Free Broken Music: A Memoir by Sting

He is still refusing to acknowledge the red trophy that gleams like an insult in my hands. I wonder if this is some sort of test. In my joy at winning the scholarship I suppose I’d assumed that Tommy had done the same; he certainly is smart enough. I had also forgotten about Tommy’s ridiculous heirloom, but the effect of my friend’s regaining his bravura despite the embarrassing difference between his steed and mine is a little like seeing Clint Eastwood in the first scene of
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
astride a donkey: yes, the bike is ugly, but I wouldn’t risk saying anything.
    Gosforth Park is about five miles away to the north of Newcastle. There is a racecourse there, in a semirural setting that is the nearest thing we have to available countryside. We set off, Tommy behind me on the wreck.
    We haven’t gone but a few streets before it is apparent that Tommy’s bike is no match for mine; at every corner I turn round to see him struggling with the tiny wheels and wait for him to catch up. My friend is now angry and getting more and more exhausted. The next time I stop to wait for him, I see he’s furiously kicking the prone bicycle into the gutter. “Fuckin’ piece of shit.”
    I ride back toward him, a vision of dazzling red and chromium.
    “What the fuck are you looking at?” he explodes.
    “Tommy, we’re never going to get to Gosforth Park at this rate.” I manage to suppress my impatience, and with a small hesitation and some steeling of resolve I say, “Why don’t you take this one for a while and I’ll take yours.”
    The effect is instant and for the first time he acknowledges the new bike, then looks at me with some suspicion. “Who bought that for you?”
    “Me dad,” I reply, reduced to wary monosyllables.
    “Why, it’s not your birthday?”
    Now I don’t know what to say.
    “Did ye get it for passing the scholarship, did ye?”
    I don’t answer the question, but I do manage, “Are you gonna take the bike or not?”
    He looks from me to the bike with calculated shrewdness, stroking the end of his chin with theatrical exaggeration.
    “I’ll give it a go,” he says, with as much condescension as he can muster, putting himself astride my new bike and looking impossibly cool.
    I pick up the ancient embarrassment from the gutter and we set off again, Tommy racing ahead and me soon struggling to catch up and cursing the wretched machine with its ridiculous pedals and its crooked wheels.
    “Get off and milk it!” shouts some wag on the corner, which only adds a piquant shame to my exhaustion. I can hardly tell him that the gleaming red vision ahead with the whitewall tires is actually mine and that I’m doing my friend a favor.
    It isn’t long before I too am kicking the miserable crock into the gutter and cursing the man who made it.
    “I suppose ye want your bike back?” says Tommy.
    We eventually make it to Gosforth Park and back before nightfall,Tommy taking the last stage of the relay on the new bike, riding with no hands and circling me derisively.
    We part at the corner of Station Road and West Street. He takes his pathetic excuse for a bike and I take mine.
    There is only a slight hesitation as we make our way to our respective homes.
    “Er, thanks,” says Tommy.
    “That’s okay.” I reply.
    Tommy has been my best friend for almost six years, and over the next few we will drift sadly and inexorably apart, but it is during this period that I will find a friendship that will endure for a lifetime.
        There was always music in my family; my mother’s piano playing, my father’s singing, even the submusical ramblings of my grandfather Tom on his mandolin engendered in me the belief that music was a kind of birthright.
    Agnes’s youngest brother, my great-uncle Joe, used to play the accordion. He would often say, with his customary and self-deprecating humor, that the definition of a gentleman is “someone who can play the accordion”—theatrical