as Natasha saw it, vehemently pro-Ukrainian. He said that wasn’t exactly true; he just couldn’t care less about Donbass or Russia. Pyotr had right-wing leanings, whereas Natasha was pushing some sort of socialist agenda. Pyotr said he was in the grip of raw youthful idealism: the Ice March heroes in the First Kuban campaign, the White Guardists, that whole thing against the Red Army. Absolute madness.

‘So what changed?’ Natasha asked him. ‘Why do you care about Donbass now?’

‘Simple, I met a guy in a bar who shook me up. He had one leg. He told me how he’d gone to Donbass, where some nationalist battalion tortured him. The bastard torturing him spoke flawless Russian. And they did it methodically, cutting open his trouser leg, severing the tendons, asking, “Tell us where the artillery is stationed.” It got me thinking, there’s a war going on, and many people in Russia had no idea what was happening. We were fighting fucking Nazis again. I decided I had to make a choice: was I for Ukraine or Russia? I chose the Motherland because the Motherland must come first.’

Pyotr became a member of the 2nd Battalion’s 2nd assault company. His job was to take out drones. Later, he did reconnaissance, and served as a ‘horse’ in evac teams. He also had to retrieve dead comrades from the battle field. He wrote a moving poem about it which included these lines:

Distant explosions, mud and sweat,
And crossing fields without drama.
Helmet, stretcher, bag, body armour.
The corpse stowed as he needs to be.
A zipper sound and he’s gone,
Resting in peace is his reward.

The poem’s hero trudges off with his body bag, ‘dying for a smoke’. Something valiant, real and shockingly human comes out in this poem. Natasha asked me for my critical assessment. I said it was a fine example of literary realism. That’s exactly how it happens. Bodies packed in bags and carried away under shelling. No bugles, no drums. It was a solid piece of writing: mature, purposeful, not overly sentimental. I translated it into English but the above lines (an extract from the poem), inevitably fail to capture the power of the Russian.

Natasha and Pyotr were sitting in a rough and ready bunker, which Pyotr jokingly called his suite at the Ritz. As they were talking a striped bandit of a cat leapt onto his lap.

‘Meet Cartridge,’ Pyotr said, stroking the cat’s neck with his big rough hands. ‘He lives with our unit so he has a military callsign. Cartridge often comes to me, wakes me up and won’t let me be. He’s a real war cat, a fearless little bugger.’

Then, Pyotr showed Natasha his ‘memory stick’.

‘But it’s rather large for a memory stick, isn’t it? And it’s wooden!’

‘It used to be a table leg,’ he explained. ‘All the towns and cities I’ve been to in this fucking war are etched on it: Lugansk, Uglegorsk, Svetlodarsk, Bakhmut, Gornyak, where I was wounded. Kurakhovka, Ostrovskoe...’

Natasha found herself attracted to the handsome young soldier. ‘What’s that bit of metal round your neck?’

‘It’s a piece of shrapnel that ripped through my right thigh. I had it made into a necklace.’

‘Tell me about your literary life before all this crap. What was it like?’

Pyotr lit a cigarette. ‘I remained underground,’ he said, blowing a perfect smoke ring before continuing. ‘I liked the outsider status, it suited me perfectly then, and still does, actually. I’ve only a few friends left in the poetry community. I can be a rampant anti-communist. I can wear a Kornilov sleeve badge. I can wear a Russian Imperial Army cap. I can do whatever. But I acknowledge that the Soviet Union and Soviet history are inherent parts of our history.’

Pyotr showed Natasha his diary. ‘I keep this with me at all times in the dugouts and trenches and even during assaults. It is probably my way of calming myself down. Combat is always horrific. You see things nobody should ever see.’ He leafed through the pages. ‘Ah, here’s a horror scene: our position got shelled with white phosphorus. I was terrified. I ripped off my scarf and, pardon me, pissed on it and put it over my face. Then I advised the group to do the same. Some followed my example. What kind of frontline stormtrooper, what kind of hero does that, for God’s sake?’

‘I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of,’ Natasha said. ‘How did you know to do that?’

‘Thanks to computer games and military books I read. I roughly knew that with phosphorus you need to cover all the airways. It’s treacherous stuff.’

‘Will you make a novel from your diary?’

‘Yeah, I’m already doing it. I’ve nearly finished, in fact. I write about episodes in which my protagonist - he’s partly based on my past self - feels fear, doubt, terror. Also I can be a real bastard. I have a revolutionary name.’

‘Will you let me read it when it’s finished?’

‘Sure.’

Then, Natasha found herself in the dashing soldier poet’s arms. Bakunin. Pyotr. The madly attractive revolutionary poet. Before she left him in his bunker, they slept together. I asked her if she was in the habit of sleeping with the poets she met. She laughed and said, ‘Not all of them.’ And then she began to weep softly.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, looking into pale blue eyes brimming with tears.

She lifted a hand to brush away a tear. ‘He was killed in an assault not long after I met him.’

I re-read The Waste Land from time to time—
baffling its heap of images and classical allusion.
Mr. Eliot’s compendious, encyclopaedic mind
leads me here and there in delirious confusion.

Its idea is alienation, things broken, lost hope…
After World War One, the darkness persisted,
for the lamps had gone out; you could only grope
through the detritus of the demonically twisted.

God, exiled in the groove of a gramophone!
Society had nothing much to recommend it.
Salvation? Distant as the dark side of the moon!
What could be done? Could anyone mend it?

The voices in the wilderness cried in a storm.
Under a fascist boot and the law of the gun,
not Buddha, not Jesus, no sermon could warn—
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! All came undone!

And where are we now? In a world of pain!
The current wasteland is a sprawling tip
that stinks from Donbass in eastern Ukraine,
to the deathly fumes on the Gaza Strip.

‘For goodness’ sake, Jasper,’ Henry moaned, ‘can’t you come down to my level once in a while? I’m sick of craning my neck up at you, you two-legged freak!’

‘What do you suggest?’ Jasper asked, looking down from the great height of six foot one. He was surprised that he was having a conversation with his cat. However, it was a wordless and mystical interaction, carried out telepathically. ‘I always knew that cats were cool,’ Jasper thought. ‘But this is extraordinary. Beyond cool!’

Henry had put up with his owner’s ignorance of cat psychology for three years and he had decided it was time to tell Jaspar a thing or two about how to treat cats. He said, or rather intuited, ‘Sit on the floor or better still lie down.’

Jasper lay down on the living room floor, with his head resting on a cushion he took from the sofa. Henry sprang onto his chest and assumed the sphinx position. His green eyes bored into Jasper’s. ‘Good,’ Henry purred. ‘We should do this more often. Now, stroke me!’

Jasper did as he was commanded.

‘Behind my ears, you know I like that.’ Presently, Henry nodded off and Jasper was stranded on the floor for the next half an hour.

Later, as Jasper was making himself some lunch (spaghetti alla carbonara), Henry wandered into the kitchen and had a look at his food bowl. It was empty. He looked up expectantly at Jasper but he was ignored. How vexing, thought Henry. He was a lithe and athletic three-year-old and to get Jasper’s attention he leapt up on the counter and then up onto the top of the fridge. From there, he proceeded to a high shelf situated just below the ceiling. The shelf contained kitchen items that Jasper rarely used: some antique serving dishes with a hideous flower design, bequeathed to him by his late grandmother, and a few empty and dusty glass containers that his mother had used to preserve pears and other fruit.

Henry made his way, sure-footed and tail-high, passed the gauntlet of crockery and jars, and parked himself in a corner near a ventilator shaft, completely out of Jasper’s reach.

‘Get down from there, you idiot, before you break something!’ Jasper shouted, windmilling his arms.

Henry looked down at him with a disdainful expression. His velvet voice appeared in Jasper’s head: ‘I am a cat,’ he began. ‘I have more poise and balance than a ballerina. Don’t get your nickers in a twist, I shan’t be breaking any of your ghastly crockery. Besides, this is another thing you fail to understand about us felines.’

‘And what’s that?’ Jasper asked, draining the al dente spaghetti into a colander, while eyeing Henry with a modicum of irritation.

Before answering, Henry shot out a hind leg like a rifle and gave it a good licking. ‘Cats find comfort and solace in high places,’ he said at last. ‘It gives us a sense of security; we can see what’s going on. You know how I love to climb the pine tree in the garden.’

‘I see. And how long do you plan on staying up there?’

‘Let’s see. Perhaps, I’ll come down when you fill my bowl. Or perhaps I won’t.’

‘How contrary of you!’

‘Well, I am a cat.’

Jaspar slopped some cat food into Henry’s white bowl decorated with a fish skeleton, and the sleek black cat descended at a leisurely pace, stopping to examine the contents of a small wooden crate on top of the fridge, which, boringly, contained nothing but onions and some mangy bits of garlic. He was taking his time. After all, he wasn’t an idiotic dog to rush at his bowl with unseemly haste and gobble all the food in three second’s flat. I am a cat and observe all the niceties of feline decorum, said Henry to himself. However, I might be sick on the rug. Fur balls are the cross we cats have to bear.

He ate some of the food in his bowl: rabbit, not his favourite but it would do. And then: Oh hell, here comes Jaspar. He’s going to pick me up. What a nuisance!

Sure enough, Jaspar hoisted Henry into his arms and began babbling childish nonsense. ‘Did puss-ums enjoy his yum-yums?’

The numskull didn’t understand that Henry was, like all his kind, fiercely independent, and only welcomed petting (and ludicrous baby-talk) when he was good and ready for it. Now was not the time, and to make a point, Henry vomited copiously down Jaspar’s neck.

I stand in the corner, in shadowed gloom. A venerable old lady. Sad and neglected in my widow’s weeds of dust and cobwebs. He hasn’t touched me for months, not since...! My strings have oxidized and gone black. My frets are as dusty as old railroad tracks. Sometimes he picks me up and cradles me as though he were embracing a woman. He comes to me now, plucks a desultory, out-of-tune chord, sighs, and stands me back in the corner.

Mike left his soul in that beautiful box. God knows! He shed blood and sweat onto its steel strings. Not to mention a few tears.

He remembers they had to live on baked beans for months when he bought me. 4,000 bucks! Hells bells he said! It cleaned him out. But Marie had encouraged him to get me, wanted him to buy me, needed him to do it.

‘You got to have a good guitar, Mike,’ she said. ‘The tone on that Japanese thing sucks _— too thin and jangly.’

‘Yeah, you’re right. But 4,000 bucks?’

‘You like the guitar, don’t you?’

‘Honey! I love it. The tone is so rich and she plays real nice. She’s a dream machine, almost as beautiful as you.’

Marie smiled at that. ‘Buy it!’ she said, emphatically. ‘I order you to buy it. We need a good instrument for recording our songs.’

So he bought me and they lived on baked beans for a while. Marie kidded him that he paid more attention to me than to her. But she was pleased. She loved to listen to him picking, and his playing really blossomed. Furthermore, she needed a professional tone to sing to, one that would complement the golden phrases she conjured out of her mouth. And she had that in me, the thoroughbred that became their workhorse.

She is indeed a magnificent guitar: a Martin D-28, a big bodied acoustic, known as a dreadnought: solid spruce top, turned a rich orange colour with age, with sumptuous East Indian rosewood back and sides. A richly resonant beast of an instrument. She made a hell of a noise in his hands. This noble machine, built by C. F. Martin & Company of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, would resound with gorgeous bursts of fingerstyle that blossomed from his fingers like wild and wonderful flowers; but now, she is reduced to the status of a dust-blown ornament.

Sometimes, at night, when he is lying in bed, the silhouette of the guitar catches his eye. She looks so lonely there, cast off in the corner, as if she were saying, ‘What happened? Why have you forsaken me?’ While his guitar was gently weeping, he would turn over and think about Marie and life on the road. They were going places. Literally. Tonight, Abilene, tomorrow Kansas City, the next night St Louis, and so on.

And I went, too, of course. Without me, it wouldn’t have been possible. After all, Mike had to speak through me to make the music.

He has hardly played me for almost 18 months now. When he picks me up, all he can hear is a golden voice soaring in his mind in perfect counterpoint to the plucking and strumming of the strings. I’m a Martin D28 and he used to play everything on me: ragtime; old country tunes; the blues; a little bit of jazz; neo-classical; Irish and English folk tunes; the Beatles; Bob Dylan, and Mike and Marie’s own songs.

Mike goes to a shelf and pulls out a CD. He stares at the cover: a boy and a girl. The boy holds a Martin D-28, trying to look cool in front of the camera, like Johnny Cash; the girl wears a black cowboy hat and blue jeans like the boy. She is slim and beautiful. Her long hair cascades from her hat in luxuriant chestnut waves over her shoulders. She is smiling at the camera with eyes the colour of desert sands. The legend on the CD reads: Mike and Marie.

He remembers the recording sessions they did for a small independent label in Nashville. Half the songs were their own compositions and half were standards. Somewhere Over the Rainbow was one. He recalls Gerry the sound engineer weeping when he was mixing. ‘She has the voice of an angel!’ Gerry kept saying that as he mixed the tracks.

They launched the CD to some critical acclaim. One writer repeated what Gerry had said. It was published in black and white for all the world to read: Marie Shines has the voice of an angel. They began to get radio play. They trailed round the country singing their songs, promoting their album. It was an adventure out there on the road. They were young, in love, and in the groove with their music. A repertoire and a reputation were being built. Mike and Marie had a bright future.

He is sitting on his bed looking at the guitar, remembering her rich, ringing tones: solid bass response, bell-like trebles and clear, mud-free mid-tones. The guitar is staring back at him. The sound hole resembles an agonized rictus, a mouth screaming. Suddenly, a blackbird flies in the open window. Strangely, it doesn’t flap about the room, panic-stricken, like birds normally do in confined places. Instead, the bird alights straight onto the Martin’s headstock. It stays there for a few moments, calmly regarding Mike. It seems like the bird is appraising him. A musical reflex starts him humming, Blackbird singing at the break of day… The blackbird cocks its head and flies out of the window.

He lies back on the bed, hands clasped behind his head, and ponders this startling event. Was it an omen of some kind? Was the universe trying to tell him something? Perhaps there was no significance to it. A blackbird had simply flown into his room and back out again. Just a random, meaningless event.

However, the next curious thing that happens makes him think the universe is actually yelling at him. On the radio, a song finishes and another begins. Instantly recognizable, it stabs at his heart, sharp as a thrust from a dagger. He picks up the guitar and hugs it tight to his chest. There are tears in his eyes. Somewhere over the rainbow…The voice of an angel swells from the radio, an achingly beautiful soprano that touches his heart and ravages its strings.

On a winter’s night, after a gig in Buffalo, he lost control of the pick-up, and slid off the road into a tree. And that, as they say, was that. No matter how many times he badgered her, Marie was always lax about wearing her seatbelt. For Mike, that was the day the music died.

Mike goes to the window and stares out: a flotilla of clouds drifts down the blue lanes of the sky, and a warm breeze is blowing, teasing the thin green curtains into a gentle dance. Too nice to stay indoors! he mutters to himself.

He leaves his small apartment and goes for a walk in the park, down to the pond with its willow trees weeping along its banks. But he doesn’t feel like weeping with them. Not today! Yesterday, he might have. Today, he has a different feeling. He remembers that he and Marie would often stroll down to the pond and feed the ducks, speak duck language to them, quacking like fools, and then shriek with laughter. On fine days, they would bring the guitar and a picnic. They would gaze into each other’s eyes and play a few tunes.

On the way home, Mike stops at a music store and buys some new guitar strings.

The rain was beating down now. The girl’s long blonde hair was soaked but she didn’t seem to notice. He wondered at this. Beautiful women tended to be fastidious about their hair. If she can’t get out of the rain immediately, a beautiful woman will open an umbrella, or someone will open it for her. He never carried an umbrella. He didn’t have to worry too much about getting his close-cropped black hair wet.

He was standing in an alcove that formed a kind of balcony in the bridge’s structure, huddled in his dark green raincoat like some gumshoe in a Dashiell Hammett novel. There was some shelter from the driving rain here. He wondered if he should go up to her and engage her in conversation. But he felt a little shy and, besides, he didn’t want to frighten her. A strange man appearing out of the darkness on a lonely bridge at night might well be alarming. Instead, he lit a cigarette, cupping the match against the wind in his large hands, and continued watching the girl. She was very easy on the eye.

He started to imagine how he might ask her out. He would take her to a fine French Bistro he knew. Wine and dine her, be suave and tell witty jokes. And if she liked dancing, he knew the venues. Jazz, mambo, or rock ‘n’ roll… he knew all the cool places. He saw them dancing into the small hours, then walking hand in hand through a blue dawn, and kissing on this very bridge at sunrise. All he had to do was approach her and get the ball rolling. In the space of a few seconds, he seemed to have mapped out their whole life together.

Then, it happened and, although he had been a champion sprinter at college, he hadn’t been able to run fast enough. That lack of speed would always haunt him. The girl climbed onto the parapet. His perception of time had slowed to agonising slow motion. She stood there, teetering, gazing down at the black water churning below her. ‘No!’ he shouted as he sprinted full tilt towards her. She turned her head, gave him a brief far-away look, and then stepped off into space, plunging to sink in the cold dark depths below.

He rushed to the parapet and looked over. It was a long way down to the water and he could see nothing but the implacable black surface of the swirling current. The river had swallowed her and would spit her out on a bank somewhere downstream.

He stood there, frozen, in shock and grief. Was it possible he had fallen in love and lost his love in the space of perhaps a minute? He tried to gather his wits and fumbled for his cigarettes. The packet fell from his hands. When he bent down to retrieve it, he saw a small moleskin notebook with a grey cover lying in a shallow puddle. He picked it up, brushed the surface wet off with his coat sleeve and put it in his pocket. It proved to be a journal of sorts. He kept it although he did of course report the girl’s suicide to the police. Later, in his flat, he pieced together the tragedy and its wounding fragments: the emotional shrapnel from an abusive father and a string of cold-hearted lovers, miscarriage, divorce, and depression that had fractured and extinguished Nadia’s will to live after just 29 years on the planet.

I have always had a thing about people called William, and not all of them are male. I have a cousin called Hillary whose father, now deceased, used to call her William. I have no idea why. Also I nicknamed my first wife, who rejoices in the aristocratic Christian name of Venetia, Bill. I was clearly influenced by my Uncle Frank who often referred to his daughter as William, but I employed the diminutive, Bill.

William is a very English name. Woody and melodious. My favourite uncle was a William, although everyone called him Bill. William Cartwright. He owned a big stretch of the River Vyrnwy in Shropshire and taught me how to fly fish.

In history there are a plethora of Williams, far too many to elucidate on here. British school children, and I was one, learned about the Normans and William the Conquerer who booted Harold from the throne at the Battle of Hastings in the memorable year of Our Lord A.D.1066. Harold, you may recall, met a grisly end: a Norman arrow pierced his eye. In the Bayeux Tapestry King Harold Godwinson’s right eye is shown to be thus afflicted. And so, the English became French. Bloody ironic that; a few centuries later we had a war with the frogs which went on for a hundred bloody years. We’ve held the grudge for centuries; today, the English and the French can’t stand each other.

Then, there’s a particular favourite of mine, the fictional William Brown: Just William. Richmal Compton’s loveable rascal is the indefatigable and immortal leader of the Outlaws (Ginger, Douglas and Henry). He invariably falls in some ordure or other, gets involved in desperate scrapes and precarious predicaments, but always comes out on top, if not exactly smelling of roses. I must have read every single story Compton wrote and chuckled at Thomas Henry’s fantastic illustrations of the loveable, perennially mud-besmeared, cap-askew ragamuffin. I passed on my great affection for William Brown to my children, who I suspect will pass it on to their children.

Naturally, when speaking of William, we can’t possibly omit William Shakespeare. And don’t tell me Bacon wrote his plays. I have never heard anything more idiotic than the assertion that Bacon wrote the plays of William Shakespeare! It’s codswallop. Francis Bacon was a philosopher and a politician; he knew zip about the theatre, so how could he possibly have written those dramas? Shakespeare was a theatre man, a scriptwriter with a deadline to meet. Stands to reason, to use a favourite phrase of William Brown, that he wrote those immortal plays. In fact, the Bacon versus Shakespeare controversy crops up in a hilarious Just William story titled William Holds the Stage (found in the short story collection William the Pirate). In the story, William Brown gets involved in a school production of Hamlet overseen by a fellow named Mr. Welbecker, an avid supporter of the theory that Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays. There is a hilarious exchange between William and Mr. Welbecker:

Mr. Welbecker: There was a man called Hamlet…
William Brown: You just said he was called Bacon.

Mr. Welbecker tries in vain to explain his Bacon theory. William gets completely confused between Francis Bacon, ham and bacon and eggs. I can thoroughly recommend the inimitable Martin Jarvis and his side-splitting narration of William Holds the Stage. You can find it on Youtube.

I have almost come to blows with people arguing about Shakespeare’s best play. I maintain King Lear; others reckon Hamlet. Both contain much royal hysteria, skullduggery and mayhem, but KL’s mythic darkness edges the incestuous gloom of Elsinor in my opinion. However, both are peerless examples of dramatic art and poetry. My generation read him at school, but today’s school kids don’t. Apparently he’s too difficult for them. I reckon it’s part of a dreadful conspiracy to lower the common denominator of intelligence in a bland and anodyne world ruled by dangerous and misguided nitwits.

A big William crush of mine is William Boyd, British novelist and author of such glittering literary hits as The New Confessions, Any Human Heart and Restless. Boyd is a realist who doesn’t bamboozle or tax the reader with modernist legerdemain, such as stream of consciousness and other weird tricks of a Joycean nature. He is a writer who manages the feat of combining literary excellence with downright entertaining stories: the narratives are gripping, the characters memorable, the settings suitably fresh and exotic. Mr. Boyd is known for what he calls the ‘whole-life novel’; these follows a character from birth to old age and death, or on the cusp of demise. There are several exemplars of this in his oeuvre: The New Confessions, Any Human Heart, Sweet Caress and The Romantic.

Will the real William Boyd please stand up. Of course, William is not such an uncommon name, whereas Boyd is less prevalent. There are apparently 1,151 William Boyds living in the United States today, and some 228 registered in the UK. I daresay there must be a few in Australia and New Zealand but I don’t have stats for them. If you google this distinctly woody name, the first one on the plate is William Lawrence Boyd (1895 - 1972), a Hollywood actor famous for playing Hopalong Cassidy in no less than 143 movies! I don’t think I’ve watched even one of them. I daresay I should remedy that. My William Boyd comes second (why I should be so possessive? I don’t know!). In a page by the Booker Prize people we are told which of his books to read. Read them all for goodness’ sake! Each and every one is brilliant. And don’t forget his short stories; if you’re short of time Boyd’s brief fictions will surely corroborate his fictive genius.

Many chaps christened William forsook this noble name and became Bill or the questionable Billy or Will or the execrable Willy! There are, in no particular order or preference: Bill Murray, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Bill Gates, Billy Joel, Billy Preston, Bill Withers, Bill Bailey, Willy Nelson and etcetera etcetera, ad infinitum, if not nauseam. However, one couldn’t possibly countenance a Bill Wordsworth, could one? Or a Bill Shakespeare for that matter. At a pinch the Bard may be referred to as Will but I would discourage it. The future king of England is a William. Bill the Fifth? Risible, no doubt, but I crown you Bill the fifth… I don’t think so. So why did all those christened William become Bill or the egregious Billy? Billy Boy! Silly Billy. Billy Bunter and so forth. Was it a need to be alphabetically further up the queue than William? Or some kind of logomantic fiddling intimating a desire to be more down to earth, a piercing of pompous nomenclature? Bill sounding more plebian than the patrician William. I could have asked my Uncle Bill, but he’s dead now. I suppose in some cases Bill sounds well, but not in others. Bill Boyd? Definitely not

!

I read Auden with elation.
And he, like all good fruits,
pursues me to the station—
I hear the creaking of his boots.

I press him for his advice
on the aesthetics of the sonnet;
he said it would be nice
if fourteen lines were in it.

I read Auden with elation;
I do not spare the rod,
for he is like unto a nation
where poetry is God.

A hungering pen hung poised
over an abyss of sheet white;
would Wystan have rejoiced
if I’d worked at it all night,

and placed this pretty paucity
like a pebble at his feet,
and proved that his poetry
is difficult and deep?

Like a drowning oyster diver,
I flounder under the swell:
the pearls of this rare writer
cling tenaciously to the shell.

I hold him in the highest regard;
I read his poems with elation.
And although the carapace is hard,
he shines like a constellation.

Johannes stood at the edge. He was barefoot, wearing brown khaki shorts and a white singlet. His arm muscles were sharply defined, dark ebony, glistening with sweat. He was lean, spare, fast and agile as a cat. He clapped his hands together and said: ‘No Sam! I can’t do it. My business with the pool is to clean it and make sure the filters are working.’ And he remained standing pool-side, with the sun behind his back casting him into a silhouette, in the attitude of a servant, waiting, while Sam splashed about in the pool.

His mother and father had told him that Johannes was the house boy. Sam thought this an odd title since Johannes was never actually in the house. He looked after the grounds, and there were a lot of them to look after. The house (the cleaning and cooking) was the domain and responsibility of the house girls: Lydia and her young cousin Sara. All the ‘natives’ lived in the compound, an outhouse of four rooms that was attached to the main house by high walls but separated from it by a spacious courtyard. The back entrance to the house was in the courtyard, up a flight of stone steps to a stoop that led to the kitchen.

Sam went back to his desk and looked at fractions and a tiresome arithmetic problem: If an army of 10,000 ants lost 43.7 percent of its forces in a battle with another army of 15,000 ants which lost 33.3 percent, how many ants would be left on the field after the battle? Suddenly, he realised how to solve the problem; it wasn’t so hard. You had to know that 33.3% was one-third, and that sort of thing. Decimal points and fractions loomed large in his education. He polished off the problem and there was still 20 minutes until supper, after which his parents would go to the theatre.

The ants reminded him of how he had recently come across Johannes doing something odd on the back stoop. It was dark and Sam had just come in, stumbling from the garden, after some jungle adventure involving a lion, encountered in a clearing, and a desperate getaway up a tree. He had fallen out of the tree when he overestimated the strength of a branch. The lion had vanished and Sam limped home through the gathering darkness. He went via the old oak tree and visualized his treehouse up there in its stout branches.

It was dark when he finally got to the house. He stood in the gloom of the courtyard assessing his condition. He tried his leg. It hurt a bit but he would be okay. The cuts on his knees were nothing, a perennial feature, anyway. He felt the lump on his head and then noticed Johannes scooping stuff into a skillet. The stoop, a kind of stage in front of the dark auditorium of the courtyard, was lit up with a reddish golden light from the kitchen. Johannes cut a fantastic figure in the dramatic lighting. Sam forgot his bruises and stared. He walked forward a few paces and saw that Johannes was scooping ants into the skillet. They were large flying ants, which had just lost their wings, and were now crawling all over the stoop, wing-less and vulnerable.

‘Why are you putting ants in a frying pan, Johannes?’ asked Sam.

‘To fry them!’

‘What?’

Johannes grinned. ‘And have them on toast. They’re delicious,’ he said.

Sam was horrified. That wasn’t baked beans on toast by any stretch of the imagination! ‘You eat ants! On toast?’ he squeaked.

‘Of course, they’re nutricious, and tasty,’ said Johannes simply, as though it were obvious. Sam was impressed but decided he wouldn’t try eating ants on toast just yet. The diet was another confusing thing about Africans. Johannes said they also ate other insects and worms. Apparently, you could buy them like a packet of crisps for five cents in the black townships. Sam was thrilled that he had a friend who ate ants and worms, although he himself decided he would stick to stuff like baked beans on toast, sausage and mash, Shepherd’s Pie, and so on, for now.

After a quick review of his treehouse plans, Sam went down to supper. He wondered if Johannes was still cowering under the house. Peter, his two-year-old brother, was being fed by Sara. She would soon bundle him off to his cot, singing Zulu lullabies and clicking away at him in the strange, percussive articulation of the Zulu tongue. He could see his mother at the end of the dining-room table. Her head was in her hands. His father intercepted him at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Sam, a word, man to man!’ he said, urgently. ‘Your mother’s had a bit of a scare, a nasty moment down near the village. So behave, be kind to her… And don’t ask any difficult questions about this bloody country!’

‘What happened?’

His father looked tired. ‘Your mother is an actress,’ he said. ‘She will of course have to tell you all about the drama herself, and relive the experience for all our benefits. Let’s go in.’

They went into the dining-room and sat down. Sam was given to understand by his mother that she had been mugged while strolling back from the village, where there was a small shopping mall, a café, a dentist and a chiropractor. She had been to the dentist for a filling and was feeling a bit woozy. She was walking back home round the golf course, and suddenly, in a shady spot, a black man appeared from the shadows, snatched her purse and ran off.

‘Imagine my shock,’ said his mother.

‘What did you do?’ asked Sam.

‘I screamed, of course!’

‘Of course!’ said his father.

‘What would any woman do in such circumstances? I screamed at the top of my lungs: STOP THIEF!’

It so happened that his mother’s practised dramatic projection managed to conjure up a nearby police car and the thief was apprehended. ‘My God,’ said his mother. ‘What those two white policemen did to that poor black man…’ She suddenly burst into sobs. Sam looked down at his plate. He didn’t like to see his mother crying. He didn’t know what to say. At last, she dried her eyes and continued her narrative. The black thief, ‘a dirty kaffir’, according to the policemen, was severely beaten in front of her eyes and then bundled, bloodied and bruised, into the patrol car.

‘I feel so guilty,’ she said. ‘I would gladly have given him the 20 rand I had in my purse. What a paltry amount to get beaten to death for.’

Sam was interested. ‘Did he die?’ His father glared at him. His mother ignored the question and went on, ‘If only he had asked. Instead, he received a brutal beating that I brought down upon his head. I told the police that! I told them I would’ve given the poor man the money… gladly… I would have given it!’

His mother complained strenuously to the police before they drove off that their arrest methods were far too robust. The senior policeman looked at her strangely. ‘Thank you, Mrs. Green,’ he said. ‘If we need to contact you about this case, we have your address.’ Then the police car drove off.

‘I told them I’d complain about their brutality to a higher authority. You should have seen the look that policeman gave me! He said: “We don’t encourage love of kaffirs round here.”’

The conversation that followed didn’t interest Sam. It was funny how his parents talked about things as if he wasn’t there. Of course, he didn’t understand everything they spoke about. It seemed the gravity of the situation precluded his regaling the family with his exploits in the cricket match. His parents usually discussed the Civic Centre Theatre, which his father had been managing since their arrival in Johannesburg, and where his mother acted. Sam didn’t usually listen to their dramas, back and onstage, but his ears pricked up when he heard his mother mention Johannes’ name. She told her husband that Lydia and Sara were worried about Johannes’ papers and could the ‘Baas’ – i.e. his father – kindly do something about it. What papers? wondered Sam. Then the subject got changed. His father began ranting about some critic who had written in an Afrikaans newspaper that he was a ‘political undesirable’, and that the ‘pornographic liberal filth’ he was pedalling at the Civic Centre had no place in a white South Africa. His father was indignant. ‘Philistine!’ he roared. ‘Well, he obviously doesn’t like Harold Pinter, does he?’ his mother remarked, studying her eyes in her compact and powdering her nose.

All of this went over Sam’s head. He finished his dessert – apple crumble and custard – and asked to be excused. Tension was in the air. The apple crumble and custard hadn’t tasted as good as it usually did. Lydia cleared the table and gave her mistress an imploring look, but her mistress was too busy staring at herself in the mirror of her compact. Sam said good night to his parents, donating a peck on the cheek to each. About twenty minutes later, his parents got in the Mercedes and drove to the theatre.

The next day, after school, Sam was dying to ask Johannes what the pantomime the day before in the space under the house had been about. He also wanted to ask him about the treehouse, but the house boy had made himself scarce. He asked Lydia and Sara, but they were vague about his whereabouts. ‘Some errands, Master Sam,’ they told him. Perhaps it had something to do with materials for the treehouse. Johannes had gone off to get them. That was it! But Sam crept into the gloom of Shaka’s cave just to check that Johannes wasn’t there, engaged in some secret rite, under the house, protecting it with special Zulu spells and charms. Then he wandered around his domain, through the apricot trees, and past the grapevines where he stopped and plucked a small bunch of red grapes. He chewed the grapes, spat out the pips, and surveyed the sturdy oak where his treehouse would soon be lodged. He moved across the lawns, the vast sun-burnished grasses of the veld, and felt the baking afternoon heat on his back. He crept stealthily through the corn and circled the jackarandas. They made long shadows across the front lawn. He studied the dark red earth for signs — the hunter in his element, near the great Limpopo. The pool shimmered in the sunlight and he looked at himself and the reflection of the sky in its waters. Where was the Zulu? He sighed and trailed back to the house to do his homework.

When Sam came home from school the following day, he found out why Johannes had been so frightened. He turned into the gate and stopped, abruptly. He stood in the shadow of one of the gate pillars. He was startled and alarmed by what he saw. There were two police cars in the drive and two young white policeman stood stiffly by one of the vehicles. An older policemen was sitting on the stoop, talking to his father. He saw his mother come out and stand in the front doorway. She lit a cigarette and listened to the conversation between her husband and the police officer.

Sam decided to make a discrete entrance. He crept down the wall along the perimeter of the property. The jackarandas and the thick, luxuriant shrubbery hid his careful hunter-like progress. On his way to the house, he glanced to the right and was horrified to see Johannes sitting in one of the police cars. What was going on? The house boy’s face looked as if he had received a beating. He had a blank expression and a far away look in his eyes. Sam stepped on a branch. It cracked sickeningly. He looked quickly at the policemen but they hadn’t heard anything. He continued creeping through the foliage, and soon managed to get within earshot of the serious conversation on the stoop.

‘Officer, I am terribly sorry for the mix-up, the hiccough with Johannes’ paperwork,’ said his father, lighting a cigarette from the one he was smoking. ‘I’ll fix it and gladly pay a fine for my… erm… administrative negligence.’

The policemen smiled a thin, mirthless smile. Sam was watching the scene, concealed in a bush near the stoop. He knew all the garden’s strategic hiding places and how to get to them stealthily. He saw a glint of in the lawman’s cruel eyes, and he knew from his heavy accent that he was Afrikaans. ‘Mr. Green, there will be no fine,’ he said.

‘Ah, right,’ said Father. ‘Just get the paperwork sorted and stamped, then, eh?’

The policeman stood up. ‘Mr. Green, I don’t think you quite grasp the gravity of the situation, how serious this matter is.’ He paused for dramatic effect and pointed an accusing finger. ‘You, Mr. Green, were responsible for this kaffir. And it transpires this native has no right to be here at all. He has no pass! The kaffir girls are legal. But this kaffir, Johannes, has no pass.’

‘No pass, and so?’ said Mother.

The lawman looked round and took notice of the woman standing at the front door. ‘Mrs. Green,’ he said. ‘Your husband has committed a serious crime. And by the way, we’ve had our eye on him for some time. We’re putting a stop to his liberal and subversive tendencies. He’s going down.’

‘Going down?’ said Father.

‘For TEN YEARS,’ bellowed the policeman.

‘Prison!’ gasped Mother, and then she fainted. During the ensuing fuss Sam melted into the house via the courtyard and the back door. Lydia and Sara were in the kitchen. They were crying. Then Peter, who had been having a nap, started yelling. Sara rushed out with Sam on her heels. They ran up the stairs together, Sam right behind the house girl, like two children racing up a hill. At the top, Sara stopped and said to him, coldly, a little out of breath, ‘You didn’t get Johannes a pass! It’s very, very bad for Johannes… and the Baas! Prison! Lord save us! Very bad… Shocking! They beat Johannes!’ She wiped a tear from her eye and went off to deal with Peter.

Sam drifted into his room, feeling numb, confused, and frightened — a helpless bystander at a calamity. Tears welled in his eyes and there was a tight knot in his stomach. He stared out of the window, out over Rork’s Drift and across the burnished grasslands, at the sturdy oak that wouldn’t be housing a treehouse any time soon.Part 1

On the far side of the forest lay Rork’s Drift, and the cave in the mountain where the great Chief Shaka of the Zulus kept his treasure - diamonds and gold! Sam had to get there before sunset. When he got to Rork’s Drift, he stood on a mound and scanned the surroundings. There was no one down at the tennis court or up at the swimming pool (sometimes Lake Victoria, or the great Limpopo River). Sam wondered where Johannes had run off to in such a hurry. He thought about the treehouse they were going to build. They had selected the tree but Johannes had said that one of the branches would need a support pole; they would organise that soon, on his day off. The treehouse would have a tin roof, floorboards, a window, and a rope ladder leading up to an entrance big enough for small boys to enter. Sam had always wanted a treehouse. It would be his lookout post, his crow’s nest, his very own inviolable space.

His treehouse daydream was rudely interrupted by his mother calling from the house. She was probably on the warpath about homework, or something equally tedious. Sam decided to disappear and deal with her later, at supper. He opened the small trapdoor in the back wall that led under the house, and crawled into the three-foot high space that lay under the floorboards. The ceiling was far too low for it to be called a cellar. Furthermore, there was no access to the space from the house. It was a dark place — the mysterious cave of Zulu Chief Shaka.

Sam had found some interesting treasure in the cave during the months they had been living in the big house on Central Street. They had moved from London to Johannesburg the previous spring, in 1967. He had come across some old comics dated 1964. He had blown the dust off the comics and read them with interest. But the best find, a truly exciting discovery, was a Zulu warrior shield and some statuettes of African heads. These relics were now displayed on a shelf in his room: real booty for an 11-year-old boy from Blackheath in South London.

He crawled towards the centre of the space. He didn’t like to go further to where it got the darkest at the far corner of the large house. Who knew what demons might be lurking there? But that was probably where Shaka kept his best treasures and artefacts. In the deepest darkest part of the cave. On this occasion, Sam decided to be brave and crept on. Then he heard movement and his heart leapt into his mouth. He saw the whites of someone’s eyes, staring at him in panic. It was Johannes, looking as though he were in fear for his life. ‘Go, go! Foot-sack!’ he hissed, making frantic shooing motions with his hands.

Sam was terrified by the anguish in the house boy’s voice. He scuttled out, came panting round the side of the house, crossed the brown grasslands of the veld that was the front lawn, and sidled up to the entrance, hoping to avoid his mother. He stood listening on the wide stoop, amid the cane furniture, which might provide cover if he was threatened with interception. He looked at the front door and glanced back at the circular drive and Central Avenue beyond the two iron gates to the property. The drive was lined with mature jacarandas in a riot of purple blooms. A beige Mercedes turned into the drive. Sam waved at the car which seemed to be coming round the curve faster than usual. It came to a halt, throwing up gravel. Sam’s father jumped out and ran up the steps of the stoop. ‘Hello Sam,’ he said, hurrying by. ‘Had a good day?’ He didn’t stop. ‘Tell me about the cricket match later.’ Sam followed his father into the hallway and watched him sprint up the stairs and disappear into his parents’ room. At a much slower pace, Sam climbed the stairs and made his way to his own room at the opposite end of the house. Two large guest rooms, three bathrooms, a spacious airing-cupboard and a box room separated him from his parents. The arrangement suited him just fine.

He couldn’t concentrate on his homework — ‘Arithmetic! Yuk!’ He went to the window and looked out at the jacarandas. The cricket news wasn’t too bad. Father would be pleased to hear that he had batted at Number 5 and scored a creditable 27 before being caught in the slips. And in the opponents’ innings he had fielded at second slip and taken a fine catch to gain revenge for being caught out in the very same place. He was annoyed about it though; it was a stupid error: the ball was wide, why dab his bat at it? But Father should be reasonably pleased. Then he thought about Johannes. What had frightened the house boy out of his wits? The Zulu warrior reduced to a mouse!

Sam had had to get used to many confusing things since his arrival in South Africa. He recalled Johannes’ crouched body and wild fearful eyes under the house. Was it some kind of bantu custom? They had a lot of those. The family hadn’t been in Johannesburg a year and it was a far cry from grey, drizzly old London, which was a familiar place in its customs and traditions. Africa was full of surprises and a huge contrast. Sam had come with misty-eyed, Tarzan-inspired expectations of the continent. His friends at school in London had been envious, thinking his life would be one long safari. However, his first school had been a disaster and he didn’t think his friends would envy his experience there. In the hullabaloo of leaving London and arriving in Johannesburg, his parents had taken temporary accommodation. After their triumph in the theatre, and all the publicity, they moved to a smarter residence in salubrious Lower Houghton.

At first, they enrolled Sam in an Afrikaans school, a big mistake. Literally everyone hated him, or at best was supremely indifferent. He learned fast what it meant to be ostracized, to be held in utter contempt. No one tried to make friends and help the new English boy orient himself. At the end of the fourth day of his harrowing ordeal, he was approached by a small group, whose spokesman was a ginger-haired Afrikaner of about 12 or 13. Sam never actually learned the boy’s name. ‘My opa was murdered by you lot. Englander!’ said the boy, poking Sam in the chest. ‘Englander!’ His gang’s murmurs were laced with hostility, ominous as a Greek chorus. Sam had no idea what the boy was talking about. He knew nothing about the Boer War that had ended 67 years previously: the English versus the Afrikaners. The boy went on about the ‘murdering English invaders’, and the group closed inexorably around Sam. He was saved by a teacher who happened to be passing. The teacher dismissed the muttering and belligerent group, telling them to ‘Foot-sack! Now!’ The teacher, a tall, athletic-looking man, watched the muttering group of boys depart and turned to Sam, who was standing there ashen-faced. He had been sure they were going to give him a good thrashing. ‘Go home, son,’ said the teacher, curtly. ‘Tell your parents, you’re in the wrong school!’

It was the only kind thing anyone at that school ever said to him. Sam took the teacher’s advice and told his parents that he flatly refused to return to ‘that place!’ His parents were aghast. They got on the phone to some people they trusted, who revealed the political nuances, and explained their horrific blunder regards their choice of edcational establishment for Sam. Some strings were pulled and they got him into another, ‘less extreme’ school. He heard them say it was ‘more Europeanized, and liberal in its outlook.’ He was confused that there appeared to be two kinds of white people in South Africa. And many of them had servants, or if they didn’t, they treated people of colour as servant-class.

The most confusing thing about his new life in Johannesburg was what Sam called the ‘No Blacks!’ The signs were everywhere — in English and Afrikaans; everything was segregated: buses, trains, taxis, cinemas, theatres, schools, and even park benches! The signs said: ‘NO BLACKS!’ There had been no such draconian rules in London. Sam thought it was daft. He himself had a friend who was black: Pete from Trinidad & Tobago. They used to go on the bus together to the Oval cricket ground, where black and white cricketers played against each other. Here, however, he was forbidden black friends. Except Johannes was a friend, wasn’t he? Okay, he was 26 years old but he was still his Zulu ‘friend’.

Johannes had mended Sam’s bike. He had shown him how to make a slingshot. They had cut the V-shape from a branch of one of the trees in the garden. Johannes had shown him how to light a fire with just twigs and dry grasses. Johannes was strong, supple, lithe, and full of energy. He could throw a cricket ball with amazing accuracy.

Johannes was the gardener. He mowed the lawns, kept order at the pool and tennis court, and left certain areas more jungle-like, overgrown, thicketed with bamboo and other exotic shrubbery — a playground for Sam. And he could run like the wind. He would give Sam a good headstart but still beat him from the tennis court up to the pool — a serious dash across a wide lawn and up a winding path through the rockery. Johannes would be standing by the finish, the deep end, and Sam would come running up and leap into the pool. They had done this race a number of times. On a hot afternoon, after a taxing foot race from the court, it was the best feeling to plunge into the cool waters. Sam remembered the first time they held the Race and he had leapt into the pool.

‘Come on in, Johannes,’ shouted Sam. ‘The water’s great!’

In springtime the air smells of earth and fresh growth. But whatever the season, I like to walk by the narrow river that meanders through the park. I commune with the ducks and the water rats that gambol along its banks; the rodents are prolific in the warmer months. They’re charming fellows, actually. You can’t be revolted by their cheeky antics. They’re adept at stealing the bread people throw to the ducks; they cut through the water like small furry torpedos; and they have to move fast for the ducks are their enemies. Or they sit on the bank combing their whiskers, looking quite satisfied with themselves and their lot.

The ducks quack and squabble among the reeds, and do things such as half-submerging themselves in the water, tail feathers in the air, before bobbing back up like corks. And you see why they say, Water off a duck’s back. I am particularly fond of the drakes with their magnificent glistening green heads. Handsome fellows who seem quite solicitous and caring of their drabber, less dandyish, but no less charming wives.

The park is a peaceful place, where usually nothing much happens. The grass grows, the leaves on the trees rustle in the breeze, birds sing in full-throated ease on the branches. Wild garlic, primrose, wood sorrel, columbine, foamflower, jack-in-the-pulpit, violets and fox gloves bloom and flourish in the dingles and dells. Children shout and scream, dogs bark, but otherwise serenity reigns within its viridescent boundaries.

There is occasionally some drama. A mugging, for instance. And once, murder most foul: the body of a young girl was discovered in the bushes near the river towards the south end of the park. Strangled and raped. A terrible business. It was like something you read about in a detective novel. I didn’t go to the park for a few days after that event. I had seen enough death in the war. The sad thing is, you get used to death, although never reconciled to it.

People sometimes speak to me in the park. They ask the time of day, or someone down on their luck begs for small change, which I freely give if I have it. Sometimes, I wish that a pretty girl would begin talking to me and things would lead on from there, perhaps to a warm bed and a perfumed embrace. It never happens, of course; I suppose I’m not much of a catch. Children laugh at my limp and half an arm. They call me names behind my back: ‘Cripple’, ‘Hop along’, ‘Gimp’… Nothing terribly drastic. It doesn’t really offend or bother me. Kids will be kids, after all. But I hope to God they’ll never have to go off to fight in a war, or as civilians suffer the carnage of bombs and urban fighting, witness the devastation of their cities.

There’s a small café in the middle of the park, not far from the Orthodox church, which makes these arcadian gardens also hallowed ground. I often get a cup of tea and a bun and sit at one of the café’s rickety, rusty old tables, and read a book. Every now and again I glance over at the two old men who are always there playing chess.

I know how the pieces move but I don’t have much of a clue about the game’s more devious and cunning strategies; but the old boys seem quite expert. They take it very seriously and even have one of those clock things that chess players use. I have never heard them speak to each other, except for, ‘Check!’ and then, if they haven’t reached a stalemate, in a friendly growl: ‘Checkmate!’ Sometimes, one or the other of them knocks his king over in capitulation, and they start over again without a word.

One time, I had a rather naïve thought while watching the old chess players: wouldn’t it be a nice idea that if two countries had an argument, instead of sending their young men off to die and bombing each other’s cities to bits, they would each select their best chess player to engage in a bloodless battle to settle the score? A third and neutral country to adjudicate.

Imagine: the Knight springs into place, the Bishop threatens from the pulpit, the Rook defends the line while the devastating Queen strikes with her lethal horizontal, vertical and diagonal powers. The King topples in his breached citadel. Mate! Game over! And let us not forget the poet who wrote: ‘In ceremonies of the horsemen, even the pawn must hold a grudge’. Yes, many a pawn is sacrificed in times of war.

Such an approach would be both elegant and cheap. As I said, it may be a naïve adumbration, but I find it appealing. Because I would hate to see this beautiful and peaceful park, with its winding waterway, its willows, oaks and elms, its green swards, and sylvan tranquility, destroyed by bombs and artillery.

I trust you had a good trip home. I remember remarking that it was quite a camel journey back to your place, to which you quipped, ‘Yes, it’s fortunate I won’t be going by camel.’

I brought up the camel analogy because we were riding, in fact it was more like lurching, through the dunes of the Sahara at the time, perched precariously upon dromedaries. We had a good laugh about it. And then you made a joke as Ali was pouring the tea in that funny oasis we stopped at with the sad lone palm tree. You said, ‘One hump or two?’ How I guffawed at that. It was a good job I wasn’t actually sitting on the camel: I would’ve fallen off and broken something, which would have seriously given me the hump.

I also recall the sand flies in the sandwiches were a perishing nuisance, as was Ali, our Arab guide, who kept trying to sell us hashish and buxom veiled desert maidans for, in Ali’s vernacular, Rumpity pum pum stick it uppee purposes. Still, didn’t we have a ball in the souk with old Mehmet and his Kifkaf boys? Soaked in the souk, as it were; that fermented date juice really does pack the kick of a camel. You certainly amazed them (and me) with your electric rendition of the Sand Dance, and your immaculate recitation of long gobbets from the Koran registered much admiration, although I did have to stifle a few yawns while you were barking interminably but not unimpressively in that uvular, pharyngeal tongue.

After a while we got thoroughly sick of mint tea, couscous, and the inevitable baksheesh effendi murmured on every street corner. We visited a number of Moslem enclaves but the heat and the flies oppressed us, and so we headed off for a bit of joie de vivre in the South of France, oh la la, and la dolce vita in Tuscany. We enjoyed some awesome plonk, trencherman repasts of at least five courses, and female flesh unencumbered by the unflattering smother of the hijab. There is something disconcerting about only being able to see a woman’s eyes and no other part of her, as if she were peeping suspiciously through a letter box.

Fray, old man, I am indebted to you for inviting me to accompany you on your world tour, after you picked me up hitchhiking near the Watford Gap. I was only going as far as Sunderland but I was enthralled and honoured by your invitation to accompany you on an expenses-paid trip.

I was fascinated to learn that it was the custom to send your young people on a globe-trotting tour for a year and a day. To see how the other half lived. And then, as you put it, not to copy their atrocious manners. You said it was equivalent to the Amish tradition of Rumspringa. Rum what? I said. You explained it was the custom of the Amish in Pennsylvania to send their young folk off into the wide and wicked world to experience how dreadful it was before returning to the fold; they could stay and stew in the worldly fleshpots if they were so inclined, but most of them opted to come back and live a clean and blameless Amish life.

And so off we sallied on our own rampant Rumspringa. How you managed to get us across all those borders without the tedious bother of visas and passports was quite an eye-opener. Talk about illegal aliens!

In St. Tropez it was amazing how you were able to chat up Brigitte Bardot and get her to put us up for nothing at her place. It was a shame we had to get out rather sharpish after you went and sat on one of her favourite cats and accidentally broke its back. I can still hear old Brigitte’s ear-splitting shrieks in my shell-like as we sprinted through her front gate: Salope, je vais te faire sauter le caisson, espèce de putain! Good job she was such a rotten shot.

The fact is, Fray, you really are a hypnotic character. A real charmer. Saturnine border officials were putty in your hands. We slipped in and out as smooth as a baby’s bum smothered in Vaseline. It was uncanny. With what did you grease the wheel? That bewitching strabismus of your left eye? I never saw any money changing hands. And I thought our goose was cooked that time the KGB got on to us in Moscow’s Metropole Hotel. But actually it led to a convivial evening with the president in the Kremlin: much vodka quaffed and Beluga caviar guzzled! How you entertained the assembled dignitaries of the politburo with that energetic, heel-kicking Cossack dance, followed by a spirited vocal rendition of Ivan Larionov’s Kalinka! Molotok chuvak (well done, buddy!), enthused the president and all the president’s men. Your perfect enunciation of Slavic syllables raised the president’s eyebrows and that’s saying something. Mr. Brezhnev was enamoured and lent us the plush presidential train, along with some delightful Russian devushkas, completely gratis. We stayed on it, totally drunk (simultaneously on and off the rails, so to speak), until Vladivostok.

From there we winged our way to the Land of the Rising Sun. Tokyo was resplendent in the fabled cherry blossom season. We visited all the best places and dined high on the hog on diverse Nipponese delicacies including Fugu, the deadly pufferfish; but I must say all the bowing we had to do was exhausting. However, we didn’t need any interpreters because, Fray, you are quite the polyglot. In Tokyo you spoke the agglutinative Tokyo dialect to perfection, while in Kyoto you switched to the softer Kansai dialect as smoothly as a locomotive negotiating a switch point. It was a tour de force that baffled the locals, not to mention myself.

By that time I had listened to you rattle away in Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek and Russian. You spoke those languages like a native which the natives corroborated. And I can certainly vouch for your English. You could be on the BBC with those cut-glass vowels. You informed me that languages were a crucial part of your education and that your people wouldn’t have dreamt of letting you loose on your globe-trotting Rumspringa without a thorough and intimate knowledge of the languages you would encounter along the way. You then gave vent to a tiresomely long list that included whistled Silbo Gomero, click-heavy Xhosa, and the grammatically unique Pirahã.

From Japan we beat a path south to the Antipodes. I shall always treasure the picture we had taken with Joey the boxing kangaroo near Mount Buggery in the Victorian Alps (yes, such a mountain does exist). Happily, my black eye developed later, along with the photograph. But the highlight for me down under was our extensive walkabout in the bush. You used aboriginal survival skills to great effect, lighting fires by twirling twigs in dry grass and so forth. We found water by following animal tracks to small creeks in the morning and evening. Wherever we went you were a mine of information. Down there you informed me that over 80 percent of the mammals, reptiles, and frogs extant in the outback were unique and found nowhere else on the planet. We saw koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, echidnas, and wombats, thriving in eucalyptus forests and arid shrublands dotted with gum trees, acacia, and banksia. We even encountered a bonafide swagman wearing a wide-brimmed hat, from which corks dangled, down in a billabong near Alice Springs. We sang Waltzing Matilda, of course, told unprintable jokes and swilled copious amounts of XXXXGold.

We flew back to London, first class, on a Qantas jumbo jet, necking Moët et Chandon all the way. We shimmered unremarked through passport control and parted tearfully near the Hammersmith flyover: me to wend my way up to sunny Sunderland and you to embark on your long journey home. Fray, I am most grateful for all the laughs we had and the spectacular places we visited. Thank you so much for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure full of priceless experiences. I shall never forget that night we spent on Ayres Rock gazing up at the supernal constellations clotted in the Southern skies, and you pointed out your distant home near Arcturus.

Yours with gratitude and affection,

Henry Bartholomew Beane

PS: My pater gave me hell for coming home eight months late, but it was worth it. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

His most recent episode began with cries of, ‘Gas, gas!’ Clouds of yellow-green were rolling towards their positions. A vicious, toxic miasma. Private Sam Johnson (for so he was called in these persistent nightmares) fumbled with his gas mask and got it on in the nick of time. Others were not so lucky: through the devilish yellow-green mist, he watched a couple of men choke as the phosgene entered their lungs and burned them from within. They writhed on the foul ground, frothing at the mouth, their throats gurgling hideously. He turned away; there was nothing he could do for them. Besides they were under attack from enemy infantry who were stealing up behind the poisonous yellow-green clouds.

Later, artillery started up. A shell landed close by. He was deafened and covered in someone’s brains. He could hear screams but he was indifferent and numb to the cauldron of pain and suffering that boiled around him; he concentrated on his own survival: kill or be killed.

He was struck by the horror and sheer absurdity of it all. He had nothing against those German lads, and for all he knew the feeling was mutual, but still, they had to slaughter one another. For what, exactly? To gain a few more yards, only to lose it in the next counterattack. Ridiculous. Rank insanity.

He found himself at a machine gun post raking through Bosch guts. And so the bellicose nightmare continued until he was halted by a bayonet driven deep into his side. He didn’t see the German devil lunging at him from his right until it was too late.

At that point, Jason woke up sweating, flailing around, punching pillows. He would have this nightmare or some frightful variation of it about a dozen times a year. Always World War One, in some vile trench, or going over the top of one into a hail of lead. That’s where the phrase over the top came from. Certainly, there was nothing more over the top than sending young men to their deaths in that senseless fashion. The generals who thought it up must have been psychopaths. It made no kind of military sense to sacrifice so many for so few gains; a generation of young men on all sides was wiped out.

Jason had no idea why he had these recurrent nightmares. He wasn’t obsessed by the Great War and didn’t read any literature or watch any documentaries about the conflict. He had never read, for example, Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal work, All Quiet On The Western Front. He avoided war films. In fact, the whole idea of war horrified and disgusted him. When he saw politicians on TV sabre rattling and talking about taking up arms, he found it repellent. Why did we need to send young men off to die in pointless wars?

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori! The idea that it was an honour to die for one’s country was complete anathema to him, as it was to one Wilfred Owen. He agreed with the doomed English poet, killed on the cusp of the Armistice: Horace’s ancient line was a twisted lie.

Jason Hill was a confirmed pacifist. He would, if it ever came to it, refuse point blank to take up arms. He would rather go to prison. He was prepared to suffer vilification, be called a coward, suffer whatever slings and arrows… He would not be drummed into any man’s army.

He kept these dreams to himself and suffered with them alone. Then, finally, he decided to confide in his good friend Robert Black over a couple of beers one night.

‘They’re the kind of nightmares veterans wake up screaming from,’ Robert said.

‘Yes, but I’m not a veteran,’ Jason replied. ‘I’ve never been in a battle.’

‘Not in this life,’ Robert said mysteriously. Jason waited for him to continue but his friend volunteered nothing.

‘Come off it!’ Jason said at last. ‘That’s a load of rubbish, complete baloney.’

‘Who knows?’ said Robert, lighting a cigarette and taking a swig from his pint. He winked over the rim of the glass. ‘More between heaven and earth and all that.’

‘You’re talking about reincarnation, I suppose?’

‘A lot of people believe in it.’

‘Yes, and a lot of people are soft in the head. I’m not buying it.’

‘Have it your own way, but these recurrent nightmares have been going on for years. You ought to see someone about it and get to the bottom of it.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

Jason did think about it. He had been having these dreadful dreams since he was 22 years old. He was now 25 and sometimes they seemed more like vivid memories than bad dreams. Memories? He dismissed these thoughts as arrant nonsense.

He had had 30 or so similar nightmares but one particular dream stuck out for its even more harrowing nature than usual. It was raining and he and a small group of comrades were moving along duckboards, the only way to traverse the morass of mud churned up by endless artillery and incessant downpours of heavy rain.

The problem was that on those duckboards they were sitting ducks. Jason, or rather Sam, stopped for a few seconds to light a cigarette. It took a while to get it lit and this saved his life, because while he was fumbling with damp matches a shell landed obliterating his comrades. Legs and torsos lay scattered in the mud. One soldier was still alive, blown into a crater. He was sinking in the dun-coloured bog.

‘My legs are gone! I’m going under,’ he screamed. The soldier was too far away from the duckboards to get to. He was sinking rapidly, now up to his chest. His agonised eyes were practically popping out of his head. ‘For Christ’s sake, shoot me!’ the soldier pleaded. ‘Don’t let me drown in this cursed mud.’

Jason raised his rifle but hesitated to shoot one of his own. Couldn’t he himself be shot for such an action? ‘Don’t let me drown in this shite! For God’s sake, shoot man! Shoot me!’ The soldier was now up to his neck.

Jason swore. Oh the horror! He gritted his teeth, aimed and shot the sinking man between the eyes. He watched the dead soldier’s head disappear in the sucking mud. He stared at the bubbles, sick to his stomach. Shaking, he lit another cigarette and trudged on, utterly exhausted in body and spirit. As he dragged himself along, he muttered to himself, ‘My generation has been damned to hell!’

Jason took the plunge. On Robert Black’s advice, he booked a session with a Ms. L. Heliotrope who specialized in what was known as regression hypnosis. He arrived at a Victorian villa in a quiet South London street. He stood there for a moment gazing at the three-storey redbrick property. The morning sun flashed in the windows. Typical of the area, it was an ordinary looking house and gave no indication of the rather extraordinary things that apparently took place in there.

He felt sceptical and somewhat nervous, but as Robert had said, if it could shed any light on his recurring nightmares, it was worth a go.

He went through a wooden gate and walked with hesitant steps up a short gravel path to the front door. It was painted a handsome dark green. There was no plaque or anything to suggest the exotic service the person who lived there offered. Just a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head with a heavy ring through its mouth.

Ms. Heliotrope turned out to be a rather attractive lady of about 35. She was quite tall and wore her ash-blonde hair in a chignon. She was dressed casually, in faded blue jeans and a lilac-coloured cashmere sweater. Jason didn’t know why but he had expected someone more official-looking. She smiled at him, not with her mouth as such, but with large blue-grey eyes, almost feverish in their hypnotic intensity.

‘Mr. Hill, do come in!’

‘Call me Jason, please,’ he said, as she led him down a corridor towards a room at the back of the house. ‘Then you must call me Lucy,’ rejoined the alluring hypnotist in a soft yet penetrating contralto voice.

She took him into a good-sized room with a large bay window that looked out on a garden boasting an immaculate lawn bounded by lush shrubbery and clusters of blooming hydrangeas. All very English and as normal as a teapot.

The room itself was uncluttered, if not to say minimalist, although it had an oddly cosy feel. A bookcase along one wall, an armchair, a small table upon which stood an incense burner, and a couch were the sum total of the furniture. Blue smoke spiralled from the incense holder and the scent of lavender pervaded the room.

‘Is that for the patient?’ Jason asked, pointing at the couch, which was upholstered in plush dark green velvet.

Lucy Heliotrope smiled with her eyes again. ‘Well, I don’t call my clients patients,’ she said. ‘But yes, that’s where you park yourself. It’s a very comfy and relaxing couch. So go on, make yourself at home.’

Lucy sat in the armchair and crossed her legs. It was indeed a comfortable couch. Jason lay there listening to the hypnotist talking. Her voice was calming and had a soporific effect.

‘So, I understand you have recurring nightmares: it’s always 1917 and in these ‘’dreams’’ you are a British soldier fighting in the Great War.’ She made a quote sign with the middle and index fingers of both hands when she said the word ‘dreams’.

‘Yes. In most dreams I am usually mortally wounded by a bayonet before I wake up.’

‘Where does the bayonet strike you?’

‘Through my right side.’

‘Do you have a birthmark there by any chance?’

‘As a matter of fact, I do.’

‘Interesting!’

Ms. Heliotrope uncrossed her long legs. She placed her hands on her thighs and looked at him with her deeply penetrating blue-grey eyes. ‘What do you think about during these dreams?’ she asked.

‘Think about?’ Jason had the odd sensation that reality was tearing at the edges like a piece of rice paper. Lucy Heliotrope’s intense gaze and dreamy voice seemed to have paralysed him, as though she were spinning a narcotic web around him; but he didn’t feel frightened or threatened. He had the odd thought that he would shortly sink into those blue-grey eyes and disappear. ‘What do I think about?’ he repeated.

After a short pause, in which Lucy appeared to do something he couldn’t quite grasp, she said, ‘Yes, what do you think about during these so-called dreams?’

Jason gathered his scattered wits for a moment. ‘I think about how stupid and futile it all is,’ he said finally.

‘Yes. And?’

‘And I worry about getting hit. If it must happen, I want it to be quick. I don’t want to lie there in the mud dying slowly in agony, screaming my head off.’

‘How long have these nightmares been persisting?’

‘I had just turned 22 when they started. I have no idea why they began then. I had had a pleasant enough birthday, nothing at all traumatic happened.’

‘And do you know, by any chance, how old you are during these episodes?’

‘Funnily enough, yes. Sam Johnson, the person I am in my nightmares, was born in 1895.’

‘Meaning he was 22 in 1917.’

‘Correct.’

‘And you say you were 22 when these “nightmares” started?’ Again, Lucy put the word in quotes.

‘Yes, I recall exactly when they started: on the night of my 22^nd birthday. They’re horrendously vivid, and I bloody well wish they would stop.’

‘I believe they are not dreams, Jason, but memories.’

‘If you say so,’ he said.

‘Yes, you must put this life behind you and move on.’ The hypnotist continued talking. Her voice was like a sedative. She invited him to close his eyes and return to Flanders in 1917. In the somnambulant atmosphere, Jason’s eyes felt heavy and his eyelids fell like metal shutters. Lucy Heliotrope’s voice seemed to come from somewhere high above him, clear as a bell, but from a great distance. He was, as they say, under.

He found himself moving through a grey mist. When it cleared, he was standing in a familiar scene of churned mud, barbed wire, bloated corpses... Big guns thudded in the distance. He heard the rat-tat-tat of machine guns. He took cover in a shallow fox-hole and lay there contemplating the drizzle falling over the Ypres Salient.

It was back in the mid 1990s in the fleshpots of Moscow. During the post-Perestroika turmoil that engulfed the former Soviet Union. Extreme violence. Terminal volatility and chaos. The era of mafiosi, molls, and madmen. It seemed the gangsters were queuing up to waste each other. And at the helm of the quixotic and delirious new Russia (bye bye USSR!) was an incompetent drunk. Great set-up!

Oh, and some people became billionaires overnight. The oligarchs had a ball!! They bought yachts and football teams. Money no object. Slava Rossii!

It was a pretty wild time in Moscow. As a confirmed Russophile, with a degree in Russian, I had hastened to the Motherland at the first opportunity, to experience the country that had spawned Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Yuri Gagarin, Dr. Zhivago, War and Peace, banyas and balalaikas, the intoxicating paraphernalia of the Russian soul… The dark towers of communism had tumbled in the restructured dust and the nation’s Slavic charms were opened up to the infidels from the West.

When McDonald’s flung its doors open on Pushkin Square, nearly 40,000 Muscovites queued in sub-zero temperatures to get a first taste of American fast food. It was pandemonium. After the privations of Soviet times, the capital’s citizens were agog; they became Big Mac addicts in a heartbeat.

All the big corporations, the vital brands, Coca-Cola, BMW, Mercedes, and Rock ‘n’ Roll bands beat a path to Moscow to make a buck. I discovered certain opportunities, too. I bought a flat in the centre of the capital just off Tverskaya Street for peanuts and began to peddle my mother tongue, with all its orthographic vagaries and grammatical traps.

One of my clients turned out to be a gangster, although I didn’t know that Boris (let’s call him Badenov!) was in fact a psychopathic gangster when he first became a client of mine in a posh restaurant near Red Square. I had been importuned and summoned there for a business meeting by one of his lieutenants. By the time I found out he was a gangster, it was too late to get out of our contract. He was paying me fat bucks for a crash course in English. ‘I vant London action,’ he had confided at our first meeting. I had assumed he was a businessman, not a gangster! Anyway, I thought it wise not to make an enemy of Boris the Bad, whose rivals often came to a sticky end, propping up overpasses and so forth.

Half-way through the course, the stress of running the gauntlet of his brutal armed guard five times a week, Monday thru Friday, had abated somewhat. They were ugly blokes, big as doors, with scarred faces and bonces like blighted potatoes, black tattooed fingers on hair triggers… Sad to say, my consumption of cigarettes increased exponentially: I always had to have a smoke break during a lesson. In fact, I’d often have two fags on the trot. Well, that day I smoked four in quick succession, and found my contract had suddenly been terminated.

Boris was a rabid anti-smoker and I was banished to the empty upper floors of his building to smoke. It happened in the middle of a lesson (actually the final and terminal lesson, when I was attempting to set Boris straight regarding the definite article: ‘The London is capital of Great Britain.’ No, Boris! London is the capital of Great Britain).

So, I was up there, smoking, and looking idly down at the street. A huge black Hummer came to a stop and four men jumped out. They hurried into our building. I had a bad feeling about it. The men wore masks and looked like they meant business. Boris’ office was on the second floor. I was on a landing up in the darkness of the fifth floor.

It all happened with lightening speed. Loud thuds and cracks pierced the air. Silencers aren’t actually silent, like in the movies; they merely suppress the sound of gunfire. I heard gasps and grunts, bodies tumbling down stairs. I froze in abject terror, hoping to God the assassins wouldn’t sweep the upper floors.

I cowered in the shadows in a corner near the stairwell, not daring to look out of the window. I smoked with furious intensity, heaving sharply on the filter of my Camel, exhaling nervous clouds of smoke through my nostrils. Then, someone downstairs shouted, ‘Vso!’ And a short while later I heard the Hummer pulling away.

I began to creep down the stairs, fearful of what I was about to discover. There was an acrid reek in the air, a combination of burnt fireworks and sulphurous matches. When I stepped gingerly into the office, Boris was sitting in his chair behind his humongous desk with a surprised look on his face and a hole the size of a sixpence in his forehead. Two henchmen were lying on the floor. All of them were dead as mutton. Brown bread. Ex-gangsters!

The stench of fear and death mingled with the acrid odour of gunsmoke. The landing from the first ground floor was littered with four more corpses. The concierge in his little box just inside the entrance was also toast: shot to the body, two to the head. A professional kill.

The hitmen had obviously been paid to take out Boris and his crew and nothing more. They’d done their job fast, with clinical precision, but they didn’t know about the huge dustbin bag stuffed with100 dollar bills under Boris’ monstrous cadillac of a desk.

It was a slim book, barely more than 120 pages, technically a novella, touted shamelessly on the cover as the best short novel since Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. Unlike his three previous novels, The Menagerie spectacularly caught the zeitgeist of a world-weary Western milieu declining in its gender-obsessed decadence. There was a small war over the film rights in Hollywood and the New Yorker was now publishing his short stories.

At any rate, he was no longer a starving author labouring in obscurity in a hovel he could barely afford. He had been propelled from happy oblivion to dazzling prominence with unseemly haste, a process that entailed taking part in the disgusting vaudeville of TV and radio.

A hermit crab type of writer, he was now obliged to talk to ponce doctors and cretins on a daily basis. Producers and reporters importuned him even before breakfast for goodness sake. The equilibrium of his innards had been ruined and he had become a martyr to an ulcerous heartburn. Also, he was inundated with readers’ letters. He couldn’t bring himself to answer and delegated the responsibility to his agent.

In short, there was just too much attention for this retiring and intensely shy individual to handle.

He was now, much against his will, a star client of the not-too-shoddy Bells Literary Agency and the darling of his agent, Stacy Wallace. (She thought he was joking when he said, ‘I’m never writing another word of fiction.’ She tittered when he told her, ‘I’m taking up shoemaking instead.’)

The erstwhile impecunious author, who hitherto could be counted on to sell maybe a couple of thousand copies and garner a smattering of okay critical comments, had now entered the dizzy arena of the million-seller and its concomitant hype and glittering prizes.

Agent and publisher were understandably agog at the cash their star author could now generate. They looked forward to a sequel soon. The author was shocked and horrified by their haste. He had lost count of the number of people who said they loved The Menagerie, and the escapades of its sexually turbulent hero, Orpheus Scamwick, running amok in the fleshpots of Soho.

The adulation the author suffered amounted to death by ingratiation. He knew it was rude but sometimes he just turned away from the gushing comments without saying thank you. Or he said something withering and ungracious: ‘I don’t understand what you find to love in it. I personally detest most of its parts.’ And then he would feel ashamed that he had poured scorn on the well-meaning fan, who slunk away crushed by the author’s baleful presence and unwarranted unkindness.

The thing was that he just couldn’t stand the attention. He wasn’t by any means like J D Salinger who was an author who obsessively rejected intrusion of any kind, but he had come to despise The Menagerie; it had whipped up such a maelstrom of literary clap-trap. The hyperbolic hucksterism affronted him; he loathed being compared to his heroes: Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Bellow…

He found it deeply disturbing, both academically and emotionally. And now what’s his name - one of the great gods of the contemporary literary scene – would be writing an introduction to the second edition, no doubt a suppurating and sickly panegyric to the young genius. The author (31) wondered if he could pay the literary god not to put pen to paper!

It was much too much, much too soon. He couldn’t stand it! Couldn’t they just wait till he was dead? Anyway, he was adamant: he was not going to write another bloody syllable. Cobblers to that!

Things had changed. There seemed little point in writing any more. So much had already been written about everything under the sun so well by countless talented authors (he didn’t include himself in that category), that it seemed impertinent to continue. He was also disturbed that the publishing industry had recently been taken for a ride by a novel written by a robot! thus eroding confidence in the whole process.

Besides all the above, he had recently had a revelation, a Eureka moment, after he finally got a bad review. It was on a train to Swansea when he had been off to appear at yet another literary symposium. He sat opposite two young fellows, eavesdropping on their conversation while pretending to read a Penguin collection of Spanish short stories.

He listened to the yapping pair while studying their feet. He took in and evaluated the precise contours of their footwear. It took his breath away. The one on the right wore a hideous pair of yellow sneakers. He didn’t know why they deserved that smug tick on the side of them.

The two young chaps fancied themselves cultured types and by and by the subject of best-sellers came up. The one on the left by the window said he thought The Menagerie was ‘a load of old cobblers!’ Finally, the writer thought, an honest appraisal. He wondered idly if he could persuade his publisher to splurge that on the cover of the second edition: A load of old cobblers!

He looked over at his stern critic. The young man had a thin pinched face and large ears. Hardly the most prepossessing exemplar of British manhood. However, the author had already fallen in love with the man’s feet. Or more precisely with what was on his feet: a pair of beautiful light brown Oxford brogues that positively glittered with the distinctive broguing of this type of shoe; that is to say those fabulous little perforated holes tooled in the leather, displayed across the shoes in curving lines of geometric gorgeousness; and on the toe a tightly-knit cluster of smaller holes culminated the triumphant, highly polished ensemble.

What a piece of foot art he beheld. He had always been moved by shoes and tended to judge people favourably or otherwise by their footwear. His earliest memories revolved around shoes. As an infant, he often encountered them, close-up. At that tender and impressionable time, he literally drooled over the shiny diversity of footwear he crawled around and slobbered and dribbled amongst. Stilettoes, wedges, block heels, kitten heels, brogues, oxfords, derbies, loafers, sandals, monk straps… He came to adore shoes and the aphrodisiac aroma of leather and shoe polish.

Nobody believed him about wanting to make shoes, least of all his agent. She thought that his talk about shoemaking was part of the plot of his next novel.

Those Oxford brogues triggered a transcendent moment, a sudden peripeteia of creative power: he no longer wanted to publish wodges of words that courted controversy and embroiled him in a limelight he hadn’t courted; instead, he wanted to create precisely tooled and beautiful bits of leather: shoes that looked and felt great on your feet. He realised with immediate conviction and passion that he had to master this art. He had to become a brilliant shoemaker, or more accurately, a master cordwainer. Write another novel? A voice in his head exclaimed, ‘Cobblers to that!’