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You walk along the lakeshore late at night and head eastward from Sunnyside Baths which is a naked castle whose towers guard nothing but themselves, or an Eastern pavilion filled with dark musicians and dancers, along Sunnyside beach and the kids' park with its paper dinosaurs and green and purple monsters gloating in the moonlight, down to the shore where you stoop and find white pebbles almost as thin as communion wafers which you send skimming and skipping across the black water as the silver sliver of the moon skims across the sky. The lake is deliciously, hellishly cold and you think of the thousands of swimmers of times gone by who shed their clothes in the great pavilion and shivering and ridiculous in their navy blue swimsuits ran across the burning sands to the scathing water. Now the fervent voices of the summer people carry all the way down to High Park, from the rides at the amusement park, from the ghosts of the ferris wheel and the roller coaster which lifted them shrieking and squealing to heaven. Farther on is the Palais Royale where the big bands played their brassy satin music and dancers danced until they dropped, then the rowing club and the Masonic Temple of Rameses. All this on the fringe, the shoreline of this most exotic of Kanadian cities.

The tennis courts in the feeble moonlight looked like cages for invisible midnight animals, or ghostly arenas, or boards on which laser-lit figures might play three-dimensional chess games in a futuristic film. Noman and Kali took up their positions on one of them and brought out flourescent lime green tennis balls. There was no net, so their eyes had to draw the necessary line across the court. The secret mouths of the trees all around them spread the rumours and gossip of the night. The players looked at each other over the imaginary net and laughed and began to exchange the crazy glowing balls which became comets and asteroids dizzily splocked through space, sent spinning on impossible missions throughout the galaxies. They were one with the night and the wicked trees and the soft lisp of the lake as it articulated something which lay at the edge of their understanding. They played their midnight game with no one keeping score and therefore no one winning.

The past was a place of games played with deadly earnest, the terrible arena of childhood. He was very young and he smelled of melting running shoes and schoolyard dust and warm apples and peanut butter sandwiches. The girls at noon bounced hard rubber balls under their knees or flung them rhythmically at the school wall, chanting in girl language: ordinary, moving, left foot, right foot, curtsies, salutsies, turnsies. The boys watched them, fascinated and bewildered and afraid. Apples, peaches, pears and plums! the girls screamed as they flung themselves in great suicidal leaps into the whirling maw of their skipping ropes. Tell me when your birthday comes! And dancing in the frenzied centre they called out the names of the months of the year - this year, any year: 'JANuary, FEBruary...' until the schoolyard was a whirling circling planet of tastes and smells and colours and sounds erupting into chaos like the first dream of his life in which the sky broke up into a jigsaw of faces and figures and mythical animals and then it all fell down.

The boys played their urgent games in another part of the yard, shouting out the latest obscenities, testing newly discovered words which were packed with forbidden knowledge, the beautiful foul language of their bodies. 'Frere Jacques!' they screamed. 'Sonny lay Matina!' And later, alone in their beds, the foam of their dreams, sweet sperm of the night, the glorious vulgar syllables of youth spewed forth, unchecked.

And the past was a place of pools where he swam every day in summer, a place called the Mineral Baths behind the old Roma Apartments between Quebec and Gothic avenues. The Minnies, it was called, and it had two pools - one an ordinary pool into which astounding divers flung themselves, often backwards, from impossible heights, and another pool which for some reason was darker and colder, the water freezing and black, where hardly anyone swam. He'd float in this one on his back and gaze at the big Victorian house on the hill, and wonder what country he was in. He lay there burning with cold, orgasmic cold, in August, and later he would slowly walk away eating ice cream and shivering and blazing with a delicious lonely joy.

The past was the secret and mysterious city, the city within the city, the city of the alleyways and swimming pools and the city of the lakeshore. And the lake, which cared nothing for time, would often cast up strange relics of the future, as well as the past, upon its shores.

A solitary figure moved along the beach behind the talking trees, walking barefoot in the sand and avoiding the dead fish and plastic cups, the condoms and bottles and weird debris of the night. He was a midnight swimmer, and he walked to the tennis court which was bathed in lunar light and stood there for a long time, staring at the phantom players. Both of them were familiar to him; one of them was himself.

Noman was acutely aware that someone was watching them. 'Suddenly I don't like this place,' he told Kali. And there the game ended. He pulled her away from the tennis court and the inscrutable indifferent lake winking and glittering in the distance, the quicksilver water, the dinosaurs and saxophones and ghostly dancers.

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