M Is for Magic Read Online Free PDF Page A

never said anything.
    She went out with the drummer in the punk band I started, and, much later, married someone else. We met once, on a train, after she was married, and she asked me if I remembered that night.
    I said I did.
    â€œI really liked you, that night, Jack,” she told me. “I thought you were going to kiss me. I thought you were going to ask me out. I would have said yes. If you had.”
    â€œBut I didn’t.”
    â€œNo,” she said. “You didn’t.” Her hair was cut very short. It didn’t suit her.
    I never saw her again. The trim woman with the taut smile was not the girl I had loved, and talking to her made me feel uncomfortable.
    Â 
    I moved to London, and then, some years later, I moved back again, but the town I returned to wasnot the town I remembered: there were no fields, no farms, no little flint lanes; and I moved away as soon as I could, to a tiny village ten miles down the road.
    I moved with my family—I was married by now, with a toddler—into an old house that had once, many years before, been a railway station. The tracks had been dug up, and the old couple who lived opposite us used the ground where the tracks had been to grow vegetables.
    I was getting older. One day I found a gray hair; on another, I heard a recording of myself talking, and I realized I sounded just like my father.
    I was working in London, doing A&R for one of the major record companies. I was commuting into London by train most days, coming back some evenings.
    I had to keep a small flat in London; it’s hard to commute when the bands you’re checking out don’t even stagger onto the stage until midnight. It also meant that it was fairly easy to get laid, if I wanted to, which I did.
    I thought that Eleanora—that was my wife’s name; I should have mentioned that before, I suppose—didn’t know about the other women; but Igot back from a two-week jaunt to New York one winter’s day, and when I arrived at the house it was empty and cold.
    She had left a letter, not a note. Fifteen pages, neatly typed, and every word of it was true. Including the PS, which read: You really don’t love me. And you never did.
    I put on a heavy coat, and I left the house and just walked, stunned and slightly numb.
    There was no snow on the ground, but there was a hard frost, and the leaves crunched under my feet as I walked. The trees were skeletal black against the harsh gray winter sky.
    I walked down the side of the road. Cars passed me, traveling to and from London. Once I tripped on a branch, half hidden in a heap of brown leaves, ripping my trousers, cutting my leg.
    I reached the next village. There was a river at right angles to the road, and a path I’d never seen before beside it, and I walked down the path, and stared at the partly frozen river. It gurgled and plashed and sang.
    The path led off through fields; it was straight and grassy.
    I found a rock, half buried, on one side of the path. I picked it up, brushed off the mud. It was a melted lump of purplish stuff, with a strange rainbow sheen to it. I put it into the pocket of my coat and held it in my hand as I walked, its presence warm and reassuring.
    The river meandered away across the fields, and I walked on in silence.
    I had walked for an hour before I saw houses—new and small and square—on the embankment above me.
    And then I saw the bridge, and I knew where I was: I was on the old railway path, and I’d been coming down it from the other direction.
    There were graffiti painted on the side of the bridge: BARRY LOVES SUSAN and the omnipresent NF of the National Front.
    I stood beneath the bridge in the red brick arch, stood among the ice-cream wrappers, and the crisp packets, and watched my breath steam in the cold afternoon air.
    The blood had dried into my trousers.
    Cars passed over the bridge above me; I could hear a radio playing loudly in one of