Mayflies

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Then I must speak with Mr Dawson.’

  On 2 September, Tully emailed me. ‘Heard from the dude again about the chow-down,’ he wrote. ‘I told him I was in constant pain. He wants a letter. I wrote to him in Zurich. Told him my body was failing and that I definitely, one hundred per cent want to go. Sent it off to him today. I put on double the number of stamps, just to be sure. And I emailed it as well. So that is definitely that, so far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Did you show it to Anna?’ I asked him that night.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I put it on her desk. It’s still there.’

  From Zurich on 15 September, a letter came by courier. I opened it that evening at the front door then stepped back into the house. The same letter had gone to Tully. My hand shook because it was suddenly there, as I knew it would be, printed in bold, the date of the ‘appointment’. I called Iona at work and cried down the phone. ‘I’m not sure it’s right, helping him to do this,’ I said, looking at his stack of singles on the dresser. She carefully went through all the reasons. It was what he wanted. He had never wavered. I toyed with the arguments – Anna’s arguments. What if he suddenly got better? What kind of friend arranges your death? But Iona gently talked them away and brought me back to earth again: Anna would begin to see the sense in it. Anybody would.

  *

  A few days later, I brought my unease to someone else, Gemma the believer, the stalwart of God, a recently elected bishop I had become friendly with after a book panel discussion we did on the radio. ‘Good for me to talk to a person of faith,’ I said to her by text, suggesting we meet for lunch in Edinburgh.

  ‘Good for me, too,’ she replied.

  On my way to the restaurant, I stopped at the Portrait Gallery. I’d woken up thinking about J. M. Barrie and I knew they had a painting of him. Beyond the chieftains and the captains of thought, it hangs in a little corridor, and I stood there. He had a tinge of green about him, with his worried face, the loose necktie and the dowdy, brown coat. He seemed old, and what is it for the author of Peter Pan to seem old?

  Walking in St Andrew’s Square, I halted at the scent of hops, something in the air of burned porridge. Old winters. Schooldays. From the corner, I saw Gemma arrive at the restaurant and hand over her coat to a smiling girl. Tall, and wearing her purple blouse and dog collar under a black jacket, she threw a brightly coloured scarf over one shoulder and strode through the Art Deco palm trees of the Ivy. I gathered myself at the crossing before heading over the road.

  ‘Crusty bread,’ I joked when I reached her. ‘Why such reckless extravagance in one so young?’ She half stood to kiss my cheek.

  ‘Hello, you,’ she said.

  ‘The Right Reverend Fisher.’

  ‘Isn’t it grand?’ she said, smiling and swatting me with her napkin. We sat down and she told me she was in battle costume because she’d been opening a food bank that morning. ‘One of the less joyful modern necessities.’

  ‘It’s great to see you,’ I said. She was one of those Anglicans who liked wine and the menace of conversation, interested in everything, old books, Shakespeare, European films, sudoku, as well as the salvation of the masses. I think she enjoyed bandying doubts with people she wasn’t likely to bump into on a Sunday. ‘I saw a whole lot of faces in the National Portrait Gallery a minute ago,’ I said, ‘rows and rows of them. Faces full of the mind’s construction, as you might say.’

  ‘They have me in there,’ she said. ‘A likeness, they call it, from when I was warden of the Episcopal Institute. A real child-frightener. Like Joan of Arc after the conversion therapy. Sculpted by some Glasgow genius.’

  ‘I wish I’d seen that. I was looking at Barrie. The Nicholson portrait. It’s haunting, actually. I’ve never seen a picture of a person more alone. He’s only forty-four. It was painted a dozen years before the tragedies began.’

  By the time the food arrived I’d already updated her on Tully. She asked me more about our past and formed a few sentences, the kind only she would deliver, that invited science and faith into a circle of common sense. ‘Everyone has a person like Tully. The thing we know is that humanity has a hundred per cent mortality rate. We all die. But the facts don’t matter – we can’t bear to lose the people we love, and it doesn’t quite register about the billions who die, or even about our own coming deaths. We don’t experience our own death the way we experience the deaths of those we love.’

  ‘Yes, that must be true.’

  ‘His dying is now part of your life.’

  ‘And that’s …’

  ‘Disappointing. Heartbreaking. Confusing. It’s one of those events that will appear to reorder your whole past. That’s the story of life, if you’re open to life, and affected by the reality of death. And one death will do it. By the sounds of it, you and he spoke about the future and believed in its power.’

  I pondered for a second and lifted my glass. ‘I allowed myself to forget it was all ephemeral,’ I said.

  ‘We all make that mistake.’

  I felt that was precisely what I’d seen in J. M. Barrie’s face. ‘He lost himself,’ I said, ‘because he forgot that time had to pass.’

  ‘He was the Scottish Proust,’ she said. ‘He lent his own childhood a myth. And he seemed really to hope for a changeless world.’

  ‘There’s this shadow beside him in the painting,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the brother.’

  ‘The lost brother?’

  ‘David, yes. Died in an ice-skating accident. He was a student at Bothwell Academy. Of course, the better-known tragedy came for Barrie with the deaths of those Llewelyn Davies boys. One of them in the trenches and another by drowning, I think. But there was that earlier loss, too – the brother.’

  I told her I’d spent one summer, a few years ago, writing a story about Jack Kerouac, who also lost a brother in his childhood. While I was working on the story I found the widow of his old friend and stand-in Neal Cassady. She was ninety years old and living in a caravan park near Reading. She’d survived all the friendships. ‘I sat with her and we smoked cigarettes into the evening,’ I told the bishop, ‘and she spoke of those times as if they were perfectly ordinary. “They were just boys,” she said, “and the romance of it all lay in knowing they’d seen the sun together.”’

  ‘That’s fantastic,’ Gemma said.

  ‘It was the end of her life. She’s dead now.’

  We slowly got around to the difficulty. She had another glass of wine and I weighed the words before trying to say them.

  ‘Is it murder,’ I asked, ‘to take Tully to Switzerland and pay the assistants there to end his life?’ She took a swig from her glass and wiped the rim, as priests do.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s that other thing beginning with ‘m’ – mercy.’

  ‘I made him a promise.’

  ‘Then you must keep it. What you said about him makes it clear – your friend is too young to die but he has lived a wonderful life and he will be remembered, and the love he expressed will multiply. That is what I believe, what I encourage you all to believe. Follow your instinct and make his exit a thing of dignity and peace.’

  ‘Thank you, Gemma. That’s—’

  ‘You were all young together. New to the world. Now help him leave. That will be the measure and the grace of your friendship. Others will understand. The medieval Church left us a Latin text, Ars moriendi, “The Art of Dying”. It’s a masterpiece of preparation, written by a couple of unknown Dominicans. The world will be less without him, you have said as much. Now help him get his house in order.’

  ‘He was the life and soul.’

  ‘Then turn up the music,’ she said.

  *

  I was due to see Tully’s band in Glasgow that evening – Kim Philby, his four-man combo, just starting to gain recognition. I was worried about his strength, but that was pure Tully, too: it somehow suited his case, his nature, that he’d go out of the world trying to make musi
c. I was driving out of Edinburgh a few hours before the event when the phone rang. It was difficult to hear but I could tell he was upset, so I pulled over. He was calling from his mother’s house. He said he was in the living room and had told the removal men to leave him alone for a minute. The house was sold and the men were trying to take everything away. ‘It’s as if the world collapsed,’ he said, weeping.

  ‘Get up and leave, Tully,’ I said.

  ‘We put the dining table on Gumtree. Nobody wants it. Anna’s out there asking the neighbours if any of them wants it. Even for nothing, nobody’ll … Jesus fuckan Christ, Noodles.’ His voice cracked. ‘The table. Remember we sat there that time, my dad was being a pure prick?’

  ‘Honestly, mate. Just leave. It’s too hard.’

  ‘He told you to watch out for the Soviets. Accused my mum of giving me more food than him, because I was working. Remember?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Findus Crispy Pancakes and mash.’ We were silent, calmer, just breathing peacefully.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about Limbo,’ he said. ‘Why did we let him die, man? He was only in his thirties. Only a young guy. In a hotel, on his own. There was powder by the bed. Did you know that, Noodles?’

  ‘I did know it,’ I said. ‘You told me at the time.’

  ‘But we’ve never really discussed it, have we? How did that happen to Limbo? How come we didn’t get a hold of him, and bring him back?’

  ‘Nobody could, Tully. He just had a run of bad luck.’

  ‘But we could’ve changed it,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’m really not sure.’

  He sobbed, and eventually his voice settled.

  ‘But we had a great time, didn’t we?’ he said.

  Sitting in the lay-by I choked up and couldn’t say anything else.

  ‘Noodles?’

  ‘I’ll see you at the gig in a couple of hours,’ I said, eventually. ‘Don’t look back. Go to the car and don’t look back.’

  ‘Looking back is all I’ve got,’ he said.

  We could all live side by side, like in Brookside Close. That was the thought I had driving past those Scottish new builds by the motorway. It had occurred to me on many of the long drives during those months: this thing was all a mistake. In time to come we’d talk about that terrible scare when Tully nearly died, we’d make fun of it, have dinner together, and watch old films and then he and Anna would go home to the house opposite. We’d switch off our lights at night knowing we were all safe at last, Iona and me, them, everyone. We could forget all the interim parts, the careers, the houses elsewhere, the made life. If he would only survive, we could give it all up and go back to the start, to those houses along the bypass. I have never forgotten them, the box bedrooms, the lofts that smelled of putty and fresh paint, the tiny gardens and their rotary washing lines. And with this, I continued driving. Only the motorway ahead, only miles of facts and Glasgow in the rain.

  I parked near the site of an old bar we used to like. Bar 82. It wasn’t really a building at all, but a kind of Nissen hut. They gave out drink like medicine, or cod liver oil, or Communion wine, or poison. Tully loved it in there, thirty years ago. So did Tibbs Lennox, sitting in a corner with a music paper. Usually loveless himself, along with the rest of us, he would read out the keepers from the Lonely Hearts. ‘“Catcher in the Rye, Come Share My Smithdom. Female and Ill. Box No. 7951.”’

  ‘Circle that one,’ I’d said.

  ‘“Lonely Male, 20. Likes Weddoes, Mondays, Roses, Peely Bands, Autumn, and cuddling cats. Seeks Lovely People.”’

  Tully looked up. ‘Take his number. Any port in a storm.’

  ‘Not cats, Tully,’ I said.

  The rain continued as I walked to the entrance. I went down a mineshaft of peeling posters. Greasy tables and no ice, different bands every night. The chairs hadn’t changed since I was a student and neither had the bands, not really, though half the musicians were now surfing on statins. Bass players, men with paid-off mortgages, nodding off during their own set, thinking of tinned pie and programmes on Netflix, while the younger singer shrieked his way past the curfew.

  I met Tully at the crowded bar before they went on. He was wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Socialism’.

  ‘You’re packing them in,’ I said.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘The fuckan NME died before I did,’ he said, ‘and I want my money back. Thursday after Thursday, year after year, boring interviews with bands called Meat Whiplash or the Shrubs, and not one of them had a single thing to say. Now, just as I’m about to kick the bucket, the BBC wants us in for a live session with that knob from Radio 6. No justice. Why didn’t it happen when I was young and handsome and could’ve shagged two million people?’

  I caught sight of Anna at one of the tables. She was sitting in a group and one of them was talking to her, but she just stared at us and didn’t move. I raised a glass in her direction and she nodded almost imperceptibly.

  I waited for Tully to finish speaking.

  ‘Have you told Anna about the date? Does she know?’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘She’ll come.’

  ‘So, it’s all clarified?’

  ‘She’ll come. That’s all she’s saying. You know what she’s like.’

  I didn’t have anything to add. There would be more to come on that front, and I thought I was ready now to accept it when it did.

  ‘You’ll be with me in Zurich, won’t you?’ he said. ‘And Iona, too. The four of us. Just like another holiday.’ And at that point one of his many friends came up to hug him, so the discussion was closed for now.

  Later, while the band played, I could see he was in pain and still upset from the house clearance. But he always wanted these gigs to be great, and needed his playing to seem unhindered. The venue was filled with the kind of people who hadn’t had a stamp on the back of their hand in thirty years, and some of them – lawyers, teachers, social workers now – had forgotten how to hold a pint. Tumblers perched on their palms, they leaned forward to hear what their old friends were trying not to say, exchanging looks from the angst-scape of youth. Bobby McCloy was still in Glasgow and he headed towards me with an air of experience. ‘I must commend the management,’ he said, ‘for their sterling effort in maintaining the venue’s traditional standards of awfulness.’

  ‘Don’t lie. You love it, Clogs,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not sure, captain,’ he said. ‘I believe the talent is unquestionable. But nothing ages you like a halo of dry ice.’

  23

  I came down Pall Mall to meet an American woman. It was the first week in October by then and all had been quiet for a week or two. She texted to say she’d gone into St James’s Park and would be sitting on a bench near the pelicans. I found her there with a notepad in her lap and she fanned herself with a theatre programme. She had read something of mine and wanted me to write a story for her pages, but I couldn’t really concentrate. Her words floated into the daylight and I tried to listen, thinking normal life should be maintained. She said it would be a long reported story about scent and memory, looking at the perfume industry in Grasse and the search for the ultimate fragrance. It would be for a special issue. They already had a title: ‘The Manufacture of Nostalgia’.

  ‘It’s a good title,’ I said. But I wasn’t thinking of Grasse, I was thinking about the reality of being eighteen and its strange afterlife. I told her the title might suit another piece I had in mind, a profile of a cigarette-paper factory in Belarus. ‘It used to supply cigarette papers to the whole of the Soviet Union,’ I said.

  ‘You speak Russian?’

  ‘Rusty now, much like the factory.’

  ‘You could write about Putin’s men,’ the editor said.

  ‘I think I’ll stick to cigarette papers. Much less toxic. But I’ll look into the business of Grasse and the fragrances and see if it might work.’

  ‘We like writers with many subjects,’ she said. We spoke for a while, then I thanked her for taking the
time to meet me and she stood up and shook my hand. I remained there after she’d gone. Squirrels were running along the boughs of the thinning trees, and one of them froze halfway, keeping vigil on the sitter.

  My phone pinged, announcing a series of long texts from Anna. Tully was in hospital, something to do with the wrong medicine, the wrong doctor, but really it was a turn for the worse and she was feeling confused. While I was reading the texts, she rang me. ‘He’s out of his skin today,’ she said. ‘The worst I’ve seen him. And he’s started going on about this date. He told me he has a date to go to this place in Switzerland.’

  ‘He’s only just told you?’

  ‘About the actual date – yes.’

  ‘But he told me he’d shown you the letter.’

  She sniggered, as if in disbelief. ‘Come on, Jimmy. You know fine well he isn’t giving me the facts. He wanted to keep it between you and him.’

  ‘I told him not to do that. So did the Dignitas people. He said you’d agreed to come and I went ahead and got tickets.’

  ‘But it didn’t occur to you to tell me yourself? Or the people in Switzerland didn’t think it was necessary to give me the information?’

  ‘They’re not allowed. It’s Tully’s job—’

  ‘But you and Tully had it all sewn up.’

  ‘Stop it, Anna.’

  She put the phone down on me. I’d felt it coming – felt it coming all year – and there wasn’t a part of me that didn’t sympathise. But I was resolved. After Edinburgh, after Gemma, my only task was to help him reach the end.

  ‘Jesus, Noodles,’ he said when I rang him five minutes later, ‘it’s a fuckan catastrophe. You’ve got to get me out of here, buddy.’

  ‘Are you on a ward?’