Mayflies

by Andrew O'Hagan

‘It’s up to Tully,’ she said.

  Iona reached out for her hand again, as if to mime the effort Anna was making. ‘But if he changes his mind, can we go home and it’ll be like normal?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘He can stop it at any time.’ She lifted her hand to push the hair out of her eyes and a scent of roses came with it.

  ‘I think you could stop this, Jimmy.’

  ‘Why would you say that? I don’t have any special power. You keep returning to this, but it’s not my call. I have no authority.’

  ‘Maybe you do.’

  ‘I’m not his father.’

  ‘Interesting choice of words.’

  ‘This isn’t a court case, Anna.’ I felt confused. I said the wrong thing. ‘You don’t get it. You’re not yourself.’

  ‘Don’t pathologise me for disliking Tully’s methods, and yours, like I don’t “get it”. I get it perfectly well. It’s the old game of men rescuing each other and being rescued. While we watch. The two of you helped each other years ago. It makes you think you’re two sides of the same coin. Game over.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Anna.’

  ‘You’re going to talk to me about fair?’

  ‘Anna.’

  ‘I’m not part of that story, Jimmy. I’m his wife. And I wanted to keep him alive because I can’t stand to lose him.’

  Her chin trembled.

  ‘But, Anna. We have to go with his choice.’

  ‘Once you put it like that, there is no other choice.’

  ‘But it was put like that – by him.’

  ‘He didn’t have the words, Jimmy. You gave him the words. Make death proud, you told him. Remember? People talk about the power of old friendship. I’m interested in that power, Jimmy. He’s speaking through you and you’re speaking through him, and there’s no room for argument.’

  ‘Look, I tried. The two of you should’ve been having these discussions from the beginning.’

  ‘It was all sewn up,’ she said. ‘By the boys from the 1980s.’

  ‘He’s an adult, Anna. He asked me to make him a basic promise. And I’m honouring it.’

  ‘Always efficient.’

  ‘You can’t say that,’ Iona said, responding to my hurt glance. ‘This is Tully’s decision. He may not have handled it brilliantly, when it comes to you, but it’s what he wants.’ Anna took a slug of wine and looked unsparingly at Iona, as if there were things about life and men that Iona might never understand. Anna’s lips were pressed together and she wrapped her hands around the base of her glass.

  ‘Thing is, Iona, you won’t be a widow tomorrow.’ There was an unspeakable force in the way she said it and Iona caught her breath.

  ‘There’s nothing I can do, Anna,’ she said.

  I shook my head and stared into the tablecloth. ‘He wants to go with grace and I want him to have that choice.’ I must have flushed, or maybe it was all tremendously clear to her at that moment, but I could see she was also provoked by the ebbing away of all diplomacy from my tone of voice.

  ‘And men tend to get what they want,’ she said.

  *

  The birch trees along the Stadthausquai were white and bare. The summer had been hot and now they stood in the dark like the dry salvages, as if the good weather had restored everything but had left the trees in ruins. The Fraumünster clock showed it was just past eleven and Anna was buoyant with a complex new energy. She took the lead in finding somewhere for a nightcap and even suggested a club. ‘Nah, babe,’ Tully said, ‘let’s stick to the drinking places. Noodles is a shocking dancer.’

  ‘Not true,’ I said. ‘I am the Gene Kelly of Ayrshire. It’s a well-known fact. I follow the moves on Strictly while others lag behind.’

  ‘He does,’ Iona said. ‘He has a freakish memory.’

  Anna stopped by the church and let the others walk ahead. She turned and suddenly gave me a hug. ‘Nobody has to be right, Jimmy. Nobody has to win. You’ve tried your best and so have I. And we’re here, that’s all.’

  I kissed her on both cheeks and then she took my arm as we walked into the cigar bar at the Hotel Storchen. They all spoke English. We sat in a corner under mullioned windows and Tully seemed relaxed. The barman knew everything about Havana and Anna asked him to bring champagne and the best Cuban cigars in the house.

  ‘These are not the most expensive,’ he said, ‘but they are the best.’ Soon, behind a glowing tip, Tully was conducting one of his famous quizzes, blowing executive smoke between large statements. He asked me to name the top three smoking scenes in cinema. We all pitched in with submissions.

  ‘That bit in Grease,’ Iona said, ‘when Frenchy shows Sandy how to smoke. That’s one of the best.’

  ‘Acceptable,’ Tully said.

  ‘The scene in Pinocchio where he smokes a giant cigar,’ I said.

  ‘Now, Voyager, obviously,’ Anna said.

  ‘I don’t want random films,’ Tully said. ‘And there’s no point saying “the whole of film noir”. I want your personal Top Three.’ None of us could satisfy his ruling, so he stuck the cigar in his mouth and counted them off. ‘One, Tatum O’Neal smoking in bed in Paper Moon. Two, Rita Hayworth smoking at the roulette table in Gilda. And three, De Niro smoking and laughing in the cinema in Cape Fear.’

  ‘You win,’ Iona said.

  We got lost crossing the rivers on the way back to our hotel, repeatedly passing the same idle roadworks, though none of us cared. We stopped at the Brasserie Lipp on the Uraniastrasse because Tully said he’d never tasted schnapps. ‘Just want to say I’ve tried it,’ he said. Once inside, we shared the pictures on our phones that we’d taken around Zurich, and I found one of Tully under a sign for Cabaret Voltaire. ‘A great band in their day,’ he said, hanging his head in a familiar way and drumming the metal surface of the bar. In a muffled voice, he said, ‘Tell us the top three things you’ve never done.’ Anna looked at me and shook her head, as if the game wasn’t up to that.

  ‘One,’ he said, sitting up straight, ‘I never ate an avocado. Two, I never visited Graceland. And three, I never got round to reading Ulysses.’

  ‘I can’t speak for Memphis,’ I said.

  ‘I can,’ Anna said, ‘and that house is a dump.’ We liked the Anna-ness of that and we snuggled up close, drinking plum schnapps.

  ‘You know Joyce died here, Tully?’ I said.

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Fifty-something.’

  ‘Same as me. I should’ve read it,’ he said. ‘Too many films and football matches and too many tunes.’

  When we left the brasserie I resorted to the map on my phone and we were soon back in District 4. We were in the square and were about to enter the hotel when Tully suddenly shook both his arms out by his sides, like someone shivering. He pointed up at the moon and said, ‘I want to buy you all just one more drink.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Anna said. ‘You’re tired, babe.’

  ‘Never tired,’ he said. ‘Never in my life.’

  The Penalty Bar had gingham curtains and big screens. Tully barrelled in and asked for four glasses of Hürlimann. He spoke to the barman about players and transfer fees and told him he loved Glasgow Rangers. Iona said he was like a sailor on leave. There was now an expansive, talkative, intimate vitality about him, as if he wanted to put himself out in the world one last time. But he had always been like that. Even when he had all the nights and all the years to play with.

  He paid for the beers with his card and then handed his wallet to Anna.

  ‘It’s totally like the Glebe in here,’ he said. ‘The boozer we used to go to when we were young.’

  There was a recording of a match on TV and he shouted at the referee and appealed to the strangers in the bar over the ref’s decisions. He always loved a stranger. After a while he said his phone had run out of charge and asked if he could borrow mine. We walked outside, lit two cigarettes, and I asked him if he needed any numbers. He sat on a bench and asked me to ring his sister.

  �
��Hold on a second,’ I said, scrolling for her name.

  ‘How late is it in Scotland?’ It was the only time during the whole ordeal that he seemed afraid. His hand was shaking.

  ‘An hour behind.’

  He said he’d posted me a bag of photographs. ‘They’ll be waiting for you at home when you get back. Loads of good pics. Including a cracker of us all hugging and laughing that time in Manchester.’ Fiona’s number was ringing. I handed him the phone and he took a deep breath. ‘This’ll be hard,’ he said. ‘I miss them.’

  26

  The fresh cotton of her pyjamas. Even on such a trip as this, Iona would bring her nightwear and her special creams, her scented candle. For all we’d drunk we weren’t tired and we faced each other on the single beds, holding hands across the gap and talking as the light from the street fell into the room. ‘Nobody expects anything like this,’ she said. ‘And she’s doing better than I would.’

  ‘It’s a shame she feels singled out for defeat. We all feel defeated.’

  ‘Don’t take it personally.’

  ‘Everything is personal. I just wish he’d spelled it out to her.’

  ‘Maybe he’s too much in love with her to do that,’ Iona said, ‘like he’s embarrassed to be ill and feels he’s let her down.’

  I stroked her hand. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

  ‘Men have a way of writing themselves into each other’s experience and placing it away from the women they love.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Do you feel that?’

  ‘Everybody feels that. And she’s got to let it out. She hates feeling coerced, and that’s been obvious all along.’

  Lying there, listening to Iona, I felt close to her, and that closeness now seemed for the first time to include all of the past, hers and mine, a last gift to us from Tully. ‘He used to collect groceries for the miners on strike,’ I said. ‘Him and Tibbs Lennox and Limbo spent the winter of 1984 gathering tins of food.’

  ‘Was it really like that?’

  ‘Pretty much. He never mentioned it to his dad, who was on strike himself. But we’d all come, Dr Clogs and Ross and Caesar, who was in his first year as a welder on the YTS. We’d all arrive at the community centre and make up these boxes from what the boys had collected, then load them into a works van and drive to New Cumnock. We had a list of striking miners we’d got off the union. Tully would knock on their doors and shake their hands and tell them he was proud of them, the whole family, telling them to stick it out. He knew something at eighteen that the government never knew, that closing those industries would murder those people, and it did.’

  ‘Some people live to be ninety,’ Iona said, ‘but they never know such things. It’s no comfort right now, but he really lived.’

  *

  The church bells began at seven across the city. You could hear them every fifteen minutes after that, until they stopped at eight. I could smell toast and hear the bumping sound of the elevator and the metallic drag of the trams outside. I hadn’t slept. Anna had sent several long texts in the night while Iona was sleeping. She said Tully had vomited a few times more when they got back to the room. He shouldn’t drink, she said. He needed his own doctors, and I replied that it was in her hands. We could wake Tully and Iona and we’d all be on the first flight back to London, then to Glasgow. The day should not go ahead as planned if she opposed it to the last. It was her decision now. Her tone changed. It had broken her heart to see him suffer, she said. Zurich was his last hope. ‘This is for Tully,’ she texted. ‘We’ve been through everything together and I’m not going to let him down.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I wrote. ‘I’ll be sorry all my life.’

  ‘He needed you,’ she said.

  *

  After breakfast I went for a walk. I wished the walk would last forever, yet it took less than ten minutes to reach the shop on Holzgasse. ‘Welcome to Schumann’s,’ said the friendly, bearded gentleman who met me inside. ‘It’s much too early for serious work,’ he said. ‘But any friend of Krisztina’s is a friend of mine, as they say.’ The man was Hungarian and he’d known her since she was in her early twenties. They had once been colleagues and lovers in Budapest. ‘We worked for the government,’ he said, rolling his eyes and pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Krisztina graduated early from our very special illusions.’ He went to the corner and returned with a pot of tea on a tray.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’

  ‘Oh, a lifetime,’ he said. ‘It’s a long story. Krisztina will tell you. I left the country in her brother’s bread van. True, you know.’

  ‘It’s in her novel The Stone Lions.’

  ‘Yes. I’m Benedek in the book. I would never have dreamed there was so much comedy to be found in us, and such sadness, such history.’

  ‘But it’s not worth it, is it?’ I said spontaneously. ‘Just for a story. You wouldn’t have chosen to live through all that just for a story.’

  ‘The choice is not ours to make. The book is the book.’ He gestured to the packed shelves going all the way up to high windows. ‘And the people who write these things wish to keep the essence alive.’

  I felt I knew the room. I had a strong sense of déjà vu, and as I looked at the man’s face something about my own life seemed clear and settled, and I suddenly wanted to tell him everything that had happened. ‘I’m here in Zurich because my friend is dying,’ I said. ‘He’s come here to end his life today.’

  ‘I’m sorry about it. Krisztina said, on the telephone.’

  I think my eyes filled with tears. He put a hand on my shoulder and a few sentences tripped out of me. ‘He loves music,’ I said, ‘and football. We were young together.’

  He squeezed my shoulder. ‘With luck,’ he said, ‘you have time ahead of you. And the future will still involve him.’

  ‘I can’t imagine it.’

  ‘You will,’ he said.

  He took his cup and saucer and went to the back of the shop and returned with a volume in his hands. ‘Our friend wanted to give you something. It’s quite rare,’ he said, pushing his glasses up again and opening the book. ‘I’ve only ever seen a few complete copies at auction.’ He laid it on the table.

  Ephemeri Vita: or the Natural History and Anatomy of the Ephemeron.

  ‘Eight engraved plates,’ I read. ‘And the date, 1681.’

  ‘A beautiful publication,’ he said. ‘Swammerdam believed that no being was higher than any other being, a revolutionary thought at the time. He wrote this book one summer in Sloten, outside Amsterdam. He filled it with poetry and visions as well as anatomical observations.’

  ‘It’s really wonderful,’ I said. ‘Mayflies.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me the price. Krisztina bought it for you. A token of friendship.’

  *

  Tully appeared in the hotel lobby wearing a Joy Division T-shirt. We hugged and he told me he’d spoken to everybody he wanted to speak to. A doctor had come to the hotel while I was out and had seen Tully in his room, where they signed papers. Anna came straight up to me in the lobby and took my arm, and Iona took Tully’s. When I saw Anna place her room key in her bag my stomach lurched, but Tully lifted his thumb in front of his chest and looked at each of us. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said. He wanted to walk a few streets and then take the first of two trams. ‘I think we blew the budget last night,’ he said, ‘and anyway it would be nice to mingle with folk going to work or whatever.’

  We walked to the tram stop. ‘Do people actually come from here,’ he said, ‘or was it just invented for strangers?’

  ‘That’s a big question,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t feel real – Switzerland, I mean. Like a place in a snow globe. Remember that glass thing I gave you, Noods?’

  ‘A paperweight. It’s on my desk.’

  ‘Found it in a junk shop in Glasgow, for his thirtieth birthday. It’s a dandelion clock preserved in a ball of glass.’

  ‘I love it,’ I said. ‘
That and the Mao clock.’

  We got on the tram and passed all the big shops on the way to Stadelhoferplatz. Tully turned to Anna. ‘Last chance to hop off and spank the credit cards,’ he said. ‘After that, it’s fraud.’

  ‘It’s always fraud,’ she said. ‘By the card companies, I mean.’ He liked that and leaned over and held her face for a kiss. The people outside were walking with purpose and the shop windows gleamed in the sun.

  ‘Eat the rich or die trying,’ he said.

  We changed trams onto an orange one that climbed up the hill. It came away from the city like a ski lift and the trees looked fresh and cold. I imagined those brown roofs were the ones we’d seen from the plane. At a yellow crossing near Zollikerberg a party of schoolchildren were passing and one of them dropped his rucksack. Anna was holding Tully’s hand and he pointed with the other. ‘Look, the wee man’s dropped his stuff and his packed lunch is all over the road.’ He seemed fascinated by the scene. Two other children and a teacher came to help the boy recover his things, and soon they got off the crossing and Tully looked back as we proceeded up the hill.

  ‘He’s all right,’ I said.

  Everything was made of weightless glass, these modular offices and wide chalets that seemed unoccupied.

  We got off and headed down to a roundabout, as instructed, then took the third turning on the left and walked along a vacant street without saying a word. A series of low-rise houses, a group of white doors opposite a tractor factory, Matteo had said. And when I texted him from outside he appeared at the middle door, wearing a philosophical expression. ‘Happy to see you in person,’ he said to Tully, then shook our hands and brought us inside.

  ‘I’ve had dreams about this place,’ Tully said. He sniffed and rubbed his nose. He seemed embarrassed now to be the centre of attention. In another room, Matteo introduced us to a pair of young women in sweatshirts.

  ‘Okay, Mr Dawson,’ Matteo said.

  ‘I’m just Tully.’

  Matteo nodded, his head to one side, as if nothing was ever a problem to him. ‘Zoe and Giorgia will be your companions,’ he said. They made small talk for a minute and then they sat us down at a round table in the conservatory and someone brought in a tray of tea, the white mugs seeming new.