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faithful to the screen men in his life. James Cagney was probably the first actor he adopted as his secondary father, then Errol Flynn, then Bogart. But they have turned out only to be surrogates for John Garfield, his man of men. It isn't just that Garfield does look a little, it seems to him, like his real father. It is that Garfield exudes a style that might have come off the streets where Tam is living. Of all his heroes, Garfield translates most easily into his own idiom. Tam feels as if he's seen him at the dancing.
    Recently, though, Garfield's pre-eminence has been under threat. When Tam saw On the Waterfront , he knew immediately that Marlon Brando was the best actor he had ever seen. In fact, he decided he knew that Marlon Brando was the best actor anybody had ever seen. And when James Dean loped through East of Eden , he became instantly iconic in Tam's thoughts.
    Still, Garfield may be dead but he lives on, his place not quite usurped, there beside Greta Garbo. This summer is still theirs. When he feels he has been kidding himself about the significance of yet another girl, he thinks of Greta Garbo. When he senses himself threatened by the arrogance of yet another hard-case, John Garfield stands beside him.
    —AFTERWARDS , he would be living alone in an attic flat in the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. It was a bitter winter and lonely as a cabin in the Yukon. He shivered in his eyrie and went out into the cold for coffees and tartines beurrées to eke his money out and came back in to the novel he was working on and it sat staring at him silently as if it were a former friend who didn't wish to speak to him any more.
    But Francois, the man who had loaned him the flat, had the French intellectual's passion to make a library of experience.He had one room full of books and tapes of old films and pornographic magazines. One of the books was a biography of John Garfield. Reading it, he knew he had been right about Jules Garfinkel all those years ago. He still loved this man, his trying to stay true to where he came from, the intensity of his political beliefs, the passionate dishevelment of his life, the dread of betraying his friends that finally burst his heart and left him lying dead in an awkward place before he had time to testify in front of the Un-American Activities Committee.
    There were no tapes of Garfield's films, which was maybe just as well, for he feared looking at former magic and finding it had been reduced to a few tricks. But there was the book of John Garfield's life and it talked him through a part of that winter like a friendly ghost. If you're in the shit, it said, I've been there too. Remember the way I was? And he did. How he entered rooms as if he were challenging their contents; the jutting face that prowed bravely into whatever was happening like a ship cleaving unknown waters; the hurt puzzlement of the eyes looking into their own wrongdoing.
    He faced a bad time and stared it down. John Garfield helped. But he was still left wondering how far he had travelled towards being whoever he really was.—
    MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL , Who the hell am I at all? He wondered how many times he had looked in a mirror for confirmation of himself. He was doing it again. He saw the reflection of the open suitcase that was behind him on the bed. His attempt at packing was a mess. Not only had he never learned to pack, he suspected he had never learned to unpack.
    ‘What are you staring at. Dad?’
    Megan stood in the doorway. She was giving him her own stare, those remorselessly innocent eyes that made him feel he was facing a plenary meeting of the Spanish Inquisition.
    ‘Nothing, Meganio.’
    ‘You were so.’
    ‘No. Ah was just lookin’.'
    ‘You were so. You were staring and staring. Into the mirror.’
    ‘Ah wasn't really staring and staring. Ah was just staring. I was just checking I was there.’
    That seemed to make sense to her.
    ‘This it. Dad?’
    She held up his toilet-bag.
    ‘It is,