It began with him explaining how he’d once been a talented guitarist with a promising career stretching out before him. He was in demand among solo performers, and the reason he was the oldest person in our school was that he’d had a life beforehand, on the road with his guitar. It had been an exciting but hard life, with all the late nights at small clubs, he said. Did I believe him? I shrugged my shoulders. He was difficult to fathom sometimes and you never knew what would come next with him, that much I had learned, because once Henrietta and I had gone to visit him up in his flat. Henrietta had been wanting to visit Mark privately—she’d talked about it a lot,​ 103just as she talked a lot about incest, since it was around that time that it first became okay to talk about it, the fact that it existed. Henrietta had seen something about it on TV, she said, and she said it should be dealt with severely. She used the word broken—the broken child, she’d say, the child would never be normal, the child was broken—and I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t a nice thing to say about anyone, especially a kid, but on the other hand I really liked Henrietta’s manner when she said it. She became clearer, in a way, and I’d gone with her up to Mark’s.

He lived in a small one-bedroom flat on the edge of town, and he had a girlfriend whose name was Majken but whom everyone called the Switchman’s Shanty, because that’s what Mark called her. She was such a desperate type, Henrietta said, riding the bus in from the country every day, but when we got there it was the would-be teacher who opened the door, and when Henrietta asked for Mark, he said that Mark would be out in a little while, we could just have a seat, and so we did. I sat and wondered how long we’d be sitting there, and then Mark emerged from the bedroom. He came out and said that he’d just popped into the Switchman’s Shanty, “And now I’m all yours.” Then they laughed, Henrietta and the would-be teacher, and the Switchman’s Shanty also laughed when she appeared a little while later.