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eyebrows pushed toward the deep vertical furrow between them. Speedy’s eyes, so light they were almost no color at all, swung up from the blistered paint of the pier and met Jack’s own – and suddenly Jack felt better again. He did not understand why, but Speedy seemed to be able to communicate emotion directly to him: as if they had not met just a week before, but years ago, and had shared far more than a few words in a deserted arcade.
    ‘Well, that’s enough work for now,’ Speedy said, glancing up in the direction of the Alhambra. ‘Do any more and I just spoil em. Don’t suppose you ever saw my office, did you?’
    Jack shook his head.
    ‘Time for a little refreshment, boy. The time is right .’
    He set off down the pier in his long-legged gait, and Jack trotted after him. As they jumped down the steps of the pier and began going across the scrubby grass and packed brown earth toward the buildings on the far side of the park, Speedy astonished Jack by starting to sing.
    Travellin Jack, ole Travellin Jack,
    Got a far long way to go,
    Longer way to come back.
    It was not exactly singing, Jack thought, but sort of halfway between singing and talking. If it were not for the words, he would have enjoyed listening to Speedy’s rough, confident voice.
    Long long way for that boy to go,
    Longer way to come back.
    Speedy cast an almost twinkling look at him over his shoulder.
    ‘Why do you call me that?’ Jack asked him. ‘Why am I Travelling Jack? Because I’m from California?’
    They had reached the pale blue ticket booth at the entrance to the roller-coaster enclosure, and Speedy thrust his hands back in the pockets of his baggy green workpants, spun on his heel, and propped his shoulders on the little blue enclosure. The efficiency and quickness of his movements had a quality almost theatrical – as if, Jack thought, he had known the boy was going to ask that particular question at that precise moment.
    He say he come from California,
    Don he know he gotta go right back . . .
    sang Speedy, his ponderous sculptured face filled with emotion that seemed almost reluctant to Jack.
    Say he come all that way,
    Poor Travellin Jack gotta go right back . . .
    ‘What?’ Jack said. ‘Go back? I think my mom even sold the house – or she rented it or something. I don’t know what the hell you’re trying to do, Speedy.’
    He was relieved when Speedy did not answer him in his chanting, rhythmic sing-song, but said in a normal voice: ‘Bet you don’t remember meetin me before, Jack. You don’t, do you?’
    ‘Meeting you before? Where was this?’
    ‘California – at least, I think we met back there. Not so’s you’d remember, Travellin Jack. It was a pretty busy couple of minutes. Would have been in . . . let me see . . . would have been about four – five years ago. Nineteen seventy-six.’
    Jack looked up at him in pure befuddlement. Nineteen seventy-six? He would have been seven years old.
    ‘Let’s go find my little office,’ Speedy said, and pushed himself off the ticket booth with that same weightless grace.
    Jack followed after him, winding through the tall supports of the roller coaster – black shadows like the grids of tic-tac-toe diagrams overlaid a dusty wasteland sprinkled with beercans and candy wrappers. The tracks of the roller coaster hung above them like an unfinished skyscraper. Speedy moved, Jack saw, with a basketball player’s rangy ease, his head up and his arms dangling. The angle of his body, his posture in the crisscrossed gloom beneath the struts, seemed very young – Speedy could have been in his twenties.
    Then the custodian stepped out again into the harsh sunlight, and fifty extra years grayed his hair and seamed the back of his neck. Jack paused as he reached the final row of uprights, sensing as if Speedy Parker’s illusory juvenescence were the key to them that the Daydreams were somehow very near, hovering all about him.
    Nineteen seventy-six? California? Jack