It was a very different picture from the one that had greeted me the morning I’d first met Tom for our swimming lessons. Now there was endless noise: the clatter of coins from the amusement arcade, gun blasts from the shooting gallery, laughter and music from Chatfield’s bar, screams from the helter-skelter. The image of Tom’s face at the top of the stairs, pale and childlike, came to me again. That had been the only time, I realized, he’d shown me any real weakness.
