The Accidental Recluse

by Tom McCulloch

  Everything is everything until a young man in a Che Guevara T-shirt stands up and shouts, ‘Bullshit!’

  Two security guards move swiftly.

  ‘What about all you’ve left out of the story?’ he asks. I hear strangled words about the Cayman Islands and the minimum wage as security drag him away.

  ‘Well, folks.’ The audience eyes turn as one from Che to me, making me think of a thousand Breda Boys performances. ‘I guess he won’t be wanting a signed copy.’

  The laughter is too loud, tension being released. My heartbeat slows to its usual ragged apathy.

  Lachie wraps things up. I sign my scrawl on a few dozen books. Old women with a twinkle and young women with none, bashful movie geeks and decrepit creatures like me, determined to reminisce. They remember JJ and Duke, the first Breda Boys shows and the last, wandering off with their wistfulness as other expectant faces take their place; please sign it to Katie . . . to Gregor . . . to my greatest fan . . . to Shinigami, my stomach an instant lurch as I look up sharply.

  It is not Lewis.

  ‘Sue Shinnie?’ repeats a middle-aged woman with an unsettlingly large perm. She’s mortified. Thinks she’s said something out of turn. Annoyed the big movie star. ‘Just Sue, if you prefer, I don’t—’

  ‘Of course, no problem. To Sue.’

  I sign the last book at nine, just in time, my patter running on fumes. I sense a growing disappointment. Never meet your heroes, that’s the rule. Don’t they know I have gone years barely speaking to anyone but Akira? He’s by my side as I wave my farewells to the still-milling throng.

  As we climb the stairs to the ground floor I hear a rising buzz of noise. At the top, across the store, bemused staff stare out the doors and windows. On the street outside, a line of skeletons peer in. They wear black trousers, black tops with stencilled white bones and grinning skull masks. They are chanting something I can’t make out, rhythmically drumming on the glass.

  ‘We leave. Now,’ says Erin.

  ‘A demonstration, Johnny.’ Akira sounds so calm, his voice almost dreamy. ‘About your business.’

  ‘It hasn’t been my business for a long time.’

  ‘You think that matters?’ says Erin.

  ‘If I’m the ghoul, why are they dressed like them?’

  ‘You really need to ask?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud.’

  Security hustles me between book stacks, Religion and Self-help. It makes such perfect sense I have to smile. We hurry through a staff door and down a flight of stairs to a loading bay that smells strongly of oil. Twenty-feet-high doors concertina open and we’re in a narrow, dark street.

  The three Mercedes have their engines running. There is a brief coldness of rain as I’m pushed into the middle car. Erin gets in beside me and the convoy takes off, coming to an abrupt halt almost immediately. A security guard hurries past with his arm out, shouting back up, back up.

  ‘Problem?’ says Erin.

  We turn to look out the back window as Akira reverses at speed, following the car behind to the other end of the narrow street. Then another abrupt stop. Again, I hear the rhythmic chanting.

  It’s all a bit exciting.

  Erin is repeating the word intelligence as the first of the figures dressed as skeletons appears.

  It sticks out a tongue and starts to batter its hands on the roof. Others swarm around and join in, peering into the car, waxy deaths heads with dark circles round the eyes, black-and-white teeth painted on either side of the mouth. Here and there are hooded figures in porcelain-white, Guy Fawkes masks. The car starts to rock from side to side, Erin shouting into her mobile as Akira revs the car and we lurch backwards. There’s something here, a memory I place in the face of a mask-less young woman standing still in all the movement, staring straight at me.

  Instantly, I am in Guadalajara, 1974, the Day of the Dead festival, Mexico; somewhere else Anna and I searched for magic. Booze from dawn until dusk, dancing to Mariachi and further away from each other, the evening fireworks exploding with the same sadness in the young woman’s eyes.

  I watch her for as long as I can, until the car reaches Stevenson Street, passing under a banner saying Low Pay, No Way.

  ‘A debacle. An utter debacle.’ Yet there is enjoyment in Erin’s eyes. She opens the drinks cabinet, pours two whiskies and says something I don’t hear, my head full of firecrackers and the looming faces of moustachioed glitter-drunks in filthy bars, the coldness of Anna’s hand and this drink that tastes like Mescal . . .

  ‘Another?’

  That I do hear.

  ‘It’s quite touching, I suppose,’ she adds. ‘That people still feel that they can make a difference.’

  In the low light of the car her face has taken on a masklike quality of its own. She’s grinning as well.

  ‘Are you ok? You seemed—’

  ‘Why were they dressed like that?’

  She looks at me carefully. ‘There really is no time in your world, is there? It’s 31st October. Halloween.’

  I look out the window. Stare at the half-lit tenements. Out there, up the heights in the full darkness is the cemetery. There you all lie. You’ve never needed to wait for Halloween to go a-wandering.

  ‘A flash demo. Nothing we could have known in advance.’

  ‘Well, it’s something to talk about.’

  ‘Just a pity that Frank Stone wasn’t here. Think of the headlines. Hollywood star caught in provincial riot.’ Her light-heartedness is uncharacteristic. She smiles. Even squeezes my arm.

  ‘Don’t underestimate the locals, Erin. I was born here. If they’d caught us they would’ve eaten us.’

  ‘You spoke very well. They loved you.’

  ‘Local boy done good.’

  ‘Apart from Che Guevara.’

  ‘You can please some of the Trots some of the time . . . ’

  ‘Oh, I picked something up, by the way, before all the excitement.’ She produces a book from her inside coat pocket. ‘Have you seen this before? It was in the local history section.’

  Anna looks at me from the front cover. She’s sitting at a typewriter, looking over her shoulder at the photographer, an enigmatic smile on her face. I’ve never seen this shot before. The book is called The Breda Girl, a short biography, published by a local historical society. ‘I didn’t know about this.’

  ‘Look at the photos.’

  There is such delight on Erin’s face. Now I understand her mood. She flicks through photos I haven’t seen for years and others I never have. Anna is smiling in all of them. She always smiled. I hope this is how Erin too remembers her mother, and feel a tremendous welling of shame. I reach out and touch her cheek, her surprise softening to affection as she grips my hand.

  ‘I miss her,’ she says.

  ‘I know. I do too.’

  ‘But you never talk about her.’

  I again see her sadness. I understand, I always have, why serious little Erin surrounded herself with one obsession after another, those surrogates for an affection we always made such hard work.

  ‘I was always waiting for you to talk to me about her. After she died I wanted you to keep her with us. But every time I mentioned her you’d change the subject. I don’t understand, I never have.’

  I sit back in the seat and close my eyes. When I open them again, she is reading the little biography.

  Undoubtedly, she will find out more details, fleshing out that life about which I have been such useless source. Yet it is as much as I can do to imagine Anna, the smoothness of her cheek, say, her hand in mine under the volcanoes of Mexico. To speak of her would be to feel her heartbeat, to hear a voice which, even as it whispered so close in my ear, was always so far away.

  Erin puts the book down. ‘I still don’t understand why there was no warning about how sick she was. Dad too. There wasn’t much explanation there either. I’ve never understood any of it.’

  I stare at her in silence. Better to say nothing
. Better to endure the hurt in her big, serious eyes so like her mother’s. I wonder what the book says about us all, Duke? I wonder if Lewis has read it.

  Twelve

  November 1966, the gloomy block of flats that is Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. I was there an hour before visiting time and wandered up and down Goldhawk Road in the rain, preparing all kinds of apologies, from the banal to the ridiculous.

  I was the first one in. A nurse whose flinty gaze offered instant and unflattering judgement ushered me into the barracks-like ward, hurrying me between long rows of beds and staring women.

  Anna was nursing a baby wrapped in a shawl. She looked up and smiled. There was no surprise in her eyes, even though we hadn’t seen each other for over a year. I had a familiar, disquieting feeling that here was another situation that she had somehow foreseen and rehearsed.

  ‘Her name is Erin.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Her smile was almost pitying, as if I had just asked the stupidest question in the world. ‘Your brother finally decided to pay you a visit then?’

  ‘If I’d have known before, I could have . . . I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise, Johnny. I wasn’t exactly seeking you out, was I? It was just all so awkward because of what . . . ’ Her smile. So delicately shy that it brought a lump to my throat.

  ‘It’s brilliant, you know. The baby. I’m so happy for you both.’ I even tried to believe it, just for a moment.

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘Not the best.’

  ‘Was he now? Poor wee boy. All too much for Duke. She’s three days old and he hasn’t been to meet her.’

  The smile remained. She didn’t seem upset or resigned, this something else she had long seen coming.

  * * *

  Anna told me a dozen times I didn’t need to but in the absence of Duke there was no choice. I’d spent three days trying to track him down. The friends I had phone numbers for either didn’t know where he was or weren’t saying. She could hardly deal with a newborn baby all by herself.

  So I moved back in to St. Stephen’s Garden.

  The press scrum was waiting when we got out of the taxi with Erin. One question over and over again.

  Where’s Duke?

  It wouldn’t take them long to work it out. He was a man of habit. I wasn’t going to be surprised by a call from Mustique. So it proved, Duke eventually phoning from a noisy pub that was obviously The Clachan. He was drunk, launching into a long, rambling story about how my boys ran that Daily Mirror bugger out of town, as if putting off the question he finally asked.

  ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

  I put the phone down and pulled the cord from the wall. The next call came a few days later. Not my brother but Fat Jack McVeigh, telling me Duke had spent a night in the cells after breaking into The Empire. ‘They huckled him onstage. He was going through your old routines, both parts . . . ’

  Anna, Erin and I took the train north. I left them at her mother’s on the heights of Inveran and took a taxi to the cottage. There was no sign of Duke but the sink was piled with unwashed crockery, a weariness of empty bottles on the table. I pictured the farce, my wild-eyed brother staggering from room to room as the wind howled, tipping the drink, babbling his case to empty space.

  The image was way off the mark. I found him in The Inveran Empire later that day. He was sitting onstage, eyes closed, nodding to the music filling the theatre, I think it was Ellington’s Far East Suite. He looked almost serene. The mod look had been replaced by a style more in keeping with a town that the sixties would bypass almost altogether: a tweed suit and brogues. On his head was a familiar, battered fedora, leaning against the chair a silver-topped cane.

  ‘He just sits there for hours.’

  Fat Jack and I were standing at the back of the auditorium.

  ‘Every now an then he gets a notion in his heid an scribbles something down on a bitty paper.’

  For the first time, I noticed the sheets scattered on the stage around Duke, barely visible in the dim light.

  ‘He paid me. I felt embarrassed but . . . you know.’

  ‘Eh? How much?’

  ‘Two hundred quid.’

  ‘Two hundred!’

  Now Fat Jack did look embarrassed. ‘I didn’t ask for it, he just offered. Would you have said no?’

  ‘Two hundred quid for what?’

  ‘I dunno. Hire? He just sits and plays music. Says he’s got something up his sleeve.’

  ‘You’re ripping him off. Can you not see he’s not well?’

  Fat Jack was suddenly angry. A finger in my chest. ‘Don’t you dare. He can be out of here quick as I let the daftie in. Who do you think smoothed it wi the polis when he bloody well broke in?’

  I shoved his hand away and hurried down towards the stage.

  ‘You’re no in London now, pal,’ shouted Jack. ‘Didn’t take long for you to forget about Jacky, eh, all ah did for you.’

  I stopped on the other side of the orchestra pit. I watched Duke nod his head to the music and wondered what was on the sheets of paper. When the music ended he reached between his legs for a bottle of whisky I hadn’t seen. He noticed me then, but not a hint of surprise.

  ‘You’re gonna love this, little bro.’ Glittery eyes that made me uneasy. ‘Come up here and have a drink.’

  He told me all about it, the mother of all memorial concerts, the old man deserves it, right, a charity gig, see all the names I’ve got lined up, it’ll be like a greatest hits thing, just can’t get a running order straight, do you think we could get Basie, imagine that, imagine the old man’s face . . .

  ‘Are they ok?’ he suddenly asked.

  ‘They’re here, Duke.’

  He swallowed. ‘That’s great. That’s great. Thanks, JJ. Thanks for being there.’

  ‘Her name’s Erin.’

  His eyes widened. ‘I’ve got a daughter.’ He looked away, into the dark of the stage.

  ‘You coming to see them then?’

  He looked back. ‘Sure.’ A smile, quick then gone. ‘Maybe tomorrow, eh? Long journey for them.’

  The next morning I drove Anna and Erin out to the cottage. As I turned up the drive I saw Duke at the top of the slope, smoking. He quickly tossed the cigarette and hurried away. When we got inside the cottage there was no sign of him. I found him in the byre, sitting quietly on the splitting log.

  ‘You coming in then?’

  ‘Give us a minute. Just doing some kindling . . . It’s right cold in there, the wean’ll need some heat.’

  He picked up the hatchet to start the small task that took half an hour to finish, eventually ambling into the kitchen with an armful of kindlers. He turned slowly from the hearth, brushing slivers of wood from his jumper. Only then did he look at Anna, sitting at the table with the baby.

  ‘This is Erin, Duke. Do you want to hold her?’

  He looked down at his hands. ‘I’m a bit dirty. Maybe best not.’

  ‘You’re bloody right. Best not.’

  Anna stood up quickly and knocked over the chair. Erin began to cry and Duke took a step forward, saying something lost in the slam of the door. In silence, I drove Anna and Erin back to Inveran.

  Duke disintegrated quickly. I thought of a car crash in slow motion, where you think you’ll have time to intervene before impact. Somewhere in those immutable red eyes I glimpsed, now and then, hints of someone remembered, ever more distant staging points on the way to a stranger.

  I found him hangover-free one morning, full of contrite determination to sort it out, right now, ‘I’m gonna be a husband and father!’ A flustered Anna called me later to say that Duke had appeared at her mother’s and started packing her bags, then tried to drag her out of the house to catch a train. I got another call the same afternoon, from the golf course. I might want to come and get my brother, who had spent two hours hitting dozens of balls from the first tee.

  At other times, there was
a fragile stillness to him. Sat in the front row of The Empire, scribbling in a notebook that he never let me see. He was still able to work the magic, that smile so charming it could transmit down a telephone line, a wink for me and an angsty this means so much as he persuaded the producer of his new film, The Sandwich Girl, to put the schedule back.

  He tried his best to fill out the bill for Smile, the Billy Jackson Memorial Concert. But less luck here for The Duke. Word spread fast in Variety Land, Fat Jack with the telephone whispers. Most of the Scottish acts found other commitments while none of the English ones were willing to make the journey north.

  There were whispers too in Inveran. Every day I drove from the cottage to town, up the heights to Anna’s house, her mother a frail and absent presence in an easy chair she never left.

  We’d take long walks with the pram, up towards the moor and down into town, along the promenade, a stop at Jameson’s tea rooms to the coos of the old biddies and the undoubtedly raised eyebrows after we left. Even the seagulls knew about Duke’s strange residency at The Empire.

  ‘Poor man’s losing his mind and his brother’s swanning around playing daddy.’

  This I overheard in the Queens Hotel. I’d gone in for lunch and was hidden away in one of the booths when Fat Jack came blustering in, indulging his habit of half a lifetime, a hauf an a hauf and the lunchtime special, holding court with the usual collection of bulbous-nosed cronies.

  ‘Think he thinks he’s Alfred Hitchcock. Sat there with his grand schemes. Tell ye, it’s pretty pathetic.’

  ‘Why’d you let him then?’

  ‘Hey, Jack’s no mug. Took him for two hunner!’

  ‘Two hunner!’

  ‘It’s rent! What’s a man to do? He’s no short of a bawbee anyways. Makes a mint in those films.’

  ‘Aye, amazing what they’ll pay for a pile of shite.’

  ‘Never mind Duke, you seen the films JJ’s been making?’

  ‘What the fuck’s all that about?’

  ‘Least there’s no a monkey in them.’