up to Olympia, walk across to Dean’s flat in Brook Green. He was a saxophonist friend of a friend. We’d meet to play chess, we didn’t talk much. We’d sit in the courtyard off his kitchen and drink Lavazza from little white cups his wife would bring out to us and listen to Sonny Rollins. And get lost in the games. There’s not much better than that. Good things like chess endure. I’d thought those afternoons were gone and forgotten but I remembered Dean this afternoon, sitting here rooftop-gazing, I remember the games. And I can still see a move, with my pawn sitting on the seventh row. It’s taken me twenty-five years to work out what I wanted to say to Dean about that move. I wanted to say: “now Dean, take a look at this pawn, only one leap away from shape-shifting, queenly greatness. This lowly foot soldier has crossed the board and won the right to become anything it wants in the chess world, and all by virtue of its own grit and gumption. It had no bishop graces to start with, no rookish solidity, no knightly flair. But it’s endured and now stands poised to snatch the game. This is you, Dean, if you can only keep blowing your horn, finally owning the game. We’re all players on the same board and the greatest, coolest, most universe-popping piece of them all is this humble, transcendent pawn.”
And Dean would have looked up from the ebony and ash squares and stared me in the eye and growled, so shut up and play.
