4

One wall and ceiling in his flat depicted a fiery sunset: crimson, orange, yellow—with whorls of gathering black. Another ceiling conjured up the night sky: velvet soaring dome, deep blue, pricked out with stars. In his bedroom, lucent waves lapped round the skirting boards, and stretches of silvery sand were fringed with palm trees. He had done it all himself. I hadn’t been prepared for it. I’d walked past the pair of wheely-bins flanking an unimposing entrance, climbed the dreary staircase which served both upper flats, wondered why landlords so routinely perpetrated neglect, and then—suddenly—

Exotica!

It wasn’t all so colourful. Zack himself was dressed in black. Shirt, trousers, socks, loafers…tonight he could have been in mourning. And yet once, when he turned away from me to draw some ink-coloured floor-length curtains and his blond hair was the only thing which for that instant remained visible, it made me think of the Olympic torch, burning brightly in a place of darkness.

Showing the way forward.