‘Top of the world, Ma.’
The passengers formed a pointless queue when the Zurich flight was called. They seemed like the sort who roamed the world, men with sunglasses propped on their heads, brandishing their fat watches like badges of prodigality. Women – slim wrists and noses upturned – listed to one side as they escorted their huge handbags through the gate. As we stood up I saw Anna dabbing the corners of her eyes.
In the glass tunnel the daylight was piercing and Tully stopped to look down at the broad ordinariness of the tarmac. He put his hands on the Perspex, seeming to take in the workers down below in their yellow vests, the catering vans and baggage trucks swooshing back and forth. We were only a few steps from the door of the plane. I went over and put an arm around him. ‘When we left Scotland this morning, I looked down and saw Paisley,’ he said, ‘and it was weird, you know, to think I’ll never be in Paisley again. Now it’s the whole country I won’t see again, the whole of Britain. I suppose I should be glad to see the back of it, but it’s hard to think of it here on its own.’
As we departed, it seemed separate, the old country. We all knew Tully was leaving for good. ‘Before he became a postie,’ I said to him, ‘Tibbs once applied to study journalism at Napier College. And when the tutor asked him to suggest a title for a newspaper column, he said, “Britain is a Ropey Old Cow”.’
‘No way,’ Tully said. ‘Did he really?’
‘Yep. “A Ropey Old Cow.” And then he proceeded to dictate the column there in the seminar room. He goes, “British Steel is dead. British Coal is dead. British Rail is dead. Britain is a ropey old cow.” And he mooed.’
‘That’s Tibbs all right.’
‘Staggeringly, they didn’t offer him a place.’
‘Silly bastards.’
He slept on the plane and I thought of his mother. She’d be sitting in her care home back in the parish, oblivious to all this. Anna held his hand and she kissed the back of it now and then as the journey passed. The ambience of travel seemed to take over somehow, and, when he woke up, I imagined he might have entered the pure, white zone of otherness he told me he’d dreamed about for months. Switzerland lay under the jet stream. It wasn’t winter but there was snow on the mountains and by and by the whiteness gave out to brackish forests and chalets with brown roofs. That neutral country glinted under the sun, the blue roads like veins carrying poor blood to the heart.
*
Tully led us straight to the escalators. He was holding on to his prejudices about taxis and big hotels. It was a matter of character. He said he’d concede to the fancy dinner that was booked for that evening, but he wasn’t about to waste money and he’d heard the Zurich trains were better than any taxi. So down we went, the four of us, into a gleaming underworld of sporting goods and luggage retailers, the escalator humming its clean sound. We boarded a train full of commuters. ‘Do you think Switzerland is a den of vice and the scrubbing is like a clean-up operation?’ he asked.
‘Almost certainly.’
‘It’s the Fredo Corleone of countries,’ he said. ‘So naive and so corruptible.’
I laughed as we passed Hardbrücke station, and Tully did, too, the expression spreading like good news over his face. ‘Fredo should never have gone to Vegas,’ he said. Images appeared to flicker in his eyes. ‘I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.’
‘You two should have your own show,’ Anna said.
Tully looked out over the streets and buildings. ‘You have to rip it up in a city like this – what do you think, Noodles?’
‘I’m hazarding a guess,’ I said, ‘but this is probably not the time to take up indifference and passivity.’
‘Nope,’ he said.
*
The Hotel St Georges is by the River Sihl. Across the bridges and beyond the trams, it sits on a corner of Weberstrasse, in a pretty square with a fountain. We checked in and handed our passports over to the receptionist, who asked Iona, in faultless English, if we’d like to settle the bill for the rooms right then, or ‘on departure’. Iona quickly dealt with it, but when I glanced at Anna I could see the thought of it was too much for her. Everywhere she looked, I imagined, there was a provocation or a further unwelcome surprise, and she was mortified by it, while trying to keep it all light for Tully.
Late in the afternoon, he was in his room watching a French football match on television. He sent me a text to say he’d just seen a local doctor, as required by the organisation. The surgery was only around the corner and he’d walked there with Anna. ‘It was all fine,’ he said. ‘Wanted to know I was of sound mind.’
‘And are you?’
‘No less than normal.’
The hotel had a smoking oasis outside, a bench with a furry rug, a brass Moroccan table with wooden legs. That evening, when I came down from our room – single beds, sink, powerless shower – he was out there, staring into the fountain and the twilight hour of the square. He looked smart, ordering two Cuba Libres. We clinked glasses. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Let’s show those two a right good time tonight.’
‘Absolutely. You’re in charge.’
We sat down on the bench.
‘That’s what they say.’ He tilted his glass. His head went back. He’d always had this way of drinking, like he was putting it away. He’d taken steroids and all sorts, he said, and would be able to eat and drink, with any luck.
He’d asked that we dress up – he didn’t usually do ties outside of work, so I’d gone to the place in London where I’d got the wedding ties and bought two knitted ones, and shirts as well, and we were both wearing them. He had on his wedding suit. The shirt was too big but when he got up to order more drinks he stopped and winked at himself in the glass door, smoothing his eyebrows and making like Albert Finney. ‘I dunno, work tomorrow,’ he said, before turning towards the bar. When he returned and sat down he told me he’d stopped watching them, the old kitchen-sink dramas.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘I think we wore out their nostalgia,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’s what happens. Realism starts to seem a bit too romantic once reality kicks in.’
‘That’s a big thing to say, Tully.’
‘We just liked the images, didn’t we? The talk. All made up. And everything that’s happened in the last year, it’s … well, it’s not made up, is it?’
‘I wish it had been,’ I said. ‘Reality’s got a lot to answer for.’
Halfway down his second drink, he said the British working class had changed so that it was no longer the natural constituency of the Labour Party. ‘It’s like the policies are good but the times are not,’ he said, ‘and the majority of the people who might benefit from those policies don’t want them.’ He paused and checked his phone. ‘Technology has knackered our sense of the common good.’
‘I wonder if it ever really existed,’ I said. ‘Like the world of those films. Maybe it only ever existed in the imagination, and that’s what we liked.’
‘No, it existed,’ he said. ‘Like Manchester existed.’
He began coughing and I got him some water. He had a sip and then waved it away, wanting to get back to the conversation. ‘Do you remember when my dad died?’ he said. ‘My mum was sitting in the living room for days, just lost really. Devastated. Then you came over and sat with her and started telling stories about Glasgow moneylenders and how one time the family dog bounded in and scoffed your dad’s wage packet, and she picked right up. Just like that. You were twenty-one. I don’t think you ever had a dog but you had the room in an uproar. She never forgot it.’ His voice was steady. He was calm. The air appeared to carry the spirit of what he was saying, and I breathed it, too, and when Anna and Iona came down it felt like our first evening on a new island.
25
Tully and Iona did a slow Buzzcocks medley on the way to the Kronenhalle. The squares were filled with people and you could hear the ringing of the trams and see reflections on the surface of the Limmat. The churches were lit up and the bars al
ong the quay had fairy lights hanging outside and from one of the bridges I saw ‘Lindt Chocolate’ glowing in blue neon at the top of an office building. We made our way through the lanes by the cathedral and I stopped to look at a bookshop, but Tully grabbed my arm and pulled me along, saying he was hungry for the first time in forever. Arriving on Rämistrasse we saw the grand building in front of us and Anna fixed her lipstick.
The sound came first in the Kronenhalle, then pictures and chandeliers. A great brightness fell from the ceiling as we were ushered through. Coats hung in iron cages and a silver samovar glinted on the bar. Our table was in the corner, with paintings all round, a beautiful red Chagall dominating. Sitting down, the women high-fived over the table. Anna kissed Tully’s cheek and wiped it clean. Behind his head, framed in flaked gilt, a small Bonnard showed a girl with an umbrella and a dog. ‘So, Noodles,’ he said. ‘Is this where socialists come to die?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Only to dine.’
‘What’s a consonant between pals?’ When each of our glasses was filled we held them up and Tully looked at the label on the bottle.
‘Fancy restaurants. You’ll be the ruination of him,’ Anna said, and I let it go with a sip of champagne.
‘I love it here,’ Tully said, twisting his wedding ring. ‘Maybe I was wrong and the bourgeois pigs had the right idea all along. Great booze. Cracking pictures.’
‘I like it, too,’ Anna said.
Six Galway oysters.
One prawn cocktail.
Blinis with smoked salmon.
Clear soup with herb pancakes.
The restaurant of the 1920s rose out of the chatter and the tinkling glasses. And somewhere beyond the buzz, I could hear Ravel.
They talked but I didn’t hear them, because of the music. I watched the waiters coming and going with their red faces, their green gloves, seeming like they too had been painted in oils. I wondered about the patrons who had come before us, those historic eaters of oysters and clear soup. The heraldic shields around the walls seemed to recall families and tribes, and it was helpful to think of them, with their own fears and regrets, present again for a minute or two in this pulling of corks.
‘Where have you wandered off to?’ Tully asked.
‘Checking out the people at the tables.’
‘Come the revolution,’ he said, ‘they’re the first to go. But not yet. What’s this music you’re tapping to?’ He looked over at Iona. ‘I once knew him in Manchester. He was mesmerised by northern workers and a million jangly guitars.’
‘Long ago,’ she said.
‘I know you’re younger than him,’ he said, ‘but take my word for it. Jangly guitars and Coronation Street, writers with a few memories and a dole card. He loved every one of them and so did we all, and now it’s pianos.’
‘Get lost,’ I said.
‘Big fat pianos,’ he went on. ‘And nobody nowadays to stop him with the opera-loving and the Beethoven whatever.’
‘Every now and then he’ll play the Smiths at full volume when we’re getting ready for a night out,’ Iona said, ‘but usually it’s some Russian pianist. He wakes up in the morning and is quiet for a minute and then he says, “Alexa, what time is it?” And then he says, “Play Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony,” and suddenly the whole house is rattling with wind instruments and tam-tams.’
‘Stop with the ganging up,’ I said.
‘It would drive you mad,’ she said. ‘Every morning. Rise and shine!’
‘I suppose you think it’s easier waking up to fourteen tracks by the Fall,’ Anna said. She grinned and Tully spread shallots on his oyster.
‘So, what is this music playing now, then?’ he asked.
‘It’s by Ravel, a nice little Catholic Frenchman,’ I said.
‘I’m sure he did a Splash One Happening in Glasgow in the Eighties,’ Tully said. ‘Possibly supported by a wee punk from East Kilbride named Debussy. It was some gig. A guy from Castlemilk called Chopin with a papier-mâché head was crushing it.’
‘He knows much more than he pretends to,’ Anna said.
‘It’s terrifying what a man can do with one O-grade,’ I said. I put down my spoon and looked at him. ‘Ravel was the punk of his time.’
‘Here we go.’
‘The piece you are currently abusing was dedicated to his mates—’
‘What, he had mates?’
‘A bunch of rebels called the Apaches.’
‘I told you!’ he said.
‘They were called the Apaches, or the Hooligans. Stravinsky was one of them, and the painter Paul Sordes.’ Iona started cheering when Tully suddenly went into a routine about gangs of European artists and intellectuals running wild on the housing estates of Glasgow. He did the routine in full dialect, picturing the Apaches armed with clubs and machetes, high on glue, ‘doing some serious damage to the Cumbie, a group of experimental poets from Easterhouse’.
Tully looked at Anna with delighted surprise. He was enjoying himself and seemed pleased to find he had the energy. ‘That Beethoven,’ he said, ‘what a nutter. Pulls a blade on some geezer at the bus stop. Turns out it’s Mozart frae the Garngad. Ludwig tried to slash him and the wee man shouts for handers—’
‘Oh, handers, is it?’
‘Reinforcements to you,’ he said. ‘Next minute, Ravel and the Apaches and the Garngad Vambo are pelting it up the hill, writing a symphony and picking up bottles and all sorts of shite and pure lamping him, what a rammy.’
He seemed suddenly to run out of steam and looked up at the pictures. The Chagall had a curious mood, in tune with the restaurant, in tune with Tully and his aides-de-camp. He focused on a second picture hanging above Iona. ‘That’s a Miró,’ he said. There was an inscription beneath the drawing, a dedication to the one-time proprietors of the restaurant, and, nearby, a note to them from James Joyce. ‘It’s hard to take it all in, like,’ he said, and I muffled the echoes in my own head. Not until that day, not until Zurich, had I known such a combination of exhilaration and dread.
Anna signalled to the waiter. He soon came over.
‘Geehrte Damen, Geehrte Herren …’
He was holding up a bottle of the Petto Dragone. He nodded to Anna. ‘The lady called ahead and requested a special bottle,’ he said. ‘A favourite from Sizilien.’
‘From Sicily,’ she said. ‘From Taormina.’ I put a thumb up and saluted her as a maker and a keeper of stories. She had planned the wine despite her doubts, creating a moment for Tully, even though her eyes, beautiful and violet and clear, would always be holding out for a miracle. She took a deep breath and exhaled. The red wine lashed into the glasses and she held hers up.
‘Sláinte.’
‘Down with propaganda,’ Tully said.
‘Spoken like a true Apache,’ I said.
Rock lobster with garlic and parsley.
Calf’s kidney with rösti.
Chateaubriand and Béarnaise sauce.
Rack of lamb Provençal.
Once the Sicilian red was gone, Anna and I looked at the wine list and ordered a bottle of Château Chasse-Spleen 1990. ‘This wine,’ I said drunkenly, ‘was loved by Lord Byron and Baudelaire.’
‘Late,’ Tully said, ‘of the Govan Young Team. Or was it the Possilpark Toi? No, wait a minute – I think your pal Byron was definitely in the Gallowgate Mad Squad. Used to twirl a stick. Famous for his knuckleduster.’ We all spluttered and the waiter came over to see that everything was all right.
‘Very good,’ I said to him. ‘I’m making a splendid speech about the wine.’ The waiter offered a nod of recognition, topping up our glasses. He was familiar with the British custom of turning everything into a drinking experience.
‘Go for it,’ Tully said.
‘But Byron’s not the reason. The reason we have this wine from 1990 is because that’s the year Margaret Thatcher was deposed.’ I clinked his glass and the smile on Tully’s face was as wide as the River Clyde. All the light in the room and the light of our shared h
istory were on his face.
‘Bringing it all back home,’ he said.
A short time later we went to the gents. He stepped into a cubicle and I could hear him being sick. I waited by the hand-drier. He came out, waving away my concern. ‘I can’t really eat,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to, and that’s that.’ We stood outside the restaurant for a smoke. There was cold air coming from the hills and a disco could be heard along the river. Tully suddenly wanted to talk to the boys in Scotland. He concentrated on the phone. I could see he was scrolling through the numbers and then he looked up, blowing the air out of his lungs. ‘I can’t face it, bud,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry. They’re all with you.’
‘I’m just going to stay here for a minute.’
At the table, Anna and Iona held hands. I saw them from the door and could tell Anna had been crying. I felt I couldn’t yet enter the circle, so I returned to the bathroom and had a breather at the mirror. When I came back, Anna at first seemed keen to recuperate the merriment, but since Tully was outside she took the opportunity to ask what time they wanted us at the clinic the next day. As happens, in drink, in crisis, the resentment that had been put to bed was suddenly awakened.
‘Tully doesn’t seem to be aware of precisely what’s happening.’
She said it formally, expressing her frustration and igniting mine, with the implication that he was somehow not in control.
‘He knows exactly,’ I said. ‘He’s spoken to them many times. And I’ve confirmed the information they gave us. We arrive at eleven.’
‘And then what?’
She was right. This was her moment to ask for the information as if it might still be subject to her revisions. While he was away from the table, she could turn to me and register a little of the feeling she’d been holding back.
‘You can take the whole day if you want,’ I replied. ‘There’s no rush.’ She rested her hands on a small, clear bowl of roses. As we spoke, she picked petals from the top flower and rolled them between her fingers.
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