On one of those first mornings I went for a coffee in Gino’s Seafront Diner that does a good line in bagels and lunchtime chowder. It’s a pleasant spot where no one minds if you linger and the waitresses are enough of an age and disposition that an older man can smile at them without it making him feel creepy. I took a window seat and pretended to focus on my local paper, reading about the ongoing battle between environmentalists and a fracking company in pursuit of new planning approval, but at the same time watching out for those I suspected were following me. After a minute one of them entered and took a booth in a corner. I let my eyes rest on him just long enough to see him looking at me over the top of the menu before he looked away, and to register that his clothes were at just the slightest of variances to those of the locals. I finished my coffee and went outside but almost immediately went back through the doors to retrieve the paper I had deliberately left. He had already stood up and then, encountering me, headed to the restrooms, the waitress still standing at his table with her pen poised. I hadn’t imagined it, nor did I imagine that a black SUV with out-of-state plates always seemed parked up somewhere along the route of my daily walk from then on.

That morning, as I walked back home and caught the reflection of the black SUV in a store window, I felt the anger that always comes with a sense of betrayal. It was as if my years of service had been expunged from the record, as if all the preceding decades counted for nothing, and I had to stop myself from turning round and knocking on the glass of the car and demanding an explanation.

It finally made sense when Corley – Corley Rodgers – suddenly made his presence known after an absence of almost forty years. After Saigon he had actually written his novel – I had winced at the universally unkind reviews it mustered – but he hadn’t married Sylvia. Despite my assurances, she had indeed dumped him, but, displaying a greater sense of ambition than he had attributed to her, passed on the gym and geography teachers and hooked up with the principal himself. That turned out to be not such a major heartbreak, for not long after Corley admitted to himself that he was in fact gay and, as I learned later, found happiness of sorts in a couple of long-term relationships. He also admitted to himself that he wasn’t a writer and took up a career in film-making. Our paths never crossed but when, subsequently, curiosity got the better of me I found him online. He made mostly low-budget documentaries and his name appeared at the smaller festivals or shortlisted for some minor prize he never actually won. To finance his film ventures he produced advertising videos and promos for various corporate interests, despite the subject matter of his own films often being radical in their motivation.