It was the summer of 1994 and Philippe had secured for us both, via one of his uncles who worked in marketing and promo, a cushy job distributing lighters and T shirts and other bits of merchandizing amongst client bars all over the Algarve of a select number of beer and cider brands. The job came with a car, petrol money and a daily stipend for our expenses and Philippe’s dad kindly lent us a flat in Vilamoura for the duration of our stay. The idea was that we would spend an easy week driving around the Algarve getting caned and exchanging beer mats for drinks here and there. As I remember we had a tremendous laugh. The car we had been given for the week was a bright red Peugeot 205 that Phillipe and other friends of his had completely trashed the year before on another promo job – for a radio, in this instance –  in the centre of Portugal. The stories I have been told about that job in the summer of 1993 are epic and extremely funny but they are not mine to tell. All I need say about all that is that they almost wrote the car off one afternoon – deciding to try a spot of rally driving on some dusty back roads near Figueira da Foz, a large megaphone bolted to the top of the car – managing to drive it into a ditch at some speed and flipping it on to its side. None of the three occupants were injured in this case but the car suffered a severe pasting. Philippe and I got the same car to drive the following year and it was mostly bright red but still very dented and scratched along its right side from the “accident” the year before. No megaphone for us this time.

My recollections of the week are something of a blur. The flat we had been lent was in a nice condominium five minutes drive from Vilamora marina and it had a communal pool we were entitled to use. We would get up mid to late morning and have a swim, clearing our heads a bit before heading out around lunchtime to our target zone for the day. We had a long list of client bars that we had to visit and our only job was to drop in on them in turn to hand them branded merchandise that corresponded to the brands of beer and cider they served their customers. The merchandise was junk really; ugly beer mats, naff T shirts and shitty lighters and the like, but we had box after box of all this to get rid of and we opted to use it all as currency in exchange for free beers and food. Mostly it went very well for us, most of our clients being happy to oblige us. Others saw us for what we were, a couple of students looking to take the piss a bit and have a laugh, giving us short thrift and sending us on our way after relieving us of what was theirs. Towards the end of the week, despite our wheeling and dealing, we began to run dangerously short of spending money and on our last day I remember us being very worried that we wouldn’t even have enough petrol money to get the car back up to Lisbon. We dropped in to a little restaurant on Quatro Estradas – just off Almancil – for a lunch of chicken and chips to discuss our precarious situation. We sat outside on the terrace overlooking the dusty parking lot. The owner was incredibly nice and very attentive with our requests for more beer, a bit more of this, might we have another one of that.  He cleared our plates away once we had finished and asked us what we might like for desert. I asked him for a coffee, Philippe saying he wanted nothing. As the man went back inside for my coffee Philippe looked at me with a demonic grin and said “fuga?” I knew exactly what he meant and got up quietly, heading over to our car at the other end of the crowded parking lot. My heart was beating fast as I got the car started and drove it as slowly as possible around all the parked cars and up to where Philippe was still sitting. As I approached him, he calmly got up, walked over and got in. “Embora!” he said. At this point my nerves got the better of me and in my haste I jumped on the throttle, spinning the wheels in the sandy gravel and sending a huge cloud of dust into the air before shooting us at high speed between the cars towards what I was convinced was another exit that lead onto the road towards Quarteira, only to find it barred with a chain. A nervous hand-break turn later, lots of grinding of tires in the gravel and more clouds of dust, we raced back up the way we came, past the terrace on our left where the owner of the restaurant was standing holding my coffee and looking at us in a state of disbelief as we shot out onto the road – all screeching tires –  in our very red, very banged up and very recognizable 205. Poor man; I felt awful about having done that to him for years to come. Next day we drove back up to Lisbon with just enough money for petrol and without getting arrested.

When we got back to Lisbon we heard about Chris’s climbing accident, he having miraculously survived a 17 meter fall onto jagged rocks and being lucky enough not to crack his skull open as he came down only because Miguel’s foot, by chance, happened to be between his head and a very hard place. I remember going to see him the next day after our return to Lisbon at the Hospital de Sao José. He was in a pretty bad way, clearly in a lot of pain, with multiple fractures and lacerations all over his body and with one of his legs in traction. He was stuck in a grimy, airless room with another two or three patients, his family and many of us friends hovering timidly around his bed. What I remember most vividly was the heat. It was damned hot in Lisbon over those days and his ward felt like The Black Hole of Calcutta. I came back a few days later with an electric fan that had been gathering dust in the garage of my parent’s house and a cassette of mantras, as chanted by a Buddhist monk and that I had inherited from one of my aunts via my Mother, that I thought he might find soothing and healing. The fan was put to good use, I’m told. The cassette got played once, for about thirty seconds, and was never heard from again.

My Mother brought that tape back with her from the US in 1989 after spending a spell with her sister in Miami who was recovering from cancer. This Buddhist eminence helped her through her recovery. On side A, the man talked you through a process of relaxation of your body and your mind. On side B he invoked powerful healing visualizations. I had  listened to the tape a number of times and had found it quite engaging. My parents lived in the Algarve in 1989 and my youngest sister Emma was around six at that time. My Mother tells me she would play the tape, telling Emma that now they were going to meditate.

“What is “meditate”, Mummy?”

“Well it is sort of like relaxing and thinking at the same time…”

“Ok….”

They would lie on the floor as the guru started his chants and directions….and within about three minutes Emma would be snoring. Perhaps this is what happened to Chris.

Chris’s family lived in Mexico for a period in his teens and he often used to refer to it in conversation –  “before we lived in Mexico” or “after we left Mexico” – in a way that had you understand that the experience had been a defining moment in his life. We used to joke about that with him. I didn’t know him in Mexico, so I cannot say. What I do know is that his climbing accident changed him profoundly. He wasn’t killed that day by a stroke of luck. Any young man in his early twenties, faced brutally with his own mortality, must have a before and then an after.

Chris is prospering and in rude health.