On Biography

Rodge Glass

WHERE ARE WE FROM? LIFE IS ROOTED IN DEATH’S REPUBLIC.

WHAT ARE WE? ANIMALS WHO WANT MORE THAN WE NEED.

WHERE ARE WE GOING? OUR SEED RETURNS TO DEATH’S REPUBLIC.

ALL WHO WORK WELL HERE. 

A BETTER COUNTRY. FOR EVERYONE. 

The first thing I saw was those capital letters, each writ large on the auditorium’s high ceiling; each designed in his own font, Òran Mór Monumental, which is named after this place. I knew the lines, but had forgotten them. The words seemed like they could belong in any order. The door swung behind me and a quote fell into my mind, as if the room had made a present of it: ‘The world sometimes seems a chessboard where the pieces move themselves,’ says Alasdair Gray’s alter ego Thaw in his novel Lanark. ‘I’m never sure what square to go to. Yet it can’t be a difficult game, most folk play it instinctively.’ In the scene, Thaw is arriving in a new place. He’s incapable of a poker face. He’s the kind of character I can relate to. Squirt squirt, with the hand gel. Rub rub, on the hands. Hello folks, I beamed, I’m so happy to be back! Where would you like me? The director pointed in a way that could not be confused. I moved into place, thumb in my 1981 first edition of Lanark, glad to have succeeded at the first ask of the day. I love to follow orders! I said, for no reason. Then I spun on my heels, looking upward.

I’d been in this spot before, but it was different now. The rainbow above our heads. The portrait of Gray’s multipurpose heroine, hiding under that rainbow, visible from every part of the space. And there she was, Bella Caledonia. Thistle in palm, eyes icy blue, feather in hat, crossed hands resting over a banner which seemed to swim between the mountains: LET US FLOURISH BY TELLING THE TRUTH. In Gray, words and pictures are always in conversation, the past and present too. The new quote is rooted in an older one: ‘Lord, let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the Word’. It’s a line attributed to St. Mungo, the city’s patron saint and founder, who worked as a missionary on the banks of the River Clyde in the sixth Century. Disgracefully, he was from Fife; 1,500 years later, he’s still a symbol of this city. For the Òran Mór central gable, Gray deleted St. Mungo’s ‘Glasgow’, replacing it with ‘us’—less precise, but welcoming to all. Nae offence, eh? Nothin personal! After all, the Lord Himself doesn’t make the cut. 

In Gray, if the religious can be mingled with the secular, it usually will be. 

Seeing the auditorium afresh after so long away made me think of my own history, how it increasingly seemed like an impossible cloud to me, while another man’s life was like a clear sky I felt I could see. Everyone should write a biography, I used to tell folk, back when I had confidence. Instead of National Service, you know? I mean, forget yourself for once, right? Concentrate on someone else’s experience! Think about what makes up a life! Observe the big and small. The early years, the mistakes, the chance and design of it all. Think about what to foreground and background, what should go in the picture and what it’s fair to leave out. Consider the times, what pressures they applied. Learn humility! I’d say, not sounding like I had any. Pore over school reports! Archives! And give your subject a voice, if you can. It’s not easy to look clearly at anyone. There are things you just can’t know, every life is a mountain of unknowns—but unknowns are a part of the picture too. It doesn’t matter who you pick, I used to say, with a big grin on my face, evangelical in my enthusiasm for the art. But we should all pick someone! Then focus, fully. For about three or four years.

For three or four years when I was a young man, I spent most of each week at Alasdair Gray’s bedroom desk. Between tasks he’d often go quiet, so there was plenty of time to think. I used to wonder how someone who drank soup cold from the can and skipped meals to avoid negotiating the hob could possibly survive on planet earth for a whole lifetime, never mind get things done there. I wondered how someone who could barely breathe without the inhaler some mornings, who couldn’t sit still for the fire raging across his skin, could paint landscapes with a steady hand, write whole pages fused together as if by someone at peace with their body. I think of Joshua whenever I have a nosebleed, Alasdair whenever I wheeze or scratch. His hand used to shake as he clicked the top of the blue Ventolin puffer, like a drummer clipping a rim shot distractedly across a snare. He did this with his thumbnail, while an unsteady index finger stretched out towards the screen. No, Rrrodgerr. Move the word back again. That’s it. Click, wheeze. It’s like they tell my daughters at school and nursery. Never give up, never give in! And on he went. Continuing, despite his body. No hero, no saint. But someone worth watching, anyway. 

One day in the middle of drafting a new short story which drew heavily on his relationship with his skin, Alasdair left the bedroom to scratch in the kitchen, setting about his scalp with a kind of dazzling, focused energy while making a quiet, whining sound. I waited at his desk, thinking about how eczema was turned into dragonhide in his novel Lanark, at once fantastic and mundane, monstrous and outsized on the arms of his creations. The noise went on. Whine, scrape. To distract myself I drafted a quick poem about teaching Alasdair the concept of junk email. Explaining that no, he didn’t need to get back to everyone who offered him penis enlargement solutions though yes Alasdair, I know, you’ve said it before. Small genitals. Can we talk about something else now? The noise in the kitchen sounded like a cat in pain, impossible to shut out. When he returned his skin was pink and angry, and I recognised it as my own. He wasn’t one for hugs—in nearly twenty years, I don’t think we hugged once—but I found an excuse to put a hand firmly on his forearm, hoping to cool it. Then we went back to work. I think about all this now and feel like I’ve lost something invisible. Around the time I wrote that poem, a favourite research discovery of mine was the postage-stamp-sized article in the Herald, published in 1961 when Alasdair had just finished his first major mural at Greenhead Church, ‘Seven Days of Creation’. ‘ATHEIST PAINTS GOD’ was the headline. Well, it’s one perspective. One that comes to mind, in wonder, under the night sky of the Òran Mór. 

When Greenhead Church was destroyed ten years later, for a motorway to cut through Glasgow, four years of work was felled by the bulldozers. For decades afterwards, Alasdair repurposed Greenhead images in new works. Recycling, revising. Putting the seas, clouds, animals and people back into the landscape, in different contexts. My favourite of these is the image of a black Adam and white Eve, which horrified some folk who prefer different races to be kept apart, or clothed, or both. In Greenhead Church, Adam and Eve’s nakedness was shown intertwined, as one, a thing of natural beauty. For a whole lifetime, Alasdair returned to these two, as if making a point. His final attempt at their embrace, begun fifty years after Greenhead, has become a centrepiece of the Òran Mór. 

What St. Mungo would make of interracial love, we can only guess. Whether he said the lines attributed to him or not, we can only guess. But I like how the mixture of the old words and new ones hover under that bright rainbow, like a title for the story of the space: LET US FLOURISH BY TELLING THE TRUTH. The truth matters, doesn’t it? When I’m talking about Alasdair, it feels okay to be full of doubt. Also, his work gives me a break from the same old questions. What’s my disease called? What would Joshua’s voice have sounded like now? Why, when no one blames me, do I feel so responsible? And what’s right to do in his name that wouldn’t be about me, or make things worse? Even in trying to forget, new experiences suggest fresh ways of remembering. Recently, I’ve been thinking about what biographies do. Also who deserves to be recorded, and how. I say this as someone who used to think he was one kind of person, before changing. Even the most basic things about myself, the most obvious traits, that I hadn’t noticed before. 

But as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m barely in the door here. All I’ve done is put my bloody bag down. 

As I laid it underneath Bella Caledonia and took my jacket off, making small talk with my hosts, I was bouncing. There it was, Eden, which Jews and Christians share, in their own, strange, disconnected way, allowing me to feel, at least in this space, like Alasdair and I were brought up the same way. Amid the highest beams of the church, animals large and small intermingled with ordinary Glasgow folk, with clouds and stars, the possible and impossible, those things always juxtaposed. There were Adam and Eve, turning their interlocked faces inward. There was Mother Nature ushering a baby into the world just as she does on the spine of my edition of Lanark, rendered here beside the grand statues of Kelvinbridge. Then, lower down, there were the mirrors along the side walls of the auditorium, each containing portraits of well kent faces, each given the same space as the Òran Mór staff. I remember Alasdair working on that, like a snail. Behold! he cried, gesturing to a mirror he’d been working on for a decade. The cleaners of 2008! Half of whom may be dead by now! Before his accident, his voice was strong. He always said, with that hale and hearty laugh, that he wanted to die in the middle of his finest job. (I don’t even want to finish the thing!—let the gaps I leave inspire wonder!) Well, he had managed it. Some achievement. Though by the end, working on that mirror, his voice was almost a whisper. 

Over two decades, I’ve been in the Òran Mór more times than I can remember. I’ve been there with Alasdair and without him. Met with his friends in the pub downstairs to raise a toast after his death. Got drunk and sung my way home, play tap-dancing or walk-reading from Gray’s own books. Got so drunk, once, that I had to sit on Byres Road in the dark while a rampant nosebleed did its worst across my shirt. One year, I even played a bit part in a reading of Fleck, Alasdair’s Scottish version of Goethe’s Faust. He couldn’t get the play staged, so he arranged a reading of it at Òran Mór to a packed house instead, each of his cast of writers pretending to be actors for the night. Alasdair played auld Nick, giving himself the best lines: ‘I hope our entertainment pleased you well—it has no moral. See you all in Hell!’ 

I hear him deliver that sign-off, even now, when I enter Òran Mór. He did have something of the devil about him, no more so than when in that space. As well as devil mode, I’ve also seen Alasdair in grumpy, distracted and shy mode there, seen him free, with brush in hand. I’ve interviewed him there, handed him a cup of tea up the scaffolding, a mug of whisky once too. I’ve watched him correct, correct, and—Goddammit, it’s NOT RIGHT, GENTLEMEN!—correct again while collaborators shake their heads, slow, rueful smiles peeling across their faces. I’ve seen him bellow and stage-whisper. I’ve seen Òran Mór on screen and been photographed there myself. But I’ve not been back to the auditorium since he died. 

I was there to give a one-minute reading from Gray’s debut novel Lanark, just one of many guests lined up to read short extracts, from the book or to camera, for the celebration of the inaugural Gray Day, tied in with Lanark’s 40th anniversary by his long-time publisher, Canongate. As I arrived, there was talk of who was committed and who they were trying to get—Would Irvine Welsh make it? Ali Smith? Alan Cumming? Would Nicola find time? What about Nick Cave? In the part I was given to read, Thaw was a teenager on his way to Art School back in the smoggy Glasgow of the 1950s, talking to his dad about money. 

Lanark is a novel I’ve read and reread. I’ve written and talked about it for years. It’s the only book I own more than two copies of. Each of these ornate objects are strictly not-to-be-desecrated by my pen. Each untouched, illustrated copy is littered with images from Alasdair’s own hand now so familiar to visitors to the Òran Mór. The Lanark first edition I was holding was given to me as payment one week when Alasdair was skint, scrabbling around in his attic, as he sometimes did, to find something he thought I’d enjoy more than money. So this novel has meant a lot to me. And yet, I’ve forgotten most of it. I practised under my breath, under the lights, before the camera rolled. It all seemed new. Then new no longer. 

It’s many years since I stopped being Alasdair’s secretary, though that still feels like my life’s main work. My biography was independent, at times critical, at times unashamedly loving, interleaving multiple portraits with a historical walk through the life and art. Watching him sketch. Driving him to a friend’s funeral. Kicking the computer till it coughed back into life. Typing emails, manuscripts, forging cheques after he taught me the loop and swirl of his signature. Perhaps that book would make a decent epitaph for me. Instead of ‘HE MEANT WELL’? ‘HE WAS, MOSTLY, A SECRETARY.’ Maybe someone could tape that to the side of the rocket my ashes go up in. But then, that would let me off the hook. And that’s not where I want to be. 

In the years since it was first published I’ve done a lot of Gray work. I feel like a lifelong cheerleader now, so many years is it since he leapt around his front room crying, ‘Be my Boswell!’ ‘I believe we will remain friendly,’ he wrote, when he reviewed my biography for The Guardian, ‘though this review is written to correct his biggest mistake.’ Even that was a deflection, a narrative trick, a way to get browsers to keep reading. He was on holiday on Iona in 1999, not Skye, he insisted, as if it mattered to him to get this particular detail right. He was denounced by Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, not Jewish and Christian ones. Later he’d come back to what really upset him. Meanwhile, he said the book I’d written ‘strikes me as true and even touching. Rodger comes across as more worried by my poor health than ever I was.’ I never went looking for compliments. I didn’t know he was reviewing my biography until it appeared—that was another typical Gray flourish. Ta-dah! Let the judge be judged and all that! But he was right. I was always worried about him. Always worried he’d soon be gone. When we met, he was already an old man. 

Why did this individual rather than any other become and remain so important to me? I don’t know, but knowing Alasdair has been the unexpected great gift of my life. One that gave me something to do when I was young and running from Promised Lands, Chosen People and old certainties, and had no family close by. It keeps giving, even now. Most weeks, someone reaches through the ether to share something that makes me see him in new ways. Dear Dr. Glass, Please see, attached: an image of a painting, a photo of a note, a sketch, a letter—from Edinburgh, from South Africa, from Canada. I didn’t know who to send this to. Just thought his biographer might like to see it. In life, he was much more important to me than I was to him. In death, that continues. Though what can be done about it now? Well, you can point to the work. A year after his death, in the depths of a lockdown winter, I left my house and spoke slowly to camera, with my English mouth, repeating Alasdair’s words on the page. I was consumed by memories, and all out of time, but was sure of being in the right place. I tried reading my page with an autocue, then without. ‘I’m more comfortable with a book in my hand,’ I said to the camera, between takes, without realising what I was saying. 

Filming my bit was quick and painless. I forgot my own skin as I chatted to the organisers. Despite the usual February tightness, I was feeling good. All day, my nose had understood the unspoken order: don’t bleed. All day, my asthma had understood, too: don’t attack. Somehow, my body seems to know when I’m on stage. Rarely does it betray me, when people are looking. Meanwhile, everyone had an Alasdair anecdote to share, it seemed, and that day at Òran Mór they passed them around like sweets. As usual, I was there and somewhere else. It was 2021, but also 2015. Lucia was a baby then, a baby without HHT, and Joshua’s life hadn’t yet begun. I was standing next to Alasdair in the Òran Mór auditorium, and there was a film showing. We were watching it together. 

In fact, there were two films. The subject of both, once an intense, sickly working-class boy from northeast Glasgow and now Scotland’s most celebrated literary artist, was in the audience, all too aware of being watched. Above us, another, older Garden of Eden flickered in the reflected light of the pop-up cinema screen. Seeing Alasdair scratch always made my own eczema worse, though it also made me feel better too. Well, if he can do it… As we watched the opening credits together, I asked him to sign a picture for Lucia, and he did so without complaint. Carefully, with that loop and swirl, checking the spelling, as if I was a fan he was meeting for the first time. I wasn’t often in Glasgow in the Lancashire years; during visits to Scotland, I had to think up excuses to see him. He was eighty. He was slowing. What I’m trying to say is, I didn’t know if I’d ever see Alasdair again. And I didn’t know how to act. 

The first film showing that day in 2015 was a rarely seen BBC documentary, Under the Helmet, made in 1964. It shows a stick-thin, serious, be-suited young Gray looking into the camera saying, ‘This isn’t how I talk to my wife. This is how I talk to a television machine!’ Like Thaw, he sounds like a Highland minister. Like Thaw, he seems freshly arrived from space. By modern standards, Under the Helmet is achingly slow, the tone dry, lacking in the humour and playfulness that became Gray’s trademark. The camera pans steadily over his early visual works, lingering on details while the artist reads his grim poetry for spells over the top, before disappearing entirely so the works can take centre stage. As Alasdair and I drank and chatted, Adam and Eve’s chins were blown up large and locked together, in Greenhead Church, that long-gone place brought back into existence on screen in flickering blacks, whites and greys, as if the motorway had never remade Glasgow. The serpent, feet sticking out, looked on. 

In Under the Helmet, the makers indirectly suggested that their buttoned-up subject was no longer alive, something they also did in that week’s Radio Times article advertising the programme. I first watched it on an old video copy. At the time, what preoccupied me was the detail: which works were featured, how, what material difference the broadcast made to his life at the time. Soon after it aired, Alasdair wrote a letter to the Herald titled ‘An Apology for My Recent Death,’ explaining that sorry, he was alive after all. So far, Gray had been ignored by critics and the public, painting for free while sleeping on floors, paintbrushes scattered around him. He considered this unremarkable. It was just what happened if you were an artist in Scotland, choosing to make public art in your city, while London remained stubbornly unmoving, over 400 miles away. 

In time, all Alasdair’s early murals would be knocked down, neglected or painted over, not just Greenhead Church. Around the time Under the Helmet was made, Gray’s literary reputation was also still in its infancy, with Lanark still two decades from publication. His latest artistic commission, a first paid gig!—was a Glasgow synagogue; the rabbis insisted on clouds only on the low ceiling, no figures for us Jews please. This made for a headache of a commission. What he produced was a swirling cloudscape for the faithful of the South Side to be wrapped in during prayer. They liked it, the rabbis. But the faithful were moving elsewhere, and soon they knocked the synagogue down too. Each cloud was pulled into pieces, then laid carefully, plank by plank, at the artist’s door. Just in case he wanted them. 

Seeing Under the Helmet with Alasdair beside me was like watching it with new eyes, and about half way through something struck me about it that suddenly seemed incredibly obvious. The programme had been curated by Gray himself, with one aim: to background the artist almost entirely, even going to the trouble of killing himself off as a way to avoid this first lengthy national exposure—his potential big TV break—getting caught up in the weeds of biographical detail. 

In the near-darkness of Òran Mór, the old Alasdair watched his younger self quizzically. The Alasdair on screen was unsure what to do with his arms. At one point, the Alasdair in the room sloshed whiskey onto my hand as he talked loudly over his other voice, the one coming through the speakers. His opinion, he shout-whispered, had not changed in fifty years, Rrrrodgerrrr. Using almost exactly the same words as his younger self, he complained into my neck that artists are ‘so often seen within the context of their personal lives,’ and that these things ‘have nothing to do with art.’ I smiled. This from a man who mentioned all his friends by name in Lanark. Who made an alter-ego of himself, which has outlasted the real thing, and may outlast us all. Who invited me to follow him, take notes, record his declarations. ‘I disagree, sir,’ I said, in my bad impression of Radio 4 Received Pronunciation. ‘But then, I would, wouldn’t I?’ I think he laughed quietly, though maybe he was wincing. I wish I’d just had the courage to listen and not speak. These are the things that bother you, when someone dies. The stupid things you said. How you can’t unsay them.

Over the time we knew each other Alasdair was always charitable with me, unfailingly kind and supportive. But the publication of the biography was hard for him—don’t be fooled by the start of that mock-peeved, smoke and mirrors Guardian review. He understood publication is performative, and he enjoyed that at times. The truth is, though,  that the attention my biography received was hard for him, both personally and professionally

Honesty matters, now more than ever: ours was a pretty one-sided relationship. I was a young fan when I met Alasdair, one among many circling, aspiring writers, elbowing others out of the road, dizzied by his achievements and by the way he seemed both extraordinary and ordinary at once. On one hand utterly ill-equipped for the basic demands of daily life, yet also somehow able to leap far beyond it. He was a working-class Scot, an atheist, a nationalist, with an uncommon intelligence and an ability to quote lengthy passages of his favourite works by heart. I was a middle-class Englishman, a Jew who couldn’t bring himself to even say the word. I had little knowledge of Glasgow and little life experience so far. I was pro-independence for any nation that wanted it, but had little patience for borders. All I knew was, I wanted people to reach beyond them. Alasdair didn’t need to be surrounded by people who reflected his own worldview, though. He was also patient with younger generations, who saw things differently. I was a full forty-five years younger, and I depended on him for money: by paying me what he called (with that twinkle) ‘A TRAAAADESEMAN’S WAGE!’ for my secretarial work, he knew he was tripling what I had been earning in pubs and bookshops. He was childish but taught me how to be an adult, also what bravery looks like. To outsiders, we seemed to have nothing in common. Certainly, he didn’t need me for anything, as I needed him. But we did have more in common than a dry list of nationality, religion, class suggests. Identity is something. It’s essential and undeniable. But it’s not everything. 

The second film shown that night in Òran Mór, A Life in Progress, was made by director Kevin Cameron for Gray’s 80th birthday, again for the BBC. This was a different beast entirely. But for the subject’s distinctive reedy, stuttering voice and his way of moving his head, like a bird trying to listen for the wind, it might have been about someone else. This artist was an extrovert—overweight, joyful, loud, often laughing or talking in different, put-on accents—shown batting away Andrew Marr on The Today Programme, then designing a mural for his local Subway station, then wobbling on the scaffolding at Òran Mór. In this incarnation, Gray was still self-aware, but now playful with it, aware there was an audience on-side. Gray had become an overnight sensation in middle age because of Lanark. After that book, he produced a whole library of work. This was the man many in Scotland now recognized, the so-called national treasure (he hated that), the democratiser who said his favourite sound was ‘the sound of deadlines whooshing past my ears!’—and whose misattributed quotation, ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’, adorns the Canongate wall of the Scottish Parliament. He turned down a knighthood offered by Gordon Brown; honorary degrees; literary awards too (except for when Morag ordered him to reverse his rejection—‘We need the money, Alasdair! Take the fucking money!’); and revelled in replying to aspiring writers that no, sorry, he couldn’t help them get published because he was ‘such a selfish auld bugger’ who only supported one person, Agnes Owens, because she was in his view, due to her being a working-class, female cleaner, ‘the most unfairly ignored of Scottish writers.’

A Life in Progress is made with affection, though as in my biographical diaries, Gray the personality is front and centre. In one uncomfortable scene, Alasdair is shown hungover, having lost the plans for the auditorium. He looks every bit the hapless alcoholic as he ambles down the road from his house, manic with fear of work wasted. (The plans were later found behind the bar. A short story with a happy ending.) Back then, we didn’t know the drinking would do for him in the end, though we had an idea, and he joked about it. While the heat crawled across my collarbone, Alasdair turned to me: ‘I do understand why folk show me this way,’ he said. ‘But I wish they’d just concentrate on the work.’ 

Whether he was referring to me or not there doesn’t matter. I know that was me. So concerned to get the man on the page ‘for future generations’ (so I kept telling folk, as if I had no ego of my own), his voice, movements, opinions, loves and losses, I sometimes forgot to stop and think. As the second film rolled, I promised Alasdair that I would return to writing about him, but this time concentrating entirely on the work and its legacy. We both knew I meant after he was dead. He looked into the distance for a time, before turning towards me and saying, with an exaggerated, Joker-esque smile, ‘Thanks!’ It was an expression I couldn’t read. Then the mask slipped and he was warm again, clinking his glass with mine. ‘Is this nearly over?’ he asked, like a child, turning back once more to the film. 

What occurs to me now is not what had changed by the time of that conversation in Òran Mór in 2015, but what had remained the same. After all these years, I was still trying to do right by him, but was looking for acceptance too, as I always had. Acceptance is something I can’t bear to be without. Though I remained proud of my Gray book, by 2015 I’d grown up enough to see its weaknesses, and particularly this one: that, as evidenced so clearly in Under the Helmet and Kevin Cameron’s film, he did not want to be in the picture. But I had still put him there, thinking him he’d asked me to do it; thinking him too tempting a character to resist. Though I made my promise, it was a lie—because I still can’t help but mix the man and the work. I thought of all this just weeks later, in June 2015, when Alasdair had a fall outside his home after a night out at the pub. He fell on the steps by the front door. Too much time passed; nobody noticed the man on the steps until 1.50am, when a stranger passed, stopped, and an ambulance was finally called. 

Alasdair was taken to the Glasgow Infirmary, at speed. When I heard the news I instantly thought of the Òran Mór. I was a soap opera character, complaining at the twists of a lifetime, still making someone else’s story my own. A cut-price Boswell, still living off my association with someone who never asked for me—by this time doing so in England, where my Gray work had helped get me the first secure job of my life. I kept doing that job in the months he was dead. I changed nappies and took Lucia out in the pram and kissed her every chance I got and bled and scratched and wheezed and tipped my head back when the trickle came. I thought about Alasdair often. I spoke to mutual friends by phone, seeking updates that would surely never come. And then, just like that, he came back to life. 

Alasdair had been in a coma for six months. When he magicked himself out of it, shaking us all, I went to visit him in hospital. Lucia was still a baby but we already had the framed picture in our lounge, the one he’d signed in Òran Mór. Was I still pushing for things? Was there anything I could give? I phoned ahead, checked the visiting hours. We were in Glasgow, seeing family for Christmas. I remember how cold the door handles were as I opened them on my way through to see him. All my pasts were with me then. I suddenly remembered taking dictation while Alasdair was in hospital way back when, making some feeble attempt at telling him off for continuing to work from bed. Now see here, Mr. Gray, this just won’t do. Back then, I was learning to put work first. As I re-entered this new ward I remembered the old one as if Alasdair was still in it. As I walked, I tapped my thumbnail on my inhaler. I was off to see the old ghost.

But I wasn’t, because the ghost had gone AWOL. I asked, ‘Which bed is Mr. Gray in, please?’ The nurse reacted in slow motion. First, she looked around the ward in front of her. Then behind. Then she looked right through me, her face gaunt and narrow, pale too, as she realised she couldn’t explain his absence. I noticed something about her expression. Surely not, but was she? Just a little, even in her confusion, impressed? ‘The old trickster will turn up soon,’ she said. ‘There isn’t,’ she told me with a straight face, ‘anywhere around here to escape to.’ Together we searched across the floor, in the toilets, down the corridor, me imagining him—poof!—disappearing off the page like the protagonist at the end of Lanark, glad to see the light in the sky, finally free of the expectations of others. Eventually, I gave up looking. What else was there to do? The grapes I left with the nurse. The book I’d brought him, too. If he doesn’t return, I told her, please keep them. Sure, she answered, as if she already had a stack of uncollected gifts in her top drawer, and this happened all the time.

 Later that night my phone rang, and that voice was on the other end of the line. ‘Rrrrodgerrrr?’ said the Highland minister, from the grave. ‘Is that yourself?’ He thanked me for the grapes and the present and invited me to come back and visit, when he promised to give me some books in return. Lots of books! Piles of books! Enough to last you a lifetime! (Clearly, every visitor had brought one. Clearly, he was offloading.) Next, he told me where he’d been. I close my eyes now and can’t remember the exact wording of what he said. I wasn’t expecting the call. I don’t carry around a Dictaphone anymore. But fragments of this conversation I can still reach for. 

This mystery gentleman, Alasdair reported, had wheeled him from the ward, without ceremony or communication, shortly before visiting hours, as if he were a palette of groceries. Down a corridor, round a bend, outside, then back in again. Before he knew it he was sitting in a large room with spaced out chairs and a few other old codgers, all sitting there, awaiting something. This room, he suddenly realised, had a large screen attached to the wall. He was at the movies! At first this struck Alasdair as good news, though what was the film? Onto this screen was soon projected much blackness, said the patient as I listened, many stars and large, bizarre weapons. Then a horde of fighters emerged from this blackness in all-over white pyjama suits, firing, firing, firing for no reason it seemed, with others in black and various other colours waving around large, penis-shaped green holograms at each other. They were seeking to cause damage with these somehow, through the ether. I couldn’t follow it! I thought: surely this film will SINK WITHOUT TRACE! 

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t about the film, but it was. He sighed, then was silent, exhausted with the horror of it all. Then his voice grew small, and I imagined him shaking his head in frustration. ‘The business was, Rrrodgerr, that I COULDN’T GET AWAY.’ I meant to say something sympathetic—Christ, the poor man was in a wheelchair now. His wife was dead. He had to suffer a stream of people like me, still calling, after all these years, and for what? To make themselves feel better? But I was distracted. Then I realised something, and I forgot to be considerate. ‘Alasdair,’ I said, suddenly unable to control myself, suddenly absolutely sure. ‘Alasdair!’ I called, desperate for him to live, and live, and keep living as long as possible. ‘Have you just…watched Star Wars? Against your will?!’ The gap grew between us, through the phone line. I beliieeeeeeve sooooo, he said, comically serious, extending each syllable as far as it would go. It’s not very good is it, this Star Wars? Or DO YOU DISAGREE? Come on! Admit it! YOU DISAGREE! He demanded I confess my undying love for Star Wars, and the rest of my sins too, while I was at it. Then he collapsed into a coughing fit. 

When I arrived back at the hospital ward, he was in the wheelchair. Bedsheets were ruffled beside him, flakes of skin around his blue pyjama shoulders like in the old days when I arrived at the flat before he was dressed. There’s something I have no record of, but he said it, that day: I’d like people to be less sure of themselves. It sounded like an echo. A line he’d said before, to a journalist on the phone, while I was typing something. I thought of this as we sat there in silence for a while. His hair was thinner. Everything about him was thinner. Perhaps he saw me looking and didn’t like the sensation. Perhaps he just didn’t know what to do, no stranger there to whisk him away. Perhaps I was imagining all this and actually he was fine. But whatever the reason, he picked up the book I’d just brought him, The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, and flicked through the contents. It was the earlier material he was interested in. As he thumbed through the book, I found myself studying Alasdair again—I couldn’t just be there, like a nurse, or friend. He picked out a story, one he said he’d known as a child. Then he began, in a voice undeniably his but undeniably reduced, to read out to me. I can’t remember what the story was called, or who it was by. It doesn’t matter.

*

After the Òran Mór filming was done, it was time for me to leave. The next reader was coming in, and it was masks and thank yous and fare thee wells. I did my thing again—So great to be here! Happy to be involved! Then turned my back on Bella Caledonia, Adam and Eve, and all of it. I walked down the stairs. WHERE ARE WE GOING? Soon I was back on the street, among strangers. 

The last conversation Alasdair and I had in person, the day of the Òran Mór cleaners, discussed the ways we would work together in years ahead. ‘If I’m spared,’ he said, as he always did, the words echoing as I pulled my hood up and headed back home. These days, that sentence holds greater weight. After all that creation, and giving us one hell of a fright in 2015, he finally died four years later, still in the middle of this big work. It’s a tragedy, and a comedy too. It’s the story of a life. And it has given me an idea about what to do for Joshua. Joshua, who lived for three hours. Joshua, who I never met, but who is with me all the time. Joshua, who I share my blood condition with, and whose biography I want to write.

Originally published in Issue #28

Rodge Glass is the author of eight books published since 2005. ‘On Biography’ is an extract from his forthcoming memoir, Joshua in the Sky, which will be published by Taproot Press in September. You can preorder the book here.