"When I was a young boy / My father took me into the city / To see a marching band"
[My Chemical Romance]

That was the song stuck in my head, and a marching beat, when I walked around the corner and down the street to the supermarket. Still playing as I roamed the aisles in a kind of reverie that supermarkets will put you in. Still, as I stepped out of the cool, humming shade of the store and stood transfixed at the top of the steps down to the footpath.
He came into sharp focus, everything else blurring into the background. Impossibly, incongruously, coming up the footpath from the Cambridge Road end. In a blue coat with epaulets and tassels and brass buttons catching the sun, blue pants with a silver stripe down the side, a blue peaked cap tucked under his arm, and black polished shoes.
It would be wrong to say he caught my eye. He just had it all along. As he passed by me, his face changed into a strange, knowing, half-polite, half-evil smile. I smiled and stayed, staring after him, till he walked on up the road out of sight.