‘Is that in Manchester as well?’
‘Aye. So, there’s that on the Friday, then on the Saturday it’s New Order, the Smiths, the Fall, Magazine. About six other bands. I don’t want to be funny, but if we miss it we might as well be dead.’ He grabbed his jug by the dimples and slugged from it as if he’d just invented common sense.
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘It’s thirteen quid, Noodles.’ (He called me Noodles after the Robert De Niro character in Once Upon a Time in America. Noodles was the childhood pal of the gangster Max, a name Tully occasionally took himself.) ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I have presented the options. I now rest my case. We’re going to Manchester.’
Two years makes a big difference when you’re eighteen. Tully was an employed twenty-year-old and he paid my way a lot. We agreed about the arrangements and drank several more glasses before Tully suddenly stood up. He walked over to the fireplace, where flames roared up the chimney despite nobody benefiting and the weather being fine. Quite casually, he threw into the fire a handful of firearm blanks that somebody in his factory had given him, then he pushed me by the arm over to the bar, and told me to watch. After a few minutes, loud eruptions in the fireplace caused the men at the bar to jump. It went off like a night of fireworks and the barman looked straight at Tully. We stepped back. The punters covered their mouths. ‘Don’t you two come back in here!’ the barman was shouting. ‘I mean it – you’re barred!’ That was pure Tully, too. He stood there with his arms out, the picture of innocence, the very soul of anarchy, and as we scrambled to the door we saw Steady in the corner, patting his chest with an open hand and nodding as if something agreeable had occurred.
*
As luck and menace would have it, the manager of the Jobcentre offered me a job that week. It was only a summer thing. They’d seen me looking at the boards and decided, after a brief, eloquent interview during which I failed to mention Karl Marx, that a person so interested in poetry might be safer off the streets. The gig didn’t last long, Tully made sure of that, and he would later describe it as my period being a junior commandant in the SS. ‘On the other hand, I feel you might be able to corrupt it from the inside.’
‘It’s Irvine Jobcentre, Tully. Three dossers and a dog. Hardly the nerve centre of international capitalism.’
Wearing a tie and a sneer, I manned the Job Information Point. Not that we had any jobs: Thatcherism had passed through the town like the plagues of Exodus. We’d had blood and frogs, and were waiting for boils and locusts. One day, I was busily sorting through the box of non-jobs and arranging non-interviews for the long-term unemployed, when one of the executive officers, Mr Bike – a man with his shirt tail hanging out, a limp in his conscience, and a face fairly barnacled with acne – demanded that claimants who’d been out of work for more than two years be called in. ‘What’s he on about?’ I said to the colleague next to me. She was painting her nails under the desk.
‘The Final Solution,’ she said, blowing her cerise fingertips. ‘Over two years on the dole. Tebbit or some other bastard came up with this thing: they have to prove they’re “actively looking for work”.’ She curled her digits, making quotes in the air. ‘And if they can’t prove it they get their benefit cut.’
‘Shite.’
‘They’re “reducing” the unemployment figs.’ And when she did the air quotes this time she reversed them into two Vs. ‘Up yours.’
The first day of those interviews we faced a row of sleepy faces. Word came down from Mr Bike that we were to tell the claimants nothing. ‘If they come in and say they’re busy looking for work we have to accept it. But if they say they aren’t, we can nab them.’ I was already forging a plan to thwart him when I went into the interview room with the glass of water he’d demanded. There was a yucca plant and a coffee table bearing an aggressive box of tissues. The girl with the nails and I were posted outside with a clutch of ballpoint pens, checking people in and helping them fill in their forms. But we took pleasure in mangling Bike’s message.
‘Tell them you’re obsessed with the jobs pages,’ said my colleague, Rosa Luxemburg, the great insurgent, whom I now loved.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘And they can’t touch your money. And it is your money.’ Even a school-leaver with a vague interest in the Decadents could see it was a low moment in the annals of common decency.
‘Are you tipping them off?’ Bike asked me later that week.
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘We can come down on them like a ton of bricks if we discover they’re at home sitting on their arses all day.’
‘Nice work.’
‘I’ve got my eye on you,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure you’re cut out for this.’
*
Woodbine kept himself out of the way. He’d get home from the pub and go straight upstairs to the bedroom, where he kept an armchair, an ashtray, and a small black-and-white portable. He never objected much to me coming over after work and spending a lot of time at the house, as if it was just more chaos, more of Tully’s way of doing things. Downstairs, Tully’s mum, Barbara, and I formed a club, a do-it-yourself alliance, where we made a festival of the circumstances.
I phoned her one day from the office to ask if she had any Oxo cubes. She said she had two. Tully and I had agreed to meet at the bottom of Caldon Road at 6 p.m. and steal as many vegetables as we could on the way home. People had patches in their back gardens. It wasn’t dark and we weren’t very talented as thieves. Tully’s method was a model of bravado and devil-may-care: he would open the gate, cough quite loudly, and walk up to the fenced-off beds and howk a turnip or a brace of carrots. I would be in the next garden over, fishing for a radish, and often a living room window would suddenly shake with banging from the inside as the part-time growers caught sight of us.
I’ll never forget that soup. We dropped a huge load of vegetables on the kitchen table and Barbara couldn’t believe her eyes. She borrowed an extra scraper from the woman next door. We laid newspapers on the floor for the peelings and peeled the veg with the radio up, Barbara chortling, getting two onions going in her biggest pot. ‘We’ll all end up in the jail because of you two,’ she said, drying her eyes with the corner of her sleeve. Above us, on the wall, a picture of a crying boy offered comfort, or creepiness, depending on where you stood. Barbara had painted its frame with gleaming white gloss. Tully made the point, to general agreement, that it seemed excessively Scottish for every meal to be overseen by the image of a poor child in distress.
At one point, Woodbine came down the stairs and walked into the mayhem of peelings. ‘It’s like a Chinese laundry in here,’ he said.
‘It’s Jimmy’s broth,’ Tully said.
I was sitting there in a shirt and tie and Tully still had his overalls on and Barbara was standing at the sink.
‘Happy families,’ Woodbine said.
Later, she carefully carried a tray upstairs to him, hoping he’d take some soup before the pub. She came back to watch telly with us, Tully and I taking turns to do the ironing and drop the items in a plastic basket.
I had never had a family like that. As the summer came, Barbara took to ringing me to make sure I was coming in for tea that night. She would see us off upstairs before ten o’clock to listen to John Peel’s show, knowing our habits, and when I said every few days that I’d better go home to my own house, she would say fine, before laying out the plans for the days to come and what we’d eat and what we’d watch. Together, Tully and Barbara had made a quiet project of including me as my parents vanished. It never felt like a crisis, or in any way odd, because they called it staying over and framed it as part of the bid for good times. Tully’s sister Fiona would sometimes be there with her boyfriend Scott, and she said the house was never livelier. ‘You three should have your own show,’ she said.
‘It’s the Marx Brothers,’ Tully said. ‘Mum’s Harpo.’
I met Barbara on the stairs one night. Tully was asleep in his
room and she was waiting for Woodbine to return. I fetched a glass of water and sat on the top step listening as she spoke about her husband, saying he used to be like Tully, a singer and someone who knew all the jokes and was great at telling them.
‘Do you worry about him?’ I asked.
‘Oh, he’s a pure pest,’ she said. But she didn’t mean it. She joined her hands, as if in prayer, and touched her lips with them. ‘He goes out like this and you don’t know if he’s fallen down a hole or been hit by a bus, or what.’
‘My mum never worried about my dad …’
‘She must’ve at one time.’
‘No.’
‘Well, maybe he didn’t love her enough.’ She said it very sweetly, from knowledge: like it was the only kind of evidence that mattered.
‘I never saw any love between them. Never once. Never saw them kiss each other or laugh together or plan a holiday. Nothing like that. I imagine they were put on earth just to make it smaller than it is.’
‘That’s a harsh comment,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘But it is weird of them just to go away like that.’
‘Unbelievable,’ I said. ‘But they take no pleasure in family. They lost all the telephone numbers of their relatives in Glasgow, their aunts and uncles, their cousins. Lived by this sort of carelessness all their lives.’
‘You’re so young to be talking like this,’ she said.
‘I hope I’m not upsetting you. It’s bad to upset people. Especially at night. You’ve been so kind to me, Barbara.’
‘Oh, don’t be daft,’ she said. She clapped both my arms. She moved her hands up to my shoulders and onto my cheeks, and I turned my face, I think automatically, and pressed it against the palm of her hand. It was a few seconds’ impulse, and felt natural and slightly wrong. ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said again, pinching my ear and withdrawing her hands into the pockets of her dressing gown.
‘You’ve got such good fun in you, Jimmy,’ she said, looking into the black well at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Let it rule the day. I’ve seen people’s lives ruined with disappointment, people who wanted to go places.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘This is a place.’
She leaned against the stippled wallpaper, the Anaglypta, the stuff encasing our lives, and a shadow fell over her face as she looked at her watch. ‘It’s dark,’ she said. She shook her head and talked for the better part of an hour. She recalled for me the younger Woodbine, back in the East End of Glasgow, in the days when he was hopeful and easy to love. She spoke of their first house, a ‘room-and-kitchen’. In spite of everything, she seemed to say, remembering the good times was a duty of care. ‘Ewan has these … episodes, the doctor calls them, when he loses it completely,’ she said. ‘He can get delusional. He thinks he’s somebody else or has important tasks.’
‘That’s terrible,’ I said.
‘That’s why I can’t sleep. You never know.’
3
Tully had outside enemies, mainly the neighbours, who hated his music nearly as much as he loved it. On £27.50 a week for shaving a heap of metal, he’d built a record collection and a life of his own. His guitar was an instrument of torture to those around him, except to Barbara, who loved whatever he did. His bedroom was plastered with Killing Joke posters and one of a huge crucified Christ under the words ‘If You’re Gonna Get Down Get Down and Pray.’ Again and again, we’d watch The Godfather or kitchen sink classics. A stack of videotapes stood next to a small amp on which he’d Tippexed ‘Jobbies and Shites’. We knew the words to the films so well we’d often watch with the sound down, speaking the lines until Woodbine banged on the wall.
*
The trip to Manchester was brewing when Barbara had me over for a more formal dinner. In most families round our way, dinner was a secretive affair, a ritual to be executed around six o’clock, when a swift heating of pies, a resentful peeling of potatoes, and a stirring of beans would be carried out in an atmosphere of self-pity. But that night Barbara insisted there would be a bottle of wine. It was a nice evening, with the window open: kids played on the waste ground next to their terrace and you could hear the traffic roaring along the bypass. When Tully’s dad came to the table, he laid his cigarettes next to his plate and took his specs from the pocket of his cardigan. He glanced at the picture of the crying boy, then he looked at me. ‘What’s that on your hand?’ he asked.
It was covered in ink.
‘Just things I noted down,’ I said. ‘It’s a bad habit.’
‘So you’re going to the university after the summer?’
‘Yes, Mr Dawson.’
‘To study what?’
‘English and Russian.’ I don’t know why I blushed, but it felt appropriate. He held his knife like a pen and seemed for a second unsure what to say. His lips moved a little with no sound. I could see Tully staring down at his mutilated curry pancake. His hair was flat (he only spiked it at weekends) and he wore a jumper with buttons on the shoulder. The atmosphere intensified when Barbara put some more mash on her husband’s plate and left the spoon sticking up in the Pyrex dish.
‘So I get less to eat than him?’ he said, pointing to Tully’s plate, ‘because he’s working?’
‘Oh, Ewan!’
‘These boys are taking over the house.’
There was a clang of cutlery.
‘What you talking about, you old bastard?’ Tully said. Barbara waved a dish towel over the table and poured more Concorde and that was signal enough. She asked me very formally if Russian was a useful language to have and I told her things were changing in the Soviet Union. ‘Maybe you could go there at the end of your studies,’ she said. ‘And if you still want to be a writer you could write the story.’
‘Like John Reed,’ Woodbine said quietly. ‘He saw the Bolshevik Revolution. He wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, didn’t he?’ Tully glanced at him and I saw there was a touch of admiration along with everything else. He’d inherited much more from his father than either would ever be able to recognise. Woodbine’s priorities were clear. He’d been a shop steward and a fan of Rangers FC.
‘You want to watch yourself in the Soviet Union,’ he added. ‘Gulags. Spies.’
‘He’s only going to Strathclyde,’ Tully said.
‘One small step for man,’ I said.
‘You and your foreign travel,’ Woodbine said, lighting one. There was still food on his plate but he pushed it away. ‘Moscow. Glasgow. Manchester.’ He turned to me and pointed with his lighted fag. ‘The moon! It’s all a con.’ He then talked about a brother of his who had worked for twenty years in the North Sea. ‘You don’t know anything about life until you’ve worked on the rigs.’ He went out to the pub after that and left the three of us to wait for Brookside and an Arctic Roll.
‘I’ve always meant to ask you, Barbara,’ I said. ‘Why is Tully called Tully? I mean, it’s not his nickname, and it’s usually a surname?’
‘You’re going to think I’m daft,’ she said, ‘but, when I was pregnant with him, I had a library book … a sort of romance, you know. And the main guy in the book, the hero, was an Italian dancer called Tullius, who made it big in Monte Carlo.’
‘Christ’s sake, Mum. Noodles is going to think you’re mad.’
‘Well, maybe I am mad. They all called him Tully in the book. And I said to myself, “If this child’s a boy he’s getting called Tully. And he’s going to be a brilliant dancer and take me to all the big casinos.”’
She lifted her mug of tea and winked.
‘That’s worked out well,’ Tully said.
‘He was born with a caul around him. Did you know that, Jimmy? It’s a special event for a baby to be born like that.’
‘Shush, Mum,’ he said.
*
Some days at the Jobcentre were like Darwin on springs. ‘Survival of the lippiest,’ I said to Rosa, who had come to work sporting red hair. Mid-morning, a mining engineer came in with a child in his arms. He said
he’d been trying to get a position as an assistant in a local pet shop and they told him he didn’t have enough experience. I informed the muttzoo manager, on the phone, that telling the engineer he was underqualified to change fish water was like the local minister telling God he was inexperienced.
‘I’m going to c-complain to your b-boss,’ he said.
‘Knock yourself out.’
The day improved after that. One woman, five feet high with pink spectacles, who came in for her interview with Mr Bike, told me she wanted to work for NASA. I asked her if she’d written to the people at Cape Canaveral. ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘and they havnae written back to me yet.’ I felt there was a lot of weight on the word ‘yet’. The lady admitted she had no experience in space aviation but was determined. ‘I feel sorry for aw they astronauts that got blown up and I think they need new people, brave people.’
‘Well, you are brave, Mrs Gunion. No question. When you go in for your interview, please tell my colleague what you have just told me, and perhaps add that you’ve looked into training opportunities in things … related to your chosen field. They’re not allowed to cut your benefit if you’re going after a particular career.’
‘Well, I am,’ she said. ‘I willnae settle for anything else.’
‘Right.’
‘I love space.’
‘Good for you.’
‘It’s ma dream. They cannae punish you for having a dream.’
‘Well, they shouldn’t, Mrs Gunion. That’s for sure.’
‘I’ve got aw the information.’
Mayflies Page 2