I’ve fallen in love, he told me. We met for a Chinese at the weekend; we used to order from the Lucky Star in Forrest Street in Airdrie and then take it to a park further along the road where no one ever went and where I still return to in my dreams, even though it doesn’t exist any more, and in the summer we would lie in the grass and eat our meals with chopsticks out of foil containers and drink cans of beer and debate the future and novels. We set ourselves courses, we had our own club, like, you know, for instance we would listen to all of John Coltrane’s albums in order, one a day, until we had gone right through his catalogue, or we would assign ourselves novels, say all Russian novels, Gogol and Turgenev and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is my favourite book of all time but just so you know you have to read it in the Michael Karpelson translation never the one that Diana Burgin and Katherine O’Connor did where it was like they were making things up for a modern audience really it was sacrilege I couldn’t believe it so the message is: avoid) and Chekhov and Pushkin and Lermontov, and then we would discuss them on our Saturday afternoons, which would inevitably turn to evenings and late nights and sleeping in the park. His wife was a real bitch, she didn’t care, though she was good-looking, I’ll give her that, which was odd, you know, as in what on earth were they doing with each other, and this particular Saturday we had been reading Chekhov, inevitably, and that’s when he told me that he wanted to stop reading, that he had no further need of reading, in fact. I’ve stepped into a novel, he said. I might as well be Rimbaud going off to Palestine. Are you really going to go? I asked him. I want to be adventurous, he said. I want to live. Books aren’t living, he said. Music isn’t living. Staying alive isn’t living. Chasing a twenty-year-old-girl halfway round the world and setting up shop in a war zone: that might be living. It was hard to argue with him, even though I knew full well that books were alive and music was alive. [...]