‘No way, man,’ he said. ‘No way.’
I thought of Fergus running all the way to G-Mex. Then I thought of him running the World Bank or taking a flight to Mexico.
*
There was no sign of the barber at his shop. Tully asked me for a pen and some paper, so I slung my duffel bag down on the step and got them out. He wrote a note saying that Paul’s old friend Stedman in Ayrshire had sent us to say hello and that we’d see him another time. I can still picture Tully’s words written out to this gentleman we’d never met, the sheer hope and personality in them. ‘We’ll get you to fix our hair next time and if you’re in a faraway place we send you the best wishes in the world. If you ever come to Scotland please depend on us for music and good times in La Lucha.’
We went from there to the canal. The development was just starting then, bridges coming down and cranes everywhere. Old warehouses stood at the edge of the water decked with faded words. ‘Manufacturers’, said one, above broken windows; like a white shadow on the bricks, the word ‘Rubber’. We sat on the bollards and Tully suddenly grew dark again, after all the hilarity.
‘You okay?’
‘That guy,’ he said. ‘The way he got totally excited. Left that fuckan furniture shop, right there and then.’
‘Top class,’ I said.
‘Dead-end job – gone, just like that.’
I felt he was trying to say more. Then he did. ‘All those guys where I work. They’re waiting to buy their houses off the council. Is that all there is? A guy in our factory topped himself. He did a total Ian Curtis from the beam in the canteen.’
‘Jesus, did he?’
‘Aye. Three weeks ago. Dead.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t say anything, Tully.’
‘I dunno. It upset me.’
‘And he did this at work?’
He nodded. ‘Start of his shift.’
‘You should get out of there, mate. Go to night school, take the Highers, go to uni. Do something you care about.’
‘Maybe I’m not cut out for anything else.’
‘Bullshit. It’s happening.’
‘Something’s changed, Jimmy.’
‘Look at that guy in the furniture shop,’ I said.
‘I know. That was a masterpiece.’
‘No question,’ I went on. ‘Soon as we get back. Take the books from my place. All of them. I’ll be in a small room anyway. Take the Highers. We’ll sort it.’
‘Sometimes I think I’ll die in there, like the guy in the canteen. I can’t rely on the band to get me out – not really. And you can’t just live for the occasional gig and a few nights down the Glebe.’
‘It’s over,’ I said. ‘We have an agreement.’
‘That teacher helped you, didn’t she?’ he said. ‘She got you. And you’re never coming back, Noodles. You’re off.’
‘I know how to do it now,’ I said. ‘We can go at life differently.’
‘Night school.’
‘Then you’re free. Or in a better prison.’ We shook on it. He changed his life as he looked towards the canal and saw the cranes and the sun over Salford. A guy walked past carrying two Kwik Save bags and Tully flicked a butt into the dirty water. Seagulls went for it. We stood up and wandered. You couldn’t walk much further: ‘Salford Quays Project Team’, it said on a board, blocking the path. We sat back down on the bank, watching flies dancing over the water, and time vanished. I won’t attempt to cover all the things we said there, but it felt like a big conversation.
‘Your dad will be all right.’
‘I hope he will. But it’s not my fight.’ He turned. ‘That night we made the soup. You could see when he came into the kitchen that he sort of hated us.’
‘It must be hard for him,’ I said.
‘But all he had to do was look at my mum’s face. She loved us being there and the soup was magic.’
‘True.’
He reclined on his elbows and looked at the sky. ‘He’s got this crazy fuckan pride in being a victim,’ he said. ‘And now he is a victim. That’s how it works. You complain long enough and then the heart attack arrives.’
‘He can’t control that, Tully.’
‘He spent the strike slagging off the other miners. He never shifted a single one of his prejudices. And recently, while we were making things nice at the house he was upstairs boiling with anger. The way he turns up at the football field all raging and full of spite about the boys trying to get a clear shot at the goal. Violence, man. At some level they pass that on to you, the violence. Unless you say no.’
‘Well, you are saying no. You’re leaving that factory.’
‘I’ve felt it all in my head, Noodles.’ He paused. ‘Fathers like ours think they’re brave. I’ll tell you who’s brave – Steady McCalla. You know what they call him in the Glebe? “That Hamilton Accie”, after the football team, to rhyme with Paki. Jesus Christ: he’s never been to Pakistan. And that’s our fathers talking like that. That’s them, socialists lumping people together and talking about “darkies”. It makes me sick. And they have nothing on Steady. Nothing as thinkers. Nothing as cooks or book-readers or fathers or anything, those men – white, working class.’
‘You’re right, Tully. But … we defend the workers.’
‘I defend their rights, not their prejudices.’
‘Tibbs would be troubled by this conversation.’
‘But he doesn’t have a dad like mine, or yours,’ Tully said.
‘That’s true. Tibbs’ll be the last man standing.’
A terrible truth was exposed, for two boys who loved those films, those trapped men, those rebellious women. ‘I can’t wait to get home and start again,’ Tully said. I think it was a moment of pure honesty, and maybe we were adults for the first time, sitting by that canal in perfect daylight under the moving cranes.
*
Salford wasn’t as far from the centre of Manchester as we’d expected, and we walked back. Along the way, near a roundabout, Tully made us enter a car repair shop, a petrol-scented dump watched over by a guy in a shiny suit. I stood by the door while Tully went up to the counter. ‘I want to spray my TR7 red,’ he said to the guy. ‘Do you have anything red? I mean really, really red, like a randy baboon’s arse.’
‘Em, okay,’ the man said. He glanced at me as if there might be help available in dealing with the lunatic before him.
‘I mean so red you could see it from space. I mean that really randy red, you know like a small dog’s penis?’
‘Right, yes. We have this.’ The man reached into a stack of cans. ‘Obviously, these are just for testing the colour. Is that what you mean?’
‘Red as the apple in Snow White, mate. Red as fuck, basically.’ Tully nodded vigorously as if the art of negotiation was all he knew. ‘As red as Diana Ross’s lips in that picture by Andy Warhol.’
The shopkeeper again looked to me for help.
‘Is this guy for real? What’s he talking about?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘And I’ve no idea.’
‘You’ll have to book the car in for a full respray.’
‘Can I not just do it myself with hundreds of cans?’
‘It wouldn’t look good, mate,’ the man said. Tully focused on the stack of cans and inspected the colours while stroking his chin. Raphael or Matisse might have struggled to show such a deep interest in the peculiarities of colour.
‘I’m talking red. Powerful red,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Jimmy?’ He turned to me. ‘Soviet, right? Good and proper red.’ I was creased by the door as he lifted a can. ‘I feel we’re getting closer. Maybe this.’ He held it aloft and nodded with a face fairly lit up with menace.
‘Randy baboon.’
He’d quickly folded away the conversation from earlier, the factory, the depression, the fears he harboured about his life, and returned to the banter, as if to prove that every mood has its instantaneous opposite. Tully was always like that – he could switch it off. But emba
rrassments were subtle, and he often took quick revenge on his thoughtful moments. The words by the canal had to be recuperated, for now, in a dashing return to his usual style; each painfully expressed ambition for himself, each hope and regret, to be parcelled up and shelved by a sudden return of Tullyness.
As we made our way down John Dalton Street, he told me we were a bit early to meet the boys outside G-Mex, and anyway he wanted to find a certain shop. He wouldn’t say more, but led us down a few side streets and eventually we came out beside a building he said we’d passed that morning. It was an Army Careers office with black signage over the window. ‘Here it is,’ he said, grinning wildly, as if nothing in life had ever bothered him. He walked straight up to the window, removing the can from his pocket. I stood back while he lifted his arm and sprayed in huge red letters, ‘Fascist Pig’.
He dropped the can and turned. ‘It’s our turn to run, Noodles!’
But I thought the graffito a tad unfinished. As he sped past me, I ran up to the window, lifted the can, and sprayed an ‘s’ to make it ‘Pigs’.
There was commotion inside the shop. I stood back for a second to admire our work and then tossed the can and pelted after Tully.
11
To my lost parents it was all Perry Como and Nat King Cole. They liked easy listening, cardigan music, and rock ’n’ roll didn’t touch them. They spoke of ration-book torch singers, Ruby Murray, Alma Cogan, and Anne Shelton, women they’d seen on their first television sets, lipsticked and mild, those broken balladeers, dressed to the nines in yellow crochet. My mother once told me Debbie Harry looked dirty, and I asked her if she meant it in a bad way. She preferred clean women who came blinking into the limelight, doing angst in a cocktail dress. ‘That was when a song was a song,’ she said. ‘And that Indian rubbish or indie rubbish or whatever it is you play would drive a person mad.’
G-Mex was the old Manchester Central railway station. The building was newly renovated that year, ready for its first big concert, and young people poured in from Deansgate and Piccadilly to reach this long, arched building, a Victorian palace of small windows with a white clock up high that said 2 p.m. On the steps outside the venue, there remained a sense of arrivals and departures, and most of us stood wearing new T-shirts. A crowd was gathering. The sun was shining. The beers came out. The decade was ripe. ‘I think we saw that girl you were with last night,’ Hogg said to me.
‘The girl from last night?’
‘The girl from last night.’
‘What, the girl from last night? You’re saying you saw her?’
‘Aye. In Portland Street. Just walking by with these other lassies. Her from last night with the hair things.’
‘Fuck, Hogg. You saw her?’
‘Definitely her. On their way to G-Mex.’
Across from where we stood, outside the Midland Hotel, I saw a woman feeding ice cream to her dog and there was an aeroplane high overhead. I saw policemen chatting on the steps and there was a total sense of July. I had a word with Tully and we discussed tactics about the missing ticket and he said it would be fine. He was all reassurance. ‘Manchester’s not for amateurs,’ he said with a nod, cuffing me round the ear. ‘Come the revolution, all the tickets will be free, anyhow.’
We went up to the doors and I swept through with the ticket, a guy gruffly ripping it in half as I shuffled my duffel bag onto my shoulder. I looked back to see Tully beaming all handsomely and shaking the hand of a man on the door. ‘Hey, mate,’ I heard him say. ‘My pal’s gone ahead with my ticket.’
‘He’s got your ticket?’
‘Standing. I promise you, mate.’
‘You taking the piss, son?’
I thought it best to take a sharp left into the hall and disappear, just in case the doorman tried to call me back. ‘Easy, when you know how,’ Tully said a few seconds later as he shouldered his way through the crowd. ‘Now, what’s it all about, Sunshine? Let’s get completely blootered.’
Then to drinks in plastic cups. In my mind the venue is huge, but it was the high, arched ceiling that made you think so. A few thousand people came straggling in wearing black denim and T-shirts, scarlet beads and considered hair. Most of the punters were standing, but there were bleachers, too, and we managed to nip behind the barrier and jam our bags under the bottom row. The concert had already started, some band onstage that we didn’t care about, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. I drew from my jacket a worn copy of my birth certificate and flattened it out on the bar when the guy asked my age. He looked like a roadie for ZZ Top. ‘I think you’ll find, Mr Barman, sir,’ Tully said, leaning over, ‘that the fellow before you comes from a long line of school refusers.’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘Multiple convictions.’
Clogs joined in. ‘I’m afraid so. Grievous crimes. These people came from the bottom rung of Glasgow society, crazed with Catholic proclivities and holy water, resistant to all the usual customs of civilisation—’
‘Mate … I’ve got a busy bar here.’
‘It’s all there to see.’ Clogs lifted the certificate. ‘Look, sir. Father a journeyman tramp, mother a toothless hawker. Names marked with a cross. They lived for years off the Communion host and free school dinners.’
‘Right,’ said the barman. ‘Three pints of cider?’
‘Make mine a double,’ Limbo said, squeezing in. ‘It’s thirsty work concealing your hatred of that abysmal band. Some guy jumped on stage and whacked the singer on the head with a beer tray.’
‘That’s bad,’ the barman said, pouring the pints. ‘We’re short on trays.’
‘Right over the napper,’ Limbo continued. ‘Deserves him right, dancing like that. Bunch of musos. What does that mean, anyway?’ He spat out the words. ‘Orchestral. Manoeuvres. Is it a sex-with-violins thing?’
I thought I caught sight of Angie, up in the stands. I walked a few steps, heart going and all that. This was pathetic. You meet a girl and you talk to her for twenty minutes and you think it’s a wedding. But I was sure I’d seen her up ahead of me, and it all felt uncanny, like she was the spirit of something. And then there were too many people in the way and I lost her. Wee Tibbs joined us now with a look of general awe. Limbo passed around the drinks. He had made a special effort with his hair that day. It stood up in epic liquorice fronds, held in place, he told us, with nearly a full can of Bristows he’d stolen from Boots while touring the town. Two girls, heavily backcombed, came up to our group with a paper cup, asking for donations. ‘What’s the charity?’ Tibbs asked.
‘We are, you great wazzock,’ one of them said. She took his pint and poured half of it into her cup, then they drank it down and gave us the finger. Time went quickly. A few vodkas and a flurry of denunciations aimed at the Queen or the Pope, and then the Fall were coming on, except it wasn’t the Fall, it was Derek Hatton from Militant. He came onstage with the aid of crutches and a grin the size of Toxteth.
‘At last!’ Tibbs said. ‘About time they took a Marxist off the subs bench.’
‘Send him to focking Siberia,’ a Brummie goth standing next to us said. Tibbs looked at him like the guy was asking for a smack.
‘Shut it, ya dick,’ he said. ‘Hatton stuck up for the miners, so he did, when most of the country was toasting Thatcher for beating them back.’
‘Nah, mate. They were right to expel him. He’s a nutcase.’ Tibbs stepped forward, spread his feet and put his index finger to his chin, a bit like Napoleon on the brow of the hill at Austerlitz.
‘Hey. I’m a lover not a fighter, man,’ the guy said.
‘You’re a fuckan tosspot blackleg prick is what you are.’
Tibbs then turned to the stage and hollered in agreement with whatever inaudible thing Hatton was saying. ‘Go on, Derek!’ There was booing from the crowd. Hatton made a few football jokes and offered good wishes from the people of Liverpool, but the crowd wasn’t having it. ‘What’s the matter with you idiots?’ Tibbs shouted, wheeling round and pointing his plastic cup at
the stage. ‘That guy stood up for working people while you lot were in your bedrooms wanking off to the Sun.’
‘He reasoned,’ said Clogs.
‘Stood up to the Tories, so he did!’ A space was opening up around him and he downed his drink for the benefit of the spectators. In Tyrone’s world, there wasn’t time for negotiations. It was better to release all your demons at once, like one of our faves, Peter Finch in Network. ‘Wake up, you fuckan bastards. You cowards! I know what else you are – total slaves. This man shakes a fist in the face of corrupt power and what do you do? How do you show your solidarity? By booing! Telling you …’ He was having the time of his life. He took Limbo’s cider off him and chugged it down before dusting off the denouement. ‘Yeez are pricks. Fuckan hippy, maw’s-beadswearin’, gladioli-spunkin’, picket-line-crossin’ pricks, and that includes you, hen.’ A pale young woman wearing a New Order T-shirt had passed in front of him holding a purple drink and a packet of Quavers.
‘Leave me out of it,’ she said. ‘I thought he was the guy from Brookside.’
‘Now Brookie’s getting it!’
As if on cue, the gap closed up and John Cooper Clarke appeared onstage to do his ‘Fuck’ poem.
*
The future was daylight. The Fall were onstage and the singer was arched over like the venue, gasping for England. It was late afternoon. What a crowd. No one really knew what was going on in the next heart along, but we heaved forward as if we all misunderstood in the exact same key, and there he was, Mark E. Smith, the Fine Fare Baudelaire, school jumper, ramping up the eff-offs and gripping the mic by the knob, sloping about the stage. He didn’t sing the words, he inebriated them. The guy in front of me was rubbing his gums with speed. He licked the wrapper, and then his pal, jacket saying ‘UK Subs’, sent arcs of white spittle over the heads of the crowd into a great happy nowhere of disdain.
Mayflies Page 9
