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people on
The Paper
had used all morning when something was even slightly out of the ordinary, like the lady who came round with the sandwiches running out of cheese-and-tomato rolls? Oh yes – Terry remembered the word. It was
surreal
.
    His thoughts felt like they were being formed in quicksand. He could taste his stomach in his mouth. He pressed his clammy face against the tower block, moaning, and felt the entire skyscraper slide away from him. Surreal didn’t quite cover it. Terry had been poisoned.
    And then Ray Keeley was standing before him.
    Even through the thick fog of industrial-strength ganja, Terry knew it was him. Ray was wearing a Stetson, like Dennis Hopper in
Easy Rider
, and it made him look like a hallucination, a vision of the Old West glimpsed on the banks of the Thames.
    Ray Keeley was only seventeen, but Terry had been reading his stuff for years. Every week Terry looked at Ray’s by-line picture in
The Paper
– he looked like those early shots of Jackson Browne, the open-faced matinee idol eyes peering out from behind the veil of long, lank, wheat-coloured hair – a teenage hippy heart-throb -and the envy came at Terry in waves, like a toothache.
    Ray was the rising star on
The Paper
in the mid-Seventies, a pretty and precocious fifth-former rhapsodising about Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and the whole California thing that seemed so very far away now. And Ray liked the Beatles, especially the Beatles, even though they were further away than anything, even though they had broken up a full six years ago, and John was hiding in the Dakota and Paul was touring with his wife and Ringo was banging out the novelty records and George was disappearing up his own Hari Krishna.
    You read Ray Keeley and you forgot about the three-day week and the miners’ strike and the streets full of rat-infested rubbish that no one was ever going to collect. All the grey dreariness slipped away when you read Ray Keeley on seeing Dylan at Wembley, reviewing Joni Mitchell’s
Court and Spark
, even trying to give Wings the benefit of the doubt. You read Ray and suddenly it was yesterday once more, summer in the Sixties, the party that everyone under the age of twenty-five had missed. You forgot about Ted Heath and thought about making love to Joni in the dunes on the beach at Monterey.
    But Ray wasn’t writing so much lately.
    ‘You all right?’ he asked Terry, with the expression of one who already knew the answer.
    Terry shook his head, speechless, feeling as if his body was paralysed and his mind was broken and his tongue was the size of an oven glove.
    Then Ray did something unexpected. He put his arm around him. ‘You’ve got to take it easy with that stuff,’ he said. ‘These guysare used to it. You’re not. Come on, let’s get you back to the office. Before someone shops
us.’
    ‘How’d you know?’ Terry mumbled. ‘How’d you know me from
The Paper?’
    Ray grinned. ‘Not from
Horse and Hounds
, are you?’ Terry laughed. ‘Nah!’
    Ray half-dragged and half-carried Terry back to the office, and sat him at his desk, and gave him orange juice and black coffee until the shivering and the sweating and the sickness began to subside. Ray took care of Terry when he had been left to melt in the dirt by a couple of the older guys, and it was a simple act of decency that Terry would never forget. He tried to thank him but his tongue was a dead weight.
    ‘Be cool, man,’ Ray told him. ‘Just take it easy now.’
    All that first morning people had been telling Terry to be cool and take it easy. The music had changed, and most of the haircuts, and people were throwing away their flares and buying straight-legged trousers, but the language was still largely the lexicon of the Sixties.
    For all the changes, for all the new things, a different language had yet to be invented. All that old-fashioned jive about being mellow and taking it easy and loving one another was still around. Be cool. Take it easy.
    All