E-Book, Englisch, 350 Seiten
O'Hagan Mayflies
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-27370-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Caledonian Road
E-Book, Englisch, 350 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-27370-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Andrew O'Hagan is one of this generation's most exciting and serious chroniclers of contemporary Britain. He has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize three times and was voted one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
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Tully Dawson made himself new to the world, and ripe for the glories of that summer, by showing he was unlike his father. It wasn’t a matter to fight over: some families are made up of strangers and nothing can change it. But I think it always bothered Tully that Woodbine couldn’t cheer him on when he came by the football field to watch the game. The old man would only shake his head in a know-all way and stare at the Firth of Clyde with an injured look. Tully had named him after the cigarettes; they all had their nicknames, those reluctant fathers. They sat at home opening cans of lager and cursing our Saturday nights. I suppose we could have drifted over to the touchline and asked his opinion, but being young is a kind of warfare in which the great enemy is experience. Our cheeks burned and we watched him walk towards the unstained light of the harbour.
Nineteen eighty-four was the end of old Woodbine, or 1985, when the strike ended and the Ayrshire men returned one by one to the pits, met at the gates by women giving out carnations. The miners had fought hard, but they were all sacked within a month. ‘He takes his shame out on us,’ Tully said. ‘I suppose Thatcher never really got it about the enemy within.’ And that comment was pure Tully. You could imagine how his whole spirit, as well as his famous good looks and his green eyes, came from a dream of the freedom that existed just beyond his dad. But the photographs tell a sadder story – the saddest one – because Woodbine had green eyes too.
Irvine New Town, east of eternity. Tully was twenty years old and a lathe turner. He impersonated Arthur Seaton from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by taunting his boss all week and drinking pints of Black and Tan all weekend. He looked like Albert Finney, all slicked-up hair, but in Tully’s case spiked with soap. At that time, he had the kind of looks that appeal to all sexes and all ages, and his natural effrontery opened people up. He was in a band, obviously. They had sprung into existence the previous winter. They were called the Bicycle Factory, another Saturday Night reference, and would later flirt with success and change their name several times as Tully went from singer to drummer. When people asked why he was so often the best man at weddings, it was clear they hadn’t known Tully Dawson in his prime. He had innate charisma, a brilliant record collection, complete fearlessness in political argument, and he knew how to love you more than anybody else. Other guys were funny and brilliant and better at this and that, but Tully loved you. He had the leader thing, when he was young, the guts of the classic frontman, and if any of us got together we instantly wanted to know where he was. Some people gain that status with power or with money, but Tully did it with pure cheek. His brighter language made older people seem dull. His dad wanted to constrain the future with robotic disappointment, drinking all day at the Twa Dogs, and Tully was ready for flight. He wasn’t so much the butterfly as the air on which it travels. And that summer he was ready for an adventure beyond the Ayrshire hedges.
*
I wasn’t meant to go to university. We weren’t that kind of family. Very soon, we weren’t any kind of family at all. My dad wandered off in search of himself – ‘You might begin by looking up your own backside,’ said my mother, Norma – then she decided that the life of the single mother was not for her, and flitted to Arran. I think they had a slightly exaggerated sense of my self-sufficiency (I’d just turned eighteen) yet it was consistent with their behaviour all through my childhood, falling apart or bolting. My mum and dad imagined I would love swanning about in a council house by myself. In fact, I spent more and more time at Tully’s, and within a few weeks I felt I was finished with them.
‘I’ve divorced my mum and dad,’ I said to Tully one night at the pictures. It was Mona Lisa for the umpteenth time.
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘They’ll be back – like Arnie.’
‘Nope. I’m not having them back. It’s the solo life now.’
‘No way.’
‘I’m serious. They can pay the bills for a few months and then that’s that. They never wanted to be in a family and they’ve tortured each other for years. I’ll stay until I go to uni. That’s the end of it, man. They fucked it.’
‘Stay at mine whenever you like. If you don’t want to stay just come over for your dinner. My mum loves you.’
‘Thanks, mate.’
He leaned over and kissed me right on the forehead.
‘You’re in charge, Noodles. Do your life your own way.’ I didn’t know I wanted approval until Tully gave it to me. I didn’t know life could be like that. It was part of the teenage dream, to find a pal who totally noticed you.
‘Do you think Bob Hoskins is a family man?’ I asked.
‘In dreams,’ Tully said, staring at the screen. ‘Everybody is, in dreams.’
That was just the latest change: the divorce. I’d always been bookish. I was one of those kids who bumped into lamp posts on the way back from the library. I read all the books they had, including the Zane Greys and the Mills & Boon. I read bird-watching books and tomes on French wine and the history of scent. I didn’t know what to do with it all, yet it somehow embroidered an image of the future.
I’d gained courage from a lovely teacher, Mrs O’Connor, who taught English at St Cuthbert’s, a Catholic secondary in the middle of a housing estate. Poor old St Cud’s. The nuns, with the grace of God, fought a hard battle against the popularity of Buckfast Tonic Wine, and readied us for a world in which piety might make up for a lack of basic arithmetic. Each year, the boy who wasn’t expelled and the girl who wasn’t pregnant became joint dux, and the football team added to its fame for rioting in nearby towns. The idea at home had been that I’d get out of school as fast as I could and get a job. And so, the year before that final summer, when I was seventeen, I’d gone for an interview in the office of a fence-building firm down by the railway station. To be honest, it was a Portakabin, or a kennel if I’m more honest, and it smelled of ancient socks and roll-ups.
The day of the interview, I arrived wearing a borrowed suit with a book jutting out of one pocket. It was a hot day for once. I wore some fat old tie of my dad’s – I think the tie was older than I was – and my hair was slick with a gel called Country Born.
‘What d’you want?’ the foreman asked. He had a scoundrel’s face and there was something swampy about his shirt.
‘I was at the Jobcentre. You advertised for an office assistant.’
‘We just want a wee lassie to make the tea.’ I saw the calendars of topless women on the walls and took a deep breath.
‘I can make tea,’ I said.
‘What’s that in your pocket?’ I pulled out the paperback. I swear to God it was a tattered copy of Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘Away you to university or something. Wasting my time.’
‘It’s only a book,’ I said. ‘It’s about existentialism.’
He grimaced. He wheezed. And a part of my library-haunting self will always be stranded there, in a cabin without air, in a world without God, as that foreman howls and gasps and slaps his knee. In a moment, he was bent double, coughing hard, as I retreated to a sticky door plastered with images of Samantha Fox.
In my life at that time, Mrs O’Connor was the voice of reason. I remember watching her as if her entire ethos, her confidence in the face of adversity, her femininity, might travel over the classroom like her perfume, and refresh me. She stood tall and resplendent in a red cardigan and glowed with her love of metaphors. She had a tenderness towards weirdos, a kind of therapeutic belief in the value of being extravagantly yourself, and I often sought her out, even when it wasn’t the English period. The school was full of kids who’d forgotten their books and hated lessons, and she stood at the front of the room with a volume of Shakespeare held up, daring one or two of us to suspend our disbelief and make a plan. The day after my failed interview I told her I couldn’t even get a job as a fencer’s dogsbody, and she sat me down at one of the desks. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you love observing people and talking back, but the truth is you’ve read more books than I have.’
I can still see her red hair with the light behind it, the sun pouring through the window of the classroom where she plied her trade in sensitivity.
‘You must have read some,’ I said, ‘to end up in this dump.’
‘I’ve never read like you do,’ she said. ‘Henry James. E. M. Forster. Stuff like that. Why are you going for daft job interviews? You have to go and study at the university. Why aren’t you doing sixth year studies?’
I looked up at her. ‘Things are …’
‘Rough at home?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ I waited a second and she took my hand. Nobody had taken my hand since Mary Stobbs in the nativity play in Primary Two. Mary was bold but Mrs O’Connor dealt in something even more mysterious – kindness. ‘My mum and dad have got zero to say to each...
