I rested my fingertips on the keys and stroked the smooth ivory. I struck a couple of chords and ran a blues scale to the top of the keyboard. I’d been playing for more than eight years, but still the sound could surprise me, excite me just as it had when Aunty Kaye had shown me the few riffs she knew when I was seven years old. I lifted my gaze over the lid and looked out at our audience. The bar fell quiet as they waited for us to begin the set. This was what I lived for. I itched for the count-in.

‘Song’s called “Rock This House”,’ Suzie whispered to me. ‘It’s a West Coast tune, key of G, nice fast swing. Join in when you’re ready.’

‘I’m ready right now,’ I told her.

She stuck her tongue out at me and thumped out four beats on the top of her bass. I came straight in on the first note with the rest of the band. The sound exploded around me. Like always when I played with a band of fine musicians, it seemed like together we were lifting a ten-ton weight into the air, each of us carrying just a tiny bit of that mass, which was no burden at all, yet between us we could make it fly.

Suzie signalled me to solo a couple of verses in. Each time I came to the end of a twelve-bar sequence, she’d cycle her hand round to tell me to go again. I held the floor for maybe three minutes, Louis echoing my riffs on the guitar next to me. As we dropped into a final chorus, I felt something silky being lowered on to my head until it rested on my ears. Applause erupted throughout the place. Aunty Kaye and Adrienne whooped from their corner of the bar. It had taken less than one full song to earn my hat.

I stayed with them for the rest of their set, playing until the bar closed at two. I kept the hat on throughout, and I wore it for the walk home through litter-strewn streets where the shouts of drunks echoed from closed-up buildings, and for the next few days it would only leave me when I went to bed.

That guy is a stranger. Someone who looked like him would leave Brighton in less than a week’s time. But he would be left behind.

12.57 p.m.