Mayflies

by Andrew O'Hagan

She was soon in the room with Mr Bike. My eyes were on the door. He would be asking her questions about cosmic gases, loving his job, testing her knowledge of landing gear and pressurised suits. ‘So, Mrs Gunion, long-term claimant, you’re in a space shuttle returning to Earth. The trip normally takes four hours at 17,500 miles per hour. We want you home thirty minutes later than scheduled. By how much are you reducing your speed of re-entry? Come on. You have one minute and can’t use a calculator.’

  It was my last day at the Jobcentre. It wasn’t supposed to be, but I was sitting at my desk, contemplating the liquidation of Mr Bike, when Tully burst through the doors with an evil grin on his mug. He wore a green ex-army shirt, Levi’s with turnups, brothel-creeper shoes, and more bangles than a Maasai bride. He ripped a card from the computer-assembly nonsense on the wall of jobs and slumped in the chair in front of me. ‘It’s a dog’s life if you ask me,’ he said, quoting from one of our films, ‘but I have a deep desire, much deeper than you can imagine, to play goal attack for the Irvine netball team. Any vacancies?’

  ‘Let me have a look, sir.’ I started flicking through the cards in my box. The film-reference game was going into full flight. ‘You’re not much good at netball, are you, Jo?’ I said. (A Taste of Honey.)

  ‘No, I’m bad on purpose.’ (The same.)

  ‘But hold on,’ I said. ‘There’s a sporting life opportunity here. Head of Keepy-Uppy at a school in Cowdenbeath.’

  ‘It’s a hard life if you don’t weaken,’ he said. (Saturday Night.)

  He slumped back in the chair. ‘You get more wisdom from one of those flicks than from the whole of Wullie Shakespeare.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t half love a cloth cap,’ I said.

  ‘I’m telling you. Billy Liar is better than Hamlet.’

  ‘If you say so, Tully.’

  ‘It is,’ he said, smiling. ‘Nicer people.’

  Tully pulled five tickets from his back pocket. ‘Check these, sucker.’ They were white with black writing and my eye fell on the words ‘Standing Area’, ‘Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre’, and ‘£13 in advance’. I think my mouth dropped open before I looked up at the eager expression on his face.

  ‘They came,’ I said.

  ‘Five tix. You, me, Tibbs, Limbo, and Hogg.’

  ‘You’re a good man, Mr George.’ (Mona Lisa.)

  ‘Here’s yours,’ he said, handing me a ticket. ‘A present for passing your exams. Your education continues in the Rainy City.’

  ‘Thanks, man. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘You’re here to work, not gab, Mr Collins.’ That was Bike, creeping up behind me in his unacceptable trousers. His plooks were angry and his eyes were pit-bull grey. ‘The Enterprise Allowance Scheme,’ he said, slapping a heap of white leaflets down on my desk. ‘A wonderful project, already proving effective, aimed at getting your average layabout to start his own business.’

  ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down,’ Tully said, sitting in the chair opposite with one leg up on the desk.

  ‘Who’s the comedian?’ Bike asked.

  ‘A rare member of the full-time employed,’ I said. ‘A scholar and a gentleman. May I introduce my dear friend Tully Dawson, Professor of Dirty Tackles at the University of Mince and Bollocks.’

  ‘Get your manky feet off that desk,’ Bike said. ‘It’s government property that is.’ With a despising look, he handed me a bundle. ‘Take these leaflets and distribute them down the shopping centre. It shouldn’t take more than an hour.’

  ‘I always was a liar, a good ’un and all,’ Tully said, and Bike just looked him up and down with narrowed eyes. He stood there with his legs apart and his arms folded over his Rotary Club tie, a born joy-crusher, an Eighties wretch. Every time he grinned a door slammed on some poor bugger’s life.

  ‘Quick march,’ he said.

  ‘Mussolini,’ Tully said and popped his lips. Bike ignored him and started walking backwards, tapping his watch.

  ‘The Job Club starts at 2 p.m. on the dot,’ he said, ‘and you’re taking the seminar.’

  ‘The seminar?’ Tully said with a sneer. ‘What – how to lick a stamp?’

  ‘I’m watching you,’ Bike said.

  ‘I usually charge extra for that,’ Tully said. I gathered my things and took the leaflets. I knew it was all over as we walked towards the exit.

  ‘Two o’clock!’ Bike shouted.

  ‘How about you go and fuck yourself, ya Tory dick,’ Tully shouted back, as I pushed him into the corridor.

  We walked through the sunshine in search of Greggs pies and a can of Vimto. He carried the leaflets and I carried the pies, and we swerved round a congregation of Bible-thumpers at the entrance to the shopping centre and threaded through the schoolgirls on their way to What Every Woman Wants. Tully told me he’d found Woodbine outside the living room, in the middle of the night. ‘He was shadow-boxing,’ he said, ‘and kind of butting his head against the banister. Then he ran up and down the stairs, drunk.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Another night, a while back, he thought he was on night shift. He was out there burying old light bulbs in the garden.’

  ‘Light bulbs?’

  ‘Like a psycho.’

  ‘Is there nobody who can help him?’ I asked.

  ‘I think he likes it.’

  Going along the side of the Trinity Church, we hopped a fence and went to a favoured spot by the old graveyard. There was a high wall there and we sat on it with our legs dangling. The pies were hot but the Vimto was cold as we passed it back and forth, looking down at the River Irvine. ‘Do you worry …’

  ‘That I might become him?’

  ‘That’ll never happen.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ he said. ‘Got to avoid it.’

  Behind us, in the graveyard, lay the bones of Dainty Davie, friend of the poet Burns. We stayed quiet for a second, then I remarked on it. ‘His name was David Sillar,’ I said. ‘Like Silver. A schoolteacher. This is a ghost town, man.’

  He sang a line of the Specials song. ‘Not like Manchester,’ he added.

  ‘We’ll see. Every town’s a ghost town.’

  ‘All right, Morrissey.’

  ‘I’m just saying we don’t know what it’ll be like.’

  ‘Well, I definitely know,’ Tully said. ‘And Manchester is the business. I’m talking Ian Curtis and Shelagh Delaney.’

  When I look back I detect a shudder in Tully’s hopes for himself. The Manchester trip was only ten days away – ten days! – and he needed it to be glorious. I knew he loved his own band but I hadn’t recognised the level of hope he had invested in it. He wanted the cover of the NME and a Peel session and a tour of Britain in a Bedford van. At that time, there was no other version of tomorrow that appealed to him. That July, it’s the hope and the humour I remember first, but then the shudder, the sense of catastrophic consequences if his father’s life was to become his.

  The river was fast down there, with high flats on the other side. ‘Did you see the look on that clown’s face?’ Tully said. ‘The king of plooks back in your office.’ We dreeped down the wall and made our way along a sunny path by the water, finding a spot by a hawthorn tree that stood on the bank, its colours fading. ‘It’s hard to believe a guy like that was ever young. He’s like some Reggie Perrin dude with his mental tie.’

  ‘Imagine having Norman Tebbit as your hero. What quagmire of depravity must you come from to think like that?’

  Tully wiped his hands on one of the leaflets while spitting crust. ‘No way, man. Where do you get that lingo? “Quagmire of depravity.” Maybe they should hire you to improve this poxy shit.’ He looked at the leaflet on top of the pile and we egged each other on.

  ‘Have You Got a Bright Idea? You Could Earn £40 Per Week.’

  There was a dazzle on the water. It was clear as silver bells beyond the nettles and the buttercups and the washed-out pinks dropping from the tree. Algae snagged on the rocks. We were full of fresh air and we had our tic
kets.

  ‘I’m not going back to that Jobcentre dump,’ I said.

  ‘Nah. It was quite an Ian Curtis job, though. He worked in a place like that.’

  ‘An unemployment exchange. No wonder he went the way he did. They gave me my wages today. I’m not going back.’

  ‘Too right you’re not. Enterprise, my arse.’ High on the day’s winnings, we dealt the remainder of the leaflets over the railings, laughing our heads off, and away to the Irish Sea went this flotilla of white lies. ‘Boldly going where no man has gone before,’ Tully said, ‘the Starship Enterprise and its crew of wanks.’ The papers drifted quickly away on the current and soon the river was clear again. I sometimes wake in the night and picture one of those leaflets floating peacefully to Nova Scotia.

  4

  Our friend Lincoln McCafferty had moved into a flat in Paisley. He shared it with two schizophrenic social workers and it was the dirtiest place we’d ever seen. For one thing, there was no bathroom. You had to go to the pub downstairs if you were desperate, which was okay because Limbo was in the Cotton Arms every hour it was open, manufacturing pee. His flat was a horror show of Victorian plumbing and zero sanitation, with just a single cold tap in the kitchen. It would be unfair to say the flat resembled a cave, unfair to caves – some of them have decent drawings – but it was a slum, surviving a number of bombing raids but struggling against the devastations wrought by Limbo.

  He loved the flat on a point of principle. What it lacked in amenities it made up for in a huge stereo stack system with a double tape deck, housed in a smoked-glass cabinet, all of which came from a local electrical store called Stepek. He put together mix-tapes on that stereo, making them for everybody, so long as they didn’t want any ‘disco shite’, revered the Exploited and agreed to pay upfront in cans of Kestrel or Breaker. If he did you an especially sought-after tape – John Peel’s Festive 50 without the chat, for instance – you’d pay him in Red Stripe, with a possible bonus in Jack Daniel’s. Naturally, the tapes varied in quality, usually beginning well with Limbo carefully pressing ‘Record’ just as a track began, but by the end – when certain of his multiple down-payments had been tasted – your tape would turn into a rasping opera of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and assorted feedback, punctuated with susurrations from the beloved DJ and liberal uses of the word ‘fuck’ as Limbo pressed the wrong button and broke unheralded into the programme.

  It was the night before the journey to Manchester. Limbo’s flat was the mustering point, or the scene of the first devastations. When Tully and Tibbs and I arrived from Paisley Gilmour Street station, he stuck his head out of the landing window and shouted, ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’ We came up the broken stairs and found him at the door of the flat, wearing a striped T-shirt and a military coat, with a bottle of Eldorado poised before his open mouth. In moments like these, where everything was appropriate, Limbo would often quote from his favourite novel, Brideshead Revisited. In drink, he liked to be Anthony Blanche, but with a fierce Ayrshire accent and a Billy Idol-style curl of the lip. ‘Hurry up, you small boys,’ he said. ‘I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion.’ All his life, Limbo was a standard-bearer for the perfectly surreal. For instance, he went to the swimming baths every day to brush his teeth but he never swam. ‘Why would anybody swim?’ he asked. ‘If God had meant you to swim, he’d have given you the shoulders and the buttocks of Mark Spitz.’

  On arrival, Tully gave him a slobbery kiss on the forehead and told him to break out the hash or he’d wreck the place. Tibbs and I followed, Tibbs patting Limbo on the head and taking a slug from his bottle, and me bowing and tumbling my hand like a dandy before the Sun King. Limbo pushed me down the hallway after Tibbs – Tyrone Lennox, the apprentice postman, a bright and merciless comedian with a fringe flopping over his pale blue eyes, was somewhere to the left of Joseph Stalin. He felt that Celtic Football Club was the saviour of mankind. This was the cause of much consternation in others and much pride in him. He carried a Rucanor bag up the stairs, a bedroll jammed between its straps. He didn’t own much, but he owned the room.

  There was a two-bar fire and a smell of gloss paint. ‘This is the un-living room,’ Limbo said, squatting on a blue milk crate to build a joint. ‘People have died in this room, long, long ago in the mists of Gothic time, before Lulu.’

  ‘It’s fuckan mingin in here, so it is,’ Tibbs said, looking disgusted.

  ‘I thought you’d be used to this,’ offered Limbo, ‘coming as your mammy does from a long line of impoverished taigs, over here to steal our totties.’

  ‘Stop talking shite and hurry up with the doobie,’ Tibbs said, grinning at the opposition and tossing his fringe out of his eyes. Without ceremony, or fear of objection, he drew out a tape from the pocket of his Harrington and stuck it into the stereo system. A master of the elaborate wind-up and the swift political assassination, he waited. He owned every single record and every T-shirt ever produced by Factory Records.

  ‘I was fuckan listening to that,’ Limbo said.

  ‘Get it right up ye,’ Tibbs said. ‘Do you think I’ve taken two days off my work and am missing a regional meeting to spend my time listening to the New York Fuckan Dolls?’ It wasn’t really an argument. ‘Yankee pish,’ he added. Limbo gave him the finger while the music of A Certain Ratio came jigging into the air.

  ‘Please, whatever you do – don’t be shy,’ Limbo said, as Tully took a slug of his Eldorado. ‘Please make use of the facilities. In this establishment there’s only one rule – if anybody draws a swastika on my forehead while I’m asleep, I’ll fuckan kill them.’

  ‘Seems fair,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t promise anything,’ Tully said. Lenin looked down from the wall above the electric fire and Tibbs began dancing and doing air trumpet in front of him, chugging the joint and spewing smoke like the battleship Potemkin.

  ‘I dunno, work tomorrow,’ Tibbs said, slipping into the film-reference game. But Limbo had his own films. As was customary, he came back with a quote from the lower regions of The Exorcist. In any given situation, he felt the horror classics best said what had to be said.

  ‘D’you know what she did, your cunting daughter?’ He sat on the floor hugging a cushion, sneering for an imagined camera.

  ‘Who else is coming to Manchester?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not who’s coming, it’s who’s there,’ Tibbs said. ‘Friedrich Engels and Pat Phoenix from Coronation Street.’

  ‘And Piccadilly Records,’ said Limbo. ‘We’re going there straight away. Soon as we get off the bus, man. I’ve looked it up.’

  ‘Magic,’ Tully said. ‘Best independent record shop in Britain.’

  We were all obsessed with record shops. The major churches of the British Isles, with their stained glass, rood screens, and flying buttresses, were as nothing next to some grubby black box under Central Station, or some rabbit hutch in Manchester, which sold imports, fanzines, and gobbets of gig information.

  ‘Soon as we get off the bus,’ Limbo said again.

  ‘Abso-fuckan-lutely,’ Tibbs said, before adding the words, ‘England is getting rode.’ The room erupted into song.

  ‘Getting rode, getting rode, getting rode. England is getting ro-o-ode. England is getting rode. Getting ro-o-ode. Get-ting rode!’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ I said, sitting this one out.

  There were differences. I make much of the camaraderie, but it’s often differences that keep the conversation lively, especially among the similar. Most of the boys were older than me – it showed in the money – and we’d all gone to different schools, some Catholic, some Protestant. We all lived on housing schemes, except for Limbo and another pal, Caesar, who lived in Spam Valley. Limbo’s father was a professor of architecture, and hopeful, I think, that Lincoln would follow him into the ranks. Sadly, or hilariously, Limbo’s current living arrangements could only sneer at such hopes.

  Last to arrive that night was David Hogg – cropped, peroxided hai
r, and wearing a sixteen-eye pair of Doc Martens, a biker’s jacket, and a Test Dept T-shirt. Hogg’s stock-in-trade was contempt: he gave us all the finger as he came in, then slid down the wall. Even as a boy he wasn’t fully comfortable with those he spent time with: he thought we were idiots, which was reasonable enough. I think he was the first person I knew to speak with a kind of upswing at the end of everything he said. He lived in Pollok and worked for British Shipbuilders, which everybody still called Fairfields, though that company was long gone. Hogg was nicer in himself than he was outwardly, if you got him on his own. That’s what I thought anyway. He was keen to cordon himself off, as though he was moving on, and perhaps he was, with his good watch and his girlfriend. After he’d been in the flat for half an hour, he started wandering around and rootling in the so-called kitchen, taking out spoons and stuff and making a sort of construction with the utensils.

  ‘You bored, Davie?’ Tully said.

  ‘I’m just making something.’ By now he’d found two tins of paint under one of the beds and an old paraffin heater on the landing.

  ‘He’s an artist,’ I said, taking the piss. ‘Best leave Hogg to his engineering. I think it’s a jazz exploration of England in D minor.’

  ‘What’s England ever done for any of you?’ Tully asked.

  ‘George Orwell. Factory Records. Brookside,’ Tibbs said.

  ‘Test Dept,’ Hogg said, opening one of the tins.

  ‘Hammer Horror,’ Limbo said, ‘and the Magna Carta.’

  Hogg stayed in the flat by himself when we went to the pub. The whole of Paisley smelled of vinegar and the evening was almost warm. But weather is one thing and regulars are another and you could say it was hostile to groups of lads in the Cotton Arms. In fact, if looks were bullets, it was the St Valentine’s Day Massacre: the four of us sauntering in with similar haircuts and jeans and all confident-like. The barman lashed a dish towel over his shoulder and poured four pints of Tennent’s, his eyes on us, then we carried them over to a table. Photographs of old mills and weavers’ rallies were hung around the walls and above the bar ran the legend ‘Pain Inflicted, Suffering Endured, Injustice Done’. At the other tables, men scowled and licked their chops in preparation. The women wore so much jewellery they jangled every time they lifted their drinks, their glances quite pitying and the gold so brassy it was almost red. Bad vibes can be an excellent spur: they can make you exist a bit more vividly in a strange room, at least that was my thinking, my hope, as some gigantic guy blocked me on my way to the bog. A neon sign for Schlitz played havoc with his angry eyes and his nightmare shirt. ‘This is oor pub,’ he said.