All of a sudden time is speeding on, moving faster than it used to. Danny has no idea where it goes. Alison marries her boyfriend Hanif and gets a job in marketing. Danny’s dad takes early retirement from the bus company and spends his time in the betting shop, or going to the races at Yarmouth, Fakenham and Newmarket. He still has the bag of pennies in the loft and says that one of these days he will clean up. Danny’s mum has discovered Neighbours, with Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, but still doesn’t like leaving the house. As for Bobby, one moment he is a red-faced toddler standing up in his playpen shouting ‘Dad-dad-dad’ at the top of his voice, and the next a silent, serious 10-year-old lining up with the other lads for Sunday-morning soccer games. Danny thinks watching Bobby play football is the greatest pleasure of his life. When the boy is through on goal, with only the keeper to beat, there is an indescribable feeling in his chest, as if there were yeast fermenting under his rib-cage. If Bobby’s team – they are called Lakeford United – loses, he is inconsolable and mopes for days. Chrissie tells him not to take it so seriously. She does her paperwork on Sunday mornings and doesn’t often get to the games. Once Danny gets into a shouting match with another man on the touchline who calls Bobby a cheat and the police are called. Danny’s dad wins £2,000 on a six-horse accumulator and invites everyone he knows to a party in an Indian restaurant on the Prince of Wales Road that lasts eleven hours.

  Danny and Keith don’t see each other so often these days – Keith is living in Costessey with his second or maybe even his third wife – but they still manage to play snooker two or three times a month. On one of these evenings Keith says he has a proposition. Why don’t the two of them start an angling shop? Actually, this is an old idea – they used to talk about it when they were fishing the UEA broad. Danny is enthused. He has visions of himself standing behind a counter flanked by pairs of wading boots and wicker baskets. Keith, who has just been made redundant from his last job, says there are plenty of vacant shops at the moment: all they need is a little capital. Danny and Chrissie spend a whole week arguing about the shop, which Chrissie says is a terrible idea. Olivia, who is sixteen now, big and fat and mysterious, sits on the sofa while they bicker, staring at a colouring book. Every so often Chrissie goes and puts an arm round her shoulder and strokes her hair. Chrissie has never liked Keith and says he is a bad influence. In the end Danny borrows £5,000 off Alison and this, together with Keith’s redundancy money, is enough for a three-year lease on a shop in Mile Cross and the first consignment of stock.

  The shop is called The Tackle Den and Danny is obsessed with it. He gets there early in the morning, long before opening time, and stands proudly in the window re-arranging the Angler’s Club cards and positioning the beginners’ rods in an arch over the door. Keith, too, is full of ideas. He wants them to do discount bait deals for competitions and get themselves photographed in Fishing World and the Eastern Evening News. But the shop is not a success. Fishing doesn’t seem so popular as it used to be, and the angling clubs all have special arrangements with the big suppliers. Two years into the shop’s existence, Bobby goes in late into a challenge, tumbles over on a hard winter pitch, breaks his leg in two places and has to have a metal plate inserted into the bone. It is so obviously not the other boy’s fault that even Danny can’t bring himself to protest. The injury takes six months to heal properly, and afterwards Bobby is nervous, shies away from tackles and likes to use his other, weaker foot. In Lound Road, half the houses are full of students and there is a Polish family, the Saluzinskis, living next door to Danny’s parents. They are nice people, Danny’s dad says, but keep themselves to themselves. Princess Diana dies in a car accident, and Danny remembers the time Chrissie had her hair cut that way.

  There is something odd about Chrissie, Danny thinks. The recruitment agency is doing well, but she is worried about the kids. There is a care centre in Cringleford where Olivia goes three days a week, but Chrissie says most of the time they just sit watching television. Meanwhile, Bobby has taken to bunking off school – he says he doesn’t but Danny knows better – and Chrissie thinks he has started smoking weed. Danny tries a man-to-man chat or two in the way his dad used to in the front room at Lound Road, but somehow it doesn’t work with Bobby, who simply nods his head at whatever is said to him and looks shifty. Plus The Tackle Den is losing money. Sometimes a whole morning will pass and only half a dozen people come through the door for a nylon fishing line or half a pint of maggots. Keith says they need some new ideas, that they ought to go to anglers’ conventions in Cambridgeshire and the Midlands, but the anglers’ conventions are at weekends and Danny knows Chrissie doesn’t like him being away. Chrissie is often away herself, seeing clients or going to trade fairs at distant hotels. She has a mobile phone which rings a dozen times an hour. When she is out, Danny and Olivia play Snap at the kitchen table. It takes Olivia ages to notice when the cards are identical, but Danny always lets her win.

  When Bobby is 17 he is arrested, together with two other boys, for breaking into a house on North Park and stealing a wallet with £85 and two credit cards in it. After it has blown over – Bobby’s solicitor manages to argue him out of the young offenders’ institution and the court settles for two years’ probation – Danny and Chrissie have a row that lasts three days. When it is finished, Chrissie says she is going to sell the house – the title deeds are in her name – and take the children to live in Spixworth with a man she met at a trade show at the Marriott Hotel. The man is called Roger – Danny has seen him once or twice – wears three-piece suits and has a handshake as clammy as one of the carp Danny lands at the UEA broad. Twenty years ago, Danny would have gone over to Spixworth and knocked out a couple of Roger’s front teeth, but it is too late for that. Keith’s accountant friend Doug has had a look at the books and says that the money Chrissie is prepared to pay him after the sale of the house will cover what the Tackle Den owes to the bank and the landlord and leave a few thousand over. The shop becomes vacant again, and Keith gets a job in security at one of the new nightclubs on Riverside.

  There is talk of Danny staying with Melissa and her husband Tony – they have a spare room and wouldn’t mind putting him up – but in the end he goes back to Lound Road. No one has slept in his old room since he moved out, and Danny is happy to pay for and hang some new wallpaper. Danny’s mum is pleased to have him at home and gets up every morning to cook his breakfast. The Polish man next door – his name is Piotr – is a fisherman, and Danny sometimes talks to him when they meet in the street. One day Danny’s dad says that Mr Vendulka, the Asian man who owns Sidney Lane’s old shop in Bunnett Square, is looking for an assistant. To his surprise, Danny gets the job. There aren’t so many people take newspapers these days, but Vendulkas employs five or six delivery boys and there is still the Menzies van to unload at 6.30 every morning. Sometimes, when one of the boys is off sick, Danny ends up doing the round himself. The big houses in Christchurch Road still take The Times and the Telegraph, but the horse chestnut trees on the Avenues are nearly all dead or cut down. Saturdays, when Chrissie and Roger tend not to be at home, he goes over to Spixworth to see the kids. Olivia is always pleased to see him; Bobby smokes cigarettes in front of the TV. Danny’s dad decides to cash in the bag of pennies, and doesn’t seem to mind when the dealer only offers him £75. The newspaper Danny picks up in the shop every morning says there is war in Iraq. What with the money Chrissie gave him, there is £4,700 in his building society account. Danny, always good with his hands, thinks of putting it into a boot and shoe repair concession on the back of Norwich market.

  LOST JOHNNY

  His name was Jonathan Bennington-Smith, which was bad enough to begin with, although in mitigation ours was a school in which the patronyms ran to Crotch, Delavacquerie and Penhaligon-Pursley (there was even a boy called Simon Esterhazy-Mainwaring, although he lasted barely half a term), and his charisma, or notoriety – in those days the two qualities were indistinguishable – rested on his having in some mysterious way, at the age of about 17, ‘let down’ the headmaster’s daughter Sally-Ann. This, it should be said, was the late 1970s and ‘letting down’ did not possess the range of undesirable imputations it has since acquired. It did not, to particularise, mean getting somebody pregnant. It did not mean delivering them in a supermarket trolley to A&E in the small hours, or abandoning them at a music festival while high on drugs. It may even have been something as innocuous as failing to turn up on time to a cinema queue, or omitting to return a borrowed copy of some set text. But it meant that Bennington-Smith, who was still at that point called Bennington-Smith, went through his last year at school with a kind of Byronic aura hanging over his not especially distinctive features. To add to this mystique, if that is what it was, was the fact that he played bass guitar in what was generally admitted to be the least competent of the school’s three amateur rock bands.

  All this may make it seem as if I was fascinated by Bennington-Smith, or at least thought him a person of consequence – someone to gossip with, say, in the school library on wet afternoons or drink coffee with in Just John’s Delicatique, Norwich’s solitary bohemian café. But this was not the case. My interest in him derived from the fact that Christopher Balfour, my bosom companion at the school since we had been nine-year-olds together in the first form, disliked him so much that the disliking became a kind of obsession, and that my mother, never known to take an interest in any of her children’s acquaintances, and in spite of hardly knowing Bennington-Smith, and scarcely having the opportunity to observe him in action, regarded him rather in the way that a monarch might regard a promising young equerry. Each of these fixations - the one hard and unyielding, the other soft and indulgent – seemed to me so odd as to be worth investigating. Far more than the ‘letting down’ of Sally-Ann, whatever form it may have taken, or the playing bass for the Sapient Gophers, as they were known, it was these two sharply detached viewpoints that raised Bennington-Smith out of the ruck and gave him distinction. What made the situation even more unusual was that Bennington-Smith seemed not to understand that it had taken place. As far as I know, he never exchanged a word with Balfour, while his dealings with my mother were limited to nods of recognition when, as occasionally happened, they came upon each at the trackside on sports day or in the crowds of parents and their progeny who milled around the school playground after the annual prizegiving. He was like some formerly privileged hen, guilelessly wandering the farmyard, quite unaware that the farmer and his wife have already chosen him for the pot.

  What I am trying to say, I suppose, is that even at this early stage – and my dealings with Bennington-Smith had several more decades to run, and may not even be done now – I had some idea of the myths that accumulate around people and the elements of their personalities to which they adhere: myths of whose existence – this was clearly the case with Bennington-Smith – they themselves have no idea. But if I had no conception of how Bennington-Smith then regarded himself – all that came later – I knew precisely how he was regarded by other people and how that regarding had come about. Balfour’s well-night fathomless dislike stemmed from an incident in early teen-dom, not even remembered by me, in which Bennington-Smith, taking to the stage at some low-level entertainment – the House Music Competition? Some charity concert? – was supposed to have exceeded the dimensions of the role allotted to him and ‘shown off.’ But whatever Bennington-Smith had done – and the event had taken place so far back in time that nobody except Balfour could recall it – was enough to damn him forever and contextualise everything that he did, so that his appearance in a lunch queue, glancing uneasily at the trays of baked beans and over-grilled sausages, would have Balfour grit his teeth and mutter: ‘Look at bloody Bennington-Smith making an exhibition of himself’, even if, manifestly, no exhibition was being made. Curiously, my mother’s high estimate of him seemed quite as arbitrary, plucked out of nothing, a frail seedling that had borne unexpectedly sturdy fruit. When I was ten or eleven, he had come, along with half the class, to a party of mine – these were the undiscriminating preteen days, when to associate with someone did not necessarily mean that you liked them – and somehow, out of the dozen or so boys present, my mother’s eye had fallen on him. Afterwards washing up in the scullery, or returning the boxes of uneaten ice cream to the freezer, she had declared that he was ‘a polite boy’ who, additionally, had ‘made things go with a swing.’

  I myself doubted this. If anyone had made the party go with a swing it was a boy called Ashley Bushmill who, showing unexpected ventriloquial skills, had produced a surprisingly good impersonation of the Prime Minister, Mr Heath. But already the damage, if that is what it was, had been done. Generally speaking, my mother was too timid, too apathetic, to take an interest in my classmates in the way that my father did – asking which of them played for the rugby team, for example, or who had come first in the three-weekly order – but she made an exception of Bennington-Smith. On the occasion that the annual school photograph came into the house, having established that my own appearance was satisfactory, she would immediately set to work to pick out his face from the group of boys clustered around me. In my last summer term, attending a school art exhibition at which several of Bennington-Smith’s paintings were displayed, she paid £10 for a smeary watercolour of the river Wensum at Pull’s Ferry, which was hung in the dining room next to the print of Dürer’s Praying Hands and an impressionistic reproduction of the Arc de Triomphe in furious little blobs of colour, which my parents had bought on their honeymoon. All three pictures looked absurd, but I could see, or thought I could see, how they chimed with the view that my mother took of the world, and that Bennington-Smith, who had ‘made things go with a swing’, was as important to her as an invitation to prayer or a glimpse of Parisian street life.

  Naturally, once we had left school our relationships with each other changed. Boys who had spent seven years being certain kinds of people mutated almost on the instant into other kinds. The odd thing about these transformations was how they involved the same materials, the same personal characteristics. The script might alter, but the part was the same. Stolid and hitherto unexceptional boys who had done well in their exams became promising, but still stolid, undergraduates. Debonair but unintellectual charmers acquired jobs at the Norwich Union and became charming and debonair insurance clerks. To add to this confusion was the lack of basic information. People were moving off into the world and were difficult to follow. Sometimes they did not want to be followed, vanished off the face of the earth, were found working in pubs, or, in the case of a boy called Andy Hendrick, discovered selling knock-off jeans from a stall on the back of Norwich market. What had been homogeneous – the blue school uniform, the regulation hair-style, the common slang – was now bewilderingly diffuse. Six months before everybody -the law students, the insurance clerks, the pub factotums and even poor Andy Hendrick on the back of Norwich market – had been living under the same roof, eating the same terrible food and attending the same morning assemblies in Norwich Cathedral. Now, like a hundred soap bubbles, they were let loose on the wind.

  To say that it took me years to track down Bennington-Smith would be an exaggeration, for there was no element of pursuit involved. Those were the days when information came upon you unexpectedly – the chance encounter on the tube train, the hand-written letter winging in out of the blue – rather than being served up hourly on an electronic plate. In Bennington-Smith’s case this separation was made worse by its hint of mystery, which is to say that, despite seven years living cheek by jowl with him, I had no idea of the kind of person he was. All I had to go on were the projections of Balfour and my mother, neither of whom, experience suggested, were at all reliable. He was like a character in a half-remembered novel, drifting in and out of focus, and – you suspected – recalled for characteristics he probably did not possess. Around this time I received a copy of the school magazine. Traditionally this contained a page in which the careers of all those who had left the previous year were summarised in a couple of lines. Balfour’s entry said that he had been a school prefect, head of Valpy House and secretary of the Debating Society. Of poor Andy Hendrick it stated merely that he had joined the school in 1971 and left it in 1978. Curiously, I approached this page of valediction – it appeared alongside the Lower School poetry supplement – with a sense of mounting excitement, anxious to see what the compiler had made of Bennington-Smith. If this was a boy whose existence seemed to consist of the myths projected on him by other people, then what would a formal survey of his teenage life look like? In the end, the resumé was almost as succinct as Andy Hendrick’s. ‘Jonathan Bennington-Smith (1970-78) played for the Second XV at rugby and was known for his musical accomplishments.’ But even this, it seemed to me, was a travesty. No one had ever seen Bennington-Smith anywhere near a rugby pitch, and the musical accomplishments consisted of being just about able to play the descending bass-line of Free’s ‘All Right Now’ at an end-of-term concert. Once again, he had slipped clear of the nets sent to pinion him and taken wing into clear blue sky.

  It turned out that there were other people on Bennington-Smith’s trail. One of them was Balfour who, the next time we met, after a withering recapitulation of the destinies being pursued by former member of the English set, said: ‘I saw that bugger Bennington-Smith the other day.’

  ‘Oh yes, what’s he up to?’

  ‘Apparently he was supposed to be re-taking two of his ‘A’ Levels at City College, but he said he couldn’t be bothered.’

  ‘So what’s going to do next?’

 

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