Lay all your cards on the table and study them closely. Each and every happening in your life has been a tool for this moment.
Find the pattern.
Step three – Act.
Take action on what you’ve come to realise.
Got it?
Yes. I think so. One question.
Tell me.
Who are you?
I am you and you are me.
Huh!?
I’ve always been here, you’re normally too busy to hear me. Consider me, as your ‘in case of emergency’ instruction manual.
Ask the right questions and the answers will come.
Sift through with a fine-tooth comb until the solution is found.
Or, until our time is up.
Remember, there is only one rule.
‘Never give up’.
Got it?
Alright.
Good.
Right. Ready?
Yep.
2.9 seconds of real time left.
Go!
1994
It was towards the end of May 1994. The Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s recent hit ‘Under the Bridge’ still played hourly on radio stations.
A few weeks before, Ayrton Senna’s steering had failed on the corner of the San Marino Grand Prix, causing him to plough head-on into an unprotected wall. The nation of Brazil, as well as the world of sport, were reeling in shock from their champion’s death.
Affecting me more personally, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain had recently been found dead – a shotgun in his hand. He’d died on the 5th of April. With barely a couple of weeks separating our days of birth, his death hit me in a curious way. The age of twenty-seven owned a desolate feeling. An overwhelming sense that I’d completed a life cycle as if I’d been through everything already. Would the same situations simply repeat in different ways, forcing me to learn the same lessons over and over? Was life to endlessly replay the same tune? Was my destiny to marvel at life’s complexities as if a song – with time, learning to pick out each instrument, melody and beat?
Was there a connection to the many rock stars who had also died at twenty-seven? Not just Cobain, but Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and Jim Morrison as well. Perhaps they had experienced the same sensations, of sensing nothing new on the horizon. To be clear I wasn’t feeling suicidal, however, I was mourning for the loss of something that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Another loop came to mind. My favourite school track event had been the 1600m, made up of four circuits of the 400m athletics track. I recalled my tactic used, where I’d initially stay back and pace myself. The first couple of laps were for warming up. Only on the third did it become time to lengthen the stride and work hard, to catch up on the heels of the leader. The sound of the bell, signalling the last circuit, was the cue to open up the legs and give it all that was possible. If life started after leaving school, I consoled myself by thinking of twenty-seven as being lap one. It was time to sit back and enjoy the ride, even if life was to become an ever-increasing spiral of repetitions.
But did the universe have a different plan?
Kurt Cobain entered the world three weeks after me. Was it to be that I’d die barely six weeks after him? Could it be my fate, to join the twenty-seven club? I succumbed to the thought for a second and came to my senses. Unable to play three chords on a guitar, I’d never released a record and couldn’t even sing. Cobain was a living legend before he died, and now dead, was an immortal legend. He’d already done all that he came to earth to do. I’d achieved zero. I needed a couple more laps of the track. I was still working things out. A grown man, but full of basic confusions. I knew everything, and yet I knew nothing.
Was I going to duck out of the race after lap one?
No way.
Besides, I’d made the promise.
Never give up.
And here I was, staring down the blade of a knife.
In the back alley of a strange city.
The short stubble on the taxi driver’s cheek reminded me of a forest after a fire. Jet black and dirty. Veins stood out on his neck, yet they were not pulsing. Older than me, probably late thirties. Calm enough that I figured he’d been through this before.
His eyes resigned to his fate.
Did he even care which way this went?
Had he already achieved his life goals?
Made a number-one hit record?
Did he even have dreams?
His indifference wasn’t helping me.
I needed him to want to live.
Time slipped forward one frame.
The blade tilted a fraction, making it glint.
Our lives depended on his survival instinct.
‘Our lives.’
I was not alone.
Luciana
I met Luciana in London’s Leicester Square during the summer of 1992. I was street-selling with a box of jewellery that I opened up and balanced on the top of rubbish bins. She was a street dancer who cast spells on men, rendering them semi-senseless as she performed to the music. Half Incan Indian and half Mestizo – the name given to the lighter-skinned offspring of the Spanish settlers who’d mixed with the Ecuadorian locals – her skin was milk-chocolate and her hair long, thick and black.
She’d team up with the buskers of London. Her hips would gyrate, her short skirt losing the effect of gravity as she spun and twirled. While hypnotising the crowd with her salsa, she maintained eye contact. Like all buskers, she knew once the performance finished, people would soon melt away to avoid tipping.
Her trick was to ‘bottle’ – holding out a hat for donations – as she danced around the horseshoe curve of watchers. Pound coin after pound coin was popped into her hat to keep her dancing legs moving, and covered in a fine film of sweat, she’d not stop until exhausted.
Once the show ended, the money would be divided equally between her and each musician. In twenty minutes, she could rustle up more than I could bring in selling jewellery on my luckiest twelve-hour day. Although dependent on the buskers’ raucous free-form music, the musicians’ income rocketed when Luciana joined them and danced. Together they worked in literal harmony.
One of Leicester
