Guitars

31/12/2021

Fiction    Download PDF  

1

I hadn’t seen Ben for about five years when I was sitting in a cafe reading my book and, raising my eyes, noticed a couple arriving who looked like they may have entered the wrong place. The cafe was for students at the art college, and for the sort of worker, like myself, who liked reading, writing, or researching in public places. The cafe was around the corner from the film centre nearby and the college across the road. It had exposed brick on one wall and student artwork on another. A third wall was behind the kitchen and the counter, and the fourth had two large windows and the door through which the couple had just entered. It was a deliberately shabby style and theirs was not. He was dressed in what I would have guessed was an Armani or Hugo Boss suit, clearly tailor-made and charcoal in colour, and the shoes were I am sure of an Italian design. She was dressed in puff blue, with a bag a darker shade and shoes that matched the bag. I took all this in momentarily, and it wasn’t until after this first impression that the second one told me that this was Ben. His hair was now short on the sides, and longer on top, but it looked like a very careful fade that showed no sign of different lengths from one number to the next that the barber would have used to grade it in.

He hadn’t noticed me and so, while they ordered, I observed Ben and his companion with some scrutiny. They were at least lovers and may have even been engaged but I hadn’t noticed their hands coming in and couldn’t see their hands as I watched them from behind. Their body language suggested intimacy, and yet also familiarity. The relationship was probably at least a year old I surmised, and I suspected he was taking her to the cafe to show her some of the places he would hang around in when he had long hair, a beard, and would sit with a few of us as we all discussed our chosen field of interest: his was music, mine was literature, another’s was film, a fourth friend worked part-time at the art college, a fifth gave poetry readings in the cafe and at a couple of other venues in the city. 

I was never close to Ben and we became acquainted through the cafe; he would come in at least a couple of times a week and one day we nodded to each other, the next time chatted briefly and after that I suggested he join a group of us as we sat around discussing politics as often as art. We were all successful enough to be recognised for the work we did but none of us made enough money to allow for the slightest change in our lives. The flats we rented we stayed in because they were cheap and the landlord didn’t want to put the price up since we were long-term tenants. The jobs we had we remained in as we knew that our employers gave us time to work on our art and gave us time off at short notice if we needed it. We were between sloth and integrity, between taking our work very seriously and showing not enough ambition to take it more seriously still. I am not sure If I would agree with this diagnosis but it was one our families, friends, and emotional partners sometimes offered and over the years people have wondered why I had been in the same flat and teaching in the same language school for more than a decade. Sometimes I feel they are right; that I lack ambition and purpose, that I play at being a writer rather than dedicate myself to the task. And yet I write at every opportunity, help with friends’ work, and I constantly seek out new writers to read. 

Yet I also see new writers appearing in the press and talking about their work as a business proposition, as a gap in the market, and where they speak with joy of how they felt when at a book festival they met some of their heroes. I have never been invited to a book festival and would prefer to read my heroes than meet them. But I suppose you can’t network by staying in all weekend absorbing a writer’s fiction; better to read one book and enthuse about it as you elbow your way towards meeting them. If I sound cynicaI, I would like to distinguish cynicism from bitterness. The cynic senses the compromises they will or will not make; the bitter person feels that they have been unlucky, that writers with less talent than they have succeeded, that nobody gave them a chance. I am not bitter: I have perhaps ignored chances I have had and certainly not tried to capitalise on any hint of one that has been given. I have been accused of both bitterness and cynicism and accepted the latter but have resisted vociferously the former. When I am now accused of bitterness I then tell them the story of Ben, and my interaction with him after his success, and say, afterwards, to those who have listened, that it is true I am a cynic.

  2

After ordering Ben and his partner looked around the room for a seat and he seemed to look through me before noticing a familiar face that hadn’t changed much. Neither had my attire, nor my habit of sitting at around 2 in the afternoon reading a book or working on my laptop. Before taking an available table on the other side of the cafe, they came over as Ben introduced Rachel as his fiancee and said he hadn’t been back in Edinburgh for a while but it was great to see me again. There wasn’t space to suggest they sit next to me. There was a chair available and they could have grabbed another one but the table was so small that there wouldn’t have been space for the cake they probably ordered as well as the coffee, tea or hot chocolate, and I thought I saw on Ben’s face a momentary calculation (whether it would have been polite or rude to ask if I wanted to join them at the bigger table, disrupting me from my work and where I would have to carry a bag, a coffee, a laptop and a book to the other side of the room, while also momentarily wondering too whether Rachel would have wished me to share with them). After an hour, they came over again and Ben asked if he could join me; Rachel was off to buy a lamp she had first seen online, at an antique shop along Newington. Of course, I said. Even if I hadn’t liked Ben, even if I had been resistant to this new and expensive image, I would have wished to find out how he became the man he had become.

The last I knew was that several years ago he had moved to Glasgow, reckoning the music options in the city were far greater than in Edinburgh. I would have assumed he was making music and not much of a living, that he may have found the odd extra gig but nothing that would transform his life. He hadn’t been close enough to any of us for him to keep in contact after he moved, and I suppose I hadn’t thought about him at all for a couple of years. The incuriosity I had shown before was antithetical to the inquisitiveness I now showed as I half-ignored his interest in my life and asked him questions about his. 

He started by telling me why he first moved to Glasgow. He said he knew of course that Glasgow was supposedly much better for music than Edinburgh but what made this most apparent to him was a certain item he saw in the flats that were for sale. He had come into a small amount of money that would pass for a decent deposit, worked out that he could afford a place for about £120,000 and that the mortgage would be lower than rent. In Edinburgh, he worked a couple of days a week and earned just enough to get a mortgage that he probably would have been refused if it weren’t for the decent deposit. But while looking, he noticed how many properties had guitars in them, as though Glasgow were a city of musicians. He started looking in Edinburgh not because he had any interest in staying in the city and couldn’t have afforded to buy, but to see if there was such a proliferation of guitars in the flats for sale in the Scottish capital. When he found there weren’t he took this to be an omen: that he was meant to move to Glasgow and pursue his musical career. 

Not only did he buy a Glasgow flat but he became friends with the seller, a man around his own age who admitted, when Ben was buying the place, that the guitars in the photos, a lead guitar in the bedroom, and a bass guitar in the living room, hadn’t belonged to the people selling; they were put there by him. Another agency had started the craze and so they bought several guitars and placed them in the property when they were up for sale. Ben had asked him how did he know that they worked and he said there wasn’t much hard evidence, no statistical data as far as he knew, but that people often commented on the guitars in the way they didn’t comment on other things in the apartments they were selling. It was true enough that when Ben looked at online properties he had seen plenty flats with guitars, but thought that was appealing to him: as a musician, he wanted to live in a city with a lot of musicians, or at least people interested in music enough to buy a guitar. 

For a few months afterwards Ben was a little disillusioned: there he was in a city that didn’t necessarily love music as he had hoped, but was full of estate agents who knew the pulling power of a musical instrument. While in Edinburgh, Ben worked in a couple of private schools, earning about £40 an hour, and he continued working there, commuting back and forth, in his first few months in Glasgow. He also still did the occasional gig in Edinburgh, and managed too to secure a slot once a fortnight in a cafe bar where he played a mixture of his own songs and covers. But he found that moving to Glasgow didn’t create many more opportunities and left him often exhausted and split as he moved between the two cities. He instead found himself thinking more about the idea of music and when he next met up with the estate agent, he asked if he knew of any opportunities in the agency trade. The agent said he could enquire; they had four agencies in the city — maybe they were looking to take on staff. A couple of months later a position became available, Ben applied and, perhaps with the help of his friend, got the job. He didn’t initially cut his hair short but he trimmed it, and he reduced his beard to a faint stubble. He gave up the teaching work in Edinburgh, and declined any gigs there, and kept only the once a fortnight cafe evening that he has long since given up. 

He explained to me that he might have stopped playing music but oddly he didn’t feel he was being any less creative in his new job than he had been in his old one. Playing covers and teaching students had become repetitive and stale. It was as though the music no longer had the impetus behind it. There was music but no spirit: and he was so often yawning and unfocused when he taught that he didn’t think he was being fair to the children. When he became an estate agent he was re-energised and constantly looked forward to new properties and new people: the permutations seemed many while in music they had become few. He would never have thought he would have felt more creative renting and selling flats than playing guitar but that was how he felt. 

However, what added to this feeling of creativity was that he pondered over whether the guitar was the only appealing object for house buyers to witness, and surely it only worked with some clients, far from all. He wondered if other instruments worked as well if not better, and so sometimes he would take the various other instruments he owned (a cello, a violin, a trumpet, a saxophone and a clarinet) and placed them in various apartments he was selling. He reckoned a two-bedroom flat he was showing people around in Cecil Street, near the university, would benefit more from a cello than a guitar; an attic flat on Park Circus seemed to demand a clarinet, while a place in Hyndland somehow needed a violin. He believed that he was adding thousands to the price even as he had no evidence for this, though he sometimes would show people around a flat where he hadn’t placed a musical instrument and was sure there had been less enthusiasm. Whether or not it was helping, he became within a few months one of their most successful salespeople, and he said this with surprise more than boastfulness, even if looking at him, with his impeccable attire and manicured hands, he may have given the image of immodesty. Others might have seen a self-made man but as Ben talked it was as though he wanted to muse over how he had become a success, yes, but also from another point of view a failure: contained within this new image of a man of money was buried inside it the shrunken image of a failed musician. He wondered how many people who were making money were failures within their success, and all those houses and apartments that he sold in the last few years, with the signs of creative aspiration, captured in clients a sorrowful awareness that they could afford to buy the place — but they no longer could expect to devote themselves to a musical vocation. 

It was with this in mind he expanded beyond musical instruments and utilised other creative objects as well, often implying that the paintings on the wall, the pottery on the sideboard, or the printed poems framed, were by the people presently living in the house. By this stage he had opened his own agency, employing five people, and had in the cellar at the office numerous cultural items that made the back room look a bit like an antique shop. At weekends he wandered round markets, charity shops and antique fairs, looking for items that would seem appropriate to the places he was selling. He never lied to anyone if they asked, though they rarely did — which might be why he often never knew for sure if the buyers were at all influenced by these touches. But if they did ask he replied honestly: he said that he liked to put something in the houses he was selling; a sort of good luck charm; a hint of superstition. Would he have started lying if almost everybody had asked him about the guitar of the cello, the painting or the framed poem? He couldn’t say — but he was open when asked.

He said to me he didn’t feel any more dishonest selling and renting houses than he sometimes felt as a musician. When he covered a song and sang it as though it was his own, clearly everybody in the audience knew it wasn’t his, but he had to give the impression that for the few minutes he played it that it happened to be. The audience may have cheered and clapped as he started playing it but that wasn’t recognition of his talent, such as it was, but a recognition of a song they had heard many times over. His purpose was no more than to remind them of that song, singing it competently enough for it to match their memory. It often felt to him far more dishonest than sticking a painting up on the wall or a guitar against a chair. With music, he thought that the apparent freedom available to him making it was in reality very little freedom at all. But being an estate agent felt much freer within the obvious constraints. Going round antique fairs reminded him of the days when he would go each weekend to the shops looking for second-hand records. His eighteen-year-old self could never have imagined that this thirty-three-year-old self would get pleasure from working as an agent and buying objects to place inside the properties, but he would let others decide whether that was selling out, false consciousness, bad faith or whatever other term the more critical or theoretically inclined might throw at him. What he did know was that he felt purposeful and comfortable. Was that so bad? Should he feel guilty about it?

3

We talked for a further twenty minutes until Rachel returned, and she joined us for another ten before they both left. They seemed happier than the others I knew who were still seeing making art as their priority even if they couldn’t make it their main source of income. He didn’t seem at all bitter, resentful or regretful and for a while afterwards I wondered if this was because I and others were deluded in our focus or that the problem wasn’t with us making art but the expectation that we ought to make money from it. If Ben had become a success as an estate agent then it wasn’t as though there was an alternative path of the failed estate agent. The estate agent who fails presumably goes bankrupt or retreats from the business. However, the failed artist is still an artist, and many of the most failed of artists have gone on to become the most important figures after their death. Many a writer, painter or musician may use the failed artist as an excuse for their unrecognised genius but no matter how obvious a cover for their lack of success this may be, there are enough failed artists who become successes posthumously for the notion to have far more validity than that of failed estate agents. Ben had clearly become a successful one and yet, within that success, he was very keen to convince me of something. What that was I couldn’t quite say, as if much of the conversation was taken up by him explaining his position. 

A week after seeing Ben in the cafe I was reading an interview with the Scottish painter Jock McFadyen, who was talking about his career generally but talked quite specifically about his time as an artist in the seventies in London. It was a special time, he reckoned, because work was respected not for how much it made but the rigour of how it was made. He reckoned for the generation after him, things changed. People, it seemed, were expected to sell their work as Ben was expected to sell houses; maybe it was better to sell a house than to regurgitate a song: nobody was inclined to say that selling a home was selling out; it was merely selling on. This thought nagged me for a while and yet I was aware too that Ben was justifying himself more than necessary for a man who had made the right decision. But I was still surprised when a few weeks after we had seen each other in the cafe, he contacted me. Our swapping numbers I assumed was a formality — more for him than for me. He was no doubt constantly exchanging details with people, and I saw it as a tic of the trade rather than an indication of friendship. Yet there he was asking if I wanted to come through to Glasgow. 

I supposed it was curiosity that made me agree; after seeing the style offered in his clothing I wondered too where he might be living. How he decorated his home. I arrived in the mid-afternoon on a Friday since he finished at 3, and, with Ben picking me up from the station, we drove across the city to the West End and to a place that appeared quite close to the Botanic gardens. The car he drove was new and presumably top of the range; all I knew was that it was a BMW, with soft leather interiors and laminated wood around the gearbox and elsewhere. The flat was a large ground floor apartment with garden access front and rear, and with a mezzanine office. There were paintings on the walls, a long, high bookcase, with only a handful of books, stretching the length of the hallway, and the flat had plants hanging in the kitchen and standing in the living room. It balanced well looking lived in and ready to sell, a place that people could envy but imagine themselves affording. It was salubrious but not quite luxurious. It had two bathrooms but no bath, only showers, and the kitchen was awkward, an L-shaped room with the cooking area, galley-like, and the dining space a little cramped. The steps leading up to the mezzanine were narrow and steep, and the ceiling too low for someone over six-foot. I gleaned all this through a combination of remarks Ben and later Rachel made, and a couple of trips to the bathroom that allowed me to see through open doors into other rooms. 

They insisted I stay for dinner and during it Ben said he had a proposition for me. I expected him to offer me a job; instead, he offered me a flat. He said he was thinking of starting a scheme to help people in the creative industries (his phrase) who didn’t have much money. He asked me how much I was paying for my place and could I describe what it was like. I said it needed work, and had needed it for several years but the rent was cheaper than anybody else was paying in the area in which I was living. I said the new tenants who had moved in below me were paying three hundred pounds more than I was, though it was the same size. Years earlier the landlord below had turned the flat into a two-bedroom apartment by making the kitchen into a bedroom and the lounge into a kitchen dining area. Perhaps I was wary of my landlord doing anything in case he chose to do everything; including a major conversion that could see my compact space suddenly become two-bedroom and with prices to match it. I also said the cooker needed replacing, the storage heaters were ineffective and the windows rattled when there was a bit of blustery weather.

Ben said that for less than I was paying he could find me a place that would be bigger and newer. He said that his plan was to get various landlords whose properties were a little run down to let him do them up and rent them out: they would get a guaranteed if modest income but they wouldn’t have to invest any money in them and the company would pay the owner a set monthly sum. Ben had noticed while renting out flats in the last five years many apartments were in poor condition, often with mild damp, plumbing problems, tables with wonky legs and cookers that would cut out when a ring wouldn’t work. Sometimes the places would go unrented for many weeks, and with some flats the owners could get students in for eight or nine months of the year but couldn’t rent it over the summer. He said that if a landlord rented it for £600 but only had tenants for 9 months, that was the equivalent of getting £450 for twelve months of the year. He would take it over, do a makeover and rent it for £450. The landlord wouldn’t need to worry about the rent and would have a property in much better condition. It also meant, Ben added, that he could stop feeling ashamed showing people around places that were hardly fit to live in. He admitted that this wasn’t an entirely altruistic exercise; he hoped if the project worked that he might eventually be able to get some sort of grant from the Scottish government but, even if he didn’t, it was a project that interested him for its own sake. I looked around Ben and Rachel’s tastefully furnished flat and thought that perhaps when I initially noticed it was just a little lived in, I might have also said that it contained a bohemian touch. I suppose he wanted to expand that across the city and I was unsure whether to be flattered or otherwise that I was the person he wished to experiment upon.

4

I heard occasionally from Ben over the next three months as he told me how his project was progressing, and he said that of course if I wanted to remain in Edinburgh and in my flat that was fine but his purpose was to lure me from both. I said I was open to the possibility; had indeed been thinking a lot about leaving Edinburgh. When I started teaching English as a foreign language I would have students for a few months and then never see them again. Increasingly, though, when students leave the school, they now ask me if I will continue helping them improve their English by teaching them online. I now have private students from India, China, Spain, France and Italy. I have also gained others from word of mouth: that relatives and friends who might have before come for three months to the city and enrolled on a course, have instead stayed at home and I’ve taught them over a year, often longer. I could move to Glasgow or anywhere else without financial pain and perhaps, taking into account the modest rent Ben promised, financial gain. I was sure I could persuade the school to let me teach one day of the week instead of three mornings if I did want to remain affiliated with the city and with the school. 

The more I thought about it, the more it appeared not just a good idea but an elaborating one. I found myself thinking how I would commute between the two cities. I didn’t drive, and would have been happy to get the train occasionally but not every week, and though I cycled it may have been too arduous there and back while teaching for six hours in between. I looked at the price of electrical mopeds, checking their speed and the distance they could travel without requiring a charge.

I have often thought that my life couldn’t countenance change except internally, and people in the past have come up against this resistance, asking why I was reluctant to marry, have children or buy a house. It was as if I believed that any external change to my life might weaken the internal impetus of it: that the decisions I had to make were on the page. It seemed to me that Ben was the ultimate manifestation of this externalisation and yet here he was potentially determined to change my life, and look at what had happened to him by changing his? Looking at Ben’s tailored clothes, his designer gear, his generally spacious apartment, where everything from the plates we ate off to the glasses we drank out of, the bathroom hand-wash and the mirror I looked in, came at a price he could afford, I saw how external decisions were made into material comfort. Ben was a competent musician who found he was a more than competent businessman, and had even convinced himself (and perhaps rightly) that he could find more creativity in his work as an estate agent than he could in a band, or even performing solo. When he talked about singing covers he managed to convey to me the sadness of that life and the purposefulness of his present one, managing to do so without undermining other musicians or my literary endeavours.

Yet while I was thinking of this modest change that Ben said he was looking to offer me, I was not a little troubled. I’ve always fretted over anything that is designed to make a writer, a painter, a musician or an actor’s life easier. Some countries have given artists special rights. In France, they have ‘intermittent du spectacle’, a form of unemployment benefit that creative people receive if they work a certain number of hours a year. In Ireland, people in the creative professions are exempt from tax. I preferred the British system which had allowed people to languish or flourish on the dole as they didn’t in the past push people too hard into jobs that they didn’t want to do. Many people had signed on before becoming well-known and they were no different in their unemployed status than anybody else. If they were taking advantage of the system, in the right-wing parlance, they were doing so like everyone. They weren’t exceptional. 

Yet at the same time, I suppose I did think people involved in the arts were if not special, different. I could see a simplicity in Ben’s life that I might not even have wished to see in my own. He was making pragmatic decisions that satisfied his ego and his material wants and I didn’t think this cynically. His world however seemed both simple and complicated: simple in that he knew that he had an appointment book and flats to show people around; simple in that he knew how to make a profit on each aspect of the work he was doing. No doubt it was logistically complicated making sure his staff knew where and when to go, and he had to fill in complex tax forms and sort out staff wages. Maybe they are simpler than I imagine but it at least appeared complicated to me. 

He had both the simplicity and the complications involved in categorical cause and effect. He might agree to sell someone’s flat for them and then find complications, and a plumber would be hired, or a gas engineer, who was only available at certain hours, and which member of staff was free to let the worker in? Ben had said that he was very involved in the process of renting and selling houses and maybe other agents weren’t but I could see for him that these complications were effective: that the houses he sold, he said, often went well over the asking price, and more so he reckoned than at other estate agent’s. It was worth the effort: the work, as they say, paid dividends. 

Phrases like that, paid dividends, had no meaning to me, but when Ben used them they had a tangible reality to him. At best they could be words on a page for me to try and understand, to provide content to them, without any concern over their manifestation out there in the world. I could delete them, move them around, ignore them altogether. I had the freedom to do so and the world that had built up around them I could also demolish, with no need of planning permission. I had responsibility for the words I used but I didn’t have to feed them, clothe them, house them or pay for their education. They weren’t my words as a child is a parent’s child, and when I write the words feed or clothe, how many other writers have used these words, and not only writers but people in a second-hand shop or a supermarket, or at a designer store or a delicatessen? Words belonged to everyone, while Ben’s world belonged to very few. Yet he wanted to incorporate me into it; to improve my life by imposing himself, perhaps benignly, on to it.

5

About three months after he offered the notion, he phoned me saying he had made progress. Several landlords agreed to rent at a cheaper rate, had allowed him to do the places up, and that the first couple of flats would be ready the following week. If I was interested I could come and look at them. I thanked him and somehow felt my decision to see them wasn’t based on the likelihood I would be moving soon to Glasgow but on the assumption that in seeing the flats I would have an instinct confirmed, as if Ben needed to haggle with the landlords and do-up the flats so that I would know why I couldn’t accept the offer. Perhaps this sounds like the height of a certain type of selfishness but that just might be the point of this story; just as there are different kinds of work, so there are different kinds of self-regard. 

I arranged to meet Ben at the first address he gave me, which was a few hundred yards from Kelvingrove station, at Woodlands Drive. As I passed restaurants and cafes, an antique shop and a deli, I could see this was an area few would be unhappy to live in, and I recalled passing along it a few times in the past and idly thinking how I could see myself living there. It was a warm, dry September afternoon and when I arrived, Ben was leaning against the bonnet of his car and looked like he was waiting for the photographer to turn up to advertise both his vehicle and his attire. But I might also have wondered if a photographer would appear to see Ben promoting his latest venture: a humble artist gratefully accepting the offer of a reduced-cost apartment. Ben seemed as happy and generous-minded as I was feeling resentful and shrunken. Passing through the landing that was wide, well-kept and the walls-tiled, he took me up three flights of stairs until we stopped at the door of the left-hand side apartment. We entered a rectangular hall and first went into the kitchen, which had a dining table big enough for six people, a gas hob and an electric oven, and the room was twice the size of the kitchen I had in Edinburgh. We then entered the lounge which had a settee, two chairs and even a couple of paintings on the wall that Ben and Rachel had bought thinking that they would be to my taste. Again, the room was much larger than my lounge. We then entered the bedroom, which had a bed Ben was sure would be to my liking and with a rug on the floor that he thought would be consistent with my taste. The bathroom had space too — and had a bath (with a shower above) while mine only had a shower. It was a tastefully furnished flat in the West End of Glasgow, double-glazed and gas centrally heated (mine was single-glazed and had electric radiators). And the rent was a hundred pounds cheaper than I was already paying. 

Objectively there was no reason why I should turn it down, and yet I couldn’t see myself living there partly because I could see any number of people living there. It was possible that, once having moved in, I could take the paintings from the walls and throw covers over the sofa and chairs, remove the rugs from the floor. However, it was though the flat would never metaphysically be my own, which may be a big word for a small feeling. Perhaps, though, we need to think of a quantum metaphysics so that we wouldn’t only be asking the largest of questions, about the existence of God, the issue of identity, whether the real world exists, and all the other pressingly abstract concerns, but also why the necessity of certain feelings cannot quite be seen; that they remain too small for general perception. 

As we exited the flat and went for a coffee in one of the cafes over past Kelvin Bridge where his car was parked, he saw the move as a formality and said he would arrange contracts. He added that there was no immediate hurry and that he knew I would have to give my landlord notice. He was excited by his project and I saw no reason why he shouldn’t be; that he wouldn’t have too many problems renting the apartment to various creative types; just that I wouldn’t be one of them. When he talked, he spoke as if I had accepted the place; as I talked I did so talking only about the flat and the project generally. I said it was a great idea; that if all the flats were like the one he showed me I was sure he could help in his own way cultivate the work and even careers of various artists. It wasn’t until the end of the discussion that I said that I wouldn’t be one of them. What I saw on his face was a look of such devastating disappointment that it was as if I had put an end to his artistic life rather than protecting my own. Maybe I had ended it, with Ben seeing that this was his way of retaining a role in the arts that his new career would, by most people’s reckoning, have removed him from. I didn’t doubt he would find other artists to occupy the spaces he had arranged to rent cheaply, and I am not sure he will ever understand why I rejected his offer. He may well see it as very subtle revenge, as no more than an envious person who is a failed artist rejecting the idea of a successful businessman. I couldn’t have the suits and the car, he might think, nor own outright a flat near the Botanics but I could petulantly turn down the offer of an apartment that would save me money and improve my living conditions. He might be correct; some decisions we make are so unfathomable that we cannot deny the worst of motives or the best. All I can say for the moment is that his offer was too actual and lacked a surrounding world of meaning, rather like the guitars, cellos and other instruments and objects that were placed in flats to give the impression of a creative act. Ben, after moving to Glasgow, had discovered out of his disappointment a new purpose and it appeared to me that the flats he wished to rent were no more than an extension of that sadness, no matter the successful status he now enjoyed. On the train home, I reckoned his success somehow didn’t belong to him, while my failure was my own. That meant something to me, even if it might take me a while to understand the meaning of this particular type of triumph, or failure.

 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Guitars

1

I hadn’t seen Ben for about five years when I was sitting in a cafe reading my book and, raising my eyes, noticed a couple arriving who looked like they may have entered the wrong place. The cafe was for students at the art college, and for the sort of worker, like myself, who liked reading, writing, or researching in public places. The cafe was around the corner from the film centre nearby and the college across the road. It had exposed brick on one wall and student artwork on another. A third wall was behind the kitchen and the counter, and the fourth had two large windows and the door through which the couple had just entered. It was a deliberately shabby style and theirs was not. He was dressed in what I would have guessed was an Armani or Hugo Boss suit, clearly tailor-made and charcoal in colour, and the shoes were I am sure of an Italian design. She was dressed in puff blue, with a bag a darker shade and shoes that matched the bag. I took all this in momentarily, and it wasn’t until after this first impression that the second one told me that this was Ben. His hair was now short on the sides, and longer on top, but it looked like a very careful fade that showed no sign of different lengths from one number to the next that the barber would have used to grade it in.

He hadn’t noticed me and so, while they ordered, I observed Ben and his companion with some scrutiny. They were at least lovers and may have even been engaged but I hadn’t noticed their hands coming in and couldn’t see their hands as I watched them from behind. Their body language suggested intimacy, and yet also familiarity. The relationship was probably at least a year old I surmised, and I suspected he was taking her to the cafe to show her some of the places he would hang around in when he had long hair, a beard, and would sit with a few of us as we all discussed our chosen field of interest: his was music, mine was literature, another’s was film, a fourth friend worked part-time at the art college, a fifth gave poetry readings in the cafe and at a couple of other venues in the city. 

I was never close to Ben and we became acquainted through the cafe; he would come in at least a couple of times a week and one day we nodded to each other, the next time chatted briefly and after that I suggested he join a group of us as we sat around discussing politics as often as art. We were all successful enough to be recognised for the work we did but none of us made enough money to allow for the slightest change in our lives. The flats we rented we stayed in because they were cheap and the landlord didn’t want to put the price up since we were long-term tenants. The jobs we had we remained in as we knew that our employers gave us time to work on our art and gave us time off at short notice if we needed it. We were between sloth and integrity, between taking our work very seriously and showing not enough ambition to take it more seriously still. I am not sure If I would agree with this diagnosis but it was one our families, friends, and emotional partners sometimes offered and over the years people have wondered why I had been in the same flat and teaching in the same language school for more than a decade. Sometimes I feel they are right; that I lack ambition and purpose, that I play at being a writer rather than dedicate myself to the task. And yet I write at every opportunity, help with friends’ work, and I constantly seek out new writers to read. 

Yet I also see new writers appearing in the press and talking about their work as a business proposition, as a gap in the market, and where they speak with joy of how they felt when at a book festival they met some of their heroes. I have never been invited to a book festival and would prefer to read my heroes than meet them. But I suppose you can’t network by staying in all weekend absorbing a writer’s fiction; better to read one book and enthuse about it as you elbow your way towards meeting them. If I sound cynicaI, I would like to distinguish cynicism from bitterness. The cynic senses the compromises they will or will not make; the bitter person feels that they have been unlucky, that writers with less talent than they have succeeded, that nobody gave them a chance. I am not bitter: I have perhaps ignored chances I have had and certainly not tried to capitalise on any hint of one that has been given. I have been accused of both bitterness and cynicism and accepted the latter but have resisted vociferously the former. When I am now accused of bitterness I then tell them the story of Ben, and my interaction with him after his success, and say, afterwards, to those who have listened, that it is true I am a cynic.

  2

After ordering Ben and his partner looked around the room for a seat and he seemed to look through me before noticing a familiar face that hadn’t changed much. Neither had my attire, nor my habit of sitting at around 2 in the afternoon reading a book or working on my laptop. Before taking an available table on the other side of the cafe, they came over as Ben introduced Rachel as his fiancee and said he hadn’t been back in Edinburgh for a while but it was great to see me again. There wasn’t space to suggest they sit next to me. There was a chair available and they could have grabbed another one but the table was so small that there wouldn’t have been space for the cake they probably ordered as well as the coffee, tea or hot chocolate, and I thought I saw on Ben’s face a momentary calculation (whether it would have been polite or rude to ask if I wanted to join them at the bigger table, disrupting me from my work and where I would have to carry a bag, a coffee, a laptop and a book to the other side of the room, while also momentarily wondering too whether Rachel would have wished me to share with them). After an hour, they came over again and Ben asked if he could join me; Rachel was off to buy a lamp she had first seen online, at an antique shop along Newington. Of course, I said. Even if I hadn’t liked Ben, even if I had been resistant to this new and expensive image, I would have wished to find out how he became the man he had become.

The last I knew was that several years ago he had moved to Glasgow, reckoning the music options in the city were far greater than in Edinburgh. I would have assumed he was making music and not much of a living, that he may have found the odd extra gig but nothing that would transform his life. He hadn’t been close enough to any of us for him to keep in contact after he moved, and I suppose I hadn’t thought about him at all for a couple of years. The incuriosity I had shown before was antithetical to the inquisitiveness I now showed as I half-ignored his interest in my life and asked him questions about his. 

He started by telling me why he first moved to Glasgow. He said he knew of course that Glasgow was supposedly much better for music than Edinburgh but what made this most apparent to him was a certain item he saw in the flats that were for sale. He had come into a small amount of money that would pass for a decent deposit, worked out that he could afford a place for about £120,000 and that the mortgage would be lower than rent. In Edinburgh, he worked a couple of days a week and earned just enough to get a mortgage that he probably would have been refused if it weren’t for the decent deposit. But while looking, he noticed how many properties had guitars in them, as though Glasgow were a city of musicians. He started looking in Edinburgh not because he had any interest in staying in the city and couldn’t have afforded to buy, but to see if there was such a proliferation of guitars in the flats for sale in the Scottish capital. When he found there weren’t he took this to be an omen: that he was meant to move to Glasgow and pursue his musical career. 

Not only did he buy a Glasgow flat but he became friends with the seller, a man around his own age who admitted, when Ben was buying the place, that the guitars in the photos, a lead guitar in the bedroom, and a bass guitar in the living room, hadn’t belonged to the people selling; they were put there by him. Another agency had started the craze and so they bought several guitars and placed them in the property when they were up for sale. Ben had asked him how did he know that they worked and he said there wasn’t much hard evidence, no statistical data as far as he knew, but that people often commented on the guitars in the way they didn’t comment on other things in the apartments they were selling. It was true enough that when Ben looked at online properties he had seen plenty flats with guitars, but thought that was appealing to him: as a musician, he wanted to live in a city with a lot of musicians, or at least people interested in music enough to buy a guitar. 

For a few months afterwards Ben was a little disillusioned: there he was in a city that didn’t necessarily love music as he had hoped, but was full of estate agents who knew the pulling power of a musical instrument. While in Edinburgh, Ben worked in a couple of private schools, earning about £40 an hour, and he continued working there, commuting back and forth, in his first few months in Glasgow. He also still did the occasional gig in Edinburgh, and managed too to secure a slot once a fortnight in a cafe bar where he played a mixture of his own songs and covers. But he found that moving to Glasgow didn’t create many more opportunities and left him often exhausted and split as he moved between the two cities. He instead found himself thinking more about the idea of music and when he next met up with the estate agent, he asked if he knew of any opportunities in the agency trade. The agent said he could enquire; they had four agencies in the city — maybe they were looking to take on staff. A couple of months later a position became available, Ben applied and, perhaps with the help of his friend, got the job. He didn’t initially cut his hair short but he trimmed it, and he reduced his beard to a faint stubble. He gave up the teaching work in Edinburgh, and declined any gigs there, and kept only the once a fortnight cafe evening that he has long since given up. 

He explained to me that he might have stopped playing music but oddly he didn’t feel he was being any less creative in his new job than he had been in his old one. Playing covers and teaching students had become repetitive and stale. It was as though the music no longer had the impetus behind it. There was music but no spirit: and he was so often yawning and unfocused when he taught that he didn’t think he was being fair to the children. When he became an estate agent he was re-energised and constantly looked forward to new properties and new people: the permutations seemed many while in music they had become few. He would never have thought he would have felt more creative renting and selling flats than playing guitar but that was how he felt. 

However, what added to this feeling of creativity was that he pondered over whether the guitar was the only appealing object for house buyers to witness, and surely it only worked with some clients, far from all. He wondered if other instruments worked as well if not better, and so sometimes he would take the various other instruments he owned (a cello, a violin, a trumpet, a saxophone and a clarinet) and placed them in various apartments he was selling. He reckoned a two-bedroom flat he was showing people around in Cecil Street, near the university, would benefit more from a cello than a guitar; an attic flat on Park Circus seemed to demand a clarinet, while a place in Hyndland somehow needed a violin. He believed that he was adding thousands to the price even as he had no evidence for this, though he sometimes would show people around a flat where he hadn’t placed a musical instrument and was sure there had been less enthusiasm. Whether or not it was helping, he became within a few months one of their most successful salespeople, and he said this with surprise more than boastfulness, even if looking at him, with his impeccable attire and manicured hands, he may have given the image of immodesty. Others might have seen a self-made man but as Ben talked it was as though he wanted to muse over how he had become a success, yes, but also from another point of view a failure: contained within this new image of a man of money was buried inside it the shrunken image of a failed musician. He wondered how many people who were making money were failures within their success, and all those houses and apartments that he sold in the last few years, with the signs of creative aspiration, captured in clients a sorrowful awareness that they could afford to buy the place — but they no longer could expect to devote themselves to a musical vocation. 

It was with this in mind he expanded beyond musical instruments and utilised other creative objects as well, often implying that the paintings on the wall, the pottery on the sideboard, or the printed poems framed, were by the people presently living in the house. By this stage he had opened his own agency, employing five people, and had in the cellar at the office numerous cultural items that made the back room look a bit like an antique shop. At weekends he wandered round markets, charity shops and antique fairs, looking for items that would seem appropriate to the places he was selling. He never lied to anyone if they asked, though they rarely did — which might be why he often never knew for sure if the buyers were at all influenced by these touches. But if they did ask he replied honestly: he said that he liked to put something in the houses he was selling; a sort of good luck charm; a hint of superstition. Would he have started lying if almost everybody had asked him about the guitar of the cello, the painting or the framed poem? He couldn’t say — but he was open when asked.

He said to me he didn’t feel any more dishonest selling and renting houses than he sometimes felt as a musician. When he covered a song and sang it as though it was his own, clearly everybody in the audience knew it wasn’t his, but he had to give the impression that for the few minutes he played it that it happened to be. The audience may have cheered and clapped as he started playing it but that wasn’t recognition of his talent, such as it was, but a recognition of a song they had heard many times over. His purpose was no more than to remind them of that song, singing it competently enough for it to match their memory. It often felt to him far more dishonest than sticking a painting up on the wall or a guitar against a chair. With music, he thought that the apparent freedom available to him making it was in reality very little freedom at all. But being an estate agent felt much freer within the obvious constraints. Going round antique fairs reminded him of the days when he would go each weekend to the shops looking for second-hand records. His eighteen-year-old self could never have imagined that this thirty-three-year-old self would get pleasure from working as an agent and buying objects to place inside the properties, but he would let others decide whether that was selling out, false consciousness, bad faith or whatever other term the more critical or theoretically inclined might throw at him. What he did know was that he felt purposeful and comfortable. Was that so bad? Should he feel guilty about it?

3

We talked for a further twenty minutes until Rachel returned, and she joined us for another ten before they both left. They seemed happier than the others I knew who were still seeing making art as their priority even if they couldn’t make it their main source of income. He didn’t seem at all bitter, resentful or regretful and for a while afterwards I wondered if this was because I and others were deluded in our focus or that the problem wasn’t with us making art but the expectation that we ought to make money from it. If Ben had become a success as an estate agent then it wasn’t as though there was an alternative path of the failed estate agent. The estate agent who fails presumably goes bankrupt or retreats from the business. However, the failed artist is still an artist, and many of the most failed of artists have gone on to become the most important figures after their death. Many a writer, painter or musician may use the failed artist as an excuse for their unrecognised genius but no matter how obvious a cover for their lack of success this may be, there are enough failed artists who become successes posthumously for the notion to have far more validity than that of failed estate agents. Ben had clearly become a successful one and yet, within that success, he was very keen to convince me of something. What that was I couldn’t quite say, as if much of the conversation was taken up by him explaining his position. 

A week after seeing Ben in the cafe I was reading an interview with the Scottish painter Jock McFadyen, who was talking about his career generally but talked quite specifically about his time as an artist in the seventies in London. It was a special time, he reckoned, because work was respected not for how much it made but the rigour of how it was made. He reckoned for the generation after him, things changed. People, it seemed, were expected to sell their work as Ben was expected to sell houses; maybe it was better to sell a house than to regurgitate a song: nobody was inclined to say that selling a home was selling out; it was merely selling on. This thought nagged me for a while and yet I was aware too that Ben was justifying himself more than necessary for a man who had made the right decision. But I was still surprised when a few weeks after we had seen each other in the cafe, he contacted me. Our swapping numbers I assumed was a formality — more for him than for me. He was no doubt constantly exchanging details with people, and I saw it as a tic of the trade rather than an indication of friendship. Yet there he was asking if I wanted to come through to Glasgow. 

I supposed it was curiosity that made me agree; after seeing the style offered in his clothing I wondered too where he might be living. How he decorated his home. I arrived in the mid-afternoon on a Friday since he finished at 3, and, with Ben picking me up from the station, we drove across the city to the West End and to a place that appeared quite close to the Botanic gardens. The car he drove was new and presumably top of the range; all I knew was that it was a BMW, with soft leather interiors and laminated wood around the gearbox and elsewhere. The flat was a large ground floor apartment with garden access front and rear, and with a mezzanine office. There were paintings on the walls, a long, high bookcase, with only a handful of books, stretching the length of the hallway, and the flat had plants hanging in the kitchen and standing in the living room. It balanced well looking lived in and ready to sell, a place that people could envy but imagine themselves affording. It was salubrious but not quite luxurious. It had two bathrooms but no bath, only showers, and the kitchen was awkward, an L-shaped room with the cooking area, galley-like, and the dining space a little cramped. The steps leading up to the mezzanine were narrow and steep, and the ceiling too low for someone over six-foot. I gleaned all this through a combination of remarks Ben and later Rachel made, and a couple of trips to the bathroom that allowed me to see through open doors into other rooms. 

They insisted I stay for dinner and during it Ben said he had a proposition for me. I expected him to offer me a job; instead, he offered me a flat. He said he was thinking of starting a scheme to help people in the creative industries (his phrase) who didn’t have much money. He asked me how much I was paying for my place and could I describe what it was like. I said it needed work, and had needed it for several years but the rent was cheaper than anybody else was paying in the area in which I was living. I said the new tenants who had moved in below me were paying three hundred pounds more than I was, though it was the same size. Years earlier the landlord below had turned the flat into a two-bedroom apartment by making the kitchen into a bedroom and the lounge into a kitchen dining area. Perhaps I was wary of my landlord doing anything in case he chose to do everything; including a major conversion that could see my compact space suddenly become two-bedroom and with prices to match it. I also said the cooker needed replacing, the storage heaters were ineffective and the windows rattled when there was a bit of blustery weather.

Ben said that for less than I was paying he could find me a place that would be bigger and newer. He said that his plan was to get various landlords whose properties were a little run down to let him do them up and rent them out: they would get a guaranteed if modest income but they wouldn’t have to invest any money in them and the company would pay the owner a set monthly sum. Ben had noticed while renting out flats in the last five years many apartments were in poor condition, often with mild damp, plumbing problems, tables with wonky legs and cookers that would cut out when a ring wouldn’t work. Sometimes the places would go unrented for many weeks, and with some flats the owners could get students in for eight or nine months of the year but couldn’t rent it over the summer. He said that if a landlord rented it for £600 but only had tenants for 9 months, that was the equivalent of getting £450 for twelve months of the year. He would take it over, do a makeover and rent it for £450. The landlord wouldn’t need to worry about the rent and would have a property in much better condition. It also meant, Ben added, that he could stop feeling ashamed showing people around places that were hardly fit to live in. He admitted that this wasn’t an entirely altruistic exercise; he hoped if the project worked that he might eventually be able to get some sort of grant from the Scottish government but, even if he didn’t, it was a project that interested him for its own sake. I looked around Ben and Rachel’s tastefully furnished flat and thought that perhaps when I initially noticed it was just a little lived in, I might have also said that it contained a bohemian touch. I suppose he wanted to expand that across the city and I was unsure whether to be flattered or otherwise that I was the person he wished to experiment upon.

4

I heard occasionally from Ben over the next three months as he told me how his project was progressing, and he said that of course if I wanted to remain in Edinburgh and in my flat that was fine but his purpose was to lure me from both. I said I was open to the possibility; had indeed been thinking a lot about leaving Edinburgh. When I started teaching English as a foreign language I would have students for a few months and then never see them again. Increasingly, though, when students leave the school, they now ask me if I will continue helping them improve their English by teaching them online. I now have private students from India, China, Spain, France and Italy. I have also gained others from word of mouth: that relatives and friends who might have before come for three months to the city and enrolled on a course, have instead stayed at home and I’ve taught them over a year, often longer. I could move to Glasgow or anywhere else without financial pain and perhaps, taking into account the modest rent Ben promised, financial gain. I was sure I could persuade the school to let me teach one day of the week instead of three mornings if I did want to remain affiliated with the city and with the school. 

The more I thought about it, the more it appeared not just a good idea but an elaborating one. I found myself thinking how I would commute between the two cities. I didn’t drive, and would have been happy to get the train occasionally but not every week, and though I cycled it may have been too arduous there and back while teaching for six hours in between. I looked at the price of electrical mopeds, checking their speed and the distance they could travel without requiring a charge.

I have often thought that my life couldn’t countenance change except internally, and people in the past have come up against this resistance, asking why I was reluctant to marry, have children or buy a house. It was as if I believed that any external change to my life might weaken the internal impetus of it: that the decisions I had to make were on the page. It seemed to me that Ben was the ultimate manifestation of this externalisation and yet here he was potentially determined to change my life, and look at what had happened to him by changing his? Looking at Ben’s tailored clothes, his designer gear, his generally spacious apartment, where everything from the plates we ate off to the glasses we drank out of, the bathroom hand-wash and the mirror I looked in, came at a price he could afford, I saw how external decisions were made into material comfort. Ben was a competent musician who found he was a more than competent businessman, and had even convinced himself (and perhaps rightly) that he could find more creativity in his work as an estate agent than he could in a band, or even performing solo. When he talked about singing covers he managed to convey to me the sadness of that life and the purposefulness of his present one, managing to do so without undermining other musicians or my literary endeavours.

Yet while I was thinking of this modest change that Ben said he was looking to offer me, I was not a little troubled. I’ve always fretted over anything that is designed to make a writer, a painter, a musician or an actor’s life easier. Some countries have given artists special rights. In France, they have ‘intermittent du spectacle’, a form of unemployment benefit that creative people receive if they work a certain number of hours a year. In Ireland, people in the creative professions are exempt from tax. I preferred the British system which had allowed people to languish or flourish on the dole as they didn’t in the past push people too hard into jobs that they didn’t want to do. Many people had signed on before becoming well-known and they were no different in their unemployed status than anybody else. If they were taking advantage of the system, in the right-wing parlance, they were doing so like everyone. They weren’t exceptional. 

Yet at the same time, I suppose I did think people involved in the arts were if not special, different. I could see a simplicity in Ben’s life that I might not even have wished to see in my own. He was making pragmatic decisions that satisfied his ego and his material wants and I didn’t think this cynically. His world however seemed both simple and complicated: simple in that he knew that he had an appointment book and flats to show people around; simple in that he knew how to make a profit on each aspect of the work he was doing. No doubt it was logistically complicated making sure his staff knew where and when to go, and he had to fill in complex tax forms and sort out staff wages. Maybe they are simpler than I imagine but it at least appeared complicated to me. 

He had both the simplicity and the complications involved in categorical cause and effect. He might agree to sell someone’s flat for them and then find complications, and a plumber would be hired, or a gas engineer, who was only available at certain hours, and which member of staff was free to let the worker in? Ben had said that he was very involved in the process of renting and selling houses and maybe other agents weren’t but I could see for him that these complications were effective: that the houses he sold, he said, often went well over the asking price, and more so he reckoned than at other estate agent’s. It was worth the effort: the work, as they say, paid dividends. 

Phrases like that, paid dividends, had no meaning to me, but when Ben used them they had a tangible reality to him. At best they could be words on a page for me to try and understand, to provide content to them, without any concern over their manifestation out there in the world. I could delete them, move them around, ignore them altogether. I had the freedom to do so and the world that had built up around them I could also demolish, with no need of planning permission. I had responsibility for the words I used but I didn’t have to feed them, clothe them, house them or pay for their education. They weren’t my words as a child is a parent’s child, and when I write the words feed or clothe, how many other writers have used these words, and not only writers but people in a second-hand shop or a supermarket, or at a designer store or a delicatessen? Words belonged to everyone, while Ben’s world belonged to very few. Yet he wanted to incorporate me into it; to improve my life by imposing himself, perhaps benignly, on to it.

5

About three months after he offered the notion, he phoned me saying he had made progress. Several landlords agreed to rent at a cheaper rate, had allowed him to do the places up, and that the first couple of flats would be ready the following week. If I was interested I could come and look at them. I thanked him and somehow felt my decision to see them wasn’t based on the likelihood I would be moving soon to Glasgow but on the assumption that in seeing the flats I would have an instinct confirmed, as if Ben needed to haggle with the landlords and do-up the flats so that I would know why I couldn’t accept the offer. Perhaps this sounds like the height of a certain type of selfishness but that just might be the point of this story; just as there are different kinds of work, so there are different kinds of self-regard. 

I arranged to meet Ben at the first address he gave me, which was a few hundred yards from Kelvingrove station, at Woodlands Drive. As I passed restaurants and cafes, an antique shop and a deli, I could see this was an area few would be unhappy to live in, and I recalled passing along it a few times in the past and idly thinking how I could see myself living there. It was a warm, dry September afternoon and when I arrived, Ben was leaning against the bonnet of his car and looked like he was waiting for the photographer to turn up to advertise both his vehicle and his attire. But I might also have wondered if a photographer would appear to see Ben promoting his latest venture: a humble artist gratefully accepting the offer of a reduced-cost apartment. Ben seemed as happy and generous-minded as I was feeling resentful and shrunken. Passing through the landing that was wide, well-kept and the walls-tiled, he took me up three flights of stairs until we stopped at the door of the left-hand side apartment. We entered a rectangular hall and first went into the kitchen, which had a dining table big enough for six people, a gas hob and an electric oven, and the room was twice the size of the kitchen I had in Edinburgh. We then entered the lounge which had a settee, two chairs and even a couple of paintings on the wall that Ben and Rachel had bought thinking that they would be to my taste. Again, the room was much larger than my lounge. We then entered the bedroom, which had a bed Ben was sure would be to my liking and with a rug on the floor that he thought would be consistent with my taste. The bathroom had space too — and had a bath (with a shower above) while mine only had a shower. It was a tastefully furnished flat in the West End of Glasgow, double-glazed and gas centrally heated (mine was single-glazed and had electric radiators). And the rent was a hundred pounds cheaper than I was already paying. 

Objectively there was no reason why I should turn it down, and yet I couldn’t see myself living there partly because I could see any number of people living there. It was possible that, once having moved in, I could take the paintings from the walls and throw covers over the sofa and chairs, remove the rugs from the floor. However, it was though the flat would never metaphysically be my own, which may be a big word for a small feeling. Perhaps, though, we need to think of a quantum metaphysics so that we wouldn’t only be asking the largest of questions, about the existence of God, the issue of identity, whether the real world exists, and all the other pressingly abstract concerns, but also why the necessity of certain feelings cannot quite be seen; that they remain too small for general perception. 

As we exited the flat and went for a coffee in one of the cafes over past Kelvin Bridge where his car was parked, he saw the move as a formality and said he would arrange contracts. He added that there was no immediate hurry and that he knew I would have to give my landlord notice. He was excited by his project and I saw no reason why he shouldn’t be; that he wouldn’t have too many problems renting the apartment to various creative types; just that I wouldn’t be one of them. When he talked, he spoke as if I had accepted the place; as I talked I did so talking only about the flat and the project generally. I said it was a great idea; that if all the flats were like the one he showed me I was sure he could help in his own way cultivate the work and even careers of various artists. It wasn’t until the end of the discussion that I said that I wouldn’t be one of them. What I saw on his face was a look of such devastating disappointment that it was as if I had put an end to his artistic life rather than protecting my own. Maybe I had ended it, with Ben seeing that this was his way of retaining a role in the arts that his new career would, by most people’s reckoning, have removed him from. I didn’t doubt he would find other artists to occupy the spaces he had arranged to rent cheaply, and I am not sure he will ever understand why I rejected his offer. He may well see it as very subtle revenge, as no more than an envious person who is a failed artist rejecting the idea of a successful businessman. I couldn’t have the suits and the car, he might think, nor own outright a flat near the Botanics but I could petulantly turn down the offer of an apartment that would save me money and improve my living conditions. He might be correct; some decisions we make are so unfathomable that we cannot deny the worst of motives or the best. All I can say for the moment is that his offer was too actual and lacked a surrounding world of meaning, rather like the guitars, cellos and other instruments and objects that were placed in flats to give the impression of a creative act. Ben, after moving to Glasgow, had discovered out of his disappointment a new purpose and it appeared to me that the flats he wished to rent were no more than an extension of that sadness, no matter the successful status he now enjoyed. On the train home, I reckoned his success somehow didn’t belong to him, while my failure was my own. That meant something to me, even if it might take me a while to understand the meaning of this particular type of triumph, or failure.

 


© Tony McKibbin