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know, watch people who didn’t know me, say hello to no one. Send a postcard to my mum telling her not to worry, and that the smell of fire would go away, find a job on a fishing boat, grow a beard. Walk along a deserted beach, feel the sand sting my face. Lick salt off my lips and watch my skin turn to leather. Sit in a pub at a corner table and drink slowly. Meet a woman with black eyes and hard hands, an honest woman who wasn’t afraid to gut a fish. Grow vegetables in a hard garden, keep a rabbit in a warm hutch. But friends are friends and, whatever they do, if they remain friends you have no option but to hold your hand up and say something about standing next to them or by them or whatever.
    “When,” I said, “did you do this?”
    “This morning. About five. It didn’t take long.”
    He said he’d watched the place for a couple of days, and once he’d worked out the routine of the bloke who was growing the stuff, down to check the crop and water at half-eight, midday, half-three and nine in the evening, he made his move. “It only took me a couple of hours. I was going to leave a note, but then I thought that might be pushing it.”
    “Yes Spike. That might have been.”
    He walked down the garage, weaving his way around the plants, stroking them as he walked. He looked like he was in love – or, if not that, in a trance. His face shone and his lips glistened, and when he spoke there was a little catch in his voice. “Every time I think about them, I can’t help laughing. I reckon I’ll have them dried by the end of the week.”
    “Do you?”
    “I know someone in Exeter who’ll take them, and then it’s…” he made a swooping move with his hand, a taking-off-in-an-aeroplane move and flying to Spain or Thailand or some other place where he could get jumped by gangsters and have his fingers removed as a starter.
    Now, rather than just walk out of the garage, I wanted to run and never see Spike again. Forget ideas of hiding in Scotland or making a new life in a place where no one recognized my face, so I put my hands up and said, “Spike, this is mad. Either you get rid of them or I’m going.”
    “What the hell are you talking about? Going where?”
    “Anywhere but here. I mean it, Spike.”
    “OK then. Fuck off.” He turned away and walked back to the plants, stepping through them like they were curtains, letting them swing back and over him until all I could see of him was his legs and feet. I thought about saying something else, but it was pointless, there was nothing left to say, nothing to do, not a lot more to think, so I turned away from my friend and walked out of his garage, jumped on the bike and rode away.
    I didn’t know where I was going, and for ten minutes I didn’t care. I wanted the illusion that I couldn’t be seen by anyone. The evening had darkened, and when I reached Ashbrittle I stopped at the village green, leant on the handlebars and stared at the lights of the cottages. Tired, happy, content people eating their supper, drinking a beer, thinking about having a bath or going to bed. People dozing in armchairs in front of the television, people who didn’t have the nag of collision in their heads, people whose only worry was whether they should eat some bacon or a tomato. I could have visited Mum and Dad and sat with them and pretended that I’d just called in to say hello because I was passing and hadn’t seen them for a day or two, but I got back on the bike and rode to the pub at Staple Cross. I’m known in the pub at Staple Cross, but I’m not a regular. For me the place is a hideaway, somewhere I can sit in a corner and be left alone. Once, one of the walls whispered with the voices of people who had been there centuries before, and for years people thought the place was haunted. But then scientists came and looked at the walls and discovered that the ancient paint contained iron, and as the years had passed this had become magnetic and started to act like