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During the summer of ’89 I spent most of my days hanging around with Andrew who was a year older than myself and whose mother had been friends with my mother for the past decade or so.

We’d often go skateboarding together and I remember being drawn to him as he seemed more alive and exciting to be around than many of the other children in the neighbourhood. His crazy stories filled with larger-than-life exploits and some of the antics we got up to fed my need for friendship and connection at that age.

It felt great to be around someone with that life energy - particularly someone who wasn’t drawn into the same social activities and interests that many others connected with and I didn’t. I never got the passion for football no matter how hard I tried to understand and relate with the game. It just bored the hell out of me and, even to this day, I’m mystified as to why people are so passionate and often fanatical about men kicking a ball around a field (and I particularly despise the pack mentality of many supporters). I still can’t figure out why that particular sport commands such social respect and adoration yet a man on a skateboard is looked down on as immature and somehow lacking in the social stakes.

Similarly rugby, cricket, tennis, athletics and other “traditional” sports just didn’t click with me. I don’t hate them - just can’t resonate with them and I fail to comprehend why they are so popular.

So hanging out with Andrew was like a breath of fresh air in comparison. We’d get up to all kinds of capers in our neighbourhood and further afield. Some of these were funny (like when we skateboarded down the ramps and levels of the town’s multi-storey car park weaving in and out of cars parked at the toll booth), other times mischievous (like when we let down the tyres on as many cars as we could in the church car park during Sunday morning service) and other times where I’d find myself extremely lucky to not be seriously injured or even worse (like when we went to put out this fire in the garden of a nearby disused house and a piece of wood that was somehow ejected from the fire narrowly missed my right eye).

There was rarely a dull moment in Andrew’s company but the more time that I spent around him the more I started to realise that he wasn’t the person he liked to paint himself to be.

I began to see how he often used people and was quite adept at lying - his many larger-than-life stories being mostly, if not entirely, fabricated. That he weaved such a tangled web of fiction, fantasy and outright falsehoods that it was almost impossible to know where the truth ended and the lies began.

One incident in particular bothered me greatly for reasons that I didn’t entirely understand at the time. During that same summer, a thirteen year old French exchange student by the name of Arno came to stay in Andrew’s house. This was quite common back in the late 80’s/early 90’s as I recall foreign exchange programmes taking place with a small number of students from my own school.

Arno was relatively quiet and shy - likely as a result of being away from his family at such a tender age in a foreign country with a different language to his native tongue. That would be difficult for most adults to navigate let alone a thirteen year old. I remember feeling bad for him as Andrew didn’t engage with Arno whenever we were around. It was almost like he was a spare shadow in reserve that Andrew had simply grown bored with. Like a shiny new toy that had now lost its lustre and was reluctantly kept around.

I can’t imagine his fortnight’s exchange in the UK with Andrew and his family was much fun and I’ll bet he was relieved to finally return home. I seem to recall that there was a financial incentive for the foreign exchange programme and, if my memory is correct there, I could believe that Arno was simply used to access that money.

Even now, years down the line, I often wonder what became of that shy, bespectacled young French boy.

In addition to using people (a trait likely inspired by his mother’s behaviour) Andrew was such a convincing liar that he could get you to doubt yourself even when you knew he was flat-out lying.

I took up some karate lessons at the local leisure centre in the summer of 1990, a year after the previously related events. The instructor would eventually be outed for the cash-grabbing conman that he was (but at the time I didn’t know any better and wasn’t experienced enough at that age to see through his “mcdojo” style of teaching with fast-tracked gradings).

I attended the Sunday afternoon classes whilst Andrew (claimed) that he attended the Wednesday evening classes. Sure enough, once he learnt that I attended the same dojo he started claiming that he had been there at the Sunday classes (which was completely untrue) and had never seen me in all the months he had been training.

He just couldn’t stop lying - no matter how many times you caught him out, no matter how many times his lies were exposed. He’d just carry on - each lie more outrageous and persistent than the preceding ones.

After the summer of ’89 had passed we stopped hanging out together. I was getting more focused with my skateboarding while he slowly drifted off until, after a year or so, I didn’t see him again.

That season had passed and he became another face in the hallway that just faded into the background like many people that I once knew from my neighbourhood. Friends and acquaintances that gradually became complete strangers. Never moving beyond the same life that had been handed down to them by their parents and their parents before them - growing older but never wiser with the passage of the years.

Just more distant faces in a hometown that feels like a graveyard filled with memories belonging to a life that happened to someone else now. I feel no connection nor resonance with streets that once felt so familiar to me. What was once identified with so strongly now feels completely cold, empty and uninviting.

I find it hard to believe I ever grew up there.

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