Twenty-two years ago, on a grey spring afternoon in 1994, myself and my good mate Mo O’Hagan trudged up to a rehearsal studio just off North London’s grim Caledonian Road. Mo was there to rehearse with Shane MacGowan’s band, the Popes, and he had brought me along to blag a foreword for a little collection of short stories I’d put together, called Life Before Death. Mo had assured me that it was a good idea, that it would be useful publicity to get a quote from somebody famous to put on the cover. And Mo was sure that Shane would be glad to help; we had known Shane from before the earliest days of the Pogues and he had always encouraged me to write. Contrary to his tabloid stereotype, Shane was always hugely intelligent and well-read, referencing everybody from Hubert Selby to Akira Kurosawa.
That day, though, it was bit early for Shane and you could say that he wasn’t at his best. He told me to just write whatever I liked, just to make it up, that it didn’t matter. It mattered to me, though, as I wanted to use his words. That was the whole point.
We tried again. Mo helped. Shane made up something about the mythology of my name and my history as a stage-diving, mosh-pit crazy. That was good – except that I was using a pen name.
Oh.
The band were getting restless, waiting. So, Shane gave me a couple more lines and that was it.
I split for home in Finsbury Park and my young family. Mo stayed and played his guts out with the band, then hung out as bands do, in pubs and clubs and Camden Town.
Life Before Death came out shortly after as a sort of fanzine / chapbook in a very limited edition, printed by a friend. It was picked up by Mike Hart of Compendium Books in Camden, who put it in the window, and pushed it on his literary customers. Getting it into the shopfront of the best underground bookshop in the UK looked like success to me. That was all I wanted. I was stoked. Mo was still annoyed that I hadn't used my real name, though. He couldn't understand why I wanted the anonymity of a stupid pseudonym like William H Milk.
After that, I turned my attention to real lives instead of fiction and collected the stories and the history of the homeless and the disadvantaged around Camden and later, even in the hell-holes of hostels in the West End and beyond. I thought people’s real stories were more valuable than anything I could make up.
Over time, I concentrated on work, on my family and I lost contact with Mo. We hadn’t spoken in some time when he passed away. And I still regret that.
I kinda forgot about Life Before Death, as I worked in Europe, and then moved to Australia. It was only recently, after I had a piece published in New Philosopher magazine, that my wife Lida brought it back again to my attention. What about those other stories, she asked, those tender stories you wrote about family and friends? Why don’t you write stories like those anymore?
Yeah?
In an idle moment, I googled Life Before Death and found a copy still alive in an antiquarian bookshop in posh Hay-on-Wye. Maybe there was still a copy somewhere at home... I searched through the garage and found one in a battered, cockroach-riddled, cardboard shipping box. It had travelled a long way to get to Sydney and it was creased, battered, scrunched up; but all still there.
I laid its rusty staples on the operating table of the scanner and went to work.
In the digital resurrection, sections got mangled and meanings got mixed. The foreword was the worst affected. And yet, when I looked at it again, it seemed to make more sense. New structures had formed from the reassembled text as Shane’s words and my words got entangled. Initially nonsense phrases like “Mall guru” brought back memories of Mo. Metal Guru was our rhyming slang for Special Brew. Migrations from Shane’s foreword illuminated passages of mine.
Quiet be the auld fellah trod Arlington House.
with their papers
the tables in the back coops
Cooking up at the televisions
and then aging
as something about football
or the hordes was mentioned.
And that seemed about right, as Shane had always been a big fan of Burroughs and the Beat writers and their cut-up techniques. It was Shane, on a hungover Saturday morning in Primrose Hill, who had first alerted me to the brutal beauty of Allan Ginsberg’s Howl.
Shane’s scrambled foreword section ended:
But I think I’ve said enough...
Milk’s stories spoil for themselves
Fair enough. I worked away and restored the foreword and the unspoiled stories back to digital life, correcting them back to the original text, as best I could, and making them available online. This time, however, I used my real name – and the whole thing seemed to make a lot more sense. Mo had been right, all along.
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Foreword
I first met Jim McCool when he was a member of the Armagh crew coming to PogueMahone gigs in the early eighties. At the time, he was a semi-legendary figure in the audience, slam-dancing and banging his head against the stage, whilst drinking huge quantities of cider. This was the early McCool, a true Gaelic hero, worthy of his name…
As time progressed, we all got older, maybe wiser, maybe not…
McCool started to develop a talent for writing short stories … a literary figure in a pink drape jacket, with star potential.
His lust for life is reflected in his writing style, and in the content of his stories, which are hard-hitting pieces of poetry in prose form, which concentrate on the Irish in London and the “London-Irish”.
He is a man who manages to blend the lunacy and lecherousness of rock ‘n’ roll culture onto the written page. He is the most exciting writer I have read in many years.
But I think I’ve probably said enough… McCool’s stories speak for themselves.
Shane MacGowan, Spring 1994
Including Those That Were Not Long For This Road
It had seemed like weeks, but in reality, was only two weeks. Two weeks without sleep. And the new baby crying. And Joe’s wife crying. And the wife’s mother crying on the phone, till he had shouted at Linda, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, LINDA, PUT THAT FRIGGIN’ PHONE DOWN. Put that friggin’ phone down. But he hadn’t meant it, of course, had held his wife to him, saying, Ah’m juss SO BLOODY TIRED. Joe phoned the mother back and apologized, or at least, was going to apologize, but she hadn’t heard him shouting. The mother had enough worries on her plate, what with the father and that...
The baby couldn’t sleep because it was too wee and always HUNGRY and she, she said her breasts were sore, and her nipples were sore, and the baby just wanted to suck and suck and suck and suck, and she said, look, if these nipples start to bleed, please Joe, just hold the baby for a little while and rock it.
He had rocked it. He had rocked it to everything from Elvis to the Flamin’ Groovies and sometimes it had worked: Look Linda, it likes this one, I knew it would like Elvis, look, it’s going off to sleep. Sleep.
And he would lower it down, lower the wee thing (my precious little thing, he whispered) down into the cot and as soon as the baldy wee head would touch the sheet, it would startle and wriggle and twist its face up into a wee guru, writhing.
His wife said: You’re too tense, Joe. Just relax. The baby can feel you getting tense when you put him in his bed and that’s what wakes him up. Don’t tense up. Don’t tense up so much.
Well, of course he was bloody TENSE. Christ Almighty. How was he supposed to relax when he had been staggering about for hours, rocking the wee thing and every time, EVERY TIME, EVERY BLOODY TIME he tried to put the child down, IT WOKE UP. And then started screaming again.
So.
So Joe went to the kitchen and got a bottle of Buckfast wine out of the cupboard. He unscrewed the cap with one hand, with the baby cradled in the other arm, and lifted the half full bottle to his lips. Awful. Sweet and syrupy and awful like cough mixture.
God, it annoyed him so much, the wife always saying that: don’t tense up. Try not to tense up. They can sense your tenseness. But the wee thing would never SLEEP. How could you NOT be tense?
Joe took a huge swallow of the Buckfast and went to put it back in the cupboard, then thought, fuck it, if I have to stay awake, I might as well enjoy being awake...
He unscrewed the bottle-top again, took another slug, and then brought it through into the living room. Relax. That was it. When she had kept going on about TENSE, he had been going to say, had been going to SHOUT, that’s RIGHT, blame it on ME. The chile won’t sleep and you blame it on ME. How in the NAME of GOD am I supposed to relax? EH?
But he hadn’t shouted at her. He had swallowed it and he was glad, glad to see Linda with her eyes closed in the bed, exhausted and beautiful, blondely breathing up and down as her chest, her exhausted chest, moved softly up and down. He lay down, gently, beside her on the bed, putting the bottle on the bedside table, the baby in his lap. And, grabbing the remote, he turned on the television, jumping through the fuss of hiss, till he got the only channel that was working at this time of the morning. The Lucy Show. Powerful.
Stretching his arm backwards and forwards to the bedside table, he drank and watched, watched and drank, while trying not to creak the bed, or jerk the baby. John Wayne was the special guest star, BRILLIANT! And of course, Ricky brought him home, but Lucy and that other eejit, the woman that lived upstairs, mucked about, acting the cod. You could see John Wayne was embarrassed. It was great, though. Joe’d never seen such a great show in ages. And the baby fell asleep in his arms, comfortable, as Linda slept on, beside him.
When Lucy was over, and the Buckfast bottle was nearly empty, Joe turned the telly off, and lifted his wee baby son up off the bed. The chile was fast asleep, breathing sweetly like its mother, its wee eyes clenched tightly together.
It was dawn and he lifted the curtain for a minute and looked out on the Holloway Road. He moved the chile toward the window and bent softly toward it, kissing it gently, careful not to rub his stubble against it. He had been too tired to shave.
It was dawn and, on the road, things were starting to move. Early workers. Bin-men, road-sweepers, bus drivers. Building labourers, heading off for distant sites, going to pick-up points for Aylesbury, Milton Keynes, Hamel Hempstead and beyond. Dark figures trooping through the cold, bent and tired, toward their day’s work. They had left warm flats, houses, bed-sits, sleeping children and sleeping wives, lovers. Joe watched them moving slowly through the early morning dark, seeing them moving slow along the road. They moved stiffly, like cold old men, after a lifetime of work. There were those amongst them that were not long for this world, not long for this road.
Joe’s son in his arms was warm, warm and with the whole road ahead of him. Joe let the greyed curtain drop over the dirt of the double-glazing, and turned toward the bed. The wee baby in his arms slept on, and soon Joe too, would sleep. He brought the boy over to his cot and lowered him in. The chile didn’t stir, but flopped its little arms above its head in a gesture of surrender to the deepest sleep. Quietly, Joe crept over and got in beside his wife.
Copyright Jim McCool, Sydney, 2016
