“My name’s Gary,” I said. “What’s yours?”

“Mine’s a gin and tonic”

“Are you a Red Indian, then?”

“What?” said the blonde girl.

“Well, when they christen Red Indian babies, they baptize them in the river, hold them up and then name them after the first thing the mother sees. Like Standing Bear, or Sitting Bull, or Passing Cloud, or Two Dogs Sexing.”

“What are you blathering about?”

“You said your name was A Gin and Tonic. Perhaps your mum didn’t live near a river, so you were christened in a cocktail bar. That would explain it.”

“Fugg off!” said the blonde girl, upon whom the subtle nuances of my sophisticated humour were obviously lost.

“I suppose sex would be out of the question, then?” I said.

“Fugg off or I’ll call the bouncer.”

“Harry’s a friend of mine,” I said.

“Harry’s my brother,” said the blonde girl.

“Look,” I said, because I was rarely put off. Knowing, as most teenage boys have always known, that nine times out of ten persistence will eventually wear down a teenage girl. “I think we’ve got off on the wrong foot here.”

“Take both your feet and walk.”

Having a secret weapon in my bird-pulling arsenal, I chose now to employ it. “I love your perfume,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s Fragrant Night, by Fabergé, isn’t it?”

“It might be.”

“And your lipstick. I love that too. That’s Rose Carmethine, by Yardley.”

“It might be.”

“And your frock is a Mary Quant. And your shoes …”

“You know an awful lot about women’s fashion.”

I leaned close to the blonde girl’s left ear and whispered the words: “I’m a homosexual.” Then stepped back to let them take effect.

The blonde girl stared me full in the eyes. “Oh,” she said. “I, err … do you really like my frock?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “The colour really flatters your complexion. You have beautiful skin, if I might say so. Flawless.”

“Thank you. My name’s Sandra, by the way.” And she put out her hand for me to shake.

So I shook it.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, dirty trickster. Yeah, all right, OK. But I was a homo; well, I had been a homo. I was all for having a go at heterosexuality. But it’s actually a great chat-up line. When you confide your homosexuality, the woman no longer feels threatened. She views you differently. And if she finds you attractive, she wonders, just wonders, whether she could “straighten you out”. Women won’t admit to this, of course, but then there are so many things that women won’t admit to, particularly when it comes to sex. And as this particular ploy had proved effective on several previous occasions, I had no reason to believe that it would fail upon this one.

Sandra bought me a gin and tonic. Well, she looked eighteen. Then she led me to one of the tables at the end of the hall away from the stage and talked to me about fashion and boyfriends. I listened to it all, offering sensitive comment when I felt the need arose, but basically letting her do all the talking. Women, I have learned, like this a lot. They like a man who listens, rather than just rabbits on about himself. So I listened and I waited, waited for the question that I knew would eventually come.

“Have you ever been with a girl?” Sandra asked.

Result!

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“You must have thought about it, though.”

I shrugged strategically. It was not a direct question – a direct answer could blow the whole thing. “The band’s starting up,” I said. “Would you like to dance?”

Sandra nodded. And so we danced.

Jeff Beck played a stormer that Thursday night. He was joined on stage by Alan Price, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Bill Wyman, who were all paying their dues.

Sandra got the rounds in all evening, although I did pay for at least half of them. By checking-out time I was rather drunk and she was rather drunk and very stoned.

I know it is an evil thing to slip purple hearts into a young woman’s gin and tonic every time she goes off to the toilet, but I was a teenage boy and few teenage boys have a conscience.

We left the Blue Triangle and while Sandra was throwing up in a dustbin around the back I spied Dave in congress with the fat girl up against the fire door. He gave me the thumbs-up and I returned it to him.

Then I took Sandra off to show her Mr Doveston’s marble tomb by moonlight. It was a favourite place of mine to bring my lovers. I even had a sleeping bag stashed nearby in one of the above-ground crypts, for those who felt the marble rather cold upon their backs.

I think that Sandra was rather pleased with herself afterwards. She had, after all, “cured” me of my homosexuality.

I might just have notched her up as one more easy conquest, but there was something about Sandra that I really liked. It wasn’t her perfume, or her lipstick, or her frock, or her shoes. I determined that I’d change all of them soon enough. But it was something about her. The person that was her. She seemed special. I couldn’t put my finger on quite how she was special. She certainly wasn’t very clever. But she had a certain something. And, as I had always seen myself marrying a posh woman and the whinnying noises she made whilst I was sexing her led me to believe that she was indeed very posh, I decided to see her again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

9

And then I awoke once more. And my teenage years were behind me and I was twenty-two.

And I was married.

To Sandra.

I was sitting in a dingy kitchenette in a ground-floor flat in a road called Mafeking Avenue in Brentford. I looked out of the window towards a dismal little yard and the back wall of a public house and I thought, Whatever am I doing here?

I thought back to my teenage years, but they were all out of focus. A snatch of detail here, a little incident there. This was the real and for now and I was here and it was all rather dull.

In fact, it was very dull indeed.

I stubbed out my cigarette. The ashtray overflowed onto a pink gingham tablecloth of grubby vinyl. From upstairs came the sounds of arguing voices.

“Mike! I hate you, Mike.”

Mike had flown Spitfires in the war. Mike, I knew, was dying of TB.

“Shut up, woman. You’re drunk!”

The woman’s name was Viv. She drank a bottle of dry Martini a day and went to Weight Watchers on a Thursday evening. At the YMCA hall that no longer housed the Blue Triangle Club. There weren’t any clubs like that any more. The council had tightened up on the licensing laws.

“Go out to work, Mike. Get yourself a job.”

“I’m retired. I have a disability allowance.”

“You’re a lazy skiver.”

“I’m dying of TB.”

“Liar! You’re a liar.”

But he wasn’t and in six months he would be dead. I stared all around and about my dire surroundings. How had I come to this? What was I doing here? Was this my life? Was this my life?

I took out another cigarette and lit it up. It was a Players Number 10. Cheapest fags that ever there were. I couldn’t afford Passing Cloud any more. I didn’t even know whether they made Passing Cloud any more.

I was out of work. Again. Work and I didn’t get on. My face never fitted and I could not subscribe to the “company ethic”. I kept on getting sacked. Which was OK in those days. You could draw the dole immediately even if you were sacked. They knew me well enough at the dole office.

“Wotcha, Gary boy,” they would say. “How did you screw up this time?” And they would tell me to get my hair cut. Get my hair cut? Get real!

But the thing was, these were the early nineteen seventies and there was plenty of work about. Loads of it. There wasn’t any unemployment. The blokes at the dole office kept finding me more work. They said that I was the only officially unemployed person in Brentford and it looked bad on their records and I’d have to start work again on the following Monday. And so here I was, sitting at this table, and Sandra had gone off to work at the new nylons company on the Great West Road and I had an interview at ten-thirty. And it was nearly ten now and I didn’t want to go.