“You really going to learn Latin?”

“Am now,” she said. “Laters.” And she went skipping up the road.

I counted my fingers to make sure they were all there and I didn’t need Nightingale to tell me that I’d handled that one wrong. One thing for certain, Abigail who lived up the road was going on my watch list. In fact I was going to create a watch list just so I could put Abigail at the top of it.

By the time I got upstairs to the flat, the musicians had gravitated into the bedroom where they were cooing over my dad’s record collection. My mum had obviously hit the snack freezer at Iceland pretty hard and there were bowls of mini sausage rolls, mini pizzas, and Hula Hoops on the coffee table. Coke, tea, coffee, and orange juice were available on demand. My mum was looking very pleased with herself.

“Do you know Abigail?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Her father is Adam Kamara.”

I vaguely recognized the name as being one of several dozen relations loosely defined as cousins—a relationship that could range from being the offspring of one of my uncles to the white guy from the Peace Corps who wandered into my granddad’s compound in 1977 and never left.

“Did you tell her I could do magic?”

She shrugged. “She was here with her father, she may have heard things.”

“So you talk about me when I’m not here?”

“You’d be surprised,” she said.

Yes I would, I thought, and helped myself to a handful of Hula Hoops.

At my mother’s command I stuck my head around the bedroom door to ask the irregulars whether they wanted any snacks. My dad said they’d be out in a minute, no snacks allowed near the collection obviously, and continued his discussion with Daniel and Max about the transition from Stan Kenton to the Third Stream. James was sitting on the bed with an LP in his hands, and he was caught in the terrible dilemma of the serious vinyl aficionado—he wanted to borrow it, but he knew that if it was his he’d never let it out of the house. He really was close to tears.

“I know it’s unfashionable,” said James, after going on about Don Cherry for a while. “But I’ve always had a soft spot for the cornet.” Which was when, had I been a cartoon character, a little lightbulb would have gone ding over my head.