My best friend’s name is Ian, but I call him Yardley.

I suppose that once upon a time the nickname meant something, but it has long since been lost to those fiendishly impenetrable trails of memory where the thistles have grown so dense there is no way through.

It is a nickname that defies explanation. Yardley is a brand of cosmetics favoured by the kind of middle-aged, middle-minded lady who lives in every house on our street.

Yardley is an eleven year old boy.

He is tall for his age, has a beaky nose, and a thick black Afro that sits on his head like a lacrosse helmet.

If you’ve ever seen footage of the Jimi Hendrix Experience playing at the BBC, then he looks like Jimi’s bass player, Noel Reading, but shrunk down into school boy size like he’s been zapped by a shrinking ray gun.

Yardley rides a green racing bicycle with five gears. The tyres are as slender as your little finger, and we have never made it more than a quarter of a mile without the chain falling off.

Once, Yardley got his picture in the paper for growing an unusually tall sunflower. His family had been looking after Madge, a neighbour’s budgerigar, and on a whim had planted some of the sunflower seeds that should have been Madge’s dinner. The sunflowers grew to somewhat over six foot tall, and the black and white photograph showed Yardley perched half way up a step ladder, tilting a watering can and grinning. This is what passed for news in our town. Yardley later confessed to me that the watering can contained no water.

Had I known what was coming, perhaps I would have seen this dark foreshadowing for what it was, but I was eleven years old and focussed on setting up a Subbuteo league, so I failed to spot it.

There was a little gang of us. Me, Yardley, Colin, Robbie (who is dead now), Natalie (who I loved), and Hayley (who I married).

Every Friday night, we walked up the hill to the sports hall to play a game of badminton.

Yardley was responsible for collecting the money and paying the woman who ran the place. She had short hair and glasses, and we all suspected she was a lesbian. This was both unusual and amusing to us. Don’t judge us, it was the early nineties and we didn’t know any better.

One week, Yardley was poorly. I think it was mumps, but maybe it was just a cold, I forget. So, it fell upon me to collect the cash and hand it over.

This is when I discovered that Yardley had been overcharging us and pocketing the change for himself.

I confronted him when I saw him. He had the good grace to blush as he admitted he’d used the surplus to buy a Highland Toffee.

I didn’t tell the others.

How could I with all the shit he had on me?