Call Me the Breeze by Patrick McCabe Page B

certain it had passed. But as soon as I closed my eyes —
    I pleaded with him: ‘Don’t hurt her, Boyle. That’s all I ask.’ He sucked his teeth and went ‘
Tsk! Tsk
!’ just folding his arms and nodding, with a thin, patronizing smile.
    I wouldn’t have blamed him for despising me. I could see Jacy staring at me and I prayed I wouldn’t catch her eye. For I knew what I’d find if I did. Something regretful, disappointed. That said: ‘
You let me down, Joey, Why
?’ as the Karma Cave closed over. Her soft voice gradually fading: ‘And now because of this, you’ll be forced to wander for ever. You’ll never find your way home.’
    You’d see him at meetings, slicing the tape for some new supermarket in this great big fucking white suit of his, or in the
Scotsfield Standard
, making a speech, with his wife standing beside him. She was a doctor from a very wealthy local family (what they called ‘old money’) and was regarded by some as ‘far too good for him’, a comment he’d laughed at when he overheard it one night in the pub. ‘Sure,’ I remembered him saying. ‘You might say that, lads. But at the end of the day whose cock is going inside her? It’s not fucking yours, you can be sure of that!
Nada
, boys! The Lady Doc is mine, all mine, and that’s the way it’s going to stay!’ In interviews, he always made sure to insist that it was her who had ‘made him what he was’. ‘The Queen’ was a term he often used to describe her.
    I started thinking about that so much and of the lies he had told to Jacy — I knew he’d never leave his wife — that I almost forgot about Banbridge. I visited Boo Boo in the hospital almost every day. But he wasn’t showing much improvement. The nurse said to me: ‘He had a terrible time all last night. He keeps on about his career being over.’
    Which was correct, of course. There weren’t going to be too many openings for one-armed guitarists. I tried my best to get through to him but it turned out to be no use. Half the time I don’t think he knew who I was. Just turned over, gesturing half-heartedly with his good arm.
25 September 1976
    Whatever happens I want you to know I love you. I cannot afford to take any more risks. I almost died without seeing you — loving you. Sometimes I fear he has a hold over you. I have hesitated and I know it’s wrong
.
    Today I read:
Do today what has to be done tomorrow; do this morning what has to be done this evening; death does not wait for you to complete your task.
    I play 10cc all the time and it seems more beautiful than ever because I have accepted that I love you totally and denial even for the protection of oneself or whatever other unsatisfactory reason shall never be possible again. In the morning the sun opens out across the fields and I wake to see you, standing by the window. Tossing your hair and turning as the music softly plays, music that’s full of — what’s the word? — yes, yearning. ‘Courage,’ you say. ‘Courage for what it is that’s meant to be.’
    There is only one way, I know that now. Total Organization. I have written a note to Una Halpin requesting the entire works of Rabindranath Tagore, who has written:
‘The river and the waves are one surf: where is the difference between the river and the waves?’
    These wonders of knowledge they empower me so. Exactly as Charles Manson said. There was a happy guy in the hospital who was into the Christian mystics. He says, What’s all this shit about the Indians when the Christians have seers of their own? Good point. I told him all about The Seeker, how he liked St John of the Cross. He was impressed by that and he quoted him to me:
‘See how the suffering of love is only cured when you — or when your face — is near.’
He was talking about his chick but when he said it I couldn’t stop thinking of how true it is — for us. I feel so fortunate having met these people. I have become as a magpie gathering jewels, acquiring