Last month, on a run in Thunder Bay, I thought of my poor murdered pal Tom Brown.
I didn’t set out to do so – my plan had been merely to run a 15km stretch of trail through the woods – but it was my running playlist that did it and conjured this remembrance from out of those wilds. Whatever algorithm that drives the shuffle function on my phone’s music player, it chose, of the hundreds of songs available, one by Robyn Hitchcock. It’s not that Tom Brown liked Robyn Hitchcock’s music -I don’t know if he knew who he was or had ever heard him – but I do, and I was introduced to his eccentric oeuvre one night at a dinner party in Stoke Newington, when, at around the same time, on a quiet street in Southgate, North London, just a stone’s throw from his front door, Tom was fatally stabbed and died alone on the pavement the day before his 28th birthday. For this reason, when I hear Robyn Hitchcock, I experience the usual high that one’s favourite music can elicit, but with it, a sliver of exquisite sadness that burrows deep in my chest, because I remember Tom and the circumstances of his untimely death.
I had spent most of the previous night’s watch sat in the ship’s mess, studiously planning the route on my phone. It was a trail that surrounds a disused gravel pit near where the ship was moored at Superior Grain Terminal. Still, when I set out, it wasn’t without some apprehension, as even with the most modern of technologies available on my smart watch and my smarter phone, and the best, best laid plans in place, getting horrendously lost remains a very real risk anytime I venture out onto routes unfamiliar.
‘If I’m not back in an hour and a half call out a search party ‘cos I WILL be lost,’ I messaged the first mate who was on watch and monitoring the load of wheat from the control room up forward. I disembarked at 1000 and took off at a trot down the walkway that threads a narrow path between the grain elevator and the water. The ground was heavily punctuated with green and white apostrophes and commas of shit, courtesy of the fat Canada geese that always loiter at grain docks and I upset a gaggle of them. Most of the flock spilled squalling over the side and into the slip, but four of them kept on running apace a few feet ahead of me. They squawked and honked in protest as they went, like harried old ladies being rushed too soon back onto a tour bus and I had a giggle at this and the noise the flip flop of their webbed feet made on the cement because it sounded -earbuds and playlist playing notwithstanding- so human to my ears. (I should make a point here by saying I don’t play my music loud enough to drown out extraneous noise, to do so could prove hazardous for a runner). Eventually, they had had enough and flapped disgruntled down into the water. I reached the car parkand I stopped at the security booth by the main gate where we sailors sign in and out when departing or returning to our ships. I paused the app on my watch that monitors my runs. The sky was cloudless. The sun was out and it was hot.
‘Good morning,’ I said to the grey-haired security guard, and in a bid to sound solicitous I added, ‘Beautiful country.’ He hefted himself gracelessly from his chair to examine my ID at the window.
‘It is if you like mosquitoes,’ he said dryly.
I pocketed my ID, un-paused my running app and began the run in earnest. I ran out the dirt drive and along the uneven shoulder of a single lane road that was bracketed by scruffy pines and cratered with formidable potholes. Logging trucks loaded with timber bound for the mill trundled heavily by. I crossed a quiet two-lane highway and found the abandoned road that would take me, with any luck, to the trail I was looking for.
Along the way I heard:
Little Steven – Patriot – great, nostalgic 80’s fun.
The Libertines – Mustangs -the second track from their new album. It displays a more mature sounding band and possesses a glorious denouement.
Lou Reed – Street Hassel -a masterclass in song writing. Hell, a masterclass in writing period.
The Fall – Living Too Late -more than any other band, Mark E. Smith and the mighty Fall have provided the soundtrack to my forties.
‘Crow’s feet are ingrained on my face
and I’m living too late.
Try to wash the black off my face but its ingrained.
And I’m living too late…’
Pure fucking magic.
I merged with the trail successfully and was somewhere around the 4 km mark when Hitchcock’s ‘The Arms of Love’ came on and a smiling Tom Brown interrupted my internal monologue, which, at that time was mostly concerned with keeping to the pre-ordained route. It was odd to think of him there. On a quiet wooded trail in Northern Ontario, lined as it was with daisies and wood rose, and alive with the chatter of birds and the hum of busy insects. The air was thick with humidity and the scent of blossom and rot. It was all so many thousands of miles and years from where and when I knew him; the context felt all wrong.
I met Tom in my first year at Middlesex University in London. He managed the bar at the student union on the Tottenham campus. My best pal Robin (another Robin but with an ‘i’, with whom I’d made fast and firm friends in my first week at uni), was already working there, and he got me the gig.
Tom could present a gruff exterior and come across as surly to his customers. Working with him closely I realized that yes, he could come across as rude, but he was also kind, fiercely intelligent and very, very funny. He was preternaturally sarcastic and had a coruscating wit that was often sealed with a wicked chuckle. He took great pleasure, as most of my British mates did then, in mocking my accent, and mimicking my expletive laden tirades, of which, in those days there were many. We initially bonded over the Clash, one of my favourite bands and one of his, as it turned out too. Joe Strummer released a solo album that year, Rock Art and the X-Ray style, and I played it over and over at the bar in a juvenile and futile bid to educate the punters who would have preferred something a little more mainstream. I was pleased to learn that complaints about the music were, as a rule, largely ignored. Like me, he was a reader and could tolerate my endless babbling about books, I was, after all, studying creative writing. He loved cricket which I ridiculed him for. I found all sports ridiculous then, but as a Canadian, especially cricket, with its three-day test matches and unfathomable rules of play. He liked the Ealing Comedies, and his favourite was Kind Hearts and Coronets starring Alec Guiness, he was very British in his tastes. He was a Londoner through and through. Most days he’dcome into work with a newspaper tucked under his arm. He knew what was going on in the world, had a firm grasp of geopolitics. I don’t remember if he was a fan of Orwell, but it would make great sense if he had been. He dropped out of a degree halfway through his studies for reasons he never told me.
Tom was a good-looking guy in an unobtrusive way. He was about my height, 5’10, but thicker set. He had blue eyes, which is of note because I don’t normally notice eye colour, but with him I did, striking as they were. He wasn’t much for fashion. Usually, it was just jeans and a plain black frayed t-shirt with a blown-out neck that had been washed so many times it was more grey than black. In winter he wore a heavy military style trench coat that made him look like a prison guard at a pre-Perestroika Siberian gulag. He was a year younger than me.
One of my favourite memories of him is the time he showed me how to tap a cask. This is the process of inserting a tap or spigot into a barrel of traditional ale so the contents can be drawn out and into the pint glass with a hand pumped pump at the bar. Tom and I went out back to the storeroom where there was a fresh barrel lying on its side in a specifically designed rack that held it at slight angle. He took up a mallet and the spile, a wooden peg, and showed me the bung (like a large cork) in the side of the barrel which I had to knock out with the spile and quickly replace with the tap.
‘You’ve got to hit the bung hard and in the middle and attach the tap straight away,’ he said and mimed doing so before handing me the tools. ‘You need to be sure to get it in one.’ I lined up the spile and gave it a whack, but it wasn’t hard enough and this only partially dislodged the bung. A powerful blast of beer emitted from the rupture, and like a wave crashing over a break wall, it engulfed Tom entirely. I was just as shocked as he was, but somehow, bone dry. Tom furiously grabbed the tools from me and finished the job properly. He stood there silent for a moment. He was utterly sodden and dripping quite a few quid’s worth of traditional ale onto the cement floor. His arms hung limp at his sides. He fixed me with a glare, more of frustration than malice, and shook his head.
‘Twat,’ was all he said.
Despite this incident, and quite a few others like it, we quickly became friends. Much of our spare time, mine and Robin’s, was spent with and around Tom. We’d have lock ins at the bar and stay and drink late into the night with other friends and misfits, our music on loud, playing endless games of pool.
The bar was a drab and uninspiring looking place, located in an unattractive single story building typical of cheap 1970s architecture in the UK. Tom had an idea to tart it up. One bank holiday weekend, the bar closed, Tom and all of us bar staff painted the nicotine-stained walls and did a pretty exhaustive deep clean. He paid us in expired bottles of Red Square, an alco-pop approximation of vodka and red bull that was popular at the time. Just thinking of it now makes my teeth hurt and gives me a proxy hangover, but we sure got through piles of it that weekend. The paint job was unremarkable.
The dinner party in Stoke Newington was quite a few years after I’d left university, at Tai’s flat, an Israeli artist and a colleague who had become another close friend. It was just me and my girlfriend Jess and Tai’s partner, Ernest. Midway through dinner I became aware of the music playing. It was spare, had a strange and eerie beauty. My ears pricked up. I was music mad back then.
‘What is this?’ I asked Tai.
‘Robyn Hitchcock,’ she replied, and she passed me the CD cover. The album was called ‘I Often Dream of Trains’ and with that title, I was already sold. Over the following years I would acquire many of his albums (his is a sizeable discography). Think Syd Barret, meets John Lennon, meets Bob Dylan with a dash of the Velvet Underground and a sense of humour thrown in and you’ll have an idea of his sound. Most of his albums are full of melodic hook-laden pop, but at times he’ll release one that’s austere and folkie like the aforementioned record. His lyrics can be bafflingly surreal, but for me, a man who likes words and how they go together, sometimes they are startling in their brilliance.
Robin called me the following morning. A Sunday. Uncommonly early for either of us on a weekend, in those our booze-sodden salad days.
‘Right,’ he said in a politic tone not usual for him. He sounded like he was about to explain an equation or impart a set of complicated directions.
‘I don’t know quite how to tell you this but…,’ he paused and took a deep breath. ‘Tom Brown [we had another close friend named Tom so he had to differentiate] was found dead on the street outside his house last night. He’d been stabbed.’
A long silence followed as I digested what he’d told me.
‘What!…Who?…How?’ I stammered.
That was all the information he had. There was no more available. It was as though something transactional had occurred between us and once completed, there was nothing more to say. And really, at that moment, when both of us were desperately trying to make sense of this news, what could either of us have possibly said?
Jess came into our bedroom after I got off the phone. When Robin called I had been sat on the floor organizing records, and I’d remained there.
‘My friend Tom Brown was murdered last night,’ I said almost matter of factly.
‘Oh my god,’ she said.
I spent the rest of the day in an, I suppose not uncommon, state of numbness. That evening we went out with another couple to a pub near Victoria Park and I drank. A lot. I watched everyone’s mouths moving but didn’t really take in what they were saying. I could feel myself getting angry. And the more I drank the angrier I got. We finished up and decided to head back to the place Jess and I shared nearby. It was a short walk, but I said some awful things on the way. Hysterical things. Racialized things, about North London and who I thought had likely done this to Tom. Dave, a big South African, grabbed me squarely by the shoulders and pushed me against the wall beneath the rail bridge by Bethnal Green tube station.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss Nick,’ he said calmly, his face inches from mine as he looked directly into my eyes. ‘But don’t say things like that.’ This shocked me back into the moment and I was justifiably ashamed. I shut up and suddenly felt very, very drunk.
At home in our kitchen on the Highroad, Jess and our guests sat around the table and continued to chat and drink. They were all kid glove consolatory to me, but I could sense that nobody knew what to say. Tom’s death was the awful elephant in the room. They didn’t know him. I did. I excused myself, said I’d had too much and was calling it a night. I went up to our third-floor bedroom where I promptly punched a hole in the wall. I looked at my fist. There was a deep gash across the index knuckle. I smashed it into the wall again. Now there were two neat holes in the plaster and my hand looked like something you’d buy in a butcher’s shop.
‘That’s better,’ I said. And I sat on the bed and wept.
There was a service of remembrance held for Tom at Christ Church in Southgate in early September. There was a register book in the vestibule which I couldn’t bring myself to sign. His body was not there. It was still being held as evidence in the ongoing criminal investigation. When the service was over, we filed out into the bright noonday sun as Primal Scream’s Loaded blared loudly through the church’s halls.
‘Just what is it that you want to do?
Well, we wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do
And we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time.’
It was quite surreal to hear this druggy, dance floor staple blasting from a place of worship. Sad faces cracked a smile and nodded their approval.
We gathered at a nearby pub, and it was like an ersatz university reunion with all the familiar faces there and I was relieved how quickly we were all able to shake off the oppressive cloud of grief that had loomed above us all and instead we shared memories and laughed and talked about the good times.
At the end of Charles Portis’ novel True Grit, and in the Coen Brothers stunning film based on it, Maddie Ross, the protagonist, is now grown up and goes to meet the grizzled Marshal, Rooster Cogburn, with whom, a quarter of a century before, when she was just a girl, she rode off to seek justice for the murder of her father. She arrives to discover she is too late and that her former trail mate had died three days prior. In the film version, Maddie speaks in somber voiceover and says simply ‘Time just gets away from us’ as the melody of ‘Leaning on His Everlasting Arms’ is teased on a hushed piano. It is a devastating moment. Poleaxes me every time. A simple sentence but weighted with so much melancholy and regret. There was a long period, after Tom died, when I thought a day would never pass where I would not think of him. For a long time there wasn’t, but I realized on that run in Thunder Bay, that Mattie was right, time does get away, because it had been some considerable amount of time since I had thought of Tom, and I felt strangely guilty for that.
All the cliched questions abound. What might have happened had he lived? What would he have become? Etc. He had gone back to university and finished his degree, and he was working in the archive department of the BBC when he died. Would we have remained close? I had seen him just a handful of times since I’d left university. Or would we have drifted apart as so many of us do and did when relationships, responsibilities and geography got in the way. Instead, Tom remains frozen in time for me. His face as it was, forever as I knew him, like a mammoth preserved in the perma frost. My memories of him are all good ones. Time has sanded away any rough edges and our friendship feels as potent now as it was then, purely because he is no longer here and because he died so brutally. The motive for his killing remains a mystery. It was not a robbery – his mobile phone and wallet were still on him. There was some suggestion by the police that he had perhaps broken up a domestic dispute. It was never substantiated, but it sounds about right to me. That is exactly the kind of thing he would have done.
Eviscerate, like immolate, is a dreadful descriptor, especially in the mind’s eye and when applied, in the past tense, to the person of an intimate. It is this word that I heard used by someone close to Tom’s family to describe the state his body was in. The man who did this to him, his killer, has never been found. The police had no leads. There were no witnesses. It has been, in the parlance of the true crime podcasts so popular today, a ‘cold case’ from the get-go.
My run came off without a hitch. In fact, it was a real beauty. One for the books. There were a few moments of panic along the way – there always are – where I feared I’d made a wrong turn, but they proved to be false alarms. Halfway through, I stopped at the crest of a hill where the trees opened a little and gave me some breathing room and I could see in the distance Lake Superior’s hazy blue and the sleeping giant. I paused my running app and my playlist, and I just stood and listened to the chorus of hundreds of songbirds. How many species could I hear? In the tall grass bees buzzed and alit on nascent flowers. How seldom we get to experience moments like this. Me, who spends my time ashore either in a big city or on a small populous Mediterranean Island and the rest of the time cooped up on a ship. I could feel the slick sweat drying on my skin and would have remained longer were it not for the hungry swarm of mosquitoes that cottoned to my presence and descended on me.
Shortly after I encountered a flooded stretch of trail where the path narrowed, and the foliage crowded in tight. I thought about turning back, but I hate breaking from a plan, so I thought ‘screw it’ and just ploughed on and spelunked in ankle-deep water for a kilometer and a half. Other than the worry of hitting a deep spot and rolling an ankle, the water felt cool and pleasant on my hard-working feet. For most of the run I was entirely alone. On the trail itself, the only signs of humanity I encountered were a shot gun shell and a single pink croc. When I left the trail and merged with the road was the first time I saw another person.
My playlist offered up a few more chestnuts along the way:
Oasis-Supersonic – a banger by any metric, and another reminder of my London years.
Gladys Knight & the Pips- Midnight Train to Georgia -simply one of the best songs ever. One of my top ten of all time. Pure joy in music form.
On the last leg of road, when I could see the top of the grain silos peeking over the tree line, my playlist shot me one more straight to the heart: the Clash – Bank Robber.
‘Ha!’ I cried out loud. ‘That’s some seren – God Damn – dipity!’ My pace synced to the songs lazy reggae beat. ‘This one’s for you Tom,’ I said.
I suppose it is the job of those of us left, we the living, to memorialize our dead however we choose to do so. In song, in sculpture or in myriad other ways like this feeble eulogy. I say feeble, because no words of mine could ever approximate the man or better his corporeal form. I do so hate it when people proselytize the dead and it isn’t my intention to do so here. Afterall, I have been a student of writing and that golden rule, ‘avoid sentimentality’, always looms large in my head. I have tried to avoid it alright, but it’s almost impossible when telling this story, because dammit, Tom was a good man, one of the few, and I’d have told you as much were he still living. He had an innate integrity and a well-formed sense of social justice and morality – of what is right and what is wrong – that is exceedingly rare for men in their callow twenties. I say all this now from a distant vantage and with whatever knowledge, dare I say wisdom, it is that age and the process of aging has gained me. I was glad to have Tom on that run with me. To scroll through all those memories, but of course, every one of them is tainted ever so slightly – in a way that my recollections of others I have lost isn’t – haunted by the specter of his horrible death. Tom died 20 years ago this week. He was my friend.
I ran up the dirt drive to the grain elevator and when I hit 15kms I slowed to a walk. As I caught my breath I noticed dozens of white butterflies on the ground ahead of me. Their wings were open and vibrating, fluttering minutely, as though they were transmitting some kind of code. There were so many I began to worry about where to put my feet, but then, in near unison, they took off and billowed before me like tufts of satined confetti moving in ragged and erratic flight.
And just as quickly as they were there, they were gone.