The blue tinted glasses appeared the winter she turned yellow.

Not all at once. The yellowing happened slowly. Her skin first, then her eyes, a colour that didn’t belong to her. She could cover her skin with foundation, thicker layers as the weeks went on. Her eyes were different. The glasses were her idea. Dark blue, the kind that look more like a fashion choice than a cover. She wore them everywhere after that, indoors and out, winter and summer, her eyes hidden behind the tint.

That first winter, a drunk outside Chesterfield market had called her out for it. Sunglasses in December. He said it twice and laughed. My mum walked away without answering him. She told me about it that evening, and I couldn’t find the words either.

She had been going to London every three months since I was thirteen. The Royal Free, Hampstead. A bag packed by the front door, my dad driving her down. They’d stay with my brothers. I’d go to my godmother’s, or my cousin’s. She’d come back quieter, not better. The drugs they gave her were trying to manage what the other drugs had done. She’d been on the happy pills since before I was born. That’s what they called them. Happy pills. What they called her was depressed. What the pills had done was poison her. Slowly, by degrees, her liver working to clear something it couldn’t clear. By the time I was thirteen, it was a medical fact. By the blue glasses, it was everything else.

Those visits to London were the rhythm we had learned to live inside. Three months, three or four days at the Royal Free, back to Chesterfield, then three months again. They’d done it long enough that it felt like a system.

That last February, she went for tests as usual, and didn’t come back for two weeks. Pneumonia, caught in the hospital. When she did finally come home, she was smaller, frailer. We told her she just needed to get her strength back. We believed it when we said it, most of us.

My dad and my oldest brother had been taken aside at the Royal Free, and told the truth. Her liver was failing. It was just a matter of time. My dad couldn’t get his head around it, and so David volunteered to tell John and me.

He carried that. I never asked what it cost him. I know what the house felt like. It didn’t change. The same meals, the same care, the same talk of getting her strength back. We were all keeping to a version of events no one had agreed on.

Mrs. Elvin had been part of the furniture of my childhood. Her husband was a retired miner, a quiet man who’d once worked with my dad, and they’d looked after me after school for years. I’d go to their house for that gap between primary school ending and my brother getting home from the grammar school. I’d sit in their front room with a biscuit and the television on low. I wasn’t allowed to watch any American cartoons, but Mr. Elvin had made an exception for Top Cat, because he really liked it. He’d died a couple of years earlier, and Mrs. Elvin still hadn’t found her footing again. My dad asked if she’d come and sit with my mum during the days, keep her company. She said yes.

She came for two or three weeks. They sat in the living room together. We’d moved a bed there, as the stairs were no longer possible. My dad went to work.

At the end of the third week, she took my dad aside in the hallway.

“Joyce isn’t getting better, is she.”

It wasn’t a question. My dad didn’t answer it like one. I don’t know exactly what he said. I know he didn’t say no. I know the silence was enough.

“I can’t come again,” she said. “I can’t watch another person die.”

She got her coat. She didn’t come back.

People stopped coming. Not all at once, and not with any announcement. They just stopped appearing at the door, stopped calling, and after a while stopped being mentioned. It was 1978. My mum didn’t have cancer, but she was dying, and the people around us had decided those were the same thing. They kept their distance the way you keep your distance from something you think might be contagious.

My mum didn’t understand it. She’d ask about people. Friends, neighbours, women she’d worked with. She’d wonder why they hadn’t been round. We told her they were busy, that they’d been meaning to call.

She wore the blue glasses and she wondered.

The last few weeks, I stopped going to school.

I told her what made sense for that morning, and she’d nod, and I’d make the tea, and we’d sit. Her mind was going by then. Not gone, but loose at the edges. She’d lose the thread of a sentence and pick up a different one. She’d ask me something she’d asked an hour before.

I answered everything as if it was the first time.

I don’t know if she knew. I don’t know if she was choosing the same silence we were all choosing, or if the weeks had taken too much, and she couldn’t hold the question anymore. We never said it. She never asked.

The room got quieter. The people who might have filled it had gone. We sat together, her and me and the television on low, and I told her whatever she needed to hear.

I don’t remember the last thing I said to her that was true.

In the autumn of 1972, David Cassidy was not just popular. He was the thing. The girls at my new school carried his face on their pencil cases and exercise books, cut from magazines that circulated around classrooms in careful hands. He was seventeen in the picture on their bedroom walls. That autumn he was on every radio in the country, asking the same question in that particular voice of his — soft, uncertain, a boy genuinely asking — how can I be sure, in a world that’s constantly changing. He was number one for weeks. As far as I could tell, nobody was in any doubt at all.

Before Deincourt, I’d been at Parkhouse Primary School, a junior school where the teachers called on you because you knew the answer. Other kids were impressed by this, or at least not offended by it. There was no cost to being clever. I’d spent six years there thinking that was simply how school worked — how people were, how the world operated.

Then the comprehensive system arrived. Instead of going to the local grammar school like my older brothers, I was sent to Deincourt Comprehensive, a hastily rebadged secondary modern in the next village.

The building was large and institutional and built for a different kind of child. The kids who were already there — whose older brothers and sisters and cousins had been there — looked at those of us who had arrived from elsewhere the way you look at weather that’s come in from the wrong direction.

In the first week, we sat in a circle. The teacher asked what our fathers did, and what we planned to do when we left school. It went around the room. My dad’s a miner, I’ll probably go down the pit. My dad’s at the plant, same for me most likely. One of the girls said her dad drove lorries but she wanted to work in a bank. A boy laughed. She smiled, absorbed it, moved on. She’d read what was coming and taken the available option.

I was near the end of the circle. I said my dad managed a supermarket. I said I intended to go to university and become a scientist.

There was a pause before the laughter, long enough to count.

The teacher was new and young and he needed them more than he needed me. I watched him make the calculation. He laughed too. Not much. Enough.

A girl in my year had been friendly to me — one of the very few who had. I don’t know what I’d done to earn it, but she’d sought me out a couple of times in those first weeks, talked to me in the way that suggested she didn’t think I was a problem to be managed. I was grateful for it. At eleven, in a building that felt like a mistake, I took it.

A week or so after the circle, she found me at the end of the day. She said there was a girl in the year above who had been asking about me. She wanted me to come round to her house that evening at six o’clock. She gave me the address. She looked pleased for me.

I went home and changed my shirt. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and spent more time on my hair than usual. In the kitchen, my mum had the radio on. David Cassidy was still asking.

I didn’t think about that. I already was.

It was a mile and a half to her house. I walked it in the early dark — late September tipping into October, coal smoke coming up from the terraced houses at Locko Brook, the particular smell of a Derbyshire evening deciding to become autumn. I was nervous in the way that felt correct, the tightness in the chest before a door opens. I thought about what I was going to say when she answered the door. I rehearsed it quietly to myself.

I don’t remember her name. I’ve tried many times. I remember everything else: Hambleton Avenue, the distance, the houses getting larger as I moved further from the main street. The driveway. The plants either side of it — one each, symmetrical, low and very dark-leafed, more formal than the street deserved. The colour of the front door.

Her mother answered. Polite, faintly puzzled. She called upstairs.

I heard footsteps on the landing. The girl came to the top of the stairs and descended slowly, watching me as she came. She stopped at the bottom and looked at me properly for the first time.

Her face was doing several things at once. She looked as if I had misunderstood something everyone else had been born knowing.

*Why are you here?*

I explained. I said someone had told me she’d asked for me.

She said she hadn’t. She closed the door.

Boys came out of the bushes at the end of next door’s drive.

As they did, I understood that the girl from my year had known.

The laughter came first, then the voices, already organized. They followed me the whole mile and a half home. Close enough that I heard every word. Far enough that anyone passing in a car would have seen a group of boys walking home from school.

I didn’t know what to do with my face. I tried to look like someone who was fine, then stopped trying. I looked at the pavement. I counted my steps for a while and then lost count. At some point I stopped rehearsing what I might say to make them stop, because there was nothing to say that would make them stop.

Somewhere along that road — in a lit window, in a front room I didn’t look up at — David Cassidy was still on somebody’s radio.

How can I be sure.

I made it through my own front door before I cried.

“You just missed Hannah Gordon.”

He says it through the bandage. There’s a wad of something white packed under his nose — a tampon, near enough — and two half-moons coming up under his eyes. Julie’s already across his private room, perched carefully on the edge of the bed, careful of the face. I stand at the end of it with grapes nobody asked me to bring.

Hannah Gordon. On the telly that month, Thursday nights, the wife in his dad’s programme. The whole country watching her, and she’s been here, in this room, an hour before me.

Julie wants to know was she lovely. Steven says she was lovely. I look at the water jug, the get-well cards stood up in a row with names I don’t know on them, and I put the grapes down where they won’t be seen.

Ten days later, me and David are meant to be in Sheffield.

It’s a thing I do. Bus into Chesterfield, train to Sheffield, walk up to the hospital, and they give you a little room, ten pounds and — the first time — a quiet word about the magazines in the cabinet, if you need a hand. I book the early ones so I miss games. I told David like it was nothing, which is how you make a thing sound like nothing, and he said he’d come. His first. My third.

We don’t go.

We’re up till four with the Red album and then the Blue one, the gatefolds open on the floor like wings, David doing the harmonies. It’s the old house. Dad isn’t there much. He runs the supermarket now the way you’d run from something — first one there, last to leave — and we pass on the stairs at half five, me coming in off the night, him going out to the day, and neither of us says anything, because there’s nothing that would fit on a staircase.

So the train goes without us.

We go and see Julie and Jane. Julie’s bored and announces that she’d like to go and see Steven. We don’t put up much of a fight.

The car still has L-plates on it. I haven’t passed. You’re meant to have someone beside you who has; instead it’s David in the back and Julie up front, and neither of them’s passed either. She likes that I drive, and I like that she likes it. So I drive her to him. She does her lip gloss in the little mirror on the passenger visor all the way, and I take the long road round by the pit so it lasts a bit longer.

His house is a surprise, and it’s all on one floor — a ranch, low and long like something off an American programme, nothing like ours. The front room could swallow three of ours. Sofas you could lose a person down the back of. And along the wall, the hifi and the televisions and the video machines, stacked like he’s recording the moon.

“What’s all that for,” I say.

“In case Dad’s on two channels at once,” Steven says.

The bruises are going yellow now. Still a little plastic guard taped over the nose. He puts a record on — Zeppelin, then the Who — afghan coat, guitar-player’s hands — and it’s all wrong, all big and brown and important, none of the fast cheap furious stuff Julie brings with her.

And then they’re on the carpet.

Not doing anything you could name. Rolling, laughing low, her hair gone into the deep pile of it — biscuit-coloured, the kind you could lie in — Steven careful of his nose and Julie careful of nothing at all. Me and David on the far sofa with the music coming down on us like weather.

David looks at the televisions. I look at the televisions. Three of them, all off, all black, the four of us in them if you counted — smeared, leaning.

The side runs out. The needle lifts itself, the arm swings back, and nobody gets up to turn it. The room just sits in the click of it — that soft knock the deck makes, over and over — while the two of them carry on in the quiet like the record’s still going.

I could have been in Sheffield by now. The little room and ten pounds and the whole thing done.

The arm clicks. David picks a bit of fluff off his knee. We sit there, the pair of us, listening to a record that’s stopped.

The projector ran hot at the back of the sixth-form classroom and the screen wobbled more than it should. Twenty of us, give or take — the ones who'd walked. Outside the windows the snow had that blue look it gets before noon, like it was holding its breath. Somebody had dug up reels of Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie, and they ran them back to back because there were no lessons and no plan and the roads were closing, and someone in an office had decided film was easier than sending us home in the dark.

In Silent Movie the only person who speaks is Marcel Marceau. A mime. He gets the one word in the whole picture, and he uses it to say no. We laughed at that the way you laugh when a thing is funnier than it has any right to be.

I’d walked it that morning, two or three miles, no buses, the drifts standing past the gateposts. Let myself out of the house without putting the kettle on. There was nobody to tell I was going. I kept forgetting that, and then remembering.

They fed us early and let us go. Bright by then, hard and crisp, the cold that makes your teeth ache if you grin into it. David and I were meant to go to his. We got as far as the top of his road and turned round. We were going to Julie’s.

You went to Julie and Jane’s for the records, and endless cups of tea. Jane was going out with Glenn, who fronted the Spasms, and the house ran on 45s — the good stuff, the stuff you couldn’t get the lads at school to listen to. I’d tried on most of a new self that winter through that front door: what I wore, what I’d own up to playing, the Chesterfield punks, the Tupton punks, and me somewhere between them.

The lane from Holmgate out to theirs off Ashover Road snows in easy. Country lane, really. One strip had been cleared and the banks stood either side higher than a car. We saw him coming too fast — a wide old sixties thing, the kind that still had wings. One of us said it — he's not going to stop — the way you say a thing half a second before it proves you right. He skidded level with us, the brakes not enough to hold it on the ice. The back end swung round slow enough to watch. For a moment I thought it had missed me. Then the wing caught me and put me into the bank head first, legs in the air, the whole white world up my sleeves and down my collar.

I came up brushing myself down. The car had stopped a little way on, slewed half across the lane. The driver wound the window down and asked David if we were all right. David said we were. The back wheels couldn’t get a grip in the snow, so we put our shoulders to it and pushed him out, and he went.

David was looking the other way down the lane. “That was lucky,” he said. “He could’ve hit us.”

I started to say it. Did you not. I got as far as looking at him. Then I brushed off the last of it and we walked on.

Julie’s mum loved me. That was the trouble. She’d have had me at the table every Sunday, would’ve signed the papers herself. *I wish you were going out with Robert* — she’d said it once, to Jane, about Glenn, said it kindly and in front of me, which is the kiss of death. Julie had me round her little finger and knew it. I’d have walked eight miles through snow for her. I more or less did.

The 45 was on when we got in, or it went on — Pete Shelley up high and bright over a tune far too cheerful for what it’s saying. Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t’ve. Julie singing along, not to me. Jane drying her hair. The drive not dug out. They were shocked we’d come all that way, and pleased, the way people are pleased by a thing they’d never have done themselves.

I knew what the song was about the way Julie meant it — the way it meant me, standing there with snow melting into my collar. It wasn’t only about Julie. I let it be about Julie.

We stayed till the light started to go. Eight miles I did that day — up on top of the banks where the lane carried traffic, down in the eighteen inches where it didn’t. The hook came with me the way they do, going round on its own, bright and stupid and exactly right.

I let myself in. The hall was cold and stayed cold. I didn’t put the kettle on. The tune kept going round, and I didn’t sing.

I was never bullied at school again. I should clarify: at school.

Elton John was everywhere that autumn. Every radio, every Saturday night. Get a little action in. Saturday was alright for fighting, apparently. Nobody said anything about Saturday mornings.

My mum made friends quickly. She could unmake them just as fast. The woman from work — the one who’d started all of this, who’d said he started doing judo and nobody bothers him now — no longer worked for her. His mum disagreed about why. Adult business. I thought none of it had anything to do with me.

I kept going to the judo class.

Brown Belt Steve was the judo master’s son. He was close to black belt and he liked everyone to know it. When his father asked him to demonstrate new moves, Brown Belt Steve would pick someone to demonstrate on.

He started picking me.

It was careful. A fraction of a second too long before the release — just enough to stop me falling right. Just enough to hurt. His father told him to ease up. Brown Belt Steve eased up on everything except what he was doing. He got better at hiding it.

I put up with it all lesson. I bowed before stepping onto the mat. A floor with rules.

In the changing room afterwards, he said something about my mum. He was repeating something his own mum had said. The worst of it was that he had not made it up.

He’d just taken his brown belt off. He was rolling it up.

Then he unrolled it.

The edge caught my cheek before I understood what he was doing. I got hold of his shoulders and ran him into the wall.

The changing room was plasterboard. Brown Belt Steve went half through it.

His father came in.

He looked at his son. He looked at the wall. He looked at me. He didn’t look at my cheek and he didn’t ask any questions.

*Get your things,* he said. *Get out. Don’t come back. You’re clearly not suitable material for judo.*

Neither of us said anything.

I got the bus home. My cheek had been throbbing for a while by then. I put my hand to it and it came back covered in blood.

I never went back.

Part 1: Three routes home from school. The direct one, down Chesterfield Road, is where they’ll be waiting. By November the nurses at Chesterfield Royal know him by name. Carl Douglas is everywhere. Two belts. Six fractures. Then the Minion appears in the bus lane in a blazer two sizes too big, and the lapels are exactly the right height.

Part 2: Vehicle engineering, 1974. A lawnmower engine on the bench, an inch-and-a-quarter bolt. The Bully recovered from the bus lane and came back with a different plan. He positioned himself behind. Started whispering. Then he kneed me. I turned to hit him. I forgot I was holding the spanner.

Part 3: Judo, autumn 1974. A floor with rules. Brown Belt Steve was the master’s son, close to black, and he wanted you to know it. He started picking me to demonstrate on. A fraction of a second too long before the release. Just enough to hurt. Then one Saturday morning, in the changing room, he unrolled his belt.

For about three days, I had more room.

Not much. Just a little more space in the corridors — people stepping back slightly, adjusting. I didn’t know what to make of it. The word had travelled, the way those things travel.

It didn’t last.

By Monday morning assembly, the Bully was back.

Slade was everywhere that year. Every corner shop, every transistor radio, every third-year singing the chorus wrong in the corridor. Cum on feel the noize. The school was full of it.

He stood directly behind me. I know it was deliberate because he did it six times. Maybe eight. Every time the headmaster made an announcement, he’d knee me in the back of my knee and my leg would buckle. He and his cronies found this hilarious.

I said nothing. Three years of practice.

First period, we had vehicle engineering together. One of the few classes we shared.

The classroom smelled of two-stroke petrol — that minerally, slightly medicinal smell that gets into your clothes and stays there. We’d been working on the same lawnmower engines all year. Taking them apart, putting them back together. That morning, I was removing the oil sump. The bolt was an inch and a quarter across and very tight. I had a large spanner in my hand.

He came in with his entourage. Not the Minion — he wasn’t that menacing with his arm in plaster and a sling — but he had new ones. Different faces, same function.

He positioned himself behind me. Started whispering in my ear. Then he kneed me.

I turned to hit him. I forgot I was holding the spanner.

It wasn’t my fist that connected with his head. It was the spanner.

He went down.

I don’t remember the sound. I remember the silence after. The whole room looking. Him on the floor, people crouching around him, me still holding the spanner. He wasn’t cut, but he was out.

You could hear Mr. Stubbins coming from two hundred yards. He had a built-up shoe and a clamp of a walk that arrived before he did. Whale cord trousers. Elbow patches. Tissue paper stuck to the shaving cuts on his face. By the time he reached a room, everyone had already straightened.

Two chairs sat outside his office. They were rarely empty.

I sat in one for a long time.

When he finally called me in, he said he was considering whether to expel me.

I said: why?

He said: I think you’re a psychopath.

My parents had been to see him about the bullying. More than once. He had intervened — called in the boys who’d been bullying me and told them I had mentioned their names in my sleep. It made things worse. He knew that.

Last week you broke someone’s arm, he said. This morning you’ve given someone else concussion. What am I to believe?

I was fourteen. I had been taking the long way home since I was eleven.

I don’t remember exactly what I said. I know I tried to explain that I was defending myself. He listened as if I were giving evidence against myself.

He didn’t expel me.

What I remember is what he said before he let me go.

Your time at this school is hanging by a thread. I’ll be keeping my eye on you.

I walked out. Passed the chairs. Both still occupied.

I was never bullied at school again.

Part 1: Three routes home from school. The direct one, down Chesterfield Road, is where they’ll be waiting. By November the nurses at Chesterfield Royal know him by name. Carl Douglas is everywhere. Two belts. Six fractures. Then the Minion appears in the bus lane in a blazer two sizes too big, and the lapels are exactly the right height.

Part 2: Vehicle engineering, 1974. A lawnmower engine on the bench, an inch-and-a-quarter bolt. The Bully recovered from the bus lane and came back with a different plan. He positioned himself behind. Started whispering. Then he kneed me. I turned to hit him. I forgot I was holding the spanner.

Part 3: Judo, autumn 1974. A floor with rules. Brown Belt Steve was the master's son, close to black, and he wanted you to know it. He started picking me to demonstrate on. A fraction of a second too long before the release. Just enough to hurt. Then one Saturday morning, in the changing room, he unrolled his belt.

I know three routes home from school. The direct one, down Chesterfield Road, where they’ll be waiting. The fields route, through the estate, out by The White Hart — I lose them there, but tear my trousers on the wire. The long way, past where the old pit used to be, out onto Hepthorne Lane, up Station Road. Forty minutes. Safe.

I tell my mum I fell in the playground.

She works it out eventually. Comes home one evening and says: I’ve been talking to a woman at work. Her son used to have the same trouble. He started doing judo. Nobody bothers him now.

I want to ask: did he also fall in the playground? But I don’t.

She finds a class, the same one that the woman’s son goes to, and his dad is the judo master. A wooden hut off Derby Road — probably a former scout hut. Same smell of damp coats and rules. We wait outside in the cold for them to arrive. Inside: a changing room partitioned by someone who’d read about carpentry once. The main floor is three inches of mat, edge to edge. Before you step onto it, you bow.

I like that. The bowing. A floor with rules.

By November, the nurses at Chesterfield Royal know me by name.

Left index finger. Right big toe. Middle finger, same story. They splint me, send me home, suggest I consider a safer hobby.

On the way home I stop at my mum’s shop. Show her the strapping. She looks at me for a moment, then asks the customer if that will be all. Judo, to her, is still working.

Carl Douglas is everywhere by now. Every radio, every corner shop, every kid in the yard doing slow-motion kicks in their Gola trainers. I have two new belts and four fractures.

There’s one in every year. Ours doesn’t do his own work.

He puts the word out on a Tuesday: Budgie’s going to get it on Thursday. It travels the way those things travel, arriving at me secondhand, already fact. I spend two days working out the geometry of the bus lane. Three buses stop there at three-forty-five. Only one will take me home, but the others would at least keep me safe. Two hundred kids. If I’m out before the bell’s done ringing, I can get to the stop first.

I almost make it.

The Bully, it turns out, is unwell. This is how I learn that his Minion exists — pre-Despicable Me, when the word still had teeth.

The Minion is wearing a school blazer two sizes too big — the kind that parents on a budget hope that their kids will grow into. He squares up to me in the middle of the bus lane. The ring forms without anyone asking.

Fight. Fight. Fight.

I put my hand up.

— Before we go any further, I say. There’s something you should probably know. I’ve been doing judo. My body is a weapon.

A pause. Then he laughs. Then everyone laughs. Then he stops laughing and moves towards me.

The blazer, I notice, has lapels.

The first throw you learn in judo is Ogoshi. The hip throw. Move in, turn, take the lapels, twist. In the hut this works because the person you’re throwing knows how to fall. And because there is mat.

Two things were different in the bus lane. He didn’t know how to fall. And there was no mat, only concrete.

I grabbed his lapels. I turned. He went.

There was nothing slow-motion about it.

I’m not sure I was thinking. I remember the look on his face when he left the ground — surprise, then something worse — and then he put his arm down to stop himself, and I heard it.

His forearm was bent at an angle it shouldn’t bend. He was screaming. Crying. Everyone standing completely still.

They parted. I got on the bus.

I sat by the window and watched the stop disappear. Held everything in — hands, breathing, face — all the way home. When I got through the door I sat down and cried.

I was thirteen. I had two belts and four fractures.

The next day, I was bullied again.

Part 1: Three routes home from school. The direct one, down Chesterfield Road, is where they'll be waiting. By November the nurses at Chesterfield Royal know him by name. Carl Douglas is everywhere. Two belts. Six fractures. Then the Minion appears in the bus lane in a blazer two sizes too big, and the lapels are exactly the right height.

Part 2: Vehicle engineering, 1974. A lawnmower engine on the bench, an inch-and-a-quarter bolt. The Bully recovered from the bus lane and came back with a different plan. He positioned himself behind. Started whispering. Then he kneed me. I turned to hit him. I forgot I was holding the spanner.

Part 3: Judo, autumn 1974. A floor with rules. Brown Belt Steve was the master’s son, close to black, and he wanted you to know it. He started picking me to demonstrate on. A fraction of a second too long before the release. Just enough to hurt. Then one Saturday morning, in the changing room, he unrolled his belt.

Eight had said they were coming. At the bottom of the hill, on the first morning, there were four of us.

Nobody mentioned the others.

Andy. Johnny. Hicksy. Me. The old colliery site sat below the school — just a pit pond now, the rest of it overtaken by scrub and long grasses nobody cut. We’d built what we called a den. Loose branches over a rough frame. Just enough to suggest something.

I’d stopped at the Co-op on the way. School bag over one shoulder. Bacon. Eggs. A loaf. The girl on the checkout eyed me suspiciously, and I told her that we had cookery class first thing. I got on the bus, got off at school, and walked toward the gates. Then turned.

We were reading Lord of the Flies in English. Nobody mentioned the book.

The first day, the den still looked like a den.

By the second, bacon had become a problem.

None of us had thought to bring a pan. We had food and an open fire and a gap between them we couldn’t close. We sat looking at bacon and eggs and a loaf and a fire until Hicksy walked off into the scrub and came back with a car door.

Old one. Interior stripped out. Just bare metal.

We built the fire under it and waited. First the paint burnt off — long minutes of thick chemical smoke that none of us named. Then the surface heated. Then it got properly hot.

We cooked the bacon on it. Cracked eggs that ran in odd directions across the uneven surface and had to be chased. Held bread against it for toast that was dark on one side and soft on the other.

It tasted of effort and paint and school not starting without us.

We ate it anyway.

After eating, there was just the day.

We walked the perimeter of the pit pond. Skimmed stones. The water was dark and gave nothing back. We talked about what we’d do differently tomorrow and didn’t. By day three, the routine had settled: cook, eat, drift, wait for the cross-country runners, hide.

Every couple of hours, we heard the footsteps. The school’s long-distance route passed close enough that we went flat and stayed quiet until the sound faded up the hill. Three, four times a day. By the end of the week we’d stopped needing to tell each other. We just went down.

When the last runners had gone, Hicksy did the car horns from “Footsee” under his breath — badly, always badly. We laughed the first few times.

We had pictured more running.

Mostly, we sat in a den that smelled of paint smoke. Most of the things we could think of doing needed money, tools, or somewhere else to be. We came back every morning.

The others had said yes and stayed clean. We came back smelling of it.

On Top of the Pops, there had been no group for “Footsee.” Just the Wigan Casino dancers, bodies doing the job of a record. They improvised. The B-side was called “Seven Days Too Long.”

By Friday, nobody laughed at the car horns.

We took longer to answer each other. Arguments stopped at the first word. Silences stayed where they were. By day five, the funny things just sat there.

We’d talked about going another week. On the last morning, nobody mentioned it.

I could only do this because my mother was in London.

She was ill. Every three months: the Royal Free, Hampstead, a bag packed by the door. While she was away, I stayed with cousins. Relatives who asked fewer questions.

She would have smelled the smoke on me. She would have come close to say goodnight. She would have known.

I knew the date she was coming back.

The last morning, I walked down the hill one more time. Sat with Andy and Johnny and Hicksy. Cooked what was left on the car door — the fire not quite hot enough, the eggs not quite right, the bread overdone on one side.

We ate without ceremony.

The programme cost two pounds. David paid. He always paid — that was David, the oldest, the one who made the gesture. He handed it over like it was nothing, but two pounds in 1976 was a fortune. It was glossy. Properly glossy — the kind that made you hold it with both hands, afraid your thumbs would leave marks.

Christmas Eve. London Olympia. Rod Stewart.

I was fifteen, though for the longest time I’d have told you twelve or thirteen. I had the venue right. I had the excitement right. I had the feeling of it — the noise rolling back off the walls before Rod Stewart even walked on. All of that was right. What I had wrong was who was there with me.

We were staying at my brothers’ place in North London. Upstairs of two semis knocked together. David and John shared the place. The family downstairs had a son my age, and his dad was a detective who looked like he’d walked straight off the set of *The Sweeney*.

David would make his famous cherry cheesecake when we visited, and nobody’s glass was ever empty around him — he’d refill them before you ever noticed. Not long before he died, I convinced him to share his cheesecake recipe with me.

Mum and Dad were with us that Christmas. Her health had really deteriorated — happy pills, they’d called them, prescribed until they’d destroyed her liver. The Royal Free in Hampstead was just up the road. She had two years left. She was soldiering on. That was always the phrase.

We spent Christmas together in London frequently after her surgery. Pantomimes in the West End — Rod Hull and Emu one year. Superman in Leicester Square. But mostly we’d stay in and watch the Christmas specials. Les Dawson. Dick Emery. Those were Mum’s favourites.

John said he couldn’t come to the concert. Had to work on his PhD. But he’d watch it on the TV — Whispering Bob Harris was presenting it live on the Old Grey Whistle Test, John Peel simulcasting on Radio One. It’d be *just the same*, he said.

I didn’t think twice. I was fifteen and going to my first ever concert. I wasn’t thinking about what John was giving up. I wasn’t thinking about John at all.

So it was David, Mary, and me. Mary was John’s girlfriend — not David’s. She’s his wife now. Forty-eight years.

David steered us in. I remember the noise hitting us — not music yet, just the sound of thousands of people pressed together, all of them bigger and older and louder than me. I remember Rod kicking footballs into the crowd. I remember him wearing the Scottish football strip for part of the set, though I’ve learned not to trust the details anymore. Britt Ekland was supposed to be there. They were together then, and there’d been rumours. I thought I saw her, stood off to the side of the stage. But maybe I made that up too.

What I know is real: the second song.

This Old Heart Of Mine.

The Isley Brothers. Tamla Motown. One of the records John used to play at home after he’d dragged me into Chesterfield on a Saturday, spent what Mum gave him to look after me at Hudson’s Records, carrying his haul back like treasure. Hudson’s still had listening booths back then — you’d hand your single to the person behind the counter, they’d put it on, and point you to the right booth. John would slip into the booth and I’d stand beside him, too small to reach, too young to be offered a turn. I couldn’t really hear anything. I’d watch his body pick up the beat — the nod, the shift, the half-smile when the hook landed. I’d ask if I could listen. He’d ignore me. I’d pretend to hate his music.

I didn’t hate his music.

And now Rod Stewart was singing it. The opening bars, and the crowd pushed forward, and I was fifteen, stood in the Olympia on Christmas Eve, and the song I used to pretend I couldn’t stand was filling a room I had no business being in.

John was back in Hendon. Watching it on the TV. Just the same.

I told this story for years. Decades. It was one of those stories you recycle — John and I would get together, start reminiscing, and the Olympia night would come around like a favourite track. I’d tell it the same way every time. The four of us — David, John, Mary, and me — at Rod Stewart on Christmas Eve. My first ever concert. What a night.

John never corrected me.

Not once. Not in forty-something years of me telling it wrong. He’d let me keep him in the crowd, standing next to me, watching his favourite singer — Rod ‘the Mod’ Stewart, the voice of The Faces, who’d come out of The Small Faces, who were John’s band. He’d let me have the version where he was there. Where we heard This Old Heart Of Mine together, the song he’d played on Saturday afternoons while I pretended not to listen.

I found out about three years ago. I was back in the UK for John’s 70th birthday, and we were doing what we always do — pulling out the old stories, turning them over. I started in on the Rod Stewart night. Told him how he’d taken me to my first ever show.

He went quiet. Not waiting-for-his-turn quiet. Something else.

Mary said it.

“No he didn’t. He didn’t go.”

I thought she was getting confused. I had this memory — fully formed, detailed, certain — of John at Olympia. But she was adamant. It was me, her, and David. I’d taken John’s place.

John wouldn’t look at me. I asked him to confirm it. He did. And when I asked him why — why he’d given up Rod Stewart on Christmas Eve, his favourite band, a gig going out live on national television — he said:

“You really, really wanted to go.”

That night became a story about me, when it was really a story about him all along.

The programme is gone. I threw it away when I was seventeen. Mum died, and I got rid of everything that marked my youth up to that point — the toys, the books, the glossy programme David had bought me at my first concert. It was time to put them behind me.

David’s gift — the one you could hold — I threw that away. John’s gift I kept for fifty years without knowing I had it.

His records, though — those I kept. He gave me his 45s in 1980, and I carried them back to Wolverhampton like holy relics. They’re in my jukebox now. A 1951 Seeburg, model 100B. His records and mine, side by side on the carousel.

Every time I drop a quarter in, I’m back in Hudson’s Records. Saturday morning. John with the headphones on. Me beside him, too small to listen, reading his body for the beat.

He’d already put me in the booth.

Mary’s still a little miffed he wasn’t there with her.

We scrubbed in silence, four teenagers bent over pie-shaped halos that refused to blend in. Cream carved pale scars into the grease of decades, lighter patches that made the rest of the wall look darker. Every wipe made it worse. The cloths turned gray. None of us looked at each other.

The night before, bread rolls had flown. Arcs of flour-dusted bread, soft thuds against shoulders and walls. Crumbs clung to our clothes. We picked up the rolls, brushed them off, and set them back on the plates. Napkins folded into the shapes Mrs. Simpson insisted on, lined sharp as soldiers. I still fold them that way. Laughter too loud in the empty ballroom, the kind that dared someone to catch us. Flour hung in the air, sticking to sweat, catching the light.

The Shoulder of Mutton could seat six hundred. More, at a pinch — six hundred and fifty, though by then you were tripping over each other. Long tables pressed close, chairs squeezed so tight knees touched. Rooms opening into other rooms. Each louder than the next. Voices colliding until no one knew where one gathering ended and another began. Smoke clung to curtains. The few carpeted areas carried the smell of beer too deep to lift.

Friday and Saturday nights were the busiest. Weddings with confetti still stuck to shoes. Works “dos” ending in slurred speeches, fisticuffs in the car park, and usually someone crying in the toilets. Plates clattered, waiters darted like minnows, arms strained with carrying up to eight stacked dinner plates, piled high with mixed grills.

Other weeknights were quieter. Not calm. Pharmaceutical reps doling out freebies to hard-drinking doctors, pushing their latest wonder drugs under the clatter of cutlery. Doctors leaning too far back in chairs, ties loosened, glasses fogged with drink. Reps grinning, briefcases stuffed with pens and pads, voices oily with promises.

There had been a fire once. One restaurant burned to the ground. Rumors said insurance — figures seen piling car batteries against the flames. Maybe not. After the fire, the Derby Room rose. Upstairs, the Phoenix Suite. Menus thick as card. Wine lists stretching beyond Blue Nun. The Phoenix smelled different: new varnish, polished brass, a sweetness that didn’t belong. Carpets springy where the old ones lay flat.

Downstairs in the Main Ballroom, we’d occasionally have boxing rings raised where tables should be. Gloves thudding. Crowds pressed close. Bands later, bass rattling glasses on the bar. Walls trembling long after the noise stopped. Ribs shook with the bass, floorboards gave, even when you stood still.

Tupton Hall’s Sixth Form made our own claim. Do’s stitched together with under-age drinking and blaring discos. Not the school, but groups of students cobbling fictitious organizations — “The Tupton Photographic Society” was a favorite — just enough to convince The Shoulder they weren’t renting to teenagers in flared trousers and black ties from school. We’d rent corporation buses for the drunk run home. Windows fogged. Breath thick. Brut aftershave cut with beer. Songs sung loud and off-key, faces pressed to glass.

Sunday lunch was always busy, but only the anointed worked it. Afterwards, the staff sat down together for a big roast in the Derby Room. In the north, dinner was midday. Tea later. Supper after that. Plates passed hand to hand. Gravy thick. Yorkshire pudding collapsing under its own weight. Meat carved with a flourish, potatoes piled until they slid. The clatter of knives and forks gave way to a lull — the weight of roast beef settling into bellies, the room fogged with steam. Jokes duller. Plates pushed aside. Silence heavier than the meat itself.

And there were nights we dreaded.
The chicken processing factory most of all.
The dread started early. When Hoppo read the bookings, the name landed like a weight. In the cloakroom, ties pulled tighter, faces tense before we even left the kitchen. Someone muttered, “chicken lot tonight,” and no one answered.

It began with whistles. Crude jokes. Shouts of “send us one of them waiters.” Laughter rolling like a dare. Then hands. Tugging shirts. Fingers at waists. A palm. A belt yanked. Younger girls pushed forward by the older women, shrieking as they clawed, laughter high and sharp. Plates wobbled. Soup rings widening on white cloth.

We were sixteen, seventeen. Black trousers. White shirts. Black ties. Uniforms not that different from school. And they laughed at that too, tearing it down with every grab. We never thought to ask the female staff what they had to put up with.

There were about fifty of us, mainly from the same twoor three schools, with a few kids drafted in from the catering college. Then the permanent staff — a handful of veterans, fed up with babysitting us. Their eyes followed us, not kindly, when rolls flew or plates wobbled. “Useless lot,” one muttered, not bothering to lower her voice.

We’d run like ants through the maze: plates wobbling, gravy jugs spilling, dishes too hot to touch. Shoes squeaked. Sweat ran down backs. Orders shouted, colliding. Soup sloshed over bowls. A trifle dropped once, quivered on the carpet. Everyone looked away. Someone singed by a dish straight from the pass. A boy walked out mid-shift. Never came back. The rest of us kept moving.

Mrs. Simpson counted every minute. Hoppo shaved hours wherever he could. “You’re not on the clock until the doors open,” he barked, sweeping a hand as though we were loiterers instead of staff. Sixty pence an hour. Never enough.

After our shifts ended, we drank beer, chalked cues, plotted. The carpet in the bar smelled of stale beer, the lights always too dim. That was when the idea came: late-night snacks. Burgers. Scampi. Chicken in a basket. Hoppo frowned at the cost of extra kitchen staff. That was our trick — we’d do both. Cook and serve.

For a while it worked. A trickle of orders. The hiss of oil, batter clinging to our hair, grease soaking into shirts. Fingers burned on fryer handles. Smell of fried food following us home. When it slowed, we tidied. Cheese boards scraped, trifles spooned down before the dishwasher hissed and steamed. A spoon clinking against glass long after it was empty.

Then the strainer became a bat. A slice of apple pie raised in pitcher’s stance. The first thwack split the pastry, sharp as a starter pistol. Cream flew, laughter cracked — sharper, higher than it should have been. Pies arced like comets across the kitchen, walls spattered, beams dripping, trays emptied. Pedal down. No brakes.

And then the quiet. Crumbs underfoot. Brushes squeaking against tile. Pie-shaped halos refusing to blend in. The smell of apple turning sour in the grease, meat and roast clinging underneath. Each cloth worked faster, harder. None of us spoke.

The next night, Hoppo killed the experiment with a shrug.

I still fold napkins the way they taught me. I still hear the thwack of pastry against steel, sharper than laughter, heavier than silence. The stain wouldn’t lift.

Being back in the UK—for the longest stretch since I left three decades ago—has stirred something quieter loose. Not a piece I once polished, but a memory I never set down. Not until now.

It came back all at once: the heatwave, the awkward joy of failing deliberately, the feeling of something light tipping suddenly heavy. It’s not a story I planned to tell. But it surfaced. And it stuck.

So, for once, this isn’t a re-visiting. It’s a recording. A return of a different kind.

It wasn’t a problem at Park House Primary School. We were small. So was the playground—just a square of tarmac where you could manage Rounders if no one missed a base, Tag if you were fast, and British Bulldog if the teachers weren't looking. So was the expectation. PE was more like sanctioned fidgeting—beanbags and hula hoops and something called Music and Movement, broadcast on a clunky school radio, where we swayed like trees or flapped like birds at the mercy of a disembodied BBC voice.

But senior school came with linoleum corridors that echoed your footsteps too loudly. And teams. And a teacher with a whistle on a lanyard who picked captains like they were checking for contraband. First lesson, he scanned the lineup, barked two names—boys who already moved like they knew they were being watched—and had them take turns picking their squads.

I was tall. That bought me two weeks of false promise. By week four, they’d learned. I had reach but no rhythm. I moved like a placeholder.

After that, it was always the same: me and the boy with the asthma pump and a body that never fit the bench, let alone the team. We’d hover at the edge of the group, pretending we didn’t notice it was down to us. Sometimes I got picked second-last. Sometimes last. It didn’t matter. What I remember most wasn’t the waiting. It was the captain’s pause. That extra breath before calling my name. Like they were stalling, hoping someone else would volunteer to go worse.

By fifteen, I’d burned through every excuse. "Forgotten" kits, phantom colds, limp wrists wrapped in borrowed bandages. The games teacher had stopped asking. I think he assumed I was the kind of kid who bruised from chalk.

Then one morning, a note on the science block noticeboard: Ogston Reservoir, Wednesday afternoons. Dinghy sailing. Optional. The technician had offered to drive a small group of us in his VW bus. He wore deck shoes with everything and had the sort of quiet patience that came from knowing knots better than people.

There were seven of us, maybe eight. We drove out past Clay Cross to where the air felt cleaner, like it hadn’t made up its mind yet. The boats rocked lightly as we climbed in. You didn’t have to win. Just stay upright. Just stay moving. It wasn’t freedom. But it floated.

That winter—’75 into ’76—dragged like wet wool. The reservoir iced over. The VW bus broke down. We waited. Asked weekly. Nothing. When we finally made it back, it was well into summer term. Just a few Wednesdays left.

And it was that summer. The heatwave. Reservoirs shrinking. At Ladybower, they said you could see the drowned village—Derwent—poking up through the water like it had been holding its breath. Ogston didn’t offer ghosts. Just warmth and algae and the smell of metal baking in the sun.

The instructor was waiting, gleaming with sweat and pride. A new fleet of dinghies had arrived. Sleek, fast, still smelling of resin. We were marched into the changing room to rehearse drills in a static mock-up. We jostled elbows in the cramped mock-up. Dryland choreography, feigned precision.

Two groups. Three in each. My trio got one of the new boats. She moved beautifully. We played it straight at first—tacking, adjusting, nodding like we cared.

But the moment his back turned, the old rhythm returned. The love of falling. I was on the tiller. The wind caught. We surged. I turned hard into it, too fast, too sharp. The hull tipped. We leaned, too late. The sail kissed the water. Then we were airborne.

Splash. Laughter. Perfect.

Until it wasn’t.

We swam to the keel, still laughing. Pulled. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing. The mast wouldn’t budge. We didn’t understand. We’d done this dozens of times.

Captain Crusty spotted us. We straightened instinctively, laughter drying up like spilled water in sun. He roared across the water in his powerboat, swearing before he even arrived. He tried to talk us through it. Still nothing.

"The mast’s stuck in the mud," he barked. "What did I tell you about going near the bank?"

He tied a rope to the dinghy, the other end to his boat, and gunned it. The rope pulled taut. The hull strained. The mast groaned.

What none of us knew: the mast wasn’t stuck in mud. It was trapped beneath the remnants of the Ashover Light Railway, long submerged. When it finally gave, it sprang free with a shudder and a bend. The dinghy righted, but its sail now listed, the mast bowed.

He wouldn’t let us sail her back. Made us climb into the powerboat. Towed the vessel behind. Said nothing for a long time.

Back at the dock, he told us we were finished. No more sailing. Not here. Not ever.

He left to file a formal complaint with the school. Said he was disappointed. Said it felt like vandalism.

We were told to get changed. Our clothes were soaked. Jeans, jumpers, socks clinging to skin. No wetsuits. No dignity.

It went quiet again. No one met anyone’s eyes. That was when I saw them: his Wellingtons, by the door. Upright. Dry. Clean.

So I filled them. Pebbles first. Then water. And then, quietly, glued the soles to the dock with epoxy from the shelf.

He didn’t return. No call from school. No letter home.

Just the boots.

Still upright.

Still full.

Still remembering.

It was a May afternoon, the kind that makes you believe in starting over.
Top down. Music low. Leather pants softening in the sun.
I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror—teal silk shirt, Cuban heels catching the light—and nodded.
Not bad for a man in reboot.

I hadn’t been to a party in a while.
I hadn’t been asked to one in even longer.
And this wasn’t just any party—it was a 50th birthday, and a kind of quiet rebellion.
A gathering of women who usually met behind closed doors.
Many still not out at work.
It wasn’t billed as exclusive.
But I understood, the moment I stepped inside, that I was the only man in the room.

At the door, I queued behind three women swapping stories about Exit 7.
The host had meant the Delaware one—but there was another Exit 7 in Pennsylvania.
Half the out-of-staters had taken the wrong turn, landed at the same gas station, and been gently rerouted by a patient attendant.
When the woman ahead of me asked if I’d gotten lost too, I told her I was local.
She smiled. “That guy at the gas station was so nice. You should go back and invite him.”

Before I could ask what she meant, her turn came.
The woman at the check-in table handed her a name tag—top right corner colored in.
It meant she was open to meeting someone.

When it was my turn, I gave my name.
“Looking to meet anyone?”
I hesitated. “I mean… I’m open, but I’m not expecting anything. Given the guest list.”
She smiled, missed the point, and colored in the corner.
Sticker logic.

Later, the host pulled me aside.
She’d invited two women.
One was the woman of her dreams—this was their second date.
The other was from earlier.
Pretty. Enthusiastic. Planning to attend.
My job was to keep them apart.

I accepted the mission.
And failed almost immediately.

The younger woman walked in. Gorgeous, of course.
And I made a beeline to the hors d’oeuvres.
We talked. She sparkled. I sparkled back.
She asked if I was seeing anyone. I said almost divorced, just starting to feel ready.
She said she’d ended a long engagement and tumbled into her first relationship with a woman—now over.
I asked if she’d ever go back to men.
She laughed. “Not after that.”

I smiled.
Inside, I sighed.
I’d already written the plotline of our romance in my head.

She left early. Said she could tell she wasn’t the one being chosen.
I walked her to her car.
We exchanged numbers.
She never called.

Back inside, I danced.
I used to love dancing—had forgotten how much.
Halfway through the second song, a woman slid in beside me.
We moved together, light and loose, until the DJ paused to find the owner of a badly parked car.

We stood catching our breath.
She laughed, told me her own Exit 7 detour story.
Then, smiling: “That guy at the gas station? He really should’ve been invited.”

And just like that, it clicked.
The woman at check-in.
This one now.
Probably everyone at the party.

They all thought I was gay.

I said, “Wait… you think I’m gay, don’t you?”
She blinked. “Aren’t you?”

I shook my head. “What made you think that?”
She looked me up and down.

“You’re at a party with 100 lesbians.
You’re wearing leather pants.
A silk shirt.
And you’re dancing.”

Fair enough.

Then she glanced across the room.
“Okay,” she said, suddenly serious. “Whatever you do, don’t let my girlfriend find out you’re straight. She gets… territorial.”

I thanked her.
Found my jacket.
And left before the DJ restarted the music.

Outside, the air had cooled.
Someone inside laughed.
I reached up to adjust the mirror—and caught the sticker still clinging to my shirt.
Top right corner, colored in.

This isn’t a memory I grew up with. It came to me sideways, pieced together from what wasn’t said, what was nearly lost. But once it found me, I couldn’t let it go.

Things You Don’t Talk About

My dad used to rattle off his share of the winnings like it was part of his birth certificate: £18,759, seven shillings and sixpence. Not boastful — just exact. Like muscle memory. Like it still amazed him.

In 1952, four miners from Glapwell Colliery split a world-record football pools win: £75,037 and ten shillings. My dad was one of them. There’s a British Film Institute (BFI) listing for the newsreel — grainy black-and-white footage that played in cinemas across Britain — but I’ve never been able to track it down, and believe me, I’ve tried. What I do have is a photo album of stills from the film. Each of the men was given one. My dad's copy sits in my desk drawer. I open it more than I admit.

At the time, my parents were living in the small rented house my mum had grown up in — a two-up, two-down with coal fires, no hot water, and communal outhouses shared between the run-down terraces. Once a week, they’d heat water on the stove for the tin bath, taking turns in the same water. They’d been married for four years and had their names on the list for a council house. It wasn’t just space they lacked — it was air.

That same house had once held her father, who returned from the trenches gassed in the First World War and later broke his back in a mining accident. He spent the rest of his life in that front room — bedbound, with a hole in his back that never properly healed. My mum was seven. My grandmother became the breadwinner, running the canteen at the Clay Cross Foundry. My mum, though clever, left school at fourteen to help.

So when the win came, it wasn’t just money. It was reprieve. A door opened that had always been closed.

They had a four-bedroom house built for them, spending more than most did at the time, but with good reason. The plot my mum had her heart set on sat above an active coal seam. My dad consulted local mining engineers, who advised that if they built there, they should do so on a six-foot concrete raft. It added about 20% to the cost of the build. They did it anyway.

A few years later, the local pit began working the seam directly beneath the house. The blasts echoed through the floor — dull, regular thuds — and slowly, the house began to tilt. It eventually settled again, more or less. Other houses nearby weren’t as lucky. Like stitching up a wound, the one across the road had to be held together with a steel rod.

Of their £18,759, seven shillings and sixpence, my parents spent nearly a third on that house. They bought a small place for my grandmother nearby in Hasland. They gave each of my mum’s three siblings £1,000 — a sizable amount, when you could buy a semi-detached house for about £1,500.

All four miners said the win wouldn’t change them. They’d stay in the pits. And for a time, they did.

Then, two years later, lightning struck again.

By then, my parents had moved into their new home. My middle brother John had been born. They still played the pools every week — same syndicate, same routines — but my mum and Mrs. Elvin, wife of a newer member, had begun to think it was a waste of money. They nagged. The men relented. They dropped out.

That weekend, the syndicate won again.

There were four winners the second time, so the syndicate's share wasn’t quite as dramatic — around £20,000. Still, another small fortune. Vernons, the pools company, turned it into an event: a trip to London, a stay at the Dorchester Hotel, a party with British celebrities in attendance — David Nixon, Terry-Thomas. My parents were invited along, even though they weren’t among the winners this time. There was another newsreel, and another album of stills. My brother treasures that one.

There’s a photo I love from that second album. Terry-Thomas — gap-toothed, grinning — is in bed, propped up like a king, with all four of the miners’ wives around him. All five of them were smiling, like they’d known each other forever. The next photo shows him balancing a chamber pot like a crown, playing the fool.

I imagine my mother laughing harder than she had in months. That flash of absurdity suspended in celluloid — something she never spoke of again. Even if the win wasn’t theirs this time, the moment still was.

After that, her mind was made up: it was time for my dad to leave the mines.

They’d both grown up around it — seen what it did. Her father. Her brothers. Health never lasted long in families like theirs. The thought of my dad going the same way — she couldn’t let it happen. Especially with two small children and a house they'd built from the ground up.

My dad had left school at 14 — another bright lad, another life shaped by duty. As the oldest of five, and with a cruel father who drank too much and spent what little he had on his fancy woman at the other side of town, he’d been called on to provide. Mining was all he’d known. But I like to think my mum asked him, just once, what he wanted. And I think he let himself answer.

They bought a shop. A corner store in Hasland. Modest, but theirs. He came alive behind the counter — chatting, solving problems, remembering names. For him, being around people was like plugging into the mains. I’d say he chose wisely.

And they were smart. Practical. They still had money put away.

Or so they thought.

It turned out they’d been caught up in a local investment scam. Their accountant — a man who promised to grow their savings — gave them confident updates, listed shares they supposedly owned. Everything looked promising — until one day, he disappeared. And with him, the last of their savings.

They never got it back. But by then, they'd learned how to carry on. You always did.

I didn’t know any of this as a child. Not the pools win. Not the shop. Not the second syndicate or the vanished savings. My parents didn’t talk about it. Not to us. I found out the way seven-year-olds usually find things out: by accident, and by not doing what I was told.

I’d been swinging on the back legs of a school chair, showing off, and fell backwards. The cast iron radiator broke my fall — and the back of my head. After a rush to A&E, a few stitches, and a turban of gauze wrapped around my skull, I was parked at home to recover. Bored. Curious. Slightly concussed. No one noticed when I started poking around in the bottom drawer of the sideboard.

That’s where I found it — tucked beside the best cutlery, in among the off-limits things. A yellowing football pools coupon. What caught my eye was the blurb down the side: something about four Derbyshire miners winning a world record payout. There were grainy little headshots along the bottom — each winner with his wife.

And there, in one of them, were my parents. Looking proud. Young. Impossible.

I don’t know why I didn’t ask them about it. Maybe I already knew it was one of those stories you weren’t meant to hear from a drawer. So I kept it to myself. I tucked it away — the memory of finding it — for another five years, at least.

I was twelve when it finally came up. One Sunday morning, the phone rang. My godmother, Auntie Ivy, was calling to speak to my dad. Her mother-in-law — well into her eighties — had just learned she’d won the pools. £300,000. A staggering sum.

Auntie Ivy was calling for advice.

After the short call, she and Uncle George (my godfather) came over. While we waited, my parents talked around it, as if in code — careful not to say aloud why they were being asked for help. I listened from the sofa. Then, quite calmly, I said something about them having experience with such matters.

They looked at me — confused. How did you know? I told them I’d seen the coupon. Years ago. I hadn’t said anything because, well… I didn’t think it was something we talked about.

The advice they gave Auntie Ivy was simple: “Don’t let anyone else make a story out of you.”

Back then, football pools coupons had a small checkbox — a preference for anonymity. When my parents won, that box had been checked . But the company pressured them relentlessly: it was a “feel-good story,” they said, one that “gave people hope”, they said. Eventually, worn down, everyone agreed to go public.

My parents always regretted saying yes. Not because of the cameras. Because after that, the story never quite belonged to them again.

He didn’t ask. Just wandered over as we slowed on Hepthorne Lane, slipping into a Top Gear-style review—handling, performance, ride—before finally arriving at the boot.

“Boot on these is like a glove compartment with ambitions.”

No one asked. That never stopped Hicksy. He moved like someone who’d skipped ahead in the manual and assumed the rest of us would catch up.

It was the middle of the day, maybe 2pm. Bright, warm, quiet in that suspicious way afternoons sometimes are. We were just back from the tops—Chatsworth side, moors still hazy with early afternoon heat. Andy in the front. Johnny folded up like cargo in the back. Me driving the Mini Cooper that I’d originally called Clarissa. People found that strange, pretentious, stupid—or all of the above. So I changed it to Min. Beige, with a chocolate brown go-faster stripe I’d painted myself—masking tape, spray cans of primer and top coat, a whole Saturday given to speed’s illusion. It wasn’t quick, but it looked like something someone had meant.

We spotted him from a distance—Hicksy was always recognizable by his gait, a kind of loose-limbed defiance of pavement logic. I crept beside him at walking pace, let him study the silhouette. He circled once, slowly, like the car might confess something if stared at long enough. He tapped the boot once, then said: “Bet I could fit in there.”

No one had asked. No one doubted him. But the moment he said it, it felt like something that had to be proven.

He didn’t take anything off. Just ducked, folded, twisted himself in. Even skinny as he was, it was astonishing. All of him disappeared except one arm—stiff, jutting out—like those novelty limbs people wedge in tailgates for a laugh.

Only this wasn’t a joke. Hicksy was actually in there.

He was grinning, ready to declare victory, when someone—maybe Andy, maybe me—said: “You’ve got to be driven in it. Otherwise it doesn’t count.”

That logic held. So we got back in. Engine on. I drove the half-mile to the Blue Bell with Hicksy in the boot—arm sticking out, voice muffled but constant, offering commentary we mostly ignored.

We pulled into the lot of the Blue Bell—a 15th-century pub with a sagging roof, its ghost stories half-remembered and more than half-embellished. It was where all of us had been served our first pints. Under-age drinking was just something you did back then, like starting to take an interest in girls, or getting acne.

I remembered being woken from my bed and shoved into a too-big coat by my brother and his mates as they set out for their own first pints. They’d filled my head with stories about the pirate’s grave—there wasn’t one, though there is a stone in the churchyard marked with a skull and crossbones—and the ghost that haunted the shortcut through the cemetery. Then they left me outside in the dark with a Coke and a packet of crisps while they went in. I sat on the low wall, listening to the laughter spill out through the warped door, and waited for the light above it to flicker.

And now here we were, years later, parking a little too close to that same wall. No Coke, no crisps. Just Hicksy, boxed and booted, his arm sticking out like punctuation.

I was about to kill the engine when I had an idea.

I pulled forward, turned around, and reversed—inch by inch—until the bumper kissed the pub’s back wall.

The boot on the old Mini opened downward, like a glove box—little chains on either side. Reversing into the wall meant it couldn’t open at all.

We got out. Looked at each other. A moment hung.

“Are you not coming with us?” one of us asked, and the three of us collapsed into laughter.

Ignoring Hicksy’s muffled objections—now loud, now impressively creative—we walked into the pub and ordered a round of beers.

“Do you think we should go and get him out?” someone asked eventually.

Pause.

“Should we have another beer first?”

That seemed funnier.

But as the pints arrived, so did the guilt. We drank quickly.

There’s something about that time in your life when even being the butt of the joke feels like being let in. Like being seen.

When we finally went back out, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Hicksy’s arm was still there, accusingly lifeless. We moved the car. Opened the boot.

He erupted—a full-throttle, expletive-laced monologue that had clearly been building the whole time we were in the pub. The kind of fury that needs an audience. (We didn’t tell him about the second round.)

And yet—even then—there was a glint. A flash of something like pride.

He’d done it. Squeezed himself into a tiny boot. Got driven to a pub. Got parked against a wall. Became legend.

I haven’t seen Hicksy in years. But an old school friend mentioned, not long ago, that he’d spotted him.

I do wonder, sometimes, if he ever tells that story.

I hope he remembers it like we did—louder, stranger, and somehow… perfectly logical.

This is a story about trying to hold on to a self you’ve only just managed to build. About hair as armour, as ritual, as one small thing you can control when the rest keeps shifting. It’s about being young, being seen, and what it takes to stay seen. A good haircut can make you feel invincible. A bad one can undo you.

Same as Last Time

The trick was to hang your head over the end of the bed. Not halfway. All the way, until blood pooled and the angle was right for Emil’s geometry to reveal itself. Gel first, then hairspray, then the whine of the blow dryer—not aimed, but ushered. The strands rose, slow and deliberate, until the shape locked in—more ritual than style.

It had started back in Chesterfield, in the little salon where Emil—once the bane of St John’s Ambulance cadets, now rebranded with a softened vowel—had figured out how to feather my hair so gravity could be reverse-engineered. Emil had been a menace on the annual getaways, where we got to enjoy a free weekend at one of Derbyshire Miner’s Holiday Camps, in exchange for learning bandaging techniques, perfecting the recovery position, and learning how to treat mining-related injuries. It was still spelled E-M-I-L, but he now pronounced it Emile, and took pleasure in playfully teasing women of a certain age who mispronounced it.

Back in those earlier years, he’d been the ringleader in a gang that would terrorize younger cadets: pinning them on the floor or on a bed, pulling down their trousers and underpants, and blacking their testicles by applying shoe polish with a stiff brush. It never happened to me. But I lived in fear of it for years. Apparently, the pain was one thing, but it was the slow, humiliating process of scrubbing off the thick, greasy polish that stayed with you—the sting of the brush, the stubborness of the polish , and the shame that clung longer than the colour. That fear stayed tucked away—lessened, maybe, but never gone. Even years later, sitting in Emil’s chair, part of me still flinched at the idea of surrendering control. Now he wielded thinning shears with something approaching grace.

By twenty-one, I’d stopped colouring my hair every week, so no more henna-stained pillowcases, but the ritual had simply shifted form. Style over shade. Height over hue. At college, I was always being miscast as an art student. People would tilt their heads and say, “You’re in... Fine Art? Design?”

“Computer Science,” I’d reply, and watch them recalibrate.

They’d laugh. Embarrassed. “It’s the hair. The way you dress. Your makeup.”

That started in 1978, the year my mum died. I wasn’t ready to grieve the usual way, so I masked it: mascara, hair dye, outlandish clothes. Let them see that boy, I thought. A boy who looked like he belonged on the cover of Smash Hits. In my first weeks at Brinsford, the cleaner walked into my room in K-block and saw the makeup on the windowsill. She blocked the doorway, assuming I was in the wrong room. It took a while to convince her. The chocolate helped.

Fair enough, if it were still 1979, when I’d first turned up in eyeliner, scarlet zip-up trousers, and ex-RAF jackets festooned with punk badges. But by the end of 1981, I was a married man (okay, more of a married boy), and the makeup had gone. The hair, though—that stayed. My hair wasn’t spiky anymore—I just prided myself on making it different from everyone else’s, by style, by colour, or both. Not rebellion anymore. Just ritual. Something to keep doubt at bay.

Everyone else had nicknames that came with their surnames. 'Muddy' Slinger; 'Spider' Webb; 'Tiny' Cox. Mine was different. Mine was earned.

Spike.

Not Rob. Not Fordy. Just Spike.

While the spikes didn’t last—I eventually moved on to a Phil Oakey–inspired asymmetric bob, long on one side and post-war short back and sides on the other—the nickname stuck. By then, I’d found a different swanky salon in Wolverhampton. Very expensive, but always on the lookout for models. If you timed it right, they’d cut you a break on the price. I’d been there with various friends over the first couple of years, and while their results were sometimes a bit hit or miss, I always seemed to come out with something special. I’d bring in pages ripped from one of the music weeklies—magazine fragments smelling of ink and pocket lint—and they’d study them like blueprints. Then the master stylist would be summoned, murmuring suggestions, adjusting angles, guiding the process like a conductor easing into the overture. The result was uncanny.

With that as a backdrop, I honestly don’t recall what prompted me to try the local Polish barber on the estate where we lived in Heath Town. Maybe convenience. Maybe curiosity. Maybe just a lapse in aesthetic judgment. I was popping down to the little shops that sat in the centre of the open-access housing complex, and just as I walked past the barber shop, I remembered I was due for a haircut. "Why not?" I thought. To get the model rate at my regular salon, I had to pre-book weeks in advance and be prepared to change plans at the last minute. Here, there was no queue. No ceremony. No waiting. Just a red vinyl chair and a severe-looking man with a buzz cut who looked like he sharpened his scissors on bricks.

But when I walked in, I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. It reminded me of Stan the barber, where I’d get my hair cut alongside my dad as a little kid. I always loved every minute of Dad-time. Stan had this tiny place in Holmewood, and he believed a liberal dollop of Brylcreem was the pièce de résistance to any haircut. He wore short-sleeved nylon smocks over long shirts, and his scissors and combs would rest between snips in a glass of fragrant blue disinfectant. Your head would always end up smelling of it by the time he was done. His was the kind of barbershop where, at the end of the cut, he'd always discreetly ask, “Anything for the weekend?”—and everyone except me knew exactly what he meant.

Heath Town in those days was a collage of brutalism and bravado: concrete towers with peeling paint, kids wheeling BMXs across broken walkways, multilingual arguments drifting through cracked windows. It had warmth, yes, and community—but also corners you didn’t linger in. We were the racial minority and stuck out like sore thumbs—visible, peripheral, not quite belonging.

That first time—oh yes, I went back—I didn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary. He wasn’t as talkative as other barbers, but when I told him what I wanted, he nodded, said “yes,” and immediately jumped in. This was in the midst of the Mod revival, and I’d opted for a retro ’60s look—short back and sides, with more length on top. He made short work of it, and it looked fantastic. What’s more, it was about a third of the heavily discounted ‘model’ rate at the swanky place. I couldn’t believe my luck.

It wasn’t just me that thought that—everyone did. People were asking me where I’d got my hair cut, and I’d be bragging about this great place I’d discovered... no waiting... no hassle... all at very little cost.

It must have been about six weeks later when I very confidently returned to the same barber.

As I sat in the chair, he smiled enthusiastically, which I took for recognition. I relaxed.

He didn’t say anything—just stood poised with his scissors. It felt a little awkward, so I decided to break the ice by gushing about my last hair cut, how much everyone liked it, and then went on to say that I wanted it exactly the same.

He paused, set down the scissors, and picked up his trimmers, switching the guard to what I now know to be a #2. I consider that to be the perfect length for the sides and the back of one's head, and that is where I assumed he was going to start.

No. What he did instead was take the trimmers and make a pass from my forehead to the back of my head. Realising what he was doing, I screamed—but it was too late. As Magnus Magnusson used to say: he’d started, so he had to finish.

I tried to explain the horrors of what he’d done, but that was when I learned I'd pretty much already reached the limits of his English. It didn’t go much beyond that emphatic “yes” and his eerie ability to parrot sentences back without understanding a single word they meant.

That was how I ended up with a #2 buzz cut, and I was crying by the end of it. There was no shame involved—just acceptance of how awful it looked. Buzz cuts look great on some people, but I am just not one of them. Plus, because my hair was so blond back then, I looked close to bald.

I ran back to the flat, determined to try and do something about it before Roz saw me. She happened to come out of the kitchen just as I was trying to sneak up the stairs. She didn’t need to say a word.

"It's not as bad as it looks," I said. It was. "It will look better after I wash it," I said. It didn’t.

Still, I tried. I got in the shower and scrubbed at my scalp like I could rinse away the mistake. When that failed, I moved to stage two: damage limitation. Somewhere in the back of a drawer, I still had a box of copper-coloured hair dye. I convinced myself it would help. Funny how little dye you need when you barely have any hair left. Funnier still, how wrong you can get it.

Remember when the Eurythmics first broke out with “Sweet Dreams,” and Annie Lennox had that whole close-cropped androgynous look with short orange hair? I had that look probably a year earlier. And trust me—I did not wear it well.

I took to wearing hats after that. For about eight weeks, I think, until my hair was back to a reasonable length.

While it was regrowing, I went home and thought about falling on my knees and asking Emil—Emile—to fix it. I imagined him tilting his head, the way he used to with clients who couldn't quite pronounce it right, that patient correction now tinged with judgement. In the end, I decided that would have been more humiliating than a 'blacking' would have been.

I learned my lesson, though. Never assume that a head nod means someone understands.

No matter what you were studying at Wolves Poly, if you were male and living at Brinsford Lodge, you were also studying Applied Resonance. Not officially. But everyone learned it. At some point in its long and checkered history, someone had discovered that if you tapped just right—just the right frequency, just above the window latch—the catch would vibrate loose. Not a trick. Not a hack. A kind of sonic persuasion. Tap, pause, wait. The latch would slowly turn itself open, like it had changed its mind.

Each year, the technique was passed from seniors to freshmen. Not ceremoniously—just quietly, inevitably. And once one fresher had it, the rest did too.

Naturally, this led to a curriculum of additional learning: Improvised Engineering and Advanced Tomfoolery. Especially on weekends, when someone had gone home and their room sat there—unguarded, available, deeply tempting.

Once the latch yielded, it was just two quick bangs at the base—where the metal arm with its row of holes sat stubbornly against the frame. A well-placed knock and it would spring free, like it knew the drill. The window opened with a groan that felt almost performative. Then one person climbed in, tiptoed to the door, and let the rest of the cohort in like guests at a secret party.

The boldest innovations didn’t require an empty block—just an unattended room and a working knowledge of sockets. One guy came back late one Sunday, flipped on the light, and triggered a spin dryer that had been filled with gallons of water and plugged into the ceiling light socket. Instead of illumination: chaos. Water sprayed in every direction. The machine convulsed around the room like a drunk unicyclist. He found the plug. He did not find the joke funny.

Another time, Supersonic—so named not for his warplanes, which he built lovingly for a wargaming club in Wolverhampton, but for his Sid Little frame—returned to find his room gone. Not stolen. Reassembled. Every piece of it had been moved outside and pinned to the exterior wall of K Block. Bed made. Posters hung. Certificates framed. Pyjamas tucked. Slippers placed. A life-size diorama of his life, relocated with unsettling accuracy. He stood, assessed, and finally said: "It's the wrong side of the bed." Then went in.

It was every Sunday afternoon. That was when the mischief happened. When the building sighed, half-empty, and time bent just enough for absurdity to become logic. We were all eighteen or so. Which meant we thought we were subtle, but we were really just thorough. Clumsy in the way only sincerity can be.

Two weeks after the Kate-from-Kent incident, I hadn’t been plotting revenge. But when both Kevin and Paul went home for the weekend—Kevin, the party-starter Scouser, and Paul, the dry-witted Yorkshireman who had theatrically unveiled my embarrassment—it would’ve been rude not to accept the invitation.

Up until then, every operation had focused on one room. I wanted more. Not chaos. Just symmetry. So I doubled the stakes.

We cracked the windows in under ten minutes. At first, I worked alone. I expected someone to talk me down. Instead, they joined in. We formed a bucket line, passing each item across the corridor—bedframes, bins, desks, chairs. Posters were retacked. Socks re-sorted. Even the lightbulbs were swapped. We were careful, precise. It started to feel like a strange kind of honour.

Their doors faced each other. Mine was next to Paul’s. I didn’t even have to pretend not to watch.

Kevin returned first. We were all peeking through cracks as he stepped in, flipped on the light, and froze. Then backed out. Checked the number. Checked his key. Tried Paul’s room. Locked. Still blinking when the first laugh escaped. Then we all did. Kevin grinned. He got it. Like Supersonic, he saw initiation where others might see insult.

We didn’t get time to bask. Paul was close. A lookout whispered from the doorway. Doors shut. Radios off. Paul walked in. Paused. And sighed. “Of course,” he said.

Feeling the joke had peaked, we offered to restore order. And we did. We were nearly finished when we hit the wardrobe.

I can’t remember whose it was—whether we were moving Kevin’s back from Paul’s, or vice versa. But halfway through, Kevin stopped. White as a sheet. There, taped to the back panel: a strange, spindly illustration.

“That,” he said, voice low, “is a Black Mass.”

We stared. It wasn’t just squiggles or vague menace. There was a pentagon. Black candles. Symbols that didn’t feel made-up. Kevin, being a good Catholic lad, wasn’t having it.

“I can’t touch that,” he said. “It’s blasphemous.”

He wanted a priest.

It was half-nine on a Sunday.

We negotiated him down to Plan B. He pulled a small bottle from under his bed. Holy Water. Sprinkled it in corners. Over the desk. Around the doorframe. We watched. Something between ritual and release. A little clumsy, a little sincere. And as the last drops fell, his panic started to melt.

“It’s okay now,” he said.

We nodded. And no one ever mentioned the picture again.

After that, I don’t remember us doing it again. Or if we did, I wasn’t involved. Not because we got caught. Just because something shifted. The joke had landed. The spell had broken.

Better to leave it intact.

Let the corridor sleep.

I’ve told this story before. The original version—Badge of Fandom, Mark of Mischief—was more amused by itself. I almost got thrown out of my course for hacking a sign-on message. A neat anecdote. A shrug of nostalgia.

But that’s not the part I remember most.

What stays with me is the bag. Or rather, what it signaled: a full teenage logic, fixed in place like a dare. If you’re going to be caught, make sure it’s for something that mattered to you.

This version edges a little closer to that—less hack, more longing.

Going Underground

The bag gave it away. Not the code, not the keystrokes—just the bag. Industrial green, heavy-duty nylon. Cylindrical, with a thick zipper that ran the full length. Heavy with textbooks and the kind of certainty that doesn’t age well. Across the top: an embroidered patch I’d sewn on myself, and a scatter of cheap Jam pins—fuzzy print, bent backs, slogans already soft with wear. As if I could badge my way into becoming the kind of person their lyrics demanded. As if being noticed for something you loved might be enough to hold a shape in the world.

It was March 1980. I’d just turned nineteen. My A-levels had been polite but not persuasive, and I’d ended up at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, in a Combined Studies course that sounded like something invented mid-panic. The computer labs were more advanced than they had any right to be. Dumb terminals clustered across campus, all tethered to a minicomputer running on trust and default passwords.

Everyone in Computer Science had to buy the manual. Page 74: a tidy list of access credentials, unencrypted and unembarrassed. It felt less like security and more like a suggestion.

I didn’t think of it as hacking. Not then. Not really. It felt like editorial work. A minor correction to the system’s cultural awareness.

That week, The Jam had gone straight to number one. I decided the network ought to show some respect. System availability out. National significance in. Going Underground had arrived. You’re welcome.

Took fifteen minutes, maybe less. I typed it once. Then again, to check the spacing. Then again, just to watch it happen. The new message looped like a secret handshake—private enough to feel personal, public enough to be noticed. I stayed logged in, watching it scroll.

Then footsteps.

He entered like a warning. Senior lecturer. Senior scowl. Already sure of what he’d find. His voice made the terminals flinch. He’d traced the change to this bank of machines, narrowed it to two still glowing. I looked busy. The other student had only just sat down. We both claimed innocence with the reflexes of small mammals.

He grunted and left.

Relief showed up early, and I let it settle. I stayed in my seat, hands still on the keyboard, breathing like stillness might protect me. The terminals kept humming. The other student had already moved on.

I hadn’t.

Two minutes passed. Long enough to believe the danger had shifted elsewhere.

Then the door slammed open again. This time, he didn’t speak. Just pointed.

“Come with me.”

I didn’t argue. Just gathered my things, the bag swinging like punctuation.

His office was small, beige, and quietly certain of my guilt. He didn’t ask for a confession. Just listed consequences: no more computer access, which meant no assignments, which meant failing the course. He couldn’t expel me, but he could make staying pointless. It was surgical, and it was practiced.

I apologized. Not out of strategy—just the flat panic of realizing that admiration, when worn too loudly, can turn on you.

He paused. Something shifted.

“You did show us the weaknesses,” he said. “Tell me how.”

I did. Quietly. No performance. Just the facts—testifying not to guilt, but to a version of myself that still thought cleverness counted as protection. Cocky. Hopeful. Afraid of being ordinary.

He let me go. Warned me there’d be no next time. I nodded. Waited, unsure if this was a reprieve or the setup for something else.

Just as I reached the door, he asked if I wanted to know how he’d known it was me.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.

He pointed at the bag.

“That thing,” he said, almost laughing.

Not because I’d broken the rules. But because the bag had already confessed, louder than I ever would.

I was uneasy as I followed Katerina through the gate and down the overgrown path toward her apartment. She lived in one of the Victorian houses owned by the university, the kind that had been chopped into awkward units for single faculty. It felt like a place that held on to its ghosts longer than its tenants.

Her unit was on the ground floor. "Three rooms in an L-shape," she’d said. I nodded, as if that meant something. Inside, the main room must have once been the grand parlor: high ceilings, wide windows, and an upturned bicycle mid-disassembly on the dining table.

Not a recent project. Dust on the frame. The chain lay coiled on a folded napkin, as if plated. It felt less like a repair in progress, more like an art installation—Still Life with Derailleur.

I stared.

"It needs a new sprocket," she said, walking past me. "But I have not yet decided which one."

The dining chairs were mismatched. One had a cushion that looked like it used to be a child’s winter coat. The others were bare. The whole room felt thrown together in a hurry and never reconsidered—each object obeying its own private logic.

She caught me looking. “All this furniture—it was already here when I moved in,” she said, with the pleased certainty of someone who believed she'd gotten very lucky.

To the left: an open-plan kitchen. Cheap cabinets. Oversized fridge. I approached it like an archaeologist.

She started opening cupboards, hunting for—anything, really. I joined in. We moved in sync, unintentionally, each reveal confirming the same thing: bare.

"You don’t cook much," I said.

"I don’t cook at all," she replied. "I told you—we have excellent vending machines."

She paused, glanced toward a high shelf.

"I might not actually have any tea."

Eventually, behind an unlabelled jar, I found some dodgy-looking tea bags and filled the kettle.

"Would you like to see the rest of the apartment?" she asked.

It felt like ceremony. And something in her posture made me think: I might be the first person to be shown around—friend, partner, witness. Like crossing a threshold she didn’t know she’d built.

The bedroom was large but hollow. Empty in that way rooms get when their purpose is theoretical. No desk. No drawers. At the far end, a queen-sized bunk bed, built into an alcove. Handmade. Slightly uneven. Proud.

She climbed up to the top level, crouching on the bare platform, her head resting against the ceiling.

"I like to sit up here," she said. "I feel safe... it’s soothing."

I stayed below. "It looks... sturdy."

"Do you want to come up?"

"I’m good down here."

She nodded, smiling.

And then I saw it: the sack.

It was tied to the bedframe and hung like an industrial stocking. Burlap. Bulging.

"What’s that?" I asked.

"What?" she said, eyes passing through it.

"This big sack," I said.

"Oh, you mean my closet."

I paused. "Closet?"

"Yes. In your country, you might say wardrobe."

"I know the word closet," I said. "But that’s... a sack."

She nodded. "My system is simple. I wash the clothes, dry them, and put them in the sack."

To prove it, she untied it and pulled out a crumpled shirt, followed by a pair of crumpled shorts. Both clean. Both devastatingly wrinkled.

I asked if she had an iron.

She blinked. Like I’d asked her if she churned her own butter.

She offered to show me the bathroom. I declined. Suggested the kettle had probably boiled.

She excused herself, said she’d join me in a minute.

I went back to the kitchen. The kettle had boiled, cooled. I restarted it.

While the kettle hissed, I opened the fridge. The light was dim and flickering, like it didn’t really want to be involved. Shelves: empty, aside from a lone takeaway container and a few condiment packets—soy sauce, ketchup, mustard—spread out like a sad buffet.

At the bottom, one drawer. It resisted, then gave, like it knew what I was about to see and couldn’t, in good conscience, let it happen easily.

Inside: a collapsed half-lemon. And something behind it, inside a plastic grocery bag. I leaned in. Whatever it was sat on a polystyrene tray, the cellophane torn. Whatever color it had originally been, it was now green. And blue. With white specks. The mold bloomed into topography—soft craters, ridges, tiny peaks. Furry and unnatural. The texture of something halfway between science and myth.

I wasn’t sure if it was food or folklore.

That’s when she walked in.

She didn’t flinch—just looked at me, calm and unblinking.

"Oh," she said. "You found the cheese."

"Cheese?"

"Yes. From my boss. Last Christmas. I’d believed she didn’t like me, but she gave me such a beautiful cheese selection."

She looked at it, then at me.

"Yes. I know. But—it was kind."

"Katerina... it’s March. You’ve had this cheese rotting in your fridge for three months?"

"Not this Christmas, Robert. Last Christmas."

I placed the cheese back in the drawer. She relaxed.

I poured the tea. No milk. No lemon. Just the gesture of tea. It tasted like patience. Or like staying polite on a sinking ship.

We sat on the sofa. I scanned for conversation. The bookshelves were bare. A handful of Russian prog rock CDs. Nothing I could translate into small talk.

Then I saw the photo.

What looked like an older, mousier version of Katerina. Two children. Two smiling grandparents.

"Your sister and her kids?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "And these are my parents."

"Nice," I began.

"You’ll be meeting them next month."

"I didn’t know they were visiting Philadelphia."

"They’re not," she said. "They’re visiting my sister. In San Antonio."

"So... how will I meet them?"

"We will go there," she said. "They must meet the man I will marry."

There was a long pause, while it sank in that she wasn’t joking.

I don’t remember what I said after that.

I don’t remember leaving.

I don’t remember getting in the car, or starting the engine.

The next thing I remember was the state line: Delaware.

I was safe.

That night, I sent the email. "Dear Katerina."

I don’t recall what it said. Probably some version of "It’s not you, it’s me."

She never replied.

Years later, I searched her name.

Now teaching in the Midwest. Publishing often.

Probably still building systems.

Still surviving.

I wonder if her closet still hangs in her bedroom, and whether she was ever able to part with the cheese. Or if that was what unsettled me most—not the mess, but the method.

And for those of you who might have missed the first two parts of this story, here they are.

If you’ve read Eligible, Not Suitable, you’ll know that by the end of date five, I wasn’t expecting much from date six—except maybe closure. But then K—let’s call her Katerina, though that wasn’t her real name (something to do with discretion and a fraught departure from the motherland)—Katerina asked me to take my birthday off. She promised a surprise. We were going to New York. Tickets to a show, dinner somewhere grand. Just enough spectacle to make sense of the last two weeks of emotional dodgeball.

What I got instead was something else entirely.

The day began with a kind of quiet promise—sky washed pale blue, light catching the corners of buildings like it was trying to make them beautiful. Still, there was a knot blooming beneath my ribs, like the overture already bracing for the finale. Other than the destination, Katerina hadn't shared any details. The arrangement was that I'd pick her up on the U. Penn campus at 1 p.m.

I'd never been on the campus; you weren’t allowed there at night unless you were faculty or a student. She suggested I meet her outside Huntsman Hall, where her office was. Because the building had only just opened, her office was one of two Portacabins squatting inside like misfit modules beneath a cathedral dome.

I'd assumed that we’d be heading straight to the train station. Instead, she told me she wanted to show me her office. It was nicer than I expected, but unmistakably a Portacabin. She motioned for me to sit and turn away—"no peeking," she added, half-joking—and when I turned back, she was holding the birthday card she'd clearly just written, along with a large box beautifully wrapped, ribbons curled and trailing.

When I took it from her, it was surprisingly heavy. I opened the card first—a slightly offbeat blend of formal well-wishes and unexpected emotional specificity. Then, as I unwrapped the gift, she began flapping—hands fluttering, breath caught, a small step backward. Just a little. I paused until she recovered, then continued.

My gift was a very fancy 18lb chocolate cake. I know the weight because she proudly announced it as I scrambled for the appropriate response. She’d had no idea how to choose a gift, she confessed, so she’d wandered into a gourmet shop that sold extravagant chocolate tortes by the slice, and asked if she could just buy the entire thing. The sheer audacity of it—this massive, decadent monument to confusion and affection—took a moment to process. And yes, it was delicious, as my entire department could later confirm when I took it into work the next day.

I thanked her, telling her no one had ever bought me an 18lb chocolate cake before. She was giddy that I liked it. Gathering my thoughts, I asked why she’d chosen it.

Without hesitation: "Survival fat."

Now, I consider myself smarter than the average bear, but I had no idea what she meant.

"In Russia, we have long and hard winters," she said, gesturing to my midsection. "And we Russian women like our men to have some... survival fat. And you, Robert... you are too skinny!"

"And you've decided I need fattening up?"

"Yes," she said, beaming.

Rewrapping the cake for what I assumed would be a short journey to my car, she suddenly said, "Before we go, I'd like to show you the lecture halls where I teach."

"Sure," I said, thinking it would be quick.

It wasn’t. We left the cake behind, and I followed her down a series of hallways until we reached a modern lecture hall with raked seating. She peered inside, found it empty, and stepped confidently to the front. Then she began: listing every course she had ever taught in that room—titles, departmental codes, perhaps even in chronological order. Her delivery was meticulous, as though she were defending a thesis no one had asked for. I stood in the back, rows of empty seats watching her with more warmth than I could muster.

Next door, the lecture theater was identical. So was the ritual. Another roll call of courses, her tone unwavering, the cadence automatic. It was impressive. It was relentless. It was surreal.

At first, I thought it might be a way of showing pride—or transparency. But by the second hall, it felt like something else. An insistence on being seen, exactly and only as she chose to be. I nodded, smiled, and said nothing.

After ten more minutes, I gently suggested we should probably get going. She nodded, and we returned to her Portacabin. I'd assumed she’d been passing time until our train. That’s when she dropped the bombshell: there was no train. She hadn’t known how to plan a surprise like that, so she hadn’t.

If I were playing Emotional Bingo, I was ready to shout "House!" Frustrated, sad, confused—but empathy was making a strong late finish. I let the silence stretch.

Then she said she had another idea. She'd asked a friend about restaurants, and maybe we could go to a Thai place nearby. I just wanted to go home, but I found myself agreeing. We packed the birthday cake into my trunk and walked.

Imagine a cross between a restaurant and a Greyhound terminal—formica tables, buzzing fluorescent lights, stale oil in the air. It was cavernous, nearly empty—exactly the kind of weird that still made sense.

Every instinct said leave. But I had other things on my mind.

The meal was just as I expected: slow service, bad food, and the place was freezing. We kept our coats on. I just wanted it to end. But something nagged at me. I asked her—why would anyone recommend this place?

She said her friend had. I asked which friend. "You met her," she said. I hadn’t met any of her friends. "When?" I asked. "Earlier today."

"Do you remember the woman who held the door open to the lecture hall?"

Yes, I did. A diminutive Asian woman who looked barely out of high school. No pleasantries, no introduction. Just an awkward nod, like she was a cameo who hadn’t learned her lines.

"She’s your friend?"

"She’s a research assistant," Katerina said. "Just arrived from China. I asked if she knew of any restaurants."

"And this is her favorite?"

"No, this is the only one she's ever been to."

I was speechless. A rarity. I sat quietly while she paid, counting down to being back in the safety of my car.

Still silent, we stepped into the kind of cold that claws through fabric and skin. My car wasn’t far, and we walked in the same direction. I knew the route—her apartment was nearby. I'd dropped her there before. This time, I planned to say goodbye and drive off.

But I couldn’t let her walk home in that cold. I’d drive her. We didn’t need to talk. Just one last act of decency.

It wasn’t about cake or curriculum anymore—I just didn’t want to feel alone. Not that day. Maybe not ever. Maybe trying—just showing up—was its own kind of survival. A loop I’d unknowingly traced since the day she explained her partner selection process—when she picked me not because I was "the one," but because I was number eight. And I stayed. Because even absurd effort was better than none. Because hope, too, needs a kind of survival fat.

I’d never been inside her apartment before. I’d always just dropped her at the door. That night, we drove there in silence, and when I parked, I waited for her to get out so I could say a final, quiet goodbye.

And then she turned to me and asked if I wanted to come in for a hot drink before heading home. I hesitated, teetering between a clean getaway and a stubborn curiosity. After everything, I needed to know: what kind of world did someone like Katerina retreat into?

I know I said this was a two-part story, but this feels like a good place to pause.

If you're as curious as I was, you'll have to come back tomorrow for the final installment.

The year was 2002, and the silence in my house no longer echoed—just hummed. My divorce had been finalized the day after 9/11. That fall, the world grieved—and I joined it, feeling everything and nothing all at once. We’d weathered a lot together—fertility issues, repeated relocations across the UK, my father’s long decline. Then came a transatlantic reboot with little support, as we tried to outrun a past we didn’t yet realize was catching up. In the end, what we carried cracked us open.

By winter, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to date again—or just desperate to feel something.

Friends had promised introductions. Each had someone in mind—a friend of a friend, a co-worker, a cousin. But when it came time to follow through, every prospect vanished. One had moved. One had married. One had come out. Another just stopped returning calls. It was like stepping onto a stage and realizing the rest of the cast had quit.

So I tried something new: Match.com.

Back then, online dating still felt vaguely illicit. People spoke of it the way they mentioned frozen embryos or offshore accounts. Amazon still only sold books. Most of us were still writing checks. But the internet was beginning to stretch its limbs. Why not look for love?

I filled out the questionnaire, uploaded a photo that was neither flattering nor dishonest, and waited.

My first match was K, a tenured psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a few years younger, but not enough to feel strange. Our emails were fluid. She asked smart questions. Responded thoughtfully. It felt like something.

She suggested ice skating for our first date. I checked the rink’s hours, but she assured me it would be open. When we got there, though, the gates were locked. It turned out she’d simply felt it should be open.

We walked. It was bitterly cold—the kind that climbs through your sleeves and settles in your spine. She didn’t seem to notice.

She apologized with a shrug and suggested we try again the next night.

Part of me—an increasingly louder part—was screaming run away. But another part, quieter and more afraid, whispered that if I bailed now, I might not try again. So I said yes.

As we wandered, she shared her “partner selection process.” Her term, not mine. She’d started with 2500 men within 25 miles of the university. Narrowed it by age: no more than ten years older. That left 225. Then came education—must have a Master’s or PhD. That brought it to 27.

“I have an MBA,” I offered.

“Of course you do,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”

I smiled. “I feel honored to have made the top of your list.”

She blinked. “You’re number eight.”

“Did you meet the other seven?”

“Yes,” she said. “They were not suitable.”

She wasn’t being cruel—just clinical. As if I were the eighth résumé on a shortlist. It wasn’t unkind, exactly. It was logical. And after everything I’d been through, I understood the appeal of logic. Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that I wasn’t quite a person to her yet—just an input in an algorithm.

We ended the night with a brisk goodbye. And then went on to have five more dates.

In our emails and evenings, there was a matter-of-factness to K—a way she had of appearing only lightly tethered to this plane. As if she were simultaneously present in fifteen others, playing speed chess or coding a new world order. I found her idiosyncrasies both endearing and exhausting—often in the same breath.

Once, she told me she loved dance—as a spectator. I got us tickets to a Broadway-style history of dance at the Walnut Theater. She was spellbound, barely remembering to breathe. At intermission, I turned to ask how she was enjoying it, but she grabbed my hand and urgently gestured that we needed air.

We made our way outside, into the crowd of smokers. Then, suddenly, she began jumping up and down—repeatedly, for about a minute. When she stopped, she held my arms and said, matter-of-factly, that she sometimes had to do that when she got overstimulated.

Later, I would learn the term “flapping.” That night, I was just grateful no one seemed to notice.

Another time, she mentioned that her diet mostly came from vending machines. I thought it was a joke. But over the next two weeks, I learned she meant it: soda, candy bars, energy drinks.

I’ve always been drawn to quirky people—those wired a little differently. Maybe it’s because I’m wired a little differently myself. Looking back, many of her quirks suggest she may have been on the autism spectrum. I didn’t see it then, but it makes me feel a complicated tenderness now—for how much I didn’t understand.

At the end of one date—another long walk in the cold—she casually mentioned needing to get divorced. I stopped walking. Her profile had said she was single.

When I questioned her about it, she simply said she felt single.

She’d married someone while at Moscow State. He’d built a promising internet business that had threatened a mafia-run industry. They fled the country, going separate ways for safety. She hadn’t seen him since.

Then there was the night she was an hour late meeting me at the university bookstore. This was pre-smartphone ubiquity, so I just waited. When she arrived, arms full of books and papers, her first words were: “Robert, this is your fault.”

She explained she’d been in the psychology library—researching me. “I think your many homosexual friends stem from unresolved maternal conflict… I believe you are a latent homosexual.” She gestured to her stack of papers like a prosecuting attorney presenting evidence.

I asked, calmly, “What do you want me to say, K?”

A week earlier, she’d struggled to understand how I—a straight man—could have close gay friends. I’d explained my involvement in my company’s LGBTQ+ affinity group. But it hadn’t landed.

There was no dramatic goodbye—just a quiet understanding that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Still, I wasn’t ready to stop. Not because I thought she was “the one.” But because I needed to prove to myself that I could try. Even if it was awkward. Even if it was absurd. Trying meant I wasn’t stuck anymore.

They weren’t bad dates. They just weren’t a beginning.

But just when I thought things were coming to a natural close, she told me to take my birthday off. She had a surprise planned. A day of adventure in New York, she said.

What I got instead was a birthday I’ll never forget—and not for the reasons you’d hope.

But that’s tomorrow’s story.