Drayton and Mackenzie E-Book

Alexander Starritt

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 806

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'A big, bustling novel about love, friendship, money, ambition and the 21st century, packed with humour and intelligent observations ... I finished it tear-stained' Sunday Times 'Will have you hooked ... an ode to the enduring power of male friendship' The Times Best Summer Books 'My book of the summer' Janice Turner 'Thrilling' Guardian Longlistedfor the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025 For the first time since university, James and Roland's paths through life – one drawn in straight lines, the other squiggled and meandering – began to cross… James Drayton has always found things too easy. By the time he leaves university, he's still searching for a challenge worthy of his ambitions, one that will fulfil the destiny he thinks awaits him. Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive risk-taker, a charismatic drifter with boundless enthusiasm but a knack for derailing his own attempts to get started in life. When a chance encounter in a pub reunites these old acquaintances, it sets them on an unpredictable course through the upheavals of the 21st century, and triggers an unlikely alliance. Against the backdrop of the financial crash and its aftermath, they strive to create something that outlasts them, something that will matter. Drayton and Mackenzie is a stunningly ambitious, immediately engaging and ultimately deeply moving novel both about trying to make your mark on the world, and about how a friendship might be the most important thing in life.

Leseprobe

To Stella

“There is a tide in the affairs of menWhich, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune”

I

All his life, James had found things too easy. So far, he’d only really known one thing: the arbitrary, rule-bounded competition for grades. Before his A-levels, he trained with the total absorption of an elite athlete. In the maths papers, he even ratcheted the bar a few notches higher: the rules said you weren’t allowed to leave the exam room in the first twenty minutes, so he tried to finish by that mark. In the first of these maths papers, he reached his personal finish line with eighteen seconds to spare. There was a moment of exhilaration. But as the pleasure and tunnel vision of racing receded, he suddenly understood that he would now have to leave the exam room alone, while the rest of his class stayed inside together.

Each time he hit this mark in the subsequent exams, it made him sadder. At least after the summer there would be Oxford. The big league. He deferred the disappointment of the present by looking ahead. And he arrived there assuming he would have to sprint constantly just to keep up. But in tutorials he watched other students admit they hadn’t read “that particular chapter” or just look blank and terrified when the tutor was talking. Others confidently embarked on theories that quickly leaked and foundered, or they just kept clinging to the last idea they’d read about.

Practically no one, not even those struggling, seemed to simply put in the forty hours of weekly study that the tutors recommended. From the snatches of their conversation he overheard, they were using that time for club nights and sports matches. James couldn’t understand them. He found that forty hours was hardly enough to master the basics.

But most bemusing were those who seemed to intentionally trip themselves up – because it showed that they were a free spirit, or glamorously troubled, or too popular for secondary reading. They seemed to think it was interesting to be bad at things. They didn’t seem to understand that being bad at things was the default. Almost everyone since the dawn of time had been bad at almost everything. It was simply the world operating as expected. It was like if you let go of an object and all it did was drop inertly to the ground. Far more remarkable if, when you let go, it began to fly.

His tutorial partners found him aloof, stand-offish, arrogant. His tutors thought him enigmatic: usually a student this brilliant would eagerly accept their invitations to join the little informal gatherings they hosted with interesting alumni. James said he couldn’t spare the time from working. But surely – surely – that was a lie. Meanwhile, James lived in fear. Because the only students he knew were the handful that the timetable paired him with, it was entirely possible that in other tutorials there would be dozens of people far better than him. He studied like he had for A-levels, as if pursued by a rival who had no weaknesses and never tired.

The only extra-curricular activity he tried – just for the first term – was rowing, since it was a bona fide irreplicable Oxford experience and not, like the student newspapers and debating societies, just a sandpit version of real things for grown-ups. In later years, when he was the subject of articles and interviews, he was often asked whether it was true that one of the others in the boat with him was Roland Mackenzie. Yes, it was true. James didn’t notice him at the time.

Instead, he was thinking about undergrad essays, which he’d realised with a sense of disillusionment were merely a technique, a form to be learned like Shakespeare learned the sonnet. All you needed was three facts and confidence. Point, counterpoint, conclusion. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It was very Hegel. And once he saw this, he saw it everywhere: Parliament, the law courts, Newsnight. The two raucous sides of the House; the two sharply antagonistic barristers; prosecution, defence, judgment; one side, other side, vote.

He supposed he’d been naive to think of university as concerned with intellect. Maybe it was different at postgrad, but at this level, Oxford was just an elementary course in information-processing, a training school for Britain’s future lawyers, politicians and administrators. You skim-read the sources and hastily produced an opinionated synopsis. Of course, it made sense. Society needed administrators far more than what his tutor had called “a rare original response” to Spinoza. It didn’t occur to him that since he’d quickly learned the essay form, he could have tried to employ it for something with value of its own. He could only see the test and not what lay behind it.

In the end-of-year exams, he came first by miles, his result an outlier in the distribution, far above the girl in second. His beefy imagined opponent, up close, turned out to be stuffed with straw. It hurt so much he had to lie on the carpet of his childhood bedroom, gritting his teeth until it passed.

He fell into a lethargic slump. After the summer, his essays became perfunctory. His Comparative Government tutor asked if he was alright. He stayed in bed all morning eating Jaffa Cakes and reading sports biographies. So as not to have to keep renewing it, he stole from the library a life of the Czechoslovakian distance runner Emil Zátopek. At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Zátopek won gold in the 5,000 metres, the 10,000 metres and the marathon – a feat unlikely ever to be equalled.

Zátopek had never run a marathon before and didn’t know how to pace himself, so he ran next to the world record holder, Jim Peters. After a pitilessly quick first nine miles in which Peters tried to break him, Zátopek turned to Peters and asked how the race was going. Peters, in astonishment, tried to trick Zátopek by saying the pace was too slow. Zátopek accelerated and was gone. Peters didn’t finish.

James loved that Zátopek had been born with less raw speed than his rivals. And he was born poor. So he worked harder than anyone before him had realised was humanly possible. He ran in snowstorms to toughen himself; he ran carrying his wife on his back. When his day job as a conscript in the Czechoslovakian army prevented him running his sets, he climbed the fence into Prague’s athletics stadium and ran at night. Performance-enhancing drugs were invented to let other athletes survive training like Zátopek.

There was a quote in the book from Christopher Chataway, an Olympian himself and one of Roger Bannister’s pace runners for the four-minute mile, who said, “For me and many others, it was simply more than we could stand.” Sometimes this floated up to James’s conscious mind when he was buying a sandwich or walking to the library – “simply more than we could stand” – and he smiled with joy. Imagine what Zátopek could have achieved if he’d been born with first-class talent and worked that hard.

He climbed out of his despond by imagining that he was competing not against the students around him but against the best student from every cohort back through Oxford’s nine centuries. No one could ever know how well he scored against them, but that only made the contest all the purer.

Then it was James’s final year. A job fair on a drizzly November afternoon. It was 2004, and the financial crisis hadn’t happened yet. Companies had come to offer a ladder up into the decision-making class, the top ten thousand who collectively made history rather than having it inflicted upon them. The talk among the students was about how much more competition there was than in their parents’ time. After the crisis, they would consider themselves lucky for having made this leap before it hit.

James went to the job fair expecting each recruiter to pitch the merits of Zátopekian devotion to his particular calling. He wanted to ask the civil servants how many years it took to become head of a proper department like the Treasury or the Foreign Office. And how would they compare the deep background power of the bureaucracy with the trivial attention-seeking but ultimate say-so of the politician? Was it better to be cabinet secretary for fifteen years or prime minister for five?

But the fair wasn’t like that. It was in a big bare room, like a school assembly hall, that was used for conferences. They’d set up two rows of desks facing each other to make an avenue of high-paying jobs. Each desk had company-branded pens and USB sticks. They had tall, free-standing posters, like Japanese battle flags, with pictures of smiling models pretending to be account managers and investment analysts. There were some noticeably less glossy stands for the graduate fast track at Tesco’s, the police and the NHS.

A hundred years earlier, the jobs might have been to administer part of a West African country or help run one of the great concerns – jute, shipbuilding – that catered to the Empire. But now most were for the professional services that since the 1980s had proliferated from the margins to the centre of the economy. Asset managers, consultants, lawyers, PR, a discreet caste of British men in blue suits, who, rather than attempt the risk, heartbreak and occasional glory of trade or industry, lived safe and comfortable on the steady flow of fees. For them, London was a kind of Switzerland, except with better restaurants.

The students meandered around these displays in sports kit or pyjamas. To James, it looked more like a Home Counties labour exchange than a search for vocation. He examined leaflets hamming up the exclusivity of joining the “Magic Circle” or the “Big Four”. The only one that appealed was a KPMG poster that exclaimed “Tax needn’t be taxing!” It had a picture of what looked like real accountants white-water rafting in brightly coloured helmets. At least they were honest that accountancy was dorkish. He took a brochure. Perhaps tax would be an interesting window into the nature of things.

As he ambled around, he said hi to people he’d seen in college, and they said hi back. But he didn’t know anyone at the fair or beyond it who he could be sure he’d see again after graduation. He was explicit to himself about this failing. He diagnosed that it was partly because he hadn’t joined the extra-curricular clubs. Of course he’d rowed in the first term, just to know what it was like, but that was it.

Partly also, he assessed, the problem was his personality. His younger sister Cleo, who was in her first year at Cambridge, knew how to talk to people at parties without turning it into a seminar. James didn’t. This was a weakness he intended to work on, because it sometimes allowed a pale rind of loneliness to grow around his days. He had some ideas for how to become a charming raconteur, along with getting a six-pack and learning either Russian or Arabic.

Years later, when journalists asked him for the story of his life, his memories of university would feel constrictive, as if he were thinking himself back into a too-small jacket. Not particularly dreamy Oxford days. But since these interviews were just a way of broadcasting his messages, he didn’t mention it.

He was looking for the Civil Service desk when someone politely touched his elbow. It was a recruiter, only a few years older than him, maybe twenty-six, quite short, with a slight paunch already. He was dressed as an Oxford type, in a midnight-blue velvet jacket and a bow tie striped in the college colours, with gold cufflinks in the shape of his employer’s initials, an A and an O. James didn’t imagine this guy had been wearing velvet jackets before he got to Oxford. It was a persona handed down by institutional tradition, like slang in the army. Now he was peacocking with it to draw in fresh graduates. He had a friend with him, another recruiter, more normally dressed in a grey suit. Evidently the straight man in the relationship.

The first recruiter shook James’s hand and said, “Hello there. James, isn’t it? I’m Will, from Allen & Overy, the top firm in the Magic Circle. And this is Hatch, who’s doing really well at a plucky outfit called – what’s it called again, Hatch? Freshwater?”

A handshake from Hatch. “Hi, James. Steve Hatchett. I can tell you that at Freshfields we do a lot more business than they do at A&O. If you like the sound of three years writing gas contracts from a satellite office in Uzbekistan, Will’s your guy. But I can’t imagine you want to go to Uzbekistan, do you?”

Hatch had teed it up for him to say something like “Not if I come back dressed like that” or “I hear Freshfields would be lucky to get some business in Uzbekistan.”

But James didn’t have the knack of banter. And actually he would quite like to go to Samarkand, to see the tomb of Tamerlane. He said, “Sorry, but why are you talking to me? I mean, out of everyone?”

“Right, right,” said Will. “Good question. Well, this isn’t my first rodeo, you know, so I just asked Big Eddie: who’s the number one student you’ve got in this cohort, because that’s all I’m here for.”

James glanced around and spotted his tutor, Professor Lawton – Big Eddie – who was worldlier than most of his colleagues and had come to the recruitment fair to make sure the right people met each other. He was loitering on the edge of the room, leaning against the wall with his gorilla’s shoulders straining against his hairy tweed blazer. His fists were in the blazer’s pockets, jingling whatever he kept in there.

Big Eddie was one of the ideas men behind the early years of the Blair government. Recalibrating the engines of capitalism to drive social justice, like motors driving a flywheel, was the subject of his books. No more violent, twentieth-century-style ideological conflict, no more class war, capital versus labour, left versus right – but a third way. It was said in college that he’d run out of new thoughts to feed into the insatiable political machine and was hardly ever in Number 10 any more. But he knew what it was to sit on those sofas in Downing Street with Blair, Brown and Alastair Campbell, and decide the fate of the country. James hoovered up whatever he could glean from him.

Will said, “He was our tutor, too, oh, a fair few years ago now. Hatch and I were tute partners back then. Eddie says you’re a shoo-in to come first in the year for PPE. Is that right?”

In the way they ogled him, James thought he detected, beneath the pleasant smiles, a tinge of hostility. He’d noticed before that people who considered themselves high achievers could turn lumpen and resentful around him.

He said, “Someone always comes first. If you got the fifty stupidest people in Britain to sit the exams, one would come first. The only thing you’re beating is other people.”

They laughed as if he’d joined in. Will said, “Too true. Most of the profession are utter buffoons. Like this one right here.” The two of them laughed again, very happy to be together on this jaunt to the old alma mater. They felt very grown up. “But that naturally makes it all the easier for a clever chap like you to get ahead. For clever chaps, it’s easy-peasy.”

James, feeling that familiar disillusionment, said, “I’m not really interested in a walkover.”

The recruiters glanced at each other, clearly both deciding at the same time that he was a bit of a dick. But Will didn’t let his bonhomie falter. He wholeheartedly agreed: “Of course! You wouldn’t want to be bored. And it’s not boring, is it, Hatch?”

“Course not.” Hatch judiciously wobbled his head from side to side. “To be fair, you obviously have to do some legwork at the beginning, same as everywhere.”

James was becoming very aware of the room around him, the milling students, the musty smell of rain-dampened hoodies. Outside, the sun had sunk below the ceiling of cloud, and there was an orangey-red glow on the windows. He felt that if he moved at all, even just his finger, the whole room would stop and turn towards him, and he would be at the centre of a silent ring of masks. He could hear himself getting haughty as he said, “So what you’re saying is I should choose the law because the competition are idiots and the work isn’t more boring than anything else?”

Will said, “No, no, no,” and the jovial expression dropped from his face. “I can see we’ve come at this from entirely the wrong angle. I apologise. Hatch and I have probably known each other too long to be allowed to talk to other people. So let me give you the brass tacks: we’ll pay for your law conversion, and we’ll match any salary here.”

Hatch broke in: “We’ll give you that, plus BUPA and a relocation bonus for moving to London.”

Will countered: “We don’t do health insurance until you’re a bit more senior. But someone like you’ll be up there in no time. And you’re not going to need it, are you, until you’re older. Hatch, be honest, have you ever actually used it once, apart from your annual check-up?”

Hatch couldn’t help smiling just a little. He said, “It’s the peace of mind. I might develop something.”

Will couldn’t help himself either: “Like what? Crotch rot? Your chat’ll have to get a hell of a lot better for that to happen.”

They both disintegrated into laughter again, and James thought: Maybe it’s time to get out of this smug little country and go to America. He tightened with the perennial fear that he should have studied computer science.

Will was saying, “Sorry, James, sorry. That was childish. Now, we’re having a little invite-only soirée this evening. Why –”

Hatch interrupted again: “We’ve laid on a much better spread than they have. If you go to –”

James held up a hand to stop him. He had to get away. “Listen. Thanks.” He inadvertently turned down his mouth as if giving them bad news. “But, well, no thanks. Good luck with the law.” He gave them a nod and walked away.

Will came a few steps after him and threw his final hook: “If you’re thinking you should shop around for a better offer, there isn’t one. We’ll match any salary here. Once you’ve done the round of the others, come back and talk to me. Will Cambourne, Allen & Overy!”

The idea that there was nothing more than this – that the best England had to offer was Will Cambourne – drove James out onto the drizzly street. The last of the daylight was going out overhead, and he stamped along with his thoughts in a jangle. The wet roads were hissing with passing cars. Small-town rush hour in narrow streets. Everyone hurrying to get out of the rain. A few postgrads huddled together outside the cinema, their umbrellas a multicoloured testudo. Some homeless men were taking shelter under the high portico of the Taylorian library, like primitives living among the ruins of ancient Rome.

As his thoughts began to cohere, he cheered himself up by imagining that he would dedicate every minute of the rest of his life to a single sacred cause: the downfall of Will Cambourne. He’d join Allen & Overy and quickly become Cambourne’s boss. He’d pretend to be Cambourne’s friend, feeding him enough titbits to keep him walking deeper into James’s maze. Then he’d have Cambourne’s promotions be passed over, his raises be meagre, his every project inexplicably fail. And finally, when Cambourne was broken, held together only by dependence on his loyal friend James, now head of the company, James would bring him into his enormous office at the top of a skyscraper and say, “Will, I am the architect of your destruction.” In that moment it would be revealed that all his seemingly random and disconnected actions had actually served one sole purpose.

Having reached that pinnacle, James’s mind started to wander back down towards its everyday paths. The rain had saturated his curling black hair, and dirty rainwater trickled down past his ears. His dad claimed that the hair was the genetic legacy of a Spanish sailor cast ashore from the Armada. It wasn’t impossible. In winter his skin went grey rather than white. And his dad’s family was from East Anglia, so… maybe.

For now, however, he was wet, his woolly jumper was damp and he wanted to sit down. He trudged towards college. The way back felt much longer. He let himself in through the door cut into the big front gate.

As he stepped through, he saw Cambourne on the quad. He was standing under an arch beside the college bar, regaling some undergrads whether they wanted to be regaled or not. Alert despite his apparent easy-breeziness, he spotted James and saluted him with a plastic tumbler. He broke away from the group, walking backwards to finish what he was saying, then swivelled and headed for James.

By a decade later, when many people wanted James’s attention, he’d learned how to give a frictionless brush-off. For now, his impulse was to flee. He could reach his door, punch in the key code and be gone. But with his young person’s self-importance, he decided that running was beneath him. So he gave a reluctant wave and let their paths cross.

Cambourne hailed him as soon as his voice could reach. “James! Good to see you again, old man. Let me shake your hand.”

James let his rain-wet hand be moved up and down. From close by, he could see that Cambourne’s eyes were watchful. Cambourne said, “Good to see you again. Very good. Now listen – oh, can I get you a drink? There’s a few grand behind the bar. Champagne? Whisky? I’m not sure I’d drink the cocktails, personally, but they make them.” James said nothing, and Cambourne’s tone shifted. “I know you don’t like the chit-chat, so I’ll tell you the heart of it.” He moved closer and went on confidentially. Another layer of performance. “The reality is, it would be a real feather in my cap, personally, to bring in the man who comes top in PPE. Biggest fish in the bag. And that gives you a lot of leverage.”

He paused for James to say something self-deprecating. But James just said, “Um, thanks for the interest.”

Cambourne grinned. “I get it. I really do. You want to play each firm against the others, bid up your price. Makes perfect sense. But let’s skip to the end of that process. We’ll max out every salary increment so you’ll be in the hundred-grand club by the time you’re about twenty-five or -six. Even I’m not getting that yet, and I’ve already bought a two-bed in Shoreditch.”

James felt as if he and Cambourne were speaking different languages. He said, “Do you even like working there?”

“Love it. Never been happier.”

James peered into Cambourne’s face but found no sign of whether that was true or not.

Cambourne again became confidential. “Can I just say, I’m sure you think I’m a vulgar materialist for talking so much about cash.”

He raised his eyebrows at James, who, caught out, shook his head and denied it. “No, no.”

Cambourne could see he’d got his man. The most talented recruits often wanted to wax lyrical about the meaning of life before they signed the contract. He’d done it himself. “It’s okay. And you know what, if your life’s mission is to cure cancer, go for it. That would be much appreciated. But if you’re like everyone else, and you want a job that’s intellectually stimulating and gives you a nice life – or a very nice life – this is it. It’s not the temples of bloody Mammon. It’s that when you’re forty you don’t want to live in a grimy flat with five randomers off the internet. Or you want to be able to go with your friends when they rent a villa in Ibiza. Or one day you’d like your kids to have some decent schooling. That’s what it’s actually all about.”

James tried to imagine himself renting a villa in Ibiza with his friends. He said, almost apologetically, “But isn’t it just a bit…”

Cambourne raised his eyebrows again, making James feel rude.

James rushed on: “Okay, if you work forty hours a week –”

“Ha. I’d love to only work forty hours a week.”

“Okay.” James blushed. “Okay. But as a baseline, that’s about a hundred thousand hours’ work before you retire. Imagine what you could accomplish if you put it all into one thing. And what are you putting it into? A flat in Shoreditch?” James was embarrassed for him.

Cambourne nodded deeply, as if this were making him think. He said, “Really interesting stuff, James. You’ve obviously taken the philosophy part of the course to heart. We should talk more out of the rain. The upstairs room’s booked at the Blue Boar, the one with the private entrance.” Cambourne thought he had his fish on the line, and relaxed into his spiel. “We’ve spent like drunken sailors on the spread, but I don’t think there’s anyone actually there. We could go over, have a few snifters and put the world to rights.”

With the lucid certainty of all his ideas, James suddenly knew what he was going to do. Not giving Cambourne any further attention, he turned back the way he’d come and strode out of college. Before the door fell shut behind him, he could hear “Bit abrupt, old bean. But great! I’ll see you in the –”

The door clunked into the gate and cut him off.

James felt calm and clear-headed again. He walked quickly to the homeless men under the high arch of the Taylorian. Arranged on the steps around them was their constant luggage of plastic orange Sainsbury’s bags, rucksacks and sleeping bags. Most of them he’d seen around, selling the Big Issue. A lanky, skinny ginger man with a wispy mouth-beard was said to be a former professor of philology.

James was a little intimidated. The homeless men seemed more hostile and unpredictable now they weren’t begging for change. But he thought of the young Julius Caesar telling the pirates who’d kidnapped him: let me go or I’ll come back one day and have you crucified – which he did. James said: “Excuse me.”

An older man, expecting bullshit, wearily said, “What?”

“I thought you might want unlimited food, drink and a warm place to sit down. Upstairs at the Blue Boar, the side entrance. A law firm has paid for a feast, but there’s no one there, so it’ll all get thrown away if you don’t take it. They might come back at some point and kick you out, but if you want it, it’s there.”

Most of them looked at him. The philology professor seemed to be in a dream. Another one, quite unfriendly, said, “What’s it to you?”

“Basically, I think they’re a bunch of wankers, and they’ll be pissed off if you take all the stuff that’s meant for posh boys in velvet jackets and signet rings.”

“But you’re a fucking posh boy.”

“Maybe so. But it doesn’t change anything I’ve just said.”

His parents were academics, not poshos. And it was normal in revolutions for the rabble to be roused by a breakaway member of the bourgeoisie. Lenin’s dad was a civil servant. “It’s up to you. Good night.”

He started walking back towards college, and the same one shouted after him, “Oi! Posh boy! Come back.”

Still walking, he called out, “No. But if someone stops you, my name’s Will Cambourne. That’s Will. Cambourne.” With that, he left them, sauntering now, laughing occasionally and smiling up into the drizzle. He imagined the tramps stuffing themselves with Bollinger and prosciutto. Good luck to them. His heart was light. It was as if he’d restored balance to one small corner of the universe. As if he’d taken the random trajectories of human lives and arranged them into a satisfying tableau: “The needy at the tables of the rich.” From disorder, a shape. From chaos, meaning.

Roland never knew about the careers fair. To him, it was only another unread poster among the continual flowering of coloured paper on the cork noticeboards. What he was looking for he wasn’t going to find in some dry workshop about “Using the internet for research”. He didn’t know the people who went to those things.

And anyway, he was more than fully occupied – with his weekly essay crisis and with his friend Emily’s plan to hire a narrowboat and throw an all-day tropical party while puttering up the river. Roland was trying to buy enough sand to turn the foredeck or whatever it was called into a beach. On the afternoon when James was at the fair, Roland was at a builder’s merchant on the edge of town where one of the staff had got caught up in this silliness and was whizzing him around the yard in a mini-forklift.

But afterwards he read about the fallout from what James had done, in TheTimes and the student newspaper, Cherwell. A crew of hobos had got into some empty corporate feast and had what sounded like the party of the decade. TheTimes had some weighty comments to make about the responsibilities a privileged university owed to the town it lived in. But Roland paid especial attention to Cherwell because he felt a kind of paternal benevolence towards it.

For a few months, he’d been passionately involved. He wore a newsman’s costume of long shabby coat over a sweat-stained white shirt, with a tie pulled to one side. To his slightly bemused friends and at parties he talked with winning enthusiasm about the importance of the news, and he had a brief, news-themed romance with the deputy editor.

The highlight was having sex under her desk. There were A3 proofs strewn around, and they started trying to throw each other off their rhythm by reading out random sentences in seductive whispers. He put his mouth to her ear and moaned, “Bust up at bus stop.”

But after a while, the whole news thing started to feel a bit thin. He couldn’t get excited any more about other people reading words he himself barely remembered. So he joined a drama group instead. He still sometimes went to the after-edition drinks. He affectionately felt that the paper stayed attached to him in some way, like an ex-girlfriend.

There was a rumour that it was James who’d turned a gang of tramps loose in a corporate drinks party. Roland thought it was the funniest, most incongruous thing he’d ever heard. He knew James from first term, when they’d both tried rowing. They went out on the river before breakfast while the boaties tried to evangelise them that early starts and gym sessions were a fun way to spend university.

It was surprisingly moving to be on the water at dawn, with the river flowing soft and cold beneath him. White mist rising off its dark surface. The long light boat slipping past reeds and meadows. He liked the quiet and the regular creak-dip-pull, creak-dip-pull, and the eightfold pattern of the blades dipping in time. His heart got so full up with this feeling that he had to tell the others about it. And then the officious little cox would start shouting, “Roland, you’re out of sync!” or “Sharpen it up, Roland” or some other boatie bullshit that he wasn’t into.

James didn’t seem the kind of guy for shenanigans. Not a particularly gifted athlete but good at rowing because he had the classic attributes of a high-achiever: follows instructions, goal-oriented, willing to be bored. Roland had none of those qualities, and didn’t want them. The more the cox told him off, the more he turned against rowing. It was actually kind of totalitarian, a Nazi sport, all about subsuming the individual into an eight-legged collective organism, like a pond skater. And he wasn’t going to be anything’s leg.

He quit in a late-night email telling them to keep their goose-stepping jackboots off his face. In the morning, the angry boaties, a man down, banged on his locked door. Roland pretended to be asleep until they went away. They got over it and even presented him with a flimsy little trophy at their end-of-term party: “Least likely to make the Olympics”. They meant it as a peace offering, and that was how he took it. They weren’t a bad bunch – just dorks with muscles. One of them, bending over outside and bracing a hand against the wall while she spewed, was wearing a T-shirt that said “Today I will do what you won’t, so tomorrow I can do what you can’t.” Not exactly party vibes. But any kind of strong attitude impressed him, and for a moment he was lost in admiration.

James was at that party. Roland remembered him boring someone about the module choices for next year. When the drinking games started, with everyone capering and stripping as the boys and girls swapped clothes, James pointlessly won a few rounds out of ingrained competitiveness. He didn’t seem to understand you were trying to lose. Then he was too drunk and outside throwing up with the others, not having visibly enjoyed himself at all.

And now this. Roland loved it. With a great sense of his own wisdom, he thought that American Psycho was dead right: it was always the tightly wound keen-beans who eventually ran amok. They came a bit loose, and, next thing you knew, they were chopping up prozzers with an axe. He should watch it again this afternoon. Christian Bale was such a good actor.

Roland had a sort-of friend called Stefan whose poster-plastered bedroom was near hall and whom Roland often visited while he was waiting for lunch to start. An earnest, obsessive Austrian, he kept his curtains drawn and was always going on about the layers of meaning in Seven Samurai. He wore Japanese manga T-shirts, and his ambition, which he and Roland regularly plotted out, was to astonish Oxford with a stage version of something called The 47 Ronin, for which he was only forty-six ronin short.

Roland’s other friends said Stefan had what they called yellow fever. Apparently, he kept hitting on the insular Asian maths girls. He’d invited Susie Teoh, who was Malaysian, to the Chinese restaurant near the roundabout, and she’d reported him to the dean. It was also widely agreed that he was a foot fetishist.

Stefan had discovered that the Japanese mafia had a website. There was even an email address: [email protected]. Together, Roland and Stefan composed an email. Calling themselves “students” was too small-fry, “professors” a bit of a stretch, so they said they were “scholars at the University of Oxford”. Because the Yakuza saw themselves as heirs to the samurai, Stefan and Roland said they were researching the survival of traditional values in contemporary Japan. And since they needed some reason for writing, they asked whether they could come and visit.

A few days later, Roland was summoned to Stefan’s bedroom by SMS message. Stefan refused to say what it was about until, after stoking as much anticipation as he could, he announced what Roland had already guessed. “The Yamaguchi-gumi have written back. And they say yes! Shit, Roland! Can you believe it? They say they want to contribute to the West understanding Japan better. Isn’t this completely crazy?”

Somehow Roland wasn’t surprised at all. He just felt a door slipping off its latch, waiting to be pushed open. From the bed where Stefan had instructed him to sit, he sprang to his feet and yelled, “Let’s get moving! I’ll pack a bag!”

Stefan stared at him in critical bewilderment. “What are you talking about? We can’t go anywhere. We’re in term time. Unless you want to go to Tokyo for the weekend.”

Roland sat back down. “No, no, of course not. That was stupid.”

Stefan took on a slightly exasperated tone. “No, Roland, you’re not stupid; you’re just not practical.”

Roland was startled. A second ago, we were adventuring to Japan, now I’m not practical. In a few days, he’d think: Fuck Stefan.

In the meantime, he wondered whether it was true. To be fair, he hadn’t thought about it being term and so on. He said, “You’re completely right” and held up both palms in surrender. “Tokyo. Too far for term time. Got it.” He made the okay sign.

“I can’t believe they wrote back. What an incredible story. Maybe we’ll be able to keep the correspondence going. Like a Yakuza penfriend. Wouldn’t that just be, like, totally unbelievable?”

“But we could go in the Christmas vac, couldn’t we? That’s only a couple of weeks away, isn’t it?”

Stefan looked uncomfortable. “I suppose, yes, theoretically. It’s three weeks away.”

Roland sprang up again. “Fantastic! We’ll go in the vac! That’ll give us time to learn some phrases and get some Japanese clothes.”

“But don’t you have the same dissertation deadline as me?”

“I don’t know.”

“The first day of next term.”

“Come on.” There was more to life than dissertations.

“Roland, my family goes to my uncle’s in the mountains over Christmas. We go every year, you understand. Or –” Something occurred to him, and with sudden urgency he said, “Roland, have you already finished your research?”

Roland had not finished his research. It wouldn’t have been precisely accurate to say he’d started. But now there was the prospect of Japan. He sat down to think, then got up again. He stood for a few seconds in silence, articulating. Then he threw his arms out wide and said, “We’ve got to go. We’ve got to. This is… this is… an opportunity, a big opportunity. Do you think we’ll ever get invited again, ever? We won’t. We should go now. Today. But we can go at the end of term if you want. Okay, that’s fine. But let’s just go.”

Stefan said, “Well, no, listen, Roland. It’s difficult because –”

Roland interrupted. “If you don’t want to come, that’s your choice and I’ll respect it. But I don’t understand. I thought you were totally mad for this Japanese stuff. Kurosawa, these posters, the Asian girls. This whole thing was literally your idea.”

Stefan had been becoming increasingly shamefaced, and now he flicked over into irritation. “I know what you’re implying, and I do not have yellow fever, which is very, very racist by the way. And I can’t explode my dissertation just to chat with some probably uneducated petty crook about his views on the world. What’s he going to tell us anyway? How to steal someone’s wallet?”

Roland laughed because what Stefan was saying was so terrible. “Fine. But I have to tell you, this is the worst decision. The worst. And obviously, if you change your mind, I still really want you to come.”

The Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate arranged for him to meet a representative they called Tanaka-san in a certain bar in Tokyo just after Christmas. Roland wanted to fly immediately after the end of term, but his mum persuaded and ultimately bribed him to wait until Boxing Day.

This was their first Christmas in England since Roland was a toddler. His dad was an engineer in the oil industry. The sun had stained his hands and forearms as if with tea. He still wore his high-performance wrap-around shades on rainy days in Guildford. From more than two decades of postings to expat compounds in Egypt, Oman and Qatar, he’d reached a fearsome amateur standard of golf and tennis. After 9/11, he started wondering whether it was time to leave the Middle East. And then his Arab colleagues kept questioning him about why the Brits and Americans were destroying Iraq. He was no longer simply an expat, like the Dutch or the Italians; he was a Brit. So they’d moved “home”.

With the enthusiasm that Roland had inherited, he was adapting a house in a commuter village near Guildford to be self-sufficient in energy. It wasn’t finished yet, so they had Christmas in a rental. A new-build box for living, not so different from the expat compounds. In exchange for sticking around till Boxing Day, Roland’s mum transferred him enough money for two weeks in Japan, on the condition that he finish his dissertation before he left.

At the gate in Heathrow, he was thrilled that most others in the boarding queue were Japanese: real Japanese people, lots of them, with Japanese faces and straight black hair and shiny clothes and colourful trainers, as if the double doors at Gate B9 were the actual entrance to Japan.

On the plane, he brought out The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a book Stefan had recommended, and found his place. He’d already read a couple of others upstairs in his bedroom while he was supposed to be writing his thesis: Shōgun, about a real English sea captain who washed ashore on Japan and became a samurai; and In Praise of Shadows, about why Western crockery was white and hospital-bright while the Japanese preferred the layered depths of dark lacquer. He’d caught the romance of an alien culture and started to feel that he wasn’t just going on a holiday but on a journey to somewhere utterly different, dislocating himself in space to open up the gap for some profound insight.

When the plane’s lights were turned off, Roland clicked on his overhead spot to keep reading. Around him the dim cabin slept and sighed while the white pages shone in his lap. The book was about trying to isolate a kind of operating system of Japaneseness that could explain Japan’s infinite phenomena – the crazy game shows, the Mitsubishi factories and the raked-gravel Zen gardens – from a finite set of rules.

Roland felt like a lone acolyte peering into sacred mysteries. With the wastes of Siberia far below, and a breathing, sleeping Japanese woman in the seat beside him, he experienced a great calm happiness. With every rotation of the four jet engines outside in the cold night, he was being carried closer to the truth. As he read further and grew sleepier, the images started to swim: horned battle helmets, cracked pottery repaired with gold, medieval dildos made of green jade – and he was asleep in his seat.

The feeling that he was trembling on the brink of some great insight intensified when he was actually walking around Japan. Or rather it felt as if everything around him – the dinky taxis whose drivers wore white cotton gloves, the shocking glass modernity of the cityscape, and the quiet, almost rural-looking backstreets behind his hostel – as if all this were trembling with meaning and might at any time dissolve into some great revelation.

He had a few days before he was due to meet Tanaka-san. On the first, jet-lagged, he clicked awake at quarter to five and couldn’t get back to sleep. He pulled on yesterday’s clothes and crept out of the dorm. The common room was silent and chilly in the half-dark. It had a framed photo of Mount Fuji and a jaunty sign reminding residents to wear flip-flops in the showers. There was a cartoon flip-flop with googly eyes and a mouth, saying “Healthy feet are happy feet”. Beside it was a smaller Mrs Flip-Flop, saying: “You can buy me at reception.” So Japanese.

Roland didn’t have flip-flops and last night had unknowingly gone into the shower barefoot. He’d definitely been seen. Pretty much the opposite of the exquisite Japanese politeness he’d been reading about. He would apologise as soon as there was someone at reception to apologise to.

With this, another thin stream of worry started flowing: he really hadn’t done a very good job on that dissertation. And he was actually slightly relying on it to pull up his other marks. His plan, before all this, had been to go totally monastic over Christmas: knuckle down, get serious and write an amazing dissertation to bring his average back up. But it would be such a waste to come to Japan and spend the entire time fretting. The right thing was to block out those thoughts for now, recharge and really smash it when he got back.

He helped himself to some paper from the printer at reception, sat down next to the hostel’s home-made binders of tourist info, and started drawing up a schedule of cultural visits. National Museum – yes. Imperial Palace – yes. He’d got lucky: New Year’s was one of only two annual days that the palace was open. Fish market – yes. Design museum – definitely. He had to get his head around kintsugi.

He’d been through almost everything when the hostel began to wake up. Groggy backpackers shuffled down the stairs yawning and rubbing their eyes, and headed into the courtyard for a tai chi lesson. A very skinny Japanese teenager in asymmetric clothes and a single dangling earring came in from outside. He put his bag down behind the reception desk and switched on the overheads. To Roland he said, “Jet lag?”

Roland stood up and resisted the urge to bow. “Yes. I’ve been up for a couple of hours. I just got in last night. From England.”

The Japanese kid didn’t take up the invitation to get acquainted. He just said, “You want breakfast?” Like in the stereotypes, the R in breakfast was somewhere between an R and an L. “We got American cereal, breakfast bagel, Danish pastry.”

“Do you have any Japanese breakfast?”

The kid laughed. “You are in Japan. There is Japanese breakfast everywhere. In the hostel, we got foreign breakfast. Apple Jack, Cheerios, Reese’s Puff.”

Roland wavered. Going out onto the frosty street to search for an authentic breakfast seemed a lot for his first day. The kid saw him wavering and said, “You are jet-lag. You need to eat. Bring your stomach to Japanese time. Then have Japanese breakfast tomorrow.”

Roland gratefully agreed. He paid a mysterious quantity of yen for a portion of Cheerios in a miniature Tupperware box, a portion of milk in an even more miniature Tupperware cylinder and a round yellow token, like the discs in Connect Four, to put in the coffee machine.

First on his schedule was beating the crowds at the National Museum by arriving when it opened. But as the Cheerios slid down into his stomach, drawing in the blood supply, his limbs grew so heavy. By the time he finished, he was so drowsy that it was all he could do to rinse his bowl and stumble back upstairs to his dorm.

As he wrapped the single duvet tightly around himself, he realised with a jolt that he’d forgotten about the flip-flops. But he pulled on his eye mask and slept till mid-afternoon. Neither that day nor on any other did he make it to the National Museum, nor to anywhere else on his list.

That first afternoon, he told the Japanese kid, “Look, I know it’s not a big deal, but I went into the showers yesterday, and I’d just arrived – but I know that’s not an excuse. Now that I’ve noticed, I can obviously see there are signs literally everywhere. And it totally makes sense. Like, verrucas and stuff.”

A girl who was sorting through flyers at the other end of the desk, setting aside those that gave a free drink on entry, noticed him.

The kid was both bored and confused. He said, “You want to make complaint about the showers? You have problem with your feet?”

The girl’s eyes shut for a moment with suppressed laughter.

Roland said, “No, no, no. I’m just saying, yesterday, I went into the shower with bare feet.”

The kid frowned and said, “No, you must to wear flip-flops. You must to read the sign.”

The girl let out a high-pitched sound like hmmm. Roland noticed her lovely warm tanned skin and her blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. He caught her eye. She lifted her eyebrows, and he smiled.

He told the Japanese kid, “Look, sorry. I’m making way too big a deal of this. But I don’t want to be rude. So, sorry. This is really stupid. I’ve made a mountain out of a molehill.”

The girl said, “Can’t be too careful. Healthy feet are happy feet.”

They both laughed, and then they were talking. Roland said, “This is ridiculous. I don’t know how I’ve got so tangled up in it.”

“Do you need some help? It really seems like buying footwear is too much for you.”

The Japanese kid’s eyes slid down and to the right, to where his phone was sitting on the desk behind the counter. With one hand he flicked up the flip screen and started reading his messages.

Roland and the girl kept talking. She was from New Zealand, from Dunedin, called Harriet. She was travelling around East Asia with her friend Jenny, whom she called Jinny.

Roland explained what he was doing there. It took her a few seconds to take this in. She said, “So, wait, this Tanaka guy’s like an actual gang boss?”

“Umm, I don’t know if he’s a boss or how the, like, promotion system works. But, um, yeah, as far as I know.”

“And you found his email address on the internet?”

“That’s right. Well, my friend did. He’s obsessed with Japan. Or, to be honest, he’s got a thing for Asian girls. And samurai stuff.”

Harriet, incredulous, started grinning awkwardly. “Hold on. Are you sure it’s not a wind-up?”

A trapdoor opened under Roland. “What?”

“I, like, hate to say it, but it just seems, you know, weird, don’t you think, that this crime lord has his email address on the internet and then you just email him, and he says: sure let’s go for a drink?”

Roland said, “Oh my God.” He put his hands on his face. “Oh my God. I literally never thought of that. And I’ve come all the way to Japan.”

Harriet, cringing from this awkwardness, blew out her cheeks. “Umm. You know. I’m sure it’s on the level. I literally don’t know anything about it. I’m sure he’s a real crime lord.”

Roland said, “Can you imagine! Can you imagine if it’s just some ten-year-old who’s made himself a Yakuza website.”

The Japanese kid’s eyes flicked up at the word Yakuza, but he went back to his messages.

Harriet said, “Are you, like, okay about this? I’m so, so sorry if I’ve ruined your trip.”

“No, no, not at all. If he’s a real crime lord, great. If he’s a ten-year-old, then, okay, you fucker, you got me. And I’m just having a random holiday in Japan. Which is kind of awesome.”

Harriet mimed her head exploding, and said, “Oh jeez, this is too good. You’ve got to tell Jinny. We’re going to get some noodles and then check out these bars. Want to come with?”

In the fast-food noodle bar, Roland told his tale again, and Jenny laughed so hard she had to bury her face in Hattie’s shoulder until her shaking subsided. When she was done, she dried her eyes on her sleeve and said, “That’s the best thing I’ve heard on this entire trip.”

Afterwards, they took their flyers to noisy bars full of foreigners, and went from one to another until the places began emptying out and there was grey light in the sky. From there, they slid into a routine of staying out till morning and sleeping through the days. Each afternoon when Roland woke up, he was full of horrible sour guilt about the National Museum. He swore himself complicated promises that he would wake up earlier tomorrow. If he didn’t, his punishment would be an extra day in the library when he got back. Two extra days; three…

But at night he was lifted by a kind of elation. Even just when driving around Tokyo in the dark back seat of a taxi, his thigh and arm against Harriet or Jenny, looking out, the fluorescent street scene reflecting on the window and playing across his face. Neon, costumes, space glitter.

One evening, they drove over the Rainbow Bridge bending through the night sky. From its arc he could see hundreds, maybe thousands, of illuminated skyscrapers standing up out of the plain that Tokyo was on and marching on over the hills around it. Compared with this, every capital city in Europe was just a murky little medieval toytown.

A thought that had been growing since he arrived in Japan enphrased itself: Oh, we in Europe aren’t actually the height of civilisation. No one ever told me.

There was a calm delight, as if someone had raised the lid of the box Roland was living in. The roof was no longer cardboard but infinite and starlit. The world was so much larger and stranger than he could have guessed. He saw himself seeing these things and thought: This is really living. I’m going to remember this forever.

He wasn’t wrong. More than thirty years later, when his daughter visited Japan, most of his mental image had faded to black, but he could still see a few wisps of fluorescent pink light, and he still possessed the remembered feeling of a night long ago.

Eventually, inevitably, Roland and Hattie slept together, giggling and shushing each other under his too-small duvet in the dorm. They undressed clumsily in their body heat, with legs or arms sticking out into the colder air. He was skinny, but she was so lean he could see the shapes of the muscles running up her side, and she was so hungry to be touched that when he did it was like she was being electrocuted through his fingers.

It turned out that Tanaka-san was a real crime lord after all, or at least a criminal of some degree. But he seemed surprised that Roland was the person who had come. They met in a street like a narrow canyon with a jumble of flashing signs suspended above it. Amid dangling bags of candyfloss and racks of “I ♥ Tokyo” T-shirts, there was a door and a grey-haired bouncer with a paunch slumping against his black T-shirt.

Inside was a quiet whisky bar. Deep shadows, dark wood, just like In Praise of Shadows. The bar was empty, and Roland imagined it had been emptied for them. The man who must be Tanaka-san was on a stool at the bar. The barman was waiting as far away as possible at the other end. Otherwise, there was no one except two more bouncers hunching and smoking in a booth in the back corner.

Tanaka-san was in his fifties, and his face was saggy and pouchy under the eyes, the skin a tired grey-brown. It was incongruous above his neat suit, which gave him the slim figure of a much younger man. Roland wondered whether he had the swirling, elaborate full-body Yakuza tattoos, but only his face and hands were visible. A white cuff gleamed as he put his tumbler down on the bar.

Tanaka-san said, “You are the professor from Oxford?”

Roland smiled broadly, failing to hide his discomfort. He said, “Um, not a full professor yet, unfortunately. The whole tenure thing, you know. Just an, um, scholar for now.” His ingratiating smile wasn’t returned. “I’m very interested in Japan, in Japan’s traditional culture, which I know that the, um, the, um…” – he realised he didn’t dare say the word Yakuza – “I’m so grateful to you, really I am, for talking to me about it.”

Tanaka-san stared at him. Roland kept his smile on, but it felt ever more rigid. He couldn’t believe he’d come wearing trainers and a hoodie. Maybe he should say one of his Japanese greetings. As he tried to arrange a phrase in his head, Tanaka-san motioned Roland to take the stool beside his. On the reflective black bar was a square white ashtray with two butts squashed into it. Next to it was a pack of Mild Sevens with a clunky steel lighter on top.

Tanaka-san said: “You like whisky?”

“Oh, yes, thank you very much. That is, I don’t know anything about it, but yes. My mum’s actually from Scotland. Near Inverness.”

Tanaka-san looked over his shoulder and nodded at the barman, who brought a bottle and a second tumbler. While he poured, no one spoke. Roland wanted to say domo arigato but his courage failed him, and he whispered, “Thank you.”

Tanaka-san lifted his tumbler and said, “Kanpai! ”

Roland had done a lot of this with Harriet and Jenny. He said, “Kanpai! ” and lifted his so the glasses only just touched. He took a suitably appreciative sip of the precious stuff.

Tanaka-san knocked his back, made a hrmmm noise and lit a cigarette. “So,” he said. “What are your questions?”

Roland hadn’t prepared any. He’d imagined a chat and a few drinks: him and Tanaka shooting the shit about life as a samurai outlaw. He hadn’t read anything about the Yakuza because he’d assumed Tanaka-san would tell him. He began talking while trying to think of something to ask. “Yes, okay. I’m very interested in the, you know, principles, the anthropological principles that – I don’t know if you’ve read this book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword? It’s amazing. I just read it actually. The army, in the war, the American army, asked this woman to write a book about the Japanese, to help them understand the enemy.”

He ran out of words, and in the quiet that followed, Tanaka-san said, “I have not read this book.”

“Oh, okay. Well, no. Why would you? You’re Japanese!” Roland grinned feebly. “It’s got this great story about doing callisthenics, um, in the war, to keep the spirit high. Like star jumps and stuff.” Roland mimed a star jump, stretching out his legs and arms, and balancing on his bum.

Tanaka-san again looked surprised.

Roland said, “I’m not explaining this very well. A lot of it is about shame, about, am I pronouncing this right, haji?”

Tanaka-san’s eyebrows lifted. “You want to know about shame?”

“No, no, no. I mean, well, yes. But shame and honour, the honour code, you know.”

Tanaka-san nodded that he’d understood and made a pronouncement: “Honour is very important. The most important. We learned this from samurai.”

And that was it. He didn’t say any more, just looked at Roland as if that was the last word on the subject. Then said, “Do you have more questions?”

Roland managed to string it out a little longer. He would blabber until he hit on a topic, then ask, “And what do, um, you think of that issue?”

Tanaka-san would nod and reply, “Yes. The Sengoku Jidai was a time of many wars in Japan.” Or “Japan and the West have much to learn from each other.”

Finally, Roland gave up, and appealed to Tanaka-san’s compassion. He said, “I’m sorry, I really haven’t done this well. I should have prepared more specific questions. I feel so stupid. I’ve, well, I’ve wasted your time. And if I’d prepared better, we could have really got into the heart of it.”

No part of Tanaka-san softened. He said, “It has been a very interesting conversation. Thank you for coming to visit Japan. I hope the West will reach a better understanding of our country.”

He paused for Roland to respond, and Roland said, “Yes. Yes, thank you so much for meeting me. I’m just sorry, yeah I’m really sorry. And yes, I hope that people in the West start to really get what Japan is all about.”

Tanaka-san nodded and began moving him along. He stood up off the bar stool, said “Please” and motioned Roland towards the back exit. Terrible crushing embarrassment and shame. Haji.

Roland didn’t know whether it was ruder to gulp the last of his whisky or leave it behind. So he gulped while Tanaka-san watched. Then Roland gabbled his thanks again and inadvertently dipped his head in a hasty sort of bow that went unacknowledged.

They went out the back, onto an alley cluttered with bins, cardboard boxes and tall metal cages on wheels. A few waiters and line cooks in dirty kitchen uniforms were smoking cigarettes and chatting on their breaks. As Tanaka-san and Roland walked towards the main street, every one of them put his hands to his sides and bowed. Following a half pace behind, Roland thought: Oh God. Oh God. I am such an idiot.

It was more or less his last experience of Japan.

He’d run out of money. Hattie and Jenny had said goodbye with a kiss and a smile and taken the train to Kyoto. He changed his flight and went back to England early. On the plane, he winced and twisted in his seat, clutching his face. The blabbering. The seated star jump. Unbearable.

He had to undo, to make up for, to make good. As soon as he got home, he’d email his tutor and switch to Japanese.