F**k you, Tim

My friend, Tim Brink, died last week. This is what he taught me. (Warning: this will set the new record for the most gratuitous use of the F-word.)

Fuck off, Tim.

We used to say that a lot to Tim Brink.

Fuck off, Tim. Fuck you, Tim.

And, then, when we didn’t want him to when were least prepared, Tim fucked off. He fucked off on Thursday. Fuck you, Tim. We weren’t ready for you to fuck off. We wanted to be fucked off by you for as long as our selfishness demanded. We needed your heart, your soul, your slap-me-now puns, your smile and the very wicked delight of your brain and the left-field thinking that had, thankfully, no off button.

We needed and need your very being, the fuckety-fuckness of your essence and presence. We will always have that. Even if you were ready to and deserved the need for peace. You never left until you did and then you did. I wasn’t set for it. You broke me on Thursday.

For the first time since I can remember when, I could not write. There were no words. It all seemed so twee and not worthy of you. It’s the toughest thing to write from a place of nothingness and cold. Writing needs heat and anger and care and love. It needs a handhold, the faint hope of the purchase of a passing ledge, a cartoon hook that appears out of nowhere when life and death and pain and love and all around you is in freefall.

Thursday was a day for grasping at memories and gasping on the thin air of loss. But, it is in those memories that you leave behind and the how great the loss that is the mark of a great human being.

Tim had an understated gift for rhythm and timing. He certainly didn’t have a gift for the rhythm method nor, and as is evidenced by his propensity to produce children, the sense to use condoms.

However, Tim’s timing was impeccable. Not just his jokes but knowing when a friend needed him. I have had a year and then some, a place of darkness of my own making and stubbornness, where I caused impossible pain to others and came close to the abyss before help was finally forced upon me.

In November last year, when I was at my nadir, when I had abandoned all hope and felt like I had no distance left to run, he sent me this message: “My friend. We use that word flippantly, but I count you as a fine friend.

“You are firmly up there on my favourite people I will keep fighting and living for. I know it’s hard sometimes, I know just how hard, but please remember how much so many of us love you and everything you do. You rock, Kevin McCallum, I for one haven't finished with you. Lots of us need you in our world. Love you, my friend. Stay strong and pick up the phone for a cry or a laugh or a swear, whatever I can help with.”

Then, being Tim, he helped with a cry, and laugh and a swear with a missive from the last Double Century Weekend I thought we would share together. The farting and P-word references are directed to an impressive gust of wind I dropped directly into a certain radio and TV personality’s face:

“Hey, sunshine. Radio silence for w few days. DC weekend is exhaustingly lekker and fucking depressing (now) as I have my new reality shoved in my face. But on balance, the lekker bit wins. Much quieter than in previous years. Nobody farted. The word poes was not used once.

“George fell over in his chalet, stone cold sober, and moered his head open. Liezel and Finch both finished. I would have got the Bee Gees award for staying alive, but had gone back to my accommodation to sleep and take too many pain killers, in no particular order. Toby got properly pissed. Braai made margaritas all night to manage his social awkwardness. Di doubted there was a man on the moon. Probably. Ribbens spoke very slowly. You were sorely missed, and will be welcomed back as lovingly as only this bunch can, with banter and bullshit.”

That was on November 27. I cried with laughter. It was perfectly Tim. Then he made me cry sad tears:

“I have had a year of dread-filled insomnia, times to reflect and think and wonder and all that destructive stuff as I face certain death, and then uncertain death in waves. And realise that our lives, no matter how insignificant we might think they are at the low times, are significant to others. Life-affirmingly significant.”

Tim Brink. A significant life-affirming force. I can see him still riding up and down the bunch at the DC, herding the cats, silencing the meows, asking how you were doing as we turned into that perpetual headwind from the halfway bacchanalian feast put on by Adri and her team:

“How you doing, Kev?”

“Fuck off, Tim.”

Fuck you, Tim and Thank You.