Boy Friends, page 1
Further praise for Boy Friends:
‘What an enchanting and astonishingly compelling read: beautifully, bouncingly and sparklingly written. A book that leaps so assuredly from joy to sorrow, from hilarity to lamentation and back to laughter again, is rare and to be treasured. Above all I came away feeling how lucky both Michael Pedersen and Scott Hutchison were to have found each other. A friend is a masterpiece of nature, Emerson said – and this book is as perfect a portrait of that natural masterpiece as I have ever read.’ Stephen Fry
‘Boy Friends is a love letter to friendship. Michael Pedersen hauntingly captures the exhilaration and the romance of fine friendship and the terror and bewilderment at the loss of it. Boy Friends is gut-wrenching and yet gallus too – taking us on a rollercoaster journey of love and loss that makes you say to yourself, more than once, yes, that’s it exactly.’ Jackie Kay
‘With a dazzling and inventive use of language as is befitting of a poet of his reputation, this sweetly unconventional work by Michael Pedersen, whilst dripping in raw grief, is uncommonly romantic, irreverent and at times laugh-out-loud funny. A delight really. And that’s that.’ Shirley Manson (Garbage)
‘Michael writes with true sensitivity and power. His words burrow down to the core of it all while at the same time offering the soaring perspective of the poet-soul. Deeply felt, carefully crafted, his language firing with pace and wit.’ Kae Tempest
‘It lifted my spirits in the way Ali Smith does.’ Val McDermid
‘As tender as honeysuckle and as bracing as a Hebridean beach. Boy Friends makes you feel as if you’ve gone on a holiday with someone dazzling. I’m ordering lots of copies for my boy friends.’ Mark Cousins
‘This beautiful book is overflowing with pathos and deep humanity. Send it to every friend you’ve ever loved.’ Charlotte Church
‘Those hungry for the bone-deep truth about grief will devour Michael Pedersen’s account of a friend lost … Boy Friends takes us into the friendships of Pedersen’s life; the boys and men who were, still are in some cases, his great loves. The most devastating, seductive and achingly funny writing of all is reserved for his remembrances of Scott, who lives on so vitally in the space between Pedersen’s words. A love letter of friendship that’s so rarely written, Boy Friends is a dazzling act of generosity and an entirely original blast of non-fiction.’ Terri White
‘Michael’s writing is exactly as playful and invigorating as the man himself. His unique signature of honest vulnerability and bravery is always arresting and generous in a world where most find it safer to dampen and cloak their true spirit. Praise be for all this book brings us.’ Ewen Bremner
‘Like the best hugs, Pedersen’s writing is tight, warm and comforting. Through pain and loss comes sweetness and love in a book you’ll want to hand to all your friends.’ Monisha Rajesh
‘Boy Friends is a tender, glowing thing, sincere and open and wonderful; exactly the balm that toxic stew we call masculinity needs right now.’ Kirstin Innes
‘Sensitive, urgent, passionate – it reminds us to hold those we love close.’ Cal Flyn
‘To locate gratitude in grief is an achievement. To map that journey out with such honesty and humour is a genuine triumph.’ Darren McGarvey
‘A writer that binds us, helps us celebrate the best things about being human and what makes us crackle up with both wonder and laughter.’ Gemma Cairney
‘A kaleidoscopic, helter-skelter, hedonistic, Henry Milleresque hurtle through the grief and shock in the aftermath of the suicide of a much-loved male friend spins off into an elegy for friendship itself in all its lifelong manifestations. Quirkily, deeply, painfully personal.’ Liz Lochhead
‘Honest reflections on the gut punch of grief are a precious commodity. Friends die. And if we live long enough, loss will hit us many times. Boy Friends pays beautiful tribute both to the treasure and joy of friendship and the pain and bewilderment of grief – a gift to anyone who loves anyone.’ Jo Browning Wroe
‘I loved this book. I’m going to tell my friends about it and then I’m going to double my efforts to be a better friend … The book is about so much more than loss. It made me wish to be as good a friend to those I love as Michael is, more than that, it made me wish Michael was my friend.’ Ricky Ross (Deacon Blue)
‘Part portrait of the artist, part In Memoriam, the rich seam of loss and glory in Pedersen’s masterful conjuration with its fizzing lingo, with its wisecracks and insights makes for a compelling and unforgettable read! Very moving whilst curiously humorous.’ Daljit Nagra
‘Inventive, true, absorbing, funny, elegiac. This is a wonderful book that voices something very special.’ Helen Mort
‘Boy Friends is a funny, poignant and thoughtful exploration into the bonds of male friendship. It’s a terrific read.’ Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub)
‘A book as full of joy and gratitude as it is of grief and regret, Boy Friends refuses to consign lost friends to the shadows.’ James Robertson
‘This book broke my heart and made me cry. Thanks, Michael. As if I didn’t have enough problems with the end of the world and trying to find ointment for the dog’s rash. It’s also really beautiful and funny. Just like the author.’ Dominic Hoey
‘Pedersen is intoxicating company – by turns giddy and tender, loquacious and recklessly honest.’ Clare Pollard
‘Michael’s beautiful words are like someone unleashing murmurations of psychedelic-patterned butterflies toward you – words, or more gifts, anchored with love, grief and the ambient longing that perhaps always accompanies the ability to love.’ Dot Allison
‘With staggering sensitivity, lyrical eloquence and razor-sharp wit, Michael Pedersen’s Boy Friends shines a rainbow of light onto the beautiful and often heartbreaking nature of human connection.’ Emun Elliott
‘If charm can save Scotland, Michael Pedersen has it in spades. And if love can save the world, this book proves he’s got that too.’ Nick Currie (Momus)
‘Boy Friends is a beautifully realised rendering of a relationship that has endured even beyond death, a testament to male friendships everywhere, and a heart-shaped hole filled with words and poetry and glittering memories. What was dark is made new and blooming by Pedersen’s incredible talent and emotional range.’ Alan Bissett
‘Inimitable, exceptional and very, very beautiful.’ Jeff Barrett
‘This is a gorgeous and courageous book, the writing is so beautiful and evocative.’ Salena Godden
‘Joyful and comic but with a stone of sadness at its centre. A playful and original memoir about the beauty and craziness of friendship; a lament for loss and an assertion of the value and privilege of friendship.’ David Shrigley
Michael Pedersen
Boy Friends
to the friends we love to excess
yet still
not nearly
enough
&
to h-craft (a-l-w-a-y-s)
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1: Curfew Tower After Curfew
Chapter 2: Come What May into June
Chapter 3: An Aftermath’s Guide to Breathing
Chapter 4: The Tackle Shop Eternal
Notes
Acknowledgements and Thanks
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
Ever feel like you were fated to be friends with someone? An alchemy in your meeting, instant fondness – part chemical, part kismet. This is how I’ve felt about every friend I’ve fallen in love with – none so much as you.
Now that you’re gone, I want to talk about you more than I care to admit. I find ways to meander and u-bend conversations into stories with you at the yolk of them.
While the friendships we forge inhabit us, there’s no escaping that one day we’ll be without them. They may go kindly with expected effervescence, or, as with you, ungentle and sudden. Either way, grief will come for the heart exposed, like hungry seabirds for a carcass washed ashore.
The invisibility in missing you can be savage. Often it feels such extreme emotion should be worn as a sash or garish lanyard, visually obvious in a manner that commands attention; or, at the very least, avoidance. Think a massive mottled bruise alluding to dramatics or hair going grey from some horrendous fright.
Other times, this couldn’t be further from the truth, and the idea that people might bear witness to my grief is humiliating and abhorrent.
I started writing this because I needed a way to keep talking to you, to honour then outlive the loss, and commemorate the impact you’ve had on me. It’s how we stay together now we’re torn apart. Like Ernest Hemingway said: ‘Write hard and clear about what hurts.’
We often spoke about finding our friends / our friends finding us – what I would chance to call the mathematics of male friendship, yet you were smarter and clearer about; although I can’t for the life of me remember how you worded it, because it was more of a feeling than a phrase.
We mused on being older starters, the joy in having all this catching up to do, about preparing ourselves for loving and losing more friends than any other category of human relation – the mettle this takes.
There was still so much I needed to share with you – this, my method of addressing that. This book, which started as a celebration of you and grew into a celebration of many friendships, perhaps all friendship. What began sweet and meek, yet more lurid than I hoped for, was soon striving to be a testimony of survival. Its list of ingredie
Funny how missing you has me fishing through my own past, rummaging in the understory of my boy friends. Has me sculpting maxims and conjuring conclusions: if there is a day of reckoning ahead, above all else, I hope to be judged on the friendships I cherished and the love I invested in them.
We’re not getting you, my clever bastard, back (not as we know it), and I get that. Accepting the finality of this is a Herculean task, best buttressed by any means necessary.
How else might we digest its massiveness? A beastly bite of grief where a friend should be is simply unacceptable. I really, REALLY, fucking miss you, and must be getting on.
1
Curfew Tower After Curfew
4 July 2018
Cushendall, Northern Ireland
I am a resident of The Curfew Tower in Cushendall, docked here for the lion’s share of this preposterous month.
I have a lime green desk on the second floor of the Tower, hovering above Mill Street with Bridge Street beyond. A picture of you is on the windowsill – the card is porous so light ribbons through it. Its flip side can be seen from the busy high street when passers-by gawk up at this fanciful abode. It is an order of service as opposed to a fan poster. It is standing sentry, setting the pace, watching all. Poetry books by Billy Collins, Sarah Howe, Jackie Kay, Ocean Vuong and Seamus Heaney brood by my side – these I brought. There are two muskets and a gold-painted electric guitar to my right – curios of the Tower, along with dozens of artworks left by residents over the years.
Also with me is a copy of our book, Oyster. I wrote the poems, you illustrated the pages, and we launched it with vim and tenacity all over the UK and South Africa. This Oyster, jointly parented, was not simply a tangible object but the impetus to develop a show, a ticket to travel and means of securing holidays. More than that, it was and still is a monument to friendship.
Outside is County Antrim: an uncharted hunk of land – its curling coastline, steep gradients and sweeping geometry all new. A perfect stranger, the table-topped Lurigethan Mountain shadows over the town like a protective giant. As expected, it’s relentlessly bonny. Its environs boast dramatic coastal walks and a bustling population of oystercatchers. The town is mystical, brimming with lore and a key stopping point for folk music troubadours. In juxtaposition to its phantasmagorical qualities, there’s a poorly stocked EuroSpar and glut of neon salons.
These recent months have been more brutal than any I’ve ever known. Any human hopes to make a statement of this magnitude only once but that’s a chimera, though a figment I’ll pin my hopes to for now.
We are small and it’s unlikely the universe really needs us in the manner we want it to. But the way we look at the world and those that orbit with us, if we’re lucky, sparks up a teeny cosmic significance.
I am thirty-three years old when – in the month of May 2018 – I learn we have lost you: a favourite creature and my dearest friend. Your leaving is tragic, abrupt, heartbreaking. Last seen in the vicinity of an iconic Edinburgh bridge, you end your own life. You were thirty-six years old.
You die the same year as Stan Lee, Aretha Franklin, Stephen Hawking and Barry Chuckle – none so young.
There is a condition called hypermnesia where people have complete, abundantly vivid memories of key periods, and can replay the past like favourite films shot in high definition. I do not have this burdensome blessing.
My memory of your final months, the close time we spent together before you went, I carry with me to The Curfew Tower (known neatly as Curfew). Here, I chastise, celebrate, mourn, grieve and pontificate this period incessantly. The memories are bloody and fragmented.
Curfew is a most veritable tower, an antique edifice in the heart of the town. Built by one Francis Turnley in the 1820s, you might say it’s Cushendall’s Eiffel Tower – said to be ‘the great object of Mr Turnley’s thoughts’ it was erected ‘as a place of confinement for idlers and rioters’. It is now owned by artist Bill Drummond, who oversees these residencies.
Lurking on the ground floor there is a dungeon – a block of total brick, a dank square in which the entombed air feels heavy and foreboding. The emptiness makes me queasy. I don’t ever fully close the chunky oak door for fear the metal lock snaps shut of its own volition. During the day, I pass it in slow motion to instil the impression I’m not afraid. In the evening, I whip past stealthily to avoid finding out whether its haunted reputation is tongue in cheek or more duly earned.
Upon arrival, writers and artists are met by one of Cushendall’s best-loved citizens, Zippy. The Guardian of the Keys, he is the sentinel who opens up the Tower and oversees any resident’s month-long stay. Zippy is the local butcher and not overly enamoured by vegetarians – although he makes exceptions for those of esteemed character. His shop is called Kearney’s Fleshers and is spitting distance from the dungeon’s street-facing wall. Zippy jovially checks in on guests and the anointed few receive an invite to his marital home, where he cooks steaks of the calibre guidebook buffs go gummy for.
You were going to come to Curfew, would have met Zippy and known all this. We would have sauntered, ordered from the Specials Board of every restaurant, visited all the watering holes – starting off in Johnny Joe’s folk bar and ending up in a seedy pub in Belfast with no clue how we got there. We would have explored the territory and uncovered key locations in propinquity to Curfew where epic scenes from the HBO hit series Game of Thrones were filmed. I’d have cajoled you into re-enacting a panoply of the central dramas.
Top of that list would have been a bamboozling occurrence shot in a cave near Cushendun where a Red Priestess (Melisandre) gives birth to a spooky demon (known on the GOT wiki as Shadow Baby) that heaves itself out the birthing canal, then launches off to slay a royal chap vying for the throne. It would seem there is a very short labour when giving birth to a Shadow Baby, a smoother and swifter process than most human and animal births and thus ideal for portrayal on a hit TV series; or amateur re-enactments. I would have let you choose whether to play the Priestess or the Shadow Baby, perhaps the swirling birth residue, but not any of the flummoxed onlookers.
An even more important occurrence, which was due to take place in Curfew, would have involved a meticulously curated viewing of Bruce Robinson’s 1987 cult classic, Withnail & I. This would have been your first viewing of a film I’ve seen perhaps fifty times and have quoted to you and others, in detail, for several years. I own a copy of the script signed by Richard E. Grant (who plays Withnail – the premier rogue) and vehemently believe there is a Withnail & I quote for every situation.
Withnail & I depicts two out-of-work actors, with a penchant for booze, who flee London for a weekend’s respite in the country. They do so by tricking a wealthy eccentric uncle into gifting them the keys to his Penrith cottage, where they become embroiled in a dispute with a local poacher, who they are convinced intends to murder them. An unannounced visit from the uncle reveals his prurient intentions and leads to both hilarity and despair. It’s callously funny and one of the most exquisite scripts I’ve ever chomped on.
During this inaugural watching we would have drunk the second bottle of M’hudi, a very special wine, which I had brought back for you from South Africa. You would have become a W&I fanatic and demanded to journey to Crow Crag for your birthday later in the year. I would have acquiesced.
Crow Crag (real name Sleddale Hall) is a farmhouse on the north side of the Wet Sleddale Valley (Cumbria) owned by the above-mentioned Uncle Monty, which plays host to a marvellous luncheon and a near buggering. The property has stunning landscape sloshed all round it and lives atop rolling hills; there’s a semblance here to Curfew. Amblers from all the surrounding districts get frothy for both buildings’ anachronistic brawness. I would not be the first to compare Curfew to Crow Crag, though am unable to do so with you.
