4

Me and Richard, Richard and I

So we decided to get a flat in Glasgow together. Me and Richard. Richard and I. Richard is a friend of mine. He went to school with me. We were never big buddies at first, but then we got to be good pals near the end of school. We bonded over heavy rock music. He was a quiet guy at school; really, really quiet. He was quite tall, but even when he was in the middle of the playground he would always stand next to a bin or a post, hoping that people would just think he was part of the bin or the post.

When I think back on it now, I wonder what his plan was. Actually, I know what his plan was because it was the same as mine. Survival. And then get the hell out as fast as you could.

This was a big, tough, Scottish, red-brick, glass and plasterboard, built-in-the-sixties, comprehensive secondary school. The comprehensive bit meant that you would get a comprehensive kicking if you did anything that hinted at smugness, smartness, braininess, poshness. Richard's dad was a teacher at the school, so he was pretty much doomed from the start. Hence he assumed the cloak of invisibility.

For him it was extra hard, though. He was almost the only non-white guy in our year, the only black guy. And he was English. There were a couple of other guys, some girls in the school, that came from different family backgrounds, different country backgrounds. But not many. It would have been different if he had been outgoing and cool. I'm guessing that the other boys would have taken to him. And he was a pretty good-looking guy. All it would have taken was for him to get a girlfriend, then the world of school would have seen him differently. Or if he'd knocked someone out with a punch. But it didn't happen. He was as open as I was to the everyday harassment of being a non-fighting male.

I'd go over to his house. I remember his younger sister, Johanna, was much more outgoing and funny - she was cut from a different cloth. She would kind of tease him, but kindly.

'Richard has lots of friends. Do you not think Richard has quite a lot of friends?'

'Johanna, what are you talking about?' Richard replied.

'I'm just asking Stephen if he knows that you're actually quite popular.'

She didn't wait for me to answer though.

'What are you going to do? Are you going to go to Richard's room to talk about music? Do you want me to come up - I'll bring biscuits?' she asked, hopefully.

'No, thank you, Johanna, we're fine. Do you not have homework?'

'I did all my homework before I even left school. I'm really clever.'

She was balancing between two banisters at the bottom of the stairs.

'Stephen, do you want to hear me play "Für Elise"? It's by Beethoven.'

'Erm, I suppose so.'

'I think we're just going to go upstairs,' said Richard.

He gave his sister a bit of a look, as if to say 'Stop embarrassing me.'

'Ok, I'm going. See you later.'

She detached herself from the stairway and let us go up.

I left school the year before Richard, but we both ended up 'studying' in Glasgow. I hadn't seen much of him the last couple of years. I think he got his degree and then went off around the world, just drifting and thinking. At the same time, I ended up back in our little hometown, on my downward slide to near oblivion. He came to see me in the hospital. I was surprised to see him; I imagined he was off doing great things. He was practically the only person that came to visit apart from my mum and dad. When I got out of the hospital around Christmastime, we met up, and I just got the feeling that something wasn't right with him either. He was moving even slower than usual; he'd slowed right down. He'd been to see his doctor and the doc had suggested that he had some sort of post-viral thing going on too.

Ironically, his mum was a doctor, but sometimes that doesn't count for much, especially with something so slippery as ME/CFS. Unexplained chronic illness is like the doctor equivalent of a detective's cold case. It usually ends up in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. Whatever it was, we quickly got on with it and accepted that we were in the same boat. A leaky, directionless little vessel - but at least we had each other for company. I could paddle, he could steer. We'd take turns.

So for the next six months we'd do the small-town hang. We'd rest in the mornings, then go out somewhere in the afternoon. We'd watch sunsets, we'd lie on the grass if it wasn't too damp. We'd play each other at Scrabble and chess at the same time. While one person was considering their Scrabble move, the other person was playing their chess move, and vice versa. Thus our minds were always occupied.

I'd picked up the Scrabble bug in the hospital. When I'd got my strength back a bit, I'd always want to play Scrabble. I'd play anyone, anytime. It occupied the hours between lunch and dinner. There was a woman called Carol. She'd had a pretty bad time on account of her husband leaving her for someone else. She didn't have kids, it was just her in a semi-detached house on a new town estate. She kinda lost it and ended up on the ward. I liked to play her because she was a crossword type of person, so she wouldn't get huffy if I used a 'big' word.

'What are you going to do when you get out of here, Stephen?' she asked.

'I don't know. I haven't thought about it.'

'Don't you think you should have some sort of plan?'

'No. I had a plan before. Plans don't work.'

I was wishing she would move. I had a possible seven-letter word on my rack. But then I thought I'd better ask her something back, out of politeness.

'What are you going to do?'

'Try to get my life back in order,' she replied.

'What does that mean?'

'I still have a house and a job. I just need to get back to normal.'

'What's the big rush? It's not as if normal was working out so great for you before.'

I didn't look up from my pieces; I was just hoping she wouldn't block the double word. I could lay all my tiles down as long as she didn't block the double-word score. She'd gone quiet though. I looked up. There was a tear trickling from the outside left corner of her eye. She caught it with her screwed-up little bloodless fist.

'Shit, I didn't mean to upset you.'

'No, it's ok, Stephen. You're not to know.'

'Are you ok? You want me to go get Janice?'

'No, I'm ok.' She found a tissue in her sleeve.

'I mean, it's ok, people are nice here. And the food's ok,' I offered, as some sort of compensation.

'But we can't just sit around for the rest of our lives playing Scrabble, can we?' she said, a little more forcefully.

I didn't reply. My plan was to sit around playing Scrabble. That was my horizon and my sunset back then.

But now, with Richard at my side, perhaps I was finally 'getting my life back in some order', like Carol was talking about. No job, no partner, no mortgage; it still feels like a big deal though. Even though I lived in Glasgow for five years already, it feels completely different going back. If you can imagine a couple of young cats that have just moved to a new house and you put them out in the garden for the first time - that's me and Richard right now. We're moving gingerly, putting our paws out carefully and then pulling them back in. Smelling everything. Sitting for long periods in pools of sunlight.

I looked for a place back in the West End of the city, back in the old leafy neighbourhood. This time, though, I was going to get extra leafiness, extra ambience, older stone, quieter, deeper streets. I knew the area so well, Richard left it to me to find a place for us. It was on the second floor of a converted Victorian townhouse. There was quite a grand entrance hall and then the building was split into apartments as you went up or down the stairs. Ours was divided up curiously. Somebody had put in fake walls when they were making the flats, and there was a long squiggly sort of walk between the kitchen at one end and Richard's room, through the living room, at the other end. That was a good thing. We could cut ourselves off from each other when we needed to. He could do his meditating, me my half-arsed praying. I took the best bedroom. I got more sunlight. I figured I had found the place. I made a vague promise that we'd switch after six months. Let's see what happens.

So that was us back in the city. We just wanted to live quietly, slowly and cheaply. Our ambition was to wake up healthier than the...