Smart - Chasing the flame

I USED to go to school with a boy called Brian Sankey. He had flame-red hair and always wore bright chestnut coloured sandals that fastened on the side with a silver buckle. Brian Sankey had a nasty habit of picking his nose and wiping the bogeys in a circular motion around the toe of his sandals until they were so shiny he could almost see his freckles in the reflection. Afterwards he would admire his handiwork while nibbling at the sticky bits on the end of his fingers. Brian Sankey had the shiniest shoes in school but, inevitably, the fewest friends. I didnt know Brian very well then and probably wouldnt even recognise him now, although Sods Law says he still picks his nose religiously and is handling the fresh fruit and vegetables at our local supermarket. I havent seen him in 30-odd years and he has no particular relevance to this story other than he turned up in a bizarre dream of mine about two days after I arrived in Atlanta. The dream itself is significant because it was the first time I had faced up to the sudden change of direction in my life, albeit while I was fast asleep.

The beauty of dreams is that you can liberally throw together people from different times and places without the slightest regard for fact or logic. On this occasion I managed to pair Brian Sankey, a snotty-nosed ginger-haired six-year-old, with Linford Christie and the two of them were chatting happily in my kitchen which, of course, wasnt really my kitchen. I have no idea what they were saying and it doesnt matter. The meeting of these two diverse figures was, I believe, a result of my attempts to reconcile the life I had left behind and the adventure I was about to begin. In his own repugnant way, Brian represented home. The very fact I had summoned a character from way back in my childhood indicated a growing sense of unease about the recent turn of events in my life, as if I was trying to scuttle as far as possible back towards the womb.

Linford, on the other hand, was a symbol of the Olympic Games which were the principal reason for this trip and why I was now lying in a hotel bed in Atlanta having strange dreams. I mean, who better to embody the Olympics than Britains pre-eminent sprinter? Either that or I had to justify to myself why I was fantasising about a muscle-bound black man with a reputation for having an obscenely large penis.

I wasnt even aware it was a dream at first. Everything seemed perfectly normal until my grandmother turned up at the front door carrying a tray of her fresh mince pies. This in itself was not particularly surprising; my grandmother was a woman of few words who always expressed herself best through pastry. When we were younger, she used to drop by every week with a variety of homemade treats, and her appearance on this or any other occasion would not have seemed out of place were it not for the fact that we had cremated her nearly four years earlier. It was, if you excuse the pun, a dead giveaway. From the moment she arrived I was able to relax and settle back into that consummate dream state when you know youre dreaming and none of this is real. That grandma isnt really grandma and the big bogey Brian Sankey is surreptitiously wiping under the rim of the kitchen table wont be there in the morning.

I had barely closed the door on grandma when the phone began to ring. I could hear it but I couldnt see it and the harder I looked, the louder it rang. The minutes of frustration that followed probably only lasted a few seconds before something clicked and I realised that the phone really was ringing. Everybody at some stage of their lives experiences that feeling of disorientation when reality interrupts the deepest sleep and drags you awake by degrees, like an elevator stopping at various levels of consciousness. It is particularly confusing when this happens in the dead of night and in a foreign place, which goes some way to explaining why I was a little short-tempered after fumbling around to locate the phone on my bedside table and identify the voice on the other end of the line.

Bollocks!

It was my brother. Charming. What do you mean by bollocks?

I dont know. Bollocks youve woken me up, bollocks its the middle of the night, youre a fucking bollocks. Take your pick.

Its not the middle of the night, he contested, obviously unaware of the five-hour time difference between England and the east coast of the United States.

To be precise, he was calling at 4.08am on a Thursday morning, a few days since we had said our goodbyes and several hours after a TWA flight had crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island in New York killing all 228 people on board. The reason for his call, he claimed, was to make sure I was alright. I had taken a connecting flight to Atlanta from New York, but he knew Id arrived safely and I knew he knew. He just wanted to be the first person to break the news about the plane crash.

You see, my brother has always had a strange fascination with death. He tackles the subject with a worrying degree of enthusiasm, whether its discussing the demise of family and friends or burying pet animals a duty he has carried out since he was old enough to wield a spade. He could take you into our back garden and without hesitation pinpoint the exact burial site of each animal, quoting the name of every dog, cat and rabbit along with their cause of death. Sundays lamb roast was never quite the same after we began picking fresh mint from a spot approximately two feet above the final resting place of my favourite spaniel.

Now his ghoulish presence was upon me in the middle of a sweltering night in Atlanta, invading a world that had until this moment seemed a million miles away from the one Id left behind in England. To be honest, we didnt get far beyond the pleasantry stage. His work was done and he realised I was in no mood to stay and chat. The phone went down and I settled back into bed knowing I would probably never find out what happened with Linford and Brian Sankey.

My brother had taken a particularly keen interest in this assignment ever since it had come my way in tragic circumstances one Sunday afternoon in the early summer of 1996. A freelance reporter who was going to help cover the Olympics for my newspaper had quite literally dropped dead while competing in a fun run. My sports editor at the time was a man of no shame who had disturbed the poor gentlemans widow in the middle of her mourning to demand the return of his Olympic press credentials. After all, a replacement had to be found and soon because the opening ceremony was only a matter of weeks away. He only gave up on the idea when he realised the press pass wouldnt be valid for anyone other than the person whose name and photograph had been permanently laminated under the front cover. Even then, he insisted on conducting a roll call of the sports desk staff to check if any of us bore even a passing resemblance to the deceased. The deceased was pushing 6ft 5in with a bad comb-over and one lazy eye so it was always going to be a long shot.