Espedair Street

All that time, I was waiting.

Waiting to feel something, waiting to suddenly burst out crying, or to suddenly feel all right again, better once more, or go hysterical and take a running jump out of the nearest high window... but none of that happened.

It was as though some autopilot had taken over, as if a temporary government was running things, some skeleton crew of the mind; the king is dead, long live the regent ...

On Iona it might be possible to know again; that was where I was heading and everything had stopped while I got myself there.

Once I'd arrived, when I was facing those blue-green waves; then I'd start thinking again; then, when I was finally faced with it, the reality of killing myself and just not being any more; opting out of this insane, tasteless, murderous circus where the freaks are too often wiser— but also more despised — than the thronging marks. I was still convinced I'd do it. I was almost looking forward to it. I'd heard that old people could accept death and there was some sort of meta-tiredness which had nothing to do with the quick sleep of night; a lulling, draining, glacial sapping of life's own life over the years, winding up, powering down... I'd thought it was just some sort of excuse, a lie the old told to convince themselves they wouldn't mind dying and so draw the sting of fear. But now... now I wasn't so sure. I thought I understood that tiredness.

I lay down fully clothed on the bed with the lights on, staring at the ceiling, waiting for something to happen.

I must have fallen asleep.

When I woke up I didn't know what time it was. It was still dark and there was music playing in the room next to mine. There was no clock in the room. I turned on the television but there was only white noise on all the channels. I rubbed my face and yawned, then took off my clothes (and thought: For the last time. I'll go in fully clothed tomorrow; quicker, less ridiculous, somehow). I climbed into the wide, cold bed, put the lights out.

The music was too loud. It was going to keep me awake, I knew it, too, which would make it even harder to ignore. It was...

... us.

I hadn't recognised it at first; music always sounds different through walls, but it was Frozen Gold all right; MIRV. It was side one; 'The Good Soldier' faded, and was replaced by '2000 AM'. So I'd slept through 'Oh Cimmaron'. Next 'Single Track' and then 'Slider', and then, very likely as this was probably a tape played on a ghetto-blaster, side two as well.

Too loud. Loud enough for me to be able to make out Christine's voice, Davey's guitar. I lay there, listening, unable to stop it, paralysed and transfixed and frozen.

And at first I laughed, because there is another song, on Personal Effects, which contains the lyrics,

Just an old rock star in a cheap hotel,
He's sung too many songs about love.
Kept awake all night in his en-suite hell,
By his old hit played too loud above.

And it was a low, despairing sort of laugh, the laugh of bitter appreciation that life could always kick you when you were down, just to make sure you were still watching the show, and with that laughter came an odd, half-appalled revelation: there was no real division between tragedy and comedy, they were just tags we'd stuck on our hooligan consequences as we stumbled and stampeded through the world's definitive grotesqueries, just a set of different ways of looking at things, from person to person and time to time, and a set of different moods to see them in ...

And Davey sang 'Single Track':

Ash blonde criminals abound in my mind
And you snow-princess were the worst I could find

And Christine sang 'Whisper':

But this is only what you say,
One single way in all the ways.
I hear the flood within the drought,
I hear the whisper in the shout.

And Davey sang 'Apocalypso':

'The dam has just gone,' said the cripple we passed
'But we shall live on,' he said, breathing his last.
'Oh please allow me,' said the young cardinal
But the wafer, we've heard, tastes a little too real

And Christine sang 'The Way It goes':

Well I suppose this is the feeling,
That pretends to true love's wonder,
Finds you standing, finds you kneeling,
Never fails to push you under...

And together they sang 'Across From The Moon And Down':

You put your shell-like ear to a shell,
Just to know what the bone will tell.
You hear no roaring ocean's flood,
Just the sweet, salt sea of your blood.

And I listened, and my laughs died away, and I just sat there, my heart thumping, and my breath coming quick and shallow, and gradually — only lightly at first — the tears came.

And that was when I grieved for Christine, and finally fell asleep on my damp, salty pillow, to wake the next morning at the sound of a passing train, at once relieved and disappointed, and reluctantly resigned to my life.

FOURTEEN

There's this sloth in the jungle walking from one tree to another, and it's mugged by a gang of snails, and when the police ask the sloth if it could identify any of its attackers, it says, 'I don't know; it all happened so quickly...'

And that's the way I feel. Everything seems to take about the right amount of time at the time, but later... Jeez, where did it all go? You look back, and sometimes you think, Did I really do all that?, and other times you think, Is that all there is? Is that all I managed to get done?

We are never satisfied. Don't even know the meaning of the word.

My ma finally decided to give up the flat in Ferguslie, and I went back there in... summer of '81, it must have been, to help her look for a house and arrange the money. I don't think my arguments had convinced her; I think she hadn't been getting on with her neighbours so well, though whose fault that was I never knew.

We found the house at Kilbarchan. Ma, ignoring my hints and suggestions, had it redecorated in red flock and moved the stock of Woolies' repros in. She set out a room that was to be my room. I'm only half-ashamed to admit I've never spent a night there.

Almost without my noticing it all my brothers and sisters had grown up. A couple married, one at Uni (wee Malcolm, though God knew how, I remember thinking at the time, unless they did degrees in Kung Fu), two — amazingly enough — in work, and one in the RAF.

My da came out of prison that year and went to stay with my ma. I told her she was a fool to take him back, but she did. I wouldn't even meet him for a couple of years. When I did, after Ma persuaded me, it was like meeting a stranger. A quiet, insignificant stranger with eyes that never seemed to look directly at anybody.

I'd spent the year after Davey died doing not very much of anything (once we'd got the horrendous legal problems caused by abandoning the tour out the way). I'd travelled a bit, aimlessly. I'd sold Morasbeg, and started looking for somewhere else to live, to settle down in the UK now that the Tories had made it so cheap for us rich people to live there. This nest-quest for a wee hoose ended when I found St Jute's, so whether you count it a success or a failure rather depends.