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stay on at school. I think that’s what Osborn wants to see me about this afternoon.’
    ‘Trust Ozzy. He’ll want to have his say.’
    ‘Why not? Everybody else does.’
    ‘Have some more beef, you’ll need it.’
    ‘Ta. But I like Ozzy.’
    ‘A minority taste.’
    ‘People grumble because he makes them work, that’s all. He knows his stuff and I think he makes it interesting. Anyway, if I get through O-level lit, it’ll be because of him.’
    ‘I’ll grant you he thinks Eng. lit, is the only thing that matters.’
    ‘Sounds like you drew blood.’
    ‘Now and then. Drink up.’
    ‘I’ve had enough, thanks.’
    He started clearing the table of the dirty plates. ‘When you’ve seen him you tell me all. Just to see if I’m right.’
    I looked at him, the question unspoken.
    ‘Well,’ he said breezing it up, ‘you’ll have to collect your clothes. Mother’s already got them in the washer. And you’ll be bringing my stuff back, won’t you? You can tell me then . . . Okay?’
    17/That was how it was.
    Correction:
That was how it was not.
    We said all that. But there was more going on behind our faces so to speak.
    But if I’m going to get it right—and I have to get it right or why bother with all this in the first place?—I’ll have to make a cringing confession that will help explain. The sort of confession people only make when they are drunk or hypnotized on a psycho’s couch. Or are mad. Loony. Like me. The sort that wakes you up afterwards, in the middle of the night, shaking your head and groaning ‘No, no!’ in an agony of sweaty regret. But what the hell, I’ve told you too much now anyway. You might as well hear the rest. And you can’t skip it because if you do you’ll miss something that makes sense of everything that happened.
    When I was a kid of about seven I watched a television programme, I’m not sure whether it was a play or an old film, about two boys. If I saw it now I’d probably rupture myself laughing at the incredible banality and pukiness of its story. But when you are seven, if you can recall those far-off days of last year, a TV sci-fi monster made from plastic foam and kitchen foil is frighteningly convincing;even the newsreaders look real. In short, at seven you still believe.
    These two boys were a couple or three years older than me, and together they had a series of adventures of the kind that, at seven, you think must be the most exciting events known to man. In the first adventure they found an old tin can that was supposed to be full of magic beans. These magic beans possessed the power of transporting people back in time. So Our Heroes had day trips to such wonders as Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, the Spanish Armada on the High Seas, Hadrian’s Wall at the time of the Romans, and the Court of King Arthur during a period when the knights weren’t getting on too well together. Wherever they went Our Heroes sorted out everybody’s troubles by dint of native twentieth-century knowhow and stunningly precocious intelligence, like commonsense. I am ashamed to admit that I was thirteen before I stopped enjoying that kind of gunk. As Barry used to say about me in a slightly different circumstance, there are times when I can be a late developer.
    The important thing is that at one glorious moment near the end of the first adventure Our Heroes swore eternal fealty, one to another, by each cutting his hand with a forage knife freshly sharpened on King Arthur’s stone, and then, holding their bleeding wounds together, mingled their blood while chanting a solemn oath and gazing deep into each other’s eyes.
    ‘Now,’ said one of them afterwards, ‘we are bosom friends forever.’
    I remember those words exactly for two reasons. The first reason is that I had just that week learned that a woman’s breasts are sometimes called her bosom. (The fact that bosom also means chest, man or woman’s, had not yet become clear to me.) One of those TV boys calling the