Resolution Way (12 page)

And what about all those who can’t get it?

Well, she asked, what are you doing about that, who are you fighting for? At least I work, she said, at least I vote.

Vote, work, save, already he has a broad and general disgust and anger roaming around in him. These people don’t understand how to live; it is as simple as that, these inauthentic lives, conservative, complacent, consumerist. He’s both angry and melancholy, their problem is, their blessing is, they have never known the ecstatic, they have never tasted real freedom, the wild depths of the mind, the bliss of communal transport and communion. Once a man has plumbed the depths, soared to such heights, there is no going back to the drab, minor satisfactions of a well-built life.

So they had an argument in which, as usual, they failed to understand even the basic, foundational terms of his analysis. No big deal, he thought, par for the course, water off a wee duck’s back and all that. Still, this year he got a card, thoughtful as ever, but no invite.

Maybe it was the row, maybe something else, the kids, maybe. Jessica. Maybe he made her uncomfortable, the creepy Uncle with his stubble and his smell of damp and his split shoes and his unhealthy lusts. She’ll be seventeen now. Probably better he doesn’t go round. Plus he still owes them money, of course.

Maybe he’s being paranoid, but there’s a distinct possibility that soon enough he will have to find alternative accommodation. That could be costly and he is holding nothing, no assets, no contacts, no favours owed, no cards in his hand, except one.

He lights a roll-up and sits back on the sofa. Imagine a couple of grand, that could make a difference. It would be a cushion at least. Good for emergencies. Imagine five grand. He can sort out Vernon’s Ma and Pa with a slice of it too, if they need it.

Here he is, forty-five years old and dreaming of five grand.

Maybe he could doss at Paula Adonor’s place for a day or two down in London. Maybe he can meet up with Hargreaves, sell him what he can salvage. He knows what Hargreaves wants to do with it, he has had a look at his website and his Amazon page and his Twitter feed and his blog and his reviews, in which several people pointed out his debt to previous authors, including some surprisingly similar passages in his smart-arse novel of ideas
Gilligan’s Century
to Peter Watson’s
A Terrible Beauty
, leading Hargreaves to write a defence of his work connecting it to remix culture and the art of sampling.

Oh aye, Rob knows, he wasn’t born yesterday. Hargreaves is not going to write anything about Vernon, he’s going to try and pass his work off as his own. He contemplates opening the envelope V. C. 96 1–5 3 and reading it himself, just so he will know when the cunt brings it out and starts talking up his swerve toward experiment and originality and modernism and the need to innovate in form in order to innovate in thought.

And maybe he has had it right all along, eh? With his car and his house and his wife and his contacts and his contracts and he’s twenty-eight years old and what did Vernon get? Fuck all. What would he have now if he was still around? Fuck all.

He thumps peg-legged up the stairs and takes a sticky-looking leak before the long car journey starts, feels some point deep within his abdomen crack and pulse with the simple act of pissing.

He better set off early, with the pace he can manage at the moment.

Should he drop Paula Adonor a line? Test the water? There’s no love lost there, is there? Never was. He can’t imagine she is itching to see her old pal Rob again, though he’s sure she’ll be impeccably well mannered. That’s your Southern English middle-class right there, isn’t it? Masters of hypocrisy. He bets she gets on fine with Alex Hargreaves, aye, whereas Rob prides himself on his innate Caledonian capacity to call a cunt a cunt.

Still, she’s not the one who’ll be asking him for a favour, is she? It has been twenty years and the last time they spoke when she was trying to find out where Vernon was a few months after he’d last been seen by anyone they knew he hadn’t been much help, hadn’t much cared. He was too busy trying to persuade Castleford to revolutionise its consciousness through esoteric literature and E.

She blames him, he knows, for dragging Vernon down, for pushing him too far, for, yes, well, they were, weren’t they, locked into something close to madness in the last few months before they got kicked out of Hulme Crescent. A kind of fevered desperation took hold and they maybe really believed they could get out of the world that was spinning in to sweep them up. The world they knew was ending and they couldn’t bear to think what kind of lives they would have outside or beyond it. It got extreme, Howard especially.

Ah, no, he doesn’t want to think about those last months, weeks, days, hours, what Vernon might have got up to alone there, what he might have fallen victim to when he was travelling. Well, it wasn’t much the Crescent but it was his home for what, the best part of a decade, straight down to Manc from Aberdeen, then ten solid years of squatting. Squatting like a dragon on time’s hoard. Aye they stole that line from a poem and stuck it on a tune later, didn’t they?

Fuck it, better off dead than end up like this, like I have. We should have just sat in that block and let the wrecking balls and the bulldozers plough us under.

It’s too hot in here, fucking global warming. I’m defrosting. Where’s the painkillers? Fucking Alex Hargreaves unsettling the delicate balance of my hard won half-life, my death in life, my analgesic drift. Eyes closed his hands pad around on the sofa cushions till he finds the bottle, unscrews it, necks a couple.

At least his painkillers are still free.

That’s better. Maybe Nick can put him up for a day or two; he’s down on the coast, close enough. Aye, he always got on alright with Nick. He’s sure Nick has done well enough for himself, he’s got himself a wee wifey and a couple of bairns and a hoos ‘n’ all.

Oh yeah, that Nick, through no exact strategy, with no gifts, no flair or determination, just a certain dogged competence compounded through years of turning up, uncomplainingly putting in the hours and sensibly and prudently decanting his capital into property and shares and pensions, will be sitting more than pretty by now.

Andy is waiting for him when he rounds the corner by the Bonny Prince.

Would he call him a friend? Well, maybe neither of them would go that far. They worked together a few years ago when Rob was obliged, through one of the council’s periodic crackdowns on malingerers such as himself, to take a job in one of the big warehouses round the port as an all purpose, very slow gopher for one of the subsidiary companies to Shell, the upshot of the whole experience being that he fucked his back up and then got a benefit boost by being able to register for disability living allowance. Andy, running some trans-national, multi-year, billion-pound project, used to come over sometimes to check stock. They struck up a conversation about the book that was conspicuously sticking out of Rob’s back pocket, one of the Alan McFairlaine mysteries they turned out to have a shared passion for. He read quite a few of them during that stint of work experience, claiming chronic constipation and disappearing off to the toilet for hours on end to power through them.

There’s a cup of coffee sitting steaming in the cup holder in front of the passenger seat, a typically thoughtful, generous gesture. It tastes good, good and strong with plenty of sugar in. Andy has kept Rob in beer and whiskey and curries and cups of coffee through the long Aberdeen winters for a few years now, waving away his repeated apologies for being skint, for not being able to contribute, go Dutch, telling him that the pleasure is all his, that to have access to someone as erudite, as articulate and eloquent as Rob, is payment enough.

Andy skipped formal academic education too, and a sense of intellectual inferiority and an exaggerated reverence for bookishness seem to haunt him, though Rob is no less an auto-didact than he. Rob seems, he imagines, more secure, more bullish. Well, that’s Rob isn’t it, never betray any sign of uncertainty or weakness, go straight for the throat, get in straight with the head, no fucking around.

The car is warm and comfortable. Robert Gillespie is in a car so infrequently it feels like a mysterious, alien technology to him, sumptuous, something from a different world. He can understand on some dim level how a person can love a car. He pulls a paperback out of the inside pocket of his coat and drops it down on the floor in front of the passenger seat, shifts his legs around; throb, creak, needle.

What are you reading? Andy asks.

Re-reading. Manly P. Hall.
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
. Came across it again. We used to pour over this when we were young ‘uns.

Alright, not heard of that one, he says.

You reading anything at the moment?

I am having a crack at Montaigne’s essays.

Oh right he says, checks himself. Good choice. How’s it going? Maybe it’s the translation?

Oh aye, it is a wee bit dense, archaic.

Andy checks the rear-view mirror as Robert Gillespie settles back in the seat.

It’s not long before they are out of town, the coffee finished, the open road.

Beautiful day! Andy says. Beautiful countryside.

Oh aye, Rob says.

Beautiful country, really, Scotland. We should be OK weather-wise all the way down.

Rob nods. Mind if I pop a CD on? Not heard it for a while.

Go for it, Andy says.

He pulls a CD out of his inside pocket and slides into the machine, a thin slot in the moulded black plastic, the mechanism pulling it hungry and noiselessly out of his hands. It’s true he hasn’t heard it for many years, just left it sitting in a pile of old CDs, vinyl and cassettes in the living room, but he remembers every pause, twist and shift, knows that it starts with a Seventies art-rock sample, “we lie unburied yet / we’ve been dead all this time”, cut and looped, multi-tracked, distorted and stretched before it segues into Trap 9’s
Dentine
. Legendary tune.

It’s been a while since I’ve been south of the border actually. Things are looking a bit grim down there at the moment, right?

Andy shrugs. There are just no jobs outside of London, are there?

No chance of a revolution then? Anti-Scottish sentiment is at an all time high in the South, I hear.

Andy chuckles. As long as you stay up North you should be alright. I know a couple of lads I have a drink with in Lancaster and they are part of some new Party that talks about more independence for the North.

The air conditioning comes on, the arrow on the GPS display shifts gently around, the radio suddenly boosts up the volume for a traffic alert, Andy’s phone pings and a second later Rob’s buzzes in his pocket.

He pulls it out and flips open the screen, ten quid pay as you go, cheapest on the market.

The text is from Alex Hargreaves.

Love the music but basically interested in text, esp what I think is a longer work under the title (maybe) V. C. 96 1–5.

Ah-fucking-ha, he knew it, he knew it. Is that likely? He asks. Independence for the North? He texts back.

Can get this. Need to talk money though.

Anyhow, he says, folding the phone away, it keeps flooding down there, pretty soon there’ll be nothing south of Birmingham as it is.

The CD is on track three now.

And where do you see yourself in, say, ten years’ time, Andy?

Well, I will probably still be in England, but I hope to be retired in ten years’ time anyway. I can’t see me persuading our Toni to move abroad. She might go to Marbella, but she will want to be close to her Mum and Dad anyway. But if I was younger I would get out, or if I wanted to have some opportunities, whatever age. We’ll be alright, but everyone is going to be a lot worse off in the future as far as I can tell, and energy costs, he makes a noise like a plane taking off. No. Basically if you didn’t make money in the last twenty years I can’t see how you are going to make any now. If making money is your thing of course, he says. Then, after a pause, ah, Blue Magick!

Oh yeah, Rob says. The vocal sample from
Call You to Mind
comes suddenly surging up from the depth of the mix, a dark stew of decayed beats and strafing basslines.

And so did you decide
.

He almost winces, remembers this track, this sample, Vernon saying, spliff in his mouth, shirtless and skinny, back from god knows where; one for your old age, Rob!

With death of glory in sight

He knows what’s coming next. He hates that fucking song anyway. Hippies.

The bravest thing was to hide

Well, did you Rob?

They take a series of long, looping roads,
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
shifting gently back and forth in the recess at the front of the BMW’s passenger seat.

Lancaster station.

He has been here before, once or twice, on his travels back and forth, back in the day, and something bittersweet is lodged in his throat, fumes tickling at the back of his eyes. Andy dropped him off with a pat on the back and a brief hug, told him to look after himself, said he’d see him back up in Aberdeen in a few weeks, and Rob discovered that somehow he’d snuck a fifty pound note into the copy of
The Secret Teachings
; must have been when they stopped for a piss break. He’s a good guy, Andy, even if politically they don’t agree.

He sits waiting for his connection to Barrow in Furness, the dim light of the station concourse, the soupily warm day beyond it.

A couple of pigeons strut and squabble over pastry crumbs at his feet. The sky darkens. Here comes the rain, again. Sudden, torrential, he watches it bouncing off the tracks, clattering on the station roof, senses the slight wave of fear that ripples through the people waiting on the station. There will be delays, people finding themselves stranded.

The train pulls in, the rain really hammering down now, the announcement coming in over the tannoy. He heaves himself up out of his seat: pins and needles. It is four o’clock and a gaggle of school kids run through the station and jump on the train. Rob keeps his eyes down and selects a carriage further toward the front.