Crad went straight into the garden of the richest family in the area. Their ivy-clad cottage stood alone and lit up by garden lighting. Mr. Atkinson was the nearest thing to the squire as you could have got, his wife a true lady and local do-gooder, their daughter, Wendy, beautiful and unapproachable. Boom-boom froze at the gate and watched with the same disbelief as myself as Crad crashed through the studded wooden front door. A minute later we braved the path. Mr. Atkinson came out. He looked shaken, but, to his credit, kept calm. "I am going to ask you young men to give up your pursuit of this man," he said. "He has barricaded himself in my daughter's bedroom with her and demanded that we telephone the police, which Mrs. Atkinson is doing at this moment. So for Wendy's sake, please, go home."

     So of course, we did. One step outside his gate, just as I was picturing the stunning Wendy being surprised by a bloodied madman then locked in the room with him, Boom-boom delivered a fierce kick straight onto the butt of the man who seemed quite content to take a stroll with us down through the now peaceful-looking village. "You can scram unless you would like some of what he just had," Boom-boom shouted and chased him for a while.

     The policeman who had come looking for Catherine that time was let in to our front room again by my father. Mother was out with Boom-boom's mother and he was sat on our sofa watching the television. The policeman sat down this time and accepted the drink that he was offered. "I've managed to quieten everything down," he said. "That Wendy is a marvellous young lady: she had actually dressed Mr. Craddock's wounds by the time we got there and talked him quite calm."

     We said nothing.

     "I want you lads to promise me you will leave that man alone. I am not allowed to say too much but I will tell you this, he is a registered drug addict. That is an illness, I'm assured. He has just told me that he does not want to press any charges."

     "He started it," Boom-boom said slowly.

     "He did," I confirmed.

     "And by the look of the state he is in, you finished it. So I judge that even." He touched his magic belt again. "Now, he told me that he does not want there to be any hard feelings between you. And in fact that he would like you lads to go round to his home some time and break bread."

     We would never go. And it was not bread that got broke in that cottage. But the girls went, Catherine and Mary, shortly after his wife had left. She had been arrested twice, in the little seaside town for soliciting - something we had not heard of before. We came home one night and there was the lady herself, leaning against the powdered white wall of the pub's skittle alley. She was wearing a split skirt, balancing on stiletto heels with the white of her legs glowing above fish-net stockings.

     "You boys want to spend your pocket money on some fun ?" she whispered.

     A warning cough sounded from somewhere in the shadows.

     "I would need to scrub mine in bleach if I did," Boom-boom said with a genuine hate, as she was already turning away and I was trying to let her see my smile to show that I understood - though obviously I did not. She staggered off into the gloom to wait for what or whoever came next. A week later she was gone. Back to the Smoke, someone said. And I could not get her out of my dreams for some time: walking the street of a Dickensian London, stalked through the fog of Limehouse by the Ripper - only this one was carrying a syringe instead of a scalpel: a slower crueller blade. Though my real regret was for the missed opportunity of that night.

     We were given another new word to play with, 'methadone'. This one via the doctor's receptionist who sometimes liked to share some of the juicier bits of her job along with the reaction of her employer. The best story so far had been about an elderly man who had gone in to ask if it was possible to have a couple of inches cut off his penis as his wife was complaining that it was too large. The doctor had apparently said he would do it, and then graft what had come off on to his own. Our village doctor was approaching seventy. His passion - or at least the one he was willing to share with us - was fishing for sea trout. A night run of them, skittering, silver bars of muscle fighting their way through fall and riffles desperate to keep their cycle of life going. I wondered how he could juxtapose that against the open-mouthed Crad arriving each day to gulp down his plastic cup of green elixir.

     I met Catherine. She was coming out of Crad's cottage, fell through the gate in a cloud of sourness and Petunia oil, with a softness of blue iridescent velvet hardened by an armour of bangles rattling against the boniness of her thinning arms. "Vincent," she said, slowly as if my name had become viscous inside her hollow cheeks and needed regurgitating. Then, "Vinny," as she remembered. A noise a short way behind her made her shove past me and hurry toward the newsagent's. I stared down the path and saw Crad supporting himself between the doorjambs like a man crucified. He was wearing a filthy dressing gown that looked as if it had been donated by some hospital or clinic. He was stark naked underneath and did not give a damn that it was wide open. Crad opened his mouth in what may have been a smile or the desire to show me the damage caused by Boom-boom's attack. The effect, whatever the intent, was the same: a cadaverous gape, that in my mind at that moment, through naivety or bigotry, had no right to life: or to be sucking the life from others.

     Boom-boom called round some weeks later. We had not been seeing so much of each other since I had stopped seeing Catherine: and the rows between both our sets of parents were beginning to mirror and spill into our lives. He appeared tired and beaten.

     "It must have been a tough bout," I said.

     I waited for his usual, 'You ought to see the other guy', reply.

     "I spent the night with Mary," Boom-boom said.

     I gave him a knowing smile. It was the first time he had admitted to anything further than his unclipping her bra. "Well done," I said; "and about time to."

     "Vinny," Boom-boom said, sounding not angry, not too sad, but distant and much older, "I sat with her all night in the bus shelter and then one of the pill boxes near the beach. She could not stop puking or shaking, I just tried to keep her clean and warm. Okay ?"

     The next week she was dead. The police found her following an anonymous phone call. She was seated at the top of some stone steps, her back against the doors of the closed mediaeval church that had a plaque for those lost in the depths of the sea that has for centuries lashed its gray stones with a salt whip for penance.

     'Drugs overdose kills girl trying to reach sanctuary', the headlines in the local paper stated. The coroner confirmed it. Just before her funeral, Rupert, now working very early mornings in the village bakery to help support his mother, claimed that he had seen her carried out of Crad's cottage by two men: "She looked," he told the other workers in the bakery, "like dough, but unleavened."

     Mary's father, the newsagent said that he was a liar and definitely his father's son. The police, if they heard, must have agreed because the matter along with her body was laid to rest. Just about the whole village turned out for her burial in the cemetery of the same church. And it was a lot of last times.

     The last time that my parents would be out together, and Boom-boom's. The final sane appearance of Catherine before her father had her confined in a secure unit - and would slap my face the only time I tried to visit her, slap it hard with all the fury, guilt and frustration he could muster as above us at a window I would catch a glimpse of Catherine for another last time.

     Also, this day would be the end of my time with Boom-boom. Not the last time that I would see him though. At least, not if you count witnessing the destruction on the television screen of someone you once loved as seeing them again.

     Shortly after my mother had gone, taking Ricky with her, Boom-boom without a word to me, followed his mother who had also left at the same moment as mine - though apparently in a different direction. Neither, it was claimed had another man waiting. My father withdrew completely into his bedroom for a period of what I could only conceive as rebuilding. At first with the philosophical assurances of the Omar Kayyam, then the already mentioned men's magazines which he had given up trying to hide. Finally he came down and announced he was going back contracting. "Your mother has left me in so much debt I have no choice," he said.

     So for my first year out of school I was alone with ghosts and copper pans, trying to decide on my future and past. I began to take long walks getting to know the tide line, the antics of beachcombers and furtive nudes. The days were mostly fine: but the nights, often when the sea-shell whisperings of the tide were joined by other susurrations, or maybe just the breeze untangling itself from the desiccated buckthorn outside, I was desperate for company. One night I even went so far as creeping up to Catherine's caravan just in case. It was broken and blowing in the wind like a sail on a plague ship. Then I walked past Boom-boom's and saw his father sitting in the same chair in the same spot where I had first seen him. I recalled Boom-boom saying he would rather die than end up like that and learnt another good lesson that night about company and self.

     The day of the raid I was not alone. My father had been home for some time and was not certain if he wanted to go again. I had found a place at college, started dating Wendy Atkinson, and was as equally unsure as to whether I would stay. They came in a rush past the end of our garden as Wendy and I were stood teasing my dad, who looked old and heavy and was fussing over his favourite rose, Peace, I recall. "Go in your house and stay inside," the one recognizable policeman ordered us. The rest were layered in body armour and full-face visors and were clinging to guns as if someone had thrust a live dangerous creature into their hands and it was struggling to attack or escape. They must have been coming from all directions at once, because as we closed our door a loud metallic voice, from what would have been about the front of Crad's cottage, began intoning conditions. We watched as a swarm of gray bodies clambered over walls, smashed through ornamental hedges and over gardens. Two of them kicked Mr. Smearl's gate off its hinges and began to belly-crawl across his bowling green lawn. Unbelievably, Mr. Smearl opened his door and marched in front of them and stood with his hands on hips. One did not hesitate, he sprang to his feet and stuffed the barrel of a snub-nose pistol into the old man's face, a flash of white showed a mouth open behind the dark glass of the mask. The way Smearl staggered back you might have thought the gun had gone off and that any second the crack would follow. Instead, the policeman dropped back to the floor and Mr. Smearl scurried inside. I thought back to the day he had come around about our bonfire and how shocked he had been when I told him where to go - I tried to imagine what he might be feeling now.

     With that memory came an image of Boom-boom that night and his little fantasy about our joint marriages and what hopes he must have held, and my feelings that day when I saw the man who had helped destroy them at his door. I thought of my father's words about destroying life and was pleased that now I had no desire to hear a gun going off for real. Then it was over. The police began to troop back, guns in holster, masks off, smiles of relief on their young faces. Mrs. Smearl carried out a tray of tea with cakes and biscuits then stood twitching and flirting with some of them.

     I got the news about it later and in a strange way it made up my mind that I had to leave. My father carried back from the local pub. This man who had once hated the taste of the stuff had now acquired it with passion. Every morning and evening he was home he went to the same pub. I would never in truth see him drunk, equally, never again see him put anything above his desire to be inside the bar as soon as his inner clock sensed the door bolt open.

     "Jeffery said he was sat having a quiet smoke with a couple of his friends," my father started to tell Wendy and myself as we sat on the sofa pretending that we had been there all evening, pretending that she was not full of my seed - not even knowing the reality of that ourselves, yet.

     "Jeffery?" I asked.

     "Jeffery Craddock," he replied: "it was his cottage."

     "You know Crad," I was shocked, "to speak to ?"

     "He comes round to the bar most days for a quiet pint."

     "Have you any idea," I said, snatching my arm from around the softness of Wendy's waist and leaning forward brittle and cold: "what that bastard did to Mary and Catherine ? What he has carried on doing with others ever since ?"

     "You do not want to believe what these silly little girls go around claiming. Jeffery is not too bad when you get to know him."

     I said no more. I half-listened to how Jeffery had been sat with two old acquaintances enjoying a 'quiet smoke' when the police had arrived. The landlord stood him one on the house as he told them about the door splintering and a machine gun poking through the haze. The newsagent, Mary's father, bought him another at the shock of finding his friends were 'tooled up' and had connections with the IRA.

     I left Wendy at her gate and went for a final walk through the village, not sleeping I knew, but brooding. I went past Gunner's who was now bed-ridden, sober and being visited regularly by the priest, I carried on to Catherine's, the farm now run down its barns bulging with stale hay, the smell neither bitter nor sweet. The caravan was gone, the earth still bare though where it had stood. Back in the middle of the village I stood outside Crad's cottage watching a pale flame move inside and waiting for a stooping shadow to be animated against the wall. The door, I noticed before leaving, had been repaired with a piece of plywood.

     That same piece of ply would still be in place five years later when I came for a visit with Wendy and our son, Tobias. Part of it anyway, black and sculptured by the flames that had ate the top half of the cottage completely and left the bottom looking like some shipwreck tossed to the shore by a violent storm and just waiting to crumble and rest in a softness of sand. Someone claimed, that even though the fire brigade had found no body, and that the police were informed that Crad had left, he had been there alright, was there now a slight part of the ash and dust. He was that dry and brittle, the story went, from all those drugs he had just gone up like a moth in a candle flame. The more modern said that it was all an insurance job. Or even revenge from someone with reasons to hate. And everyone knew that Sigfried would have his way and that a new family would arrive. "More strangers," my father said.

     Wendy's parents had sold up and left the village to live in Tuscany. After this visit, she would state that she was never coming again. Also, what an ignorant man my father had become, "How," she shouted, "could he leave us alone in that house after all the time we had not seen him for a trip to the pub ?" and: "Did he really feel a glass of beer was more important that his grandson ?" And claimed that the house was filthy and unhealthy.

     In truth, it was. The pine stairs and counters were thick with grease, the range smoked and gave off acrid fumes that bit into your breathing, those copper pots still hung in place, but so dulled and greened no voice could have escaped from their lips. Outside the back, the topsoil had blown away and it did look like an abandoned filled-in swimming pool. From the front window I could see the buckthorn hedge had grown into a forest that was petrified and crumbling back into the swamp seeping up from what its roots must have tapped.

     My father told us just before we left that day, he had seen Catherine. She had come to see her recently-widowed mother, bringing her own daughter with her. I was pleased, but only for a moment. "She is married," he said, "to a heroine addict, and is one herself. And you would not believe it but so is their child: born one. The things you hear going on out there these days," he added. I wanted to ask, Did he really feel he belonged ? And if he did, why did I believe I would always be an outsider here ? I gave him a hug, saying nothing. Knowing that there was no answer he could give and that it would be years later in a different life that I would read the words - which the writer claimed a bad phrase - 'submerged population' and begin to glimpse my truths.

     Boom-boom appeared on our television. I knew him instantly though he looked much older and heavier. I was sat with Tobias and had started lately, to tell him exaggerated stories about my past and what I had seen: the dangers waiting: eyes hands and neckties and all.

     "I know that guy," I cried out: "that's Boom-boom my old best friend."

     The commentator announced that Will Tanner was currently rated fifth in the country and was fighting for a chance to go on and fight for the British Heavyweight title. Boom-boom was in a pair of huge, gold-coloured shorts and was shadow boxing toward his corner. I only caught a brief shot of his seconds but one of them, I felt sure, was his father.

     The other fighter was very well known and had made more comebacks than Dracula prompted and promoted by his bride who appeared on the interview to be staging her own struggle for immortality.

     I held onto Tobias and was glad for once that Wendy was out at another course or meeting and that I could share this with him alone. Boom-boom fought well. He did not give ground and at one time nearly had his opponent down. Boom-boom lost on a split-points decision and the two of us, who had been cheering all through the fight, booed.

     I was still on my tiptoes in excitement when Wendy finally came in. Tobias had to tell her, "Mommy, Daddy's bestest friend ever is famous. He was on TV fighting and should have won, easily."

     "Boom-boom," I reminded her.

     "Oh, yes," Wendy said coldly: "I remember him: he chased a man into my bedroom and we could not get him out again !"

     She left the ambiguity of that statement floating like a butterfly and took Tobias into his bedroom for another dose of 'Green eggs and Ham'.

     Wendy watched the next fight. A great British hope had appeared. Or was being, according to one reporter - I had started following the game a little - groomed very carefully to look good and earn big bucks from that illusion. "He is being allowed to knock over bums," the writer claimed. "The first decent Yank will prove that he is nothing but a muscle-bound, flat-footed poser. One more horizontal British heavyweight."

     He appeared awesome, towering over Boom-boom and staring right through him like he was glass, thin picture frame glass. My friend stood toe to toe with him trying, I judged to meet and hold the other's glaring rage. I could not help seeing the smile I knew waiting just below the surface to erupt and give the game away. Within seconds of the bell ringing Boom-boom was hit. A long straight right - so obvious it seemed to us viewers - that rocked him back onto his heels. The next punch had him on the ropes. Tobias moved away from me closer to his mother as Boom-boom catapulted himself forward and threw his arms around the other man. They clung on: Tobias to his mom, Boom-boom to his would-be-destroyer - and I saw the image repeated over and over, from that fight in the street to legs in a caravan to this. Boom-boom's head was lolling on the man's shoulder, his eyes staring into our lives, scared and wild. The referee, small, pure in white like a doll playing with giants, ordered them to part. And I could see a look of betrayal in my friend's face as he stepped back. Not so much at the figure coming toward him but at the ref., his corner, all of us. The first punch was enough, the second and third probably unfelt, not even trips in a dream, though they did alter horribly the way he was crashing to the canvas: from pugilist to rabbit, bent and twitching.

     The referee threw himself on top of Boom-boom, then ripped the gum shield from his mouth and began beckoning help as just before the camera switched to the victor - and his denial that this was a mismatch, and Will Tanner was a very experienced professional - a towel, grubby and worn, fluttered down to land by Boom-boom. "Too late," I said to the empty room.

     I saw Boom-boom twice more over the next few years. The first time was just after Wendy had left taking Tobias with her to Italy to be nearer her parents. The tentative offer that I could go still whispered by my son at the end of nearly each phone conversation. The regional news station broadcast a story about one of the nearby suburbs. Drug dealers and prostitutes were working on the now expanding estate and busy road. A group had formed itself to disturb their trade. "We'll shame them into moving on," said the slurred voice of their leader: William Tanner: Ex. professional boxer. And there was Boom-boom leading what looked like an outing of train-spotters. He was heavier, dressed cheaply and had some pale, frail-looking woman hanging off one of his biceps, "My wife," he said, gesturing down, "cannot even go to the shops without a car pulling over and asking if she's 'doing business'." The camera panned down the gloomy street to where two women stood prowling in short skirts and high boots, blowing steam into the cold November night as cars slowed and answered with exhaust fumes or warm invites through opening windows. The last shot was of Boom-boom and his followers hurrying toward them.

     A few months later, my mother had just put the phone down after calling to let me know that she was 'home'. "I do not love your father," she told me, "in fact, I never have. But I know he needs me and that it is my duty to return and look after him." I was still grinning at the news, feeling some childlike warmth of comfort and security, when a mug-shot of Boom-boom appeared on the TV, following his arrest for assaulting a man that he claimed was 'pimping'. "Vigilante groups will not be tolerated," the police inspector explained: "these people have the same rights as all citizens." The camera went straight to some of 'these people'. Two working girls. "He," Julie the Prostitutes' Spokesperson - told us: "was the worst of them all." Again the face of Boom-boom stared out. Julie carried on, her impossible to age face, hard and malleable, "One time, when they had supposed to be ruining our service to the public, he put his hand inside Brenda's bra." Brenda was stood next to Julie, she was less than five feet tall, light as spume and dressed like a schoolgirl, pigtails and pleats.

     "I guess he wanted to feel the merchandize before buying," Julie stated, matter-off-factly.

     "Wanted it for free again," Brenda shouted as they both started laughing.

     The film cut back quickly to the policeman who said that the girls were considering pressing charges against Mr. Tanner for indecent assault. There was a final shot of Brenda leaning into a car window, the white tops of her thighs evanescent and cold.

     They were still glowing in my mind as the next story came on. It was about a species of American toad that had escaped from a wildlife park and bred and populated a large lake. "They croak all night," one of the residents told the reporter. "Every single night it's the same." "Non-stop songs of love, I suppose," another tired, angry person added.

     I switched off as a recording of their noise filled the room.

     I heard a different song. One made up of the shame and pain that my old friend might be feeling as he sat in a cell trying to understand, and of my parents together in that cottage trying to find words that could be sounded, and the black fall of ash as Crad's cottage was rebuilt. On and on, all the voices from that village. Our non-stop songs of love, I suppose.