Robinson at the party

Walking home after midnight, I thought I saw Robinson ahead of me, as dark and worn as the city he inhabits. I passed him on The Moor. He was looking at red-ticketed sale items through the windows of Atkinsons and when he saw me he shouted my name. “I'm going to a party,” he said. “It'll be wild.”

On the way he took me to his house. He needed a grapefruit and bottles of rum and maraschino to make Papa Dobles. I sat on a stool while he changed his shoes and played Johnny Ray though a pair of tiny speakers. We drank shots of whiskey before leaving.

The party was in a proper Sheffield house. It was up a hill, on a terrace built into a hillside, with twenty or so steps up to the front door. Only Robinson and me were not in fancy dress. Robinson put his bottles in the fridge and stole a can of Dr Pepper to drink. He introduced me to four Charlie Chaplins, two named Jake and two named Tom, and went upstairs.

The Jakes and Toms were on coke and acting it so I went to look for Robinson. I walked up some stairs and found myself level with the terrace built up the slope of the garden, a floor up from the back door. Robinson was outside talking to a man who had the lumpy, tense silhouette of a snooker referee.

I went back down and, just as I opened to kitchen door, I saw Robinson jump over a low gate and run into the ginnel under the house. A dog barked. I heard a man mumble of violence and Robinson. Without looking at anyone, I turned and walked through the house, taking a bottle of red wine as if it was my own, and left through the front door.

Robinson was hiding behind a trade bin at the end of a row of shops. He paid for our taxi and gave me a copy of a JG Ballard book through the cab window before the driver drove away.

Two weeks later, walking home after midnight, I thought I saw Robinson ahead of me. I followed him down The Moor but he didn't stop. He walked into the subway under the ringroad and when I got to the corner where I had last seen him, he was gone. The city, as dark and worn as Robinson, filled the space where Robinson had been, and I walked home on my own.