My Uncle Billy was the Jamesie Cotter of Ayrshire long before that character in Rab C Nesbitt had ever been thought of. The cheesey blonde highlight in the slightly bouffanted hair, the white Nike trainers, the bottle of Irn Bru in the jacket pocket – and this was his outfit for a round of golf at the local Corpy course where he, I and my father shared the one bag of meagre, brittle, bone-shaking clubs.
Billy emulated Burns’ in the houghmagandie stakes; the
jury’s still out on how many sprogs he may have fathered but of his three
‘official’ wives at least two were stone-cold bonkers (some may say, cruelly,
that they’d have to be to put up with this admittedly handsome but nonetheless
wayward boy-child).
Well I remember as a boy my father giving his younger
brother a hudgie on the pillion of his little blow-dryer Honda 50. From East
Kilbride they were bound for Billy’s home in Ayr but they didn’t quite make it.
My father was a danger to traffic on this seemingly inoffensive little red
machine and almost predictably he crashed through a hedge and into a field
somewhere on the outskirts of the bleak Fenwick Moors. Billy, who had once been
the rider of a far more powerful machine altogether was so freaked by my
brothers errant pilot-ship opted to walk the many remaining miles rather than
resume the journey on the ‘bike of death’.
Billy died early, in his mid-fifties, after a life of
sporadic dissolution. I remember him as a squaddie in Basingstoke borrowing
money from my fourteen-year-old self for a bottle of wine and for introducing
me to rock bands whose music I have treasured ever since.
He saved my father from enduring childhood loneliness just
by being born and I like to think of them together somewhere recounting stories
of mad motor-bike trips and laughing like the off-the-wall lunatic brothers
they were.
My Uncle was to the world around him like someone walking on
to a film set who wasn’t sure he was an actor. Life happened to him and he let
it. Virtually aimless until the day he died he was only really at home in the
army (or probably in the beds of his many women). The army suited him because
they told him what to do and where to go to do it and he couldn’t command
himself in this way. Without it, he wandered around bewildered seeking only
some form of oblivion or another: heroin, drink, whatever. If he had money – and
he did after my granny’s death and the house was sold – he spent it like a big
kid in a sweety shop: season tickets for the stand at Celtic Park, Jaguar cars,
holidays to America. There’s a family tale, perhaps apocryphal, that he used
some of it to purchase a licensed grocers shop in Prestwick and drank most of
the stock himself.
I liked him for his laugh! A laconic, gurgling laugh at the
lunacy in himself and the world. He was one of those proletarian hippies that
listens to Dylan, smokes a joint, has only tea biscuits in the cupboard and
goes to watch Ayr United at home.
