The Man Who Loved Islands

by David F. Ross

  ‘Put some music on if you want,’ she says.

  He picks up her iPod. It is connected to a tiny speaker. Portability is the prime characteristic of Megan’s lifestyle. He flicks through a few playlists. There aren’t many. He presses shuffle on the Motown Gold collection.

  ‘(Love Is Like a) Heatwave’ by Martha & The Vandellas. … Fuck sake, thinks Joseph Miller. The signs are everywhere.

  Chapter Twelve

  October 2014. Ibiza, Spain

  Bobby Cassidy stares out over the Mediterranean through freshly cleaned, frameless glass. It provides a clarity of view – if not thought – that has been missing for the past four months. The few remaining rivulets of moisture succumb to gravity and fall slowly. Everything seems to move at such a pace at this time of the year. With the previous weekend’s closing parties signalling the end of the season, the vibe has shifted. It has packed up its stimulants and its effervescence and has headed for the hills to hibernate and recharge.

  Ibiza has been the perfect form of isolation for Bobby: secluded and protected from much of the negativity that has ruthlessly enveloped other parts of the world’s economy and security. Only facile positivity has prospered here. But that is different now. Bobby still misses the buzz of the early 90s, but he isn’t sure why. It was a time of excess; of numerous, faceless, nameless young women. A vacuum of emotions that ended up spilling out on roulette wheels and shamefully destructive, early-morning card games. He sometimes feels he misses it simply because it feels like he should. He misses Gary only because something inside him tells him he should. But in more lucid moments, he recognises these feelings as guilt, not nostalgia.

  It is maintenance time at the villa, when the reckless disregard shown for it at other times of the year is normally rectified. Bobby used to love this time almost as much as the anticipation in late May of it returning refreshed; but not anymore. His body aches. More pertinently, his fingers ache. He stretches them and tries to place them flat to the glass, but – like other parts of his body – the disobedient bastards won’t play ball. Fleshy saddle-bags of relaxed muscle drape under the back of each arm. Everything is descending as gravity swoops like Ali in Zaire. Bobby Cassidy had it whupped in the early rounds, but now he’s fucked from all the effort. He has nothing left to give. He watches the dark clouds amassing on the western horizon. As climatic metaphors go, it is still too early to say whether they are a portent of unsettling and restless times to come, or a reflection of the unsatisfying and unhappy year just past. They seem to be static – undecided, threatening – a gathering vapour shelf like the Assyrian army, which once prepared for invasion from a similar position.

  ‘Storm’s comin’. Ah’m headin’ intae town for some stuff before it hits. Ye want anythin’?’ Hamish May’s voice drifts down through the sparse, open-plan volumes. It echoes and bounces and pirouettes on the cool terrazzo before finally reaching Bobby Cassidy.

  ‘Naw,’ says Bobby without turning his head. It is unlikely that Hamish has heard his reply, so mournfully was it delivered. A squeak of distant wheels and then the door shuts. Bobby is alone; only him and his fevered thoughts.

  The house became his in 1994, back in the days when it seemed impossible to conceive of life being any better. For the past twenty years he has lived here with Hammy – the ever-faithful Hammy – whose very existence Bobby Cassidy has materially altered for the better; and then for the worse. He acquired the house when the money started rolling in. He was the toast of the Balearic Beat scene at the time. Worlds and oysters, he thinks. The cool, minimalist, modernist structure rising through the verdant pines and olive groves of Can Germa was the perfect motif for his success. It is notched into the sloping hills of the White Isle, with panoramic views over San Antonio bay. After negotiating a snaking road, which narrows significantly as you approach foreboding gates, the house is entered at the top of the slope and at its highest point. Visitors to it traverse a rooftop bridge across the dramatic rocky terrain below. Those with vertigo struggle with the open, metal-mesh floor. The house is separated from the rest of the land like a modern-day castle; if constructed in the early part of the island’s inhabitation, archers and serfs with vats of boiling oil would’ve manned its parapets. Bobby and Hammy drove golf balls off the roof in the early days, trying to hit hole-in-ones into the various swimming pools that punctuated the hillside below them.

  Those lucky enough to make it inside cascade down four levels until they reach the voluminous main living space with its prominent terrace, looking to all purposes like a ship’s bow. Or at least they used to. The party set don’t come up here anymore. There are other, better experiences, ones not promoted by a lonely, depressed fifty-year-old club DJ chained to a previous era and unwilling or unable to leave it. The fear has set in and it is preparing for the long haul. Where once an invite up to the hills was an indication of cultural acceptance by the ‘in’ crowd, it now represents a journey back in time; like a reluctant stop on a tour of Ibiza’s many sites of historic interest. Cultural enlightenment is not the type of sightseeing Ibiza is known for. Hedonism doesn’t live in the past. It doesn’t actually care much for the future either. It is myopically focused on the here and now.

  Bobby’s ‘here and now’ has become a prison sentence of the mind; an ‘open’ sentence, admittedly, and one being served out in a beautiful paradise, but he still feels just as confined as those incarcerated in the moderate freedom Devil’s Island once afforded. The drawbridge once signified a lifestyle of enviable exclusivity; now it simply reinforces its occupier’s isolation.

  The house was once described as an ‘architectural icon’; a refined steel and glass composition lauded by European design journals, influenced by such luminaries as Le Corbusier and the early houses of the American modernist architect Richard Meier. With Bobby’s music industry connections, it was, perhaps more prosaically, used as a location for music videos. This initially increased its value. On one of these shoots, Simon Le Bon casually offered Bobby £3 million for it. The worldwide financial crisis of 2008 hit the tourist-reliant islands hard, and Hammy urged Bobby to reach out to the singer to determine if he was still interested. But Bobby mined hidden depths of natural optimism and convinced Hammy it was right to hold back; that all of life’s various crises invariably pass. Six long years have passed since then, and – like the house they occupied – any remaining remnants of that optimism have crumbled due to lack of regular care and attention. Now it represents a millstone around Bobby’s neck. Even the critics have reassessed their opinion of both the house and its once-revered Spanish designer. Letters discovered after his death have exposed him as a Francophile fascist and his most famous structure – the current Casa Cassidy – is now universally denigrated as a ‘big, white, sterile fridge dropped brutally and insensitively to intimidate an unsuspecting sylvan context’. Its perceived sterility is apparently contagious. Bobby turned fifty in January and a hastily arranged out-of-season party attracted only five guests, all of whom were male and two of whom were even older than Bobby. Each guest had a choice of two bedrooms, and two exercised that choice before 11 pm. Some white powder was distributed but only in the form of an Askit to fend off a guest’s developing headache. In the crushing aftermath, Bobby has considered the potential of returning to Scotland, although he’s been resident on this sun-drenched Mediterranean rock for the same amount of time as the bigger, wetter one where he grew up. Home, to Bobby, is now a vague, out-of-reach concept where the past means something tangible and where real friendships and family connections sustain him, not torment him. Hammy’s is a friendship that endures, but Bobby accepts that Hammy, too, is trapped, and by more obvious and practical circumstances than his own. He regards the storm clouds that are most definitely heading towards him, and he yearns for that past and for all of the people he ruthlessly and recklessly dismissed.

  The rain pounds against the glass. For men who grew up in the west of Scotland, attuned, year-round, to leaning in, head down, collar turned
up against the elements, it is still a remarkable sight. Rain such as this, carried on volatile weather systems working their way up and over from the African edge of the Mediterranean, doesn’t visit these islands often, but when it does it brings life to a complete standstill. Perversely, it only makes Bobby Cassidy miss that evasive notion of home even more.

  It has only been five days since Bobby’s last night at Las Dalias, but already the daily winter pattern has been established. The Scotsmen get up around midday. Hammy makes lunch and then heads out into town. He comes back around four in the afternoon and they watch television for around four hours until it is time to eat, and then generally to think about going back to bed. Bobby has just turned on the large, flat-screen in the main room. He flicks through around thirty music channels, all playing variations of essentially the same song. Everything here sounds like ‘Summer’, which was presumably Calvin Harris’s original intention. Bobby Cassidy was once where the superstar DJ from Dumfries is now, albeit without the worldwide coverage and the absurd Galáctico-style remuneration. He is now totally sick of anything 128 bpm. It has been everywhere, every day; the island’s national anthem for the year. A decade ago, a younger Harris – then going by the name of Adam Wiles – asked Bobby for an autograph. He happily obliged. The present-day Harris, briefly visiting, blanked Bobby when he sought a few brief words with him. Both men are from western Scotland, but Bobby considers that one has apparently forgotten the common courtesy inherent in sharing a background. As far as Bobby Cassidy is now concerned, Calvin Harris can go and fuck himself up the arse with the nosecone from one of his fleet of private Lear jets.

  They have taken to watching a British Gold channel. It shows repeated black-and-white classics, which remind Bobby of summer holidays from their school days.

  ‘Hammy, hurry the fuck up … this is comin’ on,’ he shouts.

  ‘Aye, gie’s peace, for fuck’s sake, ya miserable prick. Stick it on pause.’ Hammy rolls into the room.

  ‘An’ for the love of God, will ye get they fuckin’ wheels oiled?’

  ‘Ach, ye know whit … ah knew ah’d forgotten something. Ah went aw the way into Toni tae get oil,’ says Hammy, melodramatically, ‘an’ guess whit?’

  Bobby sighs.

  ‘Go on,’ Hammy continues, ‘guess whit?’

  ‘Bugger off,’ says Bobby turning the volume up.

  ‘Despite being stuck in this bastard wheelchair mornin’, noon and night, wi’ its nonstop incessant fuckin’ squeakin’, gettin’ the oil tae lubricate the cunt slipped my mind … cos ah wis out gettin’ shit for you!’

  ‘Ah’m sorry, right?’ says Bobby, exasperated but meaning it. ‘It needs a new wheel. Ah told ye this aboot a week ago. Ah ordered a new yin, remember? It should be here on Friday.’

  ‘Look, ah said ah’m fuckin’ sorry. Ah’ve nae mind ae ye tellin’ me, man.’

  ‘Aye. Right. Typical.’

  A few days into the close season and they are already getting on each other’s nerves. Bobby is struggling and Hammy knows it. But his escape – his day-release programme from the sanction of living with Bobby’s misery – is to spend time with a woman from the medical centre where he receives fortnightly physiotherapy. She is a voluptuous fifty-five-year-old Spanish señora. Her name is Esta Soler. She is an amputee, and she is married to the local police chief. Once a patient herself, she now volunteers at the centre. Hammy considers these to be details that only he needs to know. Wider knowledge only increases the risk of them getting caught, and in his situation, both fight and flight options are totally out of the question. A defiantly self-centred Bobby is too preoccupied with his own decline to question such small details, which would have otherwise cornered Hammy. Fortunately, Bobby dismisses Hammy’s apparent forgetfulness on his daily trips to the small supermarket in San Antonio as just that. Esta introduced Hammy to Viagra more than three years ago, and since then Hamish May has undertaken a voyage of intense sexual discovery that the court of Louis XIV would have roundly applauded for its diversity and dexterity.

  Hammy manoeuvres the armless chair into a position where he can see the television more clearly. The late, low-lying afternoon sun has returned, drying out the effects of the storm but reflecting on the flat screen from around fifty percent of the room’s potential viewing points. The electronic, scrolling blackout blinds that would otherwise have dealt with this problem have been faulty since 2012. Bobby presses the remote and the distinctive haunting rumbling notes of the theme tune reverberate around the bare, white room. The rolling waves, the stark titles and the words of Robert Hoffman not quite matching up with his lip movements. It is time for The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. For the third day running, Bobby is in tears by the end of the twenty-five-minute episode. His own Man Friday is rapidly running out of patience.

  Chapter Thirteen

  October 2014. Shanghai, China

  Megan looks at the five questions written in black ink on the heavy paper ripped neatly from his notebook. It is a strange feeling for her – simultaneously fun and nerve-racking. He laughs as she tells him it feels like they are cramming for a Green Card application as a newly married couple. She isn’t objecting but it shocks her to acknowledge how open she is prepared to be with a man she only met two weeks ago, and, what’s more, in the routine context of work rather than as a personal choice.

  ‘Ooh … you’ll just laugh,’ she says.

  ‘Ah won’t, honest,’ he replies.

  ‘Hmm.’ She isn’t convinced. ‘Okay, but I’m warning you.’ She wags a playful finger at him. ‘It’s Pretty Woman,’ she says.

  He laughs. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

  ‘I told you.’ She lightly slaps his knee. It is the penultimate of her five questions. Another straightforward one for her following safe ones about her favourite food, place and music. They have promised to be totally honest with each other, but she is a little embarrassed at what she assumed he would think a clichéd answer.

  ‘Have tae confess, ah like it too,’ he says.

  ‘You do not,’ she counters.

  ‘Ah do!’ he says. ‘Los Angeles, sunshine, big shoulder pads, posh folk playin’ polo, Richard Gere givin’ zero fucks about everythin’ except a big Rodeo Drive hoor … what’s no’ tae like?’

  ‘True. All human life is in there,’ she says, laughing. ‘Okay, my turn. Since we’re on the subject, what’s your favourite movie?’ It was a coincidence that it was also one of her questions, albeit she has changed the order of them.

  He has fielded slightly more searching ones about a fond childhood memory and what he is most afraid of. He ponders if it constitutes a stereotypical gender split: her questions about emotions and feelings; his, the assimilation of status via lists of cultural touchstones.

  ‘Hmm. That’s a tough one. Ah’ve got lots,’ he says. ‘Too much time spent watchin’ DVDs on ma own. Hundreds tae pick fae … hmm. There’s probably two main ones.’

  ‘But you’re only allowed one, Joseph. You have to pick,’ she says.

  ‘Aw okay. The Pope of Greenwich Village,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know that one. Who’s in it?’

  ‘Mickey Rourke,’ he says.

  ‘The bad guy from the Iron Man 2?’

  ‘Eh … dunno. He might’ve been in that. Ah haven’t seen it,’ he admits. ‘This is a bit ae a cult film fae the early 80s. About two cousins: one’s a real kinda go-getter, ye know? The other yin’s a fuckin’ balloon, but they really care about each other. Because they’re family, like.’

  She nods.

  ‘The Eric Roberts character … the balloon … gets them intae a load ae trouble with local neighbourhood gangsters an’ Mickey Rourke has tae get them out ae it. It’s brilliant. Really cool wee movie,’ says Joseph. ‘It reminds me ae the way Bobby Cassidy an’ me used tae be. Everythin’ was a great laugh, even though some of it wis really dangerous.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’

  It’s the simplest of questions but, still, it jolts hi
m. Perhaps because no one in recent years has either cared enough, or knew enough about him to ask. She is the first person he has talked to about Bobby and Gary and Hettie in more than five years.

  ‘Aye. Ah do. Ah really do,’ he says, as if recalling a fallen comrade on a particularly poignant anniversary.

  ‘You really should get in touch with him,’ she says. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world, and she can already see that it’s what he needs, but that he can’t take the first step for fear of yet more rejection. ‘You can go back into that world, I can’t. I’d love more than anything to be able to see my friends again … even my dad,’ she says. Her eyes well up. ‘My mum dying really killed a bit of him too. He couldn’t live with the rage inside of him, that whole feeling of unfairness, of them having their years ahead stolen from him.’

  Joseph puts an arm around her shoulder and pulls her closer. It amazes him how quickly this has gone from feeling awkward to feeling very natural.

  It amazes her too.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘This was just a daft wee game. Ah didnae mean tae upset you.’

  ‘It’s okay. It’s actually good to remember, don’t you think?’ she says. ‘I was very bitter towards him for years. I couldn’t comprehend why he wouldn’t defend me … why he couldn’t see the pain I was going through, but it was because he was so consumed by his own.’ She wipes her eyes and forces a smile.

  She is truly alluring when she smiles. He has taken countless pills and capsules for depression and anxiety, but in this moment it feels like he could replace them all with that sparkling smile.

  ‘Okay, next question,’ she demands, tapping a pen on the table in deflection.

  ‘What’s the secret to real happiness?’ he says. He’d deliberately left his Joker for last.