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though he only had to shave about once a week.
    His Lewis Leather biker’s jacket sported a plastic badge on the lapel featuring the Jimmy Hill-like profile of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He wore drainpipe Levi’s, a threadbare Thin Lizzy T-shirt and white Adidas trainers with three blue stripes down the side. Pretty much the standard uniform for the enlightened urban male in the summer of 1977, although Leon had topped off his look with a trilby hat from a charity shop. Funnily enough, you couldn’t buy that look in the back of
The Paper
, where they were still packaging what was left of the spirit of the Sixties.
    Cannabis leaf jewellery. Solid silver leaf pendant on real silver chain
- £7 .
    Leon closed
The Paper
, shaking his head. He adjusted his trilby. It was as if nothing had changed. It was as if there wasn’t a war on.
    It seemed to Leon that everyone he knew was living in some old Sixties dream. The people he worked with at
The Paper
, all of the readers, his father – especially his father, a man who had belonged to CND for a few years but who now belonged to a golf club.
    What was wrong with them? Didn’t they realise it was time to take a stand? What did they think the National Front was doing marching in South London? He touched the bruise on his cheek again, and wished it could stay there for ever.
    This wasn’t about some little style option – the choice between long hair or spiky, flared trousers or straight, Elvis or Johnny Rotten. It was about a more fundamental choice – not between the NF and the SWP, who were daubing their rival slogans all over the city, like the Sharks and Jets of political extremism – but the choice between evil, hatred, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and everything that was their opposite.
    The memory of Lewisham still made him shake with fear. The rocks showering down on the marchers. The faces twisted with hatred. The police lashing out with truncheon, boot or knee. Thesudden eruption of hand-to-hand fighting as marcher or demonstrator broke through the police lines, fists and feet flying. And the horses, shitting themselves with terror as they were driven into the protesters. Leon knew how those horses felt. Lewisham had been the first violence that he had been involved in since a fight in the playground at junior school. And he had lost that one.
    Mind you, Leon thought, she was a very big girl for nine.
    He thumbed through the singles until he found something worth playing. ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols. He put the record on the turntable, placed the needle on the record, and pulled the arm back for repeat play. Then, as the stuttering guitar riff came pouring out of the speakers, he set about destroying the rest of the singles. The Jacksons, Donna Summer, Hot Chocolate, Carly Simon and the Brotherhood of Man – all of them were thrown to their doom across the review room, all of them perished in a dramatic explosion of vinyl.
    Leon was about to launch Boney M’s ‘Ma Baker’ when the door to the review room opened and standing there was an elderly black cleaner with a Hoover in his hands, staring open-mouthed at the destroyed vinyl that littered the carpet.
    ‘What the goodness you doing in here, man?’ the cleaner said.
    ‘I’m doing the singles,’ Leon said, his face burning with embarrassment. ‘I was just about to clear all this up.’
    Watched by the cleaner, Leon got down on his hands and knees and began picking up the smashed records, his mouth fixed in a smile that he hoped showed solidarity, and some sort of apology.
    ‘I hope you like curry,’ Terry’s mum said to Misty.
    ‘I
love
curry,’ Misty said. ‘In fact, my father was born in India.’
    Terry shot her a look. He didn’t know that Misty’s dad had been born in India. It seemed there were a lot of things he didn’t know about her, despite being together since Christmas.
    Misty and Terry and his parents crowded awkwardly in the tinyhallway. Misty was making some rapturous speech