Baley

Baley was a well known character in the Kinglake squatting community in the 80's and 90's . He wasn't closely associated with Joe but they shared many acquaintances. He died strangely enough the day after Joe's funeral.

Here some photos from the early 80's (one with his girlfriend -at the time- Marie)

And finally a picture in the year before he passed away. Note the scar from the heart by-pass operations.

I was (with Pete) one of the few people that visited him at this late stage (or attended his funeral for that matter) I happened to be present when he died.

My recollections and a brief obituary are below:

It is possible that if you knew Joe, you might remember Baley.

He was a Glaswegian through and through, an ex-biker squatting in Kinglake at the same time Joe arrived there.

He was well known at the time for selling bad speed, not paying back borrowed money and getting regularly ripped-off.

Many people considered him a bad basket case with few redeeming graces, but he was also the one people called to help when faced with tough situations. He wasn’t too afraid of local street gangs and breaking the law.

You may remember that he was renowned as much for his physical strength as for his the lack of common sense.

He lived on the estate through prison spells (his whole life's history in a shell) and even once became a tenant, he was, more or less, in constant threat of being evicted.

The police, of course, knew him and his flat well.

But eventually his bad speed habit got the best of him.

He had multiple organs failures and his heart was so badly damaged that in spite of various bypasses, organ transplant was considered the only option the doctors could suggest.

He had been placed on a waiting list and told that he had one or at most two years of life left to be spent meanly incapacitated and in hospital.

Since that diagnosis, he survived for eleven years and many other life-threatening illnesses.

He was at death door regularly.

After a while, when former clients or acquaintances enquired about his health, it was simpler to say, for the sake of brevity, that his spleen was OK, all other vital organs having failed at some point.

Joe used to quip, with typical panache, that to kill him “we’ll have to stake him through the heart, cut off his head and staff his mouth with garlic”.

Due to his chronic poor conditions he was eventually moved by the Council to a more suitable accommodation on a ground-floor bedsit in East Street where he resided for his last 10 years or so. In relative isolation there, his social life gradually dried up and likewise his hold on life became more and more tenuous.

I, for many years his next door neighbour, and his official care worker, Pete, that too knew him for a very long time, were the last ones to see him regularly.

I popped in his flea-cat infested lodgings to say hello more and more infrequently, when I was at the East Street Market for shopping or when he phoned me reminding that I yet again had neglected to visit.

When I did manage, he tried to be hospitable until he could and even on occasions made for me his half decent haggis with mashed turnips.

All the while his strength dwindled and the in particular the last few months, were ones of accelerating decline.

The last few weeks were spent in hospital with a leg emphysema and ulcers, that taxed his remaining strength to breaking point.

I eventually visited him there regularly, mostly out of guilt because he had let me know his whereabouts after some time he had been admitted, and I had only then realised that I had not been in touch for that long.

He was well known and even liked at the St Thomas, his favourite hospital, where in the course of the years had been coming and going with increased frequency and longer permanences.

In this instance, however, his gaunt appearance and above all his resurgent Glasgow twang bespoke of his increased physical and mental frailty.

Then, I got some messages from Pete informing of his acute deteriorating conditions the day after Joe funeral, my heart already heavy.

At the hospital where we agreed to meet, we had a conference with his Intensive Care Unit nurse.

The nurse voice was considerate and calming, accustomed to tell bad news.

He skilfully guided his listeners to confront the ignored platitude that the place was both a life giver and a death bringer, and waited for the epiphany to sink in.

He softly recounted the last few days of an increasingly hopeless medical effort and suggested that it was time to reduce, and he posed to let us take in the implication of the euphemism, his life supporting medications.

There was nothing we could say to rationally object, nor I thought was it could be right in the circumstances.

Those were that Baley was lying unconscious in an open intensive care ward, impossibly gaunt, waxen and surrounded by stacks of buzzing machinery.
Probes and tubes entered his body: of the many, the one I found most prominent was large and translucent; it entered his mouth and inflated his lungs.

A regular gaggling reflex was the only sign of response in his otherwise supine, still pose.

We were assured that he was heavily sedated and comfortable with the level of painkillers pumped through his veins, and we even managed to crack one of those painful jokes, the kind that people say when they are stressed, about his affinity to drugs.

Yet crisis never come at one's convenience and Pete had to go and at the end, I remained with him alone, and the burden to acquiesce to the hospital staff request was mine alone.

When I sat next to his bed, the nurse drew curtains all around us, bestowing a surreal sense of intimacy to the bed space.

It absurdly made me feel protected, I thought, the same way our ancestors might have felt when they withdrew to their tents at nightfall.
That image, of raising darkness, ushered in the realisation that death was now real; stalking, hovering behind the slight billowing of the curtains, waiting to dance to the dull rhythms of the ventilating intubation.

Within our makeshift space, the world stopped.

The nurse untied one of Baley’s hands from the confines of padded restrains, that were holding it to the bedside and that had prevented him from tearing at those piercing intrusive artificial tentacles, now holding in place those cold and limp fingers, mattered no more .

I nodded to the nurse. He slipped behind the thin fabric barrier, starkly dividing his reality from ours, and then progressively, unobtrusively wished silence on the mechanical life surrounding us.

I took Baley’s hand in mime.
I wanted him, if he awoke, to feel for the last time the warmth of someone holding him, before death's cold embrace would whisk him away.

I thought I saw a slight opening in his closed eyes and felt a slight pressure on my fingers from his, likely only an unconscious twitch, still instinctively I tightened my grip.
Now his skin was getting warmer, and I felt his heart pulsing inside the protective cocoon of my clench.

Like acts in a play, time was only chimed by the quiet intrusion of the nurse’s hand switching off this or that life-support appliance, every few minutes or so.

Baley pulse grew weaker at each stage, and finally, the last machine ceased to hum.

I felt his pulse so light now, only a whisper.

He tensed, squeezed my hand, his eyes seemed to pucker for an instant.
A last heartbeat echoed in my palm, the life gossamer lifting.

He was gone.

His mouth twitched a little, meaninglessly. I lifted his eyelid and his eye looked vitreous, lifeless, inward looking at something I was not yet ready to comprehend.

Presently the twitching stopped, the nurse assured it was normal, some final neuronal response, apparently, and I released his hand.

It was over.

Death had gone.

I felt strangely relieved, but I still choked when later I managed to phone Pete.

On my way home, out of the blue, I thought of Baley’s cats and if they would be the only ones to really miss him and felt ashamed at my own lack of humanity, but perhaps I was only glad, against decency, to be still alive.

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Baley died the 2nd of August 2007.

Joseph Foley Memorial Site Live Memories