The writer’s new novel, Mayflies, is an elegy to a teenage friend. Here he talks about growing up in working-class Ayrshire, going against the grain and the spirit of 80s post-punk
Every teenager, or every teenager who is lucky, has a Keith. Keith is the friend who jokes and dresses with more swagger than anyone else, who looks out for misfits and makes them feel understood, who is the scourge of bullies and bigots and the master of revels, who can conjure laughs from thin air on nights when you are bored and skint.
Andrew O’Hagan met his Keith – Keith Martin – on the council estate near Irvine new town, on the coast of Ayrshire, 20 miles from Glasgow, where they both grew up. In the 1980s they went on CND protests and miners’ marches together, they were a wayward double-act chatting up girls, and while O’Hagan was still at school and Martin was working as a lathe-turner in a local factory, they formed a band. Thirty years later, with none of that history forgotten, it was O’Hagan who Keith Martin first called with the news no one wants to share; that he had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer, and that they had at best only four months of friendship left.
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