Amos was loudly a member of the University Communist Club. When he got drunk he liked to link arms with his friends and zigzag home chanting ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’.
Selwyn had been there too, laughing and skinning up, all red mouth and lean, flat belly. Selwyn’s little jumpers and shrunken vests tended to ride up and away from the tops of his velvet pants to expose disconcerting, lickable expanses of his smooth skin. It was Selwyn who would have been responsible for the music, most probably at that time precisely on the groovy cusp between the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin. Colin acknowledged to himself that he had no real idea; even in those days he had preferred Verdi. But Selwyn would have known. Selwyn ran a mobile disco called Blue Peony out of his Dormobile van. He often played at student balls and big parties, standing at the decks in headphones, dappled by the bloom of strobe lights and enclosed within a three-deep ring of girls.
Polly had been there too, talking hard and gesticulating and prodding the air to make a point. Not Katherine, though. Katherine came along later.
And Miranda of course. Wherever Selwyn was, in those days, Miranda went. Miranda had got up to dance between the tangle of legs. She made vine-tendril twisting motions with her small white hands, swaying with her eyes closed, hair falling down her back in a thick dark river. Colin watched Selwyn who watched Miranda who was wandering happily in her own universe.
‘It’s not going to happen,’ Polly said. ‘Not to us. Never. We’ve got the Pill now, they’ll have developed a magic medicine bullet by the time we’re fifty. We’ll all take it, we’re going to stay young and beautiful.’
‘If you want to be loved,’ Colin hummed, but nobody heard him.
‘That’s rubbish,’ Amos scoffed. ‘Medical and technological advances haven’t quite got to the point where they can stop you hitting fifty, Polly, and then sixty and seventy, and then you’ll die. But we’re young now, that’s what counts. We’re going to start making a difference as soon as we can.’
‘What difference?’ someone yawned.
‘We’ll bring down the old order, establish the new. Attack the morbid old institutions, the BBC, the party political system, the monarchy…’
This was not a previously unheard speech of Amos’s.
‘The class system, the public schools…’ Polly patiently and amusedly listed for him.
Colin stirred himself. He had smoked enough of Amos’s hash to realize that he knew secrets and understood mysteries, and should concentrate on those insights instead of dissipating precious energy on worrying about his clothes and the exams.
‘Listen, man. Before long, Americans will be standing on the moon. Think of that. Why can’t there be a cure for old age?’
‘There is. It’s called death,’ Amos snapped.
Miranda had gyrated to the window. She leaned her hot forehead against the cool glass and then gave a little cry.
‘Look. Oh, look. Everyone.’
Heads turned. The moon was a pale, perfect disc sailing through streamers of cloud.
Miranda breathed, ‘Imagine it. Men on the moon. How…beautiful. Their footprints will be up there in the dust, you know, for ever and ever. I’m envious. I’d like that to be my epitaph.’
‘If Polly and Colin are right, you won’t be needing an epitaph. You’ll still be here, cluttering the place up.’
‘Oh, I don’t think I want that at all. What I’d like when the time comes is to be a magnificent old lady. With a brilliant, scandalous history. Frail of course, rather grand, greatly loved. Deeply mourned, when I go.’ She lifted her arm, the trumpet sleeve of her velvet dress falling back to leave her wrist bare. ‘You know what? I’ve got the most amazing idea. When we are all old, if it has to happen, we should live together in a fabulous, outrageous commune. We should all come back together again, at the other end of our lives, when we’ve achieved everything we want to, and just refuse to do what old people do.’
‘Old people being like my gran, you mean?’ a boy interrupted. ‘She sits in a chair all day waiting to be taken to the toilet, and begs for her cup of tea because she can’t remember she had it five minutes ago?’
Miranda looked on him with pity. ‘It won’t be like that. Not for us,’ she said. ‘Polly’s talking about it all being different by then, not about actual immortality.’
‘Christ,’ Amos said. ‘What is all this? There’s so much to be done now. Why are we talking about what’s going to happen to us in a hundred years time?’
‘I like my idea,’ Miranda insisted.
Selwyn stirred himself. He reached up to grasp Miranda’s wrist, and drew her back into the circle. She had stuck sequins along her cheekbones and they flashed in the candlelight.
‘Then you shall have what you want,’ he told her. Most of them laughed. Selwyn was joking, but the joke was in part a reference to his acknowledged supremacy and power in the group. What Selwyn decided usually came to pass.
Silence had fallen after that. In their different ways they were all thinking about the conversation and peering, into the chinks between the phrases, at the remote and chilly landscape of their old age. It had seemed no less distant than the moon.
Or perhaps it was just me who was contemplating it, Colin thought now.
Maybe the others were all far too preoccupied with the constant murmur of sex. Or the roar of sedition, in Amos’s case.
‘He’s mine, for fuck’s sake. You’re not having him, whatever you say.’
The sudden shout made Colin jump. The young couple who had been sitting in the window were now on their feet and measuring up to each other as if they were about to trade blows. The dog jumped off the bench and whimpered and the boy grabbed at the lead clipped to its collar. The girl reached to snatch at the lead too. In doing so she lost her footing and overbalanced against Colin’s table. It tilted sharply and his glass slid off and smashed on the floor. Beer and shards splashed over his shoe and sock.
‘Shit, Jessie,’ the boy hissed.
The girl turned to look at what she had done, but she didn’t miss the opportunity to grab the lead out of the boy’s hand first.
‘Bugger off,’ she told him.
The boy was scarlet in the face and everyone in the room was looking at him. Beer dripped off the leg of Colin’s trousers.
‘You’re a cow,’ the boy told the girl. He banged past the table and marched out of the bar. The dog whined again, and then consoled itself by lapping at the puddle of spilled beer.
‘Mind the glass, Raff,’ the girl screeched. She jerked on the lead to haul the animal out of danger, and anchored him to the leg of a heavier table. She and Colin stooped together and began to gather up the shards of broken glass.
‘I’m really, really sorry,’ the girl muttered. ‘He wanted to take my dog, you know?’
‘Watch out,’ the barman said, arriving with a cloth and a dustpan. The girl mopped up the puddle as he swept the debris
