Tapes

‘Give him a minute and I’ll show you my party trick.’

Those were the last words I heard before I sank into the ether. There were two of them with me in the operating theatre: the old hand, Dr. Dutton (the words were his), and an apprentice of some sort, gushing with admiration as his mentor applied the preparatory brushstrokes to the blank canvas: me.

I’d looked on with polite attention as a needle went in the hand, a mask over the mouth. I’d stretched out on the trolley, ankles casually crossed as if I were lying out on the grass taking in the sun. I’d closed my eyes against the theatre spotlight, and it had glared redly through my eyelids. My efforts to sustain a masculine nonchalance had just about held up, as I tried not to dwell on the fact that my left eye was soon to be opened for me regardless.

The hospital porters had wheeled the world luxuriously around me, as if I were the still point, and I’d yielded to their hands and let the halogen strip-lights go by. I’d listened to their disembodied voices bowl back and forth across my body, now at my feet, now at my shoulder, as they moralised over the tabloid newspaper that lay open across my legs:

‘It’s no natural, is it?’

‘Aye. Animals.’

Over the preceding year or so, during which I’d turned twenty, I’d felt increasingly disconnected from the phenomenal world. My cataract-infected left eye had refused more and more of it, as if tiring of distinction, until it saw only shades and shadows. I’d first noticed this one summer’s day as I was lying on the grass in the park, looking up into the clear blue sky. For a moment I thought I could see an aeroplane’s vapour trail, way up high; as I gazed up at it, though, it began impossibly to bend and sway, as if in a light breeze. The next moment it had traversed that impossible distance and fallen lightly upon my face: it was a thread of gossamer. I then began to notice other threads drifting around me, and yet I found that they would disappear completely when I closed my right eye. With the deterioration of sight in my left eye, I was losing my perception of depth. As the colours bled into each other and faded, my own body seemed to bleed into the rest of the world, until it was less clear where my body ended and the rest began; it was like a reversal of the process whereby we learn, in infancy, what is ‘me’ and what is ‘not-me’. The world seemed to have been levelled into two dimensions; everything was exposed, and there was nowhere to run or hide anymore.

The anaesthetic mist crept into my mouth and filled my throat, tenderly paralysing. Those thin threads of gossamer had swollen like a cloud and sunk around me. I became disinterestedly curious to hear what the surgeon and his assistant would say next, so I pretended that I had lost consciousness, but then I did.

‘Probably skull-fucked you’, was the opinion of my best mate Dan, when I related the story to my parents and him that night.

My parents had come down from Aberdeenshire on the afternoon of the operation to pick me up when I was discharged. As they walked anxiously into the out-patient ward, which held sundry other convalescents, I was just emerging from the anaesthetic fog. I was engaged in identifying the purpose of the plastic plate of escalope and vegetables that had been placed in my lap. Dad stood at the foot of the bed, where my multi-coloured varnished toenails stuck out from under the blanket (my friend Siobhan had found herself at a loose end one evening the week before); Mum came to my side, and accelerated my return to consciousness by squeezing my right hand, which still had the needle in it. I survived her compassion, though, and soon we were stepping out into the sunny afternoon.

As I looked along Church Street, to the tenements on Byres Road, I caught my first glimpse of the clarity that the new lens would bring. A large patch was taped across my left eye, and the little air-holes in the Perspex afforded a pinhole view of the outside. As my head began to clear I became more aware of the discomfort, like sand in the eye, of the soluble stitches as my eyelid moved over them; it was better to keep it closed. Nevertheless, I allowed myself a partial view of the tenements, with their yellow sandstone in the sunshine. I could pick out every brick. It was so clear, I felt I could see infinitely far; and for the first time I noticed a curious visual side-effect of the new lens, which would soon become a familiar part of my world: the sun, reflected in one of the windows, threw an aureole of light into the far left of my peripheral vision and it fanned out in precise little triangles. This lasted only a couple of seconds before the cool air drifted in and drew saltwater tears, causing the street to dance as in a warped mirror, and I closed it again.

‘What would like to do, Andy?’ Dad asked. ‘Would you like to just get home to your flat? Or a whisky to take your mind off it?’

It might be explained that my parents are champion drinkers. To them, it seems, alcohol is not a mixed blessing. God forgot to expel them the morning after and they just got older, shamelessly. I inherited their penchant for the booze, if not their mental fortitude, and that’s how I found myself picking my way along on the short walk from the hospital to the pub.

An hour or so later, slightly buoyed by a round or two of medicinal whiskies, we were back at my front door in leafy Dowanhill, the wet autumn leaves now clogging the uneven pavements, with a cargo of clinking blue plastic bags. As we walked into the living-room, Dan’s eyes returned to his newspaper from my stuck-on insectile eye patch:

‘That your new lens mate?’ he deadpans.

Dan had moved up from Kent with his then-girlfriend Kylie when she started at Glasgow University, like me, in 1995. Kylie and I had found each other lost in search of our first French lecture, and the following week she brought her boyfriend. He was wearing skin-tight purple tie-dye jeans, a Mick Jagger blouse, and mascara. I was dressed like Kurt Cobain. He wasn’t a student, but he knew all about school: he sat in on the lecture and put chewing gum in the hair of the students in front.

When I told him I played the guitar, he invited me round for a music session at their bedsit on Buckingham Terrace. I forgot to bring my guitar, inexplicably, so we took turns playing his, and that was to become the routine in the months that followed: balancing on the back of the sofa at the window, passing one guitar back and forth one song at a time over a colourful collection of bottles and cans which we’d selected from the Thresher’s across the road. If the audience (Dan or me, depending on who was playing) happened to still be smoking a cigarette at the end of a song, it too would be passed over.

We were from different ends of Britain: Aberdeenshire, Maidstone. He was just three years older, but our music collections were from different generations: his was exclusively sixties, while I was still languishing in post-grunge shoe-gazer indie. We told each other stories, though, about our best friends back home; our formative experiences, as if all that growing up were over now. He told me about his mate Karl, about the cliffs and the cobbles of Hastings, about LSD and John Lennon; I told him about my mate James, about Boddingtons in the woods and top-deck bus rides through Fife, The Stone Roses in one earphone each.

The north-east of Scotland didn’t produce people like Dan, though. I had never known anyone to wear tight trousers on purpose. After a couple of weeks of listening to him belt out The Who on his acoustic guitar, I began to sing an octave higher.

And so, in the ghastly charade that was the first year of university, I had found a home at Dan’s window. It was your typical Glasgow rear window: it had a tennis racquet to hold it open because the sash had broken; it had a wide, lichen-covered window-ledge where we sat the ashtray; it opened onto a walled backcourt, overgrown and fox-friendly, with a rusty gate at the end leading onto the bin alley; there were trees everywhere, reaching up to and sometimes into the highest windows. From this one, if you looked to the left through the bright green leaves and over Queen Margaret Drive, you could see the glass dome of the Kibble Palace in the Botanic Gardens. This was all the view that we needed. It was Glasgow, the dear green place, and it was ours. I was a romantic eighteen years old, and to sit there on a bright afternoon with cans of beer, cigarettes and music was pure bliss.

We both had a feeling that something big was going to happen. Between the piano keys of ‘You Made Me Forget My Dreams’ (there was nobody better at the nostalgic lament than the West End’s very own band, Belle & Sebastian) as the leaves outside flapped in the first wind of late afternoon, melancholy seemed to reach an apotheosis. It felt like a farewell to the world as I’d always known it. The city itself seemed to be in the autumn of its life, its rich Victorian tenements, parks and pavilions all raised up in a grand gesture, and then left there for the sandstone slowly to return to sand. We watched the procession of ordinary people on Queen Margaret Drive, and the grasses sprout between the paving stones, and the trees reaching up to the sky, and we felt that we were on the cusp of something catastrophic. But whatever it was, we were in it together—like new lovers.

Dan had found himself a job in a basement café on Cresswell Lane. If I stopped by after a lecture, descending into the gloom, I’d invariably find that I was the only customer. He would be sitting at one of the tables smoking one Lambert and Butler after another and listening to ‘The Beatles Live at the BBC’ on an antique tape-player from the junk shop next door.

As time went by we began to record our music sessions on my faithful red Phillips Roller tape recorder. (I still use it for the radio, though the tape deck only makes a low complaint now, like an old tomcat rudely awakened.) We’d round off the night by playing back the tape and following our often hilarious and occasionally inspired progression towards the palace of wisdom.

Two years had passed since those first days at the window with Dan. He and Kylie had gone separate ways, and he and I had found a new flat and a new window. Some other things hadn’t changed though, and the evening after my operation followed the old format of drinking, singing and recording ourselves.

Typically, my parents took to it with zeal. Mum still has the tape. For some time afterwards she would listen to it as she got ready for work in the morning, until she knew the words to all the songs, and every clink of glasses. I suppose that day represented for my parents a tangible milestone in my recovery—something to ease their anxieties about their boy. In truth, though, my own anxieties had little to do with the cataract.