Free Different Class by Joanne Harris Page B

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    At lunchtime today the three of us went up to Mr Clarke’s room again. Mr Clarke – Harry! – was marking books. That’s what he does most lunchtimes. The boys in his form either go to lunch, or play football in the Quad, or go to the fifth-form Common Room, or stay in and eat their sandwiches, listening to records. Sometimes Harry lets you choose. Sometimes he chooses something himself.
    At first I wanted Animals . Goldie was already eating his lunch. Poodle didn’t say anything, but just gave him his usual look, like a dog expecting a biscuit.
    Harry looked at me, then took a record sleeve from the box and said: ‘I thought I’d play you a classic today. Something tells me you’ll like it.’
    The album was called The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars . It was by David Bowie. I didn’t know much about him, though I’d seen his pictures in magazines. He’s the kind of singer that my dad despises most of all, and that Mr Speight thinks is the devil incarnate. Hair like a girl. Face like a girl. Eyes like a kind of demon. Of course, my dad makes Mr Speight look sane when it comes to demons. He’s like a sniffer dog that can sense evil. Or so he thinks. If only he knew what demons were here, hidden away right under his nose.
    I wanted to look at the album sleeve, but Harry had put it aside. He dusted the record with a cloth, then checked the record player. He’s always very careful like that, making sure it’s on the right speed and the needle’s free of dust.
    I sat down next to the teacher’s desk. Goldie and Poodle sat next to me. The others opened their lunch boxes. I’d swapped one of my sandwiches for Goldie’s chocolate biscuit, and my Wagon Wheel for Poodle’s pork pie. But somehow it didn’t seem right to eat while Harry was playing his music. Harry had chosen that record for me. I owed it to him to listen. And then the music started, and I mostly forgot about eating. All I could think of was the way the music seemed to fold around me like a hand and finger its way into my heart.
    I don’t know too much about instrumentation: I could hear some sax, and some graunchy guitars, and some keyboards, and some voices – or was it all the same voice? – telling a story that I knew from somewhere, maybe out of a dream. It was amazing. It was immense. It was the biggest, most powerful thing that had ever happened to me. I sat there, holding my biscuit, listening to the music, hardly even daring to breathe. Goldie ate his sandwiches. Poodle was drawing in the margin of his Prep diary. Neither of them seemed to have realized the awesomeness of what they had just heard. To them it was just music. To me it was like a door in my mind opening into another world.
    ‘Can we play it again, sir?’
    Harry was still marking books. When I spoke, he looked up and smiled. ‘Hadn’t you ever heard it before?’
    ‘My dad doesn’t like rock music.’
    ‘It’s not just the music. It’s the vibe. In fifty years’ time, they’ll remember this.’
    I looked at the album cover then, which showed Ziggy, standing with his guitar on a street corner at night under a sign that said: K. WEST. It was a painting, not a photo, and you could see the way the artist had picked out the bricks in the wall and the rain shining on the pavement. There was a pile of litter and old cardboard boxes in the foreground; it looked seedy and exciting and dangerous all at the same time. And although he was the star of the show, Ziggy looked small in the picture, standing outside a closed door, with all the lights in the windows shining yellow and welcoming, and him outside, alone in the rain, getting wet and not giving a damn.
    It struck me then that Harry looks a little bit like Ziggy. Older, of course, and with glasses. Ziggy with experience.
    In fifty years’ time, I’ll remember this .
    That would make me sixty-four. Six years to go till I’m seventy. Funny, how death steps into my mind, even at the best