The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13

Quite recently, I heard some kid on the TV saying ‘Nothing ever changes’. It made me think about Nicola. Are we really blind to what happened before our own lives? This was just after the 1997 General Election, the first change of government in eighteen years. There’d been this joke going round that all the parties had trouble canvassing in the Black Country, because none of the local people would go outside the street they lived in. Which again reminded me of Nicola, and made me want to go back to Clayheath and see what, if anything, had changed.

Back in 1979, I was in the fifth year at secondary school. It was an odd time for me. People think ‘teenage culture’ is just one thing that everybody gets into. But it wasn’t that simple. In our school there were punks, second-generation Mods, long-haired heavy-metal kids and fledgling Rastas. Each crowd had its own language, politics and drugs. The rebels had gone by then, disappearing into casual work or street-life or youth custody. Those who remained were only playing with fire, not living in it. Like the girl who was sent home for wearing a slashed blazer. We were too obsessed with our needs and resentments to communicate. None of us knew what to say, what to feel, what to believe in. It didn’t matter: nothing was going to change.

After school, at a loose end, I often walked or ran through the long strip of parkland along the Hagley Road. The first half was neatly laid out, with flower beds and bowling greens. The second half was more like woodland, an overgrown and sometimes marshy surface flowing around the boles of huge trees. Now that I no longer had to do Games, I missed the exhausting crosscountry runs that had made me feel connected to places like this. It had been my only chance to look good in front of the heavy lads who could fillet me on the rugby pitch. Out here, I could leave them panting and clumping while I raced against the heartbeat of an invisible partner, on into a mist of adrenalin and sweat. But at sixteen, I was too lazy and self-conscious to race against anyone.

One chilly, bright day in April, I was strolling along the boundary between the halves of the park: a ragged line of birches, their silvery trunks slashed with rust. Phrases from my German homework were flickering through my head, alongside The Jam’s ‘Going Underground’. A pale-faced girl was sitting on a bench in front of a cedar tree, not far away. I walked past her, noting her short dark hair, white blouse and black skirt. In the thin afternoon light it was like a scene from an old film. Her gaze followed me impassively.

Driven by a sudden impulse to try and impress her, I ran up to the cedar tree. It was as wide as it was tall. I clasped my hands around the lowest branch and pulled myself up, kicking to gain height. A momentary shiver of sexual excitement passed through me. Using the rough trunk for support, I climbed upwards for another three or four branches. I felt a cold breeze shake the leaves around me, and didn’t dare climb any higher. The girl was standing below me. I could see her upturned face, almost featureless at this height. A sudden vertigo snapped my eyes out of focus and I could see two of her, no less alone for it.

When I’d succeeded in climbing down, we stood awkwardly for a while. ‘Which way are you going?’ I said.

‘Don’t mind.’ She smiled; her teeth were strong and very white. ‘You just come from school?’ I nodded. ‘I’m from Clayheath. Y’know, out past Quinton. Came here on the bus.’ Her accent was Black Country with a touch of something else, perhaps Irish. It was an old person’s voice.

We walked along toward the road, where the traffic was beginning to thicken. ‘Why are you here?’ I asked.

‘I have to get out sometimes. Just anywhere. It’s bad at home.’ I knew what she meant. I was in no hurry to get back to our narrow house in Smethwick: my tired parents bickering and shouting, my brother turning up the sport on TV to drown out everything, chores undone, dinner a communal stare. ‘You don’t know where Clayheath is, do you?’

I’d never heard of it. ‘Never been there. Is it far?’

‘Not really. It’s just nobody goes there. Or leaves.’ Along the Hagley Road, the lamp-posts were hung with election placards: mostly blue, a few red. Traffic punctuated our conversation. Her name was Nicola; she worked part-time in a garage. I guessed she was the same age as me. She looked unhappy even when she smiled; it was something in her gaze, always trying to run away. Her skin, stretched tight over her cheekbones, was as pale as a Chinese paper lantern. I wanted to make her blush.

When we reached her bus stop, Nicola said ‘What are you doing on Sunday?’ I shrugged. ‘D’you want to come to Clayheath?’ She gave me directions that involved catching a local train to Netherton, then taking the number 147 bus as far as the swimming baths. She’d wait for me there. ‘Promise you won’t let me down.’ I promised. We stared at each other nervously until the Quinton bus arrived. Then Nicola leaned forward and kissed me, her eyes shut. Her lips were so soft I could hardly feel them, just her teeth and a whisper of breath. When the bus drove away, I turned round and walked back into Bearwood. After a while, I realized I’d passed my stop and was in a street I didn’t recognize. All the shops had closed.

The train to Netherton stopped at Sandwell, Blackheath, Cradley Heath, and some other towns or districts I’d never heard of. The gaps between towns were a mixture of rural and industrial features: forests, waste ground, factories, scrapyards, canals. Parts of the line ran close to the backyards of terraced houses, where clothes jittered on washing lines and blurred figures moved behind windows. I pictured Nicola in such a room, brushing her hair. The only other people in the train carriage were three teenagers, not much older than me, who’d got on at Blackheath. The two girls sat behind me, whispering to each other. The boy sat in front of me, on the other side. He was wearing a brown jacket that he’d pulled up so it covered his head. After a few minutes of sitting like this, leaning sharply forward, he twisted his face around and snarled, ‘A wooden vote for th’Layba.’ The girls didn’t respond. His pale, staring face rose above the seat like a mask. ‘Ah said, a wooden vote for th’Laybabarstad.’ Then he relapsed into his leaning posture, forehead pressed against the back of his seat, jacket pulled over his ears.

The bus stop was in a narrow, old-fashioned high street with half-timbered buildings and wooden pub signs. The approaching streets were the usual Black Country mixture of small factories, houses and less easily identified buildings. Nothing was derelict, but everything had been patched up and reallocated many times over. Most of the buildings had the soft, grimy look of long-ingrained pollution. A faint sunlight filtered through the streets without catching any surface. Opposite a grey churchyard was a tall Victorian building with stone steps: the swimming baths. As I got off the bus, I saw Nicola step out from the shadow of the wall. She was wearing a pale grey jacket and black jeans. I walked towards her, wondering if I should kiss her or wait for a better opportunity. Her pale hand gripped my arm; her lips brushed my cheek. ‘Glad you made it here,’ she said.

We walked together through the centre of Clayheath, if a place so marginal could be said to have a centre. All around us were raw traces of industry a hundred years old: canals just below road level, a brickworks wearing a loose scarf of smoke, black cast-iron railings ornamented with crudely worked flowers, walls studded with blue-green pieces of clinker from glass manufacture. By contrast, the houses themselves were coldly uniform: narrow grey terraces arranged in regular grids like the lines on a chessboard. The district seemed overcast, though the sky was dead white.

Nobody much was around. I remember a white dog pissing on a lamp-post; a young woman pushing a pram; a few nondescript grocery and hardware shops with figures moving behind the window displays. ‘It’s dead here,’ Nicola said quietly. ‘Nobody comes here, nobody goes away. It’s always the same. Nothing ever changes.’ She was shivering; cautiously, I put my arm round her shoulders. A faint smile ghosted her mouth, nervousness mixed with resignation. She took my hand and curled it into a fist.

‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

‘We’ve just passed it,’ she said. I remembered a street of narrow terraces, unlit basement windows behind iron railings like display cases in a museum. ‘Don’t matter. We can’t go there.’ The houses at the end of the street were derelict: windows smashed, doors clumsily boarded over. Ahead, a new expressway crossed a stretch of canal where rotting barges clung to the towpath. Drivers raced over Clayheath without seeing it. I wanted to be with them. I wanted Nicola, but not this featureless place where she seemed little more at home than I was. Light flickered between strips of pale cloud. The road dipped under a railway bridge, part of a viaduct made from tiny bricks and blackened by industry. Frozen worms of lime poked through the brickwork overhead. In the shadow of the bridge, Nicola stopped and kissed me. For the first time, I was really aware of her vitality: a fierce, bitter energy, like the charge you felt if you put a battery to your tongue. My hand moved from her shoulder to her breast, from the shape of bone to the shape of flesh. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I know somewhere to go.’

Beyond the railway, a footpath led behind a row of allotments. They didn’t seem to have yielded any crop except leaf mould and scabs of black ash. A few small lumps of greenish clinker studded the earth, like jewellery on a drowned body. As we walked, I told Nicola about my school, my parents, my hopes of being a journalist if the O levels worked out. ‘I never took any exams,’ she said. ‘I was ill, and then it was too late. Makes no difference around here.’ Her voice seemed more accented than it had been in Bearwood: the vowels flattened, worn out. In front of us, the outlines of buildings repeated themselves as if the sun were a cheap Xerox machine. ‘I like it here. Away from the houses. It’s here too, but you have room to be yourself.’ I didn’t know what she meant.

Ahead of us now, I could see the sun setting through trees: warm petals of orange and pink that belied the growing chill. A park. We stumbled through some undergrowth, skirting a pond that was crusted with grey flakes. The trees around it were short and wide, their branches tangled together. There was a smell of decaying wood and fungus. Nicola tripped and fell; I knelt to help her up. ‘Are you okay?’ She stared into my eyes. I put my arms around her. After a while, we spread our coats beneath us on the mossy ground.

It was too cold to undress, but we arranged our clothes to allow our bodies as much contact as possible. I remember the slow warmth of her, the sudden incredible heat. Then it was over. As I wiped her thighs with a tissue, I thought of all the times I’d wiped my residues from the centrefold of a magazine. She showed me how to give her pleasure with my fingers, and I felt less guilty. As we covered ourselves, Nicola laughing softly, I had an unmistakable sense of being watched.

Going from the waste ground to the park was like stepping back into the town. The edge was marked by a straight line of poplar trees, their shadows like the bars of a giant cage. We held hands as we shuffled through the grass; Nicola was still laughing, and I realized that something like love was keeping pace with us. Then she stopped, the smile dissolving from her face like smoke. ‘All laughing,’ she said. ‘All laughing, all dust, all nothing.’ I kissed her. As if sex were a bandage for all kinds of unease and despair. You can be a lot older than sixteen and still do that.

Dusk was beginning to isolate the town, reducing it to a cluster of lights surrounded by industrial wasteland. Perhaps it wasn’t a town after all. I was still wondering what was the matter with Nicola as we returned from the uncomfortably tidy park to the grey streets. A cat waddled past us like a drunk. ‘Can’t you feel it?’ she said. ‘They’re used to it round here. But you’m not.’ I frowned at her, then shook my head. Nicola shrugged with a quiet irony that I already recognized as characteristic of her. ‘I’ve got to go to work now.’

The garage was a small plastic-roofed box, between the expressway and a low block of flats with iron railings in floral patterns. It had a long car park that smelled of petrol and old newspaper. There were two or three cars that looked abandoned, well away from the pumps. As we stood in the light of the garage window, the red above the houses fading to the blue of night, two figures emerged from the shadows. Boys, a year or two older than me. I registered the similarity of their denim jackets and blow-waved hairstyles before I realized they were twins. Nicola smiled at them. ‘Hello.’

‘Who’s this one?’ Nicola introduced me. I don’t remember their names. They both seemed to have the same crooked half-smile; their eyes were hollows of darkness. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘He’s doing her,’ the other said. Like an echo. The first one looked at Nicola and said, ‘Why do you bother?’ She pulled at my sleeve nervously. ‘This isn’t your place,’ one of them said to me. Maybe it was the failing light, but I couldn’t see their teeth when they spoke. They were both shivering, but making no effort to get warmer.

‘Whose place is it?’ I said, inwardly preparing myself for trouble. I’d been through some fights in school and knew where to hit. But I had no illusions about violence being romantic.

‘You’ll learn.’ Another blank stare, a half-choked snigger. ‘Time’s running out.’ A car drove past, white eyes turning a dull red. Nicola tugged at my sleeve again, holding it. ‘Let’s go inside,’ she said.

The twins watched us through the window, as faint as reflections in water, before moving on. Nicola lifted a wooden flap and stepped behind the counter, then fiddled with a display of cigarette cartons. A middle-aged man with greying stubble on his pink cheeks nodded at her sardonically and went back to writing figures in his accounts book. I fidgeted, bought a chocolate bar, touched Nicola’s fingers when I gave her the coins. ‘You’d better go home,’ she whispered; not coldly. I nodded and turned away, then felt in my coat pocket for my diary and stub of pencil. I wrote down my name and my parents’ phone number, tore out the page and gave it to her. She brushed it across her lips before folding it and slipping it into the pocket of her white blouse.

Outside, the cold went through me like a voice. I ran toward the lights at the higher end of the road, blinking, seeing double. I found the high street by chance and worked back to the swimming baths. The train rattled through a landscape of night shifts and distant fires. I stared out of the window and thought of home: my father asking ‘Where the hell have you been?’, my mother somehow knowing.

Ten days passed before Nicola rang. In that time, spring hardened into early summer. Light poured through trees, slipped on wet pavements. The rain tasted of smoke. Every morning, I got up half an hour early to deliver papers. They were full of the election, every tabloid but the Mirror hailing Thatcher as the saviour of England. I remember the election itself. Her clotted, suburban voice quoting St Francis of Assisi: Where there is conflict, let us bring peace. The newsagent whose papers I delivered was quietly jubilant. ‘Now we’ll get things back the way they were. The way they should have stayed.’ Years later, I heard he’d been jailed for seducing a fourteen-year-old girl who was helping in his shop. He took her to bed, then gave her ten quid, a packet of cigarettes and a hot meal. The local paper said he’d been a pilot in the Second World War.

My paper round covered a strip of roads in between our house and the local primary school: the territory of my childhood. There was the fire station that sometimes jerked awake in the night, sending out wailing engines. The railway bridge where local bullies waited in shadow for younger boys to spit on or throw eggs at. The little car park with its row of disused garages where, when I was eleven, the twin girls who lived up the road led me through a broken wall into a sealed-off alley where they showed me their vaginas. There wasn’t much to see, of course: just two scraggy folds of pale skin that reminded me of bacon left too long in the fridge. I had to expose myself too; it was probably the first time I had an erection, which I took to be somehow an effect of the cold.

Nicola phoned me late one evening; my father frowned at me as he passed me the receiver. She didn’t say much. When I asked her what she’d been doing, she said ‘Nothing.’ Then she asked if I wanted to see her on Sunday. Same place, slightly earlier time. I agreed. It suited me to be away from home when I saw her. There was some interference on the line, making us echo each other’s goodbyes — a verbal entanglement that felt somehow intimate. I put the phone down and slowly opened my eyes to see my father staring at me from his armchair. I said nothing.

Sunday was lukewarm and overcast. The train crawled through unconvincing stage sets of old factories and new housing, or vice versa. Rain chipped at the windows. I chewed a bag of aniseed sweets I’d bought in the chemist’s shop that morning, having gone in to buy a packet of Durex and been inhibited by the young female assistant. In retrospect, I’m amazed at how little Nicola and I knew about each other’s lives. I don’t think that ever changes, but it’s more obvious at a distance.

When I got to the swimming baths at Clayheath, Nicola wasn’t there. I waited while a succession of ageing swimmers emerged slick-haired and red-eyed from the baths. Clayheath appeared to be dissolving into the rain. Blinking away ghosts of narrow buildings and metallic trees, I didn’t see Nicola until she was close enough to touch. Her black umbrella covered us both as we embraced. ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘There’s a place I want you to see. And we’ll need somewhere to shelter from this.’ As we walked along the high street, the umbrella a patch of darkness just above our line of sight, I slipped an arm around her pale jacket. She was tense, braced against the cold. Around us, the wind tore up scraps of light.

Nowhere seemed to be open. The narrow streets looked more compact than ever, as if the spaces between buildings had closed up, the district shrinking into itself. We walked past the edge of the park, the line of poplar trees like huge railings. There were no leaves on their symmetrical branches. I hadn’t noticed that before.

Outside a scrapyard where rusting car parts were stacked up in mounds, two men were arguing. Something about a failed engine, where to find a replacement. I couldn’t understand most of what they were saying, though it wasn’t really dialect. It was like ordinary words in mouths that weren’t quite alive. A dog started barking from behind the wire fence as Nicola and I passed. The sound echoed along the street. The sky felt as close as an iron lid.

‘They’ve shut down the junior school,’ Nicola said quietly. ‘Not enough children to go there. It’s been closed for years.’ She pronounced closed with a break in the first vowel, almost making two syllables. ‘But some of us who were there, y’know… we miss it. So we go back.’ She laughed silently. I didn’t see the joke. I somehow never did with her. We kept walking as the trees disappeared and more of the buildings began to seem derelict, their windows smashed or boarded. The canal network was visible every few blocks, crossed by narrow bridges, underlying the street plan like a mapmaker’s grid.

The premature darkness of the rain clouds had begun to clear when we reached the school. It was like a smaller version of the swimming baths: a thin Victorian red-brick structure with an elaborate carved lintel above the door. The green chain-link fence on either side of the rusty gates was twisted and torn in several places, as if small animals had broken in. A thin strip of concrete playground ran across the front of the school and down the left-hand side. The windows were unbroken, but furred with whitewash on the inside. Some of them were covered by rusty wire grids.

‘This way.’ Nicola tugged my hand and led me along the side of the building, which was protected by spiked railings. At the back, two large dustbins were lying side by side. One railing was missing; Nicola squeezed through and I followed. To one side of the boarded-up door, an iron grille covered the basement window. The bars had been forced apart, the glass removed. Nicola smiled at me. Cautiously, but with a skill that suggested experience, she lowered herself feet first into the gap. It swallowed her eagerly. Her knuckles were white above the bars as her feet kicked in empty air. Then she fell, landing with a soft thud that I hoped was cushioned by more than dust. She climbed to her feet, breathless, and took something off a shelf. An electric torch, the batteries weak but not dead.

As I worked my way through the bars to join her, I had a sudden conviction that we were being watched. Not by human eyes, perhaps: a hidden camera, an electronic security system, or a guard dog that had been trained not to bark before it attacked. Then I was falling, too abruptly for vertigo, flailing in a sheet of damp air before landing on several thicknesses of rough sacking stitched with dust.

Nicola’s torch cast a circle of pale light, wide but fading quickly from the centre. I could see a boiler and a series of pipes, lagged with dusty whitewashed bandages. Some used condoms littered the floor. It was very quiet. Nicola shone the torch in my face, dazzling me. When my vision cleared, the torch was off. By the grey light of the basement window, I could see Nicola removing her blouse. We stripped naked, then wrapped ourselves in our coats. The near-darkness helped me to relax, slow down. It was just the way a wet dream is. I mean all the different things superimposed, as if an hour were folded over or spliced into each minute, or as if we both had many bodies to make love with. Time and again.

A pigeon moaned outside as we finally separated and fumbled for our clothes. Dressed, Nicola was different: at once more confident and less self-possessed. ‘I want to show you something,’ she said. Holding the torch in front of her, she led me up the stone steps and through the open door to the hallway. The green-painted walls were livid with damp and mould. Strips of paint curled from the ceiling. Behind one of the side doors, something ran across the room to scratch the wall. Nicola glanced back, but didn’t flinch. ‘That was my classroom,’ she said. The failing torch beam jittered in a huge cobweb, making it seem alive with darkness. Nicola tore it in half and stepped through. ‘This is the hall where we sat for assembly. We did the Nativity play here. I was Mary. The baby was a doll from Woolworths.’ She stopped, her torch beam lost in the cowebbed vaults above the dead mercury strip lights. I kissed her and realized, with a shock, that she was crying. ‘Come on,’ I said.

The first door in the next corridor had been locked, but the lock was smashed. ‘The staff room,’ she said. It was empty like all the others, smelling faintly of disinfectant. A side door, with no glass in it, was open by a crack. Nicola pushed it with her shoulder. The hinges snarled. Inside, shelves and crates were blurred with dust. ‘This is the storeroom.’ I stood beside her, my eyes following the weak torch beam as she moved it from side to side. First trying to make out what was there, then trying to make sense of it.

One set of metal shelves was filled with oblong wooden boxes, a foot or so long. They might have been games equipment, or costume items for a school play. Their lids had been crudely nailed in place. Another set of shelves, on the other side of the narrow room, was filled with murky-looking glass jars about a foot high. We stood there for minutes, Nicola banging the torch with her palm to make the battery keep working. The jars stank of formaldehyde.

It was a collection of preserved babies — or rather foetuses. I’m not sure they were entirely human. Were they deformed, or somehow a kind of hybrid? They floated, blind and colourless, shivering in the unstable light. Whatever their source, they’d been born without life. Perhaps others had survived, and these were the failures. Some had umbilical cords, I noticed; others were too distorted for anyone to tell where a cord might begin. A few looked like pairs of Siamese twins, so poorly separated that, in a photograph, you’d take them for a double exposure.

I stepped away from Nicola, walking until the darkness wrapped itself around me and I had to stop. For a moment, when she touched me, I wanted to push her away. Then I let her guide me back towards the steps and the basement, where the red sun glowed through the opening. We helped each other to climb out, then walked to the road in silence. Nicola glanced at her watch. ‘I’d better go home,’ she said. ‘My shift’s in half an hour.’

‘Leave here,’ I said. ‘Come to Birmingham. Stay with me.’

We embraced briefly. ‘There’s no point,’ she said. ‘It’s always the same. Nothing ever changes.’ We might as well have been talking to ourselves. I remember thinking that everything changed, but that somehow you never noticed.

From the train, I watched the last residue of daylight spill like oil onto wet rooftops and roads. I got home late in the evening and showered, then went straight to bed. More than Nicola’s body, I remembered kissing her. How soft her lips were, like shreds of tissue paper over her perfect teeth.

It was nearly a month before she rang again, late at night. My parents were out. I was listening to The Specials’ ‘Do Nothing’ and trying to revise Hamlet. Her voice sounded faint and echoey; I could hear traffic going past. She must have been in a call box. ‘Simon? Simon?’

‘Nicola? Is that you?’ The darkness of the living-room tensed around me. ‘Are you okay, love?’

She was crying. ‘Simon, I’m frightened. Please listen.’ Her breath caught in her throat, and I thought she was going to choke. Then, suddenly, she was calm. ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Oh, no.’ I felt cold with guilt. As if I’d thrown up on the table and the whole family was watching me. ‘I’m sorry, Nicola. It’s all my fault.’ She made an odd, throaty sound. ‘What do you want to do?’

The same sound again. I realized she was laughing. ‘Oh, Simon. You’re such a div sometimes.’ There was a pause. ‘It’s not you. I mean, it wasn’t you. It’s not yours.’ In the silence that followed, I heard a car drive past; then another. I couldn’t do anything but put the phone down. She didn’t call back.

That weekend, I went to Clayheath. After a day spent with my revision notes, endlessly rereading the same text, I caught the train in mid-evening. I thought I’d try the garage, maybe leave a message for her there. By the time I reached the swimming baths, it was already dark. Sodium light painted the roadway. The garage was on the far side of the park. Or was it the near side? I tried to superimpose a memory of the district on the blank grid ahead of me, but all I could imagine was Nicola’s face. And her body. Abruptly, I turned a corner and saw a featureless office building I didn’t recognize. Two roads diverged from a traffic island with a tilted bollard. They were both lined with unvarying grey terraces, no lights visible behind the drawn curtains.

As I struggled to hold on to a sense of direction, a van swung around the corner from behind me. At the same time, a small dark shape loped awkwardly across the road towards me. The two collided with a scream of brakes and pain. The van slowed, then sped away. Its tyres left a thin red wound in the tarmac.

A cat. Probably the same cat I’d seen here a few weeks earlier. From where I stood, I could see that it was beyond help. I could also see what had made it so clumsy. Spilling from its torn gut was a litter of bald, helpless kittens. They must have been kittens. But in the flickering light of the street lamp, they reminded me of what I’d seen in the glass jars. Their enlarged heads, blind swollen eyes, tiny clutching hands with pale fingers. There were seven or eight of them, all exactly the same. Unable to live or die. Unable to change.

Swallowing a mouthful of acid saliva, I turned and walked slowly back to the swimming baths. Caught the bus. My head was a whorl of milky light, a fingerprint on an icy road. On the train going back to Birmingham, I began to feel steadier. What made me vomit, weeping tears of pain and relief, was going to the urinals in New Street Station and seeing a coin-operated Durex machine.

There isn’t much more to tell. I stayed in Birmingham, took my O levels and passed most of them, applied myself to the task of growing up in Thatcher’s new Britain. Instead of becoming a journalist, I became an accountant. Somehow, my curiosity about the world had gone. In 1990, I moved to Guildford and became a financial consultant. I put on some weight, bought a maisonette, had a succession of girlfriends. Somehow I could never resist a new face, or experience affection without desire.

One weekend in the spring of 1997, I was up in the Midlands on business. Election fever was at its height, reminding me of 1979. I drove through South Birmingham, playing The Jam on my car stereo: ‘The Butterfly Collector’, ‘Going Underground’, ‘Dreams of Children’. That night, I decided to go back to Clayheath.

But it wasn’t there. When I looked for it in my new A-Z, the district no longer existed. I wasn’t even sure which districts it had been absorbed into. I decided to let the train and bus route take me to it; but the branch line had been discontinued. Finally I checked the Yellow Pages for swimming baths within a few miles of Netherton. There was only one.

It took me a long time to find it, driving through the narrow Black Country streets on a quiet Sunday morning. The sky was tinged with pink, like marble.

Perhaps I was distracted by images of streets that no longer existed; or perhaps I didn’t want to find real evidence of a place I’d long ago bulldozed and redeveloped in my mind. But at last I drove up a long straight road, behind a bus that stopped outside a tall Victorian building with a carved lintel and several deep steps.

My neck stiffened, as if I had a chill. I parked the Audi and got out.

Apart from that building, nothing was the way I remembered it. In place of the crowded terraces, a jumble of housing blocks and prefabricated industrial units sprawled between the pitted roads. I couldn’t see the park, nor any trees at all. A new expressway cut across the end of the high street before circling around a giant plastic-fronted garden centre, like a rubber ring around a baby floating in a pool of whitish concrete. I turned back towards the swimming baths. It wasn’t only the image of Nicola that made me start to cry at that moment. It was the knowledge of how I’d been, then and ever since. Eighteen years of selfishness and waste. I blinked, rubbed my eyes and stared at my hands. Then I started running towards the car.

Ten minutes later I was speeding along the Halesowen Road into an acid sunlight, telling myself that what I’d seen had meant nothing. For those few moments, as I’d walked past the steps outside the old baths, I’d seen my hands somehow turn into hands that weren’t left and right, that weren’t mirror images of each other. They were the same hand twice: both palms up, both thumbs pointing to the right.

Nothing ever changes. We just tell ourselves it does.