‘In a strange way it felt positive,’ he said, lightly. ‘A lot of it was extremely uncomfortable, but all the pain, and being so sick, made me stop worrying about work for once. It forced me to take a breather. I realized how a lot of things that have been bothering me, such as not having a secretary or not getting my own office, aren’t nearly as important as I thought they were. I guess the most significant thing is that it feels as if this illness has been telling me something.’
‘Like, don’t eat chicken cooked by Penny Lee?’
‘I mean it’s shown me something about my ego,’ he said. ‘It was taking over. And at the height of my fever … it was either a flash of light or total darkness, but for a moment I felt a sense of release from the weight of the world. It was beautiful.’
‘Maybe you went to the Other Side,’ I said breathily. I recounted the tale of the Ouija board, and Bartholomew, and the milk hatch flying onto the table. ‘Now don’t tell me that’s a coincidence.’
Nev smiled, but in a strained way. He had been speaking in a slightly fey tone, which I found uncomfortable. It was like when I saw him talking to the burly dad of a friend and was gripped with the fear that he was about to challenge Nev to a fight.
‘Anyway, Mum and I have got something we need to talk to you about.’
They looked solemn.
‘You’re not getting a divorce, are you?’
Mum was sending Nev off to Florida for a month to recuperate, build his strength up, and relax in a stress-free environment. He was to stay with a friend of a friend in a house by a lake in a place called, appropriately enough, Land O’ Lakes. The friend of a friend ran the house as something of a retreat, inviting people to stay with them free of charge on the proviso that they use the time there for quietude and contemplation. ‘He’s not allowed to do any work,’ said Mum. ‘I’m not going to let him tell the paper where he is. It’s going to be a total rest.’
‘Sorry to rush off as soon as I’m able to talk to you,’ said Nev. ‘But this way I’ll be able to recover properly and then we can do all kinds of things together. We can climb trees. Have conker fights. Build dens in the woods. Play games on the Atari.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’d like to do,’ I said, thinking of a family ritual that hadn’t happened in a while. ‘I’d like us to bomb down to Brighton after having loads of spare ribs in the Royal China, spend the afternoon on the pier, have a pinball tournament, play air hockey and go on the beach and try to hit a rusty tin can with a pebble. And then we can stop off at a country pub on the way back to London and you can drink beer while me and Tom have a Coke and a packet of crisps. Can we do that again?’
‘Of course we can,’ said Nev, warmly. ‘That sounds like fun.’
But we never did.
While Nev was off in Florida, I made a new friend. Sam Evans lived in Hammersmith, West London, in a flat. All of my suburban chums lived in houses – not big houses, but houses nonetheless – so a flat seemed terribly cosmopolitan. You walked up a flight of stairs to enter the living room, where Sam’s mother Erica slept on a bed that folded out of the sofa. Upstairs was Sam’s room. He had a poster of Judge Dredd, a Commodore 64 computer and a large bookshelf with grown-up novels; apart from Tom, I had not come across a boy who had read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or Animal Farm. I poked my head into Sam’s sister’s room. It was phenomenally untidy: clothes piled everywhere, ashtrays – shocking in itself – and posters of David Bowie on the walls.
‘Your sister looks cool.’
‘Are you joking? Let’s go downstairs and get Mum to make us some French toast.’
Erica Evans, who was American and wore oversized glasses and bright yellow dungarees, worked for something called the Institute For Psychic Research. ‘We’re all psychic,’ she said in a matter of fact way as she worked through a pile of papers on the dining table. ‘It’s just a question of unlocking the power within.’ I told her about the Ouija board episode. ‘Yeah, you get some pretty restless spirits with Ouija,’ she said, nodding enthusiastically. ‘Ghosts are dead people who haven’t resolved their issues in this world, so they cling on to the living. Best not to mess around with that shit.’
Sam picked up a plastic bag full of white powder that was sitting on the top of a bookcase and said, winking at me, ‘Are you selling cocaine again, Mum?’
‘I realized this morning we had run out of washing powder and I didn’t have time to go out and buy some more, so I asked one of the gay guys downstairs if I could borrow some. He was wearing incredibly tight jeans, and I swear, he had no penis whatsoever. I couldn’t stop staring. I hope he didn’t notice.’
I was incapable of contributing to this conversation.
It got worse, or rather, better, when Erica had to go out, presumably for a combination of cocaine selling, ghost hunting and the examining of tiny penises. Sam’s flat had a video machine and he suggested we watch a film called The Man Who Fell to Earth. ‘David Bowie plays an alien. Fancy it?’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘It’s got, like, a blowjob scene, but it’s no big deal.’
‘Cool,’ I said, with a shrug. What was a blowjob?
It was like moving to a foreign country for the afternoon.
The television was on the floor, under the stairs, which meant that the best way to watch it was lying down. Perhaps a family’s discipline could be measured by the height at which they relaxed. At Will Lee’s house, with the exception of the beanbags in the attic, stiff wooden chairs with high, straight backs kept you at a minimum of two feet off the ground at all times, which seemed unfair considering his mother was under five feet tall and had to climb onto them. In our house everything levelled out at a conventional foot and a half. At the Evans’s, sitting above carpet level was for the unenlightened.
The film was made up of a series of exotic images, none of which I understood but which stayed with me for years afterwards: David Bowie watching a bank of televisions; wandering around an arid, distant planet; painted figures performing a ritualistic dance in a Japanese restaurant; and a sex scene with the aforementioned blowjob, something that before then I didn’t actually know existed. As the months passed those images kept playing back at me, ever more jumbled and confused but still with vivid flashes, and always associated with the first time I saw Sadie Evans.
It was some time near the end of the film when she came up the narrow stairs and into the flat. She must have been about fourteen, the same age as Tom, but she looked older. She had lank reddish hair cut to her shoulders and pale, pimple-flecked skin. She was wearing denim jeans, a denim jacket, a studded belt and a Motorhead T-shirt. She hovered over us, hands on her hips.
‘Who said you could watch my Man Who Fell to Earth?’
‘Who said I couldn’t?’ Sam replied, not looking up at her.
‘You’re lucky,’ she said with a curl of the lip, ‘that I’m in a good mood.’ She kicked her brother in the ribs. Sam yelped and called her an idiot. She cocked her head at me and said, ‘Who’s this?’
‘I … I … I … I’m … Wuh-whu-whu … Will.’
‘You will what?’
‘That’s his name?’ said Sam, eyes raised heavenwards.
For some reason this appeared to annoy her, as she stomped off to her room. But halfway up the stairs