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      Overture

      ‘If I get this right, Tess Rampling will definitely want to have sex with me.’ The idea slouches through my fifteen-year-old brain and disappears before I’ve had time to ask it exactly why a sixth-former of Rampling’s cosmic beauty would want to have sex with a GCSE pit-sniffer like me.

      I take Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ out of its paper bag and gaze at his pink face. ‘Oh dear, Rick Astley, you’re not “gonna” like this. You really have no idea what’s about to happen to you.’ Gently, I lift the lid of Great-Auntie Trudy’s wooden gramophone to reveal the record turntable within.

      The gramophone used to be in Trudy’s bedroom, and when I was chin-high to its wooden lid (about four years old) we would happily listen to Terry Wogan on Radio 2 while she brushed her hair and ‘put her face on’. Or sometimes, she’d play a favourite LP like the soundtrack to The King and I. The first track of that record was called ‘Overture’ and seemed to be a non-singing medley of some of the other songs. I liked the ‘Overture’: a friendly invitation and a promise of what was to come. Some of the best tunes were missing, but I guessed that was to keep them as a surprise.

      *

      It’s not big, my room. The gramophone is among the wooden hand-me-downs that sprout from the walls and nearly meet in the middle. Here’s a chest of drawers and a little bookshelf that Mum gave me recently. Here’s the wardrobe that never yielded to Narnia no matter how faithfully I reached for the cold air.

      The bedroom walls are pale green: pock-marked with Blu-Tack scars from sci-fi posters now replaced with Van Gogh prints from Woolworths. They have ‘Vincent’ written under them in swirly writing. Recently, and with great solemnity, I took down the huge Empire Strikes Back poster – the picture of Darth Vader offering his hand to Luke. ‘Come with me,’ he says to his defeated son.

      There’s a Greenpeace picture of a boat cleaning a polluted sea by magically drawing a rainbow in its wake. I get the point it’s trying to make, but even I can see the thing has all the truth and beauty of Lester Piggott narrating his tax return. Anyway, it’s there to show that I mind about the ozone layer or something. Similarly, there’s a line drawing of a defiant-looking African boy against a horizontal tricolour which I vaguely associate with the ANC. In the impossible event that Tess Rampling ever sets foot in this room, she will instantly see that a) I disapprove of apartheid; b) I disapprove of pollution; and c) I now prefer post-impressionists to Star Wars. The first two parts are even true.

      We live next door to RAF Coningsby. They’ve finally supplied us with double glazing to make up for the familiar scream of the Tornados. The condensation I used to draw pictures in now occurs between the panes rather than on the inside, like an itch you can’t scratch. Thanks, lads. Still, the room retains its own unique and homely smell which I really like. It will be many years before someone points out that this smell has a name: ‘damp’. Occasionally my step-dad Derek loses an argument about turning on the central heating and the smell turns into what I would call the equally comforting ‘grilled dust’.

      Here, in 1987, it feels wrong to be using the gramophone in an enterprise even vaguely connected with sex, like trying to make erotic art out of Fuzzy-Felt. But then, extreme measures are sometimes necessary when it comes to the sublime person of Tess Rampling. Apart from being the Most Beautiful

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