*
Tully and I went off to explore. It was his idea: I was drooping, but for Tully the night could not be over. He wanted further adventures, more time, more everything, and he liked the darkness in the marble halls. We found a huge, weird space at the top of the building, a whole room under glass with a swimming pool. Nobody around, no security guard, just a white fan whirring beside a television set. We could see over Manchester and its strips of neon – Pernod, Askit, Foo Foo’s, Bingo – and endless streetlights going, I imagined, to Huddersfield or Halifax. We sat on two plastic chairs in front of the TV. I think it was the first time I’d seen a programme on so late. Reagan was speaking from the Oval Office about the many young soldiers still missing in action in Vietnam.
‘Do you think he’s unreal?’ Tully said.
‘He’s an actor,’ I said. ‘He just speaks the lines.’
Tully found the grass from the Hacienda in his pocket. He had papers and a lighter. No baccy. So I was dispatched to rifle Limbo’s pockets. He was snoring when I got there, grinning like the air of Brigadoon was in his lungs. I slid a few Kensitas Club out of his packet and I remember pausing by the door, looking back.
Upstairs, Tully was staring into the pool.
‘What’s old Limbo saying down there?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘He drank the sea.’
‘All those lights,’ Tully said. ‘It reminds me of those football stadiums abroad – when it’s a bit dark and the fans have flares, and they light up the whole place. During the World Cup in Argentina, my dad and I, we watched a game where they did that. The ground had floodlights, but the people lit flares.’
‘You watched it with your dad.’
‘Argentina versus Peru. They won six-nil, the Argies. My dad was jumping out of his chair. It’s the closest we’ve ever been.’
He ran a cigarette along his tongue and burst it open for the tobacco. He rolled a joint and we took our socks and shoes off, turned up our jeans and dipped our legs in the pool, transfixed by the city.
‘Made it, Ma! Top of the world,’ he said, passing the lighted joint.
‘Top of the world, Tully.’
‘I’m as high as a kookaburra, and I’m going in.’ He pulled off his T-shirt and all his clothes and dived into the pool. I sat on the edge, grinning. I could see the shape of him rippling underwater as he swam to the other side. Then he emerged, circling his arms backwards and treading water for the Commonwealth. ‘Stay free, Noodles,’ he shouted. ‘And get in here.’ I turned the lights off and the city blinked to the end of the night. The water was cold but it soon warms up when the boys are made of sunshine.
Autumn
2017
14
There was a dinner that night in Eaton Square. The novelist being celebrated, my eighty-five-year-old friend, was once a state-sponsored journalist in Budapest. Then one day she got up and wrote a beautiful novel about the animals abolishing the zoo. Krisztina Elek: the baker’s daughter who fought the forces of indifference in a whole society. She was not tall but always elegant and her coiffed hair was the colour of the Danube. At about ten o’clock, I crossed the room to say goodbye, and she took my hand, not entirely in the birthday mood. ‘Come and see me soon, James,’ she said, with a comical weariness of heart. ‘We can grasp the moment and drink a glass of champagne together.’ She liked to make a little drama. ‘You can help me fight the forces of self-loathing.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ I said.
‘But champagne, mind.’
I put my collar up and was walking towards Sloane Square when I took out my phone. The screen was quickly wet with rain. A text from Tully Dawson jumped out at me. It was only three words: ‘Can you speak?’
‘Home in half an hour,’ I texted back. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’ll phone you at eleven, Noodles,’ he replied.
On the Tube it was all a smear. I sat in the empty carriage, seeing in my mind the red sign for the Britannia Hotel, years ago with Tully. At home, I took off my tie and poured a whisky. Tully was a teacher now. Head of English. Many long winters ago he had studied at night school, just as we’d planned. He took all my books. And now he taught kids in the East End of Glasgow and was famous among them. I hadn’t heard from him in a while and his text worried me. I tried to think of some Highland river or a bright peat fire, then the mobile lit up. ‘Tullygarvan, townland of Ulster,’ I said. ‘What’s the script?’
‘Aw, Noodles.’
The line was silent for a moment.
‘Take your time, buddy.’
‘I’m fucked, man. Totally fucked. I didn’t want to tell you.’
He began the story.
He’d been on holiday with Anna. They were in Cuba. He was hiccupping and it had happened before, but he thought it was just the drinking. He was also in pain. ‘To be honest, I’d been in pain for months,’ he said. ‘I just thought I had a bad stomach.’ When they got back home, his doctor sent him for a scan. He hesitated. ‘And that’s the results in tonight.’ He was breathing heavily on the line. Again, he hesitated, then he said it, the worst sentence in any language: ‘It’s cancer.’
‘Where?’
‘There’s a lump in my oesophagus, but it’s spread to my liver, stomach, and the lymph nodes, whatever the fuck they are. It’s a total … I’m a dead man walking. I’ve got four months and that’s the end of it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ll get another opinion.’
‘It’s not a matter of opinion, mate. I’m done.’
I sat down on the sofa. I began to cry and then stopped myself. I told him he’d have every last thing he needed. He said it helped him to hear me say that and I had to stand by him and not let him die like a prick.
‘We all die like pricks,’ I said.
‘You know what I mean. No mawkishness. No crowds round the bed. I hate the humiliation, Jimmy. Get me out when things are bad.’
‘I promise. The sky’s the limit,’ I said, stupidly.
‘The sky won’t come into it,’ he said.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Nae bother, Noodles. Maybe we could go back to Cuba. A few of us in Havana. Take a guitar and a few spliffs.’
‘Anything.’
I could hear him trying to get his head around the news, using words to find words. ‘Just when the band is finally getting a bit of recognition,’ he said.
I hadn’t kept up with the bands. They’d swapped around. ‘What’s this one called?’
‘Kim Philby. We just made a CD. New singer and all that. I’m on the drums these days.’
‘You got it together.’
‘Nearly,’ he said.
We spoke for over an hour. Barbara was in a nursing home. He’d decided not to tell her. ‘What would be the point? She’d just be confused and distressed, and things are bad enough.’ He spoke about Limbo McCafferty, who had died fifteen years before. A whole world of hilarity had disappeared with Limbo, a perfect fire, tamped down for a few hours in that room in the YMCA on Peter Street. ‘Do you remember he came to the bus station the next day,’ Tully said, ‘and told us he wasn’t coming home. Had a ticket for the Smiths that night at Salford University and he was staying.’
‘I do remember,’ I said. ‘Old Lincoln.’
Tully asked me to come to Ayrshire on Monday and meet him at the caravan. He said Anna was totally freaking out.
‘Use the caravan as much as you like,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the keys.’
‘I want everything to go on as usual,’ he said. ‘I’ll still go to band practice and all that and keep it …’
‘Normal.’
‘My name is Norman Bates,’ he sang. ‘I’m just a normal guy.’
He laughed. The old style. The old style when it was all fixable. Then we went over the detail again and he cried.
‘Go to sleep,’ I said. ‘We’ll make a plan.’
‘I knew this was coming. And I’ve been having these dreams for a long
time. White fields that go on and on. Pure whiteness.’
*
There are moments like this, when you know nothing. I sat at the table, pouring whisky and seeing clear pictures that I’d thought had faded. My eye fell on a little Mao clock standing on the dresser. It had been a gift from Tully. He brought it back from one of his trips to Cuba. In adulthood, Tully had fallen in love with ‘Castro’s Island’, as he called it, and he would spend weeks of the long school holidays there, going back to the same bars and the same restaurants full of singers and old communists. I stared at the clock. Instead of a minute hand it had Mao waving out the seconds with his little red book. It was difficult to think of the chairman dying and the world ticking on.
I went to bed but I couldn’t sleep. Iona was away on a theatrical tour and I just stared into the dark and thought of Tully at his best. Despite distances and whatever, I had stuck with the friends of my boyhood. I had gone off and learned my trade, and so had they, but we never went far from the pond. We liked its elements, it was a lively place to be, and we stayed in touch with the past, the old crowd always in the air. At a single stroke, the phone call that night had defined the year, and several other years, too. One after the other, the images arrived and they lit up the familiar dark of the bedroom.
15
Seamill – on the north Ayrshire coast. I see my father pointing to the Isle of Arran from a tartan blanket on the beach. He held my finger up when the sun was blinding and traced the shape of Beinn Tarsuinn and Goatfell. Forty years on, a caravan stood empty on a ridge above the beach, so I took it over and fixed it up, filling it with cushions and Chinese lanterns. On visits from London, I’d sit at the small table, working by candlelight as the sky grew pink. More than anybody else, Tully loved the caravan, and in the evening he’d sit out and watch the lighthouse on Holy Isle. ‘I looked it up,’ he said, ‘and those rocks out there are called Limpet Craig and the Brither Rocks. It’s like a lunar landscape, man. All those rocks. And before you know it the tide comes in.’
He arrived at four o’clock that Monday – the last in September. I heard the car pull to a halt on the gravel outside and then he came through the door like Lord Marchmain from the grouse moor. His face was white and his nose was red from the cold. He said he’d stopped in Saltcoats to get his head together. ‘I walked by the sea wall for a while,’ he said, ‘down by the amusement arcade. I don’t mean to be funny but I was nervous about coming in.’ He carried a box set of The Godfather and a half-bottle of Glenmorangie. Kiss on the lips and the jacket unzipped: the kiss had been the Tully greeting to all his friends for decades, except this time he remained in the clinch, and we rocked in the middle of the kitchen, our foreheads pressed together. Eventually I lifted the Glenmorangie. ‘What’s this? You only doing half-bottles now, you cheap bastard?’
‘I’m worried in case I don’t have time to finish it,’ he said. ‘Got to be practical. I can only leave dregs for you losers.’ His eyes filled and we stood by the cooker, nodding to each other and wiping our eyes, trapped in the ignorant present, then I reached up to the cupboard and brought down two glasses. The terrible thing, in a way, was his still looking so healthy and fine. His hair was sparse, the old spikes a feature of memory, and some of the sharpness had gone from his face, but he hadn’t gained much weight and the same green eyes twinkled with menace. Tully always had this clear, persuasive expression, like he could back up everything he was saying, and even in our middle years, as we had previously thought of them, now his last year, he showed the same good looks and the same humour, as if cosmic eventualities were of no concern.
We sat down at the table. ‘Let’s drink some of this stuff and then we can walk along the beach to that diner up on the Ardrossan Road.’
‘Magic.’
We ran through it all again. The diagnosis, the shock. He spoke about his sister, Fiona, and her family. How dreadful it had been telling them. His nephews and his niece meant a great deal to him, and his love of childhood, the memory of his own colourful youth, seemed to inform his understanding of them. He spoke about each, how great they were, how talented and how normal in their dramas and indecisions, and I felt for the first time in all the years of knowing him what a sweet father he’d have been. He drank from his glass and stopped now and then to look out at the autumn night. The sea was rough and Arran was a bulky eminence on the other side of the water. Crows collected in the garden in twos and threes and the wire fence swayed with the weight of them. He stood at the patio doors, and then quietly turned back towards the room, pulled the doors shut, and with that he changed the subject. ‘You never saw your dad again, did you?’
‘He’s dead now,’ I said.
‘I always thought you’d get back together some day.’
‘He was in the bosom of another family,’ I said. ‘He had a second life.’
‘So did you,’ he said. ‘So did we.’
‘True. It’s one of our tricks. He loved doing favours for strangers. And I never saw him again and that seemed to suit us fine.’
‘Strange, though.’
‘I told you all this years ago,’ I said. ‘In our family, we knew how to care for other people, but not each other. My parents just weren’t equipped. And I wasn’t built to play the part of the neglected son. So we split up. I’ve never had much reason to question it. I can only remember one real conversation with him. He told me about the Yorkshire Ripper. Honestly, he sat me down and told me about this killer, and how the guy who sent the tape to the police wasn’t the real perpetrator.’
‘That’s definitely weird.’
‘Truly. My father was a complete sociopath, when I think of it.’
‘And your mum’s still living over there, on Arran?’
‘That’s right. Fifteen miles of ocean between us.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said.
I opened a spiral notebook and laid a pen on the top page. ‘Shall we make a plan?’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I want to do this properly.’
I took up the pen. ‘What’s first?’
‘Anna,’ he said. ‘What am I going to do?’
‘You should marry her,’ I said.
‘We were going to do that before,’ he said. ‘But isn’t it a bit weird to do it now, when she’ll be left on her own?’
‘You should do it all the same,’ I said. ‘It’ll mean the world to her.’
Tall, beautiful Anna, Glasgow lawyer, gale-force debater, whom he met at a party in the late 1990s. ‘She’s her own person and she won’t take any crap off me,’ he told us at the time. They were great together – fun, lippy, well-matched in cheekbones – and they were generally available for the same kinds of adventure. Tully had always been a leader in appearance only. He needed help.
‘I love her,’ he said.
‘Then it’s a wedding.’ I underlined it on the notepad. ‘Do it properly. There’s no point holding back and Anna will want a big day.’
‘Nothing too naff.’
‘Do it nicely,’ I said.
I’m sure it’s a way of not thinking about things, burying yourself in tasks, but I’ve always done it. It puts fear on ice. Holds back the dark. We could talk about a wedding. I could lose myself in a country house and a dinner, spend time over trios and cars, instead of facing the uncontrollability of what was happening. It isn’t always the fittest who survive, but the people who have the information, those who clock the exits. I could find in relentless occupation what I could never find in helplessness: a way through. And he was asking for a ready accomplice who might marshal reality instead of feeling crushed by it. ‘Imagine I’m running for office,’ he said.
‘So I’m your campaign manager?’
‘Totally,’ he said.
Our chairs faced each other at the corner of the table. We touched glasses and he pressed my forehead again with his. It was like we were launching a rescue boat, or a scuttling mission. You could hear the waves. ‘The wedding is a say-hello-wave-goodbye party,’ he said.
‘But I don’t want a whole lot of sit-downy shite with 150 speeches.’ I scribbled. ‘Honestly, Noodles. I don’t want it to be too big. No grannies-in-daft-hats-style bullshit.’
He took out a small bottle of cannabis oil and put three drops under his tongue. I asked him what the doctors had said about chemotherapy. ‘This is the biggest thing of all,’ he said, brushing a few strands of tobacco off his knee. ‘I want you to help me with this more than anything. So, I’m dying, right? I accept that now. We will all accept it eventually. What I don’t want to do is drag the whole fandango out just for the sake of it. I’m not going to lie there like a skeleton, making everybody suffer. People watching you lose weight. Don’t let it happen, man. No point delaying the inevitable. They said with chemo I could have an extra seven months.’
‘Then take it,’ I said.
‘I probably will do the chemo. But not to the last. Ending up like … just lying there. All changed. Like you never really knew me.’
His eyes brimmed over and he took a heavy pull on his cigarette and wiped his nose on his sleeve. I brought him a tissue and took the rollie from him. I had a few draws myself and I wondered if I should say it.
‘You never really knew me – Tully, that’s the exact same phrase that you thought your dad was trying to say to you.’
‘Eh?’
‘The day he died. I remember you telling us up in your room.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ he said.
His father died on a Saturday afternoon about three years after the Manchester weekend, his second heart attack proving decisive. When his body was taken from the house, we sat up in Tully’s bedroom, just a few of us, and he wept like I’d never seen anybody weep before, sobbing into his hands. That was when he told us that his father had looked up at him from the carpet as if to say, ‘You never really knew me and now it’s too late.’
I went down to the living room that night, the night Woodbine died, to hug Barbara and to borrow the key to the drinks cabinet. We stood in the middle of the room for a hug and she cried. ‘Me and Ewan used to dance at the bowling club,’ she said, ‘and he would sing, after he’d had a few, you know?’
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