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hair, and one or two had blond hair, Brendan’s hair was red. I don’t mean just auburn in the run-of-the-mill kind of way. Brendan’s was bright red, the sort of colour that if you saw it in a TV advertisement for hair dye you’d say it looked obviously artificial. It seemed implausible that it had occurred in nature, and yet it had. I never liked Brendan too much from the beginning, and no doubt this was partly due to the fact that he did not seem to care much about fitting in. However, I should admit straight away that much more of it was because Brendan fancied Harriet. Even that might have been OK – others in our group fancied her too – but the problem with Brendan was that he made no secret of thefact, even after the point where it was clear and public that she and I were an item.
    If a group of us were hanging together drinking espresso in the Prompt Corner coffee bar on Croydon High Street and Harriet walked in, Brendan would be the first to stand up and offer her his chair. If she wore a new shirt or shawl that she had found in one of her favourite vintage-clothes shops, he was always the one to notice and compliment her on her originality. Any time I arrived late to a gathering, I would find that he had taken the seat beside her and showed no inclination to allow me to sit next to my girlfriend.
    “You should take it as a compliment,” I can remember Harriet saying to me.
    “A compliment? How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
    “Because if other blokes fancy me, it’s because they find me attractive, and the fact that I choose you over them means that you are the best of the bunch.”
    “Isn’t that what is known as ‘damning with faint praise’?”
    “What?”
    “‘The best of the bunch’. It sounds very much like ‘not great, but at least better than all that lot’.”
    “If you are determined to turn something nice into something horrible, no doubt you can find a way to do so,” she said. “I was just trying to make you feel good about yourself.”
    It was so effective a put-down that I’d have preferred to have received a slap in the face. As it was, it felt like one.
    “OK, OK, I know I’m acting like a schmuck, but I thought you’d want to know how I feel about it.”
    “I do know what you feel about it. You make it so obvious that I would imagine that most of south London knows how you feel about it. Which means that Brendan also knows how you feel about it, which has probably made his day.”
    It seems obvious in hindsight that part of my special sensitivity to what might otherwise have been written off as a bit of harmless flirting was the realization that both Brendan and Harriet were, in their own ways, outsiders. Neither seemed to feel any obligation to follow the trends adopted by just about everyone else of our age. I, on the other hand, was acutely aware that any style I might have was entirely interchangeable with everyone else’s. I guess I just lacked the self-assurance which was no doubt essential in anyone who dared to make a statement of individuality.
    Meanwhile Harriet seemed at ease with herself and her surroundings in a way that I could only envy. She showed no signs of the teenage angst that everyone else seemed to have about adolescent spots or an inch more or less on her waist size. She did not get freaked out over studying for exams, or interviewing for university. She did not make a big deal of overreacting to stories in the world news that others seemed to find unduly shocking, as if the starving of Biafra were somehow doing it just to upset the teenage girls of south London.
    So despite what must have seemed to much of the rest of the world to be something of a mismatch, when we sat downto discuss how we would approach the question of further education, I was delighted to learn that she was taking it for granted that she and I would apply for the same universities. She planned to study Music while I did Politics, so we carefully went through every