Now We Are Five

Oxford Times Sunday morning, 5 am.

The pasty morning sun was coming up over Magdalen Bridge. Great Tom was just finishing its chime, awakening a dozen more distant sluggards. Oxford’s own dawn chorus was vainly attempting to rouse the sleeping city. A tall, fair-haired young man in his early twenties leant forward over the stone parapet and stared down at the river below. An unseasonably stiff breeze, all that remained of the night’s storms, ruffled the grey-black surface, sending gently pulsating concentric circles of water from the middle of the shallow channel to the banks of the Cherwell and away out of sight under the central span of the bridge.

He stood immobile, fixed in thought, the collar of his long black overcoat turned up to ward off the morning chill, his black-tie dangling loose in the wind, beneath his crumpled dress-shirt. A twothirds empty champagne bottle teetered precariously on the mossy stone next to him.

‘Bugger, bugger, bugger…’ He shivered, less to dispel the effects of the cold than in an attempt to cast off some unwelcome memory.

His arm suddenly shot out at right-angles, sending the bottle spinning down into the river, spewing out the frothing remains of the previous night’s revelry, a dying comet, which fizzled out as it collided with the chilled waters.

An oddly ancient-looking white and orange milk-float whirred past on its way back to its base on the eastern outskirts of the city, its day already ended, before that of the good citizens of Oxford had even begun. Its contents were now distributed in twos and threes around the centre of the city, cold, white, glass sentinels, dripping with condensation, standing stiffly guard outside porter’s lodges and in the doorways of the small shops eking out their cautiously optimistic existence along the High, lined up too on the steps of the drab 103