This story is partly a work of fiction. But Marcus is real and is the best author ever! It is meant as a tribute to, not a rip-off of, one the best (one of??) stories ever to appear on Nifty. Apologies to any 'Rocks' fans who were offended. And heartfelt thanks to Mr McNally for the hours of pleasure he has given us all.
The Marcus McNally Fan Club 4
It felt as if George was about to take me by the ear and lead me off like a naughty schoolboy. My head was spinning; my brain teemed with a dozen ideas, all crazy; I felt hot and cold at the same time. All I could think was 'what the hell is going on?' Please God, let me wake up and find this is all some terrible dream. Mickey? With Josh? Arguing? What about? "You've been reading too many stories, young man. Not good for you. Affects the brain, you know. Moves in on the imagination and before you know it, takes over your life." And with that George gripped both my shoulders, wheeled me round, and guided me back out of the Palace. In silence I found myself propelled back towards Great Western Road, the main thoroughfare heading out of the city towards the bonnie banks and the wild romance of Rob Roy country. It wasn't that I was being frog-marched. I was so bewildered that I was not resisting. It did not even occur to me to wonder where I was headed under George's direction. Then I heard it and then I didn't hear it. There was a sudden noisy screeching of brakes from the main road. This was followed by an eerie quiet. It was as if, all of a sudden, the city had gone to sleep. I glanced around. The gardens, which moments before had been filled with citizens going about their business - men on benches reading newspapers, boys playing ball on a distant court, women with bags of shopping, couples wandering arm in arm beside the flower beds - were now strangely still. For a moment I thought that it had all been freeze-framed. The stillness and quiet were unsettling. But it was not quiet nor still. I suddenly realised I could hear from all around me the tapping of thumbs on keypads. I could see the dexterous fingers flick. The whole city seemed to have decided to go online at the very same moment. And then the truth dawned. "He's posted chapter thirty four!" I exclaimed. George started back and let go of my arm. A woman with a pram glanced up, frowned at me, then turned her attention back to her blackberry. Damn! If C34 had been posted then I was damned sure I had to read it. I set off at a sprint towards the park gate. George was far from my mind now and anyway he too was thumbing away. Sure enough the traffic on the main road had ground to a halt. Buses remained at bus stops. Some cars had pulled over; others had simply stopped dead in the middle of the road. Pavements were full of what appeared to be statues, but all in the same position, all hunched over screens. I began to punch out the log-in on my phone. Fuck! Low battery! Why does that always happen at the critical moment? I tore across the street and sprinted down towards the Library, dodging past the immobile figures that cluttered the pavements. My progress was now orchestrated by reactions - sighs, gasps, cries of horror and many sharp intakes of breath. "Fuck," I thought, "it must be another cracker." Little did I know then just what a cracker it was! I found myself wondering if Mickey was already reading it. What had happened? Why had Mickey taken off like that, without leaving any sort of message? But no time now to dwell on that! I raced into the library and headed over to the section where the computers were located. Every machine was taken but I had expected that. Bound to be when something as momentous as this happened. I headed over to a screen around which four boys were gathered. No point asking them to go back to the beginning. I just had to settle for joining in where they already were in the story. "Oh my God!" "Tell me this is not happening!" "Oh! No, no, no!" "Oh, Mike. Poor, poor Mike!" "He didn't?" "He just so did!" "Oh, I can't bear this!" "I think there's a spelling mistake on page four," averred the lady in dark glasses who was making notes on an A4 pad - pencil notes. "Oh shut up Doris!" chorused the others. As more and more people reached the chapter's end it was as if one great collective sigh went up; a sigh that said much about C34 but also was filled with a longing, a deep desire for the speedy appearance of C35.
I wandered out of the library. Like most others I was in a total daze. Mike had moved out, out of the apartment and perhaps out of Ty's life! That took some getting your head around. "What is he doing to us!" muttered an elderly gentleman with a spaniel at his heel. He reached down to fondle the dog's ear as if to console the abject canine. "Scruffy'll be fine, don't worry," he muttered, but his voice was far from reassuring. I exchanged a glum and sympathetic glance with the dog. On the board at the Library entrance there was a poster advertising a sale next week of 'Artefacts of Oz'. It was the sub-head that stopped my breath - 'including Love on the Rocks memorabilia'. Across the road there was blond boy in budgie smugglers selling Turkish Delight from a tray strapped round his neck. He grinned at me and nodded down - was it towards the tray or to what lay snuggled in the Speedos? I continued down Byres Road, passed the Oxfam Book Shop where things were returning to normal - or at least what passed for normal given the devastation of that latest chapter and that irritating woman behind the cash desk. At the first corner there stood a lad with a placard, a large wooden finger-pointer. It signalled the way to the Western Baths and read 'Father and Son Sessions Now In Progress : Lend a Hand?' In a totally confused daze I crossed Great George without a glance up towards S'Mug. What the fuck was going on? It was as if McNally had taken over. A little ahead of me lay the Curlers. I decided what I needed was a good think and a pint of Best.
The Curlers is probably the oldest building on Byres Road and dates back, as the name suggests, to a time when the area was countryside and boasted a large pond nearby. More recently it got a reputation as the poet's pub for here McDiarmid might sit and sup and hold court. I bought a pint of eighty shilling and retreated into a corner to think. As I nursed my pint glass I become aware of voices, the hum of conversations all around me. I stilled my ears, remembering my embarrassment earlier that day but sometimes you can't help yourself. "Holy Buttons! Yon Tyson's no' wan o' us," winked the man with the backpack and a copy of Denis Matthews' book on the Beethoven Sonatas. "Amor in saxa conturbat me!" lamented the man in the clerical gown, who had grown even more morbid since C33 (and c1513, come to that).
"It's
Not
Really
Happening
Really
It's
Not," opined Mr Morgan, a bit too concretely. "It's very sad a good story cannot know how lovely it is?" muttered the man with the long face whose every statement seemed to carry a question mark. I slunk away into a corner to muse upon events. The world had gone mad. I was sure I must have slipped into some alternative universe. Perhaps the world's spinning had rotated into some kind of mobius strip which flipped me from reality to reality.
"Simon is a rat. No way should Scott go back to him." God, not again. Not more, I thought. A group of lads who, from their garb, must have been students, were nursing half quaffed measures and were clearly engrossed in conversation. A 'Love on the Rocks' conversation. There were approving grunts from the Simon-Haters. "Oh?" queried the lad with the blondish curls. "Who says?" "Scott does. He does. In C29 he tells Mike ..." The guy with the curls interrupted him. "Yeah, and Mike tells us. The whole thing is down to what Mike tells us." "So? You saying Mike is ...." Here the speaker dropped his voice, as if shocked by what he was about to say. "... telling lies?" The boy with the flaxen hair raised an eyebrow and shook his head. "Look, we all know about first person narratives. Even the bible. Can you trust it? Tobiah was a bad man. Who says? Nehemiah says. We never do get to hear what Tobiah thinks when old Nehemiah chucks him out of his apartment at the temple. Do we? You have to remember who's telling a story. It's his point of view of the truth. Not the same as the truth." The others shrugged but looked unconvinced. "It's become standard practice in fiction these days. The unreliable narrator. Loads of examples now. The Brontes sort of started it. Take Villete. You read the book and take it all at face value until the very end, the very last fucking page. And then she hits you with it. I'm not telling you what happened to the ship, she says. Telling you would spoil the story, she says. That's when a firework goes off in your head and you think three hundred pages and how much can I trust?" The others nodded. "Remember that lecture we got on Madox Ford? The unreliable narrator who didn't know he was unreliable. That was masterly. That daft American hadn't a clue what was really going on. So maybe Mike isn't exactly telling lies. Maybe he can't see what is really happening?" "Mike is a lawyer, for fuck's sake," exploded another of the lads. "And a damn good lawyer. Look at how he operates over Ty's contracts. Super smart." "According to who?" "Whom?" "Don't do a geegee. You know what I mean. According to the sainted Mike, that's whom!" The speaker sat back, took a large swallow and smirked in self congratulation. "Besides," he continued, "what is a lawyer's stock in trade? To manipulate the truth, to shape it to suit his purpose. Why the fuck do you think McNally made his narrator a lawyer?" "But that means we can't believe any of it," wailed the one in tight pants who looked he might have bother zipping back up after a pish. "McNally is a very clever writer, I reckon," argued the fair one with a stroke of his chin. "He builds in little contradictions, little clues that all is not as it seems. Take the farm at Stanthorpe. We all rush to google it and wow! There is a Stanthorpe. In Queensland. But this farm is a magical farm. It's a sheep farm. No, it's a fruit farm. Yeah? But do we notice? Nah! We are all too caught up in thinking this restaurant sounds swish, that recipe tastes delicious. It's the old conjurer's trick, divert the audience's attention." The one with the cock barely contained in his pants stood up at this point. "Show some respect for McNally. He's ... he's ... he's the greatest ever writer!" Saying this, the guy balled his fists. Oo, I thought, fisticuffs? But no. "Of course he is," retorted the boy who was making me wonder what colour his pubes were. Would they be fair? "That is my point," he went on. "The way he had set it up, it's not McNally telling the story, it's Mike. It's Mike's version of reality, not reality itself." Aha! Epiphany! "Of course!" I exclaimed as a thousand light bulbs went on in my head. "When Misha Donat says the Amadeus Quartet is the version to have what he means it's the version to have in his opinion. Or like Lord Dacre. When he said that these are the Hitler Diaries, he meant that in his ..." I suddenly realised that the whole pub had gone quiet. I hadn't realised I had been shouting out. I hadn't meant to stand up. I had just got carried away, as usual, in my enthusiasm. All eyes were fixed on me. And these eyes were not exactly friendly. I felt like Burton would have if his disguise had slipped when he was half way round the Kaaba. My eyes swivelled from one hostile face to another. Finally they rested on a boy standing at the bar, a glass of what looked like XXXX in his hand and a smirk on his face. It was Josh, the barista from S'Mug. I had gone off him big time of late but even now I felt a gentle stirring in my pants as I saw his grin and let my eyes fall from his face to his low necked tee (from which manly reddish hairs sprouted) and from there to the denim that bunched suggestively around his fulsome crotch. The students at the table next to mine were on their feet, looking as if they were looking for ... well, trouble and me, in either order. They were not alone. Men were rising from seats and stools all around me. What had I said? What had I done? Josh winked at me and raised his glass as if to say 'cheers' or whatever the ozzie-boy equivalent is. And then he spoke. Loudly. "I heard chapter thirty five was online ..." Silence. And then a wild scurrying of activity. All manner of gadgets appeared - iphones, blackberries, blueberries, laptops. Everyone in the place was in haste to get onto Nifty. Others, those with no mobile device, were hastening out the door. "... and I just ordered a pint, too," muttered a guy in a kilt as he flounced out. Me? I was forgotten. Josh approached and took me by the elbow. "Let's get you out of here." He steered me doorwards. "You need to learn some self control," he said. "Speaking out of turn like that. And your snooping. Don't deny it. I could see you were up to your old tricks, listening in on other people's conversations. Jumping ... no pole vaulting to conclusions, getting the wrong end of the stick. Remember Mike in chapter six?" "When he thought an old flame of Ty's had come back but it was really Lachie, Ty's brother?" "That's the one. Got that one so wrong. Nearly wrecked the romance before it got going. Poor Mike might be a hot-shot lawyer but he's not so good on the relationship front. First time we meet him he is escaping one failed affair. Then there's that crap relationship with his brother Steve ..." "Stop," I cried. "That is so unfair. None of that was Mike's fault." "Oh?" answered Josh, with a quizzical look. "Says who?" "Says ...." but I let my voice trail away. He was right. Josh took my arm and steered me away up Byres Road. Explaining to me that although he wasn't on duty he thought a strong coffee might do us both good, he guided me toward S'Mug.
"I saw you and Mickey." We sat nursing our Americanos (extra shot)facing each other across the table. I had gone off Josh "Yeah, that wasn't meant to happen. I guess that's why I came after you. Followed you out of the Botanics." "You followed me and George?" He grimaced but did not answer. I looked into his eyes for I could see that he was thinking, unsure what to do, what to say. "That wasn't George. It was my uncle Bruce. I just gave him some pointers about how to behave. Sorry." "Oh." I couldn't think what else to say. He made that face that people do when they are trying to say 'sorry'. Now it was my turn for my brain to go into overdrive. "Hang about," I suddenly said, "and what about that couple, Frank and Dot ..." I pointed to the table where they had been sitting. He shrugged a sort of 'I'll come clean' shrug. "My mum and dad. They are over on a family visit. I knew you were a big fan of Love on the Rocks and ..." "And Scott?" I interrupted. "My brother." I sighed then smiled. It was like all the pieces of the jigsaw were finally fitting together. Yes, I was annoyed but at the same time I was relieved that I was not going mad. "Look, I am sorry, mate. Really. Truly sorry. I ... I ... I don't know why I did it," he ended lamely. "Maybe I'll find it funny later but just now ... Josh, you really fucked with my head." "With your head ..." he said, and his voice sounded somehow wistful. "Yes, I did," he said suddenly and decisively. "Guilty." There was a silence, the sort of silence in a movie where well chosen music swells while the camera pans, close up, from one face to the other. Faces speak louder than words. I think that's what they say in Hollywood. But cue music? Who the fuck would find the right song? "Try to forgive me. Please. If you can, then maybe catch me in here? Coffee on the house?" I nodded. Slowly, and with seeming reluctance, he rose, smiling at me. "Sorry, sorry, sorry," he said. "You'll be apologising next for the mistreatment of the aborigines, and slavery, and the Costa Concordia," I replied, with a smirk. "Why leave out the Titanic?" he countered. "At least that's topical." "I don't do the Black Armband School of History," I said with a firm shake of my head. "Manning Clark? You are up on all things Oz!" "Us McNally-ites all are," I objected. He smiled again and left. I sat finishing my coffee. My feeling of relief was short lived. Okay, Josh had explained some things but fucking hell, there was a busload of other stuff going down that still made no sense. I mean what he had told me didn't explain the feeling that Love on the Rocks had taken over the world or, at the very least, that it had transferred itself into Glasgow's West End.
I had nothing to do except wander back to my flat. I went up Byres Road and crossed Great Western into Queen Margaret Drive, heading to Wilton Street. That's when I came face to face with Mickey and the boy I had assumed was Scott. The pair of them must have been in the Botanics. "Mickey! Scott!" I couldn't help myself, the words were out before I remembered what Josh had said. "Scott? What do you mean Scott? This is Simon!" There was no mistaking the note of triumph in Mickey's voice as he announced this. "No," I said firmly, "no way is this Simon." Mickey frowned with an exasperated expression. Clearly he thought I was being very stupid. "Look," he said. "I got this note. It was shoved under my door early this morning. It warned me that Simon here was being held hostage in a house down near the river. You know how some Love fans are such Simon-haters. And it warned me that some of my medico flat mates were in on it." He stared at me as if to say 'there now, you see!' "Well," he went on, "I just packed up and got out from there and fucked off down to rescue the boy. I always knew them pseudo-doctors were bad guys. Fuck, you should see the stuff they have in their rooms! Weird or nothing!" I stared. Mickey was in full flow. I was sure my face must be showing my total disbelief but Mickey didn't notice. He just kept talking. "Well, I'm heading down these posh Riverside apartments full steam ahead and fuck it, this guy comes belting round the corner from Morrisons, the one at Partick, slams right into me." "Him?" I asked, pointing at the other guy. "Yeah! He'd escaped. How about that!" "Some coincidence that," I frowned. But I don't think he noticed the frown. "Look, Mickey .... he is not Simon," I said, feeling like I was Woodie explaining to Buzz that he was a toy. "He is Simon! You ask!" "He's Scott!" "I am Simon!" "You keep out of this, mate." "Who're you anyway?" "I'm Ty. Tybalt to you." "Nuts to you as well, mate." "I am Ty." "So you'll be the top selling Oz singer who's ..." "No, it's just my name. I am Ty." "Fine. And me? I'm Simon and this is Mickey. All straight?" "You are so not straight! Hell, in chapter ..." "We settled now?" interrupted a bemused Mickey. "We all know who each other is?" "But Josh said ... I'm sure he said ... fuck, what did he say? I was sure he said you were his brother." Mickey laughed scornfully but the one who called himself Simon suddenly went quiet and looked thoughtful. That was when I too stopped and started to think. It was something about the way they were standing together, something about the looks they were exchanging, something about the smell of the whole thing. And then I just knew; they had been having sex. So much for that. There was me, who just a few hours ago was feeling like shit because I thought the love of my life had disappeared and in fact he had just ... just! ... moved on. Huh. I turned to go. I wanted to get away fast as I did not want either of them to see the tears forming in my eyes. I made it a few yards up the street before I felt an arm on my elbow. I thought it must be Mickey but when I turned I found myself face to face with Josh's brother. "Look, sorry. Josh did not mean it to work out this way. Really he didn't. He just wanted Mickey out of the way. You know? So he could ...Fucking hell, can't you see?" But I had had enough of Josh's schemes and Josh's plotting. I shook my head and turned away. I did not look back.
I went down by the river, to where the old quays and yards were deserted and derelict. There, amongst the rubble, I could be sure of being alone, of having time to think. Upriver, nearer the city centre, were the new developments, the big apartment blocks, the office buildings, the Exhibition Centre and the new museums. Downriver, there was still a shipyard and across from it the Braehead Shopping Centre. Here, between the two, the land lay undeveloped, a post-industrial wasteland. It spoke of what had once been but now lay unwanted, unused, unloved. I guess it reflected how I was feeling. I went and sat on a pile of debris near the water's edge. The evening was cool and to the west the sun was setting. Darkness crept in from the east but out there, where the river broadened into estuary, there was a gentle glow behind the hills. The water made hardly a sound and only occasionally was the silence broken by the swooping cries of the gulls. So much had happened in so little time and I could make no sense of it. My head buzzed with puzzlement. What was real, what unreal? And as if that was not enough, what sense was I to make of the turmoil of emotion? I had found Mickey and I had lost Mickey, all in the space of a day. It seemed like forever ago that I had trotted past that figure hunched over a laptop in the Offshore window but it was only yesterday. Yesterday! For the first time in a while I smiled as I thought to myself, 'cue the music'.
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away? Oh, I believed in yesterday all right! I think it was then that I realised I heard other sounds. There was a crackling noise from further downriver. I looked and sure enough there was a drift of smoke rising from a dip in the quay a hundred yards away and the distinctive smell of burning wood clung in the air. And another sound seemed to float towards me, a new song, probably from one of the apartments up there behind me. Someone must be playing music on the balcony as they drank a chilled chardonnay before dinner. The words came in unconnected little bundles, like half heard conversation ...
Speak low when you speak love
Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon
....
Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we're swept apart,
too soon, too soon, too soon
.....
Love is a spark, lost in the dark too soon, too soon
....
We're late, darling, we're late
The curtain descends, ev'rything ends too soon, too soon ...
Too soon? How fucking too right, I thought. Everything ends too fucking soon.
I made my way cautiously towards the sound of burning wood. There, sitting by a haphazard pile of driftwood, sat what looked like an old tramp. He had a battered old kettle balanced precariously on his make- shift fire. He wore an old overcoat which he had drawn tightly around himself. His hair was white, not that silvery grey but shocking white like new fallen snow. He turned as I approached. There was no alarm in his expression. In fact it was as if he had been expecting me. "It might be some time before she boils," he said with a resigned smile, "but then we shall have tea. Mint tea all right for you?" I nodded as I came down to join him. There was a stillness about him that was curiously unsettling. For a moment I wondered if he was hallucination, if he was part of some crazy dream that I was living. As if he sensed my doubt he extended a hand as if to shake mine but in fact he took mine and drew me down beside him. "It'll get colder soon, now the sun has gone. And the wind is northerly. Draw close, keep warm." I smiled my thanks and did as he suggested. I began hesitantly. "You're like a character from a movie. I can't remember. Something dad watched a lot. Robin Williams, I thought?" "I'm real. Too real. You need to watch that imagination. Imagination is a fine thing but like a horse or a boy it has to be kept in check or it will run wild, go places it is better not to go." He prodded at the fire with a length of stick. "You think that's what I have done?" "Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive." I pondered this with not much comprehension. "That's not me talking," he said as if to reassure me. "It's Frank Kermode. A great man. Insightful. You know people visit 221B Baker Street as if Holmes had really lived there? Or they stumble through Edinburgh's lost streets to see where Rebus found that mutilated body? They go by train to Hogwarts or plan trips to Stanthorpe. Shakespeare said 'imagine it as if you were there at Agincourt'. Now the poster tells us we are there. It's as if we have lost that capacity to think, the imagining is all done for us. We cannot tell real from unreal." I stared at him then for although his words made a sort of a sense, I did not find them helpful. "The great icons of today, they are not real. They are their own version of reality, carefully constructed, carefully managed. They are the narrators of their own fictitious lives." I began to have a weird sense of things fitting together, as if the jigsaw that was my life was filling in around the edges and the centre, the heart of it, was at last making sense. "Son, you must decide what is real in your life. Real. Not what you wish was real. A man's head can get jumbled. Think. In the darkness of the night a man can make himself believe in all manner of impossibilities, can conjure up nightmares. In the bright sunlight of the day he daydreams sweet fancies. It's all trickery. Listen to what we call the heart. Thoughts mislead. Emotion never does." We sat in silence for a while and then he made tea.
I thought a lot about what he said. And that's why I've written this. I won't go to S'mug to claim that free coffee but perhaps someday he will read it and then he will know. Know that I love him.
Thanks to any LOTR fans who have visited. And thank you, Mr McNally. From those who mailed you and from those who read you without ever saying.