One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Read online

  Ally tended to take most of Jake’s sexual-political theories with a pinch of post-modernism, but a retrospective analysis of his break-ups did unearth certain recurrences in the preceding days or weeks, notably a tendency on his girlfriends’ parts to dwell in front of estate agents or Pronuptia outlets. It was very possible, therefore, that he and Annette had made it so far because for so long he’d have found it hard to believe she could have such designs on him.

  Christ, maybe she hadn’t, but it was moot now. She was pregnant and glowingly happy about it. That, in fact, was the greatest compliment Ally had ever been paid: that when she told him about it, she did so with a big, cheeky, bad-girl grin. Whatever fears she was naturally bound to have for how he’d take it, she masked them behind a show of assumption that he’d be as astonished but pleased about it as she was.

  And she was right. He’d have to confess that his initial unmanly show of emotion was partly in response to the shock of the news and partly in ecstatic appreciation of its long-term ramifications (principally those affecting the likelihood of that sudden-clarity/dressing-gown/slippers/street scenario). However, in the week that followed, when he actually had time to consider the reality of what he was facing, he was even more surprised to find that he was unreservedly, uncomplicatedly, utterly fucking delighted about it.

  None of which made sense. In fact, for about four days, nothing in his head made sense. Responsibility suddenly sounded like a fourteen- rather than four-letter word. Parenthood sounded like a great adventure rather than a waste of Steve Martin. And growing up sounded plausibly achievable.

  Once his whizzing brain had calmed down a wee bit and he discovered that such ludicrous thoughts were actually there to stay, he appreciated that he shouldn’t really have been so amazed at the strength with which his paternal instincts had suddenly kicked in. It was hundreds of thousands of years of genetic programming against a brief decade or so of late-twentieth-century pseudo-individualism. Besides, bottle feeding a wean at three in the morning would provide a unique opportunity to revisit the Moonlighting back-catalogue.

  At the end of that week, Annette asked him to marry her. It was the sort of moment that made him think the real secret of their relationship might lie in ‘McQuade’ turning out to be Gaelic for ‘Faust’. Ally knew this was largely down to his Catholic upbringing and the guilt it made you feel over anything good that life allowed you. However, he was able to counter his fear with the rationalisation that, as an atheist, he hadn’t accounted for having a soul anyway, so Meph was welcome to whatever was going. Eternity seemed a price worth paying for one lifetime of what he was signing up for when he said yes to Annette.

  Of course, she did very openly add the proviso that this meant he’d have to sell all his CDs, videos and computer games, and that they’d never have sex again, but he’d taken that as read: marriage is marriage. Similarly sticking with tradition, it was decided that they should proceed to the main event fairly swiftly in order that Annette should not be ‘showing too much in the photies’, and the date was accordingly set for a month hence.

  Annette sympathetically observed that this didn’t leave much time to organise a stag night, sympathy that Ally considered misspent as he had never expressed any desire to put himself through such a thing. His now-fiancée (oh, how he loved that word) elaborated that it was an important and time-observed custom for the groom-to-be to undergo a night out so thoroughly ghastly and traumatic that he would wish to spend the rest of his life exclusively in the company of someone who hadn’t been there. She then concluded that she could think of no occasion more convenient or appropriate than Gavin Hutchison’s school-reunion party. Ally took this to be a final confirmation – as if there had been any ambiguity – that Annette would not be joining him on the Floating Island Paradise Resort.

  ‘It sounds like the most bloody awful nightmare I could possibly imagine,’ she’d said, after her email invite was forwarded from the London offices of a magazine she still strung for. Ally’s, via plain old snail-mail, arrived at the flat, being his registered business address. He found her print-out and his postcard lying side-by-side on the kitchen table when he came in from work, Annette washing dishes at the sink.

  ‘I honestly can’t think of anything worse. If there’s one thing in my life I have never looked back on, it was getting out of Auchenlea, getting out of that school and getting away from those people. Now this clown, who I don’t even remember, is suggesting getting together with all of them – overnight – on a place you can only escape from by boat! It would be like … like … actually, I can’t come up with a metaphor. In fact, in future, people will use this as a metaphor. How awful’s that? That’s as awful as cooping yourself up on a bloody oil-rig with thirty or forty people you’ve never stopped hating in all the fifteen years since you last had the misfortune of sharing a room with them.’

  ‘So,’ Ally had ventured, ‘not up for it then?’

  She laughed, but Ally knew she wasn’t kidding. Realistically, apart from visits at her parents’ place, the only thing likely to reunite Annette and Auchenlea was a bad Monday, a tower and a high-velocity rifle.

  ‘And I take it you are?’ she stated, almost accusingly. The almost-accusation derived from Annette finding Ally ‘irritatingly well balanced’ when it came to his schooldays, or indeed anything; he never having confided the sudden-clarity/dressing-gown etcetera scenario.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, feigning a wounded look. ‘This could be my only chance to tell all those people that I’ve shagged Annette Strachan.’

  Ally had to dodge a wet handful of water and suds.

  ‘See, I know you’re joking about that, but that’s what these things are about,’ she told him. ‘That’s the single reason anyone would go: the only people who turn up will be the ones who think they’ve done quite well for themselves one way or another and want to compare scores with the rest. This Gavin Hutchison idiot obviously wants to show off this ludicrous holiday resort he’s built, probably to compensate for the fact that he was so anonymous at school. I can’t even remember who he was.’

  ‘You can never remember who anyone was, Annette,’ Ally reminded her. ‘I’m surprised you remember the name of the school.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ she countered, grinning. ‘I remember Matthew Black. And Davie Murdoch.’

  ‘Oh, well, we’ll just call you Miss Mnemonic, then. Imagine bein’ able to simply pluck those names out of the ether.’

  ‘Easy for the human database to say. And besides, you remember everyone because you liked everyone.’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You did. You do. You get on with everybody. You don’t have many character defects, Ally McQuade, but that is definitely one of them. And don’t argue with me, I know you too well – you’ll already be looking forward to this thing because you genuinely want to know what happened to everybody, what they’re all doing with themselves. You can’t help it: you’re a people person. If I didn’t love you, it would make me sick.’

  So there they were, three weeks later, parked a short walk from the St Mick’s school gates on a dry Saturday morning.

  ‘You’ll be the only one there, I’m telling you,’ Annette said once more. ‘I’ll pass by again on the way back from my mum’s, and I’ll bet there’s just you and the coach driver, both looking lost. If you look pathetic enough, I might stop and offer you a lift home, but I’ll need to see some big puppy-dog eyes.’

  Ally leaned over and gave her a kiss, then opened the car door. ‘I will not be the only one there,’ he told her, climbing out. ‘Because there were two crucial words near the bottom of the invite that you have obviously failed to take into account.’

  ‘And what might they have been?’

  ‘Free drink. I’ll see you tomorrow, baby.’

  Ally closed the door and began walking towards the car park. Annette caught up with him in the Audi a few seconds later, the electric window sliding down as he turned to see her.

  �
�Remember,’ she called out. ‘Ghastly and traumatic.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  09:50 glasgow airport lost soul in transit

  The trickiest thing about not killing yourself is knowing that if one day you decide it was a mistake, then you’ll always be able to rectify it. Opting against suicide may be a choice for life, but it’s not for life. It’s kind of like parole after a murder stretch: you’re walking around free but you’ll always be serving the sentence, knowing one screw-up is all it takes to send you back down. And therein hangs the burden. The worry that one bad day could be all it takes to put the pills back in your hand, like one drink could be all it takes to send the alcoholic spiralling down Bender Avenue once again.

  If so, Matthew Black had reason to fear. He was on his way to a school reunion. How bad could a bad day get?

  He was also an alcoholic, whatever that meant. He’d read it in the Daily Record.

  Not that he should be dissing the tabloids, right enough, given the crucial role they’d played in coaxing him back from the brink. Because, when he was a bawhair’s breadth from the precipice and leaning teeteringly forwards, before he’d embraced all the life-reaffirmation shite and cried himself through to that beckoning dawn, those much-maligned newspapers had given him a reason to go on. When there seemed nothing else to cling to, the thought of those sanctimonious bastards enjoying that told-you-so moment as they gleefully reported his senseless, tragic death, resurrected some nuance of self he’d so long ago buried.

  People seldom appreciated just how vital and positive raw hatred could be.

  He eyed the conveyor belt patiently, waiting for his wee black sports bag to trundle modestly into view, thinking how old habits were hellish hard to shake. These days, people would apparently prefer to risk hernias and coronaries heaving monolithic baggage about departure terminals and on-board aircraft than stand around a carousel for five minutes at the other end. He kept picturing Atlas at a check-in desk: ‘Can I take this on as hand-luggage?’ Five minutes at the end of an hours-long flight – how big a fucking hurry would you need to be in?

  Matt usually travelled light. One wee sports bag light. And the old habit he hadn’t shaken was of checking the scrawny thing into the cargo hold, even though it was hardly much of an encumbrance. This was a throwback to a more colourful period in the Matt Black life history, and was based on the international aviation protocols stating that once a passenger’s bag is onboard, the plane is not allowed to take off without him, just in case he’s checked a bomb on and buggered off. In practice this meant he could go and get obliviously wrecked in the airport bars without fear of missing his plane, as the ground staff invariably reasoned that it was easier to make a few angry PA announcements or even send their most stern-faced and matronly stewardess to retrieve him than to unload the entire cargo hold and root through all the bags until they found his.

  A plooky adolescent male eyed him shyly as he picked up the holdall, or holdnov’rymuch might be more like it, bearing as it did only most of his worldly belongings. He pulled back the zipper and had a quick check of the contents, like there might be two identical, unlabelled and empty-looking black leather sports bags coming off the same flight. Neglecting to label his minimalist luggage-item was another historical habit, especially flying into Glasgow, ever since some baggage-handler had evidently recognised his name on the tag and shat inside it. His just-ever-so-slightly controversial sitcom pilot had gone out the week before that on Channel 4, and presumably the bloke had considered the jobbie more direct than going on Right to Reply. Matt had to admit, right enough, the show got worse reviews than that.

  Plook made his move as Matt headed for the car-hire desk.

  ‘’Scuse me, any chance of an autograph?’

  He stopped, caught off guard, staring at the guy like he had addressed him in Mandarin, feeling for a second like he’d no idea how to respond. ‘Eh, sure,’ he eventually said, sounding anything but as he patted his pockets for a pen. There was reciprocal confusion on the adolescent’s face, turning to embarrassment as it became evident that the kid had nothing to write on. That was when Matt remembered: there wasn’t supposed to be anything to write on, because an autograph was the last thing Plook was expecting. He was expecting to be told, ‘Get tae fuck’, then he could run off and impress all his pals in the student union bar, if they believed him.

  ‘Hey, Matt Black, can I have your autograph?’ – ‘Get tae fuck.’

  He couldn’t remember quite when it had gone from attitude to standing joke, but ultimately it had reached the stage where it was so much expected that any other response would have been impolite.

  Matt Black: darkest, sharpest, cruellest, scariest stand-up comic Britain ever spawned.

  Aye, right. Very good.

  Even his name now sounded like a fucking caricature: Matt Black, the cartoon comedian. Chalk another one up to Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. The excuse that it really was his name didn’t score more than sympathy, because it was still his choice to use it: in fact, if he had actually made it up, it might at least seem half ironic. He’d saddled himself with it early on, when he first started trying his hand at open-mike nights. The moral of the story was that if you’re trying to make a name for yourself, you ought to think more carefully about what that name’s going to be, because pretty soon you’ll be stuck with it. Once there’d been a bit of press and he was being offered proper slots, no-one was going to book him under any other handle: they wanted the guy people were starting to talk about.

  It all fitted together back then, anyway. The energy, the ferocity, the edge he had in those days – you couldn’t do that stuff, you couldn’t say those things and be called anything but Matt Black; same as you couldn’t call yourself Matt Black without doing that stuff, saying those things. It was dark as hell, vicious, vengeful, reckless, and too excessive to be taken as anything other than wild, scary fun. The material had to live up to the name, the name had to live up to the material, and the fact that both were over-the-top was crucial.

  The symbiosis should, in fact, have been bomb-proof, career wise. You get up there, you be the bad guy who says the wrong thing: half the audience laughs because they don’t believe you mean it, while the other half laughs because they’ve thought it themselves and they sincerely believe you do. Half the crowd thinks you’re laughing at your subject, the other half that you’re laughing at yourself. And all of them are right. And all of them love you.

  Yeah, the symbiosis was bomb-proof, but only as long as both halves stayed intact. Which meant, as he critically failed to anticipate, that you couldn’t get on a stage and be the scary bad guy after the audience had seen you taking it up the arse on US network television. According to the credits for NBC’s lame but lucrative There Goes the Neighborhood, ‘Mad Matty’, the grouchy-but-loveable Scottish bartender, was played by Matt Black. However, the truth was that once Matt Black had played Mad Matty, Matt Black, as was, no longer existed.

  Matt Black had sold out. The man who’d so gleefully lobbed boulders at other comics’ undignified lack of integrity had moved into his own villa on Glasshouse Row. The only difference was where the rent was coming from.

  The sin he’d condemned Jack Dee, Vic Reeves, Allan Davies and all the other usual fucking suspects for was doing ads. (’It’s not just them endorsing the product, you have to understand: it’s the product endorsing them. It’s the fuckin’ BSA approval stamp on a comedian-safety certificate. Guaranteed: no sharp edges.’)

  Matt hadn’t done any ads, but then neither had he particularly needed to, financially. He was filling every hall in the country, selling CDs and videos by the truckload. But perhaps more importantly, he didn’t covet the cash. This was, he appreciated, symptomatic of a middle-class upbringing on the Springwell Road. If he’d known what it was really like to be skint, like half the folk he went to school with, then maybe he’d have instinctively gone after every penny too, no matter what he had to do for it. No, not maybe: definitely
. Because whenever something he did want had been dangled before him, he’d jumped like a daft wee dog. Women, booze, drugs – and most of all, fame.

  He’d made some ripples Stateside with a couple of controversial appearances on a late-night talk show, enough to start earning him bookings in New York. Then the sitcom role was offered, which was when he bent over and spread his cheeks.

  LA. Tinseltown. Celebrity pals. Movie-star girlfriends. All that stuff. He’d depicted himself as impossible to impress, iconoclasm personified, but when those things came within touching distance, he was just another small-town boy from Auchenlea, dazzled by the bright lights.

  He could barely remember the lies he’d told himself at the time in justification: maybe something along the lines of him taking them for mugs, or it being a means to an end, widening the potential audience for his real work. That was until he tried to go back and do his real work.

  A joint in New York, a place he’d fucking slayed them a year before.

  Dead on stage. No vital signs. Pronounced at the scene.

  What the fuck, he told himself. There were film scripts on his desk now, for Christ’s sake. He’d moved on from that stand-up stuff anyway. It had been a means to an end.

  ’Course it had. All that work developing his craft, it had really just been so that he could pull women and party with the in-crowd. All those years writing his material, building up a following, cultivating a unique and widely envied reputation had merely been an overture to being the second-string bad guy in a straight-to-video cop thriller, or playing Mad fucking Matty on There Goes the Neighborhood.

  That disastrous show in New York had been almost eighteen months back, but he could see it now as the bright cold dawn of one long, messy day that ended on a Mexican beach less than a week ago. A long, messy day and a very long, dark night.