We Had It So Good by Linda Grant

No one washed enough, there were no showers, only huge cast-iron bathtubs with leaking tarnished chrome taps and a rubber hose attachment if you wanted to wash your hair.
    Ivan obtained some acid. The girls said no, they wouldn’t do it. Grace was entering a Marxist phase, which Ivan had already worked through at boarding school, and she sat in the garden, her back against the fence, reading Trotsky. She was not interested in altered consciousness; Andrea was, but had powerful instincts of self-preservation, having seen her father’s calamitous mental collapse at the time of his bankruptcy. She knew there was no safety net, no home to go to or private sanatorium if things turned weird. She would be in the public asylum, forgotten by everyone.
    Sitting on the back step with Ivan, waiting to peak, Stephen grew increasingly astounded by a dandelion. This, he realized, should have been his field of study all along. It was a massive proclamation of the sun, its vast gaseous starry being, and all the laws of geometry! Everything you needed to know about the physical world was right here in one common flower which grew between the cracks of Oxford pavements, ignored, and then transmuted itself overnight into a ball of cloudy white tendrils. The study of the dandelion was the path to the Nobel, so obvious yet he was, as far as he knew, the first person to study it. Unless, he thought, in a queasy pang of paranoia, John Baines was secretly racing toward Stockholm.
    An hour later he understood his error. Milk was a whole white floating universe and forget dandelions, milk was the answer. Itcame to him that he now knew that his own dissertation could be summed up in a single short elegant paragraph that he wrote on Ivan’s pale forearm, his own having too many black hairs to make a surface for a ballpoint pen. When he excitedly examined the arm the following day, all he could see was a series of wavy lines.
    Ivan looked at him as they walked through the Parks toward the river. Stephen’s hair was a huge black Afro, standing upright round his head, and a round beard covered half his face. He was jabbering about milk. Ivan had a thought of uncompromising clarity as a swan moodily swam toward them, its small eyes sending downy messages into the reeds.
    â€œI know how we could turn the whole world on,” he said to Stephen.
    But Stephen was distracted by a rabbit which somersaulted over a toadstool and, turning into a small boat, was boarded by a duckling with a green face and very blue eyes.
    â€œCould you actually make acid?” Ivan asked. “Would you know how?”
    â€œI guess so, I’d need to find the paper, it’s probably in the library.”
    Stephen tore out the pages and took them back to his fume hood at Dyson Perrins. Within a week he had obtained his first sample, and a month later Ivan, who appeared to know every freak and pothead at Oxford, had established a distribution network, selling it at a pound a tab. Once a week he would take the train to London and return with a shoulder bag made of a piece of Turkish carpet, filled with money.
    â€œWho are you selling it to?” Stephen asked.
    â€œJust people I know. And people they know, word gets around.”
    He had created a kind of advertising flyer which consisted of photographs of girls’ breasts with smiley faces where their nipples should be. Andrea and Grace had posed for the pictures, their titswere admired all over Oxford and far beyond. He named the tabs Mister Button.
    Mister Button bought Stephen a secondhand car, a red, two-door open-top Triumph Herald, only six years old.
    When he looks back, this is the high-water mark, he and Andrea tearing through Oxford, their hair flying, his paisley scarf whipping in the breeze, her hand on his knee and all the old things of that old city vanishing as they got out of town, driving on and on until they reached the outskirts of London and turned, abashed, not yet ready to