The Man Who Loved Islands

by David F. Ross

  ‘Jesus Christ, mam,’ Hammy chokes. ‘An’ what’s wi the “we”?’

  ‘The Bowlin’ Club lassies,’ she says, pausing before adding, ‘… an’ the lads.’

  ‘Lads? Whit’s goin’ on wi ye, mam?’ The Blood Orange ethos is not limited to the Mediterranean, it seems.

  ‘Ah’ve got a fella,’ says Maggie, proudly.

  ‘Eh?’ Hammy can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. ‘Yer whit … seventy-five?’

  ‘So whit,’ she replies, not adding the additional year that he has omitted. ‘Dinnae be a prude. Seventy-five’s the new fifty!’

  ‘Is it fuck! Fifty’s always been the auld fifty.’

  ‘Hey, watch yer language,’ says Maggie, scolding her son. ‘Would ye want me stuck in here aw day, bored wi’ life, just waitin’ tae die and relyin’ on Phillip Schofield for the only stimulation ah get until that happens?’

  Hammy dismisses the unwelcome image of Phillip Schofield stimulating his old mum, but it is quickly replaced by one in which the daytime TV presenter sticks his hand up Gordon the Gopher’s arse. Hammy isn’t sure which is the more disturbing.

  ‘That’s whit you’re needing, son,’ says Maggie.

  But Hammy’s head’s gone. ‘Whit? Phillip Schofield’s hand up ma arse every mornin’?’

  Maggie looks puzzled. ‘Ye talkin’ aboot? Naw … a companion. Someday that can love ye an’ look after ye.’

  Hammy thinks back to what he had with Esta, and with Bobby, in Ibiza. Sunshine, sex and Sangria: it’s the ultimate in clichéd ‘Brit abroad’ holiday aspiration but Hammy had it year round. What the fuck was he doing back here in the sleet and the cold and the inaccessible kerbs?

  ‘So where are ye livin’?’ says Maggie.

  ‘Ah’m bunkin’ wi’ Joey Miller up at his flat but that’ll no’ dae. Too much hassle. We’re gonnae sort somethin’ when Bobby comes back, dunno what though.’

  ‘Well, ye can stay here for a wee while, but this isnae ideal … ye ken that, eh?’

  Hammy doesn’t want to stay with his mum, but is curious about the way she has said it; there was a definitely not emphasis, as opposed to a definitely maybe option.

  ‘Why no’?’ he asks, testing his theory.

  ‘Well, there’s nae room for a start.’ She sees his Aye, right! expression. There’s more space than she knows what to do with, and were there the impetus, a ‘Thora Hird’ stairlift could be fitted to make access to a bedroom possible. But there is something else; something she’s reluctant to tell him. He stares her out. Eventually she crumbles.

  ‘Ach, it’s Bert. He’s movin’ in in a few days,’ says Maggie. She looks down.

  ‘Bert!’ shouts Hammy. ‘Who the fuck’s Bert?’

  ‘Hamish May! Language!’ She stands up. He can’t. ‘It’s Bert from the club. Bert Bole.’

  ‘Bert Bole? Jesus Christ, mam … he must be about a hundred years old. That daft auld git was the cruise singer on the Titanic!’

  Maggie May removes their plates and takes them through to the kitchen. She is trying not to smile. That last remark was quite funny.

  When she returns, Hammy has calmed down a little. He has given thought to this unlikely coupling and figured that maybe there isn’t a world of difference between his mum and him: both trying to find a bit of happiness and excitement where they can before it’s too late. And neither his mum nor Bert Bole is married to anyone else. Hammy’s in no position to cast the first stone.

  ‘So how did that come aboot, then? he asks.

  ‘He wis doin’ the club bingo night an’ he did ma song. It melted ma heart,’ she says.

  Hammy’s dad was a decent crooner and his party-piece was, unsurprisingly, ‘Maggie May’. Hammy reflects on the sweetness of his mum’s story. Although his parents spent a lot of time apart due to Stan May’s job, they were totally devoted to each other. Hammy knows his dad would approve, as long as Maggie is happy. He picks up his mum’s hand and kisses it.

  ‘Ach as long as he makes ye happy, eh mam?’ She rubs his cheek. ‘But if he ever, ever cheats on ye, or steals yer false teeth,’ he says, ‘then ah’ll hunt him doon an’ put three holes in his colostomy bag!’

  Hammy’s mum laughs. She is glad he’s back.

  Joseph Miller rings the doorbell. A dog barks. It sounds like a small dog in close proximity, as opposed to a big one that might be at the other end of this vast, detached, stone-faced Pollokshaws villa.

  Hettie has done well for herself. Her art remains very much in vogue and the bigger pieces sell for tens of thousands of pounds. The house reminds Joseph of the one he used to live in, with Lucinda and Jennifer. It is ostentatious and muscular; a house not to be trifled with or contested in divorce proceedings. Lucinda Burroughs had their house put in her name as a condition of her father’s financial support for the architectural firm. Limit the liability, they argued, and Joseph acceded. She knew what she was doing.

  The door opens and Hettie walks out and throws her arms around him without speaking, crushing the flowers he has brought her between them. Even though she knew he was coming, her hands and arms and hair and clothes are heavily flecked with paint. He assumes his clothes will be too, but when he checks he is pleasantly surprised. It’s Hogmanay and yet she’s still working.

  ‘Jeez, Joey,’ she says, standing back to look at him. ‘How are ye?’

  ‘Ah’m fine, Hettie. You look well.’ ‘Aye, ah’m a bit tired, but, yeah, things are good,’ she says.

  Joseph wasn’t sure how this would go. It has been more than six years since he has last seen her, and four years since they have spoken on the telephone.

  ‘Come away in,’ she says, sounding older than she is. He moves into a huge reception hall, bigger than the one he used to call his. It is a bohemian space with a couple of big canvasses hanging either side of an old, knotted-wood stair. Three chairs of different design typologies sit close together, like shy, awkward wallflower party-guests who haven’t been introduced to the others yet. There’s a high-backed Charles Rennie Mackintosh formal piece, a Jacobsen swivelling ‘egg’ chair, and an austere metal-and-leather Berlin seat. It’s hard to determine the prevalent influence and he finds himself wondering, like Loyd Grossman, ‘who actually lives in a house like this?’

  ‘Ah just need to finish somethin’ up,’ says Hettie. ‘Make yerself at home though, eh? The main room’s through there. Ah’ll just be five minutes.’

  Joseph watches her go and then deliberately wanders into a room adjacent to the one she suggested. It is lined wall to ceiling with books: expensive ones, not airport paperbacks. Joseph’s never been much of a reader. He has acquired a lot of books too, but he rarely reads any of them. He is so uncomfortably aware of this contradiction, he even knows that the Japanese have a name for such a person: a Tsundoku. He wonders if this extensive library of books is just for show, too. He suddenly feels superior. Like Nick Carraway slinking away from Jay Gatsby’s party, Joseph Miller thinks that he has stumbled on a façade; uncovered a falsehood. But the pages of the random selection he makes are cut and well-thumbed. These books are cherished and loved.

  The remainder of the house is as much of a stylistic melting pot, full of collected bits of furniture and fittings, and objets d’art – as he imagines Pete would refer to them. Like many houses of the Victorian vintage, it feels dark and foreboding. These interiors are dominated by dark-wood panelling. It gives the house a definite feeling of permanence and strength, but its lack of a lightness to its main spaces is a touch depressing, Joseph thinks.

  ‘So?’ she says. She has seen him scanning the details of how she lives like a property agent about to value it for a third party.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Force ae habit. The house is really interestin’, Hettie. It’s bloody massive tae.’

  ‘Aye, most ae the stuff is Pete’s. Ah’m not a collector, he is. He hoards stuff that he places a value on … which is basically everythin’. Come on through tae the studio. Ah just need tae finish up a bit
an’ then ah’ll get dinner.’

  They wander through a sequence of rooms before emerging into one flooded with north light – so much in contrast with the remainder of the house that Joseph takes a few seconds to adjust to it.

  ‘Pete likes the house tae be quite dark. Aw they years stuck in darkrooms, y’know.’

  ‘How is he?’ Joseph asks. He assumes he’ll see him later at dinner, although Hettie hasn’t made that clear.

  ‘Ach, no’ great,’ she says, then pauses. At first he thinks she won’t elaborate. ‘But he’s lasted longer than he thought he would.’ She smiles, but it is painfully forced.

  A central part of Joseph’s previous humiliation at Gary’s funeral in 2008 was his forthright insistence that Pete D’Olivera had never been right for Hettie; he behaved like a spurned boyfriend, jealous his former girlfriend’s attentions were going to another man. Only Joseph hadn’t ever been Hettie’s boyfriend, and the scene he made, at the age of forty-four, was rendered all the more shameful as a consequence. ‘Look at him!’ Joseph shouted. ‘He’s a miserable auld prick.’ Pete had been diagnosed with emphysema three weeks earlier; his ‘misery’ at that news compounded by the need to give up smoking or face a prognosis of two years, max. Paradoxically, it was Joseph’s misery that prompted the outburst. A long, drawn-out and bitter divorce from Lucinda Burroughs had been made final just about the time Pete was receiving his own bad news. Late 2008 had a lot to answer for, Joseph often acknowledges.

  Pete is now in his mid-seventies. He claims to not know his exact year of birth, having been born in a commune in India sometime around the outbreak of the Second World War. Pete’s mother was an opium addict and her fall from grace was swift. The identity of Pete’s father was also a mystery but, for the early part of his life, he had grown up in a protective, if dysfunctional and unconventional, extended ‘family’ grouping. Pete and his mother and three sisters reluctantly moved to London in late 1947, when Partition made the Punjab a dangerous place for people without financial connections. Only a donation from an elderly British gentleman, who Pete’s mother regularly serviced, made their passage from India possible.

  Both Pete and Hettie have accepted his fate and, by and large, they have been content here in Pollokshaws in the six years since his diagnosis. Now though, as Hettie is explaining, Pete is on the last lap, essentially confined to a converted ground-floor family room, full of life-prolonging apparatus, which looks out onto an expansive garden.

  ‘My God, this is fantastic,’ says Joseph Miller of the dinner he is eating.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Hettie. ‘En Croute Catering – they never let me down,’ she admits. ‘Ah’ve nae time for cookin’, an’ nae real interest in it. It’s hard when yer just makin’ things for yerself, ye know, and at all kinds ae daft hours?’

  ‘Aye,’ says Joseph. He knows that only too well.

  Earlier, Hettie showed him a preview of work for a new exhibition. It was very clear from the subject matter that Pete D’Olivera wouldn’t be joining them to eat. Countless black-and-white photographs – self-portraits – were pinned to every surface. From left to right, they mapped a steady chronology of the ravages of terminal illness on the outward surface of the body. Hettie’s paintings were all of Pete, too: gaunt and decaying, but trying to capture something dignified out of the toll it took on the inside; on his mind. Despite the brutal realism of these painfully honest figurative works, Joseph saw some kind of frail and fragile beauty in them. They were vast canvases. The workshop extension at the rear of the house was designed and constructed specifically for them. Hettie remarked that she thought Pete was defying death simply to allow her to complete this portfolio of work, but it was essentially his work too. She had three other paintings to finish and then it would be complete. It was a document of Pete’s decline over the last three years and the portfolio was entitled All This Useless Beauty. Joseph wasn’t really sure what to think. The finished paintings unnerved him. They made him pity Pete and then conversely, the experience made him feel that it was actually an invasion of Joseph’s own privacy to be invited to view them at all. Hettie explained that all of these reactions – and the complex shades in between – were the principal objectives for an artist in this – and by extension, all – figurative art.

  ‘Look, ah know ah said this before but now ah’m here in person, ah’m really, really sorry for everythin’ ah said about Pete,’ says Joseph now, as they eat. ‘Ah know how painful that must’ve been.’

  ‘Lets no’ dwell on the past, eh?’ says Hettie.

  ‘Ah know, but ah kinda need tae get past this,’ says Joseph.

  ‘Look, we’ve aw moved on. More important stuff tae be gettin’ on wi’,’ she says, casting her eyes to her left.

  He recognises that he came here craving her unconditional forgiveness and feeling that it was perhaps the missing link in his own personal rehabilitation. But she’s always loved him, anyway, just like she has always loved her brothers. Her lack of contact wasn’t to do with vengeance or disinterest; it was simply a consequence of her attention being necessarily focused on someone else’s needs. He feels childish and selfish for not appreciating that until now.

  ‘So you and Bobby are back on the prowl, then?’ she says, laughing.

  ‘Aye, seems so.’

  ‘God help us!’

  ‘This thing for Gary’s goin’ tae be great, whenever we work out what it actually is.’

  ‘Well, if ah can help, tell him ah will,’ she says, leaving the possibility open that Joseph Miller might still need to mediate somewhat.

  ‘He’ll be back in January, once he’s dealt with the house an’ stuff. Ah’m sure he’ll be here tae see ye the minute he lands,’ says Joseph.

  ‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Ah’ll maybe no’ hold my breath though, eh?’

  Bobby sits on the edge of a bed that feels bigger than his splash pool back at the villa. He feels awkward being here on Hogmanay but has already acknowledged that the dawning of a new year has different connotations for someone as ill as Laurie Revlon. She is currently asleep, propped up on a few, sizable white pillows. Everything in the room is white. Every surface, every fixture and fitting. He imagines Laurie waking and momentarily thinking that this is in fact heaven. Perhaps that’s the point, he considers.

  Laurence has shown him up to Laurie’s bedroom under some duress. Laurence has never fully understood the favour in which his mother holds this dishevelled, redundant Scotsman, but he doesn’t know that Bobby Cassidy inadvertently provided Laurie Revlon with an escape route at a time when she needed one more than the incarcerated hero of The Shawshank Redemption.

  In the early 90s, Laurie Revlon’s business was in trouble. An oil-price recession at the beginning of the decade had accounted for much of the decline in the distributed financial profits in her organisation. A new investigation into Terry Dooley’s unexplained demise was brewing, and developing a music business based in the Balearics was very much her last throw of the dice. Her capital was all but used up and her banking credentials – like many others who’d overextended in pursuing Thatcher’s capitalist dream – were worth little. But then along came ‘Dipped in Chocolate’, an unexpectedly massive worldwide smash-hit single. Consequently, the restrictive contract she’d drawn up with Bobby Cassidy had paid off and then some. The civil suit brought by Terry Dooley’s family surfaced after a Panorama investigation. So Laurie settled privately with the family and agreed an ongoing royalty percentage from the record, in perpetuity. Rather than paying for the issue to go away, it looked like a benevolent act of support for the dependents of a former client. But beyond the convenient timing of the record’s success, Laurie was fond of Bobby – and of Hamish May, as it happened – and had resolved to look after him and his newly appointed personal assistant. Bobby’s DJ’ing sell-by date had long since expired, and even though she accepted that Laurence wanted him out of the A-list clubs in San Antonio, Bobby would always have a place at the table, even if it was out in the comparative c
lubbing wasteland of Las Dalias.

  Laurie had been made aware of Bobby’s decision to return home to Scotland and had asked to see him one last time. A visit was the least Bobby could do.

  ‘Well, don’t be a stranger then.’

  Bobby has been staring out the window at a large yacht cruising slowly past the rocks just beyond the flat, green land that marks the Revlon private estate. He turns. Laurie has her cheek inclined and he bends across the bed to kiss it. Even now, with death hovering impatiently in the atmosphere, she looks serene; a woman for whom age and beauty have no ongoing dispute. Her hair has been brushed and some light make-up provides the only colour.

  ‘Hi Laurie,’ his voice trembles. He isn’t good with this sort of situation. ‘How are ye, then?’ he asks, thoughtlessly.

  She laughs, and the exertion of this makes her cough. ‘I’m good, Bobby. Peaceful. It’s been a good life. I have loads to be grateful for.’ She motions to him and he helps her sit up a bit higher in the bed. ‘More importantly, how are you?’

  ‘Things are really good, Laurie. Ah’m lookin’ forward tae gettin’ back now, y’know? Seein’ ma sister an’ dain’ somethin’ special for Gary, ma brother.’

  ‘That’s good, son,’ she says. ‘I’m really pleased.’ She hasn’t seen him in person for over a year but Laurie Revlon is well aware of the personal demons that have been strangling the very life out of him.

  ‘Look, Laurie, ah just wanted the opportunity tae say thanks … in person, like … an’ for everythin’, y’know?’ The ‘everything’ includes clearing his debts, giving him a place to stay for nearly twenty years, giving Hammy a paid job and sponsoring their original permanent-residency applications. Although Hammy has always implied that Laurie took far more than she would have otherwise been entitled to from ‘Dipped in Chocolate’ and the Miraculous Vespas remixes, Bobby knows that this has been balanced out by her covert financial support during the many wilderness years since. Unlike John Lennon’s, Bobby Cassidy’s ‘Lost Weekend’ has lasted for a generation.