Things can get weird in Robbie’s, especially on a Friday evening. It’s not a place where ‘normal’ really holds much sway at the best of times, and then things tend to get tangential, often in ways impossible to prepare for.
Last night was an evening of random coincidence. We arrived later than usual as the Mathesons had been taking care of business in the Weeg. We sat down right next to someone Adele used to work with in Leith and hadn’t seen since those days, and whose bewitching flame-haired friend Nancy I didn’t notice at all. All very pleasant. Donald and I somehow ended up talking about an erstwhile mutual colleague, Andy Fleming, who used to live in Edinburgh and we both worked with at various stages of our Intapps careers.
Cue the almost Coleridgeian tangent. There’s someone over my right shoulder asking Donald if this guy’s name is Graham. It is (see explanatory note above). I turn around to see a stocky, short-ish man sporting a rather shocking white fleece and an unmistakeable Essex accent. My natural reaction to random approaches from estuary-dwellers is caution, a lifetime’s habit it’s impossible to break. I didn’t recognise him at all, though he insisted I knew him. He started to tell me a story, straight-faced and serious, although initially I didn’t believe what I heard.
Then I recognised Chris – the fleece should have been a dead giveaway. He always did manage somehow to twist normal ever so slightly, just enough to notice, which is almost more jarring somehow. Chris was a friend of Frank Haines’ and he used to regularly appear at the house where I rented a room from Frank on White Horse Lane, E1, in the heart of Stepney Green. I lived there for a couple of years or so on my last stint in London. I had the smallest room – it was tiny – but Frank was fine with my storing various bits of my life around the house, on the landings, wherever. He was good like that – easygoing almost to the point of ambivalence, yet purposeful enough to make such a thing unthinkable. He had that ability to direct his attention and care where to him it mattered. Maybe it’s that public school upbringing – the easy confidence that seems to be instilled – an ability that, if I’m honest, I’ve always wished for myself.
My two favourite memories of Frank: one is his devotion to his tiny scooter, which he piloted with almost reckless abandon through the heart of London in any and all conditions, both meteorological and metabolic. Frank was a big guy and he dwarfed the thing – the image of him fizzing down the Whitechapel Road, bolt upright, half-face helmet screwed on and City regulation issue raincoat billowing behind like some latter-day highwayman’s cloak, is one I shall never forget. The other is when he returned from a trip to Spain with a whole leg, once belonging to a long-since departed domestic beast and which had in the meantime – some ten years, mind you – been hanging in a preserving shed gathering flavour. Apparently. We were told it was a high delicacy, to be sliced ultra-thin (you had to – it was so hard it was nigh impossible to chew) and savoured. We were sceptical. He told us we were heathens. He hung it on the kitchen door handle, covered in a sheet of newspaper, trotter and all, and devoured it almost as slowly as it had hung.
The link to Edinburgh is that Frank and Andy had both been students at Edinburgh Uni and while both had moved on, connections remain. Chris was staying with a friend of his down the road from Robbie’s. I hadn’t seen him in, say, six years. With my memory even I would forgive myself for struggling initially to place him. The story he told me was that Frank had gone to Ireland in March this year with friends to take part in a half-marathon. At around mile ten he collapsed under the assault of a major heart attack. He never recovered. He was buried on April 3rd, my birthday. He was 30 years old. Frank was one of those people I thought would get up and dust himself off with a shrug if his house fell on him. Which merely serves as another unnecessary reminder of how desperately fickle life can be. Sudden Death Syndrome they call it, apparently, which to me sounds a big medical We Don’t Know.
So, Frank, wherever you are, be at peace.
