The ticket wasn’t there.
I searched everywhere using my lighter.
Jeans and jacket. Every pocket. Then I ransacked my duffel bag, the zipped compartment, everything. My panic grew as I slowly realised I wasn’t going to find it. The bus down, that was the last place I remembered seeing it, and now, hours later, with tears in my eyes, I lay back, resigned to the worst occurrence ever. Falling into a difficult sleep, I could see the ticket, blown over Hadrian’s Wall.
*
In the morning I climbed the stairs to clean my teeth. Two girls with Mohawks were asleep in an empty bath. There was sunlight over the rooftops. Water trickled from a rusty tap and my mouth felt like the Second World War. I went back to the landing and stood. The wallpaper was peeling next to the handrail and the wall was damp all the way up. Beneath one sheet was another sheet that was also peeling, a different pattern from another time, and I wondered if it went all the way back to the beginning of the house. I imagined there must be stories. When I craned my neck to see further up, it was CND posters all the way. And somewhere on the upper landing, amid a gentle hiss of spray-painting, I could hear Dr Clogs leading a seminar on the deficiencies of Sheena Easton as a recording artist.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the lost ticket. What was I going to do? It was the end of my life if I didn’t get into G-Mex.
In one of the rooms, under a hill of torn envelopes and Letraset, Tibbs was still comatose on his Cub Scout bedroll, his Rucanor bag for a pillow, his jacket on backwards and up under his chin. I nearly lost my footing on a slope of copier paper as I bent to give him a shake.
‘Fuck off,’ he said. Sleep was not kind to Tyrone: he was one of those people who woke up looking like the angels had glued his eyelashes.
‘I’ve lost my ticket,’ I said.
He stretched. ‘You’re fuckan kiddin’. Where?’
‘If I knew that it wouldn’t be lost, Sinbad.’
‘Shut it. My bonce is gowpin’. What you going to do?’
‘Kill myself,’ I said.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘This is bad … I wonder how Tully and Hogg got on with the two nurses.’ Then he copped on. ‘I’m sorry for you, Jimmy. It’s sold out, but maybe you’ll be able to buy another one off a tout.’
‘The money they charge? I’m done for.’
He nodded sagely and wiped his eyes.
*
Our diminished party of four smoked on the bus into town. Limbo didn’t believe in hangovers and said the rioting in Portadown had fuck all to do with freeing Ireland. ‘It’s just a bunch of wee neds trying to impress their pals.’ Tibbs had a copy of the Guardian. ‘Sanctions Deadline Issued to Thatcher,’ the headline said.
‘Fuckpigs.’
I shook my head and tutted at Tibbs. ‘That’s no way to talk about Her Majesty’s government. After all they’ve done for you.’
‘They murder British Shipbuilders on Monday. They fuck British Rail on Tuesday.’ He snapped the paper open as if shooing a fly. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘An order believed to be worth about £90 million is expected to be announced by British Shipbuilders. The contract to build 24 small ferries for Denmark will provide two years’ work at the state-owned Sunderland Shipbuilders and Austin & Pickersgill yards.’ He shook the paper again. ‘The work will not mean an end to a plan to axe a total of 925 jobs at the two companies.’
‘How to dismantle a people,’ Clogs said.
‘Exactly. They’re all scum, so they are. Then this …’ Tibbs pointed to the story next to the one he’d read out. ‘British Rail broke even last year, right? It had a difficult time during the strike, but it made a profit the year before, eight million, best since the early Sixties, right?’ He punched the Guardian, that’s to say the messenger, before Limbo took it off him and rolled it into a loudhailer. ‘And what do the Tories want to do?’ Tibbs continued. ‘Privatise the fucker and shunt all the profits out of the industry.’
I went into my duffel bag for a T-shirt. Brand new: from Glasgow. We were always getting things printed at this little shop in Hope Street. I rolled on some deodorant and pulled the shirt over my head and tugged it down to show the boys: Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe dancing at the El Morocco nightclub. I’d never been to New York. Nobody had. But the people I grew up with felt glamorous watching films, listening to records, or reading books written by people who unfolded their lives, who told of the time they loved and the time they died and the time they danced at El Morocco. We loved black-and-white stills depicting the comedy and the tragedy of private life, or of public life gone wrong. The main characters in my childhood believed in realism in art, they loved quoting from it, but they also loved its very opposite, pitching themselves as far from reality as they could, knowing fine well that life would be all too real on Monday.
*
A Russian samovar stood on the counter at the Peterloo Café, gushing hot water while the night-shift workers brooded over their runny eggs. They had slices of white bread plastered with butter, and sleepily stubbed them into their plates, soaking up the yolky mess and wolfing it down between puffs on their fags. It was a silent ritual, sluiced about with tea. It seemed to me Manchester was a place of miraculous routines. I don’t know why. It wasn’t much different from Glasgow on the surface, not at all, but a powerful atmosphere was seeping into that Saturday morning.
Tully bowled in looking like he’d recently emerged from a ten-stretch at Strangeways. His hair was flat and his face was wan from a long and desperate night of knock-backs, a night of doom, he went on to tell us, where the best he got was a handful of Quality Street at the nurses’ station. ‘She was tight as a badger’s arse,’ he said, slugging my tea, ‘and she made me go over to the hospital with her, so she could talk to her pal who was on night shift. Then – nothing. Slept under a table with their pishy dog. What a nightmare. I thought they were the nympho nurses.’
‘What gave you that idea?’ I asked.
‘I’m familiar with the literature. And I know my Carry On films.’
‘Of course.’
‘Anyhow. Turns out they’re nuns from the Order of Perpetual Refusal. Hogg got a snog in the corridor and I got the bum steer.’
‘Where is he?’ Tibbs asked.
‘He’s across the square phoning his mum. He slept in a dining chair all night with his face on the table. I don’t suppose he’ll be telling her that.’
Tibbs was loving this. He took pleasure in the common curse of our romantic failures. ‘Jimmy got a knock-back as well,’ he said.
‘No, I never.’
‘The black lassie?’ Tully asked.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ I said. ‘She’s called Angie. Different class. It’s a continuing conversation.’
‘I saw her kiss you,’ Tully said.
‘Different class,’ I repeated.
And then I told him the ticket news. He raised both eyebrows. ‘Noodles, you didn’t look after your ticket?’
The traditional Scots method of dealing with a person in crisis is first to make them feel worse and then to help them. He saw the dread on my face and blew all the air out of his lungs before observing tradition to the letter. ‘What a fuckan spanner,’ he said, unzipping his breast pocket and taking out his ticket. ‘Here. Take mine.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I said.
‘This is the second one I’m giving you. And you’d better not lose it or we’re both Fuck McFuck of Fucked Alley.’
‘But I can’t have this. I need to find another one.’
‘Just leave it to me,’ he said. ‘Those bureaucrats or bouncers on the door won’t know what’s hit them when we turn up with the verbals.’
‘The verbals? They’ll demand a ticket, Tully.’
‘Well, they can take it out of this coupon,’ he said, pointing to his face. ‘You go with the legit and I’ll follow you in, talking shit.’
‘Jesus, man. Are you sure?’
‘We’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Nobody on the planet is stoppin
g us getting into this gig. Forget about it.’
He could do that – clear the decks with his confidence. I kissed him smack on the cheek and put the ticket in a buttoned pocket. But what would actually happen? I had confidence in his confidence, but what if the guys on the door said no?
Limbo hadn’t noticed any of this: he was busy making a breakfast sandwich of red and brown sauce. A bit of film banter crept in.
‘Go on, sup up,’ I said, from Saturday Night. ‘Get that stuff down you.’
Tully took my mug and downed the canal water in one.
‘It’s thirsty work falling down stairs. And look …’ he said. The night hadn’t been a complete dead end. Outside the nurses’ flats Tully had run into a guy who was wandering around selling speed and he bought two wraps.
‘Capital!’ said Clogs, leaning over from the next booth as Tully unfolded the first one behind a standing menu. ‘To dab, perchance to dream.’ Limbo showed sudden interest. It was rough stuff, but beggars and gift horses, et cetera.
‘Top three characters from Coronation Street,’ Tully said as he snapped some change on the table and nodded politely to the waitress.
‘Past or present?’ I asked.
‘All time.’
‘The Popular Culture of Manchester, 1960–1986.’ That could’ve been Tibbs’s specialist subject on Mastermind. He rubbed his hands, then dropped his finger on the table like a depth charge, set to explode with precision and truth. ‘Albert Tatlock. Ken Barlow. Mike Baldwin.’
‘Sexist pig,’ I said.
‘Tatlock’s up there,’ Tully said. ‘But Barlow?’
‘Elsie Tanner. Ena Sharples. Hilda Ogden,’ I said. Tully borrowed one of my T-shirts and nodded vigorously when his head popped through.
‘There’s no arguing with Sharples.’
‘Baldwin owns the factory,’ Tibbs said, ‘so he’s obviously a class traitor. But he’s a wind-up merchant and he’s funny, so it’s fine.’
Tully lifted the remainder of Tibbs’s Coca-Cola, using it to spike his hair.
‘There’s this photograph of Violet Carson, who played Sharples,’ I said. ‘She’s dead now. In the photograph, she’s standing on a balcony over Salford, and it tells you everything you need to know about everything.’
‘I’ve seen it,’ Tully said. ‘It would make a great album cover.’
‘All vanished now.’
‘I can’t believe you lost your fuckan ticket,’ Tully said.
‘In the midst of success we are in failure,’ I said. ‘Is that in the Bible?’
‘No, but it should be.’
10
We had hours to kill before the big show at G-Mex. The others scattered, looking for records and clothes. Tully and I got in a minicab to Salford. He wanted to visit a shop on Great Clowes Street. At first he wouldn’t explain, saying it was a surprise, but then he did, unfolding a piece of paper from his pocket. The address had come from Steady McCalla, the Jamaican guy who drank in the pub back home. The week before we left, Steady had spoken to Tully of an old friend of his in Salford, a barber like him, with his own business, and he wrote down the address. ‘Go and see my brother Paul,’ he said. ‘He’ll give you a few beers, you and your friend Jimmy.’ Tully had kept it up his sleeve.
There was a striped pole above the barber’s shop but also a sign on the door saying ‘Back Never’. We weren’t sure how to interpret that and decided it was a joke and that he must have just stepped out for a while. We walked up the street and went into a furniture shop that seemed empty of staff and customers, a long showroom of three-piece suites and beds. Near the middle, Tully flopped down on a mattress. I lay beside him and we chatted undisturbed for about twenty minutes, covering all the incidents from the night before, resting our heads on huge pillows wrapped in plastic.
‘This ticket …’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘We could talk our way into the White House.’
Tully folded his arms over his chest.
‘What I told you last night at the International,’ he said eventually, ‘I hope you didn’t think I was like, “Shut up and don’t tell me what to do.”’
‘That’s exactly what you did,’ I said.
‘Well, just a bit. It’s complicated, man.’
‘I know. Your da is your da.’
We were talking to the ceiling, the water-damaged tiles.
‘It’s hard to explain,’ he said.
‘Of course it is,’ I said. ‘Not everybody can do my thing. Not everybody can go ahead and divorce their parents.’
‘Nobody can do that, Noodles. Only you.’
‘Divorce is underrated,’ I said. ‘Round our way, I mean. If you want a new world you’ve got to ditch your parents. That’s number one.’
He punched me on the arm.
‘I’m not kidding,’ I said. ‘It’s the humane option. Dr Freud was much more extreme and a complete head-banger, when it came to all this.’
‘Kill yer da,’ Tully said. ‘Marry yer maw.’
We turned our heads on the plastic pillows. In unison: ‘Fuck that.’ And when the laughing died down he grew reflective. ‘He blames me for being younger than him. Blames me for the Miners’ Strike. Hates me being in a band. He resents us for wanting to go places and I can’t speak to him and now he’s dying.’
‘He’s not dying.’
‘And I came here, because … I can’t figure it out.’
‘You don’t have to figure it out.’
He turned. ‘Am I a bad person, Noods?’
‘Fuckan evil,’ I said, and he broke into a perfect grin.
‘There’s more to it—’
A sales assistant appeared at the foot of the bed. He was wearing an orange badge saying ‘ELS Furniture & Carpets. 50 per cent off!’ ‘Can I help you, lads?’ The guy was Irish and not as we expected.
‘I’m not sure it’s the right bed for us,’ Tully said, raised on his elbows. You could tell he thought there was something unlucky about the guy. ‘Ah, we’re just going, mate. We were having a wee rest, know what I mean?’
I swung my legs round. The assistant had spiked black hair and his tie was tucked behind the third button of his shirt. Tully took it as a sign. ‘Not going to G-Mex today?’
‘Oh, is that what yous are down for. You’re from Scotland, right?’
‘Aye. You’re not going?’
‘I want to, like. Really, really badly. It’s just I don’t have a ticket and they’ve got me working in this feckin hole all day.’
‘This one here, he lost his ticket. You’ll get in, mate,’ Tully said. ‘It’ll be a rabble down there. It’s run by Factory Records. It’s bound to be a mess.’
‘D’yez think?’ the guy said. It was as if a switch was thrown in his head and he seemed so excited he went a little cross-eyed.
A look came into Tully’s eyes, too. If conformity had a look, a facial expression, it would be the opposite of the one he wore now. ‘These arseholes,’ he said, ‘the bosses. Did they give you your money?’
‘My wages, like?’
‘Aye. Have they paid you yet this week?’
‘They have. I get it on a Friday. Yesterday. There’s no feckin customers. This dump’ll be closed before you know it.’
‘D’you know what? Run!’ Tully said. ‘Just fuckan run for it, mate.’
‘Wha’?’
‘Run and never come back.’
The boy’s face was a picture. Snaggle-toothed, with a little fuzz on his top lip, and ears like the handles on the FA Cup, he walked in a circle and stepped forward and pressed his knees into the edge of the bed. Tully was offering him a dozen reasons that he might have offered to himself, and his voice faded for half a minute, telling it like it was, as I looked at the young man and tried to imagine the years ahead for him. He bit into his lip as Tully spoke, and I saw him in another world one day, maybe twenty or thirty years in the future, marching for peace or sitting in a boardroom or reading to his children. He would never know
about the look on his face at that moment, his eyes that Saturday.
‘Everybody’s going,’ Tully was saying. ‘Come to G-Mex, you’ll get in. And then get to fuck away from this place, as far as you can go. Mate, I’m telling you. Before they get their hooks into you, before they ruin you, just run and don’t come back!’ Tully was standing on the bed now. ‘Vamoose! Scarper! How no’?’
I stood on the bed, too. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Fergus!’
‘That’s you, Fergus,’ I shouted. ‘King of Salford!’
‘The whole fuckan country needs you, Fergus,’ Tully shouted.
‘D’yez think?’
I looked at Tully and Tully looked at me. Then we both looked at Fergus and shouted as we jumped on the bed.
‘Go to G-Mex!’ Tully said, bouncing higher. ‘You’ve got to!’
‘Take. Over. The world,’ I shouted.
‘Fuck selling beds,’ Tully said. ‘The whole country’s asleep. Go … to the festival and then … fuck off somewhere else. This is it, Fergus!’
‘Go on,’ I said.
The guy was nodding and started jumping on the spot. He let off a fart. ‘I will,’ he said. ‘I feckin hate it here. G-Mex! New Order!’
‘Go!’
‘Selling stupid feckin beds to lazy bastards.’
‘That’s right, Fergus. That’s fuckan right,’ Tully said, pointing at him and egging him on and bouncing at the same time.
He jumped up on the bed next to us, a big grin on his face. Then Tully bounced to the next bed and the next one, still shouting. ‘No stopping you, Fergus! This place is dead, mate. Dead, dead, dead.’
‘Dead, dead, dead,’ the boy shouted back. His arms were all over the place and I imagined him again in a car one day, driving home.
‘Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!’
We jumped all the way to the front of the showroom. The sales assistant showed us all his mad teeth and he rubbed his hair and ripped off his badge. On the last bed nearest the door, Tully and I were bouncing and hitting each other with the pillows when young Fergus leapt onto the warehouse floor. I’ve never seen an expression like it. ‘Yer great lads!’ he said. Then he went out through the glass doors and stood on the street, looked both ways, and ran for it. Tully fell down on the bed.
Mayflies Page 8