Losing It

by Ross Gilfillan

  ‘Have you said hello to Nana?’

  ‘Nana and GD? They’re here?’ This is news to me.

  ‘They came this afternoon while you were out,’ Mum says, looking at the rain spattering on the windows. ‘That’s why your father’s still out in the garden.’

  Nana smiles as I enter the back bedroom where they always stay when they visit. Despite her condition, Nana can still get upstairs thanks to the stair lift Dad installed. I’ve always suspected it wasn’t put in so much as an aid for her, as a far-thinking precaution against his own old age. There was a closing down sale at the mobility shop, so he bought that, some handgrips for the bath and a wheelchair ramp for the kitchen steps. The house now has everything it needs to see him through to his death, in about 45 years time.

  Nana and GD always look out of place and a little uncomfortable in this room, its fussy neatness clashing with Nana’s flowing skirts and GD’s tie-dyed tee shirts, but it’s the only place in the whole house that Nana can abide because if she looks through the gap between the rows of new and identical houses that climb the hill behind us, she can just make out the dark shape of the moorland ridge and almost see the towering rock on which GD knelt so many years ago and asked her to be his bride.

  ‘How are you?’ I ask and sit down on the nearest of the twin beds. There’s just Nana. GD must have gone to see his old friend in the town, as he often does when he’s here. Garcia will have gone with him.

  ‘I’m okay, Brian. Don’t look so glum! I’m here for more treatment, of course, but lately I’ve been feeling much better. I’ve even started to write again.’

  Nana is a poet. I ask if she wrote the book of poetry she has open on her lap. She shakes her head and picks it up and reads me something about death and eternity sitting in a carriage together. It sounds so morbid but she obviously likes it.

  ‘It’s good,’ I say. I never know quite what to say to her these days. She’s so ill and each time I see her, it’s like a little bit more of the Nana I loved has disappeared. She’s thinner, her face is more lined, her eyes sort of poppy.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ she’s saying, ‘of when you spent a fortnight with us when you were younger? You remember that?’

  This was the summer Dad dragged Mum up North to watch the Scottish Open at Loch Lomond and to spend a few days touring the Travelodges and garden centres of Scotland and all points South. That’s what Dad does whenever we go anywhere. But for me it was the best outcome possible. I stayed with GD and Nana in their little cottage in the hills, the place I called Narnia, because it sounded like Nana. Narnia was everything Laurel Gardens has never been. There was always music, GD’s records or people playing guitars, mandolins or whatever. Because they always had friends staying over, people from the college where Nana taught English, or GD’s friends from his vague and colourful past.

  I was only ten at the time and I hardly knew what to make of them. They were old, of course, but not in the way that Dad is old, at just past 40. They were old with experience and appeared to have learned the secret of enjoying life. They would wake me in the early morning hours and take me with them onto the hill to watch the dawn break over the distant castle. We would tramp through the knee-high and dew-laden grass to a spot which commanded a view of the world. They talked, joked and sometimes sang as the sun pushed itself up from the distant horizon. At the time I thought they might be botanists or scientists because they took such an interest in the world about them, the petals of flowers, the bark of trees, the intricate patterns on a leaf. Later, I realised that they were all off their heads on acid. GD was still working as a carpenter then and I sometimes wonder what his work would have been like, on those long days that began like these.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, holding the thin, blue-cheese hand she’s stretching out to me. ‘I remember it all, Nana.’

  I ring the bell and Clive answers the door while the dogs are still barking and Rule Britannia’s not finished chiming in the hallway. I hadn’t noticed he was wearing makeup last night – he’s very subtle with it these days – but there’s black streaks all over his cheeks. His hair’s a mess and he looks like he’s spent the night nesting in the rust heaps in the yard. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says without much enthusiasm while he takes a squint up the street. ‘I thought it might be someone else.’

  ‘What happened to you last night?’ I say, though I’m not sure I want to know.

  ‘I was up a friend’s,’ he says ambiguously. ‘Didn’t get in ‘til two.’

  ‘In where?’ I can’t help saying, but it passes over Clive’s head without damage.

  ‘I tell you, Bri, I was completely fucked last night.’

  Does he know he’s doing this, I wonder?

  ‘Dad’s somewhere. I think he wants some help with the scrap metal scruncher.’

  ‘Not the compactor?’ My worst fears, etc.

  ‘That’s the thingy,’ Clive says cheerfully, closing the door. ‘I’d do it myself, but I’ve got the new floors to think about.’ I’m seriously considering ignoring the call I got from Roger while I was talking to Nana, and returning home on health and safety grounds, but that’s the moment when Roger appears from around the corner, wearing nothing but his red Speedos, a pair of flip flops and a lot of tattoos. It’s an unnerving sight at the best of times.

  ‘I thought I heard you,’ he says. ‘Come on round the back.’

  We sit by Roger’s new compactor, on sun-warmed bales of metal made from written-off cars and Roger opens a plastic cooler box and fishes out two tins of Tennent’s Super. He chucks me one, but the way he’s sizing me up, he might be wondering if I would gum up the works if he fed me into the compactor.

  ‘Have you seen the state of him?’ he asks, finally.

  I have.

  ‘I’m still up when he gets home, watching some old cobblers on cable – Changing Rooms, it might have been,’ and as he warms to his subject, he sounds a little friendlier, I think. ‘Fuck me, the way things change, eh, Brian? All that MDF wouldn’t get a look-in these days, not in my gaff anyway. That Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen still wants a slap, though.’ Roger takes a long sip of his lager and I can see that in his mind’s eye he has LLB’s throat in his meaty grasp as he tells him where he can shove his MDF, adding that Anna Ryder Richardson could dump all over his idea of style and she’s crumpet and all. Then he wakes from his reverie. ‘Sorry, where was I?’

  ‘Still up when Clive got home,’ I say, though my mind’s still on Anna Ryder Richardson.

  ‘So I was. And in comes Clive, looking like he’s been in a car crash, but also like the cat that got the cream, know what I mean? Maybe it had run in front of an electric milk float and caused a pile-up, I dunno. So I ask him about it and he’s telling me this wild story about all the skirt just gagging to take him home. Well, chip off the old block, I’m thinking! Perhaps we’ve all been wrong about him. So – here’s the million-dollar question, Brian, have you fixed it for me? Has Clive finally got his end away?’

  The easy bit is telling Roger all about Clive being the star of the Prom and how other blokes weren’t getting a look-in while his son was wowing them all on the dance floor. Then comes the hard bit, telling him that, as far as I know, Clive didn’t avail himself of all that snatch on tap, but spent the rest of the night up a mate’s’. I’m more than a little nervous about how Roger will take this.

  But Roger only sighs, adjusts his hefty balls and opens another beer. ‘I don’t fucking know, Brian, I really don’t. It wasn’t like that in my day.’

  And Roger tells me how it was in his day, how he only had to rub up against some bird in a disco and then it was, wham, bam, thank you ma’am – unless she screamed and it all kicked off, of course. And then I tell him how it is in my day, how it was for me last night, anyway. And this is where it all gets a bit unexpected. I start talking and soon I find that I’m telling him way more than I intended to, personal stuff about my feelings for Ros that I haven’t told my best mates. And I’m telling him all this be
cause he’s not one of my mates and I know that whatever he says, it won’t be the kind of spaccy reaction I’d get from Diesel, for instance.

  I tell him what I’d tell my dad, if I could actually talk to him about something other than the price of lawn feeds and how racy The Archers is getting these days. Still, standing outside my body, as I sometimes do on such occasions, I’m amazed to see myself telling Roger Dyson that I’m in love with Rosalind Chandler and in language that I’ve no memory of ever using before. She is, I tell him, hardly noticing his eyebrows cocking, ‘beguiling’. She has, I say, an ‘ethereal, other-worldly charm’, and ‘hidden depths’. Ethereal? Where did that come from? There’s more along similar lines and I probably sound like Oz Clarke describing a glass of, what is it, Chateau Petrus? And because I’m talking to Roger, who is very blokey and probably a bit thick, and because I can be a patronising git at times, I punctuate all this with know what I mean?

  Roger listens politely and nods and scratches his balls a lot. Then he asks me how far I’ve got with Rosalind. First or second base, he asks, or a home run? Then he gruckles, which is the only way to describe the sort of grunting chuckle he does, and asks me if I struck out (for a Millwall fan, he seems to know a lot about baseball). I have to tell him I’ve never actually spoken to her. ‘Fuck me,’ he says: for some reason, he seems to find this appalling. It’s all beyond his comprehension, though perhaps the fault’s with my crap situation, rather than his IQ.

  I tell him I have no idea what to do now.

  Where other people might signify cogitation by stroking their chin, Roger’s equivalent is to slip a hand inside his Speedos and sort out the lie of his tackle. He seems oblivious to the shuffling movements of his hand inside his trunks as he leans back and blows out his cheeks.

  ‘It’s hard,’ he says, worryingly.

  We sit there soaking up the sun for what seems like ages and despite Roger’s alarming appearance – he may have a shaven head and Love and Hate tattooed on his knuckles, but the Speedos are scarier – I feel oddly at ease talking with him about Ros and reckon I could probably talk to Roger about all kinds of stuff. Not that of course, but maybe anything else. Is it the effect of drinking strong lager in the sun or is it because I really am being patronising and think that maybe he won’t properly understand it all? I dismiss that thought – I can be an arrogant sod as well, but not that arrogant. Maybe, I’m wondering, as Roger hawks up something chewy from the deepest recesses of his lungs and spits it against the metal side of the compactor, where it begins to loop downwards like a phlegmy Mexican bean, maybe it’s because there’s actually something fatherly about him, just like there once was with my dad, before his mind became fixed on others things, like Roger’s scrap business, Roger’s dogs, Roger’s swimming trunks, etc, etc.

  ‘What you and this bird need, my son,’ Roger says at last, ‘is a mutual interest. Common ground. That’ll get you into her knickers, if anything will.’

  ‘It’s a thought,’ I say.

  ‘Of course it is. Clive’s mum and me had a mutual interest and that’s what made it all work for us.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Shagging, mainly. She fucked me for two years before fucking off herself. But you know what I mean. It works with other stuff, too.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Take Trudy, I mean. She was the bird in the boots going out as you were coming in last week. We had a mutual interest and you know what it was?’

  Roger grins and gives his balls a squeeze. I try not to look, and suggest, ‘Shagging, again?’

  ‘Eventually, yes. And she is the business, I have to say. Squeezes your cock like a python digesting a live mouse. But no, it wasn’t that, not at first.’

  ‘So what was it?’ I’m imagining everything sexual short of cross-dressing – which produces a disturbing image on the back of my eyelids, which is Roger in a light, summer dress and a pair of sling-backs.

  ‘Fucking quiz machines,’ Roger says. ‘I was playing one down the Barley Mow one night and I got stuck on the wotsits, the picture questions. Who painted The Haywain and all that bollocks. Trudy had been playing the machine since they put the fucker in, so she knew them all. But I was fucked if I knew who won last year’s Turner Prize.’

  ‘Art not your subject?’ I say, allowing myself a superior little smirk. By this time, I was beginning to think I almost liked Roger. I was grateful for the interest he had taken in my problem and was even beginning to think he wasn’t so scary after all – but I didn’t see him sitting by his compactor with a Tennents in one hand and a copy of Gombrich’s Story of Art in the other.

  ‘It’s bollocks, what they call art these days, innit?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  ‘Fucking Damien Hirst? Pickled cows? Tracey fucking Emin and her dirty knickers?’

  ‘It’s all shit, isn’t it?’ I say, and belch amicably.

  ‘Cunts, the lot of them,’ Roger pronounces. He raises himself from his seat to expel a loud, whining fart. ‘Compared, I mean, with your Leonardo or your Michelangelo.’

  It seems our chat is taking a strange turn, but I can go with a flow.

  ‘Fuck, I was a big Turtles fan too,’ I say, keeping up nicely. ‘’Course, no way should they have changed their names from Ninja to Hero. That fucking sucked.’

  ‘And your Raphael,’ Roger goes on, seeming not to have heard me. ‘Though Fra Angelico had his moments and Giotto too, obviously. No, your actual masters of the Quattrocento piss all over those modern cunts. But the secret is to see the fuckers in situ. In the chapels where they was painted. Or at least in the fucking Uffizi, you know?’

  ‘Right,’ I say. When Clive told me him and his dad’d been to Italy, I thought he’d meant Rimini, somewhere with a beach, not Florence, ground zero of the Italian Renaissance.

  ‘Yeah, I can see you’re surprised,’ Roger says. ‘There I was, in Michelangelo’s fucking library wearing Union Jack shorts and a Millwall shirt. But I won it, you see, two weeks in fucking Florence. Competition in one of Trudy’s magazines.’

  ‘Fucking Florence,’ I say, as I don’t know what else to say.

  ‘But they give you headphones and these recorded guides. All in English, too. Soon get to know your way around, know what I mean?’

  Is he taking the piss?

  ‘So,’ I say, while I think about that. ‘You were able to help this Trudy on the quiz machine?’

  ‘Help her? We emptied it that night. Then we went home and she emptied me. So what I’m saying is, you and this bird have to find something you both know a bit about, something you can rabbit about with her. You do that, she’ll think you’re on her wavelength then and that’s half your battle won.’

  ‘Half? What’s the rest?’

  ‘Well, getting her pissed won’t hurt.’

  ‘So how would you suggest I go about this?’

  ‘Well, to start with, what’s she’s into? Has she got interests?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Reading, maybe. She’s always got a bag full of books.’

  ‘And what do you know about books?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ I say, truthfully. The last book I read without having to was probably something by Roald Dahl.

  ‘Well, find out what she likes and read that. Then it’s a couple of drinks, some old pony about Harry Potter or whatever and it’ll be all systems go for the old pink Polaris.’

  ‘Will it work?’

  ‘Of course it will. You’re on your own with the fucking books though.’

  Roger pushes the button on the compactor, which starts rumbling and clanking. Now he has to shout to make himself heard over the grinding and mangling of metal going on in the belly of the machine. ‘Only things I ever read are Millwall programmes,’ he says, then there’s something I can’t quite make sense of, but it sounds like, ‘And fucking Vasari.’

  I can’t just sit there, so I get up and start helping him feed the compactor from a tangled heap of rusting scrap. I’m quite enjoying the mechanical
nature of the job as we both take an end of something heavy and drop it into the hungry jaws of the machine. I’m knackered after about three minutes, but I’m liking that feeling which all manual workers must get when they work up a sweat from honest toil. And I’m thinking how noble it is to work with your hands and satisfying to have your muscles ache at the end of the day, when Roger stops the machine to clear an obstruction.

  ‘That’s helped you, has it?’ he says.

  ‘It’s certainly an idea,’ I say.

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘And now I’ve helped you, you’ll remember to help me, won’t you?’

  I look around at the patch of flattened earth where one of the many heaps of scrap had been. It’s now reduced to a couple of neatly compacted bundles. ‘Not with that,’ Roger says. ‘With Clive. You’ll stand by your promise?’

  ‘Promise?’ I say. Had I actually promised anything?

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he says. Roger sees something in the long grass and picks it up. It’s one of Clive’s old Action Man figures, now naked and headless. ‘I don’t mind you, Brian, so we’ll forget about last night and start over. I know you won’t let me down again.’

  He drops the little figure into the machine. Any thoughts I’d had about Roger actually being ‘a bit of a pussycat when you got to know him’ wither entirely as he nails me with a loaded look.

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ I say. ‘You can count on me.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Roger says, and digs his hand into his Speedos to offer another imaginative configuration of his cock and balls.

  CHAPTER 6

  Do You Remember the First Time?

  ‘We used to play this, remember?’

  That’s Faruk, who can use the jukebox for free.

  He sits down and begins to rattle his teaspoon on his coffee cup to the sound of Motorhead’s Ace of Spades while his sister Deniz shoots him looks from the other side of the counter.

  ‘To be accurate,’ says Clive. ‘We tried to play this.’