The Leaving of George and of James
by John McGroarty
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: Life would never be the same after Delmar.
_____________________________________________________________________
George was leaving and I was pretty blue. I can tell you that very definitely. As sad as sad could be. Borderline suicidal. I didn’t know what Gabriel and I would do. What life would be like without him. How, in matter of fact, we could even go on at all. Be expected to go on. Just the two of us. Against the world. Me and Gabriel Wolf and the jam rolls and the watery machine coffee. Without George I felt I would be dead in my tomb from existential tedium spasms within six months. Our little amateur troupe broken up. He had been a splendid and inspirational Delmar to Gabriel’s obese and malaprop Delgado and my sometimes depressed and occasionally tetchy Delmonde. A weird wicked witch at my side for twenty years. How now, George? How now, me? One of the people who made life in the social security office liveable. The Sosh. My life since leaving school. Twenty five years now. He was leaving to be an actor. At fifty-three he was going up to the drama school in Garnethill. We had rehearsed his numbers for five weeks. I thought it was the funniest thing George had ever done. Ariel’s Song. Full fathom five thy father lies. In a mad John Gielgud voice. Of his bones are coral made. The final scene from Some Like it Hot. George as Daphne in a monofilament wig, me typecast as Osgood. Nobody’s perfect. Those are pearls that were his eyes. I’M A MAN! Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell. Over and over again. We never thought he would get in. Can you believe it? What’s next? Gabriel’s going to go on a starvation diet and become a supermodel? The big fat slob of a fallen angel. Is it really true that absolutely anything is possible? Anything at all?
It was five thirty on his last day. I met him outside Big Dick McAllister’s office. We were going to get pissed. He’d been in saying goodbye. George hated Big Dick but he was the boss. And maybe he will have to beg his job back. The ultimate fate of all artistic people. Cringing humiliation before the machine.
“Where’s Gabriel?” I asked him. “I haven’t seen him all day.”
“He’s in hospital,” said George, as flat as a sole fish. “He was attacked this morning by a seagull.”
“When he got out of his car?” I quipped back, cleaving to the laws of comedy.
“It pecked him on the back of the neck so savagely that he lost consciousness. The gull then tried to open his belly with a scalpel to get at the doughnuts. Wee Mary Murphy found him and quickly administered the anti-seagull serum but he had been out too long. No, it wasn’t a seagull, it was a pickle. A giant pickle jumped down his throat whole from out of his fish supper and took him by surprise. The hunted turns hunter. Wee Mary had to do the Heimlich Manoeuvre for people choking on big killer pickles from Maurizio’s fish and chip shop.”
I looked at George and I thought I was going to cry. He was the maddest craziest weirdest specimen of a human being I had ever met. And, man, there’s a lot of competition out there. Believe me; I’ve worked in the Sosh for over twenty years. I’ve seen it all from behind my reinforced Perspex screen. Seen the whole world come through those swing doors. Well, they’re swooshers now in fact. They used to swing. When swinging was all the rage for doors. Big Dick McAllister wants to install revolvers. Says it will give the security guards more time to react when they see some nutter approach. Something Dick learned on a management course for Sosh seniors. One time he told George and me about his perfect door; it has a little digital voice metal detector and three bolt-locked fast swooshers to get through. Like something from a mad dictator’s fairy tale. Pass the trials and beat the dragon to get your giro and a sleeping beauty. But alas, the Sosh disnae have the dosh, he said, making both rhyme and thinking nonsensically that it was funny.
Just then Gabriel bounced round the corner all in a sweat and stuffing a strawberry jam roll into his gob. We left the office and went down to Kitty O’Shea’s Irish theme bar in Blythswood Square. I got the beers in. Gabriel asked George to do his Michael Caine in “Kidnapped” routine. It always made Gabriel cry. He’s a sentimental nationalist, among other things, the big man. George got to it. The way I see it there’s nothing like the smell of heather on the wind in the morning, he said in his Alfie voice. Oi, keep your knees off the steering wheel! Big Gabriel was quiet and misty when he finished. We all really hate Michael Caine at the Sosh. Except for Big Dick, of course, who’s a working class Tory. Then he said in a manly voice that he was going to the toilet. But I knew the big fatty was all cut up at George’s going too. Off to the bog to binge snack. George downed half a pint of real ale.
“Gonnae dae, in yer John Gielgud voice, or Peter O’Toole if ye waant, that story about the young artist, Delmar,” I pleaded, partly in the vernacular.
I loved that story. I don’t know why. It didn’t have much to say for itself. Nothing much happens. It wasn’t The Death of Ivan Ilyich or The Lady with the Little Dog or anything like that. But George was a great storyteller. Had a wonderful voice. Something resounded in my soul. Perhaps I saw myself in there. Who can tell? And maybe this would be the last time I would be with him. He was sure to be discovered and invited over to Hollywood. Why didn’t people just live their lives the way they used to? Get born, go to school, get a job, marry, have weans, go to seed, die. Now everybody had to be always leaving. Going away somewhere to find themselves. Who was I going to sing Frank Sinatra and Barbara Streisand songs with when George was gone? There’s a place for us. Somewhere. A place for us. I never ever thought he would find it. The poor sod. I get no kick from champagne. But I get a kick out of you, George. It gives me an oof in fact. Who would listen to the tortured details of my masochistic marital conflicts now? Talk about the movies? Go for a pint on Tuesdays? I’ll always have Gabriel. I hope he doesn’t barf all over the table like the last time we went to the pub. I think his parents must have been either very ironical or very hopeful when they named him. Double Nougat would have been better (his first words, I do believe). Or Ham Burger and Chips, or Iced Donut, something more honest at least.
Gabriel came back from the toilet, sat down, and immediately started munching into a jumbo bag of cashew nuts.
“Delmonde, the poor boy, wants to hear the sad story about the young artist,” he said.
Gabriel smiled gargantually and you could see down his throat through flailing desperate cashew chippings and dark metallic fillings.
“Do go on, Delmar,” he salivated all over the table.
George turned his big sad double ringed eyes to me.
“Go on, George, let us have it,” I said.
He settled into the corner of the snug and began.
“James Carey had missed the first train. The eight-thirty. Maybe if he’d caught it he would have been alright. Would have got into Glasgow Central and started his first day at the Art School without any problems. But he missed that one. Had to wait for the nine o’clock and then it stopped outside Glasgow Central for an hour. Pure torture it was. James got to thinking and a sort of panic set in. It’s dangerous that, thinking. He felt a tightening in his chest and a knot in his stomach. He got up out of his seat and started to march up and down the aisle. Had to get off the train. He became convinced that he was going to have a heart attack. Was going to die there and then on that dirty stupid train. Other passengers noticed his odd behaviour and tried to speak to him. To calm him down. People are normally good. Always stop to help. It takes a lot of training to learn otherwise. An old woman who was going into the town for a day’s shopping took a special motherly interest. When the train finally pulled into the station, James went up to the Royal Infirmary instead of the Art School. The doctors examined him but could find nothing. The consensus was that it was mental. That James was suffering some kind of acute panic attack. They contacted his parents and he was put in a ward just to be on the safe side. Luckily for James his Auntie Betty was a nurse and was on duty at the time. She sat with him till his mum and dad arrived. Something had been wrong with James for the last six months. Since his grandfather had died. He was an exceptional student and very suited to engineering. That’s what his parents had wanted. His father was a factory worker and he wanted his son to enter the working class aristocracy. But it was all starting to break down. To break up. The solidarity. The pride. Soon we would all be Americans and money would be king. James’ generation would be chosen to go out into the world as full individuals, ready or not, to sink or to swim. Like some big pointless social experiment. I think James felt this in his bones. In his spirit. Somehow took it all into his own person. He had spent the last six months painting. This had been an unexpected discovery, a revelation. That he could paint. He painted the small things. His parents. His brothers. His wee sister. The dead angles of the rooms of his house. The street lights. Children playing. The trees coming out of winter in the park. The fall of the night. The empty swings at dusk. The Main Street. The small shops. The garages. The Town Hall. It was as if he had been given a commission. To paint up a memory of something dying . He had a couple of exhibitions in the church hall. The local paper ran a piece about him. The journalist, who had a good eye and a good Edinburgh University education, called him a working class Hopper. Had let himself go hyperbolically and said that to be a competent artist you need discipline and hard work, to be a good one talent, and to be a great one to be touched by the hand of God. James Carey was of the latter sort he said. And it had all come from nothing. James was good at maths, physics, chemistry; he had never drawn anything in his life. One day in the Art class the teacher had asked the children to draw a simple hand. James seemed to go into a trance and started drawing at top speed a brilliant anatomical sketch of an old man’s hand. It was like some of the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. The other children stopped what they were doing to watch him. The hand was pointing out off the paper. Like it was trying to speak. Trying to impart something. Pointing at everything and at nothing at the same time. When he was finished he made everybody laugh by saying that he hadn’t drawn it. That it had been somebody else. Someone in his head and in his hands. After that he abandoned everything else and took to the painting as if the devil and his legion were after him. As indeed they were. After all of us. They still are. The last painting he did was abstract. He worked at it for two weeks night and day. It was a huge canvas painted in a concave shape, drawing the eye to the centre. It took the form of a forest which became denser and denser, darker and darker as it spiralled into the centre until the eye hit the very core of James’ world. At its heart there was a fiery flickering yellow and blue light. You couldn’t tell if it was the end of all by fire or the light of some revelation still to come. It seemed to encapsulate the great question. The going and the coming. The coming and the going. All around the slit of the eye, for it was a slit, the vagina of the world, there were little twisted and bending abstracts of his other paintings. His family, his friends, the parks and streets of the scheme, the shops, the skies and the rain that fell. When he finished he slept for two days and when he awoke discovered that he could no longer paint. His gift had gone. Disappeared like mist in the sun. By now James had become a local celebrity and his parents expected great things from him at art school. But how could he go? Now that he could no longer paint. Draw nothing more than stickmen. He couldn’t tell his parents. Couldn’t disappoint them. He caught the train to go to Art School and ended up in hospital. He confessed everything to his Auntie Betty. She told his parents. They took it well and asked him what he wanted to do. I just want to go home for a while he said. James sat for a month in his room, uncertain of how to proceed with his life. Still the urge to paint came to him in the dead of night. The melancholy and the longing for something intangible. To get it all down on canvas. But it was useless. Everything his hand touched was stilted and ugly. And what was the point of pursuing something without the hand of God? He started to ponder life and who he was. And why he was. And then one night he climbed out of his window and wandered off. Disappeared from this story and went out into the world to live whatever would come. He wouldn’t be an artist. He would live his life and that would be enough. Nobody knows what became of him but I hope that there is a happy ending for the young artist. Though in most stories that is highly unlikely, both for sound tried and tested realistic and artistic reasons. But in all human life that is a chance you have to take. A chance we all have to take.”
Gabriel had finished the cashew nuts and was now eating a big poke of smoky bacon crisps. He didn’t look affected but I knew the big fellow was soft in the core and was weeping inside.
“Don’t go, George,” I said, and tried to hold his bleary eyes.
George sighed and drank down the rest of his pint. He stood up.
“You don’t need me, Delmonde, my dear dear boy. You don’t need anything more than you’ve already got. Be kind to yourself and try to be happy. For you are Delmonde, and that’s enough for one life, my friend.”
He put on his big trench coat, his Basque beret and walked out of the pub. He already looked like a famous actor, I thought. A Glasgow Morgan Freeman. George was gone and so was James. I felt alone. I looked at Delgado.
“Do you want another pint, Delmonde?” he asked hopefully.
“Aye, let’s have another round,” I said, “And get another bag of nuts, I feel a bit peckish. It’s going to be a long night now that George and James are both leaving and there’s just the two of us left to face whatever comes next.”
Swearwords: None.
Description: Life would never be the same after Delmar.
_____________________________________________________________________
George was leaving and I was pretty blue. I can tell you that very definitely. As sad as sad could be. Borderline suicidal. I didn’t know what Gabriel and I would do. What life would be like without him. How, in matter of fact, we could even go on at all. Be expected to go on. Just the two of us. Against the world. Me and Gabriel Wolf and the jam rolls and the watery machine coffee. Without George I felt I would be dead in my tomb from existential tedium spasms within six months. Our little amateur troupe broken up. He had been a splendid and inspirational Delmar to Gabriel’s obese and malaprop Delgado and my sometimes depressed and occasionally tetchy Delmonde. A weird wicked witch at my side for twenty years. How now, George? How now, me? One of the people who made life in the social security office liveable. The Sosh. My life since leaving school. Twenty five years now. He was leaving to be an actor. At fifty-three he was going up to the drama school in Garnethill. We had rehearsed his numbers for five weeks. I thought it was the funniest thing George had ever done. Ariel’s Song. Full fathom five thy father lies. In a mad John Gielgud voice. Of his bones are coral made. The final scene from Some Like it Hot. George as Daphne in a monofilament wig, me typecast as Osgood. Nobody’s perfect. Those are pearls that were his eyes. I’M A MAN! Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell. Over and over again. We never thought he would get in. Can you believe it? What’s next? Gabriel’s going to go on a starvation diet and become a supermodel? The big fat slob of a fallen angel. Is it really true that absolutely anything is possible? Anything at all?
It was five thirty on his last day. I met him outside Big Dick McAllister’s office. We were going to get pissed. He’d been in saying goodbye. George hated Big Dick but he was the boss. And maybe he will have to beg his job back. The ultimate fate of all artistic people. Cringing humiliation before the machine.
“Where’s Gabriel?” I asked him. “I haven’t seen him all day.”
“He’s in hospital,” said George, as flat as a sole fish. “He was attacked this morning by a seagull.”
“When he got out of his car?” I quipped back, cleaving to the laws of comedy.
“It pecked him on the back of the neck so savagely that he lost consciousness. The gull then tried to open his belly with a scalpel to get at the doughnuts. Wee Mary Murphy found him and quickly administered the anti-seagull serum but he had been out too long. No, it wasn’t a seagull, it was a pickle. A giant pickle jumped down his throat whole from out of his fish supper and took him by surprise. The hunted turns hunter. Wee Mary had to do the Heimlich Manoeuvre for people choking on big killer pickles from Maurizio’s fish and chip shop.”
I looked at George and I thought I was going to cry. He was the maddest craziest weirdest specimen of a human being I had ever met. And, man, there’s a lot of competition out there. Believe me; I’ve worked in the Sosh for over twenty years. I’ve seen it all from behind my reinforced Perspex screen. Seen the whole world come through those swing doors. Well, they’re swooshers now in fact. They used to swing. When swinging was all the rage for doors. Big Dick McAllister wants to install revolvers. Says it will give the security guards more time to react when they see some nutter approach. Something Dick learned on a management course for Sosh seniors. One time he told George and me about his perfect door; it has a little digital voice metal detector and three bolt-locked fast swooshers to get through. Like something from a mad dictator’s fairy tale. Pass the trials and beat the dragon to get your giro and a sleeping beauty. But alas, the Sosh disnae have the dosh, he said, making both rhyme and thinking nonsensically that it was funny.
Just then Gabriel bounced round the corner all in a sweat and stuffing a strawberry jam roll into his gob. We left the office and went down to Kitty O’Shea’s Irish theme bar in Blythswood Square. I got the beers in. Gabriel asked George to do his Michael Caine in “Kidnapped” routine. It always made Gabriel cry. He’s a sentimental nationalist, among other things, the big man. George got to it. The way I see it there’s nothing like the smell of heather on the wind in the morning, he said in his Alfie voice. Oi, keep your knees off the steering wheel! Big Gabriel was quiet and misty when he finished. We all really hate Michael Caine at the Sosh. Except for Big Dick, of course, who’s a working class Tory. Then he said in a manly voice that he was going to the toilet. But I knew the big fatty was all cut up at George’s going too. Off to the bog to binge snack. George downed half a pint of real ale.
“Gonnae dae, in yer John Gielgud voice, or Peter O’Toole if ye waant, that story about the young artist, Delmar,” I pleaded, partly in the vernacular.
I loved that story. I don’t know why. It didn’t have much to say for itself. Nothing much happens. It wasn’t The Death of Ivan Ilyich or The Lady with the Little Dog or anything like that. But George was a great storyteller. Had a wonderful voice. Something resounded in my soul. Perhaps I saw myself in there. Who can tell? And maybe this would be the last time I would be with him. He was sure to be discovered and invited over to Hollywood. Why didn’t people just live their lives the way they used to? Get born, go to school, get a job, marry, have weans, go to seed, die. Now everybody had to be always leaving. Going away somewhere to find themselves. Who was I going to sing Frank Sinatra and Barbara Streisand songs with when George was gone? There’s a place for us. Somewhere. A place for us. I never ever thought he would find it. The poor sod. I get no kick from champagne. But I get a kick out of you, George. It gives me an oof in fact. Who would listen to the tortured details of my masochistic marital conflicts now? Talk about the movies? Go for a pint on Tuesdays? I’ll always have Gabriel. I hope he doesn’t barf all over the table like the last time we went to the pub. I think his parents must have been either very ironical or very hopeful when they named him. Double Nougat would have been better (his first words, I do believe). Or Ham Burger and Chips, or Iced Donut, something more honest at least.
Gabriel came back from the toilet, sat down, and immediately started munching into a jumbo bag of cashew nuts.
“Delmonde, the poor boy, wants to hear the sad story about the young artist,” he said.
Gabriel smiled gargantually and you could see down his throat through flailing desperate cashew chippings and dark metallic fillings.
“Do go on, Delmar,” he salivated all over the table.
George turned his big sad double ringed eyes to me.
“Go on, George, let us have it,” I said.
He settled into the corner of the snug and began.
“James Carey had missed the first train. The eight-thirty. Maybe if he’d caught it he would have been alright. Would have got into Glasgow Central and started his first day at the Art School without any problems. But he missed that one. Had to wait for the nine o’clock and then it stopped outside Glasgow Central for an hour. Pure torture it was. James got to thinking and a sort of panic set in. It’s dangerous that, thinking. He felt a tightening in his chest and a knot in his stomach. He got up out of his seat and started to march up and down the aisle. Had to get off the train. He became convinced that he was going to have a heart attack. Was going to die there and then on that dirty stupid train. Other passengers noticed his odd behaviour and tried to speak to him. To calm him down. People are normally good. Always stop to help. It takes a lot of training to learn otherwise. An old woman who was going into the town for a day’s shopping took a special motherly interest. When the train finally pulled into the station, James went up to the Royal Infirmary instead of the Art School. The doctors examined him but could find nothing. The consensus was that it was mental. That James was suffering some kind of acute panic attack. They contacted his parents and he was put in a ward just to be on the safe side. Luckily for James his Auntie Betty was a nurse and was on duty at the time. She sat with him till his mum and dad arrived. Something had been wrong with James for the last six months. Since his grandfather had died. He was an exceptional student and very suited to engineering. That’s what his parents had wanted. His father was a factory worker and he wanted his son to enter the working class aristocracy. But it was all starting to break down. To break up. The solidarity. The pride. Soon we would all be Americans and money would be king. James’ generation would be chosen to go out into the world as full individuals, ready or not, to sink or to swim. Like some big pointless social experiment. I think James felt this in his bones. In his spirit. Somehow took it all into his own person. He had spent the last six months painting. This had been an unexpected discovery, a revelation. That he could paint. He painted the small things. His parents. His brothers. His wee sister. The dead angles of the rooms of his house. The street lights. Children playing. The trees coming out of winter in the park. The fall of the night. The empty swings at dusk. The Main Street. The small shops. The garages. The Town Hall. It was as if he had been given a commission. To paint up a memory of something dying . He had a couple of exhibitions in the church hall. The local paper ran a piece about him. The journalist, who had a good eye and a good Edinburgh University education, called him a working class Hopper. Had let himself go hyperbolically and said that to be a competent artist you need discipline and hard work, to be a good one talent, and to be a great one to be touched by the hand of God. James Carey was of the latter sort he said. And it had all come from nothing. James was good at maths, physics, chemistry; he had never drawn anything in his life. One day in the Art class the teacher had asked the children to draw a simple hand. James seemed to go into a trance and started drawing at top speed a brilliant anatomical sketch of an old man’s hand. It was like some of the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. The other children stopped what they were doing to watch him. The hand was pointing out off the paper. Like it was trying to speak. Trying to impart something. Pointing at everything and at nothing at the same time. When he was finished he made everybody laugh by saying that he hadn’t drawn it. That it had been somebody else. Someone in his head and in his hands. After that he abandoned everything else and took to the painting as if the devil and his legion were after him. As indeed they were. After all of us. They still are. The last painting he did was abstract. He worked at it for two weeks night and day. It was a huge canvas painted in a concave shape, drawing the eye to the centre. It took the form of a forest which became denser and denser, darker and darker as it spiralled into the centre until the eye hit the very core of James’ world. At its heart there was a fiery flickering yellow and blue light. You couldn’t tell if it was the end of all by fire or the light of some revelation still to come. It seemed to encapsulate the great question. The going and the coming. The coming and the going. All around the slit of the eye, for it was a slit, the vagina of the world, there were little twisted and bending abstracts of his other paintings. His family, his friends, the parks and streets of the scheme, the shops, the skies and the rain that fell. When he finished he slept for two days and when he awoke discovered that he could no longer paint. His gift had gone. Disappeared like mist in the sun. By now James had become a local celebrity and his parents expected great things from him at art school. But how could he go? Now that he could no longer paint. Draw nothing more than stickmen. He couldn’t tell his parents. Couldn’t disappoint them. He caught the train to go to Art School and ended up in hospital. He confessed everything to his Auntie Betty. She told his parents. They took it well and asked him what he wanted to do. I just want to go home for a while he said. James sat for a month in his room, uncertain of how to proceed with his life. Still the urge to paint came to him in the dead of night. The melancholy and the longing for something intangible. To get it all down on canvas. But it was useless. Everything his hand touched was stilted and ugly. And what was the point of pursuing something without the hand of God? He started to ponder life and who he was. And why he was. And then one night he climbed out of his window and wandered off. Disappeared from this story and went out into the world to live whatever would come. He wouldn’t be an artist. He would live his life and that would be enough. Nobody knows what became of him but I hope that there is a happy ending for the young artist. Though in most stories that is highly unlikely, both for sound tried and tested realistic and artistic reasons. But in all human life that is a chance you have to take. A chance we all have to take.”
Gabriel had finished the cashew nuts and was now eating a big poke of smoky bacon crisps. He didn’t look affected but I knew the big fellow was soft in the core and was weeping inside.
“Don’t go, George,” I said, and tried to hold his bleary eyes.
George sighed and drank down the rest of his pint. He stood up.
“You don’t need me, Delmonde, my dear dear boy. You don’t need anything more than you’ve already got. Be kind to yourself and try to be happy. For you are Delmonde, and that’s enough for one life, my friend.”
He put on his big trench coat, his Basque beret and walked out of the pub. He already looked like a famous actor, I thought. A Glasgow Morgan Freeman. George was gone and so was James. I felt alone. I looked at Delgado.
“Do you want another pint, Delmonde?” he asked hopefully.
“Aye, let’s have another round,” I said, “And get another bag of nuts, I feel a bit peckish. It’s going to be a long night now that George and James are both leaving and there’s just the two of us left to face whatever comes next.”