‘An’ ye had tae pick tonight?’ Bobby was finding the application and commitment needed to maintain their equilibrium inversely proportionate to the joy it now afforded him. They were both only twenty-two and their conversations already reminded him of unhappier times back at home in McPhail Drive, when Harry and Ethel, his mum and dad, argued over Gary. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
‘Ah’m workin’, Lizzie. Just like you are! Ye knew this when we came out here. It’s no’ aw fuckin’ sunshine in paradise, is it?’ he scowled.
But, by and large, it actually had been. In their first full year as a working couple, they had been happily inseparable. Their lives were exciting. Admittedly, their wages were as basic as the lodgings they were forced to share with six other reps, but Lizzie was used to such domestic congestion. At least this new crowded house had sunshine, and for Lizzie it had Bobby. Things got a tiny bit more congested when Hammy May flew out late on in the season of 1982. Hammy was a clever young man. He had aced all of his Highers with considerable ease and his proud father had lined up a variety of options in the Diplomatic Corps, where he worked, on condition that Hammy’s subsequent progress through university was smooth. A life of comparative privilege stretched out before him. All he had to do was work hard and follow this predetermined mouse trail.
In fact, Hammy had inherited Stanley May’s pioneering spirit, but he had very different ideas about how he would apply it. Despite acceptances from numerous notable universities, Hamish May turned his nose up at all of them, preferring the chance to work five months of the year as a beach club dogsbody for an unscrupulous holiday company.
At each summer season’s closing, they returned home to a bleak, lifeless Kilmarnock, which, when compared to the vibrant Costa Brava, looked like all colour had been drained from its structures and people. The three friends stayed in the Cassidy home, now free of any familial hassle. In a thoughtless move, which only widened the gulf between Bobby and his brother, the younger man betrayed their father’s principles and used his part of the sum left to them to acquire the council house through Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy initiative. He argued that it was an investment. Bobby’s younger sister, Hettie had moved to the Dowanhill student dorms near Glasgow University in the summer of 1983, and his tortured brother Gary had returned to his army barracks in London nearly a full year earlier.
Lizzie King’s initial dissatisfaction with Hammy being the couple’s third wheel quickly diminished. Her boyfriend was a young man who craved – perhaps even depended on – close and unquestioning friendship; and even his love relationships had to be resolutely optimistic and upbeat. There was no place for contemplative reflection of events past. Bobby was a laconic young guy but with a relentless eye for the present tense. Unshakeable positivity and a nonconfrontational attitude were the sole CV requirements for a position at Bobby Cassidy’s side. Since Hammy and Lizzie both understood these crucial rules of engagement, they all quickly settled into their primary roles.
After only five weeks working in the hotel’s outdoor beach bar, Bobby got his opportunity. Lizzie’s friend, an occasional sexual partner of Sergio, the Entertainments Manager, put a word in for Bobby and he was given a week’s unpaid trial as a DJ. Bobby had a degree of freedom to play his own music selections in a low-risk, unpressurised, day-time slot at the hotel. Even beyond his probation, the gig paid little, but it was a substantial step up from hearing ‘Haw son, can ah have a Slow Comfortable Screw against a Wall, eh?’ five hundred times a day. Bobby loved the new job. It had been spine tingling for him to hear Afrika Bambaataa, Man Parrish or Indeep blasting out of the impressive speakers even if it was to a largely uninterested audience. It also gave him the space to practise blending and linking the records in ways that the old Heatwave Disco’s birthday party or wedding function demographic hadn’t permitted. He’d even tested out some unusual cuts, such as New Order’s energetic New York-influenced ‘Confusion’ mixed into Prince’s smooth pop classic ‘Little Red Corvette’.
Soon after, Derek Dees, the semi-legendary DJ for Valentino’s, the hotel’s bar, vacated the booth, lured away by a bigger and better gig. So, after just a month as this old sorcerer’s apprentice, Bobby nervously put his name forward as his replacement. His personal playlists would have to go but Bobby was more than happy to give up such experimental freedom and toe the party line when he eventually graduated to Valentino’s main stage. The equipment decks and sound quality there were far more advanced, although his billing was unusual to say the least. DJ Bobby appeared in support of an astonishing magic show in which a dexterous Spanish woman, known professionally as Sticky Vicky, pulled unusual objects from her vagina. Lizzie didn’t believe Bobby initially when he described the elegance with which ping-pong balls, eggs, sausages and even razor blades were excavated from deep inside this bizarre woman.
‘Ye want tae see this,’ he told a sceptical Lizzie and a stunned Hammy. ‘She slides aw this stuff oot fae her fanny like she wis a fuckin’ ballet dancer. It’s like … art or somethin’.’
Hammy demanded to see it for himself. And their next night off, Lizzie and Hammy got complimentary tickets for one of Vicky Leyton’s six-times-a-night, half-hour adult cabaret show. Bobby played extended remixes of Wham’s ‘Club Tropicana’ on rotation until her performance began.
On their days off, Bobby and Lizzie participated in the occasional booze cruises, and often the midnight swims too. And until only very recently, Hammy had sex on various beaches with various female tourists. The frightening prospect of ‘dying of ignorance’ had become a real possibility, and thus curtailed his activities.
All three had only just left their teenage years behind them. They agreed that a prescriptive life of domestic drudgery and living on Thatcher’s meagre and diminishing benefits back in grey, miserable Kilmarnock was for other mugs; the mugs who only got out here to sample this lifestyle once a year, for a week if they were lucky.
But, just as soon as it looked like it would propel them forward, their luck ran out. Lizzie got pregnant and had to return home to her family’s congested flat. Having signed a contract for the rest of the ’84 summer season up until November, Bobby – encouraged by Hammy – made the selfish decision to remain. Unsurprisingly, it was the beginning of the end for the young lovers. Lizzie suffered a miscarriage three weeks after returning to Scotland. Bobby and Hammy came home at the end of the season, but Lizzie continued staying with her family until they were due back out in spring 1985. Although the couple seemed to have put the heartbreak behind them, for Bobby at least, things were never the same. Too much had changed. Serious adult issues had intervened in Bobby Cassidy’s Peter Pan lifestyle, and Lizzie King had been tainted by them too. He couldn’t look at her in the same way. He couldn’t ever admit to her that he was relieved. Better to just put distance between them and avoid any emotional confrontation.
Now – four years after immersing themselves in its uncomplicated warmth – the holiday capital of the Costa Blanca had suddenly lost all the appeal it had once held for them. Lizzie, the girlfriend that Bobby Cassidy once thought would be the love of his life, told him she was pregnant again. As she spoke the words, a loud roar went up from the beachfront bars. Diego Maradona had just punched the ball over Peter Shilton’s head and into the England net. By the time he had waltzed and snaked through the entire English defence to score one of the greatest World Cup goals ever seen, Bobby and Lizzie’s relationship was over. She had hurtfully jibed that this time the baby wasn’t his, but Javier’s; the head rep at the hotel complex where they all worked. Hammy later reckoned his friend had dodged a bullet, but it would take a while – and a decision to move to a different resort – for Bobby to see it that way.
Chapter Three
October 2014. Shanghai, China
Joseph Miller can’t conceive that he has anything in common with this astonishingly beautiful and composed young woman. But there are many things: not solely time and circumstance. He too had once been able to
conceal a darker side in the pursuit of businesslike normality. The development of new commercial relationships requires dogged positivity. No one at a conference junket or promotional lunch wants to hear about family pressures or depressed, dangerous thoughts. Such coruscating events are populated by the never-been-better brigade; recessions were things that happened to other companies, other people who didn’t – or couldn’t – work as hard. Others with less stamina. With smaller dicks. Men and women.
Joseph can’t fake this master-of-the-universe bullshit anymore. For nearly a decade, he has been principally responsible for overseas business development at his firm of design consultants. He had foreseen that the ridiculous growth enjoyed by the construction industry in the first few years of the century was as false as the banking philosophies on which they were built. The boom years of credit-based prospecting couldn’t possibly last, despite Tony Blair’s deceptively unbridled and smiling optimism. Exporting expertise overseas to those countries whose public infrastructure was way behind the UK’s was a clear strategy. His partners had backed his theory but on condition that he was the principal – or sole – focus of it. It had been a shot to nothing for them. Joseph and his small team had been successful; up to a point. This initially made him feel free. Free of the mundane matters of business management, but also free of the demeaning barbs and the financial handcuffs of Lucinda, his bitter ex-wife. Now though, he is finding it requires a level of energetic sociability that is as foreign to him as many of the customs he is expected to know and remember. While domestic work is on the increase once more, profits in overseas work are down. What’s more, the high-risk international game that took Joseph from Libya to the Middle East to India and onto the promised land of China, has left a legacy in the form of an unsustainable level of financial exposure. In the early days the opportunities rolled in, their designs elevated the profile of the practice and some of them even resulted in projects that made decent profits. But then the Arab Spring changed much of the political and cultural landscape for many of the practice’s foreign opportunities. Reckless American financiers and bankers did the rest for any necessary economic momentum. In the last year the firm has lost ground just as Joseph has lost interest. His impatient younger partners blamed the former firmly on the latter and effectively sidelined their firm’s remaining active founder as a result.
‘Sir, are you fine?’ A new voice. Less serene, more insistent. An unusual turn of phrase.
‘Em … aye. Yes, sorry.’ Joseph is standing in the corridor. The hotel’s Manager of Guest Relations has gone. An older Asian woman – presumably a fellow guest – is now leaning in to hear him answer. He has no idea how long he’s been standing there. His room door is closed behind him and the colourful basket is parked carefully against the wall, the papers having been folded in half and tucked neatly inside the bow.
His journey down to reception to get a new room keycard is punctuated by a few strange looks and a small English child repeatedly asking his mother why the man in the lift has no shoes or socks on. No explanation is given by any of the adult occupants and the child remains ignored.
Later that evening, Joseph Miller walks aimlessly through the bustling lanes and squares of Xintiandi. He has polished shoes on and a freshly laundered, black Calvin Klein suit. A crisp white shirt, open at the neck, completes the metamorphosis. He blends in to the new cosmopolitan Shanghai seamlessly, like any other poised professional man of fifty years of age. It’s a popular local demographic. When he puts his mind to it, the mask can still be very convincing. If only its power could be maintained. He strolls through the narrow passages with their carefully reconstructed facades, as he has done many times before. As an example of urban place-making, Joseph considers it to be amongst the best he’s ever witnessed. It has all the proper emotional ingredients of yearning, romance, memory and connection that make all great public spaces magnetic. But it is all based on a lie; an elaborate stage set that has little real authenticity. What’s more, to clear a path for it required the brutal displacement of almost four thousand Shanghainese families. This whole style / substance / collateral damage conundrum is one he understands only too well. He feels a curious belonging here. He is a stranger in a strange land, but one which has embraced so much in its relentless desire to be accepted on more recognisably Western terms, while stoically trying to hold onto aspects of a culture and tradition that are as old as any on earth.
He sits on the periphery of activity, observing people as they come and go. He watches a well-dressed couple approach, remarkable only in that the bulky man is wheelchair-bound and his tiny female companion struggles to push him across uneven cobblestones. She looks exhausted; he looks defeated, being unable to offer any assistance whatsoever. They are a difficult couple to age, but by Western standards they would never be referred to as elderly. The man appears almost totally dependent. The woman applies the brake at a table near Joseph’s. She sits and the relief spreading across her face is immediately obvious. They don’t speak or look at each other. Is he her cross to bear? Does their love for each other render such sacrifice beyond all question? Are there times when both crave the release that a suffocating pillow would bring?
The woman brings two drinks back to the table: one for her and the other, with a straw, for him. Before she has sipped from her own, she offers him the straw. His mouth barely opens to receive it. Liquid dribbles from the corner of his mouth and frustration flashes in his eyes. She lifts a napkin and dabs like a patient mother would a baby. Joseph is saddened by the scene; saddened more by the brutal truth of his own situation. At least the couple has company, compromised though it is. He opens his notebook and writes: From the moment we are born, we are all essentially preparing to die. Some prepare better than others, that’s all.
Joseph Miller considers such things purely because he has never shared a love to light the fire of unquestioning devotion in his heart.
He nurses a coffee. He unfolds the papers printed and copied onto Shanghai Doubletree’s headed notepaper. They comprise a month or so of increasingly concerned messages from home; from back in Glasgow. Amanda, his all-too-faithful secretary, has obviously been to the flat. He sometimes worries that she has too much access, but in truth there is nothing to hide. She knows it all. There’s a note of gratitude from the Scottish Labour Party, thanking him for voting ‘NO’ to Scottish Independence, even though he didn’t. He considers the Labour Party he had once been so loyal to much as he does the vinyl-era mobile DJs: on a downward arc headed towards virtual obsolescence. There is a scanned copy of a letter from the NHS. As fiftieth birthday greetings go it is brutally direct. It invites him to dig a wee wooden spatula into his poo and send it back to them. But at least they have bothered to write and mark the date, bless them. Unsurprisingly, there are no such acknowledgements from the tiny band of people he refers to as family. Those boats have long since been burned. The rest of the papers are exclusively from work. Records of numerous calls and printed emails from his younger business partners, apparently worried about his mental state since he went ‘off the reservation’ at the beginning of September. Amanda has clearly been tracking his movements through credit-card transactions. And there is one from his retired former colleague, Carlos Martorell, with whom he founded the practice almost twenty years previously.
This one intrigues him. The two men haven’t properly communicated since the day of Andy Masson’s funeral in 2004. Masson was the third ‘M’. The practice had been christened M(cubed) to avoid any suggestion of hierarchy or the need to explain an alphabetical basis for the original Vaudevillian name, Martorell, Masson & Miller. In truth, Joseph Miller was the instigator of the practice, and formalised it along with his university friend from Barcelona. Joseph liked the idea of them feeling like a band; of them having values and principles that would govern their work. Andy Masson had come into the picture a few weeks later, when the Lennon & McCartney had realised that they needed a pragmatic George Harrison to keep their boundless design
energy and innovation grounded in practicality. Joseph Miller held to the view that a Ringo wasn’t necessary. It was all about the attitude and the creativity. The practice name hadn’t yet been established and M(cubed) seemed clever and relevant. Andy had provided that sound judgement and business nous for twelve years, until cancer of the oesophagus took his life with brutal speed and at the tragically young age of forty-five. Andy was older than his two partners. He had married Carole when both were young and they had seemed blissfully happy. He was well liked by everyone at the firm and his measured, unruffled demeanour had defused many difficult meetings. In the latter years, his role seemed to be regularly reminding his colleagues why they had actually elected to be in business with each other in the first place.
Andy’s death changed everything. He had – rightly in Joseph’s opinion – been the driving force behind the development of a realistic succession plan: young, talented designers were openly encouraged to understand their potential place in the future of the practice. They were given their heads to a large extent, in terms of delivering projects, which freed up Carlos to focus on client relationships and Joseph to concentrate on the initial design concepts. It was a successful formula. M(cubed) won a number of regional design awards, it had a healthy financial position and when Andy was forced to withdraw from the practice in the summer of 2004, it employed fifty-eight people on a full-time basis.
The only time Andy had put a foot wrong in his time guiding the management of the practice was to promote Felix Masson to the position of partner. It was the decision that ultimately led to the end of Joseph and Carlos’s friendship. In Joseph’s opinion, Felix was a moronic product of a public-school system that continued to value connections, background and the status of an established family name over talent and an ability to empathise with people from all social levels. The time leading up to Andy’s funeral had been understandably strained and difficult for everyone, but Felix’s elevation to replace his dad as Finance Director had been rushed, and worse, agreed between Andy and Carlos without Joseph’s full involvement in the discussions. Carlos had prompted the discussion for what he believed to be a good reason. The firm was going to lose a key figure and his shares would have cost the practice a considerable amount to buy back. Andy had therefore acceded to Carlos’s plan to simply transfer the majority of them to Felix, at a price to be repaid to Carole over a five-year term. Joseph found out about this at Andy’s expansive West Kilbride house only hours after they put him in the ground. Rather than accept that Andy had any part in such subterfuge, it suited Joseph to believe the manipulative Carlos had ulterior motives concerning Joseph’s own 25% stake.
The Man Who Loved Islands Page 3