The day I was accused of murder

Choose your time-wasting activities carefully

First of all, I should tell you that my approach to memoir is incredibly literal-minded. I don’t make stuff up. Of course, I may have misremembered things that happened a while ago, but I am not misremembering for artistic purposes. I’m just getting it wrong. This story, for reasons that I hope become obvious, is still very clear in my mind.

AsI believe I have mentioned before, most of my 1980s were years of professional cluelessness and mild poverty. At one point, I was working in a language school in Soho, England, teaching English to foreigners, and like all the teachers there, I was occasionally obliged to teach what was known as a split shift: my hours were 9am-12, a three-hour break, 3pm-6pm. And those three hours in the middle were a pain. It wasn’t worth going home, and nobody can make the actual food part of lunch last for three hours, unless you decide to go for an eight-course tasting menu in a fancy restaurant, which would have been foolish in my financial situation. I spent time in Foyle’s bookshop, and in the second-hand record shops and stalls in Berwick St. But the easiest and cheapest way to kill time was to inculcate a video-game obsession, so that is what I did. Once I got good at the game, a coin of some denomination - 10p? 50p? - bought a lot of entertainment.

Around the corner from the language school was a dismal arcade, and I had to walk to the back of its dark and empty bowels to get to the game I had become addicted to. The machine was always free, and nobody ever bothered me until one day I received a tap on my shoulder. I looked round, irritated. I probably lost a life. There was a policeman standing behind me.

“Are you busy?” he said. Yes, mate. I’m busy. Obviously. I am a United Nations delegate and I stopped off here for a quick game on the way to an international summit.

“Not really,” I said instead.

“Do you want to take part in an identity parade?”

Did I? Of course I did. Which wannabe writer with literally nothing to do wouldn’t? Identity parades might become my subject, in the way that spycraft became Le Carre’s. I would write novel after novel about identity parades, all of them enthralling, funny and resonant. Even if my readers had no experience of or prior interest in identity parades, they would see that really I was writing about the human condition.

I followed the cop out into the light.