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insecurities.
    ‘Thank you.’ My father looked genuinely lightened by this comment.
    ‘Raymond, I want you to know that if there’s any way I can help over the coming weeks and months, I will do so. These are not empty words. These are words spoken in all sincerity and
full intent. Please write to me if there is something. I am not on the telephone, as you know, but I will be there for you.’
    Something struck true in Henry’s words, and I sensed that Ray, like me, was comforted by them.
    Then Henry looked at me.
    ‘Hey, stupid,’ he said lugubriously.
    ‘Hey.’
    ‘You should come and see me. At the boat. In Somerset.’
    ‘Maybe.’
    He looked at me askance, clearly doubting that I would do any such thing.
    ‘What did you sprinkle on the flowers?’ I asked.
    ‘Water blessed by the Dalai Lama.’
    Ray looked sceptical. ‘Where did you get that?’
    ‘He gave it to me,’ Henry said simply. ‘Raymond, I’m sorry, but I can’t stay for the Scotch eggs and finger buffet. I’ve got a meeting in town about my book,
and it can’t wait. They’re already annoyed with me keeping them waiting by coming to this in the first place. Business, you know. Hard heads, cold hearts. But I hope you know my
thoughts are with you and will remain with you.’
    Ray said he understood. Henry hugged him once more, shook my hand and tousled my hair. That was the last I heard of him for several more months.

Four
    S hortly after the funeral I began to spend a lot of my time wandering the avenues and crescents of Yiewsley in the evening, half-heartedly trying
to sniff out mischief. I idly vandalized road signs and kicked cans at stray cats. Most dramatically, I was caught joyriding a car – an Austin Princess, still smelling of fresh seat leather
– that had been left unlocked in the street adjacent to ours. The owner – who had momentarily nipped inside his house, I later discovered, to retrieve a tin of driving sweets –
had left the keys in the ignition. I just took the car without a second thought. My father had taught me to drive, around the back of an abandoned gasworks, but I had never driven on a road.
    The owner saw me juddering away – I hadn’t quite mastered the exigencies of the clutch – and immediately phoned the police. They were on the scene within minutes, when I had
put only a couple of streets’ distance between myself and the scene of the crime. I panicked, and didn’t have the sense to stop. There followed a brief and farcical car chase. I crashed
into the post of a creosoted fence after thirty seconds, denting the Princess and banging my head on the windscreen badly enough to need hospital attention. I ended up in front of the magistrates,
with the probability of juvenile detention. But my mother’s death, and a carefully elaborated head bandage, worked in my favour, and they let me off with a caution and a large fine, which my
father had no choice but to settle, not without bitterness.
    It was early July. It was apparent to Ray that I had lost the ability to care about anything. In June, immediately after my mother’s death, I had failed to turn up for my History exam, out
of raw apathy. Once again, my bereavement got me off the hook – on compassionate grounds my school offered me the opportunity to retake it in September, a prospect that depressed me more than
my automatic failure. The two A levels I had completed shortly before my mother died, English and Physics, I felt were doomed to poor grades anyway. Furthermore, I had no plans to go to university,
simply because nobody I knew – other than Henry – ever had. I would take a year off, then busk it. I had not the faintest idea what I wanted to do for a living, but I assumed something
would turn up. My aspirations were pitched higher than Ray’s and the shoe shop, but not massively so.
    My father, who was struggling to cope with the demands of his job through the dislocations of his grief, told me plainly that he couldn’t