Andrew Meehan’s Hey Man is the story of Ian and Tommy, whose rich and tender friendship stretches across three fateful decades.

The story begins in 1989, when seventeen-year-old Dubliner Ian, a lonely teenager finds himself lodging with his father’s cousin, thirty-year-old actor Tommy Carmody in London. He needs to get away from the family home: his mother is dead and Ian and his father have not only buried her; they’ve buried the memory of her too, distracting themselves with anagram games.  “Eric Clapton, he said. Narcoleptic, I said.”  Tommy will be a change for Ian. He’s “What you ‘d call a character actor; his face was the special effects”. He’s less likely to be seen in a leading role than “falling out of a pub with a hatchet in the head (always in the first five minutes of a film)”.

A summer of long nights and early mornings leaves an indelible mark on them both, Then, the adventure ends. Tommy vanishes, and Ian is left with the ache of something unfinished.

When they meet again in Dublin, in 2004, fifteen years later, Ian is Brother Eugene, a Benedictine Monk searching for meaning in devotion, and his familiar restlessness. The old spark is there- but so are the questions: What did they mean to each other, and why does it matter?

 

At Tommy’s Sixtieth birthday, with illness casting its shadow, the truths long buried rise to the surface. Tender and devastating, Hey man is a meditation on the mysteries of male friendship and the bonds that shape a life.

The story later jumps on a further 15 years, almost to the present day – but the scenes at the wedding show new aspects of Ian’s character: a crisis of faith; another attempt at romantic love.

Hey Man by Andrew Meehan, Muswell Press £12.99, 242 pages.