Such thoughts give dignity to your average wallflower. Tully tried to pull me onto the dancefloor, but I stood my ground with a glass of Oban. When I went out to the patio, Anna was smoking a vape and took my arm for a second. ‘It’s the man himself,’ she said. It seemed to me she was high on the possibility of life speeded up, and she began telling those around her that I was Tully’s ‘secret collaborator’. ‘You know I love you, Jimmy,’ she said drunkenly, before sealing my lips with a finger.
At my elbow, a thin man wearing round glasses appeared.
‘Hello, sir,’ he said in a theatrical way. He was smoking a long foreign cigarette. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you, Jimbo?’ It took a moment, and it wasn’t his grizzled face I recognised, but his intonation, the sense of words like nips. Dr Clogs. His eyes had sunk back and his teeth had come forward, but the old belligerence was in place. He drew deeply on the cigarette and stared at the frosty ground.
‘I’m not going to lie, Clogs – you look different.’
‘Ah, honesty,’ he said. ‘We’re living in a time of lies, Mr Collins. Best to be honest. You look much the same. Less skinny.’
‘Not before time.’
‘Well, where’s the error?’ He swigged his drink. ‘Is your wife not here?’
‘She’s working,’ I said. ‘One of those jobs where you can’t take a night off. People with tickets and all that.’
‘You became a writer,’ he said. ‘A foreign correspondent in your own country.’
‘Still trying, Clogs.’
‘It’s quite weird hearing all this music again,’ he said. He made a backwards gesture with his thumb. ‘These guys have been listening to the same tunes for thirty years. Maybe forty.’ He insisted I take one of his crazy fags – from Dubai, he said – and sparked it up with a mini-blowtorch.
‘It was always a struggle to reach the future,’ I said.
We both smirked and he took a long drag. ‘You remember the time we all went down to see those bands and got panelled for two days?’ he said. ‘I had a fight with Davie Hogg and spent the night in a bus shelter. They were good times, man. It must have been the last gathering of the old gang, before we all headed off.’
‘What a weekend.’
‘You in your Marilyn Monroe T-shirt,’ he said. ‘Tully with his black creps and white socks. There are moments from that weekend, I mean … we’re talking over thirty years ago. I can be standing at the shaving mirror or sitting at my desk, deep in some corridor of the internet or whatever, trying to do some work, and it’ll come into my head – something funny from that weekend in Manchester.’
It all seemed a way of not talking about Tully’s illness. Manchester was a byword for who we all were together, and who Tully was in particular, and it seemed easier to evoke him at his best than speak about the worst. ‘I hear you’ve been doing some sterling work on the internet, Bobby,’ I said.
‘It’s a very busy time,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of making myself a business card, “Bobby McCloy: Counter-Surveillance Mug and General Pest – Holding the Bastards to Account”.’
‘Address: No. 1, The Dark Web, Planet Earth.’
He chuckled and got a fresh cigarette between his teeth. ‘Thing is, Jimbo, there’s a centre of world power in every box bedroom.’
‘You saw that coming, with your BBC computer, then your Apple II.’
‘There’s a depressing drift to it, though … I leave off now and then. I hardly turn my laptop on at the moment. It’s an addict’s world.’
‘You mean the trolls?’
‘I mean all of it. Trolls. Supremacists. Abusers. Fundamentalists. Conspirators. Cryptocurrency nuts. Tech companies. Shopping websites. They’ll do away with you.’
‘Jesus, Clogs.’
‘Punk was right about everything,’ he said. ‘About society, I mean. And about people. We are poor slaves in a constant state of co-exploitation.’
‘A swindle.’
‘That’s right, cobber. Facebook. You must be kidding.’
‘All right, doctor. It’s just us here. I want your top three hacks.’
‘Of all time?’ He took a slug of his drink. I had written about this kind of subject and the gleam in his eye told me he wouldn’t reveal the best.
‘The three most delightful ones,’ I said.
‘Okay.’ In the traditional way, he counted them off on his fingers. ‘One – we spent a whole day rearranging the traffic in Brisbane. We controlled the traffic lights. We broke into the system and ran it for kicks. Tailbacks, perpetual red lights, green on side streets, people getting out of their cars, cursing the system. Beautiful. We could see it from a window at the university and it was sort of perfect.’
‘You’re the Dr No of Dreghorn.’
‘Two – I made all the TV sets in Kilmarnock come on in the middle of the night.’
‘Certain TVs?’
‘Most of them. They all have smart TVs. I did it twice, and the second time I was in the vicinity and it was a fantastic light show. Four a.m.’
We nodded and I stared at him for a moment. It was the continuing joy of Clogs and his secret mission to interrupt, and was so consistent with the person I once knew, with his cowlick and a metal pencil case. ‘And three,’ he said. ‘It could be so many. But the gun people are always the best fun. Many long nights.’
‘The NRA?’
‘Naturally. One time we moved $100,000 out of their New Mexico account into the account of a shooting victim’s mother, then moved it back, leaving one dollar behind, just for the poetry of it. Then we emailed a picture of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima to millions of NRA addresses.’
‘I love it, Bobby.’
We got more whiskies and settled in at a freezing garden table.
It took a minute.
‘What do you think about Tully?’ I asked.
‘Shocking business,’ Clogs said, lifting his glass. ‘Can’t get it out of my mind. We went for a few games of pool. He says he’s depending on you.’
‘He said that?’
‘To pull him through. To get him out.’
‘It’s complicated, Clogs.’
‘I’ll bet it is. It must be.’
‘We went to see Barbara two days ago. She’s in a nursing home in Irvine. All she knows is the music she likes.’
‘That’s all anybody knows, Jimbo.’
‘And the films.’
‘Them, too. It’s the stuff we found, isn’t it?’ I must have looked a little faraway because he nudged me. ‘It’s the whisky talking, Jim.’
The patio doors swung open and I saw Tibbs coming towards us. He was dragging someone by the arm, a huge bloke in a baseball cap.
‘You’ll never guess who turned up,’ Tibbs was saying. ‘Totally out the blue, and the bastard wasnae even invited.’
Tibbs was smashed.
‘Ah, come on,’ the guy said. There was a hint of an accent and he lifted his cap as if to help with the recognition issue.
‘It’s Davie Hogg!’ Tibbs shouted, still holding him by the arm and pointing at him. ‘Look at the fuckan nick of him!’
I stood up and put out my hand. ‘Davie,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘He ate every pie in Europe, so he did!’
‘Tibbs,’ I said. ‘Go easy.’
‘Go easy, my arse,’ he said. Tibbs was in his element. Banter was banter. ‘I just saw him in the corner. He’s a fuckan baldy bastard.’
‘I had to come over for Tully,’ Hogg said. ‘I had to say hello.’ He was quieter now, his sharp edges worked away by foreign necessity, I suspected, and he seemed a bit shell-shocked by the old energy and the shaming and all that. He had changed enormously, but each of his sentences still sounded like a question. Tibbs handed him a whisky and I noticed he didn’t take a single sip the whole time he stood with us. Looking at this shy man, it was impossible to believe he had ever thrown yellow paint around a room. His conversation was stilted, but I guessed he was putting the past to re
st. ‘I see nothing changes over here. You’re all exactly where I left you.’
‘He’s got six weans!’ Tibbs said.
‘And three ex-wives,’ Hogg said, nodding.
‘That must keep your nose to the grindstone,’ said the voice behind me. Clogs was still sitting in the garden chair.
‘Who’s that?’ said Hogg, squinting.
‘It’s your old friend in electronics,’ Clogs replied. It took me a second to realise that their mutual dislike had survived thirty years.
‘How you doing, Bobby?’ Hogg said.
‘Ah, still alive. For the time being.’
‘Good … great.’ He really had nothing to say. He began, painfully, to make remarks about the Scottish winter.
‘Somebody told me you live in Copenhagen,’ I said.
‘That’s correct. Denmark.’
‘It must be weird,’ Clogs said, warming to his opportunity, ‘living in a country famous for its fried pork?’
Risky strategy for verbal abuse, I thought – in Scotland.
‘Flæskesteg,’ Hogg said.
‘We were talking about Manchester,’ I said. ‘The trip we made that time.’ He looked from one of us to the other. ‘To G-Mex,’ I added.
He shook his head like he didn’t want to talk about it. ‘There were so many gigs back then,’ Hogg said. ‘It was a bit of a gong show, if I remember.’ Tibbs heard what he said and stood apart from him and screwed up his face.
‘A gong show? What the fuck you talking about? It was the best weekend in history.’ Hogg looked at Tibbs and couldn’t see what he meant. The past was not only a foreign country, it was a whole other geology. He suddenly looked like he regretted coming back, and I felt sorry for him but understood it, the wish to see Tully one last time. I stepped forward to shake his hand again, but there was no reaching him.
‘It was good seeing you fellas again,’ he said.
Hogg turned with a sort of resigned smile and walked down the frosted path towards the car park. No one could accuse him of living in the past. He wiped the past off his new shoes and called it success. ‘There he goes,’ Clogs said when Hogg was beyond the gate, ‘a one-man argument for Brexit.’
Soon we heard applause and whistling inside. We took it that Ross was about to give his speech, and rushed in. He was a tall bloke, the tallest of us all, and when he stood on a table at the end of the dancefloor he loomed over everybody.
‘Tully has many different bits to his life,’ he began, ‘and stories in each. But this evening I’m going to concentrate on his shocking delinquency. That’s the duty of a best man. I know this feels like a wedding, but in fact it is a convention for all those who have had their lives blighted in some way by the madness of Tully Dawson.’
‘Show us your arse!’ Tibbs shouted.
‘We’ll come to that, Mr Lennox,’ Ross said, unperturbed. ‘As you know, the name Tully is short for Tullius. His mother just liked it. In later life, Tully would deny that the name suggests a certain tinker nobility. We won’t go into it. Let me just say he can sniff out a beer tent at several thousand yards. And, as we all know, Tully has always been very handsome. His youthful good looks have, unfortunately, been sustained, and he’s in that insufferable group of people that includes Rob Lowe and Jamie Redknapp. Speaking of footballers, it was in 1979 at the playing fields on Irvine Moor that I first met Tully. Like his dad, Tully was an avid footballer. We were introduced by Freddie McFarlane, who I was at school with and who played on the same football team. Freddie wanted these two young footballing punks to meet, as he was certain we would get on. And that has occasionally happened, once or twice over the years.’
The crowd roared at every turn. There was energy in it, and truth, and a mass of unsayable things, but the crowd heard them. Ross put it out there in a blaze of brotherhood and loyalty. ‘Every honest man and woman is a juvenile, too,’ he said, ‘and the old humour is always at your elbow. Some people in life are just stars, and this geezer is responsible for some of the biggest laughs I’ve enjoyed in my life. I know that might sound like a small thing to say, but think about it.’
Tully was standing on his own. He glanced over at me and shrugged. ‘The humour he provides is difficult to explain,’ Ross went on. ‘But I’ll always remember him on our many journeys, rolling down the window of the car in some forgotten town in Scotland or England, shouting at some self-conscious, innocent passing teenager, “Stop walking like that!” The funny thing is, no matter how normally they had been walking, the shout would throw their co-ordination.’
The room convulsed and he shuffled his cards and began his list of thanks. ‘Anna,’ he said, ‘is the one I really want to thank. She’s the one we all really want to thank, Tully included. She’s bossy, she’s tenacious, she’s loyal, she’s got beautiful taste in her husband’s friends, and she has loved him like no person could hope to be loved in their lifetime, and that’s a fact.’
We all cheered and she hid her face with her glass.
‘He’s a difficult bugger,’ Ross said, ‘and she’s kept him right. She will never know the complete reprobate he was as a young man, and that is a mercy. Let me just say that we thank her and her family for organising this perfect day.’
And then the dancefloor was pounding for hours. People came and went from the bar, and we island-hopped the malts. As it grew late, the night began to feel pressured, as if the guests knew it was to be the last of its kind. I believe we all felt it, and when the music finally stopped there was a freeze in the heart of the room. The lights came on and the carnage was revealed: men slumped on their wives; bridesmaids overcome with emotion. Tully was standing with his oldest friends, and, signature gesture, he wiped his nose on his sleeve and sniggered as he put his tumbler down. He understood inebriation, he always had, but he seemed embarrassed by the emotion in the room. ‘You can all fuck off now,’ he said, the disco ball throwing squares of light on the floor.
*
The second course of chemo began a few days later, when the alcohol was out of his system. It was another kind of treatment, a mitotic inhibitor called Taxol. He went to the hospital at nine in the morning and didn’t leave until 7 p.m. He phoned me in the afternoon to say the stuff being pumped into him was making him feel sick. ‘I have to try this for a while longer,’ he said. ‘People want me to. But please tell me Switzerland’s going to work out.’ He spoke strangely during that call after the wedding, as if embarking on treatment instead of a honeymoon had filled him with disgust. He said one sad thing in particular and I dwelled on it down at the caravan. ‘I’ve always been kind of repulsed by people who are ill,’ he said, ‘no matter who they are.’ He recalled giving his dad the kiss of life. ‘I felt he was passing something on to me,’ he said, ‘like poison, from his mouth.’ Then he whispered, ‘I’m not saying it’s a sensible thing to say.’
‘You’re not required to be sensible, Tully.’
‘I just feel so horrible.’
‘Can I bring you anything?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Bring me the pills that will end this.’ He paused. ‘I had a dream last night. You sat down and wrote a book about us. And I woke up this morning hoping you had and I wanted to read it.’
I was walking across the rocks a few days later when he Face-Timed me, saying he was feeling a bit more human, though not fully. He asked if I could reverse the camera and show him the Arran hills. ‘Holy balls,’ he shouted. ‘The sea is silver and Arran is like lilac or something. That’s nuts.’
‘It’s never the same way twice.’
He asked me to hold the phone low so he could hear the sound of the waves. ‘I’m coming back down there tomorrow. Will you stay?’
‘I have to go to London for a thing,’ I said. ‘One or two days, then I’ll come straight back.’
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Try and get some of that Hitler chow-down in Brixton. I’m sure you can buy suicide pills down there.’
‘I’m not doing time for you,’ I said.
<
br /> ‘Come on, buddy. It’ll be Angels with Dirty Faces. And when they’re taking you to the electric chair and you turn yella to save the boys, I’ll be Pat O’Brien, standing there with a tear rolling down my fuckan cheek.’
‘That would make you a Catholic priest,’ I said. ‘I might be willing to fry for that.’
‘On second thoughts.’ He paused for a bit, then asked me to hold up the phone and show him the view again. He said he was trying to put his mind on the positive but he wasn’t sure he could sustain it. ‘When I woke up this morning, I was thinking of that Bob Marley song, “Waiting in Vain”, and I was like, “I don’t want to wake in pain no more.” You know, like singing my own words.’
‘Speaking of which, how you getting on with the jukebox fifty?’
‘I’m getting back to it,’ he said. ‘Nearly there. I promise you I’ll have it finished before you get me the chow-down. I’m not going to embarrass you.’
‘Better not,’ I said.
Speaking on the phone that night, my friend Krisztina said she was finding it harder and harder to write anything that wasn’t true, and we often spoke about Tully. She had no trouble comprehending his wish to go peacefully. ‘I have an old boyfriend who lives in Zurich,’ she said. ‘He deals in antiquarian books and has made a life in Switzerland. You must go and see him, when you finally take your friend. Let me know your date when you have it.’
‘It’s hard to think about,’ I said, ‘but it’s coming closer.’
‘All the important things are hard to think about.’
20
Above my desk is a small sketch by Madame Mohl, who had a famous salon in Paris in the 1860s. She attracted writers and painters to her apartment, which overlooked a garden off the rue du Bac, the same garden you find in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors. It is in this ‘spacious, cherished remnant’, this garden, that a young character receives some advice, and we are told of faces appearing like ghosts at the windows above. James was a frequent visitor to Madame Mohl’s, and one of those faces had to be his own, looking down and seeing the people of his imagination, and those characters turning, through the ether of time, to look up at their author standing there at the window. The sketch hung on the wall through everything that took place that year, and I would glance at it, feeling it said something true about all of us.
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