Mayflies

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ANDREW O’HAGAN

  …

  Mayflies

  for

  Keith and Joy Martin

  Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,

  And say my glory was I had such friends.

  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Summer 1986

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Autumn 2017

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Summer

  1986

  1

  Tully Dawson made himself new to the world, and ripe for the glories of that summer, by showing he was unlike his father. It wasn’t a matter to fight over: some families are made up of strangers and nothing can change it. But I think it always bothered Tully that Woodbine couldn’t cheer him on when he came by the football field to watch the game. The old man would only shake his head in a know-all way and stare at the Firth of Clyde with an injured look. Tully had named him after the cigarettes; they all had their nicknames, those reluctant fathers. They sat at home opening cans of lager and cursing our Saturday nights. I suppose we could have drifted over to the touchline and asked his opinion, but being young is a kind of warfare in which the great enemy is experience. Our cheeks burned and we watched him walk towards the unstained light of the harbour.

  Nineteen eighty-four was the end of old Woodbine, or 1985, when the strike ended and the Ayrshire men returned one by one to the pits, met at the gates by women giving out carnations. The miners had fought hard, but they were all sacked within a month. ‘He takes his shame out on us,’ Tully said. ‘I suppose Thatcher never really got it about the enemy within.’ And that comment was pure Tully. You could imagine how his whole spirit, as well as his famous good looks and his green eyes, came from a dream of the freedom that existed just beyond his dad. But the photographs tell a sadder story – the saddest one – because Woodbine had green eyes too.

  Irvine New Town, east of eternity. Tully was twenty years old and a lathe turner. He impersonated Arthur Seaton from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by taunting his boss all week and drinking pints of Black and Tan all weekend. He looked like Albert Finney, all slicked-up hair, but in Tully’s case spiked with soap. At that time, he had the kind of looks that appeal to all sexes and all ages, and his natural effrontery opened people up. He was in a band, obviously. They had sprung into existence the previous winter. They were called the Bicycle Factory, another Saturday Night reference, and would later flirt with success and change their name several times as Tully went from singer to drummer. When people asked why he was so often the best man at weddings, it was clear they hadn’t known Tully Dawson in his prime. He had innate charisma, a brilliant record collection, complete fearlessness in political argument, and he knew how to love you more than anybody else. Other guys were funny and brilliant and better at this and that, but Tully loved you. He had the leader thing, when he was young, the guts of the classic frontman, and if any of us got together we instantly wanted to know where he was. Some people gain that status with power or with money, but Tully did it with pure cheek. His brighter language made older people seem dull. His dad wanted to constrain the future with robotic disappointment, drinking all day at the Twa Dogs, and Tully was ready for flight. He wasn’t so much the butterfly as the air on which it travels. And that summer he was ready for an adventure beyond the Ayrshire hedges.

  *

  I wasn’t meant to go to university. We weren’t that kind of family. Very soon, we weren’t any kind of family at all. My dad wandered off in search of himself – ‘You might begin by looking up your own backside,’ said my mother, Norma – then she decided that the life of the single mother was not for her, and flitted to Arran. I think they had a slightly exaggerated sense of my self-sufficiency (I’d just turned eighteen) yet it was consistent with their behaviour all through my childhood, falling apart or bolting. My mum and dad imagined I would love swanning about in a council house by myself. In fact, I spent more and more time at Tully’s, and within a few weeks I felt I was finished with them.

  ‘I’ve divorced my mum and dad,’ I said to Tully one night at the pictures. It was Mona Lisa for the umpteenth time.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘They’ll be back – like Arnie.’

  ‘Nope. I’m not having them back. It’s the solo life now.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘I’m serious. They can pay the bills for a few months and then that’s that. They never wanted to be in a family and they’ve tortured each other for years. I’ll stay until I go to uni. That’s the end of it, man. They fucked it.’

  ‘Stay at mine whenever you like. If you don’t want to stay just come over for your dinner. My mum loves you.’

  ‘Thanks, mate.’

  He leaned over and kissed me right on the forehead.

  ‘You’re in charge, Noodles. Do your life your own way.’ I didn’t know I wanted approval until Tully gave it to me. I didn’t know life could be like that. It was part of the teenage dream, to find a pal who totally noticed you.

  ‘Do you think Bob Hoskins is a family man?’ I asked.

  ‘In dreams,’ Tully said, staring at the screen. ‘Everybody is, in dreams.’

  That was just the latest change: the divorce. I’d always been bookish. I was one of those kids who bumped into lamp posts on the way back from the library. I read all the books they had, including the Zane Greys and the Mills & Boon. I read bird-watching books and tomes on French wine and the history of scent. I didn’t know what to do with it all, yet it somehow embroidered an image of the future.

  I’d gained courage from a lovely teacher, Mrs O’Connor, who taught English at St Cuthbert’s, a Catholic secondary in the middle of a housing estate. Poor old St Cud’s. The nuns, with the grace of God, fought a hard battle against the popularity of Buckfast Tonic Wine, and readied us for a world in which piety might make up for a lack of basic arithmetic. Each year, the boy who wasn’t expelled and the girl who wasn’t pregnant became joint dux, and the football team added to its fame for rioting in nearby towns. The idea at home had been that I’d get out of school as fast as I could and get a job. And so, the year before that final summer, when I was seventeen, I’d gone for an interview in the office of a fence-building firm down by the railway station. To be honest, it was a Portakabin, or a kennel if I’m more honest, and it smelled of ancient socks and roll-ups.

  The day of the interview, I arrived wearing a borrowed suit with a book jutting out of one pocket. It was a hot day for once. I wore some fat old tie of my dad’s – I think the tie was older than I was – and my hair was slick with a gel called Country Born.

  ‘What d’you want?’ the foreman asked. He had a scoundrel’s face and there was something swampy about his shirt.

  ‘I was at the Jobcentre. You advertised for an office assistant.’

  ‘We just want a wee lassie to make the tea.’ I saw the calendars of topless women on the walls and took a deep breath.

  ‘I can make tea,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that in your pocket?’ I pulled out the paperback. I swear to God it was a tattered copy of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ h
e said. ‘Away you to university or something. Wasting my time.’

  ‘It’s only a book,’ I said. ‘It’s about existentialism.’

  He grimaced. He wheezed. And a part of my library-haunting self will always be stranded there, in a cabin without air, in a world without God, as that foreman howls and gasps and slaps his knee. In a moment, he was bent double, coughing hard, as I retreated to a sticky door plastered with images of Samantha Fox.

  In my life at that time, Mrs O’Connor was the voice of reason. I remember watching her as if her entire ethos, her confidence in the face of adversity, her femininity, might travel over the classroom like her perfume, and refresh me. She stood tall and resplendent in a red cardigan and glowed with her love of metaphors. She had a tenderness towards weirdos, a kind of therapeutic belief in the value of being extravagantly yourself, and I often sought her out, even when it wasn’t the English period. The school was full of kids who’d forgotten their books and hated lessons, and she stood at the front of the room with a volume of Shakespeare held up, daring one or two of us to suspend our disbelief and make a plan. The day after my failed interview I told her I couldn’t even get a job as a fencer’s dogsbody, and she sat me down at one of the desks. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you love observing people and talking back, but the truth is you’ve read more books than I have.’

  I can still see her red hair with the light behind it, the sun pouring through the window of the classroom where she plied her trade in sensitivity.

  ‘You must have read some,’ I said, ‘to end up in this dump.’

  ‘I’ve never read like you do,’ she said. ‘Henry James. E. M. Forster. Stuff like that. Why are you going for daft job interviews? You have to go and study at the university. Why aren’t you doing sixth year studies?’

  I looked up at her. ‘Things are …’

  ‘Rough at home?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ I waited a second and she took my hand. Nobody had taken my hand since Mary Stobbs in the nativity play in Primary Two. Mary was bold but Mrs O’Connor dealt in something even more mysterious – kindness. ‘My mum and dad have got zero to say to each other and they live in different parts of the house.’ She nodded. I told her they weren’t cut out for giving advice, and that was fine. I wanted my own life anyway. I should go and find it. No drama. They’d done their bit. I got wafts of her perfume and scrutinised her face for signs of ridicule. But she looked at me calmly.

  ‘Listen, I don’t care what the shrinks say. Some people’s lives are about their parents and some aren’t. I know I shouldn’t say this, but just leave. Pass the exams and go. Don’t look back. You’re a weirdo and weirdos have to get out.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘Honestly. You listen to Shostakovich. So do I, but I’m not seventeen. You take bundles of records out of the library. The other day you mentioned Edith Sitwell. Nobody in the history of this school has ever mentioned her before. I scarcely knew her myself. I know my Shakespeare and I love books, but Edith Sitwell? She had a long nose and she wore a lot of rings and … you cannot become a fencer’s office assistant, do you hear me? You’ll die. You’re too strange and you like the writing of Jean Rhys. You like … Norman Mailer and Maya Angelou and you have to be with people who … see that.’

  That evening, Tully phoned me during his night shift. ‘Just phoning to make sure you’re all right,’ he said, ‘and to tell you you’re a dick.’

  ‘Thanks. What’s happening?’

  ‘I’m going mad in here. Zombies all over the factory floor.’ I told him about the teacher who was standing up for me and he said I should take all the help. Having Tully on the case was like having an older brother. As he spoke, I saw all the things I’d written on the back of my hand from the day’s lessons and conversations. It was like I was on the edge of a big plan, and Tully was all for plans and schemes.

  Whenever I smell pine floor cleaner, I think of Mrs O’Connor. After what she said, I began coming to her classroom after school, for a few minutes at first, then half an hour, and pretty soon I was adding to my Highers, sitting at the front for two hours each evening, drilling down on Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare and Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’. We discussed gyres and tragedy. We made a project of Antony and Cleopatra. She also helped me with form-filling and took me through past papers for the other subjects, too, keeping a light on in that classroom, in the middle of that estate, in the middle of the Eighties. The cleaners were out in the corridors mopping the floors and the smell of Scots pine travelled under the door and became the odour of those perfect and unexpected hours. I fancied we were high up in a forest where the air was clear and no one could damage your hopes or trouble your freedom.

  After the results came in, I went to school for the last time. She was sitting with a huge pile of jotters. ‘Ah, James,’ she said. ‘I gather you got a place.’

  ‘Strathclyde.’ She jumped up from her desk and hugged me right next to the blackboard. ‘Susan,’ I said.

  ‘Mrs O’Connor to you.’ She was smiling. I didn’t know what to say. It can take a whole lifetime to know how to thank a person.

  ‘It’s good,’ I said, and she sat down again and took up her pen. I went to the door and slipped past it before popping my head back round.

  ‘Forgot something?’

  ‘You know she had brothers,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dame Edith Sitwell. The poet with the rings.’

  ‘Away ye go, James,’ she said.

  ‘They were called Osbert and Sacheverell.’ We both smiled. ‘There’s a couple of good Scottish names for you.’

  She threw her head back. I could still hear her laughing as I made my way down the corridor and smashed out into the sunlight.

  2

  It was Tully who thought up the trip to Manchester. The festival was advertised in the NME and John Peel had talked about it on the radio. We met in the Glebe. In those days, the patrons were pissed before first orders, and on every surface there were crumpled betting slips and stuffed ashtrays, full of stubbed cigarettes and bookies’ pens. Ex-workers stared at the television, then into their flat pints.

  We sat in the back bar at sewing tables rescued from a local factory. There was something heroic about Tully in his thirst for life. He bridged the old with the new and was on a mission to be morally alert. It was just the two of us that night. I walked through the fag smoke and saw him in the corner. He was wearing his ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ T-shirt and playing dominoes with a guy called Stedman McCalla. Now, the other men in the bar were heroic to Tully and me: they were sacked workers, mainly, guys who were struggling in a town that had just been designated an unemployment black spot. But Tully had unearthed an irony: they were victims, these veterans of the fight against Thatcher, but he was the first person I knew, and perhaps the only one, who saw they could also be victimisers. Tully understood that difficult things did not cancel out other difficult things. He had a taste for ambivalence, and I’d never met anybody before who possessed that so naturally. Steady McCalla was a Jamaican barber who had lived in Britain since 1959, when he’d arrived, aged twenty. He was a big man to us: he knew about reggae and he’d come to Southampton on the SS Begoña from Kingston, passing through, I still remember him telling us, Cartagena, then Puerto Cabello, and Port of Spain. He described the black funnel of the passenger ship. He told us about a spicy horse stew they ate when the boat left the Port of Vigo, the shebeen below decks, and his family’s journey via Lambeth in London, where his cousin lived, to Glasgow, and the setting-up of a barber’s shop in West Nile Street.

  ‘Was it always like this?’ Tully asked. ‘Full of racist fuckers?’

  ‘They don’t know what it is they’re doing,’ Steady said. ‘They’re children. They’re pickney. And children are rough.’ Tully almost pestered him for information. When they’d first come to Scotland, Steady’s father got a job working for the Corporation buses, but the union complained.
>
  ‘You hear that?’ Tully said to the guys at the bar. ‘The Transport and General Workers’ Union said they would all go on strike if men from Barbados and Jamaica were given jobs on the buses.’

  One man turned and shook his head. It was the kind of complexity you never heard about round our way until Tully spoke about it. Steady drank a half-pint of beer and a rum and Coke every night in the Glebe, and none of those men, so far as I saw, ever spoke to him. They never included him or turned in his direction, but Tully made a point of going right over to him, offering him a drink, asking if the seat beside him was free. I’m sure Steady didn’t want company, most of the time. But Tully needed those in the bar, those stalwarts, to know that they could cause pain, too, and that we all have our own wrongdoing to contend with. And Steady – who seemed old to us, though he was only in his late forties, with a sprinkling of grey in his moustache – was the best storyteller any of us had ever met and a figure of solid originality.

  ‘Hey, Steady,’ Tully said that night. ‘I was telling Noodles the other day that your old man was a born footballer.’

  ‘He was that,’ Steady said. ‘He had the touch, you see.’

  ‘Like my old man,’ Tully said.

  ‘My papa could have gone professional. In a different life he could have played for a team, I am telling you. I grew up admiring all the sportsmen, especially the ones that did big overseas. I’m talking Lindy Delapenha, the footballer. Or Randy Turpin, the Fifties boxer. When they won, and when they scored, they were British, and when they lost, they were Caribbean!’ He let out a huge bark and knocked on the table. After the dominoes, Steady waved us away to get on with reading his book.

  ‘I just like the way he lives,’ Tully said, at our new table in an empty corner, flicking through the NME.

  It showed the brothers from the Jesus and Mary Chain sitting under a Gibson guitar. ‘We can go and see these neds at the Barrowland,’ Tully reasoned, ‘playing for fifteen minutes with their backs to the audience, or we can go to Manchester for what is certain to be the best gig in history’ – a celebration of punk rock, to be held at the new exhibition centre, G-Mex. ‘It’s ten years since the Sex Pistols played at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. And the night before G-Mex, the Shop Assistants are at the International.’