BARRY WALSH
The Pimlico Kid
For Bronwen
Also for my father, Thomas Walsh and my brother, Terry Walsh. The best men I’ve known are the first men I knew.
In memory of Sarah McCormack (1978–2006), a wonderful Pimlico Kid.
“Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take”
From Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot
Table of Contents
Beach Magic and Sunray Stories
Coming in 2014 from Barry Walsh – Love Me Do
Prologue – October 1975
Taunton 20 miles. The road sign slips past and another, listing local villages, glides towards me. One name stands out like my own on a guest list. A door into the past swings open and releases a locked-away ache. The car slows, behind me a horn blares. I pull into a lay-by.
Lower Sinton: part of an address written above two kiss crosses on a sheet of lined paper. I have never been here but I know it from what she told me: narrow lanes of pale yellow cottages; black window boxes crammed with flowers; main street pavements that rose three feet above the road. Her grandmother’s house stood next to the village post office and in the road outside her father’s black Humber gleamed. Beyond the back garden lay the wide meadow and further still there was the river. She spent her holidays here: where the sun always shone. When she returned to London, I marvelled at her golden skin and the extra light that had crept into her hair. It’s what happened in Somerset. It should have been Summerset.
I close my eyes. Back they come. First, as always, her face: bright, elfin, thanks to a short hairstyle, known at the time as Italian Boy. Beside her, my friend is making a circle with thumb and forefinger to tell me that everything is OK. And the other girl, with shining blue eyes, is hiding a smile behind her hand.