Me and Rory Macbeath

by Richard Beasley

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Cultural Heritage

Synopsis

A story of friendship - and lives changed forever. Adelaide, 1977. The year Elvis died. And the year twelve-year-old Jake Taylor meets Rory Macbeath. Until then, Jake's world was small, revolving around his street, his school, and the courthouse where his mum, Harry, was a barrister. His best friend lives only a few houses away. For them daylight is for spinning a cricket ball, riding bikes around the neighbourhood and swimming at the pool until their skin is wrinkled and the zinc on their noses has washed away. But then Rory Macbeath moves into the red-brick house at the end of Rose Avenue and everything changes. At first Jake has his doubts about Rory. But after long days and nights of swimming, fishing and daring each other into trouble, Jake discovers Rory has talents and courage beyond anyone he's ever known. Then, early one evening, Rory disappears. And everyone on Rose Avenue is about to discover why. For Jake and Rory, nothing will ever be the same. 'Despite its difficult subject matter, this is a majestic, high-ceilinged cathedral of a novel' - The Australian 'a sobering portrait of sacrifice and lost innocence, a look at the cost of standing up to those who abuse their power' - Sydney Morning Herald

Release date: April 30, 2013

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 326

Sample

Harry’s last request before surgery wasn’t a surprise.

‘Get me a cigarette,’ she said.

I squeezed her hand lightly and said, ‘No.’

She looked up at me like I was the worst son in the world. ‘Could be my last one,’ she said.

‘You’ve already had your last one, Harry,’ I said.

She was about to have a lung removed, but she still managed a crooked smile. ‘I suppose a glass of red is out of the question?’ she said.

‘Ask your surgeon for one,’ I said.

A nurse and an orderly arrived by the side of Harry’s gurney, and said it was time.

‘Bring a bottle to recovery,’ she said, using her firmest courtroom tone.

I kissed her, and then she disappeared behind the operating theatre doors.

I think I’d probably told Harry to quit smoking once a year for more than thirty years. Telling her more than that was a waste of breath. No one told Harry what to do. Not saying anything, though, seemed like an abandonment of filial duty. Now that things had reached this stage, one that was not only dire but sooner or later would be fatal, I was angry at first. Not for long, though. Harry wasn’t the kind of person – or even the kind of mother – you stayed angry with for long.

I was scared instead, and Harry knew it. Which is why she was asking for cigarettes and red wine. So that I’d be able to tell myself that in a few hours she’d be finding a way to have that glass. And that she had not smoked her last cigarette. And if a nurse caught her, or her surgeon, or even the hospital CEO, I’d enjoy watching her in at least one more fight. I’d get to see them wish, should they choose to admonish her, that more than one of Harry’s lungs had been removed.

When I was frightened, I’d often think of Harry, and about how fearless she was. And there was someone else I would always think about too.

I’d met him many years before, when he and I were just boys. I didn’t like him much at first. Which is funny, because after I’d realised what it was that he had in common with Harry, that’s when I knew. I would never have another friend like him again.

Rory Macbeath materialised at the top of our street early one summer morning. Looking back now, all these years later, the weeks that followed still seem like the longest summer of my life.

I glanced up towards him each time I walked out of the Duncans’ front yard to the middle of the street, before spinning on my heels and charging in to bowl. My target was Robert Duncan, who waited at the end of his father’s driveway, bat in hand, a little slumped and inelegant, but keen to defend his wicket. Robbie had been my best friend since I was six years old.

His mother had made the introduction. Not long after we’d moved into Number 23 Rose Avenue, Mrs Sheena Duncan, of Number 42, the house next to the drain that flowed all the way to the Torrens River, came knocking at our door. I was scared of her at first. Her hair was curly and bordering on wild, her face had no make-up, and there were rivers of capillaries in her cheeks. She was handsome though, in a slightly more worn way than I thought a six-year-old’s mother should be. ‘Good looking, but tired,’ was how Harry described her when I asked later. She wore a floral dress, but I noticed the apron first. The woman I lived with did not wear aprons.

‘Hell-low,’ she said to me, as I stood behind my mother, in an accent I was later told was fading Scottish. ‘Would you like to play with my wee boy?’

I didn’t know that ‘wee’ meant ‘small’ at the time – although I did soon, because nearly everything was ‘wee’ and almost nothing ‘big’ to Mr and Mrs Duncan. Which isn’t to say that many things weren’t ‘grand’, even small things could be that, too, as I would eventually learn. At the time, though, it was enough that I grasped she was talking about the boy in the grey shorts and sky blue T-shirt who was doing his best to stand behind her.

I don’t recall answering either yes or no. I may not have said anything at all. But soon enough I was playing with Robbie Duncan and had been almost every day since.

Around the time we turned twelve, an age of vague yet secure optimism dawned on us. Robbie, for example, was convinced that I would play cricket for Australia. Probably as a bowler, but possibly as an all-rounder. For my part I don’t recall feeling that this forecast was guaranteed but, as my right arm was true and fast, I was hopeful if not cocksure that there was some truth in Robbie’s prediction. My self-belief was reinforced each time my outswinger or fastball ruptured his defences. Time would ultimately prove that Robbie’s batting defences were breachable by even modest talents, and in the coming teenage years our dreams of conquering the English at Lord’s or on Adelaide Oval dwindled away. But at twelve they were untroubled by doubt.

The heat-blurred figure at the top of the street was kicking a round ball against the low brick fence of his house. That was unusual enough. This was a city of oval shaped Aussie Rules footballs. It was also December, and the summer sun was bleeding down. Even migrants played their ‘soccer’ in winter. Summer was for cricket, and tennis and for swimming at the local pool or beach. This kid, whoever he was, was out of whack, and sensing that, and something else I couldn’t quite place and didn’t like, I glared and squinted at him from the top of my run-up.

Soon enough, the outswinger that I’d suddenly found that summer started just outside leg stump, dipped towards middle, and then clipped the top of Robbie’s off bail. Test spot all but assured, it was my turn to bat.

Robbie bowled spin, not pace, and after playing three balls watchfully, I slapped a full toss back past him and over the road. He retrieved the ball from the far gutter, turned, took a few steps, and then stood in the middle of the road, looking up the street.

Robbie could have stayed there for half the day if he wanted to. Rose Avenue was suburban, middle-class (quite a bit more, and quite a bit less, depending on your house), quiet, and there wasn’t much traffic to worry about. It was lined with trees that had bright green leaves in spring and summer. Its houses had brush fences and mown lawns. Two had tennis courts, and there were four swimming pools. There were bluestone houses and sandstone houses, and they all had gardens, and the gardens had rosebushes and azaleas and camellias. There were jacarandas and apple blossoms that bloomed violet and pink in the spring, and men wearing khaki wandered around, pruning and clipping and digging while the owners were indoors. The driveways and garages had new cars, cars that shone, cars that were washed once a week. Robbie’s house, and the house that the new boy stood in front of, bookended the street. They were the two red-bricks. It was as though their houses were there by mistake, had somehow graduated beyond their league.

‘Who’s that?’ Robbie said, motioning to the top of the street.

‘Dunno,’ I said, not wanting to encourage him. ‘Some kid.’

‘What kid?’

‘Dunno.’

Robbie paused. ‘Shall we go see?’

I didn’t need another friend or playmate. We – Robbie and I – didn’t need another friend. But Robbie was an icebreaker with other kids, and I could see where we were headed.

‘It’s my turn to bat,’ I said.

‘Come on,’ he said, throwing the ball into his front yard. ‘Let’s check him out.’

The distance from the bottom of the street to the top was about three hundred metres, and we made the walk slowly and in silence, Robbie striding slightly ahead of me. When we got within about fifty metres, the boy saw us, picked up his ball and stood still, facing us. He was tall and thin, and perhaps older than us, I thought, and his skin was tanned. His straight collar-length hair was nearly black. When we got close I could see he had long dark eyelashes, like a girl.

Robbie spoke first. ‘Howdy.’

‘Hell-low,’ the boy replied, in a thicker, heavier version of a familiar accent.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Rory,’ the boy said, rolling a dozen r’s as he did. ‘Rory Macbeath. What’s yours?’

‘Robbie. This is my friend Jake.’ There was an awkward silence, some foot shuffling and shoelace gazing. ‘Live here?’ Robbie then asked, pointing at the house with the brick fence.

The boy nodded.

It was the worst house in the street. It had been rented, periodically, over the course of the years we’d lived in Rose Avenue, to people we’d never got to know and who we often didn’t notice until a removalist’s van came to take their belongings away. Its low brick fence was flaking greying-white paint like the rest of the house. The front yard was small, mainly weeds interspersed by a few wild, unpruned and thorny rosebushes that looked too mean to flower. It seemed wrong that this house had the honour of being Number 1 Rose Avenue.

‘Where you from?’ Robbie asked.

The boy looked puzzled. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing to his house.

‘No,’ Robbie said. ‘Before, I mean.’

‘Oh,’ Rory said slowly. ‘Glasgow.’

‘Scotland?’ Robbie said.

‘Aye,’ Rory answered.

‘My mum and dad came from Glasgow,’ Robbie said. ‘A long time ago but,’ he added.

Rory nodded.

‘What team you for?’ Robbie asked.

‘Rangers,’ Rory said.

‘Me dad and me, too,’ Robbie said. I thought about saying that Robbie wasn’t really for Rangers. He was for Sturt, the local Australian Rules team. Rangers was just a soccer team his father occasionally talked about, usually misty-eyed.

There was silence for a short time as this news sunk in, and an uneasy chill settled over me as I watched the bonds of a new friendship form. One that would last the whole of summer, and beyond that. I worried, instinctively, that the friendship might never be a triumvirate. I was, after all, Scotland-less, and didn’t know my Rangers or my Celtics from my Arsenal.

‘What age are you?’ Rory asked.

‘Twelve,’ Robbie said.

‘Me too,’ I added, finally speaking. Rory took a long look at me, up and down.

‘How long have you been here?’ Robbie asked.

‘About two months, I think,’ Rory answered. ‘Only a few days in this house though.’

‘How long are you staying?’ I asked.

Rory looked mildly confused. ‘Forever,’ he said.

‘You going to go to school here?’ Robbie asked.

Rory nodded. ‘The school up the road there. Is that where you go?’

It was. Or, at least for me, it had been. Harry was sending me off to a new school for Year Seven, a place where the distances between the buildings were more vast than the whole of my primary school, that had more playing fields and tennis courts than I could believe, and where teachers wore black capes like Batman.

So I wouldn’t be at the local high school the following year. But Robbie Duncan would, as would his new friend, Rory Macbeath. And the entanglement would soon get deeper since Rory told us his older sister would be going to the high school too, where she would no doubt soon meet Robbie’s sister Fiona, and the bonds of the Scots would forge ever closer.

‘You play cricket?’ Robbie asked all of a sudden.

‘No,’ Rory said.

‘Want us to show you how? We can teach you at my place. I live at Number 42, down the road. The last house.’ I thought Robbie’s offer was not only optimistic, it disrespected the rule that three is often a crowd in backyard or front-yard cricket. There couldn’t, for example, be a test match between Australia, England and Scotland.

‘I cannae now,’ Rory said. ‘I’m waiting to go to the shops with me ma. Tomorrow?’

‘Okay,’ Robbie said. And as he did, a woman’s voice called for Rory from inside his house. A woman who spoke his name as though it had seventy r’s. At least. ‘Rrrrrrrrroar-eeeee.’ It was a faint voice though, and struggled to find our range.

‘See youse tomorrow then,’ Rory said as he headed in.

‘Number 42,’ Robbie said.

We walked slowly back down the street towards Robbie’s house. ‘He seems okay,’ Robbie said as we passed my home. This was high praise. A near total endorsement. This was ‘I like him’. This was ‘Let’s have him as a friend’.

I said nothing, just gave a shrug of sorts. The sort of shrug that says, begrudgingly, ‘I guess’. The sort that says ‘maybe’, but makes it clear the jury is still out.

There seemed to be neither a beach nor a pool near Glasgow.

On the very hottest days of December and January, while Robbie and I dived in and out of the crowded, frothing Olympic pool at our local council’s swimming centre, thousands of limbs swishing and splashing around us, Rory lay on the nearby grass and waited patiently for us to emerge from the bubbling mass. Usually we’d find him lying on the ground, one leg crossed over the knee of the other, staring up into the blue sky, nibbling on the Bush Biscuit or Wagon Wheel I’d bought him from the kiosk.

When Robbie and I had finished our swim, the three of us would lie next to each other, never saying much, with Rory quickly turning an exotic chocolate colour and me to golden brown. Robbie was the only one who truly bore the skin of the Caledonians. Untarnished by sunscreen or zinc, over the course of the morning he would slowly become strawberry, turn terracotta by lunch, and by late afternoon his shoulders were an alarming cardinal red. I joked that his skin colour was an improvement on the cosmic white of midwinter, when the veins in his legs were almost a glowing blue.

When he wasn’t nibbling on a biscuit or curiously examining the cloudless sky, Rory spent his time in battle with the local flies. While they were familiar foes to Robbie and me, easily if temporarily dismissed with casual flicks of hands and arms, Rory flailed at them like they were ancient and unknown behemoths.

‘Size of bloody buts,’ he said on our first trip to the pool.

‘What?’

‘Them flies.’

‘What?’

‘Size of buts. BUTS!’

In the throng it was hard to hear someone talk at the best of times. Splashes, shrieks, cries and the laughter of a thousand others boomed off the concrete and water. Ears were blocked. Throw in a thick Scottish accent and both transmission and translation were tough. Robbie and I looked at each other, puzzled. Then we finally got it.

‘Oh, bats,’ we said in unison.

‘Yes,’ Rory said softly, still flailing at the leviathans swarming around his head.

There was always a final swim before we headed home. For Rory this meant walking through the bath-warm kiddies’ pool, or dangling his long legs over the shallow end of the big pool – the one he’d exclaimed to be as big as the North Sea the first time he saw it. Gradually though, he ventured in, clinging to the side at first and dog-paddling like mad when he finally let go. Robbie and I told him he might need a lesson or two before freestyle was an option.

‘Can teach meself,’ he said, and he sounded like he meant it.

When our skin was wrinkled from our final swim, Robbie and I would slowly ride our bikes home, looping around the streets and the footpaths then doubling back so that Rory, if his pace was brisk, could keep up with us.

On that first trip to the pool, Rory’s pace was not quick, and he learnt a valuable lesson about what to wear. We’d left early in the morning, and he was travelling barefoot, not yet the owner of those summer essentials, a pair of thongs. When we left for home in the afternoon the footpaths had turned to magma and it wasn’t long before Rory started tap dancing and hopping, finally skipping like a Fijian firewalker across the road and onto the relative calm of someone’s front lawn.

‘Jeeezus!’ he screamed. ‘Hot!’

Robbie lent him his thongs, but he flipped in and out of them so often that we eventually took turns riding with him on the handlebars of our bikes as we slowly meandered back to Rose Avenue.



When we weren’t swimming or mucking around on the field of the nearby high school, we played at Robbie’s house, or at mine. A couple of times our next-door neighbour, Mrs Williams, invited us for a swim in their enormous pool, or to play on their tennis court, although her stepdaughter Lucy was sometimes moody and would pretend not to like us. We preferred the summer chaos of the council pool anyway with its diving boards and kiosk full of sweets. Never once did Rory ask us to his house.

In the first part of that summer it was almost as if Rory lived alone. We rarely saw his parents and only occasionally spotted his elder brother or sister. One evening, with the sun almost set, I was walking home from the shops a few streets away because Harry had forgotten to get milk again, and I saw Mrs Macbeath out in her garden. She waved, and I think she smiled, so I waved back, but she didn’t say anything except for maybe the faintest of hellos.

I only saw Mr Macbeath three times; twice driving down the road in the green Chrysler Valiant he seemed to share with his eldest son. Iain Macbeath spent most of his time under the hood of that car, tinkering and sometimes banging away. The other time, playing handball with Rory in the street after dinner in the dying light, I looked across the road into the front window of his house. The room was lit with the flickering blue light of the television and against the window I could see the silhouette of what I was sure was Mr Macbeath looking out at me. After the next point I looked back at the window and the figure was gone, the blind drawn.

Iain Macbeath showed little interest in his younger brother, and none at all in Robbie or me. If we were about he might look up from under the hood, frown disapprovingly, and then return to his work. He wore ripped jeans and white T-shirts with holes in them. He had dark hair, the longest on anyone I’d seen who wasn’t in some famous rock band. One afternoon, when we were playing soccer on the road in front of Rory’s house, Robbie kicked the ball too hard and it banged into the windscreen of the Valiant, which was parked in their driveway. Iain raced out of the house and swore at us and told us to clear off. Rory swore back at him and told him that one day he was going to get his long hair caught in the car engine when he was working on it and die. Iain picked up a wrench that was on their front verandah and motioned to chase after him. He only moved a few metres but when I looked to my right, Rory and Robbie were bolting down the street. Iain and I stared at each other, and I decided it was best to move on as well.

‘Wears safety pins in his ears,’ Rory said when I caught up with them. ‘When he goes out. Stupid git.’

‘Safety pins?’

Rory nodded. ‘Both ears.’

‘Why?’

Rory shook his head. ‘Dunno,’ he said. He paused, and then smiled. ‘Doesn’t wear ’em when Dad’s around but. He’d rip ’em out with his hands, I reckon.’

I nodded, and couldn’t help pondering just how painful that might be.

In those first few weeks, I complained regularly to Harry that I saw no point to Rory Macbeath, that he didn’t like anything I did. He couldn’t even swim properly. Harry would cut me off and tell me he’d come a long way to a new country, had no friends, and if at first he was no good at Australian football or cricket then I’d just have to teach him, and I shouldn’t tease him about his swimming because there were probably more swimming pools in Rose Avenue than the whole of Glasgow, or certainly more than in the whole of Possilpark, which was the part of Glasgow the Macbeaths were from.

I told her I doubted he’d ever be any good at cricket, and was likely to drown before he worked out the way an Australian Rules football bounced, and that Lucy Williams had told me that her dad had said that the whole Macbeath family had come out here just so that they could live on welfare and have an easy life paid for by the people who worked hard and were born here. Harry said she wasn’t interested in anything Mr Williams had to say on that topic, or any other topic, and that what he’d said was rubbish anyway, and that Lucy should pay no attention to her father’s opinions, and that if she did she ran the risk of growing up thinking like he did, which would be an unmitigated disaster for everyone, but especially for her.

Harry often said things to me that I would only fully comprehend years later, but if I understood enough of what she meant on this point I still didn’t see why I should have to spend the whole summer being patient in the hope that Rory Macbeath might get up to speed with Australian sports. I’d nearly given up on him when, the day before Christmas, I suddenly found out that there was a point to him after all.

We spent most of Christmas Eve at the council swimming centre. We swam mainly in the Olympic pool, splashing around the older kids and adults, diving in from the side despite the new ‘No Diving’ signs, bombing off the one metre springboard despite the ‘No Bombing’ sign, playing tag and laughing at Rory clinging to the side of the pool, forcing himself off, flailing around like a happy dog, sinking, resurfacing and starting all over again. He was getting better. He told us his mum had been taking him to free swimming lessons given by the council, and he spent many afternoons in the small pool Harry had built in our backyard a couple of summers before, where he was able to flail from end to end without too much risk of drowning, as Robbie and I always kept a close eye on him on Harry’s orders. He still looked like he was going to drown some of the time, but he never looked scared. I think he thought swimming was one of those things that you only needed two or three lessons for, and were then set for life.

Lucy Williams had come with us, even though she had her own pool and even though she fluctuated between warm friendliness, steadfast indifference, and total boredom. When we took a break from swimming and were lying on our beach towels under the shade of a massive gum, Lucy kept asking Rory about why he and his family had come to live in Australia. If she wasn’t in one of her moods, she asked a lot of questions. She was six months younger than me, still not quite twelve, but Harry said she was much more mature than any of my friends, and probably more than most of them ever would be.

‘But you must know,’ she said, when Rory told her for about the fourth time he didn’t really know why they had moved.

‘Mum said it would be better here,’ he said, when she pressed him again.

‘How come?’

‘Dunno. Just better.’

‘It’s warmer here, Dad reckons,’ Robbie said. ‘He grew up near Glasgow, too. Says it’s bloody cold in winter.’

‘So what’s your dad do?’ Lucy asked Rory.

Rory shrugged. ‘He’s a mechanic,’ he said. ‘Sort of.’

‘What’s a “sort of” mechanic?’

‘He is one,’ Rory said, softly this time.

‘Your brother likes it,’ I said. ‘Always under the hood.’

Rory nodded.

‘What kind of car is that, anyway?’ Lucy said.

Rory shrugged. ‘Australian,’ he said.

‘It’s a Valiant,’ Robbie said.

Rory looked straight at Lucy. ‘What’s wrong with the car?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Dad’s got a Mercedes.’ Then she added, ‘And my mum.’ No one said anything. ‘My real mum, that is. Not Barbara. Barbara’s my stepmum. That’s dad’s new wife.’ She looked at Rory, who nodded but looked at least partly confused. ‘The cars cost them heaps. My mum’s new husband bought hers for her. Barbara says that even though they’re divorced, Mum and Dad are still in some kind of competition with each other.’

She looked up and glanced quickly at Rory and smiled, and despite the tan he flushed red and looked even more confused. I’m not sure I was entirely following what she was saying either, and no one spoke for what seemed a long time.

‘Harry doesn’t believe in expensive cars,’ I said, mainly to break the silence. ‘She says she’s philosophically opposed to spending a lot of money on one.’ This is what Harry had told me when she’d driven her new Datsun home for the first time. I had no idea what she meant at the time, and nor did the other three based on the continued silence. Harry had also said that, for her, a car was no more than a moving ashtray, but I didn’t pass that on.

‘Datsuns are Japanese,’ Robbie eventually said. ‘You can get about twenty of them for one Mercedes.’

Rory had been leaning on an elbow, but now sat up straight. ‘Who cares?’ he said.

‘I’m just saying.’

‘Who cares about stupid cars?’

‘Just saying who makes them,’ Robbie said. ‘Germans make Mercedes. They’re the best engineers.’

Rory shrugged.

‘Germans make schnapps, too,’ I said, surprising myself. Apart from the world wars and cars it was about all I knew about Germany.

‘What’s schnapps?’ Robbie asked.

‘I think it’s like German wine,’ I said. ‘Or a bit like saki.’

‘What’s saki?’

‘Some Japanese drink,’ I said. ‘Harry’s had them both. She told me. She only drinks wine though now. She said they gave her the worst hangover she’s ever had.’

Lucy laughed. ‘Dad says your mum’s always got a hangover.’ She looked up at me and smiled, and I guessed that she hadn’t meant it in a nasty way, more like a joke. Which is why I didn’t say anything about Lucy’s stepmother Barbara always having a hangover, too. She drank a lot of wine, and I sometimes saw her putting loads of empty bottles in their rubbish bin, or heard the clinking and clanking of empties being disposed of late at night. I liked the new Mrs Williams, though, and that was another reason not to say anything. Whenever Harry wanted to embarrass me she’d ask me who I thought was better looking, the new Mrs Williams or Lucy. She said they were both ‘dishy’, and joked about how funny it was that they looked so much like each other with all their blonde hair and caramel skin, even though they weren’t actually mother and daughter. I never answered this question, but I didn’t ever disagree with Harry when she said they were both pretty because she always seemed to know when I was lying.

I used to play with Lucy Williams a lot when I was younger, when she was about eight and I was nine. Her real mum had remarried and she lived more of the time with her than with her dad and the new Mrs Williams. I still liked Lucy because she’d often say funny or rude things about her dad and her stepdad, but sometimes if I was having a swim at her place or playing a board game with her if it was raining, she’d get angry at me for no reason, or at least none I could understand, and would end up punching me in the arm. I’d complain to Harry about it but she’d just tell me to be nice to Lucy because her parents had gone through a rough divorce, which had even made the 1976 volume of the Family Law Reports, and she might be ‘acting out’ because of it, whatever that was.

Mr Williams was a lawyer but he worked at a bank. He was tall, with a big thatch of black hair that Harry said he was dyeing, which he ran his hand over about every five seconds. He shouted a lot. Sometimes at night, when I was in bed, I’d hear him yelling, even through the sandstone walls of our house. I could never make out the words he was saying but his voice was deep and angry. I’d wonder what Lucy was thinking if she was there, and why Mr Williams was yelling, and then a door would slam, and the Williamses’ house would fall silent. Sometimes Mrs Williams would knock on our door at night and talk to Harry in our lounge room, and I’d hear her crying, and then Harry would open a bottle of wine, and then I’d hear laughing, then more crying. Harry would tell me in the morning that Mr Williams was yelling about the same stuff he’d been yelling about for years, it was just at a different wife now.

I liked the new Mrs Williams. She was friendly and smiled a lot, and usually said ‘yes’ to everything, and kids making noise or running in the house didn’t seem to bother her. She had caused me the most embarrassing moment of my life, though. One day, when I was about ten, Lucy and I walked into their house after playing on their tennis court, and Mrs Williams was in their kitchen doing some ironing. She was doing it topless.

‘No bra?’ Rory cried when I explained this activity that day at the pool, after Lucy had gone off to the kiosk on her own.

‘Nothing at all,’ I said. ‘Just knickers.’

‘She’s got massive bazookas,’ Robbie said, as though he’d been witness to them.

‘Boulders,’ I said.

‘Jugs,’ Robbie agreed, and we all laughed.

I’d told Harry about Mrs Williams’s topless ironing, and she said it was a risky activity for someone so well endowed, but not surprising given that Barbara was a few shades short of a blonde. I thought she was talking about her hair colour at the time, but I guess because of my blank look Harry explained that what she meant was that she wasn’t the brightest star in the sky, but a lovely woman.

Harry was always talk. . .