‘Did he?’
‘Oh, aye. The old songs. He was a crooner. He wasn’t into loud music, not like yous.’ We stayed like that for a minute, and she put her hand on my shoulder and I held her other one and we swayed for a minute or so. ‘He wasn’t always the way he became.’ She said I was a good dancer for twenty-one.
I stood up to open the caravan’s patio doors. ‘There’s a bit of America in that breeze,’ Tully said. ‘And Ireland. Blowing to the wild west of Scotland.’
‘Is he on your mind?’ I asked. ‘Are you thinking of Woodbine?’
‘I hadn’t thought about him for a long time. But, since this happened, I’ve been thinking about him a lot. He was young when he died, but I’m even younger. He was fifty-three and I’m fifty-one. Does that mean he beat me, Noodles?’
‘He didn’t beat you at anything, Tully. He wanted you to win.’
He examined both his hands. In many ways, he had defined himself by being distant from his father.
‘I worry this chemo will turn me into somebody I’m not. There could be three courses of it or whatever, three sets of drugs. I don’t know how many visits. People say it’s a total nightmare. They say it can give you this extra time, but what if there’s no … life?’
‘You can use the time,’ I said. ‘You and Anna.’
‘With you and Iona,’ he said. ‘Let’s go on holiday. To Sicily. Or we could drive around America.’
A string of bunting over the door was billowing out, giving a hint of summer fête, and Tully poured another whisky and pointed towards the sea. ‘It’s amazing here,’ he said. ‘You must miss Iona when she’s away.’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘When I first met her, I told her to be kind to you. His choice, I said, but he’s gone out by himself, all his life.’
‘I’ve been lucky.’
‘There’s been love,’ he said. He wiped his eyes. ‘Let’s do what we can, then bring it to an end. I don’t want to be some sad sack waiting for pity.’
‘You’ve always had style,’ I said, ‘so let that continue. Let that be the rule. Take the chemo if it gives you more time. I’ve been thinking about it all weekend. You’ve always been yourself, Tully, so make the end like that. In Antony and Cleopatra, there’s a line, Make death proud to take us.’
‘I like that.’
We lifted our drinks and the notepad and walked out onto the decking. The lights around the caravan were all burning and a heron rose from the long grass. It made a shrill call and flew at speed over the rocks. ‘We must have scared it,’ Tully said. ‘And who are we to scare anything, eh?’
‘Are you?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Scared.’
‘We’ll see,’ he said.
The sky was darkening and the clouds disappeared. Like the hour had come and the day was now ending without remorse. Early stars began to blink over the water and the last ferry was crossing on its way to Brodick.
‘Promise me one thing, buddy,’ he said. ‘When it’s obviously curtains, you’ve got to get me the Hitler chow-down.’
‘The what?’
‘The chow-down. The suicide bullet. When the bad time comes, I want to end it myself and not go skelly. I want control.’
‘Have you spoken to Anna?’
‘I will. But that’s definitely what I want.’
‘That means Switzerland,’ I said, sitting on the bench. ‘You’re saying you want to make the trip there and end it yourself?’
‘That’s totally what I’m saying. In my own time.’
I knew we’d have to get started immediately on that and my thoughts went out to sea. And I remember thinking, ‘Anna will never agree.’
‘It’s what I want,’ he said again. ‘Make death proud to take us. You’ve given me my last quote, Noodles.’
‘Assisted dying.’
‘You’ve got to promise me.’
We walked along the beach for a mile or so, using the torch on my phone, and when I pointed down we could see the rock pools and how the pressure of our shoes darkened the sand. Tully continued to spar with his own dread, like the boy I knew, not letting his guard down very much when sentiment threatened. He wanted jokes, and, if they were at other people’s expense, so much the better. A man was coming down the beach with a large Alsatian romping in the dark. He seemed timid, the man, about our age, and he kept his head down as he drew near. ‘That’s some beast,’ Tully said.
‘Aye. It’s a lovely night,’ the man said. He was unsmiling but not unfriendly and that was all the encouragement Tully needed.
‘Tell me,’ he said to the man, ‘are you riding that dug?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You and the dug. Are yous at it?’ Tully paused and looked fully engaged, as if he’d asked a perfectly reasonable question.
‘Come on now, lads,’ the guy said. As he walked away up the beach, Tully shrugged, as if no degree of surrealism was uninvited.
When we got to the diner, he asked for cherry pie, making a joke about Twin Peaks and the weirdness of the empty diner. He said he supposed he was now in a version of the film Stand By Me. ‘The narrator-guy was right, mind you,’ he said. ‘The friends you have when you’re young can turn out to be the best you ever had.’ Tully ate another piece of pie and then a pizza. He said he didn’t know how much longer he’d have an appetite, so he might as well go for it. He was already finding it harder to swallow. We stayed in the diner for hours, the headlights going past on the highway and the moon high and clear over the water. He kept saying, ‘Switzerland’. I wasn’t sure what I owed him, or what I owed him for, but the sense of duty was there, as well as the love. And as he spoke, I felt for the first time in our lives that our friendship had a final destination.
16
I wrote to a consultant I knew at the Royal Marsden. He replied in three days. ‘I’ve read the medical reports you sent,’ he said, ‘and I advise you to help Mr Dawson accept the situation, dire as it is, and do what you can to make him comfortable.’ I sat upstairs on the 168 bus to Camden Town with the consultant’s letter in my lap. The buses were snagged up around Euston and the rain on the windows was dripping neon.
Things had moved quickly since our trip to the caravan. We spoke every day, and the conversation was always about the wedding or the ending, which competed with each other to be the larger field of anxiety. My phone rang on the bus – it was him. ‘Anna thinks that if I eat more blueberries I could be all right,’ he said. ‘She bought a NutriBullet. She won’t let me die without a battle that involves new electrical appliances.’
‘You’ll be cool for vitamin C, then.’
‘Shut your face.’
He told me he’d now spoken to all the boys. ‘And d’you know what their common reaction was?’ he said. ‘Embarrassment. That’s what it comes down to: embarrassed silences between me and the people I love.’
‘They’re not embarrassed,’ I said.
‘So what are they?’
‘They’re telling the truth. Lost for words.’
He said the chemo would start soon. He’d be confined to the house at first. He said he wanted to get to Switzerland as soon as possible.
‘I’m worried, Tully. You need to tell Anna what you’re thinking.’
‘Thinking?’
‘About this end-of-life plan.’
‘I will, in a while.’
‘No, you have to tell her now.’
‘I have told her. She’s not listening. She’s happy we’re getting married. Let her enjoy that for a while.’
‘But, Tully.’
‘I promise I’ll sit her down and explain the whole thing. She’ll be fine.’
‘She doesn’t want it,’ I said. ‘Iona told me. Anna says it’s you that isn’t listening. I mean it, Tully, she doesn’t like it.’
‘What’s liking got to do with any of this, Noodles?’
‘You’re marrying her; she needs to be involved.’
‘She’s totally
involved,’ he said. ‘But I can’t ask for anybody’s permission. That’s the reality. That’s who she’s marrying.’
There was a silent moment, while I took that in. People were coming upstairs on the bus and shaking out their umbrellas.
‘Iona’s play is coming north,’ I said to him. ‘She and Anna have arranged to have lunch and talk it all through.’
‘Lunch?’ Tully said. ‘Who invented that?’
A determination had been born from the shock of those first weeks, and now, with the kind of brio he’d once brought to living, he was beginning to embody an argument about how to die in his own way. It took me by surprise how that tearful exchange of promises in the caravan now formed into a manifesto. He wanted to be the originator of his last rites and to make a portrait of his own attitude to cancer. Despite what I’d said on the phone, it seemed to me a very natural sort of bravery. The problem was, he did little to prepare the way for it, no unfolding of argument, no open heart. Tully acted like it was merely a matter of taste – like the music you were into – and he wanted to inhabit his own values without explaining them to anybody. It was like a veil had fallen, and all his carnal energy and all his native certainty – everything strong in him – was now devoted to the matter of his own destruction. I didn’t understand it better than anybody else, but he needed to believe that I did, and believe that I would help him with all the logistics.
It became joined in my mind to the wedding, as if the marriage would buy him all the credit he needed, all the leeway. The wedding would be his last great affirmation, and he wanted it to be understood that way, as a monumental ‘yes’ to Anna, after which a steady withdrawal and a silent acquittal could be his. Yet it became obvious, as the weeks passed, that his decisions were having an impact way beyond himself. As an adult, he had a kind of complacency when it came to the opinions of others; he didn’t quite believe the world beyond himself could halt his ideas. He felt we could aid his progress, but not hinder it, and it formed a strange human puzzle in that busy period before the wedding. He was making room for death, while, all around him, people arrived with new furniture for a different room altogether, a place of honouring and cherishing, where comfort and light are believed to obliterate the dark.
*
Iona’s play eventually arrived at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh. She took the train through to Glasgow on her day off and had the advertised lunch with Anna. ‘She drank a fair amount,’ Iona said to me after the show that night. ‘Totally shattered, as you’d expect. The chemo seems to be holding back the cancer, though he’s finding the treatment murderous. Really terrible, Anna says. He complains all the time, she said, about Amazon parcels coming to the door, about visitors he doesn’t want.’
‘I’ve heard him say that.’
‘She thinks he can get a year or maybe longer.’
She told me Anna had burst into tears while saying that and had covered her face with her napkin. ‘And she went on again about Tully having secret conversations with you about Dignitas.’
‘And what did she say?’ I asked.
‘Well, she’s said it before. She’s totally against it. You don’t kill yourself, that’s Anna’s view.’
As she reported their conversation to me, I could tell that Iona more or less agreed with Anna’s position. She would do her best to protect me, but I knew Iona thought I should just refuse to talk to Tully about assisted dying. She felt it was natural for Anna to want to save the man she was about to marry.
The wedding had grown in my mind to be an event riddled with the threat of what it preceded, and I tried, as we all did, to join Anna in her struggle to see it as something joyous. She told Iona she had looked forward all her life to getting married. At the lunch, Iona ordered champagne and tried to reassure her, and promised her the day would be fantastic. She said everybody was excited. But Anna was worried, Iona said, that Tully might not be able to make it through the stress of a whole day like that. She said he would put on a big brave face for everyone and hope nobody noticed.
It was late October, and he asked me to help them with the wedding. But when he was distracted, or in pain, or too depressed to think about any of it, Anna and I would speak alone. He’d wade in now and then and make huge pronouncements, then sleep for a whole day, unable to follow up or revive his interest later on. He was there all the way, but he hated the lacy trivia, the march of obligations. Anna did all of it, and I spent hours on the phone with her discussing the possibility of lacquered chairs. She preferred a posh old house, a humanist minister – ‘Why?’ he’d asked; ‘Just because,’ she’d said – and a well-stocked bar and a smoking area were also priorities. The wedding would start with drinks in the drawing room and then vows upstairs in the grand library. There would be readings and a few speeches after dinner, which should be a buffet, Anna said, because Tully didn’t want a whole lot of fuss about food, napkins, tablecloths, or candles. One of the boys could do the photographs. Tully’s main concern was the music.
‘That’s all fine,’ I said.
‘The main event will be the party,’ she said. ‘The official bit will be over by six. Then it should just be dancing.’
‘Right.’
‘And that’s Tully’s bit.’
‘No problem.’
‘Did he always rely on you like this?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘When we were young, it was the other way. When my parents stopped being parents, I totally relied on him and Barbara.’
‘He says it was all music and comedy.’
‘It was. Plus a few films.’
‘Now it’s all silence and death,’ she said. As if to confirm her words, we said nothing. Then I cleared my throat and tried again.
‘Come on, Anna. He loves you very much. This is happening to him, and he’s just desperate to control it a wee bit.’
‘Control me, you mean.’
‘No, Anna.’
‘Yes, Jimmy.’
We fell silent again. I felt it wasn’t our argument to have. Through the phone I could hear her fingers clicking on the keys of her laptop.
‘Let’s just talk about wedding favours,’ she said. ‘Yes or no?’
Another day, another FaceTime. Tully was up and about and for a minute or two he wanted to talk. He appeared on my MacBook screen wearing a Delta 5 T-shirt and a frown he couldn’t shake. ‘If Anna orders any more shite and we have any more Amazon deliveries to this fuckan door I’m going to bomb Seattle,’ he said. ‘It would be quite a good way to go, taking out a few evil tech companies.’
‘You’d better retrain your missiles. Your parcels are coming from Gourock.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Dying is boring,’ he said. ‘If I don’t die soon then I might just die of boredom.’ It had been a month since we’d met at the caravan. ‘You wouldn’t believe how I struggle to get through the day with all this crap. It’s so slow. Mainly, I take cannabis oil and learn to hate the dogs in the street, barking all day.’
‘What else?’
‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ He cleared his throat. ‘You know how Tibbs says it was a header by Kenny Dalglish that caused the Thatcher revolution?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, by a similar logic, I can tell you it was Fred Astaire who caused Brexit.’
‘Shut up.’
‘I’m serious. I’ve worked it out. Fred Astaire was in a show in 1926 called Lady, Be Good. A girl from London called Maude Wells was in the audience. Because of him, she set up a tap-dancing school in the East End. One of her pupils was Noele Gordon, who went on to run the motel in Crossroads. But her first gig, straight out of the dancing school, was doing a test transmission for John Logie Baird’s new invention, colour television. He broadcast her trying on a few hats, and he convinced everybody it worked. When Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web, was at college he built a computer from an old analogue TV. Without him there would be no internet and no social media, and, without that, the rightwing faction couldn’t hav
e spread all those lies and convinced people to vote us out of the European Union. So, there you go – Fred Astaire caused Brexit.’
‘I actually love you,’ I said.
*
It was working, as Anna had said, but that first round of chemo went off like a dirty bomb in a deserted city. He said it was beyond description, the feeling it gave you, and he wished all the time for another existence, or non-existence. ‘I don’t think anything could take my head out of it,’ he said, ‘although the steroid days are better.’ The treatment would fall into three distinct phases. After a week or so, when he stopped throwing up, he said he was keen for some distractions. I asked him if he remembered me talking about this café that was opening next door to me in London.
‘Aye. You said the owner wanted records.’
‘I’ve become friendly with him. He’s got a vintage jukebox, a 1962 Rock-Ola Princess. It takes fifty singles.’
‘Are you asking me to fill it with tunes?’
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘That would be great.’
‘What years will you go for?’
‘The Eighties,’ he said. ‘The music was magic. And never, until now, did the country feel so divided.’ As we spoke about it, some of his old vigour and purpose came back. ‘I’m really tempted to stick with 1979 to ’86,’ he said, ‘but I have to bring a few dance tracks into the mix, so I’ll go to ’90. If your pal’s café is full of London toffs then we’ll need to give them something palatable to go with their wankuccinos.’
I was never sure that he wasn’t supplanting, with my help, his present self with a previous one, the one his pals knew better, a live wire who was healthy and unmarked and had his whole life in front of him. And that, I’m sure, is what Anna detected and what she objected to as the weeks dragged on. He told me she was often up at night – sitting by their bedroom window, using the torch on her phone to examine the guest list – and amid all these wedding plans they couldn’t speak about death. She was in many ways smarter than him, and she saw that he was punishing the present for what it was doing – and she was the present, as well as the devastated future, but he couldn’t address it that way. I asked him to slow down and consider her position, but he kept running from the cancer, knowing he’d lose ground to it, and I could only hope that she’d forgive us in the end.
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