Thoughts on a Man Who Once Was

 

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.