The Introspection of Imogen Card by Huckleberry Hax

THE INTROSPECTION OF IMOGEN CARD

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THE INTROSPECTION OF IMOGEN CARD

by HUCKLEBERRY H. HAX

Copyright ÂŠ 2010 by Huckleberry Hax All rights reserved This paperback edition published in 2010 (Version 0.1) Huckleberry H. Hax is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Published by www.lulu.com Cover design by Huckleberry H. Hax This novel was written using Open Office, the free office suite. Download your copy from www.openoffice.org

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For M.M.P.

We used to catch toads, ram the nozzle of a bicycle pump up their backsides and blow them up till they burst. That's what boys are like, I don't know why. George Orwell. Coming up for air.

THERE'S A PICTURE of me down at the quay from later that summer. I'm wearing an orange t-shirt and sitting on a bollard, opening my arms wide to what I supposed at the time was irony. I was down there for the evening because it was something to do, and in those days you could drive right up to the end of the quay and see the water between the slats under your feet when you got out of the car. Kevin and I had both spent money earlier that year. I had bought my first ever CD player and he had bought his first ever single lens reflex camera. When we went out like that for the day, it was to seek what he termed 'photographic opportunities'. On the way back home, we'd put the rolls of film into the developer and, three days later, pour over the prints in the mini diner in town, holding them delicately by the edges whilst the smoke there curled around us. The diner became known as The Photographic Evaluation Centre, but that term was coined by Terry, not Kev, and probably with a laugh, and probably on the exhale of a Marlboro 100. Terry was a mutual friend. He liked music and he liked photography. Terry had advised both of us in our purchasing earlier that year. Kev had wanted 'pictures of dock stuff'. He took photos of dockyard machinery and tried to get close to some seagulls (that might have been the moment he 9

realised his next purchase needed to be a good zoom lens). A bunch of dock workers in overalls an orange not too distant from the colour of my t-shirt were sitting out the front of a portacabin drinking tea and he took several snaps of them, which quite impressed me. They even raised their mugs to him at one point. Then again, Kev wasn't scared of workers like I was. His father was a long distance lorry driver and plenty of his pre-teen summers had been spent sitting in the cab with him, sleeping in the bunk at night in a service station car park somewhere and waking in the morning to eggs, bacon and coffee in a trucker's cafĂŠ. There are so many versions of paradise: Kev's was a day of driving and the smell of diesel. Because I was embarrassed at having to talk to the dock workers, I wandered over to the other side of the quay, and that was when I saw the Stena Normandy. I actually smiled when I saw her. I hadn't even thought about whether she'd be in or not. And she was getting ready to leave. Her waters were frothing and I watched a dock worker â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this one wore blue overalls â&#x20AC;&#x201C; lift the final line from the port-side quay and heave it into the water. The ship workers winched it up, and it slapped against the bow as it rose, dripping like a wet dog coming out of a pond. I realised it would be passing us in a matter of minutes, so I hurried back to Kevin to tell him I'd found us a new photographic opportunity. I wanted a picture of 10

me and the boat. So that's why I'm trying to look ironic in the photograph. It was either that or grief, and I don't do negative emotions in public. As it turned out, you can't make out a single dammed detail of the ship behind me because it's all blurred and out of focus. Kevin explained to me that he'd wanted to experiment with depth of field, in the PEC three days later. I knew that ship so well. I knew every publicly accessible place on it there was to know. When the camera was back looking at the seagulls again, I watched her cast her wake out across the glittering Itchen as she headed for the Solent, and then the Channel beyond. Even five minutes later I could still make out some people at the stern leaning against the rail on the sun deck and looking back at where they'd come from. I wondered if any of them were looking at me and if at that distance the orange t-shirt had become my predominant feature so that I looked like one of the dock workers. I loved that tshirt. It was the colour of cigarette ends. No guys that I knew ever wore something quite so vivid as that. Instead they all wore black or white t-shirts with stuff written on them that someone else had considered funny. I hated that. It was like telling the same joke to every person you meet. I had already decided to comment on it in my first novel. My first novel, I had resolved, would be a philosophical thriller. Thrillers were all I read back then, 11

and they dismayed me by their lack of thoughtfulness. There was space between the words of an espionage tale, I had reflected, for some musings on the meaning of life and maybe a sprinkling of social commentary. Rather inconveniently, the Cold War had not long ago ended, and I wasn't sure any more where and in what context my book would now be set. I was glad about the Cold War ending; from about age fourteen onwards I'd been convinced I was going to die as a result of being vaporised in a nuclear explosion, and any reduction in the likelihood of that happening was a welcome one. But there had been a simple theatre to the Russians being the (misunderstood) bad guys. It was like modern day Cowboys and Indians. When the Cold War ended, it was like a whole future got wiped out and we all had to start from scratch. It wasn't like I had any plans or anything. It was more like discovering a really long-running TV series you'd just assumed would always be there had been cancelled. The Cold War finishing was like hearing that season thirteen of Dallas would be the last. The spot on the Stena Normandy I remembered best of all was the corner on deck eight by the port side doors and at the top of a set of stairs that led down to the nightclub; Imogen and I had laid out to sleep there at about one in the morning. A carpet spot by a door isn't the best of places to camp in on a ship, both for reasons of traffic and for reasons of cold when the traffic slips out for a night-time smoke. And for reasons of noise, 12

because you have to lean hard on ship doors to open them and when you let go they slam shut like train doors used to. We did both have reclining seats booked – it was obligatory for night crossings – but I knew from experience you didn't go near those things if you could possibly help it. Reclining seat lounges on cross-channel ferries are god-forsaken places. If the idea of spending a whole night at a reclining angle of not much more than five degrees seems manageable to you, bear in mind that it only takes one person to vomit in that room for the whole place to stink. I once spent a whole night in a huge lounge on a P&O ship that stretched from hull to hull and I swear I've never been so glad to see the morning when it finally came. Until Imogen, of course. That was one of many trips to France with my parents. Within an hour, the room reeked of puke and farts, and you couldn't get out because every square foot of floor was taken by horizontal people who couldn't sleep in their seats. It was like a third world slum in there. I resolved there and then to never voluntarily undergo such an experience again, and was about to threaten my parents with not coming away on holiday with them ever again when they expressed a similar sentiment. Sometimes you forget your parents are human beings too. The next time I was on an overnight after that was when I went to St Malo with Kevin and Adrian Law and Cain Cassidy – my first ever trip abroad without my parents. We spent the whole night playing twenty-one in 13

the lounge bar and the next day we were so tired we walked continuously to keep ourselves awake. That was when a passing pigeon took a shit on Cain's shoulder and every time after that that he saw a pigeon, he thought it was the same bird coming back to taunt him. I mean, for years. Imogen knew the deal with reclining seat lounges too. We picked up our seat numbers from the main office on boarding and then stayed in the night club until it closed. By that hour, there was no way in hell we'd have been able to get to them even if we'd wanted to (picking your way over those tightly packed bodies in the dark on an even gently swaying boat and actually trying to find something at the same time is about as impossible as perpetual motion), but I asked her all the same if she wanted to out of mandatory politeness. She looked at me as though I'd uttered something quite absurd and then said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Let's not, eh?â&#x20AC;? We found the empty corner almost straight away. It was perfect for two people to lie down in. We used our rucksacks for pillows and our personal stereos for company. I took the outer edge and she took the wall. I shut my eyes, tried to block out the lights and the sensation of people passing. I tried to block out the memory of kissing her. I'd just about managed that the night before, but it wasn't quite so easy with her lying down right next to me. I sleep best on my side, but I usually begin my sleep on my back. Within a minute of lying down, I realised 14

that side sleeping just wasn't going to be doable that night. If I slept on my right side, that would mean I had my back to her and this seemed fundamentally wrong â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it would look angry or sullen or uninterested, and I was none of those things. On the other hand, if I slept on my left side we'd be pretty much face-to-face, and that felt like the opposite end of the spectrum: way too intimate, way too presumptuous. Besides, I didn't know what my face looked like when I was sleeping. And I knew that if I lay like that I'd be wondering the whole night if she was looking at me, and at the same time I knew I'd want to sneak a look at her from time to time and see what she looked like when she was sleeping (I had it in my mind that she would look quite beautiful). I began to wish we'd lain down head-to-toe. That would have enabled a much easier facing position. I cursed myself for not having anticipated these issues earlier. Perhaps I should mention that this was the first time I'd ever slept next to a girl. And this was the realisation that was dawning on me rapidly as I lay there that night. I hadn't thought about it as such beforehand because there was no bed involved and absolutely no removal of clothing to be planned for. It was two people who, instead of sitting next to each other, happened to be lying next to each other. I hadn't realised the fundamental difference between the two things, because that was how my brain worked back then. When I thought about things, I thought about them from what I believed at the 15

time was an entirely logical point of view. Had I been truly logical, I suppose I might have understood that new experiences of any description come pre-packaged with anxiety and disorientation thrown in. Even then, though, I wouldn't have known in advance about what lying down with Imogen would suddenly mean to me. For all the nervousness, her presence in this new manner made me feel strange in a way I hadn't felt before. She was there. She was there, right next to me; her whole body stretched out on the blue carpet: her legs alongside my legs, her arm alongside my arm, her head was just a few inches away and – most importantly of all – would remain so for several hours. In fact, that wasn't the most important thing. The most important thing was that we would enter into sleep together. I felt the same thing, years later at a conference, sitting next to a pregnant colleague on a sofa at the back of a hall; whilst a dull speaker droned on about Russian databases, we both fell victim to our large lunches and the warmth of the sun on the window beside us. There was no mutual agreement; we just fell asleep together. I hardly knew her. All the same, it felt wonderful. I said to Imogen, “I can't sleep. I think I'm going to go back down to the bar for a bit. I might smoke a cigarette.” Just ten minutes had passed since we sat down there. I'd opened my eyes, peered to the very left of my field of vision without moving my head and seen that she had her back to me. I hadn't considered that 16

possibility. It made me feel hopelessly stupid. She rolled over, looked at me with neutral eyes and said, “Ok.” I had a packet of ten Marlboro Lights I'd bought a few days previously. There were two left in it. I resolved to smoke them both. Little did I know how many more I would be smoking that night. I smoked my first cigarette at university, of course. Everyone tells you that the best way to not become a smoker is to not become a smoker, and then a girl you get along with says, “You should try one,” and suddenly this seems like the most reasonable suggestion there is that can be made. I smoked it in our local pub and I neither enjoyed it nor disliked it. I didn't cough, like you see in films where someone takes their first drag. It tasted dirty and made my mouth feel dry. Frankly, I wondered what all the fuss was about. But, from that point on, I smoked a cigarette every Saturday night. I thought it might make me look good. Imogen described herself as a social smoker. She could go for days without a cigarette and then burn up five in a row alongside half pints of Stella Artois. She did look good with a cigarette. I hadn't seen her smoke before the trip up to Sheffield a few months earlier. I'd gone up for a weekend and stayed with her at her parents' house, and on the Saturday night we'd gone out with a couple she was friends with. I hadn't taken fags up with 17

me because I didn't want her parents to smell it on my clothes, but when she lit up and placed her elbow on the table and talked with her cigarette held at eleven o'clock beside her face, I experienced for the first time a need to smoke. She would lean forward when she talked and sometimes her large eyes would open even wider. I thought she was the prettiest creature I'd ever seen and the smoke seemed to dance to the outline of her hair. She saw me taking occasional glances at the cigarette and offered me one. And I declined. We weren't lovers then. And we weren't lovers when we stepped aboard the Stena Normady. But, a couple of months prior to that visit, I'd posted her a valentines card from a post box in London. I was there on the way back from an interview for a job doing demontage in camp sites across France in September. I got offered the job, but later on they lengthened the season and that meant it clashed with my return to university. The interview was at ten in the morning and involved a ridiculously early start for me, back in Brighton. We were done in less than twenty minutes and I had time before the train back to the capital for breakfast in the greasiest greasy spoon I think I've ever been in. It had red and white checked tablecloths that stuck to your arms when you leaned on it. I ate scrambled eggs on toast and it tasted quite fantastic. I had a thing for greasy spoons back then. At uni, I was quite unable to work in the library and hopeless at working in my room at home. I can't remember how I 18

discovered that one of the cafĂŠs overlooking the covered market served up the perfect mixture of background noise and no interruptions, but from that day on that was where I went to work on anything that required any form of sustained concentration. The staff were good to me there. They let me sit and work, even when they'd closed the kitchen and were cleaning all the other tables. I never really spoke to any of them, they just quietly accepted me and let me get on with whatever assignment it was I had come there to do. I usually just drank coffee. When I ate, it was usually a fried egg on toast, with brown sauce at the ready for when the yolk ran out. I was vegetarian back then. If I hadn't been, it would have been a sausage sandwich every time. On my way back from the interview, I met up with an old school friend in London who was two years into his medical degree. We went shopping on Oxford Street and I bought a tape with a soundtrack recording on it to listen to on the train back home. He took me back to his room and cooked me pasta that we sprinkled grated cheese over once it was on our plates. Whilst we ate, he told me about the stuff that medical students got up to in the dissection lab, which was on the top floor of the college he was at. Once, they'd had a hand fight and one of them had chucked one out of a window and it had landed on a passer-by eight stories below. I wanted to ask exactly how they went about cutting off the hands in the first place â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in particular, whether or not it was a clean cut, 19

straight across the wrists – but I worried he would think me weird for asking that. I liked Philip a lot. He had the kind of intelligence I wished I had. He could sit and study by himself for hours and actually learn all the stuff that he read when he did that. He didn't need a benevolent greasy spoon café in order to get things done. He walked me back to the tube station and, on the way, we passed a post box so I dropped in Imogen's card. Inside it, I had written “Happy Valentine's Day. Love from ?” We'd been writing to each other for several weeks at that stage, so I took care to disguise my handwriting over those five words. The London post mark I thought would fool her completely. On the train back to Brighton, I wondered what on Earth the point was in sending something like that and going to such trouble to make sure the recipient never knew who had posted it. It turned out she knew it was me straight away, but she didn't tell me that until after the Sheffield visit. She told me that on the telephone. I can't remember the first time I called her, but it was after that visit. We didn't make too regular a thing of it. We carried on writing to each other, but now that the Valentine's card was outed, romance was permitted in our words. Mix tapes got made. I still have the two that she sent me. I never listened to them again after the Stena Normandy. I was too embarrassed to call Imogen from the house phone at my place in Brighton, where I would be overheard by my house mates, so I used to sneak out and 20

place the call from a phone box at the end of the street. The box was on my daily route into university so, after a couple of calls, I used to look at it when I passed as though it was a special place, as though it was giving me a knowing wink whenever I chanced by, as though it was a co-collaborator in my romance. We'd met the previous summer in France, both of us on a camping holiday with our parents. I took my brother down to the bar one evening and we took a table outside it, sitting near to a group of young people of the three main nationalities to be found in all French camp sites above two stars: French, English and Dutch. Groups like that are special, because they don't just begin and end like a group of people who meet on a package holiday might; as people come and go, they change, they mutate. It becomes expected that tonight's group won't be quite the same as last night's group and tomorrow night's group will probably be different again. There's often someone saying goodbye. There's often someone joining in for the first time. On previous vacations the group had been based around the swimming pool or the volley ball court or the disco if there was one; this group had elected to base itself outside the front of the camp site bar. How many French camping holidays did I go on with my parents? Six? Seven? Eight? We did Brittany at least twice and the same for the VendĂŠe. Normandy. The Dordogne. We started off with a six man tent that was strikingly orange and took two hours to put up. The 21

poles were made of metal and my father had carefully colour coded them with insulating tape; even so the male/female combinations always used to baffle me. Putting up the tent was always a torturous affair. My father didn't swear, but if he had done I think he'd have cursed us all to hell several times over during the course of those two hours. He wasn't made for travelling abroad and France he seemed especially incompatible with. At least once in every trip he'd sit in the car with the doors open and listen to BBC Radio 4 long wave, full volume, at 6pm (well, 7pm French time); the chimes of Big Ben would reverberate around the camp site. He never learned a word of French. At the petrol station, he'd stand with his phrasebook in his hand and ask for “sent frank de souper”. As we eventually pulled away, he'd mutter his usual grumble about the French not yet learning about self-service. Perhaps it was a war thing. My father was a social historian. The one time I saw him engaged out there was when we looked at the remains of the mulberry harbour at Arromanches. Back then, I hated history and I had no idea of the significance of what I was looking at. Even so, I could tell from his expression that he thought it was something quite incredible. My mother would insist that nothing – absolutely nothing – be permitted to touch the canvass on the inside of the tent, since that would let the rain through. Everything had to be at least a foot away, all around the 22

edges, including the inner tent where we slept; it was like miniature demilitarised zone. I always used to wonder how that rule didn't apply to the poles that held the canvas in place, but questions like that weren't encouraged. Much as she was the driving force behind going to France in the first place, she existed in an almost perpetual state of stress and anxiety the whole time through the trip. The best French holiday we ever went on was when we took Philip with us for a week to Brittany. We slept next to each other and, at night, we'd listen to his Tony Hancock tapes on his Walkman using a headphone splitter. Now that I come to think of it, mother actually found it funny how the two of us would break the silence with simultaneous laughter. I suppose it was just that if I was observably happy, she didn't have to worry about what others might think of her ability as a mother. And having Philip there made things automatically fun for me. Also, she had something genuine to worry about that holiday. Philip was diabetic and his test strips were giving consistently low readings all through the week. In those days, you had to squeeze your drop of thumb blood onto the pad at the end of a little strip of plastic and wait for it to change colour, then compare this to the chart on the side of the tin. Philip dismissed the readings instantly â&#x20AC;&#x201C; said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Well, if that were true I'd be in a coma by now,â&#x20AC;? and laughed. I trusted his judgement, but even so I was worried. My parents must have been shitting themselves 23

over the prospect of returning a dead son to his parents. It turned out it was just that the strips had been spoiled by being left on the parcel shelf in the car, where they'd been gently cooked by the sun through the window. He and I went down to the wash block one evening with a bowl full of washing up to do. The block was built so that there was a gap of several feet between the top of the outside wall and the roof. Ventilation of high density toilet area solved. He said he had to pee and went inside whilst I ran the hot water into one of the sinks on the outside of the building and it wasn't until I saw it appearing over the top of the wall that I realised the washing up liquid bottle was missing. He missed me, but hit the woman using the next sink along. Coalitions were formed; a full scale water war ensued. My mother thought the whole event was hilarious. If it had been me and my brother, I would have been promised her funeral as soon as we returned to the UK. It never mattered how bad the holiday was or how angry she got; whenever we got back home, she would talk about the trip as though it had been to Eden itself. Sometimes, I had to listen for place names I recognised to check that she was actually talking about the same holiday. The photographs would get developed and the stories behind them would unfurl in front of my grandparents and the next door neighbour like a red carpet to the premiĂ¨re of a direct-to-video movie. It wasn't so much that she made stuff up as she left the bad 24

bits out and really, really exaggerated the good bits (and their significance). As a phenomena, it fascinated me. I couldn't for the life of me work out just how much of this editing was conscious. At first, I thought she was one hundred per cent aware of what she was doing and that our co-conspiracy when we were witness to these fairytale accounts was just assumed. But then I noticed something else: as time wore on: she would even refer to these fables in her conversations with us. I began to wonder if the pretty versions she invented ended up replacing in her memory any recollections of the actual events that had transpired. But perhaps she just thought we'd forgotten all the unhappy bits. Perhaps she thought the modified version had been recounted so many times she'd successfully brainwashed the lot of us, and any attempt we made to interject with mention of a vaguely recalled temper tantrum would be met with a strange urge to vomit like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. The group that met in front of the bar, the summer that I met Imogen Card, talked about stuff like music and politics. It was an older group than I was accustomed to hanging out with â&#x20AC;&#x201C; often, there would be only one or two people older than I was in those; in this case, there were only a handful that were younger. After the first evening there, my brother didn't come with me to sit with them. It wasn't because he didn't want to, but he had a bad case of sunburn and had developed a fever; once he was well again a few days later, going out with that group had 25

become established as my thing. So, whilst he lay in the tent and sweated, I sat with Imogen and a couple of Dutch girls and we talked about the Pet Shop Boys' bastardisation of Where the Streets Have No Name. As it happened, I loved it â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and came clean on that straight away. I'd become a fan earlier that year, having been force fed extended remixes of the Behaviour tracks in Terry's mobile home, where he could turn the volume up as high as he liked. Imogen hated it, but liked that I tried to defend it rather than just agreeing with her. We went to the beach one night, which was just a five minute walk from the site. Imogen sat next to me and the others started to edge away from us, having sniffed in the air a possible romance. I already knew that she liked me. In the wash block, I would shower then go to the public sinks in the men's section and clean my teeth wearing nothing but my shorts and sandals. A few days after we'd met, I'd been doing that and had seen her in the corner of my eye walking past the open entrance to the women's section, and pausing. The pause was the thing I noted. Nearly a year later, as she straddled me in the cathedral grounds in Winchester on the night of my twenty-first birthday, she told me about seeing me then. She slid her hands a little under my shirt when she told me that and it made the skin of my stomach flutter. Three days later, we boarded the Stena Normandy and we were no longer lovers.

I spent about forty minutes in the night club, chatting to some teenage boys we'd been sitting with earlier who were about a couple of years younger than me, and the subject of Imogen came up a couple of times. I lied and told them we were together, but I avoided going into any great detail about that. When eventually I came back to the corner by the doors, Imogen was gone. An anxious looking woman was sitting by my bag. She said, “Are you Ian?” when I approached, looking at the space where Imogen should have been in and wondering if I'd somehow managed to get the wrong deck (except that that was definitely my rucksack). “Yes,” I said. She looked relieved. I don't know how long she'd been waiting there. Probably longer than she'd bargained for. “Your friend said to tell you she'd gone out on deck for a bit,” said the woman. “She said she'd be back soon.” Ten minutes later, I'd completed my first tour of the deck outside and returned to the corner in the hope that she'd returned whilst I'd been out. But she wasn't. Imogen was nowhere to be found.

THE FIRST GIRL I ever kissed was Linda Webber, who lived four doors from the corner of our road. I was about twelve and I think she was the year below me in school. Apart from my father, she was the only person I ever shared my home-made magazines with and she wrote a couple of review comments on them in the margin next to my father's words. “This is a brilliant mag,” and such like. We kissed in her back garden on the path to her parents' garage one day and I remember thinking how much more slippery the experience was than I had expected it to be. I didn't much like it, chiefly because I didn't much like Linda. We didn't repeat the experience, and that was fine by me. The next girl I kissed was Imogen. Imogen wasn't the next girl I loved – or thought I loved. There were plenty of those in between. Eileen Young when I was twelve, whose manner towards me was that I had no right to look at her. Heather Field a year later, who was that rare combination of intelligence and happiness, and who I couldn't possibly have told about my feelings because I felt I didn't meet her in either dimension (but I did send her an anonymous Valentine's card that year, because I knew she would take it the right way and smile). Jenny Parsons, a beautiful girl with a thick mop of dark brown, curly hair who was a member 28

of a youth musical/drama group I belonged too. She had such incredible cheek bones and the palest skin I ever saw. I longed for her over the two years that the group was active, but I was no good whatsoever at making myself known to her. There's a black and white photograph of me singing a solo during our first production and she's standing in the front row of the backing singers behind me, looking bored and â&#x20AC;&#x201C; well â&#x20AC;&#x201C; elsewhere. I played The Baker, a part of four lines, so it's not as though the picture showed just a momentary lapse in attention. I did my school work experience when I was fifteen for a local radio station. My producer asked me to put together a report on this group. I turned up at rehearsal with a reel-to-reel tape recorder slung over my shoulder and a microphone with a long black cable that I had to wind around my wrist several times to stop it from trailing on the floor. I had never been so popular with girls. And that was the one Thursday evening that Jenny Parsons was absent from rehearsal. I'd give you the reason why, except I never knew her well enough to find out. Then there was Abigail, one of four dancers brought in from a local studio to add youth to the next thing I got drafted into, a fifty year old operatic society that performed light musicals on the creaky old stage at the local Town Hall. My parents belonged to it. By this time, I was at college and it happened that Abi also went 29

to Charles Darwin Sixth form. She had an oval face and blonde, wavy hair and she moved like no-one I'd ever seen before, but she said she was too tall to ever make it as a dancer professionally. Yes, I actually talked to her. The annual Operatic Society Dinner Dance was approaching and I had no intention whatsoever of attending unless by some miracle she happened to be there. When I found out she was going (she was new; she didn't yet understand these things), I decided I'd impress her by learning the waltz, and that that would be my move. I practised with my mother for nearly two weeks solid, but without telling her why. When the night came, I waited through six twelve inch singles before finally the DJ obeyed his instructions and put on a dance for the generation that were paying for him to be there. I was ready. As I stood up, an enormous alto, older than my mother, appeared from nowhere and pushed me out onto the dance floor. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Your mother tells me you've been practising for this, so don't you try sitting there antisocial any longer!â&#x20AC;? she roared and grabbed me by the waist. They didn't play any more waltz music that evening. And many, many more. I didn't really love them; I just thought I did because I thought about kissing them a lot. I wondered if it would be like Linda Webber. I wanted them, and I wanted them to want me. And none of them did. Perhaps the ones who suspected my desires thought that I was just after sex, but I wasn't. Somehow 30

or another, I didn't find out about masturbation until I was 17, when a fired employee at Pizza Go! – my first job – left his semen all over the staff room table as a parting gift. Up until that moment, I'd imagined it physically impossible to orgasm unless you were actually inside a woman (the sex education classes at school had kind of suggested that to me; I just didn't think it through). Of course, I'd heard the boys at school boasting all the time about wanking off; I just assumed they were making it up. I worked at Pizza Go! for about two years. I hated the job, but loved the co-workers (with one rather obvious exception). On dead weekday evenings, the assistant manger – another Philip – would take me out to the rear car park and teach me to drive in his car. It compensated for the madness of Fridays and Saturdays, which were crazy until 11pm, and then there would a second wind at 11:20, when the pubs kicked out. We were licensed to serve alcohol until midnight, but on the condition that food was bought at the same time. We'd get groups of seven or eight coming in and ordering the smallest pizza we did to share between them, and sixteen bottles of Stella Artois. By and large, the biggest problem they actually presented with was drunken idiocy, but the time until they left would drag and drag and drag. Phil and I would lean against the chiller cabinet and fold our arms and pray together that none of them threw up. At 12:30, we'd start to turn the lights off and they usually 31

got the message. In case anyone didn't, we had a special relationship with the Police that involved free pizza whenever they showed up at the kitchen door in return for a fast response, if needed. One Friday evening, towards the end of my time there, I served a mystery shopper and earned the highest waiter rating for the whole of the South UK, pushing our branch to the top of the performance board; the company rewarded us by paying for us all to go for a night out at the local night club. It was my first time in a night club and I was riddled with anxiety about it. I couldn't understand how something like this in any manner constituted a 'reward'; as the employee who had made the ultimate contribution to its taking, however, my nonattendance was out of the question. It was a long evening, and a college night at that. I drank a couple of Bacardi and Cokes and got out as soon as I could, leaving my full-time co-workers (who only had a twelve o'clock opening time the next day to worry about) to accumulate tales of drunken endeavour that they would no doubt regale me with during the following weekend shift. On the way out, as I climbed the steps from the dance floor, a tall, blonde woman that was passing stopped me with a hand on my stomach and ran it up to my chest and down again a few times. She was stunning. She winked at me and then pushed past me on her way. I wondered if she was expecting me to follow. I had no intention of doing so and got out of there just as quickly as I could. 32

Strange Blonde Woman intrigued me in the days that followed. It occurred to me that I was possibly an attractive young man until the moment I started speaking. Then again, maybe she had seen that I was just a kid and decided it would be fun to fuck with my head. I realised that was a possibility too. The love interest at Pizza Go! was a gentle girl called Susan, who was studying art and literature at my college. She had a kind face and long hair and the most gorgeous voice I'd ever heard. We got along really well; if I'm honest, she was the most intellectual company I had in that place and her thoughtfulness was the whole reason why I was attracted to her. I don't mean thoughtfulness like in being considerate, I mean that she thought about stuff a lot. I could see sometimes that she was lost in her own world of thinking and I wanted her most of all when she was like that. In many ways, Susan was the most ideal match for me out of all those early loves â&#x20AC;&#x201C; quite apart from any other detail, we actually talked, and talked a lot; she actually knew me in my 'natural state' â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but, of course, she had a boyfriend. When she mentioned him to me, he came across as some sort of brutish thug who had no appreciation for her inner beauty, but it might be that I selectively attended only to the details which confirmed that theory. One day, they had a fight and split up. Susan told me when we were next working together that she was exhibiting at a sailing display at the weekend and that I should come along for the chance to see her in a 33

wetsuit. Even I recognised an opening like that. The following day, I went down with flu. The next time I saw her she'd got back together with her boyfriend. At University, I longed for a northerner called Kelly from afar, but that was not to be either. In the last month of the first year's summer term I grew attracted to an exnurse on my course called Elaine. She was in her late twenties â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a 'mature student' â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and not quite so loud and scary as the majority of the women in my cohort. One day, I was making coffee for us in my flat and she took the kettle from my hands to help me. Our skin touched, and it felt to me like the gentlest and at the same time the most electrifying sensation I'd ever experienced. We arranged to go out for a day and walked by the beach for a couple of hours. We had absolutely nothing in common, and by the end of the first half hour I started longing for the date to end without anything intimate happening. Luckily for me, she felt precisely the same way. And then I went home for the summer and away to France with my parents. And then I met Imogen. I hung around in that corner by the deck doors for about twenty minutes, worried that during my earlier search Imogen might have returned to the spot, found it empty and gone out again, and that if I went out looking for her once more the same might happen. As the time passed, I tried to think up a route that could enable me to revisit 34

this place as frequently as possible. The doors were about a quarter of the ship's length from the bow, which meant that exiting and walking up to the front of the boat at this level would only take a few minutes. If I walked back the same distance on the starboard side, however, I wouldn't be returned to this spot, since the hall with our corner didn't stretch hull-to-hull: the other side of the staircase had the toilets. Downstairs, however, there was a reception area that ran the whole width of the ship, so I could go down a deck whilst I was still outside, re-enter down there and then come back up the stairs to 'home' again. I decided all of this was way too complicated and instead to leave a note. I tore a page out of the notebook I always carried around with me (it felt like I couldn't possibly aspire to be a writer if I didn't at least do that) and wrote, “Imogen, Looking for you. Stay here! Ian.” I contemplated adding a kiss after my name and chose not to because a) it made me look too hopeful and b) it made me look too forgiving. After all, she'd been outside somewhere for maybe a half an hour now. That was moving towards anti-social, I decided. Not anti-social enough to warrant an angry tone, though. After all, it had been me who'd gone down to the bar for forty minutes. I folded the note over and wrote on the outside, “IMOGEN.” I didn't have any tape to stick it down anywhere, so I tucked the corner behind one of the deck maps screwed to the wall. I stood back a few paces to 35

appraise how that looked. It wasn't very visible. But it would have to do. The reason I'd felt inclined to leave a kiss after my name was that was how I always signed my letters to her. I realised whilst I contemplated this that this was the first thing I'd written to her since my last love letter in anticipation of her visit. How the world had changed since then. There probably wouldn't be any more love letters now. This note of seven functional words might well be the last I ever wrote to her. That made me sad. It was a logical consequence of what had happened over the last few days but I hadn't yet had the chance to think it all through and realise that. When she left to go home, I wouldn't just be losing her physical presence and the possibility of intimacy, I'd be losing the relationship we'd had through our words as well. Her letters had been like kisses, like gifts left on my doormat. The degree to which I'd found myself looking forward to them had both surprised and amused me. I liked the irony that something so simple and cheap in an otherwise materialistic world could have such incredible value. In a fire, they would have been the first thing I'd have rescued. I still have them in a box under my old bed at my mother's house. Folded pieces of paper with ink on them, the most valuable thing a person can own; an ages old truth that the capitalists do their best to distract us from in their endless, endless hypnosis. I left the little corner once more and started a new 36

search. I resolved that I would try to cover as much outside deck area as possible in no more than ten minutes, be back as quickly as I could in case she did return. She might see the note, but that didn't mean she wouldn't be impatient. So I walked as quickly as I could, a purposeful march down the port side towards the stern. It wasn't like it would be easy to miss anyone out there: the deck was narrow and the lights were more than bright enough to expose any human beings I might encounter along the way. I walked past a score of lifeboats, suspended off the side of the boat by their lowering arms. At the rear of the ship, a couple of minutes later, the walkway opened out into a large sun deck with rows and rows of plastic seats that looked out over the receding wake. On my last inspection, I'd just scanned this area quickly for seated figures and moved on when I saw none; this time, I stood aft and examined each row carefully, in case she was lying down across three or four of the seats. She was not. Forward of the sun deck, chained off steps on each side led up to a crew only area. I walked across to the starboard side and began my march towards the bow. It took me about three minutes. At the front of the boat, a much smaller sun deck looked out at the destination, hidden away in the total blackness of night time at sea. This deck too was empty. I went to the railing at the front and looked down. The lower deck was not open to the public at the bow; I saw a ship worker in his orange overalls leaning over his rail and inspecting 37

the deck below him as he smoked a cigarette. A cigarette. I thought about the empty pack I'd tossed into a bin in the night club on my way out, forty minutes ago. I wondered if there was anywhere open that would sell me some more. I arrived back at the doors to our spot and went in. The corner was still empty. The note was still there. I went downstairs to the reception area, went out on deck again and repeated my circuit, although this time it was a U shape moving aft, around the stern and back up to the doors on the other side; the section forward of the doors was gated off (out of sight, at the front of the deck, my orange suited worker was smoking the last of his cigarette). I returned to my corner and its unattended note. I sat down. Tried to think. So she wasn't on deck; I was fairly certain there were only two decks open to the public. That meant she had to have come back inside, gone somewhere to warm up, maybe. The night club. As soon as the idea came to me, I knew this had to be where she was. It made complete sense: she'd come back in at some point, seen I wasn't about and gone looking for me in the place where I'd last told her I was going. I gave myself a mental kick for not thinking of this idea in the first place. And relief washed over me. I was already at the entrance, so I walked straight in. Technically, the club was shut. The grill was drawn 38

down over the bar and the till behind it was open and empty. The lighting was dimmed. But the seating area had been left open to passengers to sit in. Every chair had been taken and, here and there, bodies were curled up on the floor. What conversations there were, were hushed now. There must have been at least fifty or sixty people in there, none of whom I could see clearly. The prospect of creeping around, peering closely at people to see if one of them was Imogen, didn't appeal to me at all. The group of lads I'd been sitting with earlier were still where I'd left them, sitting around their table in front of the bar. I wondered over, trying to look casual. One of them saw me approaching and looked up at me. In the green glow of the bar lighting, I could see that his eyebrows were raised. “Back again?” he said. “Have any of you seen Imogen?” I asked, making it sound like I wasn't really all that bothered if they had. “Now he's gone and lost her!” one of them said. “She went out on deck a few minutes ago for some air,” I explained, dismissively. “I thought I'd go keep her company.” “What you looking in here for then?” the first guy said. “She's not out on deck. I thought she might of come in here.” “You're gonna lose your spot, you are,” said the second speaker, “if there's no-one sitting in it.” I thought about my note, wondering if it would serve 39

to deter any would-be squatters. The next thought that came to me was that it might betray my assumed air of indifference if one of these guys should see it. Probably not – it was only seven words, after all. Then again, I had used capital letters on the front. That suggested urgency. What if one or all of these boys decided to come with me to help look for her, and came back with me to the corner so that one of them could hold base? They looked bored; they looked like they might enjoy the drama of some sort of 'mission' to while away some of the time still to pass before dawn finally crept over the perfectly flat horizon. The idea of having them impose themselves on this situation made my stomach twist. I would lose control of it. For all I knew, Imogen was casually sipping coffee next to one of the machines in the café lounge. How would it look to have a group of young men come upon her out of nowhere, shouting, “Found her!” And then they would consider themselves affiliated to us for the rest of the journey. I would look like a fool. My eyes were adjusting to the gloom in the night club. Also, the conversation had caused heads to turn in our direction. I stood for a moment and scanned the room, taking in each of the human forms and dismissing then, one by one. She wasn't here. Or if she was, she was deliberately concealing herself. It was hardly an exhaustive search of the room, but it would have to do. “Yeah, you're right,” I said. “I'd better go back up 40

and keep tabs on it. She'll come back.” I turned to go. “Maybe she's getting off with someone else!” one of the others joked. I didn't reply to that. I kept on walking. That particular thought had already crept into my head about thirty minutes earlier and I had felt ashamed for thinking it. But now that someone else had said it – and said it so quickly – it felt like I had been given permission to think it once more. But I did my best to squash it back down again. She couldn't do that to me. She wouldn't do that to me. We still meant something to each other, didn't we? On the night of my twenty-first birthday, we'd taken the train into Winchester and met up with Philip and his girlfriend, Tanya. We'd had drinks at a table in the garden of a bar down by King Alfred's statue. Earlier, we'd eaten at my parents' house and it had all been very platonic. I wondered when the romance would start. I realised that the first move was probably mine to make, but my stomach twisted at the very thought of this idea. I had no inkling whatsoever as to what sort of thing would be appropriate. None. In long distance love, it's almost as though the mind becomes a separate entity altogether from the body, but you don't realise this until it's too late and you're face to face, with no idea what to do or say. In writing, there's always time, there's no pressure to perform; the imagination is free to do its thing and wonder away about 41

how things would be if the two of you were one day standing next to each other in some imaginary place. I wrote some pretty good lines. Each letter was like a mini writing project for me; I'd approach it in a not to dissimilar way to how I'd write a short story or an essay. Some I even wrote in that greasy spoon café, overlooking the market, although getting into flow for a letter to Imogen was never a difficult thing to achieve. I would write lengthy letters, and when I was done I was almost sad to see them disappear into the post box. Of course, I could have taken photocopies, but that just seemed wrong, like sneaking a camera into someone's house and taking pictures of their décor. If it was hers then it was hers and I had no right to take a piece of it. I suppose that's one advantage of email over letter writing – you can keep everything you ever sent to a person, if you want to. When, suddenly, you're sitting beside the person you've been writing to and who you've only known romantically through words, the mind panics, because suddenly it's having to interpret stuff – and non-verbal stuff, at that – in real time. And the body has no recognition of the person ten centimetres away. It's like driving: once you know how to do it, the body does it all, and automatically (but there was nothing stopping you from thinking about driving – or even writing about driving – before you got that kinaesthetic knowledge). I was like a learner driver sitting at the start line of the 42

Grand Prix, and I didn't even know where the ignition was. Perhaps 'Grand Prix' is too grand a metaphor. It doesn't exaggerate the anxiety I felt all that much, though. Somehow or another, I'd managed to fool myself into believing that making out with Imogen would be the easiest thing in the world once we were in each other's space. As far as my body was concerned, however, I might just as well have been sitting next to a complete stranger. It was as if it was telling my mind, â&#x20AC;&#x153;What do you want me to do? And how do you expect me to do that? And who is this woman, anyway?â&#x20AC;? At university, within the first couple of months of starting there, we had a sex education lesson that they sneaked into one of our workshops. We had to split into pairs and role play putting on a condom using a banana. I suppose the facilitator imagined that at least knowing how to break open the packaging would make protection at a least a little more likely amongst us supposedly horny-as-hell students. She told us up front what we were about to do and my heart went into overdrive in sheer dread of it. Would I be expected to act? Would I be expected to act amorously? I started trying to calculate the partner who it would be least embarrassing with; to my utter horror, however, she chose me at random as the demonstration guy and someone else to be my role play lover. I actually can't remember who the demonstration girl was; I think the memory of her has 43

been completely repressed as part of some sort of posttraumatic mechanism in my brain on the off-chance that I should ever meet her again. I do remember thinking, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Why me? Why now? Out of all the occasions that someone should actually notice me, why in Christ's name does it have to be this particular moment?â&#x20AC;? And I remember holding that banana in my damp, clammy hands and wondering if I was expected to place it between my legs. As far as I could see it, getting to the stage where the wearing of a condom was required would be such a monumental achievement on my part that that final little hurdle hardly seemed like such a big deal (and then there was all the stuff that happened next to worry about). I sat next to Imogen, and Philip and I told stories like the water fight tale and the time when I made him believe there was a ghost in our house, and inside my head I started to scream, What? What?! What in God's name should I be doing? I know how to put a condom on a banana â&#x20AC;&#x201C; tell me what I need to do NOW! And then Imogen reached out and put her hand over mine on the table. And I put my other hand on top and smoothed her skin with my thumb. I thought about that moment as I left the night club. A little of that magic had been present in my head whilst we'd been lying next to each other in our corner, and then I'd gone and stuffed it all up by bailing for a cigarette I'd 44

had no actual need of. She'd been lying with her back to me; I wondered all the same what would have happened if I'd let instincts take over and reached out and stroked her arm a few times. It wasn't about romance. It was about the closeness I liked to feel still existed between us as ex-lovers. As sort of ex-lovers. Surely, we still meant something to each other? The cafĂŠ lounge, the restaurant area, even the reclining chair sleeper lounge were all now legitimate places to check. I set off at a brisk pace in case one of the lads from the club decided to come after me and offer help. I passed people reading books. I passed people curled around table legs and others with their head on their arms on the table itself, like it was some sort of double decker sleeping facility. I passed whole families in draw neck sleeping bags squeezed into tiny areas like caterpillars crowded on a leaf. I passed elderly couples completing crossword puzzles and one man who was reading softly from a newspaper to his dozing wife. I passed groups of men with open cans of lager and cards. I passed people just sitting, looking at nothing, in a trance that would last until dawn, when finally the ship would stir and wake up. I passed a cigarette machine. I decided I'd return to the cigarette machine once I'd found Imogen. It wouldn't taste good right now. Eventually, there was only the reclining seat sleeper lounge to investigate, and it was every bit as bad as I 45

knew it was going to be. I didn't think for a moment that I would find her in there. But I knew I had to do it. I knew I had to discount it from the list of possibilities that was now approaching zero. I tried to put out of my mind what would be left if this last place of searching proved as fruitless as I knew it would be. I crept into that terrible place, I tip-toed over the bodies, I put my nose an inch away from the row numbers so I could read them, looking for our seats – as though I honestly believed that she would have even remembered which seats were ours, let alone made any sort of attempt to find them, but at least it made my actions to the strangers I was passing seem rational. I worked my way slowly aft, examining each and every seat left and right of me as best as I could. I started to whisper, “Imogen? Imogen?” to see if that got any sort of reaction. But the room was dead. I received no replies at all, not even requests that I shut up. I got to the front of the lounge and then worked my way back down the other aisle. It took me about twenty minutes in total. As I knew would be the case, she wasn't there. I returned to our spot – to my spot – hoping that in all this time away from there she might have come back from wherever it was that she had been. She had not. And the note had fallen to the floor. I sat down to think. Straight away, I got back up again. Either she was on the move and I had missed her by being in the wrong place at the wrong moment or I 46

simply hadn't looked hard enough. I repeated my whole search â&#x20AC;&#x201C; everything, except the night club and the sleeper lounge â&#x20AC;&#x201C; doing the outside decks in the reverse order this time in case she was circling and previously I hadn't caught up with her. This time, when I passed the cigarette machine, I bought a packet of Benson & Hedges. My first full pack of 20 cigarettes. Actually, I suspect it might have been 18. Machines didn't give change in those days, so you got however many fags in the box your three pounds could buy you. When I got back to my spot, I gave myself five minutes to smoke the first cigarette just outside the doors. I looked through the salt stained windows at the carpet we had laid on and wondered if Imogen might still have gone for her walk if I hadn't gone back to the night club. I imagined for a moment what I might have felt like if she'd left me there alone, and I realised I'd have felt exposed and vulnerable by myself in such a public spot. As I added my butt to the waste in the Channel, watching its glow all the way into the black sea below, I cursed myself for my inability to think beyond the boundary of my own perception. And then I repeated my search all over again. Twice. By the end of the fourth cigarette, my hand was shaking. I couldn't avoid any longer thinking the thought that had been standing there, silently, in a darkened corner of my mind, waiting to be acknowledged, waiting 47

to be brought forward. Something had happened to Imogen.

WE'D LEFT THE bar by King Alfred's statue at about 11pm, said goodbye to Philip and Tanya and walked up High Street towards the station. After a minute or so, Imogen had slipped her hand into mine. Our fingers interlocked. It was the first time I'd held hands with a girl, and another one of those things I'd never really thought about. I'd just assumed that couples held hands like a parent did with their child. It was one of those moments where you realise both that you were wrong and that the alternative is so clearly and obviously better. At the Buttercross, she looked down the little alley leading to The Square and said, “What's down there?” “The Cathedral,” I replied. “Can we go look?” “Sure,” I said, thinking about the train times home. I hoped it wouldn't be a lengthy diversion. I didn't imagine things would go any further than holding hands that night. I was entirely happy with this progress and now all I wanted to do was to get home and finish the day before any opportunity came along for me to fuck things up. As we rounded the corner of the square, the great cathedral revealed itself to us in the warm glow of its floodlights. It's an amazing sight, but Imogen appeared nonplussed. We followed the path across the grounds 49

towards it and, halfway along, she took off across the grass, pulling me behind her. She stopped once the shadows were dark enough for us to be invisible from the path and turned to me, put her arms around my neck. She pulled herself close so that I could feel her breasts pressing into me. “I can feel your heart,” she said, after a moment like that. Her voice was so quiet, so close to me. “It's beating really fast. You're nervous.” “A little,” I lied. She reached up with her lips and touched them to mine. They were soft. I saw her eyes close. I didn't want to shut mine at first, but as our lips parted for the first kiss, I realised that everything I could see was a distraction too me. I closed my eyes; straight away, her mouth and her taste and her hand in my hair and her body pressed hard against mine was all that was. It was like the world had been switched suddenly off, and we didn't exist in any place any more. Later, as I lay on the grass with her sitting on me, her hands under my shirt and feeling my skin, she said, “I didn't bring anything with me.” I wondered at first what she meant, then I realised. I was glad the night was there to hide the redness I was sure was all over my face, had been all over my face since the moment I could hide my arousal from her no longer. “Neither did I,” I replied, as though it was such a ridiculous oversight. Later that year, one of my house 50

mates at university told me we should have gone ahead and done it anyway. But she didn't understand: the absence of protection being the obstacle to sex happening that night made me profoundly grateful I had not brought any with me (or bought any in the first place). As for the erection, I considered it an act of biological betrayal. But I did in time come to wonder what it would have been like. In my more honest moments, I knew it would have been clumsy and embarrassing; but sometimes I imagined something far more beautiful: a scene from a movie shot from the distant corner of the grounds, zoomed in on us as we made love; our bodies silhouetted against against the blurred, golden stones and dark glass of the cathedral behind us. I went down to the reception desk in the Stena Normady, which was closed. A sign there said it would re-open at 5:00am, two hours before disembarkation. Next to the desk was the phone booth. I studied the sign there that gave information on its operation. It too, it transpired, would not be available until five o'clock in the morning. I wondered who I'd ring first: my parents or hers. In all my searching of the ship, I'd encountered not a single member of the crew. There was just the guy in the orange overalls smoking his cigarette I'd spotted earlier from my view at the front of the upper outside deck. I couldn't bear the thought of approaching someone who 51

wore overalls. I thought about lifting the chain to the steps at the rear of the sun deck and making my way up to the crew deck in an attempt to find someone wearing a uniform. I wondered if I'd be able to make it all the way to the bridge before being intercepted. As I saw it, there were a number of possibilities. The first was that Imogen had fallen overboard. On my final tour of the ship â&#x20AC;&#x201C; which had finished with the upper outside deck â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I'd stood at the aft rail and stared at the spreading wake whilst I'd smoked another cigarette, and tried not to accept that possibility. The sea was calm and the deck was dry â&#x20AC;&#x201C; surely that made falling over the rail a virtual impossibility. But the orange life ring beside me wasn't there for no reason. Except it needed a person here to toss it, and there was no-one out here and the ring was untossed. From where I was standing, a fall would only end you up on the deck below. And after that there was a drop of another level to the back of the top car deck, where the rear end of a lorry trailer poked out next to the behind of what looked like a Ford Escort estate. She would have had to have fallen from the side of the boat in order to have made it to the sea. I wondered what it would feel like to fall overboard, whether the movement of something so massive through the water would push a human body away from the ship or somehow suck it underneath. I wondered whether a person would even think to swim away from the propellers at the back or 52

whether the shock of falling and hitting the cold water from that height would be enough to disorientate you – maybe even injure you if you fell badly – until it was too late to be able to do anything. I thought about all of that from the back of the sun deck like I was thinking it through for a future novel; I didn't allow myself to believe for one moment that this was actually what had happened. It seemed preposterous. Unless she had been pushed. Which brought me to possibility number two: Imogen had been attacked in some way. Or taken somewhere against her will. I supposed there weren't many reasons why someone would commit a crime against a total stranger on a boat in the middle of the sea that entailed her disappearing completely. Maybe it had been something stupid, like drunk guys racing each other down the deck and sending her over the rail when they couldn't stop in time. But the physics of that just didn't add up: there would have had to have been an upwards force of some sort to shift her centre of gravity to the point where toppling was inevitable; even then, she would have had an opportunity to grasp and hold on to the rail from the other side. And who would have not noticed – and done something – if it had been an accident like that? As for the idea that someone might have come along and pushed her over just for the hell of it – well, I supposed that was theoretically possible; but, where 53

probability was concerned, it seemed far more likely that something else had happened. Imogen was gorgeous. And alone. And there were cabins on this ship, with beds in them... Finally, there was possibility number three: that Imogen had willingly gone with someone to his cabin. As I looked at the telephone booth from my position opposite the reception desk, I realised that this was what I hoped had happened. I didn't care about what that said about what she thought of me or what it just said about me. I only wanted her to be ok. I only wanted her to be alive. Sure. Looking back on it now, it seems like the obvious thing to have done at this point would have been to find myself a crew member somehow and raise all hell, get the boat turned around if necessary. Possibility number three prevented me from doing that. Despite everything, the embarrassment of finding out that she was all along fucking someone whilst fifteen thousand tonnes of metal was reversing course to look for her was unbearable to even consider. For her as well as for me. But mostly for me. Yeah, that's right; I let embarrassment determine the actions I took where potentially a person's life hung in the balance. Don't think I don't know how that makes me look. I decided that I had to go down and check out the cabins. This covered possibilities two and three. The cabins were below the car decks, where the 54

motion of the boat was at its minimum. I smoked another cigarette before going down and tried to figure out what I would actually do once I got there. I supposed the only thing I could do was listen. So that's what I did: I crept up and down the silent corridors and listened at every door. I listened for sounds of sex – consensual or otherwise – and prayed that no-one would see me doing this. I should add that I didn't know what sex sounded like; not really. I gathered that it involved a degree of gasping and grunting, but I wasn't really certain why. I had only ever heard someone having sex once and that was in my house at university – the same house mate, in fact, who told me I shouldn't have worried about contraception with Imogen when we were together in the cathedral grounds. Her boyfriend had been staying with her for the weekend and they did it six times in a single day. I only overheard them the once, though. My room was next to hers and she'd left her door ajar. The problem was, I'd calculated that the half foot or so of open door potentially gave a passer-by a view of the bed inside, so I couldn't leave my room to go out of the house in case they spotted me and thought that I was spying on them. I remember lying on my bed in my room – captive – and listening to the noises they made. I'd always thought it would be erotic to hear two people making love, but I knew Jane really well and hearing her making these unusual sounds felt odd, disorientating. All the same, there was a strange sort of 55

beauty to it. The noises they made sounded real, nonartificial. They sounded totally caught up in each other, in a different mental place that was completely foreign to me, and I suppose that was why they didn't realise the door was open, or didn't care if they knew that it was. In the end, I'd put on my walkman and listened to Gary Clail so I couldn't hear them any more. I had a fear that one of them might come suddenly into my room and discover me listening, and I thought that having headphones on would absolve me of any wrongdoing if that should happen. I realised, as I crept through the empty corridors in the bowels of the Stena Normandy and listened like an eavesdropper at the cabin doors, that what I'd heard that morning in Brighton probably wasn't representative of the sounds of sex made by members of the larger population. I'd moved to that house at the start of my second year at university. I spent my first year at the YMCA, the first term in a single room there and the spring and summer in a flat. Up until Easter, my flatmate was an ex-commando called Mike. His discharge had come about due to some sort of back injury that made him unfit for the service he'd signed up for. He was part-way through a YTS scheme of some sort at the time that I moved in. Something to do with carpentry. As soon as the training money ran out, the company he was with made him redundant and took on another apprentice. Bitter didn't 56

even begin to describe the mood that left him in. Mike was sick of the civilian mentality and adopted army procedures wherever he could. He ate cold food straight out of cans most of the time, which he opened with a tin opener no bigger than the size of my thumb and which left a ragged edge all around the edge at the top. He'd eat the contents with a spoon or a fork. His room was almost empty except for a mattress on the floor, and sometimes he'd leave that propped up against the wall and sleep on the floor instead. He never listened to music. Behind the front door of the flat he'd constructed a display out of camouflage netting and suspended a couple of plastic machine guns from the ceiling. Mike and I didn't talk much, but somehow we got along. In our own ways, we both stood outside of the circle of normality. He moved out at Easter to seek work in Coventry and he left me his bicycle, a stick thin racer with ten gears that he kept in the storage area below the Y. Around the handlebars, he'd wound masking tape; he said that made it harder on the hands. I didn't take it out, not once. I left it there unridden. It's still there today, for all I know. After Mike came Steve, a marine biology student at the university. Steve was tall and skinny, and had even less of a clue about women than I did. Through a friend of a friend he knew Kelly, and when he worked out that I was interested in her, he was like a little boy who'd discovered how babies got made. Constantly, he'd be 57

asking me what my plans were to romance her, and when it became increasingly clear to both of us that such plans â&#x20AC;&#x201C; however complex â&#x20AC;&#x201C; were utterly futile, he started talking about the qualities he had that might put him in better stead. I hated those conversations. It made me feel like we were talking about a piece of meat and that I was betraying her in some sort of way. I didn't have the clarity of thought back then to understand that I was only betraying myself â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that entering into such discussions was not consistent with the sort of person I was (or, at least, the person I thought I wanted to be). A mature student (by about eight years) in the flat above took an interest in me around about then. Penelope was an intelligent, good humoured woman who was nonetheless unhappy with the course she was on. She was training to be a teacher, but her passion for the idea of teaching children wasn't matched by her ability to maintain order in the classroom. Steve told her about my adoration of Kelly (as he told so many people) and she used that as a way of getting close to me. She sat down beside me once on the kitchen windowsill and put her arm around me, and told me that she knew what it was like to have not felt affection from another person for a long, long time. Steve nearly wet himself with excitement. But I felt nothing for Penny. Her hair was long and greasy (she was one of those people who maintain that if you don't wash your hair it'll clean itself eventually) and 58

her skin pale and unhealthy in a way that I couldn't articulate. She spoke in an adenoidal way that made it sound like she permanently had a blocked up noise. I despised myself for not being able to see past these things. Perhaps if I hadn't been in love with somebody else it would have been different, but I doubt it. She quit the course a couple of months before it finished and moved up to live with her mother in Stockport, and she left me with an understanding that when the spark isn't there it just isn't there. Which actually made understanding Kelly a little bit easier. During that year, Cain went down with depression. When I went to Brighton, he went to Exeter, but within two months he'd dropped out of the course and gone back to live with his parents. Cain and I went way back, all the way to the first year in junior school, when I was seven. I'd been his buddy when he'd arrived mid-year in our class and it was my job to show him where his tray was and where to hang his coat. Very quickly, we became firm enemies. When he was eight, Cain fell from a four metre slide and landed on his head on the concrete. The impact cracked his skull open. My friend Mark was with him at the time, and it was down to him to jump on his bike and get help as fast as he could. That night, in hospital, they had to keep talking to Cain to keep him awake; later, he learned that if he'd fallen asleep he would almost certainly have died. He never thanked Mark for saving 59

his life and, years later, when we were sitting in that kitchen in the YMCA, he told me that was one of very many regrets he had. Another one was fighting me once on an afternoon when we were walking back from secondary school. It remains to this day the only physical fight I've ever had. I used to walk home from school on my own back then, or with a friend â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Paul â&#x20AC;&#x201C; who lived just up the road from me (in the opposite direction from Linda Webber). He wasn't all that much of a friend, to be honest; once we'd finished secondary school we fell out of touch immediately. I remember him coming into Pizza Go! a year or so later and having a laugh with his new friends at ordering me around like a servant. But in those days he was reasonable company and he walked in the same direction after school. Paul was what I called a 'floater', a social player able to go between groups and somehow be accepted in all of them. People I kept well clear of he could mix with easily. That afternoon, he took interest in the conversation of the boys up ahead, and Cain was amongst them. Cain said something about my mother, and what's more he said it in front of my brother, who'd walked across the green from the end of our road to greet me. It felt like I had no choice but to fight him. It wasn't like I felt any particularly strong desire to stand up for my mother, but even I knew that there were things you just couldn't let pass without action if you wanted even the slightest scrap of respect from your peers. And this was 60

one of them. To a certain extent, I realised it wasn't even especially important that I win the fight. I just had to demonstrate that a line had been crossed and I was prepared to go all the way in my response. I remember throwing my bag at my brother and telling him to take care of it, then rounding on Cain and trying to remember if you were supposed to hold your thumbs on the inside or the outside of a fighting fist (I knew there was a rule about that, I just couldn't remember what it was). The fight was totally my instigation, and I recognised even in my state of anger that hurting me was not what Cain wanted to do. I made some useless attempts at hitting him and he made a jab with his fist and punched me on the nose. The pain was not so bothersome as the immediate feeling of thickness there that followed, as though I'd just inhaled a nose full of pollen and my membranes suddenly inflated like emergency balloons. I felt blood on the inside of my nostrils, hanging there in drips. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I don't want to fight you, Ian,â&#x20AC;? he said, holding his hand palm out towards me. The other boys were cheering him on, but where earlier their attention had pushed him, he now seemed oblivious to their shouts. I knew that he could beat the shit out of me if he wanted to, so I turned without further word and walked across the green to my brother, poking at the sides of my nose and wondering if it was broken. The next day he came to school with a black eye which I knew full well had 61

absolutely nothing to do with me, but the word was out that we had fought and it was a very prominent black eye; I let gossip do its job at joining up dots and failed to make comment either way. We were enemies for maybe eight years. It wasn't until sixth form college that we became friends, and it wasn't until that first year at university that he told me all those years how he'd both hated me and longed to be like me at the same time. He told me about his childhood daydreams, where he was the White Knight and I the Black Knight, keeper of some maiden captive in the highest tower of my castle. How many times he had slain me. It wasn't like I was all that successful or popular at school, more that I became for him a symbol of the ways in which he failed, because he would have never had the tolerance to show a new kid where to hang his stuff. At junior school, he'd hide my shoes when we were doing sport so I'd have to go home in my plimsolls, or he'd take my shorts out of my bag so I got into trouble for not bringing in my kit. I knew it was him. My mother used to shout at me for not complaining more to the teacher, but when I tried that I got told off for making accusations against Cain that were totally without evidence. At college, when we recounted these stories, the thought that his teachers had actually defended him against me amused him so much he'd break out into this great big squawking laugh he had. At university, he told me that that was at the nub of his problems: it wasn't that he 62

didn't know how to behave himself – he did – it wasn't that he wasn't as bright as I was – he was – and it wasn't that he wasn't able to achieve at the same level academically as I did – in fact, his grades at the end of secondary school were higher than mine; on the outside, he told me, he was able to paint himself up in whatever manner was required of the context, but on the inside he wasn't capable of a single pure or vibrant thought. I understood what he was saying; all the same, I wondered what had led him to believe that I was. At first, though, he blamed his depression on his childhood head injury. He tried to kill himself three times that year – on one occasion, cutting himself with razor blades so savagely he had scars that took years to fade before they weren't the first thing you noticed about his wrists. Twice he tried with sleeping tablets. But that happened later, that happened after that first year in university. Which mattered to me, because during that year – whilst I was living with Steve – Cain came to stay with me for a week, and for some reason I'd thought that the chance to re-live some of our old conversational ways would be just the thing he needed to shake him out of whatever malaise it was that had taken hold of him. It wasn't. Most of that time he just spent sitting at the table in the kitchen and staring at some sort of imaginary spot over my shoulder – I kept finding myself checking the wall behind me to see if there wasn't some sort of hornet crawling on the wall or obscenity 63

written there. And my flatmate Steve made himself absent for most of that week. I became interested in depression at that point. Cain's parents were better off than mine and Cain himself was taller and stronger and better looking than I was. He was intelligent. He was quick-witted. At the same time, he was drawn to maliciousness, to rule breaking, to the deep down cruelty that I saw as the defining characteristic of most of the boys in my school. It was as though it was built into them in some way, and I didn't understand it. So I decided that it was in the tension between the desire to be good and the impulse to be bad – not the most sophisticated of psychological formulations, I know – that the root of his depression had to lie. He was not as he wanted to be, and felt unable to do anything about it. I saw myself in that hypothesis. And I wondered why I wasn't, therefore, depressed. Down below the car decks, I heard nothing. At least, I heard no sex noises. I heard plenty of snoring. I heard a baby crying. At one door, I heard a child asking how long it was until they got to France and a man saying, “Go back to sleep.” And that was it. No-one heard me at their door, no-one saw me listening. I suppose I spent about half an hour down there, creeping around furtively. I went back up to my spot, my corner by the doors to the upper deck and found that a couple had moved in and successfully managed to fall asleep. I went outside and 64

smoked two cigarettes, one straight after the other. It was four o'clock. One hour until the reception desk opened and the phone beside it got activated. Already, I could see the horizon off the port bow, a grey instead of a black, and growing steadily lighter. I repeated my earlier search a couple of times and then I went and sat down in front of the reception desk, and waited the final thirty minutes for it to open. I composed my opening sentences to her mother and father: “Is that Mr Card? It's Ian White. I have some terrible news...” Five o'clock arrived and the receptionist lifted the counter and started turning on the lights. I forced myself to stand up and walk over. The receptionist smiled and said, “Good morning.” “I'd like to report a missing person,” I said, my mouth dry and sticky before even the fifth word was spoken. They put out an announcement for her to come to reception. It made me cringe to hear something connected with me coming out of every speaker on the ship. Fifteen minutes went by and then they repeated it. Through the windows of the port doors I saw the Normandy coast come into distant view, the dawn light painting it in like the final detail of a watercolour. “Where did you say you'd looked?” the receptionist asked me. I went through the details of my search with her again. A few minutes earlier, she'd reassured me that Imogen had probably just fallen asleep somewhere, but now she looked worried. 65

“Ok. I'm going to get someone down here to look with you,” she said. And she picked up the internal phone on her desk and punched in a four digit number. “Roger? It's Karen in reception. I need someone down here to look for a passenger. Right away, please.” And that was the moment that Imogen came down the steps, into the reception area.

“WHERE THE HELL were you?” I asked. “Up on the deck,” she told me. “Outside on the deck? Imogen, I looked everywhere for you out there.” “I fell asleep listening to my music,” she said, as though that were an explanation. “But where were you?” She looked at the receptionist, who had a look that said, My time has been wasted but the outcome is a good one. “I take it this is Imogen?” she said to me, eyebrows raised, a smile at the corner of her lips. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you for your time,” I added. “Didn't you hear the announcements, dear?” she asked. “Announcements?” Imogen looked at me angrily. “You got them to put out announcements?” And she said again, this time to the receptionist, “I was listening to my music.” “I didn't know where you were,” I said, my anger protecting me temporarily from the anxiety her accusation would ordinarily have provoked. I was not accustomed to anger. I'm not sure now that I even was angry then, though I thought I was, just for a few minutes, and it was enough that the look she gave me had a lesser impact. What I think now looking back on that 67

moment was that then – just then – I considered I had a right to be angry, that nobody with knowledge of my circumstances would consider I could be anything else. In fact, I think I probably thought I had an obligation to be angry – just like I did the moment Cain Cassidy insulted my mother – that anybody with knowledge of my circumstances would consider someone who wasn't angry in that moment to be a weak and pitiful person. My audience at that moment numbered precisely two: Imogen and the woman behind the reception desk. If it had just been Imogen by herself I would have felt exactly the same way. I didn't want her to think me weak. When I say I wasn't accustomed to anger, I mean of course that I wasn't accustomed to expressing anger. The emotion itself I knew very well indeed. Expressing it, however, was something I'd learned to be a useless, pointless act with no possible beneficial outcome. In order to be angry, a person needed to feel they had a legitimate, identifiable grievance; the message to me during my childhood was that any grievance I thought I had was non-legitimate, indefensible, and – more to the point – the product of a selfish, ungrateful mind. What I learned was never to reveal that something had caused me to feel unhappy, because any attempt at this would only result in whatever right I thought I had to my anger being demolished in front of me. And then the punishment; and then the days long sulks and the sarcastic, humiliating answers. More generally, I learned 68

over time never to expose myself in any way that might make me potentially vulnerable to shame or humiliation. I never took risks. Perhaps the most damaging aspect of all of this was that I didn't know it was happening. I didn't realise I'd become an avoider of conflict until Terry pointed it out to me one night in his mobile home. And even then I didn't accept it. Every Tuesday evening, he'd make at least one attempt at eliciting some sort of emotional response from me; at best I'd politely disagree with the positions he took, but with the proviso that I respected his right to a different opinion; at worst, I'd find myself swayed by his persuasiveness and agree that I could certainly see how things could be viewed that way. Religion. Sex. Marriage. Friendship. Immigration. Music. Society. House ownership. Pensions. Violence. Alcohol. Cars. There was literally no end to the topics he would use as a vehicle for provocation. I liked Terry immensely, because he took an interest in what I thought about stuff, and in me actually thinking about stuff in the first place. He was the first person to dispute the oft-offered advice I received from various sources through the years: â&#x20AC;&#x153;You think too muchâ&#x20AC;?. But my indecisiveness frustrated the fuck out of him. A few years after Imogen and Cherbourg and the Stena Normady, he told me he'd come close at one point to telling me not to bother coming to see him ever again, because all I ever did was sit on the fence during our conversations. 69

But he was also the first person to lecture me about the the piss-poor knowledge that most people based their opinions on. So, whenever he took an opposing view to mine I would assume he was basing it on a better comprehension of the issue than I had. He was a passionate man – in his fifties at the time – and I didn't want to provoke his anger. I was scared of his anger, as I was scared of the anger of everyone. Once, he took me out for a drive into the country. It was about late spring and he took me up into the wheat fields, parked the car and got out for a short walk. We took a narrow path back along the road we'd just driven along, a track worn into the grass on the verge that was only wide enough for one person, so he walked on the road to my left. He talked the whole time, but I can't remember what he talked about; the point is that he did so to prevent me from looking to my right, just as he'd talked to me in the car when we'd driven along that stretch to prevent me from looking to my left. After about three minutes, he stopped and said to me, “Now stop walking and look behind you.” In the field to the side of the road was an enormous crop circle, except that it wasn't really a circle at all. The design was mathematical in its precision: a number of smaller circles in formation around the main design of two large and two medium sized circles, in complete symmetry on either side. It must have been a hundred metres in length, from top to bottom. It was absolutely amazing. “Now,” he 70

said, “if you go down into that circle, you'll find that all of that corn is still growing. At ninety degrees. The stalks are not broken, Ian. The crop is undamaged.” He'd become interested in crop circles the previous year, but only because he didn't understand them and because everything he'd read about them was – in his words “total bollocks”, by which he meant it was all opinion and no facts. So he'd decided to look at them for himself and to talk to the people who assessed them. Photographs do those things no justice at all: looking at the huge formation in front of me, realising for the first time the fantastic difficulty of doing something as complex as that in the darkness of night, I wondered how anybody could not become obsessed by the things once they had realised how important potentially they were. But Terry's interest was only transitory: once he'd decided on the basis of his own research that some crop circles were hoaxes and that some were not, he reasoned that there was no more he could learn about them and never looked at another one again. That was what he was trying to teach me all those years: that every person has a responsibility to find things out for themselves, that they shouldn't allow themselves to be spoon-fed information that didn't make any sense. Especially if they wanted to contribute in a meaningful manner to conversation; otherwise, they should shut the fuck up. You meet people like Terry and you either dismiss them as nut-cases – because that enables you to avoid 71

questioning your beliefs on the basis of what they say to you – or you realise they're one of a tiny, tiny fraction of a percentage of people: the ones who just don't fit into any category and manage to do so without hurting anybody. People like that are landmarks, when you recognise them for what they are. Naturally, my mother hated him. She didn't understand why a man of his age was interested in a teenager – as I was when I first met him – and she resented that I spent time thinking about what he'd said to me. In her mind, Terry was muscling in on a role that was rightfully hers. Or worse. She told me one day that she thought he was a homosexual man trying to groom me. Terry laughed at her hypothesis and said, “Well, of course she thinks that!” and he then went on to detail to me both the reasons why it was right for her to think that and the reasons why it was wrong. This conversation with my mother about his interest in me was one of the very few mentions of sex (albeit, without actually mentioning the word) that ever happened in our house, and only happened because she was genuinely concerned for my wellbeing. Sex just never got talked about and, once again, I mistook this for normality. In later years, the frank conversations with parents about sex that some of my friends at university would recount completely stunned me. I couldn't believe that that sort of openness was possible within families. It made me think about those highly religious families you sometimes hear about, where the children get lectured 72

routinely about the evils of fornication and the importance of no sex before marriage: but at least those kids had something to kick against. In our house, the S word simply never got mentioned, nor anything that could be remotely associated with it. It wasn't that we were told any rules about it that we were expected to follow, but somehow the rules got communicated anyway, like the smoke from a fire you can't locate. A changing of TV channels here; a disapproval of a song's lyrics there. Sex was taboo. Sex was dirty. Sex was what you did to have children, and nothing more. The joys of life lay elsewhere. If you'd asked me back then, I doubt that I'd have been able to imagine a more embarrassing or potentially humiliating scenario than having to have a conversation with my parents about sex. I didn't take risks with that sort of thing. Just like I didn't take risks with anger. I wasn't accustomed to anger. Almost instantly, my anger towards Imogen was gone. Of course, the relief remained. Everything could go back to normal now. I was no longer the guy who'd let his ex-girlfriend fall over the side of a cross-channel ferry. Because, when it had become clear that there was to be no response to the first of the announcements over the speakers, that had become my imminent and inevitable reality. I'd even started wondering if the newspapers might report it and, if so, how. Would the angle be safety at sea (â&#x20AC;?...a 73

spokesperson for the line today said they were were looking at safety policy in the light of this tragic incident and that lessons would be learned...”)? Would the angle be tragic misadventure? Would the angle be the idiocy of youth? Would the angle be the idiocy of me? I'd even started to wonder if my account of what had happened would be believed. Would the police run a criminal investigation? Would I be interrogated? Would I be asked, “But why, Monsieur White [I'd already decided it would be a French-led operation and it would be an inspector with a moustache who'd be questioning me], did you wait so long before reporting her missing? You lose your girlfriend on a boat and think her in danger, then you report it straight away, non?” At which point, I'd correct him by saying, “Ex girlfriend,” and he would fold his arms and sit back and say, “Oui. As you say, Monsieur White, your... “ex”. That must have been a very painful moment, when she finished with you. You must have been very upset, non? Angry, perhaps? Revengeful?” And so on. In which case, would the papers run with a photograph of Imogen on the front page next to the headline, Did she fall or was she pushed? Would there be a smaller picture of me underneath it – something that made me look suitably thuggish (my passport picture would do the trick) – with a caption such as: White “Looked everywhere,” the quotation marks like eyebrows raised in disbelief, a sneer in punctuation? 74

Or: White – Dumped three days earlier? Imogen had ended it with me the day after my birthday, when she'd discovered I was still a virgin. We'd been walking back from town and it had been different. We weren't holding hands any more. We weren't saying all that much to each other. We'd booked our place on the crossing just four hours earlier, and it had seemed at the time like we were planning some sort of impromptu honeymoon. There was no event or comment that seemed to mark any sort of turning point after the tickets were in our hands; there was no moment that I could look upon in retrospect as the instant where suddenly the chemistry dissolved. We just faded. We ran out of things to talk about. In four hours we went from in love to awkward, and the sense that the conversation I was making somehow irritated her. “Can I ask you something?” she'd said as we neared my house. “Have you actually had sex yet?” I didn't even contemplate lying, because I knew I didn't know enough to be able to pull it off. Even if I had known, I was still rubbish at lying. I tried to turn the situation into a comedy moment and told her the closest I'd come to sex so far was to put a condom on a banana. She didn't laugh. I hate it when jokes like that fail, because then you never get to explain the context. She could at least have asked me what the hell I was talking about or looked at me oddly. To this day she probably thinks I once sheathed a banana purely for the hell of it, or 75

perhaps so I could display proudly an open packet in my waste paper bin. I wonder why it is we try to lighten embarrassing moments with jokes that just end up making us even more self-conscious. It seems to me like it's some sort of human design flaw. “I take it you have.” I said. She nodded. We walked past my house and sat down in a brick circle at the top of my road which was meant as a place for kids to play in. My brother once tried to jump the wall there – it was only about a foot-and-a-half high – mistimed his take-off and smashed his shin so badly you could see the white of his bone. She lit a cigarette and told me that her first time was with a Swiss guy in a caravan two years previously. I tried to sound interested in the details and not to get too insecure over things like 'first time' and 'two years ago'. The conversation now had that this is academic quality to it. It was a topic I no longer belonged to. That morning, I'd tapped on my bedroom door at nine o'clock and she'd called to me to come in. I'd squatted at the side of the bed so our faces were level and she'd kissed me good morning whilst her head was still on the pillow. She'd worn a silk, sleeveless, burgundy tank to bed and matching shorts, and when she'd sat up and leaned forward to open the curtains the loose top had ridden forward, giving me a brief view of the underside of her breasts beneath it. She was warm and soft and still smelled of perfume. How things could change in a day. Then again, 76

perhaps it wasn't really so surprising. As I sat on the brick wall beside her and listened to her tales of sexual encounter (only the details of the guys, how she had met them and where they had done it – no information about the actual acts themselves) I was taken back to that moment in the nightclub when the blonde woman had run her hand up and down my stomach and chest and the introspection which had followed: there was nothing wrong with how I looked, it was what I said (or maybe didn't say) that was the problem. It was me – my personality – that prevented things from happening. With Imogen, it had just taken a little longer than normal – and it wasn't really a fair comparison anyway. There had been other people around us in all our time together up until our day in town, and the circumstances had been unusual, and there had been the letters. But when it came down to just me and her and a few hours alone together, the outcome was just the same as it had always been. I was incapable of effective romantic interaction. I was not a male that females wanted. I felt sad, but not overwhelmingly so. I never do in the moment that things like that happen. I feel awkward and self conscious, and my main priority becomes to get the moment over and done with as quickly as possible whilst retaining as much of my dignity as I can. The sadness can come later. The only problem in this case was that later was a long way away. Imogen was staying at my parents' house for the next few days and, 77

furthermore, we'd just booked a day trip to France together. “Do you still want to do the Cherbourg thing?” I asked her. “Of course,” she said, without hesitation. “We'll go as friends. It'll be a laugh.” And that declaration of being 'friends', incidentally, was the official confirmation that the romance was over. I should have called the trip off there and then, and to hell with any annoyance it caused. After all, break-ups nearly always happen mid-something. But I thought that would make me look weak, unable to deal with a relationship as friends, only interested in her company for the promise of – well – sex. And I didn't want to let her down. So I put on my best smile and said, just as earnestly as I knew how, “It will.” Imogen was alive. I no longer had to inform Mr and Mrs Card that their daughter had been lost at sea and face the inevitable questions as to what the hell I'd been doing whilst she'd slipped below the waves. Actions influenced by emotion – sadness, embarrassment, insecurity – always seem so straight forward and understandable except for when their consequences are dire; then they become inexplicable, inexcusable. I no longer had to live with the thought that a man and his wife would forever hate me for destroying their only daughter. And I was no longer a news story waiting to be told or the subject of a 78

murder enquiry. After I'd established that Imogen had spent the night on a crew-only part of the deck, we spoke very little about the incident. There didn't seem to be any point to further talk. Now that the ordeal was over, I just wanted to get the day over with and get back home as soon as possible. Imogen saw that I was exhausted and apologised, and appeared to mean it. I supposed she'd climbed over the chain on one of the sets of steps leading up from the sun deck. I supposed also that this story could have been a lie and she'd actually spent the night with someone in a cabin after all. I dismissed that possibility almost as soon as it entered my mind and felt guilty for thinking it. In any case, the only thing that really mattered was that she was here again. Now all I had to do was make sure she never left my sight for the rest of the day and get her back to the boat on time. We had no real plans for our few hours in Cherbourg. It had been intended as a lovers' day out. Now, it felt like hours to fill. After we disembarked, we walked into the city centre, taking a random course that involved coffee and cigarettes at the first cafĂŠ we came across. I finished my packet of Benson and Hedges there and promptly bought a full pack of 20 Marlboro. I was a chain smoker now and I didn't resent that fact. Cigarettes had been my only companion through the night, and they had helped. The sky was clear and pale blue when we got off the 79

ship, and as the sun rose it grew hotter by the minute. By nine o'clock, we'd stripped down to our T-shirts. I felt drained. The departure of fear and its associated adrenalin had left me feeling sleepy and thick-headed. We found a patch of grass in a park and lay down. She suggested we stay awhile and doze there. “How do I know you won't go off on walkabout once I'm unconscious?” I asked her, and she laughed. We were talking now about the night as though it were a funny anecdote. It was a coping strategy we'd both bought into. It meant I didn't have to be angry any more and that she didn't have to be too guilty. “I won't. I promise. I'm tired too.” So we lay down together on our patch of grass, and it was just like being in our corner of the carpet by the deck doors. The traffic noise and the sound of passing conversation lulled me. Imogen lay on her back. We looked at each other for a moment and I wondered if it would be appropriate to kiss her. She was there. She was there, right next to me; her whole body stretched out on the green grass: her legs alongside my legs, her arm alongside my arm. She looked so beautiful in the sun. Hypnagogia brought about its heaviness upon my eyes. I decided, in that boldness of nearly sleep that I would wake her with a kiss on her forehead and she would probably reach up and put her hand around the back of my neck so that she could pull me down to her lips. And then I was asleep. 80

MY EARLIEST MEMORY is of watching my first ever episode of Thunderbirds, aged about three-and-a-half and part-way through someone's birthday party, and wondering to myself where the hell this amazing thing had been all my life. I didn't put it to myself in quite those words. But, literally, I remember that feeling: I remember watching Thunderbird 2 flying around a snowcovered mountain peak on its way to rescue somebody and thinking whatever the three year equivalent was of â&#x20AC;&#x153;This is amazing! Why have I never seen this before?!â&#x20AC;? Instantly, Thunderbirds became my favourite thing in the whole world. A year or so later, it got replaced by Batman. Later, it would get replaced by things like Spider-Man and Doctor Who and Star Trek. All these science fiction things, plus the purchase of a ZX Spectrum on my twelfth birthday, were the factors that pushed me into computing. Computers were the future and I wanted to be part of that just as soon as I possibly could. All these things, also, were the factors that pushed me into writing. I won't say I wrote especially insightful stories as a child, but the desire to express things in written words became an increasingly important coping strategy for my growing inability to express them in spoken ones. 81

So I became a geek. A thoughtful geek. I'm not saying geeks aren't thoughtful, but it seemed to me that a key quality to geeks was their interest in technology for its own sake, and this wasn't a category I saw myself as fitting into. Where geeks might have analysed episodes of Star Trek for continuity errors and discussed the accuracy of the sci-fi plot devices used, I was in love with the way that Kirk and Spock were both alone in their own ways, and found meaning in duty and logic and exploration. It hadn't escaped my attention that none of the Tracey brothers had girlfriends, yet still their lives had purpose. Peter Parker chose his responsibility to others over his love for Gwen Stacy. The Doctor had companions, but none of them ever stayed. I rather fancied I saw myself in their lonely ways, or how I imagined I might become. Perhaps. I say that now, but does a child really understand something like that? When I look back, I see that; I feel myself warming to that aspect of those characters. The words we have determine the thoughts that we form: 'loner' was a word I remember reading and attaching myself to. But the haze of reminiscence filters out anything that doesn't fit the mindset we're in at the time when we look back. Perhaps I liked those things in no way different than anybody else; perhaps I reinvented my liking of them to fit what I thought I was becoming. I like geeks. Kevin was a geek. Kevin foresaw the importance of the IBM PC and sold his sparkling Amiga 82

for a second-hand PC with four colour graphics so he could learn how to use one. I thought it an act of utter lunacy at the time. A couple of years after Imogen and the Stena Normandy, he told me that CD-ROMs were a flash in the pan and the Internet was the future, and I laughed at the very idea. He's now an extremely wellpaid IT consultant. I'm not, and I guess there's the why. My first experience of a computer was a Sinclair ZX81 owned by the father of a friend who lived at the end of my road. He'd taken the whole thing out of its plastic case and stuck it into a wooden box with a proper keyboard on top. My only interest in it was to write stories on it, I liked the way I could change something I'd written without having to put a line through it or use Tippex. But it was just the BASIC editor that I was typing this stuff into on that wet afternoon in Richard Meer's living room; a paragraph was all it could handle before it started beeping at me in protest and refusing to take any more. There was no printer, and to save work you had to connect the thing to a cassette recorder. In fact, I couldn't save it anyway: the editor had no concept of what I was writing and pressing the return key just got me the message 'Nonsense in BASIC' and my story disappeared from the black and white screen with a sort of hiss from the TV loudspeaker that sounded like it had been vapourised. Computers give you control. If they don't do what you want them to do, it's just because you're not doing it 83

properly. I learned to program my Spectrum, but never at the level of machine code, which was how all the games got written at the time. Machine code is not much higher than the level of ones and zeros; this was far more than I've ever been able to hold in my head at any one time. I wasn't really interested in writing games anyway. I learned how to write these little interactive stories that used to be called 'text adventures'. There were no images to those games, only words. And it would go along the lines of: You are in a dark room. You can just about see a table. > Examine table It's too dark to examine the table. > Turn on lights You press the light switch. Nothing happens. The power must be off. > Inventory You are carrying: a pocket torch (unlit). > Turn on torch You turn on the pocket torch. > Examine table There is nothing on the table to see, but you notice it has a drawer. > Open drawer The drawer is locked.

And so on, and so on. The key to the drawer would be in the pocket of a jacket hanging on a hook in the shed, which would be secured by a padlock that had to be smashed using a hammer from the garage. You kept at it; you solved the problems. My text adventures tried to be altogether much more romantic affairs: You are in the dining room. Three of the tables are occupied by guests. You hear laughter and chatter. A businessman nearby is with a pretty blonde who is smoking a cigarette. She looks happy. He looks nervous. She has her left hand over his right hand. He plays with the ring on the fourth finger on of his left hand with his thumb. > Sit down You sit at the nearest table and pick up the menu. The waitress comes over. She looks anxious. > Examine menu The special of the day is pasta in a garlic sauce. That looks good. > Order special “Good choice, sir,” the waitress says. She adds, in a whisper, “You're the reporter, aren't you? It was me that sent you the note. Meet me at the gate at nine thirty, and make sure you bring a torch.” > Inventory You are carrying: a pocket torch (unlit). 85

Most of my attempts at writing these things were bits and pieces that went nowhere. In the end, I managed to write a complete adventure, using routines that Kevin had written to give the characters in the game more intelligence. The plan was to market it during a year off between college and university. But then I failed to get the exam grades I needed to go to university and had to go back and repeat my final year. I'd spent too much time writing text adventures and not enough time studying: a fact which my mother was keen to point out to me repeatedly. By the time that year was over, the scene for Spectrum text adventures was pretty much dead. Technology lasted for longer, back then. You had more time to get used to it. In no way did I imagine during my teens that I'd still be using a ZX Spectrum in ten years' time, but I never thought it possible that whole markets could just die like that. Then again, we never imagine that anything from our childhood will end. We just assume â&#x20AC;&#x201C; despite all logic â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that these things will somehow endure. It's not something we think to ourselves, it's something we just feel; like knowing that the Cold War will never end or Dallas will always be on for half of the Saturday evenings of the year. We do see things ending around us, but they don't all end at once. Then there comes that point, somewhere in our third decade, when we feel so alone for whatever reason and 86

we look back and see all the things that have gone and think, My God. I suppose that's when the whole nostalgia thing starts. It's not that the things from whatever period it is we long for were qualitatively any better than the things we have when we start to long for them, it's the feeling of security that they were attached to that we miss, the feeling that things would somehow endure. But they don't. Nothing endures, not even love. And the sooner we understand that, the better. When I woke up, Imogen was sitting up and smoking a cigarette. I looked at her back for a while and wished that I could have been the one to have woken up first, so that I could have watched her sleeping for a while and maybe done that kiss to the forehead thing (except I knew I wouldn't have). The sun was intense and my face felt sore from the exposure. I looked at my watch: it was coming up for eleven. The ship left at four, boarded at three thirty. We had four-and-a-half hours. She heard the movement, looked down at me. “Hey,” she said. “Hey,” I replied. Her head was blocking the sun. It made the edges of her hair glow yellow. “You went out like a light.” “I was exhausted,” I replied. The reason hung in the air in a way I didn't want it to. “Did you sleep much yourself?” “A bit. We should get our shopping done.” 87

We had orders from various friends and family for miscellaneous bits and pieces. My mother wanted a bottle of red wine and some of that French mustard that comes in a drinking glass instead of a jar. Terry wanted a carton of Marlboro 100s. I'd decided to buy myself a box of those small green bottles of cheap beer, but that was mostly because it was what I thought guys did when they went to France (back then, you'd hear tales of car boots being stacked so full of the stuff their exhaust pipes would almost scrape the road as they drove off) and in no way actually reflected any liking of it on my part. In fact, it was precisely with this sort of shopping in mind that the one day trip to Cherbourg had been invented. And there was only one destination in the city that mattered so far as that agenda was concerned: the big hypermarket in the centre of town: Continent. Continent was enormous by the standards of the time, a huge supermarket fronted by a covered arcade of buffet restaurants and shoe shops and bakers. From the outside, it was a great big block of concrete and pebble dash, a monstrous, space age cardboard box that looked like a beige Borg cube that had somehow gotten sunken into the ground halfway. In previous French camping holidays, we used to stop there en route to the ferry, using our remaining francs to buy up chocolate and baguettes and the camembert that would sit in the fridge uneaten for weeks, leading to the smell in the kitchen I came to associate with September. Continent had been 88

the full stop at the end of the holidays. The walk there plus the shopping itself soaked up the time until we wanted to eat. We looked at the restaurants, but the menus were pricey for what they offered and I don't think either of us especially fancied the idea of sitting on opposite sides of a table for half an hour. Restaurants seem to expect a certain quality of social interaction: you either fake it if you're not in the mood and then hate that restaurant forever or you sit in an awkward silence and feel the disapproval of the fittings. It was still sunny outside, so we decided to eat out there. We bought filled croissants from one of the bakeries and a brioche to share between us, plus a couple of cans of coke. Initially, I'd reached for the plastic bottles, but Imogen told me we could use a can once it was empty as an ashtray. We went outside. To the left of the main entrance as you exited, there was a harbour for fishing boats. We sat there on the concrete, facing the water, a single boat moored in front us, our backs to a large yellow garage door. “We've got an hour an a half,” I said. “Then we should head back to the boat.” “Plenty of time,” she replied. I wondered what plans she had with which to fill it. It was hardly the most romantic of locations, but I was all of a sudden taken with the desire to spend those ninety minutes kissing her. I wanted to hold hands with her again and feel her fingers 89

locked in mine. She was wearing a t-shirt and her arms were red from the sun. I wanted to feel the heat of her skin there against my palm. And I wished she'd been wearing shorts. I thought to myself, This is the last chance you'll have to save this. But I didn't know what to do. I hoped she might make a first move again, like she had at the bar in Winchester. But she didn't. She sat and lit a cigarette and looked beyond the fishing boat as though she were deep in thought. I smoked one of mine and tried to look more deep in thought than she was. We'd been there about ten minutes when a man wondered over. He looked about twenty. He seemed scruffy to me, with messy hair and stubble. He wore a light blue t-shirt that looked like it was being worn for at least the second day in a row. He asked us for a light. I didn't understand the words, but the gesture was universal. “Êtes-vous ensemble?” he asked, after he had taken his first inhale. “What did he say?” Imogen said to me. I looked at the man and shrugged. “Nous sommes anglais,” I told him. “Vous ne parlez pas Français?” he asked. “Un peu,” I replied, holding up my hand and showing him my thumb and forefinger just an inch apart. “Un petit peu. “You are... toogether?” he said slowly. 90

“Oui,” I said. “Together. Oui.” “Not together,” said Imogen, quickly. I looked at her. “But we are together,” I said. “Not that way.” “Would you like to explain that to him?” She looked up at the man and said, “Not together. Non.” “You'd prefer he thought we were strangers?” I asked her. “He knows we're not strangers,” she replied. The man took another drag on his cigarette and then pointed to himself and said, looking at Imogen, “Luc.” “Imogen,” she replied, straight away. “Ian,” I said. His eyes flicked briefly in my direction. “Bonjour Ian,” he said. He looked back at her. “Enchanté, Imojen.” “What did he say?” she asked me. “He said he's pleased to meet you.” “Plees to meet you?” Luc said, copying my words. “Pleased to meet you too,” Imogen told him. Luc smiled. “Vous êtes en vacances?” he asked, looking briefly at me again. “Oui,” I replied, and added, “Nous... allons à l'Angleterre... d'aujourd'hui.” “Aujourd'hui?” he said. “Tooday?” “Oui.” 91

“What did he say?” Imogen asked. “He asked if we were on holiday,” I told her. “I said we go back today.” “A quelle heure?” he asked, no longer looking in my direction when he spoke to me. “Deux heures et demie,” I said, playing it safe. He looked dismayed. “Vous allez dans une heure?” I didn't understand that. “Je ne comprends pas.” Luc held up his index finger. “One... uh... hower?” “What?” asked Imogen. “He wanted to know when we leave,” I told her. “I said two-thirty.” “The ship doesn't leave until four.” “But we have to be on it by three-thirty.” She looked vaguely in the direction of the port. “It's only twenty minutes walk away. Ask him if he'll keep us company.” “Qu'est-ce qu'elle a dit?” Luc asked me. “Elle a dit,” I began, trying to reword the request so I could translate it, “Allez-vous... uh... rester... avec nous?” He smiled at my formality and pointed at himself. “Tu!” he declared and wagged a finger at me. “Vous – non.” “Pardon,” I said. “Bien sûr, je vais rester.” he said. “What did he say?” Imogen asked. “I think he said he'll stay,” I replied. Luc squatted between and facing us, so that together 92

we formed a little triangle. He crushed out his cigarette on the concrete, leaving a black smudge that could have been another oil stain. Looking at the butt, he said, “Very bad” and shook his head. “Very good,” Imogen said and offered him her open packet. “Merci,” he said and took one. She held out her lighter and he leaned forward onto his knees to take the flame, as though he was bowing before her. “Ask him where he's from,” she told me. “I don't know how to say that,” I said. So she looked at him and asked him, “Where do you come from?” He looked at me, confused. “Où habitez-vous?” I said, realising a rewording made a more-or-less translation simple. “I thought you said you didn't know how to say it.” “I worked it out.” “Ici,” he told her. “À Cherbourg.” “Does he have a job?” He looked at me, expectantly. “Um...” I said. “...Travaillez?” “Moi? Non,” Luc said. To Imogen, he added, “Very... uh... very very bad.” “You're not 'bad',” she said, smiling. “We don't actually know that,” I muttered. “No... uh... 'job'? La France.” “Tell him it's like that in England too.” 93

“La même... en Angleterre,” I said. “Oui,” Luc said and shook his head again. “Et le monde. Quel age as tu?” “He asked-” “I understand,” she said. “Diss... neuf,” she told him, holding up all ten of her fingers in the air, splayed out like fans, and then repeating the movement with her right thumb tucked in. A lie, incidentally. “Ah,” he said and smiled at her. Then he pointed to himself and said, “Vingt-deux.” “Twenty-two,” she said. She pointed at herself and told him, “Nineteen,” then back at Luc to say, “Twentytwo.” “Twenty too,” he repeated. He pointed at the wrist bands she wore. There were maybe ten or fifteen of them, thin loops of leather and multi-coloured thread. “Puis-je voir?” he said. She looked at me. I shrugged. I didn't know what he had said. So he circled his right index finger around his left wrist, pointing with his eyes at her bands and said, “I... look?” Another second of uncertainty, and then she looked at the bands and worked it out. “Of course!” she said. “Oui oui.” She held out her hand and started to move toward him, but he got up and then crouched back down beside her. And I realised this had been his strategy for achieving exactly that. He held her wrist in his hands and appeared to 94

examine each one individually. “Beautiful,” he said. “Thank you,” she replied. “Merci.” Presently, They started to kiss. Presently, I got up and walked over to one of the bollards at the edge of the quay. I suppose the dignified thing to have done would have been to go somewhere else and leave them to it, but I wasn't going anywhere. In that moment, I was Kirk – or maybe Spock – attending to my duty, which was to get Imogen Card back onto the ship before it left. This time, my feelings would not matter and I would do the right thing. I turned my back on them whilst they made out and waited for three o'clock to come.

AN HOUR AND forty-five minutes later, we left the quayside. We were the last to board the boat. They had lingered over their farewell. They'd stood and hugged for several minutes as the margin of error ticked by. When finally they parted, it was like they were peeling away from each other, their hands the last bit of touch to end, and even then their fingers resisted. It was like there was a glue between them, or as though they had each of them dissolved minutely into the other. All the same, I noticed there was no attempt to exchange contact details. At one point, they had lain down together, fully stretched out on the concrete. She'd hooked her right leg over his and he'd pushed his left knee between hers. In that position, they'd looked at each other for several minutes, their faces just a few inches apart, punctuating this stretch of time with tiny in-out kisses like a pigeon pecking at crumbs. They said nothing, nothing at all. It was almost beautiful. Actually, it was beautiful; I just wasn't in a place to appreciate it. We were late. We walked at a hurried pace, the focus on urgency relieving any attempt at conversation. She didn't look back at Luc, but I did. I saw him sitting back down in the spot he'd occupied with her, Continent huge behind him, and I thought about being in the grounds of 96

Winchester Cathedral. A movement of his hand betrayed that he was smoking. So, he'd had a cigarette lighter on him all along. Once we were on the Stena Normandy, we made our way to the Night Club and managed to get a table there. Not far away from us, the same group of lads that I'd spoken to the previous evening were sitting with their feet resting on stacked up boxes of beer. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Found her, then?â&#x20AC;? one of them shouted across at me. I didn't want to shout back and neither did I want to move any closer, so I nodded and gave the thumbs up. A couple of them raised small green bottles in reply. We sat in silence, drinking our own beers in tiny sips to make them last, to make it look like we had something important to do. I thought about home, and how this would soon all be over. I wondered how much of all of this I would tell people. Kevin would probably think it funny in a non-empathetic way, but I supposed I'd tell him most of it. Then there was Jack, my best friend back in Brighton. And my house mates. My house mates would get a highly censored version, but Jack deserved to hear the whole tale. He'd join all the dots for me with my past failures with women (and his own) and that would make us laugh. We had a private joke that God had something against the two of us. As I thought about that, a smile started to creep across my face. I smile a lot at my own jokes in my head or situations I think of that I 97

find funny. I used to say when people would ask me what I was smiling about, “Oh I was just imagining how...” and then try to explain the humour I perceived. That never works, and it ought to be a rule someone teaches you. Private smiles are best kept private. “What are you smiling at?” said Imogen. “Oh, nothing,” I replied. We'd been sailing about half an hour when a guy with a suit jacket and a shirt two buttons undone came over to us and said, “Hi.” “Hello,” Imogen said to him in reply. “Did I see you in here on the way out last night?” “Possibly.” “I thought I did. I noticed you.” I realised he meant, You stood out. “We were just in Cherbourg for the day,” she told him. “I guessed as much,” he said, looking meaningfully at my small box of small beers. I found myself wishing it was a bigger box. Or that there were more of them. “I'm Imogen, by the way,” Imogen said. “Oh yes.” He feigned embarrassment. “Paul.” “This is Ian,” she added. “Pleased to meet you, Ian,” he said and extended a hand. It almost felt like there was something extra unsaid. Something like, I've heard so much about you. It might have been my imagination, but there was 98

something about the minute pause between the mention of my name and the offering of his handshake. It was like he'd had to edit. And he hadn't said, Pleased to meet you, Imogen. I took his hand and shook it. “Pleased to meet you, Paul,” I said. “I work on the ship,” he commented, as if we might have suspected this. “What do you do?” Imogen asked. “This and that,” he replied. “I'm off duty now.” “Nice.” “Not really,” he said. “After all, I'm still on a boat in the middle of the Channel. Are you guys going to sleep here?” “It's either that or the reclining seat lounge,” Imogen told him, “and I'd rather die than have to go in there.” “I know what you mean,” he said. “That's too bad. These chairs aren't very comfortable.” And then he paused, as though an incredible idea had just occurred to him. “You know... there's a spare bed in my cabin, if you'd like to use it. I'm sure you'd be more comfortable there.” He'd been looking at Imogen whilst he said this. Now he looked at me and added, “Only room for one, mind. Sorry.” “That's okay,” I said. And meant it. Imogen looked at me. “Would you mind?” she said. What could I say? Was there any dignity left to defend? And I'm going to be honest here: I wanted her to 99

go. I wanted her to be away from me so that I could be by myself, guard my beer, think, sleep, be. If I'd said, “yes,” it would have given rise to confrontation, conflict, maybe anger. And I didn't do anger well. Not then. “I don't mind at all,” I said. So she went. A fabricated introduction? A planned pretence? Perhaps. Perhaps, then, she hadn't been up on the private deck during the previous night after all; perhaps she'd spent the trip with Paul doing things that couldn't be heard by an eavesdropper on the other side of the door. Well. For all I know, there were crew only cabins up on the private deck – perhaps she had started up out there and that was where she'd met him – where you could make as much sexual noise as you fancied. Or perhaps she had been telling the truth, and wondering up to a complete stranger in a bar and asking them if they'd like to come and sleep in your room really was a bona fide tactic worth a shot. I didn't care, either way. It didn't matter. One of the lads saw her leaving with Paul and shouted to me, “Where's she off to now, then?” I was part of their story, now, a walk-on role in their adventure. I wondered how I'd be described when they retold it. Do you remember that dipstick who kept on losing his bird? I thought some more about the theory extensions Jack and I would create together in my own retelling. I thought about that because there and then I was an 100

outcast, a non-member of the group to which those lads and so many like them belonged. Jack was a fellow outcast. We could stand at the periphery by ourselves and laugh about it. Society. 'Normality'. And here was society, right here in this boat, sailing back to the UK, laden with beer that could have just been sold in English shops, except that that would make the ritual less fun. Normality was rituals that everyone had somehow agreed on, more or less. But, here and there, were people who didn't agree and had no particular inclination to do so. Jack was one of them. I was one of them. But why? What was different between me and those guys? Why was I sitting by myself and not with a group like them? I never liked football. Perhaps I should have mentioned that earlier. I was born in July, which meant that I was only just four by the time I started school. A whole year younger, almost, than the oldest in my class, equating to nearly 25 per cent less life or â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to put it another way â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 25 per cent less physical development. And my father didn't like football either, which meant there was no-one around to indoctrinate me. I realised, long before I got to university, that football was like a passport for most men. It enabled them to get into conversations with other men, it enabled them to overcome social anxiety. And then it brainwashed them, bit by bit, until lager and football shirts and shouting and meaningless conversation became the norm for every interpersonal context. The normal rituals that everyone 101

had somehow agreed on. But it was more than that also. Football was about competition. Football was about winning. You weren't a proper football fan, after all, if you didn't have a favourite team; it was one of the first questions you'd get asked if ever you tried to fumble your way into a football conversation with someone (a tactic which failed for me as many times as I tried to use it). Football was about beating the other side and just that one word – 'beating' – contained the essence of the appeal, as I saw it. Victorious fans wouldn't emerge from the stadium chanting, “We won,” they'd come out chanting the score and if there were any fans of the opposing team around, they'd do so whilst they pointed at them. They would say, “We hammered them,” or “We smashed them.” Destroyed them. Wiped the floor with them. Slaughtered them. Killed them. Murdered them. That was what it was all about: the chance to defeat someone; and the more brutal the defeat, the better. There was the essence of man, wrapped up in a package of coloured scarves and pretty patches of grass. A 'national pastime'. Male aggression made acceptable. I wanted no part of it. And yet, I was male, just the same. I was male enough to want Imogen. But I wasn't the sort of male that she wanted in return. I knew her well enough to know that the boys with their beers would have held no interest for her either. She liked people she knew nothing about: Luc, Paul; the guy at the camp site washing in his shorts. The letters, the mixtapes; these 102

were just the projection of what she had wanted me to be in the absence of actual detail; a fairytale lover to carry around in her head, a role-played romance that dissolved like sugar the moment we were actually in each other's company. In the nightclub of the Stena Normady, I sat back with my feet on Imogen's empty chair and closed my eyes, and let the sounds that normality made enter into me. My skin was sore from sunburn. I felt open, empty, filled, raw.

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Epilogue

THERE ARE NO tidy endings in life, but we can try to make them as neat as possible. A couple of weeks or so after Kevin took that picture of me down at the docks – the one with the orange t-shirt – the two of us went up to Sheffield to see Imogen. It was the last week of the summer break and he wanted to go somewhere camping for a couple of days before the new academic year began – as we'd done for the previous two years. He asked me to suggest a destination. I wanted to see Imogen again, but not because I was still in love with her. Our ending seemed ripped off at the bottom of the page to me, frayed and incomplete. We'd parted in tension and I wanted something better. Kevin always ended up hating my choice of destination, but he always ended up asking me for one, all the same. This time, we were just setting out to go home when his car stalled on Imogen's parents' driveway. It turned out his cam belt had gone and it cost him a packet to get it repaired, but it would have been so much worse if we'd actually been moving at the time. On the way home, he commented that these trips always ended up costing him money somehow. The delay cost us an extra day and we set up the tent in her back garden to sleep there overnight. The car was fixed by 5pm, but Kevin didn't want to drive back home 104

that late. My mother went spare on the phone because my driving test had been scheduled for two days after we were meant originally to get back and she was convinced I'd fail in the absence of a single additional lesson. I'd only started taking lessons four weeks earlier and my instructor had told me he had a hunch I'd pass quickly, a statement he quickly rescinded on once he'd arranged the date for the test and actually observed for himself just how anti-intuitive I found being in control of a vehicle to be. But I passed all the same. As he drove me home from the test centre, he told me he'd been wrong about me. Years later, when I ran into him, he said he'd known from the start that I was going to be his best student. Imogen had agreed immediately to me coming up when I spoke to her on the phone. When we got there, the afternoon before Kevin's cam belt failed, we hugged each other hello. We didn't talk about Cherbourg or the Stena Normandy or love letters or mix tapes. We talked about music and about futures, and we drank a couple of beers and smoked a high quantity of cigarettes. â&#x20AC;&#x153;You won't give them up now,â&#x20AC;? she told me. And, so far, she's been proven right. On the day that we finally did leave, we got up early to go home. She came out to see us off in her dressing gown. We kissed cheeks. There was an east wind blowing in my face, and I said goodbye to Imogen Card.

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