Here’s a little loose memory I found from that summer. A tiny thread, and not a knot in it. This one’s even in colour.
I’m lying on the grass by the sports centre, and I can see the basketball court and the mini-golf course and the little amusement place where they have the tiny go-karts for kids and the swingboats. It’s a really beautiful summer’s day, the sky’s a deep blue, the grass is the greenest green, and there’s one of the gang, Alex, and a girl called … I forget. Anyway, Alex has a rugby ball, and he throws it to me, and then we pass it to each other, the way you do in rugby, always throwing behind you, so one of us throws it, then the other catches it and has to run ahead before he can throw it back. We’re doing that, and then the ground begins to slope down, and we end up going faster, until we’re going really fast, and then Alex doesn’t catch it, and the ball rolls off down the slope. At the bottom of the slope is this path, and the ball goes on the path, right in front of this cyclist, who nearly hits it and has to swerve to avoid it, but then he skids and falls off his bike. He’s OK, but he’s probably grazed himself pretty badly. And he’s saying ‘fuck’ over and over again, and he looks up, really pissed off, and we’re thinking we’d better say sorry, but he’s just some weedy guy wearing bloody cycling shorts, and a helmet, and nobody wore cycling helmets in those days, and he sees that we’re metallers and that Alex has a leather jacket, which he wore even when it was fucking hot and he was running about. And this guy just gets on his bike and cycles off, wobbling from side to side like he’s bricking it. He must have thought we were going to do him over or something.
So then me and Alex go back up the slope, just laughing at this bloke, and then that girl whose name I can’t remember, she’s sitting on her denim jacket in the shade under a tree, wearing a Def Leppard T-shirt, I think, red hair, well developed, very well developed actually, pretty, freckles, and she calls out to me to rugby-tackle Alex for dropping the ball and I do, and we both roll down the slope, and we do that loads of times and then … and then … that’s where it ends.