It starts with Linda from Student Engagement getting up and belting out Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee, and Garry from the print room remembering that Janis and Leonard had that encounter at New York’s Chelsea Hotel, where the Dylans – Thomas and Bob – spent time too, though not together. This is at the Ardnamurchan, which is and always has been a traditional sort of place. A hotel, yes, but mainly known as a restaurant and bar named after that remote peninsula on the west coast. Many a loch’s worth of booze must have flowed from its taps, but the Ardnamurchan’s patrons – unlike the Chelsea’s – don’t tend to have their own wikipedia pages, and to my knowledge, no resident’s pet alligator has ever roamed the corridors. There are a few rather dusty rooms upstairs but they’re rarely occupied, and none of them have hosted one-night stands between music legends. Only now, Garry has the chance to perform an act of alchemy here: for three minutes and ten seconds he can transmute the Ardnamurchan into the Chelsea. Garry doesn’t look the alchemical type, but he wouldn’t be the first unassuming, dark jeans wearing, check shirted, wrong side of middle-aged guy to have his now-or-never moment on an office Christmas staffie in front of the karaoke machine. 

Karaoke means empty orchestra in Japanese, and unknown to everyone else in the Team, Garry can see the emptiness of the future gaping before him like a canyon, the Grim Reaper on the other side of it staring him down. Garry’s not an intimidating sight: 5’10, clean shaven, short hair, greying, receding at the temples, his one distinguishing feature a pair of thick-framed reading specs. His imaginary adversary, the Reaper, is a young barman with a moustache and elaborately tattooed arms folded across his chest; a sardonic glimmer in his eye as he guards the optics and waits to be amused. Silent, but in Garry’s mind saying this: ‘Refuse to sing and you sign your Voluntary Severance from Those Who Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night. You won’t just be letting yourself down, Garry, you’ll be letting down all of your heroes: both the Dylans and Leonard as well.’ Because Linda’s done her bit. Linda’s been Janis. She’s burned through Me and Bobbie McGee like there’s no tomorrow. Like she’s piling all the spreadsheets and the targets and the feedback forms onto a giant bonfire and lighting it with that one song written by Kris Kristofferson and recorded by Janis just before she died – of a heroin overdose, lest we forget. Aye, as soon as Linda opened her mouth and started to sing – a little tentative at first but with pretty damn near perfect pitch and the huskiness of an ex-smoker – Garry’s heart was a tyre going over a razor blade. Busted flat, like the song’s first words, and the next line’s lyrics drew his eyes magnetically down to her swaying hips, denim-clad legs; to her sports shoes, weight on the heel of one foot, the other tapping out the rhythm. She’d always had the element in her, he realised; potassium waiting to be exposed in oxygen, to reveal her effervescence. Now she burns white light, he loves her, and it kills him afresh that she’s married to that sleek-suited management wanker, Martin fucking Lafferty. Lafferty, who in his emails types everyone’s names with an @. Jesus Christ! He probably doesn’t even know who @Leonard is. 

And how could Linda – as Janis, singing Kris – equate freedom with nothing left to lose, and tolerate life with Lafferty? They don’t even have kids for fuck’s sake! But, Garry noted, she didn’t look at Lafferty once the whole time she was singing. He had his i-phone out and was videoing her, no doubt for one of those social media channels he’s always banging on about, but Linda ignored him. She climbed deep inside the song, her silvery-blonde mane swinging wild across her face. She hardly needed to look at the lyrics on the screen, the song was hers; her escape to the untarnished America of another era, a brief, unforgettable fling with the blues-singing renegade, Bobbie McGee. And to Garry she might as well have declared: If only my Bobbie would show up for real, then this cardboard cut out Lafferty would blow right over and fall flat on his face. Well, Garry can’t be Bobbie, but he can be Leonard. He has to be Leonard, and he knows the song he’s got to sing.

When the last note falls and Linda takes a bow, to rapturous applause from all of the Team, Garry, who’s known as a nice guy, with a dry wit but quiet, wouldnae say boo to a goose, accepts the Reaper’s challenge. When Linda waggles the mic and asks ‘Who’s up next?’ heads turn and eyebrows rise as Garry gets to his feet and makes his way between the tables. Someone whoops as he takes the mic – a brief electric touch of Linda’s hand, and with the wee remote he enters the number of the song that wouldn’t be on most karaoke machine’s playlists, but which fate has placed on the Ardnamurchan’s. The song that Leonard wrote after Janis died, about that night the two of them spent together at the Chelsea, and Garry stares at the purple screen as the lyrics appear in black. And as they turn to yellow he starts to sing, if you can call it singing – this is Leonard after all:

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel /
you were talking so brave and so sweet /
giving me head on the unmade bed /
while the limousines wait in the street

Questionable lyrics for any man, even if they came with more of a melody and instrumental cover, not just a few plucks from an acoustic guitar. Even Leonard grew to regret publicly associating Janis with the song, with that third line: ‘An indiscretion for which I’m very sorry,’ he told the Beeb in ‘94. Even if poor Janis was no longer alive to be offended when he sang it, and when she had been she hardly seemed the private type, indeed told a reporter that her night with Leonard was a major let-down. And Garry knows all this. He knows everything about Leonard. He’s read the books. So why did he forget it and walk blind into this of all songs to choose?

Because, he realises, too late, he’s a fucking imbecile! His shyness has always been nature’s best defence against the probability of him revealing it in public. The same reason stick insects look like sticks! Until this cursed convergence of circumstance at the Ardnamurchan tonight. But it’s too late to go back. He’s up here and all eyes in the room are upon him. The lyrics on the screen keep turning yellow, keep forcing him to sing them. His senses are caught in a vacuum. All he can see is the screen; all he can hear is the recorded guitar and his own voice filling the bar; touch reduced to the gun barrel smoothness of the mic in his hand. A vague notion that people out there are glancing at one another, mouthing: ‘Is this Garry?’ He could be doing backflips on the tables and be causing less of a sensation. The one time in his adult life, job interviews aside, when all attention in a room has been focused on him, and he’s hating every second of it. But the lyrics, they keep turning yellow, keep dragging him on. I need you / I don’t need you.

And nobody needs this, least of all Garry himself. He’s dying up here! SOS! Maybe only the Reaper’s enjoying the sheer mortifying tragedy of it. And Lafferty, who has his phone out and is recording everything. Lafferty, who doesn’t even notice that Garry, figuring he has nothing left to lose, looks pointedly at Linda as he makes his adaptation to those strange, sad last lines:

I remember you well in the Ardnamurchan Hotel /
That’s all, I don’t even think of you that often. 

And then it’s over. Garry stumbles back to his chair, banging into another one on the way, while the Team clap politely and Lafferty gets a few laughs shouting: ‘Didn’t know you had that one in the tank, Garry!’ But at least no one mentions the inappropriateness of the third line, and the karaoke machine can get back to its intended purpose of playing tunes for belting out or crooning. Christine in Enrolment gets up to do Gaga. Lafferty sings Wonderwall in an exaggerated Manc drawl. Before too much longer the night ends, as these nights do, with hearty goodbyes on the pavement outside and different directions home.

The next day’s the last before the holiday. No students in so not much to do. The Team just have to be there for a few hours, eating chocolates and cakes from the supplies that students and staff have brought in. It should be as chilled as any work day gets, but for Garry it’s excruciating. Small talk, when what he wants to do is lock himself in the print room and hide behind the copiers.

But the day ends, and he escapes. He won’t have to see them all for two whole weeks. They might forget. It’s Garry’s first Christmas without either of his parents. He’s been invited to his sister’s in the other city. She’s a primary teacher: warm, sociable, and her three kids fill the house with noise. Garry has a role here: he’s the entertainingly offbeat uncle. He loses at board games and tries not to think about what possessed him at the Ardnamurchan. But he can’t help it, and every time he imagines himself up there dying on the stage with the mic in his hand, the shame jolts him like driving over a deep pothole. He has to dull it with another glass of wine, or later in the evening a whisky with his brother-in-law, a policeman with no knowledge of Leonard but plenty of anecdotes and a growing addiction to expensive malts.

Christmas Day. The afternoon. Garry’s watching Doctor Zhivago while playing Monopoly. Forty miles north, Linda and Martin have spent the night at a fancy spa hotel, and most of the day luxuriating in hot foaming baths. Now they’re in a richly carpeted-dining room, its walls adorned with landscapes and antlers. Martin’s chewing venison and talking about who they should invite round for New Year. Linda’s gone for the sole and is listening, responding but mostly thinking of Garry from the print room, up there on stage at the Ardnamurchan. A lone stag ringed by the hunters’ guns. Looking at her. Singing for her. Or maybe not for her. Maybe for Janis? That song, she googled it, and discovered the connection. A terrible choice for karaoke, though Garry didn’t completely murder it: he was mostly in tune and his voice had a hint of the richness of Leonard Cohen, who she’s been listening to a bit more. So Long Marianne is her favourite, that’s the song Garry should’ve sung, but everyone makes mistakes. There must be depths to Garry, interesting depths. Maybe it’s not too late to consider dreaming of something else; to get back on the road to the real, wild place.

T.Y. Garner’s debut novel The Hotel Hokusai came out in February with Ringwood Publishing. He lives in Glasgow and writes fiction as well as the odd poem.

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