About a Boy

Whenever I travel through Stockport I am reminded of someone I used to know. My journey home takes me along the Stockport Road on the Trans Peak bus to Bakewell. This retraces the route my sisters and I took back to boarding school in Matlock, a road that produced a sick and sinking feeling for many years after I had left school. I am over it now, and have been for some time. The bus route out of Manchester's city centre goes through Longsight and Levenshulme, where I once lived and worked. Those associations are for another day. There's an abandoned church on the left as the bus drops down the hill into Mersey Square. It's just a facade. That's where my friend first hugged a tree. He was an unlikely nature boy. He had gone to boarding school too, one where the boys were encouraged to do outward bound activities. He could live off the land. He knew how to rough camp, how to tickle a trout and gut a rabbit. He had been brought up in Northumberland, where his father was a doctor. He was only 15 when his father died. He left his school on the Lancashire coast and headed for the beaches of Morocco. Now I would call him an adrenaline junkie. Back then he was simply a junkie. By the time our paths crossed he had been addicted to heroin and speed. He had been to Borstal. He and his girlfriend had a baby son, named after him, but put up for adoption. His mother was a psychiatric social worker, and she needed to be. He never gave her a minute's peace. Stockport was one of his stamping grounds. There was talk of a gun, hidden behind a piece of street furniture in Mersey Square, but I never saw it. There was a mysterious left luggage locker key, once thrown out of the window of Stockport police station, to avoid confiscation and detection. It took some finding after the event. He and his friends were on trial at the Old Bailey, framed by the drug squad. Their barrister was fresh from the success of the Oz trial. Could he have been John Mortimer? I don't know and there's no one to ask. Alexis Korner wrote a character statement for one of the accused. They were acquitted, when the barrister proved that the police had fabricated evidence, though they were not innocent in any true sense of the word. His totem animal was a wolf. He once turned up at my parents' house in the early hours of a summer morning, claiming to be on the run. Luckily he threw stones at the right bedroom window. He disappeared from view. I heard he had sought sanctuary at a monastery in the Kielder Forest. His favourite book was Arthur Waley's translation of the Tao te Ching, The Way and its Power. Next I heard he was in prison for manslaughter. He had sold someone battery acid as heroin. He married his girlfriend from his prison. I don't know what happened next. Perhaps they will turn up on Long Lost Family one day. Each time I go through Stockport, I remember a bit more of his story. I share this much of it here just to show how much stranger truth is than fiction.