"So, Mr. Lorenzo." He sat down with a huff, his office chair squealing once, sharply, under the weight he'd dropped into it. "Did they tell you why you're here?" 

"I was told a malfunction...?"

Crap. I'd asked a question. That's junior sales rep's mistake number one. Never ask a question, even when you are asking a question, end it like a statement. I assumed my upward inflection was due to jet lag, and hoped he would cover for me by responding quickly. Nod reassuringly, restate the word "malfunction" in an appropriately somber tone, and then tell me what was actually going on.

He didn't. He just steepled his fingers and stared at me across his glass-topped desk.

If one of the porters in the hallway hadn't greeted him as Dr. Richardson, I never would have thought he was actually a doctor on a cruise ship. His pasty skin, his puffy eyes, his chewed fingernails? All wrong. Where was the tan? Where was the too-white smile, and the little sun-squints in the corner of his eye?

I shifted a little under his gaze, my clothes creasing around my body. I had sweated and cooled so many times today that each fold seemed to have stiffened into a separate entity. "Well, I was told they have been squirting people in the eye, which is difficult to believe. They're just not designed that way."

He leaned forward, elbows squeaking on the glass. "I don't give a good goddamn how they were designed. You haven't been here. You haven't seen the people coming into my office in agony, Mr. Lorenzo. Agony. Several of them have been almost blinded." He leaned further forward, so I could see tiny red veins beginning to invade the whites of his eyes. "People are scared to leave their cabins. Refunds have been demanded. Royale isn't going to care what it costs to fix them or how much of your schedule they screw up. They need them fixed. Now."  He sat back and said more mildly: "Or else I have a feeling the things are going overboard. All of them."

"I'm here to fix them. I'm sure I'll have it done in no time." I was using the most confident version of my voice, the one I used when a customer was on the fence but on tiptoe, and only needed a nudge.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. "You know there are six hundred?"

Uh oh. I suddenly had to chew back a yawn, which clashed with the confidence I was trying to maintain. "Well, they're not all malfunctioning." Jack had promised this would only take a couple hours. There was no way they were all broken.

He shrugged, sat back in his chair, and I thought I saw a bit of a challenge in his eyes when he said, "Who knows? It seems like most of them, given the number of people I've seen. I guess you'll just have to check them all." He spread his hands and lifted them slightly toward the ceiling.

I stood up and my legs, still stiff from the plane, emitted a hot dull ache. "Well, then. I'd better get started."

"Start with the one outside the spa," he said as I left. "For some reason, people on their way to a massage scream pretty loud when a hand sanitizer squirts them in the eye."

#

Jack, my boss, called the day before and told me that he'd signed me up to meet the ship in Athens. I'd talked to him as I packed one-handed, holding the phone away from my ear to compensate for Jack's too-loud phone voice. He seemed to think he was using a tin can.

"It's like a circus out there, apparently," he yelled. "They're telling me the things have gone nuts. They're squirting people in the eyes!"

"In the eye?" I laughed. "No way. There must be a mistake. They're pulling your leg, they're trying to get you to pay for half a cruise."

"I've seen pictures! This isn't a joke. It's hideous Matt. All kinds of irritations and infections. No one's gone blind yet, but I suppose it's only a matter of time."

"What are these people doing, squatting down and trying to get their face sanitized?"

He laughed once, just a single cough of a chuckle to acknowledge that I'd made a joke. "No. Just walking past."

I zipped my carryon. "No way. Not only would they need to recalibrate the sensor for distance, but they would need to drill a hole in the casing to let the..."

"Hey!" I held the phone further away. "I don't want you to diagnose the thing now. That's why I'm sending you to meet the ship. Royale Cruise Lines are our biggest clients, Matt. Did you know they're our biggest clients?"

I sighed. "Yes."

"Fix those machines, Matt. Fix them. And notice I'm not sending a technician all the way out there just to fix them, I'm sending a sales guy. The sales guy. That's you, Matt. You're the sales guy. You're there to make them fall in love with those machines all over again. And sell more!"

"Got it."

"And get in and out fast, okay? No one likes a mooch."

"Okay."

"I mean it, Matt!" The voice was reaching painful levels again, even though I had checked repeatedly that my handset was on its lowest possible volume. "We don't want it to look like you're just trying to get a free vacation."

"I'm in, I'm out. No worries, Jack."

"Great. And Matt?" He paused, letting suspense infuse the static-filled silence. "If you fix this, all of us back at HQ will remember who it was bailed us out of this. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

And it was.

#

After I left Dr. Richardson's office, a smiling and nodding porter offered to show me to my room. "No," I said. "Thanks, but I'm only going to be here a few hours."

"Oh, no, sir." According to his nametag, he was from Cambodia. He continued to smile and nod as if his neck were on a spring. "Royale is sure you will be here days. Please. To the room!  It is quite lovely."

It was small and windowless, but the shower and the narrow bed looked equally tempting. But I resisted. I didn't even change clothes, although the thought of a fresh shirt and pair of underwear - and especially a shower - was strongly tempting. I'd planned to change at the airport, but customs spent a long time looking through my tools - so long that I was almost an hour late to meet the Royale representative, who seemed to demonstrate how pissed he was at my tardiness by chain-smoking during the entire drive to the port, filling the car interior with a blue haze until my coughs were genuine, not just hints for him to roll down a window.

And now, there was still no time for a shower. The ship left Athens tonight at six, and I needed to be done by then. Because as Jack said, no one liked a mooch. As wonderful as it sounded to have a free vacation, it wouldn't look good to my boss or his boss or Royale, our biggest client. Anyway, there really wasn't any way for the machines to be squirting up. I was betting it was all just a misunderstanding or an exaggeration. A big, expensive joke.

It was 11 am now. No problem, I thought as I closed the door to my cabin. No problem at all for Western Sanitation Solution's quarterly top ranking salesman, two quarters in a row. I'm in, I schmooze, I'm out.

My company manufactured hand sanitizing machines, which automatically dispense .03 ounces of sanitation liquid (with natural aloe extracts) when you place your hand under the sensor. Touching the unit wasn't necessary, but it didn't stop most people - at least those I'd seen at trade shows - mauling the poor things, tapping them, pushing on them, or rubbing them, as if exhorting them to give up their little squirt of alcohol. Royale ships were fitted with 4500s, our most attractive and also our most expensive model. They have spherical tops set on an asymmetrically curved pedestal base. "Sleek but sturdy," said the trade magazines. "Resists tipping with a uniquely artistic shape." The top half of the sphere is translucent, so you can see when the sanitation fluid is running low.

It was hard to believe they could squirt people in the eye. The sensor that allowed the machine to detect the presence of someone's hand wasn't strong enough to detect the presence of anything further than an inch or two away. And even if it was that strong, the machine was only designed to squirt down.

"Good old 4500," I said, as I approached the one outside the spa. "You won't believe the things they're saying about you downstairs."

I was just out of arm's reach, when I saw the red eye of the motion sensor. It had seen me, and I turned away just in time. The alcohol hit my ear. Keeping my face turned away, I dropped my tool bag and unscrewed the top half of the sphere. I felt my way under the bag of fluid for the shutoff switch. The whole time, the thing kept hurling streams of sanitizer into my ear and hair with spitting sounds.

When I'd finally turned the thing off, I wiped out my ear, which felt uncomfortably cold.

And then I saw them watching me.  

 

Pale Northern Legs

by

Lydia Suarez

The ride along Route 301 takes us past tobacco fields, firework stands and diners that smell of fried eggs and defeat.  The rear windows on the ‘62 thrust engine Le Sabre roll all the way down.  A third of my father's arm has roasted. My mother's hair is held hostage by a turquoise scarf.  "Dame eso," Give me that, he says to her. She's exceeded his time limit for refolding the map. He steers with his knee.

 In the back, I am in charge of the cooler. Bottles float and clang.  The ice came from a station near a ramp that emptied onto the smoke stacks and refineries of the New Jersey Turnpike. At four in the morning, my father stabbed the block with a pick and then reached for a cigarette.  The orange embers glowed in pitch-black.  Tonight I will make five trips with the plastic bucket.  I've learned not to ask about the air conditioning, "It's a waste of gas," he says   Gas that costs thirty- five cents a gallon.

My parents patiently grimace as I dazzle them with my eloquence and read aloud about Pedro's shenanigans all the way to South of the Border.  Tires crunch over gravel when my father pulls in the driveway that promises clean, modern comfortably furnished guestrooms with a private bath. The diamond plastic ring has been fearlessly stamped with the room number. No card to swipe.  Inside, forest green drapes, mildew on stucco walls and beds dressed in mint chenille.  A quarter buys a massage. The door will groan with abandonment when we leave.

I dread brushing my teeth at bedtime. The sulfur makes the tap water stink like rotten eggs.  I wade into a rectangular pool after fourteen hours with my thighs stuck to plastic seats.   My eyes sting and turn pink.

 Later my father orders a T-bone. He's completed a day's driving between Fayetteville and Florence. We are halfway between New York and Miami.  Time has an entirely new meaning here.  It passes languorously.  At the Formica table, I arrange pegs on a triangle and eavesdrop on my parents' conversation. 

Tomorrow at this time, we'll be in Miami Beach, the American Riviera for all Cuban families like mine.  First, we'll pick up my aunt at the factory.  Auburn with soulful coffee eyes, she is damp and dewy in the scent of Tabu.  We head to her overgrown house where fallen mangos ripen on a windowsill and then to a hotel across from coconut palms that at night turn incandescent in lime, aqua and cherry.  When I pull the lobby door, the cold air shoves me out. The precise molecules that comprise the ocean and sand and salt are propelled into my lungs where they will dwell for the rest of my life. The next day I make deals with a merciless sun and overstay on the beach eating pastelitos and croquetas and persuading my parents of my invincibility.  The shower pellets me like hail.  The solarcaine stains the unforgiving sheets.

The steak arrives an hour later: overdone and leathery.  I use my fork like a plow to push the grits to the edge of my plate. On the walk back to the room, I cry out "Daddy" and clutch his hand.  I'm afraid of frogs that will leap out of the bushes and land on my pale northern legs.

To collect a card of the Dixie Dreams Motel, a menu from Rod's grill, a frayed photo of the Sombrero Tower at dusk is to reconstruct a life, card by card.  To wage a stake in the struggle between a stony future and a past that has been razed, burnt down, and painted over.  By the time he retired, the skyscraper where my father worked had turned silver like him.  I remember it shiny and black as his hair.  

 When I was a teenager and too mature to hold his hand but oh so curious about his job, he let me tag along on snow days.  An overnight blizzard had shut down the city but not the banks. Currency transfers in another realm. My father's polished florsheims were protected by totes. My maxi coat skimmed the sidewalk.  No pictures of us exist, only the stillness of how we tread beholden to a transformative snow. A ten-minute train ride brought us across the river.   In the World Trade Center, he stepped on the escalator first. Their steepness made me dizzy. "Cuidado."  Be careful, my father said.   He was my protector.  Now, both are gone. 

Postcards, menus, tickets, ephemera as they are known in the trade are the proof, the evidence, the numbered exhibits in the case against evanescence. Otherwise, who would believe you?  How can you convince anyone that something you cannot see can kill you?  Or that a pile of rubble can make you cry? 

How else to bear the disillusion of a detour off the interstate.  "This is it?" my children said as we drove on 301 past boarded buildings and billboards that proclaimed, "When God is not enough call Dr. Womack."  Or how to explain that my aunt in the nursing home rolls her fingers forward in little waves because she's still at that phantom sewing machine, attaching zippers, sleeves, and collars?   

The quest for place and time is an alchemist's mission.  It is the creation of a force more devastating than loss, more enduring than love, more magical than turning metal to gold.  It is an equation that can prove places are immortal, a power that can return him to me, and a grace so divine it can restore what we have lost.

 

He could no longer feel his toes, and when he took a breath, the cold air made his chest ache.  The sky was clear, and the moon bathed the narrow, cobbled street in light so bright he could see his shadow.  It was January. . . the weather was always brutal in January.           

            He stood next to his mother, her tight grip leaving his hand as numb as his toes.  The large ruby and diamond ring she wore cut painfully into his fingers.  Occasionally he glanced up at her face, but every time he did, her faded green eyes seemed fixed on a point far beyond where he could see.  In the moonlight, he thought she looked like an old woman.  There were deep lines around her mouth and eyes.   

            Everyone in the ghetto had been instructed to report to the train station at 2am on Saturday, January 7, 1939.  It was the Sabbath, but he knew that, like themselves, most of the others had stopped observing the Sabbath once they'd been forced from their homes. 

            There were guards at the front of the parade as they left their building - it felt a bit like a parade to him - and more guards at close intervals on both sides of the street, bayonets affixed to their rifles.  He longed to ask if he could hold one of their weapons. 

                                                            * * * *

            Weeks earlier, when they were ordered to leave their cottage, his mother had grimly packed her clothing in a large suitcase and his in a slightly smaller one.  Finally, she'd pulled down a scarred, leather portfolio from atop a huge, mahogany wardrobe and reverently placed in it his father's paintings, as well as several pieces of sheet music, most of it yellowed and brittle. 

            This morning, though, as they prepared to leave, she told him not to bring his bag.  Instead, she made him put on layer after layer of clothing; he was sure there was little left in his suitcase.  He could barely move.  But he was happy not to have to carry the heavy bag.  She left her suitcase as well, but clutched the portfolio to her chest.  Its contents, she whispered over and over, were irreplaceable.  With her breath making little puffs of fog with each word - the room they'd been assigned at the top of a derelict three-story brick building had no heat, no running water, no furniture - she promised him new clothes, new shoes and a new topcoat when they were safely out of Poland.           

            He had nodded and set out by her side, rubbing his eyes.  He had not slept through the night since they'd arrived in Warsaw.  The walls of the building were paper-thin and the sound of babies crying and adults arguing kept him awake night after night.

            When they finally reached the railway station, they, along with everyone else, were handed a small loaf of hard, brown bread, but to his bitter disappointment, no butter or molasses.  The boy took a small bite and quickly spat it out; the bread was dry, and had all the flavor of sawdust. 

            As they waited in the frigid pre-dawn, large, wet snowflakes began to fall from the slate-colored sky.  Eventually, just as he was sure his feet were frozen to the ground, the guards who had accompanied them loudly ordered everyone into railway cars. 

            He and his mother climbed into the nearest one.  It smelled to him of animals, and there were no windows or seats.  It was not at all like the excursion train he had taken two years ago on a school outing.    

            The two of them were jostled into a back corner by the press of others.  He tugged on her arm and insisted she sit down on the fetid straw.  He felt sure the soldiers would pack as many people into the car as possible, plus dozens more, and he wanted her to have a bit of room.  Her skin appeared gray and she had stumbled, nearly falling, several times.  He was afraid she might be ill.

            No one spoke as the door to the railway car slammed shut and was padlocked from the outside.  His mother moaned softly and he placed his hand protectively on her shoulder.  

            For what seemed like hours, nothing happened.  Children whimpered and mothers shushed them.  Otherwise, no one spoke above a whisper, although he heard the unmistakable sound of someone retching. 

            Suddenly, the car jolted and the train began to lumber forward. 

            After a while, he could hear the murmur of men's voices, and while he hated to leave his mother's side, he wanted to hear what they were saying.  He slipped away, leaving her resting her head on the portfolio she'd placed against the wall of the car, staring at nothing, humming tunelessly, anxiously twisting the ring around her finger.

            He wormed his way between and around the tightly-packed bodies until he was next to Rabbi Yosef, from their village.  He listened to the sketchy information the men shared with one another. 

            All agreed the train was headed north, toward the Baltic Sea.  From there, passage for everyone would be secured to Sweden.  The Swedes and Norwegians were neutral, right?  The men nodded to one another sagely and stroked their beards thoughtfully.  The boy wanted to ask them what would happen if the train didn't arrive where they thought.  However, he was afraid of being scolded for being impertinent.

            As he made his way back to his mother, he imagined life in Sweden.  He didn't know any Swedes, and he didn't think his mother did, either.  But he was sure she would find going to Sweden, at least until the war was over, quite acceptable.  By the time he got back to her side, he was smiling.  He'd always wanted to learn a foreign language.

            The train continued to rumble along.  The air rushing in through the slats was painfully cold.  Even with all of the people crammed into the car, and the layers of clothing he was wearing, he was chilled to the bone.  He huddled on the floor next to his mother, turning up the collar of his overcoat and tucking each hand under the opposite arm.  He buried his face in her coat, his teeth chattering.  What he longed to do was to curl up on her lap and let her wrap him in her sumptuous Siberian tiger coat, as she had done when he was a little boy. 

            His father, an artist of some renown, had died five years earlier, when the boy was only six years old.  Ever since, his mother had insisted he sleep in her bed.  She told him the frequent thunderstorms and later, the incessant bombings, frightened her.  Sleeping with him nestled next to her, she said, was comforting.  She called him her mały człowiek - her little man - which embarrassed him, yet made him proud.  And while he didn't like sleeping in her bed, he did as she asked.  Besides, he'd always been afraid of thunder and lightning, too.

                                                            * * * *

            The train suddenly screeched to a halt and he jerked awake.  He tried to work the kinks out of his shoulders and neck, but the unrelenting cold left him feeling lethargic.  All he wanted to do was retreat into sleep and dream of summers spent exploring the caves high in the hills above their village. 

            Suddenly his mother shoved him away from her side and awkwardly got to her feet, cursing loudly.  The cursing soon stopped, but what followed was more frightening:  An animal-like sound came from deep within her.  She threw her fur coat aside and tore at the bodice of her navy silk dress, sending crystal buttons flying in every direction.  The boy got to his feet and tried to quiet her.  She screamed louder. 

            Others in the car angrily demanded she hush, some even threatening to toss her out if she didn't stop her caterwauling.  In the back of his mind, the boy knew they couldn't; the car was locked from the outside.  Still, her screaming would attract the guards. 

            He tugged on her arm and begged her to be silent.  A guard banged on the outside of the car and peered through the slats, a scowl on his pock-marked face. 

            "Quiet!" he commanded.  "Stop that racket or I will shoot everyone."     

            The boy reached up and boldly placed a hand over her mouth.  By now, the odor of unwashed bodies, urine-soaked straw and babies' fouled nappies was overwhelming.  He resorted to breathing through his mouth.  As his mother continued to keen, however, he risked a deep breath and shouted for the Rabbi.

            He could hear, even over her wailing, the screech of metal on metal as the doors on other railway cars opened and guards barked out orders.  Someone on the far side of the car near the door reported they had arrived at Auschwitz.  The boy knew from geography class that Auschwitz was in the opposite direction from the Baltic Sea.  This was not the port of Gdansk. 

            He closed his eyes and saw a red wash of anger.  How could these supposed learned men - men his mother had taught him to revere - not know the train was headed south instead of north?  He ground his teeth and balled his aching hands into fists, then spat disdainfully.

            By now, his mother had ripped her fine silk dress from neck to hem.  He was ashamed, and he was sure that had she been in her right mind, she would have been horrified that strangers could see her milky white shoulders, sagging breasts and flabby upper arms, not to mention her flaccid thighs bulging above her silk stockings. 

            Rabbi Yosef finally appeared at the boy's side, and in a voice devoid of any emotion, insisted the boy forever silence her.  Others in the car took up the refrain.

            The boy was speechless.  He loved her; she loved him.  Without her, he was totally alone.  He couldn't possibly do what the Rabbi demanded.  He shook his head defiantly and stared down at his mud-caked leather shoes.    

            In his heart, though, he knew that at least this time, the Rabbi was right.  His mother's wailing would bring the wrath of the guards upon them all.  Hadn't they already been threatened?

            The Rabbi placed his liver-spotted hand on the boy's arm and whispered urgently in his ear.  The boy, a sob catching in his throat, nodded once.  He prayed she would forgive him.

            He knelt and gathered up the fur coat his mother had cast off.  With the Rabbi's help, he pulled on her hands until she finally sat down.  The two of them then managed to position her so she was lying on her back on the stinking floor.  

He couldn't bear to look at her face, so as he straddled her body, he focused on the small mole at the base of her throat.  Placing her coat, fur side down over her face, he pulled it tight.  Then, using all of his strength, he pressed down.    

            Even as his tears stained her coat's black satin lining, he wondered why she didn't struggle.  He felt her body tense for several seconds and then, blessedly, she went limp.  He was relieved; had she fought him, he couldn't possibly have done it.

            By the time the guards removed the padlock on their rail car, he had dried his tears and carefully covered her body with the same coat he had used to silence her.  Hiccupping, he lifted his chin and squared his shoulders.

            A guard shoved the door open and ordered everyone off the train.  The boy laid the leather portfolio next to his mother's body and shuffled forward, his fingers caressing the smooth surface of the ruby ring he had stuffed into his pocket.

ON THE HOLLOWAY ROAD

by Andrew Blackman

 

Chapter One 

I first met Neil not long after my father died. I was living in a big old red-brick Victorian semi in north London with my mother and her vicious cat Sparky, trying and failing to finish a long, learned novel packed tight with the obscure literary allusions and authentic multicultural credentials that the publishers loved in those days, when out of nowhere Neil rode into town, all bravado and muscles and shaved head and mad, staring eyes. He was just a boy, really, but a boy with an ASBO at fourteen, a caution at fifteen, a spell in junior detention centre at sixteen and a boy of his own by seventeen. He was a boy who was wild and dangerous and soft-hearted, a boy who wanted to live more badly than anyone else I knew at that time. Compared to my own sad, shambling existence in the shadows of life, his was a kaleidoscope. I peeped from behind my mother's curtains at the world outside and wrote about people like Neil. I never believed that he really existed until I met him.

Here's how it happened. It was one of those long, cold winter evenings in London, when the streets are slick with a rain you don't recall having fallen and the lights are an orange ball above you in the damp, black chill, fighting feebly against the night. Water hangs in the air with nowhere to go. You brush against these tiny cold needles and they stab your face, making you draw your hood closer about you. Long, dark alleyways harbour thieves and villains, furtive drug-dealers and nervous knife-wielders and young drunk couples rutting. Through it all runs the Holloway Road, a long straight road with dismal shuttered shops on either side, the gloom punctuated at infrequent intervals by the bright lights of a pub, a kebab shop, a curry house, a burger joint. One or two of the old fish and chip shops remain, but they are relics of a time fast being forgotten. A younger crowd roams the streets on these nights, ravenous for real red meat, big slabs of it slathered in ketchup and hot chili sauce. Fish seems strangely genteel for such a crowd. Even an inch of grease and a side order of thick, stodgy chips cannot hide the slight effeminacy of the tender white fish that melts away at the first bite. The crowd on the Holloway Road these days wants meat that you can bite into, gristle that you can chew on, blood that you can wipe off your lower lip. It wants its beer cold, its curry hot, its lights bright and its music loud. Nothing luke-warm, nothing ambiguous for this crowd.

If you follow the long, straight Holloway Road far beyond the neon horizon, you'll end up in Scotland. It's hard to believe, but this drab parade of tawdriness is the Great North Road by another name. Before too long, the Holloway Road becomes Archway Road, then Aylmer Road, Lyttelton Road, Falloden Way, then the Barnet Bypass, and then you're out of the suburbs and into open countryside, speeding up the A1, sometimes calling itself the Great North Road, other times the London Road, depending on the perspective of the locals, and the green fields and hedgerows flash past as you tick off the towns - Stevenage, Letchworth, Peterborough, Newark, Doncaster, Pontefract, Darlington, Durham. Fight your way through the huge smoky grey sprawl of Newcastle and you find yourself speeding up along quiet open roads now, close enough to the sea to smell the salt in the air and hear the seagulls cawing but never quite close enough to see that big grey frigid North Sea until suddenly you're past Berwick-upon Tweed and hopping over the border into Scotland without even realising it, and there is the sea in front of you all craggy crumbling cliffs and white-topped waves, freezing and forbidding, so that after just a few minutes the road turns away in disappointment and heads inland, cutting across open countryside to grand, regal old Edinburgh, with its magical castle suspended in the clouds above the city. You skirt over the top of ancient Holyrood Park, and for the last few hundred yards of its existence the A1 takes on the name of Waterloo Place, as if trying to reassert its Englishness one last time, reminding the burghers of this proud town that this road, the A1, begins on Newgate Street in London, where Rob Roy himself was held in chains.

I was dreaming all these unconnected vague drunken dreams as I sat in a plastic box of light and sound and blood, Donna's Kebabs I think it was called, taking refuge from the oppressive damp mist outside which had, after some time spent walking up and down the Holloway Road looking for some friends I'd misplaced earlier in the evening, pierced the protective film of alcohol and got to my joints, making my elbows and knees ache arthritically. So I sat huddled over a white foam box filled with grey-brown, glistening slices of meat encased in pita bread and doused in hot sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, red onion, white onion, cucumber, gherkins and olives. By the time Neil walked in I had left magical castles and folk heroes far behind and was pondering on the olives, a nice touch but not right. I admired the originality, but originality is not what you expect from a kebab house at midnight on the Holloway Road in the middle of November. You want something to fill your stomach with the expected greasy-sweet flavours. The sourness of the olives was unexpected, and left me feeling somewhat dissatisfied. Donna did not have any other customers that night, either: perhaps others felt the same about olives in a kebab. So I was surprised when this big, shaven-headed hulk of a man ignored all the empty tables and eased himself creaking into the little red plastic chair opposite me, his gruff "dja mind?" uttered far too late to admit any response but an impotent shrug.

For long minutes he said nothing, just attacking his extra large kebab as if he hadn't eaten for a month. I sat saying nothing, eating nothing. I couldn't. I got the sensation that was strange to me at the time but would soon become familiar: that Neil was doing enough living for the two of us, and there was nothing left for me to do but watch. Soon he had ketchup and chili sauce all over his stubbly chin, and bits of lettuce had flown all over the table, the floor, his jeans, his T-shirt. Whereas I had been eating my kebab using a small folded piece of pita bread as an ersatz fork, Neil just shoved the whole bundle of meat, salad and sauce into his face and began chomping with his huge strong jaws, slashing the food to pieces and somehow ending up with most of it in his mouth, where he chewed only perfunctorily before gulping it loudly down and setting those chomping blades immediately to work on a new mouthful. The noise was astonishing. The dull beat of the radio, the squealing roar of the traffic on the Holloway Road and the underlying buzz of the slowly rotating lump of grizzly meat in the window were all drowned out by the sound of Neil's bones crashing against each other, his saliva washing around among the sauce and ketchup and meat, his muscles working so hard that his temples pulsed furiously with each pincer-like motion of those powerful jaws. His face, already blood-red, became redder with each mouthful, and just as I was beginning to fear that he would choke, he put the remains of the kebab down, took a big slurp of Coke and belched softly.

"So whatcha doing tonight?" he asked. He looked like a child suddenly, all eager energy and bright eyes, waiting for the next amazing thing to come his way.

"I was looking for my friends," I replied. "I lost them somewhere back there." I gestured vaguely over my shoulder into the misty wet darkness, and Neil's eyes followed my arm faithfully, searching the night for people he'd never seen before.

"Can't you call them?" he asked. "Text them? Page them? Email them? IM them? Photograph yourself holding up a sign saying ‘Where the f--- are you?' and send it to them? I mean, who loses people these days?"

I looked down at my kebab, and picked up a small mouthful with my piece of pita bread. "I don't have a mobile," I said awkwardly. Usually it was a sentence I pronounced with pride, as it comprised one of my few truly distinguishing features. People would draw in their breaths and regard me with awe, as one who had asserted his individuality and resisted the siren call of technology. But suddenly tonight my lack of a mobile phone felt like what it really was, a phoney affectation. To my relief and astonishment, Neil did not pass judgement one way or the other, just accepting it baldly as one more simple fact to add to his growing store of knowledge about the world around him.

"Well, if you can't find them, they've either gone home or gone to a club in the West End or they just don't want to be found," he said after a moment of intense concentration. "So here is what I propose. We'll finish our food here and then go around the corner to the Nag's Head and talk to as many people as we can until we find someone who's going to a party afterwards, and then we tag along and have the time of our lives. How's that sound? By the way, I'm Neil Blake."

"Jack Maertens," I replied, and Neil took that for assent to his plan of action, for he then began attacking the rest of his kebab and motioned for me to do the same, which I did, feeling a little sick as I lurched back out into the dark wet Holloway night and followed Neil to the Nag's Head, a dive of the worst kind, so bad that I didn't want to go in until he told me patiently and seriously, as if talking to a slow child, that he had chosen it precisely for the very reason of its awfulness, which would make anyone in it naturally keen to get out and on to somewhere better. He was soon proved right, too, as after just a half hour or so of working that tight-packed smelly old crowd, he hit upon a group of students who were heading on to a party up in Highgate, and all he had to do was tell them a few jokes and buy a couple of rounds of drinks, which he left me to pay for, and suddenly we were on the night bus chugging up Highgate Hill, where a few hundred years ago Dick Whittington had heard the Bow Bells calling him back to fame and fortune in London, and where today middle-class families drove their huge snorting Landrovers up to huddle together in expensive refuge from the pulsating violent ugliness below. For Neil and me that night, Highgate Hill was a place of cheap wine in plastic cups, vodka in jelly, cheap cigarettes, expensive hashish from a reputable dealer on the Edgware Road, tequila slammers, half-grabbed kisses with a girl on a sofa, loud music and shouting and some attempts to dance.

By the time we left it was already morning and people in suits and raincoats were climbing sourly onto buses. The sun was still not up, though, and neither was my mother when I sneaked in quietly through the sleeping house to my room. Where Neil went after that I don't know, but I know that he must have followed me home because the next day when I woke up, although I hadn't given him my address or phone number and was caught between relief and regret over it, I went downstairs and found him back again, sitting in my mother's living room sipping a cup of tea and chatting amiably with her about the beautiful bright yellow winter jasmine climbing across the walls of her garden. Soon we were out again onto the Holloway Road, dodging cars and buses and mingling with the crazy throngs of shoppers as we hopped from pub to pub, our talk becoming crazier at each place until the orange glow of evening took hold and the shoppers on the street became drunks like us, and after we had hopped from pub to pub for a while Neil was able to finagle us into another party, this time in Hackney.

Almost every night and every day passed this way in the new period of my life in which the morose brooding behind my mother's curtains suddenly gave way to a riotous drunken haze of colour and noise. If I felt any regret it was only because my novel was sitting unwritten on my laptop and by the time I woke up each afternoon it was time to go out again. As well, there was a slight lingering feeling of being a hanger-on. At the parties we went to I knew nobody, and usually Neil didn't either. Yet soon he was virtually playing host, while I felt myself merely being suffered as a necessary side effect of Neil's irrepressible presence. I tried to introduce him to some of my friends, but he quickly tired of them, while they thought he was mad, and we left early from whatever soiree we had ruined. As for his friends, he said he had none. Since leaving Feltham Young Offenders Institution he had drifted from town to town, making deep and intimate connections but not lasting ones. He had more phone numbers than his mobile phone's memory could handle, but each of them was accompanied by a long and extravagant story about why he couldn't call it because he owed the person money or a favour or had slept with his wife or stolen his car. So we sloped around north London from pub to pub and invited ourselves to parties with strangers.

Then, one day, Neil was gone. For several weeks I heard nothing until, just before Christmas, a battered postcard smudged with rain informed me that Cornwall in December was a truly beautiful place, full of crags and rocks and monuments to people and gods nobody can remember any more. He was staying in a friend's old cottage working his way quickly through a dusty old Cornish dictionary, he told me, seeming to remember the ancient words rather than having to learn them anew. He had got as far as "gwreg" (wife), but couldn't find anyone to teach him the correct pronunciations. So he was fumbling through, making up his own sounds as he went on and planning to get all the way through to z by New Year. He signed off "Dha weles" without even putting his name, although who else could it be? The friends with whom I now spent my time, the collection of failed writers and "mature students" who only a few weeks ago had been in my naïve young eyes the height of wit and erudition and wisdom, seemed like shades. None of them could have composed something so spontaneous and true as that smudged, creased old postcard with its spidery black script streaking across the page, winding its way between the lines of the address and spilling over onto the bright yellow sands and blue sea on the other side. I was gripped, and wanted to jump into my old blue-green Nissan Figaro and burn down the M4 to spend Christmas with Neil learning Cornish and drinking whisky in the rickety old fisherman's cottage with the fire crackling and the treacherous winds lashing the windowpanes. But I lacked the heart for it, and instead toasted Christmas with sherry in my mother's living room with some relatives who always made me feel dead.

New Year's Eve came around and I was feeling as lonely as the grave. I had been invited to a couple of parties but knew exactly what they would be like and had no interest in going. I fully intended to see the New Year in with my mother, using my desire for solitude as a pretext to be a good son for once and help her through what my vapid relatives had sententiously predicted would be a ‘difficult time' for her. By ten o'clock, however, the canned laughter from the television was making me perfectly suicidal and I knew that my mother could see it because she offered to turn it off and I hastily declined and she looked relieved as I sped out of the door and into the cold dark night full of animal yelps and whoops. I pulled the top down on my Figaro so that I could hear it all and perhaps let some of it rub off on my lonely soul. I drove down the Hornsey Road into the dark madness of Holloway and all was as I expected but it did nothing for me. After driving up and down for some time looking for something, I parked in a side street and did something truly absurd. I went to Donna's Kebabs, ordered an extra large kebab with hot sauce and chomped down on it, watching the clock tick down to midnight and all the time fully expecting Neil to come crashing in full of ideas and enthusiasm and dragging me out of my solitude into some pulsating pit of desperate young drinkers trying to live just a little more before the end of the year. Of course, nothing happened. Neil was buried in his Cornish dictionary, probably halfway through ‘y' and feverishly fighting his way to the end, and I was left with myself. It was another slow night for Donna's Kebabs: everyone with anywhere to go was somewhere else. Around midnight the spotty young man who had been left in charge shuffled out from behind the counter with two cans of beer and set one before me, saying, "Don't tell anyone, yeah?"

Midnight came and went. We clinked cans. For the kebab boy, the fear of getting caught seemed to outweigh the pleasure of rebelling against Donna, and he looked constantly out of the window for the police, hardly talking to me all the time, and about ten minutes later, with his can still half-full, he went back behind the counter. I was bad company anyway, and to avoid getting Donna's Kebabs closed down over the worst, smallest and most dismal and depressing New Year's party in history, I took my beer out into the street. People were cheering as they swayed past in flush-cheeked groups, arms around each other, and several tried to gather me up and carry me along in their tide of celebration, but I resisted and broke free. Everything felt wrong, and all I could think about was that one more year had passed with my great literary novel still unwritten. I had wasted too many nights on the Holloway Road and too many mornings lying in bed too sick and confused to do anything. My laptop brimmed with half-finished thoughts. Abandoned chapters littered the dark corners of its hard drive. It was taking longer and longer to start up in the mornings, evidence, the shop said, of a virus, but to me it was a symptom of the weight of hackneyed, cliché-ridden prose clogging its arteries. The more I wrote, the slower it ran, as if in protest at the poverty of my writing. A few days later, in a grand New Year experiment, I tried taking a notebook to a café and writing there, as I had on long dreamy university days, but the process now felt foreign. My hand ached quickly, the dull characters in the café distracted me too easily, and writing even the simplest sentence seemed to require far too much effort. I realised that I could never have churned out so many megabytes of dross had I been forced to write longhand, or even to feed paper through an old-fashioned typewriter. At some point my body would have rebelled against the wasted effort, as it rebelled now in those cafés at every trite sentence that my tired brain formed. I went back to my room and let my fingers glide swiftly over the keys. Better to produce garbage than to produce nothing at all, the writing books always said. So for two months I cluttered my hard drive with more megabytes of ponderous, inelegant, pretentiously sententious prose, all the while feeling like more of a fool.

When Neil came racing into my mother's house one bright March morning, then, I embraced him as my saviour. He did look curiously messianic, standing there in the hallway with the bright orange sun flooding in through the open door at his back and making him almost glow around the edges, as his bright brown eyes shone childlike and his thick face smiled broadly but serenely at me. He looked at once like a man who had discovered some important secret and like a child eager to discover a new one. Probably all this was in my head, a product of the months of despair and their sudden end in a blaze of glorious spring light. We hugged like old brothers, and my mother stood watching us in bemusement. She liked Neil for his polite talk of winter jasmine and for the simplicity and kindness that lay beneath all that loud masculine youth and laughter and energy, but she could sense that he was dangerous too. She knew I would leave with him soon and that she couldn't stop me, but she warned me before I left not to follow him everywhere he went.

"Keep your own mind, Jack," she said. "Don't let yourself be led anywhere you don't want to go."

I kissed her and said I'd be fine, and indeed at that time I felt stronger and more independent than at any time in my life, and the idea of going anywhere I didn't want to was ridiculous and slightly hurtful. By that time Neil and I had spent a week or two exploring every pub and bar and club and kebab shop and curry house and chicken shack and burger joint on the Holloway Road, and were thoroughly sick of London and all its grey grimy misery. We'd even taken to trying the pubs around my mother's house in sedate little Crouch End, disturbing the faithful old dogs at the feet of the old men with their crossword in one hand and pipe in the other and their pint of bitter half-drunk on the table in front of them. We decided to cause some havoc in those places just to shake them out of their dead filmy-eyed smiling expressions and get them to put down their pipes and papers and express something, if only anger. But the first place we tried it, a tiny little place with net curtains on the window and a crackling fire and a leafy beer garden out back, nobody rose to the bait. We cursed loudly and danced and shouted and even took a swig of one old man's beer. But nobody said a word. The barman stared at us with an ambiguous expression on his face, and the customers just buried themselves in their crosswords and waited for us to go away and leave them alone, which we soon did, feeling so ashamed of the whole thing that we bought a round of beers for everyone. After that we got a bottle of whisky from an off-licence on the Hornsey Road and went down the hill to dark dirty old Elthorne Park to sit among the sad old winos and drink and smoke. Neither of us said very much, not even Neil, who usually only seemed to stop speaking to eat, sleep or kiss someone. I don't know what he was thinking about, but I was thinking of my father, who had worked all his life in a government office up in the city and travelled home on the same train every night, always stopping on his way back from the station for a quick pint and a chat with his friends before coming home to dinner. I imagined how he would have looked at Neil and me if we'd interrupted his quiet pint one tired evening with foolish attempts to goad him, how he would have told the story later over dinner with a sad shake of his head.

"We must leave tomorrow," Neil said into the night. A couple of winos looked over: we'd been silent so long that they must have forgotten we were there.

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