shrugged. ‘I am home.’
‘Oh, you stupid little boy,’ his father said, and Leon was shocked to see him filling up with tears, turning his face away, staring out the window at nothing.
Leon couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand to see the old man so upset. He felt like putting his arms around him, but just as he was about to do so a couple of the French guys appeared in the doorway and stood there with their arms folded, making it clear that this man was unwanted in this place.
Leon’s father felt their presence, glanced at them waiting in the doorway and nodded, as if he understood.
The old man hugged him and pulled away quickly. Leon felt like patting him, or saying something to reassure him, or telling him it had to be this way, but he didn’t know where to start.
Leon walked his father to the door in silence. They shook hands, as formal as strangers who had not really had a chance to talk, and Leon watched the old man turn up the collar of his Humphrey Bogart raincoat and carefully cross the muddy moat.
You were meant to keep the front door shut and locked, but Leon watched his dad as he walked down the boarded-up street, and he kept watching until he had disappeared round the corner, and by then all the anger had faded to this sort of flat, empty sorrow. Leon couldn’t see a reason why they would ever meet again.
He closed the door of the squat and began setting all the locks.
The office emptied and the big white clock by the reception desk seemed to get louder by the minute. But still Ray tarried at his desk, fretting over the damaged tape recorder, huddled over it, trying to straighten the deformed spool.
Pressing start. Watching the thing wobble. Straightening it with his thumb. Pressing stop. Pressing with his thumb again – pressing harder this time…and then the spool snapped.
It came away with a crisp, sickening sound and flew across the room. Ray gasped with shock, staring at the jagged black stump that was left behind. Bad, this is so bad. So much for tracking down John Lennon, Ray thought. I never even made it out of the office. Pathetic. I deserve to be given the boot.
His friends were gone now and Ray ached for their presence – for someone, anyone, to tell him what to do next. He stared helplessly at the useless tape machine and he realised that he knew this feeling. This feeling of being completely and totally alone.
He was eleven years old and standing in front of a classroom full of children who had already had time to make friends, form alliances and learn how to grin knowingly when they saw a new kid who was trying not to cry.
Too late. Always too late.
It was easy for his two brothers. John was four years older, tough, athletic, afraid of nothing. And his younger brother, Robbie, was only five and just starting school. He wouldn’t know anything but this strange new place.
But Ray was at that awkward age. He looked different to the other boys and girls. His hair was still cut in a brutal short back and sides, he was wearing grey flannel short trousers and a short-sleeve white nylon shirt, and he was still sporting the tie and blazer of his old school.
It was the summer of 1969, and Ray Keeley was dressed like Harold Macmillan.
Although his new classmates also wore a nominal school uniform, compared to Ray they were Carnaby Street peacocks.
Long hair curled dangerously over the collars of paisley shirts, or it was cropped to the point of baldness. School ties had knots thick enough for Roger Moore. Many of the girls had hiked their regulation skirts up to just below their knickers of regulation navy blue. And lounging right at the back of the class, there were boys in pink shirts.
Pink shirts! On boys! Flipping heck!
Ray had been in England for a month. Nowhere had ever felt less like home.
‘Ray is from Hong Kong where his father was in the police force,’ announced the teacher. She picked up a ruler and slapped it twice against a map of the world. ‘Now, who knows what Hong Kong is?’
The class chanted as one, making Ray jump. ‘One of the pink bits, miss!’ ‘And what are the pink bits?’ ‘The pink bits are ours, miss!’
But Ray felt that nothing belonged to him – not the Chinese place they had left behind, or the army bases in Cyprus and Germany where his family had lived before that, and certainly not this strange suburban town where the boys and girls were dolled up as if they were going to a fancy-dress party.
A skinhead child was assigned to look after Ray but deserted him as soon as the bell went for morning playtime.
On the far side of the playground Ray could see his big brother John kicking a ball around with some of the lads. His kid brother Robbie was running in circles with a pack of little fellows, giggling like crazy. Ray stood there, not knowing where to go, what to do, or even where to put his hands. But then something happened that changed everything.
Someone started singing.
It was the chorus from ‘Hey Jude’. On and on. Voices joined in. And then there was another chant – the opening bars of ‘All You Need Is Love’.
The children kept on playing. The football and gossip didn’t stop, did not even pause for breath. The conkers and hopscotch continued. But they sang as they played.
There were more tunes, more chants – yeah, yeah, yeah – ‘She Loves You’ – and more children raising their voices in these songs that they all knew better than any hymn, better than the National Anthem.
Songs they had grown up singing, the soundtrack to all those Sixties childhoods. It was only the Beatles. Always the Beatles. As if the times that these children grew up in began and ended with John, Paul, George and Ringo. And soon the entire playground was singing and Ray Keeley stepped out among them, his senses reeling, surrounded by the music, and a world unlike any he had known before. A world of shared feelings.
Years later he wondered if he had imagined it all – the first day at the strange school, the desperate attempt to hold back the tears, the sight of his big brother playing football with his new friends somehow underlining Ray’s loneliness, and then out of nowhere the playground full of children singing Beatles songs. Certainly he never saw it happen again.
But he knew that it was real. He knew that it had really happened. He had felt it. The magic that can set you free.
And sometimes Ray felt like his entire life was about trying to get back to that moment, to recover that day when suddenly it didn’t matter that he knew no one and his clothes were all wrong, that schoolyard in 1969 where the children sang, na-na-na, yeah-yeah-yeah and love-love-love, love is all you need.
The office wasn’t empty. Ray should have known. Their office was never quite empty.
Music thundered from inside the review room, making the panel of glass in the door rattle. Ray pressed his face against the glass and saw that Skip Jones was in there. He would probably be in there all night, writing the lead album review for next week’s issue. By hand.
Despite all the modern red plastic Olivettis in the office, Skip Jones always chose to write by hand. You would see him in odd empty corners of the office, or in the review room, his long giraffe like limbs hunched over a tatty notebook, and
