‘Go fuck yourself,’ I said.
‘Let me just die here,’ he said.
The conversation petered out for a minute and the light began to fade along the coast. ‘There are plenty of medical treatments,’ Anna said eventually. ‘I want you all to know that. It’s going very well and there’s lots more they can do, a plan of care all the way to next year.’
‘Let’s not talk about it now,’ Tully said.
‘I spoke to them,’ she said. He drained his glass and looked impassive and Iona tried to change the subject, talking about The Godfather tour—
‘Make death proud to take us.’
He said it very clearly and Iona stopped. I’m not sure if he said it to goad Anna, or to establish authority, or just because he was drunk, but the use of those words was the closest he had ever come to vocalising his wishes with all three of us present.
‘What?’ Anna asked, swallowing hard.
‘From Shakespeare,’ I said.
‘Words you gave him, I suppose?’
‘Tully’s his own man, Anna,’ I said. ‘He’s an English teacher. He knows his Bard.’
She stared at me. ‘I don’t know about making death proud,’ she said. ‘It sounds like poetry to me, and reversible. Make life proud to preserve us.’
‘Good point,’ I said.
Tully went off, under the pretence of studying some vintage bottles displayed in glass cabinets, and it somehow lightened the atmosphere. Iona spoke to the manager about getting a case of the Dragone sent back to Glasgow.
We returned to the villa late that night. It was warm and mint-scented and the muslin curtains were billowing into the rooms. Etna looked Japanese under the moon and Tully went into the kitchen to pour brandy. I sat on a sun-lounger out on the balcony and suddenly felt overwhelmed with exhaustion. It wasn’t ordinary sleepiness: it felt stored up, and it went all the way through me and made my bones feel heavy. The months of tension, and the corrosive, draining business of acting for people who wouldn’t speak. I felt I could have closed my eyes and slept until it was all over. Anna and Iona were talking about the stars. My wife pointed out a constellation and Anna blew vape smoke over the railings. ‘I love how you know your stars,’ I said, opening my eyes.
‘You get bored when I point them out at the caravan.’
‘Circumstances,’ I said.
‘I don’t like them much,’ Tully said.
Iona searched his face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘They have no role,’ he said, ‘except to hang about out there, freezing cold, watching us disappear.’
‘It’s funny,’ Iona said, ‘how we feel watched by them.’
*
We had sore heads the next morning, but it was hot and we drove to Savoca. Tully said there must be a bus we could take, but I ignored him, making an argument for air-conditioning and taxis in general. The driver missed the turning and drove too far towards Messina, which Tully saw as clear evidence that we were being robbed. Then, noticing the driver spoke English, he asked about the history of the local area. The driver didn’t know much, so Anna read something off her phone about Italian mercenaries in the year 288 raiding Messina and killing the men and marrying their wives. ‘The usual,’ she said. Everything brightened as the car went up the hillside, houses and vineyards slowly revealed. Rain started falling out of nowhere, and just as suddenly disappeared. In a few minutes it was scorching and the road ahead was bleached white and we could see the rooftops of Savoca.
The driver dropped us off in the centre of the village and we walked over to the viewing platform. I held Iona’s hand, watching the ships out in the bay. In the other direction, facing inland, the haze was incredible, but you could see all the glinting promontories, towns, castles, and the windows of far-off hotels. Bar Vitelli was next to us. They served us Cokes and cannoli, then lemon granita, and Tully said he’d dreamed of coming here. We stayed as long as we could. We moved on to beers and the sun shone down and Anna took photographs with her phone. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Tully said. ‘This is actually The Godfather.’
‘Where Michael speaks to the girl’s father.’
‘Right here,’ he said, banging the arm of the chair. He was the ultimate movie aficionado, sitting in his black cap and plaid shirt, happy as a game-show winner, smiling under a metal sign that said ‘Itala Pilsen’.
Anna and Iona went down the road to buy postcards. Tully clasped my arm and shrugged his shoulders like Brando, before sliding into an impersonation of Sonny Corleone. ‘Nice college boy like you. Now you want to gun down a police captain. You gotta get up close like this and, badda-bing, you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit. C’mere.’
We sniggered and the waiter came out waving flies away. ‘You guys know all the movies,’ he said, and encouraged us to come inside and look at the little Godfather museum they’d set up. They had film scripts and props. Tully went round taking pictures with his phone and sending them to his nephews, and the waiter snapped us next to the beer sign. After that, he brought out more cannoli and an ashtray and told us about a woman who lived over the road. He pointed to a balcony overflowing with bougainvillea. ‘She was in one of the films,’ he said. ‘Mr Coppola, he hired the whole town. You see them at the church, all the people of Savoca. The signora is in a white dress, walking with Mr Pacino.’
‘This guy here,’ Tully said, pointing at me. ‘Is boss of the Primrose Hill Mafia. You wouldn’t know it, to look at his nice side-parting, but he runs one of the baddest gangs in the whole of North London.’
The waiter flicked the air with his towel. ‘Am I safe?’ he said, laughing. ‘If I go in my car tonight, will it blow up?’
Tully touched the side of his nose and winked. He asked for two more beers and licked his fingers after lifting one of the pastries.
‘Almonds,’ he said. ‘Different from the other one.’
‘That was ricotta. This is sweeter.’
He seemed the most relaxed he’d been in ages. The waiter came back with the beers and joked with me again, Il Capo dei Capi.
‘I’m sure they get this shit every day,’ I said, when he’d gone. But Tully was pensive, still playing with the pastry.
‘They say cyanide smells of almonds,’ he said.
I looked across at him and slugged my beer and waited.
‘I think we’re there now, aren’t we?’ he asked.
‘With what?’
‘The chow-down.’
So, no: he hadn’t budged an inch. ‘Everything is still in place,’ I said, tentatively, ‘as they told you. But you do seem better, and Anna’s programme—’
‘Anna is dreaming,’ he said.
‘But, Tully—’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘She’s dreaming. And I love her for it. I might be eating better and I’m glad the bastard chemo has given me more time. But I’m dying and one day soon it will get much worse and I haven’t changed my position. You’re my wingman and I’m telling you it’s going to start. The guy said everything was checked and they’re ready. He said nothing will change at their end.’
‘Matteo,’ I said. ‘Yes. He told me the same thing he told you. When it gets bad again and you feel ready, they can offer you a date. But it’s important to remember you can pull out at any time.’
‘And let nature take its course?’
‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘You have the alternative.’
Switzerland stood sharp in his mind and you could see he didn’t want survival-talk wearying the plan.
‘Stick with me,’ he said.
‘And Anna? I asked you to discuss it properly with her, Tully, and you didn’t. The Dignitas people said it was crucial.’
‘I’ve told her the basics, Noodles. That’s it. What else is there to say?’
‘It’s just upsetting for her.’
His eyes darkened. It was unusual to see him grow angry. ‘Upsetting? None of you know what you’re talking about.’
‘Tully, you can’t—’
We sat in silence then. I felt I could hear the bubbles rising in the beer bottles. He looked at me like I was on the brink of a total betrayal.
‘You have me in a bind, Tully.’
‘And what do you think I’m in? You’ll get over it. She’ll get over it. It’s me that has no future and controlling this is all I have left.’
‘I hear what you’re saying.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes, I do,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Set me free. That’s all.’
When the others came back we walked along the road to the Church of San Nicolò. Part of the way there, Tully stopped and leaned his back against one of the trees. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, catching his breath. ‘I’m like an old man. One minute you’re skanking all hours to the Specials, chugging cider and snorting speed, then, before you know it, you can’t make it up a daft wee hill.’
At the door of the church my companions searched my face for signs of resurgent Catholicism. I could see them nudging each other, preparing for mockery, so I dipped my hand in the water font just to satisfy them, and crossed myself. Had I been on my own I would probably have done it anyway, if only out of hope. When I got to the far end, in a cool plaster alcove only yards from the Sicilian sun, I took out a coin and lit a candle. ‘Fancy gaff,’ Tully said, appearing at my back. ‘I see they’re charging you. Bring back John Knox. Bring back Pastor Jack Glass and Henry VIII and Ian Paisley and King Billy.’
‘Ah, shut it.’
‘Silence is overrated,’ he whispered, walking off. He had no awareness of sin and stuck his tongue out at all the paintings. I’d once heard a poet say something about religious belief, that it gave you a ‘structure of conscience’. I couldn’t really accept it, yet the phrase stayed with me, and it came to mind, edging out other thoughts, as I tried to keep up with Tully’s comic engine, reigniting at the church in Savoca. For him it was nothing but a big tomb full of plastic flowers. He needed humour, just as he always had when we were boys, to tamp down the darkness, and to cover his embarrassment at having ever given in to seriousness of any kind. He was the same man who once made jokes about colours in a Salford car repair shop, minutes after sharing his fear of stagnation and death, his fear of life passing from him like breath from his father.
‘I smell opium,’ he said. Then he reached into his back pocket, extracted a blister pack and popped out a white pill. ‘A wee drop for Our Lady.’ He put his hand into the grotto and laid the pill by the chipped painted roses on her feet. It was morphine. He loved the perversity of it, and I stood still, wondering if a bit of the hard stuff might indeed have helped the poor woman through Holy Week. For some reason, Tully adopted the accent of the Irish mammy, staring into the statue’s upturned eyes.
‘Have you anything for a crown of thorns now, doctor? … Oh, no problem, Mary. We have these newfangled pills, you know. A distillation of the old scag. All the rage with the young ones … Oh, doctor. That would be a mercy now … Ah, away with you, Mary. You just take the prescription into the chemist, so. A wee something for the lad up on the Cross. Sure, he’ll hardly be feeling the spear. The whipping must’ve been a shock to the system. And the vinegar. The nails. Oh, for the love of God.’
He went off in search of more mischief. I reached in and removed the pill, worried about leaving it there. It felt powdery and I licked my finger. By this time he was standing on a wooden chair by the altar, intoning Joy Division in a pure voice. I walked into the aisle and looked up at Tully Dawson, that font of earthly presence, singing ‘Atmosphere’ to a high window and all the gods.
22
When we left them at London City Airport, there were dark circles under Tully’s eyes, and I sensed his healthy revival had already ended. In the transfer hall he hugged Iona and me and then all four of us hugged, spontaneously, as if to pool every last molecule of the Sicilian sunshine, and then they were off to Glasgow. In the taxi home, I remember staring out at the wet streets and thinking of other last sightings. I knew I would see him again, but the feeling gave rise to memories of Limbo. He’d shone in Manchester, but he’d given signs of a difficulty with himself that only increased with the years. Eventually, a certain lost quality took over with him and he began running with a new, rougher crowd. The last time I bumped into him it was 2002 and I’d stopped when I saw his unmistakeable shape standing at the counter of Missing Records in Glasgow. I went into the shop and tapped his shoulder, and, as Limbo turned, I saw the old anarchic face dimmed with exhaustion. He had a bag of badges in his hand and a signed poster of Iggy Pop.
‘Heavens to Betsy, it’s Jimmy Collins!’ He rummaged in the bag and held up a badge. ‘“Coal Not Dole”?’
‘Jesus, Limbo,’ I’d said. ‘Great to see you.’ We stood there catching up and he showed me other badges: ‘999’, ‘Down with Trident’. He seemed under pressure, but Limbo was Limbo and he couldn’t help but tell stories.
‘It might be a bit shady,’ he said, ‘but I can prove to you that the novelist Evelyn Waugh is personally responsible for 9/11.’
‘Go for it,’ I said.
‘Okay. In 1945, right, Evelyn Waugh published Brideshead Revisited. The book was adapted for television in the early Eighties and brought fame to the actor Jeremy Irons. In the years following his initial fame, Irons was in a series of rubbish films, including Die Hard with a Vengeance, where he played a psycho who wants to set a bomb off under Wall Street in a passing subway train. The film was screened by the film club of Hamburg University of Technology in the mid-1990s, and one of the nutters who attended at that time was Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian student who was becoming radicalised and thinking of a big crazy plan. He mentioned the film to his pals in the Hamburg al-Qaida cell and together they later carried out the attacks on America, Atta flying his hijacked plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. So, I rest my case – Evelyn Waugh caused 9/11.’
I remember putting my bag on the counter and clapping. ‘Very good, Limbo,’ I said. ‘Not sure it’ll stand up in court.’
‘It needs some work,’ he said. I slapped his back and we went for a few drinks at the old Rock Garden, and I’m glad we had those hours. What a wonderful, loving man. As the taxi drove on, I saw him very clearly in my head, sitting by the window saying everything was coming good.
*
A few weeks after our holiday in Sicily a letter came from Tully. He’d been sending me packages of singles for the café jukebox – I now had the complete fifty ready for my neighbour – and then this serious and formal letter arrived. ‘I want you to know, James,’ it started, ‘that it’s all beginning to get bad, and I refuse to die in a hospital in an undignified state. I have always said this. They want me to start a new kind of treatment, immunotherapy, and I feel like offing myself just thinking about it.’
‘Who’s they?’ I asked myself.
Then I answered my own question: ‘The doctors, Anna.’
‘All the arguments are over,’ he wrote. ‘Please push the people in Switzerland now for an actual date.’ His letter went on to talk about various difficulties he had endured over the last few years. He wrote about an argument with the head of the school he’d been teaching at. Tully had been the union rep and had been disciplined, him and another guy, over some emails they’d sent which appeared to criticise their boss. ‘Why am I telling you this? It really got to me and I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. I was accused of being aggressive to a member of staff and behaving unprofessionally. It’s as if this illness, fuck knows – as if the illness is part of a judgment made against me.’
I went to my desk but I couldn’t give him answers. Fear doesn’t have an answer. I wrote sentences of solidarity filed as paragraphs. Over the next few days, we emailed back and forth, speaking about approval and compassion, mothers and fathers, the stories that never end. The idea of ‘judgment’ was strong in him at that time. One
night we FaceTimed. He looked thinner, beginning to break.
‘What does it mean that I got this?’ he asked.
‘Illness has no meaning,’ I said. ‘It’s just illness.’
‘But it’s as if I did something terrible.’
‘You did nothing, Tully. You are a human being. And that’s an unstable condition that ends badly for all of us.’
Changes of mood were abrupt. The next day we talked about the jukebox and the selections he’d finally arrived at. ‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘how you can justify going from 1979 to 1990 and leaving out Prince.’
‘Sorry, man. It’s clearly my fault, but I refuse to pander to your interest in cross-dressing nymphomaniacs in silver boots.’
And so it went on, the gentle alternation between the serious tone, goading me to take the lead on his wish to die, as I had at the beginning, regardless of anyone’s opinion, and our usual banter, where we cut most things down to a joke. On the phone, Tibbs Lennox told me that he found it hard to keep off the big subjects when he was with Tully. They’d met up at a bar in the Gallowgate.
‘We end up talking pish,’ Tibbs said, ‘when in my head it’s all life stuff and crushed hearts.’
‘Did you say Karl Marx?’
‘Him as well.’
*
But he was definitely beginning to fail as the summer peaked. His eating declined and the doctors spoke of putting stents into his oesophagus. Tully wanted his date. I called Matteo. ‘I’m having trouble feeling secure about the volition issue,’ I said. I worried that Tully was only capable of taking this action because I was behind it, because it had been offered when we spoke about it at the caravan that first night, and accepted as a token of friendship. But was that the same as him deciding for himself to take his own life?
Mayflies Page 17
