Mayflies

by Andrew O'Hagan

  I looked behind me and saw a trail of footsteps and paw prints. My past life was everywhere on that housing estate. It was easy to forget we were near the harbour and the sea and a whole natural world of plovers and seaweed. The modern whiteness of the estate had aged very badly; it seemed tarnished now and damp. I realised I was breathing in the cold air very deeply, feeling almost dizzy. I used to walk down that path from the main road with library books in my bag. Thomas Hardy, with his snow-filled fields and his summer rituals, had once seemed so exotic to me, distant and lovely. Yet now those stories appeared real and very local – familiarly sad and sadly familiar – the litany of small tragedies that matter more to some than to others.

  Tully was wearing a coat with a furry hood. He got out of the car and took a little run and slid down the path to his mother’s gate. ‘Hey, Noodles,’ he said, crashing into me and turning it into a hug. ‘You’re here already.’

  ‘Bloody freezing,’ Anna said, coming up behind.

  ‘I hear you were out boozing with my sister last night.’

  ‘Hardly a rave,’ I said. ‘I was doing an event in Wigtown. It was a surprise seeing them. Good of them to come.’

  ‘Did they do your head in?’ Anna said. She caught my eye. We had grown a little closer during the wedding planning, but there were things we just couldn’t talk about. She had her pride and I had my promise.

  ‘They were really nice,’ I said.

  We spoke about the house. Tully opened the garden gate and then hesitated, as if he thought better of spoiling the perfect, unbroken snow. ‘You want to go in?’ he asked, taking out a key from his coat pocket.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Maybe not.’

  Anna took my arm and stomped her feet against the cold. She pulled her woolly hat down over her ears. ‘We should get going,’ she said. ‘We can take your mum down the shore and give her a bit of breakfast. Come back later.’

  ‘You know we’re selling it?’ Tully said, looking up at the house. ‘That’s what you have to do – sell the house to pay for the nursing home.’

  ‘That’s brutal,’ I said. ‘She worked hard to pay for that house.’

  ‘That’s right. After Woodbine died. She wanted to leave us something.’

  There was still the old waste ground to the right of the house. He walked to the end of the path and then stopped and pointed. ‘Over there,’ he said. ‘My best memory. One of them, anyhow. My dad banged in two posts to make a goal. I don’t think I ever scored in front of him but he set up the posts and that’s something.’

  I drove behind them to the care home. It was only a mile or so, closer to the harbour and the shopping centre, near the spot on the river where Tully and I once dumped the leaflets for the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. The reception area was busy with care assistants carrying trays or leading patients. We went up the stairs to a long corridor and I could see her standing at the very end, swaying on her own with a handbag. Barbara was in her housecoat, buttoned to the collar, her hair sticking up. The light in the corridor seemed to know something about her. Tully had said he could still joke with her but that she was confused most of the time. When he’d told her about the wedding she seemed pleased though she didn’t even ask about coming.

  Anna patted down her hair and took her hand. ‘You got your glad rags on, Barbara?’ she said. The handbag was crooked over her arm and she seemed delighted with herself, as if she was all set for the dance hall.

  ‘Mum,’ Tully said as we went into her room, ‘you remember Jimmy, don’t you? You must remember Noodles. He’s come to see you.’

  ‘Aw, my,’ she said.

  ‘He’s come all the way from London.’

  Her eyes were paler than I remembered. She pointed at me and said it again – ‘Aw, my’ – and then she fanned herself with a handkerchief and put on her music. Frank Sinatra. She stood up and placed my arm on her shoulder and we began to dance. You could feel how bony she was but the rhythm was still there.

  ‘You’re a fair mover, Barbara,’ I said.

  ‘Aw, my.’

  As we turned around the room, I saw the framed pictures on her chest of drawers. Tully in his graduation gown, 1992. His father in a 1950s suit with a cigarette dangling from his lip. Fiona and Scott with the children, and a wedding picture where Barbara looked like Doris Day.

  ‘You want to go out, Mum?’

  ‘Spain,’ she said, and sat down for a moment.

  A few times, when Tully made a joke, she’d put a fist up to his face like she was angry. And maybe she was. ‘Is it night-time?’ she asked. Then she noticed the music again and stood up to dance and stare at the bright window.

  ‘Come on, Mum. Let’s get out of here for a wee while,’ Tully said.

  We waited in the corridor while Anna got her dressed. You could hear them talking behind the door.

  The four of us walked past the high flats and down to the harbour. Barbara got excited when she saw a squirrel and Anna patted her arm. Tully went into a routine about how Elvis died from eating a squirrel in the depths of Tennessee. I think he just liked the sound of the words, and we all did, especially Barbara, who clapped.

  He wanted to show me the ruins of the Magnum Leisure Centre. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, man,’ he said. ‘They pulled it down. And when I look at it, I hear the sounds – all the shouting in the swimming pool during the summer. Before the strike, remember we used to go down to the skating rink, and they played the Clash? All the kids going round in purple hired skates, the weird smell of the ice.’ When we turned the corner I was amazed to see the huge empty space. I had once known every hall and every stairwell and every corner of that building. Walking towards the field where the leisure centre used to be, I remembered standing in a Cub Scout’s uniform, aged ten, the day the Queen turned up to open it.

  ‘Gone,’ Barbara said.

  I stood by the road with Anna while Tully took his mother closer.

  ‘He’s thinking a lot about his dad,’ she said.

  Seagulls picked in the mud, the old Magnum. ‘We once saw the Smiths play there,’ I told her. Tully walked back arm in arm with Barbara and she seemed contentedly oblivious, and only when I said it was time for the café did she look at me. We went to Small Talk because of their homemade cakes. Tully couldn’t eat, but his mum ate for two, and Anna had a bowl of soup. I took Barbara’s hand and asked her if she could tell us about her own wedding and she sang a bit of ‘A Foggy Day (in London Town)’.

  She yawned and said, ‘Frank Sinatra.’

  ‘Mr Dawson was a crooner, wasn’t he? I remember you telling me that, Barbara.’

  ‘Barbara and Ewan,’ she said.

  There was a swing park by the harbour and Barbara pointed to it as soon as we came out of the café. Anna took her ahead of us and Tully turned. ‘Noodles, you remember Stedman, the Jamaican guy who drank in the Glebe?’

  ‘Steady McCalla, the barber. Of course.’

  ‘Aye. He had a kid, right. A wee boy. Well, he once told me that he used to bring the boy down here at night, to play on the swings.’

  ‘At night?’

  ‘Because in the daytime the kids used to say stuff, like racist comments, and the boy couldn’t get playing on the swings.’

  ‘So he brought him down …’

  ‘When nobody was here,’ he said.

  ‘That’s shocking, man.’

  ‘That was Steady’s life,’ Tully said. ‘The stuff we didn’t see. We thought we knew about Britain, Noodles. We knew fuck all.’

  ‘But you did see it,’ I said. ‘You called them out for it in the Glebe.’

  ‘Not enough,’ he said. ‘Never enough.’

  His mum sat down on the swing and pushed away with her boots. Tully gave her a little help and then sat on the one next to her. Anna and I took the other two, and soon we were all swinging higher and higher, the cold breeze in our eyes. You could see the abbey tower over in Kilwinning and the old ICI factory and the Firth of Clyde all the way to Arran. ‘I’m getting
married in the morning,’ Tully sang as we worked ourselves into the air. Barbara opened her mouth as if to say something and her eyes were wet.

  19

  When I arrived at his flat on the afternoon of the wedding, I kicked the snow off my shoes on the front step and he brought me inside. He took the red ties in the hall and handed me a glass of Glenmorangie. ‘A fair exchange,’ he said. We went into the main room, where I greeted the others and we clinked glasses.

  The Clash was playing.

  I told Tully he had to put a dimple in his tie. ‘Just pinch it and push the knot up to the crux of the collar.’

  ‘It’s only a wedding,’ he said, ‘not my testimonial at Ibrox Park, where Kenny Dalglish will bow before the Huns.’

  ‘No, Jimmy’s right,’ said Mick Caesar.

  He wasn’t on that trip to Manchester and always had his own habits. Tully had made him best man, along with Ross McArdle, another Manchester absentee, and me. ‘Look.’ Caesar sniggered and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Jimmy knows zilch about gambling. But he knows about ties. Follow his advice to look like Cary Grant. Or else turn up at your wedding like a plooky schoolboy who cannae tie a tie.’

  ‘Fuck sake,’ Tully said. ‘It’s like RuPaul’s Drag Race in here. Jimmy, tie it for me while Caesar gets busy with the cheeky water.’

  ‘It’s a shame Iona couldn’t make it,’ Tully said. (She was stuck with the show and had sent her regrets.)

  ‘She’s gutted,’ I said. ‘But she says she’ll raise a glass of champagne to you and Anna tonight in Croydon.’

  ‘Can you get champagne in Croydon?’ Caesar asked. He handed each of us another whisky and his face gleamed with mischief.

  Despite the Glenmorangie and the Clash, we got Tully to the venue in plenty of time, driving through the park and stepping out at Pollok House, a huge Georgian pile with balustrades and chimney-stacks, a house of echoing corridors and servants’ quarters, famous for its collection of Spanish art. Tully’s pals were waiting outside and they crunched over the gravel to greet him. You could see their breath, the guests all standing in the yard ribbing each other, and, just beyond them, the old house, yellow light shining in the windows, behind the trees.

  Detaching from his wife, Tyrone Lennox, postman and general secretary of the Leonid Brezhnev Appreciation Society, came bowling over with the same blue eyes and the same bold grin he had when he was eighteen. The era of male hugging hadn’t quite reached Tibbs, so he shook my hand, weighing it for lost sincerity, before leading me inside to a room where the drinks reception appeared to be happening. I hadn’t properly seen him in ten years, maybe more. ‘How’s your work?’ he said. ‘I see you avoid social media. Good decision. Most of it is just right-wing thinking in left-wing dress, so it is. There’s not a lot to choose between Pitchfork Rabble and Biscuit-Tin Britain.’

  ‘The new authoritarians,’ I said. ‘They hate any fact that doesn’t confirm what they already believe to be true. They hate it even before they hear it. We’re all just one observation away from damnation.’

  ‘It’s just woke Thatcherism,’ he said. ‘It all stems from the Eighties. The Decade That Decency Forgot. So, basically it’s our fault.’

  ‘You enjoying the EU pantomime?’ I asked.

  ‘Embarrassing as hell. Hard to go to sleep at night knowing a bunch of Continental bureaucrats think you’re a loser. Britain is done for.’

  ‘You’re the scourge of the working classes, Tibbs.’

  ‘Never. But what do you do when the workers aren’t on their own side?’

  ‘We’d better stop. We’re at a wedding.’

  ‘Working people voting against their own interests,’ he said. We paused and looked at each other for a second. ‘Ah, who cares. Even happy days are odd at the moment. France must look at us and say, “What happened to poor old Britain? It used to be so brilliant and now it’s a complete basket case.”’

  Looking at his face, it occurred to me that Tibbs had never suited being young. It was something about his head: made for reading glasses and sharp angles and a bit of grey. There are the Tullys of the world, people who are themselves early on, and never better, while others are simply waiting to become the person they really are, and Tibbs now seemed entirely himself and unchangeable. It was as if the insecurities of his youth had been burned away by love and duty, and now he was here, standing up to be counted and ready to shout down the idiocies of the moment.

  ‘The whole thing,’ he said. ‘It’s murder, so it is.’ But he was no longer talking about politics and people in power. He nodded towards the wedding party, swallowed a few words, and rubbed his hands. ‘I’m finding it nearly impossible, this Tully thing. It’s so wrong and so shite. It makes me hold on to my weans, so it does, and Helen. How can a thing like this happen to a healthy guy – not just anybody, but to Tully?’

  ‘I wish I could tell you, Tibbs.’

  ‘I know none of us has a monopoly on grief, but I’m struggling.’

  ‘We each have a monopoly on our own,’ I said.

  The house was all candlelight and mahogany. As the guests headed up, I waited in the hall for the other best men and Tully. At the top of the stairs, a trio played Debussy, a piano and two violins rushing it. ‘Slow down,’ I said, as much to myself as the musicians, catching sight of my face in a mirror. Ross McArdle – master of general nonsense – came into the hall, bearing carnations on a tray, with Tully and Caesar walking behind and passing a hip flask between them. ‘Everybody is here for the wedding of the year – apart from the fuckan bride,’ Caesar said. The hall echoed with banter.

  Tully came over to the mirror and asked if I’d help him with the flower. ‘Come on, wee boy,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to look smart for one day in my life. Show me how you do this buttonhole thing.’ I stuck the pin through the stem and was fastening the carnation to his lapel when the humanist minister appeared on the stairs.

  ‘Come along, fellows,’ he said, beckoning. ‘The world is waiting. Or Glasgow, at least.’

  ‘Are you in pain?’ I whispered to Tully.

  ‘Aye. In the stomach.’ I finished securing the flower and he stood back to examine himself. He looked so pale. The blue of the painting on the opposite wall seemed to reflect back onto his face. ‘Carnations, eh, Noodles?’ he said. When we walked across the wooden floor it was like knocking on all the doors of the past, and running away.

  Upstairs, I stood with him by the French windows in the Pavilion Library, the guests in rows of gold chairs. It was already dark outside, moonlight silhouetting the trees and falling on the snow-filled garden. Anna was late and the jokes wore thin, but the sense of hesitation added a contemplative note to the hour of their marriage. And then, like a cinema bride, her entry was the banishment of all anxiety: every person in the room turned to her, and she carried optimism into the room, as if the whole of time and the whole of hope were hers and his to scatter as they liked. Tully gripped my hand for a second and then watched her as she walked towards him in her white beaded gown, the light making the most of the dress while the Cocteau Twins rang out. She seemed shy of all the attention and at the same time fulfilled by it. All eyes were on her, many of them welling with tears. People craned for a better look and some were felled by the day’s formalities. But not Anna. She arrived with self-possession at the windows where we stood, and he kissed her softly. The minister began the ceremony and he spoke slowly of commitment and asked for the rings. As Tully spoke his vows my eyes went up to a painting in the room, a masterpiece. I felt it must have waited for us all our lives, Goya’s Boys Playing at Soldiers.

  *

  It used to be so natural, dancing. Because the music defined you and the heart was in step. Then it leaves you. Or does it? Saturday night changes and your body forgets the old compliance. You’re not part of it any more and your feet hesitate and your arms stay close to your sides. It’s there somewhere, the easy rhythm from other rooms and other occasions, and you’re half convinced it will soon come back. It’
s not the moves – the moves are there – but your connection to the music has become nostalgic, so the body is responding not to a discovery but to an old, dear echo.

  Some evenings smell of the night’s ravages, the ones to come. You can sense the atmosphere of good feeling, the growth of excitement. After the food was over – and it was over very quickly – most of the guests behaved as if they’d waited years to be so at home with their old friends, and they drank heavily. Sure, it was a living wake, and I felt that their gladness, like my own, must have vied with a hinterland of dread, but most of them forgot it all and had a great night. ‘Take a bump of this and get jigging,’ someone said to me at the bar, holding a little wrap between his waistcoat and mine.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You’ll be leaping about in no time.’ I waved it away and handed him a whisky instead. I told him to fill his boots. He blew a kiss and spun away towards a thumping classic by Eric B. & Rakim.

  Among the people I recognised from our past, many of their faces were much the same and others were completely blurred by life, as if time was wiping them. There’s nothing rational about people’s looks. Some lose them and others improve with age. I saw one shy girl who was hardly noticed by anybody at school, and she now took to the dancefloor with a poised and beautiful realisation about her face. We had friends like Tibbs, who had his life sorted out, who stuck to his values and supported his team, but there were other guys (‘for all their pish’, as Tully put it) who only cared for their Christmas bonus. Tully called them out in private, but he treated them all equally. He was a friend to friendship itself and never expected people to be better than they were.