Mayflies

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Aye. I keep throwing up. A few old guys next to me. One of them worked in the shipyards and now he has a colostomy bag and there’s shit all over the floor. My immunity is down to nothing – and we’re sharing a bog. The cancer in my stomach has grown and I’m in pain all the time. They started the immunotherapy, but … I can’t.’

  ‘Take your time, man.’

  ‘I hate putting this on you. But … when …’

  ‘You know when, Tully. You got the same letter as me – 20 October.’

  ‘Can’t they bring it forward?’

  ‘It’s only two weeks away,’ I said.

  Through the trees I could hear a marching band. ‘It’s the downward spiral, this,’ he went on. ‘The same questions again and again and all I can say is I feel terrible. The doctor came round. He goes, “How are you?” and I’m like, “If I had a gun I’d fuckan shoot myself.” And he goes, “Oh, so you’re having suicidal thoughts?” And I’m like, “Shit, brother, don’t worry about it. I don’t have a gun.” But the guy goes off and speaks to some psychology team, and they rush in for a talk and now I’m on Whack Watch.’ He said they were giving him a room with a TV and a clear view of Ibrox.

  ‘As if things weren’t bad enough,’ I joked.

  He coughed the air out of his lungs.

  ‘I’ve got the date imprinted on my mind,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ He was silent for a long time. I didn’t try to fill the gap and we sat on the line, saying nothing.

  ‘We’ve got flights and everything?’

  ‘It’s all done, but remember it can be undone. I just spoke to Anna. She’s furious, Tully. She didn’t know about the date, the tickets, nothing.’

  ‘I need this to stop. I’m ready to go.’

  I kept silent.

  ‘Come up,’ he said. ‘If you’re not too busy.’

  ‘Fuck all that,’ I said. ‘I can be there tonight.’

  *

  When my train was outside Preston that evening, he texted to say he was going home. ‘What about the view of Ibrox?’ I replied.

  ‘It can’t end the pain,’ he wrote. ‘Even on current form.’

  The train took its time to Glasgow. I sat thinking about a trip we once made to a Soul Weekender in Skegness. It must have been 1990 because the World Cup was about to happen. Ross McArdle was there that time. So was Tibbs, and Mick Caesar, who drove us down in a second-hand Saab that he loved. Caesar was funny about his car – he always thought people on the road were trying to cut him up – and his willingness to drive his mates to gigs might have been considered masochistic, given he was sober. ‘Listen, soap-dodgers,’ he said on the way past Grimsby, ‘don’t get mashed in my motor. If any of you throw up, you’re getting ten rapid to the forehead and dumped at the bus stop.’

  ‘Come on, wee boy!’ Tully said, leaning over from the back seat and offering him a slug of his Buckfast. Not unreasonably, Caesar swerved into the slow lane and told him to resist interrupting the driver’s concentration, or words to that effect.

  Images came back to me on the train. The holiday camp and the boys diving into the pool. The monorail. There was a neon sign on the front of one the buildings, the dining hall or something – ‘Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight’ – and it was the last of the great trips to England. We would never go like that again as a group, the halls full of druggy fools, the mornings filled with unwanted breakfasts and daft conversations. I could see the faces and hear the words: Tibbs cracking us all up in a pub by the boating pond. ‘Yeez are full of shite,’ he said to a bunch of boys from the inner workings of Suffolk.

  ‘No. Listen,’ one of them said. ‘You asked me for the three best football songs of all time and then you won’t hear past this New Order nonsense.’ Tibbs was pointing to a paper, in this case the NME.

  ‘No, you listen,’ he said. ‘I gave you a challenge and you came up with dross.’ The paper lay sodden under a forest of Budvar bottles. The headline, if I’m not mistaken, was ‘Love Will Terrace Apart’. Tibbs waved the new East Anglian best-chums-for-life away with a firm hand chopping the air. ‘I never said “Ally’s Tartan Army” was any good. No Scottish World Cup song was ever good. What I’m saying is, none of yours have been any good either, until now, because of John Barnes and Barney Sumner.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Tully said. ‘You’re sound guys. But we can’t accept your pathetic attempt to raise 1982’s “This Time We’ll Get It Right” from the dustbin of history. It was an aggressively shite song of zero value to mankind.’

  ‘They think it’s all over,’ Ross said.

  ‘It is now,’ Caesar said.

  *

  I rented a car near Central Station and drove up the ramp, turning into a bleak precinct under the railway, west of Jamaica Street. Empty booze bottles stood on the pavement and rain dripped from the girders. I pulled over by an abandoned club called the Arches. I could still see Tully in its darkened rooms, dancing in dungarees and high as Ben Lomond, some night in our youth before the advent of distance.

  Driving up the rise to Tully and Anna’s flat, I thought the trees seemed protective of the houses underneath. I passed a group of spray-painted shops. I hadn’t noticed them the previous November when I came for the wedding. In one way or another, the shops signalled the life of the place, and reminded me of the young Tully. I drove on and parked, stepping out of the car to find him sat on his doorstep. I hadn’t seen him for over two weeks and he’d barely eaten a thing in that time. His arms were bony and he seemed delicate. He had a cigarette going in the semi-dark and was reading the sports pages under the porch light. I came walking up the path and I pointed to his sandals with socks. He smiled. ‘It’s all one to me, buddy,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what I look like any more.’

  He folded the newspaper away as I asked him all the medical stuff. ‘Whack Watch,’ he said. ‘They can see you’re about to croak but all they care about is whether you’re going to tan your wrists on the premises. So I just said, “Fuck it,” and got out of there.’

  ‘Do you think you can manage here?’

  ‘Aye, Anna’s been amazing. She does everything. I’m going to finish the last of this immunotherapy, but I’m just doing it for her sake. Switzerland is the only good news I’ve had this year.’

  ‘I think the road is clear now.’

  ‘I honestly don’t care if people don’t like it, Noodles. It feels like a godsend to me. I was in that hospital shitting myself about shitting myself. Think about that. I was scared about what humiliating thing was going to happen next.’ He opened a fresh pouch of tobacco and rolled a cigarette as we walked into the house. He made me a cup of tea in the white kitchen and Anna came through from having a nap.

  ‘Ah, it’s you,’ she said, rubbing her eyes. She seemed distant and she cast a nervous glance at Tully.

  ‘Are you not going to give Jimmy a hug?’ he said. ‘He’s come all the way from London without any notice or anything.’ He clearly knew nothing more than I’d told him about the conversation between Anna and me earlier that day. She kissed my cheek and stroked my arm and said she’d go and check her email: the nurses at the hospital might have been in touch. Tully coughed and bent over the sink for a minute. When he came up, I noticed his eyes: the thinness made them seem bigger. Not since he was a boy had they looked so green. We went through to the living room and he pointed to a painting above the sofa of La Pasionaria, a statue on the north bank of the Clyde, very near the car hire place and the old nightclub. He and Anna used to visit the monument when they were first dating. ‘That’s what it’s all about,’ he said from the sofa, craning his neck to read the words.

  ‘Better to die on your feet than live for ever on your knees.’

  ‘That could be Arthur Seaton,’ I said.

  ‘And we thought they were just quotes, Noodles.’

  He told me there was a constant pain in his stomach and in his back. ‘I never really thought about my body before, you know that? Never once. I went to the gym
but that was to clear my mind, more than anything.’ He hesitated. ‘Do you remember all those remains in that crypt in Sicily, up in the mountains? Round the back of Savoca. The place the driver took us to after we’d been to the church?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘The convent, with all those mummies.’

  ‘I know this’ll sound weird,’ he said, ‘but after seeing them I thought – it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s today or tomorrow or a few hundred years ago, or next month. When you’re done, you’re done.’

  ‘Those old Sicilian princes and monks.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘They had their time. If you’d given me a pill in that crypt, I’d happily have taken it and gone to sleep. The same mad coupon as them. I would have stretched out there and then in one of those boxes and you and Anna and Iona could’ve shut the door and walked down the hill to have a few drinks. Me: just another goner up there in old Sicily with all the dead godfathers.’

  ‘In that story,’ I said, ‘why do I have to be the one giving you the pill? Why can’t you have it in your pocket?’

  ‘Oh, don’t you start.’

  Anna came into the room, wearing her coat. She heaved a sigh and told us she was going to see her mother. ‘Jimmy, don’t let him drink too much,’ she said. ‘It’s me that has to stay up with him when his stomach’s killing him. That’s my bit.’ She said it with emphasis and looked at me. What we couldn’t say now could be said later. ‘Try to eat something, Tully, and don’t go mental on the whisky.’

  When the front door clicked shut he sank back in the sofa. He was playing an album by Run the Jewels. ‘They are the pain I can trust,’ he said, tapping his knee and staring into the fire.

  ‘Remember Limbo’s flat?’ I said. ‘When we stayed there and Davie Hogg painted the living room bright yellow?’

  ‘You went to sleep cuddling a bottle of cider.’

  ‘If being young is a crime scene,’ I said, ‘the evidence from that night is everywhere.’

  ‘How come?’ he said.

  ‘For years afterwards, I’d find spots of it, like on the edge of zippers and on the soles of my trainers. When Tibbs phoned to tell me about Limbo, I went to the shelf and took down a book I’d had with me that night at his flat – Keats’s Letters. And there it was, still bright and everything, bang on the spine of the book – a splash of yellow.’

  ‘The past isn’t really the past,’ Tully said. ‘It’s just music, books, and films.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s every day of your life. The songs. The quotes. Down at the caravan recently, I thought to myself, It’s been a life of quotations. That’s why we liked some of those bands so much in the Eighties: they sampled as much as we did.’

  I stood up and walked to the window, rubbing the condensation. ‘I’m glad you’ve used the caravan,’ I said.

  ‘It’s my favourite place. That and Cuba.’

  ‘It’s not really a dwelling,’ I said. ‘It’s an idea by the coast.’

  ‘I’d live there happily,’ he said. ‘Anywhere, to be honest, if living was an option. But we’re going all the way to Zurich and that’s what the good doctor ordered.’

  He tapped the side of his head. ‘The doctor in here.’

  He stood up and swiped a bottle from the fireplace. I followed him outside. The patio was wet, so we sat on the bench under an awning in the proper dark. He loved looking over Glasgow. ‘Just the feeling it gives you,’ he said, ‘that we’re all here together at the same time … the city going on for miles and all the lights.’

  ‘I can still see them,’ I said, ‘the city lights from the top of that building in Manchester.’

  ‘Some things are like that,’ he said. He leaned over and hugged me and we rocked on the bench for a while in silence.

  He poured two more glasses.

  ‘Make it a wee one,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to drive down to Ayrshire. And Anna’s right about the stomach, Tully.’

  He handed me the glass. ‘When I went to night school to get the Highers,’ he said, ‘the first thing I read was The Great Gatsby. And the copy I read was in that shelf of books you gave me. It had all your pencil markings on it, images underlined. And all this time later, it’s still my favourite book.’

  ‘The green light.’

  ‘That’s right. To me you were always the narrator – Nick Carraway. And I was the guy who’d end up face down in the swimming pool.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘It’s true. But you know what, buddy? We had the party. We had our story.’ He lifted his glass and walked to the garden wall for a better view of the city. ‘That’s it – the whole mad thing.’ He looked at the miles of buildings. ‘It’s like an explosion of life happening and then it’s gone,’ he said. ‘We had our time, buddy. I’ve come to terms with it and I’ve never been to Switzerland and I’m ready.’

  24

  Laughter is the obvious policy in a time of strife. Anna had said as much to me the morning we left for the airport. She had been silent and stoical as the final arrangements were made, and I never learned exactly what she and Tully said to each other, though I knew she blamed us both equally for Switzerland. She ended her silence when the day arrived and came on the phone without much hesitation.

  I was sitting on our front steps in London with my phone to my ear as she said none of this was her choice. ‘You two were planning this for months,’ she said, ‘despite me not wanting it to happen. It’s only a fortnight since he explained it fully, and I’ve had to prepare myself and my family in that short time.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Anna.’

  ‘The whole thing has made me sadder. I just want you to know that.’

  I felt I had to take it on the chin and not defend myself – not that day, not on the phone, and perhaps not ever.

  ‘But he is adamant,’ she said. ‘He’s dying and nobody can stand in his way.’

  ‘He’s got to own it,’ I said.

  ‘You gave him that idea, Jimmy, of owning it. You, with your Shakespeare. And once it’s out of the bottle, that’s it. I don’t know where you’ve been, but it’s handed you the ability to think you can invent your life and own your death.’

  ‘That’s harsh, Anna.’

  ‘I’ll try to smile and feel it’s merciful. We have all the details now and he wouldn’t let me speak to you about it. So, here we are. I’ll try to step back and let him have the ending he wants to have. Iona will help me.’

  ‘She’s right here. We’ll be at Heathrow in two hours.’

  ‘There wasn’t much else you could do, Jimmy. I know that.’

  Her tone was balanced between pity and anger.

  ‘So let’s get the jokes going,’ she said. ‘It’s the only policy. Hasn’t he always been famous for scoffing in the face of adversity? I’ll lose it otherwise.’ Their flight to London was announced and she ended the call.

  Before I ordered an Uber, Iona went through a checklist. We had the documents, the shirts and ties. I packed a sheaf of letters from the boys and Iona handed me a packet of Xanax, just in case. We locked the front door. The driver turned down his talk-radio programme and checked our destination.

  ‘How was she?’ Iona asked as we drove along.

  ‘Furious,’ I said. ‘Who can blame her? We didn’t do it properly.’ She nodded and held my chin and kissed me on the lips.

  ‘I’m on your side, James. We can air our grievances in life, or we can try to understand other people’s. Anna’s a smart person. She does the really hard work with Tully and then he goes off and makes a plan with somebody else. It’s a thing men do. Not the end of the world, but you can’t expect her to like it.’

  ‘I don’t expect her to like it. Maybe I was hoping she’d see beyond it.’

  ‘And that’s what she’s doing.’

  ‘Not quite yet,’ I said.

  ‘Go gently with people’s pain. It’s the same as yours.’

  After a moment I took her hand and held it and
looked out of the window as we drove over the Westway. It was late October once again and the clouds were scattered over West London like nothing mattered.

  *

  In the afternoon, Tully held his lower back and chuckled as we stood outside a café at Heathrow. ‘Stop with the gags,’ he said. ‘It’s too sore.’

  ‘That’s my humble opinion,’ I said. ‘Every death should involve an airport. The clue’s in the name – Terminal 5.’

  ‘Shush, James,’ Iona said.

  We were waiting for the gate number. Iona and Anna wandered off. In the days running up to our departure, Tully had become grave, like a boxer or a fighter pilot building to the task. Now he was ready, on form. He stood with a small rucksack at his feet, taking in the signs for Harrods, Burberry, Jimmy Choo. ‘I’m no tycoon,’ he said, ‘but if I was Anna I’d spank all my credit cards today. I’ve got two. She could say I went berserk on my last day and bought a hundred pairs of high heels.’ He delved into his bag for gum. ‘Do you think they’ll mind,’ he said, smiling from dimple to dimple, ‘the security dudes? Will they mind that I’ve brought a loaded Uzi and a bowie knife, just in case the chow-down doesn’t work?’

  ‘They love a challenge,’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t sure what to pack, actually. I mean, it’s not exactly an overnight bag, is it? More like an over-life bag.’

  When they returned to us, Anna held up a gift box. ‘Something for you, Jimmy.’ She pressed her lips together. ‘For giving us the caravan, and for … all your help with the wedding. Coming up and down to Glasgow …’

  ‘For everything,’ Tully said.

  Her eyes sparked with irritation. She looked briefly at him and then handed me the box. ‘We thought you might like a decent pen.’

  ‘Montblanc,’ he said. ‘None of your cheap shite.’ I took it out of the box and marvelled at its weight and the gold nib.

  ‘That’s crazy,’ I said, hugging Anna. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘What about me?’ he said. ‘It’s my dough she’s spending.’

  ‘In your dreams, James Cagney,’ she said.