It was so hot. I remember the heat burning endlessly through the last summer. It was fire on the fingertips. All this heat and space was our inheritance that summer. When you’re young, space comes very easy, you don’t have to find it, it’s just there.

So there we were, with all this heat and space, Daydream Believers everyone. The last summer had begun...

The Dark Man stood like some great ageing sentinel, guarding the dimly lit entrance of the two-roomed downstairs flat that was his home. A thin wry smile began to stretch across his tired face that had seen everything, but witnessed nothing. Painful eyes recorded every breath and every movement, aware, unaware. From the shadows his eyes blinked and caught the last remaining twilight rays that slowly sank across the concrete cricket pitch carved in chalk. So many miles from the balmy nights of Kingston, Jamaica, where cricket was king. So many miles from everywhere.

Shuffling quietly, his pyjamas crept casually beneath his heavy trousers and peaked out between his shoes and his two-inch turn-ups. The string holding the course twill battleship grey

trousers came attached to a large parcel about two year previously, courtesy of Auntie Vera’s Marshall Ward catalogue.

As the sun retreated, the heat was replaced by something else, a kind of stifling entity that we could never identify. The space rapidly disappeared and an impatient waiting heaviness descended - the heat was our life, and we had runs to score and sixes to strike.

The Dark Man was never unclean, but neither was he a Jason King. At around sixteen stone, six feet, and touching the wrong side of sixty-five, it’s hard to put appearances as a main priority in one’s life when you rely on a pension book every Tuesday. The same could never be said for his children. Nobody claimed to understand the big Jamaican, least of all his two children, but everybody respected the effort that he put into his children’s appearance.