I don’t know too much about instrumentation: I could hear some sax, and some graunchy guitars, and some keyboards, and some voices—or was it all the same voice?—telling a story that I knew from somewhere, maybe out of a dream. It was amazing. It was immense. It was the biggest, most powerful thing that had ever happened to me. I sat there, holding my biscuit, listening to the music, hardly even daring to breathe. Goldie ate his sandwiches. Poodle was drawing in the margin of his Prep diary. Neither of them seemed to have realized the awesomeness of what they had just heard. To them it was just music. To me it was like a door in my mind opening into another world.

“Can we play it again, sir?”

Harry was still marking books. When I spoke, he looked up and smiled. “Hadn’t you ever heard it before?”

“My dad doesn’t like rock music.”

“It’s not just the music. It’s the vibe. In fifty years’ time, they’ll remember this.”

I looked at the album cover then, which showed Ziggy, standing with his guitar on a street corner at night under a sign that said: K. WEST. It was a painting, not a photo, and you could see the way the artist had picked out the bricks in the wall and the rain shining on the pavement. There was a pile of litter and old cardboard boxes in the foreground; it looked seedy and exciting and dangerous all at the same time. And although he was the star of the show, Ziggy looked small in the picture, standing outside a closed door, with all the lights in the windows shining yellow and welcoming, and him outside, alone in the rain, getting wet and not giving a damn.

It struck me then that Harry looks a little bit like Ziggy. Older, of course, and with glasses. Ziggy with experience.

In fifty years’ time, I’ll remember this.

That would make me sixty-four. Six years to go till I’m seventy. Funny, how death steps into my mind, even at the best of times, like a dog that won’t stay away. Still, I knew that Harry was right. I’ll remember this moment till I die.

“I wish life was like a record, sir. I wish we could start all over again.”

He put down the pen he was using. “Why?”

“Well, sir,” I said. “Because it feels it’s all going by too quickly. Like there’s no time to get it right. Like it’s all been decided, and there’s nothing we can do to change.”

I felt a bit embarrassed then. I hoped I didn’t sound like a spaz. (It was a spazzy thing to say.)